“Difficult what?”
She sighed. “It was the title we gave our symbolic painting. You seemed to understand it then. Your fear of confined spaces and strangulation was born when you were born. Obviously, something went wrong. Possibly the umbilical cord was twisted around your neck. You were nearly suffocated to death.”
Nervously, he rubbed his neck, but he was interested. “That could be so. And when the Melas trees closed in around me, trying to kill me—”
“No, they weren’t trying to kill you. Only capture you. They were trying to form a stockade around you.”
“I see. But eventually I should have starved to death.”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. That’s what usually happens. But by then you would have helped to create a whole forest of Melas trees.”
“Well, that’s quite a consolation. How did you manage to save me, Rosala?”
“Partly you saved yourself, by becoming unconscious. They could no longer enter your mind, and therefore couldn’t complete the barrier around you. So I was able to reach you and get you out.”
“I owe you plenty for that. But to get at me, you must have walked beneath their branches. Yet, apparently, they didn’t attempt to hook you. Are you immune from their influence?”
Rosala bit her lip, and was silent for a moment.
Then she said, quietly, “At that time I was in no condition to be of use to them. I scarcely existed. I was a shadow.”
Sherret glanced at her sharply.
“Then I didn’t dream that part of it. I thought you were a ghost. You were transparent…”
He gripped her arm. It was as solid as his own.
“Yet now—” he began, but she clung suddenly to him, sobbing, “Sherry, don’t ever leave me. Please. Stay with me. Believe in me. Stay with me.”
He was surprised, but her intensity touched him. He put his arm about her and stroked her soft, bright hair. He wanted to reassure her, and the words which came automatically were tired old cliché.
“Don’t worry about it, darling. I love you. We’ll always be together after this.”
He meant it sincerely enough.
“But you said you had to go on—to Na-Abiza. You said you were Ulysses, and I was the enchantress, Circe, holding you here against your will…”
“Remember, dear, I was delirious. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
She looked up at him hopefully, with tear-wet eyes.
“Yes, you were ill,” she said, eagerly. “You kept having nightmares about the Melas tree, painting that awful picture in your mind. After this, we shall paint only lovely pictures, Sherry. We shall create such wonderful things. My mind has the power to change material things and remold them. And I can let your imagination join onto mine and work through my mind. Together we shall design and build and make our dreams reality. For you and I, we are artists.”
She emphasized the word, proudly. “Much of this work was created through the minds of men working in unison with mine,” she went on. “And the garden—”
“And you,” Sherret broke in, astonished. “I remolded you, in dreams, I thought. Are you telling me that actually happened?”
“I desired only that my appearance pleased you,” she murmured.
“And you will stay that way—you won’t fade into a ghost again?”
He felt her tremble.
“As long as you wish me here as I am, so long shall I be here.”
“Of all the mysterious things on Amara, you are the most mysterious, Rosala. Of course I wish you here, and just as you are. But does your existence depend only on my wish?”
She made no answer for a while, resting her head on his shoulder. Then, in a small and muffled voice, “Petrans do not believe in themselves, as persons. They think of themselves as mirrors, only reflecting the real people. They can exist only through the belief of the real people, the people who have faith. Then they seem real, even to themselves… and everything in the universe is only a seeming. Even you, Sherry. But you real people can live together, because you believe. We Petrans can’t—we can’t support each other by faith. If we try, we die to nothing. We sympathize with the Melas trees, because we are like them; we can survive only through the minds of others.” He held her protectively, but his mind was spinning.
These Amaran frames of reference, outside all of his experience, might end by driving him off his head. They had already caused him one breakdown. Only connect. Only adjust. But the group of associated memories and reflexes forming a personality called “Sherret” hadn’t been all that stable, to begin with. It was rent with conflicts. Under the continued stress of trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, it could well begin to break up, become schizophrenic. And “Sherret” would be no more than a loose group of nameless and aimless dreamers wandering in a fog of amnesia.
He said, “I need you, Rosala, quite as much as you need me.”
She gave a little sigh of happiness, then pressed her lips warmly to his. As they kissed, a fragment of conversation echoed somewhere in his memory.
“… Have you ever been to Na-Abiza?”
“Yes, I have, human, but I didn’t get there.”
So this was where the trek to Na-Abiza ended.
The sky shaded from color to color, and sometimes they sat in the garden and watched it. Sometimes it ran through its chromatic scale unseen and unheeded, for they remained in the house for long periods—working, talking, laughing, making love. Also—perhaps too often —quarreling.
And Sherret learned to accept the incredible. On the face of it, a mature doctrine, but occasionally he had misgivings. It could lead to a dulling of the sense of wonder. Excess of anything tended toward boredom—even, strangely enough, excess of novelty.
There was plenty of novelty.
Just to watch Rosala paint involved a series of surprises. She needed no brush. She painted with her fingers.
She would set a canvas on its back, pour quantities of colors onto it, and let them ooze sluggishly together. Then she’d run her fingers lightly over the mess, mixing, separating, arranging with hair-line delicacy. It was as though each nerve-end at her finger tips was working independently on its own contribution to the overall design. Not a speck of paint adhered to her fingers.
Sherret questioned her about this exquisitely controllable force flowing from her. She couldn’t enlighten him about its nature. All Petrans had the power at birth.
“Birth?” Sherret echoed. “I’ve been wondering about that, too. How do Petrans get to be born if they never cohabit?”
Rosala said seriously, “There are some questions you mustn’t ask, darling. We’re a parasitic race and therefore vulnerable. To protect ourselves we’re sworn to a code of secrecy about certain fundamental matters. But I’ll tell you this much. You and I could have children.”
“Petrans?”
“You might as well ask ‘boys or girls?’ We shouldn’t know until they were born.”
He fingered his beard. “Have you any children?”
“No, Sherry.”
“Somehow, I’m glad. Another thing—are you sworn not to reveal your age?”
“Bodily, I’m as young or old as you wish me to be. And mental time is merely relative. Relatively, time is not the same on this planet as on Earth,” she answered evasively.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, I’m not trying to pry. I’m only trying to learn where I stand.”
“You stand on your own feet, as you told Captain Maxton. Darling, why do you keep trying to formalize everything? You must get Reparism out of your system. It can never work on Amara. Inflexible things only get broken here.”
Another row was in danger of brewing. He thought it best to keep quiet. But his silence became sullen.
She sensed that, and her uncertain temper began to simmer. She started to work it off on a large block of granite-like stone. She attacked it with her bare hands, furiously pulling away chunks as though it were wax, indenting it with a finger-thrust, engraving it with a fingernail. It began to take shape but, obviously, from her expression, the wrong shape.