February the seventh: B. has been asleep for twenty hours: no doubt as a result of his previous mental exhaustion. “The Tank” is behaving perfectly.
February the fourteenth: B. has now been deprived of sensory contact with the world outside his immersion chamber for nine days. He sees only a diffuse grey blur of light, hears only a constant homogeneous sound. He is aware only of the contact of the water in which he is suspended. The nutrient drip, respirator and pumping mechanism continue to function well.
9 p.m.: B. has begun to make leg movements. They are irregular and correspond roughly to the act of walking.
10 pm.: Using the one-way telephone system, we attempted to contact B. and warn him that his movements were disturbing the drip-feed connection in his arm. There was a pause—during which the leg movements subsided— before he acknowledged us, using the previously agreed code; one long blink to indicate he had heard.
We then attempted to ascertain the reason for his movements, asking if he had become uncomfortable in any physical way; and if, as a result of this discomfort, he wished the S.D. period to be terminated. His reply was negative. My assistant then asked if he had experienced an hallucination, and attained an emphatic affirmative signal, accompanied by a vigorous nod of the head which threatened to dislodge the electrodes taped to his skull.
We assumed that B. had experienced what Vernon notes as a “Type Three” hallucination, in which the subject perceives definite objects, as opposed to the more common manifestation of vague spots and blurs at the periphery of vision. We were unable to discover the reason for the leg movements which accompanied the hallucination. My assistant advanced the tentative theory that B. had actually participated in an hallucinatory activity.
February the eighteenth: B. requested that the experiment be terminated. Two or three weeks will pass before he is fully recovered physically. He is vague when questioned on the subject of his hallucination, which has occurred on an average of twice a day since he first experienced it. He shows no signs of the mental disorder which he exhibited before the experiment: in fact he is unnaturally calm and self-possessed.
March the tenth: B. has disappeared from his studio. Of late, he has been difficult to deal with, remote. I suspect that he regards my presence as an invasion of the private world he has constructed about himself. I am sure that this world has its roots in “the Tank”. He is unaware of the danger of complete withdrawal in which he has placed himself. As ever, he sees himself as the Eternal Artist, oppressed by the bugbear of science.
* * * *
Monad: painting again, her denim legs hypnotic. The canvas is nearly complete; her end product is already an accomplished fact. Bailey: idly following an out-of-focus blue sprite as it dances with a complicated palette. Bailey: living the motorcycle vision of Gossing, who travelled his own perspective too far and too fast.
* * * *
Bailey had been preoccupied with the problem of the vanishing point for some days before he remembered Gossing.
The first possibility to strike him had been that of his never reaching it, that the hallucination would develop no further. He had defeated that argument somewhat smugly —by refusing to believe his mind uncreative enough to condemn itself indefinitely to vain pursuit: there must be something at the end of the road. He began a search for an alternative, coming up with theories ranging from the eventual confrontation of himself by himself, to the achievement of Nirvana. It was during this search that a youthful recollection of Gossing provided him with a prefabricated answer. Gossing’s way of death became a fixation of proportions matching those of the vision.
Gossing had died on the road.
He had been engaged in Ph.D. research in applied physics at a northern university: an isolated, withdrawn character who rarely spoke, and segregated himself stringently from campus society. He had evinced no open interest in women —to be fair, he had displayed none where men were concerned, either—and had regarded the antics of the student body with a sour contempt. Experiments with lysergic acid had been the vogue at the time, and these he had reviled with bitter humour, considering them a foolish blunting of the mind as a tool: referring to them scornfully as “Happy attempts at intellectual suicide”.
In his last term he had built himself a motorcycle; a low, squat thing that resembled an insect—its dropped handlebars replacing the anhedral wings of a wasp at rest. The machine had been extremely powerful: Bailey could recall only vague detail, but remembered fear and dislike of the thing. He had been interested in it only as a symbol of Gossing’s state of mind.
Bailey had concluded that Gossing’s lack of sexual life left him with a need to assert somehow his essential maleness: the brute, thrusting power of the motorcycle had confirmed his masculinity. It had also furnished the sense of purpose his leisure time had lacked because of his refusal to participate in the university’s social life—which, however inane, provided an imperative diversion.
Gossing had ridden the machine with an aggressive flair; laying it closely and almost viciously into corners—often with the footrests and silencers throwing up sheets of sparks as they grounded on the road surface—as if the road belonged to him alone. But he had not been reckless; every move had been calculated in his dry computer of a brain before being put into operation. There had been a harsh beauty, even poetry, in the way he had handled it; in the way that neither man nor machine had submitted itself to the other, but had remained inseparable parts of a single organism—a high-octane centaur of the clearway.
Towards the end, however, he had become an extension of the thing. It had gained ascendency, almost a personality of its own; and the road had exerted a malign fascination. He had been a pathetic, possessed creature at the time preceding his death; steadily more introverted, driven by the lash of what could only be represented by the hard, unreeling ribbon of the road and the howl of the slipstream; a man doomed and hurling towards an unavoidable, gory climacteric.
Bailey’s identification with Gossing was strengthened by the vanishing-point, their common crux. Monad’s exotic dance with the palette knife and canvas retreated. Bailey had ridden once—once had been enough to kill the desire— on the pillion behind Gossing, and it was on that one experience that he now based his re-enaction of Gossing’s final ride down the Perspective. He gave the word a capital letter impulsively; accepting the identification with Gossing; uniting Gossing’s reality with his own vision. The muted hum of traffic outside gave way to a bellow of power. There was a seven-gallon fuel tank between Bailey’s knees and fifty brake horse-power surged responsive under his throttle hand. Without a noticeable shift of reality to unreality, Bailey was Gossing.
“It’s like this: out there, everything’s simpler. On the road it all boils down to this: at that speed, you’re either going to make it—or you aren’t...”
Gossing-Bailey straightened the bike up, powering it firmly out of the last leg of the bend. Ahead, the road ran straight as a die, then broke into a series of elbows: the vanishing point. This was the ultimate high: here, for a few cathartic seconds, was the orgasm of the gods. He settled his goggles and flattened himself on the fuel tank, his chin on the foam pad. Deliberately, almost reverently, he wound back the twist-grip.
“...for a minute, you’re on your own, and free: the tear doesn’t come until you have to slow the thing down.”
Freedom: the road was a great elongated vee, empty but for the single particle of fierce energy that was Gossing-Bailey and the motorcycle. After two miles, the speedometer and the Perspective came together as one image, a circle superimposed on an open compass; the image of fulfilment. Then he had to start closing down.
“You don’t want to come off the high. It’s hell closing that throttle; it’s admitting that neither yourself nor the experience is immortal...”
Orgasm is a transient thing. The machine wasn’t slowing. In the space of a microsecond there happened an eternity of fear. He managed to nurse it through the first bend at a hundred and ten, t
aking a resigned pleasure in the achievement. But it was impossible at that speed to pull out and align the machine for the next one. His body jerked in a last ejaculation of panic. There was an improbable silence.
Bailey came back to the studio. Nobody had been sure whether Gossing or the motorcycle had failed on that ultimate straight. He knew now.
* * * *
Bailey: supine on the studio floor—head pillowed on hands to stop them shaking—watching Monad paint. The choreography of creation is almost complete.
* * * *
Bailey had not moved for two days. Inertia had finally taken him: he had found a balance between himself and the city. Only his mind moved, and that with growing lethargy, walking slowly along the Perspective.
Gossing’s ghost was laid—or rather, it had taken its place in the schema of Bailey’s illusion. Gossing and the circle of the speedo they had fished out of a ditch, still intact, needle wedged by the failure of its mechanism at one hundred and ten miles an hour; Hollis—Empirical Man and his Experiment; Gardner—the city anxiously looking after its own victim: all were integrated, assimilated; subordinate to the vision, and yet the bricks of which it was built. Bailey-Gossing/Hollis-Gardner were a composite entity, running down to the point of absolute rest.
He had ceased to eat and could not remember when he had last relieved himself. The only motion for some time, other than his plodding feet on the Perspective, had been Monad’s dance, her choreographic coupling with the easel and canvas: and he sensed that this too was terminating. She was a blue shadow behind a window, the stained-glass screen of illusion. Somehow, hers would be the final act. Monad’s was the hand privileged to throw the last switch. He was content to wait. To all intents and purposes, he was still in the womb of the Tank, waiting to be born for the third time...
* * * *
Monad made a last movement, decisively. Bailey, sensing the finality of the motion, tensed; the Perspective faded, but the girl was remote: her actions came across a great gap of space and time, a gulf, a hole in his awareness.
She danced over to him, smiling. He saw her once more as Monad in pale blue, then her identity slipped into the gulf. He felt her kiss his forehead, saw her step back and parody a curtsy, sweepingly. She motioned at the canvas.
For perhaps five minutes, he searched the picture; taking in its greens and greys; noting the sharp, geometrical definition of the skyline, the great tonal vee of the road, the unmentionable vanishing point. This, then, was it.
He conjured back the Perspective and compared the two overlapping images in his field of vision. Then he manipulated them gently, and they came together, matching perfectly, the world on the canvas and the weariness of his mind.
Tiredly, doggedly, he began to walk.
* * * *
“Do you like it?” said Monad, anxious.
But Bailey could hear only the monochrome wind.
<
* * * *
THE WALL TO END THE WORLD
Vincent King
Following up his success in our seventh volume (“Defence Mechanism”) here is another of Vincent King’s strange cities of the future—a city where legend is the cloak for government and the truth is far stranger than the legend.
* * * *
A murmur of heavy fabric. Glint of gold thread, sparkle of jewels in stiff embroidery, red in torchlight.
The Arch Teacher turned smoothly on the Sacred Lectern. He raised his arms in the dismissal. We climbed to our feet, made Obeisance and backed from the Chamber. It was time to go to the Wall.
The passage was very dark after the Holy Chamber. We called for our horses and our fighters. I swung on to the gilded saddle. Fighters came out of the dark, uneasy torchlight on their weapons.
We chosen officers of the Wall faced each other, we raised our Insignia, made salute. Our Captain led us up the Great Ramp, into the darkness. Tabors and fifes, slow marching into the gloom.
It is a long climb, up endless ramps through eternal damp. My old Captain complained about the long gaps in the lights. They garrotted him for Unfaith. The floor is very worn and slippery.
At passage branches we paused for ceremony and an officer led his fighters into the sub-passage. Mine was the highest station, the lookout platform—above the topmost battlement.
The groom took my horse, I listened to the rattle and clatter of my fighters as they made their way on to the battlement below. I climbed the last wooden steps.
Small, cold rain stung my face. I crouched through the low door on to the slippery planks. I edged left until I felt the slight step down on to the stone part, out against the parapet. The floor still moved in the storm, but I felt safer there.
The granite is mostly good. It all looks perfect, but some places you can stick in your knife like it was cheese. Here it crumbled, slimy grit under my hands. You can’t tell the Teachers—that would be Unfaith. The Wall will stand for ever. It must. If the Wall fails the World, the Span will end. Stand the Wall!
The wind roared about the ramifications and buttressing. The Wall thundered back its lion strength. Far, far out in the raging darkness, dim phosphorescence of surf showed in the rain. I was cold and wet, but Duty— Honour, the Virtue of Vigil on the Wall kept me from the high cells. A peasant, a commoner, would have sheltered; but not me—not an Officer of the Wall.
The bolts on my belt rasped on the stonework. I drew them out and laid them with my crossbow on the fire step. I laid the Insignia there too. I brought out the leather case, unwrapped the oiled silk, twisted the cord round my wrist and began to scan the beaches through my night glasses.
On the battlement the fighters still shuffled themselves into position. The broken paving makes it very difficult for the artificial walk of machines. I hoped they wouldn’t damage themselves, they’re only menials, robots—and very clumsy. Repairs are almost impossible now.
The rain slackened, the moon came through ragged cloud, splashing the sodden sea-plain with thin light. Nothing down there. On the right a few dim lights in the horn windows of the fisher hovels. We have glass, or rather the Teachers do. It’s right they should have the best, the glass and the comforts. They teach us the Order . . . theirs is the responsibility of the Wall. The Wall must stand until the Ultimate Light and the Span ends. Stand the Wall!
There would be no fishers out tonight. No enemy either; even his black hulls couldn’t live in that sea. I could taste the salt spray in the rain.
East and west the Wall runs. Sometimes you can see the curve of it turning away north and south to meet again a thousand miles across the continent. Our section reaches almost to the sea, elsewhere it runs its eternal circle over valleys and plains, through the tall mountains.
I say “eternal” and it is—the Wall is forever, from the Beginning to the End. But it is broken . . . where the sun came down it is broken. I know, I’ve seen.
It’s to the east, the Wall ends there. The Wall of the Towers ends. There’s a gap, ten, twenty miles wide. The Wall ends in twisted gobs of basalt.
The sea came in there. A circular bay, deep and wide. There’s not a lot of sand and if you dig you soon come to glass. All cracked—crazed—bubbled, iridescent.
They built a new Wall there, not as high as the real one. A great semi-circle, on the edge of the bay.
That was after the Last Battle. Five hundred years ago, there on the wide beach that was before the Wall. The enemy came in his myriads, with his arrays of fighters. There was great killing.
When he saw our fathers had won, the enemy’s wise men called down the sun to strike the Wall.
The sun touched the beach and the Wall, then rose again in chaos of purple red fire. The Wall was hurt and the bay made.
All who saw died, then or the next day. They were blinded and they died; our people and the enemy’s.
Since that time they have not come; but one day they will. We must keep the Vigil. Stand the Wall!
* * * *
East, far out along the dark Wa
ll-reef the sky paled. Wind faded. Against the dawn the sodden fabric of our banner flapped on its staff.
Soon the early sun raised steam from the wet stonework. It was a good day. Light cloud moved in from the sea. Gulls and crows wheeled in up-currents along the Wall. Song bird voices reached up from the sea-plain. Cool blue-green of pines, pink trunks . . . white surf, cerulean sea, bright sun rising in the clear air.
At the fisher hovels a girl drove out a dozen black and white goats. I put the glasses on her. Dark hair, young, creamy skin, round breasts under the white blouse, she ran through the soft sand. Her feet were bare.
New Writings in SF 8 - [Anthology] Page 16