Again, Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  But they were wonderful, lazy, wildly cerebral years while they lasted. Truly, I believe I must have been half-dead until that time. I would tumble long guiltless weekends in the sand—there was time for it—or read any book I took a fancy to—there was time for it—or, if that was all I wanted, I could get the ultimate suntan—there was time for it. Perhaps there had always been time for it, but I, craven mortal that I had been, had not believed it. There is still a little part of me that refuses to believe it, but I think the younger generation, anyone born after 2025 or so, lacks that feeling altogether. Aspera, for one, claims to find the idea quite alien. I pointed out that it was curious to find a psychiatrist who claims to be a Freudian of the most reactionary stamp and who denies the central importance of the sense of death.

  "But I don't deny it," she protested. "We've changed, but death has changed too."

  "What is death if not the darkness at the end of every corridor? And what does it mean if the corridor doesn't end?"

  "You've answered that question yourself, Oliver. Death is a symbol."

  Leapday, 2084

  Here in space every day is Leapday, the day that is part neither of any week nor of any month. To commemorate the day, the entire crew assembled in the auditorium where we were addressed by Captain Gray and Doctor Stillhøven, who pushed through the calendar reform in 2000, the first of his many famous exploits with the U.N. 2000: I can just barely remember that. I was in third grade and Miss ? (I don't recall her name, but she wore a lavender sweater and a string of pearls. She had come over from England, and we all made fun of her accent behind her back), who had just taught us that "Thirty days has September, April, June, and November, etc.," was under the onus of explaining that from now on February, March, May, June, August, September, November, and December all have thirty days. How Miss ? must have hated Dr. Stillhøven.

  Another little atavism of mine: before Dr. Stillhøven came up to the podium I had expected to see a venerable, white-haired patriarch. He is III years old. I was shocked to see that he wore a codpiece and powdered his hair like the youngest dandy among us.

  Later:

  Harness. Her name was Harness, and she was nutty about flowers.

  Tuesday, July 3, 2084

  The doe has fallen to the hunter's arrows. How quickly things happen, after all!

  Friday, July 6, 2084

  The analysis proceeds apace. Aspera tells me now that her surrender and our continuing liaison are diagnostic tools. Well, she has her tools and I have mine. She complains that I don't have enough dreams, so I have begun borrowing Slade's.

  An outsider listening to these sessions would have trouble discerning more than the ordinariest teatime duelling. Everyone, after all, is always 'psychoanalyzing' everyone else; it is part of our culture, the basic form of modern romance, in which one party tries to invade the psyche of another, the victim agreeing provisionally to assist the invader. Rather, in a way, like an old vampire movie.

  Nevertheless, there is something piquant in making love to a woman who is so forthright in her assaults. Yet the curious thing—the feeling just the other side of my power to define it (and isn't this always the most interesting kind?)—is this: that despite that she has assumed the role of vampire and I am, for the moment, her willing victim, I am convinced that it is she who is basically the more vulnerable, that she is, despite all she can do, my predestined victim. Such are the paradigms of love.

  Of what, Oliver?

  Sunday, July 8, 2084

  On reading over all of the above, I sense a curious lack of—is it?—texture. The world I present here is so intangible. A bubble drifting through the void. No, that isn't it exactly.

  It is as though I were a fetus in a jar—a curled-up, withered, half-formed little homunculus—one of a series lining a long shelf. Aspera inhabits the bottle next to mine, and we occupy the long hours tapping messages to each other on the glass.

  We are the figures in the novel that Slade dreams he is writing.

  Wednesday, August 8, 2084

  A month gone by, and yet it seems that I have only just closed this journal upon the last entry. I have still to begin my novel, unless I can count it to my credit that I have been eavesdropping extensively and transcribing what I like in another notebook. I have been neglectful of my priestly duties, since Hatoum knows them now as well as I do and claims to enjoy them. I have wasted hours and hours trying to read Genji in the Japanese, a hopeless task. And I remember things . . .

  For the humor of it let me transcribe a little scrap of paper that I found addressed to myself in my shirt pocket: "I must learn to hold to a more commonplace tone, even at the risk of seeming banal. I shall hold up, as an exemplar, my father, who was—and who essentially remains—a businessman."

  Sunday, August 12, 2084

  Genji and his three friends were watching a dance called the "Warbling of the Spring Nightingales," following which they recited appropriate poems to each other on the subject of nightingales, each of which entailed a page of footnotes. Suddenly the book struck me as intolerably insipid. Tides of adrenalin began to spill through me, and I could think but one fearful thought: "Spring! Good God, I won't see spring again for centuries. Or never—never again!" I tore out of my cabin without a mask. I had to do something. I had to go outside.

  This being impossible, I went to the gym, which seemed unusually crowded. (How often what seem our most private emotions turn out to have been part of an epidemic!) I competed in an obstacle race (and lost) and wrestled (and lost). To the extent that my panic had been due to excess adrenalin, I rid myself of it. I was still reluctant to return at once to Lady Murasaki, so I looked at the Activities Board to see what alternatives I had. It was a toss-up between a Silent Dance recital (shades of Genji!) and a séance conducted by our own medium, Mme. St. George. Aspera (who saw her in London) says she is a droll performer, but it was booked solid.

  Though I pride myself on the catholicity of my tastes, I have never been able to enjoy Silent Dance. I always sit there trying to imagine music to go along with it. A gaucherie, but one I can't help. Also I find that a nude body can give rise to thoughts extraneous to High Art. (I said this once to Aspera, and she was outraged. She thinks me an awful Philistine.)

  Today's performance was an astonishment of beauty, and my conversion has been complete. I shall never be able to look at a ballet again. There was, in effect, but a single dancer (the other bodies on the stage were mere ornaments to her own commanding presence)—but she was a goddess. Sheila Dupont. It seems almost criminally wasteful that such an artist should be cloistered aboard the Extrovert.

  How she radiated youth! How she gloried in the fact of it! How vast a footnote it would have required to lay bare all the significances implied in the turning of her wrist. After all, I have breathed spring air today.

  Aspera was present too, in a mask I haven't seen before. Though we were no more than twenty in the audience, and though I went unmasked, I don't think she noticed me. She too was under the enchantment of that child.

  Monday, August 27, 2084

  An embarrassing passage-at-arms with Aspera. Embarrassing partly because she aggressed so blatantly, partly because she found me out in a small deception.

  I had been teasing her about her professed orthodoxy and the lack of science in her methods. Taking my taunts in earnest, she suggested that I submit to a test case.

  "Anything you name," I promised.

  "Then I propose that you see me, and have seen me from the first, as your mother. And I'll prove it to you."

  I shrugged. "Well of course. The resemblance is incontrovertible. No doubt I see Captain Gray as my father too. He's the same age."

  "You can't wriggle out of it that easily. I'm not speaking in parables. There is some very specific point of correspondence, something that caught your attention from the first. This, and nothing else, was the reason you came bounding after me."

  "To be candid, Aspera, what first attracted me to you was your mas
k. My mother was dead long before masks came into fashion."

  "Tell me about her. You've scarcely mentioned your mother, you know, all this time you've been seeing me. That in itself is significant."

  "By that token, what wouldn't be significant?"

  "You're resisting like all Ireland."

  "I am, aren't I? Well then, which mother shall I tell you about? I had two."

  "How morbid." Aspera settled herself on a cushion and, like a wise, hungry cat, waited. "Siblings?"

  "One, a half-brother. He was mortal."

  "Well, go on. Tell your yarn and be done with it."

  "My first mother died in an automobile crash when I was five. 1997 that would be, long before anyone had begun to suspect what the Plague had wrought and accidents of that sort were still common. No clear memories. I suspect that much of what does pass for 'memories' are no more than stories my father told me at a later time. He has always been obsessed with the past. One, though, that I'm certain is my own: she took me to a museum. High ceilings. Marble stairways. And I remember that she lifted me up to look at an Egyptian statue, and I was scared. She was very pretty. My father claimed that that was the only reason he'd married her. It was an imprudent marriage. They were both very young, and father was, as the saying goes, impecunious."

  "Oh yes, that saying."

  "But I don't remember her face, her living face—only the photographs of it. She looked nothing like you. Her eyes were blue, like mine, and her hair was brown streaked with copper. I remember the funeral. It rained. Emma went to the cemetery with us. The path was muddy, and the wind blew the wreath off the headstone, and I had to go running after it. There were just the three of us. Dad and me, and Emma. And Mommy, of course."

  "Emma became his second wife?"

  "Yes. They married within two months of my mother's death. The funeral meats, and all that. The second time Dad was prudent. Emma's father was the President and Chairman of the Board of Freedom Mutual Insurance, where he worked. Within ten years of his marriage Dad was a vice-president. Emma was a year older than Dad, twenty-seven, single, and she'd been left standing at the altar twice. She was beginning to worry. Dad had been having an affair with her for a year before the accident, though at that time I knew nothing about that. Or maybe, in a way, I did. In any case, I hated Emma heartily."

  "She was twenty-seven in 1997?"

  "Yes, she was a mortal. After the Berkley Rumor she was one of the first to commit suicide. Her last ten years must have been hell for her. She could see herself aging, thickening, drying out—and Dad staying just as young as on the day he married her. She must have spent fifty dollars a week on beauty treatments in the last couple years. Then, right at the end, she cracked up. She was hysterical all the time. And I told you about the picture she painted of my father. I'll say this for the mortal condition—none of us could ever have painted a picture like that."

  "Pish! Of course they could. You have silly notions about what art is. What did she look like, your stepmother?"

  "Now, that's strange . . ."

  I paused, but I could see that I'd let myself in for it. "The first image that came to mind was of Emma lying in bed asleep—with a beauty mask over her eyes. A mask, you see!"

  "Elementary, my dear Watson. But tell me this—did she have brown eyes, like mine?"

  "As a matter of fact, very like yours. Oh, it's that way round." The memory of the eyeless beauty mask had been a means of evading the true point of correspondence, her eyes—their eyes.

  "I'll bet you were about twelve or thirteen when you saw her like that. And that you were, like young Hippolytus, aroused? Perhaps for the first time?"

  "Ah, you're a clever woman, Aspera."

  "Not clever. Just, as you were complaining, orthodox."

  "It's so much easier than thinking, isn't it?"

  "Mm. But you'll concede that I was right?"

  "With the proviso that it was my stepmother you reminded me of—yes."

  "How you do resist, Oliver. Don't you realize the point of the mask, why you should have found it so attractive from the first?"

  "Well, I've already let it slip—the beauty mask . . ."

  "What was it that your mother lifted you to see in that museum?"

  "An Egyptian statue."

  "A mummy. And within moments of your telling me about it, that's what you called her. Then you described her funeral in necrophile detail. Your dead Mommy, indeed! And the beauty mask, eyeless, black, serves a double purpose: it unites the images of the two women into a single image and it expresses that which seems to have impressed you most about both of them—their death, which also unites them."

  "Astonishing," I said.

  She kissed my nose. "Did I win, or did I win?"

  "Both."

  "One other thing, Oliver—what was her name?"

  I blushed. "Whose name?" I asked, trying to temporize, knowing she had caught me.

  "Your mother's, dolt!"

  There was no getting out of it. But how in hell had she thought to ask just that? "Hope," I said abashedly.

  Aspera laughed. Truly, she had cause to laugh, but she kept it up longer than was really called for. "Hope!" she crowed triumphantly. "Hope! Hope!"

  Tuesday, August 28, 2084

  Aspera confesses that it was all a trap. She had learned my mother's name at the library the day after I introduced myself to her. She's been spinning her web all this time.

  In reparation for the blood she drained yesterday, she has promised to make me a mask. It is to be of silver, the mate of her own—to make the punishment fit the crime.

  Thursday, August 30, 2084

  Chagrin comes not singly. Today, borne on the wind of my usual intercom eavesdropping, I overheard a conversation between Khalid Hatoum and another fellow (though I must know him, I couldn't place the voice) concerning me. They were in the synthesizing plant, where the occasional bleat and whistle of the vats would blot out a phrase or two, though nothing less than pandemonium would have left me unscathed.

  The Unknown: Ah well, sentimentality! That can be excused. It's a color with more or less gracefulness. It's the way he mixes his colors—or fails to—that's so ruinous.

  Hatoum: It's simpler than that. The man is stupid.

  The Unknown: You've claimed to admire many people stupider than Regan.

  Hatoum: I don't mean his native unintelligence. When one has reached his age—he's in his nineties—it's what one has made of oneself that matters. Regan has petrified. He's become a bibelot, some piece of Sèvres, callow and full of cheap fancies. Talk to him about art some time. He's living in the twentieth century. He's pre-War. He's—

  NOISE.

  The Unknown: Garrulous, certainly, but not—

  NOISE.

  Hatoum:—a stamp-collector's notion of art. He appreciates its residues, 'works' and 'pieces'—little turds lined up in rows behind glass. He admires art because he supposes it endures. It's the outlook of a mortal.

  The Unknown: (laughing) It's the card catalogue he really loves. Not even the turds, but their classification. But why do you let it upset you?

  Hatoum: Stupidity always upsets me, when it gives itself airs.

  The Unknown: We all give ourselves airs; we all presume too far. Besides, deadheads are necessary. There has to be someone around to whom this sort of thing—

  NOISE.

  —importance. The world will always need farmers, and farmers will always seem a little more mortal than the rest of us. That can be worn with style too.

  Hatoum: I like farmers. It's the Sunday painters I despise.

  I have been the rest of the day carrying on imaginary arguments with Hatoum. The bastard always shows me up. It is small consolation that he is unaware of these victories.

  Friday, Sept. 1, 2084

  I discovered today, by accident, that Aspera has a second 'patient'—and that it is none other than the young goddess, Miss Dupont. I insisted that Aspera introduce us. She agreed, but her reluctance was a
s evident to the sense as a sliced onion. I pretended not to notice.

  Within a quarter-hour she had brought up the subject of my father. A very irresponsible man, she said. A weak man. How so? I asked. Because he had thrown over my mother for Emma and deserted Emma in turn for Veronica. Men are that way, I said—men are fickle. She wanted to say more, but she saw that she had already said too much.

  Worried, Aspera?

  Monday, Sept. 4, 2084

  Aspera, bravely, brought us together. Like so many of the performers I have known, Sheila initially seems unremarkable in her merely private capacity. She fumbled making the tea, and Aspera retrieved her errors in the most unobtrusive way. She seemed genuinely concerned that her protegée make a good impression. Nor was Sheila ungrateful. She is, indeed, a very Cordelia of daughterliness—to the extent that she addresses Aspera, not without some whimsy, as "Little Mother."