Colossuss: The Original Duology by Donald Wandrei

Author:Donald Wandrei [Wandrei, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

LOOKING at Shyrna with searching eyes, the Earth-invader stopped. She was the loveliest, the wisest, the most disconcerting person he had known. And she reminded him of Anne. Did nature repeat itself? Did the cosmos, building to its unknowable destination, use the same patterns for ever higher purposes in wider cycles? Was Anne, in some mystical, or extended, or ultimate, progression of atoms and molecules, reborn in part in this enigmatic creature?

“You remind me,” said Duane, “of Anne, a woman I loved once. I do not see how you could know so much about me, unless she had once been part of you, and the devil take all Nrm’s machines.”

There was a cryptic glow in the face of Shyrna, and her emerald hair framed it with a halo of shimmering green. Duane lost all sense of time and space and balance, forgot the fantastic forest, remembered only Anne as his heart beat exultantly out toward this ultramortal enchantress.

Into those eyes he felt himself sinking, drowning, and the feel of her shoulders was a magic tingle. Wide, wider than seas and deeper than time, glowed the golden pools in her eyes. For one timeless instant, he experienced the ravage of a glory he had never before imagined and would never again possess in the caress of her lips.

Into that moment was woven the remembrance of Anne, his Odyssey that cleft a universe asunder, journey’s end, a superuniverse whose civilization had progressed infinitely further than had any race of Earth, and now his first hesitant yet deep-rooted and longing approach to the supernal Shyrna.

Shyrna had raised her hands to his temples, her eyes still gleaming hypnotic into his. An exquisite torment rioted through him with the epitome of dissolution and re-creation. All loves, all emotions, all raptures, all breathless desires, stormed into triumphant fullness.

Then the ecstasy passed, never to return in such multiple implications, though always to underlie his love for Shyrna.

Trembling like the moth she had cupped in her hands, he gradually realized that he was staring into her eyes. They were as mysterious as before; they shone with an even more mysterious knowledge.

Suddenly her eyes widened, looking at something behind him, and instinctively she moved to his side.

“Nrm!” she cried.

Duane whirled around. Not six feet distant stood the ruler of Valadom. He was radiant as a god, shining as with some mysterious irradiation, a splendid and beautiful figure, seven feet tall and magnificently built.

His face was stern, implacable, the face of a conqueror whose iron will overrode every obstacle. But his eyes were his most disturbing and compelling feature. They were black, lustrous wells, glowing with a profundity of knowledge and an intellectual scope that fell short only of the Titans.

They shone, too, with the fanatic gleam of that monomania which drives irresistibly toward its goal, even against the advice of reason. And in them glimmered also something of emotion, a rebuke to Shyrna, and an antagonism to Duane, the more formidable and menacing because they were expressed with a sort of ruthless logic, as if they were a mathematical puzzle already solved.

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