by John Brunner
For a second or two the imagined spectacle of her husband’s gross body conjoined with a Yannish girl made her want to laugh; it was so ridiculous. But the amusement faded quickly. She knew the answer only too well, and it was yes. The customs of the natives were—different.
So maybe I ought to do the same.
Short of celibacy, what was the alternative? No one in the enclave, no human male, would consider an affair with her, she was sure. It wasn’t just that she was sixty-five and losing her figure; far more important, she was the wife of the Warden.
But one of these young Yanfolk, one of these “apes”: he’d see me as a prize. Something exotic, wonderful. And Alice does claim that the Yannish anatomy—
A flash, a gleam, a whole blazing glory of light at the skylight window! She exclaimed and jolted her head up, blinking in disbelief. Her husband went on snoring.
She touched the skylight control and the panes slid back, showing her the sky direct.
Why, that can only be—! Back on Tamar, all those years ago, I remember…
No. More likely one of his imitators. But in any case this was an event. She jumped from the bed in high excitement, a cry rising to her lips, meaning to wake her husband even if it involved the risk of being hit again.
And checked the impulse.
No. Let the liquor-sodden swine be the last to find out. Maybe it’ll lead to the loss of his job. I wouldn’t weep.
As silently as possible she stole from the room, catching up a gown and stabbing her toes into slippers, and went out on the balcony to enjoy the play of colours while it lasted.
“Pompy, shut up,” Dr Lem said in the tone he reserved for occasions when he really meant it. The chubble had been complaining because her sense of the fitness of things had been disturbed; this was not the time at which one sat down to the communet. Hurt, but resigned, she let her whiskers dangle dejectedly and folded herself into the sort of small package he recalled from the days when she was a mere kit and he was training her to behave in a human home, a variation of the ostrich principle: if I can’t see you you can’t see me.
“Hah!” Dr Lem said, wishing it were really that simple. He would have liked this thing in the sky to go away. Very much.
He had suddenly been overwhelmed by a sense of unwanted responsibility. He held no official post in the enclave—indeed, there was only one official post, Chevsky’s—but with the passage of time he had become its doyen, and in consequence people tended to look up to him. Moreover, he had the cachet of his profession. Even a small community like this posed problems which now and then drove someone to seek psychiatric help, and he helped as best he could in such cases.
And he felt there were certain individuals who ought at least to realise, as soon as possible, what had happened. His colleague Harriet Pokorod, to start with, the community’s medical doctor; Jack and Toshi Shigaraku, joint tutors-in-chief of the little school—there were not very many children here, either because people were understandably reluctant to start a family on a strange planet, or because the habit-patterns of the Yanfolk had affected them, but their position was clearly one of influence; Pedro Phillips, the merchant; Hector Ducci, responsible for everything technical in the enclave and above all for the maintenance of the go-board…
All of whom, apparently, were already talking on the communet. At least he was getting the busy signal whichever of them he tried to call.
Warden Chevsky? No, of course not. He’s bound to have been the first one notified, and he must have his hands full.
Frustrated, Dr Lem leaned back in his chair. He wanted—needed—to do something, even if it was only talk to a friend. Or to the informat, he added, sullenly realising that so far he was going on guesswork and second-hand data. He punched the informat code with trembling fingers, and in a moment discovered not only that he was correct in his conclusions, but that thirty-eight earlier inquirers had beaten him to them.
“What is it?” Shyalee whispered at last, having gripped Marc’s arm so long and so hard that she had almost cut off the circulation with her fingers.
“It’s—well, it’s an advertisement,” Marc said gruffly. He used the nearest available Yannish word. It meant much more than its literal human counterpart, but in this particular case it was not in the least an exaggeration.
“An advertisement!” Shyalee cried. “But that’s absurd! What’s it supposed to advertise?”
“The arrival of…” Marc hesitated, wiping his forehead with the hem of his cape. “Well!” he said at length. “Have you ever heard any of us talk about a man called Gregory Chart?”
Eyes wide, mouth wide, she shook her head. That convention had been adopted at the time of the first human contact with Yan, and become a permanent part of the native repertoire of gestures.
“You will,” Marc sighed. “No doubt of that.”
IV
Virtually the only people in Prell and its vicinity who slept that night were infants, who crowed their appreciation of the pretty lights in the sky and relaxed happily in their mothers’ arms, and the very old, who drowsed off while muttering dire warnings about celestial signs.
The Yanfolk were not personally but racially acquainted with such matters, and were kept awake by arguments between conservative factions who quoted mysterious passages from the Mutine Epics and other inscrutable sources, and opposing—mostly younger—schools of thought who maintained that here was another admirable manifestation of the superior human culture, this use of the entire welkin as a poster hoarding. It had not taken long for the information Marc had given Shyalee to spread by word of mouth far beyond the circle of her close friends. Perhaps an hour.
But when fuller details followed the first bald summary the arguments abruptly took a different turn.
Three X down, Erik Svitra said to himself, and went blue across the go-board, then purple. He was getting tired, and guide-sequence he had memorised under hypnosis felt as though it would never end. One X diagonal, and pi to the e…
The board had been singing in F major. Abruptly it hit him with a bucket of nonexistent ice-water and put a smooth steel floor under his feet. He was through.
And about time, Erik thought. If he’d known how long and tough this sequence was, he might have thought twice about making the direct trip to Yan without stopovers. Still, at least the expensive hypnotic instructions had brought him out where he wanted to be. He set down his travel-pack with relief and stared from the board’s edge towards the shining Ring he’d seen so many pictures of.
Abruptly he spotted something orbiting beneath it. A moon.
What the—?
He snatched the informat printout from his pocket and checked it for the umpteenth time. No moon.
Hell, they’ve sent me to the wrong planet! I’ll—I’ll sue the bastards!
But tomorrow. He was exhausted. Right now he had to find a place to lodge. Gloomily he shouldered his pack and began to trudge down the hill.
The news, of course, had spread within minutes to all the Earthsiders, not only because so many people had punched the informat for an explanation, and got one, but also because several hadn’t needed to: Mama Ducci had been on Ilium when Chart came calling, Sidonie Chevsky had been on Tamar, someone else had been on Cinula, someone else on Vail… Everybody wanted to stay up and talk about him, and did so until the fantasia overhead died with the advent of dawn.
Meantime, the one exception to the general rule, Warden Chevsky snored.
At sunrise the moon came down from heaven anyway. Dwindling as it descended and shed the space-distorting refractory effects employed to make it seem vast beyond the stratosphere, it was nonetheless still huge when it settled: a plain white globe five hundred metres high, under whose released weight the Plateau of Blaw shuddered like Atlas grown tired of holding up the sky.
Some people claimed that they could sense completion, or fulfilment, here on Yan. What Dr Lem sensed was weariness. The very landscape suggested it; since the dissolution of its moon into th
e Ring, the mountains had begun to lie down under their own weight, and it was as a result of this that the land-surface was confined to a single hemisphere. Evert the shallow ocean which rolled over the other half of the globe seemed to be stirred as much by the continual bombardment of meteorites as by the sluggish solar tides.
Outside the polar circles there was still one range rugged and high enough to boast permanent snowcaps and glaciers, but only one, last testament to a vigorous mountain-building youth. Over all of Blaw and Hom there was no peak bigger than a hill, much weathered, easy to climb. Moreover Prell had not always been at the mouth of the Smor, but had taken over from seaward towns as they surrendered to the encroaching waters. Because they could not swim without elaborate respiratory aids, the Yanfolk seemed unwilling to struggle with the sea. Now one could lean over the side of a boat on a clear day, fifteen kilometres south of Prell, and peer down into the ruins of what had once been a port. When winter gales made the waves surge aside, the highest towers breached the surface like the worn yellow fangs of a sick old dog.
And this morning, this sunrise, as he sat at his communet and learned more and more relevant facts about the situation the enclave had been pitchforked into—each more dispiriting than the last—he felt fatigue on that same grand scale permeating his very bones. His mind was alert, for he had taken anti-sleep drugs, but no drug ever invented could fight such weariness as could overwhelm a planet.
Vaguely, while he watched the spectacle in the sky, Marc Simon had been aware of comings and goings. He was on the flat roof of his home, where he and Shyalee often slept, after the Yannish manner, during warm weather. It afforded a superb vantage-point.
Calls had come from the street-door, at first soft, later shouted as it became clear that the entire neighbourhood had been aroused anyway. Shyalee had gone to answer, and—so, Marc presumed—relayed what he had told her to her friends, probably in garbled fashion. He had ignored these distractions. He was hardly capable of coherent thinking, for he was torn between two utterly opposed reactions.
On the one hand, it had been said of Gregory Chart that he was the greatest creative artist of all time… and there was some evident grain of truth in the claim, inasmuch as no one in history had ever tackled such themes on such a scale. Marc himself had never had a chance to witness one of his performances; he had seen some of the consequences, though, years later, which were still being experienced on Hyrax.
Naturally, anyone would wish to be present during a Chart performance. But if his work on Hyrax was a fair sample, then the impact of his coming here, coming to Yan…!
There was a footfall behind him. A gentle tap on his shoulder. He shrugged it away like an annoying insect.
“Marc,” Shyalee said, “it is Goydel who has called.”
What? Marc jumped from the cushion on which he had been squatting, Yannish-style. It had taken him a month of practice to achieve that without sending his legs to sleep. And it was true: emerging from the oval opening at the head of the steps giving access to this roof, he recognised the familiar features of his—well, the nearest human term might be “patron”, only there was no question of financial assistance involved, only of sponsorship and the granting of opportunities to present an artist’s work to an appreciative and discerning audience.
Well, at least he wasn’t the one who got killed during shrimashey, Marc thought… and realised that that was probably the unspoken fear which had so upset him a few hours ago, caused him to make that stupid gesture with the bowl of sheyashrim drug. But there was hardly a mark on Goydel, apart from a small patch of ointment on his forehead, where part of his crest of hair had presumably been torn away.
Impossible to picture this staid, dignified personage in the middle of a heap of writhing, struggling bodies… Who did get killed, if anyone? A friend of mine?
But one must not ask. One was permitted to learn only by indirect, oblique routes. And sometimes all the participants survived, after all.
He strode forward, full of apologies that the old man should have had to negotiate the steep stairs. Goydel countered instantly, not in Yannish but in the Earthsiders’ tongue, which he spoke with an excellent accent and a good command of idiom.
“No, young friend, I prefer to be up here, believe me. These remarkable displays overhead are not to be missed! Tell me, is it correct what I have been told, that this announces the arrival of one of your greatest human artists?”
Bustling around in a most un-Yannish manner, Marc was tugging up a cushion for him to sit on, whispering instructions to Shyalee about bringing a jug of morning-brew and some cakes, and generally fussing like a house-proud hostess caught unawares. He mastered all these impulses with an effort, steadied his breathing, and after making certain Goydel was comfortable squatted facing him and composed his limbs into a deliberately relaxed posture. The aurorae were almost over by now, but from them and the lightening east came plenty of light to see each other by.
There was a proper period of silence, terminated when Shyalee had produced the refreshments. Marc said diffidently in Yannish, “As to the personage responsible for the lights above us: yes, one might reasonably refer to him as an artist.”
In his host’s tongue again, from courtesy, Goydel said, “And what sort of an artist is he—this man Chart?”
“Why, he’s…” Marc hesitated, and decided to fall in with Goydel’s choice of language. Not that that made it much easier for him to explain.
How do you sum up Chart? In half a dozen sentences? You cant. Not in any language!
Still, he must do his best. He said after long reflection, “Well, first of all I should admit that I’ve never seen him work, but only talked with people who have. I understand that he’s—he’s an interpreter of dramas on a colossal scale. He tries to actualise a situation so that the people of a planet can live in it for as long as they can afford to pay him. It may be a dream, an ambition. Or it may be a period of past history. Or it may be a choice among a dozen possible courses of future action. I believe his range is enormous.”
“It is the first time since the original visit of your species to our world that we have seen a spaceship. He invariably travels in that fashion, not by go-board?”
“Yes, I believe so.” Marc licked his lips. He was always ill at ease when talking about interstellar travel with Yanfolk; so many of them envied human freedom to go from star to star, but there was an inflexible rule against non-humans entering a go-board.
“Does he always announce his arrival the same way?”
“I heard that he did on Hyrax. First there was an extra moon in the sky—the moon of Hyrax is red, like old dry meat, and the new one was silvery, as you have seen. Afterwards there were auroral displays, though less elaborate and well-controlled. They showed me tapes.”
Of course you’d expect him to refine his techniques over the years…
“And in the case you know of, what was the content of the performance?”
“Oh—on Hyrax it was a dream. Which turned sour.” Marc grimaced. “About being happy under the rule of the Quain family. Don’t ask me for all the details, please. I gather the rulers engaged Chart thinking that he would provide a circus for the people, to reconcile them to their condition, and expecting that afterwards their subjects would be happy to be ground just a little harder to meet his fee. His charges are not low.
“But the dream ended, and the reality took over, and the last I heard the people of Hyrax were still paying.”
Goydel gave a nod. Marc realised that there were good reasons why Yanfolk should at once grasp the concepts underlying Chart’s work. If there was any historical truth hidden in the obfuscation of Yannish traditional lore, it related to another event for which payment was still being exacted—after millennia.
“By what means does he achieve his effects?” Goydel inquired eventually.
Marc deliberately misunderstood the question. “Why, I believe basically it’s a variant of the weather-control techniques employed on man
y planets, adjusting potential gradients within the natural layers of the atmosphere, then sowing patterns of activated molecules…”
His voice died away under Goydel’s impassive level gaze, and he covered a momentary fit of embarrassment by sipping his own drink—coffee, because morning-brew contained an ascorbic-acid antagonist and an Earthsider who drank it developed scurvy.
“As to the way in which he involves whole planetary populations in his performances, though,” he resumed, setting the cup aside, “there I’m afraid I know only the barest outlines. I know he starts by using gross techniques to adjust emotions—weather, again, is an example. Then he provides certain large-scale constructs which condition the reactions of people in their vicinity, either by their mere shape and colour or by subliminal emanations, and he sets the drama itself in motion with programmed volunteers, or androids. If there are mass media, he requisitions them. And I believe he may also use drugs, in drinking-water or air. But I don’t imagine anyone fully understands his methods except himself.”
“Is he, then, the only practitioner of his art?”
“I believe he has imitators. But none of them is regarded as his equal.”
There was a further pause. Goydel said at last, reverting to Yannish, “It would not be wrong to suggest that you are unenthusiastic about this arrival?”
“It would not,” Marc agreed, after unravelling the procession of negatives which decorated the formal hypothetical quasi-optative structure of the sentence. No modern human language could cram so many into so few words.
Next, he expected Goydel to ask him why not. The old man, however, did nothing of the kind. He merely drained his cup and rose.
“Must you go already?” Marc demanded, also standing up. He felt the need to go on talking, to bring into the open some of his misgivings, to try and explain why he was in two minds about Chart’s visit. But Goydel, impeccably polite, rebuffed him expertly.