BY FRITZ LEIBER
I was half-way between Arcadia and Utopia, flying a long archeologic scout, looking for coleopt hives, lepidopteroid stilt-cities, and ruined villas of the Old Ones.
On Mars they’ve stuck to the fanciful names the old astronomers dreamed onto their charts. They’ve got an Elysium and an Ophir too.
I judged I was somewhere near the Acid Sea, which by a rare coincidence does become a poisonous shallow marsh, rich in hydrogen ions, when the northern icecap melts.
But I saw no sign of it below me, nor any archeologic features either. Only the endless dull rosy plain of felsite dust and iron-oxide powder slipping steadily west under my flier, with here and there a shallow canyon or low hill, looking for all the world (Earth? Mars?) like parts of the Mojave.
The sun was behind me, its low light flooding the cabin. A few stars glittered in the dark blue sky. I recognized the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio, the red pinpoint of Antares.
I was wearing my pilot’s red spacesuit. They’ve enough air on Mars for flying now, but not for breathing if you fly even a few hundred yards above the surface.
Beside me sat my copilot’s green spacesuit, which would have had someone in it if I were more sociable or merely mindful of flying regulations. From time to time it swayed and jogged just a little.
And things were feeling eerie, which isn’t how they ought to feel to someone who loves solitude as much as I do, or pretend to myself I do. But the Martian landscape is even more spectral than that of Arabia or the American Southwest—lonely and beautiful and obsessed with death and immensity and sometimes it strikes through.
From some old poem the words came, “. . . and strange thoughts grow, with a certain humming in my ears, about the life before I lived this life.”
I had to stop myself from leaning forward and looking around into the faceplate of the green spacesuit to see if there weren’t someone there now. A thin man. Or a tall slim woman. Or a black crab-jointed Martian coleopteroid, who needs a spacesuit about as much as a spacesuit does. Or . . . who knows?
It was very still in the cabin. The silence did almost hum. I had been listening to Deimos Station, but now the outer moonlet had dropped below the southern horizon. They’d been broadcasting a suggestions program about dragging Mercury away from the sun to make it the moon of Venus— and giving both planets rotation too—so as to stir up the thick smoggy furnace-hot atmosphere of Venus and make it habitable.
Better finish fixing tip Mars first, I thought.
But then almost immediately the rider to that thought had come: No, I want Mars to stay lonely. That’s why I came here. Earth got crowded and look what happened.
Yet there are times on Mars when it would be pleasant, even to an old solitary like me, to have a companion. That is if you could be sure of picking your companion.
Once again I felt the compulsion to peer inside the green spacesuit.
Instead I scanned around. Still only the dust-desert drawing toward sunset; almost featureless, yet darkly rosy as an old peach. “True peach, rosy and flawless . . . Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe as fresh-poured wine of a mighty pulse. . . .” What was that poem?— my mind nagged.
On the seat beside me, almost under the thigh of the green spacesuit, vibrating with it a little, was a tape: Vanished Churches and Cathedrals of Terra. Old buildings are an abiding interest with me, of course, and then some of the hills or hives of the black coleopts are remarkably suggestive of Earth towers and spires, even to details like lancet windows and flying buttresses, so much so that it’s been suggested there is an imitative element, perhaps telepathic, in the architecture of those strange beings who despite their humanoid intelligence are very like social insects. I’d been scanning the book at my last stop, hunting out coleopt-hill resemblances, but then a cathedral interior had reminded me of the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago and I’d slipped the tape out of the projector. That chapel was where Monica had been, getting her Ph.D. in physics on a bright June morning, when the fusion blast licked the southern end of Lake Michigan, and I didn’t want to think about Monica. Or rather I wanted too much to think about her.
“What’s done is done, and she is dead beside, dead long ago. . . .” Now I recognized the poem!—Browning’s The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church. That was a distant cry!— Had there been a view of St. Praxed’s on the tape?— The 16th Century . . . and the dying bishop pleading with his sons for a grotesquely grand tomb—a frieze of satyrs, nymphs, the Savior, Moses, lynxes—while he thinks of their mother, his mistress....
“Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes . . . Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!”
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett and their great love. ...
Monica and myself and our love that never got started. . . .
Monica’s eyes talked. She was tall and slim and proud. . . .
Maybe if I had more character, or only energy, I’d find myself someone else to love—a new planet, a new girl!—I wouldn’t stay uselessly faithful to that old romance, I wouldn’t go courting loneliness, locked in a dreaming life-in-death on Mars. . . .
“Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask, ‘Do I live, am I dead?’”
But for me the loss of Monica is tied up, in a way I can’t untangle, with the failure of Earth, with my loathing of what Terra did to herself in her pride of money and power and success (communist and capitalist alike), with that unnecessary atomic war that came just when they thought they had everything safe and solved, like they felt before the one in 1914. It didn’t wipe out all Earth by any means, only about a third, but it wiped out my trust in human nature— and the divine too, I’m afraid—and it wiped out Monica. . . . “And she died so must we die ourselves, and thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream.”
A dream? Maybe we lack a Browning to make real those moments of modem history gone over the Niagara of the past, to find them again needle-in-haystack, atom-in-whirlpool, and etch them perfectly, the moments of starflight and planet-landing etched as he had etched the moments of the Renaissance.
“Yet—the world (Mars? Terra?) only a dream? Well, maybe. A bad dream sometimes, that’s for sure! I told myself as I jerked my wandering thoughts back to the flier and the unchanging rosy desert under the small sun.
Apparently I hadn’t missed anything—my second mind had been faithfully watching and instrument-tending while my first mind rambled in imaginings and memories.
But things were feeling eerier than ever. The silence did hum now, brassily, as if a great peal of bells had just clanged, or were about to. There was menace now in the small sun about to set behind me, bringing the Martian night and what Martian were-things there may be that they don’t know of yet. The rosy plain had turned sinister. And for a moment I was sure that if I looked into the green spacesuit, I would see a dark wraith thinner than any coleopt, or else a bone-brown visage fleshlessly grinning—the King of Tenors.
“Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years: Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?”
You know, the weird and the supernatural didn’t just evaporate when the world got crowded and smart and technical. They moved outward—to Luna, to Mars, to the Jovian satellites, to the black tangled forest of space and the astronomic marches and the unimaginably distant bull’s-eye windows of the stars. Out to the realms of the unknown, where the unexpected still happens every other hour and the impossible every other day—
And right at that moment I saw the impossible standing 400 feet tall and cloaked in lacy gray in the desert ahead of me.
And while my first mind froze for seconds that stretched toward minutes and my central vision stayed blankly fixed on that upwardly bifurcated incredibility with its dark hint of rainbow caught in the gray lace, my second mind and my peripheral vision brought my flier down to a swift, dream-smooth, skimming landing on its long skis in the rosy dust. I brushed a control and the cabin walls swung silently downward to either side of the pilot’s seat, and I stepped down through the dream-easy Martian gravity to the peach-dark pillowy floor, and I stood looking at the wonder, and my first mind began to move at last.
There could be no doubt about the name of this, for I’d been looking at a taped view of it not five hours before—this was the West Front of Chartres Cathedral, that Gothic masterpiece, with its plain 12th Century spire, the Clocher Vieux, to the south and its crocketed 16th Century spire, the Clocher Neuf, to the north and between the great rose window fifty feet across and below that the icon-crowded triple-arched West Porch.
Swiftly now my first mind moved to one theory after another of this grotesque miracle and rebounded from them almost as swiftly as if they were like magnetic poles.
I was hallucinating from the taped pictures. Yes, maybe the world’s a dream. That’s always a theory and never a useful one.
A transparency of Chartres had got pasted against my faceplate. Shake my helmet. No.
I was seeing a mirage that had traveled across fifty million miles of space . . . and some years of time too, for Chartres had vanished with the Paris bomb that near-missed toward Le Mans, just as Rockefeller Chapel had gone with the Michigan Bomb and St. Praxed’s with the Rome.
The thing was a mimic-structure built by the coleopteroids to a plan telepathized from memory picture of Chartres in some man’s mind. But most memory pictures don’t have anywhere near such precision and I never heard of the coleopts mimicking stained glass, though they do build spired nests a half thousand feet high.
It was all one of those great hypnotism-traps the Arean jingoists are forever claiming the coleopts are setting us. Yes, and the whole universe was built by demons to deceive only me—and possibly Adolf Hitler—as Descartes once hypothesized. Stop it.
They’d moved Hollywood to Mars as they’d earlier moved it to Mexico and Spain and Egypt and the Congo to cut expenses, and they’d just finished an epic of the Middle Ages—The Hunchback of Notre Dame, no doubt, with some witless producer substituting Notre Dame of Chartres for Notre Dame of Paris because his leading mistress liked its looks better and the public wouldn’t know the difference. Yes, and probably hired hordes of black coleopts at next to nothing to play monks, wearing robes and humanoid masks. And why not a coleopt to play Quasimodo?—improve race relations. Don’t hunt for comedy in the incredible.
Or they’d been giving the Martian tour to the last mad president of La Belle France to quiet his nerves and they’d propped up a fake cathedral of Chartres, all west façade, to humor him, just like the Russians had put up papier-mâché villages to impress Peter III’s German wife. The Fourth Republic on the fourth planet! No, don’t get hysterical. This thing is here.
Or maybe—and here my first mind lingered—past and future forever exist somehow, somewhere (the Mind of God? the fourth dimension?) in a sort of suspended animation, with little trails of somnambulant change running through the future as our willed present actions change it and perhaps, who knows, other little trails running through the past too? —for there may be professional time-travelers. And maybe, once in a million millennia, an amateur accidentally finds a Door.
A Door to Chartres. But when?
As I lingered on those thoughts, staring at the gray prodigy —”Do I live, am I dead?”—there came a moaning and a rustling behind me and I turned to see the green spacesuit diving out of the flier toward me, but with its head ducked so I still couldn’t see inside the faceplate. I could no more move than in a nightmare. But before the suit reached me, I saw that there was with it, perhaps carrying it, a wind that shook the flier and swept up the feather-soft rose dust in great plumes and waves. And then the wind bowled me over —one hasn’t much anchorage in Mars gravity—and I was rolling away from the flier with the billowing dust and the green spacesuit that went somersaulting faster and higher than I, as if it were empty, but then wraiths are light.
The wind was stronger than any wind on Mars should be, certainly than any unheralded gust, and as I went tumbling deliriously on, cushioned by my suit and the low gravity, clutching futilely toward the small low rocky outcrops through whose long shadows I was rolling, I found myself thinking with the serenity of fever that this wind wasn’t blowing across Mars-space only but through time too.
A mixture of space-wind and time-wind—what a puzzle for die physicist and drawer of vectors! It seemed unfair—I thought as I tumbled—like giving a psychiatrist a patient with psychosis overlaid by alcoholism. But reality’s always mixed and I knew from experience that only a few minutes in an anechoic, lightless, null-G chamber will set the most normal mind veering uncontrollably into fantasy—or is it always fantasy?
One of the smaller rocky outcrops took for an instant the twisted shape of Monica’s dog Brush as he died—not in the blast with her, but of fallout, three weeks later, hairless and swollen and oozing. I winced.
Then the wind died and the West Front of Chartres was shooting vertically up above me and I found myself crouched on the dust-drifted steps of the south bay with the great sculpture of the Virgin looking severely out from above the high doorway at the Martian desert, and the figures of the four liberal arts ranged below her—Grammar, Rhetoric, Music, and Dialectic—and Aristotle with frowning forehead dipping a stone pen into stone ink.
The figure of Music hammering her little stone bells made me think of Monica and how she’d studied piano and Brush had barked when she practiced. Next I remembered from the tape that Chartres is the legendary resting place of St. Modesta, a beautiful girl tortured to death for her faith by her father Quirinus in the Emperor Diocletian’s day. Modesta— Music—Monica.
The double door was open a little and the green spacesuit was sprawled on its belly there, helmet lifted, as if peering inside at floor level.
I pushed to my feet and walked blowing through time? Grotesque. Up the rose-mounded steps. Dust. Yet was I more than dust? “Do I live, am I dead?”
I hurried faster and faster, kicking up the fine powder in peach-red swirls, and almost hurled myself down on the green spacesuit to turn it over and peer into the faceplate. But before I could quite do that I had looked into the doorway and what I saw stopped me. Slowly I got to my feet again and took a step beyond the prone green spacesuit and then another step.
Instead of the great Gothic nave of Chartres, long as a football field, high as a sequoia, alive with stained light, there was a smaller, darker interior—churchly too, but Romanesque, even Latin, with burly granite columns and rich red marble steps leading up toward an altar where mosaics glittered in the gloom. One thin stream of flat light, coming through another open door like a theatrical spot in the wings, struck on the wall opposite me and revealed a gloriously ornate tomb where a sculptured mortuary figure—a bishop by his miter and crook—lay above a crowded bronze frieze on a bright green jasper slab with a blue lapis-lazuli globe of Earth between his stone knees and nine thin columns of peach-blossom marble rising around him to the canopy. . . .
But of course: this was the bishop’s tomb of Browning’s poem. This was St. Praxed’s church, powdered by the Rome Bomb, the church sacred to the martyred Praxed, daughter of Pudens, pupil of St. Peter, tucked even further into the past than Chartres’ martyred Modesta. Napoleon had planned to liberate those red marble steps and take them to Paris. But with this realization came almost instantly the companion memory: that although St. Praxed’s church had been real, the tomb of Browning’s bishop had existed only in Browning’s imagination and the minds of his readers.
Can it be, I thought, that not only do the past and future exist forever, but also all the possibilities that were never and will never be realized . . . somehow, somewhere (the fifth dimension? the Imagination of God?) as if in a dream within a dream. . . . Crawling with change, too, as artists or anyone thinks of them . . . Change-winds mixed with time-winds mixed with space-winds. ...
In that moment I became aware of two dark-clad figures in the aisle beside the tomb and studying it—a pale man with dark beard covering his cheeks and a pale woman with dark straight hair covering hers under a filmy veil. There was movement near their feet and a fat dark sluglike beast, almost hairless, crawled away from them into the shadows.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that beast. I didn’t like it disappearing. For the first time I felt actively frightened.
And then the woman moved, too, so that her dark wide floor-brushing skirt jogged, and in a very British voice she called, “Flush! Come here, Flush!” and I remembered that was the name of the dog Elizabeth Barrett had taken with her from Wimpole Street when she ran off with Browning.
Then the voice called again, anxiously, but the British had gone out of it now, in fact it was a voice I knew, a voice that froze me inside, and the dog’s name had changed to Brush, and I looked up, and the gaudy tomb was gone and the walls had grayed and receded, but not so far as those of the Rockefeller Chapel, and there coming toward me down the center aisle, tall and slim in a black academic robe with the three velvet doctor’s bars on the sleeves, with the brown of science edging the hood, was Monica.
I think she saw me, I think she recognized me through my faceplate, I think she smiled at me fearfully, wonderingly.
Then, there was a rosy glow behind her, making a hazily-gleaming nimbus of her hair, like the glory of a saint. But then the glow became too bright, intolerably so, and something struck at me, driving me back through the doorway, whirling me over and over, so that all I saw was swirls of rose dust and star-pricked sky.
I think what struck at me was the ghost of the front of an atomic blast.
In my mind was the thought: St. Praxed, St. Modesta, and Monica the atheist saint martyred by the bomb.
Then all the winds were gone and I was picking myself up from the dust by the flier.
I scanned around through ebbing dust-swirls. The cathedral was gone. No hill or structure anywhere relieved the flatness of the Martian horizon.
Leaning against the flier, as if lodged there by the wind yet on its feet, was the green spacesuit, its back toward me, its head and shoulders sunk in an attitude mimicking profound dejection.
I moved toward it quickly. I had the thought that it might have gone with me to bring someone back.
It seemed to shrink from me a little as I turned it around. The faceplate was empty. There on the inside, below the transparency, distorted by my angle of view, was the little complex console of dials and levers, but no face above them.
I took the suit up very gently in my arms, carrying it as if it were a person, and I started toward the door of the cabin.
It’s in the things we’ve lost that we exist most fully.
There was a faint green flash from the sun as its last silver vanished on the horizon.
All the stars came out.
Gleaming green among them and brightest of all, low in the sky where the sun had gone, was the Evening Star-Earth.