Perilous Planets

by Brian W Aldiss

  She looked down at her hands. They lay on the table before her, and they were slender and very white. The sad susurrus of the River filled the room, muting the throb of the juke box. Backgrounding both sounds was the roar of the falls.

  Farrell looked down at his own hands. ‘I guess I was sick, too,’ he said. ‘I must have been. I felt empty. Bored. Do you know what true boredom is? It’s a vast, gnawing nothingness that settles around you and accompanies you wherever you go. It comes over you in great gray waves and inundates you. It suffocates you. I said that my giving up the kind of work I wanted to do wasn’t responsible for my being on the River and it wasn’t—not directly. But my boredom was a reaction, just the same. Everything lost meaning for me. It was like waiting all your life for Christmas to come, and then getting up Christmas morning and finding an empty stocking. If I could have found something in the stocking—anything at all—I might have been all right. But I found nothing in it, absolutely nothing. I know now that it was my fault. That the only way anyone can expect to find something in his Christmas stocking is by placing something in it the night before, and that the nothingness I saw around me was merely a reflection of myself. But I didn’t know these things then.’ He raised his head and met her eyes across the table. ‘Why did we have to die in order to live? Why couldn’t we have met like other people—in a summer park or on a quiet street? Why did we have to meet on the River, Jill? Why?’

  She stood up, crying. ‘Let’s dance,’ she said. ‘Let’s dance all night.”

  ==========

  They drifted onto the empty dance floor and the music rose around them and took them in its arms—the sad and the gay and the poignant songs that first one of them and then the other remembered from the lifetimes they had cast aside. ‘That one’s from my Senior Prom,’ she said once. ‘The one we’re dancing to now,’ he said a short while afterward, ‘dates from the days when I was still a kid and thought I was in love.” ‘And were you in love?’ she asked, eyes gentle upon his face. ‘No,’ he answered, ‘not then. Not ever—until now.’ ‘I love you, too,’ she said, and the tune took on a softer note and for a long while time ceased to be.

  Toward dawn, she said, ‘I hear the River calling. Do you hear it, too?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I hear it.’

  He tried to fight the call, and so did she. But it wasn’t any use. They left the ghosts of themselves dancing in the. dawn-light and went down to the pier and boarded the raft and cast off. The current seized them greedily and the roar of the falls took on a triumphant tone. Ahead, in the wan rays of the rising sun, mist was rising high above the gorge.

  They sat close together on the raft, in each other’s arms. The roar was a part of the air they breathed now, and the mist was all around them. Through the mist, a vague shape showed. Another raft? Farrell wondered. He peered into the ghostly vapor, saw the little trees, the sandy shore. An island…

  Suddenly he understood what the islands in the River represented. Neither he nor Jill had truly wanted to die, and as a result the allegory which they had jointly brought to life and entered into contained loopholes. There might be a way back after all.

  Springing to his feet, he seized the pole and began poling. ‘Help me, Jill!’ he cried. ‘It’s our last chance.’

  She, too, had seen the island and divined its significance. She joined him, and they poled together. The current was omnipotent now, the rapids furious. The raft lurched, heaved, wallowed. The island loomed larger through the mist. ‘Harder, Jill, harder!’ he gasped. ‘We’ve got to get back—we’ve got to!’

  He saw then that they weren’t going to make it, that despite their combined efforts the current was going to carry them past their last link with life. There was one chance, and only one. He kicked off his shoes. ‘Keep poling, Jill!’ he shouted, and, after placing the end of the mooring line between his teeth and biting into it, he leaped into the rapids and struck out for the island for all he was worth.

  Behind him, the raft lurched wildly, tearing the pole from Jill’s grasp and sending her sprawling on the deck. He did not know this, however, till he reached the island and looked over his shoulder. By then, there was just enough slack remaining in the line for him to belay it around a small tree and secure it in place. The tree shuddered when the line went taut, and the raft came to an abrupt stop several feet from the brink of the falls. Jill was on her hands and knees now, trying desperately to keep herself from being thrown from the deck. Gripping the line with both hands, he tried to pull the raft in to the island, but so strong was the current that he would have been equally as successful if he had tried to pull the island in to the raft.

  The little tree was being gradually uprooted. Sooner or later it would be torn out of the ground and the raft would plunge over the falls. There was only one thing to do. ‘Your apartment, Jill!’ he shouted across the whiteness of the rapids. ‘Where is it?’

  Her voice was barely audible. ‘229 Locust Avenue. Number 301.’

  He was stunned. 229 Locust Avenue was the apartment building next to the one where he lived. Probably they had almost run into each other a dozen times. Maybe they had run into each other, and forgotten. In the city, things like that happened every day.

  But not on the River.

  ‘Hold on, Jill!’ he called. ‘I’m going the long way around!’

  ==========

  To travel from the island to the garage required but the merest flick of a thought. He came to in his car, head throbbing with misted pain. Turning off the ignition, he got out, threw open the garage doors, and staggered out into the shockingly cold winter’s night. He remembered belatedly that his hat and coat were in the back of the car.

  No matter. He crammed his lungs with fresh air and rubbed snow on his face. Then he ran down the street to the apartment building next door. Would he be in time? he wondered. He could not have been in the garage more than ten minutes at the most, which meant that time on the River moved at an even faster pace than he had thought. Hours, then, had already passed since he had left the island, and the raft could very well have gone over the falls.

  Or had there really been a raft? A River? A girl with sun-bright hair? Maybe the whole thing had been a dream—a dream that his unconscious had manufactured in order to snap him back to life.

  The thought was unendurable, and he banished it from his mind. Reaching the apartment building, he ran inside. The lobby was deserted, and the elevator was in use. He pounded up three flights of stairs and paused before her door. It was locked. ‘Jill!’ he called, and broke it down.

  She was lying on the living-room sofa, her face waxen in the radiance of a nearby floor lamp. She was wearing the yellow dress that he remembered so well, only now it was no longer torn. Nor were her slender slippers bedraggled. Her hair, though, was just the way he remembered it—short, and trying to curl. Her eyes were closed.

  He turned off the gas in the fireless circulating heater that stood against the wall, and he threw open all of the windows. He picked her up and carried her over to the largest one and let the sweet-life-giving air embrace her. ‘Jill!’ he whispered. ‘Jill!’

  Her eyelids quivered, opened. Blue eyes filled with terror gazed up into his face. Slowly, the terror faded away, and recognition took its place. He knew then that there would be no more Rivers for either of them.

  * * *

  Before him lay the mesa of the Virgin’s face, pale and poignant in the starlight. He was the only Earthman who had ever seen the Virgin as she really was; he had been only twenty at the time. Yet the intervening years were no more than a thin curtain, a curtain he had parted a thousand times.

  In the moment of conquest, he forgot what a stoney heart must beat in a…

  GODDESS IN GRANITE

  by Robert F. Young

  ==========

  When he reached the upper ridge of the forearm, Marten stopped to rest. The climb had not winded him but the chin was still miles away, and he wanted to conserve as much of his strength
as possible for the final ascent to the face.

  He looked back the way he had come—down the slope of the tapered forearm ridge to the mile-wide slab of the hand; down to the granite giantess-fingers protruding like sculptured promontories into the water. He saw his rented inboard bobbing in the blue bay between forefinger and thumb, and, beyond the bay, the shimmering waste of the southern sea.

  He shrugged his pack into a more comfortable position and checked the climbing equipment attached to his web belt—his piton pistol in its self-locking holster, his extra clips of piton cartridges, the airtight packet that contained his oxygen tablets, his canteen. Satisfied, he drank sparingly from the canteen and replaced it in its refrigerated case. Then he lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the morning sky.

  The sky was a deep, cloudless blue, and Alpha Virginis beat brightly down from the blueness, shedding its warmth and brilliance on the gynecomorphous mountain range known as the Virgin.

  She lay upon her back, her blue lakes of eyes gazing eternally upward. From his vantage point on her forearm, Marten had a good view of the mountains of her breasts. He looked at them contemplatively. They towered perhaps 8,000 feet above the chest-plateau, but, since the plateau itself was a good 10, feet above sea level, their true height exceeded 18,000 feet. However, Marten wasn’t discouraged. It wasn’t the mountains that he wanted.

  Presently he dropped his eyes from their snow-capped crests and resumed his trek. The granite ridge rose for a while, then slanted downward, widening gradually into the rounded reaches of the upper arm. He had an excellent view of the Virgin’s head now, though he wasn’t high enough to see her profile. The 11,000-foot cliff of her cheek was awesome at this range, and her hair was revealed for what it really was—a vast forest spilling riotously down to the lowlands, spreading out around her massive shoulders almost to the sea. It was green now. In autumn it would be brown, then gold; in winter, black.

  Centuries of rainfall and wind had not perturbed the graceful contours of the upper arm. It was like walking along a lofty promenade. Marten made good time. Still, it was nearly noon before he reached the shoulder-slope, and he realized that he had badly underestimated the Virgin’s vastness.

  The elements had been less kind to the shoulder-slope, and he had to go slower, picking his way between shallow gullies, avoiding cracks and crevices. In places the granite gave way to other varieties of igneous rock, but the over-all color of the Virgin’s body remained the same—a grayish-white, permeated with pink, startlingly suggestive of the hue of human skin..

  Marten found himself thinking of her sculptors, and for the thousandth time he speculated as to why they had sculptured her. In many ways, the problem resembled such Earth enigmas as the Egyptian, pyraminds, the Sacsahuaman Fortress, and the Baalbek Temple of the Sun. For one thing, it was just as irresolvable, and probably always would be, for the ancient race that had once inhabited Alpha Virginis IX had either died out centuries ago, or had migrated to the stars. In either case, they had left no written records behind them .

  Basically, however, the two enigmas were different. When you contemplated the pyramids, the Fortress, and the Temple of the Sun, you did not wonder why they had been built—you wondered how they had been built. With the Virgin, the opposite held true. She had begun as a natural phenomenon—an enormous geological upheaval—and actually all her sculptors had done, herculean though their labor had undoubtedly been, was to add the finishing touches and install the automatic subterranean pumping system that, for centuries, had supplied her artificial lakes of eyes with water from the sea.

  And perhaps therein lay the answer, Marten thought. Perhaps their only motivation had been a desire to improve upon nature. There certainly wasn’t any factual basis for the theosophical, sociological and psychological motivations postulated by half a hundred Earth anthropologists (none of whom had ever really seen her) in half a hundred technical volumes. Perhaps the answer was as simple as that…

  The southern reaches of the shoulder-slope were less eroded than the central and northern reaches, and Marten edged closer and closer to the south rim. He had a splendid view of the Virgin’s left side, and he stared, fascinated, at the magnificent purple-shadowed escarpment stretching away to the horizon. Five miles from its juncture with the shoulder-slope it dwindled abruptly to form her waist; three miles farther on it burgeoned out to form her left hip; then, just before it faded into the lavender distances, it blended into the gigantic curve of her thigh.

  The shoulder was not particularly steep, yet his chest was tight, his lips dry, when he reached its summit. He decided to rest for a while, and he removed his pack and sat down and propped his back against it. He raised his canteen to his lips and took a long cool draught. He lit another cigarette.

  From his new eminence he had a much better view of the Virgin’s head, and he gazed at it spellbound. The mesa of her face was still hidden from him, of course—except for the lofty tip of her granite nose; but the details of her cheek and chin stood out clearly. Her cheekbone was represented by a rounded spur, and the spur blended almost imperceptibly with the chamfered rim of her cheek. Her proud chin was a cliff in its own right, falling sheerly—much too sheerly, Marten thought—to the graceful ridge of her neck.

  Yet, despite her sculptors’ meticulous attention to details, the Virgin, viewed from so close a range, fell far short of the beauty and perfection they had intended. That was because you could see only part of her at a time: her cheek, her hair, her breasts, the distant contour of her thigh. But when you viewed her from the right altitude, the effect was altogether different. Even from a height of ten miles, her beauty was perceptible; at 75,000 feet, it was undeniable. But you had to go higher yet—had to find the exact level, in fact—before you could see her as her sculptors had meant her to be seen.

  To Marten’s knowledge, he was the only Earthman who had ever found that level, who had ever seen the Virgin as she really was; seen her emerge into a reality uniquely her own—an unforgettable reality, the equal of which he had never before encountered.

  Perhaps being the only one had had something to do with her effect on him; that, plus the fact that he had been only 20 at the time—20, he thought wonderingly. He was 32 now. Yet the intervening years were no more than a thin curtain, a curtain he had parted a thousand times.

  He parted it again.

  ==========

  After his mother’s third marriage he had made up his mind to become a spaceman, and he had quit college and obtained a berth as cabin boy on the starship Ulysses. The Ulysses’ destination was Alpha Virginis IX; the purpose of its voyage was to chart potential ore deposits.

  Marten had heard about the Virgin, of course. She was one of the seven hundred wonders of the galaxy. But he had never given her a second thought—till he saw her in the main viewport of the orbiting Ulysses. Afterward, he gave her considerable thought and, several days after planetfall, he ‘borrowed’ one of the ship’s life-rafts and went exploring. The exploit had netted him a week in the brig upon his return, but he hadn’t minded. The Virgin had been worth it.

  The altimeter of the life-raft had registered 55,000 feet when he first sighted her, and he approached her at that level. Presently he saw the splendid ridges of her calves and thighs creep by beneath him, the white desert of her stomach, the delicate cwm [?] of her navel. He was above the twin mountains of her breasts, within sight of the mesa of her face, before it occurred to him that, by lifting the raft, he might gain a much better perspective.

  He canceled his horizontal momentum and depressed the altitude button. The raft climbed swiftly—60,000 feet… 65,000… 70,000. It was like focusing a telescreen—80,000… His heart was pounding now—90,000… The oxygen dial indicated normal pressure, but he could hardly breathe.

  ,000, 101,000… Not quite high enough. 102,300… Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, Comely as Jerusalem, Terrible as an army with banners . . . 103,211… The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a
cunning workman… 103,288…

  He jammed the altitude button hard, locking the focus. He could not breathe at all now—at least not for the first, ecstatic moment. He had never seen anyone quite like her. It was early spring, and her hair was black; her eyes were a springtime blue. And it seemed to him that the mesa of her face abounded in compassion, that the red rimrock of her mouth was curved in a gentle smile.

  She lay there immobile by the sea, a Brobdingnagian beauty come out of the water to bask forever in the sun. The barren lowlands were a summer beach; the glittering ruins of a nearby city were an earring dropped from her ear; and the sea was a summer lake, the life-raft a metallic gull hovering high above the littoral.

  And in the transparent belly of the gull sat an infinitesimal man who would never be the same again…

  ==========

  Marten closed the curtain, but it was some time before the after-image of the memory faded away. When it finally did so, he found that he was staring with a rather frightening fixity toward the distant cliff of the Virgin’s chin.

  Roughly, he estimated its height. Its point, or summit, was on an approximate level with the crest of the cheek. That gave him 11,000 feet. To obtain the distance he had to climb to reach the face-mesa, all he had to do was to deduct the height of the neck-ridge. He figured the neck-ridge at about 8,000 feet; 8,000 from 11,000 gave him 3,000—3,000 feet!