THE MANTOOTH, Part Three

Aragorn Books

THE MANTOOTH, Part Three

The story concludes:

PART III

The Island of Ruins

Though nothing can bring back that hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flowers;
We will not grieve, rather find
Strength in what remains behind....

---William Wordsworth

Chapter 32

Sylviana strolled easily along the beach, the cub running playfully up ahead of her. As she walked the cool ocean breeze wrapped her face and body in its blanket of moist freshness. The water-pocked sand beneath her felt cold and invigorating. Tiny trills of foam nipped at her feet as if demanding her attention, before returning in hissing protest to the sea.

At long last, she thought, they had come to a place where this simple pleasure, a walk in the open air, did not mean exposure to imminent peril. High walls of stark, weather-beaten stone protected the cove from behind and to either side, reaching long tendrils out into the water. And between its arms and hollow chest a strip of sand, perhaps a mile long and a third as deep, lay open to the sea and sun. Lack of game, as much as the forbidding walls, kept the predatory threat of the land animals away from them. So Kalus had told her.

For this same reason he had never considered the margins of the sea as a home of any duration. But on that night when he felt its call so strongly, remaining upon the high watch until the fiery sun had risen from its depths to light the land, Sylviana had spoken of the many ways that food could be obtained there. His restless thought needed no other prompting. In the following weeks they had taken what they needed and could carry, and come the gray stone distance to the north and east, to live. That Kalus had another reason for doing so he kept to himself, a seeming contradiction to the intimate closeness of those days. But he knew the symptoms of his heart and would not cross them. Not yet. He was afraid, and at the same time drawn, to the thing he did not understand.

The girl watched happily as Alaska made a reckless charge back through the surf, crashing the shallow water against her chest with the inexhaustible energy of youth. Having lived more than half her life among humans, it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do: running in joyful frolic toward the outstretched, clapping hands of her soft, female friend. And as she came to a sudden, impulsive halt, shaking the cold water from her fur, she took little notice as Sylviana turned a puzzled gaze far out across the waters. It only meant that her friend no longer wished to play.

Sylviana couldn’t believe her eyes. IT HAS TO BE AN ILLUSION, she thought. SOME KIND OF MIRAGE. But still the image lingered. Perhaps a half mile out, a lone human figure had just emerged from the water and propped itself gracefully atop a tiny islet, a mere rock at the edge of the continental shelf, which had somehow survived the weathering of the years.

At least it looked human. Just at the distance where eyesight begins to fail and imagination to fill the void, the creature looked strangely surreal: something from an ancient legend of the sea. Half blocked from her vision by the stone, only its naked back and blondish mane were visible. These seemed human enough. But she was sure she remembered something odd about the way it emerged. . .the way it moved. . .something.

But suddenly her eyes descried a far more substantial form, undeniable. A huge, black dorsal fin split the surface of the water like a knife, then began to move in slow patient circles around the speck of land and shelter. Incredibly, the lone figure seemed not to notice.

Like wildfire, the thoughts and fears chased each other through her mind. MY GOD, ANOTHER HUMAN! PERHAPS THE LAST. AND A SHARK! I'VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING! Cupping her hands in front of her mouth, she inhaled as deeply as her anxiety and thumping heart would allow, and shouted in desperation:

“Look out! Stay out of the water, there’s a shark!” It was no use, the north wind and crashing surf devoured her feeble warning. Trying to master her panic, she took several deep breaths, and cried out at the top of her lungs.

“Shark! Shark! Stay out of the water. A SHARK!”

This time the creature reacted. Turning towards the sound, it returned her startled gaze with one of its own, revealing for an instant a young, almost childish face. Then to her horror, it leapt into the water immediately beside the giant killer. Frozen in terror she could only watch, unable to move or think. She didn’t breathe.

Reaching the orca’s back, the young male mounted quickly and was gone.

Still on the shore, Sylviana stood incredulous. The boy must have seen it. Had he really grabbed hold of the fin, or had she just imagined it? Her eyes detecting motion farther out, once more she beheld the impossible pairing. This time there could be no doubt. A young boy, perhaps twelve or thirteen, had resurfaced with his mount, a massive killer whale. Clutching with hand and foot both the dorsal and pectoral fins, his limbs spread spider-like against the surging torso, he rode as if he had been born to it.

In fact, he had.

“Kalus!” The girl came running to the place where he stood tacitly shaping a net, surprised he hadn’t heard her shouts. He saw her but did not immediately react, half knowing what she was going to say. She was going to tell him she’d seen a water-child. He waited patiently, hoping she would understand.

“Kalus,” she repeated, closer and out of breath. “I saw another human. . .or something that looked like one. It saw me and dashed off to sea, on the back of a killer whale!”

“Yes. I know.”

“You saw it, too?”

“No, but I have seen them before.”

She looked him full in the face, perplexed. “You knew there were other humans, and you never told me? My God, Kalus, why?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” she demanded.

“Afraid that if you knew there were others, you would have less need of me. That you would not love me as much, always wondering.....”

“Oh, Kalus, that’s so unfair! How could you think so little of me?” But even as she denied his words, she knew they held a grain of truth.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Finding no other expression, he repeated. “I’m sorry.”

For a moment she had forgotten him, and the effect her resentment would have. Now she looked at him, at the weary, washed-out face of long ago, and remembered.

“OH.” She came behind and wrapped her arms around his chest and held him tightly. “It’s all right. I understand.”

With little further speech the two worked on the nets until night forced them back into the cave, a small hollow bored into smooth stone twenty feet above the sand. It was neither spacious nor comfortable, but Kalus did not intend to remain there long.

Both knew, as later in the dead of night he opened his heart to her, that they must leave the roots of their past and strike out to a new destination. To the Island, where Kalus had often marked the smoke of fires, and where he hoped to find some answer to the questions that unsettled him, not the least of which was the riddle of the Children of the Sea.

Chapter 33

The beauty of the Sea was not lost on him, for all his preoccupation with the Island. Every day it revealed new wonders, and more and more he came to realize that it was not only a home and harbinger of infinite life, but a living, tangible thing unto itself. When Sylviana told him it had been the birthplace of life on Earth he was not surprised. When she remarked that little seemed to have changed, despite the nuclear holocaust, he believed, and felt quietly reassured.

But he also saw clearly the darker, more savage aspect of the waters, which the poetic (usually from the detached safety of an untroubled ship or peaceful shoreline) often seemed to overlook. For if the Valley had been ruthless and produced, with few exceptions, a grim array of thoughtless, thankless creatures, their only creed survival of the fittest, then the Sea was the very creator, and composer of the theme. Fierce, desperate mating followed by birth in huge numbers, of which not one in a hundred reached adulthood to fight and breed again, seemed the unbroken rule of this world without shelter, where life and death chased each other like madness, and none were immune.

One morning he watched as a pair of tiny animals, some forgotten offshoot of the hermit crab, dueled at the bottom of a small, clear tidal pool for the affections of a waiting female. Not only was their battle as cruel and fierce as any he had ever seen on land, but the speed and nature of their movements was so reminiscent of the small, poisonous spiders of the Carak that he, an immense land animal infinitely safe upon the inaccessible rock, had unconsciously recoiled in fear and disgust.

On another occasion a smallish gray shark, deceived this far north by an alluring current of warm water, became entangled in one of the nets they had strung at the end of a natural jetty. When dragged ashore with the meager catch that had lured it, its death struggle had been so ferocious that it haunted Kalus’ sleep for weeks afterward. Hopelessly entangled, drowning in a sea of air, it had nonetheless thrashed and snapped for what seemed a eternity, destroying the net and reeking such havoc that the startled fisherman, had he been able, would gladly have thrown it back into the sea. And even when it finally expired, the razor-sharp teeth and leering jaws had presented such a frightening specter that he refused, instinctively, to touch it.

Reluctantly Sylviana had admitted that this behavior, either in killing or being killed, was in no way exceptional among sharks. And far from being the archetype of its race, this relatively small and undeveloped creature could not begin to match the rakish refinements of the Blue, the Tiger, and the ineffable Great White. That they preferred to feed upon the dead and dying, that they usually left substantial, uninjured creatures alone, was robbed of all comforting assurance by the fact that their perceptions were so dim, their mental development so limited, that the actions of a given individual in a given situation could in no way be safely predicted. Like life itself, there was just no telling. From this experience these thriving, thoughtless killers became for him the very symbol of the dark, violent side of nature that had always so terrified and appalled him.

“There must be something more to life,” he said, on the thirteenth night since their arrival. They sat before a driftwood fire in the sand, protected from the wind by the high north wall, a short distance from their cave. With the stars above and the soft murmur of the waves before them, there was peace and sadness enough in his heart to speak of it, and to admit the vague emptiness he found so hard and painful to express. For he knew that she felt an emptiness, too.

“All the birth and dying,” he continued, “The endless struggle just to survive, and to create new beings to struggle and die when you are gone. It is very hard for me to say this, Sylviana, but there are times when I think Nature is very cruel, and I can see no wisdom in living only by her laws.”

“But aren’t you the one who’s always saying that the societies of men must have failed because they had forgotten the simple goodness of Nature, ‘primal virtue’ and all of that? That society had overridden the subtle ways of the Tao, creating its own, alternative order in which Man’s will alone was powerful? That there were no natural, softening influences to prevent man’s ignorance and violence?” Her words seemed mockery, but there was a reason for them. She was trying to draw him to the heart of the matter, which could be difficult when he became thoughtful and began to withdraw.

“You know I’ve said these things, and you know I still believe them. But why couldn’t men do both: raise themselves above the endless struggle, and still have the thought and compassion to put away war and racial hatred, to feed and clothe and give medicine to those who need it? Why does it have to be one or the other?” There was no answer to such a question. Impatiently, she stirred the fire with a stick.

“Aren’t you really trying to tell me that you’ve decided to visit the island at all costs, and that you’re afraid of what you might find there?”

“Yes,” he replied dourly, confused.

“Why are you so threatened by the Children? From everything you’ve told me, they sound even more primitive than the hill-people.” For a moment his eyes flashed, but he knew she meant no insult.

“Because I think there could be some other colony on the Island as well.” Her eyes became suddenly large, and she turned toward him intently. He continued reluctantly.

“I told you I’ve seen the smoke of campfires, and as many as twelve riders at once making toward the island at sunset. But I’ve also seen other lights, bright and unnatural, and broad beams that split the night..... I don’t know what they mean.”

As she heard this her heart beat suddenly faster. It was all too fantastic. Old voices and dreams that she had thought dead and in the past, surged recklessly to life inside her.

“We’ve got to go there! We’ve got to find out.”

“Yes.” He paused, watching her intently in his turn. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you all at once. It was a lot to think about.”

“I understand.” She got up and began to pace restlessly, breathing too deep, unable to control it. “Oh, Kalus, I feel as if I’m going to burst.”

“I’ll be there with you.”

“Yes. YES.” Like a child she ran and wrapped her arms about him.

But later that night, unable to sleep and watching his familiar form beside her in the darkness, she was dismayed by a strange voice that told her she wished she was going alone. Even as he had said, she began to wonder how deep, how true, how honest was their love? And for the first time in many months she felt the terrible uncertainty of the dreamer who has wrapped all hope and affection about the shoulders of a single lover.

IS THIS THE MAN I WANT TO SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE WITH? And as much as she wanted to say yes, she couldn’t. Because she didn’t know.

In the chill hour of dawn Kalus woke, and in turn looked upon the sleeping figure into whom he had poured his life’s blood. To see her lying there beside him, breathing evenly, her face warm and softened like a child’s, was all that he had ever asked, or ever could ask, of the Nameless. His love for her in that moment, when he knew, or feared, that her loyalty to him would soon be put to its severest test, was almost unbearable. Thoughts of a life without her he could not begin to face, and he, too, felt a moment of doubt.

“Sometimes if you love someone, you have to let them go.” She hadn’t meant the words then, but what if now..... If their love could not stand, in the bright and hard light of day, then the efforts of a lifetime were in vain. For if she, who knew him to the depths of his being---his trials and broken dreams, his personal weakness and indomitable strength---if she found in him nothing to love and cherish and hold on to, then who in all the cold, lonely world ever would?

If he had known the full quotation, or she the effect its partial phrasing would have on him, perhaps they could have talked it out, and both found in these simple but profound words some solace:

“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it is yours. If it does not, it never was.”

And if, in that moment he had woken her, perhaps she would have seen in his eyes a depth of love that put aside all questions, and in the returning echo of her heart, sealed their bond forever. But he did not wake her, because he was afraid. And she never told him the full quote, because like so many of life’s precious and irretrievable moments, it was gone forever.

He couldn’t cage her, and he knew it. She couldn’t love him fully without knowing. So be it.

So it was.

Chapter 34

It had been decided that they should build a boat. The only questions left to them were what kind of vessel it should be, and whether to cast off directly from the cove, or to build the craft some distance upstream along the banks of the Broad River, and follow its currents through the delta which then spilled to either side of the Island.

Two considerations made Kalus choose the latter course. First there was the problem of acquiring the wood. There were no trees of substance within a mile of their rock-bound haven, and no way of transporting the farther wood here. Second, neither he nor the girl had sufficient experience in ship-building to put an adequate vessel to sea, and perform the long, slow tack against both wind and current, northward. And though building the craft upstream meant exposure to the returning land animals, this danger, at least, he understood and could in some measure anticipate. For he knew without being told that only a fool takes to the sea unprepared.

So for the first long days, until Kalus understood well enough to continue on his own, they made the journey together to the riverside clearing where he had cut a single trunk of elm. Eighteen feet long, it would be halved and hollowed out, later to be lashed together into a sturdy, double canoe. James Michener had described such a boat in his tales of Hawaii, and Sylviana had never forgotten. Nor had she dreamed in those easy, carefree days at Ithaca College that she would one day be drawing her very existence from the precious knowledge such men passed on.

“Great fullness seems empty, yet it can never be exhausted.” So Lao Tsu had said, and more and more in these uncertain days he was proving the most trustworthy guide. Her life had become like a precious ring dropped into a shallow stream: the thrashing of her hands only muddied the waters, and made it impossible to find. Let the stream flow and cleanse, let the sediments sink back. Then, and only then, could she see what lay at the bottom.

But if Sylviana felt the need and desire to surrender, Kalus experienced a vastly different emotion: raw and intolerable frustration. He could not understand why Nature seemed to resist him at every turn, in an endeavor which he knew must be put forward and carried out. And the conditions in which he was expected to pull off this miracle were appalling. He had neither saw nor plane nor adze, every day the threat from the returning animals grew, and yet somehow he must construct a boat in which to trust the very lives of those he loved.

Each morning he would rise, his back aching from the previous day’s labor, and make the five mile journey across rock and open land to the small clearing, there to struggle and shape until the sun began to set. Then the journey back, to a place he could hardly think of as home, and a life which began to seem more and more alien, without the roots of his past. The girl massaged him, encouraged him. But since the night of his full disclosure a subtle wedge had been driven between them, intensified by Kalus’ need to concentrate all his energies on personal safety and construction of the craft.

It reminded her at times of the way he had spent himself in constructing the barrier to the Mantis’ cave, and its later effect on him. But she kept this to herself, knowing that previous labor had been essential as well, and completed not a day too soon. Hidden fires drove him, and if they tended to turn him in upon himself there was little she could, or possibly should do to change it. He became once more an enigma to her, and at times it seemed they met at nightfall like loyal strangers, cast upon a desert island and enjoined, of necessity, to live and work, and carry out disparate dreams of love, together. It was a cold metaphor, perhaps, but there was no denying it. He had been to her, literally, the last man on Earth. And she to him? The fact that he truly loved her, and would have if given the choice of thousands, he could not tell her, and she didn’t ask. His love was primal, unquestioned. And though she too had felt these pure, gut-level urgings, she was reluctant to be bound by them, when there were so many other things to consider. And to look at it from every possible angle didn’t help. The questions only brought more questions. Only time, and trial, would tell.

In the end Kalus’ will proved stronger than the knotted wood and lack of tools. The boat was finished and rigged, and the moment was at hand. They waited for a day when the winds were not contrary, then set out together for the clearing, the vessel, and the mystery that lay beyond.

Chapter 35

The double prow of the canoe floated gently in the swirling backwater of the launch, its stern still bound by gravity to the sloping earth of the bank behind. The supplies (what there were of them) had been loaded, and the make-shift sail unfurled from the high, horizontal yard. There in the shelter of trees, and running parallel to the wind, it rocked gently against the mast as the newly tied ends waved fitfully, showing every sign of readiness.

But Kalus, looking out upon the wide, sweeping waters and thinking of the still greater pool beyond, could not bring himself to force the vessel farther. His emotions were running much too high, and the fear of the unknown wrapped about him so thickly that he could not shake off its clinging dread and despair. And despite the presence of the girl and the cub, he felt as small and helpless and alone as he ever had. Courage alone would not forge this crossing. He needed guidance as well.

And in this he showed not cowardice, but wisdom. For we are all at the mercy of winds and currents we cannot always see or understand, and those who strut about pretending to be in firm control, are usually in such control all the way past the maw of death, and into the belly of unmaking.

“Sylviana,” he said finally. “It may be foolish..... I would like to say a prayer first.”

She was surprised by the request, but in no way opposed. She felt much the same uncertainty. So without kneeling or folding hands, whose gestures he had never learned, he bowed his head and spoke in deepest earnest.

“Nameless God. Perhaps you cannot hear me, or perhaps you laugh at my weakness. I do not wish to ask you this. But I am just a small and simple man; I cannot control all things. The waters into which I lower this boat seem cold to me, and I am afraid. Please, if you care and can hear me, bring us safely to the Island.”

He paused, and for the first time in many days the woman was intently aware of his existence. His eyes closed hard and his hands folded together unknowingly. This was coming from the heart.

“I do not wish to die,” he continued. “But if one of us must die. . . then let it be me. For I could not live without my Sylviana. She is my life.” He choked back wretched tears until he felt a soft pressure against him, and sweet arms enfolding his gnarled head and scarred shoulders.

“Don’t,” she said gently, reproaching herself for her coldness. “I’m here with you. I’m with you.”

But to her surprise he did not return this overture. Instead he stepped back, shook his head severely, and said to her. “I thank you, Sylviana. And I am sorry for this moment of weakness when I must be strong. But whatever you feel for me, it must not be pity.”

“I only thought---”

“No. Not now. The passage we are about to make is perilous, and we must put all our thought and effort into it. There will be time for emotions later. There is no other way. Are you prepared?”

... “Yes.” He moved away from her and lifted the balking cub, placing her in the left-hand shell, where the woman would ride. “We must be off.”

Without further speech they pushed the craft the remaining distance, then clambered in to take up their positions near the back of the parallel hulls, there both to paddle and steer, using only the awkward, bladed shafts that he had made.

Almost at once Kalus perceived the most serious flaw of his construction. The vessel was too heavy. As soon as they left the dreamy backwater he knew it. The catamaran-like craft responded to the current, and as the sail slowly filled, to the wind as well. But it often moved (or failed to move) with a will of its own. The strokes of their paddles, and even with the girl joining him for a time in the right-hand shell, were barely enough to move them a safe distance from the shore. A less auspicious beginning was hard to imagine.

And the boat was horribly slow to tack, or even move to counter the wind. This concerned Kalus more than anything. For at the meeting of the Broad River and the River of the North---in the wide water-tract of the delta---the southward flow of the latter would try to carry them away from their destination, and out into the open sea. He had cut the hulls as sharply as possible in lieu of a keel, and even leaned them slightly outward at the girl’s suggestion. But rudderless, keelless, this was not enough. The best he could manage with the now deployed steering oar was a straight line eastward, by precious yards slowly gaining the center of the stream. How he would hold it at the meeting of the two rivers and the open sea he could not imagine, though he exhausted his mind in trying. His fear and sense of helplessness grew with each passing moment.

Strange to say, Sylviana’s impressions at this early stage of their journey were nearly the opposite. To her the waters had a soothing, almost hypnotic effect. Kalus had not told her the possible complications of the voyage, being uncertain himself; and for reasons all her own she felt a naive (and perhaps misguided) assurance that all would be well. The river was broad and quiet and tranquil. The sun shone bright in an open sky lightly touched with cirrus, and a great adventure was at hand. Everything was so wide open and free: alive, still young, and in the future. The world of her past seemed to slip behind with the running coast, so easily, leaving hardly a trace of memory. But for the presence of Kalus and the pup, she would almost have believed all the tribulations of the War and the Valley to have been nothing more than a bad dream, from which she was finally waking.

But the sight of Kalus brought her back: the look of worried consternation, his desperate struggle as he wrestled with the steering oar. She watched him for a time, unwilling, and it all came back.

Only once, on the first day she hunted with him, had she witnessed this kind of ruthless determination, and through it, felt the harshness of the world that had shaped such creatures: what he had called the hungry, haunted look of a predator. So severe were his efforts, so wholly single-minded, that despite her resolve to face the crossing bravely, his unspoken fears began to rub off on her. And the rising walls to either side of them, the quickening current they now entered, turned the world ominous and forbidding once more. Almost she resented him for it, as if his actions had somehow changed the very nature of the stream.

As for Kalus, he had said his prayer, and now set out with every weapon at his disposal to make it unnecessary. Self-reliance remained the golden rule of his existence, and he knew that all their lives were in his hands. The hands of the Nameless, if they existed at all, were a thing beyond his (or any man’s) control.

But there was no more time for such thoughts. The Broad River was broad no longer, its shore no longer peaceful and forested. Great cliffs rose up on their right, the last reaches of the granite ridge. To the north the gray rock was not as steep, but its effect on the river was the same. All its wide and lazy waters now issued with great force through a deep, narrow channel scarcely sixty yards wide, falling nearly twice that distance in less than a mile. The result was a horrific, white-water chute, now drawing them swiftly to itself. Kalus’ harsh voice cut through the growing roar.

“Tie down the cub,” he commanded, “And then yourself. Take solid hold of the paddle; we’ve got to keep the boat running straight. And for anything short of death, DON'T LET GO OF THE PADDLE. Now!”

Half stunned, hardly knowing where she was, Sylviana obeyed him. She made the whimpering pup lie down, and bound her securely. Then with shaking hands she tied the waist-rope about herself. She straightened and took hold of the shaft, both knuckles and face turning coldly white. She
glimpsed at Kalus, who nodded gravely. This danger they both understood.

Several times through the roar and spray of their passage, the boat tried to whip about and dash itself against the rocks, or turn sideways to be rolled and lost. But each time, one of the rowers would pull forward with desperate strength while the other steered or slapped back at the water till the blade finally dug in against the fume: straight ahead, blocking out the screaming fear, determined.

And when the smoking mists cleared and the chaos died away, as the tract broadened and the waters smoothed again just as swiftly, their craft remained, unbroken and undaunted. Kalus gave a cry and shook his fist at the sky, while the girl wept. Another obstacle had failed to defeat them.

But Kalus was given no time for celebration, and he knew it. Soon they would enter the delta, and the meeting with the more voluminous North River. Immediately he threw down the paddle and took up the longer, stouter steering oar. The sail was heavy and wet, bunched unevenly along the yard; but with supreme, unyielding effort he tried to angle the craft into the wind, which to his dismay now turned nearly straight from the North.

The mast gave a troubled groan; the right hull and stern sank dangerously low in the water. But that was all. He could change the direction of the prow but not their course. The hulls’ edges simply would not bite and drive them forward. For all his cursing the craft barely held center. And soon the North River would be upon them.
Sylviana raised her dripping face, her chest heaving both with oxygen and emotion. And for all her trauma, she felt a swift and stark moment of recognition. Creeping feelers of memory had been pushing at her consciousness for weeks, since they came to the cove and she caught her first glimpse of the Island in the distance. Now their message hammered through.

The island that lay before them, broad and flat across the muddy waters of the delta. . .was the ruin of once proud New York City. The river to the north was the Hudson.

She gazed at it in a stupor of disbelief. Not a single scraper touched the skies of Manhattan, only mangled upheavals of stone and steel. The City had been stripped to a foundation of jagged, broken teeth, then left to endure ten thousand years of weathering.

NEW YORK! All this time, feeling at the ends of the earth, she had been
less than twenty miles from the place of her birth. It was too incredible to accept, too unlikely to be anything but the truth. Her spirit swooned at the sight of it.

But whatever the Christian name of the river they now encountered, to Kalus it might as well have been the Finger of Satan. The two currents merged into an uneasy bay, lapping slowly but steadily south-eastward. He redoubled his efforts with both sail and paddle, striking furiously at the water till the veins of his forehead seemed ready to burst. But he could not fight the devilish pull.

Away! It carried them away! With all Sylviana’s help, he could draw no closer to the Island. The SEA lay beyond, nothing but the sea! Dear God, it was slow, certain death that awaited them! In the final measure he had failed, miserably and utterly. He tore down the Judas sail and fell forward and surrendered to despair.

They were lost.

Chapter 36

But in his despair and hopeless fear of it, Kalus had forgotten (or never knew) that the Sea could also be benevolent. The Sea, which has ways and currents of its own, and to whom the incoming waters were hardly a ripple of sand in the Sahara. The fresh water currents subsided, and the waves of the Atlantic took over. Subtler, more profound, at worst they would have cast them back upon the mainland. But by a distance no greater than the trunk of a fallen tree, he had set their craft far enough east to be held by the confines of a far greater stream. Sweeping northward along the whole coast of America, washing even the pebbles of Nova Scotia before turning eastward toward Britain and the European main: the subtly altered, and miraculous Gulf Stream.

For a long time it seemed the boat moved not at all. And lost in sorrow and dark reverie, none of its passengers stirred. Only the cub seemed alive, whimpering in the wet bottom of the shell until the woman untied her. At length Kalus rose, to apologize with broken heart for killing them all.

But the words were never spoken. Somehow the boat had turned about, and no longer faced southward. For a time he wasn’t sure, afraid of some trick..... Yes! If the vessel moved at all it was north and a little east. They had missed the southwest facet of the Island, but if they paddled with strength and good hope, perhaps they might still affect a landing on its more easterly shores. He was no sailor: he had neither the skill nor the vessel for sailing. But strength still lived in his arms, and fires still burned in his heart. He turned to Sylviana.

“Have you any strength left?” he asked her. “The current no longer bears us ill, but I think we must still approach the Island on our own.”

“I’m exhausted, Kalus. I feel half drowned..... Can I rest a while first?”

“Yes. If you can steer just a little, I will try to row for both of us.” The woman-child set her paddle listlessly in the water, steering with it as best she could, until pride and returning stamina enjoined her to paddle on her own.

They continued on in this way for several hours, resting at intervals, gradually, so gradually drawing nearer the rocky shoals of the great island. Kalus now began to search for a less dangerous strip of beach, confident that if such could be found, by hook or by crook they would reach it, and effect some kind of landing.

So engrossed was he in searching the coast. . .that for a long while he did not notice the great fin that had risen to starboard, and began to parallel their course at a distance neither great nor small, cunning with the patience of a predator. It was not until it turned and began to bore in on them, as the girl caught her breath and froze in terror, that he saw it.

But once seen there was no forgetting. Black and straight as an ebon keel, it cut through the swells with effortless grace, a torpedoing, half-defined shadow beneath it. No small, Child-bearing female this, but a magnificent bull fully thirty feet long, its knifing dorsal as tall as a man.

And then the blackened knife, like a periscope, sank beneath the level of the waves, and did not reappear. Kalus unfastened his spear, moved forward and stood up in the bow---awed, but fiercely determined to defend his own. All was quiet and still.

Then suddenly (or so it seemed, for the motion was not performed in haste) a great head appeared in front of them, rising perpendicular out of the water, lightly touched by the lapping swells. Above patches of white, dark eyes studied them darkly. The orca seemed to be asking himself,
almost casually, were they worth the trouble? Aboard the suddenly diminished craft, the cub set loose a peal of frightened barking, while Kalus showed the whale clearly the point of his spear.

Without haste the creature returned to a swimming posture, and with a rough spout somewhere between laughter and a sneer, began a last, intimidating circle---though whether it intended to attack was not clear, since it drew no closer.

Then to the bewilderment of the company another, smaller fin appeared, as if to join in the kill. But it was not so. Coming between the bull and the tiny ship, the female nudged him almost angrily, then butted him outright in the side. The male at last relented. The two swam off, leaving behind them a riddle that only seemed complicated, because of its simplicity.

Perhaps nowhere else in Nature was the difference between male and female more pronounced, or more in harmony with their world. They were a mated pair: the bull nearly twice her size, aggressive and indomitable. And the female: more subtle, more compassionate (if that is the right word), strong and sure enough to act on both convictions. Either one alone could be powerful and self-sufficient. Together, nothing could withstand them, true champions of the Sea.

It was Sylviana who spoke first, feeling more acutely the need to talk that comes after tension and danger. Kalus, conversely, remained with his jaw set, trembling and pale, but with the spear clasped firmly in his hand. He did not at first seem to hear her.

“I was never so scared in my life,” she said. No reply. “Kalus?”

He turned to her, not seeming to know who she was, then answered with half his attention, perhaps a bit coldly. “Not even before the giant spider?”

... “No. Not really. Then I didn’t believe what was happening..... Are you all right?” At last his eyes and mind focused, and he too felt the need.

“I have been better. How many shocks am I supposed to be able to face in one day? I feel I’ve lived a year in just these few hours.” He released a sigh, almost a groan, laying aside for a time his resolve to keep an emotional distance from her. . .until she decided. “I’m sorry for what I said about the spider. It was thoughtless.”

“It’s all right. You’re allowed to be human, you know.”

From the tone more than her words, Kalus knew that he had stung her, and that she did not quite forgive him. Again he felt that she was holding him responsible for the harshness of his world, as if it were somehow his fault. Again the chasm opened between them, and now he was too tired to fight it. Imperceptibly he shook his head, breathed out, and returned his attention to the shoreline.

They were now less than a mile out, and the half-forgotten, ruinous landscape once more absorbed them.

All was flat on a large scale, and crumpled on a small: hard, bitter rock like cubes set on edge, careening madly this way and that. Within its valleys were patches of earth, green with grass and weeds, punctured ever and again by corroded girders and iron masonry-bars, to which clung bits of ornamental stone and naked, crumbling concrete. Trees were scarce and never large, their greatest numbers clustered in isolated patches a short distance from the coast, which seemed to have received the largest deposits of earth.

Sylviana easily saw what she had always known, that the skyline of Manhattan had been built upon solid bedrock. For this reason alone had the Island survived at all, blasted as it must have been by successive nuclear explosions. And with this she realized suddenly where the deposits of earth had come from. Besides the fact that the continental coast had been ravaged..... Long Island was gone! Just GONE. Nothing but ocean stretched eastward as far as the eye could see.

And this made her see, vividly, what she had hitherto thought of and imagined as little as possible. While her father had whisked her away and put her to sleep, like an enchanted princess, in the Canadian Rockies, an entire world had been pounded and burned to death. And the remote, less habited places of the globe had been no better off, their children, both man and animal alike, left to die and distort in the slower ravages of radiation poisoning. She did not even know how her father had protected her from the fallout, or indeed, if he had been able. Horrible thought! Would she one day die of cancer, too?

The only comfort, and it wasn’t much, was that it had all happened so long ago: that the hurts had long since been healed. But what was Time, really? Had the Island forgotten? The grim hunks of marble, were they not tombstones, the remains of a pillaged graveyard? Were the gnarled trees not alive with the ghosts of the past? She could not elude the pain, or the bludgeoning sense of complicit guilt.

Had he wanted to, Kalus could have torn her apart in those moments merely by pointing, as if to say. “Is this the humanity you mock me with? Is this the world and way of life I should mourn?” But he said nothing because he, too, seeing her spirit crushed so completely, felt through her the reality and pain of the score of books she had read to him, and realized that every book ever written was but a grain of sand in the vast desert of human struggles and emotions. Six billion intelligent beings at once sharing the globe. . .and then this. He wanted to wrap her in his arms, and shield her forever from the horror. But he could not. “I wish this day would end,” was the best he could manage.

But the day would not end. For good or ill, there remained yet one more scene for them to witness. And this, a vision of the inextinguishable nature of life, was in that hour both a joy and an indescribable sadness to behold. As the boat rounded a high promontory, a hidden inlet was revealed to them. Sylviana gasped, and Kalus lifted his spear in alarm. But there was no danger. No physical danger at least.

Thirty-three naked human forms sat, or stood, or lay placidly like seals among the rocks and mossy earth of a steep embankment, with the ruins of the United Nations building standing in broken silhouette behind them. And before them, in the deep and still waters of the inlet, a dozen fins and sleek backs rested peacefully while others moved, as if on guard, among the waters farther out. It was impossible that the whales, at least, should be unaware of their slowly logging craft; but apparently some understanding had been reached. The guards came no closer, and the Children showed no fear.

And children they truly were: none exceeded the age of sixteen. Their bodies had no hair, only the scruffy heads and thick eyebrows, the straggle of mane down neck and spine---all curly blond and brown. Their cream-colored skin was smooth and tough, and the eyes of all resembled more closely the eyes of a statue than any human’s. Indeed, their very placidness was almost cold, animal in its indifference. Upon closer inspection an abnormality of the hands and feet could be seen. The fingers were long, bony and webbed, like the sea-creatures they were, the feet slightly longer and similarly arrayed.

But in the face of all contradictory evidence, Sylviana clung with sudden conviction to the belief (perhaps unfounded) that inside them remained some spark of humanity, and a soul that might somehow be wakened.

But who would wake it? They had tarried here in their winter home long enough, and must soon return to the seal rich waters of the North. Perhaps they would return again in autumn; perhaps they would move on. Though she could not have known this, Sylviana hung her head in unknown harmony.

At last as the day wore thin, they reached a tenable stretch of beach, and in the failing light safely landed the water-soaked craft. The smallish waves could not overturn its heavy bulk, which now served them. They dragged it as far ashore as they could, which wasn’t far, and lit a fire to replace the sunken sun. There in the lee of a group of rocks they huddled together and slept in the sand, unable yet to think of tomorrow.

They slept, and dreamed, in sorrow.

Chapter 37

The next day brought unexpected hope. As the sun rose, dazzling, across the vast Atlantic, one of its urchins stood up among the wave-ends and stepped cautiously ashore.

Alerted by the sixth sense that every hill-man must possess, Kalus opened his eyes and remained perfectly still. There in the clear light of morning, he witnessed a scene that recalled to him the simple act of kindness that had changed his life forever. Quietly he woke the girl, knowing that she needed this sight as much as he. Silently, together they watched, touched by the eternal resilience of life, where nothing is new under the sun, and every sunrise is the first for some newborn creature.

A small boy, perhaps four, stood close to the water’s edge, holding something in his hand. The cub, having woken before them, remained in her alert, quizzical posture, a short distance from him up the sandy incline. As the boy took a few steps nearer she stood up, but did not bark or growl. Perhaps it was because they were of a kind, and understood each other without the dimness of fear. Or perhaps because they felt the simple affinity which all young creatures share, not yet hardened and made cruel by their elders and their world.

The Child continued to advance, glancing sidelong at the others: aware of their presence, but intent upon his mission. At last only a few feet separated boy and wolf. Squatting, he put the partly eaten fish in the sand in front of her, and took a step back. The pup came closer, sniffed at it briefly, then began to eat. Her tail wagged in childish contentment.

And then the miracle occurred. The Child laughed, throwing his arms up to the sky. If he had known the word ‘hooray’, he would certainly have used it.

Such sweet music! Sylviana thought her heart would break for it, and Kalus remembered for the first time without bitterness, the smile and trust of young Shama.

The girl sat up; she couldn’t help herself. At once the child sprinted back to the sea, diving into the waters as naturally as a newly hatched sea turtle, thinking no more of the ensuing swim than a bird thinks of flight. A short distance out an impatient, affectionate orca rose between his waiting legs, and carried him home on her back. Sylviana watched in weary peace, with dreamy eyes thinking how sweet it might be to one day have a child of her own. Until something in the emptiness of the beach arrested her.

“Kalus, the boat. It’s gone!”

And so it was. He rose beside her, and pointed to a spot on the northeast horizon. There, riding ever lower in the waves, floated the craft he had so agonizingly constructed. She was appalled by his apparent calmness.

“You’ve got to DO something. You’ve got to swim out and get it.” But he only shook his head, clearing his eyes with the back of his wrist.

“Would you have me drowned for a piece of wood?”

“But how can you be so indifferent?”

“I am not indifferent, if only for the pains it cost me. But I have not yet given up hope that the boat will return to us. The tide took it out, perhaps the waves will bring it back farther north. And if it is lost, I think I can now construct a better one, more worthy of our trust.”

“But you worked so hard to bring us here.”

“Yes,” he said. “I raged at both the sea and wind, cursing them and calling them demons. Then, when I surrendered in despair, something pulled us through, and gave us another chance. We are far out on this limb, Sylviana. We must believe in something. I will trust in the Tao that I have found, and which in all my life, has never fully betrayed me.”

But now he drew back. His eyes grew hazy, and far less confident. He paused as if in fear, for all his resolve, at the words he must now say to her.

“I give you your freedom, also..... I LOVE you. But whatever is to come, I cannot chain you to me. You must return to me, if you would, of your own free will.”

BUT THIS IS AWFUL, she thought. HIS TIMING IS TERRIBLE. She fought back the urge to say, “And what if I don’t want my freedom? Did it ever occur to you that I might feel the same way about you?” Instead she said nothing. So be it.

And here Kalus made a fundamental error of human psychology. For while on an intellectual level a woman may be pleased at the prospect of her ‘freedom’, on an instinctive or emotional level, and with a man she loves, such words are a source of deep doubt and insecurity. If Kalus truly wanted and needed her, why wasn’t he willing to guard her love, even fight for it? Didn’t he care anymore?

But all such thoughts passed through her below the surface only. Her one concern now (so she told herself) was for their welfare, which he seemed to be taking far too lightly.

“And what if we’re stranded here for a month? Our supplies won’t last half that long.”

“I don’t think we’re stranded, or alone..... I saw the lights again last night.”

These words worked on her system like an electric shock.

“What! Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You needed sleep more than water, or even air. Please don’t fight with me, Sylviana. Much could happen this day. I don’t want it to begin with a rift between us.”

She paced back and forth in the deep sand, her strides sinking, failing to carry her any meaningful distance before doubling back. It was not anger she felt now, but fear.

Because she could not yet face the prospect of finding other men and women like herself. Through all their preparations she had only half believed it, deep down. Yet now the most terrible question of her life rose in unshrouded hugeness before her:

HAD OTHERS OF HER KIND SURVIVED THE DESTRUCTION? Or was she truly alone with Kalus, who she seemed to know less and less each day? And why did a part of her WANT to be alone with him? She could not face it. If after all her hopes and fears it came to nothing.....

“All right,” she said, trying to calm herself. “All right. What do we do now?”

“Build a fire, eat and drink, then move inland carefully. We don’t know yet what we’ll find. I think I can trace the source of the beams well enough. The Island is large, but not infinite. Only its uneven surface makes it appear so. If we miss on the first try, or even the second, we will be closer to the source; and we can trace the beams by night, if need be.”

But for all her need of nourishment, Sylviana’s knotting stomach would not think of food. “We’ve got to go now! I’m sorry, Kalus, but I can’t possibly wait another minute.”

He started to overrule her, then checked himself, secretly bitter at her eagerness. “Very well,” he said. “But we go slowly, and with our weapons in our hands. I’ll take no chances in this wretched place.”

His mood had changed abruptly. He too felt the specter of the waiting unknown, though his hopes and fears were nearly opposite; and he became once more the untrusting hill-man. He lifted his spear, jaw set against the dark uncertainty that awaited them.

Sylviana strode ahead anxiously. Together they cleared the sand, and climbed the first slanting rise. It dipped, and another rose before them, frail earth punctured by an agony of stone and steel. They advanced.

Chapter 38

Inland the earth grew somewhat less troubled. The undulating cross of ridges became smoother and more widely spaced, with patchwork valleys sinking in their midst. The scarred remains of buildings were also less frequent, though here and there an inexplicable mound of slag, half overgrown like an ancient, impoverished barrow, rose to recall the unsleeping dead that still walked there.

Sylviana was soon pale and exhausted, and Kalus could no longer indulge her almost distracted urge to keep moving. Almost angry, he made her sit down in the grim shade of a leering monolith. For the day had grown hot and humid, with hardly a breeze to calm the reeling senses, or break the spell of sunny, smiling death that seemed to hang in the air around them like a witch’s curse. A delirium of fever had come over her from the tumultuous passage of the rapids and the sea, but in her excited state she was not calm or rational enough to realize it.

Kalus gave her water and tried to cool her burning forehead, telling her in no uncertain terms that they would not go one step further until she had caught her breath, and let him do something about the gash on her knee---the result of a fall---which she kept insisting was nothing.

NOTHING?

But she hardly heard him, unable to master her emotions. She knew where she was, mentally, but this drab physical assurance helped not at all. Why in the name of all that was dark, mysterious and unfathomable was she here, ten thousand years removed from the time and world she had known? And who was this half wild man who tended her, and the bewildered animal that licked her hand in half-formed worry and confusion? KALUS. ALASKA. NEW YORK. What were they but names? What was this place, truly, but the untouchable Land of the Dead, which the sun had somehow invaded.

As her breath came easier the thoughts slowed and became less feverish, but did not change in character. Her body ached. She felt lonely and numb and afraid. Yet somehow she grew calmer, feeling that if once she looked into Kalus’ eyes the world would again become comprehensible, if still cruel and unfair.

But by dint of some perverse pride she refused to do so. She would not be a slave to any man, or concede her spirit to a Nature so base and single-minded. Whatever that might mean. She did not know.

And as soon as the slightest strength returned to her limbs she was up again, fighting the stubborn rush of dizziness, assuring the nagging voice of caution that she was ready to go on.

Kalus was truly worried, himself not immune to the alien strangeness of the place. He did not know what waited over the next hill, the next series of hills, or how with his primitive weapons alone he would protect them. For he had seen the wisp of smoke, the kind that only man can make: the white smoke of intentional fire, though he dared not speak of it to the girl.

All seemed lost and out of control. He wanted to yield and to trust, and if it had been his life alone he might have done so. But the more the woman-child railed and pulled away from him, the more he knew that she was family in the deepest sense. Nothing she could do or say made him feel any less bound to her, one with her, or responsible for her safety and well-being.

There was nothing else for it. She had begun of her own to climb the uneven slant. He could either follow behind or forcibly stop her; there was no third alternative. He ran to stand beside her, taking her arm as gently as he could.

“Sylviana, please. Let me lead the way. I do not think it is far, but we must be careful. Please.”

She finally looked at him, and remembered. She wanted to collapse in his arms and weep. She wanted to say that nothing else mattered. She wanted to go back to their life by the sea and never again think of islands and men. But she could not. She took his hand firmly in hers, kissed it, and yielded to what had to be. She must go on, and he must lead her. As he must somehow understand.

Together, more slowly, they dipped two more valleys and climbed a final ridge. They reached the top of it, Kalus for some reason hugging close to the shadows of a stunted oak.....

There, in that small recession, their lives changed forever. An outdoor cooking fire, a row of low stone buildings. Two women and a man moving about a table with plates and cups. And not dressed like animals, but men. Overalls, a blue NASA worksuit, an Oriental dress. Sylviana looked on, not surprised she told herself, then felt the ground rush up to meet her.

Kalus caught her beneath the arms and pulled her under the partial cover of the tree. But it was too late. They had been seen. Without audible word or gesture, the three stopped what they were doing and began to move toward them. One, at least, had seen her fall, and they began to run, thinking she was wounded or sick.

But they were brought up short by an imposing figure with a sword, and a half grown wolf which seemed unsure whether to welcome their aid, or protect its fallen mistress from them. It growled and lunged uncertainly, looking over at the man, who remained silent. There was a moment of mutual indecision and fear.

But then the woman in the dark silk dress, lit with patterns of gold and lilac, stepped forward. Her appearance was strange to him, the shimmering black hair and olive skin seeming more exotic even than his first memories of Sylviana. Her eyes were calm and reassuring, but not naive. She put a hand to her chest, then opened it toward him in what he clearly recognized as a gesture of truce.

Her stillness, and the way she looked at him without wavering, told Kalus more than any other sign that she meant them no harm. He lowered his sword and said simply.

“Do we speak the same language?”

She smiled sadly. “Yes, I believe we do.” At this the others came forward.

“Is the girl all right?” asked the man. He started to move towards her, but Kalus’ rugged frame interposed.

“She is exhausted and feverish, and startled by the sight of you. She is of your kind, I think. I am not.”

Taking this in officiously, the man once more addressed him, offering his hand, which Kalus did not take. But he persisted. “I’m Paul McIntyre, flight surgeon..... I’m a doctor, son. Won’t you let me help your friend?”

But for all his relief and desire to yield, Kalus found it hard to let another man touch her, even in this simple way. Again the young woman interceded. She laid a soft and delicate hand on his, and looked him full in the face with brilliant, almond eyes, drawn to a gentle point at each corner.

“It’s all right,” she said. “You’re among friends. Won’t you let us help you?” Her voice and manner were so alluring that for a moment he forgot all else. He looked down at Sylviana, half ashamed of what the Oriental had aroused in him, and said quietly.

“So long as you are gentle. I think she just needs rest.”

The doctor was already at work, lifting her off the hard roots to lean back against his thighs. Then reaching inside a black bag that he had brought, he broke open a pouch of smelling salts and moved it back and forth under her nose. Her head stirred, then turned away in distaste. She regained full consciousness to find herself lying, literally, in the strange older man’s lap. Forgetting that this was what her mind had sought, she cried out instinctively.

“Kalus!” And in a moment he was beside her. “Kalus,” she pleaded. “Is it all right? Are we safe here?” He looked hard at the doctor.

“Yes, my Sylviana. I think that we are.”

She studied the man once more. “Is it true? Are you really with NASA? This isn’t a dream?”

“Yes, I’m with NASA. Second manned expedition to Mars---we never made it. But there’s time for all that later. Right now we’re going to get some fluids into you, and give you something for the fever. Then I’d prescribe bed rest, and a further examination. Young man, will you help
me---”

But before he could finish the girl had turned her face into his stomach, and was crying like a child. He stroked her hair easily and naturally, speaking words of comfort and assurance. As the man-child looked on and felt lost.

At length she grew quieter. Kalus lifted her in his willing arms, and despite all objections, carried her himself to a bed in the cool darkness of one of the huts.

Chapter 39

All that afternoon Sylviana remained in the hut, sleeping, drinking fruit juice, and luxuriating in the incredible comfort of a real bed. Twice the doctor came in to check on her, and each time she made him sit down on the edge of the bed and talk to her, about what it didn’t matter, just to hear his soothing voice that spoke of a world she knew and trusted, and to feel she was no longer alone: that it was all right to be a needing child. And after a time his words became like music, a lullaby, and she would slip back into untroubled sleep, her hand unconsciously resting on his. Then he would gently lift it and set it beside her, and smiling, rise to tell the others that she would be fine.

Kalus would have remained beside her door all day in silent watch, but they would not let him. Though all at the noon meal of the partly gathered colony were asked to let the newcomers be, by evening their curiosity could no longer be disciplined. He was asked to join them for supper, the first of the year to be eaten outdoors, and it was all but impossible to refuse.

So as the remaining men and women returned from their various labors---there were fourteen in all---Kalus took his place at the far end of the long table, not to distinguish himself, but because he did not wish to sit closely huddled among creatures he did not know. And though by all appearances they seemed the best that modern man had to offer (in fact they were), he could not help remembering the tales of human treachery that Sylviana had read to him; and half fearfully, half angrily, he kept waiting for some sign of it to surface.

But it never did. These people seemed to genuinely care about and support each other, and to respect his wish to be silent. And all would have gone well but for an incident which none could have foreseen, and for which Kalus himself could not be blamed.

Sylviana, hearing the sounds of conversation and real companionship, dressed herself quickly, and against doctor’s orders, came out to join them. She was welcomed heartily, and given a place near the head of the table. And all seemed well enough.

But as the dishes were being cleared and those still seated began to push back their chairs and settle themselves more comfortably, Sylviana began to tell her story in abbreviated form. Then Kalus saw that the tall, straight man at the head of the table---their leader, he perceived---kept staring at her in growing agitation. In truth the look was not one of hunger, but of intense curiosity, and of a man racking his brains for some distant memory. But Kalus could not know this. Finally the man interrupted her, saying plainly.

“Sylviana. What is your last name?”

To her amazement, she had to think for a moment. She hadn’t used it for what seemed, and was, an eternity.

“Matheson.”

“And was your father Guy Matheson, the physiologist?”

“Yes! Did you know him?”

“Know him? Why girl, I even know YOU, though I’m sure you wouldn’t remember. I worked with your father for the better part of a year, trying to smooth out some wrinkles in the cryogenics and life-support systems needed for longer, deep Space voyages. You were only eight or nine at the time, but I’ve thought of you at least a hundred times since, and wondered what became of you. There was such simple joy in everything you did.....”

And as a look of slow recognition and wonder came over the young woman’s face, the normally reserved Mission Commander was overcome by emotion. He stood up, telling her to do the same. He moved closer, and embraced her heartily.

“Dear God, it’s good to see you. To know that you’re still alive.”

This was too much for Kalus. The chair on which he sat flew backward and the sword leapt from its sheath, in the upward swing knocking hard against the bottom of the table. Jolted, the company turned to face him, as to contain his animal passion he took a step backward and breathed heavily. But the tip of his sword he pointed at the leader in a rage, saying with disciplined fire.

“LET HER GO.”

But none were more startled, or dismayed, than Sylviana. “Kalus!” she demanded, as if he were an errant child. “Put the sword away. Can’t you see these people mean us no harm? This man was a friend of my father’s. And of mine.”

He stood pale in the artificial light, his limbs trembling and his mind confused. He lowered the sword, and slowly realized that he had been a fool, and disgraced them both. He hung his head, and colored with shame.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand these things..... I am a wild, foolish man. But when you touched my woman---”

He looked up quickly, to find his worst fears confirmed. Sylviana had winced at being called his woman. He felt a part of himself dying. Perhaps he overreacted, but it was what he truly felt.

“I am a fool. I will leave you.” But a firm voice broke him off, that of Kataya, the Oriental.

“NO,” she said. “Don’t ever apologize for who and what you are. Ever.” He looked up to see her standing. “Commander Stenmark, and Sylviana, too, must share the blame for this.” There was a note of reproach in her voice, though she had not intended it. “You reacted in the way your world has taught you, a world that none of us can know, and in which there is no shame. You are welcome among us, and you will stay.”

There was an awkward silence. Then the Commander, who was in fact their leader, remembered himself and spoke reassuringly, voicing perhaps the sentiments of all.

“She’s right, young man. God help us, she’s always right.”

With this the tension faded. The doctor, who to this point had been lenient with his patient, now called her visit to an end.

“You, young lady,” he said in paternal tones, “Are supposed to be in bed. As for the rest of you gawkers,” he added with mock severity, “We can put Kalus under the microscope tomorrow, and then heaven help him! You’re in a colony of scientists, my boy, and you’ll get no rest until we’re as
bored with you as we are with each other. Enough now! Break up this little party or I’ll come up with a new vaccine and inject you where you sit. Literally.”

With this, chuckling, responding in kind, the company began to disperse to the various huts. The Commander approached Kalus, shook his hand, and apologized personally, while the hill-man repeated his own contrition.

At last, looking down, Kalus found himself seated at the table alone, his thoughts as dark and empty as the place itself. Sylviana had been ashamed of him. ASHAMED. As if the past meant nothing, had never happened.

He lay wearily on his arms, trying to understand. How had it all happened so fast? The colony had absorbed her like water into sand, leaving nothing for him. Even the cub had gone in to sleep beside her.

To sleep beside her! How acutely he would feel the absence of her body tonight. He felt himself out of place: in the wrong tale, immersed in chapters and characters that all around him understood, but which were to him as incomprehensible as the Valley had been to Sylviana.

But this new life would not have seemed so bleak, perhaps even pleasant, if while it slowly took possession of him, he was not losing the one thing in all the world that truly mattered: the love of the woman he had once called his. HIS.....

He felt soft fingers touch the back of his head, then slide downward and begin to massage his neck and aching shoulders. He did not move, knowing by touch alone that it was not his mate. He knew it was Kataya, but was too exhausted, both physically and emotionally, to react one way or the other.

But to the watching figure in the doorway, there was no such ambivalence. Sylviana was furious. How different when the shoe is on the other foot, was a thought she strangled as soon as it began to form inside her.

She had gone to the spacious bed, surrounded by things she thought missing from her life, only to experience the same emptiness and sense of loss at not feeling the familiar body beside her, and having no one to tell of her contentment. She tried to shrug it off and just sleep. But she had slept off and on all day, and felt her weariness replaced by a kind of yearning restlessness. PROBABLY JUST MY CONSCIENCE, she had told herself. And with this the gentler part of her nature had begun to rebel, saying that Kalus was a kind and decent man, who deserved better than to be spoken to and treated as if he were some kind of savage.

But these gentle, Christian sentiments were too easily dismissed. He had acted abominably, her harder self retorted, and fully deserved the scorn that she had shown him.

And perhaps this was the problem---trying to make herself think more fondly of him through the mind. Because gratitude and compassion are not lasting in love, while instinct and self-fulfillment never fade. If she could simply have admitted to herself that she missed the security and intimacy of lying in his arms, and that the crowning pleasure of her new-found happiness would have been to open herself to him, both body and spirit, she could have put aside the hopeless tangle of her emotions and simply gone to him, and taken him to her, and renewed again the bond of true lovers. As it was she could only toss restlessly, then get up and pace in frustration.

At length she had decided to go to him (or merely allowed the greater part of herself to act), telling herself that she should at least say goodnight, and give him the chance to make it up to her. But as she passed through the hallway and began to enter the dimly lit compound, she saw a male figure hunched at the table, and another, female form behind, touching him. Thinking it one of the other couples, she drew back into the shadows of the doorframe. But as her eyes grew more accustomed to the half-light, she saw plainly the scene laid out before her.

And there she remained, her mind and heart a whirlwind of conflicting impulses. She wanted to rush at the woman and scratch her eyes out. She wanted to walk up calmly and ask, “Have you quite finished with my husband?” Her HUSBAND? She wanted to scream at Kalus, to apologize for being cold, to seduce him, and to have him out of her life forever.

But she did none of the things, remaining stock still in the doorway. She forced herself to be calm, and tried to rationalize. Why was she so upset? After all, what had he done? And why did it matter to her anyway? She wanted to break away, and put the whole thing from her mind. But she couldn’t. She had to see what he would do.

After a time Kataya sensed the man-child’s indifference, or at least his unwillingness to yield to her. This did not cool her half-admitted desire for him, but only made it more patient, tactful. She moved to sit in a corner chair, beside him.

“Why so glum, Kalus? Or are you just ignoring me?”

“I am sorry, Kataya. It’s not you. I just feel. . .overwhelmed.” And with this, he surrendered.

“How so?”

“So much has happened,” he began, feeling as he said the words the bewilderment that lay beneath all other emotions. “Three weeks ago Sylviana and I made love as if there was nothing else in the world. And for us, there wasn’t. Three months ago we struggled together against the Cold World, in a place we called our home. At the time it often seemed like Hell, but it brought us closer than you can possibly imagine. And three days ago. Three days. I lived more or less in the land where I was born, with paradise at my fingers.”

“Then why did you leave?”

“Because I couldn’t keep lying to her, that we were alone..... She isn’t like me. She needs the company of her own kind.” He spoke now more to himself, and to the darkness. She was silent for a moment, her own feelings and experience submerged.

“And now?”

“That’s just it. I can’t bring it all up to now. It’s like a great wave that just goes on and on. The voyage here. . .sweet Jesus. And just this morning I held her close while she slept, then woke her to a sight that broke both our hearts, and opened to us the possibility of a child of our own.” Again she felt him drifting, into a world that did not even recognize her existence. “And now all of you, a flood of strange names and faces, and emotions I don’t know how to read. It just goes on and on, with Sylviana slipping farther and farther away.”

“All waves must eventually end, Kalus. This one will, too. And when you find yourself safely landed among us?” She hesitated. “And if the girl is no longer yours? What then?”

“I cannot even think of that. It would be the end of everything, of life itself.”

Kataya hung her head. WHY MUST IT ALWAYS BE SO?

Kalus saw this gesture of defeat and knew, for all his confusion and despair, that he had been selfish, and forgotten her. There in the stillness of night he felt her presence acutely, felt the soul inside her and knew she was as achingly alive as himself. And the feelings this knowledge aroused in him both troubled and comforted his own loneliness. He put his hand beneath her chin and raised the lovely, oval face to look at him.

“You are very beautiful, Kataya. I have chosen Sylviana, but you are a woman that a man could truly love.” She wrapped her hand about his wrist, whispered something in a strange language, then broke off and quickly walked away. He watched her go in sadness.

All this time Sylviana had watched them, unable to hear what was said, imagining the worst. Then she saw him lift her face to his, and whisper tender words which should have been hers alone.

Confused and angry, she stormed back into her room. Confused and weary, Kalus spread himself on the ground like an animal, missing them both, and staring at the stars. Confused and bitter, Kataya swore she would not let herself want him, and be hurt yet again and again.

All three slept alone, finding no shelter from the mocking night.

Chapter 40

The next day was Sunday, and the one day a week which the hard-working colonists had agreed to set aside as a respite from their labors. Those who worked the fields, those who maintained the power and water supply, those who scavenged the city for underground vaults filled with books and computer records, as well as those who performed the experiments, translations, and radio communications (never answered) which were vital to the group’s morale and sense of purpose, all surrendered for this one day the businesslike security of endeavor, to think and contemplate like the first pious Jews, who had looked to the heavens and tried to understand their world.

In the hushed morning they gathered for the non-denominational service, Christian, Jew, Buddhist and atheist alike, spread about the candle-lit conference room. And it was here that Sylviana first felt the depth of loneliness and sorrow that this handful of survivors carried with them as inescapably as a damaged organ, or the memory of an amputated limb. And she realized that all their surface carelessness and ease, all the jokes about being bored with one another, were mere facade, the necessary illusions of commonplace existence. It was clear in this small chapel of honesty, that they not only loved and respected one another, but clung to each other, and held the value of each human life high above any other aspiration.

Commander Stenmark in particular she watched, and began to wonder at this grizzled pioneer whose age was so incongruous to all around him, most of whom were under forty. And during the moment of silent prayer she had to restrain with difficulty her own emotions, as she saw the same face that could be so still and dispassionate, draw close over the fervently folded hands with tears of age, and thanks, and tired responsibility flowing like the sudden, relentless Spring. And it was with warmth and a further shock that she realized this outpouring was for her: that something, someone dear to him had been spared. She had never felt so honored.

When the service ended they moved outside, and after a light meal, spread themselves more comfortably on the grassy earth of a clear space at one end of the compound, backed by a gentle rise and a single, lithe and undistorted maple. This in preparation for what remained to them the greatest pleasure (and diversion) in life. Learning.

Sylviana’s story was fascinating, what they had heard of it the night before, but it was Kalus whom they longed to interrogate. For here was an anthropologist’s dream: a young man who had lived among throwback Neanderthals, who had carved his existence, without medicine or steel, from the harsh realities of a world in which Man not only held no exalted place, but was on the contrary smallish and ill-equipped, as likely to be hunted as hunter. And the fact that he himself had emerged from the recessed traits of three hundred generations, to be born fully human..... They knew nothing yet of the Machine or the Visitors, only that for most of his life Kalus had possessed no spoken language, had been an outcast and object of suspicion because of his appearance and greater intelligence, had met and shared deepest communion with a young woman and fellow creature of the twenty-first century. And for now, this was more than enough.

Dr. David Rawlings, cell biologist, spoke first, a strongly built, intense black man in his mid thirties. Apparently the least abashed of the company, he assumed the role he had chosen for himself, and which the others now expected and took for granted.

“Well,” he said, moving to stand at the fore of the group. “I suppose first we should tell you something of ourselves.” And without the wasted words of diplomacy, he did.

“You see before you the surviving crew members of Virgo II, the manned exploration of Mars. Two years into the flight, and not yet two-thirds of the way there, we received a delayed signal from earth, and at an undesignated interval. The bloody butchers who called themselves our leaders had finally done it: missiles and satellite stations vomiting their nuclear death, and pounding the cities flat. The emotions of those conscious---most of us were in a suspended state, so as not to age unnecessarily during the voyage---I can’t imagine. But Stenmark, and the Doc, and poor dead Rene’ Christian, well, they had to do something.

“So they turned the ship about, and upon returning to Earth engaged in a high orbit around it, and tried to make contact, with anybody. No one there. Even the orbiting agri-colonies and Moon bases hadn’t been spared. The latter might have been construed as some kind of military threat, to the sick and paranoid, but to kill innocent civilians, farmers for Christ’s sake, just to be sure all was ended..... The worst you can think of us isn’t bad enough, Kalus, if you look at what we did to each other in the end. Maybe we ‘common people’ of the superpowers didn’t take an active part in the destruction; but we sure as hell sat on our asses, and let the presidents and the generals make it inevitable.” He subdued, or at least restrained, his rising passion.

“But that’s neither here nor there. Or anywhere, now. That world is gone, and will never return.” He sighed bitterly.

“Back on the ship, Christian lost her mind when she saw the devastation, and knew that her husband and son were dead, like all the others. She couldn’t live without them, and so she killed herself. That left only Stenmark and Doc McIntyre to try and decide our fate. The best they could do, under the circumstances, was to re-rig the entire ship---computer, cryogenics, life-support, everything---for a vastly different purpose than what they’d been designed for. Their new function was, simply, to hold us all in suspension, retain the high orbit, and wake us all when, hopefully, it was safe to return to the surface.

“It’s no coincidence that you, Sylviana, and William---you haven’t met him yet---came out of suspension at approximately the same time we did. A German scientist named Krause had been advocating a common de-suspension date, in the event such a travesty ever occurred. He was considered a black pessimist at the time, and partly insane. But your father, and Sten, and possibly others, took his advice, and set the ‘wake up call’ for exactly ten thousand years from the first day of Armageddon, hoping that would give the planet enough time to heal itself, and support recognizable life-forms once more.

“So the rest of the crew, myself included, came back from our little nap to find our world ravaged, Christian dead, and the Commander aged twenty-five years. The poor compassionate bastard had kept himself conscious all that extra time, making sure the orbit wouldn’t decay, that the converted solar panels and other adjustments he’d made would hold up. Probably would have died for us if he thought it would help.....

“You’ve seen the worst in us, Kalus. But that damn Swede over there . . .is the best. And a lot of others like him paid the same price as the political cowboys, and blind hedonists who elected them. Death.

“So. That’s the long and short of it. We dealt with our feelings and our fears as best we could, and landed here, for a variety of reasons, just over a year ago. We found William underground, and apparently you found us. So maybe our efforts aren’t entirely futile. And who’s to say, there may be others scattered around the planet, each feeling as isolated and cut off as we do.”

He concluded as frankly as he had begun. “But now I’m heartily sick of standing here and telling you our troubles, and I should hope you’re as tired of hearing them. Apologies to the meek, and you see the kind of ‘Earth’ you’ve inherited. We’ll let the customary interval of moody silence pass, and then we’ll begin our scientific questioning.” With that he moved off and sat on the hard ground, leaving the raw taste of truth, accepted willingly or not, in the mouths of those around him.

Just as he had said, an interval of silence ensued. Then, to the surprise of all, Kalus rose without prodding and moved to stand before them.

“This will not be easy for me,” he said. “But I begin to see that it is important, if only for myself. I feared at first that you would think me a mindless animal. But I see now that isn’t true. Kataya told me not to be ashamed of what I am, and inside, in the heart of me, I’m not. I am proud. Because I survived for twenty-two years a world that would kill most of you in a week. That is not said to hurt you, and I begin to see that you are strong in other ways. It is only the truth. Here on the Island there is shelter from predators---there are no giant spiders or lizards---and you have the knowledge to bring food from the land without killing. My people have none of these things.

“We call ourselves the hill-tribe. Yes we, Sylviana, I will not renounce them.” She started to glare at him, then colored when she saw others (including Kataya) watching her, and looked away.

“We live in a cave of many entrances, in the heart of the Wild, with enemies all around us. We survive by being shrewd and fiercely determined, and by showing any creature that comes too close there is a high price to pay for thinking us weak and afraid.

“But we are not cruel, if we can avoid it, and do not kill without need. If there was some way we could live in peace and well-fed contentment, we would throw away our spears and never kill again. But no one has ever shown us how to do this, if such a way exists.”

A gleam came into his eyes such as Sylviana had not seen for many months: when he first looked out from the smaller cave, and beheld the power and majesty of the Mantis. “Go ahead,” he told them, almost defiantly. “Ask me any question. Thank you Kataya, and David Rawlings. You have made me feel strong and unashamed.”

At this there was another brief space in which the company felt reluctant to speak. But it did not last. Their desire to know, and to touch new life, was stronger than their natural timidity.

“Yes, I have a question,” said a woman. “You say that your people have no spoken language.” (Sylviana had told the doctor, who in turn had passed it on to the others). “And yet you have a name. How is that?”

“My people all have names, but no sounds to go with them. My name is a sign made with the hands, or a figure drawn in the dirt, so that I can be identified to others at need, such as during a hunt. The Machine called me Kalus, to my mind as well as my ears, just as it gave names to all the elements of my world. I have always wondered how this was done.”

Brushing over this last information, which none understood and which they could always come back to, they asked several more questions about the hill-people, until one of the younger men produced a greaseboard and marker, and approached him.

“Your sign, the one that identifies you. Could you draw it?” Kalus took the board, and after being shown how to use it, drew a straight line, horizontal, then a long curving tooth like a saber at the end of it, pointing downward.

“This represents the upper jaw of the hill-cat, one of the greatest hunters of our world. My first father made it for me, hoping that I would be as fierce and cunning. All our names our similar. When he was killed by a bear. . .I drew it in anger on the ground, then with my foot blurred away the sharp point, to show that I was no great predator, but only a man. Like this.” He smeared the lower half of the tusk, leaving only a squarish root. “That has been my mark ever since.”

“The MANtooth,” said Sylviana suddenly, and much to her own consternation. But half embarrassed, half proud in spite of herself, she pushed on. “The Machine called you the Mantooth.”

“Yes,” he said simply. “And that is what I am.”

“This machine---” began another.

“No, no, we’ll come back to that later,” said Rawlings. “Your ‘first father’, Kalus. What did you mean by that?”

“Barabbas is my father now. I think it is what you would call adoption, though to us it is much more than that. The adopted sons of a childless leader are more dear to him.....” He stopped as emotion swelled in his throat, and he realized with a sudden pang the truth of these words. “Barabbas is my father now.”

“Barabbas,” replied Rawlings thoughtfully. “Surely that’s not a name given by a machine.”

“Yes. In fact it is. But I too have always thought it strange, and somehow appropriate, since I learned of the Barabbas in your Bible.”

“It’s not MY Bible,” said Rawlings quickly. “But still, how do you mean that?” Kalus pondered for a moment, trying to think how to express it.

“It wasn’t Barabbas’ fault: that he was freed, and Jesus crucified. He was only trying to survive. And who can say what his ‘crime’ was that he should have been imprisoned by the Romans, who seem to me among the greatest criminals of history. And yet for the simple fact of his presence on that day, and his desire to live rather than die in agony, he is branded a villain and hated, by those who need such symbols of hate, and love. Surely Jesus did not hate him.”

At this all were quietly stunned. For until that moment they had retained the subconscious arrogance that Sylviana first experienced, and to which she had lately returned: the belief that a rough man without education could not think or feel as they did, could not possess the same soul, or depth of feeling.

They were wrong.

“Well said,” came a voice. And for the rest of the afternoon the questions were not asked as from adult to child, from superior beings to inferior, but as from man (and woman) to man. Sylviana could only watch and listen, and tell herself in vain she didn’t love him.

Because she had been stung by the affection he showed Kataya, and refused to admit she was afraid of losing him.

Chapter 41

The next morning Kalus was woken by Kataya, who came to the secluded clear space where he had made his bed on softer ground, with the sleeping bag that Rawlings had given him. In the first light and waking life of morning she was beautiful, and sad, and it was only with an effort that he reminded himself he was not free, to take her then and there, and make love among the sacred rites of Spring. But she showed no such inclination, saying only.

“The Children will go North today, if Ishmael speaks the truth. I want to say goodbye, and I want you to be there with me.”

Her tone was passive, and yet deeply serious. He couldn’t fully understand the reason, but consented, giving to her, unquestioningly, the next hours of his life---giving as only the innocent can, without exacting a price, or expecting anything in return.

They walked together through the jumble of wounded landscape, now growing less stark with the blooming of flowers and the spreading of new leaves. She seemed to know the way by heart, and he followed her with every confidence. They spoke little, but there seemed no need of talk between them, and Kalus felt no awkwardness.

At length the sounds of the sea became closer, and they emerged from the crumpled hills to stand at the high back reaches of the inlet, the fjord. It was not great, knifing inland for less than a mile, and scarcely sixty yards wide as it met the open sea. Yet still it formed a separate world, and spoke of green, unspoiled lands beyond.

From their rocky overlook they began to descend along an angular path that skirted its northern face. They moved carefully and quietly, as the waterline grew nearer, and the sounds of the Sea more pervasive. Turning a last, difficult bend, they saw the Children among the rocks and moss-covered earth of the uneven slope ahead of them, the margins of their amphibious, Winter home.

As the man and woman continued to advance, a cry of “Ay, oy!” was heard, and the younger members leapt into the water, as the whales clustered about the lower stones, waiting.

But one of the older males, in particular, showed no fear, and no sign of retreating. Kataya he knew, and trusted, and the strong man with the sheathed weapon he had seen, in the boat, far away. Also, as Kataya had intended, he felt something akin to jealousy at his presence here with her. There was the matter of possession.

This was Ishmael, so named by Kataya---the second leader, who would be first when the eldest died. He stood his ground in silence, along with the leader, and slowly the others returned, though maintaining their distance, and keeping close to the water’s edge.

Kataya asked Kalus to remain where he was, and walked the numbered strides that took her to the fourteen year old Ishmael. He smiled as she approached, and together they stood on the tiny patch of level ground between them. She brought an open hand to her chest, as she had done with Kalus, then opened it toward him in greeting. He did the same, taking childlike pleasure in the understanding of her ways.

“Izmai,” she said softly, pointing to the North. “You go?” Then remembering that she had affixed no time, she added. “This day, North?”

“Izmai go,” he said proudly. Then his look became one of eager entreaty, touching in its innocence. “You go, Kai-tai, Noth?” And his arm followed hers in obvious longing, a sweeping arc that to his mind held images of bergs and floes and sweeping tundra, and vast islands of thirty thousand seals: the cold, exhilarating perfection of unspoiled Arctic Seas.

She looked down, as pain clouded her face. How could she tell him, who in naive trust believed that she could follow wherever he led?

“No, I cannot.” But this word she had not taught him, and he would not have understood. She looked up into the huge, puzzled iris of his eyes---blue, crater lakes that drowned all efforts to reach him. Weakly, the more pitiable because it came from one so strong, she said. “You come, in Winter, this place?”

But he could not get past the non-answer to his own question. Knowing no other course, he repeated it. “You come, Kai-tai, Noth?” She shook her head, and there was nothing more she could do or say. He looked hurt, but could not bridge the distance between them.

At this the unnamed Eldest, a supple, wizened hunter of fifteen, grew impatient. This day they must begin the long migration, and it was time to be gone. He raised a bony left hand to his mouth and emitted a whistling, clicking sound that was more of the deep than the land, and which the whales understood as well as he.

Ishmael turned to face her one more time, his own pain not lasting. Coming closer, he touched her with the tip of his penis, indicating possession. Then he slowly turned away, and followed the others into the water. Their restless mounts surged beneath them, and soon they were drifting out of sight.

Kataya stood motionless, as if frozen by a curse, until she felt Kalus’ warm hands upon her shoulders. She brushed him aside angrily, pulling forward. But this time he did not relent, listening to his instincts instead. He grasped her by the arms and turned her towards him, holding her firmly as she struggled.

“Cry,” he said. “Just cry.”

For a moment her face showed bitter conflict, but she could deny herself no longer. She leaned against his chest, sobbing in the uncomprehending grief of one who has spared herself nothing, yet come to no reward. He stroked her hair gently, much as he had seen the doctor do with Sylviana. And though the two women were worlds apart in experience, and seemed so cold to one another, in this singular female emotion of love and loss, they were much the same.

“He’ll be dead in two years,” she said finally, not leaving the shelter of his body. “He wants me, and I would dearly love to bear his child..... If we could only mix our blood with theirs, through interbreeding, maybe we could end the tragedy of sure death in adolescence.

“But they will only mate in the North,” she continued, stepping back and clearing her eyes with the back of her wrist. “How..... How can I reach him?” She could only repeat herself, an echo of tragedy. “He’ll be dead in two years.” Both turned and looked out to sea, to the place where whale and rider moved, nearly out of sight.

“Goodbye,” she said darkly. “Always goodbye.”

“You need never say goodbye to me,” Kalus answered, almost before he knew what he had said. He shook his head reproachfully. “I’m sorry.”

She was neither hurt nor angry with him, nor even soothed and pacified. She seemed, rather, calm with a strange, fatalistic indifference. Her eyes regarded him, slightly mocking.

“I know what you mean, Kalus. You love Sylviana, but feel a sense of loyalty to me. I guess it’s better than nothing.” And with this she mastered her emotions. Or so it seemed to her then.

Kalus’ mind began to race along strange passageways, trying to find the right words. But again instinct warned him off. He wanted to heal her hidden wounds but could not, and perhaps should not try, until he better understood them. Though unknown feelings were at work inside him, too.

They returned to the camp in silence, not touching, not sharing, and if they had dared to admit it, feeling more alone than if each to the other did not exist. They returned to Sylviana’s glaring reproach, and to the doctor’s knowing questions about the Children, the others having gone off to work. For he was the one member of the company to whom Kataya would open her thoughts; and he, too, shared her desire to understand and cure the baffling self-destruction of the Children’s bodies as they neared adulthood, never forgetting that a living soul was carried within.

And as always among the social intercourse of men, many actions and words held cross-purposes at once, some realized, others forming like vague bubbles in the dark depths of the sea of human consciousness. Some would rise visibly, for those who knew how to read them; others would be raised only in the seclusion of after-thought. And still others, unwisely, would be suppressed. For all, in the end, must rise.

“Have they gone?” asked McIntyre, needing only Kataya’s desolate expression for an answer.

“We’ll get ‘em next year,” he said more quietly.

“Who? What do you mean?” asked Sylviana.

“The Children,” he answered. “Every Spring they migrate north.” He observed the tension between herself and Kalus, and added. “You’ve wondered, no doubt, why the killer whales took up with them in the first place?”

“Yes,” said Kalus. “Why?”

“Intelligent symbiosis, my friend. Works every time. A hunter like yourself will no doubt appreciate their technique. The youngsters make land some distance from the beaches where the seals lie in their hundreds, then come up behind them with sticks, startling them and driving them into the sea, where the orcas are waiting. Then the Children kill a few themselves, on land, and eat them on the spot. Feeds ‘em both, neat as neat. A lesson for us all, I dare say.” He exchanged a look with Kataya, who said nothing.

“But they’ll return next year?” asked Sylviana, still moved by the memory of them, though compassion was receding before the onslaught of jealous anger.

“Or move on to another island,” said Kataya coldly, unable to mask her dislike.

“Oh, they’ll be back,” assured the doctor, “As soon as Ishmael takes over. Only a fool leaves a beautiful princess trapped in the tower forever.” He looked at Kalus as he said this, though only Sylviana seemed to take his meaning, flushing with confusion and resentment.

Though neither of the newcomers could know it, the remark was neither light nor haphazard. The doctor was testing the waters for a procreation problem which struck much closer to home. And though lost in the swirl of double meanings, Kalus realized nonetheless that despite including several couples (he had no word for ‘married’), there were no children among company. He looked first to Kataya, whose expression in return was almost angry, then to McIntyre, who nodded gently. Sylviana
would not even look at him.

“Hell, kids,” said the doctor at length, “I might as well just tell you.” He set down the potted plants he was working on (from which he hoped to make new medicines), and pulled an end chair toward them. Then seating himself like an ancient storyteller, he bade Kalus and Sylviana to sit at his feet. To this only Kalus consented, the two women still exchanging poison glances. But if this was the audience to which he must speak, then speak he would, torn as his own feelings were by the animosity of the two young women, secretly heartened as he realized that Kataya’s scorn must be the result of physical stirrings for Kalus---as strong and healthy a sire as he could wish.

“Of the seven male crew members of the Virgo, four came out of suspension sterile.” At this blunt beginning Sylviana gasped, sensing perhaps what was to come.

“Yes,” resumed McIntyre. “Of the three still capable of producing living sperm. . .myself not included,” he added somewhat wistfully, “None are married, or even much attached to a woman still in healthy child-bearing years. They can’t father a child,” he explained for Kalus’ benefit. “An unforeseen side-effect of so long a period of physiological inactivity. We have no children, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, and unless we can overcome our natural timidity and social taboos, we never will.”

He looked again toward the lovely Oriental, trying to gauge what should and should not be said. But lost in her own bitterness, she could give him no sign. So he sighed, and said simply.

“Kataya and I had hoped that perhaps Ishmael..... But he’s gone now, and who knows if we’ll ever see him again, or even if his chromosomes would match.”

“Ishmael will come back,” answered Kalus seriously, the doctor’s words largely lost on him, but wanting to ease Kataya’s pain. “Once a man has touched his own soul through another, there is nothing else in life that matters.” And not understanding the effect that this would have, he looked not at Sylviana, of whom he was speaking, but to Kataya, by way of explanation and reassurance.

At this Sylviana let out a wordless execration, threw down the sheet she was mending, and stormed off . Kalus followed in sudden fear.

“I did not mean---” he said desperately, but found her door slammed and bolted in his face. In confusion he returned to the doctor, imploring.

“What do I have to do?” he said in frustration. “Can’t she see that there could never be anyone else for me? Why can’t she understand?”

“Give her time, my friend,” said McIntyre. “She’ll come around. If you want my observations, you’re in her deep, and that frightens her. Just have a little patience, and if a man of science may say it, a little faith. What’s meant to be, will always be in the end.” These words seemed wise, yet Kalus could find no comfort in them.

“But my stomach crawls without her. My heart is in my throat, and I cannot sleep. If I lose her there will be nothing. Nothing at all.”

“You haven’t lost her, son.” With this he looked ruefully toward Kataya. “And if I’m any judge, you won’t. Just be steady, with open arms, and she’ll come back to you in time.”

But as McIntyre continued to study the younger man, he saw that his expression remained deeply troubled, so much so that he was truly touched, as Kalus had been at the simple confusion of Ishmael.

“If it helps, I’ll tell her what you meant just now. Kataya and I understood. She’s just too close, and can’t see it.”

“Would you really do that?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you,” said Kalus, though his fear was not abated. “I have to go somewhere and think.”

Bewildered and restless, Kalus called to the cub, and went walking off in no particular direction, perhaps heading vaguely toward the solace of the sea.

He tried to tell himself that things would work out---that he would one day understand and be more comfortable among the baffling maze of human interaction. But it was no use. What was he doing here, surrounded by people and emotions he could not begin to read? Is this what Sylviana had wanted?

He found himself thinking, with sudden longing, of the world and way of life he had known in the Valley. He thought of his brother, who had taken a mate, and wondered if she was yet with child. Perhaps it would be a boy, like Shama, who would not mistrust him, but look up to him in friendship. He thought of the wolves, now led by Akar, his noble friend. Surely he did not mean for them to keep Alaska forever sundered from the pack, or from himself, who would need a mate. And last, though far from least he thought of Avatar, who would always be free. And for a time his spirit ran with him, through the heart of a forest five hundred miles deep.

Was a compromise of worlds possible, he wondered, some meaningful coexistence between the hill-people and the colonists? He tried, but could not imagine it. And what did it matter, if he lost the only woman he would ever love? Again he felt the sudden, sour turning of his stomach, and the debilitating flow of unused adrenalin.

He wanted just to go to her, and take her to him, and tell her he was hers alone, and always. He felt the longing for her touch like a hole in his chest. But what could he do, when she would not let him near her? He had not been alone with her for two days, which seemed an eternity, and she showed no sign..... Anger and jealousy hardly seemed the signs of love.

He could not work it out, and was soon too weary and sick at heart to care much, even for something that touched him so deeply. There was no understanding the minds of women, he conceded in despair. Or of men.

He could only be what he was, and hope this self-honesty would bring him to his proper place in the end.

AND IF IT DIDN'T?

Coming out of the ragged confusion of earth and stone onto a tranquil stretch of beach, he stripped off his outer garments and began to wade out into the waves, stooping to wash away both grime and fatigue. The water was not warm, and perhaps there were lurking dangers---

“I don’t care!” he cried in answer, the torrent of his anger returning with sudden force. He dove and swam out into deeper waters, while the cub remained on shore and barked at him.

Slowly, fighting the undertow, he made his way back to solid ground. OR AS SOLID AS I'M LIKELY TO FIND, he thought bitterly. Emerging truly exhausted, he fell to his knees, then sorrowfully held and reassured his unspeaking friend.

He lay down in the sand like an animal. And slept.

Chapter 42

That night, wrapped in the tragicomedy of human pride and affection, none of the three found peace.

For Sylviana the evening seemed endless, trying to drag conversation from the tired and otherwise absorbed company. And when hard night fell at last she found she could not sleep. Instead she restlessly mulled over the ‘situation’ with Kalus, as she called it: the doctor’s explanation for his actions, and his relayed message that, “There could never be anyone else.”

But this only made her angry with herself for having been so obvious in front of the others. What did it matter to her what he said or did? He had given her her ‘freedom’, and seemed intent on exercising his own, no matter what his words might say. So she tried again to make herself interested in the young botanist, Smith, who had already asked her a number of leading questions, under the pretense (she assumed) of scientific inquiry.

But the bed was still empty, and her thoughts still vague and rootless, without Kalus there beside her. She felt again the primal urge to go to him, just go to him, and renew their bond through physical love. But remembering the pain of her last submission to it, she stubbornly refused. Or tried to. Until it was too late.

Kalus lay on his back on the ground, the sleeping bag giving him warmth, but little else. He put his hands behind his head and looked to the sky, while the cub nestled at his feet.

How far away the stars looked, how indifferent and utterly unreachable. Thinking yet again of his love, he felt the loneliness and broken longing that every unfulfilled man must know: that of useless labors, and barren seed. The worry-sickness of caring for one who no longer returned that love, had slowly eaten away at the warmth and loyalty he felt for her, leaving him hard and cold and indifferent. Or so it seemed to him then. He rolled over onto his side, muttering, and perhaps an hour later fell at last into a restless, brooding sleep.

But Kataya could no more sleep than bring back the dead, stung to the very heart by intolerable memories of the love she had lost forever. And this pain which lay at the heart of all others, aggravated that very day by the departure of Ishmael and the poor, doomed Children, tormented her every thought, until even the simplest feeling could not be accomplished without a pain that was almost physical.

And while she considered herself superior to Sylviana, and even in a way to Kalus himself, the lashings of emptiness at the hollow discipline of denial were no less acute for it. She remembered the words of Sinclair Lewis, from the book she was then translating.

“Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, And THEY MOST AFFLICT THE DISCIPLES WHO MOST GENEROUSLY SERVE THEM.” A more apt description of her own religious and cultural servitude she could not imagine.

But these self-recriminations were meaningless, and she knew it. What lay at the root of her agitation was her forlorn desire for Kalus. Beyond the strong and undeniable physical attraction, his innocence, like Ishmael’s, of the brutal travesty which had killed both her husband and the unborn child she carried unknowingly onto the Virgo.....

“Enough! Leave me alone!”

But there was no escaping herself. Tragedy, desire, and longing for a new life that she could truly call her own, all drew her toward him as irresistibly as childbirth. Added to this was the knowledge, confirmed by the vaginal thermometer, that this night, this very hour, her body was as ready to conceive as it had ever been since the long sleep, as it might ever be again. All her pain and frustration now focused upon this singular and uncorrupted man as a well-spring of life and relief, pure water to one dying of thirst. If he rejected her, the agony and shame would be unbearable. But dear, sweet holy Buddha, how could any pain be worse than this?

It was not greater wisdom that sent her to him in the end, but an agitation of sorrow and loneliness that were longer, and more inescapable. While Sylviana forced herself to stay, Kataya shed a single, honest tear, and surrendered.

Kalus stirred, feeling silken fingers touch his breast, bare legs against his own. He let out a despairing sigh as soft lips caressed him---his mouth, his neck, his chest---all in deepest passion, and solemn entreaty.

It was not his true love, but he could not deny her this. Nor, as he held her close, did he have any wish to, all else falling away in the unconscious amnesia of male passion. He threw open the sleeping bag, longingly kissed her cheek, her neck, the lovely space above her breasts.

“Kataya,” he whispered passionately, and there was nothing else in his world, no other salve for the endless pain and frustration. There was only her, here and now, her face wet with tears, vulnerable, compelling. He released the knotted loincloth, as their most sensitive reaches drew nearer. Her breasts rubbed gently across his. Then he slid down, yielding to that most primal longing: to suckle at the breast, fountain of all life.

“Yes,” she whispered fervently. “Yes, Kalus. TAKE me.” He raised himself on his arms, opening her legs with his own, and with the sighing aid of her hand, was inside her. He did not love her, but he longed for her, making the physical release and abandon perhaps the greater for it. He was not gentle, nor did she ask him to be. For in that moment she was not a woman, but all women, and his anger would not be abated.

But as he approached climax, too soon, his gentler nature returned, and he not only remembered, but yearned for the soul inside her. She felt him withdraw. And though she experienced a moment of bitter disappointment, that all was yet in vain, he only moved to kneel over her, kissing her lips, her eyes, her neck and then her breasts. And all the while his right hand encircled her deepest temple, caressing, kneading, softly stroking and then penetrating its moist readiness. In rapture she threw back her head, breathed deeply and surrendered to orgasm. Then gently, now quieter, he put himself inside her once more, moving his penis in slow, beautiful patterns that she thought would break her heart with loving pleasure. And in time as his own breathing became deeper, and his thrusts more urgent, she felt the throbbing wetness come again, as together they forgot all else in the throes of that blessed, animal release. Plaintive, moaning sounds split the night.

Then he reached back and covered them both with the sweetly softened sleeping bag, inside her still, their limbs intertwined, breath commingling.

“Thank you,” she whispered, taking his head in her hands and kissing him with all her heart and soul, as she felt his strong arms engulf her and his lips caress her with spoken and unspoken words of affection and reassurance. And soon, very naturally, both drifted off into a sleep no longer bitter, at glorious, indifferent peace with themselves and with their world.

In the chill hour before dawn, Sylviana woke from a horrible dream. Some hideous, ill-defined beast had sprung upon Kalus from a shadow, and with teeth and claws and sheer weight pinned him to the ground, slashing and rending, tearing him apart.

She sat bolt upright in the silent gloom. The room was empty, and the dream had been too real. Forgetting all else she threw on a robe, left the building and ran toward the place where she knew he lay sleeping. She no longer cared for games, or being right. She only wanted to be with him. To hold him and.....

There were sounds ahead of her in the darkness. Two voices. She slowed, and then moved off the path, taking cover behind a small tree. What she heard in its near seclusion seemed less real than the nightmare, and yet far more terrible.

“I should go now,” said Kataya, rising and slipping the silk dress across her arms and shoulders, then lowering it softly into place.

“Yes. I do not think Sylviana would understand. But we understand, don’t we? You know what this night was for us?”

“Yes. Just hold me, kiss me once, and then I’ll go.”

“Goodbye, my beautiful Kataya.”

“My beautiful Kalus.” And with a tear that no longer wounded her, she was gone.

Sylviana slithered to the ground with her back against the tree, her sorrow as bitter and unquenchable as any she had ever known. Whatever her sins and follies may have been, she paid for them dearly in those moments. For she saw more clearly and painfully than ever, as much as if he had been killed, that she loved him beyond all others, almost beyond her own life. And she knew it as she felt him betray her, and give the precious love that had been hers alone, to another woman.

Another woman! How could he? After all they had been through..... How could he think that she wouldn’t come back to him, just because for a time she had been uncertain. Hadn’t he driven her to it?

That perhaps it was she who had driven him, that he had given Kataya something beautiful and desperately needed, that she herself might give such a precious gift to a man like Stenmark, none of these thoughts could occur. Because like Kalus or Kataya (or anyone else), she was a product, and in some measure a victim, of the world in which she had grown. For she had been taught (though not by her father) that this was the one, all-consuming act of a man’s betrayal, and a thing which could never be forgiven. And like Barabbas in his rage of righteous anger, she too cast him out, out of her heart forever.

On a more human level, and in a flood of final tears, like the little girl bereft of her mother she felt devastated and lost, and swore that she would never again let anyone come so close, and hurt her so badly. She stood up again, desperate and proud and defiant, ready to go on without him.

But she had forgotten his wilderness senses. He had heard her crying before Kataya was out of sight, and realized with crushing finality and self-reproach how much she loved him, and how deeply he had wounded her. He stood now just a few feet away, and committed his second great mistake of human psychology.

Because whatever rash promises she might have made to herself in the depths of rejection and spiritual agony, so long as they remained within her they might still have softened with time, leaving the heart open to forgiveness and return. But by confronting her then and allowing the volcano to erupt, spewing forth its rage upon him, the hateful words solidified and became a reality unto themselves, a spoken curse that foolish, endless human pride would then have to live up to. He stood before her, pale and shivering, neither explaining nor begging forgiveness. His simple heart would only say.
“I have never loved anyone else. I never could. This was not love, in the way that you and I---” Her open hand struck across his face with the fury of all women scorned.
“I hate you!” she cried hysterically. “We’re finished, FOREVER! And I’ll HURT you before I’m through. Just wait and see how I hurt you!” And she stormed away, her love and pain alike submerged beneath the weight of hard words, and harder justice.
Because male pride is evil enough, in its blunt and stupid way destroying much that is gentle and fair. But a woman’s vengeance, turned devious by the depths of her vulnerability, and the intricate contradiction of her emotions..... True Hell would be raised, one way or the other.
Kalus watched her go, and though shocked and stunned and hurt himself, felt yet again the indestructible bond that was his love for her. When she struck him it had been as if he struck himself, and even as she promised to hurt him, his one thought was for her safety. Kataya, Komai, even the cub who stood beside him, became secondary, superfluous in his life. She was his woman, his family, and in everything but name, his wife. And whatever she might do or say, he would never leave her.
But as the cub gently nuzzled against his leg, seeking some sign of reassurance, he was dismayed to find large tears running down his face, as in his mind’s eye he saw Barabbas with the other males huddled silently behind him, telling him to go.
“Why?” he asked aloud, his burning eyes turned toward the heavens. “Why must I always be punished for showing mercy, and trying to do what is right?” But it was not mercy he felt when he took Kataya to him, and he knew it.
He kicked at a protruding root, but trying to make his anger flare was like trying to make a fire of damp wood. Guilt and remorse quickly smothered it, smothered him. He stroked Alaska’s head and said quietly, “It’s all right.” But he neither felt it, nor believed it himself.
That afternoon William appeared, like the white shadow of a tenement grave, and Sylviana had found her instrument of revenge.

Chapter 43

All that morning Kalus stayed away, not wanting Sylviana to see him, not wanting to destroy for Kataya what they had shared the night before. The gesture was not entirely noble: now more than ever he found it impossible to think or plan, and simply did not know what else to do.

But as various members of the company began to return early from their labors, as if by mutual consent at the fine Spring weather, the amiable Smith accosted him in the place where he sat brooding. The youngest of the company, he had a pleasant, almost boyish face, with sandy hair and a light moustache. He took Kalus up as if they were old friends, and insisted they share a bottle of wine to celebrate the day. Kalus hardly felt like celebrating, and was half fearful of the liquor’s effect on him; but the other’s friendly oblivion made it all but impossible to say no. So at last, wearily, he consented.

The two went briefly to the botanist’s rooms to fetch it, then turned themselves again out of doors. There in the clear space by the tables Kalus saw the two women: Kataya, who looked up from her work and smiled faintly, and Sylviana, who did not smile, though she could not entirely hide her relief at seeing him at all. But the embers of her anger still smoldered, waiting only for a restless wind to stoke them again to withering fire.

The two men moved to the crest of the hill which formed one border of the grassy bowl in which the others had gathered, and sat beneath the speckled shade of a young tree that grew there. From here they could survey the company without feeling too close, and therefore inhibited. Smith opened the bottle, and after taking several large gulps (despite the assumed bravado he was nervous, and uncertain how to proceed) passed it to Kalus, who was much more cautious.

In time he felt the liquor, though he was not overwhelmed by it. Yet he spoke little, gazing wistfully into the small valley at the two women he had loved: desiring again the one, though he rebuked himself for it, loving, and at the same time hating, the fallen angel of his heart. Smith observed this, and failing in his attempts at indirect conversation, spoke more plainly.

“I guess by now the Doc has explained to you something of our breeding problem..... Dave Rawlings can be a bit blunt---subtle as a truck, really---but he generally says the things that need to be said. About mating, for example, and children.” Kalus turned toward him curiously, as Smith pretended not to notice.

“He and I were just talking about it last night, and do you know what he said? ‘Stop screwing around and just ask them. Enough of this timidity. It’s high time for those of us who can still procreate to get down to some serious fucking.’”

If Smith had stopped talking long enough, Kalus would have gotten up and walked away from what seemed to him a lunatic assault on those things he held most dear. But he did not stop.

“We’ve all been in rather a state of shock the past year, sexually as well as otherwise. And of course we had plenty of other things to think about first: constructing the shelters, laying up food for the Winter.”

“Survival,” said Kalus bluntly. “Just like everyone else.”

“Yes..... Are you angry with me?”

The man-child studied the face of the other, finding nothing but friendship, sensitivity and good intentions. “No,” he said sadly. “I don’t know what to feel.”

“Should we talk about this another time?”

“What would it change?”

“Probably nothing,” said Smith ruefully. “You understand that I’m only speaking for the good of the group. We’re a family, really.”

“But one without children,” added Kalus sympathetically.

“Yes. We need them. . .or everything we do dies with us. Along with all hope for the future.” He took another drink to keep from betraying emotion. But this only augmented, rather than submerging the yearning for life that so overwhelmed him. “The sound of their laughter,” he began again, his eyes welling. The wail of newborn life. . .would be such blessed relief from the dry, sterile sound of our own voices.”

At this Kalus eyes’ misted as well, remembering Shama, and the Child on the shore. “I would give everything I have to hear it,” he said, surprised by his own words, and the thoughts that lay behind them.

“Me, too.” And the young scientist put a hand on Kalus’ shoulder. “What I’m trying to tell you is that according to our tests, only Rawlings, myself and the Commander, still have the ability to father a child. And in your case, of course, there would be no reason for the sterility.” At Kalus’ questioning look he added. “Oh, the others can still make love, it just doesn’t get them anywhere..... No pregnancy. No kids.”

“What are you asking me to do?”

Smith sighed, knowing it was now or never. “Look down there. You see that beautiful, slender reed in the black dress?”

“Kataya.”

“Yes..... She’s twenty-six, and in the full flower of womanhood. She desperately wants a child, but apparently the rest of us don’t do anything for her. And then Dr. Welles, there.” He pointed. “Thirty-four, and married to a man who can’t give her children. Should they both be punished for it? And your own Sylviana. Wouldn’t the two of you, at least, consider having a child?”

But Kalus’ mind was reeling. The concept of free love was so incredible to him, at once both desirable and unthinkable..... He gave voice to only one of the myriad questions that confronted him.

“Is there no other way?”

“There’s always artificial insemination: taking a man’s sperm and a woman’s egg and placing them together, either in the uterus, or in the laboratory. But that’s so cold and mechanical. Also, we’re trying to stay a little closer to nature than our predecessors, hoping to avoid some of their mistakes. And for me, at least, there’s a ‘spiritual’ side to it: which sperm cell is MEANT to fertilize which egg. Can you see what I’m driving at?”

Kalus, who had understood very little, could only say. “I have made love to only two women in my life. And I should have been more than content with the one, if she..... Well if..... I don’t know if I can help you,” he finished weakly. But then, whether because of the alcohol, the other man’s openness, or the sheer physical need to let it out, he told him.

“I made love to Kataya last night.”

“Good,” said Smith warmly. “Good for you.”

“Not good for me. . .or Sylviana. She learned of it, and cast me out.” He lowered his face, bitter and ashamed. “I feel as if I’m already dead.”

Smith was quiet for a moment, allowing the other to gather himself, then simply said what he thought.

“You did nothing wrong, Kalus. I see in you no more of the user and the taker than I do in myself---probably the reason we’ve both slept with so few women. But as for Sylviana. . .maybe she won’t understand. But maybe, in time, she will. Welles is probably giving her the same talk right now.”

At this Kalus looked down into the bowl once more, and saw to his relief and glimmering hope that Dr. Welles was in fact speaking seriously with Sylviana, who blushed, looking down, then up at him uncertainly.

“In the meantime,” Smith continued, “Try not to isolate yourself so much. Loneliness will kill you by itself. Throw in alienation and remorse, and it’s no wonder you feel the way you do.” He looked the man-child straight in the eye, and said sincerely.

“Be my friend, Kalus. The rest of us aren’t so bad. But if you have trouble being open with them, then start with me. I’m not nearly as shallow and glib as I come across---a defense mechanism I guess, to keep myself from being hurt. But I do care, and I’d be honored.” And he gave Kalus his hand on it.

Kalus took it in his own, finding unexpected relief, as Sylviana watched him, and listened to Dr. Welles, and felt her hard resolve begin to waver.

And all might still have been well, but for the sinister and unknown timing of the Stranger, who at that moment descended the rise at a cold distance from the two men, and seeing the strange and alluring new woman, devoted to her all his questionable attention.

Chapter 44

William, who admitted to having no last name, was of slightly less than average height, with dark hair, a rough complexion, and a certain quality of nondescriptness about his face and features.

Until one met the eyes. These were at once both black and pierced with light, aloof and penetrating, as if possessed of some underworld knowledge that rendered all waking truth both poignant and, in the end, utterly meaningless. Once seen, though the rest of the face remained difficult to recall, these darkened orbs were indelibly burned into memory---fierce, desperate, and dying. Restless, fearful, weary of the crumbling bridge that so narrowly separates life from death.....

He had not always been this way. Though his childhood had been tragic enough---abandoned shortly after birth, stored like some kind of hazardous waste in orphanages and foster homes, moving on as he became a troubled adolescent (and who wouldn’t be?) to jails and juvenile detention centers---it had not killed him, and that at least was something. He had run away (escaped) at the age of sixteen, and like so many other lost souls without hope or guidance, had gravitated to New York City to be tried by the relentless hell-fire of the streets.

But unlike most, he had survived. Here, through various underground activities, ranging from petty theft and burglary to trafficking narcotics, he had somehow managed to keep body and soul together. And no one seemed to take much notice of one more suspected junkie, living in abandoned buildings and selling small quantities of marijuana, cocaine, and whatever assorted pills he could buy, make, or steal from dockside warehouses. He was left alone for the most part, and aside from the odd roughing up by the police, given tentative permission to exist.

But as he unknowingly turned the page on his twentieth year (for the date of his birth was known to no one, and his childhood but a blur of pain and abuse without names or numbers for reference), and as he found his heart still beating, his lungs still demanding air, and the various hungers of life giving him no chance to cease his restless moving, a small miracle had occurred. Someone noticed, and more than that, fell in love with him: a fifteen-year-old Chicano girl named Kathy.

Their meeting was chance enough, and would have passed like so many others, but for the small compassion that still lived in him. Finding her tearful and alone on the front steps of a tenement, in which her alcoholic father had beaten and fondled her for perhaps the thirtieth time, refraining from actual rape only because she screamed so loudly and the walls were thin, William sat down beside her, gave her his bandana to wipe the blood from her ear, and offered to take her to a public health clinic that he knew. When she declined as the result of a questionable immigration status (and a desire not to return to the even more brutal life of Guatemala City), he had given her an ounce of marijuana, along with spoken directions to the condemned building in which he slept on the floor on a mattress of flattened cardboard boxes. If she needed anything, he said, he would try to help.

The next day when he returned to check on her, he found that her father, aided in his spiritual pilgrimage by a fifth of tequila, had fallen from the fire escape, and was now in a City hospital pending deportation. That was why she had not returned to their room, but remained on the front steps, freed from one hell but confident that another awaited her, which no doubt it did: she had no money, and would soon be evicted.

William had bought her breakfast, stolen her a jacket and scarf, then brought her to his mansion of rats, fallen plaster, moldering walls, and warmed by a kerosene heater which only smoked dangerously toward morning.

After waiting for three days to be put to work on the streets, she found to her amazement that he neither demanded she sell herself to others or perform sex tricks for him, and had not put a hand on her except in awkward comfort and reassurance. That night she gave herself to him, they made sweet and tender love; and he had done something even more inexplicable. He had cried, and promised to protect her with his life against the bitcheries of poverty and despair that he knew so well.

From that time on they were inseparable, living where they could, doing what they had to do, to survive. William was not, in fact, a junkie, though he came as close to the line without crossing it as any human being ever could. But for Kathy’s sake he gave up hard drugs almost completely, finding that with her he no longer needed the barbiturates to sleep, injected amphetamines to feel alive in the night, or alcohol to keep the spiritual agony from killing him. Without the world’s help, or even its consent, he pulled himself and his young woman up out of the gutter, and as she had done for him, gave them both a reason to live.

But then Armageddon had come, oblivious to his, and everyone’s, agonies and ecstasies, bitter triumphs and long defeats. The War, that had been building for centuries from Man’s ignorance, and inability to overcome his instinct for violence, finally broke out. The satellite lasers had protected the City for a time, keeping the first wave of missiles off them, for perhaps an hour. But it didn’t take a genius to know that New York’s famous minutes were numbered.

So through the crash of panic-stricken people, trying to evacuate or merely crying, “Oh, my God!” while still others who had not seen or heard the broadcasts stood about in a daze and tried to understand what was happening, William took Kathy and sought out his friend, Dr. Wilhelm Krause---the black pessimist, partly insane. Looting, too, had broken out, but it was halfhearted, so that even the police, grim soldiers of the street, showed little inclination toward retaliatory violence. The City, for all its noise and seeming activity, was in a strangling state of shock.

William found Dr. Krause---whom he had met while hospitalized with hepatitis (from a rusted syringe)---in his basement laboratory, sunk ninety feet below the ground, side-cut into solid bedrock at the base of gigantic Mercy Hospital. For among the towering sky-scrapers, some reaching over two hundred stories, it was not uncommon for their foundations to sink another tenth that distance. And along with the subways, bored farther and farther beneath the level of the streets, they formed the literal New York underground, a silent world unto itself, a still, protected inlet in the heart of the maelstrom.

When William burst in upon the aged Krause, the latter did not at first seem to recognize him. For though he had been preparing for this day for many years, now that it had come, his mind and heart were simply overwhelmed. He found himself unable to act, or even think. It was really happening, not in theory, not in the lecture hall, but in damnable and undeniable reality. The unspeakable, of which he had spoken for thirty years, had happened at last. There was something he was supposed to do.....

Slowly his weary eyes and mind focused, his German courage rallied, and he saw before him the young man he had once caught trying to steal morphine from the hospital storeroom. In a moment almost of nostalgia, he recalled the incident. He had not called security or the police, had not tried to confront the sick and desperate youth, but said simply, “Go back to your room, son. No, I’m not going to turn you in. We’ll talk about it later.” And to the young man’s astonishment they HAD talked, on several occasions and for hours at a time. William found in the aging and alienated recluse a friend, and the closest thing to a father that he would ever know. When he had spoken of his life, Krause listened attentively, as if finding in the bitter tale of poverty and poor health, pursuit and persecution, a note in harmony with his own struggle amidst the viper-filled pit of unenlightened human nature. Upon William’s release he had shown him his laboratory, and explained what it was for. And he had told him to come, if this moment ever arrived.

“Hello, William,” he said quietly.

“Doctor!” said the other breathlessly. “I don’t care about myself, but you HAVE to save Kathy. She can’t die, she just can’t!”

“Now, now,” said Krause, “There’s no need to be heroic. You sound like one of those detestable Wagnerian operas---all full of blood oaths, and absurd quests to dubious ends. Damned prelude to the Nazis is what they were, along with Nietzsche and all that, ‘Great men create their own morality’ horse-shit. Did you know Hitler was impotent? That’s why he never married Eva Braun. They say that Goring used to wear eye make-up when they were alone, and---”

“Doctor, please!”

“Yes, yes, I know. You’re sure that at any moment the lights will go out, we’ll hear the rumble from above, and the chance will be lost. You underestimate me, young man. This laboratory will be intact, and protected from radiation, ten thousand years from now. You forget the lengths that a ‘mad German’ will go to.” But seeing William’s anguish, he said. “Yes, we’ll save Kathy. And just for the hell of it, why don’t we save you, too? Since I don’t seem to have any other volunteers.”

William looked around him, then at the two elaborate suspension casks, the best and most advanced in the world---made by Krause’s own hands, and prepared against every contingency.

“But what about you?”

“Me?” The old scientist laughed morosely. “I’m an old man. Do you think I want to crawl out of one of these things a hundred centuries from now, and try to rebuild what’s left of the world? No, William, I don’t mind dying. I’m just glad the two of you came, or it would have been much harder.” And at that moment they had in fact heard a rumble, and felt the disbelieving earth tremble at the nuclear concussion. But the lights stayed on, and the caskets of life still waited.

“Well,” said Krause grimly. “Shall we get on with it?”

And the young lovers were put into suspension, with precision and good hope.

William had woken the prescribed ten-thousand years later, intact, roughly one year from the present. He had lain very still for a time, not understanding, not remembering where he was. But as the truth slowly returned to him he felt no weight of sorrow or loss, but an unexpected joy at just being alive. And he thought of Kathy, so close beside him. He had saved her! She was ALIVE, and they would start again. He forced himself to remain in the soft warmth of the casket a while longer, as Krause had instructed him. Then he turned the inner handle, broke the seal, and emerged into the brave new world.

But even prepared against every contingency things can go wrong, and the Devil fingers of Chaos reach into the strongest fortress. And nothing made by man can endure unchanging the ravages of Time.

Something had gone wrong with Kathy’s support apparatus. What it was hardly matters, and no one ever learned. But she had died at least a thousand years before, and all that the sealed cask had done was to act as a mummy’s wrap, slowing, but not eliminating her body’s natural decomposition. He rose to find his only love, a half-rotted corpse.

McIntyre and Jennings had heard the anguished cries, as they searched through the underground vaults and passageways for the faint
life-signs they had detected, and entered the laboratory to find him lying face down on the floor. Screaming. He offered no resistance as the doctor injected a sedative, and the two brought him out into the cruel light of day.

His true love was buried, along with all his hopes, and he never spoke of her again.

Sylviana knew nothing of this tragedy, or of the menace to himself and others that he had since become. She saw only the obvious way that he looked at her, and the effect it had on Kalus. The man-child rose instinctively, as if she were in danger, and would have strode down the hill sword in hand to confront him. But Smith, who had seen the sudden brush-fire of his eyes, seized hold of his arm protectively.

“Easy, Kalus. That’s William. We’ll go down together.”

There in the depression, stiff introductions were made. Kalus, with the help of Smith beside him, managed to restrain his emotions, though making no attempt to conceal them. For his own part, William sneered at him indifferently, and continued to bathe Sylviana with mock interest and open lust. His only reply to her question, “Why haven’t I seen you before?” was a rude:

“Him Tarzan, you Jane. Me come back tomorrow.” And he had taken some food, without asking or thanks, and made off the way he had come.

“How can you let him treat you that way?” demanded Kalus.

Since the question was directed at no one in particular, Ruth Welles replied, neither apologizing nor defending their actions. She was a tall, serious woman in her mid thirties, with pincers of brown hair surrounding a pleasant face and striking eyes, which revealed to those who knew how to look, a nature both stubborn and compassionate.

“That’s just his way,” she said, “And there are reasons for it. We’ve all been hurt and bereft by the War, but his pain..... Let’s just say it’s much harder for him to forgive and go one, and that we’re all worried about him, because we do care.”

“But he won’t let anyone come close enough to help him,” added Smith. “He storms in and out for food, occasionally takes wine or medicine along with it, and that’s all we ever see of him. We helped him set up a laboratory, before we knew what it was for. We considered smashing it afterward, but what can you do for someone who makes his own poison, and flaunts his own destruction?”

“Why?” asked Sylviana. “What does he use the lab for?”

“To make LSD,” said Welles sadly. “If there were poppies on the island, no doubt he’d make heroin as well.”

Kalus found himself breathing heavily, unable to control it. He began to pace a short distance from them, then suddenly turned and came back, his manner tense and worried.

“Maybe I am wrong to say this. Maybe I have no right. But I don’t trust that one, and I don’t want him near me or mine.” He looked squarely at Sylviana. “If you have any sense left you will stay away from him, whatever you think of me. He means to hurt you, or I know nothing at all.”

But her gaze was equally unyielding. “I will see, or befriend, whoever I DAMN well please, and you have nothing to say about it.” And she returned to her work, as if he wasn’t there.

Smith released a breath, Welles shook her head, and Kataya said nothing, reproachfully. Kalus lifted the cub, forlornly lowered his forehead against it, then turned and walked away.

Chapter 45

And so a period of days ensued in which little of note seemed to happen, as is often the case when the most potent of life’s forces are at work, though beneath the surface and not yet brought to fruition. William became a more frequent visitor, and often took long walks with Sylviana. Kalus, feeling a genuine desire to work and do his share, as well as needing something to distract him, began to work the fields with Jim Smith, the botanist, his only real friend among the colonists. He still spoke to Kataya, but had told her that for a time it was best they keep some distance between them, and she had not objected. She understood, and kept a warm secret of the fact that her menstrual cycle was now a week overdue.

Under other circumstances, Kalus might have fallen in love with the rigors and lessons of farming, which taught patience and perseverance, and returned the most beautiful and honest of rewards: Life itself. When Smith told him that by the year 2000 the smaller, family farms of America were largely a thing of the past, he thought it a greater tragedy than almost any he had heard of. And unknowingly, as Smith continued to tell him of his own childhood on the Indiana farm, of his family’s hardships and eventual ruin, Kalus weaved the themes of the story in and out of his own.

Because as he toiled, he too felt the creeping sense of fatalism that told him all was lost, and the meaning gone out of his life. He too felt events pushing toward some dark and bitter climax over which he seemed to have little control. All this though he raged, and cursed, and worked harder still. Because Sylviana would not let him near her, and heeded none of his warnings.

So he worked, and waited, and prayed to the wind which knew could not hear. While the woman-child, oblivious, pursued the treacherous shadow of revenge.

It should be said in her defense that Sylviana had not stopped loving him. Hers, rather, was a classic case of one who has struggled with the help of another to achieve some desperate goal, but whom, upon attaining it, felt that he or she no longer needed the life partner who had been a pillar of love and support throughout: that she was now free to choose a more appropriate mate for her elevated status, and leave the other to get on as they would. As if that made it any better. Lastly, that if she had been herself she would have wished him no harm, whatever he had done to hurt her.

But her emotions, too (or so she told herself), were in a violent state of flux. She felt as if she had been the one struck across the face, betrayed and unjustly punished for simply following the inevitable course of events. She had never been an evil person, and was not now.

But a sin of omission can be every bit as deadly, and the venomous spider does not stop to ask the nature of its victim before it bites, a soft sting that is hardly felt, until the poison starts to work. Neither of them had realized the gift their isolation and struggle had been, or how much more complicated love becomes when lives are sheltered, and hearts confronted by a baffling array of choices. Perhaps that was why, as Smith had remarked to Kalus, the well-off never seemed to be much in love, but only to play at life. His love with Sylviana had been simple and direct, a beautiful and necessary outgrowth of their world. Now their reality had been altered, and something precious lost.

It should also be said that in dealing with a dark, embittered soul like William’s (and to a lesser degree, her own), Sylviana was every bit as naive as she had been about the primal, life and death existence of the Valley. Had she known for one minute the vicious hatred that he held for her, or the imminent danger of the course she was now pursuing, she would have fled from him and never looked back.

Because to William she had become a symbol of all the protected, thoughtless sheep whose blind acceptance of personal comfort and political ruthlessness had made the destruction of the Earth and the murder of his love possible, even inevitable. He would listen as she spoke of her days at Ithaca, and of her soft and sheltered childhood, with apparent interest and appreciation, all the while choking back his passion, and plotting her destruction. In his mind she was the ‘pretty little college whore’, and the very strength of his desire for her only intensified his wish to wound her, as he had been wounded, to punish and destroy her, as his love had been destroyed. He hated her with a malice so deep it could fain love without detection, and wallow in thoughts of sexual violence without remorse. The spirit had been charred to ash inside him, leaving only the bestial desires of the twisted animal: lust and hate and vengeance.

But his plans were not yet ripe, and like the cat, he would play with his victim before killing it. And perhaps too, though the chance was faint, the smallest part of his conscience remained, and needed further goading before ceasing to rebel.

For her own part, though she might have wished it otherwise, Sylviana could feel nothing for him but pity and a kind of awe. At times the obsidian hardness of his eyes would push her senses toward the protective realm of fear; but always his words, and her own twisted purpose called them back. She was neither attracted nor repulsed, only determined.

In truth she thought little during those final days, following out the treadmill of her plan in a kind of dull stupor, unable, for the pain it cost her, to listen to her heart and turn aside. Her scheme, if such a name can be given to walking wide-eyed into a trap, was to sleep with him at a time and place where Kalus would either witness it directly, or hear of it straight away. She meant only to raise the horrible specter of betrayal before him, to hurt him as he had done to her. Beyond that she saw nothing, knew nothing, though some half thought out rationale told her than then, perhaps, she could forgive him.

She wanted, in short, to summon the demon of Vengeance---to do her bidding, then be gone. But Hell, if it has a master, is no woman’s slave, and once raised, follows its own path of wanton destruction. And it found in William a willing conspirator, and favorite target of seduction: a man who no longer cared.

Kalus had spoken of a benevolent current to which, along with his own free will, he would entrust his life. But there is also a malevolent, just as real, and Sylviana was being carried along by it without resistance, and without awareness.

As William plotted, and Kalus burned.

Chapter 46

But life, and the myriad realities around them, did not cease because two lovers had been driven apart, or because another lived in the darkened world of near death. And their interaction, however tragic and to whatever end, was hardly its only concern. Perhaps that is life’s greatest cruelty---that it goes on, regardless---or perhaps that is its greatest gift. Nature, stern father that it is, has many children, and those who have grown must be strong and self-sufficient, able to survive and create again, without help or intercession.

There were others in the camp with lives and dreams and heartbreaks of their own. And in the seemingly distant Valley, countless animal young were being born, some who would rise to the magnificent freedom that only an untamed creature of the Wild can know, some who would never reach adulthood, their flesh sacrificed to feed the young of others. But all would continue to strive and struggle, not understanding the human concept of despair. And if the spirits of those who died returned in other forms, or if the energy that constituted their existence was merely recycled, it rose up to struggle again, filled with the endless enigma that so bravely turns to face the Night, forever battling death and the Void:

Desire, the cornerstone of Life.

On the day before the storm would break, Sylviana felt a stillness and sense of well-being in everything around her: in the gentle breeze of early morning, in the frolicking of the cub with David Rawlings, who would never have been so free with a human companion. She felt it in the absence of William from the camp, and even in the stubborn, unspeaking presence of the man-child. He would never leave her, of that she was now certain. And he would be near, very near when tomorrow, at last, her plans would be ripe.

She no longer felt any hatred towards him. As their eyes met briefly she even felt the old, half admitted love that had once been the most important reality of her world. She didn’t hate him. But she knew what she had to do. It didn’t have to mean destroying him, which she was equally certain would never happen. How could steel be destroyed? It couldn’t, she thought, only disciplined to be a better servant.

And in her live imagination she felt the strong, shy touch of his hands across her back, her ribs and then her breasts, accentuated by kissing and tender words, the mouth sliding down across her neck, her chest, licking her nipples and then squeezing and sucking in earnest, the movements of his torso becoming less gentle as his penis grew rigid against her thigh. Then he was inside her, with or without her help, and began the innumerable thrusts that made of her body a single, roused vehicle of warmth and pleasure. She gently, and not so gently massaging his back, his buttocks. Till in the last fiery moments of passion he crushed her to him, crying out in a voice made terrible by jealous rage.

“You are mine!”

She felt the strength of these images in the quickening of her heart, and the stirring of her womb. That the next day she would give herself to a man for whom she felt nothing, and who might have feelings of his own, she could not realize. It made it all too cold and sad. But this cruelty was not HER doing. She had not wanted it, or asked for it. It simply had to be done. She must think of herself first, be truly selfish for once, and let the men work it out as they would. That Kalus might hurt William, or himself, she refused to consider. That William might try to hurt HER, was beyond her imagining.

Her eyes were hazy, her senses unaware. And she did not see the deadly serpent that crawled towards her through the grass. She knew nothing of it until the air beside her was rent by the sweep of some instrument whirled in sudden violence.

Startled, she turned to find Rawlings standing, too close it seemed to her, then bending down over a wounded snake, pinned to the ground beneath his hoe. Without hesitation or remorse he drew out his knife, and separated it from its head.

“You better wake your ass up, girl,” he said bluntly. “Or death will find you, even here.”

But surely he was being too dramatic. It was only a little snake. And why would anyone or anything want to hurt her, who would not even kill a spider if she found it in her bedroom. But as she looked down at the bright bands of color encircling the serpentine corpse, she vaguely remembered something nasty about the coral snake. She moved away with a shudder.

But remembering herself, she looked around quickly. Kalus was gone---he had not seen. And Rawlings was walking off without further comment. TOO CLOSE, she told herself. TOO DAMN CLOSE. She was not sure whether she referred to the snake, or to the show of weakness, when the illusion of strength was so critical.....

WELL, replied her harder self, AND WHAT OF IT? You couldn’t let something like that ruin your whole day. Especially this day, when she had to be calm, and prepare herself. She cleared away the dishes as if nothing had happened.

And Nothing had.

Later that morning she at last admitted her loneliness, and her fear. She wanted to go to Kalus, so badly, to forgive him and start again..... But she could not. Too much strength remained in her illusions. So she set upon a compromise, going instead to her closest friend among the colonists, a man whose affection was unconditional, and (she thought) without judgment: Flight Commander Miles Stenmark.

She found him in the solitary structure a short distance from the camp: the library, or archival building. Filled with the life-giving books, computer records, maps and charts, it held a special status among these refugees of Man’s destruction, and its deep, quiet interior had the aura almost of a church. Sylviana entered soundlessly.

The Commander sat with his back to her, leaning across a large drafting table. Before him were spread a series of orbital photographs, which he reproduced in minute detail upon a wide, scroll-like map. She moved closer, standing behind him, needing to feel his reassuring presence which never wavered, and his friendship which never questioned.

She began to massage his shoulders, which tensed involuntarily, and then surrendered. With difficulty she fought back an urge to embrace him, and cry like a child. She continued, but with a softened and affectionate touch he could not help but feel.

“Bless you, Sylviana,” he said wearily. She almost smiled.

“How did you know it was me?”

“I knew.” Then, as if this conveyed too much. “Ruth Welles always tells me I’m working too hard, and Kataya’s fingers feel like flesh wrapped around steel, though she means well..... I’m afraid she’s still not quite comfortable around me. Around any of us, really.”

“Why?” asked the younger woman, unable to feign indifference.

“Will you promise not to hold it against her? I wish the two of you could make peace. There’s so much that’s good in both of you.”

Sylviana sighed deeply, again fighting off the urge to embrace him and pour out her heart. “I’ll try. Why, then?”

“She still has too much resentment against the west.”

She moved to stand beside him, her look intent. “From what?”

... “A large number of Japanese, including her grandparents, died a slow and terrible death from the radiation left behind by the bombing of Hiroshima. And here, now, losing everything to a War in which her country played no part, but was decimated nonetheless, killing her husband. And to lose the baby the way she did---not even knowing she was pregnant, then coming out of suspension to immediate miscarriage, hormonal crash, and the end of the world as she knew it. . .sweet Savior. It would have killed almost anyone else. You HAVE to forgive her, Sylviana. It’s not her fault.”

She pulled up another stool and sat beside him, silent and thoughtful. Finally she said. “It’s not my fault, either.”

Stenmark sighed. “She knows that, on an intellectual level. But to lose so much.” His expression became faraway, recalling perhaps some bitter pain of his own. “So much suffering.”

Sylviana looked full into his face, deeply stirred by the physical and emotional closeness to this wise and noble man, who had seen and known so much of life. And in that moment she wanted nothing more in the world than to nestle against him, to feel him put his arm around her protectively, kiss her gently, and tell her it would be all right. Kataya no longer mattered. This mattered. She wanted to give herself to him, as Kalus had to her rival. Even bear him a child..... And suddenly she knew that was it. His sorrow. Not a loving spouse perhaps, but a child lost. How much more terrible and bitter that sting, to lose one innocent, and with a lifetime ahead of him. Or her. Tears welled in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, both understanding.

“Yes. It would have been harder. But for you.”

And in that moment, to be so close, their sides lightly touching, was a blessed intimacy for which no words exist, and in which there is no stain. She leaned closer to examine his work, though if the page before him were blank she would still have done the same.

“What are you working on, Miles?” She was the only one among the company who called him by his first name, and then only in private. Such was the respect they all held for him, who had sacrificed so much for their well-being. And she could not restrain herself from touching him lightly on the arm. He turned toward her gratefully, smiling, then turned back to his work, so deeply reluctant to complicate or even injure her young life.

“I’m trying to chart. . .the topographical changes that took place during the first two decades after.” There was no need to clarify ‘after’. “You see, so far as I know, I’m the only one who saw it. And the photographs can only tell you so much..... Do you want me to go on.” She nodded tearfully.

“I want to recreate the full magnitude of the aftershock, as vividly as possible. I try to do this through maps and computer enhancements, along with the written account, which I’m afraid I’ll never finish.”

“Are you sure it’s worth the heartbreak?” she asked sorrowfully. “Why not just leave it in the past, and go on?”

“Because it’s important,” he said, “For the same reason it was important for the Germans to see the concentration camps after World War II, and to give an honest account of what happened to them as a people, that could ever allow such unspeakable atrocities. From my observations, it was because everything was dealt with abstractly, through dangerous philosophies and brilliantly sinister propaganda. They were taught to rationalize the deaths of others as the only means of caring for themselves: in order for their families to live, all others must die. And blinded by their desire for this utopian world they never saw, until it was too late, the true horror and vicious sadism of the Nazis.”

Sylviana wept silently, recalling images of the Holocaust, set against memories of German families she had known, so loving, nurturing, hard working. “How horrible.”

“Yes. As it’s been said many times, we must learn from the mistakes of history, or we’re doomed to repeat them. We must all realize what we’re capable of, when we close our hearts, and allow our minds to justify such brutal and inhuman acts. Or we DON'T learn, until it’s too late.” He gave a bitter sigh. “Until it comes to this.”

Needing perhaps some escape from the relentless intensity of these truths, her eyes took in the map before her: the northern Atlantic. The altered North American coast formed one boundary, the European the other. She studied the latter quietly, not wanting to look too closely at the plunder of her native America.

The European main did not at first look radically different, her eyes readily identifying Italy, though the ‘boot’ had been rounded off, and Spain, similarly worn so that the strait of Gibraltar was now broad enough to pass a small country through. But as her gaze continued toward France and the Netherlands..... Something was missing. NO. It couldn’t be.

“Where are the British Isles?” The home of her deepest ancestors. A last, disbelieving hope. “Or haven’t you drawn them yet?”

“They’re gone,” he said somberly, “Along with all of Scandinavia, my home..... A huge rift opened between them and the mainland, here, and swallowed them like Atlantis. I watched it happen, day by day, year by year. And Sweden. It was one of the saddest experiences of my life. To watch the destruction of that beautiful land, from which my ancestors set out in many-oared galleys, practically rowing themselves, when the winds weren’t favorable, all the way to northern Canada, centuries before Columbus. When I think of the courage and determination that must have taken, to brave the storms and chilling waters. All lost, the chain of humanity broken forever, ending with me, in the grim twilight of a futile existence.”

He forgot his own emotions as he found the young girl collapsed upon his chest, sobbing like a frightened child. After a moment’s hesitation, in which he saw that restraint would be tantamount to cruelty, he put his arm around her and brought her close, kissed her forehead and said gently. “Don’t cry, little Sylvie (the name he had heard her father use those many years before). It’s over now.”

“But it’s not over,” she said wretchedly. “It’s not. And if you only knew what I was going to do. You’d hate me. You’d never speak to me again. It’s too awful..... And I don’t WANT to. I don’t want to.”

He waited for her to become quieter. “The only thing I couldn’t forgive, and that I don’t understand, is why you keep punishing yourself. The way you’ve withdrawn, and won’t let anyone close to you. Especially Kalus.” He knew from the hurt look she gave him that he had struck upon the heart of her unhappiness. “Or is it him you’re trying to punish?”

“You don’t understand,” she said weakly. And she would have told him, and perhaps have found in his wisdom a way to let go, and renounce the evil thing that she proposed. But at that moment she heard a voice outside the open door.

“I thought I saw her go into the library,” answered McIntyre to an unknown questioner. She stiffened, quickly wiped the tears from her eyes. Kataya knocked lightly, then entered.

“Hello, Commander. Am I disturbing you? I’d hoped to speak with Sylviana.” There was no animosity in her voice. If anything, it was softened and conciliatory. “Would it be all right?”

Though the question had been directed to Stenmark, Sylviana felt the intrusion keenly, as if she had received yet another slight from this woman, who continued to encroach upon her most intimate acquaintances.

“Anything you have to say to me,” she replied without turning, “You can say in front of the Commander.”

Stenmark began to rise diffidently, but she took his arm and would not let him, unsure herself if she wanted his strength to lean upon, or simply did not wish to grant anything so personal to the woman who had hurt her so badly.

“Really, Sylviana, maybe I should go.” But the childlike anguish he saw in the honest look she gave him, made him turn instead with a sigh.

“Please come in,” he said.

“Are you sure, Sylviana? It’s very personal.”

“You heard my answer,” she said coldly, still not turning. “Speak to me here, or not at all.”

“All right. The Commander will have to be informed in any case.” Kataya took a deep breath, trying with all her self-discipline not to sound too triumphant.

“The tests were positive. I’m going to have a child. By Kalus. I wanted to explain that it changes nothing between you, and that I feel no hostility---”

But Sylviana broke her off, whirling in a frenzy. “You sorry Asian WHORE! Sleeping with him behind my back, and humiliating me again and again!”

“No,” said Kataya calmly, firmly. “There was only the one time, which never would have happened..... But it did happen, for which I’ll always be grateful. I just wanted to tell you that I bear you no grudge, and would never try to steal him from you.”

Sylviana stood in shocked silence. And though her face and whole bearing were hostile and inconsolable, Kataya realized they might never speak again. Better to say it all now, and have done.

“Taking him away from you was never my motive. And though I am deeply fond of him..... Can’t you see how much he loves you? PASSIONATELY, single-heartedly. Don’t you know how much that’s worth? I’ve only experienced it once in my life, and I would give all the world to have that back..... My gentle husband, so unlike the hard, cruel men among whom he was raised.”

“Get out!” screamed Sylviana, “Before I tear your eyes out! You MONSTER. You whore.” And she fell to weeping.

Kataya swallowed hard, then left to control her own emotions. Rising, Stenmark spoke for her, perhaps for all the company.
“Sylviana. SYLVIE. I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but I think you have to.”

The young woman fell back upon the stool, sobbing. Touched with pity though he was, the aging Commander knew he could not comfort her until he had made her see the truth.

“The men of Japan, Kataya’s ancestors, were every bit as cruel as the Germans during World War II. They killed millions in their march through Asia, raping women to death, cutting men to pieces, never sparing the children..... So that when America finally developed the atomic bomb, those with the power to use it had very little sympathy left. But loosing that atomic death, whose lingering effects were not yet known, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, making war against the innocent women and children of that tragic country..... One atrocity doesn’t justify another.” And while he was not sure she would understand the parallel, he knew no other way of reaching her.

“The problem with revenge, Sylviana, is that you never hurt the people you’re trying to, but only create new victims. Your country condemned to a slow and horrible death, by all the ills and cancers of radiation poisoning, more than a million men, women and children who had no knowledge of, and took no willing hand in, the butcheries of their military government.”

“I don’t care!” cried the young woman bitterly.
“You have to care,” said Stenmark grievously, “Even if it happened before you were born. And even then, that’s only the smaller part of Kataya’s anger. You lost your father, as we all lost those dear to us..... Imagine if you had lost Kalus, in the full flower of your pure and uncorrupted love for him? And not only Kalus, but the innocent life his seed had planted in your womb.” But Sylviana only wept harder, unable to feel anything but her own pain.

“She may be the last Japanese left alive,” he continued. “And the silent suffering forced on the women of that country by their culture is beyond any power of mine to convey. Should it all be for naught? Hate the men of that time if you want; sometimes I do myself. But not the women. God love them.....

“She has the right to bear a child, Sylviana, and to choose that child’s father. Think about that the next time you find yourself hating her, or despising the blessed and innocent life that now grows inside her. I don’t think you’ll have the heart to hate her then. Not in your worst moments.”

But it was all too much for her: too overwhelming to forgive, or even understand. She raised herself, angrily pushing away the hands that would have comforted her, and ran out of the room with a wordless cry of pain and self-loathing. And kept on running, as if the Devil ran behind her.

In time she slowed to a walk, though she could no more stop moving than deny her lungs the air they screamed for. “Just walk!” she cried. “WALK. Until you can’t feel anything.”

But after another mile she stopped, and knelt down and wept for the third time. Because she knew that she would do it. She would betray the one she loved most. Until she made him feel her pain, thinking nothing of his own---

“I don’t care!” she cried, raging, the three words which so often precede the worst that we are. And though they were not entirely true in her case, the tragic end is often identical.

She would go through with the evil act. She would do it.

Chapter 47

That night Kalus dreamed he was alone in a dark cave, too small and dank for a man. But the light rose slowly through a stone-lipped entrance, and he saw a familiar form beside him as he sank into the wall, to watch. Kamela lay with three cubs beside her. But two had been turned to stone. He struggled to wake himself, because he knew what was to come.

A large wolf entered, looking black, and bared its yellow fangs. Another stood guard outside as the earth parted to admit the terrible and magnificent bastard, Shar-hai. He entered, silent as death, and lifted the living cub and set it gently, almost lovingly, in a corner. Kamela never once moved, or changed her expression as they came closer, snarling sadistically.

They raped her, as he struggled to break free. Only then it was no longer Kamela, but Sylviana they raped, and the face of Shar-hai became human as it tore at her. He struggled desperately and called her name as Smith and Rawlings pinned him to the floor. BUT THEY'RE MY FRIENDS! He cried out to her with heart-crushing passion, as the sound of it filled his ears, and woke him.

He lay on his back, wet with sweat, unable to remember. He threw off the sleeping bag which now seemed to him a coffin, or a mummy’s wrap. He tried to shake off the dream, but the images of Kamela’s rape had never left him, and those of Sylviana as the victim transferred themselves with terrifying ease. His own reality, as it returned to him, seemed far less real. And it came as no surprise as he recognized the human face of Shar-hai. It was William, his teeth like knives.

The sun was climbing: she would be awake. But this was only an afterthought, as he ran toward the compound. He threw open the first door, then the second, and burst into the room he had never seen. She was there, half dressed, seeming but a continuation of the dream from which he felt he had not woken. For there was no waking from the truth.

“Sylviana,” he pleaded, closing the door while she glared at him. “You must not see William today. I have seen a terrible vision. And I know, as I have always known..... He will rape you, and try to hurt you! Perhaps he will even (the thought was unendurable), KILL you.”

She forced herself to finish dressing calmly, as he forced himself not to touch her. But as she tried to walk past him as if he did not exist, he could contain himself no longer. He seized her by the arms, and both lost control.

“You can’t go to him!” he shouted. “I won’t LET you.” And his hands were like claws. Then they softened, along with his eyes, and he all but begged her. “PLEASE.”

“Take your hands off me!” she cried, breaking free with a terrible strength of her own. “Don’t you touch me, ever!” He drew back from her, trembling.

“Haven’t you punished me long enough?” he said. “I am SORRY. For this. For everything. I am in agony; is that what you wanted? But I am also afraid for you, mortally afraid. In some things you are still very naive. You can’t see, no one can see, what he will do to you! But I know the look in his eyes, because I have seen it before. It stood in front of me in the arena, at no greater distance than the length of my sword---”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “You shut up! What do you know about MEN? You couldn’t, because you’re barely more than an ape yourself. Go back to your beloved hill-people, and eat rotten meat in the dirt!”

But here she paused, remembering her purpose. And through the heat of the first real hatred she had ever felt for him, came the cold touch of poise in the act of betrayal, and she knew with a twisted thrill what it was to surrender to Evil.

“But if you’re really worried,” she said placidly, “Wait for me at the Vale of the Obelisk. I’ll meet you there at noon, to tell you of our love-making. And then we’ll say goodbye, forever.”

She strode out, and left him shaking. He fell to his knees and wept, much as William had screamed, to find his lover dead. He was alone in a dark cave, too small and dank for a man.....

William did not wake, because he had not slept. He told himself that he was letting it build inside him, mounting toward the kill. But in truth he was far beyond even that. The amphetamines he had injected though every voice of body and mind cried against it, ate him like a cancer. He had lost all control. This would be an act of vengeance, but not his vengeance. Somewhere in the mincer of pain and loss he had become the very thing he had fought all his life against, what he swore he would never become: an instrument in someone else’s, someTHING else’s hands. He could not admit this. He could not admit, or think, of anything. For his mind was no longer his own. Not by a conscious act of submission---

He gave a violent cry and hurled a bottle at the crumbling half-wall. As it shattered, as he saw the broken glass and knew what it could do to human flesh, he remembered his purpose. In large, painful gulps he drained most of a second bottle, letting the wine take the place of blood in his veins.

He would be Master yet. The sun was up and it was day. He would have her, and then destroy her. Then destroy himself. Nothing else mattered, and Nothing never needed justification. It simply was, the only truth: the hole when the bottom fell out. It was the naked razor, stalking through the streets, cutting out men and women at random. Letting some grow fat for its later pleasure. Wantonly hewing the poor, who though possessed of a greater capacity for suffering, had reached the limits of endurance and could be tortured no more.

He had become a willing servant of the thing he had always fought, and feared. But he did not care.

He did not care.

When he came to her, as arranged, there was a moment when Sylviana saw what Kalus had seen: a wild, desperate hunger in his eyes, that could no longer feed on things which the earth gave as food. They wanted not flesh, but blood, not nourishment, but to mock the very act of nourishment. They could not be fed, or appeased, any more than one could quench the rape of napalm fire.

She turned away, and felt her heart throb violently in revulsion and fear. Only the perverse pride and will that had slowly taken hold of her, kept her from running away at the sight of him. This, and the stubborn naiveté of the illusioned, which told her this instinctive fear was a flaw of perception: that true, malignant evil did not exist, and that things could not possibly come to the ends envisioned by nightmare imagination. It was the same voice that told the world the Holocaust could not happen, was not happening, even as six million Jews, Russians, intellectuals, homosexuals and other defenseless minorities, were led to the fire. She listened to that voice, and made it her island of hope, the one that made the twisted dream of murder and healing, kindness through cruelty, destruction and rebuilding, still possible. Like one who had stared too long at the sun, insisting there was no danger, she was completely blind.

She turned back to him, more composed, and wondered only why he made no attempt to aid her: to dim the cutting laser of his eyes.

But he was through with hiding, and playing the part of the weak and worshipful lover. LET HER SEE! rang the twisted chime of his thoughts, distorted and horrible. Let her walk into the jaws of death with eyes wide open. And this choice also was correct: that his eyes and intentions were obvious, only made them the more impossible to believe.

She merely said, “Shall we go?” And she couldn’t understand why at that moment she should think of the black widow that her father had found in her bedroom as a child, killing it as she cried at his cruelty.

Kalus sat on a piece of broken stone with his head in his hands, unable yet to look up and go on. Alaska stood before him, puzzled. Her young mind had continued to develop, so that now she was aware of her existence as clearly, if without the same complexity, as any human adolescent. In the preceding weeks she had realized that such a choice might come: a choice between the two people she loved. And for reasons no more complicated than simple feeling, she had chosen Kalus, had remained with him as he lay helpless on the floor, and not followed when Sylviana called to her angrily.

It was his one compensation. He knew that if he left the colony the cub would go with him, regardless of what lay ahead. It was that simple, and that beautiful. And in that moment, alone and forlorn among the ruins of yet another tortured depression, this singular act of giving broke his heart. Because he saw in her pure, animal innocence the thing that he had always wanted from a woman, but had not dared to ask:

Loyalty, which so many have forgotten, and for which there is no other word. And not the pale imitation of it found in some marriages, which demand that each cut off and subvert some part of themselves, to be joined like hobbled twins at the place of amputation. What he wanted was nothing more and nothing less than the bond of true allies: not half a woman, because of him, but a whole woman, for the same reason. Not to enslave but to enrich, not to question in time of crisis, but to love and support, not blindly, but freely and fully. All these things he had offered her; but he knew they meant nothing if she was unwilling to give the same in return. Because there is no such thing as one-sided love.

He did not know how he understood these things, or why they had come to him now, only that he knew them, and that their truth was unbending. Yes. He would wait for her at the designated time and place. If she came to him and said she could not do it, and asked his help to rebuild the things that they had lost, he would remain with her forever.

But if she came to him in mocking triumph---if she ever again spoke to him as she had---all was finished between them. He would leave her, leave this place, and never look back. There was no middle ground. Because he knew finally, defiantly, that he was physically incapable of being other than himself, and should never have tried to be. The consequences of rejection would be devastating, and in the cold light of day he did not know how he would find the will to go on, without her. But this no longer mattered. Nothing mattered, but that this agony and fear must end. There was no other way.

He rose and walked the remaining distance. To the Vale of the Obelisk. To wait.

***

SO FAR IT'S GONE WELL ENOUGH, she told herself, though she still could not look at him, or one second further than the present. They sat together on the sunlit slope of a wide, grassy recession. Its quiet symmetry would have been lovely and serene, but for a single thrust of gnarled stone which pierced its center, ringed about the base by a matting of jagged weeds. The company called it Devil’s Thumb. It was a protrusion of the devil to be sure, but she wasn’t at all sure that ‘thumb’ was the correct metaphor. She kept her eyes away from it, concentrating instead on the white sheet spread beneath them, on the bread and wine before them.

He had brought the wine, for which she was grateful, and she drank of it probably more than she should. But it gave her confidence, and helped dull the edge of her rebelling senses. Perhaps half an hour had passed from the time of her first ready mouthful; and he smiled each time the glass touched her lips. If an eerie contraction of taut face muscles can be called a smile.

“Have you ever done hallucinogenic drugs?” He tried to ask carelessly, but could not quite pull it off.

“What on earth made you ask that?”

“Oh, nothing really. Just curious.” She wished he would stop looking at her that way.

“Yes I have. Once, with Kalus. We..... It was peyote.”

“How much did you do?”

“Two buttons each. One right away..... Why are you laughing?”

“Two peyote buttons, and you think you’ve seen it all. Ha! That wouldn’t be enough to open your pretty little eyelids.” She wondered why she suddenly felt restless and irritable.

“What makes you think it’s only how much, and not how pure? Or maybe we just didn’t need to have our whole consciousness blown away to get something meaningful from it.” She felt angry, defiant, and horribly uncomfortable. “I could do LSD if I wanted to.”

“Could you now? We’re going to find out.” She felt the touch of an icy hand inside her.

“What do you mean?”

“The wine is laced with it.”

And the current closed over her head.

Kalus sat in the fore of the leering monolith, which lay just inside the rim of the oblong vale. The dwarfish Obelisk, like a pointed tombstone, lay swart and square in its center. Kalus remembered the first time he had come here, driven on by Sylviana’s almost distracted haste to find others of her kind. AND TO ESCAPE, he thought bitterly, HER DEPENDENCE ON ME. It was here, beneath the monolith, that he had tried to cleanse and bandage the wound on her leg. The memory and sight of it, of blood on her beloved flesh, filled all his thoughts. Through the strong taste of pride and anger, a fresh and cutting sense of worry returned to him. The protective instinct was too strong inside him, and what they had shared, too deep.

He thought of following after her, but did not know which way she had gone, and doubted Alaska’s ability (as well as his own) to find and isolate her most recent trail among the layered and crisscrossing paths of the colonists. He could only wait, and watch the sun wheel the shadows around him. When the longer shadow of the Monolith joined that of the deeply carved Obelisk, locking together into a long sword of darkness upon the earth, it would be time. And she must come to him.

But that remained at least two hours away. He looked down at the deerskin pouch, which had slipped from his shoulder and rested, half open, on the ground. Remembering one of its contents, he emptied it out onto a gray, porous stone before him.

There, beside the wrapped hunting knife (which she now refused to carry), the whet-stone, and the flints for making fire, he saw them. Dryer, less green, but still potent in their otherworldly magic: the five remaining peyote buttons. He lifted one and turned it in his hand, wondering. It had helped him to understand once before..... Perhaps it would show him something now, which he could see no other way.

Guided by an impulse he did not completely understand, and half against his better judgment, he put the first in his mouth, and chewed it. Then slaked his throat with water. Again. And a short time later, again.

There are no words to describe LSD. For the person who has taken it before it is still like landing from another planet: nothing is familiar, and nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is powerful, evocative, unknown. For the person who has not, it is like a bewildered and even unconscious dream. If the experience is good, it is life at its deepest and most intense. If it is bad, there is no greater horror on the Earth. And in either case, the mind is never quite the same. Doors are opened which cannot later be shut, and some residue, both chemical and spiritual, remains forever.

The acid that William had made was not particularly strong or pure, and this alone saved her sanity. But it was strong enough, and tinged with strychnine and speed. She could not hide, from anything.

Sylviana tried to master her panic. And so far, by the narrowest of margins she had succeeded. ALL RIGHT, she told herself. All right. It had happened. There was nothing to done now but see it through. Except that she kept forgetting what the words meant, forgetting the words she said, forgetting words. She was alone in a gruesome place with a man she did not know or trust. She could not force herself to remain there a moment longer.

“We have to go,” she said, rising. The motion, scarcely felt, elevated her head, the line of her sight. But she could not shake the feeling of being deep under the water, lungs bursting for air. She wanted to swim with all her strength, upward toward the surface. But some horrible weight, or cold serpentine grip held her down, wrapped about her legs and ankles. That grip was her obsession. The life-saving air was Kalus, and she knew it.

But no, her stupor-rationale insisted. It’s not so. I can breathe. I can walk. She strode to the top of the hill, feeling a moment’s release, only to find that William had followed her soundlessly, like a shadow. And that she no longer knew where she was, or how to find her way back.

BACK. To what?

And then the real fear, the telling blows, began to find her. Because it seemed, it was, an overriding certainty that there was no returning. This was reality, doubly real. She had fallen into a bottomless pit. NO WAY OUT!

“Let’s go for a walk,” said William gently, now so sure of his prey that he was almost disappointed. But he would see it through, and knew that to do so he must build her up again, just enough. Then tear her down. Again, until the moment was ripe. And then God help her.

But Sylviana was there ahead of him. She clung to this mockery of care and affection, five simple words, with all the desperate power of her desire not to believe. “Yes, my dear, sweet William. Let’s go for a walk.” And he smiled, a moment of sympathy that he knew would only make the fire of his hatred burn the whiter. She might make the going pleasing, after all.

“Yes,” he said wryly. “A walking tour of the neighborhood. I’ll show you how the other half. . .dies.”

So they set out, Sylviana forgetting that this unraveled the last of her plans, and that Kalus would no longer be close at hand.

For better or worse.

Kalus remained, still as the stone on which he sat. He had moved some time before to the more level ground before the Obelisk, though the grotesque figures carved upon it kept him from coming too close. The peyote had begun to work on him, but its effect was entirely different than what he had hoped. Instead of giving him peace and a quiet understanding, it filled him with a dread that was almost physical. All his thoughts, worded and otherwise, seemed to crash in upon themselves like the breaking of a wave, crushing and smothering every positive impulse, every hopeful thought within him. He was back in the hopeless world of his past, from which she had helped him to escape.

But there was no escape. No matter how he turned it around, no matter what contingencies he tried to make and force himself to swallow, the bitter truth remained. Without his woman he had nothing: no love, no purpose, no home. No way to go on, and no reason to try. The ancient sense of fatalism and betrayal returned to him, with still greater intensity, because for a time he had been free. And the brief interval of spoken words and close female companionship evaporated, could no longer protect him from the silent, brutal worlds he had known. Again he saw before him the long chain of savagery and violence, of endless pain and pointless perseverance. All leading to this. To be broken and alone, as only the last of a species is alone.

He too felt the razor, though dully. And his one regret in those darkened moments was that he had been so skilled in eluding it.

“Forty-second street,” said William, continuing in the manner of a tour through Hell. They stood at the base of a long, flat stretch, like a sunken airport runway before them, the grassy dikes to either side still suggestive of the tombs, the mass graves they barely covered.

“You see before you a busy street---strip joints, adult book stores, pornographic theaters. But you don’t seem to notice the background much. No. It’s the ragged flowers springing from the sidewalk that catch and hold your eye: prostitutes, the whipping girls of the city.

“On a good day all they’re required to do is give their bodies to pawing, drooling idiots, who in their half-assed passion call them ‘mother’, ‘cheap whore’, or the name of some long-lost lover. Oh, but of course they don’t really FEEL anything. They’re not real people, like you and I.” At this he curled his lip, barely able to contain his rage. “On bad days..... They’re harassed and preyed upon by police, jaded social workers and psychotic killers, or just beaten and abused by the ‘fatherly’ pimps.

“And what is their crime, that makes them the object of universal scorn and reprisal? They’re VICTIMS, vulnerable, bringing out the predatory instinct in all of us. And more than that, they commit the most unforgivable sin of all: they make us look at ourselves, and see something about our pretty little world that we don’t like. Because they do, in fact, what the rest of us do in spirit: sell themselves, body and soul, for MONEY. Only they lack the skills and social graces, like the ones you learned in college, to be subtle and self-justifying about it. They are OBVIOUS, and much too real, an easy target for nearly everyone. And the human animal never misses easy prey.”

Sylviana heard the words---stark and depressing enough---but what gave them their power were the images her own memory provided. She saw it all: the rooster-like pimps grabbing gaudily dressed women by the hair, and without remorse throwing them into the back seats of still gaudier cars, for later punishment, which no doubt included beating and rape. And if her head happened to strike the roof, starting a rivulet of blood.....

And she remembered the murder she had so nearly witnessed: saw the chalk outline that the homicide detectives had drawn on the sidewalk as the paramedics arrived to wheel her into a waiting ambulance, her death a foregone conclusion, the eyes still terrified though the life even now fled from them. A face once young and fair: a sixteen-year-old runaway from nameless suburbs, driven from her home perhaps by an abusive parent, drawn to the city like a moth to flame. And brought to the same end. While the jagged man the police had cuffed and were dragging away, screamed in bursts of occasional coherence, “All women are whores!”

And she remembered too, even as he said, the thoughts that she had always used to dismiss such women, and the hopeless tragedy of their lives. HOW CAN THEY DO IT? THEY MUST JUST TURN OFF THEIR MINDS, AND NOT FEEL ANYTING..... IT'S AWFUL, BUT SHE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER THAN TO WALK THE STREETS ALONE. As if this was something she had done of her own volition, and against the warnings of loved ones and friends. And she thought of her own plan, which was worse. Not to sleep with a man for money, which could at least claim the honest shred of need. But for revenge.

And coming back to herself for a moment, she realized with a sudden shock that this same plan, along with the subconscious safety valve she had built into it, were now completely out of hand. She had no idea where they were (in relation to anything else), only where they weren’t: within hearing range of Kalus, on whom she had relied to protect her at need. As the dagger of fear sank an inch lower into her breast.

“You’re right William,” she said hurriedly. “And it’s horrible. But please, please take me somewhere else.” Sheer movement seemed the only defense from the razor---

“My GOD.” There seemed to be a literal razor forming out of the air before her, a glint of sunlight on cold steel. She cowered, and crossed her arms defensively in front of her.

“Oh, no, not yet,” said the Stranger, as if he understood it all. He seized her by one foreshortened arm, and led her toward the next exhibit. After an interminable length of time he stopped again, and pointed.

“Seventh Avenue.”

Kalus remained, still as stone, but no longer in confusion and despair. He stood rooted to the spot in horror.

The two shadows had met and become one, a broadsword of Death upon the wounded earth. The sun was now directly south of the monolith. Yet it was not the Shadow, but a patch of wicked, unexpected Light that showed him in a searing instant the real danger into which his woman had fallen, and the true Evil that walked upon the earth. A square-cut hole high in the center of the monolith, hidden earlier by its vague, uncontoured grayness, now let through a shaft of light, which came to rest in impossible coincidence upon a single carving of the dwarfish Obelisk: the face of a horned Devil, its lolling tongue six inches long, was held in the internal pentagon of a ghoulish star, pointing downward. Carved perhaps by some mutant from the days when half-men, like lepers, still clung to the fire-pillaged rock, it looked down upon the slab of altar at its feet, just large enough for a child, just deep enough to contain its flowing blood. As remorseless and aroused, the Beast smiled in the helpless light of day.

“Sylviana!” he cried aloud, knowing now that only he could save her. No answer. He stood up and called again, one last act of desperation.

Nothing. He went down on one knee, and patted the ground with his open hand. He needed no more prodding. The time had come to act.

“Alaska,” he whispered intently. “Sylviana. SYLVIANA.” This time the cub seemed to understand, and apparently had some insight as to where they might be found, for she set out at once. Or at least some idea where they might begin to look.

If it was not already too late.

*

“Stop it! Stop it!” she cried, covering her face with her hands. She had gone with him, and listened as he spoke of junkies, toxic waste, victims and violence and hospitals. From place to place, in growing horror, thinking with one last gasp of real courage that perhaps she deserved this, and needed to know.

But when he brought her at last to the ruins of an enormous research facility, and began to describe, in detail, the torturous experiments performed here on bound, terrified animals in the name of progress and the greater good, she felt the tip of the blade licking at her heart.

Because she knew it was true. Her father had been assigned here as an intern. He had stormed out in a rage at the asphyxiation, force-feeding of toxic substances, vivisection, “Sweet Jesus,” and ‘stress tests’, performed on dogs and cats, rhesus monkeys and other primates, some more intelligent than the lackeys who tormented them. Refusing to participate had put his career in jeopardy, something he was willing to do, to stand up against what he knew was wrong and indefensible. And he had spoken out against the Horror, for those who could not speak.

But many of his colleagues had not been willing. All the beloved doctors and scientists, characterized as forthright, altruistic men and women, working for the good of humanity, if not actively involved, at least turning the other way as innocent, uncomprehending creatures were subjected to physical and psychological tortures that were the rival of the Holocaust. The Leeds Institute of Animal Research, called by its critics, LIAR.

She kept thinking of Alaska.

But William felt no sympathy for her. The fact that such men had murdered themselves in the process, that humanity had been no kinder to its human victims, that it was ‘over now’, could not cover the brutal shame of it. All of it. Could not bring back the dead. The innocent and the dead, who had been helpless before the grim machinations of vicious human fear and ignorance.

He let her remain there, hobbled against a mound of slag. Then he drew out his stiletto, and shot the blade into place. And held it six inches from her face. She had ceased weeping and sat helpless, sobbing, ready for the fall. As he said in a gentle, sing-song voice.

“Time to wake u-up.”

She opened her hands and her eyes, as if seeing for the first time.

She opened her eyes. The razor stood before her. Not as some dark and frightening intangible, but a stark physical reality, held in the iron grip of her fellow man. Because malicious evil is still only a weapon, and requires willing human hands to wield it.

For a single instant she sat there numb, neither believing nor comprehending. But then he seized her violently by the front of the blouse, lifting her to him. And with a quick insertion of the blade and a hard jerk backwards, he cut away her bra, ripping the garment wide open as he threw her back onto the ground.

A startled, “William, don’t do this,” tried to form in her throat, but was drowned out as he screamed in a wrath no longer his own, but that of all creatures brutalized and turned vicious by the bloody hells from which man has barely begun to raise himself.

“And do you know who’s going to PAY for it! YOU ARE!”

One word alone would form from her terror, a last, instinctive cry against the Razor, and the trickle of blood at her breast. She screamed, louder than he.

“KALUS!”

From a distance of three hundred yards he heard her. Instantly his senses were trained upon the spot and he was running, leaving the startled cub far behind. The broken, undulating ridges kept her from his sight, and tried to impede him. But he did not need to hear the sound twice to locate it, or force his hammering body to respond.

And by the time he reached the final crest, his anger had turned to a rage that bordered on madness that ANYONE, EVER, would DARE to attack his woman. All his pain and frustration now found release in thoughts, soon to be acts, of violence. The sight of them struggling, of William again throwing her down and glowering over her, knife in hand, undid the last thin strands of mercy and restraint. He all but flew down the hill, and from atop the same mound of slag, leapt out like a panther with a savage cry.

An instant later their bodies crashed together, as Sylviana crawled back against the shelter of broken stone, drawing her torn blouse shut against the maelstrom.

William was stunned, the knife sent flying from his hand. For all the hardships of his life, he had never before faced the merciless onslaught of an animal defending its own. Blows rained upon like a landslide, and he knew that his death was at hand. He backed away in desperation, crawling on his elbows, pushing with his legs.

But Kalus was already on his feet, the sword seething from its scabbard. He lofted it high above his head, both hands hard on the hilt, as his eyes chose the place that he would strike, a thundering blow to cut his enemy in two.

But then time stood still.

Time stood still.

Kalus looked into the face of the man he was prepared to kill. A hideous change had come over it. His heart wrenched inside him, and the blow never fell. Sylviana gasped as well, and struggled for the breath to plead mercy. But there was no need, as both finally understood the words of the Spirit.

There before him, where a human form had been, lay the contorted figure of a demon, a face twisted and insane. A man possessed. But not by some Bible-black devil, or mythological spirit of Evil. By the more real, the more horrible.

The demon, the reality, of Fear.

Slowly Kalus lowered his sword, sick with pity and remorse, as Sylviana hid her face against the stone.

More slowly still, some semblance of its original shape returned to the red terror of William’s face. And as terrible to him as his own countenance had been to Kalus, were the words that his enemy now spoke, who should have killed him.

“Forgive me,” said the man-child sorrowfully. “I didn’t understand.”

As if struck by a hammer, William fell back. Something inside him tried to laugh, but was drowned instead by anguished tears, and a groan of pain that twisted his soul like a rag. The terrible voice continued as the cub, knowing nothing yet of hatred and violence, but only an instinctive compassion, came closer and licked his face.

“I knew only that you had lost your woman. I did not know how deeply you loved her, or what it had done to you..... We will leave you now, because you need to be alone.”

Then Kalus drew a breath, remembering hard reality.

“It is only possible for a natural man to forgive, when his enemy can no longer hurt those entrusted to his care. I cannot let you close to my loved ones, and if you ever again try to hurt them, I will kill you without pity or remorse. But I see now your pain and sickness, and I will ask the others to help you if they can.”

And the fallen man hid his face in shame.

Sylviana, who had risen, moved now toward her beloved mate. She stood beside him, looking down, silently begging forgiveness. But his touch, the way his arms enfolder her, told her there was no need, said everything that must be said. Three words only remained, and she spoke them with all her heart.

“I love you.”

Chapter 48

Together the weary lovers walked across the wounded landscape to the sea. Reaching its margins, Kalus drew out the remaining peyote buttons. The two exchanged glances, and both understood.

“You have been both a teacher and a killer,” he said. “But I have no further need of you, nor would I ask another to follow down your dark and treacherous path.” And he threw them into the sea. Then together they knelt in the cool and cleansing waters, and washed the sins from their hands.

Then returning to the narrow stretch of sand, the woman-child lay back. She lay very still, and listened to the stories told by the waves, touching them all, and hiding from none. Until all that remained was the sun behind, the sea before, and the man she loved beside her. She stood up and embraced him, and her soul was restored to her.

And together they returned slowly to the colony, as Alaska strode beside them, thinking of Akar, and of the wild woods of youth. As Avatar ran free, and the unborn life inside Kataya continued to grow.

And so one chapter ended, even as another began, as it always has been, and always will be. The only question left before a man, as before Man himself:

Will he be a part of that tale?

The End

Aragorn Books

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