Aliens from Analog

by Stanley Schmidt (ed)

  “Stabbed by a white wench’s black eyes.”

  He caught his breath suddenly, in a violent physical wrench, as memory deluged back with appalling violence. Clarissa! How could he have forgotten? How could he? How could even amnesia have erased her? He sat stunned, the shining flood all but blinding him. And somewhere under that pouring brightnçss was grief—but he would not let that break the surface yet.

  Clarissa. What words were there to get all that vivid color into speech? When the barrier went down, it collapsed with such a blast of sudden glory that…that—

  They had walked in the park above the Hudson, blue water marbled with deeper blue and twinkling in the sun, sliding away below them. Clear water in the fountain, tinkling down over pebbles wet and brown in the dappled shadows beneath the trees. And everything as vivid at Creation’s first morning, because of Clarissa walking beside him under the shining leaves. Clarissa—and he had forgotten.

  It was like looking back into a world a little brighter than human. Everything shone, everything glistened, every sound was sweeter and clearer; there was a sort of glory over all he saw and felt and heard. Childhood had been like that, when the newness of the world invested every commonplace with particular glamour. Glamour—yes, that was the word for Clarissa.

  Not sveltness and slickness, but glamour, the old word for enchantment. When he was with her it had been like stepping back into childhood and seeing everything with an almost intolerable fresh clarity.

  But as for Clarissa herself—who had she been? What had she looked like? And above all, how could he have forgotten?

  He groped backward into the shapeless fog of the past. What phrase was it that had suddenly ripped the curtain? Shock had all but erased it from his mind. It was like a lightning-flash forking through the darkness and vanishing again. Darkness—blackness—black eyes—yes, that was it. “Stabbed by a white wench’s black eyes.” A quotation, of course, but from what? More groping. Shakespeare? Yes, “Romeo and Juliet.” Why, wasn’t that what—Mercutio?—had said to Romeo about Romeo’s first love? The girl he loved before he met Juliet. The girl he forgot so completely—

  Forgot!

  Lessing sat back in his chair, letting everything else slide away for a moment in sheer amazement at the complexity of the subconscious. Something had wiped out all recollection of Clarissa from level below level of his memory, but far down in the dark, memory had clung on, disguised, distorted; hiding behind analogy and allegory, behind a phrase written by. a wandering playwright three hundred years before.

  So it had been impossible, after all, to erase Clarissa entirely from his mind. She had struck so deep, she had glowed so vividly, that nothing at all could quite smudge her out. And yet only Lieutenant Dyke’s skill and the chance unburial of a phrase had resurrected the memory. (For one appalling moment he wondered with a shaken mind what other memories lay hidden and shivering behind other allegorical words and phrases and innocent pictures, deep in the submarine gulfs.)

  So he had defeated them after all—the bodiless, voiceless people who had stood between them. The jealous god—the shadowy guardians—For a moment the glare of showering gold flashed in his mind’s eye blindingly. He was, in that one shutter-flash, aware of strangers in rich garments moving against confused and unfamiliar backgrounds. Then the door slammed in his face again and he sat there blinking.

  Them? Defeated them? Who? He had no idea. Even in that one magical glimpse before memory blanked out again he thought he had not been sure who they were. That much, perhaps, had been a mystery never solved. But somewhere back in the darkness of his mind incredible things lay hidden. Gods and showering gold, and people in bright clothing that blew upon a wind not—surely not—of this earth—Bright, bright—brighten than normal eyes ever perceive the world. That was Clarissa and all that surrounded her. It had been a stronger glamour than the sheer enchantment of first love. He felt sure about that now. He who walked with Clarissa shared actual magic that shed a luster on all they passed. Lovely Clarissa, glorious world as clear—as clarissima indeed—as a child’s new, shining world. But between himself and her, the shadowy people—Wait. Clarissa’s—aunt? Had there been an…an aunt?

  A tall, dark, silent woman who damped the glory whenever she was near? He could not remember her face; she was no more than a shadow behind Clarissa’s shining presence, a faceless, voiceless nonentity glowering in the background.

  His memory faltered, and into the gap flowed the despair which he had been fighting subconsciously since the lustrous flood first broke upon him. Clarissa, Clanssa—where was she now, with the glory around her?

  “Tell me,” said Lieutenant Dyke.

  “There was a girl,” Lessing began futilely. “I met her in a park—”

  Clarissa on a glittering June morning, tall and dark and slim, with the waters of the Hudson pouring past beyond her in a smooth, blue, glassy current. Stabbed by a white wench’s black eyes. Yes, very black eyes, bright and starry with blackness, and set wide apart in a grave face that had the remoteness and thoughtfulness of a child’s. And from the moment he met that grave, bright glance they knew one another. He had been stabbed indeed—stabbbed awake after a lifetime of drowsiness. (Stabbed—like Romeo, who lost both ~ loves

  “Hello,” said Clarissa.

  “It didn’t last very long…I think,” he told Dyke, speaking distractedly. “Long enough to find out there was something very Itrange about Clarissa…very wonderful…but not long enough to find out what it was…I think.”

  (And yet they had been days of glory, even after the shadows began to fall about them. For there were always shadows, just at her elbow. And he thought they had centered about the aunt who lived with her, that grim nonentity whose face he could not remember.)

  “She didn’t like me,” he explained, frowning with the effort of remembering. “Well, no, not quite that. But there was something in the…in the air when she was with us. In a minute I may remember—I wish I could think what she looked like.”

  It probably didn’t matter. They had not seen her often.. They had met, Clarissa and he, in so many places in New York, and each place acquired a brilliance of its own once her presence made it clarissima for him. There was no sensible explanation for that glory about her, so that street noises clarified to music and dust turned golden while they were together. It was as if he saw the world through her eyes when they were together, and as if she saw it with vision clearer—or perhaps less clear—than human.

  “I knew so little about her,” he said. (She might almost have sprung into existence in that first moment by the river. And so far as he would ever know, now, she had- vanished back into oblivion in that other moment in the dim apartment, when the aunt said—now what was it the aunt had said?)

  This was the moment he had been avoiding ever since memory began to come back. But he must think of it now. Perhaps it was the most important moment in the whole strange sequence, the moment that had shut him off so sharply from Clarissa and her shining, unreal, better than normal world.

  What had the woman said to him?

  He sat very still, thinking. He shut his eyes and turned his mind inward and backward to that strangely clouded hour, groping among shadows that slid smoothly away at his touch.

  “I can’t—” he said, scowling, his eyes still closed. “I can’t. They were…negative…words, I think, but—No, it’s no use.

  “Try the aunt again,” suggested Dyke. “What did she look like?”

  Lessing put his hands over his eyes and thought hard. Tall? Dark, like Clarissa? Gum, certainly-or had that only been the connotation of her words? He could not remember. He slumped down in his chair, grimacing with the effort. She had stood before the mirrors, hadn’t she, looking down? Had she? What were her outlines against the light? She had no outlines. She had never existed. Her image seemed to slide behind furniture or slip deftly around corners whenever his persistent memory followed it through the apartment. Here, quite clearly, the memory block was c
omplete.

  “I don’t think I ever can have seen her,” he said, looking up at Dyke with strained, incredulous eyes. “She just isn’t there.”

  Yet it was her shadow between him and Clarissa in the last moment before…before…what was it that cut off all memory between that hour and this? What happened? Well, say before forgetfulness began, then. Before Lethe.

  This much he remembered—Clarissa’s face in the shadowed room, grief and despair upon it, her eyes almost unbearably bright with tears, her arms still extended, the fingers curved as they had slipped from his. He could remember the warmth and softness of them in that last handclasp. And then Lethe had poured between them.

  “That was it,” said Lessing in a bewildered voice. He looked up. “Those were the highlights. None of them mean anything.”

  Dyke drew on his cigarette, his eyes narrow above its glow. “Somewhere we’ve missed the point,” he said. “The real truth’s still hidden, even deeper than all this was. Hard to know yet, just where to begin probing. Clarissa, do you think?”

  Lessing shook his head. “I don’t think she knew.” (She bad walked through all. those enchanted days, gravely and aloofly, a perfectly normal girl except for—What had happened? He could not quite remember yet, but that which did happen had not been normal. Something shocking, something terrible, buried deep down under the commonplaces. Something glorious, glimmering far beneath the surface.)

  “Try the aunt again,” said Dyke.

  Leasing shut his eyes. That faceless, bodiless, voiceless woman who maneuvered through his memories so deftly that he began to despair of ever catching her full-face…

  “Go back, then,” Dyke told him. “Back to the very beginning. When did you first realize that something out of the ordinary was happening?”

  Leasing’s mind fumbled backward through those unnaturally empty spaces of the past.

  He had not even been aware, at the outset, of the one strangeness he could remember now—that wonderful clarifying of the world in Clarissa’s presence~ It had to come slowly, through many meetings, as if by a sort of induced magnetism he became sensitized to her and aware as she was aware. He had known only that it was delightful simply to breathe the same air as she, and walk the same streets.

  The same streets? Yes, something curious had happened on a street somewhere. Street noises, loud voices shouting—An accident. The confusion just outside the Central Park entrance at Seventy-second Street. It was coming back clearly now, and with a swelling awareness of terror. They had been strolling up by the winding walk under the trellises toward the street. And as they neared it, the scream of brakes and the hollow, reverberant crash of metal against metal, and then voices rising.

  Lessing had been holding Clarissa’s hand. At the sudden noise he felt a tremor quiver along her arm, and then very softly, and with a curiously shocking deftness, her hand slipped out of his. Their fingers had been interlocked, and his did not relax, but somehow her hand was smoothly withdrawn.

  He turned to look.

  His mind shrank from the memory. But he knew it had happened. He knew he had seen the circle of shaken air ring her luminously about, like a circle in water from a dropped stone. It was very like the spreading rings in water, except that these rings did not expand, but contracted. And as they contracted, Clarissa moved farther away. She was drawn down a rapidly diminishing tunnel of shining circles, with the park distorted in focus beyond them. And she was not looking at Lessing or at anything around him. Her eyes were downcast and that look of thoughtful quiet on her face shut out the world.

  He stood perfectly still, too stunned even for surprise.

  The luminous, concentric rings drew together in a dazzle, and when he looked again she was not there. People were running up the slope toward the street now, and the voices beyond the wall had risen to a babble. No one had been near enough to see—or perhaps only Lessing himself could have seen an aberration of his own mind. Perhaps he was suddenly mad. Panic was rising wildly in him, but it had not broken the surface yet. There hadn’t been time.

  And before the full, stunning realization could burst over him, he saw Clarissa again. She was coming leisurely up the hill around a clump of bushes. She was not looking at him.

  He stood quite still in the middle of the path, his heart thudding so hard that the whole park shook around him.

  Not until she reached his side did she look up, smiling, and take his hand again.

  And that was the first thing that happened.

  “I couldn’t talk to her about it,” Lessing told Dyke miserably. “I knew I couldn’t from the first look at her face I got. Because she didn’t know’ To her it hadn’t happened. And then I thought I’d imagined it, of course-but I knew I couldn’t have imagined such a thing unless there was something too wrong with me to talk about. Later, I began to figure out a theory.” He laughed nervously. “Anything, you know, to keep from admitting that I might have…well, had hallucinations.”

  “Go on.” Dyke said again. He was leaning forward across the desk, his eyes piercing upon Leasing’s. “Then what? It happened again?”

  “Not that, no.”

  Not that? How did he know? He could not quite remember yet. The memories came in flashes, each complete even to its interlocking foreshadow of events to come, but the events themselves still lay hidden.

  Had those shining rings been sheer hallucination? He would have believed so, he was sure, if nothing further had happened. As the impossible recedes into distance we convince ourselves, because we must, that it never really could have been. But Lessing was not allowed to forget.

  The memories were unraveling now, tumbling one after another through his mind. He had caught the thread. He relaxed in his chair, his face smoothing out from its scowl of deep concentration. Deep beneath the surface that discovery lay whose astonishing gleam shone up through the murk of forgetfulness, tantalizing, still eluding him, but there to be grasped when he reached it. If he wanted to grasp it. If he dared. He hurried on, not ready yet to think of that.

  What had the next thing been?

  The park again. Curious how memory-haunted the parks of New York were for him now. This time there had been rain, and something—alarming—had happened. What was it? He did not know. He had to grope back step by step toward a climax of impossibility that his mind shied away from touching.

  Rain. A sudden thunderstorm that caught them at the edge of the lake. Cold wind ruffling the water, raindrops spattering~ down big and noisy around them. And himself saying, “Hurry, we can make it back to the summerhouse.”

  They ran hand in hand along the shore, laughing, Clarissa clutching her big hat and matching her steps to his, long, easy, running strides so that they moved as smoothly as dancers over the grass.

  The summerhouse was dingy from many winters upon the rocks. It stood in a little niche in the black stone of the hillside overlooking the lake, a dusty gray refuge from the spattering drops as they ran laughing up the slope of the rock.

  But it never sheltered them. The summerhouse did not wait.

  Looking incredulously up the black hills, Leasing saw it glimmer and go in a luminous blurring-out, like a picture on a trick film that faded as he watched.

  “Not the way Clarissa disappeared,” he told Dyke care-fully. “That happened quite clearly, in concentric diminishing rings. This time, the thing just blurred and melted. One minute it was there, the next—” He made an expunging gesture in the air.

  Dyke had not moved. His clear, piercing gaze dwelt unwavering upon Lessing.

  “What did Clarissa say this time?”

  Leasing rubbed his chin, frowning. “She saw it happen. I think she just said something like, ‘Hell, we’re in for it now. Never mind, I like walking in the rain, don’t you?’

  As if she were used to things like that. Of course, maybe she was—It didn’t surprise her.”

  “And you didn’t comment this time either?”

  “I couldn’t. Not when she took it so calml
y. It was a relief to know that she’d seen it too. That meant I hadn’t just imagined the thing. Not this time, anyhow. But by now—”

  Suddenly Leasing paused. Up to this moment he had been too absorbed in the recapture of elusive memory to look objectively at what he was remembering. Now the incredible reality of what he had just been saying struck him without warning and he stared at Dyke with real terror in his eyes. How could there be any explanation for these imaginings, except actual madness? All this could not possibly have happened in the lost months which his conscious mind had remembered so clearly. It was incredible enough that he could have forgotten, but as for what he had forgotten, as for the unbelievable theory he had been about to explain to Dyke, and quite matter-of-factly, drawn from hypotheses of sheer miracle—“Go on,” Dyke said quietly. “By now—what?” Leasing took a long, unsteady breath.

  “By now…I think…I began to discard the idea I was having hallucinations.” He paused again, unable to continue with such obvious impossibilities.

  Dyke urged him gently. “Go on, Leasing. You’ve got to go on until we can get hold of something to work from. There must be an explanation somewhere. Keep digging. Why did you decide you weren’t subject to hallucinations?”

  “Because…well, I suppose it seemed too easy an explanation,” Lessing said doggedly. It was ridiculous to argue so solidly from a basis of insanity, but he searched through his mind again and came out with an answer of very tenuous logic. “Somehow madness seemed the wrong answer,” he said. “As I remember now, I think I felt there was a reason behind what had happened. Claxissa didn’t know, but I’d begun to see.”

  “A reason? What?”

  He frowned with concentration. In spite of himself the fascination of the still unknown was renewing its spell and he groped through the murk of amnesia for the answer he had grasped once, years ago, and let slip again.