The Mating Of The Moons Part 3

"Madeleine!"

She looked back through the trailing skeins of moonlight. A dark spot was overtaking her. She couldn't go any faster. Evidently Don had one of those racing sleds that hardly seemed to touch the sand at all.

"Madeleine! Please--for G.o.d's sake, don't see that old hermit!"

"For the sake of which G.o.d, Don? I understand the Martians had more than one."

"Madeleine! I'm begging you to come back!"

"Why?"

"You know why."

"The contamination!" She laughed. "Your melodramatic devices don't frighten me."

"It's true. You'll die--! Come back!"

"To what?"

"We'll talk about it! Just come back!"

"What's so dangerous, Don, about my not accepting things here as they're supposed to be?"

His voice tightened. "Just stop, stop and come back!"

She didn't stop, didn't bother to answer. She circled the sandsled among the hills, skirting the rocky clefts with a reckless abandon she had never felt before, and her face was flushed as she leaned her head back and laughed.

"Madeleine!"

It was the last time he called to her. After that, the silence conveyed an intensity of purpose far stronger than verbal entreaties.

She swerved the sandsled dangerously among the erosions, and felt the grinding strain at the base of her skull as the sled bounded from one spire and careened toward another, which she barely avoided smashing into head-on.

She recognized the area. She leaped out of the car and ran, hearing the pursuing sandsled stop somewhere below her as she climbed.

For an instant dizziness threatened, and the surroundings and the motions of Don and herself and the love moons in the sky seemed wildly, almost dangerously abstracted, as if viewed through drug-glazed eyes. A panicky wash of blood came to her face and she struggled for breath, wanting to cry out. It pa.s.sed. Her mind groped for reason and the terror receded.

She went on up to the ridge and found the old man waiting. From that high ridge where the night wind cut coldly toward the Martian south, the lights of the rituals in the amphitheatre of Martian Haven flickered in a misty halo far away, like phosph.o.r.escent globes of spooky glowing, and frenetic dancings and shiftings of crazed flames.

The old man had a vague, insubstantial look, only his eyes seemed real, almost too real, in their intensity as he looked at her. He was propped against a block of eroded rock and the wind rustled the fringes of his ragged robe.

She sat beside him, their shoulders touched. And then, as though slowly dissolving through some chemical reaction, the old man began to fade.

Vaguely Don was there, too, in a nebulous transparency like the old man.

And Madeleine lay there, her face pressed into the sand. On Mars one should expect, without shock, a different kind of reality.

Their voices weren't really voices. Just thoughts, thoughts in the head, feelings, but nothing solid. The thoughts of Don and the old man seemed to be in some kind of time-worn conflict.

"You encouraged her," Don was thinking.

"Those who can see a little should be urged to try to see more. Maybe, sometime, we'll find one who is different enough to come through to us."

"No! It never works that way! They just--die."

"Maybe they won't--always," the old man thought.

Madeleine felt strangely disoriented, as though dreaming with delirious fever. All time and s.p.a.ce seemed for a moment to be enclosed within that rocky s.p.a.ce, itself unmoored and unhelmed upon a dark and compa.s.sless ocean.

Martians, Martians all around, but not a one to see. Like disembodied spirits, they had long ago evolved beyond confinement to fleshly bodies.

But Earth people suspected there was something, so the younger ones, like Don, allowed suspicion to take any stereotyped, acceptable form.

But the oldsters believed in being honest. Let those who can see--see.

"Madeleine!" Don was thinking, desperately, as desperate as only pure feeling can be. "Go back--back to the Haven. You can still go back!"

"But she cannot," the old man said. "For those who come this far, there's never anything to go back to."

"No--I cannot," Madeleine thought. "I don't want to go back."

"All right," Don thought after a while. "All right, Madeleine."

Then she was on her feet and moving over sand and stone that seemed alive toward the Ruins of Taovahr--but they were no longer ruins. She heard the murmur of sea-tides and warmer winds sighing over a younger land.

The sterile sand blossomed. Aridity drifted away. "_Don! Is that you, Don?_"

Don seemed to be somewhere, felt rather than heard, sensed, not seen.

And instead of ruins, the high white walls and rising towers surrounded by gardens, fountains, and through the gardens a stream of clear water, soft with the pads of giant water lilies, trailing like gla.s.s under the moonlight and sympathetic shadows of leaves.

"Don! You knew what real living was in your youth. It was way, way back in time. Didn't you? And only if you're really living do you know where you're going, and you knew, didn't you? You gave up the machines, and went on to freedom. You escaped the confining flesh that can be caught up in war, and in hopeless peonage to the radios and teevee and radar and thundering jets that drown out the song of real life, and a horde of cunningly made, treacherous machines--"

"Madeleine. Join us--the way we are now. You can do it--"

"I--I can't see you, Don."

"You don't have to. You just think about it and join us, all of us--"

"Just--just a spirit of some kind, Don--is that it?"

"Yes, yes--something like that! You can't explain it! Just do it!"

It was too late, she knew that now. "We're old, too old, where I come from, Don. When I was very young, I might have done it." Only the wonder-filled child can go through the looking gla.s.s and--stay.

And he knew she was right, that she was too old. But the old man had promised her a moment of joy. She suddenly saw him--Don--the bright, strong man waiting across the stream. "It's what you brought to me," he said softly. "When we were young we looked this way--and we were real."

She moved toward the water and her arms lifted to him. At first she couldn't recognize the woman who bathed there. From the water's surface a slight vapor drifted, and she saw the wet gleam of naked arms as they lowered and raised and the water shone on the pale loveliness of unashamed nakedness. And then she knew that the woman there, her hair floating over the water, was Madeleine. She whispered her own name.

He took her in his arms, and she could hear her breath joining his as the mist drifted up among the b.u.t.tressed writhings of the trees. She was laughing, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressed to the damp richness of the loam, and in the water she could see her face, white, with sharp shadows under the eyes and a high look of joy.

"I love you, Madeleine."