Fletcher Pratt (20 page)
Authors: Alien Planet
"But I should think it would be easy—" I began. He stopped me with a gesture. Someone was approaching.
Before the introduction could take place, however, there came the sound of a soft, sweet-toned bell from the upper end of the room. I looked up to see that it had gradually filled with people, men and women, all comparatively young and nearly all bearing the concentric rings of the Thutiya on their shoulders.
The bells (I now perceived there was a series of them hanging from a rod) were being played by a performer with a small padded mallet; some subtle, wordless air, without melody, but singularly pleasing in its rapid changes of tempo and tone. A moment later a very soft wind instrument struck in, high-pitched and clear. As the two played their duet a man, standing at the side of the dais, stepped upon it and began to move through the complex figures of a dance. It was all new and rather wonderful to me, but I noted that Ang Redike was bored, and though the rest of the room were listening and watching, they were doing it with an air of politeness rather than with one of enjoyment.
A few minutes later, as the performance finished on a series of repeated high notes from the wind instrument, one or two persons stood up and curtsied in acknowledgment, but most of the audience merely returned to their interrupted conversation. I turned to my companion.
"They seemed good to me," I remarked.
"Merely Thutiya Bunyo," he said disparagingly. "Wait till some of the Volva begin. Ah!"
A short man, with a round, cherub-like countenance, was making his way to the dais, a painted box about the size of a suitcase in his hand. He looked about the room, nodded a greeting here and there, opened his box and sat down. Someone at the back turned out the lights, and before my eyes had gotten used to the dimness I saw a pale green, ghostly radiance begin to grow from the box. It rose like a note of music, becoming more and more brilliant, and then dying slowly away to an intense blue tone that seemed to penetrate the very walls. Then abruptly the blue was shattered by three vivid orange flashes, so bright they seemed to have material body, and before the last one had died out color on color flowed from the box, inundating the gathering with a wild melody of tints. Here a face would be picked out by a sudden white shaft to fade into dimness in purple shadows; a series of chords in red ran around the room. ...
I fear my best efforts at description are quite inadequate to tell the beauty of this singular color-organ in the hands of the artist. He used the room and the people in it as his material. The lights sought them out, here and there, focusing the eyes of all present first on one and then another, and so cleverly did the artist manipulate his keys that in each case he seemed to accent some feature that brought out an essential bit of character and follow it with what might be described as notes in color. One
felt
rather than saw that he was describing the people. It is as impossible for me to express in words what he was doing as it would be for me to manipulate the instrument.
As the lights went on again at the end of his performance, a low murmur of appreciation ran round the room, and almost as one person we stood up to express our appreciation to the little apple-faced man. I felt that I had passed through an emotional experience.
"Who is he?" I whispered.
"Thase Tobong," answered Ang Redike. "He is a good artist. You think so?"
"Wonderful," I agreed. "We have nothing like it—"
"And we have nothing like your art. But then every artist creates his own art to a degree. Come, they wish you."
To my embarrassment I saw that people were staring at me and the host of the evening was approaching. It was a nervous moment. My previous audiences had all been Bodrog, that is, scientists of one kind or another, men no doubt brilliant but lacking in artistic sense, at least if they were anything like those on Earth. (I remember old Professor Burton, one of my clients,* a splendid biologist and a delightful old soul who thought Laura Jean Libbey ranked just above Shakespeare.) But now I was among a gathering of artists. Surely they would see through me....
*
Another check on the accuracy of the manuscript. The Educational Directory shows that a Professor A. M. Burton was head of the biology department at Galton College about
1920.
At all events, I gave them the best poetry I could, inwardly blessing the high-school teacher who had made me learn Marc Anthony's oration over the body of Caesar by rote. It saved me and I found myself bowing and blushing my thanks for more unearned applause.
I was followed by a violinist (I call him a violinist to give some idea of what he was like in familiar terms), who played a long instrument with strings that spread out fan-wise from the point where they crossed the bridge at its base. He apparently depended for his tone not so much on fingering (the strings were to widely spread for that) as upon exquisitely careful bowing. The resultant music was fundamentally much the same as that I had heard on my first day in my own dining room, high-pitched squeals, utterly lacking in any sort of charm for me.
There were more entertainers—Ang Redike himself, with a series of sheets of some white material and a box of liquid colors which he sprayed upon the sheets through stencils of adjustable size and shape to form cubistic portraits of those present; a wind instrument player, more dancers and an emaciated individual who demonstrated with lightning rapidity a complex series of manoeuvres in the cubical chess game Ashembe and I had played.
But by the time this last performer had taken his place on the dais I had begun to notice something peculiar about the room. There was a faint but perfectly definite odor, not unlike that of the piney slopes of the Adirondacks, most peculiar of smells for that far place.
Again I turned to Ang Redike. "What is that—" (What was their word for odor? For lack of it I wrinkled my nose and sniffed expansively.)
"You do not know the gas?" he asked. "What do they do for intellectual stimulus on your Earth when they hold gatherings?"
"Why, we usually drink liquids containing alcohol," I said. "Although when I left there was effort on foot to prohibit such drinks."
"Alcohol! How curious!" He laughed in the polite chuckle, which is all the cultured Murashemans allow themselves. "But alchool has lowering physiological effects, has it not? It is a poison."
"In sufficient quantity, I believe," I said. "Although it is a matter in dispute on our Earth. There are parties for it and against it. Those in favor of it are called wets and those opposed dries." (The odor was becoming stronger and even a little dizzying.)
"Wets—ha, ha!" said Ang Redike, lolling back on the lounge. (What ailed him? If I had not felt such a sense of lazy comfort, I would have asked.) I looked about. Was it my dizzied senses or was the room really a trifle misty? A little hum of conversation mingled with the gurgling laughter of the Murashemans.
Ang Redike sat up suddenly. (Odd how he seemed to be swimming rather than moving in that misty and uncanny light.) He whistled and motioned with his arm and then sank back as though exhausted. I would have sat up myself had it not been too much of an effort.
Besides, it was dizzying to sit up.
Through the light, now foggy, of the room two figures swam toward us, women with the thin, triangular faces and regular, delicate features one sees in the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites. I noted with a mild surprise that their shoulders bore not the circles of the Thutiya Volva but a tiny representation of a human figure on the background of a fan, but it was almost too much effort to conjecture that they must be Thutiya Bunyo. And for them, too, the effort of movement seemed considerable. The odor in the room was permeating everything, and it was a delight merely to breathe it.
One of the girls seated herself by Ang Redike, the other by me. The mist in the room became thicker and thicker, the odor more permeating, till one sank in a delicious languor in which one could not see one's hand before one's ' face. A throaty gurgle dying out into a sigh of pleasure rose somewhere in the room. The girl beside me flung an arm around me, laid her face close to mine. I looked for Ang Redike, six feet away, but the mist was too thick, I could not see him. Again the throaty - gurgle of pleasure somewhere in the room.
The light was streaming through the opened shutters. I moved slightly, trying to remember, then did remember and sat up with a jerk, feeling the back of my neck where the headache ought to be. To my surprise there was no headache at all. I felt glorious as though I had energy enough for anything. I looked about. Mist and people were gone—the room was empty save for the huge divans, a couple of articles of clothing on one of them and Ang Redike standing over me, smiling.
"Come," he said. "I must continue my work and there are probably calls waiting for you also."
I looked around again. "Where has everyone gone?"
"To their places. I allowed you to sleep."
"You needn't really have bothered.... Tell me, what made that mist in the room last night and the odor?"
"The gas. You do not know the gas?"
"No, we have nothing like it but alcohol. Doesn't it have any after-effects? I don't notice any."
"You mean ill after-effects? Certainly not. The Scientific Board would not permit it to be used. Let us go."
So
there
(I meditated when I had reached my apartment) were the Thutiya Bunyo. And this was the class I was escaping by the ignorance of the Murashemans and the grace of Ashembe.... And the Associations of the Grehm....
My thoughts were interrupted by a shout from the television-phone, which proved, when answered, to be the secretary of the local Scientific Board with the information that since I had not called on a philosopher for three periods they were sending one around.
It proved to be the same thin and theatrical gentleman who had visited me before.
"Man of another universe," he said, as he entered, "I have read the secrets of your heart. You have not sent for me. Therefore your mind is troubled with some unnameable trouble. I admit it is difficult for us to understand one another, but such as we are, voices calling feebly across vast spaces, let us try to arrive at a communion of minds. I implore you to open your full heart."
My heart misgave me at the thought of trusting this sententious sounding board of a philosopher with my secret. "There are some things I wish to know," I admitted with a show of reluctance, "and my friend Koumar Ashembe seems unwilling to aid me."
"No true man is unwilling to aid another," the philosopher answered, pat as you please. "The truth makes free by slaying errors of mind with its intense white light. Yet all men know that day is hard and twilight comfortable, and one who has climbed the difficult heights to understanding is loath to draw his comrades from the pleasant dusk of their little vices and ignorances. Hence your friend is not to be blamed that he did not earn your hatred by rousing you from a sleep you find so, pleasing."
Words, words—as bad as any Dr. Frank Crane of Earth. However, one more try before I tossed him out, I thought. Aloud I said, "The specific question is this.... it's a little hard to put into words ... It's a general question. Why, in a civilization that has progressed as far as yours, do you allow such a class as the Thutiya Bunyo?"
"Ah!" said the philosopher. He swung an accusatory arm at me. "You have been attending an artistic gathering and inwardly are somewhat ashamed of your attendance, and of the attraction that the Thutiya Bunyo, or some one of them, holds for you. You are also slightly desirous of a recurrence of the incident, shameful but pleasant. Do not fear on this account, you are yourself of the Thutiya, and no odium attaches to you for this.... But—
"I would judge that you have no similar class in your own planet or that you did not belong to it if you do have such a class. But let me assure you that in the eyes of the divine Beyarya you need not fear. You are exempt from mean scruples, which are for a range of men far below the attainments of the creative artist. You belong to an exalted class which demands great passions and fiery reliefs from those passions, and any amount of license is permitted to you. Your only care should be to produce your art."
I started in amazement. Too late, I remembered Ashembe's remark to me, so long ago, that the philosophers of Murashema were also its psychologists, and that psychology had been reduced to an exact science. Stripped of the flowery language, the philosopher had, in fact, given me a most accurate reading of my own psychology.
The philosopher lifted a supercilious nose. "You are thinking that I have talked to your friend, the Koumar Ashembe Acle," he said. "It is not so. Your psychology is of a simplicity absurd. All artists are either excessively simple or complex of mentality. Sometimes both are combined in one individual. But never are they of the puzzling average. The springs of your being lie close to the surface. But pause!" He pointed one hand toward the ceiling and shaking the skinny forefinger of the other under my nose with a theatrical gesture, continued, "There are indications that you were only recently raised to the state of the Thutiya. In the name of the divine Beyarya, I abjure you— is this not true?"
If I told him, would I not be degraded to the ranks of the Thutiya Bunyo?
"No-no," I told him.
His head jerked back in surprise; the pointing fingers came down—but even here his movement was smoothly theatrical. "You are to be felicitated," he said, "upon an extraordinary prudery of mind in that case. You will become a very great artist, or at least a very original one, with so remarkable an equipment. It will give you a singular, if not attractive, outlook on existence. But as for your question the reason I have stated. You are half ashamed and half delighted with the gathering you have been attending."