Collected Short Fiction, page 789
“No. Stop.”
“You don’t mean that, Artha.” Loosening the glossy red wrap now. Clutching the hard little breast. Hunting for her mouth. “You’re all tensed up. Why not relax? Loving is blessworthy. Loving is—”
“Stop it.”
Flinty again. A sharp-edged command. Suddenly struggling in his arms.
Is this the commune mode of lovemaking? The pretense of resistance? She grasps at her wrap, pushes him with her elbow, tries to bring up her knee. He surrounds her with his arms and attempts to press her to the floor. Still caressing. Kissing. Murmuring her name.
“Get off.”
This is a wholly new experience for him. A reluctant woman, all sinews and bone, fighting his advances. In the urbmon she could be put to death for this. Unblessworthy thwarting of a fellow citizen. But this is not the urbmon. This is not the urbmon. Her struggles inflame him; as it is he has gone several days without a woman, the longest span of abstinence he can remember, and he is stiff, agonizingly erect, carrying a blazing sword. No finesse possible; he wants in, as quickly as it can be managed. “Artha. Artha. Artha.” Primordial grunts. Her body pinned beneath him. The wrap off; as they fight he catches a glimpse of slender thighs, matted auburn delta. The flat girlish belly of the unchilded. If he can only get his own clothes off somehow, while holding her down. Fighting like a demon. Good thing she wasn’t wearing her weapon when she came in. Watch out, the eyes! Panting and gasping. A wild flurry of hammering fists. The salty taste of blood on his split lip. He looks into her eyes and is appalled. Her rigid, murderous gaze. The harder she fights, the more he wants her. A savage! If this is how she fights, how will she love? His knee between her legs, slowly forcing them apart. She starts to scream; he gets his mouth down on her lips; her teeth hunt for his flesh. Fingernails clawing his back. She is surprisingly strong. “Artha,” he begs, “don’t fight me. This is insanity. If you’ll only—”
“Animal!”
“Let me show you how much I love—”
“Lunatic!”
Her knee suddenly in his crotch. He pivots, avoiding the worst of her attack, but she hurts him anyway. This is no coy game. If he wants to have her, he must break her strength. Immobilize her. Raping an unconscious woman? No. No. It has all gone wrong. Sadness overwhelms him. His lust suddenly subsides. He rolls free of her and kneels near the window, looking at the floor, breathing hard. Go on, tell the old men what I did. Feed me to your god. Naked, standing above him, she sullenly dons her wrap. The harsh sound of her breathing. He says, “In an urbmon, when someone makes sexual advances, it’s considered highly improper to refuse him.” His voice hollow with shame. “I was attracted to you, Artha. I thought you were to me. And then it was too late for me to stop myself. The whole idea that someone might refuse me—I just didn’t understand—”
“What animals you all must be!”
Unable to meet her eyes. “In context, it makes sense. We can’t allow explosive frustration-situations. No room for conflicts in an urbmon. But here—it’s different, is it?”
“Very.”
“Can you forgive me?”
“We couple with those we deeply love,” she says. “We don’t open for anyone at all who asks. Nor is it a simple thing. There are rituals of approach. Intermediaries must be employed. Great complications. But how could you have known all that?”
“Exactly. How could I?”
Her voice whiplashing with irritation and exasperation. “We were getting along so well! Why did you have to touch me?”
“You said it yourself. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. The two of us together—I could feel the attraction growing—it was so natural for me to reach out toward you—”
“And it was so natural for you to try to rape me when you felt me resisting.”
“I stopped in time, didn’t I?”
A bitter laugh. “So to speak. If you call that stopping. If you call that in time.”
“Resistance isn’t an easy thing for me to understand, Artha. I thought you were playing a game with me. I didn’t realize at first that you were refusing me.” Looking up at her now. Her eyes holding mingled contempt and sorrow. “It was all a misunderstanding, Artha. Can’t we turn time back half an hour? Can’t we try to put things together again?”
“I will remember your hands on my body. I will remember your making me naked.”
“Don’t carry a grudge. Try to look at it from my point of view. The cultural gulf between us. A different set of assumptions in operation. I—”
She shakes her head slowly. No hope of forgiveness.
“Artha—”
She goes out. He sits alone in the dusk. An hour later, his dinner comes for him. Night descends; he eats with no interest in his food, nursing his bitterness. Engulfed by shame. Although he insists he was not entirely at fault. A clash of irreconcilable cultures. It was so natural for him. It was so natural. And the sadness. Thinking of how close they had come to be before it happened. How close.
IV
SEVERAL hours after sundown they begin building a new bonfire in the plaza. He watches gloomily. She has gone to the village elders, then, to tell them of his attack on her. An outrage; they console her and promise vengeance. Now they will surely sacrifice him to their god. His last night of life. All the turmoil of his existence converging on this day. No one to grant a final wish. He’ll die miserably, his body unclean. Far from home. So young. Jangling with unfulfilled desires. Never to see the sea.
And what’s this, now? A farming machine being trundled up close to the fire, a giant upright thing, five meters high, with eight long, jointed arms, six many-kneed legs, a vast mouth. Some kind of harvester, maybe. Its polished brown metallic skin reflecting the fire’s leaping red fingers. Like a mighty idol. Moloch. Baal. He sees his body swept aloft in the great clutching fingers. His head nearing the metal mouth. The villagers capering about him in rhythmic frenzy. Bruised swollen Milcha chanting ecstatically as he goes to his doom. Icy Artha rejoicing in her triumph. Her purity restored by his sacrifice. The priests droning. Please, no. No. Perhaps he’s all wrong. Last night, the sterility rite, he thought they were punishing the pregnant one. And she was really the most honored one. But how vicious that machine looks! How deadly!
The plaza is full of villagers now. A major event.
Listen, Artha, it was merely a misunderstanding. I thought you desired me, I was acting within the context of my society’s mores, can’t you see that? Sex isn’t a big complicated operatic thing with us. It’s like exchanging smiles. Like touching hands. When two people are together and there’s an attraction, they do it, because why not? I only wanted to give you pleasure, really. We were getting along so well together. Really.
The sound of drums. The awful skirling screeches of out-of-tune wind instruments. Orgiastic dancing is starting. God bless, I want to live! Here are the priests and priestesses in their nightmare masks. No doubt of it, the full routine. And I’m the central spectacle tonight.
An hour passes, and more, and the scene in the plaza grows more frenzied, but no one comes to fetch him. Has he misunderstood again? Does tonight’s ritual actually concern him as little as did the one last night?
A sound at his door. He hears the lock turning. The door opens. The priests must be coming for him. So now the end is near, eh? He braces himself, hoping for a painless finish. To die for metaphorical reasons, to become a mystic link binding commune to urbmon—such a fate seems improbable and unreal to him. But it is about to befall him all the same.
Artha enters the cell.
She closes the door quickly and presses her back against it. The only illumination is the streaming firelight glaring through his window; it shows her to him with her face tense and stern, her body rigid. This time she wears her weapon. Taking no chances.
“Artha! I—”
“Quiet. If you want to live, keep your voice down.”
“What’s happening out there?”
“They prepare the harvest god.”
“For me?”
“For you.”
He nods. “You told them I tried to rape you, I suppose. And now my punishment. All right. All right. It isn’t fair, but who expects fairness?”
“I told them nothing,” she says. “It was their decision, taken at sundown. I did not cause this.”
She sounds sincere. He wonders.
She goes on, “They will take you before the god at midnight. Just now they are praying that he will receive you gracefully. It is a lengthy prayer.” She walks cautiously past him, as though expecting him to pounce on her again, and looks out the window. Nods to herself. Turns. “Very well. No one will notice. Come with me, and make no sound whatever. If I’m caught with you, I’ll have to kill you and say you were trying to escape. Otherwise it’ll be my life too. Come. Come.”
“Where?”
“Come!” A fierce impatient whispered gust.
She leads him from the cell. In wonder he follows her through a labyrinth of passages, through dank subterranean chambers, through tunnels barely wider than himself, and they emerge finally at the back of the building. He shivers: a chill in the night air. Music and chanting floating toward him from the plaza. Artha gestures, runs out between two houses, looks in all directions, gestures again. He runs after her. By quick nervous stages they reach the outer edge of the commune. He glances back; from here he can see the fire, the idol, the tiny dancing figures, like images on a screen. Ahead of him are the fields. Above him the crescent sliver of the moon, the shining sprawl of the stars. A sudden sound. Artha clutches at him and tugs him down, under a clump of shrubs. Her body against his; the tips of her breasts like points of fire. He does not dare to move or speak. Someone goes by: a sentry, maybe. Broad back, thick neck. Out of sight. Artha, trembling, holds his wrists, keeping him down. Then at last getting up. Nodding. Silently saying the way is clear. She slips into the fields, between the burgeoning rows of tall, leafy plants. For perhaps ten minutes they trot away from the village, until his untrained body is gasping for breath. When she halts, the bonfire is only a stain on the distant horizon and the singing is drowned out by the chirping of insects. “From here you go by yourself,” she tells him. “I have to return. If anyone misses me for long, they might suspect.”
“Why did you do this?”
“Because I was unjust to you,” she says, and for the first time since coming to him this evening she manages to smile. A ghost-smile, a quick flicker, the merest specter of the warmth of the afternoon. “You were drawn to me. There was no way for you to know our attitudes about such things. I was cruel, I was hateful—and you were only trying to show love. I’m sorry, Statler. So this is my atonement. Go.”
“If I could tell you how grateful—”
His hand lightly touches her arm. He feels her quiver—in desire, in disgust, what?—and on a sudden insane impulse he pulls her into an embrace. She is taut at first, then melting. Lips to lips. His fingers on her bare muscular back. Do I dare touch her breasts? Her belly pressed to his. He has a quick wild vision of this afternoon’s breach healed: Artha sinking gladly to the sweet earth here, drawing him down on her and into her, the union of their bodies creating that metaphorical link between urbmon and commune that the elders would have forged with his blood. But no. It is an unrealistic vision, however satisfying artistically. There will be no coupling in the moonlit field. Artha lives by her code. Obviously these thoughts have passed through her mind in these few seconds, and she has considered and rejected the possibilities of a passionate farewell, for now she slides free of him, severing the contact moments before he can capitalize on her partial surrender. Her eyes bright and loving in the darkness. Her smile awkward and divided. “Go, now,” she whispers. Turning. Running back a dozen paces toward the commune. Turning again, gesticulating with the flats of her hands, trying to push him into motion. “Go. Go. What are you standing there for?”
HURRIEDLY through the moonsilvered night. Stumbling, lurching, tripping. He does not bother to pick a cautious route between the rows of growing things; in his haste he tramples plants, pushes them aside, leaves a swath of destruction by which, come dawn, he could readily be traced. He knows he must get out of the commune’s territory before morning. Once the crop sprayers are aloft they can easily find him and bring him back to feed him to thwarted Moloch. Possibly they will send the sprayers out by night to hunt for him, as soon as they find that he has escaped. Do those yellow eyes see in the dark? He halts and listens for the horrid droning sound, but all is still. And the farming machines—will they go forth to track him down? He has to hurry. Presumably if he gets beyond the commune’s domain he will be safe from the worshipers of the harvest god.
Where shall he go?
There is only one destination conceivable now. Looking toward the horizon, he sees the awesome columns of the Chipitts urbmons, eight or ten of them visible from here as brilliant beacons, thousands of windows ablaze. He cannot pick out individual windows, but he is aware of constant shiftings and flowings in the patterns of light as switches go on and off. The middle of the evening there. Concerts, somatic contests, glow-duels, all the nightly amusements in full swing. Stacion sitting home, fearful, wondering about him. How long has he been gone? Two days, three? All blurred. The littles crying. Micaela distraught, probably quarreling mercilessly with Jason to ease her tension. While here he is, many kilometers away, newly fled from a world of idols and rites, of pagan dancing, of unyielding and infertile women. Mud on his shoes, stubble on his cheeks. He must look awful and smell worse. No access to a cleanser. What bacteria now breed in his flesh? He must go back. His muscles ache so desperately that he has passed into a discomfort beyond mere fatigue. The reek of the cell clings to his nostrils. His tongue feels furry and puffed. He imagines that his skin is cracking from exposure to sun, moon, air.
What of the sea? What of Vesuvius and the Taj Mahal?
Not this time. He is willing to admit defeat. He has gone as far as he dares, and for as much time as he can permit himself; now with all his soul he longs for home. His conditioning asserting itself after all. Environment conquering genetics. He has had his adventure; someday, god willing, he will have another; but his fantasy of crossing the continent, slipping from commune to commune, must be abandoned. Too many idols wait with polished jaws, and he may not be lucky enough to find an Artha in the next village. Home, then.
HIS fear ebbs as the hours pass. No one and nothing pursues him. He slips into a steady, mechanical rhythm of march, step and step and step and step, hauling himself robotlike toward the vast towers of the urban monads. He has no idea what time it is, but he supposes it must be past midnight; the moon has swung far across the sky, and the urbmons have grown dimmer as people go to sleep. Nightwalkers now prowl there. Siegmund Kluver of Shanghai dropping in to see Micaela, maybe. Jason on his way to his grubbo sweethearts in Warsaw or Prague. Another few hours, Michael supposes, and he will be home. It took him only from sunrise to late afternoon to reach the commune, and that was with much circuitous rambling; with the towers rising before him at all times he will have no difficulty going straight to his goal.
All is silence. The starry night has a magical beauty. He almost regrets his decision to return to the urbmon. Under the crystalline sky he feels the pull of nature. After perhaps four hours of walking he stops to bathe in an irrigation canal, and emerges naked and refreshed; washing with water is not as satisfying as getting under the ultrasonic cleanser, but at least he no longer need be obsessed with the layers of grime and corruption clinging to his skin. More springily, now, he strides along. His adventure already is receding into history: he encapsulates it and retrospectively relives it. How good to have done this. Tasting the fresh air, the dawn’s mist, dirt under his fingernails. Even his imprisonment now seems a high excitement rather than an imposition. Watching the unbirth dance. His fitful, unconsummated love for Artha. Their struggle and their dreamlike reconciliation. The gaping jaws of the idol. The fear of death. His escape. What man of Urbmon 116 has done such things?
This access of self-congratulation gives him strength that sends him plunging on, across the commune’s unending fields, in renewed vigor. Only the urbmons seem to be getting no closer. A trick of perspective. His weary eyes. Is he heading, he wonders, toward 116? It would be a sad prank of topography to get turned about and come into the urban constellation at 140 or 145 or so. If, say, he is moving at an angle to his true course, the divergence could be immense by the end of his march, leaving him with a dreadful numbing hypotenuse to traverse. He has no way of knowing which of the urbmons ahead of him is his own. He simply goes onward.
The moon vanishes. The stars fade. Dawn is creeping in.
He has reached the zone of unused land between the commune’s rim and the Chipitts constellation. His legs are ablaze, but he forces himself on. So close to the buildings that they seem to hang, unsupported, in midair. The formal gardens in view. Robot gardeners serenely going about their trade. Blossoms opening to the first light of day. Perfume drifting on the soft breeze. Home. Home. Stacion. Micaela. Get some rest before going back on the interface. Find a plausible excuse.
