This side of Infinity (ssc), page 3
This is unreal and dreamlike to me. I have revealed myself, thinking to drive her away in terror; she is no longer aghast, and smiles at my strangeness. She kneels to get a better look. I move back a short way. Eyestalks fluttering—I am uneasy, I have somehow lost the upper hand in this encounter.
She says, “I knew you were unusual, but not like this. But it’s all right. I can cope. I mean, the essential personality, that’s what I fell in love with. Who cares that you’re a crab-man from the Green Galaxy? Who cares that we can’t ever be real lovers? I can make that sacrifice. It’s your soul I dig, David. Go on. Close yourself up again. You don’t look comfortable this way.” The triumph of love. She will not abandon me, even now. Disaster. I crawl back into Knecht and lift his arms to his chest to seal it. Shock is glazing my consciousness: the enormity, the audacity. What have I done? Elizabeth watches, awed, even delighted. At last I am together again. She nods. “Listen,” she tells me, “you can trust me. I mean, if you’re some kind of spy, checking out the Earth, I don’t care. I don’t care. I won’t tell anybody. Pom: it all out, David. Tell me about yourself. Don’t you see? This is the biggest thing that ever happened to me. A chance to show that love isn’t just physical, isn’t just chemistry, that it’s a soul trip, that it crosses not just racial lines but the lines of the whole damned species, the planet itself—”
It took several hours to get rid of her. A soaring, intense conversation, Elizabeth doing most of the talking. She putting forth theories of why I had come to Earth, I nodding, denying, amplifying, mostly lost in horror at my own perfidy and barely listening to her monolog. And the humidity turning me into rotting rags.
Finally: ‘I’m down from the pot, David. And all wound up. I’m going out for a walk. Then back to my room to write for a while. To put this night into a poem before I lose the power of it. But I’ll come to you again by dawn, all right? That’s maybe five hours from now.
You’ll be here? You won’t do anything foolish? Oh, I love you so much, David! Do you believe me? Do you?” When she was gone I stood a long while by the window, trying to reassemble myself. Shattered. Drained. Remembering her kisses, her lips running along the ridge marking the place where my chest opens. The fascination of the abomination. She will love me even if I am crustaceous beneath.
I had to have help.
I went to Swanson’s room. He was slow to respond to my knock—busy transmitting, no doubt. I could hear him within but he didn’t answer.
“Swanson” I called. “Swanson?” Then I added the distress signal in the Homeworld tongue. He rushed to the door. Blinking, suspicious. “It’s all right,” I said. “Look, let me in. I’m in big trouble.”
Speaking English. But I gave him the distress signal again.
“How did you know about me?” he asked.
“The day the maid blundered into your room while you were eating, I was going by. I saw.”
“But you aren’t supposed to—”
“Except in emergencies. This is an emergency.”
He shut off his ultrawave and listened intently to my story. Scowling. He didn’t approve. But he wouldn’t spurn me. I had been criminally foolish but I was of his kind, prey to the same pains, the same loneliness, and he would help me.
“What do you plan to do now?” he asked. “You can’t harm her. It isn’t allowed.”
“I don’t want to harm her. Just to get free of her. To make her fall out of love with me.”
“How? If showing yourself to her didn’t—”
“Infidelity,” I said. “Making her see that I love someone else. No room in my life for her. That’ll drive her away. Afterward it won’t matter that she knows—who’d believe her story? The FBI would laugh and tell her to lay off the LSD. But if I don’t break her attachment to me I’m finished.”
“Love someone else? Who?”
‘When she comes back to my room at dawn,” I said, “she’ll find the two of us together, dividing and abstracting. I think that’ll do it, don’t you?”
So I deceived Elizabeth with Swanson.
The fact that we both wore male human identities was irrelevant, of course. We went to my room and stepped out of our disguises—a bold, dizzying sensation—and suddenly we were just two Homeworlders again, receptive to one another’s needs. I left the door unlocked. Swanson and I crawled up on my bed and began the chanting. How strange it was after these years of solitude to feel those vibrations again! And how beautiful. Swanson’s vibrissae touching mine. The interplay of harmonies. An underlying sternness to his technique— he was contemptuous of me for my idiocy and rightly so—but once we passed from the chanting to the dividing all was forgiven. And as we moved into the abstracting it was truly sublime. We climbed through an infinity of climactic emptyings. Dawn crept upon us and found us unwilling to halt even for rest.
A knock at the door. Elizabeth.
“Come in,” I said.
A dreamy, ecstatic look on her face. Fading instantly when she saw the two of us entangled on the bed. A questioning frown.
“We’ve been mating,” I explained. “Did you think I was a complete hermit?” She looked from Swanson to me, from me to Swanson. Hand over her mouth. Eyes anguished. I turned the screw a little tighter. “I couldn’t stop you from falling in love with me, Elizabeth. But I really do prefer my own kind. As should have been obvious.”
“To have her here now, though—when you knew I was coming back—”
“Not her, exactly. Not him exactly either, though.”
“—so cruel, David! To ruin such a beautiful experience!” Holding forth sheets of paper with shaking hands. “A whole sonnet cycle,” she said. “About tonight. How beautiful it was and all. And now—and now—” Crumpling the pages. Hurling them across the room. Turning. Running out, sobbing furiously. Hell hath no fury like. “David!” A smothered cry. And slamming the door.
She was back in ten minutes. Swanson and I hadn’t quite finished donning our bodies yet—we were both still unsealed. As we worked we discussed further steps to take. He felt honor demanded that I request a transfer back to Homeworld, having terminated my usefulness here through tonight’s indiscreet revelation. I agreed with him to some degree but was reluctant to leave. Despite the bodily torment of life on Earth I had come to feel I belonged here.
Then Elizabeth entered, radiant.
“I mustn’t be so possessive,” she announced. “So bourgeois. So conventional. I’m willing to share my love.” Embracing Swanson. Embracing me. “A menage d trois,” she said. “I won’t mind that you two are having a physical relationship. As long as you don’t shut me out of your lives completely. I mean, David, we could never have been physical anyway, right, but we can have the other aspects of love. And we’ll open ourselves to your friend also. Yes? Yes? Yes?”
Swanson and I both put in applications for transfer, he to Africa, I to Homeworld. It would be some time before we received a reply. Until then we were at her mercy. He was blazingly angry with me for involving him in this but what choice had I had? Nor could either of us avoid Elizabeth. We were at her mercy. She bathed both of us in shimmering waves of tender emotion; wherever we turned, there she was, incandescent with love. Lighting up the darkness of our lives. You poor lonely creatures. Do you suffer much in our gravity? What about the heat? And the winters. Is there a custom of marriage on your planet? Do you have poetry?
A happy threesome. We went to the theater together. To concerts. Even to parties in Greenwich Village.
“My friends.” Elizabeth said, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was living with both of us. Faintly scandalous doings; she loved to seem daring. Swanson was sullenly obliging, putting up with her antics but privately haranguing me for subjecting him to all this. Elizabeth got out another mimeographed booklet of poems, dedicated to both of us. Triple Trip-ping, she called it. Flagrantly erotic. I quoted a few of the poems in one of my reports to Homeworld, then lost heart and hid the booklet in the closet.
“Have you heard about your transfer yet?” I asked Swanson at least twice a week.
He hadn’t. Neither had I.
Autumn came. Elizabeth, burning her candle at both ends, looked gaunt and feverish.
“I have never known such happiness,” she announced frequently, one hand clasping Swanson, the other me. “I never think about the strangeness of you any more. I think of you only as people. Sweet, wonderful, lonely people. Here in the darkness of his horrid city.”
And she once said, “What if everybody here is like you and I’m the only one who’s really human? But that’s silly. You must be the only ones of your kind here. The advance scouts. Will your planet invade ours? I do hope sol Set everything to rights. The reign of love and reason at last!”
“How long will this go on?” Swanson muttered.
At the end of October his transfer came through. He* left without saying goodbye to either of us and without leaving a forwarding address. Nairobi? Addis Ababa? Kinshasa?
I had grown accustomed to having him around to share the burden of Elizabeth. Now the full brunt of her affection fell on me. My work was suffering. I had no time to file my reports properly. And I lived in fear of her gossiping. What was she telling her Village friends? (You know David? He’s not really a man, you know. Actually inside him there’s a kind of crab-thing from another solar system. But what does that matter? Love’s a universal phenomenon. The truly loving person doesn’t draw limits around the planet.) I longed for my release. To go home, to accept my punishment, to shed my false skin. To empty my mind of Elizabeth.
My reply came through the ultrawave on November thirteenth. Application denied. I was to remain on Earth and continue my work as before. Transfers to Homeworld were granted only for reasons of health.
I debated sending a full account of my treason to Homeworld and thus bringing about my certain recall. But I hesitated, overwhelmed with despair. Dark brooding seized me.
“Why so sad?” Elizabeth asked. What could I say? That my attempt at escaping from her had failed. “I love you,” she said. “I’ve never felt so real before.” Nuzzling against my cheek. Fingers knotted in my hair. A seductive whisper. “David, open yourself up again. Your chest, I mean. I want to see the inner you. To make sure I’m not frightened of it. Please? You’ve only let me see you once.”
I was appalled. But I let her. She was unafraid. Transfigured by happiness. She is a cosmic nuisance but I fear I’m getting to like her.
Can I leave her? I wish Swanson had not vanished. I need advice.
Either I break with Elizabeth or I break with Home-world. This is absurd. I find new chasms of despondency every day. I am unable to do my work. I have requested a transfer once again, without giving details. The first snow of the winter today.
Application denied.
“When I found you with Swanson,” she said, “it was a terrible shock. An even bigger blow than when you first came out of your chest. I mean, it was startling to find out you weren’t human but it didn’t hit me in any emotional way—it didn’t threaten me. But then to come back a few hours later and find you with one of your own land, to know that you wanted to shut me out, that I had no place in your life—only we worked it out, didn’t we?”
Kissing me. Tears of joy in her eyes. How did this happen? Where did it all begin? Existence was once so simple. I have tried to trace the chain of events that brought me from there to here and I cannot. I was outside of my false body for eight hours today. The longest spell so far. Elizabeth is talking of going to the islands with me for the winter. A secluded cottage that her friends will make available. Of course, I must not leave my post without permission. And it takes months simply to get a reply.
Let me admit the truth: I love her.
January 1. The new year begins. I have sent my resignation to Homeworld and have destroyed my ultrawave equipment. The links are broken. Tomorrow, when the city offices are open, Elizabeth and I will go to get the marriage license.
ROGER ZELAZNY is a writer of many virtues, but central to all of them is his fascination with the transcendent: beauty, heroism, great and powerful natural forces. Many people admire him for the lyricism of his writing style, but it isn’t merely a style he gives us, it’s a world view set to words. Here is Zelazny’s view of a mountain forty miles high, and of what happens to the man who feels he must climb it.
THIS MORTAL MOUNTAIN by Roger Zelazny
I
I looked down at it and I was sick! I wondered, where did it lead? Stars?
There were no words. I stared and I stared, and I cursed the fact that the thing existed and that someone had found it while I was still around.
“Well?” said Lanning, and he banked the flier so that I could look upward.
I shook my head and shaded my already shielded eyes.
“Make it go away,” I finally told him.
“Cant. It’s bigger than I am.”
“It’s bigger than anybody,” I said.
“I can make us go away…”
“Never mind. I want to take some pictures.”
He brought it around, and I started to shoot.
“Can you hover—or get any closer?”
“No, the winds are too strong.”
“That figures.”
So I shot-through telescopic lenses and scan attachment and all—as we circled it.
“I’d give a lot to see the top.”
“We’re at thirty thousand feet, and fifty’s the ceiling on this baby. The Lady, unfortunately, stands taller than the atmosphere.”
“Funny,” I said, “from here she doesn’t strike me as the sort to breathe ether and spend all her time looking at stars.”
He chuckled and lit a cigarette, and I reached us another bulb of coffee.
“How does the Gray Sister strike you?”
And I lit one of my own and inhaled, as the flier was buffeted by sudden gusts of something from somewhere and then ignored, and I said, “Like Our Lady of the Abattoir—right between the eyes.”
We drank some coffee, and then he asked, “She too big, Whitey?” and I gnashed my teeth through caffeine, for only my friends call me Whitey, my name being Jack Summers and my hair having always been this way, and at the moment I wasn’t too certain whether Henry Lanning qualified for that status—just because he’d known me for twenty years—after going out of his way to find this thing on a world with a thin atmosphere, a lot of rocks, a too-bright sky and a name like LSD pronounced backwards, after George Diesel, who had set foot in the dust and then gone away—smart fellow!
“A forty-mile-high mountain,” I finally said, “is not a mountain. It is a world all by itself, which some dumb deity forgot to throw into orbit.”
“I take it you’re not interested?”
I looked back at the gray and lavender slopes and followed them upward once again,- until all color drained away, until the silhouette was black and jagged and the top still nowhere in sight, until my eyes stung and burned behind their protective glasses; and I saw clouds bumping up against that invincible outline, like icebergs in the sky, and I heard the howling of the retreating winds which had essayed to measure its grandeur with swiftness and, of course, had failed.
“Oh, I’m interested,” I said, “in an academic sort of way. Let’s go back to town, where I can eat and drink and maybe break a leg if I’m lucky.”
He headed the flier south, and I didn’t look around as we went. I could sense her presence at my back, though, all the way: The Gray Sister, the highest mountain in the known universe. Unclimbed, of course.
She remained at my back during the days that followed, casting her shadow over everything I looked upon. For the next two days I studied the pictures I had taken and I dug up some maps and I studied them, too; and I spoke with people who told me stories of the Gray Sister, strange stories…
During this time, I came across nothing really encouraging. I learned that there had been an attempt to colonize Diesel a couple centuries previously, back before faster-than-light ships were developed. A brand-new disease had colonized the first colonists, however, wiping them out to a man. The new colony was four years old, had better doctors, had beaten the plague, was on Diesel to stay and seemed proud of its poor taste when it came to worlds. Nobody, I learned, fooled around much with the Gray Sister. There had been a few abortive attempts to climb her, and some young legends that followed after.
Dining the day, the sky never shut up. It kept screaming into my eyes, until I took to wearing my climbing goggles whenever I went out. Mainly, though, I sat in the hotel lounge and ate and drank and studied the pictures and cross-examined anybody who happened to pass by and glance at them, spread out there on the table.
I continued to ignore all Henry’s questions. I knew what he wanted, and he could damn well wait. Unfortunately, he did, and rather well, too, which irritated me. He felt I was almost hooked by the Sister, and he wanted to Be There When It Happened. He’d made a fortune on the Kasla story, and I could already see the opening sentences of this one in the smug lines around his eyes. Whenever he tried to make like a poker player, leaning on his fist and slowly turning a photo, I could see whole paragraphs. If I followed the direction of his gaze, I probably could even have seen the dust jacket.
At the end of the week, a ship came down out of the sky, and some nasty people got off and interrupted my train of thought. When they came into the lounge, I recognized them for what they were and removed my black lenses so that I could nail Henry with my basilisk gaze and turn him to stone. As it would happen, he had too much alcohol in him, and it didn’t work.
“You tipped off the press,” I said.
