“But, Werther...”
“What is wrong, dear Werther?” begged Catherine. “It is only a masquerade.”
“Can you not see? It is you – what you and I mean – that they mock. No – it is best that you do not see. Come, Catherine. They are insane; they revile all that is sacred!” And he bore her bodily towards the wall, rushing through the nearest doorway and out into the darkened sky.
He left his typewriter behind, so great was his haste to be gone from that terrible scene. He fled with her willy-nilly through the air, through daylight, through pitchy night. He fled until he came to his own tower, flanked now by green lawns and rolling turf, surrounded by songbirds, swamped in sunshine. And he hated it: landscape, larks and light – all were hateful.
He flew through the window and found his room full of comforts – of cushions and carpets and heady perfume – and with a gesture he removed them. Their particles hung gleaming in the sun’s beams for a moment. But the sun, too, was hateful. He blacked it out and night swam into that bare chamber. And all the while, in amazement, Catherine Gratitude looked on, her lips forming the question, but never uttering it. At length, tentatively, she touched his arm.
“Werther?”
His hands flew to his head. He roared in his mindless pain.
“Oh, Werther!”
“Ah! They destroy me! They destroy my ideals!”
He was weeping when he turned to bury his face in her hair.
“Werther!” She kissed his cold cheek. She stroked his shaking back. And she led him from the ruins of his room and down the passage to her own apartment.
“Why should I strive to set up standards,” he sobbed, “when all about me they seek to pull them down. It would be better to be a villain!”
But he was quiescent; he allowed himself to be seated upon her bed; he felt suddenly drained. He sighed. “They hate innocence. They would see it gone forever from this globe.”
She gripped his hand. She stroked it. “No, Werther. They meant no harm. I saw no harm.”
“They would corrupt you. I must keep you safe.”
Her lips touched his and his body came alive again. Her fingers touched his skin. He gasped.
“I must keep you safe.”
In a dream, he took her in his arms. Her lips parted, their tongues met. Her young breasts pressed against him – and for perhaps the first time in his life Werther understood the meaning of physical joy. His blood began to dance to the rhythm of a sprightlier heart. And why should he not take what they would take in his position? He placed a hand upon a pulsing thigh. If cynicism called the tune, then he would show them he could pace as pretty a measure as any. His kisses became passionate, and passionately were they returned.
“Catherine!”
A motion of a power ring and their clothes were gone, the bed hangings drawn.
And your auditor, not being of that modern school which salaciously seeks to share the secrets of others’ passions (secrets familiar, one might add, to the great majority of us), retires from this scene.
But when he woke the next morning and turned on the sun, Werther looked down at the lovely child beside him, her auburn hair spread across the pillows, her little breasts rising and falling in tranquil sleep, and he realized that he had used his reaction to the masquerade to betray his trust. A madness had filled him; he had raised an evil wind and his responsibility had been borne off by it, taking Innocence and Purity, never to return. His lust had lost him everything.
Tears reared in his tormented eyes and ran cold upon his heated cheeks. “Mongrove was perceptive indeed,” he murmured. “To be befriended by Werther is to be embraced by a viper. She can never trust me – anyone – again. I have lost my right to offer her protection. I have stolen her childhood.”
And he got up from the bed, from the scene of that most profound of crimes, and he ran from the room and went to sit in his old chair of unpolished quartz, staring listlessly through the window at the paradise he had created outside. It accused him; it reminded him of his high ideals. He was astonished by the consequences of his actions: he had turned his paradise to hell.
A great groan reverberated in his chest. “Oh, now I know what sin is!” he said. “And what terrible tribute it exacts from the one who tastes it!”
And he sank almost luxuriously into the deepest gloom he had ever known.
V. IN WHICH WERTHER FINDS REDEMPTION OF SORTS
He avoided Catherine Gratitude all that day, even when he heard her calling his name, for if the landscape could fill him with such agony, what would he feel under the startled inquisition of her gaze? He erected himself a heavy dungeon door so that she could not get in, and, as he sat contemplating his poisoned paradise, he saw her once, walking on a hill he had made for her. She seemed unchanged, of course, but he knew in his heart how she must be shivering with the chill of lost innocence. That it should have been himself, of all men, who had introduced her so young to the tainted joys of carnal love! Another deep sigh and he buried his fists savagely in his eyes.
“Catherine! Catherine! I am a thief, an assassin, a despoiler of souls. The name of Werther de Goethe becomes a synonym for Treachery!”
It was not until the next morning that he thought himself able to admit her to his room, to submit himself to a judgement which he knew would be worse for not being spoken. Even when she did enter, his shifty eye would not focus on her for long. He looked for some outward sign of her experience, somewhat surprised that he could detect none.
He glared at the floor, knowing his words to be inadequate. “I am sorry,” he said.
“For leaving the Ball, darling Werther! The epilogue was infinitely sweeter.”
“Don’t!” He put his hands to his ears. “I cannot undo what I have done, my child, but I can try to make amends. Evidently you must not stay here with me. You need suffer nothing further on that score. For myself, I must contemplate an eternity of loneliness. It is the least of the prices I must pay. But Mongrove would be kind to you, I am sure.” He looked at her. It seemed that she had grown older. Her bloom was fading now that it had been touched by the icy fingers of that most sinister, most insinuating of libertines, called Death. “Oh,” he sobbed, “how haughty was I in my pride! How I congratulated myself on my high-mindedness. Now I am proved the lowliest of all my kind!”
“I really cannot follow you, Werther dear,” she said. “Your behaviour is rather odd today, you know. Your words mean very little to me.”
“Of course they mean little,” he said. “You are unworldly, child. How can you anticipate... ah, ah...” and he hid his face in his hands.
“Werther, please cheer up. I have heard of le petit mal, but this seems to be going on for a somewhat longer time. I am still puzzled...”
“I cannot, as yet,” he said, speaking with some difficulty through his palms, “bring myself to describe in cold words the enormity of the crime I have committed against your spirit – against your childhood. I had known that you would – eventually – wish to experience the joys of true love – but I had hoped to prepare your soul for what was to come – so that when it happened it would be beautiful.”
“But it was beautiful, Werther.”
He found himself experiencing a highly inappropriate impatience with her failure to understand her doom.
“It was not the right kind of beauty,” he explained.
“There are certain correct kinds for certain times?” she asked. “You are sad because we have offended some social code?”
“There is no such thing in this world, Catherine – but you, child, could have known a code. Something I never had when I was your age – something I wanted for you. One day you will realize what I mean.” He leaned forward, his voice thrilling, his eye hot and hard. “And if you do not hate me now, Catherine, oh, you will hate me then. Yes! You will hate me then.”
Her answering laughter was unaffected, unstrained. “This is silly, Werther. I have rarely had a nicer experience.”
He turned aside, rai
sing his hands as if to ward off blows. “Your words are darts – each one draws blood in my conscience.” He sank back into his chair.
Still laughing, she began to stroke his limp hand. He drew it away from her.
“Ah, see! I have made you lascivious. I have introduced you to the drug called lust!”
“Well, perhaps to an aspect of it!”
Some change in her tone began to impinge on Werther, though he was still stuck deep in the glue of his guilt. He raised his head, his expression bemused, refusing to believe the import of her words.
“A wonderful aspect,” she said. And she licked his ear.
He shuddered. He frowned. He tried to frame words to ask her a certain question, but he failed.
She licked his cheek and she twined her fingers in his lacklustre hair. “And one I should love to experience again, most passionate of anachronisms. It was as it must have been in those ancient days – when poets ranged the world, stealing what they needed, taking any fair maiden who pleased them, setting fire to the towns of their publishers, laying waste the books of their rivals: ambushing their readers. I am sure you were just as delighted, Werther. Say that you were!”
“Leave me!” he gasped. “I can bear no more.”
“If it is what you want.”
“It is.”
With a wave of her little hand, she tripped from the room.
And Werther brooded upon her shocking words, deciding that he could only have misheard her. In her innocence she had seemed to admit an understanding of certain inconceivable things. What he had half-interpreted as a familiarity with the carnal world was doubtless merely a child’s romantic conceit. How could she have had previous experience of a night such as that which they had shared?
She had been a virgin. Certainly she had been that.
He wished that he did not then feel an ignoble pang of pique at the possibility of another having also known her. Consequently this was immediately followed by a further wave of guilt for entertaining such thoughts and subsequent emotions. A score of conflicting glooms warred in his mind, sent tremors through his body.
“Why,” he cried to the sky, “was I born! I am unworthy of the gift of life. I accused My Lady Charlotina, Lord Jagged and the Duke of Queens of base emotions, cynical motives, yet none are baser or more cynical than mine! Would I turn my anger against my victim, blame her for my misery, attack a little child because she tempted me? That is what my diseased mind would do. Thus do I seek to excuse myself my crimes. Ah, I am vile! I am vile!”
He considered going to visit Mongrove, for he dearly wished to abase himself before his old friend, to tell Mongrove that the giant’s contempt had been only too well founded; but he had lost the will to move; a terrible lassitude had fallen upon him. Hating himself, he knew that all must hate him, and while he knew that he had earned every scrap of their hatred, he could not bear to go abroad and run the risk of suffering it.
What would one of his heroes of Romance have done? How would Casablanca Bogard or Eric of Marylebone have exonerated themselves, even supposing they could have committed such an unbelievable deed in the first place?
He knew the answer.
It drummed louder and louder in his ears. It was implacable and grim. But still he hesitated to follow it. Perhaps some other, more original act of retribution would occur to him? He racked his writhing brain. Nothing presented itself as an alternative.
At length he rose from his chair of unpolished quartz. Slowly, his pace measured, he walked towards the window, stripping off his power rings so that they clattered to the flagstones.
He stepped upon the ledge and stood looking down at the rocks a mile below at the base of the tower. Some jolting of a power ring as it fell had caused a wind to spring up and to blow coldly against his naked body. “The Wind of Justice,” he thought.
He ignored his parachute. With one final cry of “Catherine! Forgive me!” and an unvoiced hope that he would be found long after it proved impossible to resurrect him, he flung himself, unsupported, into space.
Down he fell and death leapt to meet him. The breath fled from his lungs, his head began to pound, his sight grew dim, but the spikes of black rock grew larger until he knew that he had struck them, for his body was a-flame, broken in a hundred places, and his sad, muddled, doom-clouded brain was chaff upon the wailing breeze. Its last coherent thought was: Let none say Werther did not pay the price in full. And thus did he end his life with a proud negative.
VI. IN WHICH WERTHER DISCOVERS CONSOLATION
“Oh, Werther, what an adventure!”
It was Catherine Gratitude looking down on him as he opened his eyes. She clapped her hands. Her blue eyes were full of joy.
Lord Jagged stood back with a smile. “Re-born, magnificent Werther, to sorrow afresh!” he said.
He lay upon a bench of marble in his own tower. Surrounding the bench were My Lady Charlotina, the Duke of Queens, Gaf the Horse in Tears, the Iron Orchid, Li Pao, O’Kala Incarnadine and many others. They all applauded.
“A splendid drama!” said the Duke of Queens.
“Amongst the best I have witnessed,” agreed the Iron Orchid (a fine compliment from her).
Werther found himself warming to them as they poured their praise upon him; but then he remembered Catherine Gratitude and what he had meant himself to be to her, what he had actually become, and although he felt much better for having paid his price, he stretched out his hand to her, saying again, “Forgive me.”
“Silly Werther! Forgive such a perfect role? No, no! If anyone needs forgiving, then it is I.” And Catherine Gratitude touched one of the many power rings now festooning her fingers and returned herself to her original appearance.
“It is you!” He could make no other response as he looked upon the Everlasting Concubine. “Mistress Christia?”
“Surely you suspected towards the end?” she said. “Was it not everything you told me you wanted? Was it not a fine ‘sin’, Werther?”
“I suffered...” he began.
“Oh, yes! How you suffered! It was unparallelled. It was equal, I am sure, to anything in History. And, Werther, did you not find the ‘guilt’ particularly exquisite?”
“You did it for me?” He was overwhelmed. “Because it was what I said I wanted most of all?”
“He is still a little dull,” explained Mistress Christia, turning to their friends. “I believe that is often the case after a resurrection.”
“Often,” intoned Lord Jagged, darting a sympathetic glance at Werther. “But it will pass, I hope.”
“The ending, though it could be anticipated,” said the Iron Orchid, “was absolutely right.”
Mistress Christia put her arms around him and kissed him. “They are saying that your performance rivals Jherek Carnelian’s,” she whispered. He squeezed her hand. What a wonderful woman she was, to be sure, to have added to his experience and to have increased his prestige at the same time.
He sat up. He smiled a trifle bashfully. Again they applauded.
“I can see that this was where ‘Rain’ was leading,” said Bishop Castle. “It gives the whole thing point, I think.”
“The exaggerations were just enough to bring out the essential mood without being too prolonged,” said O’Kala Incarnadine, waving an elegant hoof (he had come as a goat).
“Well, I had not...” began Werther, but Mistress Christia put a hand to his lips.
“You will need a little time to recover,” she said.
Tactfully, one by one, still expressing their most fulsome congratulations, they departed, until only Werther de Goethe and the Everlasting Concubine were left.
“I hope you did not mind the deception, Werther,” she said. “I had to make amends for ruining your rainbow and I had been wondering for ages how to please you. My Lady Charlotina helped a little, of course, and Lord Jagged – though neither knew too much of what was going on.”
“The real performance was yours,” he said. “I was merely your foil.
”
“Nonsense. I gave you the rough material with which to work. And none could have anticipated the wonderful, consummate use to which you put it!”
Gently, he took her hand. “It was everything I have ever dreamed of,” he said. “It is true, Mistress Christia, that you alone know me.”
“You are kind. And now I must leave.”
“Of course.” He looked out through his window. The comforting storm raged again. Familiar lightnings flickered; friendly thunder threatened; from below there came the sound of his old consoler the furious sea flinging itself, as always, at the rock’s black fangs. His sigh was contented. He knew that their liaison was ended; neither had the bad taste to prolong it and thus produce what would be, inevitably, an anti-climax, and yet he felt regret, as evidently did she.
“If death were only permanent,” he said wistfully, “but it cannot be. I thank you again, granter of my deepest desires.”
“If death,” she said, pausing at the window, “were permanent, how would we judge our successes and our failures? Sometimes, Werther, I think you ask too much of the world.” She smiled. “But you are satisfied for the moment, my love?”
“Of course.”
It would have been boorish, he thought, to have claimed anything else.
THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian novelist most closely associated with the science fiction subgenre cyberpunk. He has won many awards for his fiction, including the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in addition to numerous nominations and other recognition in the field. Many of his works have been made into feature films, such as Johnny Mnemonic. “The Gernsback Continuum” was first published in Universe 11 in 1981.
Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.
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