Deep in the forest, the unaccustomed sunlight glazed the forest lawns and clearings with flowers and filled the air with pollen sweeping down from the heights on the wind.
Insects hurried from flower to flower, from leaf to leaf; birds mated, built nests of warm feathers with their eggs encased in insulating mud-and-straw walls, to hatch enclosed and feed on stored nectars and resins until the next warm spell. Grasses and grains scattered their seed, which the next snows would fertilize and moisten to sprout.
On the plains, the stag-like beasts ran riot, stampeding, fighting, coupling in broad daylight, as the pollen-laden winds sent their curious scents deep into the brain. And in the trees of the lower slopes, the small furred humanoids ran wild, venturing to the ground–some of them for the only time in their lives–feasting on the abruptly-ripening fruits, bursting through the clearings in maddened disregard of the prowling beasts. Generations and millennia of memory, in their genes and brains, had taught them that at this time, even their natural enemies were unable to sustain the long effort of chase.
Night settled over the world of the four moons; the dark sun sank in a strange clear twilight and the rare stars appeared. One after another, the moons climbed the sky; the great violet-gleaming moon, the paler green and blue gemlike discs, the small one like a white pearl. In the clearing where the great starship, alien to this world, lay huge and strange and menacing, the men from Earth breathed the strange wind and the strange pollen borne on its breath, and curious impulses straggled and erupted in their forebrains.
Father Valentine and half a dozen strange crewmen sprawled in a thicket, exhausted and satiated.
In the hospital, fevered patients moaned untended, or ran wildly into the clearing and into the forest, in search of they knew not what. A man with a broken leg ran a mile through the trees before his leg gave way beneath him and he lay laughing in the moonlight while a tigerlike beast licked his face and fawned on him.
Judith Lovat lay quietly in her quarters, swinging the great blue jewel on the chain around her throat; she had kept it, all this time, concealed beneath her clothing. Now she drew it out, as if the strange starlike patterns within it exerted some hypnotic influence on her. Memories swirled in her mind, of the strange smiling madness that had been on her before. After a time, following some invisible call, she rose, dressed warmly, calmly appropriating her room-mate’s warmest clothing (her room-mate, a girl named Eloise, who had been a communications officer on shipboard, was sitting under a longleafed tree, listening to the strange sounds of the wind in its leaves and singing wordlessly). Judy went calmly through the clearing, and struck into the forest. She was not sure where she was going, but she knew she would be guided when the time came, so she followed the upward trail, never deviating, listening to the music in the wind.
Phrases heard on another planet echoed dimly in her mind, by woman wailing for her demon lover…
No, not a demon, she thought, but too bright, too strange and beautiful to be human… she heard herself sob as she walked, remembering the music, the shimmering winds and flowers, and the strange, glowing eyes of the half-remembered being, the clutch of fear that had quickly turned to enchantment and then to a happiness, a sense of closeness more intense than anything she had ever known.
Had it been something like this, then, those old Earth-legends of a wanderer lured away by the fairy-folk, the poet who had cried out in his enchantment:
I met a Lady in the wood,
A fairy’s child
Her hair was long, her foot was light
And her eyes were wild…
Was it like that? Or was it–And the Son of God looked on the daughters of men, and beheld they were fair…
Judy was enough of a disciplined scientist to be aware that in the curious actions of this time there was something of madness. She was certain that some of her memories were colored and changed by the strange state of consciousness she had been in then. Yet experience and reality testing counted for something, too. If there was a touch of madness in it, behind the madness lay something real, and it was as real as the tangible touch on her mind now, that said, “Come. You will be led, and you will not be harmed.”