‘So long, Nancy. Thanks for calling.’
‘I said to Tupper, ‘Thank you, telephone.’
He lifted a hand and stretched out a finger at me, stroking it with the
finger of the other hand, making the sign for shame.
‘Brad has got a girl,’ he chanted in a sing-song voice. ‘Brad has got a
girl.’
‘I thought you never listened in,’ I said, just a little nettled. ‘Brad
has got a girl! Brad has got a girl! Brad has got a girl!’ He was getting
excited about it and the slobber was flying all about his face.
‘Cut it out,’ I yelled at him. ‘If you don’t cut it out, I’ll break
your God damn neck.’
He knew I wasn’t fooling, so he cut it out.
14
I woke in a blue and silver night and wondered, even as I woke, what
had wakened me. I was lying on my back and above me the sky was glimmering
with stars. I was not confused. I knew where I was. There was no blind
groping back to an old reality. I heard the faint chuckling of the river as
it ran between its banks and I smelled the wood smoke that drifted from the
campfire.
Something had awakened me. I lay still, for it seemed important that
whatever had wakened me, if it were close at hand, should not know that I
was awake. There was a sense of fear, or perhaps of expectation. But if it
were a sense of fear, it was neither deep nor sharp.
Slowly I twisted my head a bit and when I did I could see the moon,
bright and seeming very near, swimming just above the line of scrubby trees
that grew on the river bank.
1 was lying flat upon the ground, with nothing under me but the
hard-packed earth. Tupper had crawled into his hut to sleep, curling up so
his feet did not stick out. And if he were still there and sleeping, he was
very quiet about it, for I heard no sound from him.
Having turned my head, I lay quietly for a time, listening for a sound
to tell me that something prowled the camp. But there was no sound and
finally I sat up.
The slope of ground above the camp, silvered by the floodlight of the
moon, ran up to touch the night-blue sky – a balanced piece of beauty
hanging in the silence, so fragile that one was careful not to speak nor to
make any sudden motion, for fear that one might break that beauty and that
silence and bring it down, sky and slope together, in a shower of shards.
Carefully I got to my feet, standing in the midst of that fragile
world, still wondering what had wakened me.
But there was nothing. The land and sky were poised, as if they stood
on tiptoe in a single instant of retarded time. Here, it seemed, was the
present frozen, with no past or future, a place where no clock would ever
tick nor any word be spoken.
Then something moved upon the hilltop, a man or a manlike thing,
running on the ridge crest, black against the sky, lithe and tall and
graceful, running with abandon.
I was running, too. Without reason, without purpose, simply running up
the slope. Simply knowing there was a man or a man1ike thing up there and
that I must stand face to face with it, hoping, perhaps, that in this land
of emptiness and flowers, in this land of silence and of fragile beauty, it
might make some sense, might lend to this strange dimension of space and
time some sort of perspective that I could understand.
The manlike thing was still running on the hilltop and I tried to shout
to it, but my throat would make no sound and so I kept on running.
The figure must have seen me, for suddenly it stopped and swung around
to face me and stood there on the hilltop, looking down at me. And now I saw
that while it undoubtedly was of human form, it had a crest of some sort
above its head, giving it a birdlike look as if the head of a cockatoo had
been grafted on a human body.
I ran, panting, toward it, and now it moved down the hill to meet me,
walking slowly and deliberately and with unconscious grace.
I stopped running and stood still, fighting to regain my breath. There
was no need of running any more. I need not run to catch it.
It continued walking down the hill toward me and while its body still
stayed black and featureless, I could see that the crest was white, or
silver. In the moonlight it was hard to tell if it were white or silver.
My breath came more easily now and I climbed up the hill to meet it. We
approached one another slowly, each of us, I suppose, afraid that any other
manner of approach might give the other fright.
The manlike thing stopped ten feet or so away and I stopped as well,
and now I saw that indeed it was humanoid and that it was a woman, either a
naked or an almost naked woman. In the moonlight, the crest upon her head
was a thing of shining wonder, but I could not make out if it were a natural
appendage or some sort of eccentric hairdo, or perhaps a hat.
The crest was white, but the rest of her was black, a jet black with
blue highlights that glinted in the moonlight. And there was about her body
an alertness and an awareness and a sense of bubbling life that took my
breath away.
She spoke to me in music. It must have been a music, for there seemed
to be no words.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I do not understand.’
She spoke again and the trilling of the voice ran across the blue and
silver world like a spray of crystal thought, but there was no
understanding. I wondered, in despair, if any man of my race could ever
understand a language that expressed itself in music, or if, in fact, it was
meant to be understood as were the words we used.
I shook my head and she laughed, the laughter making her without any
doubt a human – a low and tinkling laugh that was happy and excited.
She held out her hand and took a few quick steps toward me and I took
the outstretched hand. And as I took her hand, she turned and ran lightly up
the hill and I went running with her. We reached the top of the ridge and
continued running, hand in hand, down the other slope, a wild, ecstatic
running that was sheer youth and craziness – a running into nothing, for the
utter joy of being alive in that heady moonlight.
We were young and drunk with a strange happiness for which there seemed
no reason or accounting – drunk with, at least for me, a wild exuberance.
Her grip upon my hand was hard, with a lithe, young strength, and we
ran together as if we were one person running – and it seemed to me, indeed,
that in some awesome manner I had become a part of her, and that somehow I
knew where we were going and why we were going there, but my brain was so
seething with this strange happiness that it could not translate the
knowledge into terms I understood.
We came down to the creek and splashed across, then ran around the
mound where I had found the skulls and on up the second ridge and there, at
the top of it, we came upon the picnic.
There were other people there, at this midnight picnic, a half a dozen
of them, all like this alien girl who had run with me. Scattered on the
ground were hampers, or things that looked like hampers, and bottles, and
these bottles and the hampers were arranged in a sort of circle. In the
centre of the circle was a small, silvery contraption that was just slightly
larger than a basketball.
We stopped at the edge of the circle and all the rest of them turned to
look at us – but to look without surprise, as if it were not unusual at all
for one of them to lead in an alien creature such as I.
The woman who was with me spoke in her singing voice and they answered
back with music. All of them were watching me, but it was friendly watching.
Then all of them except one sat down in the circle and the one who
remained standing stepped toward me, making a motion inviting me to join the
circle with them.
I sat down, with the running woman on one side of me and the one who
made the invitation sitting on the other.