Universe 4 - [Anthology] Read online

  Waldo grinned. “Why not? A little humility might do you good.”

  “I see. Well, Waldo, I don’t care to participate in anything so sordid. I’m surprised at you.”

  Waldo leaned forward. “I’ll tell you exactly why I’m doing this. It’s because your arrogance and your vanity absolutely rub me raw.”

  “Hear, hear!” croaked Bo. “You talk the way I feel.”

  Alice spoke in a soft voice. “Both you boys are mistaken. I’m not vain and arrogant. I’m merely superior.” She could not control her mirth at the expressions on the faces of Waldo and Bo. “Perhaps I’m unkind. It’s really not your fault; you’re both rather pitiful victims of the city.”

  “A ‘victim’? Hah!” cried Waldo. “I live in Cloudhaven!”

  And almost in the same instant, “Me, Big Bo, a victim? Nobody fools with me!”

  “Both of you, of course, understand this—subconsciously. The result is guilt and malice.”

  Waldo listened with a sardonic smile, Bo with a lowering sneer.

  “Are you finished?” Waldo asked. “If so—”

  “Wait! One moment,” said Alice. “What of the cameras and the induction-cell?”

  Raulf, limping and groaning, went to one of the cameras which Alice had not thrown to the floor. “This one will work. The cell is gone; I guess we’ll have to dub in her track.”

  Bo looked around the room. “I don’t know as I like all this company. Everybody’s got to go. I can’t concentrate.”

  “I’m not going,” said Waldo. “You three wait in the hall. There’ll be more work for you after a bit.”

  “Well, don’t beat me any more,” whined Raulf. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Quit sniveling!” Bo snarled. “Fire up that camera. This isn’t quite like I planned, but if it’s not good, we’ll do a retake.”

  “Wait!” said Alice. “One thing more. Watch my hands. Are you watching?” She stood erect, and performed a set of apparently purposeless motions. She halted, held her palms toward Bo and Waldo, and each held a small mechanism. From the object in her right hand burst a gush of dazzling light, pulsating ten times per second; the mechanism in the left hand vented an almost solid tooth-chattering mass of sound: a throbbing scream in phase with the light: erreek erreek erreek! Waldo and Bo flinched and sagged back, their brain circuits overloaded and rendered numb. The gun dropped from Waldo’s hand. Prepared for the event, Alice was less affected. She placed the beacon on the table, picked up the gun. Waldo, Bo and Raulf staggered and lurched, their brain-waves now surging at dis-orientation frequency.

  Alice, her face taut with concentration, left the room. In the hall she sidled past Waldo’s three hireling thugs, who stood indecisively, and so gained the street. From a nearby public telephone, she called the police, who dropped down from the sky two minutes later. Alice explained the circumstances; the police in short order brought forth a set of sullen captives.

  Alice watched as they were loaded into the conveyance. “Goodbye, Waldo. Goodbye, Bo. At least you evaded your beating. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you, but I can’t extend too much sympathy, because you’ve both been rascals.”

  Waldo asked sourly, “Do you make as much trouble as this wherever you go?”

  Alice decided that the question had been asked for rhetorical effect and required no exact or accurate reply; she merely waved and watched as Waldo, Bo, Raulf Dido and the three thugs were wafted aloft and away.

  Alice arrived back at the aerie halfway through the afternoon, to find that her father had completed his business. “I was hoping you’d get back early,” said Merwyn Tynnott, “so that we could leave tonight. Did you have a good day?”

  “It’s been interesting,” said Alice. “The teaching processes are spectacular and effective, but I wonder if by presenting events so categorically they might not stifle the students’ imaginations?”

  “Possible. Hard to say.”

  “Their point of view is urbanite, naturally. Still, the events speak for themselves, and I suspect that the student of history falls into urbanite doctrine through social pressure.”

  “Very likely so. Social pressure is stronger than logic.”

  “I had lunch at the Blue Lamp Tavern, a spooky old place.”

  “Yes. I know it well. It’s a back-eddy of ancient times, and also something of an underworld hangout. Dozens of spacemen have disappeared from the Blue Lamp.”

  “I had an adventure there myself; in fact, Waldo Walberg misbehaved rather badly and I believe he’s now been taken away for penal processing.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Merwyn Tynnott. “He’ll miss Cloud-haven, especially if he’s sent out to the starlands.”

  “It’s a pity about poor Waldo, and Bodred as well. Bodred is the workman who flung his wrench upon my foot. You were quite right about his motives. I’m a trifle disillusioned, although I know I shouldn’t be.”

  Merwyn Tynnott hugged his daughter and kissed the top of her head. “Don’t worry another instant. We’re off and away from Hant, and you never need come back.”

  “It’s a strange wicked place,” said Alice, “though I rather enjoyed Jillyville.”

  “Jillyville is always amusing.”

  They went into the dome; Commander Tynnott touched the controls, and the aerie drifted away to the southeast.

  <>

  * * * *

  A SEA OF FACES

  by Robert Silverberg

  As the behavioral sciences progress, we’re approaching the great adventure, the literal exploration of the human psyche. Someday soon a psychiatrist may be able to penetrate directly into the mind of his patient, and understand clearly what problems lie there. Robert Silverberg, in a narrative rich in archetypal insights, suggests that such an ability might have its drawbacks.

  * * * *

  Are not such floating fragments on the sea of the

  unconscious called Freudian ships?

  —Josephine Saxton

  FALLING.

  It’s very much like dying, I suppose. That awareness of infinite descent, that knowledge of the total absence of support. It’s all sky up here. Down below is neither land nor sea, only color without form, so distant that I can’t even put a name to the color. The cosmos is torn open, and I plummet headlong, arms and legs pinwheeling wildly, the gray stuff in my skull centrifuging toward my ears. I’m dropping like Lucifer. From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day; and with the setting sun Dropp’d from the Zenith, like a falling star. That’s Milton. Even now my old liberal-arts education stands me in good stead. And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, Never to hope again. That’s Shakespeare. It’s all part of the same thing. All of English literature was written by a single man, whose sly persuasive voice ticks in my dizzy head as I drop. God grant me a soft landing.

  * * * *

  “She looks a little like you,” I told Irene. “At least, it seemed that way for one quick moment, when she turned toward the window in my office and the sunlight caught the planes of her face. Of course, it’s the most superficial resemblance only, a matter of bone structure, the placement of the eyes, the cut of the hair. But your expressions, your inner selves externally represented, are altogether dissimilar. You radiate unbounded good health and vitality, Irene, and she slips so easily into the classic schizoid faces, the eyes alternately dreamy and darting, the forehead pale, flecked with sweat. She’s very troubled.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Lowry. April Lowry.”

  “A beautiful name. April. Young?”

  “About twenty-three.”

  “How sad, Richard. Schizoid, you said?”

  “She retreats into nowhere without provocation. Lord knows what triggers it. When it happens she can go six or eight months without saying a word. The last attack was a year ago. These days she’s feeling much better; she’s willing to talk about herself a bit. She says it’s as though there’s a zone of weakness in the
walls of her mind, an opening, a trap door, a funnel, something like that, and from time to time her soul is irresistibly drawn toward it and goes pouring through and disappears into God knows what, and there’s nothing left of her but a shell. And eventually she comes back through the same passage. She’s convinced that one of these times she won’t come back.”

  “Is there some way to help her?” Irene asked. “What will you try? Drugs? Hypnosis? Shock? Sensory deprivation?”

  “They’ve all been tried.”

  “What then, Richard? What will you do?”

  * * * *

  Suppose there is a way. Let’s pretend there is a way. Is that an acceptable hypothesis? Let’s pretend. Let’s just pretend, and see what happens.

  * * * *

  The vast ocean below me occupies the entirety of my field of vision. Its surface is convex, belly-up in the middle and curving vertiginously away from me at the periphery; the slope is so extreme that I wonder why the water doesn’t all run off toward the edges and drown the horizon. Not far beneath that shimmering swollen surface, a gigantic pattern of crosshatchings and countertextures is visible, like an immense mural floating lightly submerged in the water. For a moment, as I plunge, the pattern resolves itself and becomes coherent: I see the face of Irene, a calm pale mask, the steady blue eyes focused lovingly on me. She fills the ocean. Her semblance covers an area greater than any continental mass. Firm chin, strong full lips, delicate tapering nose. She emanates a serene aura of inner peace that buoys me like an invisible net: I am falling easily now, pleasantly, arms outspread, face down, my entire body relaxed. How beautiful she is! I continue to descend and the pattern shatters; the sea is abruptly full of metallic shards and splinters, flashing bright gold through the dark blue-green; then, when I am perhaps a thousand meters lower, the pattern suddenly reorganizes itself. A colossal face, again. I welcome Irene’s return, but no, the face is the face of April, my silent sorrowful one. A haunted face, a face full of shadows: dark terrified eyes, flickering nostrils, sunken cheeks. A bit of one incisor is visible over the thin lower lip. O my poor sweet Taciturna. Needles of reflected sunlight glitter in her outspread waterborne hair. April’s manifestation supplants serenity with turbulence; again I plummet out of control, again I am in the cosmic centrifuge, my breath is torn from me and a dread chill rushes past my tumbling body. Desperately I fight for poise and balance. I attain it, finally, and look down. The pattern has again broken; where April had been, I see only parallel bands of amber light, distorted by choppy refractions. Tiny white dots —islands, I suppose—now are evident in the glossy sea.

  What a strange resemblance there is, at times, between April and Irene!

  How confusing for me to confuse them. How dangerous for me.

  * * * *

  —It’s the riskiest kind of therapy you could have chosen, Dr. Bjornstrand.

  —Risky for me, or risky for her?

  —Risky both for you and for your patient, I’d say.

  —So what else is new?

  —You asked me for an impartial evaluation, Dr. Bjornstrand. If you don’t care to accept my opinion—

  —I value your opinion highly, Erik.

  —But you’re going to go through with the therapy as presently planned?

  —Of course I am.

  * * * *

  This is the moment of splashdown.

  I hit the water perfectly and go slicing through the sea’s shining surface with surgical precision, knifing fifty meters deep, eighty, a hundred, cutting smoothly through the oceanic epithelium and the sturdy musculature beneath. Very well done, Dr. Bjornstrand. High marks for form.

  Perhaps this is deep enough.

  I pivot, kick, turn upward, clutch at the brightness above me. I may have overextended myself, I realize. My lungs are on fire and the sky, so recently my home, seems terribly far away. But with vigorous strokes I pull myself up and come popping into the air like a stubborn cork.

  I float idly a moment, catching my breath. Then I look around. The ferocious eye of the sun regards me from a late-morning height. The sea is warm and gentle, undulating seductively. There is an island only a few hundred meters away: an inviting beach of bright sand, a row of slender palms farther back. I swim toward it. As I near the shore, the bottomless dark depths give way to a sandy outlying sunken shelf, and the hue of the sea changes from deep blue to light green. Yet it is taking longer to reach land than I had expected. Perhaps my estimate of the distance was overly optimistic; for all my efforts, the island seems to be getting no closer. At moments it actually appears to be retreating from me. My arms grow heavy. My kick becomes sluggish. I am panting, wheezing, sputtering; something throbs behind my forehead. Suddenly, though, I see sun-streaked sand just below me. My feet touch bottom. I wade wearily ashore and fall to my knees on the margin of the beach.

  * * * *

  —Can I call you April, Miss Lowry?

  —Whatever.

  —I don’t think that that’s a very threatening level of therapist-patient intimacy, do you?

  —Not really.

  —Do you always shrug every time you answer a question?

  —I didn’t know I did.

  —You shrug. You also studiously avoid any show of facial expression. You try to be very unreadable, April.

  —Maybe I feel safer that way.

  —But who’s the enemy?

  —You’d know more about that than I would, doctor.

  —Do you actually think so? I’m all the way over here. You’re right there inside your own head. You’ll know more than I ever will about you.

  —You could always come inside my head if you wanted to.

  —Wouldn’t that frighten you?

  —It would kill me.

  —I wonder, April. You’re much stronger than you think you are. You’re also very beautiful, April. I know, it’s beside the point But you are.

  * * * *

  It’s just a small island. I can tell that by the way the shoreline curves rapidly away from me. I lie sprawled near the water’s edge, face down, exhausted, fingers digging tensely into the warm moist sand. The sun is strong; I feel waves of heat going thratala thratata on my bare back. I wear only a ragged pair of faded blue jeans, very tight, cut off choppily at the knee. My belt is waterlogged and salt-cracked, as though I had been adrift for days before making landfall. Perhaps I was. It’s hard to maintain a reliable sense of time in this place.

  I should get up. I should explore.

  Yes. Getting up, now. A little dizzy, eh? Yes. But I walk steadily up the gentle slope of the beach. Fifty meters inland, the sand shades into sandy soil, loose, shallow; rounded white coral boulders poke through from below. Thirsty soil. Nevertheless, how lush everything is here. A wall of tangled vines and creepers. Long glossy tropical green leaves, smooth-edged, big-veined. The corrugated trunks of the palms. The soft sound of the surf, fwissh, fwissh, underlying all other textures. How blue the sea. How green the sky. Fwissh.

  Is that the image of a face in the sky?

  A woman’s face, yes. Irene? April? The features are indistinct. But I definitely see it, yes, hovering a few hundred meters above the water as if projected from the sun-streaked sheet that is the skin of the ocean: a glow, a radiance, having the form of a delicate face—nostrils, lips, brows, cheeks, certainly a face, and not just one, either, for in the intensity of my stare I cause it to split and then to split again, so that a row of them hangs in the air, ten faces, a hundred, a thousand faces, faces all about me, a sea of faces. They seem quite grave. Smile! On command, the faces smile. Much better. The air itself is brighter for that smile. The faces merge, blur, sharpen, blur again, overlap in part, dance, shimmer, melt, flow. Illusions born of the heat. Daughters of the sun. Sweet mirages. I look past them, higher, into the clear reaches of the cloudless heavens.

  Hawks!

  Hawks here? Shouldn’t I be seeing gulls? The birds whirl and swoop, dark figures against the blinding sky, wings outspread, feathers like finger
s. I see their fierce hooked beaks. They snap great beetles from the steaming air and soar away, digesting. Then there are no birds, only the faces, still smiling. I turn my back on them and slowly move off through the underbrush to see what sort of place the sea has given me.

  So long as I stay near the shore, I have no difficulty in walking; cutting through the densely vegetated interior might be a different matter. I sidle off to the left, following the nibbled line of beach. Before I have walked a hundred paces I have made a new discovery: the island is adrift.

  Glancing seaward, I notice that on the horizon there lies a dark shore rimmed by black triangular mountains, one or two days’ sail distant. Minutes ago I saw only open sea in that direction. Maybe the mountains have just this moment sprouted, but more likely the island, spinning slowly in the currents, has only now turned to reveal them. That must be the answer. I stand quite still for a long while and it seems to me that I behold those mountains now from one angle, now from a slightly different one. How else to explain such effects of parallax? The island freely drifts. It moves, and I move with it, upon the breast of the changeless unbounded sea.