The Canopy Of Time Part 6

For as long as I could after he had left me, I lay in the bed in the inverted beehive. Then the darkness grt,w thick and sticky, and I could imagine all the fat, furry bodies, chitinously winged, of the bees on the ceiling. A minute more and I should fall head first into them. Stubbornly, I fought to sweat it out, but a man can only stand so much.

On hands and knees I crawled out of bed and out of the room. Quickly, softly, I clicked the door shut behind me; not a bee escaped.

People were talking in a lighted room along the cor-ridor. I crawled to the doorway, looking and listening. The wonderful stranger talked to the wonderful woman; she was in night attire (p.r.o.nounced "nighta-ta") with a hand bandaged.

She was saying: "You will have to see the authorities in the morning and pet.i.tion them."

He was saying: "It'll do no good. I can't get the law changed. You know that. It's hopeless."

I merely listened.

Sinking on to the bed, he buried his face in his hands, finally looking up to say, "The law insists on personal responsibility. We've got to take care of Alex. It's a reflection of the time we live in; owing to the timescreens we've got-whether we like it or not-historical perspectives. We can see that the whole folly of the past was due to failures in individual liability. Our laws are naturally framed to correct that, which they do-it just happens to be tough on us."

He sighed and said, "The sad thing is, even Alex realizes that, He talked quite sensibly to me at the club about not evading the future."

"It hurts me most when he talks sensibly," the wonder-ful double-you said. "It makes you realize he is still capable of suffering."

He took her bandaged hand, almost as if they had a pain they hoped to alleviate by sharing it between them.

"I'll go and see the authorities in the morning," he promised, "and ask them to let the execution be final- no reprieve afterwards."

Even that did not seem to satisfy her.

Perhaps, like me, she could not tell what either of them were talking about. She shook her head miserably from side to side.

"If only it hadn't been for his club foot," she said. "If only it hadn't been for that, he could have danced the sickness out of himself."

Her face was growing more and more screwed up.

It was enough. More.

"Laugh and grow fat," I suggested. I croaked because my throat was dry. My glands are always like bullets. It reminded me of a frog, so I hopped spontaneously into the room. They did not move; I sat on the bed with them.

"All together again," I said.

They did not move.

"Go back to bed, Alex," she of the wonderfulness said in a low voice.

They were looking at me; goodness knows what they wanted me to say or do. I stayed where I was. A little green clock on a green shelf said nine o'clock.

"Oh, holy heavens," the double-you said. "What does the future hold?"

"Double chins for you, double-yous for me," I joked. That green clock said a minute past nine, I felt as if its little hand were slowly, slowly disembowelling me.

If I waited long enough, I knew I should think of something. They talked to me while I thought and waited; what good they imagined they were doing is beyond me, but I would not harm them. They meant well. They're the best people in the world. That doesn't mean to say I have to listen to them.

The thought about the clock arrived. Divine revela-tion.

"The dancing will be on now," I said, standing up like a jack knife.

"No ""Husband said.

"No!" Perdita said.

"You look as if you have aged," I told them. That is my favourite line in all speech.

I ran out of the room, slamming the door behind me, ran step-club-step-club down the pa.s.sage and hurled myself into the elevator. With infinitesimal delay, I chose the right b.u.t.ton and sank to ground level.

There, I wedged the lattice door open with a chair; that put the elevator out of action.

People in the street took no notice of me. The fools just did not realize who I was. n.o.body spoke' to me as I hurried along, so of course I replied in kind.

Thus I came to the dance area.

Every community has its dance area. There are three of them in Union. Think of all that drama, gladiatorial contests, reading, and sport have ever meant in the past; now they are all merged into dance, inevitably, for only by dance-our kind of dance-can history be inter-preted. And interpretation of history is our being, because through the timescreens we see that history is life. It lives round us, so we dance it. Unless we have club-club-clubbadub-dub feet.

Many dances were in progress among the thirty per-manent sets. The sets were only casually separated from each other, so that spectators or dancers going from one to another might get the sense of everything happening at once, which is the sense the timescreens give you.

That is what I savagely love about history. It is not past: it is always going on. Cleopatra lies for ever in the sweaty arms of Anthony, Socrates continually gulps his hemlock down. You just have to be watching the right screen or the right dance.

Most of the dancers were amateurs-although the term means little where everyone dances out their roles whenever possible. I stood among a crowd, watching. The brightest movements have a dizzying effect; they excite me. To one side of me, Marco Polo sweeps exul-tantly through Cathay to Kubla Khan. Ahead, four children who represent the satellites of Jupiter, glide out to meet the sombre figure of Galileo Galilei. To the other side, the Persian poet Firdausi leaves for exile in Bagdad, Suryavarman builds the beautiful palace at old Angkor. Further still, I catch a glimpse of Heyerdahl turning towards the tide.

And if I cross my eyes, raft, telescope, paG.o.da, palace, palm all mingle. That is meaning! If I could only dance it!

I cannot stay still. Here is my restlessness again, my only companion. I move, eyes unfocused. I pa.s.s round the sets or across them, mingling stiff-legged among the dancers. Something compels me, something I cannot remember. Now I cannot even remember who I am. I've gone beyond mere ident.i.ty.

Everywhere the dancing is faster, matching my heart. I would not harm anyone, except one person who harmed me eternally. It is he I must find. Why do they dance so fast? The movements drive me like whips.

Now I run into a mirror. It stands on a crowded set. I fight with the creature imprisoned in it, thinking it real. Then I understand that it is only a mirror. Shaking my head, I clear the blood from behind my eyes and regard myself. Yes, that is unmistakably me. And I re-member who I am meant to be.

I first found who I was meant to be when, as a child, I saw one of the greatest dramas of all. There it was, captured by the timescreens! The soldiers and cen-turions came and a bragging mult.i.tude. The sky grew dark as they banged three crosses into the ground. And when I saw the Man they nailed upon the central cross, I knew I had His face. I knew that I was He.

Here it is now, that same sublime face, looking at me in pity and pain out of the gla.s.s. n.o.body believes me; I no longer tell them who I think I am. But one thing I know I have to do. I have to do it.

So now I run again clump-trot-clump-trot, knowing just what to look for. All these great sets, pillars and panels of concrete and plastic, I run round them all, looking.

And here it is. Professionals dance out this drama, my drama, so difficult and intricate and sad. Pilate in dove grey, Mary Magdalene moves in green, blue is the gown of Peter. Hosts of dancers fringe them, representing the crowd who did not care. I care! My eyes burn among them, seeking. Then I have the man I want.

He is just leaving the set to rest out of sight until the cue for his last dance. I follow him, keeping behind cover like a crab in a thicket.

Yes! He looks just like me! He is ray living image, and consequently bears That face. Yet it is now overlaid with make-up, pink and solid, so that when he comes out of the bright lights he looks like a corpse.

I am near enough to see the thick muck on his skin, with its runnels and wrinkles caused by sweat and move-ment. Underneath it all, the true face is clear enough to me, although the make-up plastered on it represents Judas.

To have That face and to play Judas! It is the most terrible of all wickedness. But this is Parowen Scryban, whom I have twice murdered for this very blasphemy. It is some consolation to know that although the govern-ment slipped back in time and saved him afterwards, he must still remember those good deaths, be always remembering them. Now I must kill him again.

As he turns into a rest room, I have him. Ah, my fingers slip into that slippery pink stuff, but underneath the skin is firm. He is smaller, slender, tired with the strain of dancing. He falls forward with me on his back.

I kill him now, although in a few hours they will come back and rescue him and it will all not have happened. Never mind the shouting: squeeze. Squeeze, dear G.o.d!

When blows fall on my head from behind, it makes no difference. Scryban should be dead by now, the traitor, I roll off him and let many hands tie me into a strait-jacket.

Many lights are in my eyes. Many voices are talking. I just lie there, thinking I recognize two of the voices, one a man's, one a woman's.

The man says, "Yes, Inspector, I know that under law parents are responsible for their own children.

We look after Alex as far as we can, but he's mad. He's a throw-back! I-G.o.d, Inspector, I hate the creature."

"You mustn't say that!" the woman cries. "Whatever he does, he's our son."

They sound too shrill to be true. I cannot think what they make such a fuss about. So I open my eyes and look at them. She is a wonderful woman but I recognize neither her nor the man; they just do not interest me. Scryban I do recognize.

He is standing rubbing his throat. He looks a real mess with his two faces all mixed in together like a Pica.s.so. Because he is breathing, I know they have come back and saved him again. No matter: he will remem-ber, always remember.

The man they call Inspector (and who, I ask, would want a name like that?) goes over to speak to Scryban.

"Your father tells me you are actually this madman's brother," he says to Scryban. Judas hangs his head, though he continues to ma.s.sage his neck.

"Yes," he says. He is as quiet as the woman was shrill; strange how folks vary. "Alex and I are twin brothers. I changed my name years ago-the publicity, you know - harmful to my professional career.

How terribly tired and bored I feel.

Who is whose brother, I ask myself, who mothers whom? I'm lucky: I own no relations. These people look sad company. The saddest in the universe.

"I think you all look as if you have aged!" I shout suddenly.

That makes the Inspector come and stand over me, which I dislike. He has knees half-way up his legs. I manage to resemble one of the tritons on one of Benvenuto Cellini's salt-cellars, and so he turns away at last to speak to Husband.

"All right," he says. "I can see this is just one of those things n.o.body can be responsible for. I'll arrange for the reprieve to be countermanded. This time, when the devil is dead he stays dead."

Husband embraces Scryban. Wonderful woman begins to cry. Traitors all! I start to laugh, making it so harsh and loud and horrible it frightens even me.

What none of them understand is this: on the third time I shall rise again.

The millennia pa.s.s. We must skip over the forty million years known as the Middle Period, that time of change when nothing really changed. For the solar system, there is only one long day; the sun makes the day, its planets fas.h.i.+on their own nights. And as long as the sun burns, quiet as a wick in a shuttered room, life too enjoys its uninterrupted day; only the tiny individual lives have to endure each their own nights.

O Ishrail!

The mental health s.h.i.+p Cyberqueen lay quietly against a long wharf. Alone in one of its many cabins, Davi Dael sat waiting. The b.u.t.tercup in his tunic was beginning to wilt. He half-smiled down at it because it seemed the one connection between him and the Bergharra towns.h.i.+p he had left early that morning; he had picked it before catching a fast gyre into New Union. Nothing else Davi could see, either here in the waiting-room or outside the window, had as much colour as his b.u.t.tercup.

The waiting-room was all greens and greys, relieved only by the faumium fittings. Outside, there were only greys and blacks, as evening yawned down on acres of shunting yard; on the other side of the s.h.i.+p, the Horby River would echo the same sober tones. Quiet. Quiet for pa.r.s.ecs round, that treacherous quiet when nothing stirs but the anxiety deep in the bowels.

In Davi's mind, the ordinary worries of a busy man were eclipsed by larger preoccupations which grew and grew, as if nourished by the silence. He waited tensely while these preoccupations rumbled as raggedly as thunder round his head. Nothing constructive would come of them: the elephantine anxieties padded head to tail like a series of catch-phrases: pa.r.s.ecs, galactic federa-tion, hyper-s.p.a.ce, interpenetrators.

These were the words which bothered Davi. His un-quick brain turned them over time and again, as if hoping to find something relevant beneath them. Nearing fifty, he had known most of the words for years; they had been just words, without any attachments to experience, dictionary words. Only in this season had they come to unsettle his whole life.

A silent, quick footstep pa.s.sed the door. Davi was at once on his feet, a sick feeling rising with him.

What conclusion had they come to here about Ishrail? Was he born on earth or not? Or (it was really all the same ques-tion) had he been proved sane or insane?

For a minute Davi stood trembling, then sat wearily down again as he realized the footsteps had no connec-tion with his existence. He resumed his bored scrutiny of the marshalling yards; this kind of sight was unfamiliar to him, living as he did deep in the country. Here, the imports of a great sea-fringed city were borne away to their destination. His interests being generally confined to the cattle he bred, Davi would have been indifferent to the spectacle at any other time; now, it did possess a faint tinkle of interest, for he saw it through Ishrail's eyes. And that changed the pattern entirely.

The uncountable miles of track, from Ishrail's view-point, belonged to a primitive transport system on a re-mote globe. All round this globe stretched-not sky, as Davi had once idly thought-but the great complicated highway called s.p.a.ce. Not a simple nothingness: rather, Ishrail explained, an unfathomable interplay of forces, fields and planes, Ishrail had laughed to hear that earth-word, "s.p.a.ce"; he had called it not s.p.a.ce but a maze of stresses. But of course Ishrail might well be crazy. Cer-tainly n.o.body in Bergharra had ever talked as he did.

And through the maze of stress-fields, Ishrail had said, rode the Interpenetrators. Davi thought of them as s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+ps, but Ishrail called them Interpenetrators. They apparently were not made of metal at all, but of mentally powered force s.h.i.+elds, which fed on the stress-fields and changed as they changed; so the people of the galaxy rode in safety between the civilized planets. At least, that was what Ishrail claimed.

And the planets warred on one another. But even the war was not as Davi understood the term. It was as stylized as chess, as formal as a handshake, as chivalrous as an ambulance, as unrelenting as a guillotine. Its objectives were more nebulous and vast than materialist earthmen could visualize. Or so said Ishrail, but of course Ishrail might be mad.

Even if he was, that did not affect Davi's loving admiration of him.

"Don't let them find him insane! Don't let them find him insane!" Davi said, in an agony of repet.i.tion, speak-ing to the grey walls.

And yet ... if you proved Ishrail to be sane . . . you had to accept his mad version of reality.

After all his hours of waiting, Davi was unprepared when the cabin door opened. He was standing with his fists clenched to his tunic, and dropped them in con-fusion as the white-haired man came in. This was Brother Joh Shansfor, the psychiatrist who had interviewed Davi in the Cyberqueen-one of the roving fleet of specialist s.h.i.+ps which had replaced the old static conception of a hospital-when Davi had first asked for help for Ishrail in Bergharra. Shansfor was tall, thin and brisk, and remarkably ugly, although age had now taken the sting out of his features, leaving them little more than notably rugged.

Davi went straight over to him.

"Ishrail?" he asked.

Under that tense, eager stare, Shansfor flinched.

"We aren't actually certain yet," he said, in his formal way. "Some of the factors involved invite very cautious evaluation indeed. . . ."

"It's a month since Ishrail came aboard here, three weeks since you brought him to New Union," Davi said.

"I introduced him to you for his own sake, but he can't like it here, being under constant observation and every- thing. Surely in all that time"

"A quick decision would only be a foolish one," Shans-for said. "Ishrail is entirely happy and safe here; and you may rest a.s.sured be is not being treated like an ordinary patient."

"You told me that before!" There were angry tears in Davi's eyes. He had the sensation that the whole organization of the mental health s.h.i.+p was rearing up against him. "In the short time since I found him, I've grown to love Ishrail. Surely even you people here can feel his goodness of character."

"His character is not in question. We are examining his mind," Shansfor replied, "Excuse me if I sit down; it has been a trying day."

He sat down on a hard chair and allowed his shoulders to sag slightly. Davi, old enough to understand the weari-ness that might lie behind that innocent-looking gesture, felt his wrath deflected. Distrusting psychiatrists enough to wonder if the incident might not be a covert attempt to win sympathy, he still kept hardness in his tone as he said, "All the same, Brother Shansfor, you must have felt his gentle nature. Give me a personal opinion for heaven's sake; I'm a stock-breeder, not a lawyer. Ishrail's saner than you or I, isn't he?"

"No," Shansfor said slowly. "If you want a personal opinion, your protege is sinking rapidly into schizo-phrenic trauma. Paranoia is also present. He is, in popular usage, a hopeless case."

Colour drained from under Davi's tan. He fumbled wordlessly for words among the green and grey slices of whirling room, "Let me see Ishrail P he finally gasped.