Selected Stories Read Free Page A

half to himself.
    Why should she be? thought Pete morosely as he turned on the set and watched the screen begin to glow. There were many more of the golden speckles that had killed reception for the past two weeks. Why should anything be the same, ever again?
    He fought a sudden temptation to kick the set to pieces. It, and Starr Anthim, were part of something that was dead. The country was dead, a real country—prosperous, sprawling, laughing, grabbing, growing and changing, leprous in spots with poverty and injustice, but healthy enough to overcome any ill. He wondered how the murderers would like it. They were welcome to it, now. Nowhere to go. No one to fight. That was true for every soul on earth now.
    “You hope she’s the same,” he muttered.
    “The show, I mean,” said Sonny mildly. “I’d like to just sit here and have it like … like—”
    Oh, thought Pete mistily. Oh—that. Somewhere to go, that’s what it is, for a few minutes. “I know,” he said, all the harshness gone from his voice.
    Noise receded from the audio as the carrier swept in. The light on the screen swirled and steadied into a diamond pattern. Pete adjusted the focus, chromic balance, and intensity. “Turn out the lights, Bonze. I don’t want to see anything but Starr Anthim.”
    It was the same, at first. Starr Anthim had never used the usual fanfares, fade-ins, color, and clamor of her contemporaries. A black screen, then click, a blaze of gold. It was all there, in focus; tremendously intense, it did not change. Rather, the eye changed to take it in. She never moved for seconds after she came on; she was there, a portrait, a still face and a white throat. Her eyes were open and sleeping. Her face was alive and still.
    Then, in the eyes which seemed green but were blue flecked with gold, an awareness seemed to gather, and they came awake. Only then was it noticeable that her lips were parted. Something in the eyes made the lips be seen, though nothing moved yet. Not until she bent her head slowly, so that some of the gold flecks seemed captured in the golden brows. The eyes were not, then, looking out at an audience. They were looking at me, and at me, and at ME.
    “Hello—you,” she said. She was a dream, with a kid sister’s slightly irregular teeth.
    Bonze shuddered. The cot on which he lay began to squeak rapidly. Sonny shifted in annoyance. Pete reached out in the dark and caught the leg of the cot. The squeaking subsided.
    “May I sing a song?” Starr asked. There was music, very faint. “It’s an old one, and one of the best. It’s an easy song, a deep song, one that comes from the part of men and women that is mankind—the part that has in it no greed, no hate, no fear. This song is about joyousness and strength. It’s—my favorite. Isn’t it yours?”
    The music swelled. Pete recognized the first two notes of the introduction and swore quietly. This was wrong. This song was not for … this song was part of—
    Sonny sat raptly. Bonze lay still.
    Starr Anthim began to sing. Her voice was deep and powerful, but soft, with the merest touch of vibrato at the ends of the phrases. The song flowed from her without noticeable effort, seeming to come from her face, her long hair, her wide-set eyes. Her voice, like her face, was shadowed and clean, round, blue and green but mostly gold:
    “When you gave me your heart, you gave me the world,
    You gave me the night and the day,
    And thunder, and roses, and sweet green grass,
    The sea, and soft wet clay.
    “I drank the dawn from a golden cup,
    From a silver one, the dark,
    The steed I rode was the wild west wind,
    My song was the brook and the lark.”
    The music spiraled, caroled, slid into a somber cry of muted, hungry sixths and ninths; rose, blared, and cut, leaving her voice full and alone:
    “With thunder I smote the evil of earth,
    With roses I won the right,
    With the sea I washed, and with clay I built,
    And the world was a place of light!”
    The last note