COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 240
For a moment the conviction that he was reliving the past made his head swim. Then he saw that it was Clarissa this time. Clarissa standing quite still and looking up with a glow of shining anticipation upon her face. It was that Christmas morning look he had caught glimpses of before, but never so clearly as now. What she looked at he could not see, but the expression was unmistakable. Something glorious was about to happen, the lovely look implied. Something very glorious, very near, very soon—
About her the air shimmered. Lessing blinked. The air turned golden and began to shower down around her in sparkling rain. This was the dream, then, he thought wildly. He had seen it all before. Clarissa standing quietly beneath the golden shower, her face lifted, letting that shining waterfall pour over her slowly. But if it were the dream again, nothing further was to happen. He waited for the floor to spin underfoot—
No, it was real. He was watching another miracle take place, silently and gloriously, in the quiet apartment.
He had seen it in a dream; now it happened before his eyes. Clarissa in a shower of ... of stars? Standing like Danae in a shower of gold—
Like Danae in her brazen tower, shut away from the world. Her likeness to Danae struck him with sudden violence. And that impossible rain of gold, and her look of rapt delight. What was it that poured down the shining torrent upon her? What was responsible for setting Clarissa so definitely apart from the rest of humanity, sheltering her at the cost of outraging natural laws, keeping the smooth machinery that protected her humming along its inaudible, omnipotent course? Omnipotent—yes, omnipotent as Zeus once was, who descended upon his chosen in that fabulous rain of gold.
Standing perfectly still and staring at the distant reflection in the glass, Lessing let his mind flash swifter and swifter along a chain of reasoning that left him at once gasping with incredulity and stunned with impossible conviction. For he thought at last he had the answer. The wildly improbable answer.
He could no longer doubt that somehow, somewhere, Clarissa's life impinged upon some other world than his. And wherever the two clashed, that other world took effortless precedence. It was difficult to believe that some dispassionate force had focused so solicitously upon her. He thought the few glimpses he had been allowed to catch spoke more of some individual intelligence watching everything she did. Some one being who understood humanity as perfectly as if it were itself very nearly human. Someone in the role of literal guardian angel, shepherding Clarissa along a path toward—what?
Certainly Someone had not wanted Clarissa to see the street accident, and had snatched her back through space and time to a safe distance, keeping the veil about her so that she did not even guess it had happened. Someone had meant her to experience the delirium of fever, and had erased the summerhouse. Someone, he began to realize, was leading her almost literally by the hand through her quiet, thoughtful, shining days and nights, casting glamour about her so heavily that it enveloped anyone who came intimately into its range. In her long moments of absorption, when she watched such trivial things so intently, whose voice whispered inaudibly in her ear, repeating what unguessable lessons.
And how did Lessing himself fit into the pattern? Perhaps, he thought dizzily, he had a part to play in it, trivial, but in its way essential. Someone let the two of them amuse themselves harmlessly together, except when that omnipotent hand had to stretch out and push them gently back into their proper course, Clarissa's course, not Lessing's. Indeed, when anything outré had to happen, it was Clarissa who was protected. She did not guess the hiatus at the time of the street accident; she had scarcely noticed the disappearance of the summerhouse. Lessing did know. Lessing was shocked and stunned. But—Lessing was to forget.
At what point in her life, then, had Clarissa stepped into this mirrored prison with the strange aunt for jailor, and turned unknowing and unguessing into the path that Someone had laid out for her? Who whispered in her ear as she went so dreamily about her days, who poured down in a golden torrent about this Danae when she stood alone in her glass-walled tower?
No one could answer that. There might be as many answers as the mind could imagine, and many more beyond imagination. How could any man guess the answer to a question entirely without precedent in human experience? Well—no precedent but one.
There was Danae.
It was ridiculous, Lessing told himself at this point, to imagine any connection at all in this chance likeness. And yet—how had the legend of Danae started? Had some interloper like himself, two thousand years ago, unwittingly glimpsed another Clarissa standing rapt and ecstatic under another shower of stars? And if that were possible, what right had Lessing to assume arbitrarily that the first of the Danae legend had been as true as what he was watching, and the last of it wholly false? There were so many, many legends of mortals whom the gods desired. Some of them must have had obvious explanations, but the Greeks were not a naive people, and there might, he thought, have been some basis of fact existing behind the allegory. There must have been some basis, to explain those countless stories, pointing so insistently to some definite rock of reality beyond the fantasy.
But why this long preparation which Clarissa was undergoing? He wondered, and then unbidden into his mind leaped the legend of Semele, who saw her Olympian lover in the unveiled glory of his godhood, and died of that terrible sight. Could this long, slow preparation be designed for no other purpose than to spare Clarissa from Semele's fate? Was she being led gently, inexorably from knowledge to knowledge, so that when the god came down to her in his violence and his splendor, she could endure the glory of her destiny? Was this the answer behind that look of shining anticipation he had seen so often on her face?
Sudden, scalding jealousy enveloped him. Clarissa, glimpsing already and without guessing it, the splendor to come in which he himself could have no part ...
Lessing struck the door a resounding blow and called, "Clarissa!"
In the mirror he saw her start a little and turn. The shower wavered about her. Then she moved out of sight, except for a golden flickering among the mirrors, as she approached the door.
Lessing stood there, shaking and sweating with intolerable confusion. He knew his deductions were ridiculous and impossible. He did not really believe them. He was leaping to conclusions too wild to credit, from premises too arbitrary to consider in any sane moment. Granted that inexplicable things were happening, still he had no logical reason to assume a divine lover's presence. But someone, Someone stood behind the events he had just been rehearsing, and of that Someone, whoever and whatever it might be, Lessing was agonizingly jealous. For those plans did not include himself. He knew they never could. He knew—
"Hello," said Clarissa softly. "Did I keep you waiting? The bell must be out of order—I didn't hear you ring. Come on in."
He stared. Her face was as serene as always. Perhaps a little glow of rapture still shone in her eyes, but the shower of gold was gone and she gave no outward sign of remembering it.
"What were you doing?" he asked, his voice slightly unsteady.
"Nothing," said Clarissa.
"But I saw you!" he burst out. "In the mirrors—I saw you! Clarissa, what—"
Gently and softly a—a hand?—was laid across his mouth. Nothing tangible, nothing real. But the words did not come through. It was silence itself, a thick gag of it, pressing against his lips. There was one appalling, mind-shaking moment of that gag, and then Lessing knew that Someone was right, that he must not speak, that it would be cruel and wrong to say what he had meant to say.
It was all over in an instant, so suddenly that afterward he was not sure whether a gag had actually touched his lips, or whether a subtler gag of the mind had silenced him. But he knew he must say nothing, neither of this nor of that strange, vivid dream in which he had met Clarissa. She did not guess. She must not know—yet.
He could feel the sweat rolling down his forehead, and his knees felt shaky and his head light. He said, from a long way off,
"I ... I don't feel well, Clarissa. I think I'd better go—"
-
The light above Dyke's desk swung gently in a breeze from the shaded window. Outside a distant train's hooting floated in across the post grounds, made immeasurably more distant by the darkness. Lessing straightened in his chair and looked around a little dizzily, startled at the abrupt transition from vivid memory to reality. Dyke leaned forward above his crossed arms on the desk, and said gently,
"And did you go?"
Lessing nodded. He was far beyond any feeling now of incredulity or reluctance to accept his own memories. The things he was remembering were more real than this desk or the soft-voiced man behind it.
"Yes. I had to get away from her and straighten my mind out. It was so important that she should understand what was happening to her, and yet I couldn't tell her about it. She was—asleep. But she had to be wakened before it was too late. I thought she had a right to know what was coming, and I had a right to have her know, let her make her choice between me and—it. Him. I kept feeling the choice would have to be made soon, or it would be too late. He didn't want her to know, of course. He meant to come at the right moment and find her unquestioning, prepared for him. It was up to me to rouse her and make her understand before that moment."
"You thought it was near then?"
"Very near."
"What did you do?"
Lessing's eyes went unfocused in remembrance. "I took her out dancing." he said, "the next night ..."
She sat across from him at a table beside a little dance floor, slowly twirling a glass of sherry and bitters and listening to the noises of a bad orchestra echoing in the small, smoky room. Lessing was not quite sure why he had brought her here, after all. Perhaps he hoped that though he could not speak to her in words of all he suspected and feared, he could rouse her enough out of her serene absorption so that she might notice for herself how far her own world differed from the normal one. Here in this small, inclosed space shaking with savage rhythms, crowded by people who were deliberately giving themselves up to the music and the liquor, might not that serene and shining armor be pierced a little, enough to show what lay inside?
Lessing was tinkling the ice in his third collins and enjoying the pleasant haze that just enough alcohol lent to the particular, shining haze that always surrounded Clarissa. He would not, he told himself, have any more. He was far from drunk, certainly, but there was intoxication in the air tonight, even in this little, noisy, second-rate nightclub. The soaring music had a hint of marijuana delirium in it; the dancers on the hot, crowded floor exhaled excitement.
And Clarissa was responding. Her great black eyes shone with unbearable brightness, and her laughter was bright and spontaneous too. They danced in the jostling mob, not feeling jostled at all because of the way the music caught them up on its rhythms. Clarissa was talking much more than usual this evening, very gayly, her body resilient in his arms.
As for himself—yes, he was drunk after all, whether on the three drinks or on some subtler, more powerful intoxication he did not know. But all his values were shifting deliciously toward the irresponsible, and his ears rang with inaudible music. Now nothing could overpower him. He was not afraid of anything or anyone at all. He would take Clarissa away—clear away from New York and her jailor aunt, and that shining Someone who drew nearer with every breath.
There began to be gaps in his memory after awhile. He could not remember how they had got out of the nightclub and into his car, or just where they intended to go, but presently they were driving up the Henry Hudson Parkway with the river sliding darkly below and the lights of Jersey lying in wreaths upon the Palisades.
They were defying the—the pattern. He thought both of them knew that. There was no place in the pattern for this wild and dizzying flight up the Hudson, with the cross-streets reeling past like spokes in a shining wheel. Clarissa, leaning back in the bend of his free arm, was in her way as drunk as he, on nothing more than two sherries and the savage rhythms of the music, the savage excitement of this strange night. The intoxication of defiance, perhaps, because they were running away. From something—from Someone.
(That was impossible, of course. Even in his drunkenness he knew that. But they could try—)
"Faster," Clarissa urged, moving her head in the crook of his arm. She was glitteringly alive tonight as he had never seen her before. Very nearly awake, he thought in the haze of his reeling mind. Very nearly ready to be told what it was he must tell her. The warning—Once he pulled up deliberately beneath a street light and took her in his arms. Her eyes and her voice and her laughter flashed and sparkled tonight, and Lessing knew that if he thought he had loved her before, this new Clarissa was so enchanting that ... that ... yea, even a god might lean out from Olympus to desire her. He kissed her with an ardor that made the city whirl solemnly around them. It was delightful to be drunk and in love, and kissing Clarissa under the eyes of the jealous gods ...
There was a feeling of ... of wrongness in the air as they drove on. The pattern strove to right itself, to force them back into their ordained path. He could feel its calm power pressing against his mind. He was aware of traffic imperceptibly edging him into streets that led back toward the apartment they had left. He had to wrench himself out of it, and then presently the northbound way would be closed off for repairs, and a detour went off along other streets that took them south again. Time after time he found himself driving past descending street numbers toward downtown New York, and swung around the block in bewildered determination not to return.,
The pattern must be broken. It must be. Hazily he thought that if he could snap one thread of it, defy that smooth, quiet power in even so small a way as this, he would have accomplished his purpose. But alone he could not have done it. The omnipotent machinery humming in its course would have been irresistible—he would have obeyed it without knowing he obeyed—had not Clarissa shared his defiance tonight.
There seemed to be a power in her akin to the power of that omnipotence, as if she had absorbed some of it from long nearness to the source.
Or was it that Someone stayed his hand rather than strike her forcibly back to her place in the pattern, rather than let her guess—yet—the extent of his power?
"Turn," said Clarissa. "Turn around. We're going wrong again."
He struggled with the wheel. "I can't ... I can't," he told her, almost breathless. She gave him a dazzling dark glance and leaned over to take the wheel herself.
Even for her it was hard. But slowly she turned the car, while traffic blared irritably behind them, and slowly they broke out of the pattern's grip again and rounded another corner, heading north, the lights of Jersey swimming unfocused in the haze of their delirium.
This was no normal drunkenness. It was increasing by leaps and bounds. This, thought Lessing dimly, is His next step. He won't let her see what he's doing, but he knows he's got to stop us now, or we'll break the pattern and prove our independence.
The tall, narrow buildings shouldering together along the streets were like tall trees in a forest, with windows for motionless leaves. No two windows on the same level, or quite alike. Infinite variety with infinitesimal differences, all of them interlacing and glimmering as they drove on and on through the stony forest. Now Lessing could see among the trees, and between them, not transparently but as if through some new dimension. He could see the streets that marked off this forest into squares and oblongs, and his dazed mind remembered another forest, checkered into squares—Looking Glass Land.
He was going south again through the forest.
"Clarissa—help me," he said distantly, wrestling again with the wheel. Her small white hands came out of the dark to cover his.
A shower of light from a flickering window poured down upon them, enveloping Clarissa as Zeus enveloped Danae. The jealous god, the jealous god—Lessing laughed and smacked the wheel in senseless triumph.
There was a light glimmering ahead through the trees. He would have to go softly, he warned himself, and tiptoed forward over the ... the cobbled road. Without surprise he saw that he was moving on foot through a forest in darkness, quite alone. He was still drunk. Drunker than ever, he thought with mild pride, drunker, probably, than any mortal ever was before. Any mortal. The gods, now—
People were moving through the trees ahead. He knew they must not see him. It would shock them considerably if they did; he remembered the garishly dressed people of his other dream, and the young man with the whip. No, it would be better to stay hidden this time if he could. The forest was wheeling and dipping around him behind a haze of obscurity, and nothing had very much coherence. The ringing in his ears was probably intoxication, not actual sound.
The people were somberly clad in black, with black hoods that covered their hair and framed pale, intolerant faces.
They were moving in a long column through the trees. Lessing watched them go by for what seemed a long while. Some of the women carried work bags over their arms and knitted as they walked. A few of the men read from small books and stumbled now and then on the cobblestones. There was no laughter.
