—and is quiet.
In this brittle Mexican desert he marches on. The air is crystalline; puddles from a recent rain splinter the descending light.
Poppies, mallows, zinnias, cacti, sand mats and yellow splashes of lichen—
—soil awash in life—
—sun spinning over the warped earth—
Nigel smiles. The being rides back, behind the eyes.
His legs make easy strides. A bootheel rubs. Leather creaks. Arms rocking, calves bunching. Heart pumping lungs whooshing skin warm boot turning on a stone sky flat shirt tugging in the damp armpits waxy cactus in the path canteen rattling as he turns—
From this awareness Nigel selects. The being does not. He eats it all.
A rabbit bounds to the side. A claret-cup cactus beckons. Nigel stops. Unscrews canteen. Drinks.
—feels the rushing silvery quilted reddening flavor on his tongue—
—And senses some dim trace of what the other being must feel. It honored the sanctity of living creatures; it would not have bid Alexandria to rise again, but she was already gone, already dead to her own world. So to see this fresh planet, the being used a body that men had already cast aside.
In those first moments of contact with Nigel, on the street in Mexico City, the being had very nearly withdrawn. But when it saw the ruined canvas inside this man, it had stayed. Using the subtle knowledge, learned from thousands of such contacts with chemical life forms, it undertook some brush of contact. And remained. To taste this sweet world. To shore up this man.
—blue custard sky vibrant with flapping life, drifting splotches, writhing clouds—
This place is alien.
Pausing, the sharp jagged horizon dividing this world into halves, he reflects. And sees the rippling weave of Evers and Lubkin and Shirley and Hufman and Alexandria and Nigel. A play. A net. Gravid workings. Each a small universe in itself.
But each together. Exalted. Each a firmament. A clockwork.
So familiar.
So alien.
Deep, buried in the currents of the torrent, Nigel swims.
Swimming, he heals.
The looming presence sat astride the flood of perception and took it all. Before Nigel could apply the filters of his eyes, ears, skin, touch, smell—before all that, the being sponged up this new and strange world, and in the act of taking altered it for Nigel as well.
And someday the being would go. Pass through. Nigel would split his cocoon then. Emerge. Into the splintering day. On doddering feet.
He would pass through that lens. All would pass. But for the moment:
The Snark feels the booming pulse unfolds the rocks before him carves the dry air smacks boots into yielding earth—
seeing
tasting
opening.
Eases him into the warming world.
Pins him loving to the day
—E v e r s L u b k i n S h i r l e y H u f m a n —
AlexandriaAlexandria—
Thinking of them, knowing he will return to that world someday, a weight slips from him and he rolls and basks and floats in these familiar waters of the desert. Evers-Hufman-Shirley—
Alien, they are, his brothers.
So alien.
PART THREE
He woke, staring up into an iron-gray sky glowing with dawn.
He woke alone.
The being was gone. The faint trembling pressure had seemed to ride behind his eyes; now Nigel felt only a hollow absence of something he could scarcely recall.
He sat up in his sleeping bag, felt a buzzing dizziness, and lay back again. A horned lizard froze on a nearby rock and then, sensing his relaxation, darted away.
There were two places, he thought, where people feel closer to the source of things. The ocean, with its salty memory of origins. And in the desert—bleached, carved, turning beneath a yellow flame, a place reduced to the raw edge. And yet it was alive with a fine webbing of creatures. Perhaps that was why the being wanted to come here.
