The Lily Hand and Other Stories (28 page)

‘I wonder,' I said, ‘if they'll answer us? If their world has all the favourable conditions ours used to have, why shouldn't they have progressed as far as we have?'

‘And since it still has the favourable conditions,' said Gennadi, tuning down his videoscreen to the finest definition, and watching the unbelievable colourings of the Parthenopeian dawn begin, ‘why shouldn't we conclude that they may have progressed a good deal farther? And why should we suppose they want, any more than they need, our peculiar genius grafted on to their nice, clean world?'

A physicist who is also a poet is liable to have complex vision. When he's Russian by birth into the bargain, the added complication of a political and philosophic bent is inescapable. But he was a nice fellow to work with; and he was almost always right. He was right that time too. Parthenope didn't want us.

It happened towards dawn. All our receivers began to crackle as though someone somewhere was feeling his way into their use, gently and easily and confidently, but handling something of a type not encountered before. And then the voice came, full and emphatic, pitched in a low baritone register, repeating the same short message over and over. They had understood us.

The trouble was, we couldn't understand them. Our experts sweated over those almost continuous, singing sounds for three days, and couldn't begin to break the pattern. The voice slowed down to half-speed at the third lengthy transmission, but they still couldn't get it. And some of us said, go in anyway, but the Commodore wouldn't risk it. If they'd understood and answered us, between the two sides there must be a way of working out some kind of two-way communication.

Soon after that the voice stopped, but the transmission was taken over by a very slight, throbbing vibration on a deep note. It was hardly audible, it wasn't language as we understood it; but in a few minutes we felt it transfer itself to the inside of our heads, and go reverberating through our minds. The Parthenopeians had gone farther than we had in one way, at least. They could transmit mental concepts, prohibitions, impulses, influences. And what they were telling us was to stay out; what they were saying to us was: No, no, no, you mustn't come!

‘So that's how they're going to react! Draft a second and fuller message,' said the Commodore, ‘and tell them exactly why we're here. Explain our need and ask for their help. Then we shall see if they still refuse to let us land.'

And we did that, and translated and transmitted it. But the emphatic, unintelligible answer still ticked back to us, and when it again failed to get any acknowledgement the receivers turned on us the same mental battery of absolute rejection. Parthenope wouldn't have us at any price.

‘The natives are unfriendly,' said Captain Abukaba, and looked haunted for a moment, as though a racial memory had caught up with him. ‘But we have a sacred duty to our own people, we must not let them be turned away so easily. I say we should go in and land. Then we can negotiate with them man to man.'

‘Wait!' said the Commodore. ‘Give our lingual experts more time, they may break into the language yet. This is probably only a misunderstanding.'

So we went on orbiting. And that night on watch the receivers were silent; only in our instrument room Gennadi sat with his transmitter switched on, and his screen tuned down upon the dark blue planet, and began to talk to Parthenope as sometimes he talked to himself.

‘I am one man,' he said, among many other nonsenses, casting his voice and his smile as a fisherman casts a fly. ‘I am not a soldier, I am not a politician, I am not an enemy of anything that lives. I am a scientist, and curious, and lonely, and you reject me and my curiosity if you reject us. In this ship we have one-man research hulls, how if I should take one and come? How could I be a threat, alone? What would you do if I came?'

I think he had never expected anything, but how can I tell? The blue of the screen was convulsed with a great tremor, and the silent receiver sent out a violent impulse of: No, no, no!

Gennadi said softly: ‘I am becoming sensitive to this language of the mind. If you had concepts for all those things that move me, and I had any grasp of the concepts you live by, we might talk to each other like this, silently. But how can you convey to me images which don't exist in my world by any name? You warn me off – very well! Am I necessarily to put the worst construction on that, as if you were my own kin? Answer me this: if I went away now, back to my diseased world, would you wish me and mine a fair deliverance by some other means? Do you wish me well?'

A sudden quivering warmth of assent answered him. I felt it as clearly as the: No.

He said in a gentle voice: ‘Parthenope!' From then on everything in him began to change, and on the fringe of the change I could sit and watch, but I could neither join in nor draw him back to me.

‘He said: ‘Parthenope, speak to me. Say: I wish you well!'

The receiver sighed, the cloudy screen lost colour, like a troubled pool. In the unknown, singing tongue a voice repeated something faintly; and the voice was a woman's voice, soft, warm and low.

‘There is no language anywhere in any world,' Gennadi said, ‘that has no concept for: I wish you well! If the men had no need of it, the women would not be able to live without it.' And after a moment of silence he said: ‘Let me look at you. I know you can, if you will.'

She came into the screen; cloudily, brokenly, but she came. Have you ever wondered how they would look, the inhabitants of a planet enjoying conditions much like our own, even to the single moon? Why should it be the blankest of all surprises, the most stunning of all shocks, that they should turn out to look like us?

I saw her only by glimpses that night, I never saw her clearly, the image was always fluid, like a reflection in water. But I believe that he saw her from the first more clearly than I, and by the end like one defined in fixed and perfect light. She had a face like a human woman's face, but smaller and of a more delicate pallor. I saw a cloud of dark hair in motion round her as though in water, and two great eyes alarmed and bright. I don't know how much she had of beauty, I only know beauty came into the room with her impress, and that the harder I stared the more her image shook, but the distillation of loveliness was never shaken.

I said: ‘So they look like us!'

‘No,' said Gennadi, ‘like our mirror-image. They are us reversed. They are what we could have been if we had always chosen the right turning.'

He sat looking into the screen, and he said: ‘You are beautiful.' And after a moment: ‘Do you still say to me that I may not come to you?'

No, the air shuddered, you can't come, you mustn't come! And the face that did not try to speak to him in sounds warned him away with parted lips and fixed eyes.

‘But I can't go, now, either. I have seen you now. This is the only world I want.'

The screen swirled, and sent her features sparkling away like drops of water, and all the room was convulsed with: No, no, no! Gradually the turmoil settled again, and her eyes came back first, wide, intent and wary. I knew by the look in them, and the way they brightened at the deepening of his smile, that she saw him clearly, and was as lost as he.

‘If you wish me well, and this is the only world in which I can ever be happy, why do you send me away?'

The impressions came from her in pulsations that seemed to carry waves of colour with them through the cabin. I didn't even know if I was interpreting her rightly, but he, I am sure, no longer had any doubts. What she had to say was being said to him, not to me, and he was quick and sensitive to meet her every thought, and who am I to say that the contribution of his willingness, no, his rapture, had no scientific validity?

‘It is because I wish you well that I want you to go.'

‘Should I, then, be coming to harm if I came to you?'

‘Yes.'

‘What is harm?' he said. ‘What is good? Is there a worse harm than to turn away from the only thing you want?'

The questions I heard, the answers no one heard; but he, I think, understood. But I know that to this there was no answer. Only a kind of pause for thought and wonder and self-questioning, as though she lowered her eyes to look more closely at what he showed her. And then she looked up at him again with so naked a radiance that the lines of her face paled away all to light.

And she was gone. The deep blue of the world below was paling to iris in the screen, the first saffron of dawn showed upon the arched horizon. She was gone, and he was stiff and silent and wide-eyed over his instruments and looked up at me blindly when I touched him, as if he had stared into the sun.

He said nothing to me then, and nothing to anyone afterwards, about the encounter. And I said nothing, either. The affair was wholly his, not mine.

He called her again the next night, and she came.

I might not have been there. All night they talked together, and at first there were words on his side, but soon the very words stopped. As she conveyed her will and her mind to him, so he began to speak to her without the need of language. Only sometimes the warm waves of passion and sympathy formed sentences even for me, but whether I was imagining them or whether they were truth I couldn't tell.

It seemed to me that he said: ‘I will not go away. I will never go away from you.'

‘You must go. I am afraid for you. You must go.'

‘To be afraid is to submit to deformity. Now I want to be whole. Without that there's nothing, no future, no love. And I love you.'

‘I love you.'

‘And I will not go.'

‘No! Don't go.'

‘I am coming to you.'

‘I am coming to you.'

The mirror-image encompassed even their silent utterances now, and the dialogue had become unison.

He came off watch with me like a man still dreaming. We lay on our bunks in the forward cabin, and he said to me: ‘Francis, you know, don't you, what happens when two mutually destructive particles collide?'

Half asleep, I said I did. They were destroyed on impact.

‘But new particles are generated. Don't forget that. And supposing these mutually destructive particles had consciousness to feel with, hearts to love with, minds to speculate with, souls to adventure with, and came together of their own will and purpose? What then?'

‘Then you'd have left physics for metaphysics.'

‘Where is the boundary?' he said. ‘I know of none. Where is the conflict between God and science, when every mystery resolved only uncovers a hundred new mysteries, and every demonstration of energy still leaves us meditating will and intent bigger than the energy? I see no conflict.'

Nobody but the Russians and the Indians still orientated themselves by the concept of God. Once I used to think it was because they were natural mystics, but now I'm not sure it isn't because they're natural scientists.

‘God is inseparable from the science. You might say,' said Gennadi deliberately, ‘that God's most inspired creation is science, and the ultimate achievement of science will be the discovery of God.'

‘If you like,' I said. ‘But your two animated particles would still be blasted out of existence when they collided, whether it was God or science or both accelerating them.'

‘But something new would be born, Francis, never forget that,' he said, smiling up at the ceiling. ‘Something new would be born.'

And that was the day he went to Professor von Schlucht and the Commodore, and volunteered to go down alone and make contact personally with the Parthenopeians.

I knew nothing about it until afterwards. I slept through the day, and got up a few hours before my watch to hear all about it from the junior who was coming on duty with me in Gennadi's place. It seemed he'd argued the whole proposition out for them in detail, and made complete sense of it. One man landing alone could hardly be construed as a threat. If he succeeded in opening negotiations so that the ship could land, then we'd have accomplished the first stage of our mission. And at worst he could make useful observations which might enable us to make a more effective contact later, after we'd had more time to work on our tapes of the language. It was essential that the envoy should be a capable physicist, and surely expedient that he should not be either of the two seniors. I knew him, he could argue his way to anything he wanted. And they'd jumped at his offer, and he was on his way before I was even awake. In the Number One hull, a silver shell just big enough to contain him and his micro-equipment.

I was afraid, and I didn't yet know why. I went down to the cabin alone, and turned on the radio and the screen, and probed after him. And he came in almost immediately, as if he'd been calling me. Maybe he had. He wasn't so far from us yet.

‘Gennadi – what are you up to? Why didn't you tell me?'

‘You might have tried to stop me,' he said. ‘Only you had any reason to try. Only you knew. I'm going to my girl, Francis. This is the only way I could get them to send me out. I'm going to her, and she's coming to meet me, up here, clear of her world.'

‘You're supposed to be landing,' I said. ‘What is this? What are you trying to do?'

‘Listen, Francis! Go to the Commodore for me, go now. Tell him to get the ship away from here, as far and fast as he can. Tell them they can never colonize Parthenope, no use hoping. Don't wait for me. I'm not coming back.'

‘Not coming back? And why is there no hope? Why can't we colonize it?'

‘Because matter and anti-matter can't live together. That's why they've been warning us away. We thought when we found almost no radioactivity that it must be because there was no anti-matter present. But we were wrong. There's no conflict
because there's no matter.
The whole of Parthenope is composed of anti-matter! Tell them! And tell them to get away from here.'