Forbidden Planets (31 page)
Producer Pushof had grown sleek. Her face had been lifted, and her hair looked naturally wavy, blond, and vibrant. She was, Professor Pidgeon was forced to admit, rather more attractive, indeed happier and less defensively smug, than when he had last seen her. Indeed, she had lost many of her earlier conservative attitudes. “And I have to admit in turn, professor, that you made a good point about depleting our resources, relying on fossil fuels, polluting our atmosphere, and so forth. In recent times we have developed means of transport that depend increasingly on natural sunlight, wind power, and, of course, electricity produced in a number of environment-friendly ways. You’ll note the elegance and quietness of our transport systems, many of which are now free to the public, since we abandoned the economy that was threatened by any form of social institutions. Our health care, for instance, is now the best in the system and is free at point of need, thus cutting down on paperwork and the corruption that comes from private insurance companies that are allowed to own hospital facilities as well as drug companies. This in turn releases our citizens from fear of losing jobs attached to private health insurance, allowing them greater flexibility in employment and making them no longer frightened of challenging any abuses of their contracts with their employers.” Producer Pushof continued in this vein for some time, with the air of a recent convert, until Professor Pidgeon was forced to interrupt her.
“But how was such a change of society, as well as a change of heart, brought about so quickly ?” he asked.
“By converting from producing industrial materials to moving into a specific area of the service sector,” she replied.
The jargon defeated him for a moment, and seeing his confusion she smiled. “We discovered that there’s no business like show business. Well,” she almost simpered, “Tempty did . . .”
“Tempty?”
“Temptation II. Our world. You were quite right, of course, about the planet’s sentience and growing anger with our uses of her resources and also about her ability to create the most alarming illusions. We had a very disagreeable time of it, in fact, shortly after you left. Horrible invisible beasts stalking citizens, hurling them into chasms, tearing them limb from limb, and so on. It certainly shook us up.”
“You stopped raping the planet?”
She looked disapproving for a moment. “I wouldn’t put it in quite such melodramatic terms, professor. But we did decide that perhaps we should start thinking rather differently. I read your work, specifically that relating to your adopted home world. I realized that you were right, and all the negative thoughts emanating from our people were being turned against us. So we decided it was time we thought positively. As we did so, we realized that we had many different kinds of dreams, many stories to tell, as had the planet herself. By channeling all these positive ideas, we learned to create quite elaborate illusions. We got rid of the roaring and rending beasts from the id and used our unconscious dreams and yearnings to quite different ends. The yearning became, as it were, yarning!” Her girlish giggle was a little surprising, but Professor Pidgeon decided he preferred it to her earlier, harsher exclamations.
“Yarning?”
“You wouldn’t believe how old this planet is. And what a memory! She remembers the stories of every inhabitant who ever lived here. Millions of them. Billions. And not all human, of course. All Tempty wanted was a sympathetic audience, someone to watch and listen to her stories.”
Professor Pidgeon raised an enquiring eyebrow.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Producer Pushof beamed. “From all those negative projections that were emanating from us and thus from the planet, we changed to positive ones. We now have almost a million dream theaters worldwide. Each one runs a different story every couple of weeks or so. Programs change constantly, and we are working on a means of recording them, so that people can take them home with them or we can replay them when we need to. And, of course, it’s not only the planet’s memories that are contributing to the stories; we have our own as well. All we needed to do was structure the stories and devise a way in which they could be projected for an audience. Our GPP has tripled, allowing us to invest in clean energy so that people come from all over the galaxy to take a healthy holiday and spend their time enjoying our fantasies or, indeed, their own. For Temptation II takes their dreams and projects them back to them, thus increasing the variety and scope of the entertainment we can offer. With Disneyworld XIX, we are the galaxy’s leading entertainment planet. We’re thinking of changing our name to New Hollyworld. What do you think?”
Professor Pidgeon offered a nod of silent approval. “I believe I owe you an apology,” he said. “It seems my grim warnings were unfounded.”
She was generous. “If you hadn’t said what you said, professor, I’m certain I would never have realized what a resource we had. Everyone who has the privilege of living on a sentient world could do what we have done. Not,” she offered him a self-mocking smile, “that we aren’t happy to remain, for as long as possible, the only game in the galaxy.”
“Are there no drawbacks? Is there any kind of program you can’t find here?”
“Well,” she said, “we discovered that it wasn’t wise to put on too many horror shows. These days, we’re inclined to concentrate on what you might call family entertainment. Fantasy films, that sort of thing. But our thrillers are very popular. Our audiences accept that they enter our dream-o-domes at their own risk, but we also sell insurance to anyone worried that they will be adversely affected by our shows. Of course,” she added, smiling again, “since much of the entertainment comes from their own unconscious, they have only themselves to blame if they witness something negative. It’s the perfect business, really. It is the ultimate way of giving the public what it wants. Would you like to try out one of our dream-o-domes?”
“I think not,” said Professor Pidgeon, his eyes twinkling. He signaled to Robert that they should make a discreet departure. “I’ve enjoyed the experience more than once and think I prefer, these days, to stay at home with a good book.”
“Book?” asked Producer Pushof with interest as she summoned their ferry to the etherport. “Is that another idea we could perhaps turn to our advantage?”
This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine
Alex Irvine
I
will tell you right up front that by the end of my story, you will believe that I am lying, if not about everything then certainly about the more important events I am about to narrate. Or describe. I was never clear on the difference.
will tell you right up front that by the end of my story, you will believe that I am lying, if not about everything then certainly about the more important events I am about to narrate. Or describe. I was never clear on the difference.
I will also tell you that I’m not entirely sure I’m writing this. You’ll understand why in a little while, unless you decide I’m lying.
When I began this testimony, I tried to think of ways to make sure I remained in control of what I was doing. One of the early drafts was an acrostic, with the first letter of each paragraph spelling out the last sentence I heard from the mouth of Tobin Crowder: You have to understand that I never wanted to want this. That only allowed me thirty-five paragraphs, though, and as soon as I started writing, it became clear to me that I was either going to have to abandon that scheme or inflict upon my reader some agonizingly long paragraphs. Abandonment seemed the better choice.
Another acrostic idea seemed to offer more promise. What if the first word of each sentence within a paragraph gave a letter, and thus each paragraph a word, and thus my testimony a hidden message? This focused my mind until, with Tobin’s intervention I’m sure, I found myself unable to keep any of the lines I’d selected in my head.
After that, I found myself unable to maintain any kind of formal constraint or scheme. The only thing that works is to write things down in the order they come into my head, which is not the best order to tell the story, because since Tobin’s interventions became more pervasive, my mind seems to have lost its ability to arrange things.
Tobin does not want me to be writing this (again for reasons that will become clear as we go on, if you don’t give up on me along the way). Rather, he wants you—whoever you are—to arrive and experience what I experienced.
What all of us experienced.
The problem, one of our team told me early on, is that crazy people feel things more intensely than other people do.
The way I remember it, Tobin and I have been the last survivors of our mission for years now. Thirteen years? Sixteen? Something like that. Enough so that when I look back on my life, a nontrivial fraction of my years have been spent in solitude, and my reaction to the prospect of visitors is a strangely fractured mix of eagerness for human company and guilt that I will probably fail to warn them—you—adequately.
You will arrive, and see this idyllic place, and let your guard down . . . as we did. That’s what I’m worried about. That’s why I’m writing this. I hope that’s not why Tobin is being so aggressive in my mind.
Or perhaps it should be said that people who feel things more intensely than other people do are often called crazy.
The line that I wrote above, about the last thing out of Tobin’s mouth, that was wrong. I think. His last line was something else. I think maybe I’ve already written it, but that might have been in one of the other drafts. I destroyed those because the erasures seemed to gain me some peace. I’ll try to remember.
I did try the acrostic. At least one of them. I don’t think it worked, but I like the idea of a puzzle even though I’m not sure what puzzle I could create that Tobin wouldn’t be able to anticipate and subvert.
Tobin was beautiful at the beginning, the incarnation of the Spaceman. I remember all of it before we touched down here, and he doesn’t interfere.
What do I mean by interference? I should clarify. By interference I mean that sometimes Tobin distracts me by means of noises outside the window, odd smells from the greenhouse, inconvenient urges to urinate, and so forth. Sometimes he gives me nightmares that tumble after each other in such grotesque clusters that when I wake up, I feel as if I’m walking on the meniscus between waking and dream. Literally, I feel that way; it gives, ever so slightly, at each step. What is below I—waking—do not know.
Sometimes things come out of the forest. He could kill me if he wanted to. I hope he doesn’t, although I’ve often wondered if a death wish wouldn’t be the surest way to ensure my survival. Tobin is capricious that way. Always has been.
I am going to tell you about those first couple of months, even though that’s the boring part.
They were pretty good. We made fun of each other’s quirks, just as we had on the ship. We did our best to avoid sexual entanglements, just as we had on the ship. Being a bunch of confirmed science types, they cracked wise about my liberal arts background and literary bent. We did experiments, collected and cataloged samples, prospected for commercially useful minerals and genetic strings. We experienced absolutely textbook instances of personal jealousies disguising themselves as professional disagreements, but we got along well otherwise.
Then we began to wonder if we were all poisoned, because we all started to hallucinate, first individually and then in groups.
Then we started to discern what was really going on, and it wasn’t hallucination at all. Which is not to say that we haven’t hallucinated, but . . .
I think this part is best told by example.
The thing is, I don’t really have a problem with amnesia, although I know this reads like I do. The problem is—I think—that all of the neural pathways my mind is accustomed to using for certain operations are unpredictably coopted or blocked by whatever it is Tobin is doing out there in the woods. Some days are worse than others—today, for example, has been pretty good so far—but in general, I find that I don’t think the way I used to. Or, a better way to put it might be that I am not allowed to think the way I used to and have been forced to find different ways to think.
Which might not be a bad thing, but it is unsettling. I find it more and more important to build careful chains of cause and effect, to take refuge in easily traceable progressions between evidence and conclusion. In a place like this, you learn to mistrust intuition as well as any kind of lateral or stochastic thinking.
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