by C. L. Moore
The mist swirled grayly about them. Sounds of rumbling and thunder rolled through the fog. The tilted sponginess underfoot quivered. Then, gradually, it steadied and the mist began to clear. They stood on the height of a ragged mountain. Its peaks stretched broken summits upward into the hovering gray overhead.
Below them, far away at the foot of sheer-dropping cliffs, a green land of meadows and streams lay spread. Warm light brooded over it from some invisible source, and its trees stirred in the breezes.
It was a sleeping land, untenanted by any animate life, but fair as a garden in paradise as it lay there in its frame of back-rolled mist. The man found himself envying a little the race which might one day people that pleasant green place, and the girl in his arms turned a troubled face downward, staring in puzzled wonder at the far-away panorama.
"I can remember—almost," she murmured. "I think I know that place. It is—"
The words broke off as walls of mist surged forward like an incoming tide in breakers that blotted out the whole green valley from sight. The thick blindness of it swirled over them, and again the ground was shifting beneath their feet, and the girl hid a terrified face against his shoulder as another stirring in the mist spoke of dawning creation.
This time, as the curtains of the grayness swept back, they looked down into a city, white-walled and lovely, in the midst of a fair, green valley. Shadows passed bewilderingly over it from no visible source, and there was the illusion of life in its streets, a faint stirring and hurrying, although no animate creature moved there. The girl leaned forward to look. He heard her catch her breath.
"Oh, there!" she cried. "There—that city! I remember—"
Down swept the veiling mist in a rush that blotted out the while walls and green valley so swiftly that the words died on her lips. She turned a troubled face up, searched the man's eyes with a questing stare.
"What is it I remember?" she asked. "It's gone now, but for a moment I—I knew—"
She paused, for she must have seen that he was not listening. He was watching her lovely, sun-golden face .in a wonder and puzzlement so deep that her words had little meaning to him. That face was so bewilderingly familiar that he realized suddenly he knew before it happened just how her brows would lift delicately in query, just how her mouth would quirk as she spoke.
He said: "Why are you so familiar to me? Who are you?"
She looked at him in silence, a deep wonder swimming in her eyes. Gradually knowledge seemed to dawn there—an awareness of something he could not understand. She looked about in the rolling mist with little glances of searching, half panic. What she saw seemed to overwhelm her, for suddenly she twisted from his arms and buried her face in her hands, the black hair swirling forward as she sobbed.
"I'm not real! I know it now—I'm nobody! I'm nothing! I shouldn't be born yet. Oh, let me go back!"
Helplessly he laid his hands on her shaking shoulders. She shrugged them off violently, the wail of her voice rising behind her hands.
"Don't, don't! I'm not ready to exist—I don't want to be! Why did you make me come alive? I want to go back! I'm not real!"
"My dear—my dear," he cried. "Please don't! You belong to me—I've known you for so long; just how your eyes would be, and the tilt of your nose, and the way your mouth closes. I've known you always—you are real! You belong to me!"
Her hands dropped. With drenched eyes she faced him.
"No," she said a little more calmly. "I belong to no one. I shouldn't exist. I'm not ready yet to be alive. I belong to all these things we've seen: the woods and the green valley and the city I remembered for a moment before it disappeared. Somewhere, sometime in the future, I have a life to live. But not now. Not yet. The race I belong with hasn't begun; the world I should dwell in isn't even created yet. And here I am, lost out of time and space and my own life. I'm alive, but I shouldn't be. I'm not real! I want to go back!"
"But—but—" He stared at her in a wordless confusion. The very thought of her dissolution, back into the grayness that had formed her, made him sick with an emptiness he could not explain. She was so dearly familiar. Not until he spoke had he realized that he had indeed known her always, just that sweet brown face and bending, sunburned body. She belonged to him by every right of long knowledge and understanding. From the first glimpse he had had of her he felt that, yielding without resistance to the curious, appealing pull of her, the ache of urgency to be near her always. The answer broke upon his consciousness with a blinding simplicity.
He gulped and said: "I love you. I can't let you go."
Her eyes widened upon his. A subtle terror woke in them.
"No, no!" she gasped. "I'm not ready for love. I can't! I daren't! I'm not ready for life, I tell you! Not real! All I want is to go back, to wait for my own time. I daren't love!"
She sobbed as the words left her lips, and closed her eyes tight as if to shut out the very fact of his existence along with the sight of him.
The man looked at her helplessly. There was no way now that he could undo what had happened. The very thought of its undoing was intolerable to him. But the distress in her voice was intolerable, too, and after a moment he realized what he must do.
He looked at her. She was weeping now, her face averted and the tears running out beneath her closed lids. And it seemed to him that her grief was more violent than the mere longing to return into oblivion once more. She wept as one weeps who must lose something precious, but impossible to retain. In sudden resolution he laid an arm across her shoulders, pulling her forward.
"Come," he said. "We'll go back. We'll see what can be done."
She sobbed aloud as he spoke, and suddenly gripped his arm with urgent fingers, though her face was still averted. Wordlessly, still weeping, still clinging to his arm in a grip whose tightness bespoke a terror of losing him, she moved forward at his side. In silence they went down the misty mountain that gave so spongily under their stumbling feet.
He had no idea in what direction he should head to return into that vast chamber of the presence. For all he knew it might be impossible ever to return. And the girl's clinging to his arm had roused a fantastic hope which made everything else seem trivial. It was only by an immense effort that he forced his mind away from the thought of her and turned it with all the intensity he could manage toward the great, composite mind of the Dweller in the living temple, calling through the dimness for its aid.
-
V.
THE MIST churned and twisted all about them as they stumbled on. The scenes faded into nothing. They walked a city's streets, great dim houses rising above them smokily. They waded a shallow sea that washed the feet of the dissolving city. Three times long currents of nameless emotion shivered through the gloom and shook them both in tides of violence that reached the depths of their very souls and passed on again, leaving them weak.
Once a great flight of steps rose under their feet. They climbed toward a mighty portal whose yawning darkness made the girl gasp in some half-remembered awe and terror, but before they could reach it the fog had blotted out everything and they groped again through nothingness. All about them the shadows of the presence's thoughts floated dimly, shaping the mist into world thoughts that faded, half formed.
But these shadowy whims of creation did not touch the man's own mind. Time and again he strove to establish some contact with the brain that was manifesting its power so eloquently in the mist, but no contact came. Enveloped and lost in those vast, shifting thoughts, yet untouched by them, he went on, still striving with all his brain's intensity for contact.
And then quite suddenly it came. His questing mind brushed a vaster one with a momentary touch, and exactly as a hand groping in dimness meets and grips another, so the great brain of the presence seized upon his.
There was a pull as if the strength of that meeting hand were lifting him. The gray mist swam and faded. With his last conscious effort he tightened his arm about the girl. Then everything blurred again, and
once more the presence swept him along paths outside time, so that he had no recollection of having moved.
The great rose-veined chamber of the presence inclosed them both. With the girl still gripped in his arm, he stood upon its throbbing floor, the great walls arching over him, the far-off pulses of the mighty heart beating in measured rhythm through his innermost being.
The presence was a tangible thing it the vast room. He felt it seeking through his mind, drawing out the knowledge of what had passed. Queerly grateful that he need not enter into long explanations of what was still inexplicable to him, he stood quiescent, feeling knowledge draining out of him into the consciousness of that vast, united mind. The girl had hidden her face against his shoulder, and her fingers still gripped his arm with desperate strength.
Presently a thought flowed smoothly into his brain.
"You tell yourself that you love this girl. That is untrue. It was your love which created her. Your presence in Our brain as We meditated upon creation was strong enough to project your own thoughts upon the plasm from which We are molding worlds. When the figure of a girl flashed across Our mind, yours seized upon it and shaped it into your own interpretation of perfection. Unconsciously but surely, you created your own ideal, with all the features which seem to you capable of arousing love. Inevitably you felt that love when you gazed upon them. And because We were curious to see what would evolve, we sent you out to follow."
"Yes," thought the man rebelliously. "And see what has happened. How can it be undone now? For however I came to love her, even you cannot deny that I do love her now."
Silence for a while, as the presence meditated. The girl was breathing in little gasps, and her fingers dug into his arms.
"She belongs in her own world and time," came the voiceless thought at last. "She could have no reality outside them. Her body, half real as it is, you might keep, but you would not desire it so, for the mind which dwells in it will always belong in that other life, that yet unborn future."
"But as for me," broke in the man, "my mind will always be with her, wherever she is. Can't you see that? It is the same with me, for though my body exists in my own life and time, yet my very existence will always center on her. I can't leave her."
-
THE GIRL in his arms wriggled in sudden alarm. Across his mind surface floated a plaintive wail from her inarticulate brain.
"I want to go back," it cried bewilderingly, "but do not leave me! I couldn't bear to have you leave me!"
Another silence. Out of it the voiceless presence spoke serenely: "Yes. Yes, man, you have spoken more truly than you realize. In one sense your mind will always be with this woman, because by the strength of it you awaked her out of her plasm state of unaware and impermanent existence into conscious life and semireality. By that act you infused enough of your personality into her to make you two indissolubly one. Henceforth each of you is incomplete without the other. We have permitted the ingredients of this curious union to exist, and We have no choice now but to accept it, for love is too powerful a force for even Ourself to tamper with. We cannot force you apart."
"But neither can we exist together," said the man despairingly. "What shall we do?"
His arms tightened about the girl, and she began to sob again in small, hopeless gasps.
"Peace, peace!" The great voice throbbed wordlessly through the chamber. "There is no question about an answer. The acceptance of yours you must decide in your own mind, but the answer itself is clear. The woman is a part of Our presence, the product of Our united brain. She must return into the unit that is We. But with her she carries a vital part of your humanity. You have the choice of merging with her and with Ourself, abandoning your body and the physical life which animates it to join with that single immortal spark which is essentially yourself in the composite unit of Our presence. Only thus can you two know union."
Dubiously the man hesitated as the voice fell still in his brain. He felt no affinity with the presence, certainly no urge to abandon his animate life in order to join some intangible nucleus of ultimate Self in its mighty purpose. And how could he let the girl in his arms leave them? How could he—
Sharply across his hesitance the voice of the presence broke. "There is no choice," it said with calm finality. "The girl must go back."
Suddenly he was aware of a curious lessening in the firmness of the warm body he held against his breast. Instinctively his arms tightened, and sank unresisted into semisolidity. In terror he looked down. The girl was fading. Mistily outlined, uncertain as a vision, she was melting into the colored fog from which she had sprung. Despairingly he clutched after the vanishing shape his own dreams had evoked, and saw only his hands passing unresisted through nothingness. Like the dream she was, she faded in his very arms until all reality was gone from her and nothing remained but a blur of brightly colored fog that dissipated upon the clear, throbbing air within the chamber.
Inarticulate rebellion choked up in his throat. Anger was bubbling hotly in the protest that rose to the surface of his consciousness, but before it had reached the levels of articulation, before he could frame his thoughts for the mental utterance which passed here for speech, something very strange and wonderful happened. He could not have described it. But quite suddenly the deepest sensation of intimacy came warmly over him, and he paused in the midst of his wrath and protest to gasp in the sudden wonder of it.
With that gasp all rebellion died, all need for rebellion. In that breathless moment so close a sense of unity with all that surrounded him was dawning that his very brain went mute with the splendor of it. It was a more exquisitely warm and intimate sensation than any human could ever have experienced before. He was no longer a unit, alone and in discord, struggling against forces stronger than his greatest effort. All about him closed an infolding presence that was one with his innermost being. No words can describe the peace of it, the blessed surcease from all that had tormented him. In the very center of his own innermost consciousness a serene voice radiated.
"This is what surrender means, O foolish human," it said. "The girl you love has merged again into the unit which is Ourself, carrying with her that portion of your vitality called love. A part of you is one with Ourself now, and by its merging you gain a kinship with Our presence. Do not resist—do not struggle. This is greater than individuality. This is true happiness, the submerging of Self in the unity of the whole. Be one with Us."
-
THAT LAST inarticulate command diffused itself through the man's consciousness in waves that spread like ripples in a pool, fading imperceptibly into the vast, serene rhythm of the presence.
He scarcely heeded the voice's cessation. He was no longer thinking as a unit.
In the completest relaxation, spreading beyond the body and the mind and into the innermost places of the very soul, he was surrendering himself to the all-pervading serenity of the presence. Nothing troubled him now. The answers to all his questions and doubts and hesitancies were absorbed unasked in the great calm of that composite brain which was receiving him.
In the depths of his serenity, with an untroubled perception which accepted without wonder, he began to be aware of sensations he had never known before—ripples of light, surges of colors without name, washes of sound, wave upon wave of wonder.
He began to perceive kaleidoscopic patterns forming as wave crossed wave and rollers of sensation broke across surges of nameless raptures; patterns that blended indescribably into one mighty design which extended far beyond the confines of three dimensions, reaching out to infinity through space and time and the borders of the ultimate dimension.
He was becoming less conscious of that pattern—Its colors and sensations were somehow becoming his own, and he was a vast and patterned thing which stretched across dimensions and filled space from edge to edge—space, which has no borders—and now consciousness itself was melting away; a burst of roaring glory blotted out all sensation.
Something brushing across his forehe
ad called him back to consciousness. He opened blank eyes upon a green forest world. A vine trailing over a great broken stone beside him had touched his face with its leaves as the wind blew. He sat up and stared dully around.
He was seated at the edge of a vast, gray ruin whose broken blocks heaped the ground as far as his eyes could penetrate the jungle. It was an old ruin, for vines had grown up over it and moss was thick upon the gray stones. There was something unpleasant about the luxuriousness of that moss, the green, voluptuous vines.
A faint odor like that of long-decayed flesh hung over the broken blocks, and the green things thrust avid roots into their cracks and crevices, flourishing out of the grayness as out of the richest soil.
The man's eyes slid unheedingly over the ruin. Something was teasing at the back of his brain, and he knit his brows in a stupid effort at remembrance. He seemed, somehow, with a remote part of himself, to be swimming in seas of glory, breasting surf whose crests broke into music, floating lightly as a dream through depths of nameless beauty. He could recall colors, and the loveliest waves of sound, and a peace so deep it drowned his very brain in quiet. And then—then—
The memory faded. He felt heavy and very dull, and a little frightened. That other Self was drawing farther and farther away, melting into the splendor, losing all contact with the body that had housed it. Somehow he wanted to cry, and slow tears presently began to trickle down his face. But he had forgotten why.
After a while a light caught his eyes, and he turned an empty gaze toward the west where the glow of sunset shone through the trees. He smiled happily and stumbled to his feet, setting off at a shambling walk toward it. He blundered into trees as he went, tore through vines that hung down across his path. Branches whipped his face, but he made no move to fend them off. His hands swung, forgotten, at his sides.
He came out upon the beach in time to see the last of the red glow sinking beyond the horizon. He would have walked straight on toward it, but the water lapping about his ankles distracted him and he sank down in the edge of the surf, playing contentedly with some shells that had washed up on the shore. The light went slowly out of the sky behind him.