The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes (27 page)

As he drove, Breedlove began a cat-and-mouse game in his mind, figuring and countering the probable moves of his pursuers, as Kyra, beside him, fell asleep in a sitting position. Without compromising the secrecy surrounding Kyra, Slade could enlist the aid of the State Highway Patrol by making Breedlove the object of his search. Slade by now had learned from his father that he was wearing his ranger’s uniform and driving a Jeep, and Slade’s orders would be to pick him up and hold his companion for questioning. The patrolmen on Route 2 between Spokane and Newport would be alerted and the bridge over the Pend Oreille blocked.

But at the junction Breedlove swung northwest on Route 395 to Deer Park, then drove due east past sleeping farms and rejoined Route 2 near Milan, thus avoiding a major segment of a highway he took to be dangerous. A few miles north, he took 6B due north, bypassing Newport, and joined Route 6 on the west bank of the Pend Oreille. Even with his early start the longer route would prevent him from reaching the meadow until after sunrise, but no one would expect him to enter the Selkirk area from the north.

At 2:00 a.m. he crossed the river at Metaline Falls and took the gravel road across the mountains, breathing easier as he swung from the pavement to head east, now at fifty miles an hour. Despite the jouncing, Kyra still dozed erect beside him. At 3:30 he circled Helmer Mountain and edged into Canada along a five-mile stretch of road. When the road became macadam he was back in the States and a few miles west of Porthill, Idaho, but three miles from Porthill he swung south onto an old sawmill road, with Kyra still asleep beside him.

A chuckhole made him reach over to steady her and she awakened, muttering, “I feel dawn coming.”

“It is,” he said. “But we should be in Jones Meadow in another hour.”

Constantly shifting gears and maneuvering, he drove the vehicle on a climbing, twisting course along the overgrown road, and the trees beside the trail reflected the increasing altitude, growing stunted, then twisted, then sparse. Pale gray was tingeing the east as the vehicle jolted toward Sawyer’s Summit, and when they trundled over the shale near the crest, the dawn of a cloudless day was breaking.

Kyra awakened, saying, “Look at the glorious morning ‘flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye’!”

“Yes,” he agreed, “and I need all the light I can get. It’s easy to lose your bearings on this lunar landscape.”

Craning above the windshield, she ranged her ears in the manner of a blind person and said, “Go that way,” pointing. “Myra has set the howler going.”

“To guide you home?”

“No. To lure Crick home. He has run away. Well, you can have him, Breedlove, if you can catch him, because I’m leaving without him.”

“That’s a cold way of dismissing the boy,” Breedlove complained.

“He’s only a male we don’t need any more. He likes it here, and he’s incapable of altering life on earth. He’s intelligent, and he’ll learn your language quickly, I’m sure. Look around for him next winter. If a cold snap hits he’ll hibernate, and it should be easy to spot his green hair against the snow.”

Nothing she said about the lost boy was unkind, but her detachment, if he chose to be hypercritical, might indicate she was fast losing her acquired human traits even as she seemed to be losing her human coloration. Perhaps it was a survival mechanism, this objectivity, or perhaps fatigue from the long night drive had altered his own sensibilities. After all, he couldn’t expect her to rend her hair and pound her breasts in lamentation over a child who had found what he sought, sanctuary on a friendly planet. Still, he thought it inappropriate that she should forget Crick altogether and call his attention to a flowering plant struggling from a crack in a granite wall with a “Look, Breedlove! How pretty.”

Below the rocky saddleback he crossed a swath of meadow, rolled over underbrush, and canted onto a pack trail wide enough for his vehicle. At six o’clock, in bright morning light, he drove onto Jones Meadow. The turf was dry now and as closely cropped as a fresh-mown lawn except for tufts of wire grass her people had left him for scouring his pans. He wheeled the Jeep to a stop in the bend of the creek a hundred yards downstream from the willow.

She was safe. No jet planes whined through the sky. No helicopters hovered over the surrounding peaks. Across the creek in the aspen grove the invisible needle of her space vehicle towered above them. Gazing around him at the peaceful scene, Breedlove felt the strong impression that he and Kyra had fled from pursuers existing only in their imagination.

She swung from the Jeep and leaned against the fender to remove her shoes, then to his mild astonishment she continued to undress, slipping out of her dress, unstrapping her bra, and folding the garments on the seat beside him. Finally, naked in the sunlight, she stood beside the vehicle in which he sat, transfixed, and apologized, “You know, Breedlove, I’ve been around you human beings for so long I feel self-conscious about undressing in front of you.”

“We’ve made you lose your innocence.”

“If I ever had any”—she smiled—“I’d be losing it from the way you’re looking at me now… I’m sorry I can’t invite you in. With Crick gone the mood inside will be foul. It’ll take me only a few minutes to hook in the cobalt and wash this goop out of my hair. I’d like to tell you good-bye as I was when we met and on the mound where I found you. We’ll have time together while the steam pressure builds in the propulsion unit. All I’m taking from earth is the Bulfinch and Polinski. You can take my shoes and undergarments to Matty, or keep them, or donate them to a museum.”

She put the folded dress into the satchel, turned, and was gone, fording the creek in long bounds. Without glancing back, she disappeared into the aspen grove, leaving her undergarments, hosiery, and shoes on the seat beside him. He drove the vehicle upstream, parked it beneath a cluster of alder bushes, and walked to the mound. Arms folded across his chest, Breedlove stood looking out over the scene and thinking.

Away from Kyra, his mind began to function with its usual clarity, and he found himself wondering why Slade had telephoned him, first at the airport and then at home. The calls had been such gross violations of security procedures they did not fit Slade—unless they were the spontaneous reactions of an innocent man. Besides, if Slade had wanted Kyra in jail, he would have needed no byzantine hospital bag job to entrap her on a conspiracy charge,—he could have simply placed her in a jail cell on his own authority. Slade was a melodramatic actor and fantasist, but he was no cretin. And if he had been cooperating with authorities who wanted Kyra kept away from her people, the skies above the meadow would be crowded with helicopters from the Air Force, waiting to sight his Jeep.

Something had gone askew in Seattle, he decided, and if it wasn’t Ben Slade it would have to be Thomas Breedlove. A horseback theorist might assume he had been manipulated—by one who artfully understood every human being’s basic need for a Huan Chung.

Yet he could not bring himself to accuse Kyra of supplying his imagination with a handy villain to spur him in their flight, despite elements that pointed to her doing so. There would have been no need for Slade to pursue them if he truly wanted to assist Kyra off the planet—especially after he discovered that Laudermilk had furnished her with the cobalt—and obviously there had been no massive pursuit. Slade knew their destination and their estimated time of arrival, although Breedlove had made better time than he expected in racing from the imagined pursuit.

He had never questioned Kyra’s assertion that they were being pursued. From the moment she entered the car in Seattle he had responded to her anxieties as a programmed automaton, but in the beginning at least her fears had seemed real. Only later had she grown apathetic, and her torpor could have been an emotional reaction to released tensions. Obviously she believed Laudermilk, but what if Laudermilk had lied to her? The idea seemed far-fetched; the major had no reason to slander his comrade Slade.

Hunkered down, chewing a blade of grass, cogitating, he saw Kyra emerge from the creek near the willow, drifting as lightly as a sunbeam over the close-cropped grass. He remained crouched as if impaled on the vision of her beauty and renewed strangeness, for her skin was again birch silver and her hair green. In her unadorned simplicity she was as self-complete as a flower or a tree, and it occurred to him that he was looking upon the ideal beauty men had sought since the beginning of human imagination.

As she moved toward him she gathered the sunlight and became an embodied radiance, feminine and sensuous yet so ethereal she might have swum in air. Nearing the mound, she flung herself into a pirouette, swirling on tiptoe, spine arched, head back, arms extended, displaying the harmonies of her form in exuberant glee. Sunbeams swirled around her, and she began to sing in the likings of her own language a song as blithe as darting swallows and gamboling colts.

Even at the distance her magic touched his imagination, creating the overpowering ambience of quintessential springs yearning toward fruited summers. He stood, feeling as vital and as fresh as one awakening to his first morning in some Edenic forest. Near him, she ceased the swirling and singing and walked toward him, smiling and regal, her hands extended for him to take.

“Now, Breedlove, I must take leave of my dearest votary. Kneel.”

It was a queen commanding him, and he obeyed, kneeling before her as a knight swearing fealty, and again he felt her weird duality as a living presence and as a legend. She placed his hands lightly on her hips and placed her palms on his temples, tilting his face toward hers as she drew him closer. She smelled of violets.

“Come with me, Breedlove. Follow. Follow.”

Looking into her eyes, he saw through them into a universe of pellucid green light. The light drew him into a vast hemisphere centered by the whorl of a sun, and he felt himself levitating to her. “Come, my best beloved, follow, follow.”

Ascending faster in tightening spirals, his psyche rose through the green empyrean toward the distant sun. He was undergoing a transfiguration, becoming a soaring phallic angel, God’s ultimate drone. The dichotomies of his flesh and spirit were merging into one consummate whole, the parallel lines of his nature meeting in a green interior space. Plunging upward toward creation’s fiery womb, he failed to hear the humming in the sky as the park’s helicopter cleared Hallman’s Peak.

At that moment he touched the perimeter of the sun. Into its dazzling core his psyche plunged. Sheathed in Kyra’s radiance, knowing creation’s keenest quivering thrust, of a sudden he held summer in his hands. It bathed him in its eternal glow. If death had claimed him then, he would have died replete, but a melodramatic voice, amplified by the crowd-control speaker on Peterson’s helicopter—Slade’s voice—blasting over the meadow and rumbling among the hills, shattered the moment’s sublimity.

“GET AWAY FROM THAT SHE-THING, BREEDLOVE! IT’S THE HARLOT OF EDEN. IT’S LILITH.”

Kyra dropped her hands from his temples to glance upward, and with the breaking of her touch the spell was broken. Gone was the pale green empyrean and the splendid sun. She stepped back, gave the Kanabian curtsy, and with a dancer’s whirl, turned away from him; smiling back over her shoulder at him, she was queen no longer, but the bright, gleeful girl he had first met on the meadow.

“I’ve got to get the hell out of here, Breedlove. As you say on earth, ‘Business before pleasure.’ ”

Laughing, she sped from him across the meadow with the flashing, sunbeam speed no man could equal, and the helicopter swung around and down to herd her toward the aspen grove. With four bounds she cleared the creek at an angle, dashing toward the trees. Her last gesture to humankind was to wave the helicopter away, pointing toward the invisible spaceship towering above the forest.

At the helicopter’s controls, Peterson remembered and understood her gesture, and Peterson’s voice over the loudspeaker was the last human voice she heard, saying, “Good luck, Kyra, and happy hunting.”

Peterson veered the machine and circled back toward the mound, settling toward the grass a few yards from where Breedlove stood, arms folded, watching the last flash of silver and green vanish amid the aspen boles. Peterson was right. She was not Lilith, not Merope, but Kyra.

What had happened to him on the mound, Breedlove decided, was simple yet inexpressibly complex. She had opened a door. He had stepped through it to gain an understanding of immortality with a mortal’s finite mind. For a moment only they had shared a love, but now he knew, as she had always known, that love was eternal, for in that moment he had shared the immortal love of an angel.

Running at a crouch from underneath the rotor blades, Slade made for the mound as the vanes whirred into silence.

“Where’s her vehicle?”

Breedlove pointed toward the aspens. “Over there.”

“She killed Laudermilk last night,” Slade said. “She emasculated him root and branch. He died of ecstasy, shock, and blood loss, in that order.”

“She didn’t kill him,” Breedlove contradicted. “He killed himself.”

Slade looked at him sharply and said, “That’s what Turpin said, but Turpin claimed it was divine retribution for Laudermilk’s carnal ways.”

Breedlove looked toward the helicopter, saw only Peterson emerging, and asked, “Where’s Turpin?”

“He had to go back into Seattle General, for psychiatric observation. He thinks that through Kyra he’s walked and talked with God.”

Peterson walked onto the mound, his hand extended to Breedlove, and said, “Welcome back, Tom.”

“Thanks, Pete. I’m ready to resume duty.”

“Good. Your first assignment is to get that Jeep out of the wilderness area. What’s holding up the girl?”

“She’s building up steam for liftoff,” Breedlove said.

“That’s only part of what she’s doing,” Slade said. “She’s also strapping herself to that slant board, bottom up, and hooking a lot of wires to her lower abdomen.”

Slade’s remark suggested an interesting and involved theory, another of the Texan’s specialties, but at the moment Breedlove was not encouraging any dramatic monologue from Slade. The three men stood quietly, looking toward the aspen grove and waiting.