Mind Webs - Phoenix

0:30Mind-web. Welcome to a half hour of Mind-web. Short stories from the worlds of speculative fiction. This story is out of the book, The Best From Amazing Stories, edited by Ted White. The story is by Ted White and Marion Zimmer Bradley, the title Phoenix. The story is out of the book, The Best From Amazing Stories, edited by Ted White.

1:55He 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 arrived. Pure reflex. He, he relaxed and gave himself up to the heavy luxury of the roaring fire which clothed his body. He basked in flames. His mind was a fire too. It feels like seven ice. No, no. It's different, it's... It was something new. His senses were still adjusting themselves to the new reality. and his mind contained no images with which to compare it. He didn't see or hear a fran open the door.

2:57Not! He shook his flaming body and a few brief cinders fell away in sparks. Then suddenly it snuffed out the aura of flames. He was standing nude on a smoking carpet grinning tentatively at the girl. He swallowed and said, I held the time for you to show up, fran. She seemed to stare at him without seeing him. Her face taught without expression. He blinked slowly coming down or up to reality again. Good God, yes, she thought he'd been burning up. The order of the carpet it smelled like scorching hair. I forgot about the carpet, fran. He watched her glance down at it. Acquid smoke still curled away from two singed bear patches where he'd been standing. Slowly, fran raised her eyes back to his. No! She took one fall to in 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 her body's body and back to the level of reality again

3:57to a complete realization of fran's plight. He tried to make his grip as firm as we assured him 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. You don't have any clothes on. I know, fran. I lose more pajamas that way. Fran, sit down and I'll put on a pair of pants at least. Her face was chalk white. The color had drained from her mouth, leaving the lipstick like paint on a corpse. She was rigid with shock. She hardly seemed to hear him and let him lead her like a child to the sofa. Oh God, God, why did she have to come in just now? Lie down here for a minute, fran. You hear it? Put your feet up on the arm, fran. It's all right. I'm all right. Now take it easy. I'll be right back, fran. Max retreated into the bedroom quietly closed the door behind and then leaned against it for a moment.

4:58His whole body slumped. The room was quiet. Just a third floor bedroom and an old house. Now a converted roomy house where students have filled with sunlight. Max heard his own breathing loud and the silence looked down at his naked body. Then had his pants straight 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 dustmode suspended in midair. 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.

6:00First his briefs, then pants, sweatshirt socks, and finally shoes. All moving to him and draping themselves over around up and on to his body. Blowing on to him as if himself fluid. The door opened before he reached it. He took a deep breath, said 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. Easy for God's sake, easy to curse. Fran, I'm not denying anything. What you saw, it happened. Yeah, but it wasn't... I don't know, Fran. Well, 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? Are you a warlocker? No, I don't know, Fran. I don't know. Max fell against her and felt her arms reach out for him.

7:01Hold him as he collapsed at her side. The touch did what words had failed to do. He felt the rigid frozen, bright flow out of her as she held him hard, clasping his spent body in her arms. And with a sigh, she drew his head against the softness of her breast to 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 the 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 do they mean? Reasoning was a barrier, not a path. It 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.

8:02They lay together, unmobbing on the sofa for a moment, which was for them, time was, perhaps 15 minutes, perhaps two or three hours. They exchanged no words, no gestures, not even a kiss. They simply were. They were, sharing the moment of that, mashed, tangible silence in which there was no max, no Fran. Instead, a gestalt, a separate emotional entity. Tell me about it. It was like surfacing after a deep dive and he blanked. Fran, 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. If you want to be rational about it, that is, if we can be rational about it, Fran, I guess it's what you'd call a wild talent. Wild is right. Saipar, I guess you'd call it, I can make things move or make things happen.

9:10Fran, 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 sort of paddle yourself along with your hands. I dreamed that I had done this and I was floating and waitless, pulling myself around with handholds like an astronaut in a spaceship. Only the handholds were the branches of a tree and 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. Fran, I was holding on to the curtains of the window next to my bed and I was floating about even with the top of the open window. He felt her arms tighten around him but she neither moved nor interrupted him. Blessing her, he went on. It scared me silly but my first thought was, my god, I nearly flew out the window.

10:12Just as a matter of fact about it, as if I'd been sleepwalking and woke up and said, oh I almost walked down those stairs and then I guess I woke up the rest of the way and really realized what was happening. In the next thing I knew Fran I was lying crossways on the bed with all the breath knocked out of me. His body had tensed again with a growing excitement in his voice, sensing that he shivered and moved closer into the warmth of her arms. Fran, Fran don't let me do anything now. Now, slowly under the reassurance of her touch, she felt the spasm dissolve, flowing towards again. When I woke up I thought it had all been a dream. I mean I wanted to believe I dreamed it but I knew better. I wandered out here into the living room and just kind of went through the motions of breakfast without noticing what I was doing. After a while, I located myself sitting at the table, staring at my coffee and realizing that it had gone cold. I wasn't thinking Fran, I wasn't thinking about anything. I was just staring at the coffee and

11:13wishing it was good and hot again and it started steaming. Fran, I didn't touch it, I just looked at it. I looked at it and suddenly I wasn't just looking at a cup of coffee anymore. I began to see it, really see it. I began to see the relationships of every component in the cup and the coffee, the chemical, the molecular, that's not what I mean. I could see, not really with my eyes, the entire series of relationships between all the overlapping fields of energy. Fran, I can't make sense of it before. I don't have the words, maybe there aren't any. But I could see it. You understand? I didn't try to explain it even to myself. I can't now. It's just everything's motion and I could reach out and speed it up or slow it down and I'd heated it up.

12:14Her voice was leveled when she spoke, a flat surface spread thin over panic, toneless. I'm not 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 molecule. Yeah, I guess so, is if I'd learn to see into them, but how, why? It takes in a lot of territory just to wake up and find out you had it, whatever it was. Max hardly heard. He drew himself upright, his hands clasped, tensing, searching for words. Like ice and water and steam are all the same thing, Fran, only we see them differently. We just see different aspects of the same thing and it's all the same, all this motion and I could control it. I could control everything. Yes, I know, Fran, it's frightening. I'm still afraid and I think I've been afraid ever since I woke up from

13:17that dream. I'm afraid to really try anything. Oh, thank God you came, Fran. Thank God, I think had 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 unpubbable fibers in his very skin. He soaked up her fear and babbled it forth again. Fran, 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. Think about it, Fran, I turned the air around myself to flames and burned off my pajamas before I thought to do more than protect my body because that was sort of wild and weird and ego-inflating. I've wished my clothes on and levitated and moved things around, but these are little things,

14:18these petty things, Fran, I could have done so much more, I could wipe out war. There are a thousand ways I could do it. I could feed the starving and house the homeless hell, that's minuscule. I could change this whole damn planet, Fran, I could change myself, make my body so I could go anywhere, anywhere in the whole physical universe. Fran, I could be God. I could be God, and I'm playing with burning carpets, Fran. Fran is 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, Fran, Fran, tell me what I am, tell me what to do. I wear only a pain and terror, he felt his face wet and did not even know he was sobbing. Your max, Max, your max and I love you. Again the touch calmed him, he clutched at her desperately, clinging to reality to the wholeness

15:22and rightness of her body and his arms. In a sort of senseless terror, last 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 mangling breath, his own rising hunger and need. To 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 oneness. 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 old senselessness of his adulation of being alone. He wept, feeling the tears on his cheek. Did God cry? Crying, clutching desperately at this frigid slip of a girl for salvation when the whole universe awaited him? He pushed himself up away from her. He heard her voices if from a great distance

16:26making words, but he was past words. Blackness closed in about them, time slowed. The eddies of theirs were old to a halt, and lances of fires were old through his mind. Then beyond the realm of three dimensions he saw her, clearly. His mind shattered into a thousand crystals reflecting prismatically pounding emotions he could not directly face. He looked at Fran into her through her beyond her. He saw, not the immobilized figure of a frightened woman, her body helpless beneath his own and a sofa. In fact, he saw not even a sofa. He saw, beyond the immediacy of the fields of motion contained in finite space as his body, he comprehended other patterns of subatomic flux. Below him was a geometrically ordered matrix, a precise framework simply constructed. But above it, he found an area of disorder. Complexity, confusion, patterns, and sub-patterns of a

17:30structure so immensely varied and subtly differentiated as to be nearly incomprehensible. The motion, movement, life, it offended him. It was vulgar, teeming, unruly, impossible. He began to reach out to a body had flung itself at him, kicking, scratching, screaming. He was toppled back, and suddenly lying on the floor, back in the narrow confines of a single body again. His head rang, and her words were slowly becoming words again. They heard his ears, jangling with their ridiculous cadences against the sublime expanse of perception. No, no, I love you, but you, you're mad, you're not mad. And then she had flung herself through the door and was gone, her running footsteps growing fainter on the stairs. Slowly, Max surrendered himself to a chair, without any awareness of his human

18:33motions. The old chair enveloped him with the old overstuffed cushioned arms and gave him a musty embrace, and for a moment he was part of all its unfolding past, the weariness that had come into its unrejecting depths for comfort and rest. His face was still wet with the tears he had shed before, and now they began to swell and flow again erupting and cascading almost without volition. Fran was gone. She was gone, and she had been all he had, all that was ever really real to him. Dimly, he sensed without knowing that it had been a double failure. Fran had refused, rejected his need, but was it Fran's fault that he had been unable to reach her? Had he ever been able to reach any human creature? Had he ever wanted to, except in his own selfish desire? He spoke of loving Fran, and yet he had shied away from that answer until he needed her. And so his vast paranormal powers

19:38were meaningless because the physical universe itself was without meaning. Ordered, yes, finally structured, but with no more meaning than an alarm clock. He could be God, and yet the only safety insanity had felt was when Fran drew him back from the brink of the bewildering nothingness into the shelter of her breast. Like for all his control of things, he had been unable to achieve that blending, that meant power. He had only a meaningless power over things, which now, in essence, were only nothingness in various rates of flow. The sun had set, and he had turned none of the light sun. The gloom of dusk settled blacketing his body with darkness, and his mind with despair. If Fran, if a meaningless word now, if Fran had only accepted him, if he could control his own

20:40emotions as easily as the magic show flames he had done. But he had feared to surrender himself to any emotion. He had given to little of himself to Fran, and when the moment of his need came, she had nothing of him that could call him back safe from the borderland of bleak despair. He wasn't fit. Like a baby given a straight razor, he could not cope with his gift, and the outcome was inevitable. There was only one answer. Best do it now. Suddenly the darkness was pierced by flames, afflickering, growing fire which enveloped and covered his body. His clothes vanished in a flare of flames, spreading through and attacking the soft, the poultry of the chair. A small thing to salvage is equal. But this was the grandiose way, the big way for the big failure. He sat for long moments crowned in golden flames, lost in contemplation of the streams of superheated glowing ions,

21:42radiated from the burning carbon. Then the chair shifted as cloth burned through, fiber straps released their hold on the metal springs of the seat. Time, deliberately without emotion, he released his hold on the lines of force which demarcated the limits of his body. His hair vanished instantly in a shower of sparks, and simultaneously a furnace blasted beading on him. Then his skin was blistering and blackening, gone. He collapsed into his funeral pyre, flinging out limbs in reflex pasm and struggle, and he was, he lived, he was aware, he was everything in his world, and still nothing. Streams of force, patterns of subatomic flux, he was a moment when all fear and all perception had vanished, blending into a gestalt that was more than himself.

22:46In her uneasy sleep, Francine floated five inches above the surface of her bed.

24:16The story was titled Phoenix, written by Ted White and Marion Zimmer Bradley. It's taken from the book The Best From Amazing Stories, edited by Ted White. This is Michael Hanson speaking, reading with me was Linda Klotter, technical production for Mindwebs by Leslie Hilsenoff. Mindwebs comes to you from WHA Radio, a service of University of Wisconsin extension.