Short Fiction Poul Anderson (reading a book .TXT) š
- Author: Poul Anderson
Book online Ā«Short Fiction Poul Anderson (reading a book .TXT) šĀ». Author Poul Anderson
There was no denying it, Eileenās twenty-three years of life could not compare with Langdonās two hundred or more. She was like a child, thoughtless, mentally and physically timid, ignorant, essentially shallow.
But I love her. And I can afford to wait. In fifty or a hundred years sheāll begin to grow up. In two hundred or so weāll begin to understand each other. As our ages increase, the absolute difference between them will become proportionately insignificant.
An immortal learns patience. I can waitā āand meanwhile I love her very dearly.
āWhat do you have to see him about?ā asked Eileen.
āUs,ā he answered bluntly. āOur situation. It isnāt good.ā
āNo,ā she whispered.
āCanāt you learn that thereās nothing to fear on Tanith?ā he asked. āDeath itself, the greatest dread of all, is gone. Weāve eliminated all actually dangerous life in the neighborhood of our settlements. There are things that can be annoyingā āthe sword-plants, the psyche-feeders, the static dischargesā ābut itās no trick to learn how to avoid them. Nothing here can hurt you, Eileen.ā
āI know,ā she said hopelessly. āBut Iām still afraid. Day and night, Iām afraid. There are worse things than death. Joe.ā
āBut afraid of what?ā
āI donāt know. Fear itself, maybe. How do I know something wonāt suddenly be deadly? But Iām not afraid of death. Even with the baby, I wouldnāt be afraid of wild beasts or plague orā āanything that I could understand.ā She shook her shining head, slowly. āThatās just it, Joe. I donāt understand this planet. Nobody does. You donāt.ā āā ā¦ You admit it yourself.ā
āSomeday Iāll know it.ā
āWhen? A thousand years from now? A thousand years of horror.ā āā ā¦ Joe, some of those things are so hideous I think Iāll go mad when they appear.ā
āA deep-sea fish on Terra is hideous.ā
āNot this way. These things arenāt right. They canāt exist, but still there they are, and I canāt forget them, and I never know when theyāll appear next or what theyāll be this timeā āā She checked herself, gulping.
āThis is a very beautiful world,ā he said stubbornly. āThe colors, the forms, the soundsā āā
āNone of them are right. Grass may look just as well when itās red or blue or yellowā ābut it shouldnāt be all of them at different times. The sky is wrong, the trees are wrong. Those hideous lakes of life and the things in them, obsceneā āthose voices singing out in the mists, nobody knows what they areā āthose images of things a hundred million years deadā āand the faces, and the whisperings, and thereās always something watching and waiting and moving just a little outside the corner of your eye.ā āā ā¦ Oh, Joe, Joe, this planet is haunted!ā
She sobbed in his arms with a rising note of hysteria that she couldnāt quite suppress. He looked grimly over her shoulder. A swirling, chiming mist of color formed on one corner of the room, amorphous stirrings within it, a sudden shining birth that laughed and jeered and slipped out through the wall.
He remembered that he had been frightened and repelled when he first came here. But not to this degree, and he soon got over it. Now, even while Eileen wept, he admired the shifting pulse of colors and his heart quickened to the elfin bells. Terran music sounded wrong to him after two hundred years of the sounds of Tanith.
He thought that all those voices and whisperings and singings, sliding up and down an inhuman scale, and the dreams and the visions, had a pattern, an overall immensity which some day he would grasp. And that would be a moment of revelation, he would see and know the wholeness of Tanith and there would be meaning in it. Not the chaotic jumble of random events which made up the rest of the universeā ādeath-doomed universe tumbling blindly toward a wreck of level entropy and ashen sunsā ābut a glimpse of that ultimate purposefulness which some men called God.
Briefly, a temporal mirage showed beyond the window, a fragmentary glimpse of a tower reaching for the sky. And it was no work of man, nor could it ever be, but it was of a heartbreaking loveliness.
He wondered about the ancient natives. Had they simply become extinct, reached a point of declining evolutionary efficiency such as seemed fated for all species and gone into limbo some millions of years previously? Or had they, perhaps, finally seen the allness of the world and goneā āelsewhere? Privately, Langdon rather thought it was the latter. World without endā ā
But Eileen was crying in his arms.
He kissed her, and tasted salt on her lips that trembled under his. Poor kid, poor kid, and with a baby on the way.ā āā ā¦
Something of the magic of their first days together came back to him. It was a disappointment in love which had sent him to Tanith in the first place, and for all his time here he had lived without that sort of affection. The women of the town served the casual needs of sex, which seemed to become less and less frequently manifest as his own undying personality grew in fullness and self-sufficiency, and that was all.
Still, a single man was incomplete. And a year ago one of the few colony ships landed, and Eileen had been aboard, and a forgotten springtime stirred within him.
Nowā āā ā¦ well.ā āā ā¦
She released herself, smiling with unsteady lips. āIāll be all right now, dear,ā she said. āLetās go.ā
I have to talk this matter over privately with Chang. His wife can take care of Eileen. Certainly I canāt leave her here alone.
But sooner or later he would have to. It wasnāt only that he had to go out and oversee some of the fields on which grew the native plants whose secretions, needed by Terran chemistry, gave them their livelihood. Solitude
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