I Sing the Body Electric (28 page)

T
he great eye floated in space. And behind the great eye somewhere hidden away within metal and machinery was a small eye that belonged to a man who looked and could not stop looking at all the multitudes of stars and the diminishings and growings of light a billion billion miles away.

The small eye closed with tiredness. Captain John Wilder stood holding to the telescopic devices which probed the universe and at last murmured. “Which one?”

The astronomer with him said, “Take your pick.”

“I wish it were that easy.” Wilder opened his eyes. “What's the data on this star?”

“Alpha-Cygne II. Same size and reading as our sun. Planetary system, possible.”

“Possible. Not certain. If we pick the wrong star, God help the people we send on a two-hundred-year journey to find a planet that may not be there. No, God help me, for the final selection is mine, and I may well send myself on that journey. So, how can we be sure?”

“We can't. We just make the best guess, send our starship out, and pray.”

“You are not very encouraging. That's it. I'm tired.”

Wilder touched a switch that shut up light the greater eye, this rocket-powered space lens that stared cold upon the abyss, saw far too much and knew little, and now knew nothing. The rocket laboratory drifted sightless on an endless night.

“Home,” said the captain. “Let's go home.”

And the blind beggar-after-stars wheeled on a spread of fire and ran away.

The frontier cities on Mars looked very fine from above. Coming down for a landing, Wilder saw the neons among the blue hills and thought,
We'll light those worlds a billion miles off, and the children of the people living under those lights this instant, we'll make them immortal. Very simply, if we succeed, they will live forever.

Live forever. The rocket landed. Live forever.

The wind that blew from the frontier town smelled of grease. An aluminum-toothed jukebox banged somewhere. A junkyard rusted beside the rocket port. Old newspapers danced alone on the windy tarmac.

Wilder, motionless at the top of the gantry elevator, suddenly wished not to move down. The lights suddenly had become people and not words that, huge in the mind, could be handled with elaborate ease.

He sighed. The freight of people was too heavy. The stars were too far away.

“Captain?” said someone behind him.

He stepped forward. The elevator gave way. They sank with a silent screaming toward a very real land with real people in it, who were waiting for him to choose.

At midnight the telegram-bin hissed and exploded out a message projectile. Wilder, at his desk, surrounded by tapes and computation cards, did not touch it for a long while. When at last he pulled the message out, he scanned it, rolled it in a tight ball, then uncrumpled the message and read again:

Wilder blinked, and laughed quietly. He crumpled the paper again, but stopped, lifted the telephone and said:

“Telegram to I. V. Aaronson, Mars City I. Answer affirmative. No sane reason why, but still—affirmative.”

And hung up the phone. To sit for a long while watching this night which shadowed all the whispering, ticking, and motioning machines.

The dry canal waited.

It had been waiting twenty thousand years for nothing but dust to filter through in ghost tides.

Now, quite suddenly, it whispered.

And the whisper became a rush and wall-caroming glide of waters.

As if a vast machined fist had struck the rocks somewhere, clapped the air and cried “Miracle!,” a wall of water came proud and high along the channels, and lay down in all the dry places of the canal and moved on toward ancient deserts of dry-bone, surprising old wharves and lifting
up the skeletons of boats abandoned thirty centuries before when the water burnt away to nothing.

The tide turned a corner and lifted up—a boat as fresh as the morning itself, with new-minted silver screws and brass pipings, and bright new Earth-sewn flags. The boat, suspended from the side of the canal, bore the name
Aaronson I
.

Inside the boat, a man with the same name smiled. Mr. Aaronson sat listening to the waters live under the boat.

And the sound of the water was cut across by the sound of a hovercraft, arriving, and a motorbike, arriving, and in the air, as if summoned with magical timing, drawn by the glimmer of tides in the old canal, a number of gadfly people flew over the hills on jet-pack machines, and hung suspended as if doubting this collision of lives caused by one rich man.

Scowling up with a smile, the rich man called to his children, cried them in from the heat with offers of food and drink.

“Captain Wilder! Mr. Parkhill! Mr. Beaumont!”

Wilder set his hovercraft down.

Sam Parkhill discarded his motorbike, for he had seen the yacht and it was a new love.

“My God,” cried Beaumont, the actor, part of the frieze of people in the sky dancing like bright bees on the wind. “I've timed my entrance wrong. I'm early. There's no audience!”

“I'll applaud you down!” shouted the old man, and did so, then added, “Mr. Aikens!”

“Aikens?” said Parkhill. “The big-game hunter?”

“None other!”

And Aikens dived down as if to seize them in his harrying claws. He fancied his resemblance to the hawk. He was finished and stropped like a razor by the swift life he had lived. Not an edge of him but cut the air as he fell, a strange plummeting vengeance upon people who had done nothing to him. In the moment before destruction, he pulled up on his jets and, gently screaming, simmered himself to touch the marble jetty. About his lean middle hung a rifle belt. His pockets bulged like those of a boy from the candy store. One guessed he was stashed with sweet bullets and rare bombs. In his hands, like an evil child, he held a weapon that looked like a bolt of lightning fallen straight from the clutch of Zeus, stamped nevertheless:
Made in U.S.A.
His face was sunblasted dark. His eyes were cool surprises in the sunwrinkled flesh, all mint-blue-green crystal. He wore a white porcelain smile set in African sinews. The earth did not quite tremble as he landed.

“The lion prowls the land of Judah!” cried a voice from the heavens. “Now do behold the lambs driven forth to slaughter!”

“Oh for God's sake, Harry, shut up!” said a woman's voice.

And two more kites fluttered their souls, their dread humanity on the wind.

The rich man jubilated.

“Harry Harpwell!”

“Behold the angel of the Lord who comes with Annunciations!” the man in the sky said, hovering. “And the Annunciation is—”

“He's drunk again,” his wife supplied, flying ahead of him, not looking back.

“Megan Harpwell,” said the rich man, like an entrepreneur introducing his troupe.

“The poet,” said Wilder.

“And the poet's barracuda wife,” muttered Parkhill.

“I am not drunk,” the poet shouted down the wind. “I am simply
high
.”

And here he let loose such a deluge of laughter that those below almost raised their hands to ward off the avalanche.

Lowering himself, like a fat dragon kite, the poet, whose wife's mouth was now clamped shut, bumbled over the yacht. He made the motions of blessing same, and winked at Wilder and Parkhill.

“Harpwell,” he called. “Isn't that a name to go with being a great modern poet who suffers in the present, lives in the past, steals bones from old dramatists' tombs, and flies on this new egg-beater wind-suck device, to call down sonnets on your head? I pity the old euphoric saints and angels who had no invisible wings like this so as to dart in oriole convolutions and ecstatic convulsions on the air as they sang their lines or damned souls to Hell. Poor earthbound sparrows, wings clipped. Only their genius flew. Only their Muse knew airsickness—”

“Harry,” said his wife, her feet on the ground, eyes shut.

“Hunter!” called the poet. “Aikens! Here's the greatest game in all the world, a poet on the wing. I bare my breast. Let fly your honeyed bee sting! Bring me, Icarus, down, if your gun be sunbeams kindled in one tube and let free in a single forest fire that escalates the sky and turns tallow, mush, candlewick and lyre to mere tarbaby. Ready, aim, fire!”

The hunter, in good humor, raised his gun.

The poet, at this, laughed a mightier laugh and, literally, exposed his chest by tearing aside his shirt.

At which moment a quietness came along the canal rim.

A woman appeared walking. Her maid walked behind her. There was no vehicle in sight, and it seemed almost as if they had wandered a long way out of the Martian hills and now stopped.

The very quietness of her entrance gave dignity and attention to Card Corelli.

The poet shut up his lyric in the sky and landed.

The company all looked together at this actress who gazed back without seeing them. She was dressed in a black jumpsuit which was the same color as her dark hair. She walked like a woman who has spoken little in her life and now stood facing them with the same quietness, as if waiting for someone to move without being ordered. The wind blew her hair out and down over her shoulders. The paleness of her face was shocking. Her paleness, rather than her eyes, stared at them.

Then, without a word, she stepped down into the yacht and sat in the front of the craft, like a figurehead that knows its place and goes there.

The moment of silence was over.

Aaronson ran his finger down his printed guest list.

“An actor, a beautiful woman who happens to be an actress, a hunter, a poet, a poet's wife, a rocket captain, a former technician. All aboard!”

On the afterdeck of the huge craft, Aaronson spread forth his maps.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” he said. “This is more than a four-day drinking bout, party, excursion. This is a Search!”

He waited for their faces to light, properly, and for them to glance from his eyes to the charts, and then said:

“We are seeking the fabled lost City of Mars, once called Dia-Sao. The City of Doom, it was called. Something terrible about it. The inhabitants fled as from a plague. The City left empty. Still empty now, centuries later.”

“We,” said Captain Wilder, “have charted, mapped, and cross-indexed every acre of land on Mars in the last fifteen years. You can't mislay a city the size of the one you speak of.”

“True,” said Aaronson, “you've mapped it from the sky, from the land. But you have
not
charted it via water! For the canals have been empty until now! So now we shall take the new waters that fill this last canal and go where the boats once went in the olden days, and see the very last new things that need to be seen on Mars.” The rich man continued: “And somewhere on our traveling, as sure as the breath in our mouths, we shall find the most beautiful, the most fantastic, the most awful city in the history of this old world. And walk in that city—who knows?—find the reason why the Martians ran screaming away from it, as the legend says, ten thousand years ago.”

Silence. Then:

“Bravo! Well done.” The poet shook the old man's hand.

“And in that city,” said Aikens, the hunter, “mightn't there be weapons the like of which we've never seen?”

“Most likely, sir.”

“Well,” The hunter cradled his bolt of lightning. “I was bored of Earth, shot every animal, ran fresh out of beasts, and came here looking
for newer, better, more dangerous maneaters of any size or shape. Plus, now, new weapons! What more can one ask? Fine!”

And he dropped his blue-silver lightning bolt over the side. It sank in the clear water, bubbling.

“Let's get the hell out of here.”

“Let us, indeed,” said Aaronson, “get the good hell out.”

And he pressed the button that launched the yacht.

And the water flowed the yacht away.

And the yacht went in the direction toward which Cara Corelli's quiet paleness was pointed: beyond.

As the poet opened the first champagne bottle, the cork banged. Only the hunter did not jump.

The yacht sailed steadily through the day into night. They found an ancient ruin and had dinner there and a good wine imported, one hundred million miles from Earth. It was noted that it had traveled well.

With the wine came the poet, and after quite a bit of the poet, came sleep on board the yacht which moved away in search of a City that would not as yet be found.

At three in the morning, restless, unaccustomed to the gravity of a planet pulling at all of his body and not freeing him to dream, Wilder came out on the afterdeck of the yacht and found the actress there.

She was watching the waters slip by in dark revelations and discardments of stars.

He sat beside her and thought a question.

Just as silently, Cara Corelli asked herself the same question, and answered it.

“I am here on Mars because not long ago for the first time in my life, a man told me the truth.”

Perhaps she expected surprise. Wilder said nothing. The boat moved as on a stream of soundless oil.

“I am a beautiful woman. I have been beautiful all of my life. Which means that from the start people lied because they simply wished to be with me. I grew up surrounded by the untruths of men, women, and children who could not risk my displeasure. When beauty pouts, the world trembles.

“Have you ever seen a beautiful woman surrounded by men, seen them nodding, nodding? Heard their laughter? Men will laugh at anything a beautiful woman says. Hate themselves, yes, but they will laugh, say no for yes and yes for no.

“Well, that's how it was every day of every year for me. A crowd of liars stood between me and anything unpleasant. Their words dressed me in silks.