by Paula Guran
Always the families to whom the roses went were rich—not prosperous, as almost all were now prosperous—but something extra. Rich, and endowed with friends and kin, abilities of the mind and spirit: consolations for the inevitable loss. The loss of one child. A son, or a daughter, whichever of the household was best suited to be sent, could most easily be spared, was the most likely to find the prospect challenging or acceptable, or, endurable.
He remembered how at twenty-six it had suggested to him immolations to Moloch and to Jupiter, young children given to the god. But that was foolish, of course. They did not, when they went to the alien estates, go there to die, or even to worship, to extend service. They were neither sacrifices nor slaves. They had been seen quite often after, visiting their families, corresponding with them. Their lives continued on those little pieces of alien ground, much as they had always done. They were at liberty to move about the area, the buildings, the surrounding landscapes, at liberty to learn what they wished of the aliens’ own world, and all its facets of science and poetry.
There was only discernible in them, those ones who went away, a distancing, and a dreadful sourceless silence, which grew.
The visits to their homes became less. Their communications and videochats ceased. They melted into the alien culture and were gone. The last glimpses of their faces were always burdened and sad, as if against advice they had opened some forbidden door and some terrible secret had overwhelmed them. The bereaved families knew that something had consumed their sons and daughters alive, and not even bones were left for them to bury.
It was feared, though seldom spoken of, that it was natural xenophobia, revulsion, which destroyed and maybe killed the hearts of humanity’s children. They had grown with their own kind, and then were sent to dwell with another kind. Their free revisitings of family and friends would only serve to point the differences more terribly between human and alien. The aliens—and this was almost never spoken of—were ugly, were hideous. So much had been learned swiftly, at the very beginning. Out of deference to their new world, out of shame, perhaps, they covered their ugliness with elegant garments, gloves, masking draperies, hoods and visors. Yet, now and then, a sighting—enough. They were like men or women, a little taller, a slender, finely muscled race . . . But their very likeness made their differences the more appalling, their loathsomeness more unbearable. And there were those things which now and then must be revealed, some inches of pelted hairy skin, the gaunt-leted over-fingered hands, the brilliant eyes empty of white, lensed by their yellow conjunctiva.
These, the senders of roses.
It seemed, without knowing, Levin always had known that one day the obscene sacrifice would be asked of him. To one of these creatures would now travel his youngest daughter Estár, who wore by choice the clothing of reborn history.
While she ordered the packing of her luggage, he wrote letters and prepared recordings of appeal and righteous anger.
Both knew it to be useless.
Somewhere in the house, Joya and Lyra wept.
On the first day of Midwinter, the snow-car stood beside the porch.
“Good-bye,” she said.
“I will—” he began.
“I know you’ll do everything you can.” She looked at her sisters, who were restraining their frightened tears with skill and decorum so that she should not be distressed. “I shall see you in the spring. I’ll make sure of that,” she said. It was true, no doubt. Joya kissed her. Lyra could not risk the gesture, and only pressed her hand. “Good-bye,” Estár said again, and went away.
The snow sprang in two curved wings from the car. In ten seconds it was a quarter of a mile away. The snow fell back. The sound of crying was loud. Levin took his two remaining daughters in his arms and they clung to him. Catching sight of them all in a long mirror, he wryly noted he and they were like a scene from an ancient play—Greek tragedy or Shakespeare: Oedipus and Antigone, Lear with Cordelia lost—A Winter’s Tale.
He wondered if Estár cried, now that she was in private and unseen.
2
Estár had not cried; she was sickened from fear and rage. Neither of these emotions had she expressed, even to herself, beyond the vaguest abstracts. She had always been beset by her feelings, finding no outlet. From the start, she had seen Lyra express herself through music, Joya through communication. But Estár had been born with no creative skills and had learned none. She could speak coherently and seemingly to the point, she could, if required to, write concise and quite interesting letters, essays, and fragments of descriptive poetry. But she could not convey herself to others. And for herself, what she was aware of, suffered, longed for—these concepts had never come clear. She had no inkling as to what she wanted, and had often upbraided herself for her lack of content and pleasure in the riches fate had brought her, her charming family, the well-ordered beauty of her world. At fifteen, she had considered a voluntary term at Marsha, the Martian colonial belt, but had been dissuaded by physical circumstance. It seemed her lungs, healthy enough for Earth, were not of a type to do well for her in the thin half-built atmosphere of Mars. She had not grieved, she had not wanted to escape to another planet any more than she wanted anything else. There had simply been a small chance that on Mars she might have found a niche for herself, a raison d’Estár.
Now, this enforced event affected her in a way that surprised her. What did it matter after all if she were exiled? She was no ornament at home to herself or others and might just as well be placed with the ambiguous aliens. She could feel, surely, no more at a loss with this creature than with her own kind, her own kin.
The fear was instinctive, of course, she did not really question that. But her anger puzzled her. Was it the lack of choice? Or was it only that she had hoped eventually to make a bond between herself and those who loved her, perhaps to find some man or woman, one who would not think her tiresome and unfathomable and who, their novelty palling, she would not come to dislike. And now these dreams were gone. Those who must live with the aliens were finally estranged from all humanity, that was well known. So, she had lost her own chance at becoming human.
It was a day’s journey. The car, equipped with all she might conceivably need, gave her hot water and perfumed soap, food, drink, played her music, offered her books and films. The blue-white winter day only gradually deepened into dusk. She raised the opaque blinds of the forward windows and looked where the vehicle was taking her.
They were crossing water, partly frozen. Ahead stood a low mountain. From its conical exaggerated shape, she took it to be man-made, one of the structured stoneworks that here and there augmented the Earth. Soon, they reached a narrow shore, and as the dusk turned gentian, the car began to ascend.
A gentle voice spoke to her from the controls. It seemed that in ten minutes she would have arrived.
There was a tall steel gate at which the snow-car was exchanged for a small vehicle that ran on an aerial cable.
Forty feet above the ground, Estár looked from the window at the mile of cultivated land below, which was a garden. Before the twilight had quite dispersed, she saw a weather control existed, manipulating the seasons. It was autumn by the gate and yellow leaves dripped from the trees. Later, autumn trembled into summer, and heavy foliage swept against the sides of the car. It was completely dark when the journey ended, but as the car settled on its platform, the mild darkness and wild scents of spring came in through its opening doors.
She left the car and was borne down a moving stair, a metal servant flying leisurely before with her luggage. Through wreaths of pale blossom she saw a building, a square containing a glowing orb of roof, and starred by external illuminators.
She reached the ground. Doors bloomed into light and opened.
A lobby, quite large, a larger room beyond. A room of seductive symmetry—she had expected nothing else. There was no reason why it should not be pleasant, even enough like other rooms she had seen as to appear familiar. Yet, too, there was something
indefinably strange, a scent, perhaps, or some strain of subsonic noise. It was welcome, the strangeness. To find no alien thing at once could have disturbed her. And maybe such psychology was understood, and catered to.
A luminous bead came to hover in the air like a tame bird.
“Estár Levina,” it said, and its voice was like that of a beautiful unearthly child. “I will be your guide. A suite has been prepared for you. Any questions you may wish—”
“Yes,” she broke in, affronted by its sweetness, “when shall I meet—with your controller?”
“Whenever you desire, Estár Levina.”
“When I desire? Suppose I have no desire ever to meet him?”
“If such is to be your need, it will be respected, wherever possible.”
“And eventually it will no longer be possible and I shall be briskly escorted into his presence.”
The bead shimmered in the air.
“There is no coercion. You are forced to do nothing that does not accord with your sense of autonomy.”
“But I’m here against my will,” she said flatly.
The bead shimmered, shimmered.
Presently she let it lead her silently across the symmetrical alien room, and into other symmetrical alien rooms.
Because of what the voice-bead had said to her, however, she kept to her allotted apartment, her private garden, for a month.
The suite was beautiful, and furnished with all she might require. She was, she discovered, even permitted access, via her own small console, to the library bank of the house. Anything she could not obtain through her screen, the voice-bead would have brought for her. In her garden, which had been designed in the manner of the Second Renascence, high summer held sway over the slender ten-foot topiary. When darkness fell, alabaster lamps lit themselves softly among the foliage and under the falling tails of water.
She wondered if she was spied on. She acted perversely and theatrically at times in case this might be so. At others she availed herself of much of what the technological dwelling could give her.
Doors whisked open, clothes were constructed and brought, baths run, media deposited as though by invisible hands. It was as if she were waited on by phantoms. The science of Earth had never quite achieved this fastidious level, or had not wanted to. The unseen mechanisms and energies in the air would even turn the pages of printed books for her, if requested.
She sent a message to her father after two days. It read simply: I am here and all is well. Even to her the sparseness was disturbing. She added a postscript: Joya must stop crying over me or her baby will be washed away.
She wondered, as her mail was sent out, if the alien would read it.
On the tenth day, moodily, she summoned from the library literature and spoken theses on the aliens’ culture and their world.
“Curiosity,” she said to the walls, “killed the cat.”
She knew already, of course, what they most resembled—some species of huge feline, the hair thick as moss on every inch of them save the lips, the nostrils, the eyes, and the private areas of the body. Though perhaps ashamed of their state, they had never hidden descriptions of themselves, only their actual selves, behind the visors and the draperies.
She noted that while there were many three-dimensional stills of their planet, and their deeds there and elsewhere, no moving videos were available, and this perhaps was universally so.
She looked at thin colossal mountain ranges, tiny figures in the foreground, or sporting activities in a blur of dust—the game clear, the figures less so. Tactfully, no stress was laid even here, in their own habitat, on their unpalatable differences. What Earth would see had been vetted. The sky of their planet was blue, like the sky of Earth. And yet utterly alien in some way that was indecipherable. The shape of the clouds, maybe, the depth of the horizon . . . Like the impenetrable differences all about her. Not once did she wake from sleep disoriented; thinking herself in her father’s house.
The garden appealed to her, however; she took aesthetic comfort from it. She ate out on a broad white terrace under the leaves and the stars in the hot summer night, dishes floating to her hands, wine and coffees into her goblet, her cup, and a rose-petal paper cigarette into her fingers.
Everywhere secrets, everywhere the concealed facts.
“If,” she said to the walls. “I am observed, are you enjoying it, O Master?” She liked archaic terms, fashions, music, art, attitudes. They had always solaced her, and sometimes given her weapons against her own culture which she had not seemed to fit. Naturally, inevitably, she did not really feel uneasy here. As she had bitterly foreseen, she was no more un-at-home in the alien’s domicile than in her father’s.
But why was she here? The ultimate secret. Not a slave, not a pet. She was free as air. As presumably all the others were free. And the answers that had come from the lips and styluses of those others had never offered a satisfactory solution. Nor could she uncover the truth, folded in this privacy. She was growing restless. The fear, the rage, had turned to a fearful angry ache to know—to seek her abductor, confront him, perhaps touch him, talk to him.
Curiosity . . . if by any chance he did not spy on her, did not nightly read reports on her every action from the machines of the house, why then the Cat might be curious too.
“How patient you’ve been.” she congratulated the walls, on the morning of the last day of the month. “Shall! invite you to my garden? Or shall! meet you in yours?” And then she closed her eyes and merely thought, in concise clipped words within her brain: I will wait for you on the lawn before the house, under all that blossom. At sunset.
And there at sunset she was, dressed in a version of Earth’s fifteenth century, and material developed from Martian dust crystals.
Through the blossoming spring trees the light glittered red upon her dress and on her, and then a shadow came between her and the sun.
She looked up, and an extraordinary sensation filled her eyes, her head, her whole torso. It was not like fear at all, more like some other tremendous emotion. She almost burst into tears.
He was here. He had read her mind. And, since he had been able to do that, it was improbable he had ever merely spied on her at all.
“You admit it,” she said. “Despite your respect for my—my privacy—how funny—you admit I have none!”
He was taller than she, but not so much taller that she was unprepared for it. She herself was tall. He was covered, as the aliens always covered themselves, totally, entirely. A glint of oblique sun slithered on the darkened faceplate through which he saw her, and through which she could not see him at all. The trousers fit close to his body, and the fabric shone somewhat, distorting, so she could be sure of nothing. There was no chink. The garments adhered. Not a centimeter of body surface showed, only its planes, male and well-formed: familiar, alien—like the rooms, the skies of his world. His hands were cased in gauntlets, a foolish, inadvertent complement to her own apparel. The fingers were long. There were six of them. She had seen a score of images and threedems of such beings.
But what had happened. That was new.
Then he spoke to her, and she realized with a vague shock that some mechanism was at work to distort even his voice so it should not offend her kind.
“That I read your thoughts was not an infringement of your privacy, Estár Levina. Consider. You intended that they should be read. I admit, my mind is sensitive to another mind which signals to it. You signaled very strongly. Almost I might say, with a razor’s edge.”
“I,” said, “am not a telepath.”
“I’m receptive to any such intentional signal. Try to believe me when I tell you I don’t, at this moment, know what you are thinking. Although I could guess.”
His voice had no accent, only the mechanical distortion. And yet it was—charming—in some way that was quite ab-human, quite unacceptable.
They walked awhile in the outer garden in the dusk. Illuminators ignited to reveal vines, orchids, trees—all o
f another planet, mutating gently among the strands of terrestrial vegetation. Three feet high, a flower like an iris with petals like dark blue flames allowed the moon to climb its stem out of the valley below.
They barely spoke. Now and then she asked a question, and he replied. Then, somewhere among a flood of Earthly sycamores, she suddenly found he was telling her a story, a myth of his own world. She listened, tranced. The weird voice, the twilight, the spring perfume, and the words themselves made a sort of rhapsody. Later that night, alone, she discovered she could not remember the story and was forced to search it out among the intellectual curios of the library bank. Deprived of his voice, the garden, and the dusk, it was a very minor thing, common to many cultures, and patently more than one planet. A quest, a series of tasks. It was the multitude of plants that had prompted the story, that and the rising of a particular star.
When they reentered the house, they went into an upper room, where a dinner was served. And where he also ate and drank. The area of the facial mask which corresponded with his lips incredibly somehow was not there as he raised goblet or fork toward them. And then, as he lowered the utensil, it was there once more, solid and unbreachable as ever. Not once, during these dissolves of seemingly impenetrable matter, did she catch a glimpse of what lay beyond. She stared, and her anger rose like oxygen, filling her, fading.
“I apologize for puzzling you,” he said. “The visor is constructed of separable atoms and molecules, a process not yet in use generally on Earth. If this bothers you, I can forgo my meal.”
“It bothers me. Don’t forgo your meal. Why,” she said, “are you able to eat Earth food? Why has this process of separable atoms not been given to Earth?” And, to her astonishment, her own fragile glass dropped from her hand in pieces that never struck the floor.
“Have you been cut?” his distorted voice asked her unemphatically.
