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WYCH
HAZEL
on
the planet Terror
Her
chiffon scarf quiffed stiffly under the jib in the salt spray as the sea
flashed by like polished pewter.
There
was an inclination in the upper sky towards the anthems of Debussy’s Sirènes,
the distant contralto aahs rising and falling and vanishing on their
way in sudden lathers of strings and horn.
The
islands were slowly materialising like bruises above the morning
ectoplasm of the horizon.
She
had met the need these lands, these seas, had had of her.
The
sails drew in and the yacht waited as she toyed with a bracelet
to summon her intricate craft from the sea’s bed.
As
it rose, a scallop of irised flutes and facets, she took Aristophanes’
hand.
Goodbye.
And
in seconds the petrol hues of her shell had been heeled from the scrum
of the Milky Way and into the heart of the galaxy of Andromeda.
The
controls had no need of touch. The
valve she travelled in was so tuned to the quivering mirror between
space and its twin, anti-space, that it homed through the vortex whose
stressed code most meant: ‘Emergency! Wych Hazel!’
She
emerged as if from a giant lens embedded in the leprous lianas
and drupes of the planet Terror, the pores of her beauty intact against
its plagues.
Naked
she stepped, tall and supple, her breasts like auriferous pears.
Her hair was a red Devonian loam muted to the oxide towers of
Utah’s eroded canyons. It fell round her tilting haunches as if the
notched spine, the spool of life, were the only truly erotic thing that
must be concealed. While in
front her hair fell helically round the infinitely studiable, gritty
areolae and dugs whose seminal milk was fuel more for the hard lips of
the plagued and scrofulous than for hardy nurslings.
She
was in fact overdue on Terror.
Two
predominant life-forms, Gammas and Thetas, had for untold loops of their
two suns grown to knowledge together.
The Gammas were like manx iguanas, but more erect, more
handsome. The Thetas were
large ants, broad of thorax, metallic-fingered, the nether abdomen a
small residual node.
Stepping
through the tangled quiet, Wych Hazel saw how every leaf had erupted in
scabby fungi, as if the sap had been driven to madness.
Her
instinct led her to the edge of Epidauros, the Gamma metropolis, and
there she met a young cynic from the lizard élite, his tongue a laconic
lariat.
The
language they used was sympathy, hers.
‘We
are done for, Hazel,’ he said. ‘Mind has got out of step here.
Nerve gas, anthrax, radiation: we’ve broadcast the seven
diseases. Leave us.
We have no hope. A
few of the old stock, ours and theirs, were inoculated, and they are
starving on reefs at the opposite ends of Terror.’
She
was not deterred though. Desire,
the itch to assist, was searching the circuits of her lovely body.
She put one arm round the smooth hide of his shoulders.
They
looked down at the tortured city. In
some streets the citizenry were sprawling through eccentric somersaults
in an effort to get out of their skins, stoned by the wickeder LSDs and
atropine extracts, running their heads at the walls when they could find
them. The darling young
were beside themselves in little orgasms as the nerve agents took all
the time on Terror to work their osmosis.
The nubile daughters lay groaning on their backs as their milky
skins gave vent to the soft plosives of Rocky Mountain Fever.
In
the sky
in
the blue anthems of the sky
in
the blue distance beyond one stiff banner of cloud
the
two suns flung their force
content
enough if some virulence down below
some
newly successful bacteria
would
siphon the solar energy
and
run it down.
Any
form of death,
any
form would do.
‘Not,’
said Wych Hazel, ‘if I know.’
‘Look
at me, Gamma!’ she breathed. ‘Let
me lie at your feet in this foul heather.
I will provide the serum—if you satisfy me.’
His
eyes browsed on her as she squirmed to stillness among the volcanic
flowers. Her image sped
like a cry through his eye, through the retinal ganglia and rods,
twisting like a ravished Persephone down the optic nerve, waving at her
ghostly twin that flitted past in the crossing hall of his chiasma,
writhing her thighs in evident approbation as she skimmed out of the
lateral geniculate and round the base centrifuge of the cortex into the
flashing pool of the area striata, where she met her spirit again and
became his, wholly.
‘Hazel,’
he said, ‘Hazel, Hazel,’ on her saffron breasts, his whip-tongue
scything the air around them.
His
delicate, almost womanly search parted the thickets of the landscape he
was born to.
And,
as he licked and touched, the parched gutters under the briars began to
water.
His
staff touched the poisoned rock and it ran like mouth-juices crying for
meat.
The
brooks came in little frolics and in her eyes the two helpless suns
skipped discs of light.
And
she was smiling and encouraging, as a mother is, milking her child.
And
then she took the measure. He
had admired, but the rhythm now was hers.
A
serene curve above him against the cirrus and thistles, she saddled and
started her tight canter.
She
shivered, as if in her heats irregular staccatos of ice were offset upon
her.
She
jack-knifed, her baptising as spicy as winter feed or fertiliser.
Till
the leaves on Terror repented, mended, and the husks of the old children
withered away.
Overcome,
he called, but she had dispatched on another errand.
She
had to have one more taste of Terror.
Rising
in the other hemisphere, astride, she stood among the inquisitive dabs
of the Thetas, those of the formic inheritors left unmarred.
Inside
their armour, annealed by the presence of her geist, the ants’ fret
and mayhem altered.
They
saw
that
although life checked life,
although
among solpugids, snakes, wolf spiders,
life
checked life by teething on it,
that
was not her way.
‘I,’
she said, ‘submit.’
Shyly
the mandibles measured.
She
was like an e or pi, a number only precise in its
perpetually shelved attainment.
And
she was known by the Thetas also.
Till
a new swarm rose and, out of the whirling, new queens taxied to their
beds like merciful helicopters.
Hazel’s
naked foot switched the dust, erasing her trail, then she sought her
instinctual shell.
And…
But
she was evading praise.
In
an instant she was drained out of those bearings in space and time
to
wait
in
a shuddering port
of
the dark glass
for
another mission.
Alan Marshfield
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