“I wasn’t hungry. You still eat, do you, now that you’ve been changed?”
“Of course we do. It’s not that kind of change.”
“I suppose. How would I know?”
“How would you, yes.” She ran her hand lightly across his arm. This time he didn’t flinch. “Not as much has changed as you’d think. I still love you, Val. I said I would, and it’s true.”
He nodded. There was nothing he could say.
Did he still love her, he wondered? Was it possible even to imagine that he did?
He slipped his arm around her shoulders. Her skin was smooth, cool, familiar. Pleasing. She nestled against him. They might have been the only two people in the world. She still seemed human to him. He bent forward and kissed her softly in the hollow between her chin and her shoulder, and she laughed.
“Val,” she said. “Oh, Val.”
That was all, just his name. What was she thinking, what had she left unsaid? That she wished he had gone to the Face with her? That she still hoped that he would? That she prayed that he would go to Delagard, and beg to have the ship turned around, and taken back to the island so that he too could undergo the transformation?
Should I have gone with her?
Was it a mistake to have refused?
For a moment he saw himself inside the machine, part of it, part of the All—surrendering at last, dancing with all the rest.
No. No. No. No.
I am who I am. I have done what I have done because I am who I am.
He lay back, with Sundira curled against him, and looked upward at the stars again. And one more vision came to him: the Earth that once had been, the Earth that had been lost.
His great romantic fantasy of old vanished Earth, that blue and shining planet, the shattered mother world of humanity, filled him once again: he saw it as he wanted it to have been, a peaceful and harmonious world teeming with loving human beings, a haven, a perfect entity. Had it ever really been like that? Probably not, he thought. Almost certainly not. It had been a place like any other, evil mixed with the good, flaws, failings. And in any case that world was gone from the universe, swept away by malign fate.
And here we are. Here lie we. Rest in peace.
Lawler peered into the night, imagining that he was looking toward the place in the heavens where that world had been. But he knew that for Earth’s surviving people scattered through the universe there was no hope of regaining the lost ancestral home. They must move on, they must discover some new place for themselves in this vast universe into which they had been flung as exiles. They must transform themselves.
They must transform themselves.
They must transform themselves.
He sat up as if jolted by a blast of burning light. It was all so wondrously clear to him, suddenly. The people he had known who lived their lives from day to day as though Earth had never existed had been right, and he, hopelessly dreaming of what once had been, long ago and far away, had been wrong. Earth would never return. For the Earthmen on Hydros there was only Hydros, now and forever more. To hold yourself apart, clinging desperately to your ancestral Earth identity amidst the native life-forms of your adopted world, was folly. On whatever world you might find yourself living, it is your task to make yourself fully a part of that world. Otherwise you will always be an outsider, alien and alienated.
And so it was. Here I am. More alone than I have ever been before.
And Hydros had offered to take him in, but he had said no and made the refusal stick, and now it was too late.
He closed his eyes and saw Earth bright and beautiful in the heavens once again. That vision of lost Earth that he had carried in his mind for so long was gleaming more vividly than he had ever seen it before. The blue Earth, lovely and strange, with its great golden-green land-masses shining by the light of a sun he had never seen. As he watched, the broad blue seas began to boil. Steam rose from them. The land was swept by flame. The golden-green immensities parched and blackened. Deep jagged fissures darker than night sprang up across their broad surfaces.
And after the flames: ice, death. Darkness.
A shower of small dead things, falling through space. A coin, a bit of statuary, a potsherd, a map, a rusted weapon, a chunk of stone. Tumbling helter-skelter, plummeting through the windless wastes of the galaxy. He followed them with his gaze, tracking them as they fell.
All gone, he thought. Let it all go. Forget it. Begin a new life.
The sudden thought astounded him.
What was that?he asked himself. What are you saying?
Surrender? Join? Was that what he had meant? Lawler began to tremble. Sweat broke out all over him. He sat up and looked out to sea, back in the direction of the Face.
It seemed to him that he could feel its force after all, reaching him even over this much distance, infiltrating his mind, wrapping its tentacles around his soul, pulling at him, drawing him in.
He fought it. Frantically, furiously, he struggled with it, hacking with desperate urgency at the strands of alien power that seemed to be invading him. For a long silent moment he worked at it, fiercely trying to cleanse himself of its intruding energies. The image came to him of Gospo Struvin, all the way back at the outset of the voyage, battling with that tangle of moist yellow fibres that had come up out of the sea to ensnare him. Struvin kicking in the air, shaking his foot, attempting vainly to extricate himself from that sticky, persistent thing that enfolded him. It was like that now. Lawler knew he was fighting for his life, as Gospo had done; and Gospo had lost.
Get—away—from—me—
He summoned all his energies for one great cleansing thrust. And launched it.
Against nothing. There was nothing there. No nets held him. No mysterious force entwined him in its snare. Lawler understood that and had no doubt of it: he was struggling against shadows, he was fighting with himself, really, only with himself, no one but himself.
So you want to go to it?he asked himself numbly. Despite everything, you actually do want to go? Even you? Is that what you want? What is it that you want, anyway?
Once again he saw the blue Earth gleaming in his mind as it had been before, and then once again it began to boil and blacken, and he beheld once again the ice, the death, the darkness, and the tiny objects falling.
And the answer came: I don’t want to be alone any more. God help me, I don’t want to be the last Earthman when there’s no more Earth.
Sundira stirred, warm against him. “What are you thinking, Val?”
“That I love you,” he said.
“Do you? You love what I am now?”
He drew a deep breath, the deepest he had ever drawn, pulling the air of Hydros far down into his lungs.
“Yes,” Lawler said.
Where Earth had been in his mind, there was only a flawless sphere of shimmering water. The scattering of tiny objects that had fallen from the dying world hovered for a moment above the surface of that great sea, dropped into it, vanished without a trace.
He felt a great easing, a sudden thawing. Something breaking within him like an ice-floe at the end of winter. Breaking up, streaming away, flowing. Flowing.
He sat up and turned toward her to tell her what had happened. But there was no need. She was smiling. She knew. And he could feel the ship moving in a big arc beneath him, already swinging about, heading back through the luminous sea toward the Face of the Waters.