“I--”
“I’ll tell you what you aren’t. Human, for instance. You aren’t human!”
His mouth curled as if he had tasted something disgusting and horrible.
“No wonder we couldn’t find your ship. There wasn’t any ship. You
belong here. You’re a native. You can change. You can change the color
of your hair and the shape of your mouth. Maybe you can change more
than that. And I’ve been making love to you and I’ve been in love with
you and I didn’t know--What are you?”
His voice had been rising steadily. Now it cracked and broke in a
thousand brittle pieces.
“You,” he said. “The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. And maybe you
aren’t even female. Maybe they don’t have male and female here.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m female.”
He didn’t hear me.
“It’s all been a game--a horrible, deadly game. What’s real and what
isn’t? You aren’t. I know that. Where are the rest of your kind? What
kind of foul monster have I been making love to? _What are you?_”
His voice ended in a shriek. He pulled out his gun and whirled, peering
into the woods, pointing it here and there, the fat barrel trembling.
“Come out!” he sobbed. “Come out, damn you! Come out!”
“There’s only me,” I said quietly. “I’m whatever you want me to be.”
He didn’t hear me. He didn’t understand me. Nothing could penetrate
the thunder of blood pounding through his brain. But suddenly he swung
around to face me again, suddenly aware that his back had been exposed
to me.
“God!” he said. “God! And I thought this was paradise!”
He shook and the gun trembled and his finger tightened on the trigger.
I knew what was coming, and I shrank back with horror. The trees
trembled and the ground writhed.
“It was, Sam,” I whispered. “It was.”
“Change, damn you!” he shouted. “_Change! I want to see you as you
really are!_”
His thoughts--mad, violent, powerful--wrenched at me, twisted me,
tortured me. I changed. Hatred, terror, and horror were in his eyes as
he stared at me and thought he saw me, and I could not tell him that
he saw only what he had willed to see. I could not tell him that I did
only what he willed me to do.
“God.” He whispered. “God.”
I came toward him, my clawed hands outstretched. His finger tightened
convulsively on the trigger. A wave of heat crisped my body, but it was
nothing to the pain in my mind. He could not stop me, of course. He
could not stop me with his gun, and it was too late for anything else.
I was close to him now, and my hands were reaching for his throat and
squeezing, squeezing....
The last thing he ever heard--I know he heard it--was a low whisper
that might only have been the wind sighing through the trees.
“I love you, Sam.”
He was dead. He was gone. And now that he was gone the reality that
had been created for him--that he had created out of his desires--went
back to another reality, no more real and perhaps not as much. With the
fulfillment of his desire the trees melted back into the ground and the
turf was no longer grass and I drew back into myself too the part of me
Sam had called Louise and there was nothing but unending stretches of
flat, featureless plain which from a great distance looked green.
One thing remained. Not far from where the blue sea lapped the edges
of the plain stood a tall, slim spire, like a monument. Nearby was a
mound, at one end of it a small, flat slab of stone. On the stone were
three words: