Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  “Stop it, Joya.” Estár turned away, but the machines packing her bag needed no supervision. She stared helplessly at the walls. Joya would not stop.

  “There is only one obstacle. In your case, not culture or species. You know what it is. The way they look. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Estár. But this is the root of all your trouble, isn’t it?”

  “How do I know?” She was exasperated.

  “There is no way you can know. Unless you’ve seen him already, without that disguise they wear. Have you?”

  Estár said nothing. Her silence, obviously, was eloquent enough.

  “Go back then,” said Joya, “go back and make him let you see him. Or find some way to see him when he doesn’t realize you can. And then you will know.”

  “Perhaps I don’t want to know.”

  “Perhaps not. But you’ve gone too far.”

  “You’re trying to make me go too far. You don’t understand.”

  “Oh, don’t I?”

  Estár rounded on her, and furiously saw only openness.

  “You might possibly,” said Estár, “want to spoil—something—”

  “I might. But what does that matter? He—it—whatever the alien is, he’s real and living and male and you’re committed to him, and until you see him and know if you can bear it, how can you dare commit yourself?”

  “But they’re ugly,” Estár said flatly. The words, she found, meant very little.

  “Some humans are ugly. They can still be loved, loving.”

  “Suppose somehow I do see him—and I can’t think how I would be able to—and suppose then I can’t stand to look at him—”

  “Then your feelings will undergo some kind of alternate channeling. But the way you are now is absurd.”

  “Oh prithee, sweet sister,” Estár snarled, “let me be. Or, blameless one, throw thou the first stone.”

  Joya looked bemused. Then she said, “I did, didn’t I? Two of them. You caught them, too.”

  And went out of the room, leaving the brown topaz earrings in Estár’s hand.

  It was so simple to return in the end it was like being borne away by a landslide.

  All at once she was in a vehicle, the house flowing off behind her to a minuscule dot, and so to nothing. Then she was alone and sat down with her thoughts to consider everything—and abruptly, before she was ready, the conical mountain loomed before her.

  There was a ghost of winter frost in the garden by the gate. Further on, the banana-yellow leaves were falling. She had seen many places anachronized by a weather control, yet here it seemed rather wonderful . . . for no reason at all.

  The blossom was gone from about the building, but roses had opened everywhere. Alien roses, very tall, the colors of water and sky, not the blood and blush, parchment, pallor, and shadow shades of Earth. She walked through a wheatfield of roses and in at the doors.

  She went straight through all the intervening rooms and arrived in the suite the alien called—had given her. There, she looked about her steadfastly. Even now, she was not entirely familiar with the suite, and unfamiliar with large sections of the house and gardenland.

  Under such circumstances, it was not possible to recognize this place as her home. Even if, intellectually, she did so.

  She wondered where he might be in the house. Surely he would know she had returned. Of course he would know. If she went out into her own garden, perhaps—

  A word was spoken. It meant “yes.” And although she did not know the word she knew its meaning for it had been spoken inside her head.

  She waited, trembling. How close they were, then, if he could speak to her in such a way. She had been probing, seeking for him, her intuitive telepathy now quite strong, and she had touched him, and in turn been touched. There was no sense of intrusion. The word spoken in her head was like a caress, polite and very gentle.

  So she went out into her garden, where it was beginning to be autumn now, and where the topiary craned black against the last of the day’s sunlight. He stood just beyond the trees, by the stone basin, with the colored fish. A heron made of blue steel balanced forever on the rim, peering downward, but the fish were sophisticated and unafraid of it, since it had never attacked them.

  Suppose it was this way with herself? There he stood, swathed, masked, hidden. He had never given her cause to fear him. But was that any reason not to?

  He took her hand; she gave her hand. She loved him, and was only frightened after all because he must know it. They began to talk, and soon she no longer cared that she loved him or that he knew.

  They discussed much and nothing, and it was all she had needed. She felt every tense string of her body and her brain relaxing. All but one. What Levin, her father, had hinted, what Lyra had shied away from saying and Joya said. Could he perceive and sense this thing in her thoughts?

  Probably. And if she asked, in what way would he put her off? And could she ask? And would she ask?

  When they dined that evening, high up in the orb of the roof, only the table lit, and the stars thickly clustered over the vanes above, she watched the molecules parting in his visor to accommodate cup or goblet or fork.

  Later, when they listened to the music of his planet, she watched his long hands, cloaked in their gauntlets, resting so quiet yet so animate on the arms of a chair they were like sleeping cats.

  Cat’s eyes. If she saw them would she scream with horror? Yes, for weeks her sleep had been full of dreams of him, incoherent but sexual dreams, dreams of desire. And yet he was a shadow. She dreamed of coupling in the dark, blind, unseeing. She could hate Joya for being so right.

  When the music ended, there came the slow turn of his head, and she beheld the graceful power of it, that concealed skull pivoted by that unseen neck. The cloaked hands flexed. The play of muscle ran down his whole body like a wave, and he had risen to his feet, in a miracle of coordinated movement.

  “You’re very tired, Estár,” he said.

  “But you know what I want to ask you.”

  “Perhaps only what you feel you should want to ask.”

  “To see you. As you are. It must happen, surely, if I live here with you.”

  “There’s no need for it to happen now. Sometimes, with those others like yourself who are the companions of my kind, it only happens after many years. Do you comprehend, Estár? You’re not bound to look at me as I am.”

  “But,” she said, “You would allow it?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared at him and said, “When?”

  “Not tonight, I think. Tomorrow, then. You recall that I swim in the mornings. The mechanism that waits on you will bring you to my pool. Obviously, I swim without any of this. You can look at me, see me, and after that stay or go away, as you wish.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Her head began to ache and she felt as if some part of her had died, burned out by the terror of what she had just agreed to.

  “But you may change your mind,” he said. “I won’t expect you.”

  There was no clue in his distorted, expressive voice. She wondered if he, too, was afraid.

  She made all the usual preparations for bed and lay down as if tonight were like any other, and did not sleep. And in the morning, she got up and bathed and dressed, as if it were any other morning. And when the machines had washed and brushed her hair, and enhanced her face with pastel cosmetics, she found she could not remember anything of the night or the routines of waking, bathing, dressing or anything at all. All she could remember was the thing to come, the moment when she saw him as he truly was. That moment had already happened to her maybe five thousand times, over and over, as she conjured it, fled from it, returned to it, in her mind.

  And therefore, was he aware of all she had pictured? If he had not sensed her thoughts, he must deduce her thoughts.

  She drank scalding tea, glad to be burned.

  The voice-bead hovered, and she held out her hand. It came to perch on her fingers, something which she liked it to do, a
silly affectionate ruse, her pretense, its complicity, that it was somehow creaturally alive.

  “Estár, shall I take you to the indoor pool?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Take me there now.”

  It was a part of the house she had not been in very much, and then, beyond a blank wall which dissolved as the molecules in his visor had done, a part of the house she had never entered.

  His rooms.

  They opened one from another. Spare, almost sparse, but supple with subtle color, here and there highlighted by things which, at some other time, she would have paused to examine in fascinated interest—musical instruments from his world, the statue of a strange animal in stranger metal, an open book on whose surfaces be had written by hand in the letters of an alien alphabet.

  But then doors drew aside, and the bead glimmered before her out into a rectangular space, open above on the skies of Earth, open at its center on a dense blue water. Plants grew in pots along the edges of the pool, huge alien ferns and small alien trees, all leaning lovingly to the pool which had been minerally treated to resemble the liquids of their home. With a very little effort, Estár might imagine it was his planet she saw before her, and that dark swift shape sheering through the water, just beneath its surface, that shape was the indigenous thing, not the alien thing at all. Indeed, she herself was the alien, at this instant.

  And at this instant, the dark shape reached the pool’s end, only some ten feet from her.

  There came a dazzle across the water as he broke from it. He climbed from the pool and moved between the pots of ferns and trees, and the foliage and the shadow left him, as the water had already done. It was as he had told her. She might see him, unmasked, naked, open-eyed.

  She stared at him until she was no longer able to do so. And then she turned and walked quickly away. It was not until she reached the inner rooms that she began to run.

  She re-entered the suite he had given her, and stayed there only for an hour before she sent the voice-bead to him with her request. It returned with his answer inside five minutes. This time, there was no telepathic communion. She could not have borne it, and he had recognized as much.

  4

  “Please don’t question me,” she said. “Please.”

  Her family who, not anticipating her arrival on this occasion had not been waiting to meet her—scattered like blown leaves about the room—acquiesced in gracious troubled monosyllables.

  They would realize, of course, what must have occurred. If any of them blamed themselves was not apparent. Estár did not consider it, would consider nothing, least of all that she was bound, eventually, to return to the place she had fled.

  She went to her apartment in Levin’s house, glanced at its known unknown angles and objects, got into the remembered unremembered bed. “Bring me something to make me sleep,” she said to the household robots. They brought it to her. She drank the cordial and sank thousands of miles beneath some sea. There were dreams, but they were tangled, distant. Waking for brief moments she could not recall them, only their colors, vague swirlings of noise or query. They did not threaten her. When she woke completely, she had more of the opiate brought, and slept again.

  Days and nights passed. Rousing, she would permit the machines to give her other things. She swallowed juices, vitamins, and small fruits. She wandered to the bathroom, immersed herself in scented fluid, dried herself and returned to bed. And slept.

  It would have to end, obviously. It was not a means of dying, merely of temporary oblivion, aping the release of death. The machineries maintained her physical equilibrium, she lost five pounds, that was all. No one disturbed her, came to plead or chide. Each morning, a small note or two would be delivered—Joya or Lyra—once or twice Levin. These notes were handwritten and full of quiet solicitude. They were being very kind, very patient. And she was not behaving well, to worry them, to throw her burden upon them secondhand in this way. But she did not care very much about that.

  What galvanized her in the end, ousted her from her haven of faked death, was a simple and inevitable thing. Her dreams marshalled themselves and began to assume coherence. She began to dream of him. Of the instant when he had left the water and she had seen him as he was. So they condemned her to relive, over and over again, that instant, just as she had lived it over and over before it had happened. Once the dreams were able to do this to her, naturally, there was no point in sleeping any longer. She must wake up, and find a refuge in the alternative of insomnia.

  Seven days had gone by. She emerged from the depths a vampire, eager to feed on each of the other living things in the house, to devour their lives, the world and everything, to cram her mind, her consciousness. Again, they humored her. None of them spoke of what must have caused this, but the strain on them was evident. Estár liked them more each second, and herself less. How could she inflict this on them? She inflicted it. Three days, three nights went by. She did not sleep at any time.

  Catching the atmosphere like a germ, Joya’s son became fractious. The cat leapt, its fur electric, spitting at shadows. A terrible recurring headache, of which she did not speak but which was plain in her face, began to torment Lyra. Her lover was absent. Estár knew Ekosun would dislike her for consigning her sister to such pain. Finally Joya broke from restraint, and said to her, “I’m sorry. Do you believe that?” Estár ignored the reference, and Joya said, “Levin’s in contact with the Mercantile Senate. They have a great deal of power. It may be possible to force the issue.” “No one has ever been able to do anything of the sort.”

  “What would you like me to do?” said Joya. “Throw myself from a great height into the river?”

  Estár laughed weakly. She took Joya in her arms. “It wasn’t you. I would have had to—you were right. Right, right.”

  “Yes,” said Joya, “I was right. Perhaps one of the most heinous crimes known to humanity.”

  When Estár courteously excused herself and went away, Joya did not protest. Joya did not feel guilty, only regretful at the consequences of an inevitable act. Clean of conscience, she in turn set no further conflict working in Estár—the guilty are always the most prone to establish complementary guilt, and the most unforgiving thereafter.

  And so Estár came to spend more and more time with Joya, but they did not speak of him once.

  On the twelfth day Estár fell asleep. She dreamed and saw him, framed by the pool and the foliage of his planet, and she started awake with a cry of loud anger.

  It seemed she could never forget the awfulness of the revelation, could not get away from it. And therefore she might as well return to the mountain. Probably he would leave her very much alone. Eventually, it might be possible for her to become reconciled. They might meet again on some level of communication. Eventually. Conceivably. Perhaps.

  That evening she spent in one of the communal rooms of her family’s house. She tried to repay their sweetness and their distress with her new calm, with gentle laughter, thanking them with these things, her reestablished sense of self, her resignation tinged by intimations of hope, however dull, and by humor coming back like a bright banner.

  They drank cold champagne and vodka, and the great fire roared under the transparent column, for like the drinks still the nights were cold. Estár had grown in this house, and now, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, she remembered it. She smiled at her father who had said he loved her the best of his daughters. She knew it was untrue, and yet that he had said it to her had become a precious thing.

  There was a movement, a flicker like light. For a moment she thought it came from the fire, or from some mote traveling across the air of the room, the surface of her eye. And then she knew it had moved within her brain. She knew that he had spoken to her, despite the miles between them, and the manner in which she had left him. There were no words at all. It was like a whisper, or the brush of a low breeze across the plateau of her mind. She felt a wonderful slowness fill her, and a silence.

  One hour later a message came
for her, delivered to the house by a machine only glimpsed in the gusty evening. She opened the synthetic wrapper. She had anticipated, nor was she wrong to have done so. There was one line of writing, which read: Estár. Tomorrow, come back to the mountain. And he had signed it with that name she could not read or speak, yet which she knew now as well, maybe better, than her own. She looked a long while at the beautiful unhuman letters.

  They watched her, and she said to them, “Tomorrow I am going back to the mountain. To him.”

  There was again that expression on her face; it had been there, mostly, since she had reentered Levin’s house on this last visit. (Visit. She did not belong to them anymore.) The expression of the children of Earth sacrificed to monsters or monstrous gods, given in their earthly perfection to dwell with beasts. That dreadful demoralizing sadness, that devouring fading in the face of the irreparable. And yet there was nothing in her voice, and as she left the room her step was untrammelled and swift. And, Levin recollected, not wanting to, the story of lemmings rushing in blithe tumult toward the ocean to be drowned.

  A peacock-green twilight enclosed the mountain garden and the building. Estár looked at it in wonder; it transformed everything. It seemed to her she was on some other planet, neither her own nor his.

  A capsule had given her sleep throughout the journey. Drowsily serene she walked into the building and the voice-bead played about her, as if glad she had returned. They went to her suite and she said, “Where is he?” And opened her door to find him in the room.

  She started back. In the blue-green resin of the dusk she saw at once that he was dressed in the garments of his own world, which concealed hardly anything of him.

  She turned away and said coldly: “You’re not being fair to me.”

  “It will soon be dark,” he said. “If you leave the lamps unlit, you won’t see me well. But you have seen me. The pretense is finished.” There was no distortion to his voice. She had never really heard him speak before.