9 Tales of Space and Time Read online

  Bettyann glided now, fleeting across the treetops; the moon gleamed for a moment and her shadow lay upon the snow. But now it was gone, and with a last flutter, of wings she settled down in the frozen garden behind the dark and silent house.

  The back door would be unlocked. In a moment she could be at the service porch. The anticipated drama of a nude arrival would not eventuate. Her heart beat warmly. She could visualize every dark moment of progress toward her second-story room . . . She changed, and was neither bird nor human, and she crouched low in terror of discovery against the frozen earth. A light in an adjoining house flipped on.

  “Sounded like the beating of wings,” came a voice.

  Yellow light made a blunt rectangle across the snow. Mr. Richardson, forever curious, peered into the cold. He satisfied himself that he had heard only the wind (for only the wind remained to be identified as cause: and it whirled high above among the clouds, leaving the surface of the world still and mysterious). He grumbled to himself, a solitary, untraveled adventurer deprived once more of experience. A few flakes of new snow slipped down, and his wife called to him. He retreated. The light vanished. Tomorrow afternoon the local paper would report that several citizens claimed to have seen a great bird sweeping across the moon, and he would shudder with superstitious fear and think: If only my wife had not called; if only I had stayed another minute . . .

  Bettyann waited. The town was silent; white flakes spiraled down invisible slots in the air. She was fleeting shadow without shape. She merged with the darkness around the porch. In a moment, soundlessly entering the cold house, she made her way toward her room: a flicker of motion whose passing seemed only to be the settling of the boards.

  She entered her room. She resolved the familiar contours of it from the darkness. Nothing had changed; nothing was different. But she was no longer the same, and her identity with her own past seemed to dissolve away and she knew that she was, herself, new and unfamiliar.

  The moon was gone; the stars were far; only the snow, silent and immediate, came down upon the world to bear a message from elsewhere. There was regret and a sense of loss, and then those emotions vanished and warmth and pleasure replaced them.

  Her winter clothing was all at Smith College. She went to the closet and slowly and quietly opened the door. To the faint tinkle of wire hangers, she removed a cotton print dress.

  Regaining her familiar and reassuring body, she dressed. When she was finished, she left the house, her light summer coat across her arm, and swiftly planned her second and more conventional home-coming.

  She tiptoed down the driveway to the street. Snow sifted into her footprints behind her. She was on the sidewalk. She took a deep breath; her face flushed with excitement. She started toward the front porch.

  Then, through the stillness of the night came a sound strange and familiar: plaintive, tuneless, strong, and defiant—seeming in the moment to capture a thousand emotions at cross purposes, seeming, in the moment, to identify itself with all the town. She turned. She saw a block away, passing beneath a street light, Whistling Red, going home late to loneliness and sleep. The sound grew in her mind until it encompassed everything: the complexity of living filled with the overtones of time . . . She watched until he was gone and until the sound was only memory.

  Then she was knocking on the front door. A freight whistled, leaving the Missouri Pacific station, wailing steam into snow and isolation. And she thought again, I am not—not human.

  A light came on, a sleepy call, “Yes? Who is it?”

  She was knocking quickly and desperately. “It’s me! Bettyann!”

  Dave was opening the door. In the first second his eyes searched her with quick fear; and then, seeing her whole and sound (his first irrational thought, upon hearing her voice, had been of a bruised, bloody, and hysterical face) relief replaced the fear, and he said, “My God! What are you doing home, Bettyann?”

  Jane, halfway down the stairs and tucking her robe in place with nervous haste, called, “Is she all right, Dave? What is it?”

  “What’s wrong?” Dave said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m—I’m . . .”

  Jane was rushing toward her to gather her in protectively. “Darling, what is it?”

  “I came back, I—I left college. No, I’m all right. I’m not hurt. It’s . . .”

  Jane had both arms around her. “There, there, tell us what it’s all about, now.”

  Bettyann closed her eyes and shook her head. “Please, Mom, Dad. I’m all right. I don’t want to talk about it right now, that’s all. I had to come home. I wasn’t in any trouble. It wasn’t anything like that. I just had—I just had to come home.”

  “Now, now,” Jane said.

  “You’re all right?” Dave said. “You’re not sick or anything, you’re sure?”

  “I’m . . .” Bettyann tried to hold back the tears. “I’ll be all right in a little while.” She blinked her eyes rapidly. “I—I, gosh, I’m sorry to get you out of bed.”

  She was acutely aware of her alienness. For the first time she was isolated from Jane and Dave. “I don’t want to talk right now, please, please, Mom.” Her nature had been established at a nonhuman conception and her real parents had chosen this present body for her when she was very young, in a period she could not even remember. After the automobile accident that had injured her arm and killed those parents, she had lived and thought of herself as a human girl. And now facing the parents who had adopted her, she thought, What can I tell them? I’ve turned out to be a visitor, marooned just after I was born on your planet, and now that I know—in a vague way only—what I’m really like, I’ve turned out to be quite . . . accomplished? I can change bodies like you change clothes? I can . . . do parlor tricks of the most astonishing kind?

  Suddenly she thought: I’ve started to smoke?

  The incongruity was overpowering. The tension and the fear was gone. She began to laugh.

  The three of them stood in the midnight corridor and erupted with mutually contagious laughter—at what, not knowing, knowing only that there were three of them together.

  “She’s all right, she’s just fine,” Dave said. “Make some coffee, Jane.”

  Now that the laughter was gone, Jane felt the return of empty apprehension. Worrying her hands helplessly, she turned to go.

  “Come on in and tell us what it’s all about,” Dave said.

  “Light the fire in there,” Jane said. “She must be frozen.”

  “I’ll do that. Come along, Bettyann.”

  In the living room he lit the oil heater and stood before it. They could hear Jane drawing water in the kitchen. Dave, without looking directly at Bettyann, cleared his throat in interrogation and shifted the weight of his body. Bettyann wanted the lengthening silence to continue. Each passing second seemed a reprieve from decision. She felt that if she could avoid speaking for only a few more moments, the necessity would pass.

  Dave wished she would say something. The longer she delayed, the more uneasy he became. Soon he felt a tiny stirring of fright. He was no longer at all certain that he wanted her to say anything at all.

  Bettyann moved about restlessly, touching old, familiar objects as if to assure herself that they were real. She bent down to read the inscriptions on the backs of his record albums; she knew perfectly well what they said.

  Dave wished Jane would hurry with the coffee.

  “It’s so wonderful to be home!” Bettyann said.

  Dave wanted to smile, but at the same time his eyes burned strangely. Her tone made it seem that she had rediscovered something she thought she had lost forever. For no identifiable reason, he knew he had nothing to fear. She was back with them; that was enough. He waited with paternal understanding, and forgiving patience.

  “The coffee’s ready!” Jane called. “Shall I bring it in there? It’s warmer in here with the oven on, I think.”

  “We’re coming right in,” Bettyann said. A crisis seemed to have passed.

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nbsp; The coffee cups were arranged in a triangle upon the red and white oilcloth of the table. They drew up kitchen chairs. Jane’s hand trembled slightly as she poured. Her smile reminded Bettyann of the way an adult smiles at a children’s party, a smile unhinged from its wearer’s thought. Dave put too much sugar in his coffee, noticed what he had done, frowned to himself, and blew to cool a spoonful for verification. Jane’s eyes were deeply uneasy before the unknown.

  Bettyann was lighthearted and she loved them wildly for their trust. They were waiting to come to her defense should she need them. But in the far back of her mind—as she looked out upon them—was a little whimpering voice that said, you are an alien, a stranger, and from far way.

  She sipped her fiery coffee. Suddenly she was ineffably sad, and that passed, and then she was afraid with a vast and formless afraidness, and the whimpering voice was louder in her mind. The silence was almost terrifying.

  “I wrote you a letter,” she began. Then she forgot what she had intended to say. She gave a sharp little intake of breath. “That letter! You mustn’t open it!” She felt her heart leap at the thought. “You really mustn’t open it!” She was thinking: I told you I had to go away, and that I was going away so far that I could never see you again, but it wasn’t true, and you mustn’t read it, because I couldn’t go away. I don’t want you to read it.

  “We won’t, if you don’t want us to,” Dave said.

  “I’ll give it to you when it comes,” Jane said.

  “Much as we like getting your letters,” Dave said.

  Bettyann was going to cry. She gulped quickly at the coffee and through the tears, she said, “My! It’s hot!”

  “I just made it,” Jane said.

  Bettyann put the cup back on the saucer. She blinked the tears away and sniffed and shook her head.

  “We’d better get you off to bed,” Dave said.

  “I don’t want to go back to Smith this semester,” she said in a nervous burst of words. “Will that be all right? It wasn’t anything that happened there. I mean, I didn’t get in any trouble at the school or with any other teachers or anything.”

  “The man, that man who came here looking for you,” Jane said. “It was something about your real parents? I told Dave that he’d come to see you about your parents.”

  Don, Bettyann thought, yes, he came to tell me something about my real parents, only he wasn’t a man or a human. The twinge of fear was sharp. “Mother, Dad . . .” Her voice was an urgent plea for understanding.

  Bettyann was ready to explain. Don was his name, she prepared her thoughts, and he showed me that I was one of his race. It was the first time they’d been back to earth since they thought I was killed in the automobile wreck. They could feel my thoughts, and they sought me out. Don and Robin came to take me back with them. I didn’t know what to say, and then, then I said, Yes, yes, I’ll go with you. I thought they were my people. And Don and Robin took me to the spaceship that was off the coast of Mexico . . .

  Bettyann suddenly felt a strange, sad pride in the race that had conquered space before the race of man had conquered fire, the race that seemed as old as time and that was, in some respects, superior to mankind.

  And then, she thought, I talked to them; and they frightened me, in a way they frightened me, and I knew I didn’t want to go with them any more, and so, I—I—We were on the spaceship, and I went to the port, and there was no one with me, so I changed into a seabird, and I flew away.

  But then the still voice came and said, You belong now. Now you belong. Now only you know that you are not human.

  Her mouth was half open; she closed it. She bit her lower lip and drank hastily from the cup. “I don’t . . . not tonight.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk right now, please. I’m so glad to be home, I don’t want to talk about anything.”

  Dave waited a little while, then pushed his coffee cup away. He stood up. “We’ve got lots of time to talk. Jane, leave those cups and saucers until the morning. It’s late.”

  Jane stood, her hands helplessly at her sides. “I’ll lay the sheets on your bed,” she said, wanting to hold and comfort Bettyann, knowing that Bettyann was no longer a child and must face the world alone.

  They left her seated at the kitchen table; and when their steps were on the stairs, she put her head on her arm and cried.

  Dave and Jane lay in darkness.

  Jane said at length, “She had on a cotton dress. I’m almost sure she didn’t take that dress with her back East.”

  “If there’s one thing I’m sure of,” Dave said, “it’s that she didn’t travel nude from Massachusetts to Missouri.”

  Jane was crying silently against his shoulder. He slipped an arm around her. He wanted to tell her that Bettyann was all right, that she was not in any serious trouble. “It’s something inside of her,” he said. “Something she’ll have to figure out for herself. She’s home. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  He lay with his eyes open against the darkness. She had not taken the dress East with her? He remembered once when she had walked among a group of wild and shy English sparrows and picked one up without frightening it . . .

  She awoke to winter stillness. The predawn curtain of hush revealed, by its presence, the stage behind it composed of human habit and human necessity. In the town square at this hour (in the world at this hour) the buildings are vacant and the streets are empty. The world is composed of things, and the people, in their weakness and their companionship of lungs and hearts and bones and flesh and minds, have left their creations and, leaving, having taken meaning with them. A city devoid of movement and laughter, lying still in the darkness, is lonely and soulless. The standing steel and stone are pathetic before night’s infinity and a mechanical universe. But dawn comes, and day. Mankind stirs and the universe is solicitous once more and the vast fabrications of inert materials have purpose.

  Bettyann wondered if others had imagined going into the street one day to find all the people gone, to find themselves confronted alone by the terrible grandeur of space, time, and silence. How then would the world seem?

  She had never before thought of herself as being essentially different from anyone else. She felt that her very personality was the product of the countless people who had in countless ways touched her life: She could only understand herself when she could understand humanity at large. Now she knew intense isolation, for she was alone among aliens. Frightening thoughts rose in her as she sought to adjust to this changed reality. How different were her emotions and reactions and perceptions from a human’s? How could she ever be sure that she thought and felt the same things her neighbors did? Might she not be, with her new abilities, even further from understanding mankind? It seemed to her that the act of understanding was an affirmation of faith without which the world was useless and herself no more than a blank mirror.

  Don’t leave me, she thought. I want . . . I only want . . . to fit in, to do something in the scheme of things, to be useful, to understand what I should do . . .

  The sun met breaking clouds; the last snow hurried down. Distantly she heard the awakening sounds from Dave and Jane’s bedroom and then the bustle of breakfast. She heard Jane’s footsteps approach the stairs and Dave’s voice, muffled, calling, “No—let her sleep . . .”

  She remained, waiting. The opening and the closing of the door. The dry, protesting snarl and cough of the motor. The creak and roar of the car in the driveway. Silence.

  The clatter of dishes in the sink.

  Jane’s hesitant footsteps again, pausing at her door; the knob softly turning, the click. Jane was looking in. Bettyann stirred sleepily and pretended to wake up. “Good morning, Mom.”

  “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “I was awake.” She sat up, throwing back the covers and hugging her knees.

  Jane felt her throat constrict, as it often did when she saw Bettyann use her one useful arm in a traditionally two-armed gesture; never noticing the use without a
prayer of gratitude that she and Dave had chosen her of all the children available for adoption. Never without thinking: This is one thing we have done for which there need be no regret and apology; this is the best thing that ever happened to us.

  Bettyann laughed and nodded approval at the white, shining world of snow. A gentle wind rippled the curtain and she shivered deliciously. Her breath was frosty on the air. “I’ll be right down.”

  Jane thought: What about her parents? We’ll understand, Dave and I, whoever they are. She must know. She knows we’ll understand.

  “I’m coming right down,” Bettyann said.

  How red (Jane thought) her cheeks are. She’s sick. She’s caught a cold.

  Jane felt that somehow it was her fault: Bettyann was ill, and it was her fault. She crossed to the open window and closed it. “There,” turning, “now you stay in bed. Let me feel your forehead.” The touch was meant to reassure herself and her child. “It’s warm. You’ve got a fever.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “No. Cover up. Pull the covers up.”

  It was an obsession with Jane. Bettyann was sick.

  Here was something she could fight and conquer. Here was something she and Bettyann together could face. She patted the covers. “There, there . . .”

  “I’m all right. I’m going to get up in a second.” Between them lay a great unspoken void. Jane sought to reduce it to the commonplace.

  “Just a little cold,” Jane said.

  “I’m . . .”

  “I’ll have Dr. Wing stop in this morning.”

  “No,” Bettyann protested. “There’s nothing wrong.”