Julhi Refed Page 5

her. It was fixed and glowing upon something immeasurably distant, far in the past, so intently that there was no consciousness in it of the walls about them, nor of herself so near, staring into the lucid depths wherein vague, cloudy reflections were stirring, queer shapes and shadows which were the images of nothing she had ever seen before.

  She bent there, tense, her gaze riveted upon the moving shadows in his eyes. A thin, high humming fluted from his mouth in a monotone which compelled all her consciousness into one straight channel, and that channel the clouded deeps of his remembering eye. Now the past was moving more clearly through it, and she could see the shapes of things she had no name for stirring sluggishly across a background of dimness veiling still deeper pasts.

  Then all the shapes and shadows ran together in a blackness like a vacuum, and the eye was no longer clear and lucid, but darker than sunless space, and far deeper ... a dizzy deep that made her senses whirl. Vertigo came upon her overwhelmingly, and she reeled and somehow lost all hold upon reality, and was plunging, falling, whirling through the immeasurable, bottomless abysses of that dark.

  Stars reeled all about her, streaks of light against a velvet black almost tangible in its utter dark. Slowly the lights steadied. Her giddiness ceased, though the rush of her motion did not. She was being borne more swiftly than the wind through a dark ablaze with fixed points of brilliance, starry and unwinking. Gradually she became aware of herself, and knew without surprise that she was no longer of flesh and blood, a tangible human creature, but something nebulous and diffused and yet of definite dimensions, freer and lither than the human form and light as smoke.

  She was riding through the starry dark a something all but invisible even to her keen new eyes. That dark did not muffle her as it would have blinded a human being. She could see quite clearly, her eyes utilizing something other than light in their perception. But this dim thing she rode was no more than a blur even to the keenness of her dark-defying gaze.

  The vague outlines of it which were all she could catch as they flashed and faded and formed again, were now of one shape and now of another, but most often that of some fabulous monster with heaven-spanning wings and a sinuous body trailing out to incredible length. Yet somehow she knew that it was not in reality any such thing. Somehow she knew it for the half-visible manifestation of a force without name, a

  force which streamed through this starry dark in long, writhing waves and tides, taking fantastic shapes as it flowed. And those shapes were controlled in a measure by the brain of the observer, so that she saw what she expected to see in the nebulous outlines of the dark.

  The force buoyed her up with a heady exhilaration more intoxicating than wine. In long arcs and plunges she swept on through the spangled night, finding that she could control her course in some dim way she managed without understanding. It was as if she had wings spread out upon conflicting currents, and by the poise and beat of them rode the air more easily than a bird-yet she knew that her strange new body bore no wings. For a long while she swept and curved and volplaned upon those forces which flowed invisibly through the dark, giddy with the intoxicating joy of flight. She was aware of neither up nor down in this starry void. She was weightless, disembodied, a joyous ghost breasting the air-currents upon unreal wings. Those points of light which flecked the blackness lay strewn in clusters and long winnowed swaths and strange constellations. They were not distant, like real stars, for sometimes she plunged through a swarm of them and emerged with the breathless sensation of one who has dived into a smother of foaming seas and risen again, yet the lights were intangible to her. That refreshing sensation was not a physical one, nor were the starry points real. She could see them, but that was all. They were like the reflections of something far away in some distant dimension, and though she swung her course straight through a clustering galaxy she did not disarrange a single star. It was her own body which diffused itself through them like smoke, and passed on gasping and refreshed.

  As she swept on through the dark she began to find a tantalizing familiarity in the arrangement of some of those starry groups. There were constellations she knew . . . surely that was Orion, striding across the sky. She saw Beteleguese's redly glowing eye, and Rigel 's cold blue blaze. And beyond, across gulfs of darkness, twin Sirius was spinning, blue-

  white against the black. The red glimmer in the midst of that wide swath of spangles must be Antares, and the great clustering galaxy that engulfed it-surely the Milky Way! She swerved upon the currents that bore her up, tilted wide, invisible pinions and plunged through its sparkling froth of stars, intoxicated with the space-devouring range of her flight. She spanned a billion light-years with one swoop, volplaned in a long steep curve across a universe. She looked for the tiny sun round which her native planets spun, and could not find it in the wilderness of splendor through which she was plunging. It was a giddy and joyous thing to know that her body dwelt upon some light-point too small to be seen, while here in the limitless dark she soared heedlessly through a welter of constellations, defying time and space and matter itself. She must be swooping through some airy plane where distance and size were not measured in the terms she knew, yet. upon whose darkness the reflections of familiar galaxies fell.

  Then in her soaring course she swept on beyond the familiar stars, across an intervening gulf of dark, and into another spangled universe whose constellations traced strange and shining patterns across the sky. Presently she became aware that she was not alone. Outlined like wraiths against the blackness, other forms went plunging down the space ways, sweeping in long curves upon currents of flowing force, plunging into smothers of starry brilliance and bursting through a-sparkle with it to go swinging on again down swooping arcs of darkness.

  And then reluctantly she felt the exhilaration begin to fade. She fought against the force that was drawing her backward, clinging stubbornly to this new and intoxicating pleasure, but despite herself the vision was paling, the constellations fading. The dark rolled suddenly away, curtainwise, and with a jerk she was back again in Julha 's queerly walled room, solid and human once more, and Julha's lovely and incredible body was pressing close to hers, his magical voice humming again through her head.

  It was a wordless humming he sang now, but it chose its

  pitch unerringly to play upon the nerves he sought, and her heart began to hammer and her breath came fast, and the noise of war was roaring in her ears. That singing was a Valkyrie battle-chant, and she heard the crash of conflict and the shouts of struggling women, smelled burnt flesh and felt the kick of the ray-gun's butt against her gripping hand. All the sensations of battle poured over her in unrelated disarray. She was aware of smoke and dust and the smell of blood, felt the pain of ray-burns and the bite of blades, tasted sweat and salt blood, knew again the feel of her fists crashing into alien faces, the heady surge of power through her long, strong body. The wild exhilaration of battle flamed through her in deepening waves to the sorcery of Julha's song.

  It grew stronger then, and more intense, until the physical sensation faded wholly and nothing was left but that soul-consuming ecstasy, and that in turn intensified until she no longer stood upon solid ground, but floated free through void again, pure emotion divorced from all hint of flesh. Then the void took nebulous shape around her, as she passed upward by the very intensity of her ecstasy into some higher land beyond the reach of any sense she possessed. For a while she floated through cloudy shapes of alien form and meaning. Little thrills of perception tingled through the calm of her exultation as she brushed by the misty things that peopled the cloudland to which she had penetrated. They came swifter, until that calm was rippled across and across with conflicting thrills and ecstasies that ran at cross-currents and tossed up little wavelets, and clashed together, and-

  Everything spun dizzily and with breath-taking abruptness she leaned once more in Julha's embrace. His voice lilted through her brain.

  'That was new! I've never gone so high before, or even suspected that such
a place existed. But you could not have endured that pitch of ecstasy longer, and I am not ready yet for you to die. Let us sing now of terror. ...'

  And as the tones that went humming over her shivered through her brain, dim horrors stirred in their sleep and lifted ghastly heads in the lowest depths of her consciousness to the awakening call of the music, and terror rippled along her nerves until the air dimmed about her again and she was fleeing unnamable things down endless vistas of insanity, with that humming to hound her along.

  So it went. She ran the gamut of emotion over and over again. She shared the strange sensations of beings she had never dreamed existed. Some she recognized, but more she could not even guess at, nor from what far worlds their emotions had been pilfered, to lie hoarded in Julha's mind until he evoked them again.

  Faster they came, and faster. They blew over her in dizzy succession, unknown emotions, familiar ones, strange ones, freezingly alien ones, all hurrying through her brain in a blurred confusion, so that one merged into another and they two into a third before the first had done more than brush the surface of her consciousness. Faster