by Damon Knight
They sat side by side on the wooden bench outside the hut. The afternoon sunlight lay pleasantly on the flagstones; a little animation came to his withered face, and for the first time she was able to see the shape of Dio’s features there.
“I don’t say I’m not bitter. You remember what I was, and you see what I am now.” His eyes stared broodingly; his lips worked. “I sometimes think, why did it have to be me? The rest of you are going on, like children at a party, and I’ll be gone. But, Claire, I’ve discovered something. I don’t quite know if I can tell you about it.”
He paused, looking out across the fields. “There’s an attraction in it, a beauty. That sounds impossible, but it’s true. Beauty in the ugliness. It’s symmetrical, it has its rhythm. The sun rises, the sun sets. Living up here, you feel that a little more. Perhaps that’s why we went below.”
He turned to look at her. “No, I can’t make you understand. I don’t want you to think, either, that I’ve surrendered to it. I feel it coming sometimes, Claire, in the middle of the night. Something coming up over the horizon. Something—” He gestured. “A feeling. Something very huge, and cold. Very cold. And I sit up in my bed, shouting, “I’m not ready yet!’ No. I don’t want to go. Perhaps if I had grown up getting used to the idea, it would be easier now. It’s a big change to make in your thinking. I tried—all this—and the sculpture, you remember—but I can’t quite do it. And yet—now, this is the curious thing. I wouldn’t go back, if I could. That sounds funny. Here I am, going to die, and I wouldn’t go back. You see, I want to be myself; yes, I want to go on being myself. Those other men were not me, only someone on the way to be me.” They walked back together to the kiosk. At the doorway, she turned for a last glimpse. He was standing, bent and sturdy, white-haired in his rags, against a long sweep of violet sky. The late light glistened grayly on the fields; far behind, in the grove of trees the birds’ voices were stilled. There was a single star in the east.
To leave him, she realized suddenly, would be intolerable. She stepped out, embraced him: his body was shockingly thin and fragile in her arms. “Dio, we mustn’t be apart now. Let me come and stay in your hut; let’s be together.”
Gently he disengaged her arms and stepped away. His eyes gleamed in the twilight. “No, no,” he said. “It wouldn’t do, Claire. Dear, I love you for it, but you see . . . you see, you’re a goddess. An immortal goddess—and I’m a man.”
She saw his lips work, as if he were about to speak again, and she waited, but he only turned, without a word or gesture, and began walking away across the empty earth: a dark spindling figure, garments flapping gently in the breeze that spilled across the earth. The last light glowed dimly in his white hair. Now he was only a dot in the middle distance. Claire stepped back into the kiosk, and the door closed.
CHAPTER VI
FOR A LONG TIME she cannot persuade herself that he is gone. She has seen the body, stretched in a box like someone turned to painted wax: it is not Dio, Dio is somewhere else.
She catches herself thinking. When Dio comes back . . . as if he had only gone away, around to the other side of the world. But she knows there is a mound of earth over Sector Twenty, with a tall polished stone over the spot where Dio’s body lies in the ground. She can repeat by rote the words carved there:
Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edges of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil. Then are they borne away; like smoke they vanish into air; and what they dream they know is but the little that each hath stumbled upon in wandering about the world. Yet boast they all that they have learned the whole. Vain fools! For what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of man.
—Empedocles
(5th cent. B.C.)
One day she closes up the apartment; let the Planner, Dio’s successor, make of it whatever he likes. She leaves behind all her notes, her student’s equipment, useless now. She goes to a public inn, and that afternoon the new fashions are brought to her: robes in flame silk and in cold metallic mesh; new perfumes, new jewelry. There is new music in the memory units, and she dances to it tentatively, head cocked to listen, living into the rhythm. Already it is like a long-delayed spring; dark withered things are drifting away into the past, and the present is fresh and lovely.
She tries to call a few old friends. Katha is in Centram, Ebert in the South; Piet and Tanno are not registered at all. It doesn’t matter; in the plaza of the inn, before the day is out, she makes a dozen new friends. The group, pleased with itself, grows by accretion; the resulting party wanders from the plaza to the Vermilion Club gardens, to one member’s rooms and then another, and finally back to Claire’s own apartment.
Leaving the circle toward midnight, she roams the apartment alone, eased by comradeship, content to hear the singing blur and fade behind her.
In the playroom, she stands idly looking down into the deep darkness of the diving well. How luxurious, she thinks, to fall and fall, and never reach the bottom . . .
But the bottom is always there, of course, or it would not be a diving well. A paradox: the well must be a shaft without an exit at the bottom; it’s the sense of danger, the imagined smashing impact, that gives it its thrill. And yet there is no danger of injury: levitation and the survival instinct will always prevent it.
“We have such a world . . .”
Things pass away; people endure.
Then where is Piet, the cottony haired man, with his laughter and his wild jokes? Hiding, somewhere around the other side of the world, perhaps; forgetting to register. It often happens; no one thinks about it. But then, her own mind asks coldly, where is the woman named Marla, who used to hold you on her knee when you were small? Where is Hendry, your own father, whom you last saw . . . when? Five hundred, six hundred years ago, that time in Rio. Where do people go when they disappear . . . the people no one talks about?
The singing drifts up to her along the dark hallway. Claire is staring transfixed down into the shadows of the well. She thinks of Dio, looking out at the gathering darkness: “I feel it coming sometimes, up over the horizon. Something very huge, and cold.”
The darkness shapes itself in her imagination into a gray face, beautiful and terrible. The smiling lips whisper, for her ears alone, Some day.