Anywhen

by James Blish

  Another stir of movement in the middle distance caught her eye: a free cloak, seemingly riding an updraft over a fixed point. For a moment she wondered what on that ground could be warm enough to produce so localized a thermal. Then, abruptly, she realized that she was shaking with hatred, and fought furiously to drive the spasm down, her fingernails slicing into her naked palms.

  A raster of jagged black lines, like a television interference pattern, broke across her view and brought her attention fully back to the minutely solipsistic confines of her dilemma. The wave of emotion, nevertheless, would not quite go away, and she had a vague but persistent impression that it was being imposed from outside, at least in part—a cold passion she was interpreting as fury because its real nature, whatever it was, had no necessary relevance to her own imprisoned soul. For all that it was her own life and no other that was in peril, she felt guilty, as though she was eavesdropping, and as angry with herself as with what she was overhearing; yet burning as helplessly as the forbidden lamp in the bedchamber of Psyche and Eros.

  Another trope—but was it, after all, so far-fetched? She was a mortal present at the mating of inhuman essences; mountainously far from home; borne here like the invisible lovers upon the arms of the wind; empalaced by a whole virgin-white world, over which flew the banners of a high god and a father of gods; and, equally appropriately, Venus was very far away from whatever love was being celebrated here.

  What ancient and coincidental nonsense! Next she would be thinking herself degraded at the foot of some cross.

  Yet the impression, of an eerie tempest going on just slightly outside any possibility of understanding what it was, would not pass away. Still worse, it seemed to mean something, to be important, to mock her with subtle clues to matters of great moment, of which her own present trap was only the first and not necessarily the most significant.

  And suppose that all these impressions were in fact not extraneous or irrelevant, but did have some import —not just as an abstract puzzle, but to that morsel of displaced life that was Ulla Hillstrom? She was certainly no Freudian—that farrago of poetry and tosh had been passe for so long that it was now hard to understand how anybody, let alone a whole era, had been bemused by it—but it was too late now to rule out the repulsive possibility. No matter how frozen her present world, she could not escape the fact that, from the moment the cloak had captured her, she had been equally ridden by a Sabbat of specifically erotic memories, images, notions, analogies, myths, symbols, and frank physical sensations, all the more obtrusive because they were both inappropriate and disconnected. It might well have to be faced that a season of love can fall due in the heaviest weather —and never mind the terrors that flow in with it, or what deep damnations. At the very least, it was possible that somewhere in all this was the clue that would help her to divorce herself at last even from this violent embrace.

  But the concept was preposterous enough to defer consideration of it if there were any other avenues open, and at least one seemed to be: the source of the thermal. The virus bubble, like many of the Terrestrial microorganisms to which it was analogous, could survive temperatures well above boiling, but it seemed reasonable to assume that the flying cloaks, evolved on a world where even words congealed, might be sensitive to a relatively slight amount of heat.

  Now, could she move inside this shroud of her own volition? She tried a step. The sensation was tacky, as though she were plowing in thin honey, but it did not impede her except for a slight imposed clumsiness which experience ought to obviate. She was able to mount the sled with no trouble.

  The cogs bit into the snow with a dry, almost inaudible squeaking, and the sled inched forward. Ulla held it to as slow a crawl as possible, because of her interrupted vision.

  The free cloak was still in sight, approximately where it had been before, insofar as she could judge against this featureless snowscape—which was fortunate, since it might well be her only flag for the source of the thermal, whatever it was.

  A peculiar fluttering in her surroundings—a whisper of sound, of motion, of flickering in the light—distracted her. It was as though her compound sheath were trembling slightly. The impression grew slowly more pronounced as the sled continued to lurch forward. As usual, there seemed to be nothing she could do about it except, possibly, to retreat; but she could not do that either, now; she was committed. Outside, she began to hear the soft soughing of a steady wind.

  The cause of the thermal, when she finally reached it, was almost bathetic: a pool of liquid. Placid and deep blue, it lay inside a fissure in a low, heart-shaped hummock, rimmed with feathery snow. It looked like nothing more or less than a spring, though she did not for a moment suppose that the liquid could be water. She could not see the bottom of it; evidently, it was welling up from a fair depth. The spring analogy was probably completely false; the existence of anything in a liquid state on this world had to be thought of as a form of vulcanism. Certainly the column of heat rising from it was considerable; despite the thinness of the air, the wind here nearly howled. The free cloak floated up and down, about a hundred feet above her, like the last leaf of a long, cruel autumn. Nearer home, the bubble cloak shook with something comically like subdued fury.

  Now, what to do? Should she push boldly into that cleft, hoping that the alien part of the bubble cloak would be unable to bear the heat? Close up, that course now seemed foolish, as long as she was ignorant of the real nature of the magma down there. And, besides, any effective immersion would probably have to surround at least half of the total surface area of the bubble, which wasn't practicable—the well wasn't big enough to accommodate it, even supposing that the compromised virus suit did not fight back, as in the pure state it had been obligated to do. On the whole, she was reluctantly glad that the experiment was impossible, for the mere notion of risking a new immolation in that problematical hole gave her the horrors.

  Yet the time left for decision was obviously now very short, even supposing—as she had no right to do—that the environment-maintaining functions of the suit were still in perfect order. The quivering of the bubble was close to being explosive, and even were it to remain intact, it might shut her off from the outside world at any second.

  The free cloak dipped lower, as if in curiosity. That only made the trembling worse. She wondered why.

  Was it possible—was it possible that the thing embracing her companion was jealous?

  4

  There was no time left to examine the notion, no time even to sneer at it. Act—act! Forcing her way off the sled, she stumbled to the mound and looked frantically for some way of stopping it up. If she could shut off the thermal, bring the free cloak still closer—but how?

  Throw rocks. But were there any? Yes, there were two, not very big, but at least she could move them. She bent stiffly and tumbled them into the crater.

  The liquid froze around them with soundless speed. In seconds, the snow rimming the pool had drawn completely over it, like lips closing, leaving behind only a faint dimpled streak of shadow on a white ground.

  The wind moaned and died, and the free cloak, its hems outspread to the uttermost, sank down as if to wrap her in still another deadly swath. Shadow spread around her; the falling cloak, its color deepening, blotted Saturn from the sky, and then was sprawling over the beautiful banners of the rings—

  The virus bubble convulsed and turned black, throwing her to the frozen ground beside the hummock like a bead doll. A blast of wind squalled over her.

  Terrified, she tried to curl into a ball. The suit puffed up around her.

  Then at last, with a searing, invisible wrench at its contained kernel of space-time, which burned out the control box instantly, the single creature that was the bubble cloak tore itself free of Ulla and rose to join its incomplete fellow.

  In the single second before she froze forever into the livid backdrop of Titan, she failed even to find time to regret what she had never felt; for she had never known
it, and only died as she had lived, an artifact of successful calculation. She never saw the cloaks go flapping away downwind—nor could it ever have occurred to her that she had brought heterosexuality to Titan, thus beginning that long evolution the end of which, sixty millions of years away, no human being would see.

  No; her last thought was for the virus bubble, and it was only three words long:

  You goddam philanderer—

  Almost on the horizon, the two cloaks, the two Titanians, flailed and tore at each other, becoming smaller

  and smaller with distance. Bits and pieces of them flaked off and fell down the sky like ragged tears. Ungainly though the cloaks normally were, they courted even more clumsily.

  Beside Ulla, the well was gone; it might never have existed. Overhead, the banners of the rings flew changelessly, as though they too had seen nothing—or perhaps, as though in the last six billion years they had seen everything, siftings upon siftings in oblivion, until nothing remained but the banners of their own mirrored beauty.

  SKYSIGN

  “Und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln

  Und mit fuenfzig Kanonen

  Wird entschwinden mit mir.”

  Pirate-Jenny:

  “The Threepenny Opera”

  I

  Carl Wade came back to consciousness slowly and with a dull headachy feeling, as though fighting off a barbiturate hangover—which, under the circumstances, was quite possible. He remembered right away that he had been one of the people who had volunteered to go aboard the alien spaceship which had been hanging motionless over San Francisco for the last month. The “lay volunteer,” the Pentagon men had insultingly called him. And it was likely that the aliens would have drugged him, because to them, after all, he was only a specimen, and, therefore, possibly dangerous—

  But that didn’t seem quite right. Somehow, he could not bring his memory into focus. He hadn’t actually been taken aboard the ship, as far as he could recall. On the night before he had been supposed to join the volunteer group, in honor of his own approaching martyrdom—as he liked to think of it—he and some friends from the local Hobbit Society, including the new girl, had cycled up to Telegraph Hill to take a look at the great ship. But it had only continued to hang there, showing no lights, no motion, no activity of any kind except a faint Moon-highlight, as had been the case ever since it had first popped into view in the skies over Berkeley—it responded only to the answers to its own radio messages, only to answers, never to questions—and the club soon got bored with it.

  And then what? Had they all gone off to get drunk? Had he managed to get to bed and was now about to have one of those morning-afters? Or was he in a cell as an aftermath of a brawl?

  No one of these ideas evoked any echo in his memory except old ones; and a persistent hunch that he was on the spaceship, all the same, discouraged him from opening his eyes yet. He wondered what insanity had ever led him to volunteer, and what even greater insanity had led the Pentagon people to choose him over all the saucerites and other space nuts.

  A vague clink of sound, subdued and metallic, caught his attention. He couldn’t identity it, but somehow it sounded surgical. As far as it went, this matched with the quiet around him, the clean coolness of the air, and the unrumpled, also apparently clean pallet he seemed to be lying on. He was neither in a jail nor in the pad of anybody he knew. On the other hand, he didn’t feel ill enough to be in a hospital ward, just a little drugged. The college infirmary? No, nonsense, he’d been thrown out of college last year.

  In short, he must be on the ship, simply because this must be the day after yesterday. The thought made him squeeze his eyes still tighter shut. A moment later, further speculation was cut off by a feminine voice, unknown to him, and both pleasantly sexy and unpleasantly self-possessed, but obviously human. It said:

  “I see you’ve given us his language, rather than him ours.”

  “It cops out on … rules out … avoids … obviates making everyone else on board guard their tongue,” a man’s voice replied. “Oan, I really had to dig for that one. He’s got a constipated vocabulary; knows words, but hates them.”

  “That’s helpful, too,” the woman’s voice responded. “If he can’t address himself precisely, it’ll matter less what wesay to him. But what’s he faking for, Brand? He’s obviously wide awake.”

  At this Carl opened eyes and mouth to protest indignantly that he wasn’t faking, realized his mistake, tried to close both again, and found himself gasping and goggling instead.

  He could not see the woman, but the man called Brand was standing directly over him, looking down into his face. Brand looked like a robot—no; remembering the man’s snotty remark about his vocabulary, Carl corrected himself: He looked like a fine silver statue, or like a silver version of Talos, the Man of Brass—and wouldn’t Carl’s faculty advisor have been surprised at how fast he’d come up with that one! The metal shone brilliantly in the bluelight of the surgery-like room, but it did not look like plate metal. It did not look hard at all. When Brand moved, it flowed with the movement of the muscles under it, like skin.

  Yet somehow Carl was dead sure that it wasn’t skin, but clothing of some sort. Between the metallic eye slits, the man’s eyes were brown and human, and Carl could even see the faint webbing of blood vessels in their whites. Also, when he spoke, the inside of his mouth was normal mucous membrane—black like a crow’s mouth instead of red, but certainly not metal. On the other hand, the mouth, disconcertingly, vanished entirely when it was closed, and so did the eyes when they blinked; the metal flowed together as instantly as it parted.

  “That’s better,” the man said. “Check his responses, Lavelle. He still looks a little dopey. Damn this language.”

  He turned away and the woman—her name had certainly sounded like Lavelle—came into view, obviously in no hurry. She was metallic, too, but her metal was black, though her eyes were gray-green. The integument was exceedingly like a skin, yet seeing her, Carl was even more convinced that it was either clothing or a body mask. He noticed a moment later, either she had no hair or else her skull cap—if that was what she wore—was very tight, a point that hadn’t occurred to him while looking at the man.

  She took Carl’s pulse, and then looked expertly under his upper eyelids. “Slight fugue, that’s all,” she said with a startling pink flash of tongue. Yet not quite so startling as Brand’s speaking had been, since a pink mouth in a black face was closer to Carl’s experience than was any sort of mouth in a silver face. “He can go down to the cages any time.”

  Cages?

  “Demonstration first,” Brand, now out of sight again, said in an abstracted voice.

  Carl chanced moving his head slightly, and found that his horizon-headache was actually a faint, one-sided earache, which made no sense to him at all. The movement also showed him the dimensions of the room, which was no larger than an ordinary living room—maybe 12′ x 13′—and painted an off-white. There was also some electronic apparatus here and there, but no more than Carl had seenin the pads of some hi-fi bugs he knew, and to his eyes not much more interesting. In a corner was a drop-down bunk, evidently duplicating the one he now occupied. Over an oval metal door—the only shiplike feature he could see—was a dial face like that of a large barometer or clock, its figures too small to read from where he lay, and much too closely spaced.

  Brand reappeared. After a moment, the shining black woman called Lavelle took up a position a few feet behind him and to his left.

  “I want to show you something,” the man said to Carl. “You can see just by looking at us that it would do you no good to jump us … to attack us. Do you dig … do you understand that?”

  “Sure,” Carl said, rather more eagerly than he had intended. As a first word, it wasn’t a very good one.

  “All right.” Brand put both hands on his hips, just below his waist, and seemed to brace himself slightly. “But there’s a lot more to it than you see at the moment. W
atch closely.”

  Instantly, the silver man and Lavelle changed places. It happened so suddenly and without any transition that for a second Carl failed to register what he was supposed to have noticed. Neither of the two metal people had moved in the slightest. They were just each one standing where the other one had been standing before.

  “Now—” the man said.

  At once, he was back where he had been, but the gleaming black woman—man, that outfit was sexy!—was standing far back, by the oval door. Again, there’d been not a whisper, or hint of any motion in the room.

  “And once more—”

  This time, the result was much more confusing. The metal aliens seemed to have moved, but after a while Carl realized that they hadn’t; he had. The switch was so drastic that for an instant he had thought they—all three of them—were in another room; even the hands of the dial face looked changed. But actually, all that had happened was that he was now in the other bunk.

  The switch made hash of a hypothesis he had only barely begun to work out: that the metal skins, or suits, made it possible for Brand and Lavelle to swap places, or jump elsewhere at will, by something like teleportation. Ifthat was how it worked, then Carl might just hook one of those shiny suits, and then, flup! and …

  … And without benefit of suit white or black, he In the other bunk, huddled in the ruins of his theory and feeling damned scared. On the face of a cathode-ray oscilloscope now in his field of view, a wiggly green trace diagrammed pulses which he was sure showed exactly how scared he was; he had always suspected any such instrument of being able to read his mind. The suspicion turned to rage and humiliation when Lavelle looked at the machine’s display and laughed, in a descending arpeggio, like a coloratura soprano.