By the time supper was over she was living in a new world, feeding on electricity. Her star had become electric to the core. Sunlight was still reflected from the sphere, but the sphere itself was lightning.
After she washed the dishes she went out and looked at the universe. The neutral lightning called the St Mary’s was flowing peacefully. The neutral lightning called her island seemed immobile, but was vibrating in every atom. The pines were not coruscating, but garbed their thunderbolts in shadowy green.
And so the spring of 1921 passed into summer, opening her eyes. A billion years ago this gem beneath her feet had been an ammunition dump constantly exploding. For some reason God had slowly closed His hand around it and almost hushed it.
Chapter 82. Lead
Almost, but not quite. Lightning still escaped from earth in the form called life. Wherever there was water, it stole forth as liquid voltaic cells. It was balanced and bottled in animals, but always enough escaped to drive them.
It drove fish through the water like darts. It drove the wings of flies so fast that no eye could follow them. It flashed out in the tongues of snakes. In her own body it carried messages from her fingers to her brain at the rate of several miles a second.
Such were the thoughts that haunted her all that spring, and a dry hot spring it was. There seemed to be no more rain along the St. Mary’s than there had been the summer before along the Volga. Even in the clearing, where the grass had been lusty for a year, the ground began to look yellow. The gift of half a dozen sheep from Chase Mahan arrived, but they found little food.
The mosquitoes, which usually hold their revel for about a month along the river, failed to come. On the other hand, the mayflies, which usually lie hid in the river till July, arrived a month earlier.
Jean watched them one hot evening from her wonted seat on the Tarpeian. They had been suppressed in their shells for two years, and now burst forth for the one day of passion that should end them. Vast swarms of them hovered and hummed, seeking no food but only their random mates. The female received the fertilizing flash from the male, laid her eggs in the water, and floated dead near the dying mate. The watchful herring, themselves like flashes of living lightning, gorged themselves on dead lovers.
The electric swiftness of the whole tragedy appalled her, and yet human beings were not much slower. She herself had felt the lightning-flash when Marvin first looked into her eyes, and her mother had confessed to feeling the same thing on meeting Ambrose Rich.