New Writings in SF 25 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  It ended as they both realised it must during a period of increasing anxiety on Iella’s part. She had become inconsolably restless and ill-at-ease, even though her work had been going well. The answer had been obvious to them both.

  ‘I have to go.’ She had told him simply. ‘You do understand, don’t you? I have to go.’ They had both accepted that she would be making the trip alone. The fact that Cin 2347 was classified unstable was never mentioned.

  * * * *

  These memories and others came flooding over Storrs with a vividness that left him aching with longing and despair. As the last traces of gas fled from the viewscreen Storrs turned away, his mind swimming with visual echoes. Standing in the half-open doorway at the back of the view-room stood Ceol. He had obviously been standing there for some time. He left before Storrs reached the door.

  On his next visit to the viewroom, Storrs was appalled to discover that someone had been in during his absence. Whoever it was had been persistent. Iella’s name had been scored into the rest of the chairs.

  * * * *

  Before leaving for Cin 2347, Iella had presented Storrs with a self-portrait as a parting gift. She had painted it in secret and she insisted that Storrs was not to remove the wrapping until after her departure. It was undoubtedly the best piece she had ever painted, possibly a masterpiece. Every time he looked at it he experienced despair and pride in equal measure, a mingling of emotions. It was the final proof that her decision had been the right one. Now it hung on his cabin wall in the Glider.

  * * * *

  After the latest incident in the viewroom, Storrs had a series of strangely vivid dreams, each revolving around a specific facet of his relationship with Iella, each conjuring her presence more powerfully than the last. In those dreams Storrs relived the anguish and the exhilaration of their relationship; recollections of events he had struggled desperately to forget flashing past with the clarity of yesterday’s memories.

  He woke once in the darkness of his cabin. He was covered in sweat and had obviously been crying out. His face was wet with tears. He sobbed in the darkness remembering Iella. As sleep dragged him back into his dreams he sensed that he was not alone in the room.

  When he next awoke he was shivering violently. He snapped the light on, staring feverishly around the cabin. He was alone. When his eyes rested on Iella’s self-portrait he cried out in anguish. The symmetry of her features had been tortured into a distorted agony, the colours running and merging under the pressure of ill-shaped fingers.

  Storrs felt a blind rage sweep over him at this violation of Iella’s portrait. It was senseless, alien. He cursed Ceol’s incomprehensible interference with his privacy. The situation, always uneasy, had now become intolerable.

  * * * *

  Bursting from his cabin, Storrs found Ceol crumpled into a motionless heap in the corridor. His skin had taken on a disturbing grey pallor. The only colour on his body was smeared on the tips of his fingers.

  After Storrs delivered news of the alien’s collapse. Van Vliet applied medical aid to the unconscious form. Though Ceol’s body was humanoid, Storrs realised that there were vast biological differences between the alien and an Earth man. Yet Van Vliet seemed to know exactly what to do, administering drugs and checking the level of organic activity with a sureness and dexterity that indicated long practice. Storrs began to wonder where Van Vliet had accumulated such unlikely knowledge.

  There was an awkward moment when Van Vliet, satisfied he could do no more until Ceol was transferred to the medical centre, asked for Storrs’ help to carry him there.

  Storrs shook his head, stepping back a pace. There was no way he could explain. He just couldn’t bring himself to touch Ceol’s body. The thought was abhorrent to him. He remembered Iella’s ruined face in the painting; Ceol’s recurring intrusions on his eremetic existence; the growing suspicion that the alien’s presence aboard the Glider was other than just coincidental. Even in Van Vliet’s behaviour Storrs had begun to detect an ambiguity of purpose. ‘Ceol has to go,’ Storrs said defensively. ‘He has to leave this ship. I can stand no more of his interference.’

  Van Vliet stared at him, then lifted the alien in his arms, his face flushed with effort and anger. ‘Go where?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you understand? Ceol is dying.’

  * * * *

  It was some days before he saw either of them again. Storrs had resumed his routine of sitting in the viewroom during his waking hours, eating and sleeping in his cabin, attempting to come to terms with his apparently futile existence.

  When Storrs learned from Van Vliet that Ceol, after making a partial recovery, had locked himself in the hold containing the Quar by destroying the opening mechanism, his initial reaction was relief. He had feared further impositions; at least his solitude was assured.

  However, Van Vliet’s expression suggested that his relief was premature.’

  ‘What exactly is Ceol doing in the hold?’

  Van Vliet was evasive. ‘I suggest you determine that for yourself.’

  * * * *

  On the instrument deck, the nerve centre of the ship, Storrs watched one screen of the visual monitoring system. The wide angle lens of the closed-circuit camera mounted in the hold’s ceiling gave the scene a distorted surrealistic atmosphere, increasing Storrs’ unease. Ceol was working with strange cutting tools on the Quar. It was obvious even then that the subject he had chosen was Iella.

  ‘Why?’ Storrs asked, turning bewildered from the screen. ‘Why me—why Iella?’

  ‘Don’t you really understand, after all this time?’ Van Vliet sighed. ‘Iella would. Empathy and feeling. Inspiration, Storrs; inspiration!’

  Storrs looked at what Ceol was doing. ‘You condone that?’

  ‘I am unable to judge. I am merely the instrument.’

  ‘And I the victim.’

  ‘A question of interpretation.’

  From that moment Storrs’ visits to the. viewroom were abandoned. He spent as much time as possible watching Ceol on the monitoring screen, refusing to leave the set even for his meals, dragging himself away only when his inflamed eyes and tortured mind induced fantasies and aberrations.

  Ceol seemed a shadow, ghastly thin, driving himself with inhuman energy, denying the weakness of his failing body as his hands moved and shaped and reformed the Quar.

  Occasionally Van Vliet would come and stare at the screen, a look of tired hopelessness on his face. His concern was obvious and Van Vliet offered no explanation, made no attempt to disguise his involvement. Storrs frequently found himself deliberating about their relationship.

  * * * *

  At first merely apprehensive about the statue of Iella Ceol was fashioning, Storrs progressed by rapid stages to unconcealed distress. This was Iella as seen through alien eyes, through alien senses. At first glance the differences seemed slight, intangible almost, as though Ceol was reinterpreting her personality rather than her physical appearance. Yet Storrs sensed a deeper allusion. Ceol was making a statement; but unable to translate the form of that statement, Storrs experienced an impotent confusion.

  Though he possessed the machinery to force an entry into the hold, Van Vliet, afraid of the possible harmful consequences to Ceol in such a confined area, refused. Storrs was growing desperate, the strain he was undergoing assuming all the symptoms of a potential nervous breakdown.

  Seeking some way at least to delay the completion of the statue of Iella, Storrs managed to convince Van Vliet that it would be in Ceol’s interests if the lights in the hold were to be extinguished. Van Vliet agreed, realising that if Ceol continued working at the same compulsive intensity he would be dead within a matter of hours, that unable to see he would be forced to rest. It was a decision that suited both of them. It allowed them an extension of the inevitable, an opportunity to think.

  Even then Storrs found it impossible to leave the blacked-out screen. He sat in front of the set, completely immobile for long periods, more on edge than when he had been able
to watch Ceol working.

  He waited for a day and a night, not knowing what was happening, until the tension reached an unendurable level. When Van Vliet had turned the lights off in the hold, Storrs had made a note of the position of the switch on the complicated instrument display. Unable to bear the uncertainty any longer, Storrs switched the lights back on.

  * * * *

  His unvoiced suspicions assumed reality. Ceol had finished the statue. The alien had worked on in the darkness and now his work was complete.

  It was many minutes before Storrs realised that Ceol had not moved. Even in death the alien retained the ability to frighten him.

  And the copy of Iella inspired fear, a subtle uncertain scratching of nerve ends, a series of fluid visual distortions always too transient to identify, never so fleeting they could be ignored. Now more acutely aware than ever of the contradictions and discords Ceol had worked into his interpretation of Iella, Storrs groped blindly for an understanding of the origin of these unnerving declensions.

  He looked down at his hands then. In the uncontrollable twitchings of his fingers lay the only possible route to that answer.

  * * * *

  Van Vliet called him a madman but did not refuse his request. ‘There are hazards you know nothing of in handling Quar,’ he explained.

  ‘I must correct the errors/ Storrs insisted. ‘I must!’ The desperation in his voice could not be denied.

  Van Vliet nodded. ‘Very well. There are precautions. I will instruct you as best I can.’ He recognised the impossibility of attempting to change Storrs’ mind, that there were dangers for Storrs no matter which course he took. At least let the decision be of his own making.

  * * * *

  The first time Storrs touched the Quar his stomach heaved. It was warm, with the feel of flesh. So real was the illusion that momentarily he could almost believe that it was Iella who stood before him. But the differences remained, grew more apparent the longer he looked. The dream shattered.

  Van Vliet had instructed him on the malleability period of Quar. Hours remained, perhaps a day at the longest, before it became impossible to work the material. But old fears were not lightly overcome, the heritage of superstition still paced uneasily in the subconscious.

  Oddly, once started he did not doubt his ability to resurrect the real Iella from beneath the alien mask, Ceol had been a great artist. But he had been Iella’s lover, her soul-mate. He knew her.

  But he did not know Quar. And he did not know himself. He began to learn in the hours that followed.

  * * * *

  Quar; of vegetable origin, Van Vliet had said. It moved under his hands, twitching slightly, shivering, as though rejecting the knife. And as Storrs worked the Quar fastened to his hands, attached itself to his fingers, interfered with his control and his grip on the oddly shaped knife.

  Time after time he was forced to stop to cut the Quar away, experiencing revulsion, even pain if he left the shearing away long enough. The pain was real. The Quar was growing into his skin. Blood flowed when he cut it away. If Quar had a vegetable origin it also had an affinity for flesh.

  With the pain came delusions, products of a mind too long under stress; images from the id conjured by his ordeal and the evocative stimulant of the duplicate Iella. His senses fragmented. Chaos filled his mind. Added to an increasing temporal discontinuity, came a heightened symphysis of tactile and visual perceptions in a tumult of unintelligible impulses. Intellect and the critical eye surrendered to instinct and subconscious desires. The agony of his hands faded to insignificance before the assault on his mind.

  When he could do no more, when violent spasms shook his body and his willpower fled, Storrs staggered blindly out of the hold screaming obscenities along the corridors of the Glider. Obeying some irrational urge he dragged his body towards the viewroom. There, before collapsing into unconsciousness, he saw on the viewscreen that the Glider was approaching an asteroid.

  * * * *

  The asteroid was remarkable only in that it was large enough to retain a tenuous atmosphere. Its surface was harsh, pitted with faults and crevasses and grey with long dead laval plains; with here and there indications of lichens and mosses. An uninspiring destination.

  Waiting for Van Vliet, Storrs used the visual monitoring equipment to look into the hold. He stared in silence for a moment then switched it off.

  The duplicate Iella was exactly as it had been before Storrs had attempted the metamorphosis. Though able to correct certain physical inaccuracies, the prime illusive imperfections remained.

  A sudden suspicion, a moment of freezing doubt, entered his mind. Was Ceol’s interpretation closer to the real Iella ? Was Ceol, an alien, capable of a more accurate assessment of her character than he ? For Storrs, the implications were appalling.

  * * * *

  ‘Why are we landing?’ he said when Van Vliet entered the instrument deck.

  ‘Because Ceol requested it.’

  ‘Ceol is dead.’

  ‘Am I then to ignore his wishes?’

  Storrs shook his head. Confused. Then: ‘Why did he choose this place?’

  ‘His motives do not concern me. He had his reasons.’

  ‘Reasons?’ Storrs challenged. ‘What did you know of his reasons ? How could you ? Ceol was an alien!’

  ‘Alien?’ Van Vliet mused, studying the landscape whirling past below them. The bleakness in the rocks was reflected and intensified by the expression on his face.

  * * * *

  Storrs stood gasping in the thin acidic air, wondering what madness had prompted him to leave the ship. It was bitterly cold and except for a narrow band of glittering light which marked the edge of the galaxy, the sky was black. There were shadows and deeper shadows, and soul destroying silence.

  Van Vliet appeared in the airlock after a time. He was carrying something. Even at that distance Storrs knew immediately what it was.

  He watched as Van Vliet moved across the inclined plain away from the ship.

  Iella! He had to fight down the insane conviction that it was she Van Vliet carried in his arms. The suggestion was almost too strong for him to ignore.

  The cold and the bitter atmosphere, an eventually deadly combination of gasses, were draining his strength. Already sluggish motor responses were warning him of the danger of remaining much longer. He had been out on the surface over an hour now. Yet he refused to heed the warnings. The enigma of the duplicate Iella replaced all other considerations.

  He looked down for a moment, resting his eyes. In the dust at his feet and embedded in the rocks were the fragments and remains of earlier life.

  Van Vliet set the statue down, then began to walk back across the plain towards the Glider. If he noticed Storrs he made no sign.

  * * * *

  Relative to the galaxy the asteroid was spinning slowly, revolving along its own axis. Low down on its horizon a star appeared, glimmering and pulsing with unnatural rhythms, oscillating slowly from dim red to brilliant blues.

  Without being told, Storrs knew the name of that Star; Cin 2347. It was the most beautiful and the most terrible star he had ever seen.

  Now he realised Van Vliet’s reason for pushing the Glider towards the galaxy’s edge. They had overtaken the light explosion from Cin 2347’s nova. The destruction of that star still lay in the future here.

  But what was the purpose of it all ? What was this dreadful myopia that affected his understanding ?

  * * * *

  Tension grew within him. The tension, the waiting and the unending silence were slowly crushing him.

  The rime forming on his lips tasted like salt-blood. All the confusion and torment he had experienced since Iella’s death mounted within him. Storrs was human and fallible; and desperately afraid. The pressures inside him were unbearable.

  Unable to face the answer which waited for him, Storrs ran sobbing from the shadows towards Van Vliet and the Glider.

  ‘Van Vliet!’ he screamed. ‘I’m coming too. Wait
for me!’

  The last sounds were the roars and reverberations of the Glider’s impulse jets as she lifted off.

  * * * *

  Later the laval plain was illuminated by a brilliant radiance erupting from low down on the asteroid’s horizon. In the glare of that dying sun could be seen the tears in Iella’s eyes.

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  * * * *

  TALENT SPOTTER

  Sydney J. Bounds

  The Laws of conservation of energy, no less than those demanding equal and opposite reactions, apply to our universe whether we will it or no. In sharp defiance of these rules, often in attempts to outflank them, cults have grown up founded on beliefs that, in essence, are demands for something for nothing. In this world—as in others as Sydney Bounds here points out—that demand is the wishful thinking.