The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0801553598
Publisher: Hawthorn Books
Published: 1975-04-30T21:00:00+00:00

II

… Immensely tall, eternally noble, the woman paces through gray streaming clouds. In rituals of grief she moves, her heavy hair bound with dark jewels; she gestures to her head, her heart, a mourning queen pacing beside a leaden sea. Chained beasts move slowly at her heels, the tiger stepping with sad majesty, the ape mimicking her despair. She plucks the bindings from her hair in agony, it streams on the icy wind. She bends to loose the tiger, urging it to freedom. But the beast-form wavers and swells, thins out; the tiger floats to ghostly life among the stars. The ape is crouching at her feet; she lays her long fingers on its head. It has turned to stone. The woman begins a death chant, breaking her bracelets one by one beside the sea …

Aaron is awake now, his eyes streaming with grief. He hears his own throat gasping, Uh-uhh-uhh, a sound he hasn’t made since—since his parents died, he remembers sharply. The pillow is soaked. What is it? What the hell is doing it? That was Lory’s goddam ape and tiger, he thinks. Stop it! Quit.

He stumbles up, finds it’s the middle of the night, not morning. As he douses his face he is acutely aware of a direction underfoot, an invisible line leading down through the hull to the sealed-up scouter, to the alien inside. Lory’s alien in there.

All right. Face it.

He sits on his bunk in the dark. Do you believe in alien telepathic powers, Dr. Kaye? Is that vegetable in there broadcasting on a human wavelength, sending out despair?

Possible, I suppose, Doctor. Anything—almost anything—is possible.

But the tissue samples, the photos. They showed no differentiated structure, no neural organization. No brain. It’s a sessile plant-thing. Like a cauliflower, like a big lichen; like a bunch of big grapes, she said. All it does is metabolize and put out a little bioluminescence. Discrete cellular potentials cannot generate anything complex enough to trigger human emotions. Or can they? No, he decides. We can’t do it ourselves, for god’s sake. And it’s not anything physical like subsonics, not with the vacuum between. And besides, if it is doing this, Lory couldn’t possibly have got back here sane. Nearly a year of living ten feet away from a thing sending out nightmares? Not even Lory. It has to be me. I’m projecting.

Okay; it’s me.

He lies down again, reminding himself that it’s time he ran another general checkup. He should expand the free-association session, too; other people may be getting stress phenomena. Those Tighe-sightings … Last time he caught two incipient depressions. And he’ll do all that part himself, people won’t take it from Coby he thinks, and catches himself in the fatuity. The fact is that people talk a lot more to Coby than they do to him. Maybe I have some of Lory’s holy-holies. He grins, drifting off.

… Tighe drifts in through the walls, curled in a foetal clasp, his genital sac enormous. But it’s a different Tighe. He s green, for one thing, Aaron sees.

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