The death of their way of life? — I would ask, sadly.
Oh, no big thing — They’d come back.
Over and over, up down and sideways, they denied carrying any leftover ideals.
“It became an injurious doctrine,” the marble men told us, in their profound marble voices, “continuously striving to be pure.”
“There’s only so much light a body can put up with,” an aluminum creature told us, with a rattle in its vowels. “Light, light, light. Do you think the rocks noticed while I was there trying to shine my brightest?”
“One realizes after a while that the concept, funny, covers too large a spectrum of related ideas.” This was an unusually delicate group of beings, made of what appeared to be nylon and rotted fruit. “One tried, but one never understood all the complexities.”
These creatures could communicate only by inserting a kind of appendage, an olive-colored nylon filament, inside each of their listeners. When the point had gone in, just below my diaphragm, there’d been no more than a moment’s pain. But now, as the creature began explaining itself, I suffered a pang of jealousy from head to toe. Ul ‘Lyu, at the nylon touch, had started to warble.
“One realizes after a while,” my filament spoke just before I violently jerked free, “that life goes on.”
Life goes on! Those last words in my belly meant more to me than all our other loose talk with the dead put together. For in that one simple shock of jealousy, after the uncounted arousals and depressions brought on by these visitors, I’d perceived at last the unique hold I had on Ul ‘Lyu. Now I kicked and tugged like the worst spoiled brat of a child. I hauled her away. Behind us, the freed points of the nylon people waved feebly. But I wouldn’t allow Ul ‘Lyu to watch; I shrieked and yanked with both wrists….
Really, it embarrasses me to recall the scene, these days. Even after all that’s gone on since. But with more weeping, more low opera, more hysterics than ever before, once I got Ul ‘Lyu away from the nylon people I made it clear all over again that I loved her.
“Don’t be silly, Baby,” she said many times. “Oh, you are silly.”
But no, Ul ‘Lyu, no I wouldn’t stop. I knew what I’d just at last perceived. Because you remained always yourself, my winking, motley darling. During a thousand visitations from dead worlds everywhere, we’d met no one so irrepressible as you, so uncaring as you. Yes. While the other ruined creatures looked on amazed, you would make pleasant conversation about, say for example, waking at night in a barracks to hear two soldiers buttfucking a third. Any ghost in earshot was struck dumb. Meantime I would stand there, or hang there, smiling knowledgeably. That’s nothing, my look would say; what you just heard was nothing for my Ul ‘Lyu. So what if these other dead worlds had learned to put on a thick skin? Not one of them, Ul ‘Lyu, not one that we’d come across yet could match your range. Monster girl, what did you know about caring? You asked the aluminum people what it felt like to be torn apart. You asked the men in their alabaster chambers whether, as their world collapsed, any of them had slashed their wrists. Innumerable times, in fact, I’d watched you poking and prodding, drilling for any new sensation. And now that the nylon filament had poked you, now that for once your guts had been converted to mere talk, now I understood. What you saw in me was precisely that thing I’d feared made me bad company. For you, I was the one grip on true feeling. Among the cool talk of destruction, the flick-of-the-wrist way these people could dismiss hopes they’d once believed they would live off forever, I alone offered genuine caring. Ul ‘Lyu, I was your touchstone.
So I screamed, I wept. It embarrasses me still to think of it. I ignored the little insults that would have stopped my tears in their tracks before this. I showed Ul ‘Lyu what feeling was.
And soon enough, sure enough, she was responding: “Ooo Baby Baby, I love you.”
I think I noticed in those very first words the falseness, the utter vacancy, of what she was saying.
“Ooo Bay-bay, yes I do.”
I couldn’t help but notice. She sounded exactly like one of those vapid soda-pop love songs I could remember from when I was last a teenager. I could almost hear the sappy strings, the faked echo effects.
“Ooo Baby, I love you-ooo too.”
But I wept on, drawing the promises out of her.
I should have realized what would happen. No insight, no matter how genuine, no trick no matter how devious, could have blocked every possible way I might lose her.
From some unmarked place high overhead, at some unmarked point in time, there arrived a dead population of singers. The music, however, was different from Ul ‘Lyu’s; it wasn’t accidental. In the shape of trumpets, more or less the consistency of brass, these new singers flew into the chalk-bright air of my adopted world. Around their distant bodies the sky became a mottled blue and green. I too was intrigued, during those brief moments before I realized the danger.
But then those trumpets began to play, then the bells of their horns grew and shrank according to the demands of their song…and then at once my Ul ‘Lyu began to respond. Of course I wouldn’t have minded if she’d merely wanted to talk. But something extra came into her electric hum, while the trumpets sang. I felt — oh, something extra. I felt the iron surfaces spreading once more against my palms, my fingers.
Ul ‘Lyu, trying to sing, went higher. The first time it happened, as she struggled for the tune, it became obvious that she would forget me if I let her. But, my bright bird, talented as you were, you couldn’t master the art right off. I did manage to survive pass after pass of these visiting trumpets. I did get to see how, below us, the buttes and canyons would shrink to no more than wrinkles in the white sheetrock, marked from end to end by the irregular intervals of five grouped lines. Against them, our shadows were dots.
For the music was different from Ul ‘Lyu’s. In order to play with this new kind — in order, it seemed, to communicate at all — she had to work. Ul ‘Lyu began by simply trying the melody. Then since the trumpet-people seemed uninterested, my lover turned to harmony, to counterpoint, or to adding a baroque, quasi-woodwind flourish. Yes, of course I took note of every least modulation. I was desperate for any chance at regaining her. And very pretty, Ul ‘Lyu, your work was very pretty. With each additional music lesson you put a new crack in my heart. Moreover the trumpets, also, must have liked something of what they heard, because they returned for pass after pass. At the edge of her sky, the brass ghosts would swivel like snakes and come back for another attempt at the combined symphony. And the more my lover tried to round out the score, the more metal she became.
Ul ‘Lyu, Ul ‘Lyu. I…
I don’t like to think, now, of the humiliations I went through to get her attention. Maybe the Powers on my world, inside their shuttered stalls, can identify gradations of pain. For myself, however, there is only a single, seamless ball-bearing of shame that rattles up and down the spine as I recall my excesses. I will admit I shouted till the muscles of my lungs were weary. I will admit that, with forced jealousy, I pointed out that the trumpet is considered a masculine instrument. Whenever I succeeded in tearing Ul ‘Lyu away from her music there followed pitiful bawlings of “true love, Ul ‘Lyu, true love.” And there are tricks even a cripple can do. By the end I was injuring myself deliberately. I kicked my feet bloody, against the metal that emerged while she tried to sing. Heaving myself up like a man pulling himself onto a tree branch, I cut my forehead open. I could even bash my nose against her iron self, until I was swallowing blood and mucus.