Dancers at the End of Time (69 page)

They had not spoken since they had left; neither, it seemed, was capable of beginning a conversation; neither could come to terms with feelings which were, to Jherek at least, completely unfamiliar. He thought that for all her gaudy new finery he had never known her so despairing. She hinted at this despair, yet denied it when questioned. Used to paradox, believing it the stuff of existence, he found this particular paradox decidedly unwelcome.

"You will look for Mr. Underwood?" he asked, as they approached the city.

"And you?"

He knew foreboding. He wished to volunteer to accompany her, but was overwhelmed by unusual and probably unnecessary tact.

"Oh, I'll seek the haunts of my boyhood."

"Isn't that Brannart?"

"Where?" He peered.

She was pointing into a tangle of ancient, rotten machinery. "I thought in there. But he has gone. I even glimpsed one of those Lat, too."

"What would Brannart want with the Lat?"

"Nothing, of course."

They had flown past, but though he looked back, he saw no sign either of Brannart Morphail or the Lat. "It would explain why he did not attend the party."

"I assumed that was pique, only."

"He could never resist an opportunity in the past to air his portentous opinions," said Jherek. "I am of the belief that he still works to thwart our Lord Jagged, but that he cannot be successful. The time-traveller was explaining to me, as I recall, why Brannart's methods fail."

"So Brannart is out of favour," said she. "He did much to help you at first." She chided him.

"By sending you back to Bromley? He forgets, when he berates us for our meddling with Time, that a great deal of what happened was because of his connivance with My Lady Charlotina. Waste no sympathy on Brannart, Amelia."

"Sympathy? Oh, I have little of that now." She had returned to her frigid, sardonic manner.

This fresh ambiguity caused further retreat into his own thoughts. He had surprised himself with his criticisms, having half a notion that he did not really intend to attack Brannart Morphail at all. He was inexpert in this business of accusation and self-immolation: a novice in the expression of emotional pain, whereas she, it now seemed, was a veteran. He floundered, he who had known only extrovert joy, innocent love; he floundered in a swamp which she in her ambivalence created for them both. Perhaps it would have been better if she had never announced her love and retained her stern reliance upon Bromley and its mores, left him to play the gallant, the suitor, with all the extravagance of his world. Were his accusations really directed at her, or even at himself? And did she not actually rack her own psyche, all aggression turned upon herself and only incidentally upon him, so that he could not react as one who is threatened, must thresh about for an object, another person, upon whom to vent his building wrath, as a beaten dog snaps at a neutral hand, unable to contemplate the possibility that it is its master's victim?

All this was too much for Jherek Carnelian. He sought relief in the outer world; they flew across a lake whose surface was a rainbow swirl, bubbling and misty, then across a field of lapis lazuli dotted with carved stone columns, the remnants of some peculiar two hundred thousandth-century technology. He saw, ahead, the mile-wide pit where not long since they had awaited the end of the world. He made the locomotive circle and land in the middle of a group of ruins wreathed in bright orange fire, each flame an almost familiar shape. He helped her from the footplate and they stood in frozen attitudes for a second before he looked deliberately into her kohl-circled eyes to see if she guessed his thoughts, for he had no words — to express them; the vocabulary of the End of Time was rich only in hyperbole. He reflected then that it had been his original impulse to expand his own vocabulary, and consequently his experience, that had led him to this present pass. He smiled.

"Something amuses you?" she said.

"Ah, no, Amelia. It is only that I cannot say what I wish to say —"

"Do not he constrained by good manners. You are disappointed in me. You love me no longer."

"You wish me to say so?"

"It is true, is it not? You have found me out for what I am."

"Oh, Amelia, I love you still. But to see you in such misery — it makes me dumb. The Amelia I now see is not what you are!"

"I am learning to enjoy the pleasures of the End of Time. You must allow me an apprenticeship."

"You do not enjoy them. You use them to destroy yourself."

"To destroy my old-fashioned notions. Not myself."

Perhaps those notions are essential. Perhaps they 
are
 the Amelia Underwood I love, or at least part of her…" He subsided; words again failed him.

"I think you are mistaken." Did she deliberately put this distance between them? Was it possible that she regretted her declaration of love, felt bound by it?

"You love me, still…?"

She laughed. "All love all at the End of Time."

With an air of resolve, she broke the ensuing silence. "Well, I will look for Harold."

He pointed out a yellow-brown metal pathway. "That will lead you to the place where you left him."

"Thank you." She set off. The dress and the boots gave her a hobbling motion; her normal grace was almost entirely gone. His heart went to her, but his throat remained incapable of speech, his body incapable of movement. She turned a corner, where a tall machine, its casing damaged to expose complicated circuits, whispered vague promises to her as she passed but became inaudible, a hopeless whore, quickly rebuffed by her lack of interest.

For a moment Jherek's attention was diverted by the sight of three little egg-shaped robots on caterpillar tracks trundling across a nearby area of rubble deep in a conversation held in a polysyllabic, utterly incomprehensible language; he looked back to the road. She was gone.

He was alone in the city, but the solitude was no longer palatable. He wanted to pursue her, to demand her own analysis of her mood, but perhaps she was as incapable of expressing herself as was he.

Did Bromley supply a means of interpreting emotion as readily as it supplied standards of social conduct?

He began to suspect that neither Amelia's society nor his, for all their differences, concerned themselves with anything but the surface of things. Now that he was in the city it might be that he could find some still functioning memory bank capable of recalling the wisdom of one of those eras, like the Fifth Confucian or the Zen Commonwealth, which had placed rather exaggerated emphasis on self-knowledge and its expression. Even the strange, neurotic refinements of that other period with which he had a slight familiarity, the Saint-Claude Dictatorship (under which every citizen had been enjoined to supply three distinctly different explanations as to their psychological motives for taking even the most minor decisions), might afford him a clue to Amelia's behaviour and his own reactions. It occurred to him that she might be acting so strangely because, in some simple way, he was failing to console her. He began to walk through the ruins, in the opposite direction to the one she had taken, trying to recall something of Dawn Age society. Could it be that he was supposed to kill Mr. Underwood? It would be easy enough to do. And would she permit her husband's resurrection? Should he, Jherek, change his appearance, to resemble Harold Underwood as much as possible? Had she rejected his suggestion that he change his name to hers because it was not enough? He paused to lean against a carved jade post whose tip was lost in chemical mist high above his head. He seemed to remember reading of some ritual formalizing the giving of oneself into another's power. Did she pine because he did not perform it? Or did the reverse apply? Did kneeling have something to do with it, and if so who knelt to whom?

"Om," said the jade post.

"Eh?" said Jherek, startled.

"Om," intoned the post. "Om."

"Did you detect my thoughts, post?"

"I am merely an aid to meditation, brother. I do not interpret."

"It is interpretation I need. If you could direct me…"

"Everything is as everything else," the post told him. Everything is nothing and nothing is everything.

The mind of man is the universe and the universe is the mind of man. We are all characters in God's dreams. We are all God."

"Easily said, post."

"Because a thing is easy does not mean that it is difficult. Because a thing is difficult does not mean that it is easy."

"Is that not a tautology?"

"The universe is one vast tautology, brother, yet no one thing is the same as another."

"You are not very helpful. I sought information."

"There is no such thing as information. There is only knowledge."

"Doubtless," said Jherek doubtfully. He bade good day to the post and retreated. The post, like so many of the city's artefacts, seemed to lack a sense of humour, though probably, if taxed, it would — as others here did — claim a "cosmic sense of humour" (this involved making obvious ironies about things commonly observed by the simplest intelligence).

In the respect of ordinary, light conversation, machines, including the most sophisticated, were notoriously bad company; more literal-minded even than someone like Li Pao. This thought led him, as he walked on, to ponder the difference between men and machines. There had once been very great differences, but these days there were few, in superficial terms. What were the things which distinguished a self-perpetuating machine, capable of almost any sort of invention, from a self-created human being, equally capable? There 
were
 differences — perhaps emotional. Could it not be true that the less emotion the entity possessed the poorer its sense of humour — or the more emotion it repressed the weaker its capacity for original irony?

These ideas were scarcely leading him in the direction he wished to go, but he was beginning to give up hope of finding any solution to his dilemma in the city, and at least he now felt he understood the jade post better.

A chromium tree giggled at him as he entered a paved plaza. He had been here several times as a boy. He had a great deal of affection for the giggling tree.

"Good afternoon," he said.

The tree giggled as it had giggled without fail for at least a million years, whenever addressed or approached. Its function seemed merely to amuse. Jherek smiled, in spite of the heaviness of his thoughts.

"A lovely day."

The tree giggled, its chromium branches gently clashing.

"Too shy to speak, as usual?"

"Tee hee hee."

The tree's charm was very hard to explain, but it was unquestionable.

"I believe myself, old friend, to be 'unhappy' — or worse!"

"Hee hee hee." The tree seemed helpless with mirth. Jherek began to laugh, too. Laughing, he left the plaza, feeling considerably more relaxed.

He had wandered close to the tangle of metal where, from above, Amelia had thought she had seen Brannart Morphail. Curiosity led him on, for there were, indeed, lights moving behind the mass of tangled girders, struts, hawsers, cables and wires, though they were probably not of human origin. He approached closer, but cautiously. He peered, thinking he saw figures. And then, as a light flared, he recognized the unmistakable shape of Brannart Morphail's quaint body, an outline only, for the light halfblinded him. He recognized the scientist's voice, but it was not speaking its usual tongue. As he listened, it dawned on Jherek that Brannart Morphail was, however, using a language familiar to him.

"Gerfish lortooda, mibix?" said the scientist to someone beyond the pool of light. "Derbi kroofrot!"

Another voice answered and it was equally unmistakable as belonging to Captain Mubbers. "Hrunt, arragak fluzi, grodsink Morphail."

Jherek regretted that he no longer habitually carried his translation pills with him, for he was curious to know why Brannart should be conspiring with the Lat, for conspiring he must be — there was a considerable air of secrecy to the whole business. He resolved to mention his discovery to Lord Jagged as soon as possible. He considered attempting to see more of what was going on but decided not to risk revealing his presence; instead he turned and made for the cover of a nearby dome, its roof cracked and gaping like the shell of an egg.

Within the dome he was delighted to find brilliantly coloured pictures, all as fresh as the day they were made, and telling some kind of story, though the voices accompanying them were distorted. He watched the ancient programme through until it began again. It described a method of manufacturing machines of the same sort as the one on which Jherek watched the pictures, and there were fragments, presumably demonstrating other programmes, of scenes showing a variety of events — in one a young woman in a kind of luminous net made love underwater to a great fish of some description, in another two men set fire to themselves and ran through what was probably the airlock of a spaceship, making the spaceship explode, and in another a large number of people wearing rococo metal and plastic struggled in free fall for the possession of a small tube which, when one of them managed to take hold of it, was hurled towards one of several circular objects on the wall of the building in which they floated. If the tube struck a particular point on the circular object there would be great exultation from about half the people and much despondency displayed by the other half, but Jherek was particularly interested in the fragment which seemed to be demonstrating how a man and a woman might copulate, also in free fall. He found the ingenuity involved extremely touching and left the dome in a rather more positive and hopeful spirit than when he had entered it.

It was in this mood that he determined to seek out Amelia and try to explain his discomfort with her own behaviour and his. He sought for the way he had come, but was already lost, though he knew the city well; but he had an idea of the general direction and he began to cross a crunching expanse of sweet-smelling green and red crystals, almost immediately catching sight of a landmark ahead of him — a curving, half-melted piece of statuary suspended, without visible support, above a mechanical figure which stretched imploring arms to it, then scooped little golden discs in its hands and flung them into the air, repeating these motions over and over again, as they had been repeated ever since Jherek could remember. He passed the figure and entered an alley poorly illuminated with garish amber and cerise; from apertures on both sides of the alley little metal snouts emerged, little machine-eyes peered inquisitively at him, little silver whiskers twitched. He had never known the function of these platinum rodents, though he guessed that they were information-gatherers of some kind for the machines housed in the great smooth radiation-splashed walls of the alley. Two or three illusions, only half tangible, appeared and vanished ahead of him — a thin man, eight feet tall, blind and warlike; a dog in a great bottle on wheels, a yellow-haired porcine alien in buff-coloured clothing — as he hurried on.