The Toynbee Convector (16 page)

But since the invasion and the disease, he had slowed to stillness. His universe was sunken away by death. The sawed and hammered and freshly painted towns were carriers of disease. The weight of so much dying rested heavily on his dreams. Often he woke weeping and put his hands out on the night air. But his parents were gone and it was time, past time, for one special friend, one touching, one love.

The wind was circling and spreading the bright odor.

Sio took a deeper breath and felt his flesh warm.

And then there was a sound. It was like a small orchestra playing. The music came up through the narrow stone valley to his cave.

A puff of smoke idled into the sky about a half mile away. Below, by the ancient canal, stood a small house that the men of Earth had built for an archaeological crew, a year ago. It had been abandoned and Sio had crept down to peer into the empty rooms several times, not entering, for he was afraid of the black disease that might touch him.

The music was coming from that house.

“An entire orchestra in that small house?” he wondered, and ran silently down the valley in the early afternoon light

The house looked empty, despite the music which poured out the open windows. Sio scrambled from rock to rock, taking half an hour to lie within thirty yards of the frightful, dinning house. He lay on his stomach, keeping close to the canal. If anything happened, he could leap into the water and let the current rush him swiftly back into the hills.

The music rose, crashed over the rocks, hummed in the hot air, quivered in his bones. Dust shook from the quaking roof of the house. Paint fell in a soft snowstorm from the peeling wood.

Sio leapt up and dropped back. He could see no orchestra within. Only flowery curtains. The front door stood wide.

The music stopped and started again. The same tune was repeated ten times. And the odor that had lured him down from his stone retreat was thick here, like a clear water moving about his perspiring face.

At last, in a burst of running, he reached the window, looked in.

Upon a low table, a brown machine glistened. In the machine, a silver needle pressed a spinning black disc. The orchestra thundered! Sio stared at the strange device.

The music paused. In that interval of hissing quiet, he heard footsteps. Running, he plunged into the canal.

Falling down under the cool water, he lay at the bottom, holding his breath, waiting. Had it been a trap? Had they lured him down to capture and kill him?

A minute ticked by, bubbles escaped his nostrils. He stirred and rose slowly toward the glassy wet world above. He was swimming and looking up through the cool green current when he saw her.

Her face was like a white stone above him.

He did not move, nor stir for a moment, but he saw her. He held his breath. He let the current slide him slowly, slowly away, and she was very beautiful, she was from Earth, she had come in a rocket that scorched the land and baked the air, and she was as white as a stone.

The canal water carried him among the hills. He climbed out, dripping.

She was beautiful, he thought. He sat on the canal rim, gasping. His chest was constricted. The blood burned in his face. He looked at his hands. Was the black disease in him? Had looking at her contaminated him?

I should have gone up, he thought, as she bent down, and clasped my hands to her neck. She killed us, she killed us. He saw her white throat, her white shoulders. What a peculiar color, he thought. But, no, he thought, she did not kill us. It was the disease. In so much whiteness, can darkness stay?

“Did she see me?” He stood up, drying in the sun. He put his hand to his chest, his brown, slender hand. He felt his heart beating rapidly. “Oh,” he said. “I saw her\”

He walked back to the cave, not slowly, not swiftly. The music still crashed from the house below, like a festival all to itself.

Without speaking, he began, certainly and accurately, to pack his belongings. He threw pieces of phosphorous chalk, food, and several books into a cloth, and tied them up firmly. He saw that his hands shook. He turned his fingers over, his eyes wide. He stood up hurriedly, the small packet under one arm, and walked out of the cave and started up the canyon, away from the music and the strong perfume.

He did not look back.

The sun was going down the sky now. He felt his shadow move away behind to stay where he should have stayed. It was not good, leaving the cave where he had often lived as a child. In that cave he had found for himself a dozen hobbies, developed a hundred tastes. He had hollowed a kiln in the rode and baked himself fresh cakes each day, of a marvelous texture and variety. He -had raised grain for food in a little mountain field. He had made himself clear, sparkling wines. He had created musical instruments, flutes of silver and thorn-metal, and small harps. He had written songs. He had built small chairs and woven the fabric of his clothing. And he had painted pictures on the cave walls in crimson and cobalt phosphorous, pictures that glowed through the long nights, pictures of great intricacy and beauty. And he had often read a book of poems that he had written when he was fifteen and which, proudly, but calmly, his parents had read aloud to a select few. It had been a good existence, the cave, his small arts.

As the sun was setting, he reached the top of the mountain pass. The music was gone. The scent was gone. He sighed and sat to rest a moment before going on over the mountains. He shut his eyes.

A white face came down through green water.

He put his fingers to his shut eyes, feeling.

White arms gestured through currents of rushing tide.

He started up, seized his packet of keepsakes, and was about to hurry off, when the wind shifted. Faintly, faintly, there was the music. The insane, metallic blaring, music, miles away. Faintly, the last fragrance of perfume found its way among the rocks. As the moons were rising. Sio turned and found his way back to the cave.

The cave was cold and alien. He built a fire and ate a small dinner of bread and wild berries from the mossrocks. So soon, after he had left it, the cave had grown cold and hard. His own breathing sounded strangely off the walls.

He extinguished the fire and lay down to sleep. But now there was a dim shaft of light touching the cave wall. He knew that this light had traveled half a mile up from the windows of the house by the canal. He shut his eyes but the light was there. It was either the light or the music or the smell of flowers. He found himself looking or listening or breathing for any one of the incredible three.

At midnight he stood outside his cave.

Like a bright toy, the house lights were yellow in the valley. In one of the windows, it seemed he saw a figure dancing.

“I must go down and kill her,” he said. “That is why I came back to the cave. To kill, to bury her.” When he was half-asleep, he heard a lost voice say, “You are a great liar.” He did not open his eyes.

She lived alone. On the second day, he saw her walking in the foothills. On the third day, she was swimming, swimming for hours, in the canal. On the fourth day and the fifth day, Sio came down nearer and nearer to the house, until, at sunset at the sixth day, with dark closing in, he stood outside the window of the house and watched the woman living there.

She sat at a table upon which stood twenty tiny brass tubes of red color. She slapped a white, cool-looking cream on her face, making a mask. She wiped it on tissues which she threw in a basket. She tested one tube of color, pressing in on her wide lips, clamping her lips together, wiping it, adding another color, wiping
it
off, testing a third, a fifth, a ninth color, touching her cheeks with red, also, tweezing her brows with a silver pincers. Rolling her hair up in incomprehensible devices, she buffed her fingernails while she sang a sweet strange alien song, a song in her own language, a song that must have been very beautiful. She hummed it, tapping her high heels on the hardwood floor. She sang it walking about the room, clothed only in her white body, or lying on the bed in her white flesh, her head down, the yellow hair flaming back to the floor, while she held a fire cylinder to her red, red lips, sucking, eyes closed, to let long slow chutes of smoke slip out her pinched nostrils and lazy mouth into great ghost forms on the air. Sio trembled. The ghosts. The strange ghosts from her mouth. So casually. So easily. Without looking at them, she created them.

Her feet, when she arose, exploded on the hardwood floor. Again she sang. She whirled about. She sang to the ceiling. She snapped her fingers. She put her hands out, like birds, flying, and danced alone, her heels cracking the floor, around, around.

The alien song. He wished he could understand. He wished that he had the ability that some of his own people often had, to project the mind, to read* to know, to interpret, instantly; foreign tongues, foreign thoughts. He tried. But there was nothing, she went on singing the beautiful, unknown song, none of which he could understand:

“Ain’t misbehavin’, I’m savin’ my love for you...”

He grew feint, watching her Earth body, her Earth beauty, so totally different, something from so many mil lions of miles away. His hands were moist, his eyelids jerked unpleasantly.

A bell rang.

There she was, picking up a strange black instrument, the function of which was not unlike a similar device of Sio’s people.

“Hello, Janice? God, it’s good to hear from you!” Sio smiled. She was talking to a distant town. Her voice was thrilling to hear. But what were the words?

“God, Janice, what a hell-out-of-the-way place you sent me to. I know, honey, a vacation. But, it’s sixty miles from nowhere. All I do is play cards and swim in the damned canal.”

The black machine buzzed in reply.

“I can’t stand it here, Janice. I know, I know. The churches. It’s a damn shame they ever came up here. Everything was going so nice. What 1 want to know is when do we open up again?”

Lovely, thought Sio. Gracious. Incredible. He stood in the night beyond her open window, looking at her amazing face and body. And what were they talking about? Art, literature, music, yes, music, for she sang, she sang all of the time. An odd music, but one could not expect to understand the music of another world. Or the customs or the language or the literature. One must judge by instinct alone. The old ideas must be set aside. It was to be admitted that her beauty was not like Martian beauty, the soft slim brown beauty of the dying race. His mother had had golden eyes and slender hips. But here, this one, singing alone in the desert, she was of larger stuffs, large breasts, large hips, and the legs, yes, of white fire, and the peculiar custom of walking about without clothes, with only those strange knocking slippers on the feet. But all woman of Earth did that, yes? He nodded. You must understand. The women of that far world, naked, yellow-haired, large-bodied, loud-heeled, he could see them. And the magic with the mouth and nostrils. The ghosts, the souls issuing from the lips in smoky patterns. Certainly a magical creature of fire and imagination. She shaped bodies in the air, with her brilliant mind. What else but a mind of clarity and clear genius could drink the gray, cherry red fire, and plume out architectural perfections of intricate and fine beauty from her nostrils. The genius! An artist! A creator! How was it done, how many years might one study to do this? How did one apply one’s time? His head whirled with her presence. He felt he must cry out to her, “Teach me!” But he was afraid. He felt like a child.

He saw the forms, the lines, the smoke swirl into infinity. She was here, in the wilderness, to be alone, to create her fantasies in absolute security, unwatched. One did not bother creators, writers, painters. One stood back and kept one’s thoughts silent.

What a people! he thought. Are all of the women of that fiery green world like this? Are they fiery ghosts and music? Do they walk blazingly naked in their loud houses?

“I must watch this,” he said, half-aloud. “I must study.” He felt his hands curl. He wanted to touch. He wanted her to sing for him, to construct the artistic fragments in the air for him, to teach him, to tell him about that far gone world and its books and its fine music....

“God, Janice, but how soon? What about the other girls? What about the other towns?”

The telephone burred like an insect.

“All of them closed down? On the whole damn planet? There must be
one place
! If you don’t find a place for me soon, I’ll ... !”

Everything was strange about it. It was like seeing a woman for the first time. The way she held her head back, the way she moved her red-fingernailed hands, all new and different She crossed her white legs, leaning forward, her elbow on a bare knee, summoning and exhaling spir its, talking, squinting at the window where he, yes, he stood in shadow; she looked right through him, oh, if she knew, what would she do?

“Who, me, afraid of living out here alone?”

She laughed, Sio laughed in cadence, in the moonlit darkness. Oh the beauty of her alien laughter, her head thrown back, the mystic clouds jetting and shaping from her nostrils.

He had to turn away from the window, gasping.

“Yeah! Sure!”

What fine rare words of living, music, poetry was she speaking now?

“Well, Janice, who’s afraid of any Martian? How many are left, a dozen, two dozen. line ‘em up, bring ‘em on, right? Right!”

Her laughter followed as he stumbled blindly around the corner of her house, his feet thrashing a Utter of bottles. Eyes shut, he saw the print of her phosphorous skin, the phantoms leaping from her mouth in sorceries and evocations of cloud, rain and wind. Oh, to translate! Oh, gods, to know. Listen! What’s that word, and that, and yes then, that!? Did she call out after him. No. Was that his name?

At the cave he ate but was not hungry.

He sat in the mouth of the cave for an hour, as the moons rose and hurtled across the cold sky and he saw his breath on the air, like the spirits, the fiery silences that breathed about her face, and she was talking, talking, he heard or did not hear her voice moving up the hill, among the rocks, and he could smell her breath, that breath of smoking promise, of warm words heated in her mouth.