Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  rose-jean: It was going to be something entirely new. I think he said he wanted to alter the essence of things. Could a new thing alter the essence of things? I seem to remember someone telling me that human life was cyclic. (Pause) Anyhow, about this breakdown, this breakthrough, I mean, of Andy’s, he had some new idea about timing people’s dreams in relation to their circadian mechanisms. That was somehow going to show that we have all sorts of different times going on in our heads at once. I forget the details, but that was it in general.

  interviewer: Did you regard this as a feasible idea?

  rose-jean: I used to contribute my dreams. I was one of his guinea pigs. That was how we met, really.

  interviewer: Did you believe in Andrew’s theories or did you think they might be illusions?

  rose-jean: Oh, he didn’t know that himself. He was just working along a scientific hypothesis. I guess a lot of things sound nutty before they’re proved, don’t they? Like people didn’t used to believe in acupuncture, except for the Chinese, I mean, until modern science showed how it all worked. But Andy’s ideas weren’t way-out to me. I went to Europe for vacation once, and got most terrible jet lag, so I know there are different times in the body. Maybe Andy found a time he liked best and settled for that. Maybe we shouldn’t disturb him.

  interviewer: You think he is happy as he is?

  rose-jean: Golly, who’s ever happy? I just meant—well, I don’t know what I meant. I mean, maybe Andy isn’t sick— maybe he made his breakthrough. You people at the mental hospital ought to see how his brain waves register. But just don’t fool around with him. I’d say—I know you don’t want my advice—but I’d say let him be as he is. He could be happy, who knows, properly looked after. Gosh, I’m happy, don’t think I’m not, but—well, it’s nice to be looked after, isn’t it?

  * * * *

  Interview B. Miss Alice Butley.

  interviewer: It’s good of you to see me in your lunch hour, Miss Butley.

  alice: Who wants to hang around this place? What can I tell you about Andrew Angsteed? He’s real sick, is he?

  interviewer: We are curious to know why he went into a state of complete withdrawal just when he was excited by new things he was discovering.

  alice: “New” is a relative term. As a philosopher, I distrust it. Everyone’s hot for the new, the novel. I’ll tell you what my old man used to say—I’ve got a great admiration for my old man, and I don’t care who hears me say it—he used to say, “Boffers (that was his nickname for me, kind of a baby-name), Boffers, if it’s new, it won’t last, and if it’s lasted, then it’s not new.” Andy wanted to find something new, something to weary people’s minds with. I told him, nothing new is going to alter the essence of things.

  interviewer: I believe that Angsteed claimed his discoveries could affect the essence of things.

  alice: Don’t make the mistake he made. Say what you will, the essence of the human experience is cyclic. It’s largely a matter of repetition, with every generation suffering the same basic joys and sorrows.

  interviewer: You’re not suggesting that Angsteed has suffered from this sort of withdrawal before?

  alice: How do I know? I haven’t known him all that long or all that well.

  interviewer: But you were lovers at one time?

  alice: Be your age! Does that have to mean I know him well? He was always a closed guy. He never knew me, never took any interest in me as a person. Yet I was prepared to love him —my mother died when I was just a girl, so I was always chock full of love to give to the right person, don’t believe otherwise. And we did have a bond in common. ... Oh well. . .

  interviewer: You were going to say?

  alice: Things sound silly in daylight to strangers that seem important whispered in bed at night. The idea of philosophy is to knock the silliness out of things. But why not say it? Andy had an older sister die when he was eight years old. She drowned in a lake at a summer camp. He always said it marked him for good. He really loved that sister. Still—not quite so much drama in that as losing your dear old Ma, even if she did tan your hide, is there? (Pause) I guess we’d all like to withdraw at times—on full pay, of course. Was Andy’s trouble sexual or to do with his work? Or both?

  interviewer: We hoped you’d tell us.

  alice: Well, I don’t know. Is that thing switched off? Maybe I shouldn’t suggest this, but all this business with dreams, it could have become obsessive with Andy. Who knows, maybe he vanished into the recesses of his own mind. Maybe he’s happy where he is! (Laughs)

  interviewer: Mrs. Dempson suggested the same thing.

  alice: She did? She’s hardly the person to know about such things. A little immature for such speculations, wouldn’t you say?

  * * * *

  Interview C. The Author.

  interviewer: Mr. Aldiss, the interviews with Miss Butley and Mrs. Dempson didn’t get us very far. Don’t you feel both ladies could have been more revealing?

  author: No. I thought they were very revealing about themselves. I agree they produced no astonishing revelations about Angsteed, but then that’s the way life goes.

  interviewer: This is a story, not life. Do you intend to finish the story without telling the reader what happened to Angsteed? Did he have some sort of personality collapse, or did he actually find his way into a dream world?

  author: It’s a good question. You are asking me, in effect, whether this is a sad story or a happy one. I believe you are also asking me whether it is a science fiction story or not.

  interviewer: I wasn’t aware of so doing. Like Miss Butley and Mrs. Dempson, you wish to talk about yourself?

  author: Not at all. Unlike those ladies, I am intensely interested in Angsteed as a person. You see, I know him. He is an actual person, although I have changed a few details to protect the parties involved, as they say. And I have a particular reason for ending the story here and now: because the real Angsteed is still in his state of schizophrenic withdrawal, or however you care to label it. So the resolution has yet to come.

  interviewer: May I say on behalf of the reader that I think it might have been a better story if you had waited till the resolution came?

  author: Ah, but then the quality of my interest would change and you would get a different story. A science fiction writer is like a journalist in that respect—he gets hooked on something that is still happening. The mystery intrigues him just as much as the solution. However, I have no wish to cheat. Far from it. Let me give you not one but two possible endings, just briefly. Okay?

  interviewer: Go ahead.

  author: Right First the sad ending, the non-SF ending.

  Eventually, Angsteed is brought out of his withdrawal. He seems not quite as he was before, and is reluctant to return to the university. He is kept on at the mental institution for some while, but shows little interest in the outside world. His prognosis is not favorable. As for the diagnosis, while it is couched in abstruse and precise-sounding terms, it actually reveals little.

  Angsteed, it says, has suffered a mental collapse caused primarily by overwork. Rose-Jean has inadvertently brought about the crisis point. Angsteed wanted her love, while realizing that he and she were nevertheless incompatible.

  His “case history,” slowly compiled from various sources, reveals a number of affairs over the years with older women, Alice Butley being his most recent involvement. Rose-Jean, a younger woman, is identified in his mind with his dead sister. The terms “incest fixation” and “guilt association” are bandied about.

  interviewer: And Angsteed’s promising line of dream research?

  author: There was no promising line. The dream research was getting nowhere; Angsteed’s fantasies of imminent revolutionary discoveries were to protect himself from knowledge of yet another failure. The unit is closed down shortly after his breakdown and its appropriations reassigned.

  interviewer: There had been other failures in his life?

  author: The essence of human experience
is cyclic, you know.

  interviewer: Do things work out better in the alternate ending?

  author: Oh, much better. The first story, you see, is just a little downbeat study of character. Whereas the science fiction story, the story with the happy ending, is an upbeat study of ideas. Whereas Angsteed’s theories prove, in the first story, to be just a paranoid fixation, in the SF story they are proved to be true.

  interviewer: True?

  author: Yes, true—part of the external world. A whole range of SF stories operate like that: the screwy ideas, instead of being certifiable, turn out to mirror true reality. The hero is proved right and everyone else is proved wrong, from Aristotle onward. Paranoia triumphs, logic is defeated. That’s one of the reasons why outsiders believe SF to be a load of nonsense. Why did Angsteed so enjoy Rose-Jean’s dreams? Because they strengthened his growing conviction that the “cold sane,” as he called them, were deluded and that the mad were really the sane.

  interviewer: Yes, but that was just his interpretation of her dreams.

  author: That’s what I’m trying to say. To my mind, interpretation is everything—and not merely in my story. However, here’s how the second version goes.

  Angsteed comes out of his withdrawal in a few weeks. He remains quiet and reserved, but is again in control of himself. Since his post remains open for him, he returns to the university.

  He is as convinced as ever that he has—no, I’d better phrase this with care—he is aware that his consciousness penetrated into Dream Time. “Dream Time” is his phrase for it Dream Time is obviously akin to Jung’s “Collective Unconscious.”

  The place he went to was no particular place—not in Rose-Jean’s mind, not his own mind, although her dreams gave him the key he needed. He regards that as important: that he was in some impersonal place.

  He feels sure that many other people have been there, often maybe in one form or another of madness, where time-displacement is a familiar phenomenon; but those people were unable to recognize where they had been.

  “My conception of a dream globe enabled me to navigate, and to control my consciousness deeper into the Heartland than anyone else had ever been,” he says. “I return just as out of madness, as a person reborn. I feel older, wiser, replenished at source, as people do after sleep and dreams.”

  “You’re a real pioneer, Andy,” says Rose-Jean. “An astronaut, no less!”

  “In a sense I’ve discovered nothing new,” he says. “Yet I know that when I come to publish my findings, a slow revolution in human thought will be set in motion, a unifying revolution that will make us revise our ideas about the unity of human life, not only in waking and sleep, in madness and sanity, but one with another. Eventually, everyone will be able to visit the Heartland and replenish themselves.”

  “The problem with the human race is that it needs to wake up, not go further asleep,” says Alice. “‘Sing heigh-ho, the wind and the roses, This life damn soon closes!’. . .”

  “It won’t be like that, Alice. We will no longer be cut off from our inner beings. It’s nearer immortality than death, believe me! Maybe madness and psychosis and neurosis and the rest will fade away in a couple of generations. Why the human race was barred from its own Heartland for a million years, we don’t know. Maybe we’ll find out now. Maybe it was necessary for growing purposes—like an adolescent’s quarrel with his family. Now we’re back, back to an entirely new vision of reality. At last we’re going to be able to change the essence of things.”

  “It sounds marvelous,” says Rose-Jean. She hugs him.

  “Sounds too good to be true,” says Alice. She laughs.

  She pours them drinks. Martinis for her and Angsteed, a Coke for Rose-Jean.

  <>

  * * * *

  The wonders of new technologies are given first to the rich, and only after the jet-set has sampled them do prices come down to a level most of us can afford. Which means that the rich serve as technology-tasters for us in much the same way servants were once used to make sure their monarchs’ food wasn’t poisoned. Considering that too rich a diet of new wonders can cause the disease of ennui, maybe we should be thankful for this situation. See, for instance, the following pungent serving of technology on wry.

  Gordon eklund and gregory benford have published two previous collaborations in Universe; the most recent was their Nebula Award-winning novelette in If The Stars Are Gods.

  * * * *

  What Did You Do Last Year?

  BY GORDON EKLUND & GREGORY BENFORD

  They waited impatiently, David Golden and his young bride, Melody, beneath the colossal dome. Their table was private, away from the rabble. Overhead were stars, drifting slowly through a swirl of color. David drummed his fingers, wishing his sister Carol would arrive with her lout of a husband.

  Melody’s head craned back, watching the display in the dome and oblivious to the low murmur of voices. David nudged his chair and it said, “—in the central region. Blue from hydrogen, red from oxy radicals. This is an emission nebula, its fluorescence fed by ultraviolent from the young, hot stars embedded in the dust. Explorers—”

  He wasn’t sure this new place, the Castle Orion, was going to work out at all. God, what confusing stuff. He ignored Melody, still looking, and searched the crowd for Carol, his twin. January 31, she couldn’t have forgotten. And if she had—was it calculated? No, no one forgets his birthday.

  “You must be really eager,” Melody said. Her excited gaze flickered past the undisciplined mass of human flesh that circulated through the public portion of the ballroom. “David, tell me, how long has it been? Not a whole year? You two must have so much to say.”

  “No, nothing.” He glanced up to where, upon the black interior of the dome, a glittering message was burning into existence. “Not that I can think of.”

  “Well, I certainly am,” Melody said, gazing up too. But it was only a commercial. Tomorrow, come noon, an electrical man would implode himself. Seats were available on a strictly reserved basis, with priority going to the better listings. David burped. He had witnessed so many electrical men imploding themselves that he was afraid to start counting.

  He drank his liquor through a pale thin straw. “The time?” he asked, as two nearly naked men—one in hot pursuit of the other—crossed the top of their table.

  “Nearly eleven,” said Melody when the men had passed. “David, are you sure they haven’t—”

  “Oh, Lord, they’re here,” he said, waving into the shifting crowd that dangled in the public air. Carol came floating toward them. Except for a neat triangle of painted breasts she could have been him. Even their hair—midnight-black and trimmed exactly to the shoulders—was the same. Behind her Carol drew a large hairy man dressed in African jewelry. Otherwise naked, the man was artificially enhanced, a huge thing dangling past the kneecap.

  “Is that—” Melody said, refusing to conceal her astonishment.

  “For God’s sake, sit down,” David said. “It’s Garth—yes.”

  “Why, they’re . . . they’re marvelous.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.” Deliberately he turned away, facing the floorshow. A man in uniform holding a long bloody sword was disemboweling a naked child. A historical spectacle. Good God! How many times had he seen this one before?

  “Carol,” he murmured, turning back.

  “Happy, happy, happy,” Carol said, touching David’s mouth. Their lips, identical in shape and color, slid neatly together.

  Distantly, Melody cried her approval. Drawing back from his sister, David mechanically said, “Shut up, Melody.”

  “No!” Carol cried. She pointed across the table. “David— don’t tell me. Is that her?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Oh, but, David, why did you do it? Wasn’t there any other way?”

  Melody was chattering at Garth, who slowly stroked his forearm hair with a white fish-skeleton comb. His massive, animal silence made Melody speak faster. David made an
effort to deflect the conversation: “I see Garth hasn’t changed.”

  “Should he? But her. Her? Why her? David, surely you didn’t—”

  “I did.” Calmly he removed a cigarette from his tin nose. “Advancement. Her father happens—”

  “Oh, him—her.” Carol wiped a tear from her eye. “Oh, Christ, David, I’m sorry—I forgot.”

  * * * *

  “So what did you do last year?” Carol asked David. All four were seated at the table. Garth fingered Melody’s silvered dorsal fins in explicit invitation, using his thumbnail to advantage.

  “Not much. It was—”

  “We had a marvelous time on our honeymoon,” Melody interrupted. “It was really fun, wasn’t it?”