Antigrav : Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters

by Philip Strick

  It was at this critical point, so perfectly timed as almost to invite certain conclusions about the computer’s motives, that the Companion announced the desirability of a plant call in order to replenish the ship’s chemical supplies. A star was located only a few hours distant, possessing an E-type planet stocked with the appropriate materials from which the ship could synthesise what it needed. According to the file, the planet was inhabited by a human-type race at a fairly primitive stage of development; well aware of the strict Federation directives on matters of inter-cultural contact, Randy aimed to land on one of the many uninhabited islands scattered across the oceanic Northern hemisphere.

  Finally the computer selected a lush, cone-shaped island which according to the infra-detectors supported no animal life likely to present any major problems, and the ship settled itself down with something of a flourish. The Companions always enjoyed the chance to show off, and landings had been known at which the computers burst out with flags, fireworks, and the Home Planets Anthem, ruining all hopes of peaceful contact with the local life forms. But on this occasion the ship’s door merely whispered open and with enormous relief Randy stepped outside. .

  He was on an open grassy^ plain close to the sparkling sapphire sea, a beach of fine white sand crusting its edges. Here and there the grassland featured intriguing pod-shaped plants with superbly velvet green leaves. Occasional trees bore fruits which the Companion stated to be acceptable to the human constitution, and Randy gave them enthusiastic attention ; they collapsed succulently in his hands, revealing juices and flesh that were intoxicatingly flavoured. When at last he could eat no more, he ran into the clear, astonishing shallows of the ocean and washed nine months of plus-light from his mind. He rolled in the sun, laughed and shouted, jumped over his own shadow, and did most of the foolish things you’d expect, and in due time he was quiet again, stuck with the one problem that the scents and breezes of the island did nothing to solve.

  Part of the trouble was that the ship didn’t need him. Its glistening ground serpent, directed by the computer, probed the planet’s surface for suitable mineral veins, while the Companion’s laboratory section hummed with self-satisfied activity. Samples were tested, ores smelted, reagents mixed and centrifuges whirled; bursts of bluegrass music punctuated the murmuring litany of equations, a racket to which the pilot had become resigned as indication that the computer was deep in thought. He shrugged away the sense of impotence that threatened all too soon to return, and set out to explore the island. It would be good to walk himself into a natural sleep for a change, instead of having to accept one of the computer’s nauseating dozee drugs which, whatever the shape and colour (and the range seemed infinite) always gave him nightmares of quite shattering decadence.

  The coastline was a delight, composed of clear simple colours in sudden sweeps and curves. A sun of muted gold hung in the sky as though the afternoon would last forever, and the air tasted of perfume, a kind that seemed to bring back unexpected memories of fulfillment. Dreamily following his nose, Randy strolled through a clump of trees that took him out of sight of the ship, and halted abruptly in their shadow while all considerations of the penalties for cultural interference drained from his mind. On the green plain beyond, reality shimmered as if the light-waves themselves were melting in the heat. Then his vision cleared, and there appeared before him, seated on a couch of velvet leaves, a creature of such spectacular beauty that he found himself vowing feverishly never again to waste his time with the 3-D pull-out pin-downs from Stagman magazine.

  She appeared not to have seen him as she gazed out to sea with mysterious hooded eyes, her body languid and relaxed on the couch. She wore nothing but a short blue shift of some intricately worked material, and the sunlight lapped across her skin to make a tapestry of glowing curves and enticing shadows. Softly Randy moved to her side and amazingly she turned to welcome him, making a tentative movement with her hand which he took as an invitation. He sat down, paused for a moment on the edge of conversation, then reached instead to stroke the dark brown hair that swept like a long veil down her back. Words were unnecessary for the messages pouring between them in the electric air, and the lady showed no sign of wanting a language lesson.

  She sighed like the murmur of leaves in midsummer and stretched herself out before him, the hem of her garment rising gently to reveal dark and appetising areas of accessibility. Her scent was all cinnamon, musk, and pure violets, stifling rational thought. Randy toppled drunkenly into her and was enfolded by flesh that writhed delicately against his own, and by hair that seemed to caress him with gently powdered tendrils as he plunged and gasped and shook. The afternoon exploded in golden fragments.

  Afterwards, Randy slid from the couch and lay on the white sand convinced, as the Companion had never been able to convince him, that he now stood a chance of understanding his place in the universe. It was as though beings from some outer galaxy were suddenly aware pf his presence, but as they stirred to greet him he began to fear the hollow echo of their thoughts, the dissonant music of their knowledge, and he sank back into wakefulness. A mist of writhing green and purple shapes lay briefly over his eyes, and warning voices whispered instantly forgotten messages. But the girl still sat placidly on her couch and at the sight of her, Randy’s confusion melted away. Purpose and anticipation pulled him briskly to his feet.

  To his surprise, her welcome was not repeated. She smiled in an absent-minded fashion and returned her gaze to the ocean. When he tried to caress her as before, her flesh seemed actually to crawl with distaste, she made no move to lie back, and her shift stayed clamped demurely to her knees. Randy was half inclined to force the issue, but the Federation directives had once more begun to hover at the back of his mind and at last he gave up. Promising to return soon with priceless gifts, an offer to which she paid not the slightest attention, he resumed his exploration of the island.

  The coastline dipped again, and the girl soon disappeared behind him. The rich grass rippled in the heat and the air quivered with a spice that made his blood surge; beside him, the ocean flashed a million reflections of the sky. Shading his eyes, he blinked with disbelief at a new girl who lay ahead on her couch of velvet, her body undulating in unmistakable delight at his approach. She could have been the sister of the gorgeous creature he had just left; the same dark hair cascaded over the same perfect slopes of the back, the same kaleidoscope of delicate lights and shadows was picked out by the sun across the smooth and supple limbs, the same sweet savour drifted teasingly across the grass. She even wore a similar shift, although this one was red. It was intricately textured with tiny patterns that changed and flowed as he tried to follow them, their writhing designs suggesting an elusive and haunting symbolism.

  Disinclined to question the gifts that fate so seldom placed in his path, Randy made reverent haste towards the startlingly beautiful phenomenon that awaited him. Again words could be discarded as unnecessary; her eyes, deep violet pools of promise, beckoned him with unequivocal invitations, fully reinforced by the receptive and compliant body. He became mindless, drawn into a frenzy of sensations that mingled and mounted, until a nova flared and he sank at last into a dreamlike state where the girl’s every movement and gesture seemed part of an obscure but vital communication between one end of the universe and the other. He stared fascinated into her eyes, while a haze of glorious colours spiralled around the couch, and then he must have slept, for there was a time when the grasses and creepers that carpeted the island appeared to explore him with their tendrils and the moss grew restless beneath his back. The sun was a deeper gold and had dipped lower in the sky when Randy splashed ocean over his head and returned refreshed to his delightful partner.

  Close to her, he found desire reviving as strongly as if it had never been satisfied, but when he reached again for the girl she was as unyielding as a block of wood, and her gaze was coldly out to sea. Try as he might, he was unable to rekindle her interest in the healthy athletic pursuits he had in mind.
She ignored him so completely that he couldn’t even be sure she understood what he wanted. Eventually Randy decided he would have to leave her there and hope she’d be around next day in more amenable mood. He kissed the motionless mouth and wandered back in the direction of the ship.

  He splashed in the shallows along the dappled coast, the sand crunching beneath his feet, the breeze stirring across the grass dunes and probing the clumps of trees. The girl in the blue shift was still sunbathing where he had left her, and he halted on the edge of the water, uncertain whether to wave and rush by or stop to talk about old times.

  Her perfume settled the matter. As he approached, led by the nose, she stirred and stretched and her smile got inside his body and tuned it up like an orchestra. She reached for him with irresistible urgency and once more he felt himself swept into her on an unthinking torrent of enjoyment. Ripping away the shift completely, he abandoned himself to an extraordinary symphony of exotic rhythms and caresses. It was as if the planet itself had opened up to swallow him, the grass and the giant green leaves closing above his head.

  The climax seemed to scatter him around the landscape like fragments of a bursting pod. For a long time he lay unable to move, with fantastic visions of strange beings and unearthly music wandering through his mind. The colours of the waning afternoon ran slowly together into a magnificent sunset, and when he finally staggered to his feet it was growing dark. The girl lay on her couch in a tight ball and he could do nothing to rouse her. Reluctant to carry her back to the ship and risk arousing the Companion’s suspicion about his illegal activities, he draped the torn shift and some of the big velvet leaves over her as some form of protection against the night, and made his way alone across the grass.

  The computer was rather stuffy about having been left on its own for so long but at last it consented, after some argument, to turn the lights out. Randy fell instantly asleep on his bunk as dozee capsules bounced unheeded across his chest to the floor.

  When he awoke the next morning, the Companion was strangely silent, although lights pulsed here and there on its console. The datadials indicated that the task of chemical restocking was now complete, but there was no indication that any resumption of the journey had been calculated. Debating whether to give the thing a kick in the fusebox, Randy suddenly noticed that the ship’s door was wide open, revealing sea and sand and sunlight. The spiced air of the island summoned him, and gladly he responded.

  It was crowded out there. Green couches were spread around in the sun, thickly clustered near the ship but also dotted across the grass in all directions as far as Randy could see, covering the island. And on them reclined girls of every description, of all sizes, all colours. They all wore shifts of the familiar design, in hues of rainbow miscellany, although red and blue were obvious favourites. Otherwise the girls were only alike in that they were blindingly beautiful and their deep clear eyes were fixed on Randy as if their lives had been specially constructed for this one ecstatic moment. As he appeared, a wave of delight surged across his audience, and he thought he heard the island itself sigh in the shimmering silence of the morning. His fans were waiting and there was much to be done. Their perfume tugged him forward.

  For several hours, Randy was extremely busy. Arms, bodies and legs ensnared him in a thicket of willing flesh, and hunger and pleasure pursued each other with frantic urgency. He ploughed and dug his way across this incredible plantation of sun-soaked skin, discarded garments, and voluptuous welcome, until his responses became too painful to be worth the continuing effort, and the pauses between bouts were shadowed with uneasy dreams in which his whole being became fragmented and seemed to crumble into sand with untraceable finality. Dimly he congratulated himself on his performance, and at last he ventured to hope that he might spend the rest of his days without again setting eyes on another female form.

  Breaking free from the eager ranks of his admirers, he splashed and floated in the warm ocean until a modest confidence returned to his legs that they could hold him upright once more. The girls fortunately made no attempt to follow him, but gazed in worship from the shoreline, undulating pensively on their couches. Randy chewed some fruit and wandered at the water’s edge, keeping out of reach; maintaining a polite smile, he eyed the girls dispassionately and did some hard thinking.

  Suddenly he noticed among the sunbathers the girl in blue he had left wrapped in leaves the night before. Evidently her night out had proved far from beneficial. She lay apart from the others, unmoving on the stained and fraying couch, her shift draped over her limbs like a rotten .shroud. The tawny skin that had shone out to him yesterday was now pallid and dull, sagging in places to create hollows of emaciation, and her mane of dark hair had coagulated into a limp, repellent mess. Horrified at this apparent consequence of his attentions, Randy made his way towards her; the Companion had assured him that under normal circumstances there could be no possible compatibility between the local bacteria and Randy’s own collection of extra-galactic viruses, but the circumstances had strayed rather far from the normal. If the girl was in trouble, Randy was likely to be in trouble too.

  In the first automatic move of diagnosis, he took her hand. It parted immediately from the sagging mass of her body and rested soggily in his grip, greenish matter dripping from the severed wrist. The fingers broke and oozed together in his palm, and the thumb dropped to the ground with a soft squelch. Shaking off the decaying tissue in revulsion, he turned the girl’s face towards him. It slipped under his touch, and his fingers sank into the black jelly where her eyes had been.

  Randy left in a hurry, clambering heedlessly across a landscape of enchanting smiles. The island heaved beneath "his feet, and the sun beat like a hammer on his skull. When he got to the ship he was crawling and had the impression that he was making a lot of noise. He fell through the doorway and dragged the hatch shut.

  The computer received Randy’s confession in utter contempt. If he had only bothered, said the Companion, to study all the information available before charging out of the ship like some Jugoslavian nudist (the doubtless apocryphal ardour of this legendary race was the basis for one of the more memorable sagas of the spaceways), he might have avoided making so spectacular a fool of himself. He should be aware, added the Companion, that nothing was unknown to or unforeseen by the cmp DiRAC-deriv. Mk iv Astg. multi-media computers, and that exploits such as Randy’s not only had no hope of being kept secret but were even so predictable as to be exactly calculable according to a now-proven constant in which x was equal to fifteen plus-light square roots divided simultaneously by point seven recurring. During the hours in which Randy had been neglecting his duties, stated the Companion, it had taken the opportunity to prepare a thesis on this very subject, demonstrating a breadth of vision so extraordinary that the Companion made so bold as to be confident that the highest intergalactic honours would be accorded to it when the voyage was completed. With a modest cough, the Companion disgorged a six-hundred-page volume of computer print-outs, handsomely bound in leather with gold edgings. Randy might care, suggested the Companion, to browse through this epoch-making work while preparing his own report to the Federation, although they were unlikely to treat his case with much sympathy if he presented it in his usual inarticulate manner.

  Wearily dropping the book into the recycler, Randy pressed the Bowman button (the emergency control known only to the pilot in plus-light ships), and let the Companion sing nursery rhymes for half an hour while he consumed a soothe-tube of nerve paste. Relaxing on the control couch, he then re-engaged the information banks of the computer and summoned up all available facts and references about the planet they were on. The Companion had neglected to mention, of course, that the place had actually been visited before, so that instead of the usual brief list of aerial survey data there were voluminous technical and ecological reports, mostly incomprehensible to the non-specialist. They rolled across the information screen and Randy scowled his way through them without finding anything helpful. S
uch biological deductions as had been made seemed in no way related to his own experiences, and only one group of the exploring team had been anywhere near the islands of the Northern hemisphere, their purpose and conclusions connected merely with the botanical.

  After presenting all the main texts, the computer automatically began to turn up the footnotes and addenda. Letting these run at double speed, Randy was about to give up hope when a small picture flashed by that struck a faint chord. He turned back and stared for a long time. The brightly coloured illustration showed the cross-section of a flower, and the accompanying article, under a severe Latin headline, was a report by one of the botanists.

  Of the three species of Bacchantius growing on the planet Rosy Lee, perhaps the most unusual is Gigantiflora. The plant is herbaceous, and perenniates by means of thick starchy tubers. It flowers annually in the correct conditions and is a member of the family Phorusorchidacae, the local orchid family. (See ref. Axaia p. 74,418 for description of the parallel evolution of flowering plants on E-type worlds. See ref. Modoinisk p. 731,111 for detailed parameters of E-type conditions.)

  Normally the Gigantiflora flowers only after sensing the airborne waste products of the humanoid species Gaggus gaggus which inhabits the planet Rosy Lee. The buds take some five months to mature but require no external stimulus to begin formation. When fully developed, they lie dormant under a thick covering of velvety green leaves. Once the presence of a humanoid has aroused the flowering response the buds rise above the leaves overnight and open just before dawn. The flowers are huge and strikingly shaped. Specimens examined ranged from 1-3716 m to 1-8315 m in height.