*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40969 ***

                    The Mating of the Moons

                      _by Kenneth O'Hara_

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1
number 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _SHE CAME TO MARS IN SEARCH OF SOMETHING, SHE KNEW NOT WHAT,
TO GIVE HER LIFE MEANING. SHE FOUND IT ... IN A WAY...._]


The sun glared, fiercely detached. The thin air suddenly seemed
friendless, empty, a vast lake of poison and glassy water. All at once,
the stretching plains of sand began to waver with a terrible
insubstantiality before Madeleine's eyes.

[Illustration]

Even the Ruins of Taovahr were false. And for Madeleine, even if they
were not false, there was no sign of the outer garments of dream with
which, on a thousand lonely nights back home on the Earth, she had
clothed those dusty scattered skeletons of crumbled stone.

Don, one of the brightest and most handsomely uniformed of all the
bright young guide-hosts at Martian Haven, droned on to the finish of
his machine-tooled lecture about the Ruins of Taovahr. He, of course,
was the biggest chunk of falseness on Mars.

"And so folks, this is all that's left of a once great civilization. A
few columns and worn pieces of stone. And we can never know now how they
lived and loved and died--for no trace whatsoever of an ancient people
remain. The dim, dark seas of time have swept their age-old secrets into
the backwash of eternity--"

"Oh God," whispered Madeleine.

"Shhhh!" said her father. And her mother blinked at her with a resigned
tolerance.

"But he's a living cliche," she said, trying to control the faintness,
the dizziness, the dullness coming back as the last illusion drained
away. "Even if the ruins were real, he'd make them seem trite."

"Madeleine!" her mother gasped, but in a subdued way.

"But there ought to be something special about a Martian ruin, Mother."

Don had heard her. His smile was uneasy, though politely tolerant, as
all good hosts were to rich tourists. "You're hard to please, Miss
Ericson. Maybe too hard." His lingering glance stopped just short of
crudity. But the look made it clear that if she wanted the romance all
women were assumed to expect at Martian Haven, he could provide it, as
he did everything else--discreetly, efficiently and most memorably.

Mrs. Ericson giggled. She had long since abandoned any hope of Madeleine
being, even by stretching the norm, a well-adjusted girl. But much faith
had been placed in a Martian vacation, and hope that it would provide
Madeleine with some sort of emotional preoccupation, even an affair, if
need be--something, anything, that would at least make her seem faintly
capable of a normal relationship with a male. Even this fellow Don. For
Madeleine was past thirty-five--how far past no one discussed any
more--and was becoming more tightly withdrawn every day.

Don shouted. "All right, folks! Now we wend our way back to Martian
Haven, over a trail that's the oldest in the Solar System, a trail that
was once a mighty highway stretching from the inland city to the great
ocean that once rolled where now there is only thousands of miles of
wind-blown sands!"

The long line of exclaiming and sickeningly gullible tourists, either
too young and wide-eyed to know better, or too old and desperate to
admit the phoniness, ooohhhed and ahhhhed, and the rickshaws and camels,
plus a few hardy adventurers on foot, turned with him as Don twisted his
own beast toward Martian Haven.

Even the Ruins, she thought--they were like imported props lying in the
sand, like old abandoned bits of a set for a TV production.

"Madeleine," her father said, still trying to be a big brother after
years of failure. "I really don't understand this at all. Coming all the
way to Mars, and you act like--well--like we'd just stepped around the
corner in Chicago to some ridiculous carnival!"

"I am cursed," she whispered. "I'm tortured."

"What?" her mother said, and stared, with that child-like curiosity with
which she had greeted Madeleine's advent into the world, and which she
had never lost.

"Tortured by the insight that both enables and compels me to see through
the sham and pretense."

Her father grunted and blinked twice. He almost always blinked twice
when she began sounding pedantic like that. He suspected that she did it
deliberately to show off his ignorance.

"Funny," she said, mostly to herself, "that I allowed myself to be sold
this--Mars--the biggest piece of ersatz junk of all!"

"Madeleine!" her mother exclaimed.

"The advertisers got here first," Madeleine said, glancing at Don. "The
hucksters." She stopped talking. Mars offered none of itself, but the
others didn't understand. Mars was only what the hucksters wanted it to
be.

She wondered how she could hang on to the end of the season--even though
it was only three more days. They had committed themselves to a
rigidly-planned schedule, a clockwork program that had them and the
other "vacationing" tourists jumping and squeaking like automatons:
Exotic Martian sports. Martian tennis played on a hundred-yard court
with the players hopping through the rarified air and lower gravity with
an almost obscene abandon. Swimming in a strangely buoyant water,
called, of course, Martian water. Sandsled racing. Air-hopping with the
de-gravity balloons. Spectator sports, including gladiators who leaped
into the phony canals and fought to the death against the
hideous-looking Martian rat-fish. There were many other "activities", in
none of which Madeleine had been able to interest herself.

This last three days promised something called the "Martian Love Ritual
under the Double Moons." And a climactic treasure hunt among the
subterranean Martian labyrinths. They too, Madeleine was sure, were
artificial.

Mrs. Ericson adjusted her polaroid glasses and waved her rickshaw boy
into his harness, where his thighs tensed for the long haul. He was an
incredibly huge man, taller even than those specially-bred movie stars,
who averaged eight feet tall. Madeleine felt faint and clung to her
camel. The Martian camels were coughing and wheezing and the sun glared
horribly in the early afternoon.

Mr. Ericson looked with guarded apprehension at the six-legged camel.
Don pulled him aboard. "What a helluva beast!" laughed Ericson. Earth
camels specially bred by the big travel agencies to have a so-called
"unearthly" appearance. Sad creatures with two extra, dangling limbs and
a single, half-blind, blood-shot eye, watery and humbly resentful.

Pathetic mutation, Madeleine thought. Like those horrid rat-fish, like
the canals and the games and the ruins and those silly rituals. All
ersatz.

The caravan moved along the high ridge, a narrow trail that wound back
toward Martian Haven along the edge of the eroded cliffs.

"Maybe the only thing that would satisfy Madeleine," her father said,
"would be a real Martian."

"But that's not in the brochure," Don said.

"What's Mars without a Martian?" giggled Mrs. Ericson.

In her own insular little world, which had been the only one Madeleine
had ever been able to tolerate at all, she swayed and bumped to the
camel's movements. "One thing sure, Don," she said softly. "There were
_real_ Martians once. So why all the phony props? You can't tell me this
nonsense is better than the facts about the real Martians."

"Ask the boys who built this place. They hired me, they make the rules,"
Don said. He did not look at her.

"How did you ever end up with a job like this, Don?"

"The outfit that built the Haven hired all the old Martian colonists and
their descendants, any who wanted to work for them. So I took a job.
Pay's good. It's seasonal. Anyway, I like Mars."

"Sure," she said. "You must love it--to corrupt it like this."

"Mars was here, it'll still be here after the last tourist goes."

She laughed thinly. Don, with her, was trying to play another role, one
he hoped she might find interesting. "You're a symbol of the phoniness,
Don. Trained in the special host schools. Selected for your beautiful
resemblance to a statue of Adonis. Artificially created to be an
ever-smiling host of good-will, just like these pathetic camels have
been bred for an exotic touch. No real intelligence, Don, nor
originality. And everything you do or say is right out of the text book
on how to make friends and influence tourists."

Don didn't look at her. His fingers trembled on the camel's reins.

"What is this fascinating-sounding 'Ritual of Love' going to be like?"
giggled Mrs. Ericson.

"It's an authentic exploitation of actual rituals once held by the
Martians," Don said. "It has a pagan religious significance. The moons
were male and female, and when they--ah--united their light, the
Martians held feasts, fertility rituals--highly symbolic rites."

"Only symbolic?" said Mrs. Ericson, pretending blasé disappointment.

"Well," grinned Don, "the Martians were only human. Just as--ah--well--I
must say that a number of tourists have a tendency to chuck their
inhibitions during the rituals. But if not on Mars, then where?"

"I still say," yelled Mr. Ericson from his camel, "that you should
spring a live Martian on us."

"We get plenty of calls for them," Don said. "But so far we haven't been
able to scare up any."

"What did they look like?" asked Mrs. Ericson.

"Nobody knows. The only Martians around now are--ghosts," Don said, with
a strange softness. "A few old prospectors, fakirs, beggars live in
these hills--hermits. They claim they see Martians, know they're here.
They believe in ghosts. The Martian sun drives them crazy."

"Like that old man we saw coming out here," said Mr. Ericson.

Don nodded. "They're dangerous. You must stay away from them, you
understand. Or you'll get the contamination."

For the first time, Madeleine felt that Don was touching something real.
She straightened. "Contamination?"

"Those crazy old guys are like lepers. They stay apart from everybody
else. But if you go to them, you pay for it. And if you're contaminated,
it'll cost. If you really get it, you can't be cured at all. You die."

No one said anything. Odd, Madeleine thought, his coming out with scare
talk. Didn't seem to be good propaganda. Then she got it, and laughed a
little. "Sensationalism," she said. "Pure bunk."

"What is this contamination?" Mr. Ericson said.

"An alien virus. Martian. Nobody's been able to isolate it. If a case
isn't too bad we cure it in the antiseptic wards, but otherwise--well,
you just wither away and die in a few hours. You're all shriveled up and
look like a mummy."

"That's horrible!" whispered Mrs. Ericson.

"They're diseased fakirs who say they can read the sands, predict your
future, bring you paradise, for five credits. But stay away from them!"

And just at that moment, as though on cue, Madeleine thought, the old
man stepped out about fifty feet in front of Don's camel, and blocked
the narrow trail.

"Caravan halt!" Don yelled and raised his hand.

Not knowing why, laughing and exclaiming, the long line of the caravan
halted. And Madeleine stared ahead into the old man's face. The old man
was dirty, bent and very ancient and hairless, with only a soiled robe
of crude but heavy cloth hanging on his frame. There was nothing that
seemed very much alive about him except his eyes.

Even he was a stereotype, she thought. The classic old hermit character.
The yogi, the magi, the wise old man, the Hindu Rope Trick, look into my
crystal ball, I am the teller of the sands--

But her heart was pounding extraordinarily loud. His eyes--

Don jumped from his camel. His hands were shaking as he raised his
quirt. "Out of the way!" he shouted, then turned slightly. "Don't come
any nearer, folks! It'll be all right. I'll have him out of the way in a
minute."

"We'll all be contaminated," whispered Mrs. Ericson.

"Just stay clear. You have to contact them directly to be contaminated,"
Don said.

He stopped five feet from the old man and raised his quirt. The old man
looked only at Madeleine, then shook his head slowly up and down as
though reaffirming some special secret. As though he shared some secret
with her.

"Five credits," the old man said, in a loud whisper. "And I'll read the
sands for you. The Martian sands know all your secrets and the
timelessness of your dreams. Let them speak to you, through me, for five
credits."

Don swung the quirt savagely. It was heavy, and it thudded and smacked
across the old man's face and chest. He fell in the middle of the trail.

The sun wheeled crazily. Madeleine could hear her mother screaming and
her father yelling as she moved, as though in a trance, toward the old
man. Her feet slipped, stumbled in the shale. The old man crawled a
little, got up, fell again.

She was screaming at Don to stop.

The old man had fallen to one side and the trail was clear now.

"Let him alone! Let him alone!" Madeleine screamed. "He's out of the
way!"

"Madeleine!" Mr. Ericson shouted. "Come back! Get away from that beggar,
right now, or we return to Earth in the morning!"

For the first time in her life, that she could remember, her father's
threats meant nothing. But the old fear was there as she moved toward
the Martian hermit, on a painful tightwire of impulse between threat and
desire. She had learned that for any real feeling--fear, joy, pain or
even the dimmest-remembered pleasure, you paid a dear price. But she
moved on.

The old man's face was bleeding. She saw the long welts of red on the
flesh, and the blood-flecks and tortured little broken channels of blood
crossing it. Sound roared around her as she eluded Don's hands and knelt
down, took the old man's head in her arms. She tilted her canteen to his
lips.

There was a kind of strange triumph in the old man's eyes as he
peered past her for only a moment and looked at Don. And from
somewhere--Madeleine couldn't even tell whether it was real--came a
thought.

"_Madeleine--come back. Come back when you can. And you will find joy._"

Later she knew how she kicked and screamed at them as they dragged her
away. How Mrs. Ericson was embarrassed by the display, and how her
father refused to touch her because of the fear of contamination. And
her mother weeping, later, because of the disgrace and because of what
the other guests would think.

In the shiny antiseptic ward at Martian Haven, the virus was burned out
by a certain number of roentgens of carefully proportioned X-rays, gamma
rays and neutron bombardment. She kept thinking of the old man's eyes,
of the stray thought that promised joy.

She kept seeing the old man lying off the trail among the rocks, how he
had raised himself on his elbow, and how he waggled the blood-clot of
his head in the glaring sun as they dragged Madeleine away.

Occasionally she thought of the whole project--in Mars, Mecca of Earth
tourists, Martian Haven, Dream City of the Solar System--that was so
colorful and impressive and exotic to others, and she wondered if it was
all really as ridiculous as it seemed to her.

She lay there in the dark of the room as evening reached over the dead
sea bottom toward the edifice that was Martian Haven. Out there in the
big amphitheatre, resurrected supposedly from old Martian ruins, Martian
Haven, with all of its rich, efficient facilities and staff, was
preparing the stage, props and guests for the Love Ritual of the Double
Moons.

The core and centerpiece of Martian Haven was a great cubistic hotel,
with the two Martian canals on two sides, renovated, of course, and a
five-mile-long artificial lake on a third side. It was somehow designed,
in the middle of all that vast emptiness of dead sea, sand and eroded
rock, to have a not-ungraceful look of insubstantiality, as though at
any moment it might open great wings of some sort and take off into the
Martian nowhere by which it was so overwhelmingly surrounded. The side
that faced the lake curved in a half-moon, so that it commanded a wide
prospect to the eroded hills that had once been mountains to the west
and to the east thousands of unbroken miles of desert, that had once,
they said, been an ocean.

When Madeleine opened her eyes, it was night. On many a starry night she
had lain inside walls not so different from these, and felt much the
same, she thought, surrounded by a desert of her own. Away off there in
the blackness, Earth shone palely--and she might as well never have left
it at all.

And then again she saw the old hermit's eyes out there in the dark, his
burning eyes where there should be only sterile emptiness in the night.
And his voice calling where there would otherwise have been only the
dusty echoes of an arid past.

Outside now the tourists were gathering in the double moonlight. The
weird extrapolation of Earth music that was supposed to be the strains
of Martian rhythms drifted to her, and lights flickered from burning
tapers where dancers undulated and writhed fitfully. A libidinous
expectancy was as heavy as a thick scent in the night.

Then, only for a moment, she despised herself for not being with the
others, for never having been able to participate in the futile
make-believe. She felt like a child who had never grown beyond the stage
of the most old-fashioned fairy tales. Someone who had gone beyond the
looking-glass and had never been able to get back, but who had never
quite been able to forget the world from which she had come.

She could hear her parents and Don talking in the next room.

"It's a shame for her to miss the ritual of the double moons," Don said.

"She's always been that way," Mr. Ericson said. "Staying by herself."

"We've tried everything," said Mrs. Ericson.

"She's spent half her life on an analyst's couch," said Mr. Ericson.

"She wouldn't even," Mrs. Ericson said, "fall in love with her
_analyst_!"

"She was only in love once," said Mr. Ericson, "and that had to be with
an idiot who was always writing sonnets."

[Illustration]

"A poet," said Don. "There used to be a lot of poets."

"But not in my life," said Mr. Ericson.

"Maybe," Don said, "your daughter expected a little bit too much from
Mars."

"Don," Mrs. Ericson pleaded, "maybe _you_ can do something."

"I'll be glad to try," Don said.

So Madeleine lay there and waited for Don, the perfect host, who could
supply everyone at Martian Haven with whatever was necessary to insure a
pleasant day.

Later, though she did not turn or make any sign of noticing, she knew he
had entered the room and was standing over her. She could see the
periphery of his giant shadow projected by moonlight over the colored
glass.

"Madeleine--we've got a date for the ritual tonight."

"That's odd, Don. I don't remember it."

"But you didn't say you _wouldn't_ attend it with me, when I suggested
it this morning."

"Well, Don, this is an official rejection of your proposal."

She saw his shadow bend, his body drop down beside the couch. She felt
his hands on her arm. The peculiar fright went through her.

"You won't listen, Madeleine, but whatever you're looking for
here--please forget it! The rituals will help you forget. Try it,
Madeleine! Please--"

Why did he, all at once, sound so desperate?

"With you?"

"Why not?"

"You're just an artificial dream, Don, that comes true seasonally for
people so sick that they can convince themselves you're real--for a
price."

"Well, Madeleine--are you so different?"

"I guess I am."

"You just want the impossible. The others--they want little dreams we
can give them easily."

There was a strain, a tension in him, in his hands, in his voice.
Suddenly, his hands held her, and his face was close above her lips.
"You're still young and beautiful to me," he whispered.

She turned her face away, and gazed at the tattered and splendid veils
of moonlight as Deimos and Phobos neared one another, with undying
eagerness to consummate the timeless ritual.

Dimly, she could hear the communal voices rising to desire.


    "_Twin Moons, Love Moons, whirling bright,
    Bring me Martian love tonight!_"


If you could expect too much from Mars, then where could one find the
answer to the intangible wish? Sirius. Far Centauris. And at the end of
it, the hucksters, the phony props, would be there first.

Some people should stay on Earth, she thought, those who are so hard to
please. There the veils of space and time might keep the last illusions
living. Once you find that even the farthest star is illusory, there's
no place left to go.

His lips were near her lips. His voice was low. "You are different!" His
throat trembled. "You really are. But--I wonder if you're different
enough."

She was aware of the awful gnawing emptiness within her that was only
intense desire too frightened to be free. And then his lips were
crushing to hers and she allowed it, for she knew what was to be her
only way out, and the promise of union was a haze in the room like the
veils of light from the moons of Mars that joined against the starlight
of heaven.

There was more than the ardent in his intensity. A kind of desperation,
his desire to please going beyond the line of duty. The old consuming
terror returned.

She pushed him away. His hands reached, his body crushed. Panic. She
felt unable to breathe, and she started to scream. His hand was over her
mouth.

"Don't look any deeper, don't probe any farther!" he said, like a
suddenly terrible threat. "I beg you, don't do it! You're
different--beautifully different, Madeleine. But not different enough!
None of them ever are!"

She squirmed away, onto the floor between the glass and the couch, and
scurried toward the door. She could hear the gasping, the sobbing
desperation in his voice, and his shadow lengthened across the walls.

Then, as she hesitated in the doorway, he was gone.

She put on a nylon hiking suit and left the room. The silence of the
hall was not real, and the emptiness was not really emptiness. It was
like waking and being exasperatingly aware of only the fleeting end of a
dream. And as she slipped out a side entrance, even the wailing of
exotic musical instruments seemed in a sense not real. Even the silence,
the feeling of being followed, watched, even that seemed artificial--it
was impossible to substantiate the suspicion.

Her palms were wet as she slipped along the wall toward the garage where
the sandsleds were kept. From the amphitheatre she could hear the
rituals, the intercessions, comminations, hymns, libations,
incense-burning, and who knew what else. She saw the reflection of
chrome and artificial glitter disguised as Martian authenticity, the
lights hanging like a grove of pastel moons, and the shrill empty
laughter of girls uncoiling as bright as tinsel through the sluggish
Martian evening. And in spite of the sound and elaborate pretension, it
all had the undying feel of lugubrious solitude.

It had, for a doomed generation driven into inescapable conformity, the
necessary quality of a dream in which a stubborn unconsciousness seeks
ever for truth. And later, back on Earth, in the rut and groove, it
would remain only a dream no one ever talked about to anyone else. After
all, it would simply be something that happened on another world.

She gave one brief, bitter laugh. And even on another world the last
desperate dream was false.

There might be something to be said for release through a pagan orgy
under the double moons; she had no moral scruples about it. But the
paganism would have to be real, that was the thing. Besides, it was too
late. For a moment she pressed her flattened hands against her face and
felt tears squeezing through the tightly-locked fingers. She felt as
though she might explode somewhere inside and realized how the invisible
edges of living had cut her soul to pieces.

It wasn't even self-pity any more. It had grown above self-pity to a
realism beyond tragedy.

She felt icy and empty and alone as she lit a cigarette. Through the
taper smoke, the glowing amphitheatre seemed like a golden porpoise
lapped in dawn, and coupled with the expanse of the Haven it nestled in
the night to resemble a sleeping question mark, an entity gay and sad
and full of what was called life.

There was no turning back now. There was no turning back, even to Earth,
for that would be the most humiliating defeat of all.

Then she was inside the first sandsled. The sled moved noiselessly out
of the garage and whispered away over the sands.

After only a few minutes the radio frightened her with an abrupt voice
like that of a disembodied spirit.

"Madeleine!"

She looked back through the trailing skeins of moonlight. A dark spot
was overtaking her. She couldn't go any faster. Evidently Don had one of
those racing sleds that hardly seemed to touch the sand at all.

"Madeleine! Please--for God's sake, don't see that old hermit!"

"For the sake of which God, Don? I understand the Martians had more than
one."

"Madeleine! I'm begging you to come back!"

"Why?"

"You know why."

"The contamination!" She laughed. "Your melodramatic devices don't
frighten me."

"It's true. You'll die--! Come back!"

"To what?"

"We'll talk about it! Just come back!"

"What's so dangerous, Don, about my not accepting things here as they're
supposed to be?"

His voice tightened. "Just stop, stop and come back!"

She didn't stop, didn't bother to answer. She circled the sandsled among
the hills, skirting the rocky clefts with a reckless abandon she had
never felt before, and her face was flushed as she leaned her head back
and laughed.

"Madeleine!"

It was the last time he called to her. After that, the silence conveyed
an intensity of purpose far stronger than verbal entreaties.

She swerved the sandsled dangerously among the erosions, and felt the
grinding strain at the base of her skull as the sled bounded from one
spire and careened toward another, which she barely avoided smashing
into head-on.

She recognized the area. She leaped out of the car and ran, hearing the
pursuing sandsled stop somewhere below her as she climbed.

For an instant dizziness threatened, and the surroundings and the
motions of Don and herself and the love moons in the sky seemed wildly,
almost dangerously abstracted, as if viewed through drug-glazed eyes. A
panicky wash of blood came to her face and she struggled for breath,
wanting to cry out. It passed. Her mind groped for reason and the terror
receded.

She went on up to the ridge and found the old man waiting. From that
high ridge where the night wind cut coldly toward the Martian south, the
lights of the rituals in the amphitheatre of Martian Haven flickered in
a misty halo far away, like phosphorescent globes of spooky glowing, and
frenetic dancings and shiftings of crazed flames.

The old man had a vague, insubstantial look, only his eyes seemed real,
almost too real, in their intensity as he looked at her. He was propped
against a block of eroded rock and the wind rustled the fringes of his
ragged robe.

She sat beside him, their shoulders touched. And then, as though slowly
dissolving through some chemical reaction, the old man began to fade.
Vaguely Don was there, too, in a nebulous transparency like the old man.
And Madeleine lay there, her face pressed into the sand. On Mars one
should expect, without shock, a different kind of reality.

Their voices weren't really voices. Just thoughts, thoughts in the head,
feelings, but nothing solid. The thoughts of Don and the old man seemed
to be in some kind of time-worn conflict.

"You encouraged her," Don was thinking.

"Those who can see a little should be urged to try to see more. Maybe,
sometime, we'll find one who is different enough to come through to us."

"No! It never works that way! They just--die."

"Maybe they won't--always," the old man thought.

Madeleine felt strangely disoriented, as though dreaming with delirious
fever. All time and space seemed for a moment to be enclosed within that
rocky space, itself unmoored and unhelmed upon a dark and compassless
ocean.

Martians, Martians all around, but not a one to see. Like disembodied
spirits, they had long ago evolved beyond confinement to fleshly bodies.
But Earth people suspected there was something, so the younger ones,
like Don, allowed suspicion to take any stereotyped, acceptable form.
But the oldsters believed in being honest. Let those who can see--see.

"Madeleine!" Don was thinking, desperately, as desperate as only pure
feeling can be. "Go back--back to the Haven. You can still go back!"

"But she cannot," the old man said. "For those who come this far,
there's never anything to go back to."

"No--I cannot," Madeleine thought. "I don't want to go back."

"All right," Don thought after a while. "All right, Madeleine."

Then she was on her feet and moving over sand and stone that seemed
alive toward the Ruins of Taovahr--but they were no longer ruins. She
heard the murmur of sea-tides and warmer winds sighing over a younger
land.

The sterile sand blossomed. Aridity drifted away. "_Don! Is that you,
Don?_"

Don seemed to be somewhere, felt rather than heard, sensed, not seen.
And instead of ruins, the high white walls and rising towers surrounded
by gardens, fountains, and through the gardens a stream of clear water,
soft with the pads of giant water lilies, trailing like glass under the
moonlight and sympathetic shadows of leaves.

"Don! You knew what real living was in your youth. It was way, way back
in time. Didn't you? And only if you're really living do you know where
you're going, and you knew, didn't you? You gave up the machines, and
went on to freedom. You escaped the confining flesh that can be caught
up in war, and in hopeless peonage to the radios and teevee and radar
and thundering jets that drown out the song of real life, and a horde of
cunningly made, treacherous machines--"

"Madeleine. Join us--the way we are now. You can do it--"

"I--I can't see you, Don."

"You don't have to. You just think about it and join us, all of us--"

"Just--just a spirit of some kind, Don--is that it?"

"Yes, yes--something like that! You can't explain it! Just do it!"

It was too late, she knew that now. "We're old, too old, where I come
from, Don. When I was very young, I might have done it." Only the
wonder-filled child can go through the looking glass and--stay.

And he knew she was right, that she was too old. But the old man had
promised her a moment of joy. She suddenly saw him--Don--the bright,
strong man waiting across the stream. "It's what you brought to me," he
said softly. "When we were young we looked this way--and we were real."

She moved toward the water and her arms lifted to him. At first she
couldn't recognize the woman who bathed there. From the water's surface
a slight vapor drifted, and she saw the wet gleam of naked arms as they
lowered and raised and the water shone on the pale loveliness of
unashamed nakedness. And then she knew that the woman there, her hair
floating over the water, was Madeleine. She whispered her own name.

He took her in his arms, and she could hear her breath joining his as
the mist drifted up among the buttressed writhings of the trees. She was
laughing, her breasts pressed to the damp richness of the loam, and in
the water she could see her face, white, with sharp shadows under the
eyes and a high look of joy.

"I love you, Madeleine."

His face was above her and his lips crushed to hers, and she could hear
the stream flowing all around her like blood in her ears.

"I love you, Madeleine."

A whisper went through the gray starlight that Mars was turning toward
morning. And the waters of the mind drained away, leaving high and clear
the common desire that stands like a drowned tower.

"I love you, Madeleine."

She could hear it all fading away--her own joy, the fires--as if
everything were melting, a wax candle dying, a wine glass draining, a
soft light dimming....

       *       *       *       *       *

They had found her by following the pathway left by bits of abandoned
clothing. There was nothing but the rescue party and thousands of miles
of waste around Madeleine where she lay in the ancient, dried-up creek
bed. And she was shriveled and dried out and resembled, as Don had
predicted, a mummy. But there was a kind of softness of repose on her
face that hadn't been there before. Don stood back and looked down at
her and thought about the waste.

Mr. Ericson ran forward in his purple shirt and fell to his knees
whispering, "Madeleine, we've found you! Madeleine--Madeleine--can't you
hear your Daddy?"

"We give you anything you want," Don whispered, but no one heard him.

And while Mr. Ericson wept, Mrs. Ericson slumped into Don's arms as
though it was the end of the world.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Mating of the Moons, by Kenneth O'Hara

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40969 ***