New Writings in SF 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Morning,” Copeland answered, sitting down at the table.

  “You seem cheerful this morning,” Peter said, “and on top of oversleeping. Did you enjoy yourself last night ?”

  “Yes,” Copeland said between mouthfuls.

  Sunlight streamed in through the studio window and Copeland felt great. He glanced at the easel where the half-finished painting was covered so that Peter hadn’t seen it. He ate an extra large breakfast before getting to work.

  Remembering Peter, he moved the easel around so that the painting would be turned away from Peter’s sensory scanners. Then he removed the cover and regarded the painting a moment before picking up his brush.

  “Why did you do that?” Peter asked.

  “Do what?” asked Copeland. “Oh. Move the easel—the light’s better here.”

  “But there is less light at that angle,” Peter said. “Is something wrong?”

  “What could be wrong?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. But why else hide the painting from me?”

  “Hide? Oh, it’s a surprise. I’ll show it to you when I finish it.”

  “It must be quite special,” Peter said pleasantly. “I look forward to it. But you’ll have to go some to improve on Bevel Gear in Lavender. That should make you rich in itself. You almost have a full quota for the exhibit, haven’t you ?”

  “Oh, yes . ..”

  Copeland became intent on his work and was completely lost in himself when the door announced a visitor that afternoon. The door had to repeat the announcement. Copeland blinked and asked, “Who?”

  “Mr. Apery from Reality Gallery,” the door said.

  Copeland hastily covered the painting and told the door to admit Apery. Apery was Copeland’s agent and the owner of the gallery where most of his work was exhibited. Apery was a big gorilla-like man who favoured large and malodorous cigars.

  “How’s it coming?” Apery asked, slapping his paw into Copeland’s hand. “The exhibit lined up yet?”

  “Just about,” Copeland said, pointing to the paintings against the wall. “See for yourself.”

  Apery poured forth a cloud of stagnant smoke and began examining the paintings one by one, occasionally whistling in admiration at those which would probably bring large commissions. “These are great,” he said when he had seen them all.

  “Of course they’re great,” Peter said.

  “Is this another one?” Apery said, indicating the painting covered on the easel.

  “No!” Copeland said, but it was too late. Apery pulled back the cloth and stared at the painting.

  “Hey, what’s this ? Don’t I know this dame ?” he asked.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Peter.

  “You’ve probably seen her around,” Copeland said.

  “Oh yes,” Apery said. “Name’s Bemis. She’s quite a doll, isn’t she. Hey, you have quite a line here. I never realized just how handy it must be to be an artist.”

  “Is that a painting of a young lady?” Peter asked coldly.

  “Her?” Apery asked.

  “I only wanted to do something a little different,” Copeland said.

  “May I see it?” Peter asked.

  Copeland moved the easel around so that Peter could pick up the painting on his scanner sensors. “She’s real nice,” he said. “You’d like her.”

  “I’m certain I would,” Peter said coldly. “Will you finish this today ?”

  “Yes,” Copeland said.

  “What about the rest of the exhibit?” Apery asked.

  “I can do four more cogwheel paintings in a couple of weeks,” Copeland said.

  “Good,” Apery said. “We’ve got a month. Those I just looked at are great. Bring in a mint.” He headed for the door.

  “Whatever prompted you to do a painting like that?” Peter asked when Apery was gone.

  “I don’t know. I’m getting tired of painting cogwheels.”

  “Cogwheels? Is that all you think of those works of art? Douglas, you’re forgetting the poetry of the machine that you’ve so often captured in your works. Think of the basic simplicity of the universe!”

  “I’ve done that. I want to do something else. I’m not so sure there’s any basic simplicity to the universe anyway.”

  “Douglas!”

  “I’m tired of painting cogwheels. Let me finish this.”

  “Very well,” Peter said. “There is, after all, the strain of being a great artist. I’ll permit you to indulge yourself therapeutically this once.”

  Copeland finished the painting of Philomene that evening. He set it against the wall with the others but face out where he could see it. The next morning he took a blank canvas and the sketch of the cogwheel design he had been thinking of doing. He thought for a moment about colour, then picked up his pencil to begin the drawing for the painting. As he did so, he saw the canvas of Philomene. It was very good that painting. For a moment, he debated with himself, then he took out the sketches he had made of her and selected one. He began pencilling it on the canvas. Peter said nothing.

  A couple of days later, when he had finished the painting, he stood both of them side by side and looked at them. “Peter,” he said. “I’ve done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “Painted for the ages.”

  “You have, Douglas,” said Peter. “Bevel Gear in Lavender is your masterpiece.”

  “I don’t mean that,” said Copeland. “I mean these two of Philomene.”

  “Oh, please, Douglas. Those are, after all, only paintings of a woman. Finding her desirable is one thing, but to idealize her in this way is preposterous. Call her up here and go to bed with her. That’ll satisfy you so that you can go back to your paintings.”

  “I’m thinking about marrying her,” Copeland said.

  “You can’t afford to get married,” Peter said. “Not to her. It would affect your financial standing. You could end up without the right to vote.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that and it seems that I usually vote the way you tell me to. Why don’t you vote instead of me.”

  “Douglas!” said Peter horrified.

  “I mean it.”

  “But your vote is almost as important to you as your painting,” Peter said.

  “Maybe I’ll change that. I’m pretty sick of painting cogwheels. I’d rather paint figure studies. Philomene offered to pose nude------”

  “That is enough, Douglas! I’ll not hear any more of this. I absolutely forbid you to consider marriage to her. You have four paintings to do for your exhibit. Do them at once. Do you hear?”

  Copeland stared at the wall that housed Peter, but said nothing.

  “At once,” Peter said firmly.

  Copeland took out his cogwheel sketches.

  The next day, the door announced Philomene.

  “Send her away,” said Peter.

  “Send her in,” Copeland told the door. He turned back to the painting and applied yellow to a cogwheel. The door opened and he heard feminine footsteps on the floor behind him. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello yourself,” Philomene said. “Are you mad at me?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then why don’t you face me?”

  Copeland put down his brush and turned. She was wearing a form-fitting blue dress and her hair was fixed in a new way, piled apparently haphazardly on her head. “I’m working on an important painting,” he said.

  “It doesn’t look right,” she said.

  “Nothing is wrong with it,” Copeland said.

  Philomene pressed the tip of one forefinger under her lower lip and studied the painting, then extended her arm and pointed. “The colour doesn’t look right,” she said. Copeland caught an almost devastating whiff of her perfume.

  “You don’t understand art,” he said without conviction, but he looked back at the painting, and sure enough, the colour looked wrong. The yellow was too yellow, too soon. It ruined the red to blue shading effect. “Well, so maybe it i
sn’t perfect,” he said.

  “Douglas,” said Peter, “your art is very good. You mustn’t let this young lady undermine your confidence like that.”

  “Is that your Guardian Angel?” Philomene asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” said Philomene. “Did you finish the painting of me?”

  “It’s over there,” Copeland said, pointing towards the wall.

  “Oooohh,” Philomene said. “You did two of them.” She knelt down and picked up the second canvas. “I like this.”

  “You may have both of them,” Peter said, “if you promise not to divulge the name of the artist.”

  “Shut up,” Copeland said. He knelt down next to Philomene and picked up the other painting. She turned her head and kissed him impulsively. “Thank you,” she said, looking back at the painting.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Are you going back to the other kind of painting now?”

  Copeland considered his answer before saying, “No. I think I’d like to do another of you.”

  “Undressed?” she asked.

  “This has gone far enough,” Peter said. “I was willing to let you play around with those two paintings and even to go to bed with her but I cannot permit you to jeopardize your entire career with so radical a painting. That young lady is nothing more than a tramp.”

  Copeland stood up. “I’m going to marry her,” he said angrily.

  “You are?” Philomene asked with amazement.

  “You are!” Peter said. “I’ll have you committed first. This is a rash act of insanity------”

  Philomene walked across the room to Peter and pointed to a lever. “What’s this?” she asked.

  “That’s the on-off switch.”

  “I thought so,” Philomene said. She pulled the lever down. There was a shriek from Peter, then silence. “He can be sold as junk,” she said.

  “But------” said Copeland. “But—but------”

  Philomene came back and kissed him. This time more firmly and longer.

  “You really want to marry me ?” she asked. “When ?”

  “How about today?”

  “But won’t a honeymoon interfere with getting out the rest of the paintings for the exhibit?” she asked.

  “I’ve had a clever idea,” he said. “I could do two more of you and have the right number. We could bill the four of you as radical departures.”

  “How radical?” she asked suspiciously.

  <>

  * * * *

  SECOND GENESIS

  by Eric Frank Russell

  Here is a little known Eric Frank Russell story which we feel is more than worth bringing to the notice of readers. Vintage Russell at his best, in fact

  * * * *

  Through the foreport the vault of the night could be seen with its vivid scattering of stars, the cross-hairs being lined on a minor orb dead ahead. Yes, a minor orb, small, red, of little importance relative to the mighty host around and beyond it.

  From end to end of space gleamed the mighty concourse of suns—blue, white, golden and cherry-coloured. Some were giants burning in colossal solitude. Others huddled in groups like fiery families. Many were more gregarious, naming in close-packed ranks to fling sparkling curtains across the dark, or form glowing clouds of inconceivable dimensions, or rotate themselves in mass to create titanic swirls beyond which lay others and again still more.

  Amid all this, one small red sun burning modestly as if overawed by the vastness around it—maidenly shy and conscious of its own insignificance. But the cross-hairs on it selecting it for special attention, choosing it as the one true beloved from a myriad of greater beauties. There was reason for this special attention: its name was Sol—and that was almost another word for home.

  The man behind the cross-hairs, keeping the tiny ship steady on its drive, was called Arthur Jerrold, a pilot-engineer by profession, a near-suicide by choice. His light grey eyes contrasted with his pure white hair. His features were a mass of fine lines, a living map of where he’d been. He was thirty years old, also two thousand and thirty years old.

  It was that latter fact that filled him with anxiety and a good deal of nostalgia as he looked at the sun called Sol. Three years ago he had hurtled outward, leaving it behind his tail, deserting it as one throws away his heart when others beckon more enticingly. Now he was coming back, and Sol was some two thousand years older.

  “Think carefully,” they had warned him, “lest later you are racked with vain regrets. Within that ship you will be in a tiny artificial universe of your own; you will be in your own space, your own peculiar time. There is no other way to reach so far.”

  “I know.”

  “Nor will you meet another of your kind in some strange far-off field. This is one of those experiments that are not repeated until we have weighed and estimated the results of the first.”

  “Somebody has to do it first. I’m ready.”

  “When you return—if ever you do return—the world you knew may be well-nigh unrecognizable. You will be a relic of its past. Perhaps none will remember you even by hearsay. All those you once held dear will be so long gone that their names will have vanished from the book of life, and their resting-places will be beyond anyone’s power to find. You will have been away two thousand years.”

  “I’m ready, I tell you.”

  So they had feted him and made much of him, and launched him amid a worldwide thunder of huzzahs. After that, he’d been on his own, just he and the ship, with Sol sinking and shrinking unseen behind the tail.

  Now he was coming back. All he had to show for his Odyssey was his data on soundings of the great depths, a long, magnificent story of flaming orbs and whirling spheres, and the rise and fall of far-away civilizations and strange, almost incomprehensible barbarities.

  Plus, of course, the countless seams on his face matched by the longitudinal scars on his ship. They were young and vigorous and full of intense vitality, he and the little ship; yet both were incredibly old, stamped with the mark of long years and great experiences.

  Pluto was the outpost, that pointed down the starry lane. He swooped over it in a high arc and bulleted onward. Uranus was on the other side of Sol, and Neptune—far to his left; but Saturn was only slightly off his course, and Jupiter loomed almost straight in front. Maybe they were settled now, to what extent humans could settle them. Much can happen in twenty centuries.

  For a moment he toyed with the notion of transferring the ship to normal time and making a swift circumnavigatory inspection of Saturn and Jupiter’s satellites. It would be good to see outcroppings of slanty roofs and tall towers that identified the haunting-places of mankind.

  But he resisted the temptation. To jump out of his own superfast time-rate would delay things unbearably. In the neighbourhood of Mars would be the proper place to change over. He contented himself by curving over the big planets and again marvelled at the way in which temporal ratios made them appear to whirl and move at tremendous rates. Even after three years of it, he was still amazed that he could discern any features of space at all, much less distortedly; for one hour on the ship was roughly one month on Earth. So relatively fast did the sands of time run out in the exterior universe that his course for Sol described a fine curve which compensated for the system’s Vegadrift.

  Jupiter swung grandly to the rear, it and its circling children seeming to move at some seven hundred times their accustomed velocities. The Asteroid Belt had similar acceleration, its multitude of rocks and midget worlds appearing elongated by the sheer rapidity of their passing. Then -Mars, the home world’s next-door neighbour, pink and shining, like a lightship telling the far voyager of coming landfall.

  Here was the point of readjustment. Jerrold braced himself and flipped a knife-switch. A terrible blackness momentarily encompassed his mind; a fragmentary but powerful nausea seized his body. It was as if multi-million submicroscopic feet had stamped down hard to put the brakes on every vibrating mol
ecule of his being. The effect was always the same, despite that he had used the switch times without number while scouting an army of distant suns. There was no getting hardened to it; one could only take the strain and wait for it to pass.

  So it came, and tore at him, and went away, leaving him shaken but whole. Another line had been written upon his face. Another hair might have been whitened had it not already been silvery.