by John Brunner
Behind him was its retina: a panel four metres high on and through which he could dictate the course of his illusions, by speech, touch, throwing a shadow or any other means, as the whim took him. The rods and cones of sensors tactile, sonic, heat-responsive—for all Dr Lem knew, capable of detecting impulses directly from a human nervous system—jutted towards him, finer than fur.
The platform on which the ascensor debouched was overlooked by a railed gallery. Leaning on the rail, staring down at him, was a woman with a Salvadoran merlin on her wrist, a lovely savage creature of blood-red, green and grey. Impatient of its hood, it rustled its wings with a tinkle of the bells on its jesses.
The woman, strangely enough, was also hooded. But that was a fashion on certain planets, he had heard.
A chair appeared on the platform, fatly padded. Chart’s voice, disembodied, invited him to sit down, and he complied, soothing Pompy, who had spotted the merlin and reacted badly. The curving wall of what he now thought of as the eye deformed Chart himself into a series of warped bows, as though his long bones had been softened and his whole body shaped anew under a roller, but it could be seen that he was thin, and that he was plainly dressed in a blue coat without ornament except a monogram in gold.
Dr Lem felt as though his mind were darting back and forth inside his skull, a mouse in a cage, finding no gap in the wire. Chart watched him lazily, making the translucent globe surrounding him seem like the objective of a microscope and his visitor a gratifying specimen.
Ask who our mutual friend is…? Trivial. No, there’s only one important question I must put.
Abruptly Dr Lem found his voice, and spoke up. “What brings you to Yan, Mr Chart?”
“This, chiefly,” Chart said, and reached to his right with an arm that briefly elongated into a horrible curved line, then returned to near-normal bringing with it a cuboidal shape. Dr Lem recognised it at once, but was taken aback; it was so out of keeping with the advanced technical environment of this ship.
“A book?” he said uncertainly.
“Yes, a book! And one I feel sure you must know. Oh—I’m sorry; perhaps it’s at an awkward angle for you to read the title and author’s name.” He turned the large oblong volume so that its spine was visible and well lit.
“Why, it’s Marc Simon’s version of the Mutine Epics!”
“Yes, indeed,” Chart said with a smile. “Unusual to find even a poet’s work being published in book form nowadays, isn’t it? I’m told that it’s due, in Simon’s case, to the very limited demand for—but I digress. I was answering your question, wasn’t I?”
At the distant edge of Dr Lem’s awareness he fancied he could hear landslides. He said eventually, stroking Pompy with one hand all the time because the chubble was trembling, “You’re not acquainted with the author?”
“Not yet. I intend to meet him. I presume he can be located, even though his publishers tell me he lives among the Yanfolk and not in the enclave. That must account for the insight of his translations, I suppose. To my inexpert eye they seem brilliant.”
Dr Lem gave a distracted nod.
“Even though he has—ah—gone native, though, I doubt if he can be so withdrawn as to refuse to meet me. Or is he? Have I made my trip in vain?”
“Uh…” Dr Lem wanted to wipe his face; it was prickly with sweat, although the temperature here was mild and pleasant. He had assumed, directly he was shown the book, that Marc was the friend of a friend Chart had referred to, but if he had had a chance to reflect, he would have realised that was out of the question—he hadn’t seen Marc among the crowd outside, but it was beyond doubt that Shyalee would have insisted on him coming here. So Chart could have called for him at once.
Who, then…?
But the silence was dragging on unbearably. He said with an effort, “No, I imagine he’ll be delighted that you like his work… However, you have scarcely come scores of parsecs for a social call.”
“Admitted,” Chart said with a chuckle.
“Then—”
“Oh, there’s no need to beat about the bush with me, Dr Lem,” Chart said with a sudden access of weariness. “I’m here because I’m alive and in good health, and I’ve been everywhere and done almost everything else. I’m looking for a new audience offering a new challenge.”
The landslide in Dr Lem’s imagination turned to the crash of galaxies. He set his shoulders back, conscious of how ridiculous a figure he must cut: small and thin, against that vastly magnified form in the globe, with the furry chubble draped across his chest like a stole.
He said, “You must not come looking for it here.”
“And why not?”
“Because… Well, because I have been on Hyrax. And how long ago were you there? Sixty years?”
“Ah, Hyrax!” Chart echoed softly. “Yes, some have said that was my masterpiece. But I can’t live in the shade of past achievements, you know. For me, the next one is always going to be my best.”
“The next one will have to be somewhere other than on Yan,” Dr Lem insisted. “With the example of what you’ve done to disrupt human worlds before us, we dare not risk—”
Abruptly Chart’s expression was very stern; his eyes narrowed, his lips pressed into a thin line.
“Since when has this planet been your property? I didn’t come here to talk with Dr Lem, or any other human. I came here to perform for the Yanfolk, and what I do will be entirely up to them.”
Dr Lem sat very still. Because he knew what the decision of the Yanfolk was going to be—Speaker Kaydad had come to tell him, to ask for his support. Against all the odds, against the logic which had brought him to the contrary conclusion at once, not just the Earth-worshipping youngsters but also the grave, conservative elders did want Gregory Chart to perform on Yan.
Perhaps that noise in his mind wasn’t the clash of galaxies after all. Perhaps it was smaller, but closer: the shattering of a moon.
VIII
At long last Dr Lem said, “So the temptation to play at being a god has finally got the better of you, has it?”
For an instant he thought he had contrived to make Chart lose his temper; he leaned forward within his globe, and his head and shoulders deformed towards the hugeness Dr Lem had first seen, the monstrous embryonic forehead looming over the small full-lipped mouth.
He recovered quickly. But there had been that brief breach in his composure, and Dr Lem resolved to exploit it if he could.
“To play at being a god, did you say? Dr Lem, I expected more insight from a man like you. You are a psychologist, are you not? Then you should be able to recognise my particular breed of ambition. It’s not in the least megalomaniac. It’s—well, the drive towards maximum realisation of my capacities. I told you: I’ve done almost everything I’ve ever wanted to. There’s very little left that offers me a fresh challenge.”
“Your existing audiences have grown bored with you, then? Or have your imitators overtaken you and squeezed you out?” Dr Lem made the words deliberately sarcastic, hoping to wound Chart’s amour propre.
But they glanced off him harmlessly, for he laughed.
“It must be the fact that you’ve spent too long among the Yanfolk. I’m told they’re fantastically courteous and peaceable. You’ve forgotten how to frame an insult, haven’t you? Not that there are many insults which can touch me… Still, I’ll dispose of your objections anyhow. It may simplify matters.
“No, I have not been ‘squeezed out’ by any imitators. I have some. They are all inferior. My audiences are not bored with me; every world where humans have settled has hired me at least once, and every single one is begging me to come back—yes, before you interrupt, that does include Hyrax!”
“I find that hard to believe,” said Dr Lem.
“Do you? Yes, I can see why.” Chart rubbed his chin with a horribly distorted hand. “I presume you were there after my visit?”
“Yes.”
“Had you also been there before?”
Dr Lem swa
llowed and shook his head.
“I doubted that you had. Under the Quains there was little chance to visit the planet.” Chart made an expansive gesture. “I’ll tell you how I saw it when I first arrived: a devilish tyranny, excused on the grounds that it offered ‘security’ and ‘peace’. Every man, woman and child on Hyrax was hung about with invisible fetters, branded the private property of Elias Quain as surely as if a hot iron had been seared into their cheeks. True or false?”
“So you’re presenting yourself as a disinterested liberator?” gibed Dr Lem. But his heart was not in the words, and his tone betrayed him.
“I am not. The people of Hyrax paid me, every penny of the sum agreed by the Quains. They felt it was well worth bleeding themselves in their own interests for a change, after so many centuries of being bled by their rulers. They were paying in arrears, and they admitted it, for their own stupidity and sloth.”
“If you feel proud of rescuing people from that sort of predicament, are there no other chances for you to do so?” Dr Lem countered. “I could name half a dozen worlds where the situation—”
“So could I, so could I, so could I!” Chart cut in. “But I’ve just told you: that is not what I am. I did it once, almost incidentally. Why should I do it again, even if I am proud that I was instrumental in freeing Hyrax? I don’t repeat myself—I leave repetition to my silly imitators. I, Gregory Chart, create!”
The head drew back inside the globe, and two clenched fists rose before the magnified face, pounding knuckles against knuckles.
Looking at him, Dr Lem thought: This is the most dangerous man in the galaxy. Artists have always been dangerous. But with this much talent and this much power…
He said suddenly, “But you won’t find what you want here. This is an ancient world. There’s no chance to create on Yan—only to…”
“Imitate?” Chart supplied softly.
“I was hesitating to use the word. But—yes.”
There was a pause. Eventually Chart said, not looking towards Lem but into vacant space, “Yes, in one sense that may be true. Nonetheless, don’t you see that that would furnish me with a new challenge? I’ve performed for every human-occupied world. What’s left to me? I’m not worn out, I’m not old! Oh, in years, I suppose I am, but not up here inside my head! My brain heaves and surges like a wild beast in a cage, conceiving and aborting a score of ideas every day! I can carve a sun’s corona into strange and lovely shapes, create poems in plasma, and—yes, I have passed time in doing that. But for whom? Who can watch me? Who can appreciate what I do on that scale? Am I to perform for myself and the dumb churning audience of the stars? Shall I tackle colossal simple tasks, tug the stars into new constellations? I think I could; the last contract I had was with Tubalcain, the payment is still not exhausted, and if I chose I could take the balance in the machines I’d need. What for? To leave myself a monument, a constellation in the sky of some abandoned planet which will spell my name to the first explorers when they get there? I don’t want a monument! I’m an artist, Dr Lem! I need an audience, the most discerning, the most discriminating, the most responsive I can find! I’ve used up all of them… bar one.”
“An audience of another species,” said Dr Lem. The sound of his own words made him shiver.
“Yes.” Chart licked his lips. “Yes, I have never satisfied an alien audience. And I think—I have to believe—that I can.”
“Papa!” Guiseppe said. “Give me the binox for a moment. The go-board is active again.”
Ducci swung around, raising the binox to his own eyes instead, and a moment later roared, “Quick! Go and— No, diavolo! Too late, too late!”
He rounded on his son furiously. “You said you’d tied it up for hours—that news-machine!”
Flinching back from his father’s sudden unaccountable rage, Giuseppe said, “But I did! I sent it on a wild-goose chase!”
“Then why is it over there at the board, in terminal emergency mode?”
“What?” Giuseppe seized the binox and stared through them. True enough. On the edge of the go-board, the obsolescent machine was taking itself systematically to bits: individual sections each primed with the same condensed news-item and a different route across the board.
“Now the whole galaxy will know Chart has come here!” Ducci fumed. “We’ll be inundated! Oh, you—you…!”
“Oh, shut up, papa!” his son snapped. “Chart had probably told everyone already. A man like him must have news-machines at his heels wherever he goes. Maybe that one came here because of him.”
“I guess so,” Ducci admitted reluctantly after a few moments’ reflection. “But all the same it makes me mad! Why couldn’t the bastard have gone somewhere else?”
“Why are you so angry about him coming to Yan?” Giuseppe countered. “Surely it’s—”
There was a shout, and they glanced around to find Warden Chevsky approaching them, obviously out for someone’s blood.
Behind the deforming globe, Chart shifted on his chair and brought his face and limbs into newly weird arrangements. He said, “Before we go any further, let me dispose of all the other objections I suspect you’re going to advance. The question of payment will not arise—as I told you, I have a vast amount of credit on Tubalcain, enough, if I spin it out, to last me the rest of my life.”
Dr Lem nodded. He had never been to Tubalcain, but it was notoriously the galaxy’s most industrialised planet: almost intolerable to live on because everything right down to water and oxygen had to be manufactured, but so dedicated to technology that its output of desirable goods supported half a dozen other planets’ needs. Its products were even exported to Earth.
He made a mental note to check the encyclopedia and find out what the people there had hired Chart to do.
“Also,” Chart pursued, “I imagine you’ve considered getting up a petition, or something, to have me legally removed from Yan. You can’t. Earthsiders here are on sufferance. Legally and actually the authority resides with the natives. I’m prepared to take my chances with them. And you can’t keep me from meeting and talking to them, can you?”
“No, of course not. You and your staff have the same rights as if you’d come off the go-board in conventional fashion—”
“Staff?” Chart cut in. He curled his lip. “I have no staff! I did have, long ago, but one by one they decided they could do better on their own after milking my brains, and they drifted away. And one by one they found out that they couldn’t. Some have begged to be taken back, and I’ve always refused them. I’ve learned to do without them—without anyone, indeed, except my mistress.”
He gestured, and Lem turned automatically to look at the woman on the gallery. She raised the hand which did not carry the merlin as though to unhood it. Instead, after a second of hesitation, she removed her own hood.
“Remember me, Yigael?” she said.
Time stopped.
Since nobody had disturbed him—one couldn’t count the interruption caused by the news-machine—and the streets outside were still quiet, Erik Svitra decided to look over the house he’d wandered into and see how these people lived. He had inspected four or five of the house’s nine rooms before he suddenly realised that it wasn’t the squalid little hovel he had assumed; it was meant for one family.
He didn’t believe it at first. Back where he came from, a place this size would never have been built, but the larger structures that were built averaged three or four rooms per family.
So that was why they had single-form furniture! No point in having items that changed their shape and texture, if you had enough space to store separate units for each domestic purpose. Old-fashioned, maybe, but at least it meant you didn’t have to squabble over whether you should or shouldn’t change the eatoff into a lieon now, or later.
And that thing over there, that he’d taken for a funny arrangement of shelves: that must be a staircase! No ascensor to reach the upper story—but, on the other hand, no exercisers in the children’s playroom
, either. They must get their exercise on the stairs, lifting their own weight against this Earth-force gravity, and maybe even running and jumping, right out in the open.
Hmm!
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He’d been wondering why anyone should choose to come to this one enclosed corner of a world full of funny aliens, instead of a human-controlled planet. All of a sudden he was wondering the exact opposite: why the place wasn’t cram-jammed with people in search of the quiet life and the good old-type luxuries. Of course, there were probably drawbacks: insects, maybe, or cold weather, or—what was the term?—rain.
Still, there was one thing in the place that was bang up to date: a communet terminal with as wide a range of facilities as he’d seen anywhere. He ran his finger over the board, counting news, encyclopedia, person-call, conference, real-time entertainment, home-help, and library options. Almost absent-mindedly, he chose encyclopedia, and then tapped out the name CHART, GREGORY.
Just to see if the facilities were as good as they looked.
When Dr Lem descended the ship’s ramp again, he found that the roses had gone, and the soldiers, and the musicians. There was nothing but the plain grey ramp. Delighted to be back in the open air, Pompy wriggled out of his arms and raced ahead down it to the ground, not even minding when she was pitched off the end because she misjudged the speed of travel and rolled over in the dust. She might almost have been a kit again.
Calling her to heel, he set off the way he had come, and realised with a start that there was no one waiting at the foot of the ramp to demand what he and Chart had talked about. Instead, there was a dense crowd of people with their backs to him, about a hundred metres off. Some sort of trouble, he read from their nervous gestures.
Abruptly Hector Ducci caught sight of him and strode to meet him. Others followed: his son Giuseppe, and those of the people of the enclave that Dr Lem would have termed responsible—in other words, those who would at once have realised the danger of Chart coming here, without being even briefly blinded by the man’s reputation. He saw Toshi Shigaraku—her husband Jack was still lecturing his pupils—and Pedro Phillips too. All except Harriet Pokorod, the medical doctor.