The Complete Short Stories Page 6

  $6 x 10.

  5th Day: West 270' .17th Greater Federation.

  At a kiosk on the station Franz bought a clip of razor blades and glanced at the brochure put out by the local chamber of commerce.

  '12,000 levels, 98 cents a foot, unique Elm Drive, fire safety records unequalled...'

  He went back to the train, shaved, and counted the thirty dollars left. He was now ninety-five million Great-Miles from the suburban station on 984th Street and he knew he could not delay his return much longer. Next time he would save up a couple of thousand.

  $7 x 10127.

  7th Day: West 2700. 212th Metropolitan Empire.

  Franz peered at the indicator.

  'Aren't we stopping here?' he asked a man three seats away. 'I wanted to find out the market average.'

  'Varies. Anything from fifty cents a - '

  'Fifty!' Franz shot back, jumping up. 'When's the next stop? I've got to get off!'

  'Not here, son.' He put out a restraining hand. 'This is Night Town. You in real estate?'

  Franz nodded, holding himself back. 'I thought...'

  'Relax.' He came and sat opposite Franz. 'It's just one big slum. Dead areas. In places it goes as low as five cents. There are no services, no power.'

  It took them two days to pass through.

  'City Authority are starting to seal it off,' the man told him. 'Huge blocks. It's the only thing they can do. What happens to the people inside I hate to think.' He chewed on a sandwich. 'Strange, but there are a lot of these black areas. You don't hear about them, but they're growing. Starts in a back street in some ordinary dollar neighbourhood; a bottleneck in the sewage disposal system, not enough ash cans, and before you know it a million cubic miles have gone back to jungle. They try a relief scheme, pump in a little cyanide, and then - brick it up. Once they do that they're closed for good.'

  Franz nodded, listening to the dull humming air.

  'Eventually there'll be nothing left but these black areas. The City will be one huge cemetery!'

  10th Day: East 900 .755th Greater Metropolitan - 'Wait!' Franz leapt out of his seat and stared at the indicator panel.

  'What's the matter?' someone opposite asked.

  'East!' Franz shouted. He banged the panel sharply with his hand but the lights held. 'Has this train changed direction?'

  'No, it's eastbound,' another of the passengers told him. 'Are you on the wrong train?'

  'It should be heading west,' Franz insisted. 'It has been for the last ten days.'

  'Ten days!' the man exclaimed. 'Have you been on this sleeper for ten days?'

  Franz went forward and found the car attendant. 'Which way is this train going? West?'

  The attendant shook his head. 'East, sir. It's always been going east.'

  'You're crazy,' Franz snapped. 'I want to see the pilot's log.'

  'I'm afraid that isn't possible. May I see your ticket, sir?'

  'Listen,' Franz said weakly, all the accumulated frustration of the last twenty years mounting inside him. 'I've been on this..

  He stopped and went back to his seat.

  The five other passengers watched him carefully.

  'Ten days,' one of them was still repeating in an awed voice.

  Two minutes later someone came and asked Franz for his ticket.

  'And of course it was completely in order,' the police surgeon commented. 'Strangely enough there's no regulation to prevent anyone else doing the same thing. I used to go for free rides myself when I was younger, though I never tried anything like your journey.'

  He went back to the desk. 'We'll drop the charge,' he said. 'You're not a vagrant in any indictable sense, and the transport authorities can do nothing against you. How this curvature was built into the system they can't explain, it seems to be some inherent feature of the City itself. Now about yourself. Are you going to continue this search?'

  'I want to build a flying machine,' M. said carefully. 'There must be free space somewhere. I don't know... perhaps on the lower levels.'

  The surgeon stood up. 'I'll see the sergeant and get him to hand you over to one of our psychiatrists. He'll be able to help you with your dreams!'

  The surgeon hesitated before opening the door. 'Look,' he began to explain, 'you can't get out of time, can you? Subjectively it's a plastic dimension, but whatever you do to yourself you'll never be able to stop that clock'- he pointed to the one on the desk - 'or make it run backwards. In exactly the same way you can't get out of the City.'

  'The analogy doesn't hold,' M. said. He gestured at the walls around them and the lights in the street outside. 'All this was built by us. The question nobody can answer is: what was here before we built it?'

  'It's always been here,' the surgeon said. 'Not these particular bricks and girders, but others before them. You accept that time has no beginning and no end. The City is as old as time and continuous with it.'

  'The first bricks were laid by someone,' M. insisted. 'There was the Foundation.'

  'A myth. Only the scientists believe in that, and even they don't try to make too much of it. Most of them privately admit that the Foundation Stone is nothing more than a superstition. We pay it lip service out of convenience, and because it gives us a sense of tradition. Obviously there can't have been a first brick. If there was, how can you explain who laid it and, even more difficult, where they came from?'

  'There must be free space somewhere,' M. said doggedly. 'The City must have bounds.'

  'Why?' the surgeon asked. 'It can't be floating in the middle of nowhere. Or is that what you're trying to believe?'

  M. sank back limply. 'No.'

  The surgeon watched M. silently for a few minutes and paced back to the desk. 'This peculiar fixation of yours puzzles me. You're caught between what the psychiatrists call paradoxical faces. I suppose you haven't misinterpreted something you've heard about the Wall?'

  M. looked up. 'Which wall?'

  The surgeon nodded to himself. 'Some advanced opinion maintains that there's a wall around the City, through which it's impossible to penetrate. I don't pretend to understand the theory myself. It's far too abstract and sophisticated. Anyway I suspect they've confused this Wall with the bricked-up black areas you passed through on the Sleeper. I prefer the accepted view that the City stretches out in all directions without limits.'

  He went over to the door. 'Wait here, and I'll see about getting you a probationary release. Don't worry, the psychiatrists will straighten everything out for you.'

  When the surgeon had left M. stared at the floor, too exhausted to feel relieved. He stood up and stretched himself, walking unsteadily round the room.

  Outside the last pilot lights were going out and the patrolman on the catwalk under the roof was using his torch. A police car roared down one of the avenues crossing the street, its rails screaming. Three lights snapped on along the street and then one by one went off again.

  M. wondered why Gregson hadn't come down to the station. Then the calendar on the desk riveted his attention. The date exposed on the fly leaf was 12 August. That was the day he had started off on his journey - exactly three weeks ago.

  Today!

  ***

  Take a westbound Green to 298th Street, cross over at the intersection and get a Red elevator up to Level 237. Walk down to the station on Route 175, change to a 438 suburban and go down to 795th Street. Take a Blue line to the Plaza, get off at 4th and 275th, turn left at the roundabout and You're back where you first started from. $Hell x ion.

  1957

  Venus Smiles

  Low notes on a high afternoon.

  As we drove away after the unveiling my secretary said, 'Mr Hamilton, I suppose you realize what a fool you've made of yourself?'

  'Don't sound so prim,' I told her. 'How was I to know Lorraine Drexel would produce something like that?'

  'Five thousand dollars,' she said reflectively. 'It's nothing but a piece of old scrap iron. And the noise! Didn't you look at her sketches? What's th
e Fine Arts Committee for?'

  My secretaries have always talked to me like this, and just then I could understand why. I stopped the car under the trees at the end of the square and looked back. The chairs had been cleared away and already a small crowd had gathered around the statue, staring up at it curiously. A couple of tourists were banging one of the struts, and the thin metal skeleton shuddered weakly. Despite this, a monotonous and high-pitched wailing sounded from the statue across the pleasant morning air, grating the teeth of passers-by.

  'Raymond Mayo is having it dismantled this afternoon,' I said, 'If it hasn't already been done for us. I wonder where Miss Drexel is?'

  'Don't worry, you won't see her in Vermilion Sands again. I bet she's halfway to Red Beach by now.'

  I patted Carol on the shoulder. 'Relax. You looked beautiful in your new skirt. The Medicis probably felt like this about Michelangelo. Who are we to judge?'

  'You are,' she said. 'You were on the committee, weren't you?'

  'Darling,' I explained patiently. 'Sonic sculpture is the thing. You're trying to fight a battle the public lost thirty years ago.'

  We drove back to my office in a thin silence. Carol was annoyed because she had been forced to sit beside me on the platform when the audience began to heckle my speech at the unveiling, but even so the morning had been disastrous on every count. What might be perfectly acceptable at Expo 75 or the Venice Biennale was all too obviously pass at Vermilion Sands.

  When we had decided to commission a sonic sculpture for the square in the centre of Vermilion Sands, Raymond Mayo and I had agreed that we should patronize a local artist. There were dozens of professional sculptors in Vermilion Sands, but only three had deigned to present themselves before the committee. The first two we saw were large, bearded men with enormous fists and impossible schemes - one for a hundred-foot-high vibrating aluminium pylon, and the other for a vast booming family group that involved over fifteen tons of basalt mounted on a megalithic step-pyramid. Each had taken an hour to be argued out of the committee room.

  The third was a woman: Lorraine Drexel. This elegant and autocratic creature in a cartwheel hat, with her eyes like black orchids, was a sometime model and intimate of Giacometti and John Cage. Wearing a blue crpe de Chine dress ornamented with lace serpents and other art nouveau emblems, she sat before us like some fugitive Salome from the world of Aubrey Beardsley. Her immense eyes regarded us with an almost hypnotic calm, as if she had discovered that very moment some unique quality in these two amiable dilettantes of the Fine Arts Committee.

  She had lived in Vermilion Sands for only three months, arriving via Berlin, Calcutta and the Chicago New Arts Centre. Most of her sculpture to date had been scored for various Tantric and Hindu hymns, and I remembered her brief affair with a world-famous pop-singer, later killed in a car crash, who had been an enthusiastic devotee of the sitar. At the time, however, we had given no thought to the whining quarter-tones of this infernal instrument, so grating on the Western ear. She had shown us an album of her sculptures, interesting chromium constructions that compared favourably with the run of illustrations in the latest art magazines. Within half an hour we had drawn up a contract.

  I saw the statue for the first time that afternoon thirty seconds before I started my speech to the specially selected assembly of Vermilion Sands notables. Why none of us had bothered to look at it beforehand I fail to understand. The title printed on the invitation cards - 'Sound and Quantum: Generative Synthesis 3' - had seemed a little odd, and - the general shape of the shrouded statue even more suspicious. I was expecting a stylized human figure but the structure under the acoustic drapes had the proportions of a medium-sized radar aerial. However, Lorraine Drexel sat beside me on the stand, her bland eyes surveying the crowd below. A dream-like smile gave her the look of a tamed Mona Lisa.

  What we saw after Raymond Mayo pulled the tape I tried not to think about. With its pedestal the statue was twelve feet high. Three spindly metal legs, ornamented with spikes and crosspieces, reached up from the plinth to a triangular apex. Clamped on to this was a jagged structure that at first sight seemed to be an old Buick radiator grille. It had been bent into a rough U five feet across, and the two arms jutted out horizontally, a single row of sonic cores, each about a foot long, poking up like the teeth of an enormous comb. Welded on apparently at random all over the statue were twenty or thirty filigree vanes.

  That was all. The whole structure of scratched chromium had a blighted look like a derelict antenna. Startled a little by the first shrill whoops emitted by the statue, I began my speech and was about halfway through when I noticed that Lorraine Drexel had left her seat beside me. People in the audience were beginning to stand up and cover their ears, shouting to Raymond to replace the acoustic drape. A hat sailed through the air over my head and landed neatly on one of the sonic cores. The statue was now giving out an intermittent high-pitched whine, a sitar-like caterwauling that seemed to pull apart the sutures of my skull. Responding to the boos and protests, it suddenly began to whoop erratically, the horn-like sounds confusing the traffic on the far side of the square.

  As the audience began to leave their seats en masse I stuttered inaudibly to the end of my speech, the wailing of the statue interrupted by shouts and jeers. Then Carol tugged me sharply by the arm, her eyes flashing. Raymond Mayo pointed with a nervous hand.

  The three of us were alone on the platform, the rows of overturned chairs reaching across the square. Standing twenty yards from the statue, which had now begun to whimper plaintively, was Lorraine Drexel. I expected to see a look of fury and outrage on her face, but instead her unmoving eyes showed the calm and implacable contempt of a grieving widow insulted at her husband's funeral. As we waited awkwardly, watching the wind carry away the torn programme cards, she turned on a diamond heel and walked across the square.

  No one else wanted anything to do with the statue, so I was finally presented with it. Lorraine Drexel left Vermilion Sands the day it was dismantled. Raymond spoke briefly to her on the telephone before she went. I presumed she would be rather unpleasant and didn't bother to listen in on the extension.

  'Well?' I asked. 'Does she want it back?'

  'No.' Raymond seemed slightly preoccupied. 'She said it belonged to us.'

  'You and me?'

  'Everybody.' Raymond helped himself to the decanter of scotch on the veranda table. 'Then she started laughing.'

  'Good. What at?'

  'I don't know. She just said that we'd grow to like it.'

  There was nowhere else to put the statue so I planted it out in the garden. Without the stone pedestal it was only six feet high. Shielded by the shrubbery, it had quietened down and now emitted a pleasant melodic harmony, its soft rondos warbling across the afternoon heat. The sitar-like twangs, which the statue had broadcast in the square like some pathetic love-call from Lorraine Drexel to her dead lover, had vanished completely, almost as if the statue had been rescored. I had been so stampeded by the disastrous unveiling that I had had little chance to see it and I thought it looked a lot better in the garden than it had done in Vermilion Sands, the chromium struts and abstract shapes standing out against the desert like something in a vodka advertisement. After a few days I could almost ignore it.

  A week or so later we were out on the terrace after lunch, lounging back in the deck chairs. I was nearly asleep when Carol said, 'Mr Hamilton, I think it's moving.'

  'What's moving?'

  Carol was sitting up, head cocked to one side. 'The statue. It looks different.'

  I focused my eyes on the statue twenty feet away. The radiator grille at the top had canted around slightly but the three stems still seemed more or less upright.

  'The rain last night must have softened the ground,' I said. I listened to the quiet melodies carried on the warm eddies of air, and then lay back drowsily. I heard Carol light a cigarette with four matches and walk across the veranda.

  When I woke in an hour's time she was sitting strai
ght up in the deck chair, a frown creasing her forehead.

  'Swallowed a bee?' I asked. 'You look worried.'

  Then something caught my eye.

  I watched the statue for a moment. 'You're right. It is moving.'

  Carol nodded. The statue's shape had altered perceptibly. The grille had spread into an open gondola whose sonic cores seemed to feel at the sky, and the three stem-pieces were wider apart. All the angles seemed different.

  'I thought you'd notice it eventually,' Carol said as we walked over to it. 'What's it made of?'

  'Wrought iron - I think. There must be a lot of copper or lead in it. The heat is making it sag.'

  'Then why is it sagging upwards instead of down?' - I touched one of the shoulder struts. It was springing elastically as the air moved across the vanes and went on vibrating against my palm. I gripped it in both hands and tried to keep it rigid. A low but discernible pulse pumped steadily against me.

  I backed away from it, wiping the flaking chrome off my hands. The Mozartian harmonies had gone, and the statue was now producing a series of low Mahler-like chords. As Carol stood there in her bare feet I remembered that the height specification we had given to Lorraine Drexel had been exactly two metres. But the statue was a good three feet higher than Carol, the gondola at least six or seven across. The spars and struts looked thicker and stronger.

  'Carol,' I said. 'Get me a file, would you? There are some in the garage.'

  She came back with two files and a hacksaw.

  'Are you going to cut it down?' she asked hopefully.

  'Darling, this is an original Drexel.' I took one of the files. 'I just want to convince myself that I'm going insane.'

  I started cutting a series of small notches all over the statue, making sure they were exactly the width of the file apart. The metal was soft and worked easily; on the surface there was a lot of rust but underneath it had a bright sappy glint.

  'All right,' I said when I had finished. 'Let's go and have a drink.'