Again I was agreeably surprised when neither of them rebelled but seemed willing. And I was even more astonished when, as I tucked Oomark in, he caught my hand and held it tightly, looking up into my face as if he needed reassurance.
“You won’t go? You will be here?”
“In this room, Oomark? Do you want me to stay with you until you go to sleep?”
Neither child had before shown any such feeling. And I was heartened to think that Oomark had so turned to me, though I regretted the reason for it.
For a moment I thought that he would accept my offer. But then he released my hand and shook his head. “Just here – in the house.” He raised himself on one elbow. “Bartare says – She doesn’t like you.”
“Bartare doesn’t like me?” I countered, though I had a suspicion that the She of his speech was not his sister.
“Bartare won’t like you if She doesn’t,” he said. “Bar-tare – ”
“You want me, brother?”
Bartare stood in the doorway. She had her nightrobe pulled about her. And her hair, freed from its daytime cords, was loose on her shoulders.
“No.” He turned his head away sharply as if the last thing he wanted was to see his sister. “I’m sleepy. Go away! I want to sleep.”
I knew better than to try to press him then, so I pulled the covers smooth and wished him good night. As I went to the door, his sister retreated before me. But I found her waiting outside.
“Oomark’s just a little boy, you know,” she said, as if a long range of years separated her from her brother. “A frightened little boy.”
“He has nothing to be afraid of here.” A simple sentence, but the intonation of the word “he,” the look she sent in my direction from under her bar of eyebrows, was revealing. She was delivering a warning. And there was such vast effrontery in it that I was astounded because in that moment, if only for a second or two, our roles appeared reversed. I was subject to her control, not she to my responsibility. I think she was quick to sense she had made a mistake, gone a little too far, for the other something that she wrapped around her as a cloak vanished, and she was a little girl again.
“It is strange – ” She glanced away from me, around the courtyard, as if she were trying to suggest that she, too, was a little tearful of this alien world. Only her change of mood was too late and too false – though I kept myself under control and did not reveal any knowledge of her mistake.
“But a pleasant planet from what we have seen of it.”
“It killed my father, you know.”
“An accident.” I could not understand her, and perhaps I was no match for her either.
“Yes, an accident,” she agreed. And again, though perhaps I was overly suspicious, I read a warning in her words.
“Do you want to go to bed now? I- thought you said you were tired – ”
“I am,” she agreed, and there was almost a note of relief in her voice, as if she were thankful for my suggestion.
And she was all little girl again as I settled her in bed as I had Oomark.
“You are going to bed now, too?” she asked as I was about to leave her.
“In a little while – ”
“But you are not going far away?”
“I’ll be in the courtyard.” But I did not believe that she needed any reassurance of mine. It was rather a desire to know where I would be to satisfy some purpose of her own.
I sat down where I could see the doors to both of the children’s chambers. Before I had so settled, I set the servo-alarm at the courtyard gate. Nothing could come in or out now without alerting a guard robo and sounding an alarm. Why I had taken that step I did not really know, but I felt safer when it was done.
In the light of the very large and yellow moon that served Dylan by night, those crystal patches in the pavement fluoresced and glowed, almost as if each had a small lamp beneath the block. I could see the night light burning in Guska’s room and knew that the nurse planned to sit up with her for part of the night.
But though I tried to think coherently and purposefully of all that had happened since we had landed, I found myself growing more and more drowsy, until I stumbled out of my chair toward my own bedroom.
I had come into the room with my head slightly turned, so that I saw a flicker of movement from the comers of my eyes. But when, aroused a little, I jerked around to face that straightly, I saw nothing there save a mirror. And I imagined it had been my own reflection that had momentarily startled me.
That alarm had shaken me more awake, and I set about preparing for bed more briskly. It was not until I sat down before the mirror, combing my hair, that it happened.
My brown skin, the hair above it, my green eyes – they showed very large and more green in this mirror than I had ever seen them. I examined what I saw closely, remembering Lazk Volk’s words concerning my looks and wondering if he had spoken the truth, that I had some small claim to a pleasing appearance – a thought that will intrigue any woman.
Then, my reflection vanished, as if a flick of the comb through a tight curl had winked it out of existence. And I saw –
The bare bones of it, maybe, were like unto mine, but what leered and postured there was not me. Horror held me dumb and still, though in me grew a need to scream. The smooth brown skin I had seen was sere, wrinkled, freckled with dark patches. The teeth were gone, so my mouth was shrunken into a wrinkled opening, and my chin and nose drew together. My hair was white and thin, hanging in limp, sparse strands over a seamed and corrugated forehead. The eyes were only dark and empty pits – yet I could seel
I heard a choked cry and saw that horror in the mirror shake and reel, even as I swayed back and forth before it. The comb fell from my hand and clattered on the dressing table. And that slight noise broke the illusion. It was gone, and I stared wild-eyed, with a heart beating so fast and heavily that it frightened me, at what I had always seen in any glass. The vision, nightmare, whatever it was, was gone. But as I sat there limp, shivering with a cold inside me, I knew I had seen it. It? What had I seen? And why?
3
Badly shaken, I crept into bed and lay there shivering, trying to make some sense of that illusion, for illusion I was sure it must be. Only no possible combination of light and shade in this room could have accounted for the hideous thing on the mirror’s surface. And I had certainly not taken dream smoke or any of the hallucinatory drugs. As I drew the covers tighter around my body, feeling that I could never be warm again, I searched my memory for some hint of what must have really happened during those few moments.
There were numerous accounts of odd experiences on many worlds to be found in Volk’s library. I had read enough to know well that what seemed “magic,” totally unexplainable to one species or race, might be commonplace to another perhaps a quarter of the galaxy away. Even espers could achieve strange results to baffle their own race –
Espers! Had the commandant’s guess concerning Bartare been correct, and was my experience some projection of her thoughts concerning me – forcing me to see myself as she wished me to be?
That idea was terrifying enough, but it was less weird than some of the other explanations that I resolutely thrust away. On impulse I got out of bed again and caught up a robe to wind about me. That thick drowsiness into which I had sunk earlier was dispelled. I was as far from the need of sleep now as I would have been at morning rising.
I thrust my feet into loose flap-slippers and went to look out into the courtyard, for the second time catching a flicker of movement. But this time as I faced it squarely, it did not disappear. There was a figure slipping along the inner wall from the shadow of one doorway to the next – a small figure.
My first impulse was to call out. But then I remembered the guard I had set at the outer door, and I wanted very much to see all that I could before I revealed myself. I moved as silently as I could along the same way, trying not to allow my slippers to flap against the pavement.