The Great Lover (29 page)

When I come back to myself again, I am sitting in a hard steel chair on a terrace, with a view of the intersection of two boulevards. There is a fountain there, which surrounds the base of a colossal metal statue of two figures, in the Soviet style. She is straddling him, both upright, her head flung back ecstatically against the white grid of the glass roof, water oozing along the edge of the fountain’s raised metal plumes and hanging in heavy drops, dropping into the water with a musical sound... Every corner has a similar statue, and if I could spin by them I would see a time-lapse animation of their monumental, precisely-phased intercourse. The artist modelled the figures on himself and his lover, and incorporated her name somehow in a way no one understands. I peer up at her face, tilted away in rapture, and imagine the northern lights billowing and shining over her polished body.

People ride along the boulevards in hollow metal bulbs sliding along in deep grooves. I sit alone in one of them, a copper colored ball with red cushions, an encyclopedia drones on in my brain. Drone on, drone on. The human immigrants developed into two distinct strains, based on their preferred time of activity. In thousands of years of isolation, they adapted under the extreme evolutionary pressures of this difficult environment. Both types exhibit mineral characteristics, and have correspondingly more complex diets.

Along the galleries one may observe the Day People; tall lean with dark plum-black skin to protect against powerful solar radiation here. Eyes of vivid white and electric black. Long narrow noses pointed tip angled straight down between flaring nostrils, tip and nostrils in a row — narrow faces, full lips, and small ears. They don’t wrinkle as they age but their skin begins to powder away to dust... a grey coating of dust on the skin. The men wear their iron-colored hair short, it lies sleek against their tapering skulls like little filings, and bands of tiny ringlike beads, made from bone, frame their heads. The women walk haughtily along the galleries, wear their thick hair long and flowing, swept back from the brow; they are testy irritable impatient and waspish. The men are cordial and accommodating. The women possess thrilling alto viola voices, the men resounding double basses. With sweeping hinged ribcages and enlarged lungs they are outstanding runners for both speed and endurance. Their eyes have developed special ridges on the surface of the iris itself — contracting against snowblindness; and a pattern-fixing structure in the hippocampus enables them to see clearly in blizzards and to find the horizon. Their normal vision is extremely acute. A Day sharpshooter can knock a gull out of the air a mile away, detect extremely minute movements. They are indefatigable, heavy eaters, and possess a high resistance to cold. Characteristic Day gesture — in shaking hands they swing their arms out wide from the waist in a circle and bring the hand up flat.

The Day people sleep in wooden cabinets set into the walls of their angular, lean buildings. The Night people live in round or oblong houses clustered outside the pavilions; they sleep squatting on the floor wrapped in blankets with just their heads poking out. The Night people predominate in food services. In some places Night fishers dive through a hole cut in the ice floor of the bistro, pop up a few minutes later and hand fresh steaming aphrodisiac crustaceans to the patrons, their bodies steaming from the twenty-three degree waters. The diver is attended by a pair of assistants, change his goggles for a fresh pair swab his mouth nose and ears with something, pour boiling water over his suit, rub gelatin into his hair.

The Night people exhibit a general attitude of dreamy intentness. The men are built like tanks with square inexpressive faces, skin white as beluga whales, fingers and toes without nails. The women are sweet and light as marshmallows, with little girls’ faces on large adult heads. Stony brawn of the bodies, pale crispy hair, beaky noses, large pupils fringed with a thin ring of icy blue, and sky-blue lashes. The women wear their hair in braids, men’s hair grows any old way. The women are pranky silver-voiced snipes full of teasy nicknames, the men speak with robotic flatness in voices like nasal flutes. Echolocating all the time with inaudible trills produced in a special sinus, registers a three-dimensional sense image of their immediate surroundings 360 degrees. Come into a shop: Night man at the counter, you ask for something on the shelf behind him pointing, without taking his eyes off of you he reaches behind his own back and unerringly takes it down for you. Like the Day people they are indefatigable, heavy eaters, with a high resistance to cold. Extremely good swimmers, pressure resistant, they can hold the breath for upwards of fifteen minutes.

Their space program is already a thousand years old — a Night waiter brings me the house special, a kind of invisible ragout, and I fold the thick, cumbersome newspaper in half so as to fit it on the rest of the table. The food weighs down my fork. I can get it into my mouth all right if I don’t think about what I’m doing. Go on reading the words in my mind:

Enormous tethered balloons were sent high into the atmosphere, from which stars and planets could be observed with sophisticated optics. The existence of planets in other solar systems was also established mathematically. Explorers were wrapped in a special substance and frozen within enormous balls of ice; balloons carried the ice aloft to floating platforms at the uppermost limit of the atmosphere, where the accompanying crew pushed it into a precisely-determined orbit (thereafter taking the balloon back down to the surface). The ice vessel gathered speed with each revolution until breaking away at exactly the right moment. After centuries of travel through the interstellar void, the sphere would enter the gravitational field of the target planet at a certain angle well calculated to initiate orbit, from which it would then eventually sink into the atmosphere. The resulting friction would burn the ice away, turning the spacecraft into a column of steam, and the disintegrating vessel would finally expel its occupants several miles above the surface. The material in which the traveller was wrapped expands on contact with air to form a landing cushion and also to slow descent. This material is designed to dissolve completely within hours of its deployment. Assuming they had survived, the new arrivals would generally regain consciousness only after this dissolution was completed, awakening slowly from a sleep that began in the City of Sex to find themselves naked on another planet. These were not voyages of conquest, or even of discovery exactly, but ventures with the object of dispersing human beings among the stars, where they would begin entirely anew all over again. For this reason, nothing from earth could be permitted to remain with them. At present, it is believed that at least one planet has been successfully seeded with a population of human beings large enough to reproduce itself, and that new strains of the human type may already be emerging there.

I lie down behind an iron pylon, gazing out sideways through the glass wall. There is a man making his way into the city after crossing the ice sheet. A feeling floats through my head as though it gives off a balloon of light, and I remember coming to the city when I was somebody else — the wind rammed me from the side, burned in my eyes and rasped along my face brittle with ice around my nostrils and mouth. I remember too, the confusion and dazzled senses as the walls rose around me and the wind was suddenly gone. Open-eyed, I carried all that yawning open space in my mind, and I felt these others and the buildings pressing the billowing fabric of space back inside me, my inflated consciousness being pressed back into me... But I still could not speak, or think. The wind scrubbed my mind blank.

My common mind is returning; with groping self-conscious thoughts I have enough now almost to decide, somehow it’s something I can allow or refuse, that space I can give up or not, as I choose. I stagger in among the iron buildings and stop against a wall, and when I open my eyes, I see a wisp of smoke drift down from the open window, fall through an amber beam of sunlight toward the iron street, and at once am calm again.

Out on the ice there are algae mats growing beneath the pack in motionless lakes and in high salt pools that don’t freeze. In some of these one finds mummified remains of animals, some thousands of years old, or wind-scrubbed bones scattered among the rocks bruised with lichen. I am still lying on the floor, behind the pylon. An antarctic riddle trickles through the humming glass and asks me:

“
Lichen,” I say into the crook of my elbow. Lichen grows on ice and stones, although lichen isn’t really a plant — he listens to himself — it’s not a plant, it’s the marriage of a fungus and an algae.

*

“
Nine-thirty, all right,” I step still a bit shaky from the friction of re-entry through an open door into one of the many iron passageways set into the ice. My breath misting, I unerringly follow the tunnels to find the deep sun.

Some are so amazed on first seeing it that they never want to leave, it’s all they ever want to look at. Their eyes have been taken out of the level of their lives and now they can look at nothing else. It is forbidden to touch the ice wall, or to get too close. One’s breath, or perhaps the mere heat of one’s ardour, may melt the ice. Attendants are kept on hand at all times to remove those who have fainted, or those who otherwise manifest some indisposition. The tunnel entrance is lit with pale, heatless chemical lamps, but the deep sun is brightened only by the thin daylight illumination that filters through the ice sheet above it. The light descends, a blue-white dome.

On first seeing the deep sun, I sob once involuntarily, something heavier than a gasp. It is a hollow sphere of nearly clear ice, over a quarter-mile in diameter, embedded in but wholly distinct from the ancient pack ice. That it is hollow has been demonstrated by analyzing the spectra of light passing through it, although it is not clear whether the interior is a vacuum, or contains some rarefied atmosphere. It was discovered during excavations centuries ago and has since become an object of pilgrimage, the closest thing to a church in the City of Sex. An apartment was cut into the ice at the initial point of discovery of the deep sun, just before its base, so the sloping wall sweeps overhead. One can see up into and through the deep sun, all the way to the far side. Again, the encyclopedia goes rattling through my mind like a decrepit old cart.

Pilgrims congregate at the base of the deep sun, processions arrive daily from the city to visit it, and some never leave. Their improvised shelters are kept to one side of the passageway, so as not to close it off entirely. Hallucinations among those assembled are common; most of them involve a dimly-visible figure, or silhouette, hovering in the heart of the deep sun — a human form, usually, but sometimes a seal, or whale, or some variety of fish, or a huge starfish, a crab, or polar bear. For most of those who involved themselves with it, the deep sun was an emblem of eternity; they felt that, by gazing at it continuously, they would imbibe something of the essence of time itself, or achieve single moments altogether outside of time. A guidebook phrase trickles through my head: “Our region is full of spectacular attractions like these.”

I see my face reflecting in it — the face is not European, I see no traits or color. There is the mask of cracked muck I always wear. I can see my gaze but not my eyes. My expressions are there, but no features. I look down at my hand and it’s a color — the name of the color is on the tip of my tongue, but the color itself is something else. I have some color, anyway. Am I male or female? It doesn’t show.

One of the attendants politely asks me to stand to one side. This brings me back to my lines and as I feign embarrassment I look around, scanning the faces of the devotees. One man’s nondescript, sacklike features suddenly throb at me: a single, equivocally grey pulse of neutral emotion. This is my contact. I amble over to where the man is sitting in a shapeless heap of rags, taking my time. He had routinely to pass through inundated rooms where cadavers floated upright. The man’s rags are scraps of raw silk watered with ash-perfume, his prayer-rug is the color of salmon meat, with cobalt dragons woven into the fabric and a white fringe. The man is counting an ice-rosary with purplish-grey fingers; he has already been paid. I kneel nearby, just slightly away from the praying man; a moment later I feel a dash of coldness hit my midsection on the inside, and something in my coat pocket that wasn’t there before.

The deep sun glows a few feet from my face. A sun, deep down... As clouds cross the sky above, the light waxes and ebbs again making a grand, slowly smoking lamp of the deep sun. Cold air falls from its surface onto my brow, pressing down on my features in a new mask. I get up with care and get out of there, my new frost-face is already boiling away. Suddenly, a nameless jeopardy is there, all around me, a part of the book I didn’t know — probing attention and seeking all around like searchlights. Alarm bristling and snapping from the walls and the floor, I keep my face down, holding his breath. Getting into a group of visitors filing out the exit I slither along the red velvet rope past the attendants and the placards, straining to reach the anonymous tunnels before my breath gives out.

Finally I duck aside into a small alcove with fuseboxes, and let go — my exhalation smashes through my mist-mask, destroying it. I reach into my pocket. My fingers pull out a piece of heavy paper, almost cardstock, folded in fours. It’s stiff with cold, and I have to pry it apart and scrape the frost from its surface to read the address in iridescent blue ink.

*

People are congregated in a dark, head-craning mass at the glass wall, to either side of one of the massive, airlock-like iron doors to the outside. These doors open onto an elevated causeway connecting two pavilions a hundred stories in the air, normally employed only by the maintenance men. Use of the causeways when the wind exceeds a certain force is forbidden for safety reasons, which is why the crowd is now gawking at the lone figure who lies face down out there, gripping the causeway floor with all his might and bracing himself with his legs as the bludgeoning wind trains on him in an unremitting flat horizontal beam.