Now it became summer, growth and strength, a giant rush of rain; clouds burst apart, sunlight speared through, it blazed across an endlessness of ocean. Land raised green from the sea, surf white against its cliffs, trees lifting heavenward and striving their roots into the planet. An animal roared, shaking his horns in might and splendor, The dance leaped into fury.
It became slower, stately, the passion of laden boughs and the laiid turning gold for harvest. The death of summer lay in hazy distances and cool high nights. Far overhead, a wedge of birds flew southward, and their cry was a lonely song for wanderers.
Trevelyan wondered what the music was to the Alori. To him it was Earth, the sweeping years and the final sinking back against the strong bones of the world. But be was human; he held Nicki close.
Winter. The dancers scattered like blowing leaves; moonlight fell cbill on emptiness, and the music keener with hungry winds. Cold gripped the planet, daylight like steel, night of bitter stars, hissing snow and the southward-grinding glaciers. Aurora shimmered weirdly over the face of heaven. One dancer came forth and stood for an instant as if in despair. Then she stamped her foot, once, twice, and began to dance the end of all things. Trevelyan saw that it was Ilaloa.
She danced slowly at first, groping as if through mists and flying snow. The music lifted again, sharp and savage;
she danced faster, fleeing, cowering, the flutter of broken wings, bunger and ruin, cold and death and oblivion. She danced with a wildness and a hopelessness that numbed him to watch. The music”was like the crash of glaciers trampling mountains underfoot, spilling across broad plains and proud forests. It was like winter gone mad -, wind and snow, night and storm, calving icebergs in the north and whelping hurrica,nes in the south. The world groaned under its weight.
The storm died. Slowly, the dancer moved away, slow as life fading from creation. When she was gone, there was only the heavy dead thunder of the ice and sea, mourning wind and the sun smoldering to ash. It was over.
And yet there was fulfillment in it. Life had been, bad struggled, and died. Reality was-no man needed more.
When silence and moonlight came back, the Alori did not stir. They sat for a long while without moving or speaking’ Then, one by one, they rose and disappeared into the shadows. The festival was over.
Nick-i’s face was white under the moons. They were sinking, Trevelyan saw with dim surprise. Had it only been one Digbt?
When they got back to the Nomad camp, Joachim said the marriage service over them. Afterward there was a feast and merrymaking, but Trevelyan and Nicki didn’t stay long.
CHAPTER XVIII
Inevitable Conflict
THEY WANDERED from the settlement, two of them alone, and
ranged about the island. There was no hurry. When they
found a place they liked especially well-a sandy cove, a hidden glen, the lonely heights of a mountain-they stayed until a vague restlessness blew them on.
Trevelyaii wanted to learn more about the Alori civilization. But to know it, he bad to contemplate it.
Often they encountered Alori in the woods, or stumbled onto one of their villages. They were always made welcome and their questions were freely answered. As he became more adept in the language, he took to thinking in it, for no speech in his civilization could fully handle the new concepts.
In so far as Alori culture could be compared to any human society at all, it was Apollonian-restrained, moderate, everything balance and order and adjustment. It had little use for the aggressive individual; nevertheless, each individual was fully developed, very much himself, free to choose his own endeavor within the pattern.
It was not a perfect society, even by its own standards. Utopia is a self-contradictory dream. There was sorrow here, as elsewhere in the universe; but grief was a part of living.
Nor was the Great Cross domain a place of mindless contentment. In its own way, it was as scientific a culture as Sol’s. But the underlying theoretical foundation was altogether alien. The Alorian mind did not analyze into factors; it saw the entire problem as one unified whole. When the question itself was incomplete, a man would say be had not taken all the relevant data into consideration; an Alorian would say the organization did not feel (look? seem? There is no equivalent word in Basic) right.