Antigrav : Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters

by Philip Strick

  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-lamined 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 splendour, which looks as if it were designed by Pangolini himself, although he laughed sharply when she suggested as much. The ample bust which won her the qualifying round as Mrs. Ernstein-Dipthong 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 through.

  We catch a guest saying, Tn 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 muscleplane,’ 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 Pangolini 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 centre 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, 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 labelled.

  ‘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 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 Lhasa during the first stage of the Himalayan Rally, closely followed by two I.B.M. Saab Nanosines. Cheering lamas. 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 fluorescents. 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 Lhasa 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 kilometre by kilometre, one hundred lengths of pipe to the kilometre. 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 Habsburg 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, me 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 curtsey, and an obscene gesture.

  ‘Mr Cecil Rhodes is the world’s Number One film-maker, right? He is not present here. Mr 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 Lhasa and all that therein is from what was once a fairly unpromising stretch of the Andes. Rhodes and Pagolini now work together, right? Now Mr 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, Mr 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, Mr 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 1970s, 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 born in the Parthenon.’

  ‘Yeah, well, dobro, only what you going to do with the 1970s 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 treacly liquid through a straw. She has a straw in the same liquid and is—significantly, one supposes—not yet sipping.

  ‘I’ll be around here, Molly.’

  ‘Cataleptic, doll!’

  She takes Rhodes’ arm and leads him slowly away. Dappled light and shade as of sun through lightly foliaged trees—the poplars of Provence perhaps—play over their faces as they move through the long room among the droves of elegant bodies. The expression on their faces is pleasant. Here and there, a man or woman stands naked among the other guests. One such woman is being absent-mindedly fingered by a man and wife as she plays with a little toy clown.

  Molly and Rhodes enter the dance room, where strobe lights burn to the beat. The stop-start-stop-start movements of dance are abstract. Limbs are dislocated in the microseconds of dark.

  ‘A friend of mine had epilepsy in here last week. Some sort of an illness.’

  ‘Coffin, gutta percha, illness.’

  She laughed, sagging against him. ‘Dobro! Must have been hell back in the old centuries. Too few people to go round. . .’

  Rhodes’ beard trembles with emotion as he speaks.

  ‘Old Byrnes was right, a true prophet. I met him—I told you, over at his ranch in the States, big ranch. Gondwana. We did some filming there. Not too good. He perceived that the essential differentness of humanity to other species is our interdependence, one on another. Sometimes we call it love, sometimes hate, but it is always interdependence. So societies built up, always just too elaborate for the average solitary consciousness to comprehend. It’s the building up, the concentration, that accounts for man’s progress. We make ourselves forcing houses. Greater concentrations precede major cultural advances. Byrnes grasped many years ago that—’

  He emphasizes what he is saying with forceful gestures, in a manner unlike his usual cool speech. He is shouting to compete with the insistent beat that rivals the strobes in punching sensibilities. So part of this crucial speech is lost, and is drowned out finally before completion as the camera gets snarled in dancers and loses Molly and her guest in the melee.

  Instead we get an almost subliminal shot of Quiller Singh snarling up a series of hairpins, with Rosemay beside him in the red Laser 5.

  Instead we have to put up with the bare-bummed girl smiling her beautiful best and whispering to Pagolini. ‘They say she really does change her cars whenever the ashtrays are full.’

  He is looking pensive. ‘Probably so, but you must remember that she has cut down her smoking considerably.’

  She is taking his hand and saying, ‘Ride with me in an ashtray-powered automobile and we will all the pleasures prove that stately mountain, hill, and grove....’

  He is running with her down a long flight of steps, saying, ‘Isn’t it “We with all the pleasures disprove.. .”?’

  When she dives into the lake, he follows, and they sink down and down deeper, smiling at each other. All that we are Happened so long ago—What we may be... A cascade of harps. At the bottom of the sea, a little Greek temple with fish fluttering like birds among the pillars. They drift towards it, hand in hand.

  ‘This is the green again, the exact green I want,’ he tells her. ‘We are all moving towards a new level of human consciousness! It’s the green of Macbeth. You know Macbeth?'

  ‘Was that the guy who swam all the way from Luna to Earth a few years back?’

  ‘No, that was Behemoth or some such name. Macbeth is a Shakespeare film. That’s the green I want.’

  ‘Rigor mortis, man! Isn’t any old green green enough?’

  ‘Not if you are an artist. Are you an artist?’

  It was all white inside the temple, white and Macbeth green.

  ‘Ask me another.’

  ‘Will you let me lie with you for, say, forty-three minutes?’ She looks up startled from the treacly liquid which she has now begun to sip, almost as if his fantasy disrupted her own line of thought. ‘What was that?’

  He stares at his watch, studying the minute, second, and micro-second hand. ‘Maybe it’s not worth the bother. I was wondering if you would lie with me for around forty-one and a half minutes.’

  Meyer’s wife is running about the place screaming. She has a long Asian axe in her hands. A sub-title reads: like an ordinary axe, but sharper. She is smashing up things.

  ‘What is she doing?’ Shackerton asks.

  ‘She’s smashing up things,’ Meyer says.

  ‘Right, right, right!’ He goes over to Pagolini, who is leaning out of one of the windows looking down at the monastery roofs. ‘Mrs Meyer has gone mad. Very revenant. Hadn’t we better leave, right?’

  ‘She’s not mad,’ Meyer explains, scratching his ear by way of apology. ‘It’s the ergot in the bread, that’s what they tell me. Ergot in the bread—makes you mad.’

  ‘How cataleptic to find ergot here,’ Pagolini says. The view shows rows of terraced houses stretching east and west; crowning Mount Everest is a big sign reading ‘lots’, visible several hundreds of miles away—and even further than that when Earth is on the wane and you are standing in Luna City with a pair of good binoculars. ‘Ergot has played a major part in influencing human history. The French character, so I have heard, has been moulded—’

  ‘Moulded, right, right, right!’ says Shackerton, screaming with laughter at the pun.

  ‘—by various outbreaks of ergot throughout the centuries. The Ottoman Empire would have fallen two centuries before it did had not the Armies of Peter the Great, which were marching south to defeat the Turks, been afflicted by madness caused by ergot. It stopped them in Astrakhan. Make a note of that title, Shackerton—possible song there
. You don’t know when you are made—’

  While he is speaking, Mrs Meyer has been drawing nearer, carving her way through panelling, furniture, and light fixtures as she comes.

  ‘I know when I’m mad! And I’m good and mad now!’

  ‘Right, right, right!’

  ‘Catatonic!’

  ‘She does know, too, she does!’

  Meyer runs to a huge gamboge sofa that would hold ten, swivels it round, and reveals an escape chute. They take it. Mrs Meyer comes after them, axe in hand. As they pick themselves up in the snow, she runs past them and begins to chop up the Pagolini helicopter.

  ‘She likes a good whirley-bird when the fit takes her, does my Mary,’ Meyer says, with just a touch of complacency to his sorrow.

  ‘Coffin, complicated, gutta percha, whirley-bird,’ collects Pagolini. He appears somewhat impatient.

  ‘Figgle-fam, then,’ says Meyer, sulkily. He is caught at a disadvantage. He goes over to where one of the rotor vanes lies, stoops, holding the small of his back as he bends, and retrieves a shattered vane.

  ‘I suppose I’d better agree to financing the 1970s,’ he says. People can change Without any why or how, Powers will emerge Building behind your brow. . .

  The axe comes flying and catches Shackerton on the glutea maxima. He falls, screaming.

  Blood fills the screen. A notice appears:

  FOR THE BENEFIT OF THOSE WHO WOULD CARE TO LEAVE THIS THEATRE NOW

  It hangs there in the void before giving way to its completion, and the dissolve is so slow that the two ends of the sentence intermix irritatingly before the end can be read.

  LEAVE

  The screams of Shackerton fade as the theme emerges again. WE ANNOUNCE THAT THE REST OF THE FILM IS NON-VIOLENT

  ‘Isn’t it a bit of a muddle?’, Rhoda asked, as Byrnes switched off.

  ‘Life?’

  ‘The Rhodes epic.’

  ‘To a degree.’

  ‘Come on, Jake. It’s a load of bullshit!’

  ‘Life?’

  ‘He isn’t making one connection with your book, not one little connection, right?’