He bent and found a fossiclass="underline" a great leaf-shape imprinted in the stone, larger than his hand. It was the skeletal remnant of a living thing, more lovely in its demise than ever it had been in life. For never would its beauty fade; never would its essence die.
His gloved fingers caressed the fixed serrations in honor of a lingering camaraderie. Would the fossil of Aton ride through space with such indifferent éclat?
Death, where is now thy—
He tried to shake off the mood by climbing toward the bright sunside of the asteroid. The leaf must have grown in sunshine, once. If one could only enter the heaven of the fossil’s past, see the waving foliage, touch the mighty tree. Turn back the metronome of matter, allow all doubts to be resolved in the soft embrace of life’s origins.
The sharp horizon brightened as he approached sun-side. One heave, around the second corner—
He was bathed in the warm brilliance of that sun; light, light everywhere, banishing all dark and all doubt.
The mechanism of the suit compensated immediately, protecting him, allowing him to look out upon the land, to see the air on it, the shining mists in the air, the growing things in the soil, the great green leaves.
To me this land is lush and lovely, convex hills so high and fine, matching mounds so softly rounded, waiting for—
Aton shook himself, the sealed suit shifting with him like a second skin. What was happening to him? Why was he thinking in metric feet? There was no atmosphere; there could be no trees, no poetry. This was a bare slab of rock hurtling in orbit around a numbered star. There could be no security in hallucination. If he ever really forgot where he was, death would be a blunt reminder.
Yet down beyond those yearning mountains, where the passive waters shine, the source of life is waiting for me, waiting while I—
Shocked, Aton turned again, resuming his progress toward the fossil at the planet’s edge. Somehow, unconsciously, he had traveled farther down the valley, lulled by the hint of some fierce ecstasy—to which he dared not yield. Something was speaking to him, luring him, drawing him onward to some unimaginable rendezvous.
Beyond the mountains are the waters, thick and warm as fresh-let blood.
“Jill!” he cried. “Stay out of my fantasy.” I fled from your cruelty ten years ago; I hardly remember you; you don’t belong here; I am afraid of the thing you stand for: the feel of blood upon my hand, the sound of laughter at my ear. Not blood, you say—not blood, but bliss, offered to my fourteenth year.
Aton turned once more, breathing hard, trying to achieve the objectivity of the stone leaf. That had been the turning point. Until then he had been in control of himself.
Reality came back, showing the conical outcroppings he had walked between, the glaring shadows they cast in the beam of the distant sun. As he watched, those shadows softened, became misty. The hills turned green and more than green, breathing with luxury.
Before him was a curving field leading down to a valley sheltered between gently rolling bluffs. The secret lake was there, more exciting, more inviting than any isolated mirage. The bliss it offered within its depths no longer wholly repelled him. His blood sang with the need to enjoy that liquid, to plunge himself totally into it. He had come from it; he would return to it.
No! But the vision reached inside his resistance and turned it off, leaving a faint muted protest tingling far behind. Fourteen steps he took to reach that lake, and hesitated, afraid to pass beyond the nameless barrier within himself. The water called, it called, but that tiny castrate conscience, damned somewhere behind the frozen leaf, pleaded with him not to sacrifice the thing he had been for the thing he would become. The shaking sweat mottled his face as he fought, knowing that the outcome had already been determined, but fighting still to preserve the forms of a bygone innocence.
Slowly a hand came up to unfasten the helmet of his suit. Could it be his own? The clasps came open, the seals were broken, the helmet came away from his head. He did not die. The air of the valley came to him then, musky and sweet, exhilarating in its freshness. He tasted the bloom of it and felt strong. Soon the remainder of his impeding suit was off; naked, he ran on to the water.
Once more the fading doubt held him back, a doubt permitted now because the usurper felt secure. Resistance had become mere titillation, adding luster to the act. The dominant emotion toyed felinely with his timorous conscience and gave it the freedom of thinking it was free.
He was suffused with the sense of impending accomplishment. The touch of the water at his bare toes electrified his body. He could not see the liquid any more. Only his flesh was aware of it sliding voluptuously over his ankles enfolding them in a closure of incipient pleasure, tantalizing at its commencement, luxurious in its completion.
A fundamental meaning was rising in him, a meaning whose only expression had to be calamitously powerful, a thrusting-forth of such magnitude as to remove mountains and impregnate the entire lake with animation.
The warm pressure ascended, circling calves, knees, thighs. It washed against him rhythmically, drawing forth the deepest force in him with delicate strokes. The tide of it increased, suddenly, compellingly, throwing him into a second vision of a young hand traveling up younger skirts, touching the forbidden junction. But this time the stickiness did not alarm; it drew him on and in with tempestuous passion.
The two scales of flesh and liquid merged under a superimposed image of the vernier, jumping into focus before his closed eyes. Unable to hold back full expression any longer, he plunged in all the way.
The water, the landscape, the universe rang with the tumescence of his urge, and from the depths of his most intimate ambition the fluid essence surged, climbing, swirling, subject to enormous pressure, bursting into a hurricane of force, exploding at last in a tortured pleasuration rending flesh and dissolving bone and satiating spirit beyond endurance. In Heaven you have heard… Love has pitched his… O joy! O joy! O joy!
Some power outside himself buoyed him up, lifted him through surging currents of excruciation far, far to a light above. It was her hand, warm on his arm, bringing him away from the obliteration his equivocal passion had led him to. A dark god waited at the terminus, a thing to whom passion and guilt were simple tools, a god whom a sane man could not serve.
A god that Aton would serve when the full implication of the asteroid allegory reached his conscious mind.
The rain had stopped, though he was soaking; monsters and confining walls were gone. Sunlight played down, not on the broken column he half expected, but on a glistening countryside, high and green in the dusk and wondrously attractive.
“You have—won,” she said, selecting an imprecise word. She was the woman of the forest, the nymph of love. “I cannot, I cannot let you go that way. Not to so great an evil.” She spoke of eviclass="underline" not the thing they had done at the spotel, but the god he was to serve. The god who had offered him sanctuary.
The phantasmagoria was over. The specters were gone, whatever they had been, and Malice was once again the unspoiled luster of his dreams. The lovely lady of his childhood had returned, the object of all his love, never to be distorted again.
His pure emotion encompassed her. He kissed her, savoring the completion of the melody at last. Never had his love been so strong.