Nova 2 Page 22

  The floor of the path was not long, perhaps a hundred meters if the perspective was true. A lilac-blue color showed at the upper end. Freshness flowed down, mingled with The Clivorn’s spume.

  He could not possibly get up it just now . . . But he could look.

  There was machinery, too, he saw. An apparatus of gelatinous complexity at the boundary where the path merged with Clivorn rock. He made out a dialed face pulsing with lissajou figures—the mechanism which must have been activated by his passage through the barriers, and which in turn had materialized this path.

  He smiled and felt his smile nudge gravel. He seemed to be lying with his cheek on the tawny pebbles at the foot of the path. The alien air helped the furnace in his throat. He looked steadily up the path. Nothing moved. Nothing appeared. The lilac-blue, was it sky? It was flawlessly smooth. No cloud, no bird.

  Up there at the end of the path—what? A field perhaps? A great arena into which other such corridor-paths converged? He couldn’t imagine.

  No one looked down at him.

  In his line of sight, above the dialed face was a device like a translucent pair of helices. One coil was full of liquid coruscations. In the other were only a few sparks of light. While he watched, one of the sparks on the empty side winked out and the filled end flickered. Then another. He wondered, watched. It was regular.

  A timing device. The read-out of an energy bank perhaps. And almost at an end. When the last one goes, he thought, the gate will be finished. It has waited here, how long?

  Receiving maybe a few sheep, a half-dead native. The beasts of Clivorn.

  There are only a few minutes left.

  With infinite effort he made his right arm move. But his left arm and leg were dead weights. He dragged himself half his length forward, almost to where the path began. Another meter . . . but his arm had no more strength.

  It was no use. He was done.

  If I had climbed yesterday, he thought. Instead of the scan. The scan was by flyer, of course, circling The Clivorn. But the thing here couldn’t be seen by a flyer because it wasn’t here then. It was only in existence when something triggered the first barrier down below, pushed up through them both. Something large, warm-blooded maybe. Willing to climb.

  The computer has freed man’s brain.

  But computers did not go hand by bloody hand across The Cli-vom’s crags. Only a living man, stupid enough to wonder, to drudge for knowledge on his knees. To risk. To experience. To be lonely.

  No cheap way.

  The shining Ship, the sealed Star Scientists had gone. They would not be back.

  He had finished struggling now. He lay quiet and watched the brilliance at the end of the alien timer wink out. Presently there was no more left. With a faint no-sound the path and all its apparatus that had waited on Clivorn since before the glaciers fell, went away.

  As it went the winds raged back but he did not hear them. He was lying quite comfortably where the bones of his face and body would mingle one day with the golden pebbles on The Clivorn’s empty rock.

  The Ergot Show

  by Brian W. Aldiss

  The mainstream world of letters has at last discovered Brian Aldiss after the publication of his uproarious, hyperrealistic comic novel, Hand-Reared Boy. We have happily known for years both him and the dazzling pyrotechnics he displays here as he leads us by the hand through the prophesied McLuhanesque global village of the future.

  Church interior: not very inspiring but very lofty, walls faced with mottled brown marbling, light dim, frescoes hardly recognizable. Organ case, with clock perched slenderly on its arch, is a fine and elegant work, if a little crushed between gallery and ceiling. It now peals forth with a flamboyant rendering of the toccata from Georgi Mushel’s “Suite for Organ,” as the congregation genuflect and depart, laughing.

  Pagolini emerges with his friend and fellow-artist, Rhodes, and genially rubs his hands as they descend the steps.

  “A dinky service. I attend only for the sake of the departed. Things are bad enough for them without our neglect. Why should the living cut them dead? Live and let live, I say.”

  He is a tall and well-built man, rugged, a very tough fifty, still with a thatch of faintly pink fair hair. Nothing eccentric, but when you’ve met him, you know you’ve met him.

  Rhodes merely says, “Coffin is a word with a beautiful period flavor. Like gutta percha and rubric ”

  Rhodes is also large, no signs of debauchery about him. He is forty-six, his face still fresh, his eyes keen behind heavy glasses. He makes love only to Thai women, and then only in the soixante-neuf position.

  The viewpoint moves back faster than the two men move forward, revealing more and more of the church behind. It is recognizable as Pennsylvania Station in New York, U.S.A., no longer used for rail traffic and hired by Pagolini for the occasion. The organ still plays.

  Most of the congregation are holding hands as they emerge, stranger smiling at stranger. There are people everywhere.

  Pagolini and Rhodes cross to a public transport unit, but a moment later we see them driving across sand in Rhodes’ Volvo 255S. The organ is still playing. The car filming them lies behind, occasionally drawing level for a side-shot. Some areas of the beach are crowded with people. Fortunately nobody is killed, or not more than one might expect.

  Now the music pealing forth is—surely we recognise it with a thrill—the Byrnes theme, “All That We Are.” All that we are happened so long ago. Envelops us like a bath full of fudge.

  Rhodes punches the cassetteer as he steers. Naked women swim up in the holovision and dance on the dashboard. He enlarges them until they fill the windscreen and the car is zooming through their thighs. Then he flips off. “Shall we go to Molly’s as invited?”

  “Feel holy enough?”

  Rhodes shrugs. So Pagolini picks up the radiophone and dials Molly. Yeah, it would be dobro to see them. Come on up. Have they fixed on the two films yet? No, but they are going ahead and shooting the first one anyway. Isn’t that kinda complicated? The men look at each other. Gutta percha, coffin, complicated, says Rhodes.

  Now we are following one of Rhodes’ muscle-planes as it gathers background footage over what may be regarded as a typical city of the teens of the new century: the Basque seaside tourism-and-industry center of San Friguras. Siesta is over, the streets are crowded with people. The evening is being passed in the usual way with plenty of demo, agro, and proto. The demo is by local trade unions demonstrating against poor working conditions and bad leisure pay. The proto is by tourists protesting against poor holiday facilities—when you have to spend a month holidaying abroad each year to support economically depressed areas, doll, you need adequate recompense! The agro is by local yobs aggravating anyone who looks too pleased with himself.

  The muscle-plane takes it all in, the five rowers straining at their wings as the cameraman, Danko Brankic, a Croat, peers through his sights. Machine-powered planes are forbidden over most Mediterranean holiday resorts. The shadow of wings flutters over the crowd. Brankic points his instrument elsewhere, eschewing obvious symbolism.

  Throughout this shot, Molly is still conversing in brittle fashion over the radiophone. Despite her millions, hers is the voice of the crowd, as the demo-argo-proto footage may perhaps indicate.

  Back-and-forth dissolve to Molly’s place, where some three hundred people loll on the sunlit terraces or stroll through the shadowy rooms. She managed to pick up an old Frankfurt tube alloy factory cheap in the nineties. Gutted and plastic-laminated in black, yellow, and gamboge, it contrasts well with the replica of a Nubian palace already in situ.

  Molly herself is rather a disappointment amid all this trendy splendor, which looks as if it were designed by Pagolini himself, although he laughed sharply when she suggested as much. The ample bust which won her the qualifying round as Mrs. Ernstein-Diphthong the Third still supports her almost as well as she supports it, but the essentially shoddy bone structure of her cheeks is beginning to show th
rough.

  We catch a guest saying, “In five years’ time, give or take the give-and-take of a year either way, her chin will begin to cascade.”

  A female guest replies, “She’s as high as Brankic’s muscle-plane,” for all the world as if she caught the last sequence—in which we are still involved in the back-and-forth dissolve.

  “And absorbs as much man-power.”

  Molly is coming forward to greet Pagolini and Rhodes as they alight from their plane. A close-up of their expressionless faces shows rugged Adriatic scenery in the background, with the sea glinting in an old-fashioned key of blue. The camera, turning with them to greet their hostess, reveals the familiar peak of the Matterhorn towering behind her mock-palace. Maybe it is just a phallic symbol.

  “You two gorgeous men! Things were getting just a little bit boring until you came. Don’t think I really mind but, Cecil, do we have to have your camera team tracking you all the time?”

  “It’s only my number two camera team,” he apologized.

  “Catatonic!” she enthused.

  While they are talking, the scene has been growing dark, until it fades to a living black. No sound. An excerpt from Jacob Byrnes’ book, The Amphibians of Time, appears:

  Again we face a time of historical crisis, which I call clock-and-gun time. Such crises have occurred before, notably towards the end of the Thirteenth Century, when towns were growing rapidly, creating new human densities which foreshadowed the Renaissance. Guns and clocks were invented then, symbolizing the outward and inward aspects of Western man. New densities have always created new levels of consciousness.

  A verge-escapement with foliot, ticking, ticking. Growing in the center of it, the ravaged and mountainous visage of Jacob Byrnes himself.

  Byrnes is talking to Rhoda, who is still in her air-drop outfit. She brushes her hair as she listens. Hint of theme song on a solitary violin.

  “Although I could say that the globe is my habitation, I don’t share the contemporary restlessness. You know I’m just a relic from last century, doll. But I could live anywhere, and the Amoy ranch would suit me dandy for my declining years. That does not bug me one bit.”

  “Dobro! Then don’t let it occupy you!” She still has her superb leonine hair, unchanged now for thirty years, and it fills the screen.

  “It occupies me only to this extent. Should I sell up the Gondwana estates here in the States before I move out?”

  She made an impatient gesture. She loved him, had loved him, because he was not the sort of man who needed to ask questions in order to make up his mind. When he asked, it was because he had possession of the answers.

  “Rhoda, you know Gondwana means a lot to me—but it is always insanity to own land. I have the essential Gondwana inside me. I’ll sell—unless you want it all. If you want it all, it’s all yours.”

  “What about Rhodes? Is he going to film any more here?”

  He crossed the room with its drab Slavonic curtains at the tall windows. He was as stocky as ever, slightly too heavy. His legs were painful. He had taken to limping.

  Flinging open the end door, he gestured into the writing room, which had been converted into a projection room a few months before. She looked over his shoulder.

  “I know.”

  Cans of holofilm were stacked here, standing on tables and floor. Some cans were not even labeled.

  “Maybe they’ll be back.”

  She looked at him.

  “No two people ever really understand each other, Jake. Give about yourself. Do you resent the tricks Rhodes and Pagolini are playing with your book?”

  He grinned. “We used to have trouble about finding where our real selves lay. Remember? That was a long time ago. We never solved the mystery. It was simply one of the fictitious problems of the twentieth century.”

  “Answer my poxing question, will you?”

  He picked up one of the holofilms out of the can and slid it into the projector. “There’s a logic in their illogic. Even their mode of expression is outmoded now, with sense-verity arriving. So my book is doubly outmoded. At least they appear to be transmitting the basic message, that we are reaching an epoch where literacy is a handicap. Now give me a decision on what we do about Gondwana . . .”

  He has flipped the power and drive switches, and the last words are played out against a three-dimensional view of the star, Quiller Singh, in a Ford-Cunard Laser 5, driving into Lasha during the first stage of the Himalayan Rally, closely followed by two I.B.M. Saab Nanosines. Cheering llamas. A yak stampeding up a side street. Singh turns into the pits for a quick change of inertia baffles. The cube fills with bent bodies of mechanics. Steam and smoke rise in the chill sunlight.

  Singh raises his goggles and looks across at Rosemay Schleiffer. Theme music, a husky voice singing, “All that we are Happened so long ago—What we may be, That is deciding now . . .” The vantage point swings up to the monasteries clinging to battlements of the mountains and, above them on the real heights, the curly-eaved palaces of the revenant Martian millionaires.

  Dissolve into interior shot of one of the curly-eaved palaces. Antiseptic Asian light here, further bleached by hidden fluores-cents. They can never get enough light, the revenants. Gravity is another matter. Old barrel-chested Dick Hogan Meyer wears reflecting glasses and leg braces, walks with a crutch attached to his right lower arm. He points the crutch at Pagolini.

  “Listen to me, I may own half of Lasha now, but when I first shipped out to Mars as a youngster, I was just a plain stovepipe welder, what they called a plain stovepipe welder. Know what that is, Mister, ’cos they don’t have them any more?”

  Pagolini took a drink and said, “Whenever you talk, Meyer, I begin to think of a certain tone of green.”

  “You do? Well, you listen to me, I was one of the guys that laid the water pipes right across half of Mars, you know that?”

  Very murky landscape, like a close-up shot of a boulder sparsely covered by lichen. Land and sky split the screen between them. Nothing to see except the odd crater and the depressions of the ground. Emptiness that was never filled, desolation that was always deserted. Habitable, sure, but whatever came to inhabit it would be changed in the process.

  Slowly the vista moves. The machines come into view. Dexion lorries, designed to come apart and make up into different vehicles when needed. They carry giant-bore water pipes. Two excavators, a counterbalanced pipe-laying caterpillar. Down in the thousand-mile ditch, a couple of men work, welding the sleeves of the pipes together. The lorry’s engine splutters, feeding in power on a thin sad note.

  All the time, Dick Hogan Meyer’s voice continues, although it also is thin and sad, as if attenuated by weary planetary distances.

  “Men did that, working kilometer by kilometer, one hundred lengths of pipe to the kilometer. They hadn’t the machines like on Earth, they hadn’t the machines to do it, Mister. So we did it. Mind you, the pay was great or I wouldn’t have been there, would I? But, by Christ, it was hard slogging, that’s what it was, Mister! We lived dead rough and worked dead rough. Such a wind used to blow out of them dinky pipes, you wonder where it come from.”

  “Catatonic! It’s the green of a Hapsburg uniform perhaps.”

  “If so happen I’m boring you, you’ll tell me? All I’m saying is I were just a stovepipe welder on Mars, that’s how I made my jam, so what you want you’ll have to spell out to me simple, so I can understand, just a simple stovepipe welder at heart.”

  Mars was gone, though still reflected in Meyer’s reflecting lenses as Shackerton, smart young aide to Pagolini, came forward through the brightness of the great room saying, “Right, right, right, Mr. Meyer, my name’s Provis Shackerton but never mind that—I won’t bother you with irrelevancies—let’s just say my name’s Jones or Chang, as you prefer, and I will proceed to explain the deal in words of one syllable suited to those who carved their pile out of stovepipe welding, right?” He genuflected with something between a bow, a curtsy, and an obscene gest
ure.

  “Mister Cecil Rhodes is the world’s number one film-maker, right? He is not present here. Mister Pagolini is world’s number one film-designer, right? Stands beside you. Used to be world’s number one environment-designer, right? Designed, in fact, this Lasha and all that therein, from what was once a fairly unpromising stretch of the Andes. Rhodes and Pagolini now work together, right? Now Mister Pagolini makes a film based loosely on the masterwork Amphibians of Time by Jake Byrnes—don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him, Mister Meyer, because very many rich revenant Martian stovepipe-laying millionaires are in the same ignominious position—besides he’s only the greatest prophet of our pre-post-literate age—and, at the same time, Mister Rhodes will make a film of Pagolini making his film, right? All we ask of you is the loan of x million credits to recreate the nineteen-seventies, for an agreed percentage of the gross of both holofilms.”

  Sneak close-up of Pagolini laughing. He adopts an English accent to say to himself, “The poor old sod is so ignorant he thinks parthenogenesis means being bom in the Parthenon.”

  “Yeah, well, dobro, only what you going to do with the nineteen-seventies when you get them?” Some tendency of the old mouth to sag open. Could be the effect of Earth-gravity.

  “Shoot them!” View over the busy busy idle guests. “Shoot them all, that’s what I’d like to do!” Molly says, twinkling up at the heavy glasses and the light beard of Rhodes. “Now you come with me some place where we can talk.”

  “Mind if I take a fumigant?”

  “Let me show you to your suite. How about you, Pagolini, doll, darling?”

  He is talking to a tall bare-bummed girl in an Oriental mask, and sipping a treacley liquid through a straw. She has a straw in the same liquid and is—significantly, one supposes—not yet sipping.