Of Man And Manta - Ox Part 29

"You were not speaking intellectually or theoretically or platonically. Your voice trembled with the devotion of a woman for her lover. You were wild and forward, and I -- I was powerfully moved by it. You meant it.

"Your vision of seeming death had charged you, first with grief, then with enormous pa.s.sion. We were naked, and in love, and it seemed wholly natural that we resort to the natural culmination. All the suppressed urges I had entertained toward you were released in the bursting of that dam; it seemed I could never get my fill of your body. And you were eager for me; you were a creature of l.u.s.t. It was as though we were two animals, copulating interminably, driven by an insatiable erotic imperative.

"All day we remained in that cave. Once there was a terrible tremor. It bounced Tyrann half awake; it dislodged stalact.i.tes from the back of the cave. We were afraid the mountain would collapse in on us -- so we made love again, and slept, and woke, and did it yet again.

"At night I woke, disgusted with myself for using you like that. Yet even as I looked at you in your divine sleep, the pa.s.sion rose in me again, and I knew that I had to get out of the sight of you if I were not to succ.u.mb again. So I retreated to the back of the cave.

"I remembered the key and searched for it in the dark. My hand found it on the ledge. I picked it up and shook it -- and suddenly there was a illumination about me, and I experienced that dizzy feeling -- and there was the machine in front of me again.

"Alarmed, I returned to where you slept -- but you were gone. You could not have left by the cave mouth, for Tyrann was there, and there were no fresh tracks in the powdering of snow near him. I was sure you had not left by the rear pa.s.sage, for I had been there. Yet there was absolutely no evidence of your presence; even the lichen on the ledge where we had made love was undisturbed, as though no one had ever been there.

"Forgive me: My first thought was intense regret that I had not awakened you for one more act of love before you disappeared. Then I cursed my sordid nature, for I would love you as strongly were I a eunuch. I lay down and tried to piece it out, and finally I slept again. In the morning I knew it had been a dream -- an extravagant, far-fetched, ridiculous, wonderful, masculine wish fulfillment. And so I put it out of my mind, ashamed of the carnal nature underlying my love for you, and I have maintained a proper perspective since."

Aquilon sat leaning over her diagrams, stunned. The episode Cal had so vividly described had never happened, and it was shocking to hear him speak so graphically, so uncharacteristically. Yet it mirrored the secret pa.s.sion she had longed to express if only there were some way around her inhibitions and his. And it touched upon something hideous, something she herself had buried until this moment.

"Cal -- " she faltered but had to force herself to go on, lest he think it was revulsion for the s.e.xual description that balked her. Yet she could not say what she had intended, and something almost irrelevant came out instead. "Cal, the key -- what happened to it?"

"What happens to any dream artifact when the sleeper wakes?" he asked in return, as though glad for the change of subject.

"No -- did you keep it, or put it back? Did you check for that machine again? It should have -- "

"I must have replaced the key automatically," he said. "I never returned to the rear of the cave. It was part of my disgust, and I refused to humor the pa.s.sions of the dream by checking."

"Oh!" It was a faint exclamation of emotional pain. He had never even checked! But that pang freed her inhibition somehow, and now she was able to approach her own hidden concern. "Cal, you said I thought you had died in your dream. What did I say?"

He did not answer, and she knew he was suffering from acute embarra.s.sment, realizing how frankly he had spoken.

"Please, Cal -- this is important to me."

His voice came back from the machine. "Not very much. We did talk about it some, but it was not a pleasant subject, and there obviously had been some error."

Aquilon concentrated. "Tyrann galloped after you, those awful double-edged teeth snapping inches short of your frail body, the feet coming down on you like twin avalanches. Snap! and your rag-doll form was flung high in the air, striped grisly red, reflected in the malignant eyes of the carnosaur. Tyrann's giant claw-toes crushed your body into the ground; the jaws closed, ripping off an arm. Your head lolled from a broken neck, and your dead eyes stared at me not with accusation but with understanding, and I screamed."

Now Cal's head jerked out of the machine. "Yes!" he exclaimed. "That's what you said in essence. How could you know?" Then he did a double take. "Unless you actually were there in that cave -- "

"No," she said quickly. "No, Cal, I wasn't there. I was stranded on an earthquake-torn island with Orn's egg. I swear it."

Still he looked at her. "You desired my death?"

"No!" she cried. "I dreamed it -- a nightmare. I told that dream to the birds, Orn and Ornette, that third day, before the last quake. That I had seen you die."

"You dreamed it -- the same time I dreamed my -- "

"Cal," she said, another shock of realization running through her. "In some alternate -- could it have happened?"

He came to her. "No. How could I have made love to you if I were already dead?"

She caught his hand, shaken, desperate. "Cal, Cal -- your dream was so much better than mine. Make it come true!"

He shook his head. " 'Quilon, I did not mean to hurt you. It was only that if there were an unaccounted day for me, I would be compelled to believe that somehow -- but the whole thing is insane. I do love you -- that much has never been in doubt -- but I slept around the clock in that cave, recovering from the ravages of that chase, and it is hardly surprising that exaggerated fancies emerged, an ugly expression of -- "

"I don't care!" she cried. "Your dream was not ugly; mine was. Yours was more accurate than your belief. I am like that -- or could be, would be, if I thought I'd lost you. You like to think I'm cold and chaste, but I'm not. I never was! I seduced Veg -- it's no platonic triangle. I made a mistake, but this is no mistake. I want to love you every way I can!"

He studied her uncertainly. "You want the dream -- and all that it implies?"

"Your dream, not mine. Then you'll know me as I am. Yes, I want it -- now!"

He shook his head, and she was suddenly, intensely embarra.s.sed, afraid she had repulsed him by her eagerness. Did he only love the ethereal image, not the reality?"

"I take you at your word," he said. Relief and surprise flooded her, made her weak. "After we complete this project."

"Communication with the pattern-ent.i.ties? But that may take days!"

"Or weeks or years. There will be time."

"But the dreams, the cave -- "

"We are not in the cave."

She saw he was not going to re-enact the dream-orgy of lovemaking he had described. Had she really thought he would? This was Cal, civilized, controlled. The chaste, celestial personification -- it was not of her but of him.

Yet he had acceded. Why?

Because he wanted to give her time to reconsider. The impulse of the moment was too likely to lead to regret, as with her and Veg, or with Cal and his dream-girl in the cave. He would not grasp what he was not a.s.sured of holding.

It was better this way.

He kissed her. Then she was sure of it.

So it was not the dream. It was love, s.h.i.+fted from the suppressed to the expressed -- gentle, controlled, and quiet. It was more meaningful than any wild erotic dream could have been, this simple affirmation of commitment.

Glowing inside, she completed her charts while he worked on the machine, as though there had been no interruption. It was as though they had walked through a desert and suddenly been admitted to an exotic garden filled with intriguing oddities and fragrances that could be explored at leisure together. Yes -- there would be time!

"I worked out 'ideal' rules for one, two and three dimensions," she said brightly. "One dimension would be a line. It takes one dot to make another, and any dot with two neighbors or no neighbors vanishes. It doesn't work very well because one dot makes a figure that expands at the speed of light indefinitely, and you can't even start a figure with less than one. For two dimensions, same as now: Three dots make a fourth, and a dot is unstable with less than two or more than three neighbors. Since up to eight neighbors are possible, it has far more variety than the one-dimensional game."

"Of course," Cal agreed.

"For three dimensions there are twenty-seven potential interactions, or up to twenty-six neighbors. We should require seven neighbors to make a new dot, and the figure is stable with six or seven. Less than six or more than seven will eliminate a given dot. So a cube of eight dots would be stable, each dot with seven neighbors -- like the four-dot square in the two-dimensional version."

Cal nodded. "I believe it will do. Let's try some forms on our cubic grid, applying those rules."

I believe it will do. And Aquilon was as pleased with that implied praise for her work as with anything that had happened.

Chapter 14.

FORMS.