The Best of C. L. Moore Part 26

There was angry silence in the house. Oliver could feel Kieph's quick, excited breathing light upon his cheek, feel the soft motions of her body in his arms. He tried consciously to make the moment last, stretch it out to infinity. Everything had happened too swiftly to im-press very cleariy on his mind anything except what he could touch and hold. He held her in an embrace made consciously light, though he wanted to clasp her in a tight, despairing grip, because he was sure this was the last embrace they would ever share.

The eye-straining blinks of light and blindness went on. From far away below the roar of the burning city rolled on, threaded together by the long, looped cadences of the sirens that linked all sounds into one.

Then in the bewildering dark another voice sounded from the hall downstairs. A man's voice, very deep, very melodious, saying: "What is this? What are you doing here? Hollia-is that you?"

Oliver felt Kieph stiffen in his arms. She caught her breath, but she said nothing in the instant while heavy feet began to mount the stairs, coming up with a solid, confident tread that shook the old house to each step.

Then Kleph thrust herself hard out of Oliver's arms. He heard her high, sweet, excited voice crying, "Cenbe! Cenbe!" and she ran to meet the newcomer through the waves of dark and light that swept the shaken house.

Oliver staggered a little and felt a chair seat catching the back of his legs. He sank into it and lifted to his lips the cup he still held. Its steam was warm and moist in his face, though he could scarcely make out the shape of the rim.

He lifted it with both hands and drank.

When he opened his eyes it was quite dark in the room. Also it was silent except for a thin, melodious humming almost below the thresh-old of sound. Oliver struggled with the memory of a monstrous night-mare. He put it resolutely out of his mind and sat up, feeling an unfamifiar bed creak and sway under him.

This was Kleph's room. But no-Kleph's no longer. Her s.h.i.+ning hangings were gone from the walls, her white resilient rug, her pic-tures. The room looked as it had looked before she came, except for one thing.

In the far corner was a table-a block of translucent stuff-out of which light poured softly. A man sat on a low stool before it, leaning forward, his heavy shoulders outlined against the glow. He wore ear-phones and he was making quick, erratic notes upon a pad on his knee, swaying a little as if to the tune of unheard music.The curtains were drawn, but from beyond them came a distant, m.u.f.fled roaring that Oliver remembered from his nightmare. He put a hand to his face, aware of a feverish warmth and a dipping of the room before his eyes. His head ached, and there was a deep malaise in every limb and nerve.

As the bed creaked, the man in the corner turned, sliding the ear-phones down like a collar. He had a strong, sensitive face above a dark beard, trimmed short. Oliver had never seen him before, but he had that air Oliver knew so well by now, of remoteness which was the knowledge of time itself lying like a gulf between them.

When he spoke his deep voice was impersonally kind.

"You had too much euphoriac, Wilson," he said, aloofly sym-pathetic. "You slept a long while."

"How long?" Oliver's throat felt sticky when he spoke.

The man did not answer. Oliver shook his head experimentally. He said, "I thought Kleph said you don't get hangovers from-" Then another thought interrupted the first, and he said quickly, "Where is Kleph?"

He looked confusedly toward the door.

"They should be in Rome by now. Watching Charlemagne's coro-nation at St. Peter's on Christmas Day a thousand years from here."

That was not a thought Oliver could grasp clearly. His aching brain sheered away from it; he found thinking at all was strangely difficult. Staring at the man, he traced an idea painfully to its con-clusion.

"So they've gone on-but you stayed behind? Why? You . you're Cenbe? I heard your-symphonia, Kieph called it."

"You heard part of it. I have not finished yet. I needed-this." Cenbe inclined his head toward the curtains beyond which the sub-dued roaring still went on.

"You needed-the meteor?" The knowledge worked painfully through his dulled brain until it seemed to strike some area stifi un-touched by the aching, an area still alive to implication. "The meteor? But-"

There was a power implicit in Cenbe's raised hand that seemed to push Oliver down upon the bed again~ Cenbe said patiently, "The worst of it is past now, for a while. Forget if you can. That was days ago. I said you were asleep for some time. I let you rest. I knew this house would be safe-from the fire at least."

"Then-something more's to come?" Oliver only mumbled his question. He was not sure he wanted an answer. He had been curious so long, and now that knowledge lay almost within reach, something about his brain seemed to refuse to listen. Perhaps this weariness, this feverish, dizzy feeling would pa.s.s as the effect of the euphoriac wore off.

Cenbe's voice ran on smoothly, soothingly, almost as if Cenbe too did not want him to think. It was easiest to lie here and listen.

"I am a composer," Cenbe was saying. "I happen to be interested in interpreting certain forms of disaster into my own terms. That is why I stayed on. The others were dilettantes. They came for the May weather and the spectacle. The aftermath-well why should they wait for that? As for myself-I suppose I am a connoisseur. I find the after-math rather fascinating. And I need it. I need to study it at first hand, for my own purposes."

His eyes dwelt upon Oliver for an instant very keenly, like a phy-sician's eyes, impersonal and observing.

Absently he reached for his stylus and the note pad. And as he moved, Oliver saw a familiar mark on the underside of the thick, tanned wrist.

"Kieph had that scar, too," he heard himself whisper. "And the others."

Cenbe nodded. "Inoculation. It was necessary, under the circ.u.m-stances. We did not want disease to spread in our own time-world."

"Disease?"

Cenbe shrugged. "You would not recognize the name."

"But, if you can inoculate against disease-" Oliver thrust himself up on an aching arm. He had a half-grasp upon a thought now which he did not want to let gO. Effort seemed to make the ideas come more clearly through his mounting confusion. With enormous effort he went on.

"I'm getting it now," he said. "Wait. I've been trying to work this out. You can change history? You can!I know you can. Kieph said she had to promise not to interfere. You all had to promise. Does that mean you really could change your own past-our time?"

Cenbe laid down his pad again. He looked at Oliver thoughtfully, a dark, intent look under heavy brows.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, the past can be changed, but not easily. And it changes the future, too, nec-essarily. The lines of probability are switched into new patterns-but it is extremely difficult, and it has never been allowed. The physio-temporal course tends to slide back to its norm, always. That is why it is so hard to force any alteration." He shrugged. "A theoretical science. We do not change history, Wilson. If we changed our past, our present would be altered, too. And our time-world is entirely to our liking. There may be a few malcontents there, but they are not allowed the privilege of temporal travel."

Oliver spoke louder against the roaring from beyond the windows. "But you've got the power! You could alter history, if you wanted to-wipe out all the pain and suffering and tragedy-"

"All of that pa.s.sed away long ago," Cenbe said.

"Not-now! Not-this!"

Cenbe looked at him enigmatically for a while. Then-"This, too," he said.

And suddenly Oliver realized from across what distances Cenbe was watching him. A vast distance, as time is measured. Cenbe was a composer and a genius, and necessarily strongly empathic, but his psychic locus was very far away in time. The dying city outside, the whole world of now was not quite real to Cenbe, falling short of reality because of that basic variance in time. It was merely one of the building blocks that had gone to support the edifice on which Cenbe's culture stood in a misty, unknown, terrible future.

It seemed terrible to Oliver now. Even Kleph-all of them had been touched with a pettiness, the faculty that had enabled Hoffia to con-centrate on her malicious, small schemes to acquire a ringside seat while the meteor thundered in toward Earth's atmosphere. They were all dilettantes, Kleph and Omerie and the other. They toured time, but only as onlookers. Were they bored-sated-with their normal existence?

Not sated enough to wish change, basically. Their own time-world was a fulfilled womb, a perfection made manifest for their needs. They dared not change the past-they could not risk flawing their own present.

Revulsion shook him. Remembering the touch of Kleph's lips, he felt a sour sickness on his tongue.

Alluring she had been; he knew that too well. But the aftermath- There was something about this race from the future. He had felt it dimly at first, before Kleph's nearness had drowned caution and buffered his sensibilities. Time traveling 'purely as an escape mecha-nism seemed almost blasphemous. A race with such power- Kleph-leaving him for the barbaric, splendid coronation at Rome a thousand years ago-how had she seen him? Not as a living, breath-ing man. He knew that, very certainly. Kleph's race were spectators.

But he read more than casual interest in Cenbe's eyes now. There was an avidity there, a bright, fascinated probing. The man had re-placed his earphones-he was different from the others. He was a connoisseur. After the vintage season came the aftermath-and Cenbe.

Cenbe watched and waited, light flickering softly in the translucent block before him, his fingers poised over the note pad. The ultimate connoisseur waited to savor the rarities that no non-gourmet could appreciate.

Those thin, distant rhythms of sound that was almost music began to be audible again above the noises of the distant fire. Listening, re-membering, Oliver could very nearly catch the pattern of the sym-phonia as he had heard it, all intermingled with the flash of changing faces and the rank upon rank of the dying- He lay back on the bed letting the room swirl away into the dark-ness behind his closed and aching lids. The ache was implicit in every cell of his body, almost a second ego taking possession and driving him out of himself, a strong, sure ego taking over as he himself let go.

Why, he wondered dully, should Kieph have lied? She had said there was no aftermath to the drink she had given him. No aftermath -and yet this painful possession was strong enough to edge him out of his own body.Kleph had not lied. It was no aftermath to drink. He knew that- but the knowledge no longer touched his brain or his body. He lay still, giving them up to the power of the illness which was aftermath to something far stronger than the strongest drink. The illness that had no name-yet.

Cenbe's new symphonia was a crowning triumph. It had its pre-miere from Antares Hall, and the applause was an ovation. History itself, of course, was the artist-opening with the meteor that forecast the great plagues of the fourteenth century and closing with the climax Cenbe had caught on the threshold of modem times. But only Cenbe could have interpreted it with such subtle power.

Critics spoke of the masterly way in which he had chosen the face of the Stuart king as a recurrent motif against the montage of emo-tion and sound and movement. But there were other faces, fading through the great sweep of the composition, which helped to build up to the tremendous climax. One face in particular, one moment that the audience absorbed greedily. A moment in which one man's face loomed huge in the screen, every feature clear. Cenbe had never caught an emotional crisis so effectively, the critics agreed. You could almost read the man's eyes.

After Cenbe had left, he lay motionless for a long while. He was thinking feverishly- I've got to find some way to tell people. If I'd known in advance, maybe something could have been done. We'd have forced them to tell us how to change the probabilities. We could have evacuated the city.

If I could leave a message- Maybe not for today's people. But later. They visit all through time.

If they could be recognized and caught somewhere, sometime, and made to change destiny- It wasn't easy to stand up. The room kept tilting. But he managed it. He found pencil and paper and through the swaying of the shadows he wrote down what he could. Enough. Enough to warn, enough to save.

He put the sheets on the table, in plain sight, and weighted them down before he stumbled back to bed through closing darkness.

The house was dynamited six days later, part of the futile attempt to halt the relentless spread of the Blue Death.

Afterword: Footnote to "Shambleau".. . and Others

C. L. MOORE.

One question is almost certainly asked of every professional writer more than any other: "Where do you get your ideas?" For the past forty-odd years I have had to admit I didn't know. But the answer has suddenly come to me as I look back over the origins of my first story, "Shambleau," and I am very happy indeed to pa.s.s it on to you.

Brace yourself now for some rather dull but necessary background: My name was Catherine Moore and I lived in a large midwestern city and the depression of the 1930S was rampant over the land. So I was s.n.a.t.c.hed from my soph.o.m.ore year at the state university and crammed into a business school to learn the rudiments qf shorthand and typing. By incredible good fortune, before I'd finished the course, a job opening in a large bank loomed up and I leaped at it, unprepared but eager. (In those days you didn't mess around. You bluffed, prayed, and grabbed.) Well, I was adequate, but typing was something I practiced in every spare moment. And this is where "Shambleau" began, halfway down a sheet of yellow paper otherwise filled up with boring quick-brown-foxes, alphabets, and things like "The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly," to lighten the practice.

Midway down that yellow page I began fragments remembered from soph.o.m.ore English at theuniversity. All the choices were made at random. Keats, Browning, Byron-you name it. In the middle of this exercise a line from a poem (by William Morris?) worked itself to the front and I discovered myself typing something about a "red, running figure." I looked at it a while, my mind a perfect blank, and then s.h.i.+fted mental gears without even adding punctuation to mark the spot, swinging with idiot confidence into the first lines of the story which ended up as "Shambleau."

The red, running figure in the poem had been a young witch pursued by soldiers and townspeople in some medieval village. In my story they had perfectly sensible reasons for killing her as soon as pos-sible.

I sat at the typewriter and heard distant bells ringing somewhere on the backstairs of my mind. The situation was wide open, and with no conscious mental processes whatever I surrendered myself to it and the typewriter. (This is among life's most luxurious moments-giving the story its head and just keep your fingers moving. They know where they're going.) Unfortunately, you can't expect your unconscious to carry on for very long unaided. So far I have only promised to reveal where the ideas come from, not the story itself. So stay with me, pay close atten-tion, and I'll see what I can do.

First, you have to read a great deal of the works you enjoy most. Much of it will be useless. But the trusty unconscious can be relied on to make lots of unseen notes, just in case. Mine did not fail me.

I couldn't let my character Shambleau go on running forever, could I? I had the whole scene in hand now-medieval setting, red, running figure, pursuing soldiers and citizens. But then what?

Obviously she was going to need help-also a foil to set her off effectively and to give the story a shape it didn't yet have. So Northwest Smith strolled onstage without even a glance my way, per-fectly sure of what he was going to do about this. (Northwest Smith? Well, once I had typed a letter to an N. W.

Smith, and the name lin-gered tantalizingly in my mind, waiting for this moment. What would a man named Northwest Smith look like? Be like? Occupy himself with? I soon found out.) To complete the triumvirate of lead characters to whom my type-writer introduced me that day long ago, a companion and foil for Smith slouched carelessly into view, thirsting for drink and women. His name was Yarol, and I cannot conceal from you that it is an ana-gram from the letters in the name of the typewriter I was using. But I like it anyhow.

Here we return to my conviction that you must read enough, enjoy it enough, to absorb unconsciously the structure of the fiction you like best. In this case Shambleau needed help urgently. There wasn't any yet.

The story required a backbone strong enough to support the plot, and Northwest Smith arrived on cue.

For contrast with the seemingly helpless fugitive, "Shambleau" needed a strong, tall, romantically steely-eyed male. I think it was along about here my mind got devious and I realized that after his use as a defender was over she might just possibly spring her trap and destroy him. You will note that this gave my still unfledged plot a way to go after the rescue.

So Smith himself was going to need help. Preferably from someone as ant.i.thetical to Smith as Smith was to Shambleau. (Who needs two Northwest Smiths?) Theref ore, Yarol.

And that's how it all began.

There are of course seven or eight other stories in this collection, which could be traced along much the same curve as I've just plotted for "Shambleau."

"No Woman Born," for instance. Given the basic idea-what would happen to the most beautiful and gifted dancer of her time if she were totally incapacitated by a frightful accident? Well, you gear your mind to a technological solution, but the human element keeps intruding and you know you haven't really answered the question. How would being a quasi-robot, no matter how beautiful, affect her thinking and her feeling as a human being? How would you handle it?

"Vintage Season" was, I believe, the first science-fiction story to ask, "What if time travelers from the future visit epic events of our era simply as tourists, here to make a Roman Holiday of our personal disasters?" It's a challenging idea and has been dealt with often since.

If you have read past Shambleau to Jirel, you will probably have no-ticed what a close relations.h.i.+p thetwo women bear to. one another. They set the keynote for a lot of my own (incessant) writing until I met and married Henry Kuttner. I realize now that, unconsciously, no doubt, both were versions of the self I'd like to have been. I'd never noticed this before. The unconscious works in a mysterious way, doesn't it? (I have just glanced at my Unconscious to see if the tribute was noticed. It wasn't. He has fitted himself into the image of a large black cat and is preening his left shoulder and ignoring me. A rebuke I should take to heart. The unconscious more than anything hates being dragged into public. He can't work under the inspection of the conscious mind.) All but two of the stories in this collection ("No Woman Born" and "Vintage Season") were written before Henry Kuttner and I married, and there was not yet any melding of styles or even collabora-tion-beyond my asking helplessly now and then "What should come next?" All started out with some wild but malleable idea for which I had to chose a lead character strong enough to play the action against, which is what gives a story form.

Sometimes the stories went very fast and I had to cast around des-perately when I outran the idea, until Unconscious Himself came in dragging a rat or a bird and I could get on with it. (I always make him let the birds go.-If possible.) One last comment on "Shambleau." This is as good a time as any to clear up a misconception which has long crept about unchallenged. This story was not rejected by every magazine in the field before it crept humbly to the doorstep of Weird Tales. My own perfectly clear memory tells me that I sent it first to WT because that was the only magazine of the type I knew well, and that an answering acceptance and a check for the (then) fabulous amount of $ioo.oo arrived almost by return mail.

Actually, I was far too unsure of myself to have hammered on the door of every publisher in New York if my first opus had been so unkindly treated. I'd simply have given it up and turned to some other form of activity, and this book would not be in your hands now. (I'm glad it is, too.) C. L. Moon~a 1975.