It was ridiculous. He knew it was ridiculous, but could not help himself. Everywhere he looked he seemed to see her face. When the wind blew, he heard her whispering. When a door creaked open, he would turn, thinking it was her. And nothing he could do - nothing - could take his mind from her.
"Tom?"
He turned as his father came out and joined him at the rail. Ben was silent a while, his eyes taking in the scene.
"You like it here, Tom?"
Tom shrugged. He hadn't even thought about it. From the bower a peal of laughter, high-pitched and melodious, rang out, and as it did he felt a shiver ripple through him, making the hairs on his neck stand up.
"You want to see what I'm doing?"
He met his father's eyes, then nodded. What did it matter after all?
"Come then."
He followed his father inside. While Ben prepared things at the far end of the workroom, Tom sat in the tall-backed chair beside the window, the sunlight through the glass making him feel drowsy. Ben, by comparison, moved quickly, energetically about, his helmet - a cross between an exo-skeletal skull and a surgeon's cap, the delicate metallic frame studded with swivel-mounted lenses - set momentarily on a workbench at the side as he switched on this and tampered with that, then paused to sketch out an "external" for his assistant.
Scaf stood just behind his Master, watching patiently and nodding whenever Ben asked him if he understood. It was Scaf s job to make the roughs - the first stage 3-D landscapes within which Ben would set his drama. As Ben finished, the ancient dayman grunted his approval.
"It's like the painting," he said in his gruff Clay voice, taking the sketch from Ben and holding it up to study it.
"Precisely," Ben said. "But only like. We must make literal what was allegorical in the painting."
The dayman's head turned slowly, his eyes - night dark, the skin about them heavily lined - meeting his Master's briefly, as if registering understanding. Again he nodded.
"Good." Ben laid a hand gently on Scafs shoulder and smiled. "You get on with that. I'll be setting down the opening viewpoint."
As Scaf disappeared through the end door, Ben looked across at his son, as if noticing him for the first time, though Tom had sat there for the best part of ten minutes.
"So?" he said, mentioning it for the first time, "how was the journey?"
Tom shrugged. Behind him, from the garden, came the sound of laughter. He shivered, then moved his hands. It was. . . . eventful.
"Ah . . ." Ben went to the bench and picked up the helmet, staring at it as he spoke. "I can't stop you having adventures, Tom. To be frank, I wouldn't want to. But you should spare a thought for your mother. You worried her, you know." He looked up, meeting Tom's eyes, trying to make some kind of contact. "After all, this isn't the Domain. It can be very dangerous out there."
Tom moved his hands in his lap. I know. But inside he felt a tremendous restlessness. What was he doing sitting here? What in God's name was he doing? Why wasn't he back there in the cabin with her? Why was he here?
Ben set the helmet down and came across. He stood there, just to Tom's right, barely an arm's length from him, staring out into the garden. For a moment the silence was complete. Then Ben looked down at him.
"So what did happen out there?"
Tom took a long, calming breath. Nothing, he signed.
"I see." Ben made a small gesture, as if it didn't matter. "So you had an eventful journey in which nothing happened, do I understand that correctly?"
Tom almost smiled. Almost. Yet suddenly, frighteningly, he felt close to tears. There was a silence in his head, and his heart. ..
"Was it a girl?" Ben asked, crouching, facing him now, his eyes staring into Tom's face. "Is that it? Did you meet someone?"
He closed his eyes against that searchlight stare, wanting but not wanting to tell his father everything. But so it was. So it had always been. He wanted so much to share it all with Ben -wanted it almost as much as he wanted the girl - yet he was afraid. Afraid that his father would use it, as he used everything. Afraid that Ben would transform his life into a confection - a thing for others to chew upon and spit out. And maybe he had always feared that. Maybe that was why he was silent, for the doctors said there was no physiological reason for his dumbness.
He shook his head, his eyes squeezed tightly shut now, so tight they seemed to bleed.
"Tears?" Ben said, a tone of genuine surprise in his voice. "You want to talk about it?"
The irony of that made him laugh inwardly. His eyes opened to see his father's face a hand's width distant, studying the look of him; scanning his features like a probe above a planet's surface.
Yes, and I too am like that. That much I got from him, Tom thought, recalling the girl's face - seeing it so clearly that it might have been her crouching there only inches from him.
I'll tell you, he signed. I'll tell you everything. But not now.
"Okay," Ben said, his eyes releasing him, his hand resting briefly on Tom's knee before he stood. "But if you need help.. . if you need advice . . . well, you know where to come."
Tom stared at him as he walked back to the bench, surprised. Now that was a first. His father had never offered him advice before, let alone help.
Surprised, yes, but also suspicious.
He stood, hesitating a moment in case there was something else, but his father had done with him, it seemed. Already he was working again, the helmet perched on top of his head, the leather strap undone, a notebook open on the bench before him.
Nothing changes, Tom thought, taking in the scene. As long as I have known him he has been thus. Like a machine. A machine that sucks in life and turns out art.
The thought of it chilled him as it had never chilled him before. And maybe that too was the girl's doing. Maybe she had woken more than the response of love in him, if love it was and not some strange illness spawned by need and nurtured by physical infatuation.
After all, how could one love a woman one did not know?
And yet he did.
He turned, leaving his father's workroom, glad to be gone from there, but for once there was no sense of release. It was as if what had been wild in him - the freedom he had felt playing in the fields and secret hiding places of the Domain - was suddenly no longer there. As he paused, staring about him at the lushness of the palace corridor, he felt that there was nowhere to turn, no place for him to go. Something strange, something irreversible, had happened to him and there was no way back from it.
Sampsa! he called, the cry echoing loudly in the hollow of his skull. Sampsa, where are you?
But there was no answer. Only the silence in his head. Only that and the sound of the maids' shrill laughter in the garden.
Sampsa turned, feeling a vague sensation at the back of his head, a gentle tickling reverberation, as if something very small were crawling about the inside his skull. He knew that feeling; knew that Tom was trying to talk to him. For a moment he closed his eyes, straining to catch that faint sussuration, but it was too faint, too far away.
What is it, Tom? What are you doing at this moment?
No answer came. He shivered and turned back, looking across the platform at his father. Kim stood at the very edge of the platform beside the squat, spider-like transmitters, his face visible through the lit visor of his helmet as he stared out into the void, as if listening. Beyond him the blackness was dusted with stars. Below him was a million miles of nothingness.