“You!” He gasped and caught his breath.
“Me. Now you know who he is—and after you think it over you’ll know who you are . . . and if you think hard enough, you’ll figure out who the baby is . . . and who I am.”
He didn’t answer, he was badly shaken. It’s a shock to have it proved to you that you can’t resist seducing yourself. I took him to the Apex Building and we jumped again.
2300-VII-12 Aug 1985-Sub Rockies Base: I woke the duty sergeant, showed my I.D., told the sergeant to bed my companion down with a happy pill and recruit him in the morning. The sergeant looked sour, but rank is rank, regardless of era; he did what I said—thinking, no doubt, that the next time we met he might be the colonel and I the sergeant Which can happen in our corps: “What name?” he asked.
I wrote it out. He raised his eyebrows. “Like so, eh? Hmm—”
“You just do your job, Sergeant.” I turned to my companion.
“Son, your troubles are over. You’re about to start the best job a man ever held—and you’ll do well. I know.”
“That you will!” agreed the sergeant. “Look at me—born in 1917—still around, still young, still enjoying life.” I went back to the jump room, set everything on pre-selected zero.
2301-V-7 Nov 1970-NYC “Pop’s Place”: I came out of the storeroom carrying a fifth of Drambuie to account for the minute I had been gone. My assistant was arguing with the customer who had been playing “I’m My Own Granpaw!” I said, “Oh, let him play it, then unplug it.” I was very tired.
It’s rough, but somebody must do it and it’s very hard to recruit anyone in the later years, since the Mistake of 1972. Can you think of a better source than to pick people all fouled up where they are and give them well-paid, interesting (even though dangerous) work in a necessary cause? Everybody knows now why the Fizzle War of 1963 fizzled. The bomb with New York’s number on it didn’t go off, a hundred other things didn’t go as planned—all arranged by the likes of me.
But not the Mistake of ’72; that one is not our fault—and can’t be undone; there’s no paradox to resolve. A thing either is, or it isn’t, now and forever amen. But there won’t be another like it; an order dated “1992” takes precedence any year.
I closed five minutes early, leaving a letter in the cash register telling my day manager that I was accepting his offer to buy me out, so see my lawyer as I was leaving on a long vacation. The Bureau might or might not pick up his payments, but they want things left tidy. I went to the room back of the storeroom and forward to 1993.
2200-VII-12 Jan 1993-Sub Rockies Annex-HQ Temporal DOL: I checked in with the duty officer and went to my quarters, intending to sleep for a week. I had fetched the bottle we bet (after all, I won it) and took a drink before I wrote my report. It tasted foul and I wondered why I had ever liked Old Underwear. But it was better than nothing; I don’t like to be cold sober, I think too much. But I don’t really hit the bottle either; other people have snakes—I have people.
I dictated my report; forty recruitments all okayed by the Psych Bureau—counting my own, which I knew would be okayed, I was here, wasn’t I? Then I taped a request for assignment to operations; I was sick of recruiting. I dropped both in the slot and headed for bed.
My eye fell on “The By-Laws of Time,” over my bed:
Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.
If At Last You Do Succeed, Never Try Again.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine Billion.
A Paradox May Be Paradoctored.
It Is Earlier When You Think.
Ancestors Are Just People.
Even Jove Nods.
They didn’t inspire me the way they had when I was a recruit; thirty subjective-years of time-jumping wears you down. I undressed and when I got down to the hide I looked at my belly. A Caesarian leaves a big scar but I’m so hairy now that I don’t notice it unless I look for it.
Then I glanced at the ring on my finger.
The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever…I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?
I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.
So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light.
You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark.
I miss you dreadfully!
A Kind of Artistry (1962)
BRIAN W. ALDISS
BRIAN ALDISS (b. 1925) began publishing fiction in the 1950s and quickly established himself as one of science fiction’s preeminent writers. His many novels include Hothouse, Greybeard, The Malacia Tapestry, and the Helliconia trilogy. Various works of his have been adapted for film, including Brothers of the Head, Frankenstein Unbound, and “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” (which formed the basis for A.I. Artificial Intelligence). He lives in Oxford, England, and in 2005 Queen Elizabeth awarded him an OBE (meaning that he was dubbed an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire).
“A Kind of Artistry” is one of his many stories that ventures far into the future to explore elements of humanity that might possibly be universal. It was incorporated into Aldiss’s novel Starswarm.
I
GIANT RISING from the fjord, from the grey arm of sea in the fjord, could have peered over the crown of its sheer cliffs and discovered Endehaaven there on the edge, sprawling at the very start of the island.
Derek Flamifew Ende saw much of this sprawl from his high window; indeed, a growing ill-ease, apprehensions of a quarrel, forced him to see everything with particular clarity, just as a landscape takes on an intense actinic visibility before a thunderstorm. Although he was warmseeing with his face, yet his eye vision wandered over the estate.
All was bleakly neat at Endehaaven—as I should know, for its neatness is my care. The gardens are made to support evergreens and shrubs that never flower; this is My Lady’s whim, that likes a sobriety to match the furrowed brow of the coastline. The building, gaunt Endehaaven itself, is tall and lank and severe; earlier ages would have found its structure impossible: for its thousand built-in paragravity units ensure the support of masonry the mass of which is largely an illusion.
Between the building and the fjord, where the garden contrived itself into a parade, stood My Lady’s laboratory, and My Lady’s pets—and, indeed, My Lady herself at this time, her long hands busy with the minicoypu and the agoutinis. I stood with her, attending the animals’ cages or passing her instruments or stirring the tanks, doing always what she asked. And the eyes of Derek Ende looked down on us; no, they looked down on her only.
Derek Flamifew Ende stood with his face over the receptor bowl, reading the message from Star One. It played lightly over his countenance and over the boscises of his forehead. Though he stared down across that achingly familiar stage of his life outside, he still warmsaw the communication clearly. When it was finished, he negated the receptor, pressed his face to it, and flexed his message back.
“I will do as you message, Star One. I will go at once to Festi XV in the Veil Nebula and enter liaison with the being you call the Cliff. If possible I will also obey your order to take some of its substance to Pyrylyn. Thank you for your greetings; I return them in good faith. Good-bye.”
He straightened and massaged his face: warmlooking over great light distances was always tiring, as if the sensitive muscles of the countenance knew that they delivered up their tiny electrostatic charges to parsecs of vacuum, and were appalled. Slowly his boscises also relaxed, as slowly he gathered together his gear. It would be a long flight to the Veil, and the task that had been set him would daunt the stoutest heart on Earth; yet it was for another reason he lingered: before he could be away, he had to say a farewell to his Mistress.
Dilating the door, he stepped out into the corridor, walked along it with a steady tread—feet covering mosaics of a pattern learnt long ago in his childhood—and walked into the paragravity shaft. Mome
nts later, he was leaving the main hall, approaching My Lady as she stood gaunt, with her rodents scuttling at beast level before her and Vatna Jokull’s heights rising behind her, grey with the impurities of distance.
“Go indoors and fetch me the box of name rings, Hols,” she said to me; so I passed him, My Lord, as he went to her. He noticed me no more than he noticed any of the other parthenos.
When I returned, she had not turned towards him, though he was speaking urgently to her.
“You know I have my duty to perform, Mistress,” I heard him saying. “Nobody else but a normal-born Earthborn can be entrusted with this sort of task.”
“This sort of task! The galaxy is loaded inexhaustibly with such tasks! You can excuse yourself forever with such excursions.”
He said to her remote back, pleadingly: “You can’t talk of them like that. You know of the nature of the Cliff—I told you all about it. You know this isn’t an excursion: it requires all the courage I have. And you know that only Earthborns, for some reason, have such courage . . . Don’t you, Mistress?”
Although I had come up to them, threading my subservient way between cage and tank, they noticed me not enough even to lower their voices. My Lady stood gazing at the grey heights inland, her countenance as formidable as they; one boscis twitched as she said, “You think you are so big and brave, don’t you?”
Knowing the power of sympathetic magic, she never spoke his name when she was angry; it was as if she wished him to disappear.
“It isn’t that,” he said humbly. “Please be reasonable, Mistress; you know I must go; a man cannot be forever at home. Don’t be angry.”
She turned to him at last.
Her face was high and stern; it did not receive. Yet she had a beauty of some dreadful kind I cannot describe, if weariness and knowledge can together knead beauty. Her eyes were as grey and distant as the frieze of snow-covered volcano behind her, O My Lady! She was a century older than Derek: though the difference showed not in her skin—which would stay fresh yet a thousand years—but in her authority.
“I’m not angry. I’m only hurt. You know how you have the power to hurt me.”
“Mistress—” he said, taking a step towards her.
“Don’t touch me,” she said. “Go if you must, but don’t make a mockery of it by touching me.”
He took her elbow. She held one of the minicoypus quiet in the crook of her arm—animals were always docile at her touch—and strained it closer.
“I don’t mean to hurt you, Mistress. You know we owe allegiance to Star One; I must work for them, or how else do we hold this estate? Let me go for once with an affectionate parting.”
“Affection! You go off and leave me alone with a handful of parthenos and you talk of affection! Don’t pretend you don’t rejoice to get away from me. You’re tired of me, aren’t you?”
Wearily he said, as if nothing else would come, “It’s not that . . .”
“You see! You don’t even attempt to sound sincere. Why don’t you go? It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”
“Oh, if you could only hear your own self-pity.”
Now she had a tear on the icy slope of one cheek. Turning, she flashed it for his inspection.
“Who else should pity me? You don’t, or you wouldn’t go away from me as you do. Suppose you get killed by this Cliff, what will happen to me?”
“I shall be back, Mistress,” he said. “Never fear.”
“It’s easy to say. Why don’t you have the courage to admit that you’re only too glad to leave me?”
“Because I’m not going to be provoked into a quarrel.”
“Pah, you sound like a child again. You won’t answer, will you? Instead you’re going to run away, evading your responsibilities.”
“I’m not running away!”
“Of course you are, whatever you pretend. You’re just immature.”
“I’m not, I’m not! And I’m not running away! It takes real courage to do what I’m going to do.”
“You think so well of yourself!”
He turned away then, petulantly, without dignity. He began to head towards the landing platform. He began to run.
“Derek!” she called.
He did not answer.
She took the squatting minicoypu by the scruff of its neck. Angrily she flung it into the nearby tank of water. It turned into a fish and swam down into the depths.
II
Derek journeyed towards the Veil Nebula in his fast lightpusher. Lonely it sailed, a great fin shaped like an archer’s bow, barnacled all over with the photon cells that sucked its motive power from the dense and dusty emptiness of space. Midway along the trailing edge was the blister in which Derek lay, senseless over most of his voyage.
He woke in the therapeutic bed, called to another resurrection day that was no day, with gentle machine hands easing the stiffness from his muscles. Soup gurgled in a retort, bubbling up towards a nipple only two inches from his mouth. He drank. He slept again, tired from his long inactivity.
When he woke again, he climbed slowly from the bed and exercised for fifteen minutes. Then he moved forward to the controls. My friend Jon was there.
“How is everything?” Derek asked.
“Everything is in order, My Lord,” Jon replied. “We are swinging into the orbit of Festi XV now.” He gave the coordinates and retired to eat. Jon’s job was the loneliest any partheno could have. We are hatched according to strictly controlled formulae, without the inbred organisations of DNA that assure true Earthborns of their amazing longevity; five more long hauls and Jon will be old and worn out, fit only for the transmuter.
Derek sat at the controls. Did he see, superimposed on the face of Festi, the face he loved and feared? I think he did. I think there were no swirling clouds for him that could erase the clouding of her brow.
Whatever he saw, he settled the lightpusher into a fast low orbit about the desolate planet. The sun Festi was little more than a blazing point some eight hundred million miles away. Like the riding light of a ship it bobbed above a turbulent sea of cloud as they went in.
For a long while, Derek sat with his face in a receptor bowl, checking ground heats far below. Since he was dealing with temperatures approaching absolute zero, this was not simple; yet when the Cliff moved into a position directly below, there was no mistaking its bulk; it stood out as clearly on his senses as if outlined on a radar screen.
“There she goes!” Derek exclaimed.
Jon had come forward again. He fed the time coordinates into the lightpusher’s brain, waited, and read off the time when the Cliff would be below them again.
Nodding, Derek began to prepare to jump. Without haste, he assumed his special suit, checking each item as he took it up, opening the paragravs until he floated, then closing them again, clicking down every snap-fastener until he was entirely encased.
“395 seconds to next zenith, My Lord,” Jon said.
“You know all about collecting me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I shall not activate the radio beacon till I’m back in orbit.”
“I fully understand, sir.”
“Right. I’ll be moving.”
A little animated prison, he walked ponderously into the air lock.
Three minutes before they were next above the Cliff, Derek opened the outer door and dived into the sea of cloud. A brief blast of his suit jets set him free from the lightpusher’s orbit. Cloud engulfed him like death as he fell.
The twenty surly planets that swung round Festi held only an infinitesimal fraction of the mysteries of the galaxy. Every globe in the universe huddled its own secret purpose to itself. On some of those globes, as on Earth, the purpose manifested itself in a type of being that could shape itself, burst into the space lanes, and rough-hew its aims in a civilized extra-planetary environment. On others, the purpose remained aloof and dark; only Earthborns, weaving their obscure patterns of will and compulsion, challenged those alien beings, to wres
t from them new knowledge that might be added to the pool of the old.
All knowledge has its influence. Over the millennia since interstellar flight had become practicable, mankind was insensibly moulded by its own findings; together with its lost innocence, its genetic stability went out of the galactic window. As man fell like rain over other planets, so his strain lost its original hereditary design: each centre of civilization bred new ways of thought, of feeling, of shape—of life. Only on old Earth itself did man still somewhat resemble the men of pre-stellar days.
That was why it was an Earthborn who dived head-first to meet an entity called the Cliff.
The Cliff had destroyed each of the few spaceships or lightpushers that had landed on its desolate globe. After long study of the being from safe orbits, the wise men of Star One evolved the theory that it destroyed any considerable source of power, as a man will swat a buzzing fly. Derek Ende, going alone with no powering but his suit motors, would be safe—or so the theory went.
Riding down on the paragravs, he sank more and more slowly into planetary night. The last of the cloud was whipped from about his shoulders and a high wind thrummed and whistled round the supporters of his suit. Beneath him, the ground loomed. So as not to be blown across it, he speeded his rate of fall; next moment he sprawled full length on Festi XV. For a while he lay there, resting and letting his suit cool.
The darkness was not complete. Though almost no solar light touched this continent, green flares grew from the earth, illuminating its barren contours. Wishing to accustom his eyes to the gloom, he did not switch on his head, shoulder, stomach, or hand lights.
Something like a stream of fire flowed to his left. Because its radiance was poor and guttering, it confused itself with its own shadows, so that the smoke it gave off, distorted into bars by the bulk of the 4G planet, appeared to roll along its course like burning tumbleweed. Further off were larger sources of fire, impure ethane and methane most probably, burning with a sound that came like frying steak to Derek’s ears, and spouting upwards with an energy that licked the lowering cloud race with blue light. At another point, blazing on an eminence, a geyser of flame wrapped itself in a thickly swirling mantle of brown smoke, a pall that spread upwards as slowly as porridge. Elsewhere, a pillar of white fire burnt without motion or smoke; it stood to the right of where Derek lay, like a floodlit sword in its perfection.
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2 Page 12