“Yes, I have, human, but I didn’t get there.”
So this was where the trek to Na-Abiza ended.
The sky shaded from color to color, and sometimes they sat in the garden and watched it. Sometimes it ran through its chromatic scale unseen and unheeded, for they remained in the house for long periods—working, talking, laughing, making love. Also—perhaps too often —quarreling.
And Sherret learned to accept the incredible. On the face of it, a mature doctrine, but occasionally he had misgivings. It could lead to a dulling of the sense of wonder. Excess of anything tended toward boredom—even, strangely enough, excess of novelty.
There was plenty of novelty.
Just to watch Rosala paint involved a series of surprises. She needed no brush. She painted with her fingers.
She would set a canvas on its back, pour quantities of colors onto it, and let them ooze sluggishly together. Then she’d run her fingers lightly over the mess, mixing, separating, arranging with hair-line delicacy. It was as though each nerve-end at her finger tips was working independently on its own contribution to the overall design. Not a speck of paint adhered to her fingers.
Sherret questioned her about this exquisitely controllable force flowing from her. She couldn’t enlighten him about its nature. All Petrans had the power at birth.
“Birth?” Sherret echoed. “I’ve been wondering about that, too. How do Petrans get to be born if they never cohabit?”
Rosala said seriously, “There are some questions you mustn’t ask, darling. We’re a parasitic race and therefore vulnerable. To protect ourselves we’re sworn to a code of secrecy about certain fundamental matters. But I’ll tell you this much. You and I could have children.”
“Petrans?”
“You might as well ask ‘boys or girls?’ We shouldn’t know until they were born.”
He fingered his beard. “Have you any children?”
“No, Sherry.”
“Somehow, I’m glad. Another thing—are you sworn not to reveal your age?”
“Bodily, I’m as young or old as you wish me to be. And mental time is merely relative. Relatively, time is not the same on this planet as on Earth,” she answered evasively.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, I’m not trying to pry. I’m only trying to learn where I stand.”
“You stand on your own feet, as you told Captain Maxton. Darling, why do you keep trying to formalize everything? You must get Reparism out of your system. It can never work on Amara. Inflexible things only get broken here.”
Another row was in danger of brewing. He thought it best to keep quiet. But his silence became sullen.
She sensed that, and her uncertain temper began to simmer. She started to work it off on a large block of granite- like stone. She attacked it with her bare hands, furiously pulling away chunks as though it were wax, indenting it with a finger-thrust, engraving it with a fingernail. It began to take shape but, obviously, from her expression, the wrong shape.
Suddenly her temper boiled over. The whole massive block went hurtling to the far wall. The crash made the house shake. Hung paintings came toppling to the glassy floor.
“Think I’ll go for a stroll,” said Sherret, with forced calm. Inwardly, he was shaking. In one of her blind rages, Rosala could as easily smash him against a wall. After the house, the garden was a haven of peace in the subdued green daylight. Rosala never painted by the light of the Three Suns because they were never together in the sky. But in the house she drew their light together by some optical wizardry and fused them into the glaring white light she demanded for her work. Sherret, chewing on a B-stick, roamed along the edge of the pool. Recently he’d noted that the diving plinth was subsiding. He planned a minor engineering job to reset the thing. When he mentioned it to Rosala, she laughed.
“Sherry, it’s so easy!”
She lifted the weighty plinth with a finger, then rearranged its foundations with little more than a wave of the hand.
