Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Robin said passionately, “I’d have stayed!”

  The woman found herself laughing. “Well—you did stay, Robin.”

  He asked, “Am I like my father?”

  Helen looked gravely at her son, trying to see the half-forgotten features of young Reynolds in the boy’s face. No, Robin did not look like Colin Reynolds, nor like Helen herself. She picked up his hand in hers; despite his robust health, Robin never tanned; his skin was pearly pale, so that in the green sunlight it blended into the forest almost invisibly. His hand lay in Helen’s palm like a shadow. She said at last, “No, nothing like him. But under this sun, that’s to be expected.”

  Robin said confidently, “I’m like the other people.”

  “The ones on the ship? They—”

  “No,” Robin interrupted, “you always said when I was older you’d tell me about the other people. I mean the other people here. The ones in the woods. The ones you can’t see.”

  Helen stared at the boy in blank disbelief. “What do you mean? There are no other people, just us.” Then she recalled that every imaginative child invents playmates. Alone, she thought, Robin’s always alone, no other children, no wonder he’s a little—strange. She said quietly, “You dreamed it, Robin.”

  The boy only stared at her in bleak, blank alienation. “You mean,” he said, “you can’t hear them, either?” He got up and walked out of the hut. Helen called, but he didn’t turn back. She ran after him, catching at his arm, stopping him almost by force. She whispered, “Robin, Robin, tell me what you mean! There isn’t anyone here. Once or twice I thought I had seen—something, by moonlight, only it was a dream. Please, Robin—please—”

  “If it’s only a dream, why are you frightened?” Robin asked, through a curious constriction in his throat. “If they’ve never hurt you ...”

  No, they had never hurt her. Even if, in her long-ago dream, one of them had come to her. And the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair—a scrap of memory from a vanished life on another world sang in Helen’s thoughts. She looked up at the pale, impatient face of her son, and swallowed hard.

  Her voice was husky when she spoke. “Did I ever tell you about rationalization—when you want something to be true so much that you can make it sound right to yourself?”4

  “Couldn’t that also happen to something you wanted not to be true?” Robin retorted with a mutinous curl of his mouth.

  Helen would not let go his arm. She begged, “Robin, no, you’ll only waste your life and break your heart looking for something that doesn’t exist.”

  The boy looked down into her shaken face, and suddenly a new emotion welled up in him and he dropped to his knees beside her and buried his face against her breast. He whispered, “Helen, I’ll never leave you, I’ll never do anything you don’t want me to do, I don’t want anyone but you.”

  And for the first time in many years, Helen broke into wild and uncontrollable crying, without knowing why she wept.

  Robin did not speak again of his quest in the forest. For many months he was quiet and subdued, staying near the clearing, hovering near Helen for days at a time, then disappearing into the forest at dusk. He heard the winds numbly, deaf to their promise and their call.

  Helen too was quiet and withdrawn, feeling Robin’s alienation through his submissive mood. She found herself speaking to him sharply for being always underfoot; yet, on the rare days when he vanished into the forest and did not return until after sunset, she felt a restless unease that set her wandering the paths herself, not following him, but simply uneasy unless she knew he was within call.

  Once, in the shadows just before sunset, she thought she saw a man moving through the trees, and for an instant, as he turned toward her, she saw that he was naked. She had seen him only for a second or two, and after he had slipped between the shadows again common sense told her it was Robin. She was vaguely shocked and annoyed; she firmly intended to speak to him, perhaps to scold him for running about naked and slipping away like that; then, in a sort of remote embarrassment, she forbore to mention it. But after that, she kept out of the forest.

  Robin had been vaguely aware of her surveillance and knew when it ceased. But he did not give up his own pointless rambles, although even to himself he no longer spoke of searching, or of any dreamlike inhabitants of the woods. At tunes it still seemed that some shadow concealed a half-seen form, and the distant murmur grew into a voice that mocked him; a white arm, the shadow of a face, until he lifted his head and stared straight at it.

  One evening toward twilight he saw a sudden shimmer in the trees, and he stood, fixedly, as the stray glint resolved itself first into a white face with shadowy eyes, then into a translucent flicker of bare arms, and then into the form of a woman, arrested for an instant with her hand on the bole of a tree. In the shadowy spot, filled only with the last ray of a cloudy sunset, she was very clear; not cloudy or unreal, but so distinct that he could see even a small smudge, or bramble scratch on her shoulder, and a fallen leaf tangled in her colorless hair. Robin, paralyzed, watched her pause, and turn, and smile, and then she melted into the shadows.

  He stood with his heart pounding for a second after she had gone; then whirled, bursting with the excitement of his discovery, and ran down the path toward home. Suddenly he stopped short, the world tilting and reeling, and fell on his face in a bed of dry leaves.

  He was still ignorant of the nature of the emotion in him. He felt only intolerable misery and the conviction that he must never, never speak to Helen of what he had seen or felt. He lay there, his burning face pressed into the leaves, unaware of the rising wind, the little flurry of blown leaves, the growing darkness and distant thunder. At last an icy spatter of rain aroused him, and cold, numbed, he made his way slowly homeward. Over his head the boughs creaked woodenly, and Robin, under the driving whips of the rain, felt their tumult only echoed his own voiceless agony.

  He was drenched by the time he pushed the door of the shack open and stumbled blindly toward the fire, only hoping that Helen would be sleeping. But she started up from beside the hearth they had built together last summer.

  “Robin?” Deathly weary, the boy snapped, “Who else would it be?”

  Helen didn’t answer. She came to him, a small swift-moving figure in the firelight, and drew him into the warmth. She said, almost humbly, “I was afraid—the storm—Robin, you’re all wet, come to the fire and dry out.”

  Robin yielded, his twitching nerves partly soothed by her voice. How tiny Helen is, he thought, and I can remember that she used to carry me around on one arm; now she hardly comes to my shoulder. She brought him food and he ate wolfishly, listening to the steady pouring rain, uncomfortable under Helen’s watching eyes. Before his own eyes there was the clear memory of the woman in the wood, and so vivid was Robin’s imagination, heightened by loneliness and undiluted by any random impressions, that it seemed to him Helen must see her too. And when she came to stand beside him, the picture grew so keen in his thoughts that he actually pulled himself free of her.

  The next day dawned gray and still, beaten with long needles of rain. They stayed indoors by the smoldering fire; Robin, half sick and feverish from his drenching, sprawled by the hearth too indolent to move, watching Helen’s comings and goings about the room; not realizing why the sight of her slight, quick form against the gray fight filled him with such pain and melancholy.

  The storm lasted four days. Helen exhausted her household tasks and sat restlessly thumbing through the few books she knew by heart—they had allowed her to remove all her personal possessions, all the things she had chosen on a forgotten and faraway Earth for a ten-year star cruise. For the first time in years, Helen was thinking again of the life, the civilization she had thrown away, for Robin who had been a pink scrap in the circle of her arm and now lay sullen on the hearth, not speaking, aimlessly whittling a stick with a knife (found discarded in a heap of rubbish from the Starholm) which was his dearest possession. Helen felt s
low horror closing in on her. What world, what heritage did I give him, in my madness? This world has driven us both insane. Robin and I are both a little mad, by Earth’s standard’s. And when I die, and I will die first, what then? At that moment Helen would have given her life to believe in his old dream of strange people in the wood.

  She flung her book restlessly away, and Robin, as if waiting for that signal, sat upright and said almost eagerly, “Helen—”

  Grateful that he had broken the silence of days, she gave him an encouraging smile.

  “I’ve been reading your books,” he began diffidently, “and I read about the sun you came from. It’s different from this one. Suppose—suppose there were actually a kind of people here, and something in this light, or in your eyes, made them invisible to you.”

  Helen said, “Have you been seeing them again?”

  He flinched at her ironical tone, and she asked, somewhat more gently, “It’s a theory, Robin, but it wouldn’t explain, then, why you see them.”

  “Maybe I’m—more used to this light,” he said gropingly. “And anyway, you said you thought you’d seen them and thought it was only a dream.”

  Halfway between exasperation and a deep pity, Helen found herself arguing, “If these other people of yours really exist, why haven’t they made themselves known in sixteen years?

  The eagerness with which he answered was almost frightening. “I think they only come out at night, they’re what your book calls a primitive civilization.” He spoke the words he had read, but never heard, with an odd hesitation. “They’re not really a civilization at all, I think, they’re like—part of the woods.”

  “A forest people,” Helen mused, impressed in spite of herself, “and nocturnal. It’s always moonlight or dusky when you see them—”

  “Then you do believe me—oh, Helen,” Robin cried, and suddenly found himself pouring out the story of what he had seen, in incoherent words, concluding, “and by daylight I can hear them, but I can’t see them. Helen, Helen, you have to believe it now, you’ll have to let me try to find them and learn to talk to them ...”

  Helen listened with a sinking heart. She knew they should not discuss it now, when five days of enforced housebound proximity had set their nerves and tempers on edge, but some unknown tension hurled her words at Robin. “You saw a woman, and I—a man. These things are only dreams. Do I have to explain more to you?”

  Robin flung his knife sullenly aside. “You’re so blind, so stubborn.”

  “I think you are feverish again.” Helen rose to go.

  He said wrathfully, “You treat me like a child!”

  “Because you act like one, with your fairy tales of women in the wind.”

  Suddenly Robin’s agony overflowed and he caught at her, holding her around the knees, clinging to her as he had not done since he was a small child, his words stumbling and rushing over one another.

  “Helen, Helen darling, don’t be angry with me,” he begged, and caught her in a blind embrace that pulled her off her feet. She had never guessed how strong he was; but he seemed very like a little boy, and she hugged him quickly as he began to cover her face with childish kisses.

  “Don’t cry, Robin, my baby, it’s all right,” she murmured, kneeling close to him.

  Gradually the wildness of his passionate crying abated; she touched his forehead with her cheek to see if it was heated with fever, and he reached up and held her there. Helen let him lie against her shoulder, feeling that perhaps after the violence of his outburst he would fall asleep, and she was half-asleep herself when a sudden shock of realization darted through her; quickly she tried to free herself from Robin’s entangling arms.

  “Robin, let me go.”

  He clung to her, not understanding. “Don’t let go of me, Helen. Darling, stay here beside me,” he begged, and pressed a kiss into her throat.

  Helen, her blood icing over, realized that unless she freed herself very quickly now, she would be fighting against a strong, aroused young man not clearly aware of what he was doing. She took refuge in the sharp maternal note of ten years ago, almost vanished in the closer, more equal companionship of the time between: “No, Robin. Stop it at once, do you hear?”

  Automatically he let her go, and she rolled quickly away, out of his reach, and got to her feet. Robin, too intelligent to be unaware of her anger and too naive to know its cause, suddenly dropped his head and wept, wholly unstrung. “Why are you angry?” he blurted out. “I was only loving you.”

  And at the phrase of the five-year-old child, Helen felt her throat would burst with its ache. She managed to choke out, “I’m not angry, Robin—we’ll talk about this later, I promise,” and then, her own control vanishing, turned and fled precipitately into the pouring rain.

  She plunged through the familiar woods for a long time, in a daze of unthinking misery. She did not even fully realize that she was sobbing and muttering aloud, “No, no, no, no!”

  She must have wandered for several hours. The rain had stopped and the darkness was lifting before she began to grow calmer and to think more clearly.

  She had been blind not to foresee this day when Robin was a child; only if her child had been a daughter could it have been avoided. Or—she was shocked at the hysterical sound of her own laughter—if Colin had stayed and they had raised a family like Adam and Eve!

  But what now? Robin was sixteen; she was not yet forty. Helen caught at vanishing memories of society; taboos so deeply rooted that for Helen they were instinctual and impregnable. Yet for Robin nothing existed except this little patch of forest and Helen herself—the only person in his world, more specifically at the moment the only woman in his world. So much, she thought bitterly, for instinct. But have I the right to begin this all over again? Worse; have I the right to deny its existence and, when I die, leave Robin alone?

  She had stumbled and paused for breath, realizing that she had wandered in circles and that she was at a familiar point on the riverbank which she had avoided for sixteen years. On the heels of this realization she became aware that for only the second time in memory, the winds were wholly stilled.

  Her eyes, swollen with crying, ached as she tried to pierce the gloom of the mist, lilac-tinted with the approaching sunrise, which hung around the water. Through the dispersing mist she made out, dimly, the form of a man.

  He was tall, and his pale skin shone with misty white colors. Helen sat frozen, her mouth open, and for the space of several seconds he looked down at her without moving. His eyes, dark splashes in the pale face, had an air of infinite sadness and compassion, and she thought his lips moved in speech, but she heard only a win familiar rustle of wind.

  Behind him, mere flickers, she seemed to make out the ghosts of other faces, tips of fingers of invisible hands, eyes, the outline of a woman’s breast, the curve of a child’s foot. For a minute, in Helen’s weary numbed state, all her defenses went down and she thought: Then I’m not mad and it wasn’t a dream and Robin isn’t Reynolds’ son at all. His father was Ms—one of these—and they’ve been watching me and Robin, Robin has seen them, he doesn’t know he’s one of them, but they know. They know and I’ve kept Robin from them all these sixteen years.

  The man took two steps toward her, the translucent body shifting to a dozen colors before her blurred eyes. His face had a curious familiarity—familiarity—and in a sudden spasm of terror Helen thought, “I’m going mad, it’s Robin, its Robin!”

  His hand was actually outstretched to touch her when her scream cut icy lashes through the forest, stirring wild echoes in the wind-voices, and she whirled and ran blindly toward the treacherous, crumbling bank. Behind her came steps, a voice, a cry—Robin, the strange dryad-man, she could not guess. The horror of incest, the son the father the lover suddenly melting into one, overwhelmed her reeling brain and she fled insanely to the brink. She felt a masculine hand actually gripping her shoulder, she might have been pulled back even then, but she twisted free blindly, shrieking, “No, Robin, no,
no—” and flung herself down the steep bank, to slip and hurl downward and whirl around in—the raging current to spinning oblivion and death . . .

  Many years later, Merrihew, grown old in the Space Service, falsified a log entry to send his ship for a little while into the orbit of the tiny green planet he had named Robin’s World. The old buildings had fallen into rotted timbers, and Merrihew quartered the little world for two months from pole to pole but found nothing. Nothing but shadows and whispers and the unending voices of the wind. Finally, he lifted his ship and went away.