The Touch Page 22

  Scott felt he could do it, even if he didn’t know how. And tightening his embrace a little, he did it anyway.

  Something fizzed and popped on the wall behind a Beardsley print in its black and gold frame. A shower of sparks flew, and there were electrical crackling sounds from upstairs and in the sitting room.

  “What the—?” said Scott.

  “Aha!” said Shania as she eased herself away from him—reluctantly, Scott thought, which pleased him inordinately. But she quickly continued. “You will want to examine things, checking for damage, also to ensure there is no lingering electrical danger. Meanwhile, as you suggested, I will wait for you in the sitting room. What would you like to drink?”

  “Pour me a brandy,” Scott muttered, still dizzy from their contact, almost staggering as he headed for the stairs . . .

  The telephone in Kelly’s study had been bugged; the phone was now useless, its diaphragm exploded, melted, and congealed out of shape. An acrid stench and a thin spiral of smoke from under an oak coffee table in the living room led Scott to the discovery of a burned-out listening device; the living-room telephone still worked but its bug had fallen to bits. And as for the bug behind the Beardsley: that had scorched the wallpaper a little, but was now dead.

  “What a job they did on me!” said Scott, still furious as he sipped at a half inch of cognac in his sitting room. “And I still don’t know what they took from my study, or why.”

  “It’s not unlikely I can tell you why, if not what,” Shania told him. “Perhaps we can look into that later?”

  “Later? You’re not thinking of skipping out on me again?”

  “No,” she answered. “Previously I’ve been worried that the two of us together might make too much of a disturbance, but in the last day or two the Mordri Three have been concentrating on their murderous business—a terrible machine they’re building in an icy crag in Switzerland—and as far as I can tell they haven’t been scanning abroad to any great extent. Which is why I believe their fearful project is moving into its final phase, and that in their excitement they may have let their guard down if only a little; they are after all quite mad. Also, I’ve been engaging my mental shields as best I’m able, to ensure psychic invisibility. And, Scott, you should try to do the same.”

  Scott blinked, sighed, and said, “You see, there’s the rub. For in a single minute, or maybe two at most, you’ve mentioned some kind of disturbance we might make, a fearful machine, mental shields, and psychic invisibility. And I’m not even halfway there yet!”

  “But you are!” Shania got up from her easy chair, came and perched on the sofa where he sprawled with his drink, trying to relax. “I know you can shield yourself; you even shielded yourself from me! Also from E-Branch when they questioned you.”

  Nodding, he answered, “Yes, I remember. But I still don’t know how I did it.”

  Suddenly she looked angry, her face clouding over and her eyes flashing dangerously. She leaned over him, took his shoulders, stared deep into his eyes. “Now I shall probe your innermost thoughts, to discover what you really think of me!”

  With that scent of hers, and Shania’s cleavage just a few inches in front of Scott’s eyes, the very last thing he wanted was that she should “probe his innermost thoughts!” And:

  “No!” he said, shutting her out.

  The wrath vanished from her face at once; it hadn’t in any case been real. And having made her point she smiled in genuine triumph. “You see?” she said. “I couldn’t read you!”

  Still shielding himself, Scott thought, An alien creature you may be, but you’re similar to our females in more ways than one! And I can easily see how your blood, your essence, runs in the women of Earth. While out loud and still a little wonderingly, he said: “Well, what do you know? It seems I did it, and it wasn’t too hard at that!” As for just how he had done it: that no longer mattered. The fact that he could was sufficient.

  “Bravo!” said Shania.

  Scott looked at her where she now kicked off her shoes and seated herself on his sofa, legs crossed, elbows on knees, chin in hands. Her skirt was quite short; she seemed naive, unaware, or unconcerned. But Scott remembered: she didn’t know any other men, not as intimately as she knew him. She would perhaps know something of the mores of the day, but as for sexual attitudes and practices . . .

  Like his jaw, his mind had fallen open. Too late, he once again closed it.

  “Oh!” she said, straightening herself and moving closer to him. “Do I seem forward? Perhaps I am trying too hard.”

  And right out of nowhere Scott said, “Show me how you look . . . I mean the real you. Because—” He paused and chewed his lip.

  “Because you want to kiss me,” she said. “But I can’t show you, because then you might not want to.”

  “Are you so . . . so very strange, then?”

  “Not at all, but it would remind you that I am not of your race. And, Scott, my sexuality runs deep; it knows of many cultures, many odd practices, many of the diverse ways of universal nature. And I know I would enjoy your kisses, caresses, and all that goes with them.” Her voice was such a low seductive growl that Scott felt himself slipping toward her.

  He sat back—jerked back, into the corner of the sofa—and husked, “Too fast! And this is all too crazy!”

  “Yes,” Shania breathed, moving away. “And I think that now would be a good time for us to start at the beginning. You have earned the right to know everything. So now let’s sit apart and I’ll tell you all that I know, all that you’ll believe, and perhaps certain things that you won’t . . .”

  Scott drew the drapes across bay windows to shut out the dark, and satisfied now that they couldn’t be “overheard”—but still with their mental shields in place in case strange metaphysical talents were at work in the night—they sat facing each other, Shania back in her chair and Scott on the sofa.

  And finally, folding her feet up under her again, but more decorously now, she began to talk.

  “The Shing’t is—or at least it was—my race. Our planet, Shing, orbited a white star so old that only a few billion years of fuel, of life and light, remained to it. Because Shing hung close, however, the star’s warmth sufficed. Now, thanks to the Mordri, only a handful of the Shing’t remain, and the world Shing and its star are gone, destroyed in a great rent in space-time. It will be something of a miracle if any of the race survive, for when the far travellers return to Shing they’ll find only a vortex, a dark region where all is chaos.

  “We thought of ourselves as one of the oldest, perhaps the oldest, race in the universe, and like many other races held to our beliefs, legends, and religions. Many of the Shing’t—most of the Threes, our Units of Learning and Endeavour—believed in a God much like yours. Others didn’t. But no one Three Unit claimed to understand all the riddles of creation. Much like your scientists, philosophers, and religious men, we sought for enlightenment through the laws of Physics, Nature, Mathematics, and pure Thought. Oh, yes, we, too, ‘thought and therefore were,’ except we thought it some four million years before your ancestors came down out of the trees; which is not to belittle you, for your evolutionary development has been most remarkable!

  “As to our development:

  “We had the same savage origins as most other races across the universe. Our wars, at first tribal, became planetwide; our weapons evolved through clubs, spears, and energy guns, finally to devices of mass destruction. We might easily have destroyed our world, as others have destroyed theirs. Scott, I have seen, even walked through, the most magnificent ruins on a number of dead cinder planets . . .

  “Our world Shing had three major continents—”

  (Scott thought: I just knew you were going to say that!)

  “—whose races were only very slightly different by reason of evolution. Realizing the looming threat, their leaders developed a system of planetwide cooperation: the Three Units, where persons from each continent became members of millions of teams working to
gether for a better understanding of . . . well, everything! The Threes carried out their studies, their works, based on a rotational system, moving from continent to continent in a constant round and never staying in any one place for more than three of our years. And all knowledge, discoveries, and revelations were shared by all Shing’s scientific establishments, made public for all our world’s citizens.

  “There could nevermore be a case for hostilities, for only a lunatic nation would deliberately attack one-third of its own people, and at the same time invite retaliation from two-thirds of the planet’s populace! Thus our dreadful weapons were either done away with or put to benevolent use, for in their development many new scientific principles had been discovered. Understand, however, that all I have told you so far is as much myth as historical fact, for in millions of years even a world such as Shing will pass through troubled times. Invaders from other star systems struck twice, faced defeat, and went away. A comet hurled our oceans all about and created a darkness that almost doomed us to extinction. But always we recovered, buoyed up by our Three Units’ scientific advances.

  “During the space wars, for example, our astrophysics Three Units had finally fathomed gravity, and—”

  “Wait!” Scott cut in. “Look, I’m no scientist, but I’m not a dimwit either. Surely gravity is gravity; it’s why it’s a lot easier to walk down a hill than up one. What I’m trying to say: what is there to fathom?”

  Shania smiled. “I’m not a scientist either—well, I’m not a physicist—but I do have the benefit of experience. Gravity was always believed to be one of the universe’s weak forces, but it isn’t. Even light, when it strays too close to a black hole, cannot escape the gravity. And beyond the black hole: what laws of physics apply there? I shall put it as simply as possible:

  “Gravity was the first of things, coming even before light and time. In the Very Beginning gravity was created and broken, and created again. For without it there was nothing to hold the universe in place.”

  “This was after the Big Bang?” said Scott.

  “After creation, yes.” She nodded. “But gravity is—how best to put it?—layered, yes. There are levels of gravity not only in our four-dimensioned universe but also above and below it; beyond the black holes, for example. There are levels that exist in subspace, and some that exist without time, omnipresent. Oceans of gravity wash all unseen all about us, but by no means languid or lacking in shoals, storms, and whirlpools.

  “During the space wars certain physicist Threes developed a gravity weapon to deter these ferocious alien attackers. The undertow of the weapon’s powerful gravity wave caught up their vessels, sucked them into subspace, and hurled them to the very rim of the universe itself. Thus the space-faring technologies of the Shing’t took a huge leap forward. No longer confined to the planets of our own star system: a swamp world, a gas giant, and Shing itself—three of them, yes—we headed out across our galaxy and beyond. When I say ‘we,’ I mean our most remote forebears, of course.

  “So the Shing’t voyaged into deep space. Hostile planets were avoided; nascent worlds were often cultivated and brought on, especially if they had features in common with Shing, such as Earth. On planets like Earth the work of our exobiologists was . . . it was . . .” But here she paused, then said: “Scott, why do you frown at me like that?”

  And Scott said, “Because I can’t help wondering why anyone would find it necessary to fiddle with the natural evolution of entire planets. What exactly did your biologists do to Earth?”

  “Who can say, ‘exactly’?” she replied. “Not I . . . I wasn’t there four million years ago! But I am assuming it was the same for primal Earth as for a small handful of worlds whose records still do exist—or existed until recently—on Shing.”

  “You’re assuming it was the same . . . as what?” said Scott.

  “Our biologists would have sought out the life-forms with the greatest potential—early primates—and performed some sculpturing.” Shania offered a small shrug. “Is it important?”

  “Sculpturing?” Scott frowned more yet. “You mean interfering with their genes and such?”

  She nodded. “Most likely. And with their DNA. I don’t know—perhaps they were presumptuous, those ancient scientists, in introducing something of the Shing’t into other races.”

  “You’re saying we might have sprung from you?”

  “I would say definitely. But haven’t I already said so, in connection with your females?”

  Remembering, but frowning still, Scott slowly nodded.

  And seeing what troubled him, Shania said, “Then think of it like this: if those Shing’t biologists had not ‘interfered,’ you might not even be here. Would you prefer not to be here, Scott? Perhaps you would prefer to be an ape in a tree?”

  How to answer that one? And Scott said, “You’ve given me a great deal to think about. Maybe we should take a break now.”

  “I agree,” said Shania Two. “I’m weary. I have worried for long and long. About you, and Wolf; about myself and the Mordri Three. It can wear on one, worrying like that. Now I’m tired.”

  “You’re going to do your disappearing act?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I’ve left my hotel. Now I shall stay here—if that is fitting?”

  “You’re welcome to take my bed,” said Scott. “And I’ll be in the spare room.” But:

  “No need for that,” said Shania. “I find your smell quite pleasing, and our hearts beat at a similar speed.”

  Well, right now they do! Scott thought. And “hearing” him, Shania laughed . . .

  20

  Scott tried to dissuade her, but not very hard.

  For the first time in a long time he wore pajamas—after first going into something of a panic trying to find them while she was in the bathroom. The trouser bottoms were old but still serviceable—still decent?

  Shania came to the bedroom not quite naked, in panties and a bra that she really didn’t need. Already in bed, Scott looked at her, looked away, then thought: What? Have I gone crazy? and looked again; he would have defied any red-blooded heterosexual man not to. But Shania was already slipping into bed on Kelly’s side. God! What would Kelly have thought of this? He had deliberately left his mind wide open, at least at close range. Maybe Shania would see how he was torn two ways. He hoped so, anyway.

  And Shania murmured, “Scott, we’re both tired, and you are loyal to your memories, loyal to a fault.” Reaching across from her side, she touched him. And all the tension went out of him; he felt himself melting into the bed, and the sigh going out of him was audible at first, then silent, because by the time he’d sighed it Scott was asleep . . .

  Scott dreamed of many strange and wonderful things. He dreamed of Kelly. She appeared to know everything yet wasn’t angry with him. Indeed, she seemed to want only to comfort him.

  They sat on the grassy bank of a Thames backwater outside London, a place that they had used to visit in their courting days, and it was summer. They fed ducks with the dry crusts of picnic sandwiches until Scott, living half in memories and half in mourning, tried to pour his heart out to her. But as in that other dream—that nightmare in which Kelly had crumpled into nothing in her hospital bed—he had no voice! And in any case she couldn’t answer. But still he knew that everything was okay with her, and that he had nothing to explain. Odd, though, that he could talk to a wolf in his dreams yet was unable to talk to Kelly. Now why was that?

  Because Kelly was dead, perhaps? But in dreams most things are possible, and this was only a dream, surely?

  And Scott was amazed that he knew this was a dream, when previously he wouldn’t have known until he was awake. So then, was it that he could only speak to living persons and creatures in his dreams? That seemed reasonable, for he definitely couldn’t speak to the dead ones in his waking hours!

  In seeming confirmation of this theory, Scott suddenly remembered how he hadn’t been able to speak to his father either. He remembered, too, th
at there had been a barrier between himself and the dead, some secret medium to which he wasn’t privy. Not yet, anyway.

  Toward the end of this phase of the dream, the ducks swam away, the sun went behind a cloud, and Kelly took on a far more serious expression. Then, as once before, she drew his attention to those now sinister marks on her left wrist, nodding to confirm his suspicions about Simon Salcombe. When Scott nodded gravely in return, clenching a hard-knuckled fist by way of an answer, then Kelly, the river, and everything else slowly faded away . . .

  Scott dreamed of a world where “meat forests” were cultivated, insensate vegetable crops with the texture and protein content of flesh without the wholesale slaughter attendant to the preparation of livestock for consumption. The beings of this world were tall, willowy, very elegant and beautiful in an alien way. Their cities were soaring spires fashioned to the same sparing design as they themselves, where they lived in a harmony utterly unheard of on Earth.

  He found himself in a room in one of the cities, a laboratory of sorts, and experienced a very strange thing. Scientists or perhaps doctors of the tall graceful race spoke reassuringly to a couple who appeared to be the parents of a small, glowing infant in its crib. Scott was unable to understand the complex musical language they very sparingly engaged in, but he seemed to find something of meaning in their motions, their gestures, and perhaps even their thoughts. And it soon dawned on him that their means of communication was as much telepathic as vocal.

  They were a very advanced race, yes. And a thought came to him that perhaps in some far future human beings might evolve into just such creatures. But as for now:

  In their magnificent robes of office, the doctors, scientists, or priests, whatever they were, appeared to be engaging the parent beings in a sort of ritual, during which the basket with the child was placed in a transparent receptacle attached to the side of a huge and highly complex machine. Then they all blessed the child and the machine was switched on. Gases flowed through a conduit that joined the transparent receptacle to the machine, and after a while a creature (there was no easy way to describe it, except perhaps as a “thing”) emerged from the conduit into the crib. A shapeless blob of protoplasm as big as a large fist, it hovered over the infant and gradually developed features, becoming a bodiless jellylike head with a beatific, even angelic face! And gazing on the glowing child with a joyful, adoring expression, it let itself be inhaled, breathed in like air, to become one with its host. And somehow Scott understood that from now on the insubstantial jelly-thing was to be the infant’s lifelong companion, a beneficial familiar.