by John Boyd
“I’m glad, Breedlove. Then we both breathe oxygen. You’re my brother.”
“Welcome to the family, Sister Kyra.”
She laughed, a pleasant, tinkling sound. She seemed vastly reassured by the color of his blood.
At breakfast she was fascinated by the design of his spoon, holding it to look at it from various angles. Her sense of wonder was so great it communicated itself to him, and he remarked, “Kyra, you’re the original ‘child of the clear, unclouded brow and dreaming eyes of wonder.’ ”
“You’ve got a terrific phrase there, Breedlove.”
“It’s not mine. It’s from a poet. Do you like poetry?”
A shadow flickered over her face as she answered, “We had poetry once, long ago, but the poets left us.”
He wanted to ask where the poets had gone, but he did not wish to stir the grief he had seen in her eyes, and he was growing protective of her madness. On the other hand he admired her quickness and grace and remained always conscious of her dignity, despite her absurd dress, which almost totally revealed her nubile loveliness.
Her face enchanted him most. Though regal, it was a fine-tuned instrument for conveying the wide range of emotions that arose from her Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. The bone structure beneath the silvery gray skin was classic Swede—she could have been a young Garbo—and as they talked her charm wove a spell that made her odd coloring as unobtrusive as her semi-nudity. She ate only a slice, of bacon and a slice of bread with a bit of jam and drank half a cup of coffee.
“If you don’t eat more you’ll be famished by noon.”
“The sunlight feeds me, Breedlove,” she said, fluffing her hair.
The charm of her wholly feminine gesture buffered the implications of what she said. She claimed the ability to photosynthesize light. If that was true, it would explain the green of her hair as chlorophyll. There was a scientific logic to her fantasies, and, playfully, he matched her zany logic with zaniness of his own.
“Maybe you’re descended from a plant.”
“Some believe so,” she said. “Plants that lived on air.”
“I’d have to agree.” He smiled. “We call them aerophytes, and among them is the world’s most beautiful flower, the orchid. From the first time I saw you I felt you were the kissing cousin of an orchid.”
Her eyes sparkled at his compliment, surprising him with her delight in flattery, but she could give as well as receive. “You must have sprung from the loins of a sturdy oak, Breedlove.”
“Where did you see an oak around here?”
“I saw them on KSPO. We had them on Kanab.”
“Kanab? Are you from Utah?”
“No. Kanab was the name of my world.”
She was drifting into her mania, and he was intrigued by the novelty of her delusions. It was a pattern followed by many psychotics, he had read; outside the areas of their delusion they could be bright and sensible. Only when they moved into their illusionary world did their behavior grow strange, but they could become upset when their version of reality was derided. He decided to treat her imaginary world with gravity.
“What does the word Kanab mean?”
Seated on the grass before him, her legs crossed, she considered the question before answering hesitantly, “Kanab means ‘mother,’ but it means something more to us, perhaps ‘queen-mother.’ ”
Suddenly she leaped to her feet and swirled before him. “What do you think of my dress, Breedlove? It’s made from the sheerest of fabrics, laminated hydrogen plasma. Am I not the height of fashion?”
“Height of fashion” was a phrase plucked from a dress advertisement, he realized, but as she settled to the grass again as lightly as a falling thistle, she awaited his answer with girlish eagerness.
“It’s beautiful. Laminated hydrogen beats nylon by a country mile. But earth women use dresses for concealment as well as decoration. Your dress is very decorative but also very revealing.”
“We used to decorate ourselves on Kanab, but we found it was too… provocative.”
For the first time she groped for a word, to find the least offensive, he sensed, and not because her vocabulary faltered. Her vocabulary was excellent and apparently growing stronger by the minute. He didn’t know precisely what hydrogen plasma might be. Probably it was a term learned from the early-morning science courses broadcast by KSPO.
“Actually you need to complete your ensemble with undies,” he said, “to conceal your breasts and bottom.”
“What are undies?”
He explained, and she sighed in genuine disappointment. “I feel bound enough with the dress alone. It’s getting too warm in here.”
Her madness and his common decency put a shield of propriety between them far stronger than her inadequate garment, and she seemed so vexed by the confinement of the dress, he invited her to take it off. Rising to her knees, she slithered from the garment in sinuous bendings and twistings, and she was totally unaware of the sensuality of her movements. Heaving a sigh of relief, she sat down in front of him as naked as a curd, folded the dress and laid it on the grass beside her.
Breedlove almost gasped his astonishment when he noticed a peculiarity of her anatomy that gave him the first inkling of evidence that she was not some mad waif wandering in the wilderness but exactly what she said she was, a girl from another planet.
Glancing over, she read the astonishment in his eyes incorrectly. “Breedlove, you do not consider me well formed and beautifully proportioned.”
“Kyra, your body’s beautiful, but—I hate to tell you this you’ve got no bellybutton.”
“What’s a bellybutton?”
He unbuttoned his shirt, slipped up his undershirt, and exhibited his navel. The whorled bud of flesh struck her as humorous, and she laughed. “If that’s all it is, I’m doing quite well without one.”
Chagrined by their sudden focus on anatomy, he turned to another subject, asking, “What is it like on Kanab?”
“Oh, it was beautiful, Breedlove. Almost as beautiful as your own gorgeous planet, with mountains and snow and meadows with bright streams flowing to rivers which flowed to the sea.”
The elation in her voice plummeted into sudden silence, and she added softly, “But that was long ago, long, long ago.”
He could almost touch the sadness in her voice, but she was shaking off the mood. “My people worked by day and slept by night. At twilight they gathered to tell stories and pass on their knowledge to the young. We had but one creed, ‘Love one another,’ and we loved until the end. For men such as you death often came from too great a happiness, when they melted like snowflakes in the fires of life. But that was before the great sadness when the twilights grew too long.”
“Why did you leave, Kyra?”
As her eyes and hair had seemed to absorb the dawn’s earliest light, the sorrow in her face extracted sadness from the air they breathed, and the chill of her desolation infected him. He regretted his question as she looked away from him, out over the meadow, as if averting her eyes from some inner abyss of despair.
“Kanab is no more. Our sun grew pale, collapsed upon itself, and exploded.”
Her palpable sorrow convinced Breedlove of the truth of what she said. His heart believed her, and with his knowledge came a great unease. Men had speculated that this might happen which was happening to him now, and he, a simple forest ranger, had become the first man to establish contact with an emissary of an alien species. Beyond his inner turmoil, overshadowing Kyra’s sorrow, loomed the overwhelming question he knew he had to ask.
“Tell me, Kyra, out of all the planets in the universe, why did you choose to come to earth?”
Chapter Two
“We came for help.”
Her answer aroused his suspicion. It was not credible that one who traveled interstellar space should seek aid from a planet of toddlers only now making their first step into the solar system.
“You want our help?”
“There are only ten of us, and we
are not gods but exiles. We heard radio noises from your planet and knew we’d find a civilization here. We seek a planet where we may renew our race, but we do not wish to usurp the dwelling place of other intelligent beings. But our fuel is exhausted. We need only a few gallons of water and a spoonful of fuel.”
“What is your fuel?”
“It is a heavy metal that gives off heat from its own furnaces.”
“You’re probably looking for uranium 235.”
“Two-three-five,” she repeated, looking at him closely, then her face lighted up, and he could see a burden lift from her mind. “Yes, uranium. Could you give us a spoonful of uranium?”
She was asking for a spoonful of uranium as a neighbor might drop in to borrow a cup of sugar, and the absurdity of her request helped convince him of its authenticity.
“Uranium is controlled by the government. It’s a very dangerous element. It’s radioactive and has to be shielded with heavy lead whenever it’s moved.”
“I have a very light shield to carry it in.”
“I’m sure the government would be interested in your shield, but the government guards the supply of uranium very carefully.”
“Would you take me to your government?”
He laughed. “On earth, Kyra, there’s a famous cartoon showing a being from another planet walking up to a grazing cow and saying, ‘Take me to your leader.’ I’m afraid that you’ve come to that cow.”
She sensed the humor in the situation and repeated, “Breedlove, take me to your leader.”
“There are so many leaders I don’t know where to start. The topmost leader is the President of the United States, but two houses of Congress and a Supreme Court pass on most of what he does, and he doesn’t ladle out spoonfuls of uranium. The agency in charge of uranium used to be the Atomic Energy Commission, but it has been divided into two separate agencies. Neither could act on your request without referring it to other interested agencies, such as the Department of Defense…” As she listened, he wove his way through a maze of bureaucracies that might be concerned with her request. “The man who would know offhand which agency to take you to would have to be a lawyer specializing in political science.”
“So there’s nothing you can do?”
She spoke with a sympathy and understanding for his plight that made him more concerned with hers.
“There’s something I can do. It’s called ‘passing the buck.’ I can take you to my leader in the National Park Service and let him figure out what to do. Have you any written authorization from your planet’s government to make the request?”
“My planet no longer exists,” she reminded him.
“That’s only a technicality,” he told her. “The government needs documents. I’m not officially alive unless I produce a birth certificate and not dead until I have a death certificate.”
He thought for a moment and said hopefully, “There may be another way. In my capacity as a civil servant I could act as an official witness to authenticate your arrival on earth, but to make the deposition I’d have to see the space vehicle you arrived in and officially attest to your need of radioactive uranium.”
“I would take you inside the vehicle, Breedlove, because I trust you, but first I must ask you: How long will this take?”
“I’d hope to get it done within the next three weeks because, after that, this meadow will be swarming with campers and fishermen.”
Her question had been voiced with concern, and his answer seemed to relieve her.
“It must not be much longer, or we may never leave.”
“Would this environment be fatal?”
“No. Already my people love your planet, so beautiful and so like our own. It has given us hope. But we are people of light, Breedlove, and the day will soon come when the light from your sun will bid us to stay. This must not be.”
The gravity of her manner disturbed him. Trying to cheer her, he said, “If you don’t get away, there’s an earth ritual I’d like to be the first to introduce to you. It’s called ‘courting.’ Young men call on young women in their parlors with the intention of proposing marriage or a reasonable facsimile.”
“Then I must show you my parlor.” She smiled.
“First let me call my office. I’m expected back by noon.”
“Can you spend another night on the mound and join my people in our twilight ceremony? It will teach you much about us.”
“I’d be delighted. Was it your people who cropped the grass?”
“We ate it.”
He had grown so accustomed to her oddities he only glanced around and commented, “I hope the wire grass didn’t upset your stomachs, and you should leave enough for me to clean my pans.”
He radioed Peterson and requested permission to stay overnight to conduct a survey of the trout population in Jones Creek. Peterson agreed and wished him luck.
“Thank you for being discreet, Breedlove.”
“I want to keep you secret until we’ve made plans. If it became known you had landed here, there’d be claim jumpers all over the place, and I want to keep you for myself. You’re my chance to go down in history. Now, take me to your leader.”
“We have no leader, Breedlove. We are all as one.”
“What do you know about the qualities of light, Breedlove?”
Her question came as they neared the aspen grove on the far side of the creek.
“Not much,” he admitted. “I’m no scientist. But I read a lot. I just finished an article about lasers. A laser beams light amplified by the stimulated emission of radiation, but don’t ask me what that means.”
“Then maybe you can best understand when I tell you that what you don’t see before you is an optical illusion.”
Forty feet in diameter and over three hundred feet high, the Kanabian space vehicle rested on its base in the aspens barely four hundred yards from the hillock in the meadow. It was invisible and unrecordable on human instruments.
It had destroyed three or four trees on landing, but even its self-made landing pad was invisible. Kyra continued to explain the ship’s properties in terms intelligible to a nonscientist.
“Light corpuscles travel halfway around the circumference of the craft and continue onward as rays so you can see behind it from any angle. Its invisibility protects us and keeps it from frightening animals. In nonmountainous areas it would be a hazard to low-flying aircraft, but birds sense it and fly around it because it alters the magnetic lines of a planet in its near vicinity.”
Leading him into the grove, she whistled three notes on an ascending scale. Before them in the shadowy forest he saw a swash of pale light grow visible, lengthen downward, and become a door opening to form a stepless ramp, resembling translucent ivory, leading into the spaceship. It was a gateway through nothingness leading into something. For a moment the sight disoriented his sense of reality, and he faltered in his stride. She reached over and took his hand lightly and said, “Be careful going up. The ramp’s slippery.”
Her touch and conversational tone steadied him. He followed her up the ramp, feeling massive and gross, a mortal invading a fairy dimension, but he was not alarmed, no more, he thought, than Aeneas following the Sibyl into Hades. When he stepped into the rotunda of the ship, he had lost his feeling of unreality completely to his sense of awe, but he remained alertly observant.
Centering the rotunda they stood within was a shallow concavity about four feet in diameter surrounding a manhole cover with an inset handle. A narrow ramp without a guardrail spiraled upward from the rotunda until it was lost in a pink haze of sunlight filtering through the skin of the ship. Anchored to the deck at the base of the ramp stood a padded couch, designed, he assumed, to absorb the G forces on its occupant at takeoff, but it was like none constructed for earth astronauts.
The gravity lounge had straps he assumed were safety belts, but the headrest and shoulder straps were at the foot of the couch, which was tilted at an acute angle. Three separate lines of tubes, red,
yellow, and green, wound down from the bulkhead above to cluster at a terminal box above the couch. From the box itself, a single tube with the dimensions of a garden hose dangled from the terminal box, its knobbed head almost reaching the couch.
His observation of the peculiar gravity lounge took only seconds, and as his eyes traced the varicolored tubes upward he saw a woman descending the ramp.
This female, too, was nude and green-haired, but there her resemblance to Kyra ended. Barrel-torsoed, with a massive uplift of pectorals in the travesty of a bust, her gross-featured head was sunk into a wrestler’s sloping shoulders. Advancing on him, she scowled, and began to hiss as she drew nearer.
She was the Gorgon of this fairyland. He cowered as she descended, fighting an impulse to flee even as he felt the beginnings of paralysis from the irrational, primordial terror the sight and sound of this creature aroused in him. Kyra fluted in the direction of the brute in a purring, lilting language, and the she-thing halted, her scowl relaxed, the hissing ceased; but the female remained standing above them, crouched in baleful alertness.
His terror subsided, but Breedlove felt inwardly weak and shaken as he struggled for lightness in a comment, “That must be Medusa.”
“She’s Myra. Her function is to guard the door, but you’re safe. Just ignore her.”
Above Myra he discerned a vanishing line of hatchlike doors opening onto the ramp. Trying to ignore the guardian, he said, “Why, you have only ten people in a ship that could carry hundreds.”
“It’s designed to be our first city when we find a planet to inhabit.”
“Why so many tubes leading to the couch?”
“They lead from the couch,” she said. “They’re designed to relieve internal pressures on the occupant of the couch. The box is sort of a… medical device.”
“Where are your other people?”
“In their compartments. They come out only for the twilight ceremony.”
“Your constant traveling must get boring,” he said with strained amiability, still conscious of the woman on the ramp.
“Oh, no. Below a certain temperature we fall asleep.”