Brian Aldiss
It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late.
W. S. Landor
i
A giant rising from the fjord, from the grey arm of sea in the fjord, could have peered over the crown of its sheer cliffs and discovered Endehaaven there on the edge, sprawling at the very start of the island.
Derek Flamifew Ende saw much of this sprawl from his high window; indeed, a growing unease, apprehensions of a quarrel, forced him to see everything with particular clarity, just as a landscape takes on an intense actinic visibility before a thunderstorm. Although he was warmseeing with his face, yet his eye vision wandered over the estate.
All was bleakly neat at Endehaaven—as I should know, for its neatness is my care. The gardens are made to support evergreens and shrubs that never flower; this is My Lady’s whim, that likes a sobriety to match the furrowed brow of the coastline. The building, gaunt Endehaaven itself, is tall and lank and severe; earlier ages would have found its structure impossible: for its thousand built-in paragravity units ensure that column, buttress, arch, and wall support masonry, the mass of which is largely an illusion.
Between the building and fjord, where the garden contrived itself into a parade, stood My Lady’s laboratory, and My Lady’s pets—and, indeed, My Lady herself at this time, her long hands busy with the minicoypus and agoutinis. I stood with her, attending the animals’ cages or passing her instruments or stirring the tanks, doing always what she asked. And the eyes of Derek Ende looked down on us; no, they looked down on her only.
* * * *
Derek Flamifew Ende stood with his face over the receptor bowl, reading the message from Star One. It played lightly over his countenance and over the boscises of his forehead. Though he stared down across that achingly familiar stage of his life outside, he still warmsaw the communication clearly. When it was finished, he negated the receptor, pressed his face to it, and flexed his message back.
‘I will do as you message, Star One. I will go at once to Festi XV in the Veil Nebula and enter liaison with the being you call the Cliff. If possible I will also obey your order to take some of its substance to Pyrylyn. Thank you for your greetings; I return them in good faith. Good-bye.’
He straightened and massaged his face: warmlooking over great light distances was always tiring, as if the sensitive muscles of the countenance knew that they delivered up their tiny electrostatic charges to parsecs of vacuum and were appalled. Slowly his boscises also relaxed, as slowly he gathered together his gear. It would be a long flight to the Veil, and the task that had been set him would daunt the stoutest heart on Earth; yet it was for another reason he lingered: before he could be away, he had to say a farewell to his Mistress.
Dilating the door, he stepped out into the corridor, walked along it with a steady tread—feet covering mosaics of a pattern learnt long ago in his childhood—and walked into the paragravity shaft. Moments later, he was leaving the main hall, approaching My Lady as she stood gaunt, with her rodents scuttling at breast level before her and Vatna Jokull’s heights rising behind her, grey with the impurities of distance.
‘Go indoors and fetch me the box of name rings, Hols,’ she said to me; so I passed him, my Lord, as he went to her. He noticed me no more than he noticed any of the other parthenos, fixing his sights on her.
When I returned, she had not turned towards him, though he was speaking urgently to her.
‘You know I have my duty to perform, Mistress,’ I heard him saying. ‘Nobody else but a normal-born Earthborn can be entrusted with this sort of task.’
‘This sort of task! The galaxy is loaded inexhaustibly with such tasks! You can excuse yourself for ever with such excursions.’
He said to her remote back, pleadingly: ‘You can’t talk of them like that. You know the nature of the Cliff—I told you all about it. You know this isn’t an excursion: it requires all the courage I have. And you know that only Earthborns, for some reason, have such courage. . . . Don’t you, Mistress?’
Although I had come up to them, threading my subservient way between cage and tank, they noticed me not enough even to lower their voices. My Lady stood gazing at the grey heights inland, her countenance as formidable as they; one boscis twitched as she said, ‘You think you are so big and brave, don’t you?’
Knowing the power of sympathetic magic, she never spoke his name when she was angry; it was as if she wished him to disappear.
‘It isn’t that,’ he said humbly. ‘Please be reasonable, Mistress; you know I must go; a man cannot be for ever at home. Don’t be angry.’
She turned to him at last.
Her face was high and stern; it did not receive. Yet she had a beauty of some dreadful kind I cannot describe, if weariness and knowledge can together knead beauty. Her eyes were as grey and distant as the frieze of snow-covered volcano behind her, O My Lady! She was a century older than Derek: though the difference showed not in her skin—which would stay fresh yet a thousand years—but in her authority.
‘I’m not angry. I’m only hurt; You know how you have the power to hurt me.’
‘Mistress------’ he said, taking a step towards her.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said. ‘Go if you must, but don’t make a mockery of it by touching me.’
He took her elbow. She held one of the minicoypus quiet in the crook of her arm—animals were always docile at her touch—and strained it closer.
‘I don’t mean to hurt you, Mistress. You know we owe allegiance to Star One; I must work for them, or how else do we hold this estate? Let me go for once with an affectionate parting.’
‘Affection! You go off and leave me alone with a handful of parthenos and you talk of affection! Don’t pretend you don’t rejoice to get away from me. You’re tired of me, aren’t you?’
Wearily he said, as if nothing else would come, ‘It’s not that....’
‘You see! You don’t even attempt to sound sincere. Why don’t you go? It doesn’t matter what happens to me.’
‘Oh, if you could only hear your own self-pity.’
Now she had a tear on the icy slope of one cheek. Turning, she flashed it for his inspection.
‘Who else should pity me? You don’t, or you wouldn’t go away from me as you do. Suppose you get killed by this Cliff, what will happen to me?’
‘I shall be back, Mistress,’ he said. ‘Never fear.’
‘It’s easy to say. Why don’t you have the courage to admit that you’re only too glad to leave me?’
‘Because I’m not going to be provoked into a quarrel.’
‘Pah, you sound like a child again. You won’t answer, will you? Instead you’re going to run away, evading your responsibilities.’
‘I’m not running away!’
‘Of course you are, whatever you pretend. You’re just immature.’
‘I’m not, I’m not! And I’m not running away! It takes real courage to do what I’m going to do.’
‘You think so well of yourself!’
He turned away then, petulantly, without dignity. He began to head towards the landing platform. He began to run.
‘Derek!’ she called.
He did not answer.
She took the squatting minicoypu by the scruff of its neck. Angrily she flung it into the nearby tank of water. It turned into a fish and swam down into the depths.
* * * *
ii
Derek journeyed towards the Veil Nebula in his fast light-pusher. Lonely it sailed, a great fin shaped like an archer’s bow, barnacled all over with the photon cells that sucked its motive power from the dense and dusty emptiness of space. Midway along the trailing edge was the blister in which Derek lay, senseless over most of his voyage.
He woke in the therapeutic bed, called to another resurrection day that was no day, with gentle machine hands easing the stiffness from his muscles. Soup gurgled in a retort, bubbling up towards a nipple only two inches from his mouth. He drank. He slept again, tired from his long inactivity.
When he woke again, he climbed slowly from the bed and exercised for fifteen minutes. Then he moved forward to the controls. My friend Jon was there.
‘How is everything?’ Derek asked.
‘Everything is in order, My Lord,’ Jon replied. ‘We are swinging into the orbit of Festi XV now.’ He gave the coordinates and retired to eat. Jon’s job was the loneliest any partheno could have. We are hatched according to strictly controlled formulae, without the inbred organizations of D.N.A. that assure true Earthborns of their amazing longevity; five more long hauls and Jon will be old and worn out, fit only for the transmuter.
Derek sat at the controls. Did he see, superimposed on the face of Festi, the face he loved and feared? I think he did. I think there were no swirling clouds for him that could erase the clouding of her brow.
Whatever he saw, he settled the lightpusher into a fast low Orbit about the desolate planet. The sun Festi was little more than a blazing point some eight hundred million miles away. Like a riding light of a ship it bobbed about a turbulent sea of cloud as they went in.
For a long while, Derek sat with his face in a receptor bowl, checking ground heats far below. Since he was dealing with temperatures approaching absolute zero, this was not simple; yet when the Cliff moved into a position directly below, there was no mistaking its bulk; it stood out as clearly on his senses as if outlined on a radar screen.
‘There she goes!’ Derek exclaimed.
Jon had come forward again. He fed the time co-ordinates into the lightpusher’s brain, waited, and read off the time when the Cliff would be below them again.
Nodding, Derek began to prepare to jump. Without haste, he assumed his special suit, checking each item as he took it up, opening the paragravs until he floated and then closing them again, clicking down every snap-fastener until he was entirely encased.
‘395 seconds to next zenith, My Lord,’ Jon said.
‘You know all about collecting me?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I shall not activate the radio beacon till I’m back in orbit.’
‘I fully understand, sir.’
‘Right. I’ll be moving.’
A little animated person, he walked ponderously into the air lock.
Three minutes before they were next above the Cliff, Derek opened the outer door and dived into the sea of cloud. A brief blast of his suit jets set him free from the lightpusher’s orbit. Clouds engulfed him like death as he fell.
The twenty surly planets that swung round Festi held only an infinitesimal fraction of the mysteries of the galaxy. Every globe in the universe huddled its own secret purpose to itself. On some of those globes, as on Earth, the purpose manifested itself in a type of being that could shape itself, burst into the space lanes, and rough-hew its aims in a civilized extra-planetary environment. On others, the purpose remained aloof and dark; only Earthborns, weaving their obscure patterns of will and compulsion, challenged those alien beings, to wrest from them new knowledge that might be added to the pool of the old.
All knowledge has its influence. Over the millennia since interstellar flight had become practicable, mankind was insensibly moulded by its own findings; together with its lost innocence, its genetic stability went out of the galactic window. As man fell like rain over other planets, so his strain lost its original hereditary design: each centre of civilization bred new ways of thought, of feeling, of shape—of life. Only on old Earth itself did man still somewhat resemble the men of pre-stellar days.
That was why it was an Earthborn who dived head-first to meet an entity called the Cliff.
The Cliff had destroyed each of the few spaceships or light-pushers that had landed on its desolate globe. After long study of the being from safe orbits, the wise men of Star One evolved the theory that it destroyed any considerable source of power, as a man will swat a buzzing fly. Derek Ende, going alone with no powering but his suit motors, would be safe—or so the theory went.
Riding down on the paragravs, he sank more and more slowly into planetary night. The last of the cloud was whipped from about his shoulders and a high wind thrummed and whistled round the supporters of his suit. Beneath him, the ground loomed. So as not to be blown across it, he speeded his rate of fall; next moment he sprawled full length on Festi XV. For a while he lay there, resting and letting his suit cool.
The darkness was not complete. Though almost no solar light touched this continent, green flares grew from the earth, illumining its barren contours. Wishing to accustom his eyes to the gloom, he did not switch on his head, shoulder, stomach, or hand lights.
Something like a stream of fire flowed to his left. Because its radiance was poor and guttering, it confused itself with its own shadows, so that the smoke it gave off, distorted into bars by the bulk of the 4G planet, appeared to roll along its course like burning tumbleweed. Farther off were large sources of fire, impure ethane and methane most probably burning with a sound that came like frying steak to Derek’s ears, and spouting upwards with an energy that licked the lowering cloud race with blue light. At another point, blazing on an eminence, a geyser of flame wrapped itself in a thickly swirling mantle of brown smoke, a pall that spread upwards as slowly as porridge. Elsewhere, a pillar of white fire burnt without motion or smoke; it stood to the right of where Derek lay, like a floodlit sword in its perfection.
He nodded approval to himself. His drop had been successfully placed. This was the Region of Fire, where the Cliff lived.
To lie there was content enough, to gaze on a scene never closely viewed by man fulfilment enough—until he realized that a wide segment of landscape offered not the slightest glimmer of illumination: He looked into it with a keen warm-sight, and found it was the Cliff.
The immense bulk of the thing blotted out all light from the ground and rose to eclipse the cloud over its crest.
At the mere sight of it, Derek’s primary and secondary hearts began to beat out a hastening pulse of awe. Stretched flat on the ground, his paragravs keeping him level to IG, he peered ahead at it; he swallowed to clear his choked throat; his eyes strained through the mosaic of dull light in an effort to define the Cliff.
One thing was sure: it was large! He cursed that although photosistors allowed him to use his warmsight on objects beyond the suit he wore, this sense was distorted by the eternal firework display. Then in a moment of good seeing he had an accurate fix: the Cliff was three-quarters of a mile away! From first observations, he had thought it to be no more than a hundred yards distant.
Now he knew how large it was. It was enormous!
Momentarily he gloated. The only sort of tasks worth being set were impossible ones. Star One’s astrophysicists held the notion that the Cliff was in some sense aware; they required Derek to take them a pound of its flesh. How do you carve a being the size of a small moon?
All the time he lay there, the wind jarred along the veins and supporters of his suit. Gradually it occurred to Derek that the vibration he felt from this constant motion was changed. It carried a new note and a new strength. He looked about, placed his gloved hand outstretched on the ground.
The wind was no longer vibrating. It was the earth that shook, Festi itself that trembled. The Cliff was moving!
When he looked back up at it with both his senses, he saw which way it headed. Jarring steadily, it bore down on him.
‘If it has intelligence, then it will reason—if it has detected me—that I am too small to offer it harm. So it will offer me none and I have nothing to fear,’ Derek told himself. The logic did not reassure him.
An absorbent pseudopod, activated by a simple humidity gland in the brow of his helmet, slid across his forehead and removed the sweat that formed there.
Visibility fluttered like a rag in a cellar. The slow forward surge of the Cliff was still something Derek sensed rather than saw. Now the rolling mattresses of cloud blotted the thing’s crest, as it in its turn eclipsed the fountains of fire. To the jar of its approach even the marrow of Derek’s bones raised a response.
Something else also responded.
The legs of Derek’s suit began to move. The arms moved. The body wriggled.
Puzzled, Derek stiffened his legs. Irresistibly, the knees of the suit hinged, forcing his own to do likewise. And not only his knees: his arms too, stiffly though he braced them on the ground before him, were made to bend to the whim of the suit. He could not keep still without breaking bones.
Thoroughly alarmed he lay there, flexing contortedly to keep rhythm with his suit, performing the gestures of an idiot.
As if it had suddenly learnt to crawl, the suit began to move forward. It shuffled forward over the ground; Derek inside went willy-nilly with it.
One ironic thought struck him. Not only was the mountain coming to Mohammed; Mohammed was perforce going to the mountain...
* * * *
III
Nothing he could do checked his progress; he was no longer master of his movements; his will was useless. With the realization rode a sense of relief. His Mistress could hardly blame him for anything that happened now.
Through the darkness he went on hands and knees, blundering in the direction of the oncoming Cliff, prisoner in an animated prison.
The only constructive thought that came to him was that his suit had somehow become subject to the Cliff. How, he did not know or try to guess. He crawled. He was almost relaxed now, letting his limbs move limply with the suit movements.
Smoke furled him about. The vibrations ceased, telling him that the Cliff was stationary again. Raising his head, he could see nothing but smoke—produced perhaps by the Cliff’s mass as it scraped over the ground. When the blur parted, he glimpsed only darkness. The thing was directly ahead!
He blundered on. Abruptly he began to climb, still involuntarily aping the movements of his suit.
Beneath him was a doughy substance, tough yet yielding. The suit worked its way heavily upwards at an angle of something like sixty-five degrees; the stiffeners creaked, the paragravs throbbed. He was ascending the Cliff.
By this time there was no doubt in Derek’s mind that the thing possessed what might be termed volition, if not consciousness. It possessed too a power no man could claim: it could impart that volition to an inanimate object like his suit. Helpless inside it, he carried his considerations a stage further. This power to impart volition seemed to have a limited range: otherwise the Cliff would surely not have bothered to move its gigantic mass at all, but would have forced the suit to traverse all the distance between them. If this reasoning were sound, then the lightpusher was safe from capture in orbit.
The movement of his arms distracted him. His suit was tunnelling. Giving it no aid, he lay and let his hands make swimming motions. If it was going to bore into the Cliff, then he could only conclude he was about to be digested: yet he stilled his impulse to struggle, knowing that struggle was fruitless.
Thrusting against the doughy stuff, the suit burrowed into it and made a sibilant little world of movement and friction which stopped directly it stopped, leaving Derek embedded in the most solid kind of isolation.
To ward off growing claustrophobia, he attempted to switch on his headlight; his suit arms remained so stiff he could not bend them enough to reach the toggle. All he could do was lie there helplessly in his shell and stare into the featureless darkness of the Cliff.
But the darkness was not entirely featureless. His ears detected a constant slither along the outside surfaces of his suit. His warmsight discerned a meaningless pattern beyond his helmet. Though he focused his boscises, he could make no sense of the pattern; it had neither symmetry nor meaning for him....
Yet for his body it seemed to have some meaning. Derek felt his limbs tremble, was aware of pulses and phantom impressions within himself that he had not known before. The realization percolated through to him that he was in touch with powers of which he had no cognizance—and, conversely, that something was in touch with him that had no cognizance of his powers.
An immense heaviness overcame him. The forces of life laboured within him. He sensed more vividly than before the vast bulk of the Cliff. Though it was dwarfed by the mass of Festi XV, it was as large as a good-sized asteroid. ... He could picture an asteroid, formed from a jetting explosion of gas on the face of Festi the sun. Half-solid, half-molten, it swung about its parent on an eccentric orbit. Cooling under an interplay of pressures, its interior crystallized into a unique form. So, with its surface semi-plastic, it existed for many millions of years, gradually accumulating an electrostatic charge that poised . . . and waited . . . and brewed the life acids about its crystalline heart.
Festi was a stable system, but once in every so many thousands of millions of years, the giant first, second, and third planets achieved perihelion with the sun and with each other simultaneously. This happened coincidentally with the asteroid’s nearest approach; it was wrenched from its orbit and all but grazed the three lined-up planets. Vast electrical and gravitational forces were unleashed. The asteroid glowed: and woke to consciousness. Life was not born on it: it was born to life, born in one cataclysmic clash!
Before it had more than mutely savoured the sad-sharp-sweet sensation of consciousness, it was in trouble. Plunging away from the sun on its new course, it found itself snared in the gravitational pull of the 4G planet, Festi XV. It knew no shaping force but gravity; gravity was to it all that oxygen was to cellular life on Earth; yet it had no wish to exchange its flight for captivity; yet it was too puny to resist. For the first time, the asteroid recognized that its consciousness had a use, in that it could to some extent control its environment outside itself. Rather than risk being broken up in Festi’s orbit, it sped inwards, and by retarding its own fall performed its first act of volition, an act that brought it down shaken but entire on the surface of the planet.
For an immeasurable period, the asteroid—but now it was the Cliff—lay in the shallow crater formed by its impact, speculating without thought. It knew nothing except the inorganic scene about it, and could visualize nothing else, but that scene it knew well. Gradually it came to some kind of terms with the scene. Formed by gravity, it used gravity as thoughtlessly as a man uses breath; it began to move other things, and it began to move itself.
That it should be other than alone in the universe had never occurred to the Cliff. Now it knew there was other life, it accepted the fact. The other life was not as it was; that it accepted. The other life had its own requirements; that it accepted. Of questions, of doubt, it did not know. It had a need; so did the other life; they should both be accommodated, for accommodation was the adjustment to pressure, and that response it comprehended,
Derek Ende’s suit began to move again under external volition. Carefully it worked its way backwards. It was ejected from the Cliff. It lay still.
Derek himself lay still. He was barely conscious.
In a half-daze, he was piecing together what had happened.
The Cliff had communicated with him; if he ever doubted that, the evidence of it lay clutched in the crook of his left arm.
‘Yet it did not—-yet it could not communicate with me!’ he murmured. But it had communicated: he was still faint with the burden of it.
The Cliff had nothing like a brain. It had not ‘recognized’ Derek’s brain. Instead, it had communicated with the only part of him it could recognize; it had communicated direct to his cell organization, and in particular probably to those cytoplasmic structures, the mitochondria, the power sources of the cell. His brain had been by-passed, his own cells had taken in the information offered.
He recognized his feeling of weakness. The Cliff had drained him of power. Even that could not drain his feeling of triumph. For the Cliff had taken information even as it gave it. The Cliff had learnt that other life existed in other parts of the universe.
Without hesitation, without debate, it had given a fragment of itself to be taken to those other parts of the universe. Derek’s mission was completed.
In the Cliff’s gesture, Derek read one of the deepest urges of living things: the urge to make an impression on another living thing. Smiling wryly, he pulled himself to his feet.
He was alone in the Region of Fire. The occasional mournful flame still confronted its surrounding dark, but the Cliff had disappeared; he had lain on the threshold of consciousness longer than he thought. He looked at his chronometer, to find it was high time he moved towards his rendezvous with the lightpusher. Stepping up his suit heating to combat the cold that began to seep through his bones, he revved up the paragrav unit and rose. The noisome clouds came down and engulfed him; Festi was lost to view. Soon he had risen beyond cloud or atmosphere.
Under Jon’s direction, the space craft homed on to Derek’s radio beacon. After a few tricky minutes, they matched velocities and Derek climbed aboard.
‘Are you all right?’ the partheno asked, as his master staggered into a flight seat.
‘Fine—just weak. I’ll tell you all about it as I do a report on spool for Pyrylyn. They’re going to be pleased with us.’
He produced a yellowy grey blob of matter that had expanded to the size of a large turkey and held it out to Jon.
‘Don’t touch this with your bare hands. Put it in one of the low-temperature lockers under 4Gs. It’s a little souvenir from Festi XV.’
* * * *
IV
The Eyebright in Pynnati, one of Pyrylyn’s capital cities, was where you went to enjoy yourself on the most lavish scale possible. This was where Derek Ende’s hosts took him, with Jon in self-effacing attendance.
They lay in a nest of couches which slowly revolved, giving them a full view of other dance and couch parties. The room itself moved. Its walls were transparent; through them could be seen an ever-changing view as the room slid up and down and about the great metal framework of the Eyebright. First they were on the outside of the structure, with the bright night lights of Pynnati winking up at them as if intimately involved in their delight. Then they slipped inwards in the slow evagination of the building, to be surrounded by other pleasure rooms, their revellers clearly visible as they moved grandly up or down or along.
Uneasily, Derek lay on his couch. A vision of his mistress’s face was before him; he could imagine how she would treat all this harmless festivity: with cool contempt. His own pleasure was consequently reduced to ashes.
‘I suppose you’ll be moving back to Earth as soon as possible?’
‘Eh?’ Derek grunted.
‘I said, I supposed you would soon be going home again.’ The speaker was Belix Ix Sappose, Chief Administrator of High Gee Research at Star One; as Derek’s host of the evening, he lay next to him.
‘I’m sorry, Belix, yes—I shall have to head back for home soon.’
‘No “have to” about it. You have discovered an entirely new life form; we can now attempt communication with the Festi XV entity, with goodness knows what extension of knowledge. The government can easily show its gratitude by awarding you any sort of post here you care to name; I am not without influence in that respect as you are aware. I don’t imagine that Earth in its senescent stage has much to offer a man of your calibre.’
Derek thought of what it had to offer. He was bound to it. These decadent people did not understand how anything could be binding.
‘Well, what do you say, Ende? I’m not speaking idly.’ Belix Ix Sappose tapped his antler system impatiently.
‘Er . . . Oh, they will discover a great deal from the Cliff. That doesn’t concern me. My part of the work is over. I’m just a field worker, not an intellectual.’
‘You don’t reply to my suggestion.’
He looked at Belix with only slight vexation. Belix was an unglaat, one of a species that had done as much as any to bring about the peaceful concourse of the galaxy. His backbone branched into an elaborate antler system, from which six sloe-dark eyes surveyed Derek with unblinking irritation. Other members of the party, including Jupkey, Belix’s female, were also looking at him,
‘I must get back to Earth soon,’ Derek said. What had Belix said? Offered some sort of post? Restlessly he shifted on his couch, under pressure as always when surrounded by people he knew none too well.
‘You are bored, Mr. Ende.’
‘No, not at all. My apologies, Belix. I’m overcome as always by the luxury of Eyebright. I was watching the nude dancers.’
‘I fear you are bored.’
‘Not at all, I assure you.’
‘May I get you a woman?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘A boy, perhaps?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Have you ever tried the flowering asexuals from the Cephids?’
‘Not at present, thank you.’
‘Then perhaps you will excuse us if Jupkey and I remove our clothes and join the dance,’ Belix said stiffly.
As they moved out on to the dance floor to greet the strepent trumpets, Derek heard Jupkey say something of which he caught only the words ‘arrogant Earthborn’. His eyes met Jon’s; he saw that the partheno had overheard the phrase too.
In an instinctive gesture of his left hand, Derek revealed his mortification. He rose and began to pace round the room. Often he shouldered his way through a knot of naked dancers, ignoring their complaints.
At one of the doors, a staircase was floating by. He stepped on to it to escape from the crowds.
Four young women were passing down the stairs. They were gaily dressed, with sonant-stones pulsing on their costumes. In their faces youth kept its lantern, lighting them as they laughed and chattered. Derek stopped and beheld the girls. One of them he recognized. Instinctively he called her name: ‘Eva!’
She had already seen him. Waving her companions on, she came back to him, dancing up the intervening steps.
‘So the brave Earthborn climbs once more the golden stairs of Pynnati; Well, Derek Ende, your eyes are as dark as ever, and your brow as high!’
As he looked at her, the wakeful trumpets were in tune for him for the first time that evening, and his delight rose up in his throat.
‘Eva! . . . And your eyes as bright as ever. . . . And you have no man with you.’
‘The powers of coincidence work on your behalf.’ She laughed—yes, he remembered that sound!—and then said more seriously, ‘I heard you were here with Belix Sappose and his female; so I was making the grandly foolish gesture of coming to see you. You remember how devoted I am to grandly foolish gestures.’
‘So foolish?’
‘Probably. You have less ability to change in you, Derek Ende, than has the core of Pyrylyn. To suppose otherwise is foolish, to know how unalterable you are and still to see you doubly foolish.’
He took her hand, beginning to lead her up the staircase; the rooms moving by them on either side were blurs to his eyes.
‘Must you still bring up that old charge, Eva?’
‘It lies between us; I do not have to touch it. I fear your unchangeability because I am a butterfly against your grey castle.’
‘You are beautiful, Eva, so beautiful! And may a butterfly not rest unharmed on a castle wall?’ He fitted into her allusive way of speech with difficulty.
‘Walls! I cannot bear your walls, Derek! Am I a bulldozer that I should want to come up against walls? To be either inside or outside them is to be a prisoner.’
‘Let us not quarrel until we have found some point of agreement,’ he said. ‘Here are the stars. Can’t we agree about them?’
‘If we are both indifferent to them,’ she said, looking out and impudently winding his arm about her. The staircase had reached the zenith of its travels and moved slowly sideways along the upper edge of Eyebright. They stood on the top step with night flashing their images back at them from the glass.
Eva Coll-Kennerley was a human, but not of Earthborn stock. She was a velure, born on the y-cluster worlds of the dense Third Arm of the galaxy, and her skin was richly covered with the brown fur of her kind. Her mercurial talents were employed in the same research department that enjoyed Belix Sappose’s more sober ones; Derek had met her there on an earlier visit to Pyrylyn. Their love had been an affair of swords.
He looked at her now and touched her and could say not one word for himself. When she flashed a liquid eye at him, he assayed an awkward smile.
‘Because I am oriented like a compass towards strong men, my lavish offer to you still holds good. Is it not bait enough?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t think of you as a trap, Eva.’
‘Then for how many more centuries are you going to refrigerate your nature on Earth? You still remain faithful, if I recall your euphemism for slavery, to your mistress, to her cold lips and locked heart?’
‘I have no choice!’
‘Ah yes, my debate on that motion was defeated: and more than once. Is she still pursuing her researches into the transmutability of species?’
‘Oh yes, indeed. The mediaeval idea that one species can turn into another was foolish in the Middle Ages; now, with the gradual accumulation of cosmic radiation in planetary bodies and its effect on genetic stability, it is correct to a certain definable extent. She is endeavouring to show that cellular bondage can be------’
“Yes, yes, and this serious talk is an eyesore in Eyebright! Must I hear of her when I want to talk of you? You are locked away, Derek, doing your sterile deeds of heroism and never entering the real world. If you imagine you can live with her much longer and then come to me, you are mistaken. Your walls grow higher about your ears every century, till I cannot cannot—oh, it’s the wrong metaphor!—cannot scale you!’
Even in his pain, the texture of her fur was joy to his warmsight. Helplessly he shook his head in an effort to shake her clattering words away.
‘Look at you being big and brave and silent even now! You’re so arrogant,’ she said—and then, without perceptible change of tone, ‘Because I still love the bit of you inside the castle, I’ll make once more my monstrous and petty offer to you.’
‘No, please, Eva! ...’
‘But yes! Forget this tedious bondage of Earth, forget this ghastly matriarchy, live here with me. I don’t want you for ever. You know I am a eudemonist and judge by standards of pleasure—our liaison need be only for a century or two. In that time, I will deny you nothing your senses may require.’
‘Eva!’
‘After that, our demands will be satisfied. You may then go back to the Lady Mother of Endehaaven for all I care.’
‘Eva, you know how I spurn this belief, this eudemonism.’
‘Forget your creed! Fm asking you nothing difficult. Who are you to haggle? Am I fish, to be bought by the kilo, this bit selected, this rejected?’
He was silent.
‘You don’t need me,’ he said at last. ‘You have everything already: beauty, wit, sense, warmth, feeling, balance, comfort. She has nothing. She is shallow, haunted, cold—oh, she needs me, Eva.
‘You are apologizing for yourself, not her.’
She had already turned with the supple movement of a velure and was running down the staircase. Lighted chambers drifted up about them like bubbles.
His laboured attempt to explain his heart turned to exasperation. He ran down after her, grasping her arm.
‘Listen to me, will you, damn you!’
‘Nobody in Pyrylyn would listen to such masochistic nonsense as yours! You are an arrogant fool, Derek, and I am a weak-willed one. Now release me!’
As the next room came up, she jumped through its entrance and disappeared into the crowd.
* * * *
v
Not all the drifting chambers of Eyebright were lighted. Some pleasures come more delightfully with the dark, and these pleasures were coaxed and cosseted into fruition in shrouded halls where illumination cast only the gentlest ripple on the ceiling and the gloom was sensuous with ylang-ylang and other perfumes. Here Derek found a place to weep.
Sections of his life slid before him as if impelled by the same mechanisms that moved Eyebright. Always, one presence was there.
Angrily he related to himself how he always laboured to satisfy her—yes, in every sphere laboured to satisfy her! And how when that gratification was accorded him it came as though riven from her, as a spring sometimes trickles down the split face of a rock. Undeniably there was satisfaction for him in drinking from that cool source—but no, where was the satisfaction when pleasure depended on such extreme disciplining and subduing of himself?
Mistress, I love and hate your needs!
And the discipline had been such ... so long, also . . . that now when he might enjoy himself far from her, he could scarcely strike a trickle from his own rock. He had walked here before, in this city where the hedonists and endemonists reigned, walked among the scents of pleasure, walked among the ioblepharous women, the beautiful guests and celebrated beauties, with My Lady always in him, feeling that she showed even on his countenance. People spoke to him: somehow he replied. They manifested gaiety: he tried to do so. They opened to him: he attempted a response. All the time, he hoped they would understand that his arrogance masked only shyness—or did he hope that it was his shyness which masked arrogance? He did not know.
Who could presume to know? The one quality holds much of the other. Both refuse to come forward and share.
He roused from his meditation knowing that Eva Coll-Kennerley was again somewhere near. She had not left the building, then! She was seeking him out!
Derek half-rose from his position in a shrouded alcove. He was baffled to think how she could have traced him here. On entering Eyebright, visitors were given sonant-stones, by which they could be traced from room to room; but judging that nobody would wish to trace him, Derek had switched his stone off even before leaving Belix Sappose’s party.
He heard Eva’s voice, its unmistakable overtones not near, not far....
‘You find the most impenetrable bushels to hide your light under....’
He caught no more. She had sunk down among tapestries with someone else. She was not after him at all! Waves of relief and regret rolled over him . . . and when he paid attention again, she was speaking his name.
With shame on him, like a wolf creeping towards a camp fire, he crouched forward to listen. At once his warmsight told him to whom Eva spoke. He recognized the pattern of the antlers; Belix was there, with Jupkey sprawled beside him on some elaborate kind of bed.
‘... useless to try again. Derek is far too entombed within himself,’ Eva said.
‘Entombed rather within his conditioning,’ Belix said. ‘We found the same. It’s conditioning, my dear.’
‘However he became entombed, I still admire him enough to want to understand him.’ Eva’s voice was a note or two astray from its usual controlled timbre.
‘Look at it scientifically,’ Belix said, with the weighty inflections of a man about to produce truth out of a hat. ‘Earth is the last bastion of a bankrupt culture. The Earthborns number less than a couple of millions now. They disdain social graces and occasions. They are served by parthenogenically bred slaves, all of which are built on the same controlled genetic formula. They are inbred. In consequence, they have become practically a species apart. You can see it all in friend Ende. As I say, he’s entombed in his conditioning. A tragedy, Eva, but you must face up to it.’
‘You’re probably right, you pontifical old pop,’ Jupkey said lazily. ‘Who but an Earthborn would do what Derek did on Festi?’
‘No, no!’ Eva said. ‘Derek’s ruled by a woman, not by conditioning. He’s-----’
‘In Ende’s case they are one and the same thing, my dear, believe me. Consider Earth’s social organization. The partheno slaves have replaced all but a comparative handful of true Earthborns. That handful has parcelled out Earth into great estates which it holds by a sinister matriarchalism.’
‘Yes, I know, but Derek-----’
‘Derek is caught in the system. The Earthborns have fallen into a mating pattern for which there is no precedent. The sons of a family marry their mothers, not only to perpetuate their line but because the productive Earthborn female is scarce now that Earth itself is senescent. This is what the Endes have done; this is what Derek Ende has done. His “mistress” is both mother and wife to him. Given the factor of longevity as well—well, naturally, you ensure an excessive emotional rigidity that almost nothing can break. Not even you, my sweet-coated Eva!’
‘He was on the point of breaking tonight!’
‘I doubt it,’ Belix said. ‘Ende may want to get away from his claustrophobic home, but the same forces that drive him off will eventually lure him back.’
‘I tell you he was on the point of breaking—only I broke first.’
‘Well, as Teer Ruche said to me many centuries ago, only a pleasure-hater knows how to shape a pleasure-hater. I would say you were lucky he did not break; you would only have had a baby on your hands.’
Her answering laugh did not ring true.
‘My Lady of Endehaaven, then, must be the one to do it. I will never try again—though he seems under too much stress to stand for long. Oh, it’s really immoral! He deserves better!’
‘A moral judgement from you, Eva!’ Jupkey exclaimed amusedly to the fragrant bloom.
‘My advice to you, Eva, is to forget all about the poor fellow. Apart from anything else, he is scarcely articulate— which would not suit you for a reason.’
The unseen listener could bear no more. A sudden rage—as much against himself for hearing as against them for speaking—burst over him, freeing him to act. Straightening up, he seized the arm of the couch on which Belix and Jupkey nestled, wildly supposing he could tip them on to the floor.
Too late, his warmsight warned him of the real nature of the couch. Instead of tipping it, it swivelled, sending a wave of liquid over him. The two unglaats were lying in a warm bath scented with ylang-ylang and other essences.
Jupkey squealed in anger and fright. Kicking out, she caught Derek on the shin with a hoof; he slipped in the oily liquid and fell. Belix, unaided by warmsight, jumped out of the bath, entangled himself with Derek’s legs, and also fell.
Eva was shouting for lights. Other occupants of the hall cried back that darkness must prevail at all costs.
Picking himself up—leaving only his dignity behind—Derek ran for the exit, abandoning the confusion to sort itself out as it would.
Burningly, disgustedly, he made his way dripping from Eye-bright. The hastening footsteps of Jon followed him like an echo all the way to the space field.
Soon he would be back at Endehaaven. Though he would always be a failure in his dealings with other humans, there at least he knew every inch of his bleak allotted territory.
* * * *
ENVOI
Had there been a spell over all Endehaaven, it could have been no quieter when My Lord Derek Ende arrived home.
I informed My Lady of the moment when his lightpusher arrived and rode at orbit. In the receptor bowl I watched him and Jon come home, cutting north-west across the emaciated wilds of Europe, across Denmark, over the Shetlands, the Faroes, the sea, alighting by the very edge of the island, by the fjord with its silent waters.
All the while the wind lay low as if under some stunning malediction, and none of our tall trees stirred.
‘Where is my Mistress, Hols?’ Derek asked me, as I went to greet him and assist him out of his suit.
‘She asked me to tell you that she is confined to her chambers and cannot see you, My Lord.’
He looked me in the eyes as he did so rarely.
‘Is she ill?’
‘No. She simply said she would not see you.’
Without waiting to remove his suit, he hurried on into the building.
Over the next two days, he was about but little, preferring to remain in his room while My Lady remained in hers. Once he wandered among the experimental tanks and cages. I saw him net a fish and toss it into the air, watching it while it struggled into new form and flew away until it was lost in a jumbled background of cumulus; but it was plain he was less interested in the riddles of stress and transmutation than in the symbolism of the carp’s flight.
Mostly he sat compiling the spools on which he imposed the tale of his life. All one wall was covered with files full of these spools: the arrested drumbeats of past centuries. From the later spools I have secretly compiled this record; for all his unspoken self-pity, he never knew the sickness of merely observing.
We parthenos will never understand the luxuries of a divided mind. Surely suffering as much as happiness is a kind of artistry?
On the day that he received a summons from Star One to go upon another quest for them, Derek met My Lady in the Blue Corridor.
‘It is good to see you about again, Mistress,’ he said, kissing her cheek. ‘Staying confined in your room is bad for you.’
She stroked his hair. On her nervous hand she wore one ring with an amber stone; her gown was of olive and umber.
‘I was very upset to have you go away from me. The Earth is dying, Derek, and I fear its loneliness. You have left me alone too much. However, I have recovered myself and am glad to see you back.’
‘You know I am glad to see you. Smile for me and come outside for some fresh air. The sun is shining.’
‘It’s so long since it shone. Do you remember how once it always shone? I can’t bear to quarrel any more. Take my arm and be kind to me.’
‘Mistress, I always wish to be kind to you. And I have all sorts of things to discuss with you. You’ll want to hear what I have been doing, and------’
‘You won’t leave me alone any more?’
He felt her hand tighten on his arm. She spoke very loudly.
‘That was one of the things I wished to discuss—later,’ he said. ‘First let me tell you about the wonderful life form with which I made contact on Festi.’
As they left the corridor and descended the paragravity shaft, My Lady said wearily, ‘I suppose that’s a polite way of telling me that you are bored here.’
He clutched her hands as they floated down. Then he released them and clutched her face instead, cupping its melancholy oval between his palms.
‘Understand this, Mistress mine, I love you and want to serve you. You are in my blood; wherever I go I never can forget you. My dearest wish is to make you happy—this you must know. But equally you must know that I have needs of my own.’
Grumpily she said, withdrawing her face, ‘Oh, I know that all right. And I know those needs will always come first with you. Whatever you say or pretend, you don’t care a rap about me. You make that all too clear.’
She moved ahead of him, shaking off the hand he put on her arm. He had a vision of himself running down a golden staircase and stretching out that same detaining hand to another girl. The indignity of having to repeat oneself, century after century.
‘You’re lying! You’re faking! You’re being cruel!’ he said.
Gleaming, she turned.
‘Am I? Then answer me this—aren’t you already planning to leave Endehaaven and me again soon?’
He smote his forehead.
He said inarticulately, ‘Look, you must try to stop this recrimination. Yes, yes, it’s true I am thinking. . . . But I have to—I reproach myself. I could be kinder. But you shut yourself away when I come back, you don’t welcome me-----’
‘Trust you to find excuses rather than face up to your own nature!’ she said contemptuously, walking briskly into the garden. Amber and olive and umber, and sable of hair, she walked down the path, her outlines sharp in the winter air; in the perspectives of his mind she did not dwindle.
For some minutes he stood in the threshold, immobilized by antagonistic emotions.
Finally he pushed himself out into the sunlight.
She was in her favourite spot by the fjord, feeding an old badger from her hand. Only her increased attention to the badger suggested that she heard him approach.
His boscises twitched as he said, ‘If you will forgive a cliché, I apologize.’
‘I don’t mind what you do.’
Walking backwards and forwards behind her, he said, ‘When I was away, I heard some people talking. On Pyrylyn this was. They were discussing the mores of our matrimonial system.’
‘It’s no business of theirs.’
‘Perhaps not. But what they said suggested a new line of thought to me.’
She put the old badger back in his cage without comment.
‘Are you listening, Mistress?’
‘Do go on.’
‘Try to listen sympathetically. Consider all the history of galactic exploration—or even before that, consider the explorers of Earth in the pre-space age, men like Shackleton and so on. They were brave men, of course, but wouldn’t it be strange if most of them only ventured where they did because the straggle at home was too much for them?’
He stopped. She had turned to him; the half-smile was whipped off his face by her look of fury.
‘And you’re trying to tell me that that’s how you see yourself—a martyr? Derek, how you must hate me! Not only do you go away, you secretly blame me because you go away. It doesn’t matter that I tell you a thousand times I want you here—no, it’s all my fault! I drive you away! That’s what you tell your charming friends on Pyrylyn, isn’t it? Oh, how you must hate me!’
Savagely he grasped her wrists. She screamed to me for aid and struggled. I came near but halted, playing my usual impotent part. He swore at her, bellowed for her to be silent, whereupon she cried the louder, shaking furiously in his arms, both of them tumultuous in their emotions.
He struck her across the face.
At once she was quiet. Her eyes closed, almost it would seem in ecstasy. Standing there, she had the pose of a woman offering herself.
‘Go on, hit me! You want to hit me!’ she whispered.
With the words, with the look of her, he too was altered. As if realizing for the first time her true nature, he dropped his fists and stepped back, staring at her sick-mouthed. His heel met no resistance. He twisted suddenly, spread out his arms as if to fly, and fell over the cliff edge.
Her scream pursued him down.
Even as his body bit the waters of the fjord, it began to change. A flurry of foam marked some sort of painful struggle beneath the surface. Then a seal plunged into view, dived below the next wave, and swam towards the open sea over which already a freshening breeze blew.