I put my arm around Nova. “These are . . . old friends. Mike is an artist. Michael Cilento, remember?” I saw the astonishment in her eyes.
“But you’re dead—or something!” she said.
“Or something,” Mike grinned.
“Mike found a way to . . .” I hesitated. “How do I say it?”
“Slip through space?”
“But what did we do?” asked Nova. “I’ve never experienced anything like that!”
“Oh, never mind that,” Madelon said. “You did it, we did it, we’re all here.” She started walking and we went along. “Our cave is over there,” she said.
“What do you call—this place?” Nova asked.
“We haven’t really decided,” Mike said. “Most of the time we just call it
“Flowerworld,” Madelon said. “Pacifica. But mostly it’s
“A world by any other name would be just as sweet,” I said.
“It’s beautiful.”
Nude, the four of us walked up the golden beach and around a rock to find the cave house they had created. A border of flowers edged a sand terrace, and an arbor of poles supported a growth of red pear-shaped grapes. The cave was long and twisting and there were beds of moss and, back in the coolness, a carcass of some kind of meat animal.
“We came through naked,” Mike said. “Not even our tooth fillings made it. Luckily we only had a couple. We came down here and caught fish bare handed and used their bones for tools. I made spears and tracked the jumpers for meat. They’re a bit like deer, but they can jump unbelievably high. There’s a kind of grain that grows south of here, and there is the fruit.”
His voice petered out and I felt a sudden empathy for him. This Eden-like life was like a vacation, easy and fun, but not a man’s world, certainly not Michael Cilento’s. I noticed the sun-dried clay sculptures, the fire- hardened pots, the unfinished mural he was scratching into a smooth spot on the rock wall. An artist will always create art, but Mike had known better tools, and he was unsatisfied with the primitive ones he had.
“Do you want to go back?” I asked.
All three looked at me. “Can we?” asked Madelon.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think so.” I looked at Nova. “I’m not certain we can do it without . . . them.” Mike and Madelon looked at each other questioningly.
“It’s the Martians,” Nova said, “or something they left behind. I’m not really certain. Brian . . . contacted them, in the Star Palace. We merged with them, somehow. Brian wanted to come here and focused us
. . . and we just . . . came.” She looked at me confidently. “We can do it.”
I was not quite so confident. Some of the sureness was dissipating with new doubts. To avoid thinking of it for awhile, I asked about the fruit in a woven basket, then about the planet in general. Mike told me that from what he could determine it appeared to be an ocean world and the land a vast prairie, although he had seen only a small portion of it.
“Brian, come see the sunset,” Nova said and we all joined her at the entrance to the cave. The western sky was red-orange and the underlit clouds were magnificent far out to sea.
A whirring insect as large as a canary came at me from the eastern darkness, and I raised a hand to bat at it, but Mike caught my wrist. “They won’t hurt you unless you hurt them,” he laughed. “Believe me, I learned the hard way. There are no tiny annoying buggies here, just three or four species of big ones, sort of all purpose types, to fertilize the trees and flowers. We all—co-exist here.”
The two women stepped out further, to stand on a weathered snub of rock and listen to the waves breaking as the unnamed sun set. Their naked bodies, lithe and voluptuous, were gilded by the sun. They both seemed very alive, very much aware of each other’s presence, obviously taking pleasure in the other’s beauty. Nova turned toward me to point out the low flight of a fast waterbird and I saw that the apprehension was gone, replaced by a smile. The nipples of her full breasts were hard, and the sunset breeze stirred her long dark hair. Madelon looked over her shoulder to smile at us, too, to share the beauty and her delight at companionship. Her figure was that delicious combination of the voluptuary and the athlete
