Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

Her voice whiplashing with irritation and exasperation. “We were getting along so well! Why did you have to touch me?”

“You said it yourself. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. The two of us together — I could feel the attraction growing — it was so natural for me to reach out toward you—”

“And it was so natural for you to try to rape me when you felt me resisting.”

“I stopped in time, didn’t I?”

A bitter laugh. “So to speak. If you call that stopping. If you call that in time.”

“Resistance isn’t an easy thing for me to understand, Artha. I thought you were playing a game with me. I didn’t realize at first that you were refusing me.” Looking up at her now. Her eyes holding mingled contempt and sorrow. “It was all a misunderstanding, Artha. Can’t we turn time back half an hour? Can’t we try to put things together again?”

“I will remember your hands on my body. I will remember your making me naked.”

“Don’t carry a grudge. Try to look at it from my point of view. The cultural gulf between us. A different set of assumptions in operation. I—”

She shakes her head slowly. No hope of forgiveness.

“Artha—”

She goes out. He sits alone in the dusk. An hour later, his dinner comes for him. Night descends; he eats with no interest in his food, nursing his bitterness. Engulfed by shame. Although he insists he was not entirely at fault. A clash of irreconcilable cultures. It was so natural for him. It was so natural. And the sadness. Thinking of how close they had come to be before it happened. How close.

Several hours after sundown they begin building a new bonfire in the plaza. He watches gloomily. She has gone to the village elders, then, to tell them of his attack on her. An outrage; they console her and promise vengeance. Now they will surely sacrifice him to their god. His last night of life. All the turmoil of his existence converging on this day. No one to grant a final wish. He’ll die miserably, his body unclean. Far from home. So young. Jangling with unfulfilled desires. Never to see the sea.

And what’s this, now? A farming machine being trundled up close to the fire, a giant upright thing, five meters high, with eight long, jointed arms, six many-kneed legs, a vast mouth. Some kind of harvester, maybe. Its polished brown metallic skin reflecting the fire’s leaping red fingers. Like a mighty idol. Moloch. Baal. He sees his body swept aloft in the great clutching fingers. His head nearing the metal mouth. The villagers capering about him in rhythmic frenzy. Bruised swollen Milcha chanting ecstatically as he goes to his doom. Icy Artha rejoicing in her triumph. Her purity restored by his sacrifice. The priests droning. Please, no. No. Perhaps he’s all wrong. Last night, the sterility rite, he thought they were punishing the pregnant one. And she was really the most honored one. But how vicious that machine looks! How deadly!

The plaza is full of villagers now. A major event.

Listen, Artha, it was merely a misunderstanding. I thought you desired me, I was acting within the context of my society’s mores, can’t you see that? Sex isn’t a big complicated operatic thing with us. It’s like exchanging smiles. Like touching hands. When two people are together and there’s an attraction, they do it, because why not? I only wanted to give you pleasure, really. We were getting along so well together. Really.

The sound of drums. The awful skirling screeches of out-of-tune wind instruments. Orgiastic dancing is starting. God bless, I want to live! Here are the priests and priestesses in their nightmare masks. No doubt of it, the full routine. And I’m the central spectacle tonight.

An hour passes, and more, and the scene in the plaza grows more frenzied, but no one comes to fetch him. Has he misunderstood again? Does tonight’s ritual actually concern him as little as did the one last night?

A sound at his door. He hears the lock turning. The door opens. The priests must be coming for him. So now the end is near, eh? He braces himself, hoping for a painless finish. To die for metaphorical reasons, to become a mystic link binding commune to urbmon — such a fate seems improbable and unreal to him. But it is about to befall him all the same.

Artha enters the cell.

She closes the door quickly and presses her back against it. The only illumination is the streaming firelight glaring through his window; it shows her to him with her face tense and stern, her body rigid. This time she wears her weapon. Taking no chances.

“Artha! I—”

“Quiet. If you want to live, keep your voice down.”

“What’s happening out there?”

“They prepare the harvest god.”

“For me?”

“For you.”

He nods. “You told them I tried to rape you, I suppose. And now my punishment. All right. All right. It isn’t fair, but who expects fairness?”

“I told them nothing,” she says. “It was their decision, taken at sundown. I did not cause this.”

She sounds sincere. He wonders.

She goes on, “They will take you before the god at midnight. Just now they are praying that he will receive you gracefully. It is a lengthy prayer.” She walks cautiously past him, as though expecting him to pounce on her again, and looks out the window. Nods to herself. Turns. “Very well. No one will notice. Come with me, and make no sound whatever. If I’m caught with you, I’ll have to kill you and say you were trying to escape. Otherwise it’ll be my life too. Come. Come.”

“Where?”

“Come!” A fierce impatient whispered gust.

She leads him from the cell. In wonder he follows her through a labyrinth of passages, through dank subterranean chambers, through tunnels barely wider than himself, and they emerge finally at the back of the building. He shivers: a chill in the night air. Music and chanting floating toward him from the plaza. Artha gestures, runs out between two houses, looks in all directions, gestures again. He runs after her. By quick nervous stages they reach the outer edge of the commune. He glances back; from here he can see the fire, the idol, the tiny dancing figures, like images on a screen. Ahead of him are the fields. Above him the crescent sliver of the moon, the shining sprawl of the stars. A sudden sound. Artha clutches at him and tugs him down, under a clump of shrubs. Her body against his; the tips of her breasts like points of fire. He does not dare to move or speak. Someone goes by: a sentry, maybe. Broad back, thick neck. Out of sight. Artha, trembling, holds his wrists, keeping him down. Then at last getting up. Nodding. Silently saying the way is clear. She slips into the fields, between the burgeoning rows of tall, leafy plants. For perhaps ten minutes they trot away from the village, until his untrained body is gasping for breath. When she halts, the bonfire is only a stain on the distant horizon and the singing is drowned out by the chirping of insects. “From here you go by yourself,” she tells him. “I have to return. If anyone misses me for long, they might suspect.”

“Why did you do this?”

“Because I was unjust to you,” she says, and for the first time since coming to him this evening she manages to smile. A ghost-smile, a quick flicker, the merest specter of the warmth of the afternoon. “You were drawn to me. There was no way for you to know our attitudes about such things. I was cruel, I was hateful — and you were only trying to show love. I’m sorry, Statler. So this is my atonement. Go.”

“If I could tell you how grateful—”

His hand lightly touches her arm. He feels her quiver — in desire, in disgust, what? — and on a sudden insane impulse he pulls her into an embrace. She is taut at first, then melting. Lips to lips. His fingers on her bare muscular back. Do I dare touch her breasts? Her belly pressed to his. He has a quick wild vision of this afternoon’s breach healed: Artha sinking gladly to the sweet earth here, drawing him down on her and into her, the union of their bodies creating that metaphorical link between urbmon and commune that the elders would have forged with his blood. But no. It is an unrealistic vision, however satisfying artistically. There will be no coupling in the moonlit field. Artha lives by her code. Obviously these thoughts have passed through her mind in these few seconds, and she has considered and rejected the possibilities of a passionate farewell, for now she slides free of him, severing the contact moments before he can capitalize on her partial surrender. Her eyes bright and loving in the darkness. Her smile awkward and divided. “Go, now,” she whispers. Turning. Running back a dozen paces toward the commune. Turning again, gesticulating with the flats of her hands, trying to push him into motion. “Go. Go. What are you standing there for?”