The Mantooth Part 39

'She's right, young man. G.o.d 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 ma.s.sage 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 s.p.a.cious 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 grat.i.tude and compa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l, 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 dispa.s.sionate, 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 gra.s.sy earth of a clear s.p.a.ce 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.