Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (2 page)

The Director braced himself. Next second he was plunged into the dreams of Floyd Milton.

It was pleasant. After the creepy vaults of Dreamery Five and the murmurs of a global war, it was doubly pleasant.

All the same, for the Director it was strange, incredibly strange.

The plants sported flowers as lovely as girls’ mouths; the flowers budded, blossomed, faded and produced streamers fifty yards long which billowed lightly in the breeze, scattering perfumed seeds. The plants grew in a circle, and the circle was a room.

Only one room. Another room had for its walls a twinkling myriad of fish, little grey fellows with forked black tongues like snakes. They swam in towers of water that wet your finger if you touched them. The matter-transmitter fields, two molecules thick, held them in place, towering into the vermilion air.

Another room seemed to be sheathed in stars; giant moths flew about and settled on the stars. The stars chimed as they were touched.

In another room, tall grasses glistened with the heavy-lidded dews of dawn.

In another room, snow fell eternally, magnifying itself as it sank into crystals three inches across which vanished as they touched the floor.

In another room — but every room was different, for this was the palace of Amada Malfreyy, and the palace was on Solite. Amada herself was here, just returned from her visit to Earth, loaded down with flowers and tigers. She was giving a party to reunite all her old friends and introduce them to her second husband.

The guests numbered under five hundred. A good proportion of them had brought their husbands, brightly dressed men whose frivolous robes contrasted with the black-draped semi-nudity of the women. Many women and some men came escorted by animals — cheetahs, macaws, or a sort of superb lizard that was three feet high when it walked erect. Animatedly, they thronged through the magnificent rooms.

Gay balloons, wafted on artificial trade winds, floated glasses of drink about the rejoicing palace. Everyone appeared to be drinking; no one appeared to be drinking too much. Another thing made the party quite unlike an earthly party — although everyone talked, no one did so at the top of his voice.

Dazzled as he watched it all, the Director thought that he had never seen a fantasy half so fantastic as this. He could tell by its careful detail that it was memory rather than the wish-fulfilment stuff most of the inmates of Dreamery Five brewed in their dark little brains. Floyd Milton had actually walked through this incredible building.

He had walked among these gay avenues of cold-burning argon, playing its rainbow light over the guests’ faces. He had strolled along this invisible path above a gurgling stream. He had eaten those fantastic foodstuffs and spoken to guests in his halting version of the Solite tongue.

All these things Milton had done because it was his palace. He was Amada’s second husband, and the party was being given in his honour. The guests flocked here to meet him. This was the great night of his life; yet he was not happy.

“You look worried, pet,” Amada said to him. She might have been a woman of Earth, and a lovely woman at that, except for the scanty thatch of hair which curled tightly across her head. Now she wore the martyred look any woman wears when her husband is being awkward at an awkward moment.

“I’m not worried, Amada,” Milton said. “And please don’t call me ‘pet.’ Your blue tiger here is a pet.”

“But it’s a compliment, Floyd,” she said, patting the creature’s head. “Is not Subyani a beautiful pet?”

“Subyani is a tiger. I am a man. Can’t you try and remember that little distinction?”

Amada never looked angry, but now the martyred expression deepened; it made her, Milton had to admit, extremely desirable.

“The distinction is quite obvious to me,” she said. “Life is too short to waste pointing out the obvious.”

“Well, it’s none too obvious to me,” Milton said angrily. “What do your people do? You come to Earth, and you proceed to take everything you can — trees, grass, fish, birds — ”

“Even husbands!” Amada said.

“Yes, even husbands. You do all this, Amada, because you people have fallen in love with Earth. You ship just about everything you can here. It makes me feel no better than an exotic plant or a poodle.”

She turned her beautiful back on him.

“Now you are acting as intelligently as a poodle,” she said.

“Amada!” he said. When she turned slowly around, Milton said penitently, “I’m sorry, darling. You know why I’m irritable; I keep thinking of the war back on Earth. And — the other thing...”

“The other thing?” she prompted.

“Yes. Why you Solites are so reticent about where in the universe this world is. Why, you wouldn’t even point out its direction to me in Earth’s night sky. I know that with your portmatters distance is immaterial, but I’d just like to know. It may be a detail to you but it s the sort of thing that bothers me.”

Amada let an image of a big butterfly settle on her finger as she said, carefully, “In Earth’s present state of civilization, she cannot reach this world; so why should it matter where we are?”

“Oh, I know our little spaceships are just a beginning...”

He let his voice trail away. The trouble was, Solite civilization was too big and too beautiful. They might look like Earth people, but they thought and acted differently; they were — alien. That, basically, was what worried Milton. A lingering puritanism made him wonder if he was not, perhaps, committing some nameless sin in marrying a woman of another planet.

After only a month of marriage, he and Amada had had several — no, they were not quarrels, just differences. They loved each other. That, yes; but Milton, questioning his own love, wondered if perhaps his hand had not been forced by the knowledge that by marrying her he could get to fabulous Solite. Only by marrying a citizen of the matriarch-dominated planet could one visit it; otherwise, it hung remotely in other skies, completely out of reach.

Despite himself, Milton tried to make his point again.

“Earth’s a poor world,” he said, ignoring the boredom on her face. “Solite is a rich world. Yet you fall in love with all terrestrial things. You import them. You give Earth nothing in exchange — not even your location.”

“We like the things of Earth for aspects in them you do not see,” she said.

There it was again, the alien line of thought. He shivered, despite the warmth of the room.

“You don’t give Earth anything,” Milton repeated, and was at once aware of the meanness of what he had said. He had spoken without thought, his mind filled with a host of other things.

“I’m trying to give you all this if you will accept it,” she answered lightly. “Now please come and smile at some people for my sake.”

Although his worries persisted, Milton soon managed to shake them to the back of his mind. Guilt was his trouble; at home his country was at war, while here everything was created for pleasure. Solite was immensely enjoyable for its own sake. Milton loved its hedonistic atmosphere, that nevertheless contained an astringent tang. He loved its women for their beauty and for the gay delicacy which concealed the firmness with which they controlled everything. With Solite men he was less enamoured; they were nice enough, but Milton could not forgive them for being the weaker sex. Old attitudes die hard.

The new bunch of women and animals — as ever they were mixed together — that Milton was introduced to began roving around the palace with him. All was wonderfully confusing — some rooms had an indoor feeling, some an outdoor; the contiguity of flesh and fur was stimulating; the kaleidoscope of colour intoxicated. Milton found himself besieged with questions about Earth. He answered them almost without thought, as it grew later and the procession became a sort of strutting dance. Inevitably, the gaiety soaked into him, warming his heart, tempering his pulses.

What the Solites thought of him was clear enough: he was a primitive, odd, perhaps even dangerous, but therefore all the more exciting. Let them think what they liked! They could think he was a cave man, provided this wonderful party went on a little longer.

Yet for all his rapture, Milton learned a little about the civilization of which he had become a member, picking up scraps of information dropped in casual conversation. Solite was mainly a barren world; half the land between the poles was crater-filled and bereft of soil. In the rest, the Solites had tried to create their idea of paradise, raising occasional oases among the deserts.

Their oases were being stocked with the fauna and flora of Earth, since their own species were few in number.

“Don’t you get plants and animals from other planets in the Galaxy?” Milton asked
one witch-eyed woman. Just for a second he thought she lost her step in the dance. Her green eyes searched him until he dropped his gaze.

“Only from your Earth,” she said, and dipped away from him in a glide.

The Solites reckoned their culture to be fifteen thousand years old. They had now reached a period of stability. For all their gaiety, Milton fancied he could detect a core of loneliness in them. But, finally, his sense of difference disappeared in the excitement of the evening. He was becoming slightly drunk, though he drank little.

Now the palace was like a mirage, shining with people, glittering with music, its whole architecture adrift with calculated magic.

“Soon we will move it all down to the sea!” Amada cried. “Such a night is incomplete without an ocean. We will transport shortly to Union Bay. We must have waves, and the rhythms of the tide around us!”

Meanwhile, the rooms became hallucinatory. The portmatters seemed capable of any miracle, as the delicate servomechanisms behind them responded to the party-goers’ mood. Bright wall drifted through bright wall, rooms floated up and down among each other bearing their merrymakers with them, so that stars and snowflakes mingled in a beautiful, impossible storm, and angelfish flew among branches of viridian cacti. Hidden music increased in tempo to match the marching decor with its beat.

Then Wangust Ilsont arrived, the last of all the guests. In her hair a magenta chameleon curled, matching the magenta of her lips and the nipples of her breasts. She hastened to Amada and Floyd Milton. She, too, had been to Earth; she, too, had returned with a native husband.

“It’ll be pleasant for each of you,” Wangust said, beaming warmly at Milton as she clutched his hand, “in case you ever feel homesick; you shall be my husband’s best friend, hunting and drinking with him. We don’t live far from you; a horse can take you almost as quickly as a portmatter.”

She brought her Earthman husband forward and introduced him as Chun Hwa.

As the two men confronted each other, everyone else seemed to fade away, lost in a moment of crisis.

Clearly enough the expressions chased themselves across Chun Hwa’s face. First an angry dislike. Then regret for the dislike. Then embarrassment. A pained searching. Finally a grimace that said, “Well, this isn’t any time or place to be unpleasant.” With a smile he put out his hand.

Milton recovered himself less quickly.

Ignoring the hand outstretched to him, he turned vexedly to Amada.

“This man belongs to a nation which is at war with mine,” he said.

A strained silence fell instantly over the whole group. In part, it was a silence of incomprehension. Milton spoke in the Solite tongue, but since to his knowledge that language had no exact equivalents for the words “nation” and “war,” he was forced to use instead the equivalents for “group” and “trouble.”

“How can there be trouble between you?” Amada asked, calmly enough, but with a hint of danger in her voice. “You are both Solite men now. Earth is far away and has no claims on you.

The words had exactly the wrong effect on Milton. All his feelings of guilt welled up strongly within him. He clenched his fist, part of him aware he was about to act foolishly.

“There is trouble between us,” he said. “One of us must leave at once.”

“This I don’t understand,” Wangust said. She was completely nonplussed by Milton’s reaction. “You are both Earthmen — ”

“Have you ever met before?” someone asked.

“What are these groups you speak of?” someone else asked.

“What is this trouble?”

“Stay out of this!” Amada begged them all. She turned to her husband. Subyani, her tiger, could not rival her for ferocious beauty when she grew angry. Amada in her wrath was at once potently appealing and intimidating.

“I wish to know at once, clearly, the cause of this foolishness,” she demanded of Milton.

Chun Hwa began to explain. His Solite, Milton noted angrily, was more fluent than Milton’s own. The concept of nationality seemed above the heads of most of the women present; they belonged to a sparsely populated world where the ubiquitous portmatters rendered segregation into groups an impermanent affair.

Amada and Wangust, however, having visited Earth, knew something of the terrible weapons of war, and had even seen the start of the global conflict before leaving for Solite. Both were alarmed to find an echo of that fearful struggle here in their midst. During the argument that followed, they let slip a piece of information previously withheld from Milton, either by accident or design: now that the war was on, no more portmatter units would visit Earth. He was entirely cut off from his native world.