“I see,” Mr. Smith said wryly. “And following this period for which you hired the professor, did he discontinue his investigations into time travel?”
Piedmont made a vague gesture. “How would I know?”
John Smith-Winston interrupted stiffly. “Sir, we have all drawn up complete accountings of your property. To say it is vast is an understatement beyond even an Englishman. We should like instructions on how you wish us to continue.”
Mr. Smith looked at him. “I wish to begin immediate steps to liquidate.”
“Liquidate!” six voices ejaculated.
“I want cash, gentlemen,” Smith said definitely. “As fast as it can be accomplished, I want my property converted into cash.”
Warner Voss-Richer said harshly, “Mr. Smith, there isn’t enough coinage in the world to buy your properties.”
“There is no need for there to be. I will be spending it as rapidly as you can convert my holdings into gold or its credit equivalent. The money will be put back into circulation over and over again.”
Piedmont was aghast. “But why?” He held his hands up in dismay. “Can’t you realize the repercussions of such a move? Mr. Smith, you must explain the purpose of all this...”
Mr. Smith said, “The purpose should be obvious. And the pseudonym of Mr. Smith is no longer necessary. You may call me Shirey—Professor Alan Shirey. You see, gentlemen, the question with which you presented me, whether or not time travel was possible, became consumingly interesting. I have finally solved, I believe, all the problems involved. I need now only a fantastic amount of power to activate my device. Given such an amount of power, somewhat more than is at present produced on the entire globe, I believe I shall be able to travel in time.”
“But, but why? All this, all this ... Cartels, governments, wars . . .” Warren Piedmont’s aged voice wavered, faltered.
Mr. Smith—Professor Alan Shirey—looked at him strangely. “Why, so that I may travel back to early Venice where I shall be able to make the preliminary steps necessary for me to secure sufficient funds to purchase such an enormous amount of power output.”
“And six centuries of human history,” said Rami Mardu, Asiatic representative, sd softly as hardly to be heard. “Its meaning is no more than this ... ?”
Professor Shirey looked at him impatiently.
“Do I understand you to contend, sir, that there have been other centuries of human history with more meaning?”
<
* * * *
PRIMA BELLADONNA
by J. G. Ballard
This year “S-F” covers the s-front, quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Fifteen short stories, one verse parody of one novella, one satire and one article about too many movies bring you a pretty complete (and surprisingly proportionate) representation of the science-fantasy scene here and abroad. One story from Wales, via Canada; plus the peripatetic Mack Reynolds; together with Shanghai-born Ballard’s story from a British magazine, combine, I feel, to offer an appropriately international flavor.
This is Mr. Ballard’s first published science-fiction, and contains one of the very few entirely new s-f ideas of the last few years.
* * * *
i first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us. Certainly I can’t believe I could make myself as ridiculous now, but then again, it might have been just Jane herself.
Whatever else they said about her, everyone had to agree she was a beautiful girl, even if her genetic background was a little mixed. The gossips at Vermillion Sands soon decided there was a good deal of mutant in her, because she had a rich patina-golden skin and what looked like insects for eyes, but that didn’t bother either myself or any of my friends, one or two of whom, like Tony Miles and Harry Devine, have never since been quite the same to their wives.
We spent most of our time in those days on the wide cool balcony of my apartment off Beach Drive, drinking beer— we always kept a useful supply stacked in the refrigerator of my music shop on the street level—yarning in a desultory way and playing i-Go, a sort of decelerated chess which was popular then. None of the others ever did any work; Harry was an architect and Tony Miles sometimes sold a few ceramics to the tourists, but I usually put a couple of hours in at the shop each morning, getting off the foreign orders and turning the beer.
One particularly hot lazy day I’d just finished wrapping up a delicate soprano mimosa wanted by the Hamburg Oratorio Society when Harry phoned down from the balcony.
“Parker’s Choro-Flora?” he said. “You’re guilty of overproduction. Come on up here. Tony and I have something beautiful to show you.”
When I went up I found them grinning happily like two dogs who had just discovered an interesting tree.
“Well?” I asked. “Where is it?”
Tony tilted his head slightly. “Over there,” he indicated.
I looked up and down the street, and across the face of the apartment house opposite.
“Careful,” he warned me. “Don’t gape at her.”
I slid into one of the wicker chairs and craned my head round cautiously.
“Fourth floor,” Harry elaborated slowly, out of the side of his mouth. “One left from the balcony opposite. Happy now?”
“Dreaming,” I told him, taking a long slow focus on her. “I wonder what else she can do?”
Harry and Tony sighed thankfully. “Well?” Tony asked.
“She’s out of my league,” I said. “But you two shouldn’t have any trouble. Go over and tell her how much she needs you.”
Harry groaned. “Don’t you realize, this one is poetic, emergent, something straight out of the primal apocalyptic sea. She’s probably divine.”
The woman was strolling around the lounge, re-arranging the furniture, wearing almost nothing except a large abstract metallic hat. Even in shadow the long sinuous lines of her thighs and shoulders gleamed gold and burning. She was a walking galaxy of light. Vermillion Sands had never seen anything like her.
“The approach has got to be equivocal,” Harry continued, gazing into his beer. “Shy, almost mystical. Nothing urgent or grabbing.”
The woman stooped down to unpack a suitcase and the metal vanes of her hat fluttered over her face. I didn’t bother to remind Harry that Betty, his wife and a girl of considerable spirit, would have firmly restrained him from anything that wasn’t mystical.
“She must use up about a kilowatt,” I calculated. “What do you think her chemistry is?”
“Who cares,” Harry said. “It doesn’t matter to me if it’s siliconic.”
“In this heat?” I said. “She’d ignite.”
The woman walked out onto the balcony, saw us staring at her, looked around for a moment and then went in again.
We sat back and looked thoughtfully at each other, like three triumvirs deciding how to divide an empire, not saying too much, and one eye watching for any chance of a double-deal.
Five minutes later the singing started.
At first I thought it was one of the azalea trios in trouble with an alkaline pH, but the frequencies were too high. They were almost out of the audible range, a thin tremolo quaver which came out of nowhere and rose up the back of the skull.
Harry and Tony frowned at me.
“Your livestock’s unhappy about something,” Tony told me. “Can you quieten it down?”
“It’s not the plants,” I told him. “Can’t be.”
The sound mounted in intensity, scraping the edge off my occipital bones. I was about to go down to the shop when Harry and Tony leaped out of their chairs and dived back against the wall.
“For chrissake, Steve, look out!” Tony yelled at me. He pointed wildly at the table I was leaning on, picked up a chair and smashed it down on the glass top.
I stood up and brushed the fragments out of my h
air.
“What the hell’s the matter?” I asked them.
Tony was looking down at the tangle of wickerwork tied round the metal struts of the table. Harry came forward and took my arm gingerly.
“That was close. You all right?”
“It’s gone,” Tony said flatly. He looked carefully over the balcony floor and down over the rail into the street.
“What was it?” I asked.
Harry peered at me closely. “Didn’t you see it? It was about three inches from you. Emperor Scorpion, big as a lobster.” He sat down weakly on a beer crate. “Must have been a sonic one. The noise has gone now.”
After they’d left I cleared up the mess and had a quiet beer to myself. I could have sworn nothing had got onto the table.
On the balcony opposite, wearing a gown of shimmering ionized fiber, the golden woman was watching me.
* * * *
I found out who she was the next morning. Tony and Harry were down at the beach with their wives, probably enlarging on the scorpion, and I was in the shop tuning up a Khan-Arachnid orchid with the UV lamp. It was a difficult bloom, with a normal full range of twenty-four octaves, but like all the tetracot K8 + 25 C5 A9 chorotropes, unless it got a lot of exercise it tended to relapse into neurotic minor key transpositions which were the devil to break. And as the senior bloom in the shop it naturally affected all the others. Invariably when I opened the shop in the mornings it sounded like a madhouse, but as soon as I’d fed the Arachnid and straightened out one of two pH gradients the rest promptly took their cues from it and dimmed down quietly in their control tanks, two-time, three-four, the multi-tones, all in perfect harmony.
There were only about a dozen true Arachnids in captivity; most of the others were either mutes or grafts from dicot stems, and I was lucky to have mine at all. I’d bought the place five years earlier from an old half-deaf man called Sayers, and the day before he left he moved a lot of rogue stock out to the garbage disposal scoop behind the apartment block. Reclaiming some of the tanks, I’d come across the Arachnid, thriving on a diet of algae and perished rubber tubing.
Why Sayers had wanted to throw it away I’d never discovered. Before he came to Vermillion Sands he’d been a curator at the old Kew Conservatoire where the first choroflora had been bred, and had worked under the Director, Dr. Mandel, who as a young botanist of twenty-five had discovered the prime Arachnid in the Guiana forest. The orchid took its name from the Khan-Arachnid spider which pollinated the flower, simultaneously laying its own eggs in the fleshy ovule, guided, or as Mandel always insisted, actually mesmerized to it by the vibrations which the orchid’s calyx emitted at pollination-time. The first Arachnid orchids beamed out only a few random frequencies, but by crossbreeding and maintaining them artificially at the pollination stage Mandel had produced a strain that spanned a maximum of twenty-four octaves.
Not that he’s ever been able to hear them. At the climax of his life’s work Mandel, like Beethoven, was stone deaf, but apparently by merely looking at a blossom he could listen to its music. Strangely, though, after he went deaf he never looked at an Arachnid.
That morning I could almost understand why. The orchid was in a vicious mood. First it refused to feed, and I had to coax it along in a fluoraldehyde flush, and then it started going ultra-sonic, which meant complaints from all the dog owners in the area. Finally it tried to fracture the tank by resonating.
The whole place was in uproar, and I was almost resigned to shutting them down and waking them all by hand individually—a back-breaking job with eighty tanks in the shop —when everything suddenly died away to a murmur.
I looked round and saw the golden-skinned woman walk in.
“Good morning,” I said. “They must like you.”
She laughed pleasantly. “Hello. Weren’t they behaving?”
Under the black beach robe her skin was a softer, more mellow gold, and it was her eyes that held me. I could just see them under the wide-brimmed hat. Insect legs wavered delicately round two points of purple light.
She walked over to a bank of mixed ferns and stood looking at them, her ample hips cocked to one side.
The ferns reached out toward her and trebled eagerly in their liquid fluted voices.
“Aren’t they sweet?” she said, stroking the fronds gently. “They need so much affection.”
Her voice was low in the register, a breath of cool sand pouring, with a lilt that gave it music.
“I’ve just come to Vermillion Sands,” she said, “and my apartment seems awfully quiet. Perhaps if I had a flower, one would be enough, I shouldn’t feel so lonely.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
“Yes,” I agreed, brisk and business-like. “What about something colorful? This Sumatra Samphire, say? It’s a pedigree mezzo-soprano from the same follicle as the Bayreuth Festival Prima Belladonna.”
“No,” she said. “It looks rather cruel.”
“Or this Louisiana Lute Lily? If you thin out its SO2 it’ll play some beautiful madrigals. I’ll show you how to do it.”
She wasn’t listening to me. Slowly her hands raised in front of her breasts so that she almost seemed to be praying; she moved toward the counter on which the Arachnid stood.
“How beautiful it is,” she said, gazing at the rich yellow and purple leaves hanging from the scarlet-ribbed vibro-calyx.
I followed her across the floor and switched on the Arachnid’s audio so that she could hear it. Immediately the plant came to life. The leaves stiffened and filled with color and the calyx inflated, its ribs sprung tautly. A few sharp disconnected notes spat out.
“Beautiful, but evil,” I said.
“Evil?” she repeated. “No, proud.” She stepped closer to the orchid and looked down into its huge malevolent head. The Arachnid quivered and the spines on its stem arched and flexed menacingly.
“Careful,” I warned her. “It’s sensitive to the faintest respiratory sounds.”
“Quiet,” she said, waving me back. “I think it wants to sing.”
“Those are only key fragments,” I told her. “It doesn’t perform. I use it as a frequency—”
“Listen!” She held my arm and squeezed it tightly.
A low rhythmic fusion of melody had been coming from the plants around the shop, and mounting above them I heard a single stronger voice calling out, at first a thin high-pitched reed of sound that began to pulse and deepen and finally swelled into full baritone, raising the other plants in chorus about itself.
I’d never heard the Arachnid sing before and I was listening to it open-eared when I felt a glow of heat burn against my arm. I turned round and saw the woman staring intently at the plant, her skin aflame, the insects in her eyes writhing insanely. The Arachnid stretched out toward her, calyx erect, leaves like blood-red sabers.
I stepped round her quickly and switched off the argon feed. The Arachnid sank to a whimper, and around us there was a nightmarish babel of broken notes and voices toppling from high C’s and L’s into discord. Then only a faint whispering of leaves moved over the silence.
The woman gripped the edge of the tank and gathered herself. Her skin dimmed and the insects in her eyes slowed to a delicate wavering.
“Why did you turn it off?” she asked heavily.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’ve got ten thousand dollars worth of stock here and that sort of twelve-tone emotional storm can blow a lot of valves. Most of these plants aren’t equipped for grand opera.”
She watched the Arachnid as the gas drained out of its calyx, and one by one its leaves buckled and lost their color.
“How much is it?” she asked me, opening her bag.
“It’s not for sale,” I said. “Frankly I’ve no idea how it picked up those bars—”
“Will a thousand dollars be enough?” she asked, her eyes fixed on me steadily.
“I can’t,” I told her. “I’d never be able to tune the others without it. Anyway,” I added, trying to smile, “t
hat Arachnid would be dead in ten minutes if you took it out of its vivarium. All these cylinders and leads would look a little odd inside your lounge.”
“Yes, of course,” she agreed, suddenly smiling back at me. “I was stupid.” She gave the orchid a last backward glance and strolled away across the floor to the long Tchaikovsky section popular with the tourists.
“ ‘Pathetique,’” she read off a label at random. “I’ll take this.”
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2 - [Anthology] Page 25