Part 16 (1/2)
”G.o.d,” he said, his breath uneven, ”this reminds me of my mother making me say prayers when I was five. I hated it I was embarra.s.sed, I couldn't see G.o.d anywhere, I didn't know who I was supposed to be talking to. It was so terrible, my mother gave up. Years later, I learned to pray, on my own, inside. All right, all right, don't stare at me that way. Here's what I said-”
He got up suddenly, walked to the window and looked out across the city, toward a building, any building that looked like the hospital, and focused his attention there. His voice was almost inaudible. He knew this and stopped, and started over, so she could hear: ”I said: please, G.o.d, save her, save my daughter, let her live. If you do, I promise, I swear to give up the dearest thing in my existence. I promise to give up Laura, and never see her again. I promise, G.o.d. Please.”
There was a long pause until he repeated the last word, quietly: ”Please.”
Without moving, she lifted the gla.s.s to her lips and drank the brandy straight down and, eyes shut, shook her head.
”Now, you've really done it,” she said.
He turned from the window and started toward her, but stopped. ”You believe me, don't you?”
”I wish I didn't, but I do. d.a.m.n!” She hurled the gla.s.s away and watched it roll unbroken along the rug. ”You could have promised something else Couldn't you, couldn't you, couldn't you?”
”Promise, what, what?” Not knowing where to go, he prowled the room, not able to look back at her. ”What can you promise G.o.d that means anything! Money? My house? My car? Give up my Paris trip? Give up my work? G.o.d knows I love that that! But I don't think G.o.d takes things like that There's only one value, isn't there? For him him? Not things, people, but...love. I thought and thought and I knew I had only one special last rich thing in my life that was of any priceless value that might mean something in an exchange.”
”And that thing was me me? she said.
”Yes, dammit. Name me something else. I can't think of anything. You. My love for you has been so big, so all-consuming, so vital to my whole life, I knew it had to be the right gift, the right promise. If I said I'd give you up, G.o.d would have to know what a devastation it would be, what a total loss. Then he'd just have have to give my daughter back! How could he not?” to give my daughter back! How could he not?”
He had stopped in the middle of the living room now. She picked up the fallen gla.s.s, looked at it, and circled him, slowly.
”I've heard and seen everything now,” she said.
”Heard and seen what?”
”Men, one way or another, getting out of their affairs.”
”Is that what this looks like to you?”
”How else can it look? You've been wanting out for a long time. Now you have your excuse.”
He made a mourning sound, then a groan, then a sigh of exasperation.
”An excuse? No. A commitment. What else would you have wanted me to do?”
”Well, certainly not promise G.o.d to give me up!” she cried. ”Why me?'
”Don't you know? Haven't you been listening? You're all I had as collateral. I loved you, I love you, I will always love you. And now, though I know I'll bleed for years, I have to hand you over. Who is hurt worse here, me or you? Does it hurt more for you to be left or for me, to leave? Can you really, I mean really, figure that and tell me?”
”No,” she said, and her shoulders slumped again. ”I'll be all right. Forgive me. It'll just take time. It's only been ten minutes since you came in that door. Christ.”
She turned and walked slowly out to the kitchen. He' heard her rummaging in the refrigerator. He went and sat down and held on to the armchair as if it might suddenly hurl him across the room.
She came back in with a bottle of champagne and two gla.s.ses, walking across the floor as if it were land-mined. ”What's that?” he asked, as she sat down on the floor.
”What's it look like?” She worked the cork expertly and when it popped and hit the ceiling, she added, ”Wei began with this, why not end with it?”
”You're angry at me-”
”Angry, h.e.l.l, I'm mad clean through, and so sad I'd like to go to bed for a month and not get up again, but I will, tomorrow, dammit. Maybe this G.o.dawful champagne will help, lake your gla.s.s.”
She poured and they drank and were silent for a long! while. i ”So this is the last time well ever see each other;” she said.
”You don't have to put it so bluntly.”
”Why not? You already have. Let's not kid around. This is the last five minutes of our lives. When you finish that, I want you out the door. I can't stand having you here. I don't want you to go. I wish I had a prayer, a promise, as strong as yours, that I believed in. I'd cry out to G.o.d with it But I don't have that strength, and no one's dying for me, except you, and you're not really dead, just going. So, don't ever call, don't write, don't come back, don't drop in. I know, I know, that's what you intend, to go, to stay. But you might be tempted. And if you called, I'd have to the all over again. Do I sound mean, do I sound hard? I'm not. I can't handle it any other way. So-”
She lifted her gla.s.s and finished the champagne, then got up and walked to open the door to her apartment and stand by it, waiting.
”So soon?” he said, bleakly.
”Hard to believe it's been five years. But-so soon.”
He got up and looked around as if he had left something, and then realized it was really her and came to stand before her, his hands at his sides. He didn't seem to know what to do with his arms or his body.
”Do you forgive me?”
”No, not now. But soon, yes, I must. Either that, or stop going to church. Give me time to really think about your daughter and her dying almost, and yes, I will. It's a terrible week for all of us. Fart of me knows that you are being cut right down the middle. Goodbye.” Her mouth whispered, darling darling, but she couldn't say it out loud.
She kissed him once, for a long moment, and when she felt the slight pull of her gravity moving him closer, broke off and stepped away.
He went out the door and halfway down the stairs turned and looked at her and said: ”Goodbye.”
He turned and went the rest of the way down.
Tears exploded from her eyes. She flung herself forward to seize the top stair rail and stare blindly down. ”How dare you!” she shrieked, and stopped. She stared at the empty stairwell, stifling her breath.
The next words fell out of their own accord: ”-love your daughter-” And then the rest, which only she could hear: ”-more than me?” She backed up, groped round, found herself inside, and slammed the door, hard hard.
Downstairs, he heard. And it was like the sound of the shutting of a tomb.
The Love Affair
All morning long the scent was in the clear air, of cut grain or green gra.s.s or flowers, Sio didn't know which, he couldn't tell. He would walk down the hill from his secret cave and turnabout and raise his fine head and strain his eyes to see, and the breeze blew steadily, raising the tide of sweet odor about him. It was like a spring in autumn. He looked for the dark flowers that cl.u.s.tered under the hard rocks, probing up, but found none. He searched for a sign of gra.s.s, that swift tide that rolled over Mars for a brief week each spring, but the land was bone and pebble and the color of blood.
Sio returned to his cave, frowning. He watched the sky and saw the rockets of the Earthmen blaze down, far away, near the newly building towns. Sometimes, at night, he crept in a quiet, swimming silence down the ca.n.a.ls by boat, lodged the boat in a hidden place, and then swam, with quiet hands and limbs, to the edge of the fresh towns, and there peered out at the hammering, nailing, painting men, at the men shouting late into the night at their labor of constructing a strange thing upon this plan et. He would listen to their odd language and try to understand, and watch the rockets gather up great plumes of beautiful fire and go booming into the stars; an incredible people. And then, alive and undiseased, alone, Sio would return to his cave. Sometimes he walked many miles through the mountains to find others of his own hiding race, a few men, fewer women, to talk to, but now he had a habit of solitude, and lived alone, thinking on the destiny that had finally killed his people. He did not blame the Earthmen; it had been an accidental tiling, the disease that had burned his father and mother in their sleep, and burned the fathers and mothers of great mult.i.tudes of sons.
He sniffed the air again. That strange aroma. That sweet, drifting scent of compounded flowers and green moss. ”What is it?” He narrowed his golden eyes in four directions.
He was tall and a boy still, though eighteen summers had lengthened the muscles in his arms and his legs were long from seasons of swimming in the ca.n.a.ls and daring to run, take cover, run again, take swift cover, over the blazing dead sea bottoms or going on the long patrols with silver cages to bring back a.s.sa.s.sin-flowers and fire-lizards to feed them. It seemed that his life had been full of swimming and marching, the things young men do to take their energies and pa.s.sions, until they are married and a woman soon does what mountains and rivers once did. He had carried the pa.s.sion for distance and walking later into young manhood than most, and while many another man had been drifting off down the dying ca.n.a.ls in a slim boat with a woman like a bas-relief across his body, Sio had continued leaping and sporting, much of the time by himself, often speaking alone to himself. The worry of his parents, he had been, and the despair of women who had watched his shadow lengthening handsomely from the hour of his fourteenth birthday, and nodded to each other, watching the calendar for another year and just another year to pa.s.s....
But since the invasion and the disease, he had slowed to stillness. His universe was sunken away by death. The sawed and hammered and freshly painted towns were carriers of disease. The weight of so much dying rested heavily on his dreams. Often he woke weeping and put his hands out on the night air. But his parents were gone and it was time, past time, for one special friend, one touching, one love.
The wind was circling and spreading the bright odor.
Sio took a deeper breath and felt his flesh warm.