Universe 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  She said, “The Alexandrian Pleiad—Homer the younger and six other poets.”

  He said, “The French Pleiad—Ronsard and his six.”

  She said, “The Pleiades again, meaning the seven nymphs, attendant on Diana, for whom the stars were named—Alcyone, Celaeno, Electra, Maia (she’s Illusion), Taygete (she got lost), Sterope (she wed war) and Merope (she married Sisyphus). My, that got gloomy.”

  Matthew looked down from the stars and fondly at her, counting over her personal and private sevens.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. Actually, he’d winced at the sudden memory of his eight-orifices error. The recollection faded back as he continued to study her.

  “The Seven Children of the Days of the Week, Fair-of-Face and Full-of-Grace, and so on,” he said, drawing out the syllables. “Whose are you?”

  “Saturday’s—”

  “Then you’ve got far to go,” he said.

  She nodded, somewhat solemnly.

  “And that makes another seven that belongs to you,” he added. “The seventh day of the week.”

  “No, sixth,” she said. “Sunday’s the seventh day of the week.”

  “No, it’s the first,” he told her with a smile. “Look at any calendar.” He felt a lazy pleasure at having caught her out, though it didn’t make up for a Game error like the terrible one he’d made.

  She said, “ ‘The Seven Ravens,’ a story by the Brothers Grimm. Another gloomy one.”

  He said, gazing at her and speaking as if they too belonged to her, “The Seven Wonders of the World. The temple of Diana at Ephesus, et cetera. Say, what’s the matter?”

  She said, “You said the World when we were in the Stars. It brought me down. The world’s a nasty place.”

  “I’m sorry, Sev,” he said. “You are a goddess, did you know? I saw it when the starlight freckled you. Diana coming up twice in the Game reminded me. Goddesses are supposed to be up in the stars, like in line drawings of the constellations with stars in their knees and heads.”

  “The world’s a nasty place,” she repeated. “Its number’s nine.”

  “I thought six sixty-six,” he said. “The number of the beast. Somewhere in Revelation.”

  “That too,” she said, “but mostly nine.”

  “The smallest odd number that is not a prime,” he said.

  “The number of the Dragon. Very nasty. Here, I’ll show you just how nasty.”

  She dipped over the edge of the bed for her purse and put in his hands something that felt small, hard, cold and complicated. Then, kneeling upright on the bed, she reached out and switched on the lamps.

  Matthew lunged past her and hit the switch for the ceiling drapes.

  “Afraid someone might see us?” she asked as the drapes rustled toward each other.

  He nodded mutely, catching his breath through his nose. Like her, he was now kneeling upright on the bed.

  “The stars are far away,” she said. “Could they see us with telescopes?”

  “No, but the roof is close,” he whispered back. “Though it’s unlikely anyone would be up there.”

  Nevertheless he waited, watching the ceiling, until the drapes met and the faint whirring stopped. Then he looked at what she’d put in his hands.

  He did not drop it, but he instantly shifted his fingers so that he was holding it with a minimum of contact between his skin and it, very much as a man would hold a large dark spider which for some occult reason he may not drop.

  It was a figurine, in blackened bronze or else in some dense wood, of a fearfully skinny, wiry old person tautly bent over backward like a bow, knees somewhat bent, arms straining back overhead. The face was witchy, nose almost meeting pointed chin across toothlessly grinning gums pressed close together, eyes bulging with mad evil. What seemed at first some close-fitting, ragged garment was then seen to be only loathsomely diseased skin, here starting to peel, there showing pustules, open ulcers, and other tetters, all worked in the metal (or carved in even harder wood) in abominably realistic minuscule detail. Long empty dugs hanging back up the chest as far as the neck made it female, but the taut legs, somewhat spread, showed a long flaccid penis caught by the artificer in extreme swing to the left, and far back from it a long grainy scrotum holding shriveled testicles caught in similar swing to the right, and in the space between them long leprous vulva gaping.

  “It’s nasty, isn’t it?” Severeign said dryly of the hideous hermaphrodite. “My Aunt Helmintha bought it in Crotona, that one-time Greek colony in the instep of the Italian Boot where Pythagoras was born—bought it from a crafty old dealer in antiquities, who said it came from ‘Earth’s darkest center’ by way of Mali and North Africa. He said it was a figure of the World, a nine-thing, Draco homo. He said it can’t be broken, must not, in fact, for if you break it, the world will disappear or else you and those with you will forever vanish—no one knows where.”

  Staring at the figurine, Math muttered, “The seven days and nights the Ancient Mariner saw the curse in the dead man’s eye.”

  She echoed, “The seven days and nights his friends sat with Job.”

  He said, his shoulders hunched, “The Seven Words, meaning the seven utterances of Christ on the cross.”

  She said, “The seven gates to the land of the dead through which Ishtar passed.”

  He said, his shoulders working, “The seven golden vials full of the wrath of God that the four beasts gave to the seven angels.”

  She said, shivering a little, “The birds known as the Seven Whistlers and considered to be a sign of some great calamity impending.” Then, “Stop it, Math!”

  Still staring at the figurine, he had shifted his grip on it, so that his thick forefingers hooked under its knees and elbows while his big thumbs pressed against its arched narrow belly harder and harder. But at her command his hands relaxed and he returned the thing to her purse.

  “Fie on you, sir!” she said, “to try to run out on the Game, and on me, and on yourself. The seven letters in Matthew, and in Fortree. Remember Solon: Know thyself.”

  He answered, “The fourteen letters in Severeign Saxon, making two sevens too.”

  “The seven syllables in Master Matthias Fortree,” she said, flicking off the lamps before taking a step toward him on her knees.

  “The seven syllables in Mamsel Severeign Saxon,” he responded, putting his arms around her.

  And then he was murmuring, “Oh Severeign, my sovereign,” and they were both wordlessly indicating sevens they’d named earlier, beginning with the seven crucial points of a girl (“Crucial green points,” he said, and “Of a green girl,” said she), and the whole crucial part of the evening was repeated, only this time it extended endlessly with infinite detail, although all he remembered of the Game from it was her saying “The Dance of the Seven Veils,” and him replying “The seven figures in the Dance of Death as depicted on a hilltop by Ingmar Bergman in his film,” and her responding, “The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” and him laboriously getting out, “In the like legend in the Koran, the seven sleepers guarded by the dog Al Rakim,” and her murmuring, “Good doggie, good doggie,” as he slowly, slowly, sank into bottomless slumber.

  Next morning Math woke to blissful dreaminess instead of acutely stabbing misery for the first time in his life since he had lost his childhood power to live wholly in the world of numbers. Strong sunlight was seeping through the ceiling. Severeign was gone with all her things, including the purse with its disturbing figurine, but that did not bother him in the least (nor did his eight-error, the only other possible flyspeck on his paradise), for he knew with absolute certainty that he would see her again that evening. He dressed himself and went out into the corridor and wandered along it until he saw from the corner of his eye that he was strolling alongside Elmo Hooper, whereupon he poured out to that living memory bank all his joy, every detail of last night’s revelations.

  As he ended his long litany of love, he noticed
bemusedly that Elmo had dropped back, doubtless because they were overtaking three theoretical physicists headed for the Commons. Their speech had a secretive tone, so he tuned his ears to it and was soon in possession of a brand-new top secret they did well to whisper about, and they none the wiser—a secret that just might allow him to retrieve his eight-error, he realized with a throb of superadded happiness. (In fact, he was so happy he even thought on the spur of the moment of a second string for that bow.)

  So when Severeign came that night, as he’d known she would, he was ready for her. Craftily he did not show his cards at first, but when she began with, “The Seven Sages, those male Scheherazades who night after night keep a king from putting his son wrongfully to death,” he followed her lead with “The Seven Wise Masters, another name for the Seven Sages.”

  She said, “The Seven Questions of Timur the Lame—Tamurlane.”

  He said, “The Seven Eyes of Ningauble.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Never mind. Seven Men (including ‘Enoch Soames’ and ‘A.V. Laider’), a book of short stories by Max Beerbohm.”

  She said, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a book by Lawrence of Arabia.”

  He said, “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, a fantasy film.”

  She said, “Just The Seven Faces by themselves, a film Paul Muni starred in.”

  He said, “The seven Gypsy jargons mentioned by Borrow in his Bible in Spain.”

  She said, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, another film.”

  He said, “The dance of the seven veils—how did we miss it?”

  She said, “Or miss the seven stars in the hair of the blessed damosel?”

  He said, “Or the Seven Hills of San Francisco when we got Rome’s?”

  She said, “Seven Keys to Baldpate, a play by George M. Cohan.”

  He said, “Seven Famous Novels, an omnibus by H.G. Wells.”

  She said, “The Seven That Were Hanged, a novella by Andreyev.”

  That’s my grim cue, he thought, but I’ll try my second string first. “The seven elements whose official names begin with N, and their symbols,” he said, and then recited rapidly, poker-faced, “N for Nitrogen, Nb for Nobelium, Nd for Neodymium, Ne for Neon, Ni for Nickel, No for Niobrium, Np for Neptunium.”

  She grinned fiendishly, started to speak, then caught herself. Her eyes widened at him. Her grin changed, though not much.

  “Matthew, you rat!” she said. “You wanted me to correct you, say there were eight and that you’d missed Na. But then I’d have been in the wrong, for Na is for Sodium—its old and unofficial name Natrium.”

  Math grinned back at her, still poker-faced, though his confidence had been shaken. Nevertheless he said, “Quit stalling. What’s your seven?”

  She said, “The Seven Lamps of Architecture, a book of essays by John Ruskin.”

  He said, baiting his trap, “The seven letters in the name of the radioactive element Pluton—I mean Uranium.”

  She said, “That’s feeble, sir. All words with seven letters would last almost forever. But you’ve made me think of a very good one, entirely legitimate. The seven isotopes of Plutonium and Uranium, sum of their Pleiades.”

  “Huh! I got you, madam,” he said, stabbing a finger at her.

  Her face betrayed exasperation of a petty sort, but then an entirely different sort of consternation, almost panic fear.

  “You’re wrong, madam,” he said triumphantly. “There are, as I learned only today—”

  “Stop!” she cried. “Don’t say it! You’ll be sorry! Remember Thales: Suretyship is the precursor of ruin.”

  He hesitated a moment. He thought, that means don’t cosign checks. Could that be stretched to mean don’t share dangerous secrets? No, too far-fetched.

  “You won’t escape being shown up that easily,” he said gleefully. “There are eight isotopes now, as I learned only this morning. Confess yourself at fault.”

  He stared at her eagerly, triumphantly, but only saw her face growing pale. Not ashamed, not exasperated, not contumacious even, but fearful. Dreadfully fearful.

  There were three rapid, very loud knocks on the door.

  They both started violently.

  The knocks were repeated, followed by a bellow that penetrated all soundproofing. “Open up in there!” it boomed hollowly. “Come on out, Fortree! And the girl.”

  Matthew goggled. Severeign suddenly dug in her purse and tossed him something. It was the figurine.

  “Break it!” she commanded. “It’s our only chance of escape.”

  He stared at it stupidly.

  There was a ponderous pounding on the door, which groaned and crackled.

  “Break it!” she cried. “Night before last you prayed. I brought the answer to your prayer. You have it in your hands. It takes us to your lost world that you loved. Break it, I say!”

  A kind of comprehension came to Math’s face. He hooked his fingers round the figure’s evil ends, pressed on the arching loathsome midst.

  “Who is your brother, Severeign?” he asked.

  “You are my brother, in the other realm,” she said. “Press, press!—and break the thing!”

  The door began visibly to give under the strokes, now thunderous. The cords in Math’s neck stood out, and the veins in his forehead; his knuckles grew white.

  “Break it for me,” she cried. “For Severeign! For Seven!”

  The sound of the door bursting open masked a lesser though sharper crack. Warren Dean and his party plunged into the room to find it empty, and no one in the bedroom or bathroom either.

  It had been he, of course, whom Matthew, utterly bemused, had mistaken for Elmo Hooper that morning. Dean had immediately reactivated the bugs in Matthew’s apartment. It is from their record that this account of Matthew’s and Severeign’s last night is reconstructed. All the rest of the story derives from the material overheard by Dean (who quite obviously, from this narrative, has his own Achilles’ heel) or retrieved from Elmo Hooper.

  The case is still very open, of course. That fact alone has made the Coexistence Complex an even more uneasy place than before—something that most connoisseurs of its intrigues had deemed impossible. The theory of security is the dread one that Matthew Fortree was successfully spirited away to one of the hostiles by the diabolical spy Severeign Saxon. By what device remains unknown, although the walls of the Coexistence Complex have been systematically burrowed through in search of secret passageways more thoroughly than even termites could have achieved, without discovering anything except several lost bugging systems.

  A group of daring thinkers believes that Matthew, on the basis of his satanic mathematical cunning and his knowledge of the eighth isotope of the uranium-plutonium pair, and probably with technological know-how from behind some iron curtain supplied by Severeign, devised an innocent-looking mechanism, which was in fact a matter transmitter, by means of which they escaped to the country of Severeign’s employers. All sorts of random setups were made of Matthew’s ivories. Their investigation became a sort of hobby-in-itself for some and led to several games and quasi-religious cults, and to two suicides.

  Others believe Severeign’s employers were extraterrestrial. But a rare few quietly entertain the thought and perhaps the hope that hers was a farther country than that even, that she came from the Pythagorean universe where Matthew spent much of his infancy and early childhood, the universe where numbers are real and one can truly fall in love with Seven, briefly incarnate as a Miss S.S.

  Whatever the case, Matthew Fortree and Severeign Saxon are indeed gone, vanished without a trace or clue except for a remarkably nasty figurine showing a fresh, poisonously green surface where it was snapped in two, which is the only even number that is a prime.

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  * * * *

  Human history is, among other things, the story of continual improvement in the quality of life, as science has given us greater creature comforts, longer life spans, increasing range in travel and communicatio
ns. But it’s possible that we’ve passed our zenith, for unless we develop new and safe sources of energy, our technological civilization cannot be maintained at its present level and our descendants may be forced back to more primitive modes of life.

  Brian Aldiss has written before of the downfall of civilization, in such novels as Greybeard and Earthworks, but in the following tale he reminds us that different people have contrasting responses to change. What, after all, determines the quality of anyone’s life?

  * * * *

  MY LADY OF THE PSYCHIATRIC SORROWS

  Brian W. Aldiss

  GODDARD WORKED WITH the northern reindeer herds all that long winter. With the other skin-clad men, he followed the migratory pattern of the animals in their search for lichens through snow or shine. He slept by beggarly fires under pines or under the stars. His whole life was encompassed by the sad guilts in reindeer eyes, by clouds of reindeer breath hanging in the crisp air.