The Mantooth Part 49

She turned back to him, more composed, and wondered only why he made no attempt to aid her: to dim the cutting laser of his eyes.

But he was through with hiding, and playing the part of the weak and worshipful lover. LET HER SEE! rang the twisted chime of his thoughts, distorted and horrible. Let her walk into the jaws of death with eyes wide open. And this choice also was correct: that his eyes and intentions were obvious, only made them the more impossible to believe.

She merely said, 'Shall we go?' And she couldn't understand why at that moment she should think of the black widow that her father had found in her bedroom as a child, killing it as she cried at his cruelty.

Kalus sat on a piece of broken stone with his head in his hands, unable yet to look up and go on. Alaska stood before him, puzzled. Her young mind had continued to develop, so that now she was aware of her existence as clearly, if without the same complexity, as any human adolescent. In the preceding weeks she had realized that such a choice might come: a choice between the two people she loved. And for reasons no more complicated than simple feeling, she had chosen Kalus, had remained with him as he lay helpless on the floor, and not followed when Sylviana called to her angrily.

It was his one compensation. He knew that if he left the colony the cub would go with him, regardless of what lay ahead. It was that simple, and that beautiful. And in that moment, alone and forlorn among the ruins of yet another tortured depression, this singular act of giving broke his heart. Because he saw in her pure, animal innocence the thing that he had always wanted from a woman, but had not dared to ask:

Loyalty, which so many have forgotten, and for which there is no other word. And not the pale imitation of it found in some marriages, which demand that each cut off and subvert some part of themselves, to be joined like hobbled twins at the place of amputation. What he wanted was nothing more and nothing less than the bond of true allies: not half a woman, because of him, but a whole woman, for the same reason. Not to enslave but to enrich, not to question in time of crisis, but to love and support, not blindly, but freely and fully. All these things he had offered her; but he knew they meant nothing if she was unwilling to give the same in return. Because there is no such thing as one-sided love.

He did not know how he understood these things, or why they had come to him now, only that he knew them, and that their truth was unbending.

Yes. He would wait for her at the designated time and place. If she came to him and said she could not do it, and asked his help to rebuild the things that they had lost, he would remain with her forever.

But if she came to him in mocking triumph---if she ever again spoke to him as she had---all was finished between them. He would leave her, leave this place, and never look back. There was no middle ground.

Because he knew finally, defiantly, that he was physically incapable of being other than himself, and should never have tried to be. The consequences of rejection would be devastating, and in the cold light of day he did not know how he would find the will to go on, without her.

But this no longer mattered. Nothing mattered, but that this agony and fear must end. There was no other way.

He rose and walked the remaining distance. To the Vale of the Obelisk.

To wait.

SO FAR IT'S GONE WELL ENOUGH, she told herself, though she still could not look at him, or one second further than the present. They sat together on the sunlit slope of a wide, gra.s.sy recession. Its quiet symmetry would have been lovely and serene, but for a single thrust of gnarled stone which pierced its center, ringed about the base by a matting of jagged weeds. The company called it Devil's Thumb. It was a protrusion of the devil to be sure, but she wasn't at all sure that ?thumb' was the correct metaphor. She kept her eyes away from it, concentrating instead on the white sheet spread beneath them, on the bread and wine before them.

He had brought the wine, for which she was grateful, and she drank of it probably more than she should. But it gave her confidence, and helped dull the edge of her rebelling senses. Perhaps half an hour had pa.s.sed from the time of her first ready mouthful; and he smiled each time the gla.s.s touched her lips. If an eerie contraction of taut face muscles can be called a smile.

'Have you ever done hallucinogenic drugs?' He tried to ask carelessly, but could not quite pull it off.

'What on earth made you ask that?'

'Oh, nothing really. Just curious.' She wished he would stop looking at her that way.

'Yes I have. Once, with Kalus. We..... It was peyote.'

'How much did you do?'

'Two b.u.t.tons each. One right away..... Why are you laughing?'

'Two peyote b.u.t.tons, and you think you've seen it all. Ha! That wouldn't be enough to open your pretty little eyelids.' She wondered why she suddenly felt restless and irritable.

'What makes you think it's only how much, and not how pure? Or maybe we just didn't need to have our whole consciousness blown away to get something meaningful from it.' She felt angry, defiant, and horribly uncomfortable. 'I could do LSD if I wanted to.'

'Could you now? We're going to find out.' She felt the touch of an icy hand inside her.

'What do you mean?'

'The wine is laced with it.'

And the current closed over her head.

Kalus sat in the fore of the leering monolith, which lay just inside the rim of the oblong vale. The dwarfish Obelisk, like a pointed tombstone, lay swart and square in its center. Kalus remembered the first time he had come here, driven on by Sylviana's almost distracted haste to find others of her kind. AND TO ESCAPE, he thought bitterly, HER DEPENDENCE ON ME. It was here, beneath the monolith, that he had tried to cleanse and bandage the wound on her leg. The memory and sight of it, of blood on her beloved flesh, filled all his thoughts. Through the strong taste of pride and anger, a fresh and cutting sense of worry returned to him. The protective instinct was too strong inside him, and what they had shared, too deep.

He thought of following after her, but did not know which way she had gone, and doubted Alaska's ability (as well as his own) to find and isolate her most recent trail among the layered and crisscrossing paths of the colonists. He could only wait, and watch the sun wheel the shadows around him. When the longer shadow of the Monolith joined that of the deeply carved Obelisk, locking together into a long sword of darkness upon the earth, it would be time. And she must come to him.

But that remained at least two hours away. He looked down at the deerskin pouch, which had slipped from his shoulder and rested, half open, on the ground. Remembering one of its contents, he emptied it out onto a gray, porous stone before him.

There, beside the wrapped hunting knife (which she now refused to carry), the whet-stone, and the flints for making fire, he saw them.

Dryer, less green, but still potent in their otherworldly magic: the five remaining peyote b.u.t.tons. He lifted one and turned it in his hand, wondering. It had helped him to understand once before..... Perhaps it would show him something now, which he could see no other way.

Guided by an impulse he did not completely understand, and half against his better judgment, he put the first in his mouth, and chewed it. Then slaked his throat with water. Again. And a short time later, again.

There are no words to describe LSD. For the person who has taken it before it is still like landing from another planet: nothing is familiar, and nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is powerful, evocative, unknown. For the person who has not, it is like a bewildered and even unconscious dream. If the experience is good, it is life at its deepest and most intense. If it is bad, there is no greater horror on the Earth. And in either case, the mind is never quite the same.

Doors are opened which cannot later be shut, and some residue, both chemical and spiritual, remains forever.

The acid that William had made was not particularly strong or pure, and this alone saved her sanity. But it was strong enough, and tinged with strychnine and speed. She could not hide, from anything.

Sylviana tried to master her panic. And so far, by the narrowest of margins she had succeeded. ALL RIGHT, she told herself. All right. It had happened. There was nothing to done now but see it through. Except that she kept forgetting what the words meant, forgetting the words she said, forgetting words. She was alone in a gruesome place with a man she did not know or trust. She could not force herself to remain there a moment longer.

'We have to go,' she said, rising. The motion, scarcely felt, elevated her head, the line of her sight. But she could not shake the feeling of being deep under the water, lungs bursting for air. She wanted to swim with all her strength, upward toward the surface. But some horrible weight, or cold serpentine grip held her down, wrapped about her legs and ankles. That grip was her obsession. The life-saving air was Kalus, and she knew it.

But no, her stupor-rationale insisted. It's not so. I can breathe.

I can walk. She strode to the top of the hill, feeling a moment's release, only to find that William had followed her soundlessly, like a shadow. And that she no longer knew where she was, or how to find her way back.

BACK. To what?

And then the real fear, the telling blows, began to find her. Because it seemed, it was, an overriding certainty that there was no returning.

This was reality, doubly real. She had fallen into a bottomless pit.

NO WAY OUT!

'Let's go for a walk,' said William gently, now so sure of his prey that he was almost disappointed. But he would see it through, and knew that to do so he must build her up again, just enough. Then tear her down. Again, until the moment was ripe. And then G.o.d help her.

But Sylviana was there ahead of him. She clung to this mockery of care and affection, five simple words, with all the desperate power of her desire not to believe. 'Yes, my dear, sweet William. Let's go for a walk.' And he smiled, a moment of sympathy that he knew would only make the fire of his hatred burn the whiter. She might make the going pleasing, after all.