The Mating Of The Moons Part 2

"We've tried everything," said Mrs. Ericson.

"She's spent half her life on an a.n.a.lyst's couch," said Mr. Ericson.

"She wouldn't even," Mrs. Ericson said, "fall in love with her _a.n.a.lyst_!"

"She was only in love once," said Mr. Ericson, "and that had to be with an idiot who was always writing sonnets."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"A poet," said Don. "There used to be a lot of poets."

"But not in my life," said Mr. Ericson.

"Maybe," Don said, "your daughter expected a little bit too much from Mars."

"Don," Mrs. Ericson pleaded, "maybe _you_ can do something."

"I'll be glad to try," Don said.

So Madeleine lay there and waited for Don, the perfect host, who could supply everyone at Martian Haven with whatever was necessary to insure a pleasant day.

Later, though she did not turn or make any sign of noticing, she knew he had entered the room and was standing over her. She could see the periphery of his giant shadow projected by moonlight over the colored gla.s.s.

"Madeleine--we've got a date for the ritual tonight."

"That's odd, Don. I don't remember it."

"But you didn't say you _wouldn't_ attend it with me, when I suggested it this morning."

"Well, Don, this is an official rejection of your proposal."

She saw his shadow bend, his body drop down beside the couch. She felt his hands on her arm. The peculiar fright went through her.

"You won't listen, Madeleine, but whatever you're looking for here--please forget it! The rituals will help you forget. Try it, Madeleine! Please--"

Why did he, all at once, sound so desperate?

"With you?"

"Why not?"

"You're just an artificial dream, Don, that comes true seasonally for people so sick that they can convince themselves you're real--for a price."

"Well, Madeleine--are you so different?"

"I guess I am."

"You just want the impossible. The others--they want little dreams we can give them easily."

There was a strain, a tension in him, in his hands, in his voice.

Suddenly, his hands held her, and his face was close above her lips.

"You're still young and beautiful to me," he whispered.

She turned her face away, and gazed at the tattered and splendid veils of moonlight as Deimos and Phobos neared one another, with undying eagerness to consummate the timeless ritual.

Dimly, she could hear the communal voices rising to desire.

"_Twin Moons, Love Moons, whirling bright, Bring me Martian love tonight!_"

If you could expect too much from Mars, then where could one find the answer to the intangible wish? Sirius. Far Centauris. And at the end of it, the hucksters, the phony props, would be there first.

Some people should stay on Earth, she thought, those who are so hard to please. There the veils of s.p.a.ce and time might keep the last illusions living. Once you find that even the farthest star is illusory, there's no place left to go.

His lips were near her lips. His voice was low. "You are different!" His throat trembled. "You really are. But--I wonder if you're different enough."

She was aware of the awful gnawing emptiness within her that was only intense desire too frightened to be free. And then his lips were crushing to hers and she allowed it, for she knew what was to be her only way out, and the promise of union was a haze in the room like the veils of light from the moons of Mars that joined against the starlight of heaven.

There was more than the ardent in his intensity. A kind of desperation, his desire to please going beyond the line of duty. The old consuming terror returned.

She pushed him away. His hands reached, his body crushed. Panic. She felt unable to breathe, and she started to scream. His hand was over her mouth.

"Don't look any deeper, don't probe any farther!" he said, like a suddenly terrible threat. "I beg you, don't do it! You're different--beautifully different, Madeleine. But not different enough!

None of them ever are!"

She squirmed away, onto the floor between the gla.s.s and the couch, and scurried toward the door. She could hear the gasping, the sobbing desperation in his voice, and his shadow lengthened across the walls.

Then, as she hesitated in the doorway, he was gone.

She put on a nylon hiking suit and left the room. The silence of the hall was not real, and the emptiness was not really emptiness. It was like waking and being exasperatingly aware of only the fleeting end of a dream. And as she slipped out a side entrance, even the wailing of exotic musical instruments seemed in a sense not real. Even the silence, the feeling of being followed, watched, even that seemed artificial--it was impossible to substantiate the suspicion.

Her palms were wet as she slipped along the wall toward the garage where the sandsleds were kept. From the amphitheatre she could hear the rituals, the intercessions, comminations, hymns, libations, incense-burning, and who knew what else. She saw the reflection of chrome and artificial glitter disguised as Martian authenticity, the lights hanging like a grove of pastel moons, and the shrill empty laughter of girls uncoiling as bright as tinsel through the sluggish Martian evening. And in spite of the sound and elaborate pretension, it all had the undying feel of lugubrious solitude.

It had, for a doomed generation driven into inescapable conformity, the necessary quality of a dream in which a stubborn unconsciousness seeks ever for truth. And later, back on Earth, in the rut and groove, it would remain only a dream no one ever talked about to anyone else. After all, it would simply be something that happened on another world.

She gave one brief, bitter laugh. And even on another world the last desperate dream was false.

There might be something to be said for release through a pagan orgy under the double moons; she had no moral scruples about it. But the paganism would have to be real, that was the thing. Besides, it was too late. For a moment she pressed her flattened hands against her face and felt tears squeezing through the tightly-locked fingers. She felt as though she might explode somewhere inside and realized how the invisible edges of living had cut her soul to pieces.

It wasn't even self-pity any more. It had grown above self-pity to a realism beyond tragedy.

She felt icy and empty and alone as she lit a cigarette. Through the taper smoke, the glowing amphitheatre seemed like a golden porpoise lapped in dawn, and coupled with the expanse of the Haven it nestled in the night to resemble a sleeping question mark, an ent.i.ty gay and sad and full of what was called life.

There was no turning back now. There was no turning back, even to Earth, for that would be the most humiliating defeat of all.

Then she was inside the first sandsled. The sled moved noiselessly out of the garage and whispered away over the sands.

After only a few minutes the radio frightened her with an abrupt voice like that of a disembodied spirit.