Universe 2 - [Anthology] Read online

  The general hauled the corporal into the copter.

  “Now, boy, we don’t want to get into that little trouble down there. That’s a derivative. You always had a talent for the genuine. We got to find the Center of the Trouble. Look at me, boy, even if you don’t understand me. Let’s go where we can get our trouble wholesale. You’ll like that. Nose it out! Point!”

  The corporal didn’t understand the words but he did have the best nose in the outfit for finding the middle of a trouble. He pointed, and the general pointed the copter. They came down near an isolated laboratory on the edge of town. They got out. The corporal followed his nose, and the general followed the corporal.

  * * * *

  “I am calm again, young man,” said Professor Hegeman. “Look. It is simple. We have always had telepathy. It is so constant with us that we do not recognize it. But we have to bring it into general recognition before we can bring it to a more significant stage. Everybody is telepathic. Everybody always has been. That is the way that we communicate with each other. Oh, the words and the adjuncts help a little. Bott-Grabman believes as much as fifty percent, I believe much less. We will have a closer idea of it after tonight’s experiment.

  “With our inhibitors, we have set up a special condition in Summit City tonight. For a while, and under this special condition, nobody will be telepathic. They should be having difficulty in communicating with each other right now. Perhaps they are feeling a certain frustration about it all.”

  * * * *

  The corporal broke into the room and the general followed him. The general sized it all up immediately with a bitter eye.

  “Turn that damn thing off!” he ordered. “It’s bugging the people.”

  They turned it off. The experiment was over with. The people in the city could understand each other again—as well as they ever could.

  They began to put out the fires and to bind up their wounds. The cases of smallpox reverted to nervous hives, und people made the best of the curious situation.

  But the dead did not come back to life.

  * * * *

  Professor Hegeman was blue in the face. Professor Bott-Grabman had taken on rather an ashen hue. They had just been sentenced to death for crimes against humanity and they were disturbed by the sentence.

  “But the experiment was a success,” Bott-Grabman protested again and again. “It was an excessive success. Even we did not realize how complete was the popular dependence on telepathy. Otherwise we would have used a milder inhibitor. I request that you release us so we can get on with our work. A wide field of experimentation will be opened up as soon as the recognition of the thing seeps down to the doltish public. We have great things ahead of us.”

  “True,” said the judge. “The two of you will soon embark on what a mordant humorist once called The Greatest Journey of Them All—Death. You are sentenced for the four hundred deaths you have caused and for the thousands of cases of induced insanity.”

  “But it worked! We are vindicated! Everybody is a telepath!” Hegeman cried. “Surely you understand it now.”

  “Were I indeed a telepath, perhaps I could see into the twisted minds of you two and comprehend somehow your inhumanity,” said the judge. “Being only a man, I cannot do it. I only pray that your evil and your secret method of destruction will die with you.

  “Take them away!”

  <>

  * * * *

  * * * *

  William Rotsler has been writing science fiction for only the past year, but he has several stories in print already and more are on the way. Rotsler has been an artist all his life—painter, sculptor, cartoonist, photographer—and in matters of love he’s a self-confessed romantic. His strong feelings about art and love enrich and charge with life this story of people involved in a new art-form of tomorrow. After reading it I could hardly wait for somebody to invent the first sensatron unit.

  PATRON OF THE ARTS

  by William Rotsler

  She stares out at you from her cube of near blackness, calm, quiet, breathing easily, just looking at you. She is naked to the hips where a jeweled girdle encircles her, and she sits regally on a pile of luxurious pillows. Her long white hair cascades down over her apricot-colored shoulders and is made to shimmer slightly by some hidden light.

  As you come closer to the life-size sensatron the vibrations get to you. The startling reality of the three-dimensional image cannot be overstated, for Michael Cilento’s portrait of one of history’s greatest society courtesans is a great work of art.

  As you view the cube the image of Diana Snowdragon stops being quite so calm and in some subtle way becomes predatory, commanding, compelling. She is naked, not nude. The drifting bellsounds of melora musicians are heard . . . almost. The power of her unique personality is overwhelming, as it is in person, but in this artist’s interpretation there are many other facets exposed.

  Diana’s sensatron cube portrait is universally hailed as a masterpiece. The subject was delighted.

  The artist was disgusted and told me that the ego of the subject prevented her from seeing the reality he had constructed.

  But it was this cube that gave Michael Benton Cilento the fame he wanted, needed, and hated. This was his first major sensatron cube and cubes were just then beginning to be used by artists, instead of scientists. It was becoming “fashionable” to be working in sensatrons then and everywhere there was shop talk of electron brushes, cilli nets and blankers.

  Mike’s portrait of society’s most infamous—and richest-wanton made him famous overnight. Even the repro cubes you can buy today are impressive, but the original, with its original subtle circuits and focused broadcasts, is staggering.

  A collector in Rome brought Cilento to my attention and when I had seen the Snowdragon cube I managed an introduction. We met at Santini’s villa in Ostia and like most young artists he had heard of me.

  We met by a pool and his first words were, “You sponsored Wiesenthal for years, didn’t you?” I nodded, wary now, for with every artist you help there are ten who demand it.

  “His Montezuma opera was trash.”

  I smiled. “It was well received.”

  “He did not understand that Aztec anymore than he understood Cortez.” He looked at me with a challenge.

  “I agree, but by the time I heard it, it was too late.”

  He relaxed and kicked his foot in the water and squinted at two nearly nude daughters of a lunar mineral baron that were walking by. He seemed to have made his point and had nothing more to say.

  Cilento intrigued me. In the course of a number of years of “discovering” artists I had met all types, from the shy ones who hide to the burly ones who demand my patronage. And I had met the kind who seem indifferent to me, as Cilento seemed to be. But many others had acted that way and I had learned to disregard everything but finished work and the potential for work.

  “Your Snowdragon cube was superb,” I said.

  He nodded and squinted in another direction. “Yeah,” he said. Then as an afterthought he added, “Thank you.” We spoke for a moment of the cube and he told me what he thought of its subject.

  “But it made you famous,” I said.

  He squinted at me and after a moment he said, “Is that what art is about?”

  I laughed. “Fame is very useful. It opens doors. It makes things possible. It makes it easier to be even more famous.”

  “It gets you laid,” Cilento said with a smile.

  “It can get you killed, too,” I added.

  “Its a tool, Mr. Thorne, just like an integrated circuit or a knowledge of molecular electronics. But it can give you freedom. I want that freedom; every artist needs it.”

  “That’s why you picked Diana?”

  He grinned and nodded. “Besides, that female was a great challenge.”

  “I imagine so,” I said and laughed, thinking of Diana at seventeen, beautiful and predatory, clawing her way up the monolithic walls of society.
/>   We had a drink together, then shared a psychedelic in the ruins of a temple of Vesta, and became Mike and Brian to each other. We sat on old stones and leaned against the stub of a crumbling column and looked down at the lights of Santini’s villa.

  “An artist needs freedom,” Mike said, “more than he needs paint or electricity or cube diagrams or stone. Or food. You can always get the materials, but the freedom to use them is precious. There is only so much time.”

  “What about money? That’s freedom, too,” I said.

  “Sometimes. You can have money and no freedom, though. But usually fame brings money.” I nodded, thinking that in my case it was the other way around.

  We looked out at the light of a half-moon on the Tyrrhenian Sea and had our thoughts. I thought of Madelon.

  “There’s someone I’d like you to do,” I said. “A woman. A very special woman.”

  “Not right now,” he said. “Perhaps later. I have several commissions that I want to do.”

  “Keep me in mind when you have time. She’s a very unusual woman.”

  He glanced at me and tossed a pebble down the hill. “I’m sure she is,” he said.

  “You like to do women, don’t you?” I asked.

  He smiled in the moonlight and said, “You figured that out from one cube?”

  “No. I bought the three small ones you did before.”

  He looked at me sharply. “How did you know they even existed? I hadn’t told anyone.”

  “Something as good as the Snowdragon cube couldn’t come out of nowhere. There had to be something earlier. I hunted down the owners and bought them.”

  “The old lady is my grandmother,” he said. “I’m a little sorry I sold it, but I needed money.” I made a mental note to have it sent back to him.

  “Yes, I like doing women,” he said softly, leaning back against the pale column. “Artists have always liked doing women. To ... to capture that elusive shadow of a flicker of a glimpse of a moment ... in paint, in stone, in clay, or in wood, or on film ... or with molecular constructs.”

  “Rubens saw them plump and gay,” I said. “Lautrec saw them depraved and real.”

  “To Da Vinci they were mysterious,” he said. “Matisse saw them idle and voluptuous. Michelangelo hardly saw them at all. Picasso saw them in endless mad variety.”

  “Gauguin . . . sensuality,” I commented. “Henry Moore saw them as abstracts, a starting point for form. Van Gogh’s women reflected his own mad genius brain.”

  “Cezanne saw them as placid cows,” Mike laughed. “Fellini saw them as multifaceted creatures that were part angel, part beast. In the photographs of Andre de Dienes the women are realistic fantasies, erotic and strange.”

  “Tennessee Williams saw them as insane cannibals, fascinatingly repulsive. Sternberg’s women were unreal, harsh, dramatic,” I said. “Clayton’s females were predatory fiends.”

  “Jason sees them as angels, slightly confused,” Mike said, delighted with the little game. “Marmon saw them as motherly monsters.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  He stopped and the smile faded. After a long moment he answered. “As illusions, I suppose.”

  He rolled a fragment of stone from the time of Caesar in his fingers and spoke softly, almost to himself.

  “They . . . aren’t quite real, somehow. The critics say I created a masterpiece of erotic realism, a milestone in figurative art. But . . . they’re . . . wisps. They’re incredibly real for only an instant . . . fantastically shadowy another. Women are never the same from moment to moment. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate me.”

  I didn’t see Mike for some time after that, though we kept in touch. He did a portrait of Princess Helga of the Netherlands, quite modestly clad, the cube filled with its famous dozen golden sculptures and the vibrations of love and peace.

  Anything Mike chose to do was quickly bought and commissions came in from individuals, from companies, even from movements. What he did was a simple nude of his mistress of the moment that was erotic in pose but powerfully pornographic in vibrations. For his use of alpha, beta and gamma wave projectors, as well as integrated sonics, he was the subject of an entire issue of Modern Electronics. The young Shah of Iran bought the cube to install in his long-abuilding Gardens of Babylon.

  For the monks at Redplanet Base on Mars Mike did a large cube of Christ, and it quickly became a tourist attraction. Although he did it for nothing the monks insisted he take a small percentage of the repro cube sales.

  I met Mike again, at the opening of his “Solar System” series in the Grand Museum in Athens. The ten cubes hung from the ceiling, each with its non-literal interpretation of the sun and planets, from the powerball of Sol to the hard, shiny ballbearing of Pluto.

  Mike seemed caged, a tiger in a trap, but very happy to see me. He was a volunteer kidnapee as I spirited him away to my apartment in the old part of town.

  He sighed as we entered, tossed his jacket into a Lifestyle chair and strolled out onto the balcony. I picked up two glasses and a bottle of Cretan wine and joined him.

  He sighed again, sank into the chair, and sipped the wine. I chuckled and said, “Fame getting too much for you?”

  He grunted at me. “Why do they always want the artist at openings? The art speaks for itself.”

  “Public relations. To touch the hem of creativity. Maybe some of it will rub off on them.” He grunted again, and we lapsed into comfortable silence, looking out at the Parthenon, high up and night-lit.

  At last he spoke. “Being an artist is all I ever wanted to be, like kids growing up to be astronauts or ball players. It’s an honor to be able to do it, whatever it is. I’ve painted and I’ve sculpted. I’ve done light mosaics and glow dot patterns. I even tried air music for awhile. None of them really seemed to be it. But I think molecular constructs are the closest.”

  “Because of the extreme realism?”

  “That’s part of it. Abstraction, realism, expressionism— they’re just labels. What matters is what is, the thoughts and emotions that you transmit. The sensatron units are fairly good tools. You can work almost directly on the emotions. When GE gets the new ones ready I think it will be possible to get even more subtle shadings with the alpha waves. And, of course, with more units you can get more complex.”

  We lapsed into silence. The ancient city murmured at us. I thought about Madelon.

  “I still want you to do that portrait of someone very close to me,” I reminded him.

  “Soon. I want to do a cube on a girl I know first. But I must find a new place to work. They bother me there, now that they found where I was.”

  I mentioned my villa on Sikinos, in the Aegean, and Mike seemed interested, so I offered it to him. “There’s an ancient grain storage there you could use as a studio. They have a controlled plasma fusion plant so there would be as much power as you need. There’s a house, just the couple that takes care of it, and a very small village nearby. I’d be honored if you’d use it.”

  He accepted the offer graciously and I talked of Sikinos and its history for awhile.

  “The very old civilizations interest me the most,” Mike said. “Babylon, Assyria, Sumer, Egypt, the valley of the Euphrates. Crete seems like a newcomer to me. Everything was new then. There was everything to invent, to see, to believe. The gods were not parted into Christianity and all the others then. There was a god, a belief for everyone, big and small. It was not God and the Anti-gods. Life was simpler then.”

  “Also more desperate,” I said. “Despotic kings. Disease. Ignorance. Superstition. There was everything to invent, all right, because nothing much had been invented.”

  “You’re confusing technology with progress. They had clean air, new lands, freshness. The world wasn’t used up then.”

  “You’re a pioneer, Mike,” I said. “You’re working in a totally new medium.”

  He laughed and took a gulp of wine. “Not really. All art began as science and all science began as art. The engin
eers were using the sensatrons before the artists. Before that there were a dozen lines of thought and invention that crossed at one point to become sensatrons. The sensatrons just happen to be a better medium to say certain things. To say other things a pen drawing or a poem or a motion picture might be best. Or even not to say it at all.”

  I laughed and said, “The artist doesn’t see things, he sees himself.”

  Mike smiled and stared for a long time at the columned structure on the hill. “Yes, he certainly does,” he said softly.

  “Is that why you do women so well?” I asked. “Do you see in them what you want to see, those facets of ‘you’ that interest you?”