Antigrav : Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters

by Philip Strick

  ‘Right, right, right!’ He laughed. ‘Let’s go and get an old-fashioned alcoholic drink, the kind that these holofilm guys don’t use any more.’

  As they padded back into the rather old-fashioned living area, where an alligator dozed with open eyes beside an ivory pool, he said, ‘No, honey, Rhodes has made the connection okay. He is second generation to my book. He finds the book kind of fuddy-duddy simply because the message got across to him so long ago that he acts on it well nigh instinctually.’

  She smiled, curling her long legs beneath her as she settled by the pool and started fondling the drugged reptile. ‘ “Well nigh.” Coffin, gutta percha, what was the other thing?’

  ‘Literacy. The mass-psychosis of the 1970s was merely build-up for the break-through into a higher level of human consciousness. That’s what we’re witnessing now. Rhodes’ epic would hardly be intelligible a few years ago. And he has seen that literacy has to go, just as I predicted.’

  She accepted the drink he poured her and set the clouded glass down on the alligator’s head.

  ‘You explained to me before about why literacy has to go, but I still don’t get it. It’s to do with needing more dimensions, isn’t it?’

  ‘The linear business, yes. More importantly, we are going to regain senses by sloughing off literacy. Those who could write ruled the world for—what?—ten thousand years. Very powerful minority, but only a minority in almost any culture you care to name. They were the clerks, and they shaped civilization. Now Rhodes, and more especially the generation after him—the true inheritors of this alien new century—they are shaking off the stultifying effects of literacy and getting back all the senses that have to be sacrificed to master a printed page and the cultures of the printed page.’

  Rhoda sipped her drink and then began to slide into the pool.

  ‘And this sloughing of literacy, as you call it, is the result of computerization?’

  ‘I’d put it this way, and how lovely you look I—The result of man’s still-developing mind. We have never been satisfied with our limited senses. The earliest men painted and developed weapons to extend their psychespheres. But some senses we were born with got lost in the upward battle, just as Meyer lost all potentiality in his fight for brute cash. Now that computers take most of the load, we reclaim many old freedoms...’

  She smiled up at him as he stripped.

  ‘You hairy old ape! Come in with me. Drag Horace in!’

  ‘You and I, Rhoda, my eternal love, we are the first man and woman on this planet.’ And he blundered down into the water beside her.

  ‘Ah, the female element!’

  The Number Two camera crew are sitting on the wide landing outside Rhodes’ suite, drinking stepped-milk and eating chickwiches. The landing is lumbered with Molly’s signature motifs, bright and outrageous confections inspired by Khmer art, burial ornaments, and the morphology of insects. The boys munch and chatter.

  ‘Wonder how Danko and his gang are getting on . . .’

  ‘Yeah ...’

  ‘Think they’ll let us sleep here?’

  ‘You know the Commo-capitalist system, boy—you’ll be sacking out on the beach tonight.’

  ‘What beach? The mountains, you mean!’

  ‘Get phased! You’re on the wrong dinky set.’

  ‘Alpha, I was getting muddled . .

  ‘What’s she doing in there with Cecil, anyway? Not being Thai, she’ll get no change out of him!’

  Beyond his moving mouth, before the chickwich comes up again, we see the door open and Molly emerge. We glide through the door before she can close it.

  Rhodes is polishing his spectacle lenses; without them, he has a deceptively mild look.

  ‘Gun-and-Clock Time . . .’

  He kicks off his boots.

  There is an array of screens in the hall of his suite. He pads over to them and turns them on. Views of packed humanity everywhere, long distance or swooping to close-up revealing skin texture as he twiddles the controls. He fiddles the volume at the same time, so that noise comes and goes. We see Meyer running through the snow, weeping, pursued by his wife who still wields the axe. Shots from Pagolini’s fantasy, swimming down to the temple—what he dreamed, someone else acted out in reality because the Earth is so crowded that coincidence is one with coffin and complicated. Shots of Danko Brankic sill flying noiselessly in and out of choking Mediterranean alleys. Byrnes, belly upwards, floating beside an alligator and a blonde. Quiller Singh, his Laser 5 belting triumphantly into Katmandu.

  Rhodes laughs.

  ‘Great old prehistoric man, Byrnes! We’ve left him behind. Left them all behind . . . New human beings are coming up.’

  Flicking over switches with decision, he hurries back into the adjoining room among plastic insect bodies and adjusts monitor and scanner so that he can stand and see himself burning solid in the screen. He begins to ‘act,’ reciting rather than speaking.

  ‘Earth swarms with people—crawls with people. It’s full up with people, but there’s still room for more. Byrnes saw it first—this film is our tribute to him while he still lives. He saw that the population explosion was a positive thing, born from our love of children, of more and more life. He saw that great pressure of population was necessary for man to be forced into his next stage of being, a new level of awareness, a greater integration. From the mass-psychosis of the twentieth century, a new sanity is being born. Now that we have entire control of population-build-up, and can feed our glad new mouths, we need fear nothing except the old fears. .

  Then he burst out laughing.

  ‘Cut! I’m talking twentieth-century rhodomentade! One foot in the past, that’s me—but we’ll get there. One more generation, psyche striking sparks off psyche... It needs seeing. ..’

  His voice tails off inaudibly. He goes over to the interior omnivision and switches on. Room after room is revealed, many untenanted, many bare of furnishing. Some are packed with human activity. He hits on one room where there is a monitor screen burning. He sees himself in it.

  The woman viewing his image looks up, startled but smiling. She waves, her lips move, but Rhodes has the volume too low to hear. He flicks on. He is searching searching for a nest of Thai girls. Molly must have one somewhere in her castle.

  He flips on to the terraces, zooms in on Pagolini just getting up to go, holding the hand of his bare-bummed girl.

  ‘Ever see a movie called Kid Auto Races at Venice?’

  ‘Is that a movie?’

  ‘Quite an historic one.’

  Rhodes is fiddling with the volume. Their voices are enormously loud, echoing through the room, growing louder as Pagolini and the girl retreat from the eye of the camera.

  Pagolini is talking to Byrnes and Rhoda in a cathedral. They walk up and down. It is an unusual cathedral, very heavy—possibly the cathedral in Saragossa, Spain.

  ‘This is where we intend to start recreating the 1970s. This cathedral is not used any more, except for the benefit of tourists—they get about fifty thousand through the turnstiles on an average day in the high season. I have bought it. A performance of Macbeth was given here some years ago which I stage-managed. I like the colouring.’

  ‘Maybe we should holiday near here and watch you shoot,’ Rhoda said.

  ‘You know what a Macbeth green is?’

  ‘Sure, it’s the place where the witches three shacked up.’

  ‘You are a lady of the old culture.’

  ‘You must get in my point about cities as a symbol of the death of the old human psyche, Signor Pagolini. The Romantics are the sickening point. Their cities slowly sink underground. Remember Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome, and the subterranean passages in Poe . . . Partly they were the effect of opium, but only in part.’ As he speaks, he stops to study some intricate stucco ornamentation, not noticing that Pagolini has walked on with Rhoda. Tn later writers, the psyche fades lower still. The writings of Cocteau and Asimov provide examples. Asimov has whole underground planets, if one ma
y so say . . . Psychic death before rebirth. Dark before renaissance ...’

  There is a beautiful shot of Pagolini and Rhoda as they pause far down the patterned aisle under the high windows. She hesitates, as if wishing to go back to Jake. Jake’s voice is lost. Before Pagolini can turn to her, a girl appears in the main entrance, framed in light from outside. She may be the girl he is later to discover on Molly’s terraces. She wears a long simple dress of frail material which might have been designed from a Walter Crane drawing. When Pagolini sees her, he in his turn hesitates, looking back to see what Rhoda is doing. People caught in light, transfixed, transformed. All this in long shot, viewed from Byrnes’ pillar.

  Rhoda makes a slight gesture. Pagolini interprets it as one of assent. With a slight bow to her, he turns towards the door, the daylight, the girl framed there. Beyond her, the crowded square can faintly be discerned. The camera crew is there, ready to record the moment of splendour when Pagolini emerges. Is that Rhodes, sitting on a camera dolly?

  The organ is playing part of Georgi Mushel’s Suite for Organ—something of a second-rate piece of music.

  Almost subliminal shot of Pagolini manifesting himself in the doorway from outside. The cathedral is Pennsylvania Station.

  Another cathedral facade—or at least a monstrous building. Shadow of the muscle-plane over it. The plane lands. While the five rowers slump over their oars, Rhodes and Brankic jump nimbly out.

  Rhodes walks along the promenade by the sea, head down, hands clasped behind his back in a somewhat dejected fashion.

  DON’T WORRY—ALL ENDS HAPPILY

  Brankic trudges behind, lugging cans of film.

  OR CEASES ON A NOT UNHAPPY NOTE, LET’S SAY

  ‘We also have to bring in the dear departed. Where would we all be without the countless past generations copulating away for our sakes?’

  Brankic chuckles. ‘You don’t really want to make a holo. You want to recreate life itself.’

  Rhodes also chuckles. ‘Right, right, right!’ he quotes.

  On the snow-covered cliffs above them are running figures. We see Mrs Meyer, axeless now that the madness has passed. She weeps as she flees, pursued by her husband, who is wielding the axe. Some day we’ll evolve so far, we’ll become All That We Are . . . Louder and louder, till drowned by the ticking of a clock. Last chance to study a verge-escapement with foliot before the house-lights come up.