New Writings in SF 26 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  ‘We tidied her only this morning; yet she untidies herself. We gave her a fresh gown; yet she soils it instantly. We combed her hair; yet-’

  ‘Do not say anything, dear Doctor. There is no need. I understand that your solicitude for her equals my own.’

  Jane stared at her visitors in exhausted reverie.

  ‘I am thirsty. Mother,’ she cried; ‘such heat and crowds!’

  ‘There are no more than three people in this room, Jane,’ Mrs. Elliot rebuked her; ‘that hardly constitutes a crowd, despite the proverb; and my landaulette was driven through almost empty streets, to visit you.’

  ‘I am thirsty, Mother.’

  ‘Yet she will not drink; resists drinking,’ whispered Dr. Hood; ‘except upon extreme persuasion-’

  He poured a cup of water from the ewer on the table; proffered it to Jane who held it for a moment, gazing into it; before suddenly inverting the cup and spilling every last drop of water deliberately on to the paved floor.

  ‘I am thirsty, Mother,’ her thin voice complained. ‘The crowds! The heat!’

  <>

  * * * *

  THE SEAFARER

  Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman

  A crew of people sundered from the roots of their culture would seek to retain what they could and to enhance the dream-dust sparkle of memories of beauty and truth, and who would blame them it they exaggerated their cultural heritage into artistic indigestion and intellectual snobbery that verged on the fringe of bad taste? Could blame attach to the drives of those who wish to learn and who inevitably Rock to those who know? Richard Mantree Karangetti was only too well aware, through his own peculiar and personal psychic problems, that he must tread this razor-sharp dividing line with exquisite care ...

  * * * *

  One

  Their boat’s prow was a magical-smith’s hammer, beating upon the steel blue anvil, scattering bright showers of whiteness, She ran vast, their Goldberry, over the silver-flowered blue fields of the sea, with spray a cloak she wore about her, flapping and wetly billowing.

  Putting out from Grey Havens in the early morning rain, after Karangetti and a smiling canvas-crawler acquaintance of his had raised up the swelling orange sail, he had steered his sea-craft to the south and east, then she had begun to flee before the wind. Time passed. And while they were eating the bread and cheese and the ripe, tangy citrus fruits that Ana had prepared, and mockingly raising toasts in the vitriolic spirit Richard poured from a wickerworked bottle, they found the softer hues of afternoon all around them: somewhere, their Goldberry had ran out from the later brightness of morning.

  About this time a ship appeared out of the distance; he recognized her, a bluff ungainly paddle-cruiser on picket duties off the coastal waters of Mancontinent, all military camouflage greyness and raw, unnatural straight lines, with a single stack trailing a white scarf of smoke; fore and aft were rocket-launcher bundles and light steam cannon. She had hooted twice, three times, as she crossed their course; tiny figures of men waved back at them. Then, she was past, and receding, and soon there were again only the sun and some ghosts of cloud hanging in the vast blueness of the sky, and the darker, mirroring blueness of the sea, with somewhere a horizon sandwiched between.

  Karangetti had not mentioned where he was steering for, and Anatera had not asked, for he appeared, even for him, to be preoccupied and self-absorbed.

  So, Ana talked of trivia or did not talk, but fell to watching the glittering sea slide endlessly past them. She hid her creamy, oval face behind her raven hair, daydreaming of last night when he had escorted her to the tavern, of raising her grotesque glass stein, peering fascinatedly through its smooth, bubble-bright amberness, seeing the wink of mellow candlelight on copper curio-pieces and objet d’art coloured glass. She thought of the liquors she had tasted; and the old songs, thin through others’ laughter, haunted Anatera’s memory.

  Finally—’Richard Mantree Karangetti ...’ He glanced gravely at her light smile, salt spume glittering on his cheek. ‘How did you come by such a curious name?’ she asked.

  Wondering which fable to recount he laughed warmly, because she wore a flower called Lady-of-the-Lake in her hair, and he had named it, long ago.

  ‘I’ll admit it: pure imagination, although the surname is mine. First Christian name ... let’s say in a previous life I was a friend of the House of York, back when the Roses of England were strangling one another. Now the middle bit comes from an Old Chinese ideogram Ezra Pound dissected in an essay once. I read,’ he recollected, with a sudden tartness, ‘that one early spring day in the Yankee Catskills ... sun tangled in tree’s branches, at dawn ... Man ... tree...’ So says what I see in memory’s dim looking-glass, anyway.

  ‘More, you want? Well, the weather was misty, faintly autumnal. I walked in ferns, under dripping leaves. It was very, very quiet. ‘Poem in October’, but I was ... oh, nineteen maybe ... and there was a glade atop the hill where you had a clear prospect, and the sky was huge, a natural cathedral of paling, unfrosting blue glass, with rafters made of cirrus, choirs of skylarks: holding a mystic ambience.’ He smiled. ‘I thought I was Burne-Jones, out of what was once called the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, because the pictures I could see were so arcanely, purely beautiful...’ He looked away, over the sea. ‘And I disliked my old ‘Christian’ names, anyway ...’

  Time passed as Karangetti read some of his love-poems, and Ana watched the warm glow of the sun through closed eyelids, and basked. She particularly liked the one where he compared her to a summer’s day. Later, she sang: old songs, amorous ballads, sea-shanties, and Karangetti accompanied her gently on sitar, tiller pegged firmly beneath his elbow.

  And then there it was. Rising out of the sea from a smudge of land-ho at the edge of distance; to a laugh from Anatera and a slow nod from Karangetti: an island. Perhaps half a dozen miles square it spread, she guessed, lightly forested, like green moss on a stone; its silhouette rose to a high hill towards one end. The isle had grown, and grown, until now the sky was noisy with its gulls and sea-wights, the hunchback hill loomed high, and the sea itself had not merely white torn edges where the island thrust itself out of it, but actual, massive bursts of foam that crashed on rocks and swirled and made noises like sleeping dragons.

  * * * *

  It took Karangetti some minutes to tack inshore and find the cove, and more to beach Goldberry, to draw her water-jewelled body up on the narrow bow of sand. That done, they caught up the supplies and gear they had brought with them and started up the small beach towards the appearing green of the shingle’s botany.

  Ana laying her head over to one side and blinking her sea-green eyes paused daintily to finger-comb out her long, luxuriantly black hair, which was pearled with spindrift and made wild by the wind. Karangetti stalked a few steps further through the sands before pausing and glancing back over his shoulder.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘I know an old place built in a nook in the hill.’ Karangetti gestured west, at the seaward side. ‘It’s been abandoned to ghosts for some centuries; but we should not suffer much over two nights. Each year, at this green season, I like to come. A sort of troth-plighting, and a rite of renewal. But of course—you know how lax I am, Ana—I often fail. I suppose I’m just a loser and a heart-breaker, really...’ he trailed off.

  ‘That is perhaps all very well, Richard, but... what else?’ She opened her clasped hands, spasmodically.

  ‘Hmmh?’

  ‘This place. What is it? Why are you drawn here?’

  He gave an automatic ‘Why not?’, then paused a moment, She felt the change come over him. The net of emotion that had been slowly drawing inside him suddenly tightened, yielding to her the silvery flicker and churning caught within it: she sensed bright moments, words, faces, gestures ...

  The Free Order, who had instructed this seduction, had been unable to locate her exactly in any of their precisely-drawn classes of parability; but among other things. Ana had traces of the empathetic
Talent. It was the storm-compass she always used to steer through Karangetti’s wildly fluctuating moods and passions.

  In the broken kaleidoscope, she perceived that the place meant, deeply.

  ‘This-’ Karangetti shaded his eyes from the sun, and looked around as the island dreamed itself about them, ‘—was an Isle of the Blessed. The island of the man who died.’ His face twisted around a small, twisted smile. ‘And then history happened. Come on, Anatera.’ He started walking again, whistling to himself with an effort not looking back. He carried their tied bedroll over his right shoulder, hooked in one finger as one might sling a jacket. Down by his left side he swung a light canvas bag holding various knick-knacks, and his ever-present sitar, slung rifle-like from his left shoulder at a slight angle, banged its bulbous gourd against his hip as he walked.

  She started after him, hurrying to catch up, finding the sand still hot and loose beneath her feet which were clad only with foot-jewellery.

  He murmured: ‘ ‘Here, once, east and west were confused, and autumn and spring were one, and there grew magic herbs and moly’,’ but she could not see his face. After a moment of trudging he gave a small laugh.

  ‘Once, only once?’

  ‘Aye.’ He didn’t give a small laugh. ‘The world has passed by.’

  They departed the swordgrass stands girdling the beach, and began to mount the silky-green slope of the hill, following the vivid orange mosses that coloured what might have been a long overgrown promenading-place. From a clump of banyan, a lizard flickered across their path, insectile and bright green. Ana heard a cuckoo calling somewhere across the island. As they walked together, Karangetti shook his head, and his hair, which shagged over his shoulders in a vague mass of black curls, heaved with the motion.

  ‘Atop and within these limestone cliffs is a moment out of my past. That’s all. No one in the world recalls it now, except for me.’

  She side-glanced at him. ‘Then why come back?’

  She had another fragment of her Rosetta stone then, as he turned and said quietly to her, ‘For remembrance’ sake. Ana. To look back, and maybe to wonder. To feel glad to be alive...’

  * * * *

  Two

  Later, they passed through a screen of chameleon-blossom and came upon the sunken gardens. Water tinkled somewhere as they descended the staircase cut into the living stone.

  ‘This used to be a formal garden, didn’t it?’ she said, entering.

  Karangetti nodded, and lifted a hand to sweep away an over-reaching green arm of sweetbriar that swayed in front of his face.

  These are all the flowers of lost Home.’

  She nodded vaguely, as she wandered entranced ahead into the midst of the rampant floweriness, arms trailing, hands touching, face radiant. Karangetti watched her dispassionately, and there was something, a certain déjà vu perhaps, in the way she moved, in how her hips rocked beneath the ankle-length, limp, simple gown of white.

  ‘We called these the Gardens of Life. But they have all fallen into ruin and wildness these many years.’

  Slender, giant sunflowers, growing higher than ever they did on Earth, hung their mellow, yellow receiving dishes beneath the outpourings of a sun that was slightly whiter than the Sol of Home. All about, briars draped the trees, littered them with explosions of coloured crepe and wraithed them about with humid, strangely exotic perfumes. In Ana’s eyes, all the flowers were on fire.

  She stopped, stooped to touch one, delicately. She smelled its erotic sweetness, beamed with simple delight, then savoured it again. ‘Richard?’

  ‘I am here.’

  ‘This isn’t ...?’ He could read the question in her face too.

  ‘A rose? Yes, it is. As are these. These are the oldest roses in the world, and even they are mutating and dwindling. See ...’ He plucked out the delicately misshapen crimson flower, matched it with a twisted white rose; then he allowed his hands to go limp, and the petals tumbled to the ground.

  He gestured and, sometimes specifically pointing about the garden, named for her the flowers, the birds and the insects. Further off clustered stands of chrysanthemums, growing amidst the once-sculptured trees, just as though in a Japanese garden that had flourished beneath Fuji-Yama’s slopes, somewhere in the faery tale of ‘once upon a time’.

  Anemones and columbines, daffodils and lavender, and many that he could not now find a title or even a lineage for, grew around them. Willows and maidenhair trees rustled beside the small silver lake they walked towards, and king crimson was in bloody riot among the greenness. Standing guard were islets of what might have been cherry and almond trees in full, living pink blossom. They saw yellow and purple and scarlet and blue and lilac, and broken Bi-frost. All unordered and confused and vivid with life.

  It was the tapestry of a mad Penelope.

  They left the ornamental gardens, and from the crown of the hill walked down towards the sea. It was shouting up at them from the foot of the cliff, and the faint east wind had freshened. The sky was soon scrubbed almost clean.

  ‘And this?’ Ana said, turning to him in wonder and sadness, ‘was it once your home?’

  ‘It used to be, and I helped build it here. After a while I left it, and went away again. Now its only tenants are the wind, and the memories blown about with the dust It belongs to no one anymore.’

  Something had happened to the house a long time before. Time had happened to it since.

  It had been low and simple and glittering white, and fused silk smooth, like something from the twentieth century in stainless steel, or a sculpture from the twentieth before Christ in polished jade. It had been struck by something, Ana saw, and a great hole opened in it, and the creamy-coloured fused rock had turned to smoky glass again in places. The house, she thought, was a carious tooth, a ruined thing that once had had an ascetic beauty in its perfection.

  Karangetti climbed into the cottage, and moved from room to broken room, to open-roofed space, to yet another broken room. And there was nothing there ... Nothing remained except walls, and spaces where walls used to be, glistening with the webs of a land crustacean that might be called an insect. He looked about him, then left the place’s strangeness.

  Outside, Anatera was walking through interweaving flowers and brambles among the jazzy colours of the grown-wild herb-garden. She had her back to him, straight, slender, and her hair was a dark flame that breathed down her white gown. Fairer than the flowers ... At times, she made him feel as grotesque as a self-parody, sometimes merely awkward. On occasion, she seemed to babble with no more than the attractive, clichéd shallowness of a Brooke. Yet she was a woman, and she had time to change; Karangetti knew he had enough time to see her come to full blossom. Heaven knows, he had time. He stood there, dreading the day he must leave her, tear out the tenuous roots she gave him, destroy the illusion of permanence she wove about the moment. But he would not be able to bear it, seeing that flower fade past full bloom. And so he’d have to follow the sun ...

  That was still some moments off, however.

  Anatera raised her hand above her head, half open, half clenched, with two half-bent fingers extended. A moment passed, meaninglessly. And then something huge and bright and all colours came flitting through the garden’s wildness, swooped up, then alighted on her hand, wafting its paper wings for a moment. Karangetti saw it was a fantastical acid-dream of a butterfly, with wings like an artist’s sheaf of canvases, rainbow-whorled. It was no insect; but then, this was not Home.

  She turned, knowing he was looking at her, and the—butterfly—fanned its wings in alarm at the motion.

  ‘Look! Isn’t it beautiful?’

  ‘My lady,’ he said, considering making a mock bow, ‘you charm all creatures with your grace and beauty...’

  She smiled, freeing it. ‘Did they have glory-wings such as this on Home?’ With a jerky movement, the creature was gone.

  ‘No. Not quite like that. We—Home was a greater world than Exile. Things weighed so heavily there...’r />
  ‘How can that be?’

  He shrugged, and removed the blade of grass he had been chewing on. ‘How can you summon glory-wings to your fingers?’

  She smiled, standing facing him waist-deep in the flowers, Guinevere, in a long white gown, whose eyes were green.

  ‘Perhaps I am a witch.’

  He smiled and shook his head, thinking of the steps that wound down into the catacombs of the island, and then he said: ‘No. No. You’re a bright flower, a child of the springtime, a lady ...’ and knew the answer would not entirely please her.

  Then Karangetti’s eyes re-explored the heavy pendant that hung low from the silver chain belt that slackly looped her waist. It was of fine gold filigree work and amethyst. He had given it to her of course.