Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition (28 page)

Within a decade of their planetary years, they became less fertile, and then sterile. Their bodies could not form children, either within a female womb or externally, in an artificial one. Cells met, embraced, and died in that embrace. Those scarcity of embryos that were successfully grown in the crystalline generative placentae lived, in some cases, into the Third Phase, approximate to the fifth month of a human pregnancy—and then they also died, their little translucent corpses floating like broken silver flowers. To save them, a cryogenic program was instituted. Those that lived, on their entry to the Third Phase, were frozen into stasis. The dream persisted that at last there would be found some way to realize their life. But the dream did not come true. And soon even the greatest and most populous cities of that vast and blue-skied planet must report that, in a year twice the length of a year of the Earth, only eight or nine children had been saved to enter even that cold limbo, which now was their only medium of survival.

The injustice of fate was terrible. It was not that they had become effete, or that they were weakened. It was their actual peerlessness which would kill the race. But being what they were, rather than curse God and die, they evolved another dream, and before long pursued it across the galaxies. Their natural faculties had remained vital as their procreative cells had not. They had conceived the notion that some other race might be discovered, sufficiently similar to their own that—while it was unlikely the two types could mingle physically to produce life—in the controlled environment of a breeding tube such a thing might be managed. The first world that offered them scope, in a system far beyond the star of Earth, was receptive and like enough that the first experiments were inaugurated. They failed.

And then, in one long night, somewhere in that planet’s eastern hemisphere, a female of that race miscarrying and weeping bitterly at her loss, provided the lamp to lead them to their dream’s solution.

With the sound and astounding anatomical science of the mother world, the aliens were able to transfer one of their own children, one of those embryos frozen in cryogenesis for fifty of their colossal years, into the vacated womb.

And, by their science too, this womb, filled and then despoiled, was repaired and sealed, brought in a matter of hours to the prime readiness it had already achieved and thought to abandon. The mother was monitored and cared for, for at no point was she to be endangered or allowed to suffer. But she thrived, and the transplanted child grew. In term, the approximate ten-month term normal to that planet, it was born, alive and whole. It had come to resemble the host race almost exactly; this was perhaps the first surprise. As it attained adulthood, there was a second surprise. Its essence resembled only the essence of its parental race. It was alien, and it pined away among the people of its womb-mother. Brought back to its true kind, then, and only then, it prospered and was happy and became great. It seemed, against all odds, their own were truly their own. Heredity had told, not in the physical, but in the ego. It appeared the soul of their kind would continue, unstoppable. And the limitless horizons opened again before them, away and away.

By the date in their travels when they reached Earth, their methods were faultless and their means secret and certain. Details had been added, refining details typical of that which the aliens were. The roses were one aspect of such refinements.

Like themselves, the plants of the mother world were incredibly long-lived. Nourished by treated soil and held in a vacuum—as the embryos were held in their vacuum of coldness—such flowers could thrive for half an Earth century, even when uprooted.

Earth had striven with her own bellicosity and won that last battle long before the aliens came. Yet some aggression, and some xenophobic self-protective pride remained. Earth was a planet where the truth of what the aliens intended was to be guarded more stringently than on any other world. A woman miscarrying her child in the fourth or fifth month, admitted to a medical center, and evincing psychological evidence of trauma—even now it happened. This planet was full of living beings, a teeming globe prone still to accident and misjudgment. As the woman lay sedated, the process was accomplished. In the wake of the dead and banished earthly child, the extra-terrestrial embryo was inserted, and anchored like a star. Women woke, and burst into tears and tirades of relief—not knowing they had been duped. Some not even remembering, for the drugs of the aliens were excellent, that they had ever been close to miscarrying. A balance was maintained. Some recalled, some did not. A sinister link would never be established. Only the eager and willing were ever employed.

There was one other qualification. It was possible to predict logistically the child’s eventual habitat, once born. Since the child would have to be removed from that habitat in later years, the adoptive family were chosen with skill. The rich—who indeed tended more often to bear their children bodily—the liberated, the open-minded, the un-lonely. That there might be tribulation at the ultimate wrenching away was unavoidable, but it was avoided or lessened wherever and however feasible. Nor was a child ever recalled until it had reached a level of prolonged yearning, blindly and intuitively begging to be rescued from its unfitted human situation.

Here the roses served.

They in their crystal boxes, the embryos frozen in their crystal wombs. With every potential child a flower had been partnered. The aura of a life imbued each rose. It was the aura, then, which relayed the emanations of the child and the adult which the child became. The aura which told, at last, this telepathically sensitive race, when the summons must be sent, the exile rescued.

The green rose now flourishing in her garden here was Estár’s own rose, brought home.

The woman who had carried Estár inside her, due to her carelessness, had aborted Levin’s child, and received the alien unaware. The woman had needed to bear a child, but not to keep the child. Levin had gladly claimed what he took to be his own.

Estár, the daughter of her people, not Levin’s daughter, not Lyra’s sister or Joya’s either. Estár had grown up and grown away, and the green rose which broadcast her aura began to cry soundlessly, a wild beacon. So they had released her from her unreal persona, or let her release herself.

And here she was now, turning from the window of stars to the invisible darkness of the room, and to his invisible darkness.

For a long while she said nothing, although she guessed—or telepathically she knew—he waited for her questions. At last one came to her.

“Marsha,” she said. “They disqualified me from going there.”

“A lie,” he said. “It was arranged. In order that your transposition should be easier when it occurred.”

“And I—” she said, and hesitated.

“And you are of my kind, although you resemble the genera which was your host. This is always the case. I know your true blood line, your true father and mother, and one day you may meet them. We are related, you and I. In the terminology of this world, cousins. There is one other thing.”

She could not see him. She did not require to see him with her eyes. She now waited, for the beauty of his voice.

“The individual to whom you are summoned—this isn’t a random process. You came to me, as all our kind return, to one with whom you would be entirely compatible. Not only as a companion, but as a lover, a bonded lover—a husband, a wife. You see, Estár, we’ve learned another marvel. The changes that alter our race in the womb of an alien species, enable us thereafter to make living children together, either bodily or matrically, whichever is the most desired.”

Estár touched her finger to the topaz in her left ear.

“And so I love you spontaneously, but without any choice. Because we were chosen to be lovers?”

“Does it offend you?”

“If I were human,” she said, “it might offend me. But then.”

“And I, of course,” he said, “also love you.”

“And the way I am—my looks… Do you find me ugly?”

“I find you beautiful. Strangely, alienly lovely. That’s quite usual. Although for me, very curious, very exciting.”

She shut her eyes then, and let him move to her across the dark. And she experienced in her own mind the glorious wonder he felt at the touch of her skin’s smoothness like a cool leaf, just as he would experience her delirious joy in the touch of his velvet skin, the note of his dark and golden mouth discovering her own.

Seeing the devouring sadness in her face when she looked at them, unable to reveal her secret, Estár’s earthly guardians would fear for her. They would not realize her sadness was all for them. And when she no longer moved among them, they would regret her, and mourn for her as if she had died. Disbelieving or forgetting that in any form of death, the soul—Psyche, Estár, (well-named)—refinds a freedom and a beauty lost with birth.

THE WATERS OF SORROW

The dead live in the trees. But in winter, when the trees are bare, the dead go down after the fallen leaves, into the waters, and hide there, in the glowing dark.

The dead are cruel. They have reasons to be.

And they dance.

* * * *

Back in the old days, when some of us were children, and some, of course, not yet born, the only boats on the River were the kind with paddle and sail. But for a while now we have had the levisteamers, which travel two or three feet above the River’s surface, with only their steel ‘sippers’ trailing down in it to suck up wet fuel for the fired pod. And the long trails of white steam go fluffing out behind them, like the feathers of a swan in moult.

When the first few of these craft appeared they were a marvel. Folk would take a special journey to the shore to watch them go by. Some still swear the wide River grew wider, and its water grew darker green because of the constant churning. Others tell you they have eaten fresh hot steam-cooked fish straight from the water. Certainly, the birds that use the riverbank roost higher up. But in half a dozen years anyway, we had a handful of steam-chariots too on the inland tracks, and now and then a pretty coloured balloon-pod would sail across the sky.

It was about then that the levisteam showboat came down the River.

She was a lovely sight, the boat, green and gold and polished up like a medal. No matter she had an unlucky name. The
Vilya
she was called. After all those girls that die of broken hearts when their lovers betray or abandon them, those dead girls who live in the trees or the waters, and come out on certain nights of the year to catch men - any man - since to any vilya, by that hour of their living hating death, any man may have been a traitor to all or any woman. And they lure him, with their weird dead beauty, to dance, until his own heart, or his lungs, go out and he dies. Or else they cast him under the River. There was and are stories even now of a particular lady, daughter of a rich businessman in the steam-power trade. Her name was Myrra, for that Biblical ointment of mourning. He gave her the name at an ignorant fancy, it would seem, but it turned out a prophecy too, because her lover jilted her two days before their wedding, and she broke her own heart - by driving a dagger through it. Five or fifteen years after, depending on who tells the tale, the wrongdoer strayed back to his former haunts. And one midnight, as he smoked his cigar in the woods, she found him, Myrra. Beautiful and unhuman and terrible she must have seemed to him, with her long, uncombed hair and flimsy garment, and her skin, white as the live-dead ancient moon, staring at him from them. She made him dance too, dance till he fell into the River, where she and her fellow vilyas drowned him, but very slowly, they say, very, very slowly.

Even today you can find entirely blameless men who will refuse to leave their homes, be they mansion or hut; they will not set one foot out of doors on such nights when the moon is full. But nowadays they are generally old men, who remember when the River was empty of steam traffic, and only horse-carts and carriages on the roads, and birds to cross the sky.

* * * *

It was becoming respectable for women to go to the theatre without male escort, providing they did not go singly. So Ghisla slipped on to the showboat with a bevy of other young women, as if she were part of their group. They were strangers though and she quite alone. She was nervous, yet eager. She had heard of the play from her mother’s customers at the haberdashery shop in the town. Due to the shop as well, Ghisla had been able to kit herself out quite nicely, in a plain white gown, hair combs and proper gloves. It was a warm night, and all along the track to the River, the crickets were tuning up like tiny violins. Set up by the
Vilya
’s stage hands, coloured lanterns lit the trees.

“Such an exotic name for the boat,” the gossips had cried. “
Vilya
! My goodness. But he is exotic, everyone knows that, the Prince.”

As she wrapped their ribbons and stockings, Ghisla had listened. She was sixteen, quite tall, and slender as a reed, graceful too, which she somehow realized without naming it to herself, let alone ever having had anyone tell her. Her mother certainly never told Ghisla such things. What Ghisla must aim for, her mother always said, was to be virtuous, polite, modest, and hardworking. She must help her mother, who herself had toiled so ceaselessly she had aged in looks, voice and personality to an embittered crone of sixty by the time she was thirty-three. But the mother’s husband had died of coughing fits when Ghisla was only seven years old. Another betrayer, Ghisla’s father, heartlessly running off with death like that, and leaving the pair of them to cope as best they could.

Ghisla’s hair was very black and silky. She had put it up on her head with the four green combs to support it. Her eyes were that kind of brown that looks like jet at dusk or by moonlight, but under sun or a lamp go the colour of Amontillado sherry with a dash of gold in it.

The exhausted mother was already in her bed by the time Ghisla left their little apartment behind the shop. But light lingered in the sky, it was not yet nine o’clock and the show began late. When Ghisla reached the River and went up the broad gang-plank just behind the other girls, the air and the water were like pale amber. But on the boat, and seated in the gilded gallery’s front row, only the steam lamps shone, and outside darkness fell swiftly. It was like being in a cradle too. The boat, now grounded on water, rocked softly at her moorings. Which made Ghisla a little giddy, but she did not mind.

Then the lights went down, and the stage burned up, and out he came, to great applause, the actor-manager they called the ‘Prince’. His name in fact was Lutz Alvarek. His hair was long, ice-blond-white, and his eyes were of a clear gleaming glacial blue, like a blue topaz. Tanned by the summer, and accented by his stage make-up, he was fit to knock anyone else’s eyes quite out. He stood there in his elegant costume and welcomed his audience, and they clapped and cheered, and the women sighed. The drama was to be a play known as
To Hunt the Hidden Sword
. But the showboat had brought to it one further startling element. The main female character, a femme fatal of enormous beauty and treachery, Bithida, was played in this version by a steam mannequin, a life-size doll run on fire, water and clockwork. It was able to move and to make a variety of gesturings, although an actress must supply the voice from the wings.