Read Ebook: Phoenix by Bradley Marion Zimmer White Ted Finlay Virgil Illustrator

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Ebook has 73 lines and 6912 words, and 2 pages

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release date: December 13, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1962

Illustrated by FINLAY

He lived. He was aware. He was everything in his world. He was....

Flames wrapped themselves around his body, pouring sinuously around him. For a few seconds, as he stood in the center of the floor, he writhed; pure reflex; then he relaxed and gave himself up to the heady luxury of the roaring fire which clothed his body. He basked in flames.

He shook his flaming body and a few brief cinders fell away in sparks. Then, suddenly, he had snuffed out the aura of flames; he was standing nude on a smoking carpet, grinning tentatively at the girl. He swallowed and said "Hell of a time for you to show up, Fran."

She seemed to stare at him without seeing him, her face taut, without expression. He blinked, slowly coming down or up to reality again. Good God, yes, she thought he'd been burning up. The odor of the carpet--it smelled like scorching hair.

"I forgot about the carpet." He watched her glance down at it. Acrid smoke still curled away from two singed-bare patches where he'd been standing.

Slowly, Fran raised her eyes back to his. She said "Max--!"

She took one faltering step toward him; then she crumpled and swayed forward. He caught her in his arms as she fell, straining her close. The physical contact of their bodies brought him back to the level of reality again, to a complete realization of Fran's plight. He tried to make his grip as firm, as reassuring as he could--to bring her back to a world in which men were not, one minute, cloaked in streaming flame, and the next minute alive and human and--

"I know. I lose more pajamas that way," he said, lightly, keeping his voice casual. "Sit down, Fran, and I'll put on a pair of pants, at least."

"Lie down here for a minute, Fran. Here, put your feet up on the arm. Fran, it's all right, I'm all right; take it easy, now. I'll be right back."

He retreated into the bedroom, quietly closed the door behind him, and leaned against it for a moment. His whole body slumped.

The room was quiet, just a third-floor bedroom in an old house, now a converted rooming-house for students, half filled with sunlight. Max heard his own breathing loud in the silence, looked down at his naked body, then at his pants, draped over the bed. He stared at them and closed his eyes. His body grew rigid.

Slowly, the pants began to stir as if with a breeze; but all else was still. Sunlight cut across the stationary dust-motes suspended in mid-air, and the warm summer noon seemed to hold its breath. The pants legs flapped.

Then, suddenly, the room was filled with a timeless density. The silence of the moment before thickened into a tangible, measurable dimension, possessing a reality of its own. He could taste the silence.

He rose three feet into the air, his head clearing the ceiling by inches. As he did so, the tension dissolved from his muscles; he lay loose-flung on the air and watched articles of clothing, first his briefs, then pants, sweatshirt, socks and finally shoes, moving to him and draping themselves over, around, up and onto his body, flowing onto him as if themselves fluid.

The door opened before he reached it. He took a deep breath, set his feet on the floor, and walked into the other room. Fran started upright as he came in, and flinched away.

"Fran, are you afraid of me?"

She nodded, moving her mouth mutely.

"Afraid of me? Now that I'm fully clothed again and didn't even attempt felonious rape?"

"Don't laugh," she said, finding her voice. "I know what you're trying to do. But--don't. And don't tell me that I didn't see--what I saw." Her eyes moved quickly, a little rabbit movement, to the charred carpet, and away again.

"Fran." He seated himself beside her and took her face in his hands. "I'm not denying anything. What you saw--it happened, yes--but it wasn't--" he ran out of words.

"I'm not crazy! And it wasn't an illusion!"

"Okay, then! I'm a warlock! I weave dark spells! I've sold my soul to the devil! Do you like that any better?" He flung the words at her, bitterly.

"I don't know. I don't--Fran!" He fell against her, and felt her arms reach out for him, hold him as he collapsed at her side.

The touch did what words had failed to do; he felt the rigid, frozen fright flow out of her as she held him; hard, clasping his spent body in her arms. With a sigh, she drew his head against the softness of her breast and let him lie there.

This was the best way. It had come to him without words; perhaps there were no words. But what had he done to Fran, to this shy girl who held him now so tightly? He sensed, through the tension of her terror and its release, that she loved him--did he love her? When he had asked himself that, he could not answer--yet now, in his response to her, he sensed his own answer.

Words, more words--what did they mean? Reasoning was a barrier, not a path. He had always felt most apart from her when he had tried to think out their relationship into words. Better to let the words go, better to react.

"Tell me about it," she said finally.

It was like surfacing after a deep dive. He blinked. "I don't know what happened."

"How did it begin?"

He turned slightly, snuggling closer to her, his cheek buried against her neck, his shoulder tucked under her arm, her arms warm around his body. He paused, then reached out for words and found that the words were there.

"Psi power, I guess you'd call it--I can make things move, or--things happen.

"I had a dream last night. It was a very strange kind of dream--you know how sometimes you have dreams about flying? Like, you're running along on the ground, and sometimes you can jump, and pull your feet into the air, and then you paddle yourself along with your hands--? I dreamed I'd done this and I was floating and weightless, pulling myself around with handholds like an astronaut in a spaceship, only the handholds were the branches of a tree. I was floating, and pulling myself into the tree.

"Things began feeling strange. Like they were happening in double--like the dream was fading out into sleepwalking. And then I woke up.

He felt her arms tighten around him, but she neither moved nor interrupted him. Blessing her, he went on;

Slowly, under the reassurance of her touch, he felt the spasm dissolve, flow into words again.

Her voice was levelled when she spoke, a flat surface spread thin over panic; toneless. "I'm not a--a nuclear physicist, but it sounds as if you were trying to put the theory of atoms and force-fields into one word. Like--matter not being solid but just little bits of loose energy whirling around and building up into atoms and the atoms into molecules."

"It takes in a lot of territory," she said, still the flat stretched toneless voice. "Just to wake up and find out you had it, whatever it was."

"Max--"

"Yes, I know. It's frightening. I'm still afraid, and I think I've been afraid ever since I woke up from that dream. I'm afraid to really try anything--oh, thank God you came, Fran! Thank God! I think I'd have cracked up if you hadn't!"

But the moment of complete and intense rapport was gone; Fran had drawn away from him again, and he felt cold and afraid. He had said too much; she was afraid of him again, and her fear, like her love, communicated itself to him through the impalpable fibres in his very skin. He soaked up her fear and babbled it forth again.

"I've been afraid to really try anything, because that's playing God. I've been doing parlor tricks, Fran, because I haven't really wanted to face the fact that I could do so much more than that!

His whole body shook. "I could be God, and I'm playing with burning carpets! Fran--oh, Fran, it's too much for me! I'm not God, I don't want it, I'm too small for it--I wish it was only a dream and now I could really wake up and find it never happened--oh, Fran, Fran, tell me what I am, tell me what to do!"

Aware only of pain and terror, he felt his face wet and did not even know he was sobbing.

Again the touch calmed him. He clutched at her desperately, clinging to reality, to the wholeness and rightness of her body in his arms, in a sort of senseless terror lest that, too, should dissolve suddenly into a flux of intermingling atoms and force-fields. He was aware only of Fran, close and warm against him, their mingling breath, his own rising hunger and need. He wanted to melt into her, lose himself in her flesh and her reality. The clothes she was wearing separated them, were a senseless intrusion into his longing for contact, for one-ness. He moved. They were gone, her body warm and naked in his arms.

"Fran!"

But she was white and rigid in his arms, thrusting him away, gasping with terror. "What are you doing? Max, no!"

It was an icy shock, a rejection like a flood of ice, thrusting him back into the wild senselessness of his sudden mad universe. He felt only the desolation of being alone. He wept, feeling the tears on his cheek.

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