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He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth;
The applause was always deafening. (And we never had to modify it by taped responses, either, isn’t that beyond belief?)
We finished our tour on Giuliu II. Sam had been right: it wasn’t much like Heaven.
Broomall and Ordak were malformed … a mole and blindness … but they had been in the community long, and they were intelligent enough to keep to themselves. But their offspring was another matter.
With eyes of dust, who could tolerate such a thing?
Deepest black, with bright shoots of red thrusting up. It reminded me of the mouth of a volcano, Father.”
“But you have never seen a volcano, my son.” Person took a step away from the wall, and his great hands hung loosely below his knees. “I know.”
It is all one, Father. I see.”
Person conjured up a vision of the sense centers, where smells and sounds and feelings of beauty were poured out on the air of Topaz, for the inhabitants to enjoy. “She must like it there. So near to the scent of gardenias.” “She says it’s a job.”
“No, Father. I lack for nothing. I have my meal cakes and my ale. I have my shadows and my colors. And there is the smell of time passing. I need nothing more.” “How strange you are, my son,” the blind man said. Person gave a soft musky chuckle of amusement. “How strange I am indeed, Father.”
“Wheeew!” She stepped out of the bowl and sank onto a nest of foamettes. “What a day. If I never smell another gardenia, it’ll be too soon.
The other two did not answer, and that was a perfect sign of agreement, so he applied the beam.
Roul followed, and as the form of Person grew specific, he uttered a round, pear-shaped, then suddenly, shattered cry of terror.
First there was love, and then there was no-love. But in its place did not come the absence of love, the emptiness that the going of light and heat had left. Another moved in to take its place. In its place came hate.
Simply the little pains of walking through the apartment where they had bumped into one another constantly, the lawyer talks, the serving of the papers, the phone calls that lacked any slightest tinge of communication, the recriminations, and worst of all, the steadily deteriorating knowledge that somehow what had gone wrong was not real, but a matter of thoughts, attitudes, dreams, ghosts, vapors. All insubstantial, but so omnipresent, so real, they had broken up his marriage with Georgette.
his life set itself up in a new sequence, apart from her, yet totally motivated by her existence, and the reality of her absence.
If I can figure out what this means, I’ll know, he thought suddenly. In the midst of the multi-colored haze of the dream, he knew abruptly, certainly, that if he could just make some sense from the events unreeling behind his eyes (and he knew it was a dream, right then), there would be a key to his problems, a solution that would work for him. So he concentrated.
(This description. Forget it. The creature was nothing like that. Not a thing like that at all.)
he absorbed as much maudlin sorrow and self-pity as he could, finally tumbling from the place when the strings and the voice oozed forth: How I wish I could forget Those happy yesteryears, That have left A rosary of tears.
he was lovely and god-like, extremely god-like.
The hours melted into a shapeless colloid, and he could not tell whether he was making his way through the dense greenmass, or standing still while the jungle crawled imperceptibly toward him, filling in behind the clots he was hacking away. And darkness, suffocating, in the jungle.
