*
When he came to her, as arranged, there was a moment when Sylviana saw what Kalus had seen: a wild, desperate hunger in his eyes, that could no longer feed on things which the earth gave as food. They wanted not flesh, but blood, not nourishment, but to mock the very act of nourishment. They could not be fed, or appeased, any more than one could quench the rape of napalm fire.
She turned away, and felt her heart throb violently in revulsion and fear. Only the perverse pride and will that had slowly taken hold of her, kept her from running away at the sight of him. This, and the stubborn naiveté of the illusioned, which told her this instinctive fear was a flaw of perception: that true, malignant evil did not exist, and that things could not possibly come to the ends envisioned by nightmare imagination. It was the same voice that told the world the Holocaust could not happen, was not happening, even as six million Jews, Russians, intellectuals, homosexuals and other defenseless minorities, were led to the fire. She listened to that voice, and made it her island of hope, the one that made the twisted dream of murder and healing, kindness through cruelty, destruction and rebuilding, still possible. Like one who had stared too long at the sun, insisting there was no danger, she was completely blind.
She turned back to him, more composed, and wondered only why he made no attempt to aid her: to dim the cutting laser of his eyes.
But he was through with hiding, and playing the part of the weak and worshipful lover. LET HER SEE! rang the twisted chime of his thoughts, distorted and horrible. Let her walk into the jaws of death with eyes wide open. And this choice also was correct: that his eyes and intentions were obvious, only made them the more impossible to believe.
She merely said, 'Shall we go?' And she couldn't understand why at that moment she should think of the black widow that her father had found in her bedroom as a child, killing it as she cried at his cruelty.
*
Kalus sat on a piece of broken stone with his head in his hands, unable yet to look up and go on. Alaska stood before him, puzzled. Her young mind had continued to develop, so that now she was aware of her existence as clearly, if without the same complexity, as any human adolescent. In the preceding weeks she had realized that such a choice might come: a choice between the two people she loved. And for reasons no more complicated than simple feeling, she had chosen Kalus, had remained with him as he lay helpless on the floor, and not followed when Sylviana called to her angrily.
It was his one compensation. He knew that if he left the colony the cub would go with him, regardless of what lay ahead. It was that simple, and that beautiful. And in that moment, alone and forlorn among the ruins of yet another tortured depression, this singular act of giving broke his heart. Because he saw in her pure, animal innocence the thing that he had always wanted from a woman, but had not dared to ask:
Loyalty, which so many have forgotten, and for which there is no other word. And not the pale imitation of it found in some marriages, which demand that each cut off and subvert some part of themselves, to be joined like hobbled twins at the place of amputation. What he wanted was nothing more and nothing less than the bond of true allies: not half a woman, because of him, but a whole woman, for the same reason. Not to enslave but to enrich, not to question in time of crisis, but to love and support, not blindly, but freely and fully. All these things he had offered her; but he knew they meant nothing if she was unwilling to give the same in return. Because there is no such thing as one-sided love.