“I’ll—marry her, then?” he whispered.
She nodded, terrified. “As you like, boy.”
He blew out the light and left her.
Ran worked hard and saved his wage, and made one room beautiful for Bianca and himself. He built a soft chair, and a table that was like an altar for Bianca’s sacred hands. There was a great bed, and heavy cloth to hide and soften the walls, and a rug.
They were married, though marrying took time. Ran had to go far afield before he could find one who would do what was necessary. The man came far and went again afterwards, so that none knew of it, and Ran and his wife were left alone. The mother spoke for Bianca, and Bianca’s hand trembled frighteningly at the touch of the ring, writhed and struggled and then lay passive, blushing and beautiful. But it was done. Bianca’s mother did not protest, for she didn’t dare. Ran was happy, and Bianca—well, nobody cared about Bianca.
After they were married Bianca followed Ran and his two brides into the beautiful room. He washed Bianca and used rich lotions. He washed and combed her hair, and brushed it many times until it shone, to make her more fit to be with the hands he had married. He never touched the hands, though he gave them soaps and creams and tools with which they could groom themselves. They were pleased. Once one of them ran up his coat and touched his cheek and made him exultant.
He left them and returned to the shop with his heart full of music. He worked harder than ever, so that Harding was pleased and let him go home early. He wandered the hours away by the bank of a brook, watching the sun on the face of the chuckling water. A bird came to circle him, flew unafraid through the aura of gladness about him. The delicate tip of a wing brushed his wrist with the touch of the first secret kiss from the hands of Bianca. The singing that filled him was part of the nature of laughing, the running of water, the sound of the wind in the reeds by the edge of the stream. He yearned for the hands, and he knew he could go now and clasp them and own them; instead he stretched out on the bank and lay smiling, all lost in the sweetness and poignance of waiting, denying desire. He laughed for pure joy in a world without hatred, held in the stainless palms of Bianca’s hands.
As it grew dark he went home. All during that nuptial meal Bianca’s hands twisted about one of his while he ate with the other, and Bianca’s mother fed the girl. The fingers twined about each other and about his own, so that three hands seemed to be wrought of one flesh, to become a thing of lovely weight at his arm’s end. When it was quite dark they went to the beautiful room and lay where he and the hands could watch, through the window, the clean, bright stars swim up out of the forest. The house and the room were dark and silent. Ran was so happy that he hardly dared to breathe.
A hand fluttered up over his hair, down his cheek, and crawled into the hollow of his throat. Its pulsing matched the beat of his heart. He opened his own hands wide and clenched his fingers, as though to catch and hold this moment.
Soon the other hand crept up and joined the first. For perhaps an hour they lay there passive with their coolness against Ran’s warm neck. He felt them with his throat, each smooth convolution, each firm small expanse. He concentrated, with his mind and his heart on his throat, on each part of the hands that touched him, feeling with all his being first one touch and then another, though the contact was there unmoving. And he knew it would be soon now, soon.
As if at a command, he turned on his back and dug his head into the pillow. Staring up at the vague dark hangings on the wall, he began to realize what it was for which he had been working and dreaming so long. He put his head back yet farther and smiled, waiting. This would be possession, completion. He breathed deeply, twice, and the hands began to move.
The thumbs crossed over his throat and the fingertips settled one by one under his ears. For a long moment they lay there, gathering strength. Together, then, in perfect harmony, each cooperating with the other, they became rigid, rock-hard. Their touch was still light upon him, still light … no, now they were passing their rigidity to him, turning it to a contraction. They settled to it slowly, their pressure measured and equal. Ran lay silent. He could not breathe now, and did not want to. His great arms were crossed on his chest, his knotted fists under his armpits, his mind knowing a great peace. Soon, now …
Wave after wave of engulfing, glorious pain spread and receded. He saw color impossible, without light. He arched his back, up, up … the hands bore down with all their hidden strength, and Ran’s body bent like a bow, resting on feet and shoulders. Up, up …
Something burst within him—his lungs, his heart—no matter. It was complete.
There was blood on the hands of Bianca’s mother when they found her in the morning in the beautiful room, trying to soothe Ran’s neck. They took Bianca away, and they buried Ran, but they hanged Bianca’s mother because she tried to make them believe Bianca had done it, Bianca whose hands were quite dead, drooping like brown leaves from her wrists.
THE SKILLS OF XANADU
AND THE SUN WENT nova and humanity fragmented and fled; and such is the self-knowledge of humankind that it knew it must guard its past as it guarded its being, or it would cease to be human; and such was its pride in itself that it made of its traditions a ritual and a standard.
The great dream was that wherever humanity settled, fragment by fragment by fragment, however it lived, it would continue rather than begin again, so that all through the universe and the years, humans would be humans, speaking as humans, thinking as humans, aspiring and progressing as humans; and whenever human met human, no matter how different, how distant, he would come in peace, meet his own kind, speak his own tongue.
Humans, however, being humans—
Bril emerged near the pink star, disliking its light, and found the fourth planet. It hung waiting for him like an exotic fruit. (And was it ripe, and could he ripen it? And what if it were poison?) He left his machine in orbit and descended in a bubble. A young savage watched him come and waited by a waterfall.
“Earth was my mother,” said Bril from the bubble. It was the formal greeting of all humankind, spoken in the Old Tongue.
“And my father,” said the savage, in an atrocious accent.
Watchfully, Bril emerged from the bubble, but stood very close by it. He completed his part of the ritual. “I respect the disparity of our wants, as individuals, and greet you.”
“I respect the identity of our needs, as humans, and greet you. I am Wonyne,” said the youth, “son of Tanyne, of the Senate, and Nina. This place is Xanadu, the district, on Xanadu, the fourth planet.”
“I am Bril of Kit Carson, second planet of the Sumner System, and a member of the Sole Authority,” said the newcomer, adding, “and I come in peace.”
He waited then, to see if the savage would discard any weapons he might have, according to historic protocol. Wonyne did not; he apparently had none. He wore only a cobwebby tunic and a broad belt made of flat, black, brilliantly polished stones and could hardly have concealed so much as a dart. Bril waited yet another moment, watching the untroubled face of the savage, to see if Wonyne suspected anything of the arsenal hidden in the sleek black uniform, the gleaming jackboots, the metal gauntlets.
Wonyne said only, “Then in peace, welcome.” He smiled. “Come with me to Tanyne’s house and mine, and be refreshed.”
“You say Tanyne, your father, is a Senator? Is he active now? Could he help me to reach your center of government?”
The youth paused, his lips moving slightly, as if he were translating the dead language into another tongue. Then, “Yes. Oh, yes.”
Bril flicked his left gauntlet with his right fingertips and the bubble sprang away and up, where at length it would join the ship until it was needed. Wonyne was not amazed—probably, thought Bril, because it was beyond his understanding.
Bril followed the youth up a winding path past a wonderland of flowering plants, most of them purple, some white, a few scarlet, and all jeweled by the waterfall. The higher reaches of the path were fla
nked by thick soft grass, red as they approached, pale pink as they passed.
Bril’s narrow black eyes flickered everywhere, saw and recorded everything: the easy-breathing boy’s spring up the slope ahead, and the constant shifts of color in his gossamer garment as the wind touched it; the high trees, some of which might conceal a man or a weapon; the rock outcroppings and what oxides they told of; the birds he could see and the birdsongs he heard which might be something else.
He was a man who missed only the obvious, and there is so little that is obvious.
Yet he was not prepared for the house; he and the boy were halfway across the parklike land which surrounded it before he recognized it as such.
It seemed to have no margins. It was here high and there only a place between flower beds; yonder a room became a terrace, and elsewhere a lawn was a carpet because there was a roof over it. The house was divided into areas rather than rooms, by open grilles and by arrangements of color. Nowhere was there a wall. There was nothing to hide behind and nothing that could be locked. All the land, all the sky, looked into and through the house, and the house was one great window on the world.
Seeing it, Bril felt a slight shift in his opinion of the natives. His feeling was still one of contempt, but now he added suspicion. A cardinal dictum on humans as he knew them was: Every man has something to hide. Seeing a mode of living like this did not make him change his dictum: he simply increased his watchfulness, asking: How do they hide it?
“Tan! Tan!” the boy was shouting. “I’ve brought a friend!”
A man and a woman strolled toward them from a garden. The man was huge, but otherwise so like the youth Wonyne that there could be no question of their relationship. Both had long, narrow, clear gray eyes set very wide apart, and red—almost orange—hair. The noses were strong and delicate at the same time, their mouths thin-lipped but wide and good-natured.
But the woman—
It was a long time before Bril could let himself look, let himself believe that there was such a woman. After his first glance, he made of her only a presence and fed himself small nibbles of belief in his eyes, in the fact that there could be hair like that, face, voice, body. She was dressed, like her husband and the boy, in the smoky kaleidoscope which resolved itself, when the wind permitted, into a black-belted tunic.
“He is Bril of Kit Carson in the Sumner System,” babbled the boy, “and he’s a member of the Sole Authority and it’s the second planet and he knew the greeting and got it right. So did I,” he added, laughing. “This is Tanyne, of the Senate, and my mother Nina.”
“You are welcome, Bril of Kit Carson,” she said to him; and unbelieving in this way that had come upon him, he took away his gaze and inclined his head.
“You must come in,” said Tanyne cordially, and led the way through an arbor which was not the separate arch it appeared to be, but an entrance.
The room was wide, wider at one end than the other, though it was hard to determine by how much. The floor was uneven, graded upward toward one corner, where it was a mossy bank. Scattered here and there were what the eye said were white and striated gray boulders; the hand would say they were flesh. Except for a few shelf- and tablelike niches on these and in the bank, they were the only furniture.
Water ran frothing and gurgling through the room, apparently as an open brook; but Bril saw Nina’s bare foot tread on the invisible covering that followed it down to the pool at the other end. The pool was the one he had seen from outside, indeterminately in and out of the house. A large tree grew by the pool and leaned its heavy branches toward the bank, and evidently its wide-flung limbs were webbed and tented between by the same invisible substance which covered the brook, for they formed the only cover overhead yet, to the ear, felt like a ceiling.
The whole effect was, to Bril, intensely depressing, and he surprised himself with a flash of homesickness for the tall steel cities of his home planet.
Nina smiled and left them. Bril followed his host’s example and sank down on the ground, or floor, where it became a bank, or wall. Inwardly, Bril rebelled at the lack of decisiveness, of discipline, of clear-cut limitation inherent in such haphazard design as this. But he was well trained and quite prepared, at first, to keep his feelings to himself among barbarians.
“Nina will join us in a moment,” said Tanyne.
Bril, who had been watching the woman’s swift movements across the courtyard through the transparent wall opposite, controlled a start. “I am unused to your ways and wondered what she was doing,” he said.
“She is preparing a meal for you,” explained Tanyne.
“Herself?”
Tanyne and his son gazed wonderingly. “Does that seem unusual to you?”
“I understood the lady was wife to a Senator,” said Bril. It seemed adequate as an explanation, but only to him. He looked from the boy’s face to the man’s. “Perhaps I understand something different when I use the term ‘Senator.’”
“Perhaps you do. Would you tell us what a Senator is on the planet Kit Carson?”
“He is a member of the Senate, subservient to the Sole Authority, and in turn leader of a free Nation.”
“And his wife?”
“His wife shares his privileges. She might serve a member of the Sole Authority, but hardly anyone else—certainly not an unidentified stranger.”
“Interesting,” said Tanyne, while the boy murmured the astonishment he had not expressed at Bril’s bubble, or Bril himself. “Tell me, have you not identified yourself, then?”
“He did, by the waterfall,” the youth insisted.
“I gave you no proof,” said Bril stiffly. He watched father and son exchange a glance. “Credentials, written authority.” He touched the flat pouch hung on his power belt.
Wonyne asked ingenuously, “Do the credentials say you are not Bril of Kit Carson in the Sumner System?”
Bril frowned at him and Tanyne said gently, “Wonyne, take care.” To Bril, he said, “Surely there are many differences between us, as there always are between different worlds. But I am certain of this one similarity: the young at times run straight where wisdom has built a winding path.”
Bril sat silently and thought this out. It was probably some sort of apology, he decided, and gave a single sharp nod. Youth, he thought, was an attenuated defect here. A boy Wonyne’s age would be a soldier on Carson, ready for a soldier’s work, and no one would be apologizing for him. Nor would he be making blunders. None!
He said, “These credentials are for your officials when I meet with them. By the way, when can that be?”
Tanyne shrugged his wide shoulders. “Whenever you like.”
“The sooner the better.”
“Very well.”
“Is it far?”
Tanyne seemed perplexed. “Is what far?”
“Your capital, or wherever it is your Senate meets.”
“Oh, I see. It doesn’t meet, in the sense you mean. It is always in session, though, as they used to say. We—”
He compressed his lips and made a liquid, bisyllabic sound, then he laughed. “I do beg your pardon,” he said warmly. “The Old Tongue lacks certain words, certain concepts. What is your word for—er—the-presence-of-all-in-the-presence-of-one?”
“I think,” said Bril carefully, “that we had better go back to the subject at hand. Are you saying that your Senate does not meet in some official place, at some appointed time?”
“I—” Tan hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, that is true as far as it—”
“And there is no possibility of my addressing your Senate in person?”
“I didn’t say that.” Tan tried twice to express the thought, while Bril’s eyes slowly narrowed. Tan suddenly burst into laughter. “Using the Old Tongue to tell old tales and to speak with a friend are two different things,” he said ruefully. “I wish you would learn our speech. Would you, do you suppose? It is rational and well based on what you know. Surely you have another language besides the Old Tongue
on Kit Carson?”
“I honor the Old Tongue,” said Bril stiffly, dodging the question. Speaking very slowly, as if to a retarded child, he said, “I should like to know when I may be taken to those in authority here, in order to discuss certain planetary and interplanetary matters with them.”
“Discuss them with me.”
“You are a Senator,” Bril said, in a tone which meant clearly: You are only a Senator.
“True,” said Tanyne.
With forceful patience, Bril asked, “And what is a Senator here?”
“A contact point between the people of his district and the people everywhere. One who knows the special problems of a small section of the planet and can relate them to planetary policy.”
“And whom does the Senate serve?”
“The people,” said Tanyne, as if he had been asked to repeat himself.
“Yes, yes, of course. And who, then, serves the Senate?”
“The Senators.”
Bril closed his eyes and barely controlled the salty syllable which welled up inside him. “Who,” he inquired steadily, “is your Government?”
The boy had been watching them eagerly, alternately, like a devotee at some favorite fast ball game. Now he asked, “What’s a Government?”
Nina’s interruption at that point was most welcome to Bril. She came across the terrace from the covered area where she had been doing mysterious things at a long work-surface in the garden. She carried an enormous tray—guided it, rather, as Bril saw when she came closer. She kept three fingers under the tray and one behind it, barely touching it with her palm. Either the transparent wall of the room disappeared as she approached, or she passed through a section where there was none.
“I do hope you find something to your taste among these,” she said cheerfully, as she brought the tray down to a hummock near Bril. “This is the flesh of birds, this of small mammals, and, over here, fish. These cakes are made of four kinds of grain, and the white cakes here of just one, the one we call milk-wheat. Here is water, and these two are wines, and this one is a distilled spirit we call warm-ears.”
Selected Stories Page 14