by John Boyd
He had never questioned Kyra’s assertion that they were being pursued. From the moment she entered the car in Seattle he had responded to her anxieties as a programmed automaton, but in the beginning at least her fears had seemed real. Only later had she grown apathetic, and her torpor could have been an emotional reaction to released tensions. Obviously she believed Laudermilk, but what if Laudermilk had lied to her? The idea seemed far-fetched; the major had no reason to slander his comrade Slade.
Hunkered down, chewing a blade of grass, cogitating, he saw Kyra emerge from the creek near the willow, drifting as lightly as a sunbeam over the close-cropped grass. He remained crouched as if impaled on the vision of her beauty and renewed strangeness, for her skin was again birch silver and her hair green. In her unadorned simplicity she was as self-complete as a flower or a tree, and it occurred to him that he was looking upon the ideal beauty men had sought since the beginning of human imagination.
As she moved toward him she gathered the sunlight and became an embodied radiance, feminine and sensuous yet so ethereal she might have swum in air. Nearing the mound, she flung herself into a pirouette, swirling on tiptoe, spine arched, head back, arms extended, displaying the harmonies of her form in exuberant glee. Sunbeams swirled around her, and she began to sing in the likings of her own language a song as blithe as darting swallows and gamboling colts.
Even at the distance her magic touched his imagination, creating the overpowering ambience of quintessential springs yearning toward fruited summers. He stood, feeling as vital and as fresh as one awakening to his first morning in some Edenic forest. Near him, she ceased the swirling and singing and walked toward him, smiling and regal, her hands extended for him to take.
“Now, Breedlove, I must take leave of my dearest votary. Kneel.”
It was a queen commanding him, and he obeyed, kneeling before her as a knight swearing fealty, and again he felt her weird duality as a living presence and as a legend. She placed his hands lightly on her hips and placed her palms on his temples, tilting his face toward hers as she drew him closer. She smelled of violets.
“Come with me, Breedlove. Follow. Follow.”
Looking into her eyes, he saw through them into a universe of pellucid green light. The light drew him into a vast hemisphere centered by the whorl of a sun, and he felt himself levitating to her. “Come, my best beloved, follow, follow.”
Ascending faster in tightening spirals, his psyche rose through the green empyrean toward the distant sun. He was undergoing a transfiguration, becoming a soaring phallic angel, God’s ultimate drone. The dichotomies of his flesh and spirit were merging into one consummate whole, the parallel lines of his nature meeting in a green interior space. Plunging upward toward creation’s fiery womb, he failed to hear the humming in the sky as the park’s helicopter cleared Hallman’s Peak.
At that moment he touched the perimeter of the sun. Into its dazzling core his psyche plunged. Sheathed in Kyra’s radiance, knowing creation’s keenest quivering thrust, of a sudden he held summer in his hands. It bathed him in its eternal glow. If death had claimed him then, he would have died replete, but a melodramatic voice, amplified by the crowd-control speaker on Peterson’s helicopter—Slade’s voice—blasting over the meadow and rumbling among the hills, shattered the moment’s sublimity.
“GET AWAY FROM THAT SHE-THING, BREEDLOVE! IT’S THE HARLOT OF EDEN. IT’S LILITH.”
Kyra dropped her hands from his temples to glance upward, and with the breaking of her touch the spell was broken. Gone was the pale green empyrean and the splendid sun. She stepped back, gave the Kanabian curtsy, and with a dancer’s whirl, turned away from him; smiling back over her shoulder at him, she was queen no longer, but the bright, gleeful girl he had first met on the meadow.
“I’ve got to get the hell out of here, Breedlove. As you say on earth, ‘Business before pleasure.’ ”
Laughing, she sped from him across the meadow with the flashing, sunbeam speed no man could equal, and the helicopter swung around and down to herd her toward the aspen grove. With four bounds she cleared the creek at an angle, dashing toward the trees. Her last gesture to humankind was to wave the helicopter away, pointing toward the invisible spaceship towering above the forest.
At the helicopter’s controls, Peterson remembered and understood her gesture, and Peterson’s voice over the loudspeaker was the last human voice she heard, saying, “Good luck, Kyra, and happy hunting.”
Peterson veered the machine and circled back toward the mound, settling toward the grass a few yards from where Breedlove stood, arms folded, watching the last flash of silver and green vanish amid the aspen boles. Peterson was right. She was not Lilith, not Merope, but Kyra.
What had happened to him on the mound, Breedlove decided, was simple yet inexpressibly complex. She had opened a door. He had stepped through it to gain an understanding of immortality with a mortal’s finite mind. For a moment only they had shared a love, but now he knew, as she had always known, that love was eternal, for in that moment he had shared the immortal love of an angel.
Running at a crouch from underneath the rotor blades, Slade made for the mound as the vanes whirred into silence.
“Where’s her vehicle?”
Breedlove pointed toward the aspens. “Over there.”
“She killed Laudermilk last night,” Slade said. “She emasculated him root and branch. He died of ecstasy, shock, and blood loss, in that order.”
“She didn’t kill him,” Breedlove contradicted. “He killed himself.”
Slade looked at him sharply and said, “That’s what Turpin said, but Turpin claimed it was divine retribution for Laudermilk’s carnal ways.”
Breedlove looked toward the helicopter, saw only Peterson emerging, and asked, “Where’s Turpin?”
“He had to go back into Seattle General, for psychiatric observation. He thinks that through Kyra he’s walked and talked with God.”
Peterson walked onto the mound, his hand extended to Breedlove, and said, “Welcome back, Tom.”
“Thanks, Pete. I’m ready to resume duty.”
“Good. Your first assignment is to get that Jeep out of the wilderness area. What’s holding up the girl?”
“She’s building up steam for liftoff,” Breedlove said.
“That’s only part of what she’s doing,” Slade said. “She’s also strapping herself to that slant board, bottom up, and hooking a lot of wires to her lower abdomen.”
Slade’s remark suggested an interesting and involved theory, another of the Texan’s specialties, but at the moment Breedlove was not encouraging any dramatic monologue from Slade. The three men stood quietly, looking toward the aspen grove and waiting.
They did not wait long. Although they were mentally prepared for what they would see, when it came, shaking the earth with a seismic roll, the sight was mind wrenching.
First the noise, an instantaneous crack and roll of thunder as if the safety valve on a Titan’s boiler had burst, not with a hiss of steam but a roar like Niagara’s. Billowing from the aspen grove, compressed by its invisible weight, a white cloud of condensing steam rolled across the meadow, and even in his awe Breedlove understood why Kyra wanted him on the mound, to keep him beyond the perimeter of the scalding blast. He saw the aspen tops bend from the blast, clacking outward in frenzy. From the center of the grove, slowly at first, a truncated column of steam arose. Then it extended upward in a whiplash of motion whose G forces would have crushed any human occupant of the ship that rode the column, and Kyra ascended.
Terrifying but beautiful, the column of pristine white hurled itself into the cloudless sky, arcing above them from the earth’s rotation and conveying a sense of arctic chill to the expanse of blue. In silence the three men stood gazing up at the attenuated white cloud as the warm rain of its condensation drifted against their faces. Silently Breedlove formed a prayer to the God of Exiles to see Kyra to a haven.
Slade broke the silence, saying, “So ends, let
us hope, Project Fair Visitor. But remember, gentlemen, it still remains top secret. The world’s not ready for this one.”
“You don’t have to worry about me telling anyone,” Peterson said, and perceptive as usual, Slade understood the chief ranger’s emphasis.
“Kyra got you off the hook on your little-green-man report. We used it to authenticate our records… If you don’t mind, Chief, I’d like a private word with your boy here before we leave him to his Jeep.”
Peterson nodded and walked back to the helicopter, and Breedlove turned to Slade. “Did you come here to stop Kyra?”
“Not to stop her. To warn you. I had lost one of my boys, and I didn’t want to lose another. Not that I grieve much for Laudermilk. His number was up anyhow, and Kyra gave him what all military men want—a glorious death.”
“What happened to Laudermilk?”
“Breedlove, I’ll tell you true. I reckon you figured me for project chief, and I knew the whole picture. Laudermilk didn’t. On a need-to-know basis, Kyra’s anatomy was no concern of his. Theoretically she was off-limits to him because his orders were specific, no hanky-panky, but Kyra was all woman. She had more Fallopian tubes than a telephone exchange has cables, with multiple clusters of quick-ovulating wombs designed to produce embryos only. As far as that went, she was safe enough, but with Kyra what went up did not necessarily have to come down. To insure the fertilization of her multiple womb system she had a vagina like a snapping turtle. Of course some of the medical boys gossiped about Kyra’s ‘snapper,’ some nurses overheard, and Laudermilk got the rumors from the nurse he dated. Putting two and two together, he came up with five. He figured Kyra was a snapper like the stars in his foldout gallery.”
Slade shook his head sadly and continued: “Thinking like that, Laudermilk wasn’t about to be stopped by an order. He heisted the cobalt from the Navy clinic and used it to dicker with Kyra. No doubt he supported his offer with some tale of treachery on my part. He wanted to bring her here, reasoning as you did that I wouldn’t follow, but she didn’t want to come with him, apparently. For that task, she wanted you. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Laudermilk, it was that she didn’t trust him.
“What Laudermilk didn’t know—hell, you didn’t know it and you’d been inside—was that Kyra’s spaceship was a beehive. Doctor Upton, the entomologist, figured it out. The ship was a brooder. The pipes carried the embryos from the queen bee to the brooder cells, where they were nurtured through the fetal stages. The slanted gravity couch was designed to use G forces to ram home the seminal charge through the network of womb ducts. Our computers verified the ship’s layout, and the computers were verified last Saturday by a green-haired male juvenile picked up by the sheriff of Shoshone County. The boy had defected because he did not want to play the role of sacrificial lamb in Kyra’s operation.
“Meanwhile, back in Seattle, along comes Laudermilk offering Kyra instant cobalt on the spot for a price, probably backing it up with a tale to make Kyra believe she is trapped. He knows she’s got to go. He knows she’s going. But Laudermilk’s got his record to think about, and Kyra is his chance for immortality in the hall of records. So he persuaded her, never knowing that she was the queen bee and that the drone that couples with the queen bee loses his coupling gear. I’ve got the strong idea that if Peterson and I had got here five minutes later, you’d be stretched out here with the same grin on your face that Laudermilk had when he expired. Anyhow, Laudermilk set a record that’ll never be touched, but too bad it’s classified top secret. He’ll never even get to enjoy it posthumously.”
Breedlove listened, neither believing nor disbelieving Slade’s story. At most points it agreed with the facts he possessed. Laudermilk had bought the first-class tickets for himself and Kyra, no doubt hoping for a second session on the meadow, and he had concocted the tale of Slade’s treachery. But there was a logical flaw in Slade’s telling of the tale.
“I have a low-grade security clearance,” Breedlove reminded him. “If what you say is true, and if the project is still top secret, why are you telling me all this?”
“I’m clearing you for the total picture for a reason. There’s a possibility that Laudermilk’s advances were not accepted under duress. He might have been her first choice as a drone, because she knew that once the colony was ready to swarm it would have to settle. Earth was the only habitable planet she had found, and it was populated. If she has to settle on an inhabited planet, she’ll need a warrior brood, and Laudermilk was a warrior.
“We figure there’s a good chance she won’t leave the solar system, that she’ll hang out there in orbit waiting for her brood to develop. The hive has a capacity for an estimated 21,000 babies, and she’s packed with enough spermatozoa to cull all but the green-haired males. With the forced-growth methods she uses in her beehive, she can return in a decade with an army of guerrillas, more mobile and agile than cheetahs, which could live off grass and sunlight. What can we do against such an army, blowing up power plants it doesn’t need and fighting with weapons we never dreamed of?”
It was a rhetorical question, and Slade paused for dramatic effect. In the pause it occurred to Breedlove that if Kyra carried the seeds of man she would have no need to consider swarming times or incubation periods, since she was even now moving into frames of relativity where light and matter and time merged into one timeless whole.
“Plenty!” Slade answered his own question. Then, forty miles from the nearest hamburger stand, he leaned closer to Breedlove and began to speak from the corner of his mouth to keep from being overheard. “… If we know when and where she lands. You’ll be the one to help us there, old buddy, because you’ll know. Kyra was a queen, but she was also one hell of a woman, and she had the hots for you. All the psycho-emotional compatibility charts said so. When her swarm settles, she’ll contact you because she’s a baby farm and has to keep the crops coming. She’ll want you for her next drone.”
“How would she get in contact with me?”
Slade looked at him in amazement and exclaimed, “Hell, she’d call you on the nearest telephone—dial you collect! You’d be happy to pay the charges. But when you get that call, son, you call me pronto. Call any government bureau, tell them you’re Tom Breedlove and you want to speak to Ben Slade. Don’t hang up. No matter where I am in the world, I’ll be on the phone in five minutes.”
“I’ll believe she’s coming back when I hear her voice.”
“You’d better start believing now, son, and when it happens you’ll call me, won’t you?”
There was a plea in Slade’s request that Breedlove’s humanity would not let him deny. Slade was the perennial spook whose professional task was to create conspiracies to guard against, but a deeper, more personal concern fretted behind his words.
“Of course I’ll call you, Ben.” Breedlove extended his hand to seal the promise. “Kyra would be heartbroken if you were absent from her welcoming committee, and she’ll need a general for her army who’s familiar with earth’s terrain. Now, fly away. I want to be alone.”
Slade held the hand tor a moment, slapped Breedlove’s shoulder in unvoiced gratitude, turned and strode toward the helicopter. Reluctant to move from the mound on which he stood, Breedlove watched the helicopter lift off, threw it a wave of his arm, and stood looking down at the willow aslant the creek, remembering that Kyra’s name had meant “the far-wandering willow.” In the sunlight the tree had the same shimmering quality as the girl.
She had been a quick learner. From the model at Mason’s she learned the ruse for escaping from the motel. From the tale of Huan Chung she had learned how to make Ben Slade happy. And she had been generous. Beyond her general gift to humankind in her promise of an evolutionary progress toward transcendentalism, she had given each of her acolytes a special gift—Slade a continuing conspiracy, Laudermilk an unbreakable romantic record, Turpin a different and no doubt happier reality—but she had given most to Thomas Breedlove.
From the psycho-emotiona
l charts and compatibility analysis the learned philosophers had decreed that she loved him, but what she had revealed to him on the mound was beyond documentation. Contrary to Slade’s belief, there had been a consummation, and it had been more than a union. She had lifted him to heights unachieved by artists or poets and opened to his imagination the furthermost horizons of an ideal beauty, when with her radiant body she had touched his mind.
On this spot, with her time running out, she had bequeathed him one moment of grace in the fulfillment of their devotion, and the memory of her grace would provide him a quiet harbor through the vicissitudes of his remaining days. It was enough, and it was all he would ever have of her, for he knew that Kyra would not come again to Carthage.
