Orbit 12 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  3/ the hoisterjacks

  In the domed cities (not simply in Atlanta, but in all the Urban Nuclei) there exist among the affluent surfacesiders, particularly among the adolescent boys of the wealthy and/or enfranchised, a significant few who have more leisure and more adrenalin than they can intelligently deal with. These few release their energy and defile their time in inutile pursuits that frequently terrorize the innocent, the unprepared, the preoccupied. They do not pick pockets. They do not engage in vandalism. They do not kill.

  Instead, they practice the grotesque art of instilling a wholly meaningless terror in all those whom they assault with mad gestures and mad nylon-distorted faces. These boys—and, sadly, these few perverse adult males—go by the name ofhoisterjacks, primarily because of their inclination to leap out of the darkness of the catacombs, to cling reasonlessly to the crystalline face of a lift-tube, arms full out, fingers gripping the maintenance handles on either side of the lift-tube door, and to scream like ravening hyenas as they press their already misaligned features against the glass.

  One can in no way make adequate psychological preparation for the coming of a hoisterjack—even if one sees him beforehand.

  I had entered the central concourse on Level 8, the concourse leading to the lift-station from which we had earlier disembarked, when I became aware of an echo on the tiles. An echo in addition to Newlyn’s tentative taptaptaptapping. The echo was coming to me from the direction in which I moved, not from behind me. I looked down the ill-lit corridor, through the haze of red light. I saw the deeper glimmering of the lift-station and the translucent outline of the waiting lift-tube itself. I thought the cylinders presence a fine piece of luck; we would not have to wait for transportation—and I would not have to make inane conversation to cover the depressing childishness of Newlyn’s funk.

  Then I saw, or believed I saw, two wraithlike figures cross the glimmering backdrop of the lift-station and disappear into an auxiliary hallway. I could not be sure. I paid little heed.

  When I reached the lift-tube, I entered and held my thumb on the thin silver operating panel so that the door would not close. From out of the fog of halflight Newlyn came. He entered the cylinder and stood to one side, away from me. I did not remove my thumb from the operating panel.

  “Let go of it,” Newlyn said. “Send us up.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Let go of it’? Who are you talking to?” Newlyn didn’t answer. I repeated my self-defeating straightline: “Who are you talking to, Newlyn?’

  “A bigshot fire man. A burnheaded topsider.”

  He spoke with such incredible malice, enunciating each consonant and each vowel as if they would carve flaming signs in the air, that I could say nothing. My thumb was on the panel; the door remained open. At last, gathering a little strength against my embarrassment, I said: “You knew what we had to do. And what we found in Almira Longhope’s cubicle didn’t make any difference. In fact, it deserved the combustgens and the spray even more than the ordinary furnishings of one of these places. What a waste, Newlyn! That sort of thing, that sort of crap, has to be burned out, cut away, buried. Everyone goes through that, Newlyn.”

  Yates’ son sprang toward me and knocked my hand away from the control panel. The glass door slid into place. I dropped the old woman’s blue ledger.

  Then a number of things happened simultaneously.

  A huge shadow leaped at us from the corridor and affixed itself to the surface of the lift-tube. Another shadow, less quick, fell away behind the first and disappeared as the lift-tube began, seemingly of its own accord, to ascend. An hysterical, mocking scream pierced the thin wall of glass that contained the boy and me.

  And then (beneath the terrifying scream) another sound: Newlyn was trying to quench the sobs that rose in his throat Unsuccessfully.

  “It doesn’t have to be—” he said. “It doesn’t have to be . . . to be . . . unless you make it—”

  I’m afraid that I pushed him. He was leaning into my chest, and all my attention had shifted from him to the droop-lipped, acromegalic hoisterjack who clung to our lift-tube, leering, insupportably leering.

  I shoved Newlyn aside and began pounding on the glass between me and the hoisterjack’s hooded face. I wanted him to lose his grip. I wanted him to fall down the terminal shaft to the concrete of Level 9, there to split and pulp open like an overripe radish. I wanted to murder his iconoclasm and turn his impudence to bile.

  Then I felt a fist against the side of my head and heard Newlyn shouting and sobbing at once: “Leave him alone, you bastard! Leave him alone!”

  We grappled. The boy struck me again. I pushed him down. He came back and pummeled my chest Now I realized exactly what I was doing, and the pain that it gave me could not have been more real, more cruel, more excruciating. I knew that we would not go combcrawling with each other this weekend, nor any weekend to come. I struck Newlyn solidly under the chin, and it was like striking myself.

  He crumpled and sat on the crystalline floor, making low noises.

  The lift-tube continued to ascend. I picked up Almira Longhopes ledger. I raised my eyes. The hoisterjack clinging to our little prison was grinning at me, grinning at me in cryptic triumph.

  <>

  * * * *

  Brian W. Aldiss

  FOUR STORIES

  SERPENT BURNING ON AN ALTAR

  THE CRANES flying south at window level were a splendid omen for the getting and giving of amatory gifts. Accordingly, after the morning’s rehearsal, my friend Lambant decided he would order a nuptial present for his sister, whose marriage date had been announced. This chanced to be on the first day of the autumn fair or mop.

  Lambant and I visited a glass-engraver’s studio to order some glass goblets as a gift befitting the great family occasion. The studio stood beyond the city wall. The paint on its orange door flaked and fell like frost-nicked leaves as we heaved it open. The entrance was narrow and the stairs as crooked as any in Malaria, leading to Master Giovanni Bledlore’s studio.

  He came out on the landing to us, an ague-ridden old figure, closing his creaking workshop door behind him.

  “You young fellows are a nuisance to an honest craftsman,” he said. “You disturb the dust, and dust will spoil my colours. What do you want of me? I shall have to go back and sit still for a quarter hour before the dust settles and I can open my palettes again!”

  “Then you should keep cleaner premises, Master Bledlore,” I said. “Open up the windows—even your bluebottles are crying for escape.”

  “I need you to make me a dozen goblets with local scenes on them, such as you designed for Thiepol of Tera a twelve-month ago,” Lambant told him.

  The old man threw up his hands and wagged his beard in our faces. “Spare me your needs! Every one of those designs aged me by a lifetime. Nor has Thiepol paid me yet. My eyesight’s too bad for any more of that sort of order. My hand shakes too much. Besides, my wife is ill and I must care for her. My foreman has deserted me and gone over to that rogue Dapertuto...No, no, I could not possibly attempt . . . Besides, when would you require them?”

  He took much persuading. Before we had signed our bond on the deal and paid him a token in advance, the old craftsman had shown us the treasures of his workshop, and the beautiful miniatures on which he had worked with so much pain and skill, their tiny figures incised on glass and glowing with colour.

  “Ah, what accomplishment!— It’s nothing short of alchemy,” Lambant said, as we passed through the narrow doorway and strolled, hands on each other’s shoulders, across the green to where the pedlars were putting up the frail stalls of their autumn fair. “You saw his azure vase with its vignette? You saw those two children sporting by the whale’s skeleton, with the hurdy-gurdy man playing in the background? What could be more beautiful in such small compass?”

  “Indeed, it was beautiful. And isn’t perfection greater for being so small? He confirms what I have heard rumoured, that he studies
everything from life. The broomstick is copied from one in his niece’s yard, the hurdy-gurdy belongs to an old man living over by the flea market, and no doubt the two urchins are running ragged-assed about the gates even now!”

  “What a decadent age we live in! Giovanni Bledlore is the last of the grand masters, and he scarcely recognised except by a few cognoscenti!”

  “Such as ourselves, Lambant!”

  “Such as ourselves, Prian! People are so blind in these last years of the century—the lees of time!—that they only appreciate merit on a grand pretentious scale. Write a history of the universe and it will be applauded, however lousy and steeped in errors factual and grammatical; yet paint a tiny perfect landscape on your thumb and nobody will cheer.”

  A pleasant warbling filled the air. A flute seller was moving toward us, bearing his tray full of flutes and playing one as he came. As we circled him, I snatched a flute and played a quick echo to his own charming tune, “When the Still Air Hath Waked.”

  “Flutes would be no better if they could be heard half a dozen valleys off—you’re not suggesting that Bledlore should take to monstrous frescos in his old age, to make his name?”

  “I’m condemning the general taste, not Bledlore’s. He has found perfection because he has first found his correct scale. I’m regretting that he does not receive the just acclamation due to him. Thirty kopits per glass!—He should demand and get ten times that!”

  We had stopped by the marionette stall, to watch both puppets and their childish audience. “I feel as you do on that score. Better paid, he could fight his dust obsession with a vacuum cleaner. But in that we are perhaps merely children of our admittedly decadent age. Should not the real reward of a true artist be his ability, and not the applause it merits him?”

  “Real. . . True . . . Your adjectives baffle me, Prian! Who was it said that Reality and Truth are weapons in the dialectical armoury of all schools of thought?”

  The school of thought whose activities we were now negligently observing was a primitive one, designed to elicit immediate and uproarious pleasure from its unreflecting spectators. Robber Man came on with red-masked eyes and tried to break into Banker Man’s big safe. Banker Man, fat and hairy and crafty, appeared and caught him at it. Robber Man socked him with his sack, to the plaudits of the children. Banker Man pretended genial, asked to see how much money Robber Man could get into sack. Robber Man, despite warning cries of children in front, climbs obligingly into safe. Banker Man slams safe shut, laughs, goes for Police Man. Meets Allosaur Man instead. Children roar with merriment, open and honest, as Allosaur Man gets multitudinous teeth round Banker Man’s nose. Space Man descends, traps Allosaur Man in helmet. During fracas, Banker’s Lady, togged to nines, enters to take some cash from safe. Releases and is walloped by Robber Man. And so on. Continuous entertainment

  Two cool girls near us in frocks that hover between innocence and indecency comment to each other. She to her: “Disastrous lowbrow hokum! I can’t think how we laughed at it last year!” She to her: “Hokum maybe, Chloe, but brilliant Theater!” I had propped myself against the stones of a fallen arch. Lambant had hoisted himself up and now sprawled on them. He said in my ear, “Be warned by that exchange!—Thus, enjoyment in youth gives way to criticism in old age!”

  His casual words were caught by the girls, who failed to join in the general laughter then prevailing as Judy, the Law Man’s Daughter, tried to kiss Allosaur Man—mistaking him, still trapped in the helmet, for Space Man. They turned to us, and one turned rosy and one pale at Lambant’s affront, so that I was vexed to think which colouring effect took me most.

  “We also overheard your conversation, cavaliers, but less insultingly, since our overhearing was involuntary, and caused purely by the loudness and coarseness of your voices,” one of these delicate creatures indited. “We found your remarks as amusing as you appear to have found ours!”

  She it was whose sister had addressed her as Chloe. She was the smaller and the more rounded of the two, with pretty chestnut hair and soft brown eyes—though they attempted to pierce both Lambant and me at that moment. She it was who had turned to so fair a shade of rose, her sister who bore cheeks that temporarily resembled ivory.

  Her sister, whose name we soon discovered to be Lise, was no less ferocious, but of a more willowy physique, slender and dark, with hair as black and shining as midnight reflected down a well, and eyes as blue-grey as the flower of speedwell. Neither of them could have been much more than halfway through their second decade, and neither was empty of words; for Lise, following swift on her sister’s jibe, cried, with stormy brows—but I saw the moon shine through the storm—“To hear brainless gallants like you discussing the just rewards of artists! I’d as lief go to my maid for instruction in the True Religion!”

  Lambant slid from his stone to his feet, saying, “Your maid should instruct me in anything she liked, Miss, if she were one-half as fair as you!”

  “She should instruct me in nothing, were either of you princesses present to teach the lesson!” I said, looking from one to the other to decide which one of them had my heart more firmly in sway, and perceiving that the dark and willowy Lise had its chief custody.

  “Your compliments are as feeble as your insults!” Chloe said.

  She spoke among the general applause of the little audience, for the show had now ended, the Banker’s Lady had gone off with the Space Man, the Banker had rewarded the Police Man, the Joker had had his way with Bettini, the Banker’s Daughter, and the Allosaur Man had devoured the Robber Man. Now the puppet master came round with his wooden plate, thrusting it hopefully among the dissolving auditory. As he leveled it at us, I tossed in a kopetto, and said, “Here’s one true artist at least believes his reward should be neither ability nor applause alone.”

  “Faith, master,” he quoth, rolling his eyes, “I need fuel as well as flattery for my performance. So do my missus and our six children!”

  “Six children!” said Lambant. “Then you also need a lettro for your performance!”

  Our two young beauties looked abashed at this pleasant crudity and, perhaps to hide their embarrassment, Chloe said, “These carnival men deserve money possibly, but not the title of artist.”

  Boldly, I took her sister’s arm and said, “Since the subject of artistry interests you, let’s stroll awhile and see whether you have an equivalent knowledge of it. Our main topic—of which the theme of artistic reward was merely a subtopic—was whether this was not a decadent age.”

  “How very strange, sirs,” said Chloe, smiling, “for we had been saying to each other how creative this age was, although our seniors little realised the fact.”

  “Stabbed to the heart!” I cried, clutching at my chest and falling against Lambant “You hear that, brother? ‘Our seniors’. . . that’s for us, at least six years the senior of these two old maids. Poor croaking greybeards, they must think us!”

  Taking the cue, Lambant began to hobble before us, clutching one knee and limping like an old man.

  “Quick, quick, Prian, my embrocation! My rheumatics are killing me!”

  “’Tis your wit rather that will be the death of us!” exclaimed Lise, but she and Chloe were laughing prettily, making their youthful bosoms shake like fresh-boiled dumplings. So pleasant was the sight that Lambant redoubled the vigour of his parody of senility, somewhat spoiling the effect

  “Hokum, Lambant, maybe, but brilliant Theatre!” I said. ‘‘Now take your bows before we take these ladies somewhere where we may have out our argument in peace. Let’s stroll to the river.”

  The girls were looking doubtfully at one another when we saw, distantly, one of the winged women take off gracefully from the city walls and come flying in our direction. As was often the fashion of her kind, she wore long ribbons in her hair which trailed out behind her in the tranquil air. She was both young and naked and the sight of her overhead was in sunlight very pleasing; as she passed behind the Big Cornet to alight, we heard the sol
emn flutter of her wings, like some transvestite Jove seeking an hermaphrodite Leda.

  No doubt the sight inspired Lise. “We’ll come with you if we can fly,” she said, resting a pretty hand upon my sleeve.

  “Done,” said Lambant and I together. “Let’s go and find the carpet man!” And we swept them along, whistling “When the Still Air Hath Waked” in march-time, Lambant taking the melody and I the counterpoint, past the booths of chance and cheiromancy.

  Since it was by now growing late in the afternoon, the crowds at the fair were thickening. The most crowded and the gayest time would come after dusk, when flares were lit and masks were donned, and the Eastern dancers started their contortions on the open stage. We soon found our way to the nearest carpet man. His carpets were of plastic and too brilliantly coloured for our liking; but they carried a six-hour guarantee, and we were in no mood to be particular. We paid the man’s fee and a deposit besides, mounting his rickety little scaffold with a good deal of jesting.