Collected Short Fiction, page 164
Who, and where, was the real he?
It was a puzzle without answer in a timeless, meaningless existence.
Then suddenly, without the slightest warning, full consciousness struck him. There was a sunburst in the mind.
In the strong white light which permeated Rosala’s house all objects became as hard, brilliant, and strikingly colourful as though he were seeing them under the influence of mescalin.
He knew that he was Alexander Sherret, and he remembered very clearly his adventures on the trek to Na-Abiza up to the point where he fell and crashed his head against something hard. After that, things remained hazy.
That part of him who had had long talks with Rosala was still absent, lost in some blind alley of the memory.
However, here he stood now in the centre of the studio, in slippers and a blue velvety gown with a golden cord gathering in the waist. He felt vitally alive and strong. He walked across the glassy floor, which contained intertwining ribbons of colours, moving slowly like snakes, in its depths, to a wall mirror.
He looked well, too, and had grown an impressive, rust-red beard. He fingered it, and touched more tenderly the still sore place above his right ear. A slight lump remained there.
He noticed an easel and inspected the painting thereon. It sent a little shock of disquiet through him. In purple monochrome it stylistically displayed the pattern of a man trapped, grotesquely twisted, and crushed amid a cluster of tall, smooth pillars. Although contorted in pain and fright, the face was recognisably his. The pillars, presumably, were the trees simplified.
As he regarded it, unconsciously he began a new habit: a nervous tugging at his beard.
A pair of ivory-white, perfectly moulded arms stole around his shoulders from behind. A honeyed voice whispered in his ear, in Amaran with an attractive, unfamiliar accent.
“Ah, my Ulysses, you said you never wanted to look at it again. But it fascinates you, doesn’t it? Art is stronger than our fears or desires. Didn’t I always tell you that?”
He disengaged himself awkwardly and turned to look into Rosala’s smiling eyes. They were his favourite shade of blue. She was an ash-blonde; he had a weakness for the Scandinavian type.
He said in an undertone: “How could anyone so lovely as you create anything so horrible as that?”
She pouted childishly. “Create? I didn’t create it. An artist only receives and records impressions.”
“Art is selection, Rosala. You could have selected more worthy impressions than these. This picture is gloating sadism. You must be a cruel woman.”
She stared at him strangely. “You can believe that?”
“I don’t know. I only know I loathe this picture.”
She took a deep breath. “Very well,” she said, in a steely voice, startlingly different from her former tone. She thrust past him and punched at the canvas with both fists. There was strength in those smooth arms. They smashed the painting to a torn ruin.
She turned on him with an angrily flushed face.
“Perhaps you—” she began, but on impulse he seized her, hugged her, and smothered her with kisses. She didn’t resist but returned his kisses with passion. He observed, belatedly and with wry amusement, that she was quite naked. From the assured and easy way he fondled her, it was apparent that this had happened many times, that his muscles and nervous system remembered what he did not.
“Ulysses,” she murmured, full of love.
“Why do you call me Ulysses?”
She stood back, holding him at arm’s length, and looked searchingly at him.
“Darling, you are talking strangely. Something has happened. What is it? Have the bad dreams come back?”
“Bad dreams?”
“That picture which you call sadistic didn’t come from my mind. Nor from reality. Only from your imagination. It was our picture. Your conception, my execution. We were exercising your bad dreams. Once expressed externally, in paint, we hoped they would cease to haunt you.”
“I don’t remember that, Rosala. I’m afraid I’ve . . . lost touch. You’ll have to help me. Let me tell you what I can remember. Then you can fill in the gaps.”
Chapter Four
He took her hand, led her to a couch nearby. They settled among cushions, and while she watched him wonderingly, he told her all he could remember, the things seen through a glass darkly.
Afterwards, she said: “It’s strange to have to tell you again these things. I’m Rosala—yes, you were right about the name. When I asked your name, you did not say ‘Sherret’ ” (she pronounced it ‘Sherry’) but ‘Ulysses.’ And at first you called me ‘Circe,’ I don’t know why. But later, ‘Rosala.’
“One day I was walking sadly in my house, knowing that neither it nor I had much longer to live. I was wondering how long was left, whether it was worth starting another painting. Or whether I could ever paint again. Then I looked out of the window and saw you being trapped by the Melas tree.
“Then you fell and lost your senses. So I went and brought you here. I felt sorry for you and sorry for the Melas tree, too, that I should deprive it of further companions. Still, it had done very well from you. I was glad of that. The Melas trees and we Petrans have a bond of sympathy, something in common which distinguishes us from all other living things on Amara.”
Sherret raised an eyebrow, and she paused.
“However,” she resumed, “Melas trees can live together in a community. The one beyond my garden, by the river, was unfortunate. It was isolated. Now it isn’t any more. It’s become a community because of the accident of your coming. But we Petrans can’t live with each other for long. We have nothing to give one another. We must live alone, and die alone, unless—”
She broke off, and stroked his arm gently. Almost possessively, Sherret thought, with vague alarm.
“There aren’t many of us. We live near the river. And the Melas trees grow only by the river, too. Most Amarans are afraid to come near us. Lee wasn’t afraid. He was a real man, although sometimes he lost confidence in himself.”
“Lee? Who was Lee?”
“He was the man who lived with me before you came.”
Sherret sat up straight, suddenly, and frowned down at her. Her beautiful white body lay at careless ease upon the bright cushions. Her profile, with the high brow, straight nose, firm little chin, was upturned as she gazed at the lofty and domed ceiling. Obviously she was remembering Lee with affection.
Or perhaps with more than affection.
“You were lovers?” Sherret asked, and was surprised at the condemnatory note that rang through the last word. He’d never thought of himself as a puritan. Perhaps a Calvinistic streak had been inherited from his Scottish ancestors.
“Of course. I have loved all the men who have lived with me.”
“Well, I’ll be damned! You promiscuous little baggage!”
That phrase didn’t translate into Amaran. The result implied unfaithfulness.
She sat up abruptly, too, and stared at him with wide, horrified eyes. Then she clawed at his face, with vigour. The beard saved him from the worst of the attack but the blood dripped from scratches near his eyes.
He swore, jumping to his feet and flinging her back on the couch. He dabbed at the wounds with the back of one hand.
“That’s a wicked temper, you have Rosala. I can guess why none of your men would stay on with you. Or . . . did you kill them?”
Her eyes shone like blue fire.
She lifted an arm and pointed at him. It was as though a cannonball had hit him in the chest. He went flying on to his back on the glacial floor and slid for some feet over the slowly writhing shapes beneath it.
He lay still for a moment, whooping. Then he sat up slowly, hands pressed to his sore breast-bone. From the couch she regarded him, the fire of hate gone. She looked like a petulant child.
“Technical knock-out,” wheezed Sherret, and laughed breathlessly.
At once she ran over to him, knelt and embraced him.
“Sherry, I’m sorry. Oh, Sherry—”
“No, my pet, I’m to blame,” said Sherret, caressing her.
Between kisses she said softly: “Only wicked Petrans . . . live with more than one man . . . at a time. I always had . . . only the one. So I couldn’t be . . . unfaithful. I loved them all . . . but only some of them loved me . . . Perhaps none of them did. For they all left me . . . in the end. I think Lee loved me . . . and will come back to me . . . when he has proved himself.”
Sherret felt a stab of jealousy about Lee. He stood up, picked her up—she was surprisingly light—and carried her back to the couch.
He said, perplexedly: “I’m in a whirl. I don’t understand your way of life. I was angry with you because I love you, and I was jealous of those other men.”
She ripped a piece of cloth from a cushion, licked it wet, and gently cleaned up his blood-smeared face. He was amused by her method and a little touched by her concern. Even though she would have done as much for Lee—and perhaps had done, if they had fought in the same way.
“Did you ever fight with Lee?” he asked, suddenly.
She avoided his gaze. “Yes.”
“Who won?”
“I lost,” she sighed. “For he left me.”
“But that was to prove himself, didn’t you say?”
“Yes. He had to. He might have stayed if I hadn’t been so foolish. I annoyed him so much sometimes that he tried to beat me.”
“But you wouldn’t let him. You knocked him down with your pocket thunderbolt. What are you—an electric eel?”
She didn’t understand the reference, and let it pass. “Yes, I was foolish. He came here seeking self-respect, and I tried to help him—and I did, too. And then I would lose my temper and undo all I’d built up. But perhaps he would have gone on his way eventually, all the same. He said he must face the most dangerous creatures on this planet, stand up to them, and survive. Only then, he said, could he call himself a man.”
“What are these dangerous creatures?”
“They’re called the Three-people. I’ve never seen them and never want to. They live in the pass between the mountains in the north-west. Only fools or heroes go there. The fools never return. The heroes return seldom. And when they do, they have become fools. They’ve lost their wits and rave wildly about the Three-people. But nothing they say makes any senses any more. Their minds have gone . . . Lee said he would come back to me. Perhaps he meant to. Sometimes I fear he’ll never return. Sometimes I fear he will . . . as a poor crazy man.”
Sherret ran his fingers through his hair, a little wearily.
“Amara gets altogether too bizarre for me at times. Now and then I think I might be able to piece it all together. And then again I think the pieces were never meant to fit—they belong to different jigsaw puzzles. Nothing joins on to anything. Melas trees and Petrans and Three-people . . . Have you ever heard the expression ‘Beware of those who become three’ ?”
“Yes, it’s a common saying. It relates to the Three-people.”
“But how do they become ‘three’ ?”
“I don’t know, Sherry. Let us forget them. Let’s talk about . . . oh, the Melas trees.”
“All right, tell me about them.”
Long ago, she said, the Melas tree was a simple fruit-bearing tree which flourished in this part of the country in a perfectly normal way. The birds ate of its fruit and carried its seeds far and wide.
Then the species was attacked by a pernicious blight which all but killed it off. Its fruit became poisonous: only the ignorant devoured it—and died. Moreover, the seeds had lost the vital reproductive power, except for the occasional throwback or sport. The lone tree near the house must have sprung from an odd exception of this kind, the seed having been carried there by some creature perhaps at the cost of its life.
But the Melas trees had a tremendously strong instinct for survival. Paradoxically, the disease caused a mutation which aided survival. Some chemical change in the sap enormously stimulated the primitive awareness winch all plants possess and which is weakly telepathic.
The Melas tree’s consciousness became strongly telepathic, but lacked hindsight or foresight. Yet it was aware that past and future states existed, and it knew that humanoid creatures were conscious of them.
It found a way of using the humanoid brain as a medium for reproducing itself. Literally reproducing itself. For in the humanoid mind there was foreknowledge of the Melas tree’s continued existence tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow. A Melas tree existing in millions of future instants of time.
The Melas tree, living for the instant, conceived of these multitudinous future states of itself as separate, other trees living in the instant. Desperately it sought to connect with them. And did so, through another’s mind.
The tree’s sphere of influence didn’t extend beyond the reach of its branches. Any humanoid who strayed beneath them became a victim. Even so, the tree’s control was limited. If the humanoid was contemplating the past or present or was unconscious, it was useless to the tree. For the past was unalterable, the present couldn’t be duplicated, an unconscious mind couldn’t be contacted. Only the future was malleable.
Once the humanoid mind became forward-looking, extrapolating into the future, even if for a distance of only a few seconds, the tree would reach through, contact its future self, and snatch it into the present.
“For heaven’s sake, how?” asked Sherret.
“Nobody knows.”
“Well, then, how do you know all this other stuff about the Melas tree?”
“Some very wise men have stayed under this roof,” said Rosala, archly.
“H’m. Some of it is very likely true. Certainly, every time I contemplated making a movement, or a sequence of movements, a tree materialised—sometimes in batches. You can’t make a movement without thinking about it first, however fleetingly. But did they have to keep barring my way?”
“Of course, darling. They didn’t want you to escape until they’d used your mind to the limit.”
“But they were trying to crush me to death.”
“No. That was only your fear. They were trying to form a stockade round you, and keep you imprisoned in it.”
“Then I should have starved to death.”
“Eventually. That’s what usually happens. But by then you would have helped create a whole forest of Melas trees.”
“Some consolation! How did you save me, Rosala?”
“Partly you saved yourself, by becoming unconscious. They couldn’t complete the barrier around you. I got you out.”
“Why should you be immune from their influence? To get me, you must have walked beneath their branches.”
Rosala bit her lip, and was silent for a moment. Then she said, quietly: “At that time I was in no condition to be of use to them. I hardly existed. I was a shadow.”
Sherret looked at her, and tugged nervously at his beard.
“Then I didn’t dream that part of it. I thought you were a ghost. You were—”
He gripped her arm. It was as solid as his own.
“Yet now—” he began, but she clung suddenly to him, sobbing: “Sherry, don’t ever leave me. Please. Stay with me. Believe in me. Stay with me.”
Her intensity touched him. He put his arm about her and stroked her soft, bright hair. He wanted to reassure her with telling phrases. And all that came was tired cliche.
“Don’t worry, darling. I love you. We’ll always be together.”
He meant it sincerely enough.
“But you said you had to go on—to Na-Abiza. You said I was the enchantress, Circe, holding you here . . .”
“I must have been out of my mind, delirious.”
She looked up at him hopefully, with tear-wet eyes.
“Yes, you were ill,” she said, eagerly. “You kept having nightmares about the Melas tree. You were painting a horrible picture in your mind. I helped to externalise it for you. If I choose, your imagination can work through mine to influence material things. Together, our minds can change the forms of anything, mould everything to our will. We are artists.”
She emphasised the word, proudly.
“This house was built through the minds of men working in unison with mine,” she said. “And the garden—”
“And you,” Sherret broke in, astonished. “I remoulded you. I remember now.”
“I desired only to please you,” she murmured.
“You won’t fade into a ghost again?”
She trembled slightly. “As long as you wish me here as I am, so long shall I be here.”
“Your existence depends only on my wish?”
She was silent for a while, resting her head on his shoulder. Then, in a small, muffled voice: “Petrans do not believe in themselves. They exist only through the belief of others, others who have faith. That is why Petrans who try to live together merely die to nothing. Like the Melas trees, we can survive only through the minds of others.”
He held her protectively. “Poor little Rosala,” he said, automatically. His mind was spinning, trying yet again to fit itself into the mad frames of reference which was life on Amara. Only connect. Only adjust. Else the schizophrenia will return and the personality called Sherret will split into nameless, aimless dreamers, lost in a fog of amnesia.
He said: “I need you, Rosala, quite as much as you need me. We’ll start a new life together.”
Chapter Five
The new life went on like a pleasantly exciting dream as the sky shaded from colour to colour.
So far the trek had taught Sherret one thing: to accept the incredible. That may or may not be a good doctrine. It could lead to a dulling of the sense of wonder. Excess of anything tends to boredom—even, strangely enough, excess of novelty.
There was plenty of novelty.
Just to watch Rosala paint involved a series of surprises. She needed no brush. She painted with her fingers.
