by Paula Guran
Estár beheld she had not.
“I wasn’t,” she said, “holding it tightly enough for that to happen.”
“The house is eager to serve you, unused to you, and so misunderstands at times. You perhaps wanted to crush something?”
“I should like,” she said, “to return to my father’s house.”
“At any time, you may do so.”
“But I want,” she said, “to stay there. I mean that I don’t want to come back here.”
She waited. He would say she had to come back. Thus, she would have forced him to display his true and brutal omnipotence.
He said, “I’m not reading your mind, I assure you of that. But I can sense instantly whenever you lie.”
“Lie? What am I lying about? I said, I want to go home.”
“‘Home’ is a word which has no meaning for you, Estár Levina. This is as much your home as the house of your father.”
“This is the house of a beast,” she said, daringly. She was very cold, as if winter had abruptly broken in. “A superior, wondrous monster.” She sounded calm. “Perhaps I could kill it. What would happen then? A vengeance fleet dispatched from your galaxy to destroy the terrestrial solar system?”
“You would be unable to kill me. My skin is very thick and resilient. The same is true of my internal structure. You could, possibly, cause me considerable pain, but not death.”
“No, of course not.” She lowered her eyes from the blank shining mask. Her pulse beat from her skull to her soles. She was ashamed of her ineffectual tantrum. “I’m sorry. Sorry for my bad manners, and equally for my inability to murder you. I think I should go back to my own rooms.”
“But why?” he said. “My impression is that you would prefer to stay here.”
She sat and looked at him hopelessly.
“It’s not,” he said, “that I disallow your camouflage, but the very nature of camouflage is that it should successfully wed you to your surroundings. You are trying to lie to yourself, and not to me. This is the cause of your failure.”
“Why was I brought here?” she said. “Other than to be played with and humiliated.” To her surprise and discomfort, she found she was being humorous, and laughed shortly. He did not join in her laughter, but she sensed from him something that was also humorous, receptive. “Is it an experiment in adaptation; in tolerance? To determine how much proximity a human can tolerate to one of us? Or vice versa.”
“No.”
“Then what?”
There was a pause. Without warning, a torrent of nausea and fear swept over her. Could he read it from her? Her eyes blackened and she put one hand over them. Swiftly, almost choking, she said, “If there is an answer, don’t, please don’t tell me.”
He was silent, and after a few moments she was better. She sipped the cool wine from the new goblet which had swum to her place. Not looking at him at all, she said, “Have I implanted this barrier against knowledge of that type, or have you?”
“Estár,” she heard him say, far away across the few yards of the table, “Estár, your race tends sometimes to demand too little or too much of itself. If there’s an answer to your question, you will find it in your own time. You are afraid of the idea of the answer, not the answer itself. Wait until the fear goes.”
“How can the fear go? You’ve condemned me to it, keeping me here.”
But her words were lies, and now she knew it.
She had spoken more to him in a space of hours than to any of her own kind. She had been relaxed enough in his company almost to allow herself to faint, when, on the two other occasions of her life that she had almost fainted, in company with Levin, or with Lyra, Estár had clung to consciousness in horror, unreasonably terrified to let go.
The alien sat across the table. Not a table knife, not an angle of the room, but was subtly strange in ways she could not place or understand. And he, his ghastly nightmarish ugliness swathed in its disguise . . .
Again with no warning she began to cry. She wept for three minutes in front of him, dimly conscious of some dispassionate compassion that had nothing to do with involvement. Sobbing, she was aware after all he did not read her thoughts. Even the house did not, though it brought her a foam of tissues. After the three minutes she excused herself and left him. And now he did not detain her.
In her rooms, she found her bed blissfully prepared and lay down on it, letting the mechanisms, visible and invisible, undress her. She woke somewhere in the earliest morning and called the bead like a drop of rain and sent it to fetch the story he had told her. She resolved she would not go near him again until he summoned her.
A day passed.
A night.
A day.
She thought about him. She wrote a brief essay on how she analyzed him, his physical aura, his few gestures, his inherent hideousness to which she must always be primed, even unknowingly. The distorted voice that nevertheless was so fascinating.
A night.
She could not sleep. He had not summoned her. She walked in her private garden under the stars and found a green rose growing there, softly lighted by a shallow lamp. She gazed on the glow seeping through the tensed and tender petals. She knew herself enveloped in such a glow, a light penetrating her resistance.
“The electric irresistible charisma,” she wrote, “of the thing one has always yearned for. To be known, accepted, and so to be at peace. No longer unique, or shut in, or shut out or alone.”
A day.
She planned how she might run away. Escaping the garden, stumbling down the mountain, searching through the wilderness for some post of communications or transport. The plan became a daydream and he found her.
A night.
A day.
That day, she stopped pretending, and suddenly he was in her garden. She did not know how he had arrived, but she stepped between the topiary and he was there. He extended his hand in a formal greeting; gloved, six-fingered, not remotely unwieldy. She took his hand. They spoke. They talked all that day, and some of the night, and he played her music from his world and she did not understand it, but it touched some chord in her, over and over with all of its own fiery chords.
She had never comprehended what she needed of herself. She told him of things she had forgotten she knew. He taught her a board game from his world, and she taught him a game with dots of colored light from Earth.
One morning she woke up singing, singing in her sleep. She learned presently she herself had invented the fragment of melody and the handful of harmonies. She worked on it alone, forgetting she was alone, since the music was with her. She did not tell him about the music until he asked her, and then she played it to him.
She was only ashamed very occasionally, and then it was not a cerebral, rather a hormonal thing. A current of some fluid nervous element would pass through her, and she would recall Levin, Lyra, Joya. Eventually something must happen, for all that happened now was aside from life, unconnected to it.
She knew the alien’s name by then. It had no earthly equivalents, and she could not write it, could not even say it; only think it. So she thought it.
She loved him. She had done so from the first moment she had stood with him under the spring trees. She loved him with a sort of welcome, the way diurnal creatures welcome the coming of day.
He must know. If not from her mind, then from the manner in which, on finding him, she would hurry toward him along the garden walks. The way she was when with him. The flowering of her creativity, her happiness.
What ever would become of her?
She sent her family three short noncommittal soothing messages, nothing compared to the bulk of their own.
When the lawns near the house had altered to late summer, it was spring in the world and, as she had promised, Estár went to visit her father.
3
Buds like emerald vapor clouded the boughs of the woods beyond the house. The river rushed beneath, heavy with melted snows. It was a windless day, and her family h
ad come out to meet Estár. Lyra, a dark note of music, smiling, Joya, smiling, both looking at her, carefully, tactfully, assessing how she would prefer to be greeted, not knowing. How could they? Joya was slim again. Her child had been born two weeks ago, a medically forward seven-month baby, healthy and beauteous—they had told her in a recording, the most recent of the ten they had sent her, along with Lyra’s letters. . . . Levin was standing by the house door, her father. They all greeted her, in fact, effusively. It was a show, meant to convey what they were afraid to convey with total sincerity.
They went in, talking continuously, telling her everything. Lyra displayed a wonderful chamber work she and Ekosun, her lover, were composing—it was obvious he had been staying with her here, and had gone away out of deference to Estár’s return, her need for solitary confinement with her family. Joya’s son was brought, looking perfectly edible, the color of molasses, opening on a toothless strawberry mouth and two wide amber eyes. His hair was already thick, the color of corn. “You see,” said Joya, “I know the father now, without a single test. This hair—the only good thing about him.”
“She refuses even to let him know,” said Levin.
“Oh, I will. Sometime. But the child will take my name, or yours, if you allow it.”
They drank tea and ate cakes. Later there came wine, and later there came dinner. While there was food and drink, news to tell, the baby to marvel at, a new cat to play with—a white cat, with a long gray under-stripe from tail to chin-tip—a new painting to worship, Lyra’s music to be heard—while there was all this, the tension was held at bay, almost unnoticeable. About midnight, there came a lull. The baby was gone, the cat slept, the music was done and the picture had faded beyond the friendly informal candlelight. Estár could plead tiredness and go to bed, but then would come tomorrow.
It must be faced sometime.
“I haven’t,” she said, “really told you anything about where I’ve been.”
Joya glanced aside. Lyra stared at her bravely.
Levin said, “In fact, you have.”
She had, he thought, told them a very great deal. She was strangely different. Not actually in any way he might have feared. Rather, she seemed more sure, quieter, more still, more absorbent, more favorably aware of them than ever in the past. One obvious thing, something that seemed the emblem of it all, the unexpected form of this change in her—her hair. Her hair now was a calm pale brown, untinted, no longer green.
“What have I told you then?” she said, and smiled, not intending to, in case it should be a smile of triumph.
“At least,” he said, “that we needn’t be afraid for you.”
“No. Don’t be. I’m really rather happy.”
It was Lyra who burst out, unexpectedly, shockingly, with some incoherent protest.
Estár looked at her.
“He’s—” she sought a word, selected one, “interesting. His world is interesting. I’ve started to compose music. Nothing like yours, Lyra, not nearly as complex or as excellent, but it’s fulfilling. I like doing it. I shall get better.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Lyra. “I didn’t mean—it’s simply—”
“That I shouldn’t be happy because the situation is so unacceptable. Yes. But it isn’t. I’d never have chosen to go there, because I didn’t know what it would entail. But, in fact, it’s exactly the sort of life I seem to need. You remember when I meant to go to Marsha? I don’t think I would have done as much good there as I’m doing here, for myself. Perhaps I even help him in some way. I suppose they must study us, benignly. Perhaps I’m useful.”
“Oh, Estár,” Lyra said. She began to cry, begged their pardon and went out of the room, obviously disgusted at her own lack of finesse. Joya rose and explained she was going to look after Lyra. She too went out.
“Oh dear,” said Estár.
“It’s all right,” Levin said. “Don’t let it trouble you too much. Over-excitement. First a baby invades us, then you. But go on with what you were saying. What do you do on this mountain?”
He sat and listened as she told him. She seemed able to express herself far better than before, yet even so he was struck by the familiarity rather than the oddness of her life with the alien. Really, she did little there she might not have done here. Yet here she had never done it. He pressed her lightly, not trusting the ice to bear his weight, for details of the being with whom she dwelled. He noticed instantly that, although she had spoken of him freely, indeed very often, in the course of relating other things, she could not seem to speak of him directly with any comfort. There was an embarrassment quite suddenly apparent in her. Her gestures became angular and her sentences dislocated.
Finally, he braced himself. He went to the mahogany cabinet that was five hundred years old, and standing before it pouring a brandy somewhat younger, he said, “Please don’t answer this if you’d rather not. But I’m afraid I’ve always suspected that, despite all genetic, ethnic or social disparity, those they selected to live with them would ultimately become their lovers. Am I right, Estár?”
He stood above the two glasses and waited.
She said. “Nothing of that sort has ever been discussed.”
“Do you have reason to think it will be?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“I’m not asking out of pure concern, or out of any kind of prurient curiosity. One assumes, judging from what the others have said or indicated, that nobody has ever been raped or coerced. That implies some kind of willingness.”
“You’re asking me if I’d be willing to be his lover?”
“I’m asking if you are in love with him.”
Levin turned with the glasses, and took her the brandy. She accepted and looked at it. Her face, even averted, had altered, and he felt a sort of horror. Written on her quite plainly was that look he had heard described—a deadly sorrow, a drawing inward and away. Then it was gone.
“I don’t think I’m ready to consider that,” she said.
“What is it,” he said, “that gives you a look of such deep pain?”
“Let’s talk about something else,” she said.
Merchant and diplomat, he turned the conversation at once, wondering if he were wrong to do so. They talked about something else.
It was only much later, when they parted for the night, that he said to her, “Anything I can do to help you, you’ve only to tell me.”
And she remembered when he brought the rose and gave it to her, how he had said he loved her the best. She wondered if one always loved, then, what was unlike, incompatible.
“This situation has been rather an astonishment to us all,” he added now. She approved of him for that, somehow. She kissed him good night. She was so much easier with him, as if estrangement had made them closer, which it had not.
Two weeks passed, Lyra and Joya laughed and did not cry. There were picnics, boat rides, air trips. Lyra played in live concert, and they went to rejoice in her. Things now seemed facile enough that Ekosun came back to the house, and after that a woman lover of Joya’s. They breakfasted and dined in elegant restaurants. There were lazy days too, lying on cushions in the communal rooms listening to music or watching video plays, or reading, or sleeping late, Estár in her old rooms among remembered things that no longer seemed anything to do with her. The green rose of her summons, which would not die but which had something to do with her, had been removed.
It was all like that now. A brightly colored interesting adventure in which she gladly participated, with which she had no link. The very fact that their life captivated her now was because of its—alienness. And her family, too. How she liked and respected them all at once, what affection she felt for them. And for the same reason.
She could not explain it to them, and would be ill advised to do so even if she could. She lied to herself, too, keeping her awareness out of bounds as long as she might. But she sensed the lie. It needed another glass of wine, or another chapter of her book, or a peal of laughter, alwa
ys something, and then another thing and then another, to hold it off.
At the end of two weeks her pretense was wearing thin and she was exhausted. She found she wanted to cry out at them: I know who you are! You are my dear friends, my dazzling idols—I delight in you, admire you, but I am sometimes uneasy with you. Now I need to rest and I want to go—
Now I want to go home.
And then the other question brushed her, as it must. The house on the mountain was her home because he (she wordlessly expressed his name) was there. And because she loved him. Yet in what way did she love him? As one loved an animal? A friend? A lord? A teacher? A brother? Or in the way Levin had postulated, with a lover’s love? And darkness would fall down on her mind and she would close the door on it. It was unthinkable.
When she devised the first tentative move toward departure, there was no argument. They made it easy for her. She saw they had known longer than she that she wanted to leave.
“I almost forgot to give you these. I meant to the first day you came back. They’re fawn topaz, just the color your hair is now.”
On Joya’s smoky palm, the stones shone as if softly alight. “Put your hair back, the way you had it at the concert, and wear them then.”
“Thank you,” said Estár. “They’re lovely.”
She reached toward the earrings and found she and her sister were suddenly holding hands with complete naturalness. At once she felt the pulse under Joya’s skin, and a strange energy seemed to pass between them, like a healing touch.
They laughed, and Estár said unthinkingly, “But when shall I wear them on the mountain?”
“Wear them for him,” said Joya.
“For—”
“For him,” said Joya again, very firmly.
“Oh,” Estár said, and removed her hand.
“No, none of us have been debating it when you were out of the room,” said Joya. “But we do know. Estár, listen to me, there’s truly nothing wrong in feeling emotion for this—for him, or even wanting him sexually.”
“Oh really, Joya.”
“Listen. I know you’re very innocent. Not ignorant, innocent. And there’s nothing wrong in that either. But now—”