"Be serious, will you? I meant a short pleasure trip, no further than to Aphrodite or Ares."
She dropped her hand to rest her weight on it. Forearm, hip, and thigh continued pressing gently on him. He felt her breath on his cheek as her tone dropped mirth. "Well, then it's serious I will be, dear wurra-wurra-wart. You've confessed you'll have no quartermaster and, what's worse, no medical officer. Can I not be both? Should I let you far off into danger without me when I might help? Think also of your crew, Captain Brodersen. Would you be denying them what might save a life, to be free of fear on my account?"
"But the trip won't be dangerous."
"In that case, why refuse me the experience? You know what flying barracks the emigrant ships are. I've more sense of a universe around me here or, aye, watching a newscast from space than ever I got aboard isabella."
"Well, uh, well, no telling what'll happen. We're steering mighty close to the wind, and-uh-"
"And your mistress must not be at your side? Daniel, Daniel, it's angry I'd be at you were I not so disappointed."
"Oh, hell, Pegeen!" He reached around to draw her closer yet.
"Of course," she said slyly, "if you fear scandal, I could keep decorous with you. Sure some boy aboard would console me."
"Stop that, you witch." He had known this was the last skirmish in a fight she'd won, by her special weapons, soon after they reached this place. "I give up. You're on." The surrender gladdened him. She sealed her victory by waiting for him to kiss her- thirty seconds? -though immediately after, nobody knew quite who was in charge.
They halted there, since the boat might appear at any minute, and sat for a while letting serenity well up within them. Presently Caitlin rose. "I will make my farewells," she said. He saw her clear through the twilight, but changed by it to a sight not altogether real, the hue of the Milky Way, moving around the meadow. She dipped a hand into the lake and drank, she plucked a sunbloom petal and crushed it lovingly between lips and teeth, she cast arms around a man-tall koost and hugged the bush to her, burying her face in its leaves. . . . At last she came back to him.
"You really try to be part of all this, don't you?" he half whispered.
"No, I am." Her hand swept an arc from stars to water and across the woods. "And you are, Dan. Everything is. Why cannot people feel it?"
"We can't be you, I suppose. You said something once about maybe having faerie blood. I thought it was just your figure of speech. Tonight I wonder."
She stared before her. "I wonder my own self."
"You mean that? I could pretty near believe it, old agnostic me."
"Oh, no, I'd not give you any mystical blarney. Not even from Yeats will I buy his metaphysics." She looked upward. "Yet sure, and this is a strange cosmos, more strange than we can guess, is that not so, my joy?"
He nodded. "The size of it alone. I've tried and tried to imagine a light-year, a single light-year, but of course I can't. Then I've tried to imagine the smallness of an atom, and can't. Wave mechanics. Background radiation left over from the Beginning. Expansion forever -into what? Black holes. Quasars. T machines. The Others. Yes." After a silence, touching her: "I think, though, you were getting at a particular mystery."
"Well, it was a queer story my mother told me, and she a good Catholic."
"Want to tell me?"
"That I do, but och, I don't know how. For it is not really a story, anything that truly happened or else was a lie. No, it is in the way and the time of telling, and herself who told it. Would you indeed like to hear?"
He tightened his arm about her. "Why do you ask me that?"
Caitlin responded. "Thank you, dear bear that you are.
"You must first understand, Mother was from Lahinch in County Clare. That's among the parts of Eire which grew poor during the Troubles, until none were left but smallholders, and many of them unlettered. There again they believe in the Slieve, if ever they stopped believing, though I suppose Lady Gregory would not recognize their tales. And knowing about the Others, why under the winter stars should they not believe?"
Out in the lake, the great black bulk of a wassergeist surfaced, uttered its eldritch whistle, and sank.
"Well, as I've told you before, Mother came to Dublin on a scholarship to study music, after a professor on a fishing trip had heard her sing," Caitlin went on. "But she was only a little in the opera, for she married Padraig Muiryan and soon bore him two children. Then she fell homesick. He, a physician, could not take free, but he sent her back on holiday to the cottage of her parents, and glad she was to roam about that countryside she loved."
Caitlin sat straight, twining her fingers hard together, searching her thoughts. Brodersen waited. Her profile against the light night was dear to him.
"This she related long afterward, and I the first to hear except her priest. My father, that good dry man, fifteen years older than she, would have called it a mere dream, as likely it was. But Mother was seeking to reach me, when she saw me breaking from faith and family both. She wanted me to know that she too had felt what I did, so that she could warn me to beware.
"And yet she could say no more than this. She had been on a week's tramp, where she would sleep at whatever house the sunset found her near, and they always happy to meet a new person. But this moonlit night beneath Slieve Bernagh was so fair that she spread her bedroll on the moss, and late she lay while her vision lost itself upwards.
"Then there came a music out of the moonlight like flame, and one whose beauty was stich that she wept to see, and he asked her would she go into the mountain with him. No woman born could have refused, or would have been a saint if she could, my mother told me. She left the sod like a bird, and he nested her in his arms and bore her away. But as for what followed, she could only speak of rainbows and suns, purple and gold, wind and wild seas and everything a glory. If that was how he made love to her, then that was how he made love to her. She awoke where she had lain down, and a sunbeam tickled her nose till she sneezed. . . . I've given you in English, Dan, a song I made about it in Gaelic, for Mother lacked the words; I do myself, but I saw her eyes and heard her voice."
Nor had he aught he could say.
"Nine months later, I was born, and grew to be the image of her," Caitlin continued after a spell during which a meteor streaked overhead. "Aye, well do I know what you are thinking. My father, the dear, never did. To him, she had carried me a little time long or a little time short, no matter which it was. And how he spoiled me, for I was his single daughter and the last child they had. Dan, he was right. You'll grant me, won't you, I read people well? She has known no other man than him, ever."
"Oh, I didn't mean that," Brodersen protested clumsily. "Not that I'd give a damn, but- No, I just guess at maybe a fantasy she was nursing-you'll agree she might, huh? -maybe without quite realizing she did- And she got a little high."
"She was never one for the poteen or the pot." When he tried to apologize, Caitlin laid a palm across his lips. "Aye, you mean she got drunk on moonlight."
"It happens," he replied when she let go. "Why, I remember an old juniper behind the house that'd talk to me. I forget what it said, but I remember it talking as well as I remember learning to ride a horse at the same age, four or five or whenever that was. Dreams hang on in the oddest ways. And. . . if you're like her, Pegeen, then she's like you, and you're a dreamer- "-except sometimes when you're so practical you scare me."
She didn't ease and laugh as he'd hoped, though she did smile. "I'm simply a woman, Dan. You men are the romantic sex."
"All right, what do you suppose happened? If you think she really went into Elhoy -what we call it where I come from- if you think that, I won't scoff. In the same world as the Others, no trouble to accept Underearth."
"Or devils?" He felt her shiver. "That's what Mother feared it was, hell tempting her and she falling. The priest said not to believe that; likeliest she'd had but a gust in the brain. Yet in her soul she bears the fear to this day. My father has told me how she was light-hearted in her youth, but from about that time grew very devout."
The pressure toward that would certainly be there, Brodersen reflected. Where the fact of the Others hasn't destroyed religions, it's inspired new ones, or repowered the old. Was any of that their intention? "What is your guess?"
"Mine? I have none. I know what scientific evidence consists of, and here is naught."
"But you must have speculated. It obviously matters a lot to you."
"Naturally. Norah is my mother. Far though I've drifted, I love her and my father and brothers, and hope to see them again on our journey."
Caitlin took his hand in a close grip. "You recall what started this talk was when you asked about the sense of belonging in the whole universe," she said. "I think she had it that night, stronger than ever myself have. Were she a Buddhist, she would have been speaking of Nirvana or enlightenment or some such wonderful thing. Being an Irish peasant girl, for all she was wedded to a Dublin doctor and had sung in the opera, she recoiled in horror, and dreadful is the pity of that. But as for what brought on her experience and gave it such form, I will not guess."
"May I?" he responded. "She was as adventurous by nature as you are, as hungry for life, except she never fought her way to freedom the way you did. So-"
Br-r-roo-oom-m said the sky. They sprang to their feet. Metal high aloft caught light from the hidden sun and glimmered, then dived into eclipse. Nonetheless they could track it as it neared them. The rumble became a roar, leaves trembled, air buffeted. The spaceboat rotated wings, descended vertically, lowered wheels, touched ground, cut motors, and rested. Silence thundered back.
Brodersen and Caitlin grabbed up their gear and ran toward her.
X
