Short Fiction - Poul Anderson (books to read for self improvement .TXT) 📗

learn. Tonight was the turning point. Tanith would take her to itself and they would be together forever.

“Eileen,” he said, very softly, and got up and walked toward her. “Eileen, darling.”

The atmosphere trembled between them. She saw the flesh run from his bones, it was a skull that grinned at her, shining evilly green against the dark, and the sounds that rasped from it were the mouthings of nightmare.

Somewhere, far back in the depths of her mind, a little cool voice told her that there was nothing to be afraid of, that it was a brief variation in optical and sonic constants which would pass away and then Joe would be there. But the voice was drowned in her own screaming, she was screaming for her mother to come and get her, it was a nightmare and she couldn’t wake up⁠—

Langdon ran toward her, with the rags of flesh hanging from his phosphorescent bones, until Chang grabbed him back with a violence he had never known to be possible in the old man.

There was a storm outside; the cottage shook to a fury of wind and was filled with its noise and power. They had a fire going, and its restless glow played over the room and beat against the calm white light of fluorotubes, but it could not drive out the luminousness beyond the window.

“Pull the shades,” asked Eileen. “Please, Joe.”

He looked away from the window where he stood staring out at the storm. Fire sleeted across the landscape, whirling heatless flames that hissed and crackled around the wind-tossed trees, red and blue and yellow and icy white. The wind roared and boomed, with a hollow voice that seemed to shout words in some unknown tongue, and from behind the curtain of flaming rain there was the crimson glow of an open furnace. As if, thought Langdon, as if the gates of Hell stood open just beyond the hills.

“It won’t hurt us,” he said. “It’s only a matter of phosphorescence and static discharges.”

“Please, Joe.” Her voice was very small in the racket of wind.

He shrugged, and covered the wild scene. He used to like to go out in firestorms, he remembered, their blinding berserk fury woke something elemental in him and he would go striding through them like a god shouting back at the wind.

Well, it wouldn’t be long now. The Betelgeuse Queen was due in a couple of days on the intragalactic orbit that would take her back to Sol. Eileen didn’t have long to wait.

He took a moody turn about the room. His wife had been very quiet since her collapse of a week ago. Too quiet. He didn’t like it.

She looked wistfully up at his tall form. He thought that she looked pathetically small and alone, curled up⁠—almost crouched⁠—in the big armchair. Like a very beautiful child, too thin and hollow-eyed now but beautiful.

A child.

She has to go. She can’t live here. And I⁠—well⁠—if she goes, it will be like a death within me. I love her.

“I remember winter storms on Terra,” said Eileen softly. “It would be cold and dark, with a big wind driving snow against the house. We’d come inside, cold but warm underneath with being out in it, and we’d sit in front of a fire and have hot cocoa and cheese sandwiches. If it was around Christmas time, we’d be singing the old songs⁠—”

The wind yammered, banging on the door. A stealthy shape of light and shadow wavered halfway between existence and nonexistence over in a corner of the room. Eileen’s voice trailed off and her eyes widened and there was a small dry rattle in her throat. She gripped the arms of her chair with an unnatural tension.

Langdon saw it and came over to sit beside her on one arm of the chair. Her hand closed tightly around his and she looked away from the weaving shape in the corner.

“You were always good to me, Joe,” she murmured.

“How could I be anything else?” he asked tonelessly. There was a new voice in the storm now, a great belling organ was crying to him to come out, Tanith was dancing in a sleet of fire just beyond the door.

“I’ll miss you,” she said. “I’ll miss you very much.”

“Why should you? I’ll be along.”

“Will you. Joe? I wonder. I can’t ask it of you. I can’t ask you to trade a thousand years of life, or ten thousand or a million, for the little sixty or seventy you’ll have left out there. I can’t ask you to leave your world for mine. You’ll never be at home on Terra.”

He smiled, without much mirth. “It’s a trite phrase,” he said, “but you know I’d die for you.”

“I don’t doubt that. Joe. But would you⁠—live for me?”

He kissed her to avoid answering. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

It isn’t so much a question of losing immortality, though God knows that means a lot. It means more than any mortal will ever know. It’s that I’d be losing⁠—Tanith.

He thought of Sol, Sirius, Antares, the great suns and planets of the Galaxy, and could not keep from shuddering. Drabness, deadness, colorlessness, meaninglessness! Life was a brief blind spasm of accident and catastrophe, walled in by its own shortness and the barren environment of a death-doomed cosmos. Too small to achieve any purpose, too limited even to imagine a goal, it flickered and went out into an utter dark.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty place from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.⁠ ⁠…

The storm sang outside, and he heard music and lure and enchantment. It was not a discord, after two centuries he could hear some of the tremendous harmony⁠—after another while, he might begin to understand the song.

If he stayed, if he stayed.

Eileen.

His face twisted. She saw it, and pain bit at her, but there was nothing she could say.

He began pacing, and his mind took up the weary