“Somebody brought it from Home. Had it in their baggage,” Reine suggested.
“For twenty-five years?” said the Commander. “Why? And who? We all know what all the others have!”
“No. I think”—Miriam was confused, and stammered—“I think it’s something Genya did. I asked him to put up one of his paintings here. Not this one. How did he do this?”
“Copied from a photograph,” Avram suggested.
“No no no no, impossible,” old Marca said, outraged. “That is a painting, not a copy! That is a work of art, that was seen, seen with the eyes and the heart!” With the eyes and the heart.
Miriam looked, and she saw. She saw what the light of NSC 641 had hidden from her, what the artificial Earth daylight of the room revealed to her. She saw what Genya saw: the beauty of the world.
“I think it must be in Central France, the Auvergne,” Reine was saying wistfully, and the Commander, “Oh no no no, it’s near Lake Como, I am certain,” and Avram, “Well it looks to me like where I grew up in the Caucasus,” when they all turned to look at Miriam. She had made a strange noise, a gasp or laugh or sob. “It’s here,” she said. “Here. That’s Ararat. The mountain. That’s the fields, our fields, our trees. That’s the corner of the school, that tower. See it? It’s here. Zion. It’s how Genya sees it. With the eyes and the heart.”
“But look, the trees are green, look at the colors, Miriam. It’s Earth—”
“Yes! It is Earth. Genya’s Earth!”
“But he can’t—”
“How do we know? How do we know what a child of Zion sees? We can see the picture in this light that’s like Home. Take it outside, into the daylight, and you’ll see what we always see, the ugly colors, the ugly planet where we’re not at home. But he is at home! He is! It’s we,” Miriam said, laughing in tears, looking at them all, the anxious, tired, elderly faces, “we who lack the key. We with our—with our—” she stumbled and leapt at the idea like a horse at a high wall, “with our meta pills!”
They all stared at her.
“With our meta pills, we can survive here, just barely, right? But don’t you see, he lives here! We were all perfectly adjusted to Earth, too well, we can’t fit anywhere else—he wasn’t, wouldn’t have been; allergic, a misfit—the pattern a little wrong, see? The pattern. But there are many patterns, infinite patterns, he fits this one a little better than we do—”
Avram and the Commander continued to stare. Reine shot an alarmed glance at the picture, but asked gamely, “You’re saying that Genya’s allergies—”
“Not just Genya! All the sicklies, maybe! For twenty-five years I’ve been feeding them metas, and they’re allergic to Earth proteins, the metas just foul them up, they’re a different pattern, oh, idiot! Idiot! Oh, my God, he and Rachel can get married. They’ve got to marry, he should have kids. What about Rachel taking metas while she’s pregnant, the foetus. I can work it out, I can work it out. I must call Leonid. And Moishe, thank God! maybe he’s another one! Listen, I must go talk to Genya and Rachel, immediately. Excuse me!” She left, a short, grey woman moving like a lightning bolt.
Marca, Avram, and Reine stood staring after her, at each other, and finally back at Genya’s painting.
It hung there before them, serene and joyful, full of light.
“I don’t understand,” said Avram.
“Patterns,” Reine said thoughtfully.
“It is very beautiful,” said the old Commander of the Exile Fleet. “Only, it makes me homesick.”
Mazes
I have tried hard to use my wits and keep up my courage, but I know now that I will not be able to withstand the torture any longer. My perceptions of time are confused, but I think it has been several days since I realised I could no longer keep my emotions under aesthetic control, and now the physical breakdown is also nearly complete. I cannot accomplish any of the greater motions. I cannot speak. Breathing, in this heavy foreign air, grows more difficult. When the paralysis reaches my chest I shall die: probably tonight.
The alien’s cruelty is refined, yet irrational. If it intended all along to starve me, why not simply withhold food? But instead of that it gave me plenty of food, mountains of food, all the greenbud leaves I could possibly want. Only they were not fresh. They had been picked; they were dead; the element that makes them digestible to us was gone, and one might as well eat gravel. Yet there they were, with all the scent and shape of greenbud, irresistible to my craving appetite. Not at first, of course. I told myself, I am not a child, to eat picked leaves! But the belly gets the better of the mind. After a while it seemed better to be chewing something, anything, that might still the pain and craving in the gut. So I ate, and ate, and starved. It is a relief, now, to be so weak I cannot eat. The same elaborately perverse cruelty marks all its behavior. And the worst thing of all is just the one I welcomed with such relief and delight at first: the maze. I was badly disoriented at first, after the trapping, being handled by a giant, being dropped into a prison; and this place around the prison is disorienting, spatially disquieting. The strange, smooth, curved wall-ceiling is of an alien substance and its lines are meaningless to me. So when I was taken up and put down, amidst all this strangeness, in a maze, a recognisable, even familiar maze, it was a moment of strength and hope after great distress. It seemed pretty clear that I had been put in the maze as a kind of test or investigation, that a first approach toward communication was being attempted. I tried to cooperate in every way. But it was not possible to believe for very long that the creature’s purpose was to achieve communication.
It is intelligent, highly intelligent, that is clear from a thousand evidences. We are both intelligent creatures, we are both maze-builders: surely it would be quite easy to learn to talk together! If that were what the alien wanted. But it is not. I do not know what kind of mazes it builds for itself. The ones it made for me were instruments of torture.
The mazes were, as I said, of basically familiar types, though the walls were of that foreign material colder and smoother than packed clay. The alien left a pile of picked leaves in one extremity of each maze, I do not know why; it may be a ritual or superstition. The first maze it put me in was babyishly short and simple. Nothing expressive or even interesting could be worked out from it. The second, however, was a kind of simple version of the Ungated Affirmation, quite adequate for the reassuring, outreaching statement I wanted to make. And the last, the long maze, with seven corridors and nineteen connections, lent itself surprisingly well to the Maluvian mode, and indeed to almost all the New Expressionist techniques. Adaptations had to be made to the alien spatial understanding, but a certain quality of creativity arose precisely from the adaptations. I worked hard at the problem of that maze, planning all night long, re-imagining the links and spaces, the feints and pauses, the erratic, unfamiliar, and yet beautiful course of the True Run. Next day when I was placed in the long maze and the alien began to observe, I performed the Eighth Maluvian in its entirety.
It was not a polished performance. I was nervous, and the spatio-temporal parameters were only approximate. But the Eighth Maluvian survives the crudest performance in the poorest maze. The evolutions in the ninth encatenation, where the “cloud” theme recurs so strangely transposed into the ancient spiralling motif, are indestructibly beautiful. I have seen them performed by a very old person, so old and stiff-jointed that he could only suggest the movements, hint at them, a shadow gesture, a dim reflection of the themes: and all who watched were inexpressibly moved. There is no nobler statement of our being. Performing, I myself was carried away by the power of the motions and forgot that I was a prisoner, forgot the alien eyes watching me; I transcended the errors of the maze and my own weakness, and danced the Eighth Maluvian as I have never danced it before.