The Metallic Muse (21 page)

“Thank you,” Kalder said. “I regret that our relationship was so brief, but for the time that I have been associated with Solar Productions I am more grateful than I can tell you.”

He turned away with one overwhelming regret—June, who sat blinking her eyes to keep back the tears. His newly acquired realization that there were more important things in life than his personal happiness seemed a rather feeble compensation.

June left her chair suddenly and hurried after him. Outside the door, Kalder gripped her arm and said, “I’d like to show you something.”

They caught a company swing train and rode over to the Tank. The vast room’s simulated landscape looked dead under a simulated evening sky. The ceiling lights were gradually being dimmed. Soon they would go out and the simulated stars would be turned on.

He led her along a jungle trail and over the hill toward the motionless lake. “It looks very real, doesn’t it?” she said.

“It looks like our idea of real. But this, and our idea, are both false. You know that, don’t you?”

“This is the first time I’ve ever been here. What do the Writers do?”

He did not answer. They walked down to the lake and removed their sandals. The shark fins paraded toward them as they waded in. Kalder said, “The trouble is, you and I, and the Board, and all those like us have been living Code for too long. We’ve lost touch with the people. Children of the wealthy receive the best educations, choose the careers they want, and look forward to a generally satisfying lifetime. They live in comfort. They have clubs and recreation facilities. There is room for those things for a few of us, but most people have nothing at all. They’re just hanging around and reproducing themselves so there will be plenty of people when we’re ready to go back to the surface. They do a little work, and they eat and sleep, and the rest of the time they sit in front of a TV set and inhale the drugs that Code prescribes for them. The TV films are drugs, because they induce dreams of a world that won’t exist again for centuries—a world where there are trees, and plants, and animals, and rivers of pure water.”

“Isn’t it good for them to get their minds off the way things are?” June asked.

“That’s Code. The Code philosophy—tyranny would be a better word for it. The people have surrendered to it completely, and they’ve given up. When men first moved underground they must have slaved to achieve what we have now. They built well, and then when the machines, were operating and living quarters were prepared, there seemed to be nothing else to do. So the film companies were established to give the people TV, and they exercised all of their ingenuity to provide realistic settings and stories and keep alive the dream of what man had lost. I think the idea was to remind people of what their sacrifices were for, of what man hoped to regain, but the dream became an end in itself. People are no longer interested in planning ahead, or in regaining anything—just in dreaming. Only the writers, who had to create the dreams, knew how false they were.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Form my own company. I won’t have any trouble getting a wire or two. We can keep down production costs by shooting in corridors and private living quarters, because we’re going to show life like it is. Scripts won’t be a problem. Donald is turning out five a day, and some of the others are doing almost as well.”

“How can they, when they can’t write Code?” she exclaimed.

They waded out of the lake, and the shark fins drifted away. They dried their feet on the synthetic grass and put on their sandals.

“The first script writers wrote about something they remembered,” Kalder said. “They wrote about a world they’d lived in—the world the way it used to be. Each successive generation of writers got one more step removed from that reality. The Tank was supposed to be a crutch for the writers’ imaginations to lean upon, but we’re so many years removed from what it represents that it’s lost its value. Men get tired of crutches. They always prefer walking without them.”

They were moving toward Area Five, and he caught her arm as they stumbled through the sand of the desert. “Do you feel up to a battle with Solar Productions?” he asked.

“With you I do.”

He slipped his arm around her and led her through the forest. He opened the door of the vent and pointed upward. “Look!”

She saw blackness and a glimmer of light. “What is it?”

“A star. A real star.”

“I’ve seen films about stars—about going to the stars.”

“Perhaps men will, someday. Certainly men will return to the planets, but well have to get out of the ground first. There’s a long wait ahead of us, and we can’t waste it in dreaming. We need to be getting ready, so when our children or their children or grandchildren, climb back to the surface, what they find there won’t defeat them. The first ones will have it rough, and they’ll probably wish they were back underground watching TV, but they’ll make the move. They must make it”

“I remember a film about a star,” she said. “A little girl saw it and she made a wish.”

“Do you have a wish?”

“I think I do.”

They wished together, looking upward.

page 162

In His Own Image

(Introduction)

Religion and thoroughbass are settled things. There should be no disputing about them.

—Beethoven.

Religion and poetry address themselves, at least one of their aspects, to the same part of the human constitution: they both supply the same want, that of ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realized in the prose of human life.

—J. S. Mill.

If religion is the highest of the arts, does it necessarily follow that it is the lowest of the sciences?

—F. W. von Schelling.

page 163

CHAPTER SIX

In His Own Image

The sun’s shrunken disc hung above the shallow horizon like an inflamed evil eye, but the light that delineated the buildings was the pure, hard radiance of a million clustering stars.

Gorton Effro stepped from the door of the communications shed and looked about curiously. He had served on space liners for twenty years without so much as glimpsing an emergency space station—or wanting to. Somewhere he’d got the notion that they were man-made, but this one had been constructed on the planed surface of an inhospitable chunk of rock. A landing cradle thrust up through the transparent dome, spreading a spidery embrace vast enough to contain the largest star-class liner. Its supports were piston springs mammothly anchored in concrete. In that feeble gravity the danger was not collapse, but that the shock of an inept landing might bounce the station into space.

Maintenance and storage sheds formed an oval about the anchors. Beyond, in a larger oval, stood the circular hostels. The emergency manual had promised ample accommodation for a thousand, or for as many as two thousand if the refugees didn’t mind being crowded. Effro eyed the buildings skeptically and growled, “The liars,” though he couldn’t have said why he cared. There was only one of him.

The station’s logbook contained ten previous entries covering a hundred and seven years, all of them by maintenance and supply crews. It was untouched by time, undisturbed by man except for those fleeting, widely spaced inspections, unneeded and unused. All of the incalculable expense and meticulous planning that went into its making had been squandered to this end: that one lifeboat could lock onto its rescue beacon and eventually discharge into its life-sustaining environment one passenger: Gorton Effro.

The lifeboat perched at the end of the landing cradle like a small parasite attached to a gigantic abstract insect. The solitary passenger fingered his tight collar irritably and savored his disappointment. He had known what he would find here—the lifeboat’s emergency manual described it in tedious detail—but through the long days of sterile solitude he had come to think of this place, not as a way station to be touched en route to rescue, but as a destination. As a refuge, waiting to welcome him with warmth and hospitality.

It was only a larger solitude.

The lifeboat’s landing had triggered the station out of its frozen hibernation. The air outside the communications shed was noticeably warmer than it had been when he entered, and a robot cleaner snuffed past him, patiently searching for impurities he might have tracked in. Effro moved with slow steps toward the nearest hostel, still looking about him curiously. A movement off to his left caught his attention; it was only another robot cleaner, but he watched it for a moment and when he turned his head—

The shock halted him in midstride. A man stood near the hostel’s entrance. Before Effro’s stunned mind could quite comprehend what his eyes were seeing, the strange figure hurled itself forward in a weird flutter of ragged garments. Effro backed away, his trembling hands raised defensively, but the man sank to his knees in front of Effro and said, eyes averted, voice a supplicant whine, “May I have your blessing, Excellency?”

“Blessing!” Effro exclaimed. His purser’s uniform had been mistaken for a priest’s costume!

He took another step backward, staring down at the man, and suddenly he comprehended that the threadbare clothing was meant to be some kind of ecclesiastical apparel. The robes were tattered vestments, the ridiculous headpiece a strangely fashioned miter, the clicking footwear crudely shaped metal sandals. He looked like a devilish caricature, an atheist’s mocking concept of a priest.

Effro knew the type. The man was a lay predicant, self-appointed, self-educated, self-clothed religious, wanderer by definition, shrewd beggar who’d found in the pietistic pose a sure-fire means of increasing his daily take.

But the last call at this remote station had been logged fourteen years before! “What the devil are you doing here?” Effro demanded.

Still on his knees, the man waited silently. “I’m no ‘excellency,’” Effro said. “I was purser on the spaceship Chierbilius. It blew up nineteen days out of Donardo, and as far as I know I’m the only survivor. Toasts I can give you, and a few first-rate curses, but not blessings. I don’t know any.”

The predicant raised his eyes slowly. His face was old, its flesh shriveled and taut. His eyes, widely dilated in the dim starlight, stared expressionlessly. He held his left arm bent awkwardly in front of him.

He said uncertainly, “Do you come to instruct me, Excellency?”

“I come because my lifeboat followed the station’s rescue beacon. In other words, by accident. If I’d hit another station’s beacon first, I’d have gone there.”

“There are no accidents,” the predicant said. His right hand’s sweeping gesture traced a cross. “The will of God brought you here.”

Effro said bitterly, “Then God murdered more than four hundred people to do it. I suppose that’s a small price for such a splendid achievement—bringing together a drunken thief and some kind of fugitive pretending to be a priest. Cut the nonsense and stand up!”

The predicant got to his feet in a flutter of ragged clothing. Effro asked, “Is there anyone else here?”

“I have my flock,” the predicant said proudly.

“Flock? Here?”

A cleaning robot snuffed past them, and the predicant stooped, halted it with a caressing gesture, and held it hissing and rumbling above the ground.

He released it. “Such are my flock,” he said quietly.

“Machines?”

The predicant met Effro’s eyes boldly. Only an idiot, Effro thought, could look so divinely inspired. An idiot or a saint.

“Did not our Lord say, ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done

it unto me.’ And these—” His ragged gesture encompassed the cleaning robots and the rows of silent machines by the maintenance sheds. “These, Excellency, are the least of all.” He sank to his knees again. “May I have your blessing, Excellency?”

The sheer, pleading ecstasy in the man’s voice, the dumb depth of veneration in his eyes, unnerved Effro and moved him strangely. He knew that forever afterward he would consider it a cowardly act, but he extended his blessing, gesticulating vaguely and resurrecting a half-forgotten phrase from the buried memories of his childhood. “In the name of the Almighty, may your graces be magnified and your faults forgiven.”

He stepped around the predicant and strode hurriedly toward a hostel. He did not look back until he reached it. The predicant was moving slowly in the opposite direction still holding his bent arm awkwardly in front of him. Three cleaning robots were snuffing after him in single file.

“His flock!” Effro muttered disgustedly.

He chose the sleeping room nearest the entrance, and the first thing he examined was its door—to make certain that it had a lock.

The hostel was a self-sustaining unit complete with air lock to safeguard its inhabitants in the event of damage to the dome. Effro’s first concern was for a bath, and he lolled in warm water for an hour, soaking off the accretions of his long journey while a massaging machine worked over him expertly. A valet machine accepted his begrimed uniform and returned it to him in spotless, pressed condition. A dispenser furnished three complete outfits of new clothing. He dressed himself in one of them and carried the others, and his uniform, to his sleeping quarters with a cleaning robot dogging his footsteps. His bed, which he had tested perfunctorily, had been remade by a domestic robot. It was occurring to Effro that the predicant’s flock was no small congregation.

Opening drawers to put away his clothing, he encountered a book.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. This Bible was placed here for your spiritual solace by the Society of St. Brock.

Impulsively Effro searched the adjoining room and two others across the corridor. All contained Bibles. Probably every sleeping room on the station had a Bible, but one would have sufficed. And if a lonely man, marooned here for years, chose to occupy himself with a Bible, he might in time become a fairly competent theologist.