Time Travel Omnibus, page 632
“A terrible scar.”
“Indeed!” said the Duke of Queens in vague affirmation, his attention wandering. “Well, thank you for a lovely afternoon, Werther. Come along, you two!” He signed to the time travellers, who claimed to be from the eighty-third millennium and were dressed in primitive transparent “exoskin”, which was not altogether stable and was inclined to writhe and make it seem that they were covered in hundreds of thin, excited worms. The Duke of Queens had acquired them for his menagerie. Unaware of the difficulties of returning to their own time (temporal travel had, apparently, only just been re-invented in their age), they were inclined to treat the Duke as an eccentric who could be tolerated until it suited them to do otherwise. They smiled condescendingly, winked at each other, and followed him to an air car in the shape of a cube whose sides were golden mirrors decorated with white and purple flowers. It was for the pleasure of enjoying the pleasure they enjoyed, seemingly at his expense, that the Duke of Queens had brought them with him today. Mistress Christia waved at his car as it disappeared rapidly into the sky.
At last they were all gone, save herself and Werther de Goethe. He had seated himself upon a mossy rock, his shoulders hunched, his features downcast, unable to speak to her when she tried to cheer him.
“Oh, Werther,” she cried at last, “what would make you happy?”
“Happy?” His voice was a hollow echo of her own. “Happy?” An awkward, dismissive gesture. “There is no such thing as happiness for such as I!”
“There must be some sort of equivalent, surely?”
“Death, Mistress Christia, is my only consolation!”
“Well, die, my dear! I’ll resurrect you in a day or two, and then . . .”
“Though you love me, Mistress Christia—though you know me best—you do not understand. I seek the inevitable, the irreconcilable, the unalterable, the inescapable! Our ancestors knew it. They knew Death without Resurrection; they knew what it was to be Slave to the Elements. Incapable of choosing their own destinies, they had no responsibility for their own actions. They were tossed by tides. They were scattered by storms. They were wiped out by wars, decimated by disease, ravaged by radiation, made homeless by holocausts, lashed by lightnings . . .”
“You could have lashed yourself a little today, surely?”
“But it would have been my decision. We have lost what is Random, we have banished the Arbitrary, Mistress Christia. With our power rings and our gene banks we can, if we desire, change the courses of the planets, populate them with any kind of creature we wish, make our old sun burst with fresh energy or fade completely from the firmament. We control All. Nothing controls us!”
“There are our whims, our fancies. There are our characters, my moody love.”
“Even those can be altered at will.”
“Except that it is a rare nature which would wish to change itself. Would you change yours? I, for one, would be disconsolate if, say, you decided to be more like the Duke of Queens or the Iron Orchid.”
“Nonetheless, it is possible. It would merely be a matter of decision. Nothing is impossible, Mistress Christia. Now do you realize why I should feel unfulfilled?”
“Not really, dear Werther. You can be anything you wish, after all. I am not, as you know, intelligent—it is not my choice to be—but I wonder if a love of Nature could be, in essence, a grandiose love of oneself—with Nature identified, as it were, with one’s ego?” She offered this without criticism.
For a moment he showed surprise and seemed to be considering her observation. “I suppose it could be. Still, that has little to do with what we were discussing. It’s true that I can be anything—or, indeed, anyone—I wish. That is why I feel unfulfilled!”
“Aha,” she said.
“Oh, how I pine for the pain of the past! Life has no meaning without misery!”
“A common view then, I gather. But what sort of suffering would suit you best, dear Werther? Enslavement by Esquimaux?” She hesitated, her knowledge of the past being patchier than most people’s. “The beatings with thorns? The barbed-wire trews? The pits of fire?”
“No, no—that is primitive. Psychic, it would have to be. Involving—um—morality.”
“Isn’t that some sort of wall-painting?”
A large tear welled and fell. “The world is too tolerant. The world is too kind. They all—you most of all—approve of me! There is nothing I can do which would not amuse you—even if it offended your taste—because there is no danger, nothing at stake. There are no crimes, inflamer of my lust. Oh, if I could only sin!”
Her perfect forehead wrinkled in the prettiest of frowns. She repeated his words to herself. Then she shrugged, embracing him.
“Tell me what sin is,” she said.
II. IN WHICH YOUR AUDITOR INTERPOSES
Our time travellers, once they have visited the future, are only permitted (owing to the properties of Time itself) at best brief returns to their present. They can remain for any amount of time in their future, where presumably they can do no real damage to the course of previous events, but to come back at all is difficult for even the most experienced; to make a prolonged stay has been proved impossible. Half-an-hour with a relative or a loved one, a short account to an auditor, such as myself, of life, say, in the 75th century, a glimpse at an artefact allowed to some interested scientist—these are the best the time traveller can hope for, once he has made his decision to leap into the mysterious future.
As a consequence our knowledge of the future is sketchy, to say the least: we have no idea of how civilizations will grow up or how they will decline; we do not know why the number of planets in the Solar System seems to vary drastically between, say, half-a-dozen to almost a hundred; we cannot explain the popularity in a given age of certain fashions striking us as singularly bizarre or perverse. Are beliefs which we consider fallacious or superstitious based on an understanding of reality beyond our comprehension?
The stories we hear are often partial, hastily recounted, poorly observed, perhaps misunderstood by the traveller. We cannot question him closely, for he is soon whisked away from us (Time insists upon a certain neatness, to protect her own nature, which is essentially of the practical, ordering sort, and should that nature ever be successfully altered, then we might, in turn, successfully alter the terms of the human condition), and it is almost inevitable that we shall never have another chance of meeting him.
Resultantly, the stories brought to us of the Earth’s future assume the character of legends rather than history and tend, therefore, to capture the imagination of artists, for serious scientists need permanent, verifiable evidence with which to work, and precious little of that is permitted them (some refuse to believe in the future, save as an abstraction; some believe firmly that returning time travellers’ accounts are accounts of dreams and hallucinations and that they have not actually travelled in Time at all!). It is left to the Romancers, childish fellows like myself, to make something of these tales. While I should be delighted to assure you that everything I have set down in this story is based closely on the truth, I am bound to admit that while the outline comes from an account given me by one of our greatest and most famous temporal adventuresses, Miss Una Persson, the conversations and many of the descriptions are of my own invention, intended hopefully to add a little colour to what would otherwise be a somewhat spare, a rather dry recounting of an incident in the life of Werther de Goethe.
That Werther will exist, only a few entrenched sceptics can doubt. We have heard of him from many sources, usually quite as reliable as the admirable Miss Persson, as we have heard of other prominent figures of that Age we choose to call “the End of Time”. If it is this age which fascinates us more than any other, it is probably because it seems to offer a clue to our race’s ultimate destiny.
Moralists make much of this period and show us that on the one hand it describes the politeness of human existence or, on the other, the whole point. Romancers are attracted to it for less worthy reasons; they find it colourful, they find its inhabitants glamorous, attractive; their imaginations sparked by the paradoxes, the very ambiguities which exasperate our scientists, by the idea of a people possessing limitless power and using it for nothing but their own amusement, like gods at play. It is pleasure enough for the Romancer to describe a story; to colour it a little, to fill in a few details where they are missing, in the hope that by entertaining himself he entertains others.
Of course, the inhabitants at the End of Time are not the creatures of our past legends, not mere representations of our ancestors’ hopes and fears, not mere metaphors, like Siegfried or Zeus or Krishna, and this could be why they fascinate us so much. Those of us who have studied this Age (as best as it can be studied) feel on friendly terms with the Iron Orchid, with the Duke of Queens, with Lord Jagged of Canaria and the rest, and even believe that we can guess something of their inner lives.
Werther de Goethe, suffering from the knowledge of his, by the standards of his own time, unusual entrance into the world, doubtless felt himself apart from his fellows, though there was no objective reason why he should feel it. (I trust the reader will forgive my abandoning any attempt at a clumsy future tense.) In a society where eccentricity is encouraged, where it is celebrated no matter how extreme its realization, Werther felt, we must assume, uncomfortable: wishing for peers who would demand some sort of conformity from him. He could not retreat into a repressive past age; it was well known that it was impossible to remain in the past (the phenomenon had a name at the End of Time: it was called the Morphail Effect), and he had an ordinary awareness of the futility of re-creating such an environment for himself—for he would have created it; the responsibility would still ultimately be his own. We can only sympathize with the irreconcilable difficulties of leading the life of a gloomy fatalist when one’s fate is wholly, decisively, in one’s own hands!
Like Jherek Carnelian, whose adventures I have recounted elsewhere, he was particularly liked by his fellows for his vast and often naive enthusiasm in whatever he did. Like Jherek, it was possible for Werther to fall completely in love—with Nature, with an idea, with Woman (or Man, for that matter).
It seemed to the Duke of Queens (from whom we have it on the excellent authority of Miss Persson herself) that those with such a capacity must love themselves enormously and such love is enviable. The Duke, needless to say, spoke without disapproval when he made this observation: “To shower such largesse upon the Ego! He kneels before his soul in awe—it is a moody king, in constant need of gifts which must always seem rare!” And what is Sensation, our Moralists might argue, but Seeming Rarity? Last year’s gifts re-gilded.
It might be true that young Werther (in years no more than half-a-millennium) loved himself too much and that his tragedy was his inability to differentiate between the self-gratifying sensation of the moment and what we would call a lasting and deeply felt emotion. We have a fragment of poetry, written, we are assured, by Werther for Mistress Christia:
At these times, I love you most when you are sleeping;
Your dreams internal, unrealized to the world at large:
And do I hear you weeping?
Most certainly a reflection of Werther’s views, scarcely a description, from all that we know of her, of Mistress Christia’s essential being.
Have we any reason to doubt her own view of herself? Rather, we should doubt Werther’s view of everyone, including himself. Possibly this lack of insight was what made him so thoroughly attractive in his own time—le Grand Naif!
And, since we have quoted one, it is fair to quote the other, for happily we have another fragment, from the same source, of Mistress Christia’s verse:
To have my body moved by other hands;
Not only those of Man,
But Woman, too!
My Liberty in pawn to those who understand:
That Love, alone, is True.
Surely this displays an irony entirely lacking in Werther’s fragment. Affectation is also here, of course, but affectation of Mistress Christia’s sort so often hides an equivalently sustained degree of self-knowledge. It is sometimes the case in our own age that the greater the extravagant outer show the greater has been the plunge by the showman into the depths of his private conscience. Consequently, the greater the effort to hide the fact, to give the world not what one is, but what it wants. Mistress Christia chose to reflect with consummate artistry the desires of her lover of the day; to fulfil her ambition as subtly as she did reveals a person of exceptional perspicacity.
I intrude upon the flow of my tale with these various bits of explanation and speculation only, I hope, to offer credibility for what is to follow—to give a hint at a natural reason for Mistress Christia’s peculiar actions and poor Werther’s extravagant response. Some time has passed since we left our lovers. For the moment they have separated. We return to Werther . . .
III. IN WHICH WERTHER FINDS A SOUL MATE
Werther de Goethe’s pile stood on the pinnacle of a black and mile-high crag about which, in the permanent twilight, black vultures swooped and croaked. The rare visitor to Werther’s crag could hear the vultures’ voices as he approached. “Nevermore!” and “Beware the Ides of March!” and “Picking a Chicken with You” were three of the least cryptic warnings they had been created to caw.
At the top of the tallest of his thin, dark towers, Werther de Goethe sat in his favourite chair of unpolished quartz, in his favourite posture of miserable introspection, wondering why Mistress Christia had decided to pay a call on My Lady Charlotina at Lake Billy the Kid.
“Why should she wish to stay here, after all?” He cast a suffering eye upon the sighing sea below. “She is a creature of light—she seeks colour, laughter, warmth, no doubt to try to forget some secret sorrow—she needs all the things I cannot give her. Oh, I am a monster of selfishness!” He allowed himself a small sob. But neither the sob nor the preceding outburst produced the usual satisfaction; self-pity eluded him. He felt adrift, lost, like an explorer without chart or compass in an unfamiliar land. Manfully, he tried again:
“Mistress Christia! Mistress Christia! Why do you desert me? Without you I am desolate! My pulsatile nerves will sing at your touch only! And yet it must be my doom forever to be destroyed by the very things to which I give my fullest loyalty. Ah, it is hard! It is hard!”
He felt a little better and rose from his chair of unpolished quartz, turning his power ring a fraction so that the wind blew harder through the unglazed windows of the tower and whipped at his hair, blew his cloak about, stung his pale, long face. He raised one jackbooted foot to place it on the low sill and stared through the rain and the wind at the sky like a dreadful, spreading bruise overhead, at the turbulent, howling sea below.
He pursed his lips, turning his power ring to darken the scene a little more, to bring up the wind’s wail and the ocean’s roar. He was turning back to his previous preoccupation when he perceived that something alien tossed upon the distant waves; an artefact not of his own design, it intruded upon his careful conception. He peered hard at the object, but it was too far away for him to identify it. Another might have shrugged it aside, but he was painstaking, even prissy, in his need for artistic perfection. Was this some vulgar addition to his scene made, perhaps, by the Duke of Queens in a misguided effort to please him?
He took his parachute (chosen as the only means by which he could leave his tower) from the wall and strapped it on, stepping through the window and tugging at the rip cord as he fell into space. Down he plummeted and the scarlet balloon soon filled with gas, the nacelle opening up beneath him, so that by the time he was hovering some feet above the sombre waves, he was lying comfort-ably on his chest, staring over the rim of his parachute at the trespassing image he had seen from his tower. What he saw was something resembling a great shell, a shallow boat of mother-of-pearl, floating on that dark and heaving sea.
In astonishment he now realized that the boat was occupied by a slight figure, clad in filmy white, whose face was pale and terrified. It could only be one of his friends, altering his appearance for some whimsical adventure. But which? Then he caught, through the rain, a better glimpse and he heard himself saying:
“A child? A child? Are you a child?”
She could not hear him; perhaps she could not even see him, having eyes only for the watery walls which threatened to engulf her little boat and carry her down to the land of Davy Jones. How could it be a child? He rubbed his eyes. He must be projecting his hopes—but there, that movement, that whimper! It was a child! Without doubt!
He watched, open-mouthed, as she was flung this way and that by the elements—his elements. She was powerless: actually powerless! He relished her terror; he envied her her fear. Where had she come from? Save for himself and Jherek Carnelian there had not been a child on the planet for thousands upon thousands of years.
He leaned further out, studying her smooth skin, her lovely rounded limbs. Her eyes were tight shut now as the waves crashed upon her fragile craft; her delicate fingers, unstrong, courageous, clung hard to the side; her white dress was wet, outlining her new-formed breasts; water poured from her long, auburn hair. She panted in delicious impotence.
“It is a child!” Werther exclaimed. “A sweet, frightened child!”
And in his excitement he toppled from his parachute with an astonished yell, and landed with a crash, which winded him, in the sea-shell boat beside the girl. She opened her eyes as he turned his head to apologize. Plainly she had not been aware of his presence overhead. For a moment he could not speak, though his lips moved. But she screamed.
“My dear . . .” The words were thin and high and they faded into the wind. He struggled to raise himself on his elbows. “I apologize . . .”
She screamed again. She crept as far away from him as possible. Still she clung to her flimsy boat’s side as the waves played with it: a thoughtless giant with too delicate a toy; inevitably, it must shatter. He waved his hand to indicate his parachute, but it had already been borne away. His cloak was caught by the wind and wrapped itself around his arm; he struggled to free himself and became further entangled; he heard a new scream and then some demoralized whimpering.
