“Hello,” I said, or its equivalent.
She bowed before replying. Evidently I had been promoted in status.
“I shall dance,” said the red wound in that pale, pale cameo, her face. Eyes, the color of dream and her dress, pulled away from mine.
She drifted to the center of the room.
Standing there, like a figure in an Etruscan frieze, she was either meditating or regarding the design on the floor.
Was the mosaic symbolic of something? I studied it. If it was, it eluded me; it would make an attractive bathroom floor or patio, but I couldn’t see much in it beyond that.
The other two were paint-spattered sparrows like M’Cwyie, in their middle years. One settled to the floor with a triple-stringed instrument faintly resembling a samisen. The other held a simple woodblock and two drumsticks.
M’Cwyie disdained her stool and was seated upon the floor before I realized it. I followed suit.
The samisen player was still tuning it up, so I leaned toward M’Cwyie.
“What is the dancer’s name?”
“Braxa,” she replied, without looking at me, and raised her left hand, slowly, which meant yes, and go ahead, and let it begin.
The stringed-thing throbbed like a toothache, and a tick-tocking, like ghosts of all the clocks they had never invented, sprang from the block.
Braxa was a statue, both hands raised to her face, elbows high and outspread.
The music became a metaphor for fire.
Crackle, purr, snap…
She did not move.
The hissing altered to splashes. The cadence slowed. It was water now, the most precious thing in the world, gurgling clear then green over mossy rocks.
Still she did not move.
Glissandos. A pause.
Then, so faint I could hardly be sure at first, the tremble of the winds began. Softly, gently, sighing and halting, uncertain. A pause, a sob, then a repetition of the first statement, only louder.
Were my eyes completely bugged from my reading, or was Braxa actually trembling, all over, head to foot.
She was.
She began a microscopic swaying. A fraction of an inch right, then left. Her fingers opened like the petals of a flower, and I could see that her eyes were closed.
Her eyes opened. They were distant, glassy, looking through me and the walls. Her swaying became more pronounced, merged with the beat.
The wind was sweeping in from the desert now, falling, against Tirellian like waves on a dike. Her fingers moved, they were the gusts. Her arms, slow pendulums, descended, began a counter-movement.
The gale was coming now. She began an axial movement and her hands caught up with the rest of her body, only now her shoulders commenced to writhe out a figure-eight.
The windl The wind, I say. O wild, enigmatic! O muse of St. John Perse!
The cyclone was twisting around those eyes, its still center. Her head was thrown back, but I knew there was no ceiling between her gaze, passive as Buddha’s, and the unchanging skies. Only the two moons, perhaps, interrupted their slumber in that elemental Nirvana of uninhabited turquoise.
Years ago, I had seen the Devadasis in India, the street-dancers, spinning their colorful webs, drawing in the male insect. But Braxa was more than this: she was a Ramadjany, like those votaries of Rama, incarnation of Vishnu, who had given the dance to man: the sacred dancers.
The clicking was monotonously steady now; the whine of the strings made me think of the stinging rays of the sun, their heat stolen by the wind’s halations; the blue was Sarasvati and Mary, and a girl named Laura. I heard a sitar from somewhere, watched this statue come to life, and inhaled a divine afflatus.
I was again Rimbaud with his hashish, Baudelaire with his laudanum, Poe, De Quincy, Wilde, Mallarmé and Aleister Crowley. I was, for a fleeting second, my father in his dark pulpit and darker suit, the hymns and the organ’s wheeze transmuted to bright wind.
She was a spun weather vane, a feathered crucifix hovering in the air, a clothes-line holding one bright garment lashed parallel to the ground. Her shoulder was bare now, and her right breast moved up and down like a moon in the sky, its red nipple appearing momently above a fold and vanishing again. The music was as formal as Job’s argument with God. Her dance was God’s reply.
The music slowed, settled; it had been met, matched, answered. Her garment, as if alive, crept back into the more sedate folds it originally held.
She dropped low, lower, to the floor. Her head fell upon her raised knees. She did not move.
There was silence.
I realized, from the ache across my shoulders, how tensely I had been sitting. My armpits were wet. Rivulets had been running down my sides. What did one do now? Applaud?
I sought M’Cwyie from the corner of my eye. She raised her right hand.
As if by telepathy the girl shuddered all over and stood. The musicians also rose. So did M’Cwyie.
I got to my feet, with a Charley Horse in my left leg, and said, “It was beautiful,” inane as that sounds.
I received three different High Forms of “thank you.”
There was a flurry of color and I was alone again with M’Cwyie.
“That is the one hundred-seventeenth of the two thousand, two hundred-twenty-four dances of Locar.”
I looked down at her.
“Whether Locar was right or wrong, he worked out a fine reply to the inorganic.”
She smiled.
“Are the dances of your world like this?”
“Some of them are similar. I was reminded of them as I watched Braxa—but I’ve never seen anything exactly like hers.”
“She is good,” M’Cwyie said. “She knows all the dances.”
A hint of her earlier expression which had troubled me…
It was gone in an instant.
“I must tend my duties now.” She moved to the table and closed the books. “M’narra.”
“Good-bye.” I slipped into my boots.
“Good-bye, Gallinger.”
I walked out the door, mounted the jeepster, and roared across the evening into night, my wings of risen desert flapping slowly behind me.
II
I had just closed the door behind Betty, after a brief grammar session, when I heard the voices in the hall. My vent was opened a fraction, so I stood there and eavesdropped:
Morton’s fruity treble: “Guess what? He said hello’ to me awhile ago.”
“Hmmph!” Emory’s elephant lungs exploded. “Either he’s slipping, or you were standing in his way and he wanted you to move.”
“Probably didn’t recognize me. I don’t think he sleeps any more, now he has that language to play with. I had night watch last week, and every night I passed his door at 0300—I always heard that recorder going. At 0500 when I got off, he was still at it.”
“The guy is working hard,” Emory admitted, grudgingly. “In fact, I think he’s taking some kind of dope to keep awake. He looks sort of glassy-eyed these days. Maybe that’s natural for a poet, though.”
Betty had been standing there, because she broke in then:
“Regardless of what you think of him, it’s going to take me at least a year to learn what he’s picked up in three weeks. And I’m just a linguist, not a poet.”
Morton must have been nursing a crush on her bovine charms. It’s the only reason I can think of for his dropping his guns to say what he did.
“I took a course in modern poetry when I was back at the university,” he began. “We read six authors—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Stevens, and Gallinger—and on the last day of the semester, when the prof was feeling a little rhetorical, he said, ‘These six names are written on the century, and all the gates of criticism and hell shall not prevail against them.’
“Myself,” he continued, “I thought his Pipes of Krishna and his Madrigals were great. I was honored to be chosen for an expedition he was going on.
“I think he’s spoken two dozen words to me since I met
him,” he finished.
The Defense: “Did it ever occur to you,” Betty said, “that he might be tremendously self-conscious about his appearance? He was also a precocious child, and probably never even had school friends. He’s sensitive and very introverted.”
“Sensitive? Self-conscious?” Emory choked and gagged. “The man is as proud as Lucifer, and he’s a walking insult machine. You press a button like ‘Hello’ or ‘Nice day’ and he thumbs his nose at you. He’s got it down to a reflex.”
They muttered a few other pleasantries and drifted away.
Well bless you, Morton boy. You little pimple-faced, Ivy-bred connoisseur! I’ve never taken a course in my poetry, but I’m glad someone said that. The Gates of Hell. Well now! Maybe Daddy’s prayers got heard somewhere, and I am a missionary, after all!
Only…
… Only a missionary needs something to convert people to. I have my private system of esthetics, and I suppose it oozes an ethical by-product somewhere. But if I ever had anything to preach, really, even in my poems, I wouldn’t care to preach it to such low-lifes as you. If you think I’m a slob, I’m also a snob, and there’s no room for you in my Heaven—it’s a private place, where Swift, Shaw, and Petronius Arbiter come to dinner.
And oh, the feasts we have! The Trimalchio’s, the Emory’s we dissect!
We finish you with the soup, Morton!
I turned and settled at my desk. I wanted to write something. Ecclesiastes could take a night off. I wanted to write a poem, a poem about the one hundred-seventeenth dance of Locar; about a rose following the light, traced by the wind, sick, like Blake’s rose, dying…
I found a pencil and began.
When I had finished I was pleased. It wasn’t great—at least, it was no greater than it needed to be—High Martian not being my strongest tongue. I groped, and put it into English, with partial rhymes. Maybe I’d stick it in my next book. I called it Braxa:
In a land of wind and red,
where the icy evening of Time
freezes milk in the breasts of Life,
as two moons overhead—
cat and dog in alleyways of dream—
scratch and scramble agelessly my flight…
This final flower turns a burning head.
I put it away and found some phenobarbital. I was suddenly tired.
When I showed my poem to M’Cwyie the next day, she read it through several times, very slowly.
“It is lovely,” she said. “But you used three words from your own language. ‘Cat’ and ‘dog,’ I assume, are two small animals with a hereditary hatred for one another. But what is ‘flower?’ ”
“Oh,” I said. “I’ve never come across your word for ‘flower,’ but I was actually thinking of an Earth flower, the rose.”
“What is it like?”
“Well, its petals are generally bright red. That’s what I meant, on one level, by Taunting heads.’ I also wanted it to imply fever, though, and red hair, and the fire of life. The rose, itself, has a thorny stem, green leaves, and a distinct, pleasing aroma.”
“I wish I could see one.”
“I suppose it could be arranged. I’ll check.”
“Do it, please. You are a—” She used the word for “prophet,” or religious poet, like Isaias or Locar. “—and your poem is inspired. I shall tell Braxa of it.”
I declined the nomination, but felt flattered.
This, then, I decided, was the strategic day, the day on which to ask whether I might bring in the microfilm machine and the camera.
I wanted to copy all their texts, I explained, and I couldn’t write fast enough to do it.
She surprised me by agreeing immediately. But she bowled me over with her invitation.
“Would you like to come and stay here while you do this thing? Then you can work night and day, any time you want—except when the Temple is being used, of course.”
I bowed.
“I should be honored.”
“Good. Bring your machines when you want, and I will show you a room.”
“Will this afternoon be all right?”
“Certainly.”
“Then I will go now and get things ready. Until this afternoon… “
“Good-bye.”
I anticipated a little trouble from Emory, but not much. Everyone back at the ship was anxious to see the Martians, poke needles in the Martians, ask them about Martian climate, diseases, soil chemistry, politics, and mushrooms (our botanist was a fungus nut, but a reasonably good guy)—and only four or five had actually gotten to see them. The crew had been spending most of its time excavating dead cities and their acropolises. We played the game by strict rules, and the natives were as fiercely insular as the nineteenth-century Japanese. I figured I would meet with little resistance, and I figured right.
In fact, I got the distinct impression that everyone was happy to see me move out.
I stopped in the hydroponics room to speak with our mushroom master.
“Hi, Kane. Grow any toadstools in the sand yet?”
He sniffed. He always sniffs. Maybe he’s allergic to plants.
“Hello, Gallinger. No, I haven’t had any success with toadstools, but look behind the car barn next time you’re out there. I’ve got a few cacti going.”
“Great,” I observed. Doc Kane was about my only friend aboard, not counting Berty.
“Say, I came down to ask you a favor.”
“Name it.”
“I want a rose.” “A what?”
“A rose. You know, a nice red American Beauty job—thorns, pretty smelling—”
“I don’t think it will take in this soil. Sniff, sniff.”
“No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to plant it, I just want the flower.”
“I’d have to use the tanks.” He scratched his hairless dome. “It would take at least three months to get you flowers, even under forced growth.”
“Will you do it?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind the wait.”
“Not at all. In fact, three months will just make it before we leave.” I looked about at the pools of crawling slime, at the trays of shoots. “—I’m moving up to Tirellian today, but I’ll be in and out all the time. I’ll be here when it blooms.”
“Moving up there, eh? Moore said they’re an in-group.”
“I guess I’m ‘in’ then.”
“Looks that way—I still don’t see how you learned their language, though. Of course, I had trouble with French and German for my Ph.D, but last week I heard Betty demonstrate it at lunch. It just sounds like a lot of weird noises. She says speaking it is like working a Times crossword and trying to imitate birdcalls at the same time.”
I laughed, and took the cigarette he offered me.
“It’s complicated,” I acknowledged. “But, well, it’s as if you suddenly came across a whole new class of mycetae here—you’d dream about it at night.”
His eyes were gleaming.
“Wouldn’t that be something! I might, yet, you know.”
“Maybe you will.”
He chuckled as we walked to the door.
“I’ll start your roses tonight. Take it easy down there.”
“You bet. Thanks.”
Like I said, a fungus nut, but a fairly good guy.
My quarters in the Citadel of Tirellian were directly adjacent to the Temple, on the inward side and slightly to the left. They were a considerable improvement over my cramped cabin, and I was pleased that Martian culture had progressed sufficiently to discover the desirability of the mattress over the pallet. Also, the bed was long enough to accommodate me, which was surprising.
So I unpacked and took sixteen 35 mm. shots of the Temple, before starting on the books.
I took ’stats until I was sick of turning pages without knowing what they said. So I started translating a work of history.
“Lo. In the thirty-seventh year of the Process of Cillen the rains came, which gave rise to rejoicing, for it wa
s a rare and untoward occurrence, and commonly construed a blessing.
“But it was not the life-giving semen of Malann which fell from the heavens. It was the blood of the universe, spurting from an artery. And the last days were upon us. The final dance was to begin.
“The rains brought the plague that does not kill, and the last passes of Locar began with their drumming… “
I asked myself what the hell Tamur meant, for he was an historian and supposedly committed to fact. This was not their Apocalypse.
Unless they could be one and the same…?
Why not? I mused. Tirellian’s handful of people were the remnant of what had obviously once been a highly developed culture. They had had wars, but no holocausts; science, but little technology. A plague, a plague that did not kill…? Could that have done it? How, if it wasn’t fatal?
I read on, but the nature of the plague was not discussed. I turned pages, skipped ahead, and drew a blank.
M’Cwyie! M’Cwyie! When I want to question you most, you are not around!
Would it be a faux pas to go looking for her? Yes, I decided. I was restricted to the rooms I had been shown, that had been an implicit understanding. I would have to wait to find out.
So I cursed long and loud, in many languages, doubtless burning Malann’s sacred ears, there in his Temple.
He did not see fit to strike me dead, so I decided to call it a day and hit the sack.
I must have been asleep for several hours when Braxa entered my room with a tiny lamp. She dragged me awake by tugging at my pajama sleeve.
I said hello. Thinking back, there is not much else I could have said.
“Hello.”
“I have come,” she said, “to hear the poem.”
“What poem?”
“Yours.”
“Oh.”
I yawned, sat up, and did things people usually do when awakened in the middle of the night to read poetry.
“That is very kind of you, but isn’t the hour a trifle awkward?”
“I don’t mind,” she said.
Someday I am going to write an article for the Journal of Semantics, called “Tone of Voice: An Insufficient Vehicle for Irony.”
The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth Page 10