Read Ebook: Travelogue by Aycock Roger D

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Ebook has 144 lines and 8783 words, and 3 pages

Release date: November 19, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1956

travelogue

She seemed to be so much smaller than any child would be, turned out with a fragile perfection more doll-like than human....

Adventure came late--at thirty-two, if the detail matters--into the diffident life of Wesley Filburn, but with all the fictional improbability of the wistful little fantasies he wrote for his living.

It called, in a voice Wesley failed at first to recognize because he had long ago given up listening, just when he least expected it--when he was walking one late April afternoon along the rocky banks of Sampson's Creek, temporarily blind to the drowsy mountain charm of the place while he mulled over an inconsistency that niggled at his current plot-line.

There was this utopian little planet, he mulled, that circled the major sun of a binary star named Aldhafera upon which his space-roving protagonist was to discover his true self--and the glory of the One Love inevitable to every such spacefaring gallant--by destroying his ship and so making it impossible to betray Her people's unspoiled paradise to his own grasping mechanical culture. The rub was, and Wesley was too honest to dismiss it unresolved, that any world circling one primary of a double star would very probably be something less than a paradise. Caught between two such stellar furnaces, it was more likely to be a slag-shelled inferno of heat and desolation.

Still, if one sun should be very small or nearly spent, there might be no problem at all. It might even offer fresh background detail as a novel sort of moon, shedding living light upon an already exotic setting. He'd have to check further on Aldhafera, though he doubted that his scanty astronomical texts would supply his want.

The call, too strong for a bird's piping yet too slight and musical for even a child's voice, drew him back from Aldhafera to the banks of Sampson's Creek.

It was a child after all, but an improbably tiny one.

She floundered in a pool deep enough to drown even an adult, so manifestly helpless that Wesley plunged instantly to her rescue without arguing his own inability to swim. He had a briefest glimpse of hair floating like a small silver cloud about a frightened elfin face with enormous lilac eyes; then the icy pool received him and he was splashing mightily to keep his own head above water.

Momentum took him near enough for the child to grasp his sleeve. The rest, the immemorial emergency of learning to swim the hard way, was up to Wesley.

He made it, not because he was capable of meeting such a challenge at a moment's notice but because the bank and safety were after all only a few feet away. His frantic paddlings brought the two of them out, to lie panting and dripping side by side in the welcome heat of sunlight.

When he had recovered enough to sit up, Wesley examined his find with more amazement than satisfaction.

The child was smaller than any child could be, he thought, and turned out with a fragile perfection more doll-like than human. Her hair was drying rapidly to look more like spun platinum than like silver; her dress, a mothlike wisp that changed color with mother-of-pearl iridescence, seemed not to have been wet at all. There was a belt of slender metal links about her tiny waist, caught with a flattened oval buckle the size of a pocket watch.

Her lilac eyes, more blue than purple now with the shock gone out of them, looked up at him wonderingly.

"Are you hurt?" Wesley asked. The child winced from the sound and he lowered his voice, feeling like an ogre before such fragility. "Can you talk yet?"

He reached out to help her and she caught his thumb with both tiny hands and stood knee-deep in grass that barely covered his own ankles.

Her voice was as high and clear as a sleigh-bell. "Clellingherif," she said, as if that unintelligibility settled everything.

Wesley considered her unhappily. It was not Adventure yet; he saw only that he was saddled with a lost child who looked like a pixie and who talked like a bird, and that he would very probably lose the rest of his afternoon getting her off his hands.

He tried again.

"Where do you live?" It was so unlikely that her parents might have moved to Sampson City, with its insular aloofness and its once-a-day train, that he dismissed the idea at once.

Second thought heartened him briefly. "Are your parents staying at the inn?"

The "inn" was a rambling, seedily genteel resort catering mainly to retired couples and trout fishermen. He owned a half interest in it and lived there with his Aunt Jessica, who owned the other half and controlled both, and Miriam Harrell, who taught sixth grade at the Sampson County school and nursed a determination to become Mrs. Wesley Filburn. If the child's parents were new guests of his Aunt Jessica's, his problem was solved already.

It was not so simple. The child fingered the oval buckle of her belt, shaping a curious suggestion of pattern.

She caught Wesley's thumb again and as quickly as that they were no longer on the banks of Sampson's Creek.

They were in a place that Wesley, for all his experience at contriving the unlikely, could not have dreamed up in a month of trying. It was essentially a room, not large yet seemed to extend indefinitely, that looked at first glance like a conservatory for exotic plants and at second like a library stocked with tables and files and endless shelves of books. There was a sprinkling of what might have been furniture, with here and there an erect oval that could have been either mirror or crystal screen.

The whole was scaled to a diminution that made Wesley feel like Gulliver in Lilliput, and through it breathed a barely perceptible scent somewhere between honey-suckle and crushed mint.

The man and woman who came out of that improbable background seemed to Wesley's dizzied senses hardly taller than the child who held his thumb, but their resemblance to her was as unmistakable as their serene air of having the situation completely in hand.

The girl's mother took her away, making admonishing birdlike sounds. The father, as if aware of Wesley's wavering control, gripped his thumb in turn and led him to an open expanse of soft-rugged floor large enough to hold them both.

"Sit down," he said in unexpected sleigh-bell English.

Wesley sat, and realized finally that Adventure had come.

It had come to him, he discovered, because the child--Mitsik--had not visited a world with fish before. The fascination of a sunning trout in Sampson's Creek had proved too much for her small caution; maneuvering for a closer look had tumbled her into the pool, and her transporter unit did not work under water.

His rescue had placed her parents--the father's name was Clelling and her mother's Herif, explaining her cryptic pipings--under an obligation that seemed to demand fulfillment. It was something like letting a genie out of his bottle and being granted a wish, except that Clelling and Herif were no sort of djinni and their capacity for granting wishes was strictly limited.

"A travel advisor's work is more interesting than profitable," Clelling said. "But be assured that we shall offer as much as lies within our means."

Embarrassed, Wesley made deprecating sounds. "I don't really want payment. I'm more interested in knowing how and why you're here."

The information was readily given. Clelling, completely telepathic among his own kind and nearly so with humanity--as witness his instant grasp of English--anticipated Wesley's questions with answers that left him dizzier than before.

"The galaxy is a more populous place than you imagine," Clelling said. "And civilized to a degree beyond your comprehension. Transportation and trade among so many differing worlds is a complex business occupying the attention of millions. My wife and I deal in travel for pleasure--we are what you would call tourist agents."

Clelling denied it with regret. "Your world has been under observation for years by a galactic ecological group in upstate Pennsylvania, but you are not ready yet. Economic and social stabilization, and elimination of war, must come before you can be admitted as a culture."

Wesley sighed and Clelling made hasty correction.

"Under the circumstances, that ban need not apply to you. We can offer help too with the information on galactic conditions you need to lend authenticity to your writing."

He went to a file that nestled between two feathery flowering shrubs and drew out a glossy folder that glowed in three-dimensional illustration as if lighted from within.

"Aldhafera," Clelling said.

"It's priceless," Wesley said. The text was undecipherable, but the photography so perfect that his eyes misted and refused to leave it. "It more than repays me."

Anxiety dimmed his rapture. "You did mean that I could keep it, didn't you?"

Clelling looked abashed. "Of course. It's only a sort of tourist travelogue.... I'll select a group of them dealing with worlds that might interest you and see that our local outpost makes up English translations. They will be mailed to you as they are completed."

His wife appeared out of the shrub-and-file background, leading a chastened Mitsik, and stood beside him. Her fair head was hardly even with the seated Wesley's shoulder.

"We mustn't leave Sonimuira out of the group," she said. Her lilac eyes laughed with an inner, private amusement. "He'll like Sonimuira."

"Out of this group we can offer you one physical visit to the world of your choice," Clelling said. "Each brochure will have round-trip tear-off coupons attached. Bring them here when you have decided where you will go."

"If I have the nerve," Wesley said. The prospect dazzled him until he remembered his Aunt Jessica. "You'll still be here?"

"This is a permanent relay point," Clelling told him. "Our agency's galactic transporter has been here for centuries of your time."

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