Tatja smiled at Cor and Svir—the same scornful, bitter smile they had seen so often before. “You never were very bright, were you, Svir? It’s possible that I’ll take over the world. As a matter of fact I probably will. It will be a by-product of my other plans. I chose Crownesse very carefully. The country has immense physical resources. If there are large heavy-metal deposits anywhere, they are in Crownesse. The government is talented and dedicated. Most administrative posts are awarded on the basis of civil-service tests. And the entire Bureaucracy is fanatically dedicated to one person—the legal holder of the Crown. They served Tar Benesh and his evil for twenty years, and they will serve me just as faithfully. I will not be bothered with coups and elections, as I might if I took over one of the archipelagates.
“We’ve reached a very critical point in the development of civilization—in case you don’t realize it. In the past century there have been a number of really basic scientific discoveries made in all parts of the world. The pharmacists of the Tsanart Islands are very close to immortality drugs. A physicist in the Osterlei Archipelagate developed that picture-maker we use. All over the world, revolutionary advances are being made. Sometimes I think that organizations like Tarulle are responsible for this. For centuries they spread ideas from island to island until finally scientists stopped thinking of them as fantasy and actually invented what writers described. I’m making a gift of that Fantasie collection to Tarulle, by the way.”
“That’s big of you,” snapped Svir. Grimm ignored him.
“All these inventions and techniques are going to have effects far beyond what is obvious. Just think what that picture-taker will do for parallax astronomy. You’ll be able to make pictures of all observations. If these inventions were brought together and worked over intensively, the changes would be even more spectacular. But you people out in the islands are too lazy to do that. The people of Crownesse are not. They’ve had to work awfully hard just to stay alive here on The Continent. They will take your inventions and use them and develop more inventions—until they control the entire planet.”
Tatja looked up into the sky, at Seraph and the bright star Prok. “You know, there is a very common legend among the Wildmen at the center of The Continent. The legend says that man originally came from the stars, that he landed on The Continent and lost his magical arts to the storm and wind. Sounds like a Fantasie story, doesn’t it? But imagine—if it is true, then the races of men live among the stars, their empires so vast that they can ‘forget’ whole planetary systems. They may have colonized Seraph at the same time as Tu. We are not alone.” As she spoke to them, Tatja’s voice changed, lost its authority and its spite. Now she spoke softly, sadly. Her shoulders slumped. For a moment she wasn’t the master of events, but a young girl, very much alone, and very lonely. “No, Svir, ruling this world does not interest me, except for one thing. I’ve never found anyone 1 can talk to, anyone that can understand the things I often want to say. When I call you stupid—I mean it, even though you’re of above-average intelligence, and even though I just say it to make you angry.” She turned to look at Svir and Cor. Her eyes were soft, and her lower lip almost seemed to tremble. Her vast intelligence had crippled her, just as surely as it she had had no arms. In point of fact there was no person on Tu who was her equal. Svir suddenly understood the meaning of her scornful, hostile smile. It was the bitter, hopeless envy of a woman seeing well-adjusted people all around her and not being one herself.
“And that is why I am going to turn this world upside down, and regain the ancient arts that mythology said we once had. For somewhere in this universe there must be what I need most ... a man.” The fallen goddess turned away from the parapet and the gay crowds. She didn’t look up as she walked slowly away.
<
* * * *
James Sallis, 23, is a Southerner educated at Tulane. Until recently he lived in rural Iowa with his wife, a painter and medical illustrator, and their son Dylan, 3. At present he is living in London, where he is fiction editor of New Worlds. With Thomas M. Disch and Samuel R. Delany, he typifies the emerging new generation of science fiction writers.
Almost to a man, the writers of “new wave” science fiction deny that there is any such thing as a new or old wave; they say there are only good stories and bad ones. Nevertheless, the new writers form a distinctive group. They are trained in the arts, particularly in poetry and music, rather than in science or engineering, and it shows in their work. (Some of the older writers majored in English, but went ahead and wrote pulp just the same.)
Like Disch and Delany, Sallis uses all the resources of English, not just those few that have trickled down our side channel in the last forty years. “A Few Last Words” is an end-of-civilization story, if you like, but it owes much more to Eliot than to Wells or Wyndham. Its domain is not the great out-there of conventional science fiction, but the poetic intensity of right-here, right-now:
Is this how it feels, the instant of desertion?
* * * *
A FEW LAST WORDS
By James Sallis
What is the silence
a. As though it had a right to more
—W. S. Merwin
Again: the dreams.
He was eating stained glass and vomiting rainbows. He felt he was being watched and looked up and there was the clock moving toward him, grinning, arms raised in a shout of triumph over its head. The clock advanced; he smelled decay; he was strangled to death by the hands of time . . . The scene changed. He was in a red room. The hands of the clock knocked knocked knocked without entering . . . And changed again. And the hours had faces, worse than the hands. He choked it was all so quiet quiet only the ticking the faces were coming closer closer he gagged screamed once and—
Sat on the edge of the bed. The hall clock was ticking loudly, a sound like dried peas dropping into a pail. This was the third night.
The pumpkin-color moon was arrested in motion, dangling deep in the third quadrant of the cross-paned window about three-quarters out along the diagonal. Periodically clouds would touch the surface and partly fill with color, keeping it whole. Dust and streaks on the window, a tiny bubble of air, blurred its landscape; yellow drapes beside it took on a new hue.
He had watched it for hours (must have been hours). Its only motion was a kind of visual dopplering. It sped out into serene depths, skipped back in a rush to paste itself against the backside of the glass, looking like a spot of wax. Apogee to perigee to apogee, and no pause between. Rapid vacillation, losing his eyes in intermediate distances, making him blink and squint, glimmering in the pale overcast. And other than that, it hadn’t moved. Abscissa +, ordinate +. Stasis. This was the third night.
* * * *
His wife stirred faintly and reached to touch his pillow, eyelids fluttering. Hoover quickly put out his hand and laid it across her fingers. Visibly, she settled back into blankets. In the hall, the clock ticked like a leaking faucet. The moon was in its pelagic phase, going out.
The third night of the dreams. The third night that lying in bed he was overcome by: Presence. In the dark it would grow around him, crowding his eyes open, bunching his breath, constricting—at last driving him from the bed, the room. He would pace the rugs and floors, turn back and away again on the stairs, wondering. He would drink liquor, then coffee, unsure which effect he wanted, uneasy at conclusions—certain only of this sense of cramping, of imposition. In the dark he was ambushed, inhabited, attacked again from within.
His wife turned in bed, whispering against sheets, taking her fingers away.
Hoover lifted his head to the dresser, chinoiserie chair, sculpt lame valet, to glazed chintz that hid the second, curiously small window. A simple room, sparse, clean, a room with no waste of motion. And a familiar room, intimate and informal as the back of his hand, yet his eyes moving through it now encountered a strangeness, a distortion. He cast his vision about the room, tracing the strangeness back to its source at the window: to pale plastic
light that slipped in there and took his furniture away into distances. It occurred to him that he was annoyed by this intrusion, this elusive division of himself from his things. He watched the moon and it stared back, unblinking.
Hoover fixed his chin between his fists, propped elbows on knees, and became a sculpture. His face turned again to see the window, head rolling in his hands, ball-in-socket.
A cave, he thought: that was the effect. Gloom, and moonlight sinking through cracks: pitch and glimmer. A skiagraphy of the near and foreign. Quarantine and communion, solitude and confederation. A cave, shaped in this strange light. . .
And bruising the light’s influence, he walked to the chair and stared down at the suit he’d draped over one arm—looked at the hall clock—ten minutes ago. It was happening faster now . . .
The suit was pale, stale-olive green and it shined in a stronger light. The coat barely concealed the jutting, saddlelike bones of his hips; his wrists dangled helplessly away from the sleeve ends like bones out of a drumstick —and Cass hated it. Regardless of fit, though, it felt right: he was comfortable in it, was himself.
He took the coat from the chair, held it a minute, and put it back. Somehow, tonight, it seemed inappropriate, like the man-shaped valet that no one used. As with the room, the furniture, it had been taken away from him.
He turned and shuffled across the rug to search through the crow-black corner closet behind the creaking, always-open door, discovering a western shirt, with a yoke of roses across its breast and trying it on, then jeans, belting them tightly, and boots. The clothes were loose, looser than he remembered, but they felt good, felt right.
Stepping full into light at the door, he shattered strangeness, and looking back saw that the moon was now cockeyed in the corner of the pane.
Ticking of a clock, sound of feet down stairs.
* * * *
He assassinated death with the cold steel rush of his breathing. . .
The night was pellucid, a crystal of blackness; hermetic with darkness. He moved within a hollow black crystal and up there was another, an orange separate crystal, bubble in a bubble . . . And quiet, so quiet so still, only the ticking of his feet, the whisper of breath. He pocketed his hands and wished for the coat he’d left behind.
Hoover turned onto the walk, heels clacking (another death: to silence).
A sepulchral feeling, he thought, to the thin wash of light overlaying this abyss of street. A counterpoint, castrati and bass. Peel away the light and you: Plunge. Downward. Forever.
Another thought . . . you can tell a lot by the way a person listens to silence.
(Sunday. It was evening all day. Over late coffee and oranges, the old words begin again. The speech too much used, and no doors from this logic of love. We go together like rain and melancholy, blue and morning . . .)
At the corner, turn; and on down this new abyss. Breath pedaling, stabbing into the air like a silent cough, feet killing quiet—
I am intruding.
Darkness is avenging itself on my back.
(And I, guilty realist, dabbler at verses, saying: There is no sign for isolation but a broken spring, no image for time but a ticking heart, nothing for death but stillness . . .)
Light glinted off bare windows. Most of the houses were marooned now in a moat of grass and ascending weed. Driveways and porches and garages all open and empty, dumbly grinning.
(Evening all day. World out the window like a painting slowly turning under glass in a dusty frame. Rain in the sky, but shy about falling. The words: they peak at ten, pace by noon, run out to the end of their taut line . . .)
The shells have names, had them. Martin, Heslep, Rose. Walking past them now, he remembered times they were lit up like pumpkins, orange-yellow light pouring richly out the windows; cars, cycle-strewn yards, newspapers on steps. The casual intimacy of a person inside looking out, waving.
(And I remember your hair among leaves, your body in breaking dew, moonlight that slipped through trees and windows to put its palm against your face, your waist; bright and shadow fighting there . . .)
Darkness. It moves aside to let you pass. Closes, impassable, behind you.
(Four times: you came to bed, got up, came back to bed. You turned three times, you threw the pillows off the bed. Michael, never born, who had two months to live, was stirring in you and stirring you awake.
Your hair was on the bed like golden threads. The moon had pushed your face up into the window and hidden your hands in shadow. You were yellow yellow on the linen bed, and opened your eyes.
—If I weren’t afraid, I could leave and never look back.
You say that, sitting in a hollow of bed, knees tucked to your flanneled breasts, arms around yourself.
—Would you follow, would you call me back?
I watch your steps track down the walk to the black, inviting street. And later, when I open the door, you’re there, grinning, coming back; coming back to make coffee and wait for morning. And another night, another day, saved from whatever it is that threatens at these times . . .)
Hoover looked at the streetlight shelled in rainbow and it was ahead, above, behind, remembered. Darkness shouldered itself back in around him. Snow hung in the air, waiting to fall. The dead houses regarded him as he passed, still, unspeaking.
(October, time of winds and high doubt. It comes around us like the shutting of a light: the same thing is happening to others. And the people are going away, the time has come for going away ... It all boils up in a man, and overflows. His birthright of freedom, it’s the freedom to be left alone, that’s what he wants most, just to be left alone, just to draw circles around himself and shut the world out. Every man’s an island, why deny it, why tread water. So people let go . . .)
Hoover picked the moving shape out of the alley and was down in a crouch, whistling, almost before the dog saw him. It raised its nose from the ground and walked bashfully toward him, sideways, tail banging at a drum, whining.
“Folks leave you, fella?” A brown shepherd with a heavy silver-studded collar; he didn’t bother to look at the jangling nametags. “Take you home with me then, okay?” The shepherd whimpered its agreement. Hoover rummaging in his pockets.
“Sorry, fella, nothing to give you.” Showing empty hands, which the dog filled with licks and nuzzles, snuffling.
“Bribery, eh. Sorry, still no food.” He stroked his hand into the dog’s pelt, found warmth underneath. It sat looking up at him, waiting, expecting, its tail swishing across pavement.
When he erected himself to full height, the dog jumped away and crouched low, ready to run. Hoover walked toward it and put out a hand to its broad, ridged head.
“It’s okay, fellow. Tell you what. Come along with me to see a friend, then I’ll take you right home and see about getting you something to eat. Think you can wait?”
They punctured the night together, down the walk, heels clacking, claws ticking. Hoover kept his hand on the dog’s head as they walked. The nametags threw bells out into the silence.
“Or maybe he’ll have something for you there, come to think of it.”
Click, clack, click. Staccato tattooed on the ponderous night. The sky is still ambiguous.
(Remembering a night we sat talking, drinking half-cups of coffee as we watched stars sprinkle and throb and fade, then saw dawn all blood and whispered thunder. I remember how your eyes were, pink like shrimp, pink like the sky when it caught the first slanting rays and held them to its chest. And as morning opened around us we were talking of Thoreau and men who sailed the soul, of ways and reasons to change, the old orders, and of why things break up. Outside our window it was growing between them, people were letting go, were wanting their Waldens, their Innisfrees, their Arcadias, they were falling away from the town like leaves, like scaling paint, by twos, by ones. Even in our house, our hearts, it moves between us. Between us. We feel it turning, feel it touching. But we care, we love, we can’t let go . . .)
Hoover drew up shor
t, listening. The shepherd beside him cocked its cars, trembled happily.
It happens like this . . .
A drone, far off. Closer. Becomes an engine. Then a swelling of light blocks away. Then a rush and churning and soon two lashing white eyes. Loudest, chased by a dog. A roar and past, racing. A thrown thing. Neil’s car . . . and silence again.
And minutes later, the shepherd’s body went limp and its head fell back onto his lap. Hoover took it in his arms and walked out of the road, its head rolling softly along the outside of his elbow. In the streetlight his face glistened where the dog had licked it.
Orbit 4 - Anthology Page 25