They were thin, and in spots, through their silken wings, he glimpsed the sun. “Daedalus, your labyrinth was no more mystifying than a single wing of these creatures. And Icarus, turn from beside the sun, beauty is not up there. Look down and see.”
They were dragons of the wind.
And with his lenses, their eyes did not burn him.
He walked forth, his mouth gaping. Other lines from Whitman’s “Passage to India” entered his mind.
I mark from on deck the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level sand in the distance . . .
Truly, there was something about the alien landscape that seemed fresh. In the sunlight filtered through gossamer wings, he seemed to see more detail. The strange way the chlorophyll was formed as a crystalline substance within the yellow-green leaves; the patterns in the sand that he had once considered only chance happenings. He looked around. There were patterns to everything. The sky was delicately shaded in a soft-hued, artistic effect. There was a tasteful blending of all nature—something he had never seen before.
He could almost see the rays of sun like individual golden rivers, beaming into everything, showering back when reflected, soaking in and disappearing when refracted. The world was more real . . .
The gigantic dredging machines …
He saw the mining shafts and cranes, recognizing them as dredgers that sucked the scum of a planet, sent the base ores in gross tanker ships to run large, smoky factories on an over-populated Earth where some lived in poverty and some in plenty. And they were no longer just mining fools . . .
I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world . . .
From the air, vibrating the molecules of his body so that he heard with his eyes and ears and mouth and nose. So that he tasted the notes, ‘the pitched wailings of melancholy and joy. So that joy was sweet and melancholy bittersweet. The dragons flocked above him and sang.
The music was soundless and all sound. It was the trumpets of the marching dead and the flutes of the living angels. They were strange songs.
Crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold the enchanting mirages of waters and meadows . . .
He stumbled over the sand, heedless of destination. Everything was new to him. A thousand times before had he looked at it. Never had he seen it.
The dragons sang of it, the why of it. The why.
Careening drunkenly to the mirages, he dipped his hands in cool water and there was no mirage. The meadows smelled fresh and grassy. They were real.
A spark within his mind was relighted; his search had ended.
Stumbling, laughing, seeing and hearing the gossamer butterfly-formed dragons, he reached the complex, went inside, and started for the shelter door.
They were all standing there looking when he came down the stairs. He threw the glasses at their feet and laughed loudly.
“He’s insane,” someone said.
“No!” Mare Dante shouted. “You’re insane. All of you. Crackier than a box of saltines. You hide while all of life waits for you out there with the Gods.”
“The dragons?”
“The dragons, the Gods. I’m not sure yet.”
“Someone grab him,” Marshall shouted, working his way up front.
“And you,” Mare said. “You are phony to the bottom of your being. You don’t even want to be captain. You’re afraid of the position. But you have to prove yourself; you’re impotent—”
“Shut up!” Marshall screamed, his face white.
“Impotent because once when you were eight, your aunt—”
“Shut up!”
“I can’t. It’s in your eyes. God, can’t the rest of you see it in his eyes?”
“How did you look at the dragons?” someone asked.
“Through a mirror.”
“But other men had their eyes burned out.”
“Because they could not face what they saw in the liquid eyes of the dragons. They were not killed by strange, burning rays. They simply folded and lost their souls. But it’s beautiful. If you have always searched for it, you will find it in their eyes.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Abe asked.
“The dragons are not constituted of matter.”