I remember that I lived nearly two months--or so it seemed--in that
other world. I was assigned an apartment near to Edvar's--Selda was
between us. Edvar instructed me in the details of the life I was to
lead. But he was a rather cold sort: his interests were ancient history
and archeology, and he would spend his mornings at work in the Library
of History or in his study, the rest of his time flying about the world
on curious expeditions of discovery--examining the soil, I suppose, and
investigating the customs and records of other cities.
Selda devoted most of her time to me. It was she who took me from place
to place, showing me the natural beauties of that world. There were, you
see, not only gentle slopes and hill-tops. There were mountainous crags
as high and as wild as the Alps, forests as impenetrably deep and still
as the jungles of the Amazon, and rivers that rushed and tumbled over
rocks, or fell for thousands of feet from mountain cliffs.
The first time I went with her, she took me to a gigantic peak that
overlooked the sea. There was, of course, a small level place for the
airship to land. We left it there, and climbed on foot the last hundred
yards or so. Our way lay through the heavy snow, but it was not too cold
to be more than gloriously bracing, exhilarating. We wore our usual
costume of trunks and tunic.
We stood at the top and looked out over the grandest horizon I had ever
seen. To the east there lay the sea, deep and very blue in the sunlight.
The shore was just a dark line far away and below us. There was a long
strip of grass and field bordering the sea for miles, and behind that
the forest. Toward the north, the mountains crept out from under the
forest and moved down to the sea, rising until they became a vast
wilderness of cliffs and rocks, and hid the sea, with peak after peak
rising as far as the eye could reach into the snow and the mist. Then
the hills sloped down westward into a series of wooded valleys, through
which ran the wide river I had seen at my awakening, coming down from
the mountains and through the valleys until it flattened broadly out
into the low plains in the south and moved eastward to the sea.
Everywhere in the valleys and over the plains, I knew that cities were
scattered, lonely and tall like the one they called Richmond. But we
were so high in the mountains that they were invisible to us--perhaps a
keen eye could have found them, tiny white dots crouching upon the
earth.
I turned to Selda--and caught my breath. The wind, swooping up from the
sea, whipped her thin covering against her body and fluttered it like
the swift wings of a butterfly behind her. Her short, dark hair, too,
was lifted and blown back from her forehead, revealing the clean, soft
profile of her face. I had never seen a girl who stood so clean, so
straight. I watched her until she turned, too, and met my eyes. In them
I thought I detected something startled and unfathomable.
"My God!" I cried across the wind, "you are beautiful!" She frowned a
little, but her eyes still looked searchingly into mine. I stepped
forward, facing her. But I didn't touch her. I was afraid to touch
anything so clean.
"You belong here, Selda," I added. "The wind is a part of you, and the
mountains, and the sea. You shouldn't have to live in the midst of all
those people in the city. You belong here." She smiled faintly, looking
up at me.
"You belong here more than I do, Baret," she said. "You came to us, not
from the city, but from the hills."
* * * * *
We stood there, examining each other's eyes, for a long while. I wanted
to take her in my arms, but I didn't. I looked away at last, back at the
sea, puzzled and disturbed. I had never been aware of anything so fine
as this before, nor of anything so painful. Suddenly I found myself
wanting to be something, to do something--not for myself, but for her.
It was strange.
"Come," she said at last, "we had better go back."
"I'd like to stay here forever," I answered moodily, glancing around a
last time at the versatile horizon.
"So would I," she admitted. Then, in a low voice, she added, "But one
can't. One has to follow one's program."
We returned to the airship, raid rose into the cool, thin air. I stood
behind her on the way back, watching her slender body as she guided the
plane. Once in a while she would turn her head and look up at me over
her shoulder, then quickly look away again.
"Why is it," I asked her as we passed over the valleys and the river on
our way home, "why is it that these hills have such a cultivated
look--as though they had been laid out?" She glanced back, and smiled.
"They _have_ been laid out," she said. "The hills, and the rivers, and
the tallest mountains have all been constructed by our landscape artists
in order to achieve their various effects. Even the line of the sea has
been determined and arranged by the artists."
"But why?" I said. "Wasn't it a frightful waste of energy?"
"It didn't seem so to us," she answered. "We had no further need to
cultivate the land except in small patches, when we learned the secret
of artificial food. And we wanted to have perfect beauty about us. So we
remodeled the outlines of the earth, and eliminated the insects and the
harmful animals and the weeds. We made the land clean and fine as it had
never been before."
"It must have been a terrific labor."
"It pleased us. Our instinct is to arrange and remodel things, to order
our life so that we know what it is and what it will always be." She
paused for a moment, and added in a low voice, "One is necessarily a
determinist here."
We said no more until our arrival in Richmond.
It is not my purpose to detail here all that happened during the time I
spent on that world. Most of it had to do with Selda, and our daily
expeditions about the world. This is not, after all, a love story, but
the account of a very strange experience; and, too, none of it was real.
During my last week, a series of strange moods and happenings
complicated my life. One day, after a visit to the sea with Selda, we
were walking back to our plane across the sand. Without any warning,
surrounded by the brilliant morning sunlight and the miles of sea and
beach, I struck my knee against something hard and immovable, and,
flinging out my hand to catch myself from falling, I clung to a hard
surface like an iron railing. For a moment I was stunned and confused.
The sunlight seemed to fade, and there was a vague hint of darkness all
about me, with black walls looming up on all sides. It was as though I
stood in two worlds at once, transfixed between night and day. Then the
darkness went away, the sunlight brightened. I looked around, and found
Selda watching me curiously, a little alarmed.
"What happened, Baret?" she asked, puzzled. I shook my head in
bewilderment.
"I seemed to stumble--" I said. There was nothing underfoot but the soft
sand, and where I had flung my hand against a sort of railing, there was
nothing either. We went back to the airship in silence, both of us
confused.
* * * * *
After that, with increasing frequency, there would come interruptions,
like iron bars striking dark, jagged holes in the tissue of life. From
time to time I heard inexplicable noises--the whirring of motors, the
skid-skid of tires on invisible streets, the rumble of carts around
corners of a world where there were no carts. Again and again those
moments of confusion would come over me, when I seemed to be looking
into two worlds at once, one superimposed upon the other, one bright,
the other dark with faint points of light in the distance. Once, walking
along the corridor beyond my room in Richmond, I collided with a man.
For a moment the corridor faded completely. I stood on a street with
dark houses about me. Overhead was the glow of a street-lamp, and a
milk-cart was just rattling away around a corner. A man with a
frightened face stood before me, his hat on the pavement, his eyes
staring. We looked at each other in astonishment. I started to speak.
Then he reached for his hat quickly, and brushed by me, muttering close
to my ear.
"For God's sake, look where you're going...."
I stood in the corridor again, staring. Down the corridor, coming toward
me, was a single figure--Selda. Behind me there was nobody. I went to
meet Selda, dazed and uneasy. I could still hear, close to my ear, an
echo of that muffled, hoarse voice that I had never heard before.
That was two days before the end. We were leaving the city on that final
bright morning, when a representative of the Bureau stopped us. I looked
at him inquiringly.
"I have come to tell you, Baret," he said, "that your departure is
scheduled for this evening." I drew back, startled, and looked at Selda.
"My departure?" I repeated in a low voice, hardly understanding. "So
soon?" I had forgotten that one day I should have to leave.
"It has been arranged," he said impersonally.
We bowed slightly to each other, and he went away. Selda and I stepped
aboard our ship in silence.
That time we flew up the river until we came to the foothills of the
mountains in the north. We landed in a little clearing by the river at
the foot of a waterfall hundreds of feet high, towering over us. The
forest stood about us on all sides, coming down to the river's brim on
the opposite bank and meeting it not far from us on the near bank. The
precipice, covered with moss and small bushes, stood above us.
* * * * *
We sat a long while in silence, before I said bitterly:
"So I must go."