A Song for Lya by George R. R. Martin Page A

Valcarenghi was saying, moving his light around like a pointer. “The spots fade in time, of course. The Greeshka is growing steadily. In another hundred years it will fill this chamber, and start up the passageway."
    Then there was a rustle of movement behind us. I looked back. Someone else was coming through the web.
    She reached us soon, and smiled. A Shkeen woman, old, naked, breasts hanging past her waist. Joined, of course. Her Greeshka covered most of her head and hung lower than her breasts. It was still bright and translucent from its time in the sun. You could see through it, to where it was eating the skin off her back.
    “A candidate for Final Union,” Gourlay said.
    “This is a popular cave,” Valcarenghi added in a low, sardonic voice.
    The woman did not speak to us, nor we to her. Smiling, she walked past us. And lay down on the Greeshka.
    The little Greeshka, the one that rode her back, seemed almost to dissolve on contact, melting away into the great cave creature, so the Shkeen woman and the great Greeshka were joined as one. After that, nothing. She just closed her eyes, and lay peacefully, seemingly asleep.
    “What's happening?” I asked.
    “Union,” said Valcarenghi. “It'll be an hour before you'd notice anything, but the Greeshka is closing over her even now, swallowing her. A response to her body heat, I'm told. In a day she'll be buried in it. In two, like him—” The flash found the half-dissolved face above us.
    “Can you read her?” Gourlay suggested. “Maybe that'd tell us something."
    “All right,” I said, repelled but curious. I opened myself. And the mindstorm hit.
    But it's wrong to call it a mindstorm. It was immense and awesome and intense, searing and blinding and choking. But it was peaceful too, and gentle with a gentleness that was more violent than human hate. It shrieked soft shrieks and siren calls and pulled at me seductively, and it washed over me in crimson waves of passion, and drew me to it. It filled me and emptied me all at once. And I heard the bells somewhere, clanging a harsh bronze song, a song of love and surrender and togetherness, of joining and union and never being alone.
    Storm, mindstorm, yes, it was that. But it was to an ordinary mindstorm as a supernova is to a hurricane, and its violence was the violence of love. It loved me, that mindstorm, and it wanted me, and its bells called to me, and sang its love, and I reached to it and touched, wanting to be with it, wanting to link, wanting never to be alone again. And suddenly I was on the crest of a great wave once again, a wave of fire that washed across the stars forever, and this time I knew the wave would never end, this time I would not be alone afterwards upon my darkling plain.
    But with that phrase I thought of Lya.
    And suddenly I was struggling, fighting it, battling back against the sea of sucking love. I ran, ran, ran, RAN ... and closed my minddoor and hammered shut the latch and let the storm flail and howl against it while I held it with all my strength, resisting. Yet the door began to buckle and crack.
    I screamed. The door smashed open, and the storm whipped in and clutched at me, whirled me out and around and around. I sailed up to the cold stars but they were cold no longer, and I grew bigger and bigger until I was the stars and they were me, and I was Union, and for a single solitary glittering instant I was the universe.
    Then nothing.
    * * * *
    I woke up back in my room, with a headache that was trying to tear my skull apart. Gourlay was sitting on a chair reading one of our books. He looked up when I groaned.
    Lya's headache pills were still on the bedstand. I took one hastily, then struggled to sit up in bed.
    “You all right?” Gourlay asked.
    “Headache,” I said, rubbing my forehead. It throbbed , as if it was about to burst. Worse than the time I'd peered into Lya's pain. “What happened?"
    He stood up. “You scared the hell out of us. After you began to read, all