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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40969 ***
+
+                    The Mating of the Moons
+
+                      _by Kenneth O'Hara_
+
+[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1
+number 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+[Sidenote: _SHE CAME TO MARS IN SEARCH OF SOMETHING, SHE KNEW NOT WHAT,
+TO GIVE HER LIFE MEANING. SHE FOUND IT ... IN A WAY...._]
+
+
+The sun glared, fiercely detached. The thin air suddenly seemed
+friendless, empty, a vast lake of poison and glassy water. All at once,
+the stretching plains of sand began to waver with a terrible
+insubstantiality before Madeleine's eyes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Even the Ruins of Taovahr were false. And for Madeleine, even if they
+were not false, there was no sign of the outer garments of dream with
+which, on a thousand lonely nights back home on the Earth, she had
+clothed those dusty scattered skeletons of crumbled stone.
+
+Don, one of the brightest and most handsomely uniformed of all the
+bright young guide-hosts at Martian Haven, droned on to the finish of
+his machine-tooled lecture about the Ruins of Taovahr. He, of course,
+was the biggest chunk of falseness on Mars.
+
+"And so folks, this is all that's left of a once great civilization. A
+few columns and worn pieces of stone. And we can never know now how they
+lived and loved and died--for no trace whatsoever of an ancient people
+remain. The dim, dark seas of time have swept their age-old secrets into
+the backwash of eternity--"
+
+"Oh God," whispered Madeleine.
+
+"Shhhh!" said her father. And her mother blinked at her with a resigned
+tolerance.
+
+"But he's a living cliche," she said, trying to control the faintness,
+the dizziness, the dullness coming back as the last illusion drained
+away. "Even if the ruins were real, he'd make them seem trite."
+
+"Madeleine!" her mother gasped, but in a subdued way.
+
+"But there ought to be something special about a Martian ruin, Mother."
+
+Don had heard her. His smile was uneasy, though politely tolerant, as
+all good hosts were to rich tourists. "You're hard to please, Miss
+Ericson. Maybe too hard." His lingering glance stopped just short of
+crudity. But the look made it clear that if she wanted the romance all
+women were assumed to expect at Martian Haven, he could provide it, as
+he did everything else--discreetly, efficiently and most memorably.
+
+Mrs. Ericson giggled. She had long since abandoned any hope of Madeleine
+being, even by stretching the norm, a well-adjusted girl. But much faith
+had been placed in a Martian vacation, and hope that it would provide
+Madeleine with some sort of emotional preoccupation, even an affair, if
+need be--something, anything, that would at least make her seem faintly
+capable of a normal relationship with a male. Even this fellow Don. For
+Madeleine was past thirty-five--how far past no one discussed any
+more--and was becoming more tightly withdrawn every day.
+
+Don shouted. "All right, folks! Now we wend our way back to Martian
+Haven, over a trail that's the oldest in the Solar System, a trail that
+was once a mighty highway stretching from the inland city to the great
+ocean that once rolled where now there is only thousands of miles of
+wind-blown sands!"
+
+The long line of exclaiming and sickeningly gullible tourists, either
+too young and wide-eyed to know better, or too old and desperate to
+admit the phoniness, ooohhhed and ahhhhed, and the rickshaws and camels,
+plus a few hardy adventurers on foot, turned with him as Don twisted his
+own beast toward Martian Haven.
+
+Even the Ruins, she thought--they were like imported props lying in the
+sand, like old abandoned bits of a set for a TV production.
+
+"Madeleine," her father said, still trying to be a big brother after
+years of failure. "I really don't understand this at all. Coming all the
+way to Mars, and you act like--well--like we'd just stepped around the
+corner in Chicago to some ridiculous carnival!"
+
+"I am cursed," she whispered. "I'm tortured."
+
+"What?" her mother said, and stared, with that child-like curiosity with
+which she had greeted Madeleine's advent into the world, and which she
+had never lost.
+
+"Tortured by the insight that both enables and compels me to see through
+the sham and pretense."
+
+Her father grunted and blinked twice. He almost always blinked twice
+when she began sounding pedantic like that. He suspected that she did it
+deliberately to show off his ignorance.
+
+"Funny," she said, mostly to herself, "that I allowed myself to be sold
+this--Mars--the biggest piece of ersatz junk of all!"
+
+"Madeleine!" her mother exclaimed.
+
+"The advertisers got here first," Madeleine said, glancing at Don. "The
+hucksters." She stopped talking. Mars offered none of itself, but the
+others didn't understand. Mars was only what the hucksters wanted it to
+be.
+
+She wondered how she could hang on to the end of the season--even though
+it was only three more days. They had committed themselves to a
+rigidly-planned schedule, a clockwork program that had them and the
+other "vacationing" tourists jumping and squeaking like automatons:
+Exotic Martian sports. Martian tennis played on a hundred-yard court
+with the players hopping through the rarified air and lower gravity with
+an almost obscene abandon. Swimming in a strangely buoyant water,
+called, of course, Martian water. Sandsled racing. Air-hopping with the
+de-gravity balloons. Spectator sports, including gladiators who leaped
+into the phony canals and fought to the death against the
+hideous-looking Martian rat-fish. There were many other "activities", in
+none of which Madeleine had been able to interest herself.
+
+This last three days promised something called the "Martian Love Ritual
+under the Double Moons." And a climactic treasure hunt among the
+subterranean Martian labyrinths. They too, Madeleine was sure, were
+artificial.
+
+Mrs. Ericson adjusted her polaroid glasses and waved her rickshaw boy
+into his harness, where his thighs tensed for the long haul. He was an
+incredibly huge man, taller even than those specially-bred movie stars,
+who averaged eight feet tall. Madeleine felt faint and clung to her
+camel. The Martian camels were coughing and wheezing and the sun glared
+horribly in the early afternoon.
+
+Mr. Ericson looked with guarded apprehension at the six-legged camel.
+Don pulled him aboard. "What a helluva beast!" laughed Ericson. Earth
+camels specially bred by the big travel agencies to have a so-called
+"unearthly" appearance. Sad creatures with two extra, dangling limbs and
+a single, half-blind, blood-shot eye, watery and humbly resentful.
+
+Pathetic mutation, Madeleine thought. Like those horrid rat-fish, like
+the canals and the games and the ruins and those silly rituals. All
+ersatz.
+
+The caravan moved along the high ridge, a narrow trail that wound back
+toward Martian Haven along the edge of the eroded cliffs.
+
+"Maybe the only thing that would satisfy Madeleine," her father said,
+"would be a real Martian."
+
+"But that's not in the brochure," Don said.
+
+"What's Mars without a Martian?" giggled Mrs. Ericson.
+
+In her own insular little world, which had been the only one Madeleine
+had ever been able to tolerate at all, she swayed and bumped to the
+camel's movements. "One thing sure, Don," she said softly. "There were
+_real_ Martians once. So why all the phony props? You can't tell me this
+nonsense is better than the facts about the real Martians."
+
+"Ask the boys who built this place. They hired me, they make the rules,"
+Don said. He did not look at her.
+
+"How did you ever end up with a job like this, Don?"
+
+"The outfit that built the Haven hired all the old Martian colonists and
+their descendants, any who wanted to work for them. So I took a job.
+Pay's good. It's seasonal. Anyway, I like Mars."
+
+"Sure," she said. "You must love it--to corrupt it like this."
+
+"Mars was here, it'll still be here after the last tourist goes."
+
+She laughed thinly. Don, with her, was trying to play another role, one
+he hoped she might find interesting. "You're a symbol of the phoniness,
+Don. Trained in the special host schools. Selected for your beautiful
+resemblance to a statue of Adonis. Artificially created to be an
+ever-smiling host of good-will, just like these pathetic camels have
+been bred for an exotic touch. No real intelligence, Don, nor
+originality. And everything you do or say is right out of the text book
+on how to make friends and influence tourists."
+
+Don didn't look at her. His fingers trembled on the camel's reins.
+
+"What is this fascinating-sounding 'Ritual of Love' going to be like?"
+giggled Mrs. Ericson.
+
+"It's an authentic exploitation of actual rituals once held by the
+Martians," Don said. "It has a pagan religious significance. The moons
+were male and female, and when they--ah--united their light, the
+Martians held feasts, fertility rituals--highly symbolic rites."
+
+"Only symbolic?" said Mrs. Ericson, pretending blasé disappointment.
+
+"Well," grinned Don, "the Martians were only human. Just as--ah--well--I
+must say that a number of tourists have a tendency to chuck their
+inhibitions during the rituals. But if not on Mars, then where?"
+
+"I still say," yelled Mr. Ericson from his camel, "that you should
+spring a live Martian on us."
+
+"We get plenty of calls for them," Don said. "But so far we haven't been
+able to scare up any."
+
+"What did they look like?" asked Mrs. Ericson.
+
+"Nobody knows. The only Martians around now are--ghosts," Don said, with
+a strange softness. "A few old prospectors, fakirs, beggars live in
+these hills--hermits. They claim they see Martians, know they're here.
+They believe in ghosts. The Martian sun drives them crazy."
+
+"Like that old man we saw coming out here," said Mr. Ericson.
+
+Don nodded. "They're dangerous. You must stay away from them, you
+understand. Or you'll get the contamination."
+
+For the first time, Madeleine felt that Don was touching something real.
+She straightened. "Contamination?"
+
+"Those crazy old guys are like lepers. They stay apart from everybody
+else. But if you go to them, you pay for it. And if you're contaminated,
+it'll cost. If you really get it, you can't be cured at all. You die."
+
+No one said anything. Odd, Madeleine thought, his coming out with scare
+talk. Didn't seem to be good propaganda. Then she got it, and laughed a
+little. "Sensationalism," she said. "Pure bunk."
+
+"What is this contamination?" Mr. Ericson said.
+
+"An alien virus. Martian. Nobody's been able to isolate it. If a case
+isn't too bad we cure it in the antiseptic wards, but otherwise--well,
+you just wither away and die in a few hours. You're all shriveled up and
+look like a mummy."
+
+"That's horrible!" whispered Mrs. Ericson.
+
+"They're diseased fakirs who say they can read the sands, predict your
+future, bring you paradise, for five credits. But stay away from them!"
+
+And just at that moment, as though on cue, Madeleine thought, the old
+man stepped out about fifty feet in front of Don's camel, and blocked
+the narrow trail.
+
+"Caravan halt!" Don yelled and raised his hand.
+
+Not knowing why, laughing and exclaiming, the long line of the caravan
+halted. And Madeleine stared ahead into the old man's face. The old man
+was dirty, bent and very ancient and hairless, with only a soiled robe
+of crude but heavy cloth hanging on his frame. There was nothing that
+seemed very much alive about him except his eyes.
+
+Even he was a stereotype, she thought. The classic old hermit character.
+The yogi, the magi, the wise old man, the Hindu Rope Trick, look into my
+crystal ball, I am the teller of the sands--
+
+But her heart was pounding extraordinarily loud. His eyes--
+
+Don jumped from his camel. His hands were shaking as he raised his
+quirt. "Out of the way!" he shouted, then turned slightly. "Don't come
+any nearer, folks! It'll be all right. I'll have him out of the way in a
+minute."
+
+"We'll all be contaminated," whispered Mrs. Ericson.
+
+"Just stay clear. You have to contact them directly to be contaminated,"
+Don said.
+
+He stopped five feet from the old man and raised his quirt. The old man
+looked only at Madeleine, then shook his head slowly up and down as
+though reaffirming some special secret. As though he shared some secret
+with her.
+
+"Five credits," the old man said, in a loud whisper. "And I'll read the
+sands for you. The Martian sands know all your secrets and the
+timelessness of your dreams. Let them speak to you, through me, for five
+credits."
+
+Don swung the quirt savagely. It was heavy, and it thudded and smacked
+across the old man's face and chest. He fell in the middle of the trail.
+
+The sun wheeled crazily. Madeleine could hear her mother screaming and
+her father yelling as she moved, as though in a trance, toward the old
+man. Her feet slipped, stumbled in the shale. The old man crawled a
+little, got up, fell again.
+
+She was screaming at Don to stop.
+
+The old man had fallen to one side and the trail was clear now.
+
+"Let him alone! Let him alone!" Madeleine screamed. "He's out of the
+way!"
+
+"Madeleine!" Mr. Ericson shouted. "Come back! Get away from that beggar,
+right now, or we return to Earth in the morning!"
+
+For the first time in her life, that she could remember, her father's
+threats meant nothing. But the old fear was there as she moved toward
+the Martian hermit, on a painful tightwire of impulse between threat and
+desire. She had learned that for any real feeling--fear, joy, pain or
+even the dimmest-remembered pleasure, you paid a dear price. But she
+moved on.
+
+The old man's face was bleeding. She saw the long welts of red on the
+flesh, and the blood-flecks and tortured little broken channels of blood
+crossing it. Sound roared around her as she eluded Don's hands and knelt
+down, took the old man's head in her arms. She tilted her canteen to his
+lips.
+
+There was a kind of strange triumph in the old man's eyes as he
+peered past her for only a moment and looked at Don. And from
+somewhere--Madeleine couldn't even tell whether it was real--came a
+thought.
+
+"_Madeleine--come back. Come back when you can. And you will find joy._"
+
+Later she knew how she kicked and screamed at them as they dragged her
+away. How Mrs. Ericson was embarrassed by the display, and how her
+father refused to touch her because of the fear of contamination. And
+her mother weeping, later, because of the disgrace and because of what
+the other guests would think.
+
+In the shiny antiseptic ward at Martian Haven, the virus was burned out
+by a certain number of roentgens of carefully proportioned X-rays, gamma
+rays and neutron bombardment. She kept thinking of the old man's eyes,
+of the stray thought that promised joy.
+
+She kept seeing the old man lying off the trail among the rocks, how he
+had raised himself on his elbow, and how he waggled the blood-clot of
+his head in the glaring sun as they dragged Madeleine away.
+
+Occasionally she thought of the whole project--in Mars, Mecca of Earth
+tourists, Martian Haven, Dream City of the Solar System--that was so
+colorful and impressive and exotic to others, and she wondered if it was
+all really as ridiculous as it seemed to her.
+
+She lay there in the dark of the room as evening reached over the dead
+sea bottom toward the edifice that was Martian Haven. Out there in the
+big amphitheatre, resurrected supposedly from old Martian ruins, Martian
+Haven, with all of its rich, efficient facilities and staff, was
+preparing the stage, props and guests for the Love Ritual of the Double
+Moons.
+
+The core and centerpiece of Martian Haven was a great cubistic hotel,
+with the two Martian canals on two sides, renovated, of course, and a
+five-mile-long artificial lake on a third side. It was somehow designed,
+in the middle of all that vast emptiness of dead sea, sand and eroded
+rock, to have a not-ungraceful look of insubstantiality, as though at
+any moment it might open great wings of some sort and take off into the
+Martian nowhere by which it was so overwhelmingly surrounded. The side
+that faced the lake curved in a half-moon, so that it commanded a wide
+prospect to the eroded hills that had once been mountains to the west
+and to the east thousands of unbroken miles of desert, that had once,
+they said, been an ocean.
+
+When Madeleine opened her eyes, it was night. On many a starry night she
+had lain inside walls not so different from these, and felt much the
+same, she thought, surrounded by a desert of her own. Away off there in
+the blackness, Earth shone palely--and she might as well never have left
+it at all.
+
+And then again she saw the old hermit's eyes out there in the dark, his
+burning eyes where there should be only sterile emptiness in the night.
+And his voice calling where there would otherwise have been only the
+dusty echoes of an arid past.
+
+Outside now the tourists were gathering in the double moonlight. The
+weird extrapolation of Earth music that was supposed to be the strains
+of Martian rhythms drifted to her, and lights flickered from burning
+tapers where dancers undulated and writhed fitfully. A libidinous
+expectancy was as heavy as a thick scent in the night.
+
+Then, only for a moment, she despised herself for not being with the
+others, for never having been able to participate in the futile
+make-believe. She felt like a child who had never grown beyond the stage
+of the most old-fashioned fairy tales. Someone who had gone beyond the
+looking-glass and had never been able to get back, but who had never
+quite been able to forget the world from which she had come.
+
+She could hear her parents and Don talking in the next room.
+
+"It's a shame for her to miss the ritual of the double moons," Don said.
+
+"She's always been that way," Mr. Ericson said. "Staying by herself."
+
+"We've tried everything," said Mrs. Ericson.
+
+"She's spent half her life on an analyst's couch," said Mr. Ericson.
+
+"She wouldn't even," Mrs. Ericson said, "fall in love with her
+_analyst_!"
+
+"She was only in love once," said Mr. Ericson, "and that had to be with
+an idiot who was always writing sonnets."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"A poet," said Don. "There used to be a lot of poets."
+
+"But not in my life," said Mr. Ericson.
+
+"Maybe," Don said, "your daughter expected a little bit too much from
+Mars."
+
+"Don," Mrs. Ericson pleaded, "maybe _you_ can do something."
+
+"I'll be glad to try," Don said.
+
+So Madeleine lay there and waited for Don, the perfect host, who could
+supply everyone at Martian Haven with whatever was necessary to insure a
+pleasant day.
+
+Later, though she did not turn or make any sign of noticing, she knew he
+had entered the room and was standing over her. She could see the
+periphery of his giant shadow projected by moonlight over the colored
+glass.
+
+"Madeleine--we've got a date for the ritual tonight."
+
+"That's odd, Don. I don't remember it."
+
+"But you didn't say you _wouldn't_ attend it with me, when I suggested
+it this morning."
+
+"Well, Don, this is an official rejection of your proposal."
+
+She saw his shadow bend, his body drop down beside the couch. She felt
+his hands on her arm. The peculiar fright went through her.
+
+"You won't listen, Madeleine, but whatever you're looking for
+here--please forget it! The rituals will help you forget. Try it,
+Madeleine! Please--"
+
+Why did he, all at once, sound so desperate?
+
+"With you?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"You're just an artificial dream, Don, that comes true seasonally for
+people so sick that they can convince themselves you're real--for a
+price."
+
+"Well, Madeleine--are you so different?"
+
+"I guess I am."
+
+"You just want the impossible. The others--they want little dreams we
+can give them easily."
+
+There was a strain, a tension in him, in his hands, in his voice.
+Suddenly, his hands held her, and his face was close above her lips.
+"You're still young and beautiful to me," he whispered.
+
+She turned her face away, and gazed at the tattered and splendid veils
+of moonlight as Deimos and Phobos neared one another, with undying
+eagerness to consummate the timeless ritual.
+
+Dimly, she could hear the communal voices rising to desire.
+
+
+    "_Twin Moons, Love Moons, whirling bright,
+    Bring me Martian love tonight!_"
+
+
+If you could expect too much from Mars, then where could one find the
+answer to the intangible wish? Sirius. Far Centauris. And at the end of
+it, the hucksters, the phony props, would be there first.
+
+Some people should stay on Earth, she thought, those who are so hard to
+please. There the veils of space and time might keep the last illusions
+living. Once you find that even the farthest star is illusory, there's
+no place left to go.
+
+His lips were near her lips. His voice was low. "You are different!" His
+throat trembled. "You really are. But--I wonder if you're different
+enough."
+
+She was aware of the awful gnawing emptiness within her that was only
+intense desire too frightened to be free. And then his lips were
+crushing to hers and she allowed it, for she knew what was to be her
+only way out, and the promise of union was a haze in the room like the
+veils of light from the moons of Mars that joined against the starlight
+of heaven.
+
+There was more than the ardent in his intensity. A kind of desperation,
+his desire to please going beyond the line of duty. The old consuming
+terror returned.
+
+She pushed him away. His hands reached, his body crushed. Panic. She
+felt unable to breathe, and she started to scream. His hand was over her
+mouth.
+
+"Don't look any deeper, don't probe any farther!" he said, like a
+suddenly terrible threat. "I beg you, don't do it! You're
+different--beautifully different, Madeleine. But not different enough!
+None of them ever are!"
+
+She squirmed away, onto the floor between the glass and the couch, and
+scurried toward the door. She could hear the gasping, the sobbing
+desperation in his voice, and his shadow lengthened across the walls.
+
+Then, as she hesitated in the doorway, he was gone.
+
+She put on a nylon hiking suit and left the room. The silence of the
+hall was not real, and the emptiness was not really emptiness. It was
+like waking and being exasperatingly aware of only the fleeting end of a
+dream. And as she slipped out a side entrance, even the wailing of
+exotic musical instruments seemed in a sense not real. Even the silence,
+the feeling of being followed, watched, even that seemed artificial--it
+was impossible to substantiate the suspicion.
+
+Her palms were wet as she slipped along the wall toward the garage where
+the sandsleds were kept. From the amphitheatre she could hear the
+rituals, the intercessions, comminations, hymns, libations,
+incense-burning, and who knew what else. She saw the reflection of
+chrome and artificial glitter disguised as Martian authenticity, the
+lights hanging like a grove of pastel moons, and the shrill empty
+laughter of girls uncoiling as bright as tinsel through the sluggish
+Martian evening. And in spite of the sound and elaborate pretension, it
+all had the undying feel of lugubrious solitude.
+
+It had, for a doomed generation driven into inescapable conformity, the
+necessary quality of a dream in which a stubborn unconsciousness seeks
+ever for truth. And later, back on Earth, in the rut and groove, it
+would remain only a dream no one ever talked about to anyone else. After
+all, it would simply be something that happened on another world.
+
+She gave one brief, bitter laugh. And even on another world the last
+desperate dream was false.
+
+There might be something to be said for release through a pagan orgy
+under the double moons; she had no moral scruples about it. But the
+paganism would have to be real, that was the thing. Besides, it was too
+late. For a moment she pressed her flattened hands against her face and
+felt tears squeezing through the tightly-locked fingers. She felt as
+though she might explode somewhere inside and realized how the invisible
+edges of living had cut her soul to pieces.
+
+It wasn't even self-pity any more. It had grown above self-pity to a
+realism beyond tragedy.
+
+She felt icy and empty and alone as she lit a cigarette. Through the
+taper smoke, the glowing amphitheatre seemed like a golden porpoise
+lapped in dawn, and coupled with the expanse of the Haven it nestled in
+the night to resemble a sleeping question mark, an entity gay and sad
+and full of what was called life.
+
+There was no turning back now. There was no turning back, even to Earth,
+for that would be the most humiliating defeat of all.
+
+Then she was inside the first sandsled. The sled moved noiselessly out
+of the garage and whispered away over the sands.
+
+After only a few minutes the radio frightened her with an abrupt voice
+like that of a disembodied spirit.
+
+"Madeleine!"
+
+She looked back through the trailing skeins of moonlight. A dark spot
+was overtaking her. She couldn't go any faster. Evidently Don had one of
+those racing sleds that hardly seemed to touch the sand at all.
+
+"Madeleine! Please--for God's sake, don't see that old hermit!"
+
+"For the sake of which God, Don? I understand the Martians had more than
+one."
+
+"Madeleine! I'm begging you to come back!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You know why."
+
+"The contamination!" She laughed. "Your melodramatic devices don't
+frighten me."
+
+"It's true. You'll die--! Come back!"
+
+"To what?"
+
+"We'll talk about it! Just come back!"
+
+"What's so dangerous, Don, about my not accepting things here as they're
+supposed to be?"
+
+His voice tightened. "Just stop, stop and come back!"
+
+She didn't stop, didn't bother to answer. She circled the sandsled among
+the hills, skirting the rocky clefts with a reckless abandon she had
+never felt before, and her face was flushed as she leaned her head back
+and laughed.
+
+"Madeleine!"
+
+It was the last time he called to her. After that, the silence conveyed
+an intensity of purpose far stronger than verbal entreaties.
+
+She swerved the sandsled dangerously among the erosions, and felt the
+grinding strain at the base of her skull as the sled bounded from one
+spire and careened toward another, which she barely avoided smashing
+into head-on.
+
+She recognized the area. She leaped out of the car and ran, hearing the
+pursuing sandsled stop somewhere below her as she climbed.
+
+For an instant dizziness threatened, and the surroundings and the
+motions of Don and herself and the love moons in the sky seemed wildly,
+almost dangerously abstracted, as if viewed through drug-glazed eyes. A
+panicky wash of blood came to her face and she struggled for breath,
+wanting to cry out. It passed. Her mind groped for reason and the terror
+receded.
+
+She went on up to the ridge and found the old man waiting. From that
+high ridge where the night wind cut coldly toward the Martian south, the
+lights of the rituals in the amphitheatre of Martian Haven flickered in
+a misty halo far away, like phosphorescent globes of spooky glowing, and
+frenetic dancings and shiftings of crazed flames.
+
+The old man had a vague, insubstantial look, only his eyes seemed real,
+almost too real, in their intensity as he looked at her. He was propped
+against a block of eroded rock and the wind rustled the fringes of his
+ragged robe.
+
+She sat beside him, their shoulders touched. And then, as though slowly
+dissolving through some chemical reaction, the old man began to fade.
+Vaguely Don was there, too, in a nebulous transparency like the old man.
+And Madeleine lay there, her face pressed into the sand. On Mars one
+should expect, without shock, a different kind of reality.
+
+Their voices weren't really voices. Just thoughts, thoughts in the head,
+feelings, but nothing solid. The thoughts of Don and the old man seemed
+to be in some kind of time-worn conflict.
+
+"You encouraged her," Don was thinking.
+
+"Those who can see a little should be urged to try to see more. Maybe,
+sometime, we'll find one who is different enough to come through to us."
+
+"No! It never works that way! They just--die."
+
+"Maybe they won't--always," the old man thought.
+
+Madeleine felt strangely disoriented, as though dreaming with delirious
+fever. All time and space seemed for a moment to be enclosed within that
+rocky space, itself unmoored and unhelmed upon a dark and compassless
+ocean.
+
+Martians, Martians all around, but not a one to see. Like disembodied
+spirits, they had long ago evolved beyond confinement to fleshly bodies.
+But Earth people suspected there was something, so the younger ones,
+like Don, allowed suspicion to take any stereotyped, acceptable form.
+But the oldsters believed in being honest. Let those who can see--see.
+
+"Madeleine!" Don was thinking, desperately, as desperate as only pure
+feeling can be. "Go back--back to the Haven. You can still go back!"
+
+"But she cannot," the old man said. "For those who come this far,
+there's never anything to go back to."
+
+"No--I cannot," Madeleine thought. "I don't want to go back."
+
+"All right," Don thought after a while. "All right, Madeleine."
+
+Then she was on her feet and moving over sand and stone that seemed
+alive toward the Ruins of Taovahr--but they were no longer ruins. She
+heard the murmur of sea-tides and warmer winds sighing over a younger
+land.
+
+The sterile sand blossomed. Aridity drifted away. "_Don! Is that you,
+Don?_"
+
+Don seemed to be somewhere, felt rather than heard, sensed, not seen.
+And instead of ruins, the high white walls and rising towers surrounded
+by gardens, fountains, and through the gardens a stream of clear water,
+soft with the pads of giant water lilies, trailing like glass under the
+moonlight and sympathetic shadows of leaves.
+
+"Don! You knew what real living was in your youth. It was way, way back
+in time. Didn't you? And only if you're really living do you know where
+you're going, and you knew, didn't you? You gave up the machines, and
+went on to freedom. You escaped the confining flesh that can be caught
+up in war, and in hopeless peonage to the radios and teevee and radar
+and thundering jets that drown out the song of real life, and a horde of
+cunningly made, treacherous machines--"
+
+"Madeleine. Join us--the way we are now. You can do it--"
+
+"I--I can't see you, Don."
+
+"You don't have to. You just think about it and join us, all of us--"
+
+"Just--just a spirit of some kind, Don--is that it?"
+
+"Yes, yes--something like that! You can't explain it! Just do it!"
+
+It was too late, she knew that now. "We're old, too old, where I come
+from, Don. When I was very young, I might have done it." Only the
+wonder-filled child can go through the looking glass and--stay.
+
+And he knew she was right, that she was too old. But the old man had
+promised her a moment of joy. She suddenly saw him--Don--the bright,
+strong man waiting across the stream. "It's what you brought to me," he
+said softly. "When we were young we looked this way--and we were real."
+
+She moved toward the water and her arms lifted to him. At first she
+couldn't recognize the woman who bathed there. From the water's surface
+a slight vapor drifted, and she saw the wet gleam of naked arms as they
+lowered and raised and the water shone on the pale loveliness of
+unashamed nakedness. And then she knew that the woman there, her hair
+floating over the water, was Madeleine. She whispered her own name.
+
+He took her in his arms, and she could hear her breath joining his as
+the mist drifted up among the buttressed writhings of the trees. She was
+laughing, her breasts pressed to the damp richness of the loam, and in
+the water she could see her face, white, with sharp shadows under the
+eyes and a high look of joy.
+
+"I love you, Madeleine."
+
+His face was above her and his lips crushed to hers, and she could hear
+the stream flowing all around her like blood in her ears.
+
+"I love you, Madeleine."
+
+A whisper went through the gray starlight that Mars was turning toward
+morning. And the waters of the mind drained away, leaving high and clear
+the common desire that stands like a drowned tower.
+
+"I love you, Madeleine."
+
+She could hear it all fading away--her own joy, the fires--as if
+everything were melting, a wax candle dying, a wine glass draining, a
+soft light dimming....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had found her by following the pathway left by bits of abandoned
+clothing. There was nothing but the rescue party and thousands of miles
+of waste around Madeleine where she lay in the ancient, dried-up creek
+bed. And she was shriveled and dried out and resembled, as Don had
+predicted, a mummy. But there was a kind of softness of repose on her
+face that hadn't been there before. Don stood back and looked down at
+her and thought about the waste.
+
+Mr. Ericson ran forward in his purple shirt and fell to his knees
+whispering, "Madeleine, we've found you! Madeleine--Madeleine--can't you
+hear your Daddy?"
+
+"We give you anything you want," Don whispered, but no one heard him.
+
+And while Mr. Ericson wept, Mrs. Ericson slumped into Don's arms as
+though it was the end of the world.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Mating of the Moons, by Kenneth O'Hara
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40969 ***