Legends From the End of Time (4 page)

"Then they are, indeed, unfortunate," she said. "There is a price they pay for their pleasure, after all."

"You find our conceits shallow, then?" Lord Jagged wished to know.

"I do. I grieve. Everywhere is waste and decay — the last stages of the Romantic disease whose symptoms are a wild, mindless seeking after superficial sensation for its own sake, effect piled upon effect, until mind and body disintegrate completely, whose cure is nothing else but death. Here, all is display — your fantasies appear the harmless play of children, but they disguise the emptiness of your lives. You colour corpses and think yourselves creative. But I am not deceived."

"Well," he replied equably enough, "visions vary. To one who cannot conceive of such things, another's terrors and appetites, his day-to-day phantasms, are, indeed, poor conceits, intended merely to display their possessor's originality and to dismay his fellows. But some of us have our joys, even our profundities, you know, and we cherish them."

She felt a little shame. She had offended him, perhaps, with her candour. She lowered her eyes.

"Yet," continued Jagged, "to one of us (one who bothers to contemplate such things at all, and there are few) your way of life might seem singularly dull, denying your humanity. He could claim that you are without any sort of real passion, that you deliberately close your consciousness to the glowing images which thrive on every side, thus making yourself less than half alive. He might not realize that you, or this dour fellow Li Pao here, have other excitements. Li Pao celebrates Logic! A clearly stated formula is, for him, exquisite delight. He feels the same frisson from his theorems that I might feel for a well-turned aphorism. I am fulfilled if I give pleasure with a paradox, while he would seek fulfilment if he could order a silly world, build, comfort, complete a pattern and fix it, to banish the very Chaos he has never tasted but which is our familiar environment, and precious to us as air, or as water to the fish. For to us it is not Chaos. It is Life, varied, stimulating, rich with vast dangers and tremendous consolations. Our world sings and shimmers. Its light can blind with a thousand shapes and colours. Its darkness is always populated, never still, until death's own darkness swoops and obliterates all. We inhabit one sphere, but that sphere contains as many worlds as there are individuals on its surface. Are we shallow because we refuse to hold a single point of view?"

Li Pao was appreciative of the argument, but something puzzled him. "You speak, Lord Jagged, as you sometimes do, as one from an earlier Age than this, for few here think in such terms, though they might speak as you did if they bothered to consider their position at all."

"Oh, well. I have travelled a little, you know."

"Are there none here," asked Dafnish Armatuce, "who have the will to work, to serve others?"

Lord Jagged laughed. "We seek to serve our fellows with our wit, our entertainments. But some would serve in what you would call practical ways." He paused, serious for a second, as if his thoughts had become a little private. He drew breath, continuing: "Werther de Goethe, perhaps, might have had such a will, had he lived in a different Age. Li Pao's, for instance. Where another sees dreams and beauty, Li Pao sees only disorder. If he could, or dared, he would make our rotting cities stable, clarify and formalize the architecture, populate his tidy buildings with workers, honest and humane, to whom Peace of Mind is a chance of worthy promotion and the prospect of an adequate pension, to whom Adventure is a visit to the sea or a thunderstorm during a picnic — and Passion is Comfort's equal, Prosperity's cohort. But shall I judge his vision dull? No! It is not to him, or to those who think as he, in his own Age, in your own Age, Dafnish Armatuce." Lord Jagged teased at his fine nose. "We are all what our society makes of us."

"When in Rome…" murmured Miss Ming piously. Something flapped by and received a cheer.

Jagged was impatient with Miss Ming. "Indeed." His cloak billowed in a wind of his own subtle summons, and he looked kindly down on Dafnish Armatuce. "Explore all attitudes, my dear. Honour them, every one, but be slippery — never let them hold you, else you fail to enjoy the benefits and be saddled only with the liabilities. It's true that canvas against the skin can be as sensual as silk, and milk a sweeter drink than wine, but feel everything, taste everything, for its own sake, and for your own sake, then no one thing shall be judged better or worse than another, no person shall be so judged, and nothing can ensnare you!"

"Your advice is well-meant, sir, I know," said Dafnish Armatuce, "and would probably be good advice if I intended to stay in your world. But I do not."

"You have no choice," said Miss Ming with satisfaction.

He shrugged. "I have told you of the Morphail Effect."

"There are other means of escape."

Miss Ming, by her superior smirk, felt she had found a flaw in Lord Jagged's argument. "Cancer?" she demanded. "Could we love cancer?"

He rose to it willingly enough, replying lightly: "You are obscure, Miss Ming, for there is no physical disease at the End of Time. But, yes, we could — for what it taught us — the comparisons it offered. Perhaps that is why some of our number seek discomfort — in order to comfort their souls."

Miss Ming simpered. "You argue cunningly, Lord Jagged, but I suspect your logic."

"Is it so dignified, my conversation, as to be termed Logic? I am flattered." One hand pressed gently against Dafnish Armatuce's back and the other against Li Pao's, rescuing them both. Miss Ming hesitated and then retreated at last.

Eight dragons waltzed the skies above while far away music played; the crowd grew quieter as it watched, and even Dafnish Armatuce admitted, to herself, that it was a delicate beauty they witnessed.

She sighed. "So this is Utopia, Lord Jagged, for you? You are satisfied?"

"Could I expect more? Many think the days of our universe numbered. Yet, do you find concern amongst us?"

"You sport to forget the inevitable?"

He shook his head. "We sported thus before we knew. We have not changed our lives at all, most of us."

"You must sense tension. You cannot live so mindlessly."

"I do not think we live as you describe. Do you not strive, in your Age, for a world without fear?"

"Of course."

"There is no fear here, Dafnish Armatuce, even of total extinction."

"Which suggests you are far divorced from reality. You speak of the atrophy of natural instinct."

"I suppose that I do. There are few such instincts to be found among those who are native to the End of Time. You have no philosophers among your own folk who argue that those natural instincts might be the cause of the tragedy once described, I believe, as the Human Condition?"

"Of course. It is part of our creed. But we ensure that the tragedy shall never be played again, for we encourage the virtues of self-sacrifice and consideration of the common good, and we discourage the vices."

"Which suggests that they continue to exist. Here, they do not; there is no necessity for either vice or virtue."

"Yet if Hate dies, surely Love dies, too?"

"I think it has been rediscovered, lately. Love."

"A fad. I spoke with your Doctor Volospion. An affectation, nothing more." She gasped and shut her eyes, for two great suns had appeared, side by side, glaring scarlet, and drenched the gathering with their light.

Almost at once the suns began to grow smaller, rising away from the Earth. She blinked and recovered her composure, though weariness threatened her thoughts. "And Love of the sort you describe is no Love at all, for its attendants are Jealousy and Despair, and in Despair lies the most destructive quality of all, Cynicism."

"You think us cynical, then?"

She looked about her at the chattering press. One of their number, tall, bulky and bearded, festooned in feathers and furs, was being congratulated for what doubtless had been his display. "I thought so at first."

"And now?"

She changed the subject. "I have the impression, Lord Jagged, that you are trying to make this world palatable to me. What if I agree that there is something to be said for your way of life and turn the conversation to a problem rather closer to my heart? My husband, cousin to the Armatuce, and a Grinash on his mother's side, cares for me, as he cares for Snuffles, our son, and eagerly awaits our return, as does the committee which I serve (and which elected me to accomplish my voyage). I would go back to that Age, which you would find grim, no doubt, but which is home, familiar, security for us. You tell me that I cannot, so I must consider my position accordingly. Could I not send a message, at least, or return for a second to assure them of my physical safety?"

"You speak of caring for the common cause," interrupted Li Pao. "If you do, you will not make the attempt, for Time disrupts. Morphail warns us. And you risk death. If you tried to go back you might succeed, but you would in all probability flicker for only a moment, unseen, before being flung out again. The time stream would suck you up and deposit you anywhere in your future, in any one of a million less pleasant ages than this, or you could be killed outright (which has happened more than once). The Laws of Time are cruel."

"I would risk any danger," she said, "were it not for —"

"— the child," softly said Lord Jagged.

"We are used to sacrifice, the Armatuce. But our children are precious. We exist for them."

Darkness fell and ivory clashed and rattled above her as a great ship, made all of bone, its sections strung loosely together, its wings beating erratically, staggered upon a sea of faintly glowing clouds.

"What a splendid ending," she heard Lord Jagged say.

Your auditor, for the most part a mere ear, a humble recorder of that which he is privileged to hear, apologizes if he interrupts the reader's flow with a few words of his own, but it is his aim to speed the narrative on by condensing somewhat the events immediately following Dafnish Armatuce's introduction to the society at the End of Time.

Her reaction was a familiar one (familiar to you who have followed this compilation of legends, gossip, rumours and accredited reminiscence thus far) and to detail it further would risk repetition. Suffice: she was convinced of the Morphail Effect. Time had thrown her (as a shipwrecked English tar of old might have been thrown on the shores of the Caliph's Land) upon the mercies of an alien and self-satisfied culture which considered her an amusing prize. Her protestations? They were not serious. Her warnings? Irrelevant fancies. And her sensitivities? Meaningless to those who luxuriated in the inherited riches of an entire race's history; to whom Grief was a charming affectation and Anxiety an archaic word whose meaning had been lost. They were pleased to listen to her insofar as she remained entertaining, but even as their enthusiasms waxed and waned, mayfly swift, so did their favours shift from visitor to visitor.

Ah, if they had known how cruel they were, how they might have explored the sensation — but they were feline, phantasmagorical, and, like careless cats, they played with the poor creatures they trapped until one of them wearied of the game, for even those denizens at the End of Time who claimed to have known pain knew only the play-actor's pain, that grandiose anguish which, at its most profound, resolves itself as hurt pride.

Dafnish Armatuce knew great pain — though she herself would not admit it — particularly where her maternal instincts were involved. Children, like all else, were scarce in Armatuce, and she had worked for half her life to be permitted one. Now her ambition was that her boy be elected to adult status among the Armatuce and take her place so that she might, at last, rest from service, content and proud. For sixty years, since Snuffles' birth, she had looked forward to the day when he would be chosen (she had been certain that he would be) and had known that his voyage through Time would have been a guarantee of early promotion. But here she was, stranded, thwarted of all she had striven for, unable and unwilling to give service to a community which had no needs; thus it is no wonder that she pined and schemed alternately while she remained a guest of Lord Jagged of Canaria, and fought to retain the standards of the Armatuce against every temptation.

However, though she remained rigorously self-disciplined, she indulged the boy, refusing to impose upon him the demands she made of herself. She allowed him a certain amount of decoration in his clothing; she let him eat, within reason, what he wished to eat. And she took him on journeys to see this world, so similar, in much of its topography, to the deserts of their own. Ruined it might be, wasted and tortured, covered with the half-finished abandoned projects of its feckless inhabitants, but it was beautiful, too.

And it was on these trips that she could find a certain peace she had never known before. While Snuffles climbed the remains of mountains, crying out in delight whenever he made a discovery, she would sit upon a rock and stare at the pale, faded sky, the eroded landscape through which dust and the wind sang with quiet melancholy, and she would think the world new and herself its first inhabitant, perhaps its only inhabitant. As an Armatuce, in Armatuce, she had never once spent a full hour alone, and here, at the End of Time, she realized that it was what she had always wanted, that perhaps this was why she had looked forward so much to her commission, that she had secretly hoped for the cold peace of a lifeless planet. Then she would turn brooding eyes upon her son, as he scrambled, ran or climbed, and she would consider her duty and her love and wonder if she had, after all, been prepared to risk his life, as well as her own, in this quest for loneliness. Such thoughts would throw her into a further crisis of conscience and make her more than ever determined to ensure that he should not suffer as a result of her desires.

But if there was a Devil in this dying Eden, then it came in the shape of Miss Ming, who sought out Dafnish Armatuce wherever she went. Lord Jagged was gone from his cage-shaped castle, either to work in his hidden laboratories or else embarked upon a journey, Dafnish did not know, and with him had gone his protection. Miss Ming found excuse after excuse for visiting her, each one increasingly unlikely. And there was no solitude which Miss Ming might not interrupt, in whatever obscure corner of the globe Dafnish flew her little air boat (a gift of Lord Jagged). Miss Ming had observations on every aspect of life; she had gossip concerning every individual in the world; she made criticism of all she met or saw, from Doctor Volospion's new mannikin to the shade of the sky hanging over the Ottawa monuments; but in particular Miss Ming had advice for Dafnish Armatuce, on the care of her skin, her clothes, the upbringing of children (she had had none of her own), her diet, her choice of scenery and of residence.

"I wish," Miss Ming would say, "only to help, dear, for you're bound to have difficulty getting used to a world like this. We expatriates must stick together. If we don't, we're in trouble. Don't let it get to you. Don't mope. Don't get morbid."

And if Dafnish Armatuce would make an excuse, suggesting that Snuffles must be put to bed, perhaps, Miss Ming would exclaim. "There! You'll do harm to the boy. You must let him grow up, stand on his own two feet. You're afraid of experience — you're using him to protect yourself from what this world can offer. While he remains a child, he gives you an excuse to turn away from your own responsibilities as an adult. You're too possessive, Dafnish! Is it doing any good to either of you? He's got to develop his personality, and so have you."

At last, Dafnish Armatuce turned on the intolerable Ming. She would ask her, direct, to leave. She would say that she found Miss Ming's company unwelcome. She would ask Miss Ming never to return, but Miss Ming knew how to respond to this.

"Menstrual tension," she would say, sympathetically, undeterred by Dafnish Armatuce's reiteration of the fact that she had never experienced the menstrual cycle. "You're not yourself today." Or she would smile a sickly smile and suggest that Dafnish Armatuce get a better night's rest, that she would call tomorrow, in the hope of finding her in an improved mood. Or: "Something's worrying you about the boy. Let him have his head. Lead your own life." Or: "You're frustrated, dear. You need a friend like me, who understands. A woman knows what a woman needs." And a clammy, white, red-tipped hand would fall upon Dafnish's knee, like a hungry spider.

That Miss Ming wanted her for a lover, Dafnish Armatuce understood quite early, but love-making, even between man and woman, was discouraged in Armatuce; it was thought vulgar, and some would have it that the old sexual drive had been another central cause of the disaster which had nearly succeeded in destroying the whole race. The new methods of creating children, originally developed from necessity, were seen to contain virtues previously unconsidered. Besides, there was plainly no Armatuce blood in Miss Ming, and there was a strong taboo about forming liaisons beyond the clan.

Thus, no matter how lonely she might sometimes feel, Dafnish Armatuce remained unswervingly contemptuous of Miss Ming's advances, which would sometimes bring the accusation from that poor, smitten, unlovely woman that Dafnish Armatuce was "playing hard to get" and shouldn't "toy with someone's affections the way you do".

Scarcely for a day did Miss Ming lift her siege. She tried to dress like Dafnish Armatuce, or impress her with her own coarse taste. She would appear in fanciful frocks or stern tweed; several times she arrived stark naked, and once she had her body engineered so that it was a near-copy of Dafnish's own.

Even Miss Ming's determinedly self-centred consciousness must have understood that the look on Dafnish Armatuce's face, when she witnessed the travesty of her own form, was an expression of revulsion, for the invader did not stay long in that guise.

Harried, horrified and exasperated by Miss Ming's obsessive suit, Dafnish Armatuce began to accept invitations to the various functions arranged by those who were this world's social leaders, for if she could not find peace of mind in the great, silent spaces, then at least she might find some comfort in surrounding herself by a wall of noise, of empty conversation or useless display. To these balls, fetes and exhibitions she sometimes took her Snuffles, but on other occasions she would trust his security to the sophisticated mechanical servants Lord Jagged had placed at her disposal. Here she would often encounter Miss Ming, but here, at least, there was often someone to rescue her — the Iron Orchid or Sweet Orb Mace or, more rarely and much more welcome, Li Pao. Dafnish Armatuce resented Miss Ming mightily, but since this world placed no premium on privacy, there was no other way to avoid her — and Dafnish resented Miss Ming for that, too: for forcing her into a society with which she had no sympathy, for which she often felt active disgust, and which she suspected might be corrupting the values she was determined to maintain against a day when, in spite of constant confirmation of the impossibility, she might return to Armatuce.

Moreover, it must be said, since she made no effort to adapt herself to the world at the End of Time, she often felt an unwelcome loneliness at the gatherings, for the others found her conversation limited, her descriptions of Armatuce dull, her observations without much wit and her sobriety scarcely worth playing upon; she made a poor topic. Her boy was more attractive, for he was a better novelty; but she balked any effort of theirs to draw him out, to pet him, to (in their terms) improve him. As a result both would find themselves generally ignored (save by the ubiquitous Ming). There was not even food for malicious gossip in her — she was too likeable. She was intelligent and she understood what made her unacceptable to them, that the fault (if fault it were) lay in her, but the treatment she received hardened her, laid her prey to that most destructive of all the demons which threaten the tender, vulnerable human psyche, the Demon of Cynicism. She resisted him, for her son's sake, if not her own, but the struggle was exhausting and took up her time increasingly. Like us all, she desired approval, but, like rather fewer of us, she refused to seek it by relinquishing her own standards. Her son, she knew, had yet to learn this pride, for it was of a kind unattractive in a child, a kind that can only be earned, not imitated. So she did not show active disapproval if he occasionally warmed to some paradox-quoting, clown-costumed fop, or repeated a vulgar rhyme he had overheard, or even criticized her for her dour appearance.

How could she know, then, that all these efforts of hers to maintain a balance between dignity and tolerance would have such tragic results for them both, that her nobility, her fine pride, would be the very instruments of their mutual ruin?

Not that disaster is inherent in these qualities; it required another factor to achieve it, and that factor took the form of the despairing, miserable Miss Ming, a creature without ideals, self-knowledge or common sense (which might well be mutually encouraging characteristics), a creature of Lust which called itself Love and Greed masquerading as Concern, and one who was, incidentally, somewhat typical of her Era. But now we race too fast to our Conclusion. Your auditor stands back, once again no more than an observing listener, and allows the narrative to carry you on.