The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One 1929-1964--The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time Chosen by the Members of the Science Fiction Writers of America

by Robert Silverberg

  She was a spun weather vane, a feathered crucifix hovering in the air, a clothes-line holding one bright garment lashed parallel to the ground. Her shoulder was bare now, and her right breast moved up and down like a moon in the sky, its red nipple appearing momently above a fold and vanishing again. The music was as formal as Job’s argument with God. Her dance was God’s reply.

  The music slowed, settled; it had been met, matched, answered. Her garment, as if alive, crept back into the more sedate folds it originally held.

  She dropped low, lower, to the floor. Her head fell upon her raised knees. She did not move.

  There was silence.

  I realized, from the ache across my shoulders, how tensely I had been sitting. My armpits were wet. Rivulets had been running down my sides. What did one do now? Applaud?

  I sought M’Cwyie from the corner of my eye. She raised her right hand.

  As if by telepathy the girl shuddered all over and stood. The musicians also rose. So did M’Cwyie.

  I got to my feet, with a Charley Horse in my left leg, and said, “It was beautiful,” inane as that sounds.

  I received three different High Forms of “thank you.”

  There was a flurry of color and I was alone again with M’Cwyie.

  “That is the one hundred-seventeenth of the two thousand, two hundred-twenty-four dances of Locar.”

  I looked down at her.

  “Whether Locar was right or wrong, he worked out a fine reply to the inorganic.”

  She smiled.

  “Are the dances of your world like this?”

  “Some of them are similar. I was reminded of them as I watched Braxa—but I’ve never seen anything exactly like hers.”

  “She is good,” M’Cwyie said. “She knows all the dances.”

  A hint of her earlier expression which had troubled me …

  It was gone in an instant.

  “I must tend my duties now.” She moved to the table and closed the books. “M’narra.”

  “Good-bye.” I slipped into my boots.

  “Good-bye, Gallinger.”

  I walked out the door, mounted the jeepster, and roared across the evening into night, my wings of risen desert flapping slowly behind me.

  II

  I had just closed the door behind Betty, after a brief grammar session, when I heard the voices in the hall. My vent was opened a fraction, so I stood there and eavesdropped:

  Morton’s fruity treble: “Guess what? He said ‘hello’ to me awhile ago.”

  “Hmmph!” Emory’s elephant lungs exploded. “Either he’s slipping, or you were standing in his way and he wanted you to move.”

  “Probably didn’t recognize me. I don’t think he sleeps any more, now he has that language to play with. I had night watch last week, and every night I passed his door at 0300—I always heard that recorder going. At 0500 when I got off, he was still at it.”

  “The guy is working hard,” Emory admitted, grudgingly. “In fact, I think he’s taking some kind of dope to keep awake. He looks sort of glassy-eyed these days. Maybe that’s natural for a poet, though.”

  Betty had been standing there, because she broke in then:

  “Regardless of what you think of him, it’s going to take me at least a year to learn what he’s picked up in three weeks. And I’m just a linguist, not a poet.”

  Morton must have been nursing a crush on her bovine charms. It’s the only reason I can think of for his dropping his guns to say what he did.

  “I took a course in modern poetry when I was back at the university,” he began. “We read six authors—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Stevens, and Gallinger—and on the last day of the semester, when the prof was feeling a little rhetorical, he said, ‘These six names are written on the century, and all the gates of criticism and hell shall not prevail against them.’

  “Myself,” he continued, “I thought his Pipes of Krishna and his Madrigals were great. I was honored to be chosen for an expedition he was going on.

  “I think he’s spoken two dozen words to me since I met him,” he finished.

  The Defense: “Did it ever occur to you,” Betty said, “that he might be tremendously self-conscious about his appearance? He was also a precocious child, and probably never even had school friends. He’s sensitive and very introverted.”

  “Sensitive? Self-conscious?” Emory choked and gagged. “The man is as proud as Lucifer, and he’s a walking insult machine. You press a button like ‘Hello’ or ‘Nice day’ and he thumbs his nose at you. He’s got it down to a reflex.”

  They muttered a few other pleasantries and drifted away.

  Well bless you, Morton boy. You little pimple-faced, Ivy-bred connoisseur! I’ve never taken a course in my poetry, but I’m glad someone said that. The Gates of Hell. Well now! Maybe Daddy’s prayers got heard somewhere, and I am a missionary, after all!

  Only …

  … Only a missionary needs something to convert people to. I have my private system of esthetics, and I suppose it oozes an ethical by-product somewhere. But if I ever had anything to preach, really, even in my poems, I wouldn’t care to preach it to such lowlifes as you. If you think I’m a slob, I’m also a snob, and there’s no room for you in my Heaven—it’s a private place, where Swift, Shaw, and Petronius Arbiter come to dinner.

  And oh, the feasts we have! The Trimalchio’s, the Emory’s we dissect!

  We finish you with the soup, Morton!

  I turned and settled at my desk. I wanted to write something. Ecclesiastes could take a night off. I wanted to write a poem, a poem about the one hundred-seventeenth dance of Locar; about a rose following the light, traced by the wind, sick, like Blake’s rose, dying….

  I found a pencil and began.

  When I had finished I was pleased. It wasn’t great—at least, it was no greater than it needed to be—High Martian not being my strongest tongue. I groped, and put it into English, with partial rhymes. Maybe I’d stick it in my next book. I called it Braxa:

  In a land of wind and red, where the icy evening of Time freezes milk in the breasts of Life, as two moons overhead—cat and dog in alleyways of dream—scratch and scramble agelessly my flight …

  This final flower turns a burning head.

  I put it away and found some phenobarbital. I was suddenly tired.

  When I showed my poem to M’Cwyie the next day, she read it through several times, very slowly.

  “It is lovely,” she said. “But you used three words from your own language. ‘Cat’ and ‘dog,’ I assume, are two small animals with a hereditary hatred for one another. But what is ‘flower’?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’ve never come across your word for ‘flower,’ but I was actually thinking of an Earth flower, the rose.”

  “What is it like?”

  “Well, its petals are generally bright red. That’s what I meant, on one level, by ‘burning heads.’ I also wanted it to imply fever, though, and red hair, and the fire of life. The rose, itself, has a thorny stem, green leaves, and a distinct, pleasing aroma.”

  “I wish I could see one.”

  “I suppose it could be arranged. I’ll check.”

  “Do it, please. You are a—” She used the word for “prophet,” or religious poet, like Isaiah or Locar. “—and your poem is inspired. I shall tell Braxa of it.”

  I declined the nomination, but felt flattered.

  This, then, I decided, was the strategic day, the day on which to ask whether I might bring in the microfilm machine and the camera. I wanted to copy all their texts, I explained, and I couldn’t write fast enough to do it.

  She surprised me by agreeing immediately. But she bowled me over with her invitation.

  “Would you like to come and stay here while you do this thing? Then you can work night and day, any time you want—except when the Temple is being used, of course.”

  I bowed.

  “I should be honored.”

  “Good. Bring your machines when you want, and I
will show you a room.”

  “Will this afternoon be all right?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then I will go now and get things ready. Until this afternoon …”

  “Good-bye.”

  I anticipated a little trouble from Emory, but not much. Everyone back at the ship was anxious to see the Martians, poke needles in the Martians, ask them about Martian climate, diseases, soil chemistry, politics, and mushrooms (our botanist was a fungus nut, but a reasonably good guy)—and only four or five had actually gotten to see them. The crew had been spending most of its time excavating dead cities and their acropolises. We played the game by strict rules, and the natives were as fiercely insular as the nineteenth-century Japanese. I figured I would meet with little resistance, and I figured right.

  In fact, I got the distinct impression that everyone was happy to see me move out.

  I stopped in the hydroponics room to speak with our mushroom master.

  “Hi, Kane. Grow any toadstools in the sand yet?”

  He sniffed. He always sniffs. Maybe he’s allergic to plants.

  “Hello, Gallinger. No, I haven’t had any success with toadstools, but look behind the car barn next time you’re out there. I’ve got a few cacti going.”

  “Great,” I observed. Doc Kane was about my only friend aboard, not counting Betty.

  “Say, I came down to ask you a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  “I want a rose.”

  “A what?”

  “A rose. You know, a nice red American Beauty job—thorns, pretty smelling—”

  “I don’t think it will take in this soil. Sniff, sniff.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to plant it, I just want the flowers.”

  “I’d have to use the tanks.” He scratched his hairless dome. “It would take at least three months to get you flowers, even under forced growth.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “Sure, if you don’t mind the wait.”

  “Not at all. In fact, three months will just make it before we leave.” I looked about at the pools of crawling slime, at the trays of shoots. “—I’m moving up to Tirellian today, but I’ll be in and out all the time. I’ll be here when it blooms.”

  “Moving up there, eh? Moore said they’re an in-group.”

  “I guess I’m ‘in’ then.”

  “Looks that way—I still don’t see how you learned their language, though. Of course, I had trouble with French and German for my Ph.D., but last week I heard Betty demonstrate it at lunch. It just sounds like a lot of weird noises. She says speaking it is like working a Times crossword and trying to imitate birdcalls at the same time.”

  I laughed, and took the cigarette he offered me.

  “It’s complicated,” I acknowledged. “But, well, it’s as if you suddenly came across a whole new class of mycetae here—you’d dream about it at night.”

  His eyes were gleaming.

  “Wouldn’t that be something! I might, yet, you know.”

  “Maybe you will.”

  He chuckled as we walked to the door.

  “I’ll start your roses tonight. Take it easy down there.”

  “You bet. Thanks.”

  Like I said, a fungus nut, but a fairly good guy.

  My quarters in the Citadel of Tirellian were directly adjacent to the Temple, on the inward side and slightly to the left. They were a considerable improvement over my cramped cabin, and I was pleased that Martian culture had progressed sufficiently to discover the desirability of the mattress over the pallet. Also, the bed was long enough to accommodate me, which was surprising.

  So I unpacked and took sixteen 35 mm. shots of the Temple, before starting on the books.

  I took ’stats until I was sick of turning pages without knowing what they said. So I started translating a work of history.

  “Lo. In the thirty-seventh year of the Process of Cillen the rains came, which gave rise to rejoicing, for it was a rare and untoward occurrence, and commonly construed a blessing.

  “But it was not the life-giving semen of Malann which fell from the heavens. It was the blood of the universe, spurting from an artery. And the last days were upon us. The final dance was to begin.

  “The rains brought the plague that does not kill, and the last passes of Locar began with their drumming….”

  I asked myself what the hell Tamur meant, for he was an historian and supposedly committed to fact. This was not their Apocalypse.

  Unless they could be one and the same …?

  Why not? I mused. Tirellian’s handful of people were the remnant of what had obviously once been a highly developed culture. They had had wars, but no holocausts; science, but little technology. A plague, a plague that did not kill …? Could that have done it? How, if it wasn’t fatal?

  I read on, but the nature of the plague was not discussed. I turned pages, skipped ahead, and drew a blank.

  M’Cwyie! M’Cwyie! When I want to question you most, you are not around!

  Would it be a faux pas to go looking for her? Yes, I decided. I was restricted to the rooms I had been shown, that had been an implicit understanding. I would have to wait to find out.

  So I cursed long and loud, in many languages, doubtless burning Malann’s sacred ears, there in his Temple.

  He did not see fit to strike me dead, so I decided to call it a day and hit the sack.

  I must have been asleep for several hours when Braxa entered my room with a tiny lamp. She dragged me awake by tugging at my pajama sleeve.

  I said hello. Thinking back, there is not much else I could have said.

  “Hello.”

  “I have come,” she said, “to hear the poem.”

  “What poem?”

  “Yours.”

  “Oh.”

  I yawned, sat up, and did things people usually do when awakened in the middle of the night to read poetry.

  “That is very kind of you, but isn’t the hour a trifle awkward?”

  “I don’t mind,” she said.

  Someday I am going to write an article for the Journal of Semantics, called “Tone of Voice: An Insufficient Vehicle for Irony.”

  However, I was awake, so I grabbed my robe.

  “What sort of animal is that?” she asked, pointing at the silk dragon on my lapel.

  “Mythical,” I replied. “Now look, it’s late. I am tired. I have much to do in the morning. And M’Cwyie just might get the wrong idea if she learns you were here.”

  “Wrong idea?”

  “You know damned well what I mean!” It was the first time I had had an opportunity to use Martian profanity, and it failed.

  “No,” she said, “I do not know.”

  She seemed frightened, like a puppy being scolded without knowing what it has done wrong.

  I softened. Her red cloak matched her hair and lips so perfectly, and those lips were trembling.

  “Here now, I didn’t mean to upset you. On my world there are certain, uh, mores, concerning people of different sex alone together in bedrooms, and not allied by marriage…. Um, I mean, you see what I mean?”

  “No.”

  They were jade, her eyes.

  “Well, it’s sort of … Well, it’s sex, that’s what it is.”

  A light was switched on in those jade lamps.

  “Oh, you mean having children!”

  “Yes. That’s it! Exactly.”

  She laughed. It was the first time I had heard laughter in Tirellian. It sounded like a violinist striking his high strings with the bow, in short little chops. It was not an altogether pleasant thing to hear, especially because she laughed too long.

  When she had finished she moved closer.

  “I remember, now,” she said. “We used to have such rules. Half a Process ago, when I was a child, we had such rules. But”—she looked as if she were ready to laugh again—“there is no need for them now.”

  My mind moved like a tape recorder played at triple speed.
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  Half a Process! Halfa Processa-Processa Process! Not Yes! Half a Process was two hundred-forty-three years, roughly speaking!

  —Time enough to learn the 2224 dances of Locar.

  —Time enough to grow old, if you were human.

  —Earth-style human, I mean.

  I looked at her again, pale as the white queen in an ivory chess set.

  She was human, I’d stake my soul—alive, normal, healthy. I’d stake my life—woman, my body …

  But she was two and a half centuries old, which made M’Cwyie Methusala’s grandma. It flattered me to think of their repeated complimenting of my skills, as linguist, as poet. These superior beings!

  But what did she mean “there is no such need for them now?” Why the near-hysteria? Why all those funny looks I’d been getting from M’Cwyie?

  I suddenly knew I was close to something important, besides a beautiful girl.

  “Tell me,” I said, in my Casual Voice, “did it have anything to do with ‘the plague that does not kill,’ of which Tamur wrote.”

  “Yes,” she replied, “the children born after the Rains could have no children of their own, and—”

  “And what?” I was leaning forward, memory set at “record.”

  “—and the men had no desire to get any.”

  I sagged backward against the bedpost. Racial sterility, masculine impotence, following phenomenal weather. Had some vagabond cloud of radioactive junk from God knows where penetrated their weak atmosphere one day? One day long before Shiaparelli saw the canals, mythical as my dragon, before those “canals” had given rise to some correct guesses for all the wrong reasons, had Braxa been alive, dancing, here—damned in the womb since blind Milton had written of another paradise, equally lost?

  I found a cigarette. Good thing I had thought to bring ashtrays. Mars had never had a tobacco industry either. Or booze. The ascetics I had met in India had been Dionysiac compared to this.

  “What is that tube of fire?”

  “A cigarette. Want one?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She sat beside me, and I lighted it for her.

  “It irritates the nose.”

  “Yes. Draw some into your lungs, hold it there, and exhale.” A moment passed.