Alien Archives, page 28
Suddenly he cannot breathe.
“Get me out of here,” Schwartz mutters hoarsely, choking.
Dawn, with stewardess efficiency, chops a path for him through the mob. The sponsors, concerned, rush to his aid. He is floated swiftly back to the hotel in a glistening little bubble-car. Dawn helps him to bed. Reviving, he reaches for her.
“You don’t have to,” she says. “You’ve had a rough day.”
He persists. He embraces her and takes her, quickly, fiercely, and they move together for a few minutes and it ends and he sinks back, exhausted, stupefied. She gets a cool cloth and pats his forehead and urges him to rest. “Bring me my drugs,” he says. He wants siddharthin, but she misunderstands, probably deliberately, and offers him something blue and bulky, a sleeping pill, and, too weary to object, he takes it. Even so, it seems to be hours before sleep comes.
He dreams he is at the skyport, boarding the rocket for Bangkok, and instantly he is debarking at Bangkok—just like Port Moresby, only more humid—and he delivers his speech to a horde of enthusiastic Thais, while rockets flicker about him carrying him to skyport after skyport, and the Thais blur and become Japanese, who are transformed into Mongols, who become Uighurs, who become Iranians, who become Sudanese, who become Zambians, who become Chileans, and all look alike, all look alike, all look alike.
***
THE SPICANS HOVERED ABOVE HIM, weaving, bobbing, swaying like cobras about to strike. But their eyes, warm and liquid, were sympathetic: loving, even. He felt the flow of their compassion. If they had had the sort of musculature that enabled them to smile, they would be smiling tenderly, he knew.
One of the aliens leaned close. The little translating device dangled toward Schwartz like a holy medallion. He narrowed his eyes, concentrating as intently as he could on the amber words flashing quickly across the screen.
“. . . has come. We shall . . .”
“Again, please,” Schwartz said. “I missed some of what you were saying.”
“The moment . . . has come. We shall . . . make the exchange of sacraments now.”
“Sacraments?”
“Drugs.”
“Drugs, yes. Yes. Of course.” Schwartz groped in his pouch. He felt the cool, smooth leather skin of his drug case. Leather? Snakeskin, maybe. Anyway. He drew it forth. “Here,” he said. “Siddharthin, learitonin, psilocerebrin, acid-57. Take your pick.” The Spicans selected three small blue siddharthins. “Very good,” Schwartz said. “The most transcendental of all. And now—”
The longest of the aliens proffered a ball of dried orange fungus the size of Schwartz’s thumbnail.
“It is an equivalent dose. We give it to you.”
“Equivalent to all three of my tablets, or to one?”
“Equivalent. It will give you peace.”
Schwartz smiled. There was a time for asking questions and a time for unhesitating action. He took the fungus and reached for a glass of water.
“Wait!” Pitkin cried, appearing suddenly. “What are you—”
“Too late,” Schwartz said serenely, and swallowed the Spican drug in one joyous gulp.
***
THE NIGHTMARES GO ON AND on. He circles the Earth like the Flying Dutchman, like the Wandering Jew, skyport to skyport to skyport, an unending voyage from nowhere to nowhere. Obliging committees meet him and convey him to his hotel. Sometimes the committee members are contemporary types, indistinguishable from one another, with standard faces, standard clothing, the all-purpose new-model hybrid unihuman, and sometimes they are consciously ethnic, elaborately decked out in feathers and paint and tribal emblems, but their faces, too, are standard behind the gaudy regalia, their slang is the slang of Uganda and Tierra del Fuego and Nepal, and it seems to Schwartz that these masqueraders are, if anything, less authentic, less honest, than the other sort, who at least are true representatives of their era. So it is hopeless either way. He lashes at his pillow, he groans, he wakens. Instantly Dawn’s arms enfold him. He sobs incoherent phrases into her clavicle and she murmurs soothing sounds against his forehead. He is having some sort of breakdown, he realizes: a new crisis of values, a shattering of the philosophical synthesis that has allowed him to get through the last few years. He is bound to the wheel; he spins, he spins, he spins, traversing the continents, getting nowhere. There is no place to go. No. There is one, just one, a place where he will find peace, where the universe will be as he needs it to be. Go there, Schwartz. Go and stay as long as you can. “Is there anything I can do?” Dawn asks. He shivers and shakes his head. “Take this,” she says, and gives him some sort of pill. Another tranquilizer. All right. All right. The world has turned to porcelain. His skin feels like a plastic coating. Away, away, to the ship. To the ship! “So long,” Schwartz says.
***
OUTSIDE THE SHIP THE CAPELLANS twist and spin in their ritual dance as, weightless and without mass, they are swept toward the rim of the galaxy at nine times the velocity of light. They move with a grace that is astonishing for creatures of such tremendous bulk. A dazzling light that emanates from the center of the universe strikes their glossy skin and, rebounding, resonates all up and down the spectrum, splintering into brilliant streamers of ultra red, infraviolet, exoyellow. All the cosmos glows and shimmers. A single perfect note of music comes out of the remote distance and, growing closer, swells in an infinite crescendo. Schwartz trembles at the beauty of all he perceives.
Beside him stands the seal-slick Antarean. She—definitely she, no doubt of it, she—plucks at his arm and whispers, “Will you go to them?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“So will I. Wherever you go.”
“Now,” Schwartz says. He reaches for the lever that opens the hatch. He pulls down. The side of the starship swings open.
The Antarean looks deep into his eyes and says blissfully, “I never told you my name. My name is Dawn.”
Together they float through the hatch into space.
The blackness receives them gently. There is no chill, no pressure at the lungs, no discomfort at all. He is surrounded by luminous surges, by throbbing mantles of pure color, as though he has entered the heart of an aurora. He and Dawn swim toward the Capellans, and the huge beings welcome them with deep, glad, booming cries. Dawn joins the dance at once, moving her sinuous limbs with extravagant ease; Schwartz will do the same in a moment, but first he turns to face the starship, hanging in space close by him like a vast coppery needle, and in a voice that could shake universes he calls, “Come, friends! Come, all of you! Come dance with us!” And they come, pouring through the hatch, the Spicans first, then all the rest, the infinite multitude of beings, the travelers from Fomalhaut and Achernar and Acrux and Aldebaran, from Thuban and Arcturus and Altair, from Polaris and Canopus and Sirius and Rigel, hundreds of star-creatures spilling happily out of the vessel, bursting forth, all of them, even Pitkin, poor little Pitkin, everyone joining hands and tentacles and tendrils and whatever, forming a great ring of light across space, everyone locked in a cosmic harmony, everyone dancing. Dancing. Dancing.
DIANA OF THE HUNDRED BREASTS
I visited Turkey in April 1994—Turkey is a country that has exerted continued fascination on me since my first trip there in 1967, which produced my Byzantine time-travel novel Up the Line—and this time I went down the Aegean coast, which is rich in the ruins of the ancient Greek culture that formerly flourished there. Among our stops was Ephesus, once the site of the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. There’s nothing left of that glorious temple today—it was burned down by a disgruntled parishioner in 356 B.C., rebuilt by Alexander the Great, sacked by the Goths, and later stripped of its masonry to build the Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, so all that remains is an open field with a single column rising above a scattering of stonework. But in the small museum in the adjacent Turkish town of Seljuk are the two mysterious statues of Artemis that once were worshipped there: huge stone figures of a woman whose midsection is festooned with what seem to be dozens of breasts, though perhaps they are eggs. Breasts or eggs, no one is sure, but either way they are symbols of fertility, and it is apparent that the Artemis of Ephesus was a fertility goddess rather than the virginal huntress of classical Greek myth.
Artemis passed into Roman mythology as the goddess Diana, and continued to be worshipped there into the Christian era. We read in the Book of Acts, 19, that the Apostle Paul turned up there in the first century A.D. and denounced the cult of Diana and the famed statues thereof, saying, “They be no gods, which are made by hands.” He called for the destruction of her shrine. The citizens of Ephesus, full of wrath at this, gathered and cried out with one voice, the Bible tells us, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” Eventually things quieted down, though, and Paul got out of town with his skin intact, and ultimately neither Diana nor Jesus emerged victorious from the fray, because today Ephesus is a very picturesque ruin and Allah is the god of the region where it was located.
Avram Davidson wrote a clever, charming, complex little story (did he ever write any other kind?) in 1958 called “Great is Diana,” which makes oblique reference to the famed many-breasted statues of Ephesus. The Davidson story is mostly about breasts, rather than the cult of Diana/Artemis, but in any case I had long forgotten it in July of 1995, when, brimming with images from the previous year’s Turkish trip, I set about to write a fantasy story that would explain what those strange statues were doing in Ephesus.
The immediate precipitating factor was a plaintive phone-call from Alice K. Turner, the fiction editor of Playboy, for whom I had written a great many stories over many years and with whom I had a remarkable editor-writer relationship that was for two decades a fascinating creative challenge for me. Alice called up to complain that her inventory of science-fiction stories had dwindled to zero, and wondered if I would mind writing one for her. I have attempted, since 1970 or so, to do no writing at all in the summer months, and here we were in the splendid California June of unending sunshine, and yet, and yet, how could I ignore such a request from Alice Turner? So I wrote her, on June 30, 1995, that I was halfway through the six-month holiday from writing that I had bestowed upon myself after a particularly grueling winter of work, but I was getting a bit restless with a daily life of swimming, gardening, and sitting on the porch reading, so perhaps I might just interrupt my dolce far niente and do a story for her.
And so I did, although things didn’t work out quite as planned. Within ten days I had written “Diana of the Hundred Breasts,” which I sent to her with a note saying, “Herewith is a report for you on What I Did On My Summer Vacation In Turkey Last Year. The scenery is rendered reliably; I did make up a few of the details of the events, I have to confess.”
But Alice didn’t like the story. It was what she called an “I.R.S. Story”, she said—stories that I would set in exotic places merely to prove, so she said, that my travel expenses were legitimately tax-deductible. Alice had rejected two or three of my foreign-based stories over the years, always with that same reason and always to my bewilderment, because I couldn’t understand her objection to foreign-based stories, whether they were I.R.S.-connected or not. Also she didn’t care much for the plot and she didn’t think one of the characters was realistically rendered. And I think she was bothered by the fact that I had given her a fantasy story rather than the pure science-fiction tale that she had asked me for. (Though something in my excessively rational mind seems to recoil at the irrationality that lies at the heart of most fantasy themes, so that when I set out to write fantasy it usually turns out to have a science-fictional explanation, as can be seen here.)
Well, rejections happen. Playboy under Alice Turner was not only the highest-paying fiction market around, but also one of the toughest, and though I sold her plenty of stories over the years, I had to expect that once in a while, she would turn one down. I replied to her rejection note on July 31: “Well, of course I disagree, but what the hell. I’ll sell it somewhere else and sell you something else next year.”
Which I did. I shipped the story off to the new fantasy magazine Realms of Fantasy, edited by Shawna McCarthy, for whom I had written one of my favorite stories, “Sailing to Byzantium,” when she had been editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine ten years before. Shawna bought it instantly and published it in her February 1996 issue. I don’t like having stories rejected any more than any other writer would, but in a long career it’s bound to happen now and then to anybody, and I am quick on the rebound when it does.
A fantasy magazine published it, but is it fantasy or science fiction? I hardly think the distinction matters. But there’s an alien in it, at any rate.
THE TWO FAMOUS MARBLE STATUES stand facing each other in a front room of the little museum in the scruffy Turkish town of Seljuk, which lies just north of the ruins of the once-great Greek and Roman city of Ephesus. There was a photograph of the bigger one in my guidebook, of course. But it hadn’t prepared me—photos never really do—for the full bizarre impact of the actuality. The larger of the statues is about nine-feet tall, the other one about six. Archaeologists found both of them in the courtyard of a building of this ancient city where the goddess Diana was revered. They show—you must have seen a picture of one, some time or other—a serene, slender woman wearing an ornamental headdress that is all that remains of a huge, intricate crown. Her arms are outstretched and the lower half of her body is swathed in a tight cylindrical gown. From waist to ankles, that gown is decorated with rows of vividly carved images of bees and of cattle. But that’s not where your eyes travel first, because the entire midsection of Diana of Ephesus is festooned with a grotesque triple ring of bulging pendulous breasts. Dozens of them, or several dozens. A great many.
“Perhaps they’re actually eggs,” said my brother Charlie the professor, standing just behind me. For the past eighteen months Charlie had been one of the leaders of the team of University of Pennsylvania archaeologists that has been digging lately at Ephesus. “Or fruits of some kind, apples, pears. Nobody’s really sure. Globular fertility symbols, that’s all we can say. But I think they’re tits, myself. The tits of the Great Mother, with an abundance of milk for all. Enough tits to satisfy anybody’s oral cravings, and then some.”
“An abomination before the Lord,” murmured our new companion Mr. Gladstone, the diligent Christian tourist, just about when I was expecting him to say something like that.
“Tits?” Charlie asked.
“These statues. They should be smashed in a thousand pieces and buried in the earth whence they came.” He said it mildly, but he meant it.
“What a great loss to art that would be,” said Charlie in his most pious way. “Anyway, the original statue from which these were copied fell from heaven. That’s what the Bible says, right? Book of Acts. The image that Jupiter tossed down from the sky. It could be argued that Jupiter is simply one manifestation of Jehovah. Therefore this is a holy image. Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Gladstone?”
There was a cruel edge on Charlie’s voice; but, then, Charlie is cruel. Charming, of course, and ferociously bright, but above all else, a smart-ass. He’s three years older than I am, and three times as intelligent. You can imagine what my childhood was like. If I had ever taken his cruelties seriously, I suspect I would hate him; but the best defense against Charlie is never to take him seriously. I never have, nor anything much else, either. In that way Charlie and I are similar, I suppose. But only in that way. Mr. Gladstone refused to be drawn into Charlie’s bantering defense of idolatry. Maybe he too had figured out how to handle Charlie, a lot quicker than I ever did.
“You are a cynic and a sophist, Dr. Walker,” is all that he said. “There is no profit in disputing these matters with cynics. Or with sophists. Especially with sophists.” And to me, five minutes later, as we rambled through a room full of mosaics and frescoes and little bronze statuettes: “Your brother is a sly and very clever man. But there’s a hollowness about him that saddens me. I wish I could help him. I feel a great deal of pity for him, you know.”
***
THAT ANYONE WOULD WANT TO feel pity for Charlie was a new concept to me. Envy, yes. Resentment, disapproval, animosity, even fear, perhaps. But pity? For the six-foot-three genius with the blond hair and blue eyes, the movie-star face, the seven-figure trust fund, the four-digit I.Q.? I am tall too, and when I reached 21, I came into money also, and I am neither stupid nor ugly; but it was always Charlie who got the archery trophy, the prom queen, the honor-roll scroll, the Phi Beta Kappa key. It was Charlie who always got anything and everything he wanted, effortlessly, sometimes bestowing his leftovers on me, but always in a patronizing way that thoroughly tainted them. I have sensed people pitying me, sometimes, because they look upon me as Charlie-minus, an inadequate simulacrum of the genuine article, a pallid secondary version of the extraordinary Charlie. In truth I think their compassion for me, if that’s what it is, is misplaced: I don’t see myself as all that goddamned pitiful. But Charlie? Pitying Charlie?
