Virtual Unrealities, The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (42 page)

“I can’t,” Krane said. “The wind will blow the cinders away.”

“Then burn it,” Hallmyer ordered with dream-logic.

It seemed that they helped him thrust the dead dog into his knapsack. They helped him take off his clothes and packed them underneath. They cupped their hands around the matches until the cloth caught fire, and blew on the weak flame until it sputtered and burned limply. Krane crouched by the fire and nursed it. Then he turned and once again began crawling down the ocean bed. He was naked now. There was nothing left of what-had-been but his flickering little life.

He was too heavy with sorrow to notice the furious rain that slammed and buffeted him, or the searing pains that were searing through his blackened leg and up his hip. He crawled. Elbows, knee, elbows, knee— Woodenly, mechanically, apathetic to everything … to the latticed skies, the dreary ashen plains and even the dull glint of water that lay far ahead.

He knew it was the sea—what was left of the old, or a new one in the making. But it would be an empty, lifeless sea that some day would lap against a dry, lifeless shore. This would be a planet of stone and dust, of metal and snow and ice and water, but that would be all. No more life. He, alone, was useless. He was Adam, but there was no Eve.

Evelyn waved gaily to him from the shore. She was standing alongside the white cottage with the wind snapping her dress to show the slender lines of her figure. And when he came a little closer, she ran out to him and helped him. She said nothing—only placed her hands under his shoulders and helped him lift the weight of his heavy pain-ridden body. And so at last he reached the sea.

It was real. He understood that. For even after Evelyn and the cottage had vanished, he felt the cool waters bathe his face.

Here’s the sea, Krane thought, and here am I. Adam and no Eve. It’s hopeless.

He rolled a little farther into the waters. They laved his torn body. He lay with his face to the sky, peering at the high menacing heavens, and the bitterness within him welled up.

“It’s not right!” he cried. “It’s not right that all this should pass away. Life is too beautiful to perish at the mad act of one mad creature—”

Quietly the waters laved him. Quietly … Calmly …

The sea rocked him gently, and even the death that was reaching up toward his heart was no more than a gloved hand. Suddenly the skies split apart—for the first time in all those months—and Krane stared up at the stars.

Then he knew. This was not the end of life. There could never be an end of life. Within his body, within the rotting tissues rocking gently in the sea was the source of ten million-million lives. Cells—tissues—bacteria—amoeba— Countless infinities of life that would take new root in the waters and live long after he was gone.

They would live on his rotting remains. They would feed on each other. They would adapt themselves to the new environment and feed on the minerals and sediments washed into this new sea. They would grow, burgeon, evolve. Life would reach out to the lands once more. It would begin again the same old repeated cycle that had begun perhaps with the rotting corpse of some last survivor of interstellar travel. It would happen over and over in the future ages.

And then he knew what had brought him back to the sea. There need be no Adam—no Eve. Only the sea, the great mother of life was needed. The sea had called him back to her depths that presently life might emerge once more, and he was content.

Quietly the waters comforted him. Quietly … Calmly … The mother of life rocked the last-born of the old cycle who would become the first-born of the new. And with glazing eyes Steven Krane smiled up at the stars, stars that were sprinkled evenly across the sky. Stars that had not yet formed into the familiar constellations, and would not for another hundred million centuries.

Editor’s note: This is a fragment of a story that Bester did not complete before his death. However, because it contains Bester’s unique style and trademark radical ideas, we felt it should be included in this definitive collection
.

S
ociologists have never agreed on whether societies through the ages have demanded conformity because they think that the status quo is perfection, or believe that the majority, ipso facto, must be the yardstick—in which case we should make way for the insects—or because they resent extraordinary talents which produce extraordinary results and sometimes strange behavior.

There have been so many of these singular sports, perhaps multitudes of mutations through the millennia, who were forced to conceal their unique powers from mob hostility or else run for cover like hunted animals. This is the story of a batch who took off singing:

Patience. All will be made clear very shortly.

These marvels or misfits, depending on your point of view, banded together and roamed the known universe, peddling their talents. They knew they could never settle down anywhere unless they concealed their faculties and conformed, something none was willing to, or even could, do. They were sometimes called “The Wandering Blues” and other times “The Blue Devils,” again depending on the point of view. Word about them got around.

There’s no doubt that they were often a curious blue when they emerged from their ship to sell their genius on some boondock planet or satellite. Long hauls through space forced them to conserve oxygen at the minimal survival level, turning them cyanotic. They recovered normal color if the new environment was hospitable, which, occasionally, it was most emphatically not. The same was true of their social reception now and then, forcing them to cut and run. They were, well, unusual.

Van Ryn, for instance, was a magnificent artist. (He was born Sam Katz but that’s a hell of a name for a fashionable painter.) Rynny was astigmatic. There was a distortion in the lenses of his eyes that caused rays of light from an external point to converge unequally and form warped images. This is the common-or-garden-variety of astigmatism that afflicted El Greco and caused him to paint elongated faces and figures. The sixteenth century hadn’t yet got around to prescription glasses.

What was strange about Rynny’s astigmatism was the fact that some of the external point sources of light were far in the future of whatever or whoever he was painting, and he got mixed up. He didn’t know what to believe so he settled for painting anything he saw, sometimes the present, more often the future. The twenty-fifth century hadn’t yet got around to prescribing for anything as bizarre as that.

Clients got sore as hell at being depicted as decrepit ancients or embalmed corpses in the coffin (one was portrayed as a suicide hanging by the neck from a flagpole) and naturally refused to pay. But when Rynny was commissioned to paint the chateau of a royal mistress and produced a bijou of her in the garden of same, flagrante with another lover, that was the end. He had to leave, quickly.

Hertzing Matilda was a composer. He came from New South Wales, hence the odd play on the famous Aussie tune, “Waltzing Matilda,” which gave him the girl part of his nickname. He was a brilliant musician, a genius in fact, but born with a deformity in his ears which gave him the front part of his name.

You see, all of us hear the audio-frequency band from around 30 Hz to 15,000 Hz. “Hz” is the abbreviation for “hertz,” the symbol for cycles-per-second, and honoring the great physicist, Heinrich Rudolph Hertz (1857-1894). The infrasonic lies below 30 Hz, the ultrasonic is above 15,000 Hz, and only a few rare creatures can sense them, humans not among them.

Well, as Hertzing Matilda grew older, he and the rest of the world thought he was going deaf. By the time he was thirty he seemed to be stone deaf, a tragedy for a composer, and it showed in his music, for, like Beethoven, he went on composing. But his work got crazier and crazier until it was so far out that he was run out of the business. Nobody could read his scores, which looked like paradigms in symbolic logic, as in the third line of the “One for the money” jingle, which he arranged.

It was a skilled audiologist who discovered what had really happened to Hertz. He hadn’t gone deaf. His hearing had shifted from the normal audio-frequency band up into the ultrasonic, higher and higher. He was sensing 30,000, 40,000, and 50,000 hertz and trying to translate the
outré
hyperworld he heard into conventional music, which was like trying to divide apples by pears. The audiologist’s paper on the discovery created a sensation in the medical journals, but all it earned for Hertz was his nickname.

Fay Damien had been an actress. She was most attractive without being pretty, sweet, warm, appealing to the public, cooperative, and hardworking with her colleagues. She had everything going for her except the one kink that ruined all chances for success; she was a jinx.

Wherever she went, bad luck was sure to follow; props failed, sets collapsed, lights exploded and fell on heads, cameras jammed. Everybody was afraid to work with this hoodoo and stars flatly refused. The end came when a producer took her along to dine with a new potential backer and help coax him into putting up front money for a new series. The backer’s wife suddenly appeared at the table and shot him dead. Out of the blue it had occurred to her that he and Fay were having an affair.

All this was a mystery to Ms. Damien until she happened to meet Hertzing Matilda at an audition where they were both desperately trying to get work. They’d heard of each other but never met. They chatted and exchanged sympathy for their perplexing problems—Hertz had trained himself to read lips and body language—when suddenly he cocked an ear, then winked and said in the strange singsong tones imposed by his ultrasonic handicap, “It’s all right. He says to tell you not to worry. He likes me.”

“What? He? Who?”

“Your brother.” Hertz grinned. “He says we’re a pair of fruitcakes and ought to stick together.”

Fay was bewildered. “What brother? I haven’t got a brother.”

“Sure you do. Inside.”

“Inside? Inside where?”

“Inside you.”

“Are you saying I’ve got a brother inside me and you’re talking to him?”

“Uh-huh. Ultrasonics.”

Fay burst out laughing. “This is a brand-new come-on and I’d love to fall for it. God knows, most men on the make are so damn unoriginal.”

“I’m not on the make; this is straight. You’ve got your brother Morgan inside you. Didn’t you know?”

She didn’t, and for an interesting reason. When mama Damien discovered she was expecting she resolved that, boy or girl, she’d name the baby Morgan. If a boy, after Sir Henry Morgan, the bold buccaneer, because she wanted him to be piratical, devil-may-care, and successful in a cutthroat world. If a girl, after Morgan le Fay, the fairy sister of King Arthur, because she wanted her to enchant and captivate the whole world. Mama was devoted to romantic literature.

Well, fraternal twins developed, brother and sister, which is not unique; it’s simply a case of two fertilized ova. Only in this gestation the sister embryo overgrew the brother embryo, quite by accident, engulfed him and incorporated him in herself as a fraternal cyst. This is most unusual but, again, not unique.

What
was
unique was the fact that Morgan, the enclosed brother, was alive. And Morgan was not only piratical, he was also a witch, a living, fraternal devil-cyst with a will and ideas of his own.
He
was Fay’s jinx because he had a hot temper and the most trivial things could sting him into casting malevolent spells. The backer’s table conversation had annoyed him, hence the murdering wife. Morgan was the invisible, unpredictable “half” in the jingle and his motto was,
Incipere multost quam impetrare facilius
.

IT
’
S MUCH EASIER TO BEGIN A THING THAN TO FINISH IT

H
e was wearing a prefaded jump suit, beautifully tailored, the
dernier cri
in the nostalgic 2100s, but really too youthful for his thirty-odd years. Set square on his head was a vintage (circa 1950) English motoring cap with the peak leveled on a line with his brows, masking the light of lunacy in his eyes.

Dead on a slab, he might be called distinguished, even handsome, but alive and active? That would depend on how much demented dedication one could stomach. He was shouldering his way through the crowded aisles of

THE SATURN CIRCUS

50 PHANTASTIK PHREAKS 50

!!!ALL ALIENS!!!

He was carrying a mini sound-camera that looked like a chrome-and-ebony pepper mill, and he was filming the living, crawling, spasming, gibbering monstrosities exhibited in the large showcases and small vitrines, with a murmured running commentary. His voice was pleasant; his remarks were not.

“Ah, yes, the
Bellatrix basilisk
, so the sign assures us. Black-and-yellow bod of a serpent. Looks like a Gila-monster head attached. Work of that Tejas tailor who’s so nitzy with surgical needle and thread. Peacock coronet on head. Good theater to blindfold its eyes. Conveys the conviction that its glance will kill. Hmmm. Ought to gag the mouth, too. According to myth the basilisk’s breath also kills… .

“And the
Hyades hydra
. Like wow. Nine heads, as per revered tradition. Looks like a converted iguana. The Mexican again. That seamstress has access to every damn snake and lizard in Central America. She’s done a nice join of necks to trunk—got to admit that—but her stitching shows to
my
eye… .