by Kris Neville
“Listen carefully,” Robin said. “Do you hear my thoughts?”
After a moment she breathed a tired sigh. “Yes.” Inside her mind, not a part of it—terrifyingly, an intrusion upon it—she could feel words form and dissolve. They were indistinct and scattered, and beyond them there was an awareness of his presence. She felt revulsion, and she tried to fight against the words, but they continued, and then, after a moment, the revulsion passed.
“It is difficult to project this language. The symbols are too . . . heavy; not heavy, but . . . There’s no word for it, here: oxu, in Fbun. You will see. You will learn many languages. Relax, my dear. I want to show you something more. Are you relaxed?”
“Yes,” she said, but her body was tense.
“Try to follow this if you can. It may be difficult at first so you must help me.”
It was not words inside her mind, now, although she was aware of his presence. He was trying to guide her own thoughts. She put her hand to her forehead. He was making her. . . Her thoughts were . . . tugging . . . at a closed compartment, a new part of her mind, so strange a part that she tried to draw away from it, but he insisted . . .
“You must help,” he said.
She moaned, finally, when she felt a sensation that was entirely different from any she had felt before: something like an electric shock, something like a fresh breeze, something like remembered pain.
“It’s . . . It’s . . . growing! I can feel it growing!” she cried.
She opened her eyes and looked at her left arm. She turned the hand over and over, holding it before her face. She felt of it uncertainly. “It’s new,” she said. “My arm is new.” She turned her eyes, pleading, toward Robin. She wanted to cry; she felt tears well toward her eyes, and, with effort she blinked them back. Her skin prickled. “Who are you?”
Some part of her mind insisted, querulously, that this could not be happening. (Most real of all were the walls of the room: splotched wallpaper was so very stolid and prosaic that it shrieked refutation, but its presence insisted reality.) And the fingers of her new left hand, slim, delicate fingers, flexed in impossible freedom.
Robin stood and walked to the window. “You’ll have to learn,” he said. “Show her, Don.”
Again she looked at Don. Instantly she felt her vague dislike dissolve into awe. She wanted to look away, to tremble, to, to . . . but she stood mute before him, unbelieving, overpowered, and her feelings, her thoughts, her whole body, was suspended in dull wonder. Slowly, before her eyes, he shimmered and changed. And after a moment he was not human. “Oh!” she said, and her voice was weak and small.
“That’s what we’re like,” Robin said. “That’s what you’re like, Bettyann.”
“I’m like that?” she said. Don—what had been Don—was strange, compelling, not beautiful, but attractive in strangeness. She shuddered, scarcely able to think; to imagine that she, too, was like that was not to be believed, not in the moment, and belief and disbelief did not exist: merely wonder, mute.
“You’ll get used to it,” Robin said. “You will learn to take many shapes, to be, if you wish, as you are now; to be, if you prefer, something else: a bird, perhaps, an animal, or things with which you are not yet familiar. Once you learn you may take many forms.”
She looked down at the new arm. Almost afraid to try to think, she let her mind explore the new compartment of its own accord. What happened seemed automatic reflex. Slowly the arm shrunk to its original, withered shape. “Like that?” she said dully. “Like that?”
“You’ll learn, Bettyann,” Robin said.
Her heart seemed ready to burst. The very real—the oh, so real—walls of the room blurred, and the pattern of the wallpaper ran together, making her head ache with dry excitement. She expected them to crumble and resolve, the walls, into flowing, rippling lines that would merge away in all directions leaving her alone on a little island of solid carpet surrounded by moving silence. “Where are you from?”
“The stars.”
“. . . the . . . stars . . .” she said. Odd words. She had seen stars at night. They were very far away (but sometimes they seemed farther away than at other times). Tensions were building up inside of her body. The stars. It would be very difficult to control the tensions, and she was going to be whipped back and forth in her mind, thoughts pulling this way and then that way, for some time. (Eventually, her mind would quiet: she could sense that, but it was meaningless for now there was no quiet.) It would take time. For the stars were very far away.
“We are not from this planet. Surely, you, yourself, Bettyann, must have felt that you did not . . . entirely belong to this planet. Surely you must have seen that you were different from the rest.”
She shook her head, feeling the curls move, and one dropped over her forehead, and she brushed it away. Different? Different? “Tell . . . tell me about it,” she said. Tell me very slowly, she wanted to say, a little bit at a time, for I do not fully believe you, yet, and I would not like to hear more that I cannot believe, except slowly, so I can fit in pieces (like in a jigsaw puzzle). I remember a jigsaw Jane and I worked: it was a picture of two dogs, bird dogs, and we had lost the box top, and it was a very long time before we could imagine what the picture was about. (Jane at first thought it was a behemoth, and I thought it was a grizzly bear.)
“There’s a great deal to tell,” Robin said.
Bettyann thought of the bird dogs, and, when Dave came home, he laughed and said, “Sure. It was on the box top.” (And then she and Jane remembered, of course, and they said they’d really known it all along, now that he reminded them.) It seemed, suddenly, as if she had known forever: that here, finally, here were her people, people who could understand her as no one else had ever understood her, and she wanted to cry out with happiness, and then, not with happiness, but just surprise.
“We travel,” Robin said. “. . . originally we came from a world that I suppose may have been much like this one. Our records show it was called Amio. We were already travelers when the race on this planet was still in its caves. It has been so long that our own planet is lost beyond the expanding horizon, perhaps twirls around a dead sun: I do not know.
It has been very long. Our history . . . much of it . . . is forgotten. Who knows but perhaps all races pass through the same stages, and we may have been once like these new people among whom you have lived? But we travel now. We grew old . . . and wise on Amio, and after a long time, somehow, one of us discovered the zeiui effect, and we traveled far from Amio. And now we find a sunset here and the blue of waters a million-million miles away . .
As she listened the unshocked part of her mind realized that he was old, but not old in the sense she had used the word before, not as Earthmen are old; and it almost seemed as if his words were weary with age. The thought fluttered and died.
“When we came last to this planet,” Robin said, “your parents were killed in an accident. I, myself, heard your father’s thoughts just before he died for I was waiting in a scout ship for him. I thought that you, too, were dead . . . We returned a month ago. One of us thought he felt your presence on the planet. I was able to remember where the accident occurred; we computed the date from the Big Ship’s log; we checked the files of a newspaper in the town nearest the accident. We found, indeed, that you had survived. From that, discreet inquiry led us to you.”
“. . . go on . . .”
“There are not many of us any more; not as many as we might prefer. It would be nice to have a new face again among us. There is ample room for you. And we have come for you, for you are one of us; we could not leave you here, lonely. We have come to ask you to come back to your own people, to travel with us. For you are one of us.” He turned to stare out the window into the falling snow. “Many planets have more beautiful snow,” he said.
“There are better snows on Lylo,” Don said. “And better shadows, too. There are three moons there.”
Bettyann knew they were giving her time to let the inf
ormation settle into her mind. But it insisted on floating free, unmoored.
This planet is famous for its greens,” Robin said, more to himself than to Bettyann or Don. “There are some really startling greens in the tropical foliage, particularly Guam, for instance. But not here, not at this season, only this snow . . .”
“These are not your people,” Don said from the alien body. Bettyann looked at him again. The form began already to lose some of its compelling strangeness. She was coming to accept it. And now familiarly her emotions went out to it, and she longed to assure herself of its reality and the reality of her own true body beneath the Earth flesh.
“Let me help you,” Don said.
Trembling, Bettyann began to change. She reached back along unfamiliar paths toward the new compartment of her mind. Utter complexity there: a twisted skein of controls. Again unrealized patterns swirled her thoughts; and like birds southward in winter, the thoughts knew direction from instinct. It was slow and painful at first, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out. And then, as she felt her body move upon itself, she was stunned by the miracle, wonderful beyond belief, that vibrated on the edge of existence. Her thoughts were too overcome for understanding: there was only a sense of awe, of humbleness, that here, within herself, she bore the great secret that could unlock the matter of her body and change it and release it and fashion it and mold it. She knew the new shape; she knew its lines; she knew its outward form: it was there in the compartment; and the compartment was not a second mind, not a greater mind at all, but something distinct from that, something apart from her personality, and wonderfully, wonderfully subservient to her thoughts. The transformation continued, with increasing speed, with increasing ease. And yet, she had never seen before; could hardly believe now, and they had shown her. It was too . . . alien.
It will take time, she thought, for the strangeness to leave. At first, so strange, and then, so new, and then (time is a wonderful thing) so natural after all. (And Dave had said, “If you walk over a path long enough, they’ll pave it.”) “No,” she said, her mind still quivering with the shock of the change and with the new (but not yet certain) freedom of her new form. “No,” she said dully. There was the sense of belongingness: the absolute certainty of it, beyond everything, beyond feelings, thoughts: she belonged; it was right. “No,” she said again. “They are not my people.” She looked down to see how awkwardly her Earth clothing draped on the alien body, and she tugged at the dress, and, for a moment, she felt sad and isolated.
“Then you will come with us?”
She started to say, “Yes. Yes, I will go. I must go, mustn’t I? You are my people.” But all the impressions, all the jumbled-together memories out of the past rose within her, moaning. She tried to squeeze them away, tried to forget the now re-experienced excitement she had felt but two weeks ago at knowing she stood upon the brink of discovery (even now, still stood: still on the brink). My people are from the stars, she thought, unbelieving. And they go where they will, free and unbound. (And I told Doris I’d give her my history notes tomorrow, and I had an idea for an Outlook article.) She waited for her emotions to quiet.
“Give me a minute,” she said. Emotions bubbled, frightfully out of control, and moved upward in her like furious hot water toward the top of a pan. (She stood feeling the strange body and watching Robin at the window staring into the snowfall.)
She had, once, a nightmare that her room was gone; above the stairs, at home, was nothingness; and when she awakened, moonlight fell on the carpet, and there were Momma Jane’s soft hands, hand’s that had been there, quieting, as long as she could remember and before she could remember. And downstairs there were lacy curtains and nine (she had counted them often) twelve-inch albums of music that Dave, sometimes, after supper, listened to, and some day she would put the music into a painting, along with how Dave felt and how she felt (and there was a new compartment in her mind that would help her mold paints to her will and show her many things to be done and to be shown). And there was once a family of mockingbirds nesting in the withered oak tree in summer, they sang all night, and through the open windows she could listen until sleep came. She could taste the night summer air (with sweet hyacinth and mystic lily of the valley and polleny honeysuckle and spicy rose). And it was neither happy nor sad, the memory that came, wrapping up everything in a flash of the five senses colored by time, but strangely wonderful, and she remembered with quiet amazement until her blood tingled.
Don shuffled restlessly.
Watching the stars, ever so far away, sometime before she entered school—very early, one of her first memories which merged into warm, assuring, nonmemories of the impalpable before . . . They were hard and bright and intensely inviting, and she wanted to gather them like flowers. (Wasn’t there a children’s story about a little girl who wanted the moon, and one day she was gone, and her Daddy, pointing, said: “She’s up there, she rowed away on a moonbeam,” and the townspeople all shook their heads because it was sad?)
(Old man Starke was dying of cancer.)
But looking at Robin, old/young Robin, so very wise, she felt vast longing, longing more than Earth longing, and the stars were spread out in a thousand excitements at her fingertips, and the wonder of it, vast, eternally vast, overcame her. (A blazing sun to play with, and spin beyond, and a dead sun to make you ask never-to-be-answered questions; and a thousand planets, and blue water, and sound and movement, and love of space; and never understanding, until a comet comes from nowhere, and it makes you know, and know, forget, and try to remember again . . . later . . . in a quiet time.) She wanted to fall down on her knees before the thought and throw out her no longer arms in a gesture of gratitude for these, her people, and she wanted to cry: These are my people, and this strange body is my body, and these are the ones who will understand me because they are what I am. These are my people, and the sad-funny people and the world I have known, merely . . . human . . . These, my people, and her blood raced with excitement, and she said, “Yes. Yes. I’ll go. You are my people.”
The words were said. And now she wanted to cry.
Robin was at her side. She looked up, and her heart raced with hope. “I’ve got to tell my parents good-by first,” she said. “I’ve got to tell them. I couldn’t leave without telling them.”
“I am sorry,” Robin said after a moment. “I think I can imagine how you must feel. But that is impossible. To permit that would be to risk exposure. We ask only to be let alone; in return we let others alone. We waited for you here when your parents . . . seemed to want to question us. We did not want any trouble.”
“But I just can’t leave! I’ve got to see them again! I’ve got to tell them I’m going away!”
“The others will be waiting now,” Don said. “We have delayed departure for you. We cannot wait any longer.”
“You must write your good-by,” Robin said.
“Please . . .” she said.
Robin shook his head. “It is the rule, Bettyann. It has always been the rule. If this race were to discover our visits, if your parents found out . . . No, the risk is too great. I cannot answer to the others. We ask only to be let alone; that is not too much to ask.”
Slowly she changed back to the form of a college girl with a withered left arm, withered because it was more comfortable than the whole one which she would scarcely know how to use. (And she wondered idly with part of her mind, what would Bill say to see me with two arms, and where is Bill now—in the army somewhere—and does his handsome face, or the meaning of it, the memory of it, the . . . does it really matter what he would say or think? I could let the arm grow, a little at a time, a fraction of an inch a day, and get used to it, and tell everyone that some kind of exercise was making it grow again, and in a year when it was whole they would not think it strange, nor I. And I’m being a child to cry.)
“I’d . . . I’d like to be alone,” she said. “I’ll be all right after a bit. Please leave me alone for a few minutes.”
“There is a pen and stationery on the desk,” Don said.
When they came back, Robin said, “Do you feel better now?”
And she said, . . Yes . . . I have written a letter to the college telling them that I have been called home by illness. They will not contact my parents and worry them about my absence.” She looked at Don. “I wrote my parents a letter telling them I must go away.” She looked at Robin, appealing for understanding. “It wasn’t easy to write.”
Robin said, “I am very sorry, believe me. But perhaps a letter will be best for you. I’ll give them to the man at the desk downstairs.”
Don said, “We’d better go.”
“We have a car outside,” Robin explained. “We have a scout ship several hours away.”
They left the room, and, in the lobby, Robin roused the sleepy clerk and said, giving him the two letters and a bill, “Will you mail these first thing in the morning?”
(And Bettyann thought: It will take three days, maybe four days, for Jane to get it, and she will take it from the mailbox . . . and she will stand by the mailbox, perhaps open the letter before going back inside—if it isn’t too cold on the porch that day. Open it by tearing neatly the right-hand edge, and shake out—or perhaps reach inside with thumb and forefinger after—the single page and the large-scrawled and few, pathetically few, words.)
They were in the car, and they drove through the cold night, and Bettyann trembled, sitting between Robin (driving) and Don, until finally noticing, Robin said, “Better turn on the heater, Don.”
Robin drove slowly, and the night was long. Don dozed fitfully beside the window. At first Bettyann knew rising excitement that she could scarcely contain—not unmixed with sorrow but stronger. After a while she turned to Robin to ask him to hurry, and then suddenly desperate, she wanted to talk to overcome the sickness of parting, but she could not find the words. Finally, her mind grew weary, and she wanted to sleep and forget (or perhaps dream a moment of flashing stars).