Moreover she was naked, as he was.
Or was she?
There was something. . .
But it hurt his eyes, and he had to blink, and as his lids came down she repeated her command in a more urgent manner, holding up her thin right hand.
Diffident, he complied when the blink was over, and felt warm convincing flesh, perhaps a little sparse over the bones.
“I can touch you and I cannot see my own reflection,” he said after a while. Giddying, the clash between the apparent reality of this alien woman and the plain incontestable nonreality of himself who could not make a mirror give back his portrait made him tremble and sway.
“But if I touch you . . .” the woman said, and reached out, and with a quick sidelong gesture like an axe-blow demonstrated how she could pass her own hand through his. Or—no! Where his hand seemed to be. He felt nothing, except the phantom of a chill, yet he witnessed and would have sworn on his life to the reality of her action.
Gasping, and realising in the same moment that he could detect no rush of air into his lungs, he cried out, “I don’t understand!” Still not knowing, either, how he could talk.
The man advanced, his face—which was too long, too skimpy, too much dominated by vast eyes—set in an expression of concern and regret.
“Lodovico Zaras, before we proceed with explanations, we must offer our deepest and most sincere apologies. It is to be hoped that a person such as yourself, a pioneer in your own day, an intellectual explorer as it were, may forgive the presumptuous interference we plead guilty to. I speak to you as what you were, not what you are, but I trust that the difference has not yet become unendurable. Inevitably the burden of that difference will grow greater as time passes, but we hope and predict that the series of shocks you are due for will be slow enough for you to make adjustments and ultimately grant us the forgiveness which we beg of you now. I am Horad. It is not a name as you would understand a name, but more of a title, which I think you would find meaningless. My companions, of whom the same ought to be said, can be addressed as Genua”—who had passed her hand through his—“and Orlalee.”
Still in the grip of that impulse which had dictated his suicide, he nonetheless failed to prevent his mind from setting to work on the data offered. It had been his curse since childhood that he could not bear mental inactivity. The prospect of having to lie like a dummy for yet another year in a hospital bed, when he had hoped the latest operation might also be the last, had been what drove him to knock on the doors of death. There were drugs aplenty to cure pain; those which cured boredom were not recognised as part of the pharmacopoeia, and most were illegal.
He said at length to Horad, “If I try and touch you . . .”
“Do so!” Horad held up his right arm. It felt much like Genua’s, slim to the point of being scrawny. But. . .
There was something about these three which had already prevented him from thinking of them as merely naked, though none of them wore what he was accustomed to regarding as a garment.
In the case of Horad, it was far more striking than it was on Genua. It registered on his eyes as a zone where it was hard to focus; on his skin, as a vibration or a tingling; most, though, it impinged directly on his mind as a—a—
A state as much between something and nothing as he himself was between alive and dead.
On the women it might have passed for some form of protective garb; after all, who can predict what will happen in the vicinity of ghosts? But on Horad it could be—could be detected all around his head, across his shoulders, down his upper arms. . . To look at him any other way except straight in those excessive eyes was to be gravely disturbed by . . . it.
Lodovico swallowed: nothing, not even his own saliva. Yet it was as though he did. He remembered what he had formerly experienced as the act of swallowing, and this was much like it, and had his attention not been on the act it might have passed as well as the real thing.
Faintly he said, “What have you made of me, that you think I ought to call myself a ghost?”
The three exchanged pleased looks. Orlalee spoke up for the first time.
“We hope to be able to answer that question first of all. We need, however, to know how you perceive us before we can choose the proper terms to express our intended meaning. How do we seem to you?” And they struck poses for inspection.
He looked them over in detail as best he could, still finding it impossible to study certain areas of—no, that was inexact: around—Horad. He found all three alike in their fragility and near-hairlessness; on their respective pubes there was only down, not actual hair. Their feet, as he looked lower, he found to be high-arched, with the toes reduced to simple stubs, the nails to thin pale lines.
He pondered the implications, disregarding one sick notion which had briefly occured to him: that he might be in Hell. There was no torment in his mind at the moment other than the sense of need-to-know-unsatisfied which had always been an integral part of his personality. On the contrary! He was in a dream-like state of elation all of a sudden. In his mind, such total terror that it made him want to dissolve into eternal darkness balanced and teetered
