Lynne stirred uneasily on her plastomat. She knew she was there, felt sure she was not asleep. Yet the dream persisted, holding her in a grip that was tighter than reality.
She was alone in a strange crystaline chamber, high, high up in a strange crystaline tower. Thanks to the fact there was no metal in its construction, nowhere was there rust. Yet her chamber, like the tower itself, showed definite signs of age and ruin.
An irregular segment of one wall had been penetrated by a missile of some sort and patched with plastic spray to keep out the thin, chill, unending wind. On lower levels, she knew, were larger scars of long-forgotten destruction. Just above the transparent arched ceiling what had been an elaborate tracery of gleaming flying buttresses, their functional purpose long since lost, stood precariously in a pattern of ruin.
Here and there about her, other surviving towers of the city rose in more serious stages of decay. And far below, on the windswept square, huddled the gleaming egg-shaped shelters of the Earthfolk. Beyond the city area the red desert and green oases stippled off to the dark horizon or advanced to invade the steep scarp of the far bank of the great canal.
Lynne was alone in a tower on Mars. Instruments, strange to her eyes but stamped with the familiar patterns of Earthly design and manufacture, lined three walls of the chamber. She knew she should take the downlift and return to the tiny cluster of Earth-dwellings in the court below, that her tour of duty was ended.
Yet she could not leave. Voices whispered within her head and tugged at her emotions, voices whose owners she could not see, whose embodiment lurked ever just beyond the range of her eyes, no matter how quickly she rolled them. Voices that begged for her assistance, offering unheard-of pleasures as a reward, unthought-of torments as punishment for her refusal to cooperate.
They were strange voices, whose message bore the corrupt cynicism of the very old, coupled with the naïve enjoyments of long deferred second childhood—alien voices. Or were they alien? Wasn't it rather that she was the alien, like those other Earthfolk who lived in the cluster of pathetic little huts below, who strove to reclaim the too-lean atmosphere of a planet, most of which had long-since escaped into the star-studded black-velvet backdrop of space.
Yes, it was she who was alien. And with the thought came another, a human picture, so horrible, so gruesome, that her mind refused to accept it. Yet she knew it was vitally important she see it clearly. But the others, the invisibles, kept derailing her concentration with their whispers of joys unknown before to mortal man or woman, their soft threats of torments beyond those conceived by Dante himself.
"Let us in," they offered softly, with the mischief of the very old. "Let us in and we shall romp and travel and find new uses for your bodies. We shall live side by side within you and lead you to pleasures no souls contained by bodies can ever know. We shall...."
There was something Lynne should ask them, an answer to their Saturnalian bribery—but like their visibility it refused to rise to the upper level of her consciousness. She felt sudden shame at not being able to speak, fear at her inability to marshal needed thoughts, fear that grew quickly into terror while the all-important question struggled vainly to make itself uttered.