Collected Short Fiction, page 168
“Heart’s blood, we call it,” he said. “Native brew. Potent. It’ll be the death of me. Cheers.”
Sherret watched him over the rim of his glass.
“Is the ship—” he began, and choked as a fireball seemed to explode in his gullet.
Captain Bagshaw guffawed. “You get used to that delayed action, in time.”
When Sherret could speak, he tried again: “Is the ship still run under Reparism?”
“Good lord, no. Reparism is passe—dontcher know?”
There was a trace of bitterness in Bagshaw’s tone. He took another gulp of the brew.
“Goffism is the bright new hope of Earth,” he went on. “Don’t believe in it myself. Don’t believe in anything much any more.”
“You don’t have Goffism here, then?”
“We do not. We don’t have any Kings for a Day kicking us around. We all do as we damn well please.”
“But—”
“Look, son, we’ve had it. The dream days of Reparism are over for us. Oh, it’ll come back—after we’re dead. That won’t do us much good. And I’ve no family, so what does it matter? I used to sit here waiting for notification from H.Q. that I’d been given an award for the success of this expedition. I lived for those gongs and ribbons, y’know, the eternal boy scout. I hoped they’d make me a Colonel. But the Goffists—they don’t even bother to answer our messages. What does the latest jack-in-office care about us? They’re too busy with their private vendettas. Look at what happened to that poor old fool, Maxton . . .”
“What, sir?”
“Don’t ‘sir’ me, Alex. I’m Bob to you. Maxton? Oh, they hung him. Chief Engineer’s orders—what’s his name?—Mackay. He was sorry afterwards. The Scots get murderous in drink, y’know. They were all blind drunk. Must be a foul brew in those parts. This stuff isn’t like that. It makes you feel good, benevolent and all that. We Pegasus chaps get on fine together here. The natives worry me, though. Fine-looking lot, comely wenches—you saw them?”
Sherret started. He was thinking about Captain Maxton and his own shipmates, and their fate.
“Yes, I saw them sir. They seemed to imagine I was a little tin god.”
Bagshaw shook his head and tapped the ship’s ladder.
“This is the little tin god: the Pegasus. At least, it’s supposed to be the temple of the god. And we’re the priests of the god, to be respected as such. That’s what the natives made up out of their own heads when we arrived, and at the time we saw no reason to disillusion them. For they’re a tough crowd. They’d kill you as soon as look at you if you hadn’t got some sort of hold over them. I was a fool. I took the easy, ready-made way—not like me in those days, y’know. And, naturally, now it’ll backfire on me—on us.”
“How?”
“You’ve seen the slow burn, as they call it?”
“Yes. It’s heading right for the ship,” said Sherret, starting another loaf.
“I know. Heading for the village, too. When Pegasus landed plumb in its path, the natives assumed a god had descended from Olympus or thereabouts to cry: ‘Halt! You shall not pass. I have come to save Na-Abiza.’ Egotistical lot! But it’ll pass through Pegasus like a super blow-torch. In anything from ten to fifteen years, I reckon. Doubt if I’ll be here then—Heart’s Blood will have taken care of me. But how better to pass the time than in wassail? The men like the women here, too—most of ’em have gone native to some extent. Hang the women, I say. For me—the grape.”
“But, sir—Bob—why don’t you get to hell out of it before the showdown? Amara is plenty big enough to get lost in.”
“Lost? I’m already lost, Alex. Still, I did plan to get out, long ago. But I’d already lost authority through accepting this priesthood pantomime. The men became too happy here. Never been made such a fuss of in their lives. Not a man would come with me. Not one. If I could have had just one of them at my side . . . Pity you weren’t in my bunch, Alex. You’d have come with me.”
“Sure I would, Bob.”
Bagshaw sighed. “It means everything to have someone you can rely on.”
Sherret thought: You’re too right.
Aloud, he said: “It’s not too late. Come with me now.”
Bagshaw shook his head. “Too out of condition. Amara’s a tough place. I hate it. I’ve been out there. You can’t count on anything. You never know what’s going to hit you next, but it’ll be unexpected and unpleasant. An unpredictable world. I’m a product of Reparism. There’s no place for me on this lunatic planet. But if you can take it, believe me, you’re a man . . . Got a B-stick on you? No, I suppose not. Run out of ’em long since. Know what? Wish we hadn’t run right out of fuel when we landed. Wish we had something left in the drive-box, just enough to blast Pegasus right out of here—and I wouldn’t care a damn where we crashed. End with a bang, not a whimper. Where’s your glass?”
“Thanks, I’ve had enough. Enough of everything. I’m moving on now, Bob.”
“But you haven’t met any of the boys. Digger, Fritzy, and Doc Lamont—you know them. Doc’s up in the ship. The others are with their lady-loves in the village. They’d be glad to see you.”
“Another time, maybe,” said Sherret. But he knew there would never be another time. “Good-bye, Captain.” He grasped Bagshaw’s hand and shook it.
“I’m sorry you’re not staying, Alex. Yet, in another way, glad. You may make out. The rest of us have made a mess of it.”
He insisted that Sherret take a big plastic bag full of food from the heap of offerings, and a full wineskin. He saw him off at the gate, and the natives made obeisance to both of them. Bagshaw indicated them with good-humoured contempt.
“If they could read our minds, within an hour we’d be fatting all the region kites. Especially me.” He thumped his paunch.
Sherret climbed up and over the ridge, and never turned his head to look back. There was nothing to look back on. Na-Abiza—the Na-Abiza of his imagination—just wasn’t there.
He recalled a conversation with a Paddy at the outset of the trek, which seemed pure nonsense at the time.
“Have you ever been to Na-Abiza?”
“Yes, I have, human, but I didn’t get there.”
“Why not?”
“Because it wasn’t there when I got there.”
“But you just said you didn’t get there.”
“Of course I didn’t, human, if it wasn’t there.”
“Well, is it there now?”
“How can I tell? I’m here, not there.”
Yes, he would always be here, and never there. The paradox was that a man just wasn’t here if he weren’t trying to get there. You had “to shine in use, or rust in monumental mockery.” He seemed to have learned the hard way what Stevenson had proclaimed long ago, that to travel hopefully was a better thing than to arrive.
He set his sights on the next goal, the V-shaped notch in the distant mountains. Once, he had thought of it as the gateway to Na-Abiza. Well, it still could be.
Without Rosala, for him there could be no Na-Abiza.
He was well into the pass, almost back to the village. He was sad but not afraid. The villagers, isolated in their separate cells, wished only to be left alone.
Then he saw the cemetery, just off the road. He had stumbled past it mindlessly before. It was well tended and there were two new graves, heaped with fresh earth, with carved wooden boards at the head of each.
He picked his way through other graves to them.
The inscriptions, not long completed by an unknown villager, said baldly on the one board:
LAURAL CANATO
And even more baldly on the other:
UNKNOWN
There were several other nameless boards around, too, but they were old and weathered. This could only be Lee’s.
He stood for a long time looking down at it, remembering. But for the accidental death of this Laural Canato, almost certainly the old man in the chair, he himself might well be filling a nameless grave here.
Just behind him, someone stepped on a twig and snapped it. He started and spun around, afraid of beholding he knew not whom—or what.
It was Rosala, in a travel-stained tunic but as lovely as ever, regarding him between tears and laughter. She held out her arms to him.
Almost stunned by surprise, he went to her. They embraced with passion.
After a few moments, a doubt struck him. He held her a little apart.
He asked: “Were you looking for me—or for Lee?” And added, a trifle sourly: “As it happens, you’ve found both of us.”
“Both? What do you mean?”
He had to explain. She knelt over the grave and cried freely. He watched with mixed feelings.
Then, quite abruptly, she stood up, dried her eyes, and said: “Let us get away from this terrible place.”
“And go where?”
“Wherever you want to go, darling.”
He thought about that as they walked back to the road. On its verge, he stopped and said: “You said that Petrans were forbidden to leave their appointed area. Yet you are here—very much here. I don’t understand.”
“I broke the law. I walked out of my area. I didn’t wish to go on living in that way any longer. Not after you left me. I came to find you.”
“Not Lee?”
“When Lee left me, I remained there, didn’t I? I didn’t walk out for him. But I did for you, Sherry.”
He kissed her.
“Well, now we can go back,” he said.
“There’s no going back once the law has been broken. Anyway, I don’t want to. I’m happier the way I am.”
“But your pictures, and all your—”
“You said art wasn’t the whole of existence. I’ve found that’s true. I want you. I can learn to paint and sculp again later, in a more deeply satisfying way. It came too easily before.”
“Sorry, my dear, but I don’t get your meaning.”
“I can tell you now—now that I’m outside the law, I mean—that a renegade Petran loses the ability to tap the Power. When he quits his area, the connection breaks.”
“And you renounced that—for me?”
“When it came to it, there was no choice. I couldn’t live without you. In any case, I haven’t lost anything: I’ve gained. My body is my own—you can’t change me now. I exist in my own right, and believe in my own existence. I’ll live and die like any normal humanoid. You see, it was a sort of paradox. If you were content to let the Power act through you, then you had no faith in your own power to act independently. Or even to exist independently. If you renounce the Power, then you gain faith in yourself. Perhaps I’m the first Petran to learn this.”
“Perhaps the first of many, Rosala. Why not go on a mission to enlighten your fellow Petrans? If they’re at all like you, they may choose freedom, too. It would give us the hope of one worthy stock coming into being on this planet. Frankly, I see little other hope. With a very few exceptions, Lee’s people, by his account, are soft, selfish, and unenterprising. The first contingent of mankind to reach this planet has failed to adjust. It’ll be a long time before we can hope for anything better from my world. The poor unfortunates in the village over there have branched off into some kind of ghastly psychobiological cul-de-sac. They must all be old people now, and I can’t see how they can possibly breed in personal isolation. They’re defeated. It seems that much rests on you now, Rosala.”
She thought for a little, then said: “It’s fine to feel you’re important and significant, isn’t it? But I’m still dependent—on you. It means little if I can’t do it without you.”
“But of course we’ll work at it together. This is the sort of opportunity to build and create that I’ve been looking for, without consciously realising it.”
She sighed contentedly. “Then we have a purpose in life, Sherry, and we have each other. What else could we possibly need?”
“Well, there’s food, for one thing,” he smiled, patting the bag over his shoulder.
“We’ve got that. So let’s begin.”
They walked arm in arm up the road, talking excitedly, exchanging ideas and telling of their adventures.
“So you knew of the Creedos in the woods, and yet you dared them, because of me,” Sherret said. “What a woman!”
“Nonsense. I came by the stream, all the way. Lee had told me all about the Creedos, you see. I knew the right thing to do. You didn’t.”
“We live and learn,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot on this trip. It seems to me that life is just one long trek to Na-Abiza—and back.”
1964
A Niche in Time
And if you were a Visitor—who’d be your choice as one to be encouraged?
It had to be a painter this time. My kind of painter.
I’ve catholic taste, but a natural bias. Music, literature, poetry, the theater, sculpture, architecture: all stairways for my spirit. All tracks up the slopes of Parnassus.
Yet to me the crest meant just one thing: a certain masterly arrangement of colors and of light and shade, bringing blazing exaltation.
It had to be van Gogh.
Concerning others there was usually doubt about the right Moment to choose. Vincent’s Moment for me, personally, was the painting of his masterpiece, “The Yellow House.” For my employer, the University, Department of History, sub-Department A.E. (Active Encouragement), the Moment was in the Borinage, during van Gogh’s period of greatest early discouragement. The Church Council had declared he was a most unsatisfactory preacher, and flung him out.
He didn’t know which way to turn. So I visited him.
Shortly afterwards, he wrote to his brother, Theo: “I decided to take up my pencil and start drawing again, and from that moment everything looked different.”
He was twenty-seven then.
I had been the man of that “moment,” which it’s my job to be: I am a Visitor.
It’s a responsible job, and the strain of saying the right thing at the right time can be wearing on the nerves. So the University, which is sometimes understanding—but often not—allows me the odd trip now and then purely for relaxation. A little holiday.
This holiday I wanted to see a painter. My kind of painter. I chose to revisit Vincent eight years after the Borinage—eight years of his time, of course. On a day when the paint on the canvas of “The Yellow House” was still wet . . .
In my excitement I miscalculated, and instead of the tree-sheltered park set the chronocab plumb in the center of the lawn in Place Lamartine. But no one was around to witness me stepping out of nothingness. I was in costume, as always. This time masquerading as a French agricultural laborer, with walnut juice brown-staining my face and arms.
One must never excite the attention of the populace.
There it stood, on the corner. The yellow house itself, with its green door. The sun drenched it, but the yellow was hard, lacking the honeyed warmth from Vincent’s brush. The sky above it was pure cobalt, lacking the magic ingredient of black Vincent had worked into his sky. It takes a master painter to gild Nature.
Beyond, on the right, the glamorous Café de Nuit—dusty, crumbling, prosaic in plain daylight. Also, the two railroad bridges, and just crossing the nearer—a timely gift from Time!—a slow, slug-black, smoky train.
Wide open to every precious nuance of awareness, I lounged across the brown grass.
This time it wasn’t necessary to explain that I was a Visitor. It’s never easy to do, and it was nice to be able to relax. Vincent van Gogh still had two more years—the terrible years—to live, and there was nothing I could do about that. His disease was already deep-rooted in his brain.
My French was far better than his, and he accepted me as a Frenchman. An odd type, admittedly: a laborer who knew something about the technique of painting. But Vincent was already dwelling in a fantasy world, and I became merely part of it to him.
On my first visit it had been more difficult. He had been let down badly. He was suspicious: thought I was an agent of the Evangelist Committee. I was a pretty good linguist, even then, but Dutch wasn’t my strong suit. He’d been teaching—and preaching—in England, so we got by in English that time.
And that time I took him back to England—in the chronocab.
London in midwinter, 1948. A dark gray day by the dark gray Thames. There was an endless drizzle from a sky of mud. We arrived behind a telephone booth—its red was the only visible splash of color—on a side street.
I led him around the corner, and there on the sidewalk, patient in the rain, was a line of more than a thousand people. Slowly, they were shuffling into the Tate Gallery. And as the big building swallowed the head of the line, so others joined the tail, keeping the line at a constant length.
“That,” I told him, “has been going on all day. It went on all yesterday. So it will go on, day after day. A thousand people an hour, every hour. All records for attendance at an art exhibition have already been smashed. These people, weary after a long war, are starved of sunshine and color. They flock here to feast their souls on the work of one great artist.”
“Rembrandt?” he guessed, innocently, watching the traffic on the street with a wondering but wary eye. It was thin today, but I had warned him of it.
“No. You—Vincent van Gogh.”
He was stunned, and had no words. Those wild paleblue eyes rolled more wildly. I feared he would have one of his fits, but his shaking was only excitement at this evidence of his unbelievable success.
We stood in line, so that presently he could see for himself the blazing sunflowers and orchards of the future in his style of the future . . .
And now, in that future of his, in Arles, on my second visit, I stood with him again, looking at some of those very same paintings: unhung, unwanted, unbought.
The thick paint of “The Yellow House” was damp as toothpaste on the canvas: he’d just brought it in from the square. I could have left my thumb print on it for posterity—theoretically.
