A small boy wandered through the circular fields of the Family of Five, careful not to tread on the green flowers yearning toward him. Too young to cultivate the crop, he could afford to be its friend. The hvee plants all about him projected, in effect, a multiple personality, an almost tangible aura that was comforting indeed.
He was seven years old, his birthday just one day behind, and he was still awed at the marvel of it, of that extra year so suddenly thrust upon him. The planet was smaller now, by a seventh of his life, and he wanted to explore it all over again and come to understand its new dimension.
In his arms he carried a large, heavy object, his birthday gift. It was a book, sealed in shiny weatherproof binding and closed by a bright metal clasp with a miniature combination lock. Ornate letters on its surface spelled out L O E, and beneath them, in script, his name: ATON FIVE.
The virgin forest of Hvee stood at the edge of the gardens, the trees less responsive to human mentality than the cultivated plants, but friendly all the same. The boy walked in the shadow of the wood, looking back toward the house of his father, Aurelius, far across the field. He stood beside the new garden shed, built within the year, looking winsomely up at its lofty peaked roof and thinking thoughts too large for him. Then he looked down behind it, where the hot black highway wriggled toward the distant spaceport—a pavement leading beyond even his present horizons.
At this moment of introspection the sound of music came, borne on the gentle wind, almost too fleeting to be real. The boy stopped to listen, turning his head this way and that, searching out the strains. His musical sense was untrained, but the compelling beauty of this melody could not be denied.
The song rose and fell in spectral ululations, the tenuous melody from some faerie instrument. There were bird-songs in it, and the rippling of hidden forest water, and the delicate sounds of the uncomplicated melodies of ancient troubadours. Aton was reminded of music he would later come to recognize as “Greensleeves” and “The Fountains of Rome” and older and younger pieces, and he was enthralled.
Unfinished, it stopped. The boy of seven forgot his other explorations, overcome by a desire to listen to the finish. He had to hear its end.
The melody began again, thrillingly, and he clutched the giant book to his chest and trailed his curiosity into the forest. The fascination grew, taking firmer hold on his mind; this was the loveliest thing he had ever heard. The great trees themselves seemed responsive to it, standing silently and letting it drift among them. Aton touched the bark of their trunks as he passed, drawing courage as he skirted the bottomless forest well (afraid of its black depth) and went on.
He could make out the music more readily now, but it had led him to an unfamiliar part of the forest. It was a voice—a woman’s voice, full and sweet with overtones of promise and delight. The delicate arpeggios of a soft-toned stringed instrument accompanied it, counterpointing the vocal. She was singing a song, the meaning of half-heard words fitting the mood of the forest and the day.
The boy came to a glade and peeked through the tall ferns rising strongly at its edge. He saw the nymph of the wood. She was a young woman of striking beauty, so elegant that even a child just mastering seven could understand immediately, without question, that there could be no other on his planet to match her. He watched and listened, spellbound.
She sensed him, hiding there, and ceased her singing. “No!” he wanted to cry as the song was broken again in midrefrain; but she had put aside her instrument.
“Come to me, young man,” she said, clearly and not loudly at all. Discovered when he had thought himself secure, he went to her, abruptly bashful.
“What is your name?” she asked.
“Aton Five,” he said, proud of a proud name. “I’m seven years old yesterday.”
“Seven,” she said, making him feel that it was indeed the right age to be. “And what is this burden you have undertaken?” she inquired, touching the volume in his arms and smiling.
“This is my book,” he said with diffident vanity. “It has my name.”
“May I see it?”
Aton stumbled back a step. “It’s mine!”
She looked at him, making him feel ashamed of his selfishness. “It’s locked,” he explained.
“But are you able to read it, Aton?”
He tried to tell her that he knew that the big LOE spelled The Literature of Old Earth, and that the rest was his own name, to show that it belonged to him; but the words got all tangled up in his throat as he encountered her deep and silent eyes. “It’s locked.”
“You must never tell the numbers to anyone, ever,” she said. “But I will close my eyes and let you open it yourself.”
She closed her eyes, her features as calm and perfect as those of a statue, and Aton felt somehow committed and not a little confused. He fumbled with the lock, turning the dial in the pattern so recently memorized! The clasp popped open and the tinted pages were exposed.
Her lashes lifted at the sound and her gaze fell upon him once more, as warm and bright as a sunbeam. He pushed the volume into her waiting hands and watched, half fearfully, as she turned the fine sheets.
“It is a beautiful book, Aton,” she said, and he flushed with pride. “You will have to learn to read the old language, English, and this is a difficult thing, because the symbols do not always match the words. They are not so clear as those of Galactic. Do you think you can do that?”
“I don’t know.”
She smiled. “Yes, you can, if you try.” She found a place and spread the pages flat. “You are a child, Aton, and this book will have meaning for you. Here is what Mr. Wordsworth says about the immortality of childhood: ‘O joy! that in our embers / Is something that doth live, / That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!’ ”
Aton listened blankly. “It only seems obscure,” she said, “because your symbols do not quite match those of the poet. But when you begin to grasp it, the language of poetry is the most direct route to the truth you can find. You will understand, Aton, perhaps when you are twice seven.
“And when you are twice seven what will you be, what will you be doing?”
“I’ll be farming hvee,” he said.
“Tell me about the hvee.”
And so Aton told her about the green flowers that grew in the fields, waiting to love, and how when a person took one it loved him and stayed green as long as he lived, and survived on no more than the air and his presence, and how when the owner grew old enough to many he gave his hvee to his betrothed and it lived if she loved him and died if her love was false, and if it did not die he married her and took it back to himself and did not test her love ever again, and how the hvee grew only on Hvee, the world named after it or maybe the other way around, in the ground, and was sent all over the human sector of the galaxy because people everywhere wanted to know they were loved, no matter what.
“Oh, yes,” she said, when he ran out of breath. “Love is the most painful thing of all. But tell me, young man—do you really know what it is?”
“No,” he admitted, for his words had been rhetoric, a rehearsal of adult folklore. He wondered if he had heard her description correctly.
Then she said something else to him, something strange. “Look at me. Look, Aton, and tell me that I am beautiful.”
He looked obediently at her face, but all he could see were her black-green eyes and her hair, a fire and a smoke, burning and swirling in the wind. “Yes,” he said, finding unexpected pleasure in the saying, “you are beautiful, like the blaze upon the water when my father burns the swamp in the spring.”