“My name is Thomas Breedlove, ma’am. I’m a forest ranger assigned to this area, and I’ve come—”
“What does ‘Thomas Breedlove’ mean?”
“It has no meaning. It’s just a name.”
“My name has a meaning. I’m Kyra. Do you see that tree there?”
She pointed to a willow in the bend of the creek. The sun was fast dissipating the ground fog, which hovered in a thin veil over the lowlands and the creek.
“The willow.” He nodded.
She spoke with the sudden enthusiasm of a child revealing a secret to a special friend. “My name is Kyra Lavaslatta.
Kyra
means ‘willow’ and
Lavaslatta
means ‘far wandering’ in my language.”
What was her language? he wondered. Her name sounded Finnish.
“Are you from Finland, Kyra?”
“No.”
“Where are you from?”
She glanced toward the eastern ridge, studying it, and for a moment he thought she might point to a rock or a tree. Weighing her answer carefully, she pointed toward the top of the ridge and said, “From there.”
“From the other side of the mountain?” he asked.
“No. From the other side of the morning.”
She answered with a guileless simplicity that convinced him she believed she was telling the truth. She might be an escapee from a mental hospital, he realized, who lived completely in a world of delusion, and compassion came to him with the realization.
“How did you get into these mountains, Kyra?”
“In a vehicle.”
“What kind of vehicle?”
“I could tell you, but you wouldn’t know.”
She had dismissed his question. She turned her face from his and looked into the now bright morning. “Isn’t the sky terrific. It’s getting almost as blue as Breedlove’s eyes.”
She was being shyly evasive, but she was not avoiding him. Apparently she wanted to visit a while, and he was not averse to her company. Out of regard for her shyness he would desist from any official questioning, he decided, but would ingratiate himself with her and let her reveal the truth about herself in her own way. If she was a mental case, eventually she would divulge enough information to permit him to take her into custody, and he was mindful that others were probably with her. So far Haney’s report was proving accurate in detail, so the others must be secreted in the woods. Perhaps an entire ward had escaped.
“I’ll shave now,” he said to her. “Then I’ll cook some coffee and bacon. Perhaps you’ll join me for breakfast?”
“Terrific, Breedlove. Does your bacon have easternmost flavor at westernmost prices?”
He was bending to take his shaving gear from his pack when she asked about the bacon, and her phrase sounded weirdly familiar. Straightening, he asked, “Who taught you English?”
“I learned your rich and diversified language from Station KSPO.”
There was a peculiar logic to what she said. She had been talking to him in the fervid language of television commercials.
“Come to the creek with me, and I’ll show you how I shave. You must be a wizard at learning languages.”
Walking beside him, she said, “It’s easy. All beings who communicate are alive, so ‘to be’ is a key to language. Find it, and you can pair other concepts to it by a frequency of usage relationship. But I do have trouble with your color words. The television signal is very weak.”
“It’s the mountains around here,” he said.
Vaguely he grasped the method she used for learning a language, and it had the same crazy logic as her clothes. It would be an easy way to learn if the learner had total recall and a memory bank as large as a computer’s. To use such a method the green-eyed girl beside him would have to be the greatest linguistic genius on earth—if she was of earth.
He paused at his random qualification and dismissed it as an idea his own sanity would not let him accept. The girl was a kook, delightful, whimsical, and regal, but still a kook.
He found reason to shove the vagrant idea further behind him at creekside. If she was an inheritor of a technology more advanced than earth’s, the supposition was belied by the intentness with which she watched him shave, as if a tool so simple as a razor and a lubricant such as shaving soap were marvelous inventions. But after he finished shaving and bent to brush his teeth, he found her intentness had another motive.
“You didn’t cut yourself and say ‘ouch’!”
In short, he had not followed the television commercial.
“Did you want me to?”
“I wanted to see the color of your blood.”
“It’s red, like the lettering on this toothpaste tube.”
“I’m glad, Breedlove. Then we both breathe oxygen. You’re my brother.”
“Welcome to the family, Sister Kyra.”
She laughed, a pleasant, tinkling sound. She seemed vastly reassured by the color of his blood.
At breakfast she was fascinated by the design of his spoon, holding it to look at it from various angles. Her sense of wonder was so great it communicated itself to him, and he remarked, “Kyra, you’re the original ‘child of the clear, unclouded brow and dreaming eyes of wonder.’ ”
“You’ve got a terrific phrase there, Breedlove.”
“It’s not mine. It’s from a poet. Do you like poetry?”
A shadow flickered over her face as she answered, “We had poetry once, long ago, but the poets left us.”
He wanted to ask where the poets had gone, but he did not wish to stir the grief he had seen in her eyes, and he was growing protective of her madness. On the other hand he admired her quickness and grace and remained always conscious of her dignity, despite her absurd dress, which almost totally revealed her nubile loveliness.
Her face enchanted him most. Though regal, it was a fine-tuned instrument for conveying the wide range of emotions that arose from her Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. The bone structure beneath the silvery gray skin was classic Swede—she could have been a young Garbo—and as they talked her charm wove a spell that made her odd coloring as unobtrusive as her semi-nudity. She ate only a slice, of bacon and a slice of bread with a bit of jam and drank half a cup of coffee.
“If you don’t eat more you’ll be famished by noon.”
“The sunlight feeds me, Breedlove,” she said, fluffing her hair.
The charm of her wholly feminine gesture buffered the implications of what she said. She claimed the ability to photosynthesize light. If that was true, it would explain the green of her hair as chlorophyll. There was a scientific logic to her fantasies, and, playfully, he matched her zany logic with zaniness of his own.
“Maybe you’re descended from a plant.”
“Some believe so,” she said. “Plants that lived on air.”
“I’d have to agree.” He smiled. “We call them aerophytes, and among them is the world’s most beautiful flower, the orchid. From the first time I saw you I felt you were the kissing cousin of an orchid.”
Her eyes sparkled at his compliment, surprising him with her delight in flattery, but she could give as well as receive. “You must have sprung from the loins of a sturdy oak, Breedlove.”
“Where did you see an oak around here?”
“I saw them on KSPO. We had them on Kanab.”
“Kanab? Are you from Utah?”
“No. Kanab was the name of my world.”
She was drifting into her mania, and he was intrigued by the novelty of her delusions. It was a pattern followed by many psychotics, he had read; outside the areas of their delusion they could be bright and sensible. Only when they moved into their illusionary world did their behavior grow strange, but they could become upset when their version of reality was derided. He decided to treat her imaginary world with gravity.
“What does the word
Kanab
mean?”
Seated on the grass before him, her legs crossed, she considered the question before answering hesitantly, “
Kanab
means ‘mother,’ but it means something more to us, perhaps ‘queen-mother.’ ”
Suddenly she leaped to her feet and swirled before him. “What do you think of my dress, Breedlove? It’s made from the sheerest of fabrics, laminated hydrogen plasma. Am I not the height of fashion?”
“Height of fashion” was a phrase plucked from a dress advertisement, he realized, but as she settled to the grass again as lightly as a falling thistle, she awaited his answer with girlish eagerness.
“It’s beautiful. Laminated hydrogen beats nylon by a country mile. But earth women use dresses for concealment as well as decoration. Your dress is very decorative but also very revealing.”
“We used to decorate ourselves on Kanab, but we found it was too… provocative.”
For the first time she groped for a word, to find the least offensive, he sensed, and not because her vocabulary faltered. Her vocabulary was excellent and apparently growing stronger by the minute. He didn’t know precisely what hydrogen plasma might be. Probably it was a term learned from the early-morning science courses broadcast by KSPO.
“Actually you need to complete your ensemble with undies,” he said, “to conceal your breasts and bottom.”
“What are undies?”
He explained, and she sighed in genuine disappointment. “I feel bound enough with the dress alone. It’s getting too warm in here.”
Her madness and his common decency put a shield of propriety between them far stronger than her inadequate garment, and she seemed so vexed by the confinement of the dress, he invited her to take it off. Rising to her knees, she slithered from the garment in sinuous bendings and twistings, and she was totally unaware of the sensuality of her movements. Heaving a sigh of relief, she sat down in front of him as naked as a curd, folded the dress and laid it on the grass beside her.
Breedlove almost gasped his astonishment when he noticed a peculiarity of her anatomy that gave him the first inkling of evidence that she was not some mad waif wandering in the wilderness but exactly what she said she was, a girl from another planet.
Glancing over, she read the astonishment in his eyes incorrectly. “Breedlove, you do not consider me well formed and beautifully proportioned.”
“Kyra, your body’s beautiful, but—I hate to tell you this you’ve got no bellybutton.”
“What’s a bellybutton?”
He unbuttoned his shirt, slipped up his undershirt, and exhibited his navel. The whorled bud of flesh struck her as humorous, and she laughed. “If that’s all it is, I’m doing quite well without one.”
Chagrined by their sudden focus on anatomy, he turned to another subject, asking, “What is it like on Kanab?”
“Oh, it was beautiful, Breedlove. Almost as beautiful as your own gorgeous planet, with mountains and snow and meadows with bright streams flowing to rivers which flowed to the sea.”
The elation in her voice plummeted into sudden silence, and she added softly, “But that was long ago, long, long ago.”
He could almost touch the sadness in her voice, but she was shaking off the mood. “My people worked by day and slept by night. At twilight they gathered to tell stories and pass on their knowledge to the young. We had but one creed, ‘Love one another,’ and we loved until the end. For men such as you death often came from too great a happiness, when they melted like snowflakes in the fires of life. But that was before the great sadness when the twilights grew too long.”
“Why did you leave, Kyra?”
As her eyes and hair had seemed to absorb the dawn’s earliest light, the sorrow in her face extracted sadness from the air they breathed, and the chill of her desolation infected him. He regretted his question as she looked away from him, out over the meadow, as if averting her eyes from some inner abyss of despair.
“Kanab is no more. Our sun grew pale, collapsed upon itself, and exploded.”
Her palpable sorrow convinced Breedlove of the truth of what she said. His heart believed her, and with his knowledge came a great unease. Men had speculated that this might happen which was happening to him now, and he, a simple forest ranger, had become the first man to establish contact with an emissary of an alien species. Beyond his inner turmoil, overshadowing Kyra’s sorrow, loomed the overwhelming question he knew he had to ask.
“Tell me, Kyra, out of all the planets in the universe, why did you choose to come to earth?”
“We came for help.”
Her answer aroused his suspicion. It was not credible that one who traveled interstellar space should seek aid from a planet of toddlers only now making their first step into the solar system.
“You want our help?”
“There are only ten of us, and we are not gods but exiles. We heard radio noises from your planet and knew we’d find a civilization here. We seek a planet where we may renew our race, but we do not wish to usurp the dwelling place of other intelligent beings. But our fuel is exhausted. We need only a few gallons of water and a spoonful of fuel.”
“What is your fuel?”
“It is a heavy metal that gives off heat from its own furnaces.”
“You’re probably looking for uranium 235.”
“Two-three-five,” she repeated, looking at him closely, then her face lighted up, and he could see a burden lift from her mind. “Yes, uranium. Could you give us a spoonful of uranium?”
She was asking for a spoonful of uranium as a neighbor might drop in to borrow a cup of sugar, and the absurdity of her request helped convince him of its authenticity.
“Uranium is controlled by the government. It’s a very dangerous element. It’s radioactive and has to be shielded with heavy lead whenever it’s moved.”
“I have a very light shield to carry it in.”
“I’m sure the government would be interested in your shield, but the government guards the supply of uranium very carefully.”
“Would you take me to your government?”
He laughed. “On earth, Kyra, there’s a famous cartoon showing a being from another planet walking up to a grazing cow and saying, ‘Take me to your leader.’ I’m afraid that you’ve come to that cow.”
She sensed the humor in the situation and repeated, “Breedlove, take me to your leader.”
“There are so many leaders I don’t know where to start. The topmost leader is the President of the United States, but two houses of Congress and a Supreme Court pass on most of what he does, and he doesn’t ladle out spoonfuls of uranium. The agency in charge of uranium used to be the Atomic Energy Commission, but it has been divided into two separate agencies. Neither could act on your request without referring it to other interested agencies, such as the Department of Defense…” As she listened, he wove his way through a maze of bureaucracies that might be concerned with her request. “The man who would know offhand which agency to take you to would have to be a lawyer specializing in political science.”