Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (21 page)

Big Cello spoke.

“I’ve seen them, Rhapsody,” he said throatily. “They’re just too sordid to have popular appeal.”

Rhapsody stood absolutely still. A dark stain rose in his face. Those few words told him — and everyone else present — exactly where he stood. If he persisted, he would rouse the chiefs anger; if he backed down, he would lose face.

In the solid behind Rhapsody, men and women jostled for admission to an all-sense horror show,
Death in Death Cell Six.
Above them, gigantic, was a quasi-live jell of a man being choked, head down, eyes popping, mouth agape.

“We needn’t show all this sordid stuff, of course,” Rhapsody said, grinning as if in pain. “I’m just giving it a runover to put the general idea before you. We’ll settle on the final details later, naturally.” Naturally.

Big Cello nodded. “You’re too sold on Bastion 44, though, Rhap,” he said kindly. “He was only a bum with a camera, after all.”

Ars Staykr’s city was emptying now. Crumpled aphrohale packets, minni-newscasts, tickets, programmes, preventos, sicksticks, handbills, and flowers lay in the gutter. The revellers were straggling home to sleep.

A fog settled lightly over Bosphorus Concourse, emphasizing the growing vacancy of the place. A fat man, clothes unbuttoned, reeled out of a participation hall and made for the nearest moveway. It spun him off like a leaf in a drain.

Three and one half sounded from Pla-To Court. Lights snapped off in a deserted restaurant, leaving on the retina an afterimage of upturned chairs. Even the Cello pleasure domes went dim. One last drab clattered wearily home, clutching her handbag tightly.

Yet the Concourse was not empty of humanity. The remorseless eye of the camera hunted down, in sundry doorways, the last watchers of the scene — the ones who had stood, motionless, not participating, when the evening was at its height. Watching the crowd, they waited in doorways as if peering from warrens. From the shadows, their faces gleamed with a terrible, inexpressible tension. Only their eyes moved.

“These men,” Rhapsody said, “really fascinated Ars Staykr. They were his discovery. He believed that if anyone could lead him to the heart of the city, these people could, these subterraneans in doorways. Night after night they were there. Staykr called them ‘the impotent spectres of the feast’.”

The solidscreen blanked, then filled with form once again. An overhead camera tracked two men down a canal-side walk. Ars Staykr and his young assistant, Rhapsody 182. They had movewayed down to the quiet side of Tiger.

The two figures paused outside a shabby boutique, looking doubtfully at the sign, A WILLITTS, COSTUMES AND VESTMENTS.

“I have the feeling we’re going to turn up something,” Ars was saying as the sound came on. “We’re going to hear what a city really is, from someone who must have felt its atmosphere most keenly. With this fellow, we’re digging right down into the heart of it. But it won’t be pleasant.”

Darkness. It seemed to seep out of the black G-suits; they were the antique tailor’s speciality, hanging stiff and bulky around the walls, funereal in the gloom. The costumier, Willitts, was a newt of a man; his features were recognizable as those of one of the Concourse night watchers, now trailed to his lair.

Willitt’s eyes bulged and glistened like those of a drowning rat. He denied ever going to Bosphorus Concourse. When Ars persisted, he fell silent, dangling his little fingers against the counter.

“I’m not a flux officer,” Ars Staykr said. “I’m simply curious. I want to know why you stand there every night the way you do.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Willitts muttered, dropping his eyes. “I don’t do anything.”

“That’s just it. You don’t do anything. Why do you — and others like you — stand there not doing anything? What are you thinking of? What do you see? What do you feel?”

“I’ve got business to attend to,” Willitts protested. “I’m busy. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“I want to know what you feel, how you tick, Willitts.”

“Leave me alone, will you?”

“Answer my questions and I’ll go away.”

“We could make it worth your while, Willitts,” young Rhapsody added, with a knowing look.

The little man’s eyes were furtive. He licked his lips. He seemed so tired, his tiny frame devoid of blood.

“Leave me alone,” he said. “That’s all I ask — leave me alone. I’m not hurting you, am I? A customer might come in any time. I’m not answering your questions. Now please get out of here.”

Unexpectedly, Ars Staykr jumped, pinning the little man backward across the counter. Of the two, Staykr’s face was the more desperate.

“Willitts,” he said, “I’ve got to know. I’ve
got
to know. I’ve been digging into this cesspit of a city week after week, and you’re the thing I’ve found at the bottom of it. You’re going to tell me what it feels like down there or, so help me, I’ll break your neck.”

“How can I tell you?” Willitts demanded with sudden, mouselike fury. “I can’t tell you. I can’t. I haven’t got the words. You’d have to be me — or my kind — before you’d understand.”

In the end they gave it up and left Willitts panting, lying behind his counter in the dust.

“I didn’t mean to lose control,” Ars Staykr said, pressing his brow, licking his knuckles, as he emerged from the shop. He must have known the camera was on him, but was too preoccupied to care. “Something just went blank inside me. We’ve all got our hatreds far too ready, I guess. But I must find out...”

His set face loomed larger and larger in the cube, eclipsing all else. One eyelid was flickering uncontrollably. He moved out of sight.

Everyone was talking in the audience now, except the chief; they had all enjoyed the beating up.

“Seriously,” Ormolu 3 was saying, “that last scene had something. You’d resolidify, of course, with proper actors, have a few broken teeth. Maybe finish with the little guy getting knocked into the canal.”

Timing his exits was a speciality with Rhapsody. He had them awake and now he’d show them no more. He came slowly down the few steps into the auditorium.

“So there’s the story of a man called Ars Staykr,” he said, as his right foot left the last step. “He couldn’t take it. After he beat up that little tailor, he dropped everything and disappeared into the stews of Nunion. He didn’t even stay to round off his picture, and Unit Two folded then and there. He was a quitter.”

“How come we’ve had to wait twenty years to hear all this?” came a shout from Rhapsody Double Seven.

Carefully, Rhapsody 182 spread his hands wide and smiled.

“Because Ars Staykr was a dirty word when he first quit,” he said, aiming his voice at Big Cello, “and after that he was forgotten. Then, well, it happened I ran into Staykr a couple of days back, and that gave me the idea of working over the old Unit Two files.”

He tried to move in front of Big Cello, to make it easier for the chief to compliment him on his sagacity if he felt so inclined.

“You mean Ars is still alive?” Double Seven persisted. “He must be quite an old man now. What’s he doing, for To’s sake?”

“He’s a down-and-out, a bum,” Rhapsody said. “I didn’t care to be seen talking to him, so I got away from him as soon as possible.”

He now stood before the chief.

“Well, BC,” he said, as calmly as he could, “don’t tell me you don’t smell a solid there — something to sweep ‘em off their feet and knock ‘em into the aisles.”

As if deliberately prolonging the suspense, Big Cello took another drag on his aphrohale, then removed it gently from his mouth.

“We’d have to have a pair of young lovers in it,” Big Cello said.

“Sure,” Rhapsody exclaimed, scowling to hide his elation. “Young lovers! There’s an idea! A great idea!”

“I see it as a saga of the common man,” Hurricane 304 suggested. “We could call it
Our Fair City
— if that title isn’t legally sequestered.”

“It’s a vehicle for Edru Expusso!” someone else suggested.

They were playing with it. Harsch had won the day.

He was hustling out of the little theatre when a hand touched his arm and Rhapsody Double Seven pulled him back.

“How did you happen to find Ars Staykr again?” he asked.

“Well,” Rhapsody said happily, “I happened to have a rendezvous a couple of nights back. I was looking for a helibubble afterward when I happened to walk through Bosphorus Concourse. This old wreck hanging about in a doorway recognized me and called out.”

“It was Ars?”

“It was Ars. I kept on going, of course. But it put me onto the concept of this solid.”

“Didn’t you ask Ars if he’d found out what was at the heart of the city? That was what he’d gone looking fix, wasn’t it?”

“What’s it matter? That quaint had nothing we’d want to buy. His clothes were in rags, I tell you; why, the crazy fool was shivering with viro! I was lucky that bubble came when it did!”

They made the solid — one of Supernova’s big-budget productions for the year. It took in credits on every inhabited planet of the Federation, and Rhapsody 182 was a powerful, respected man thereafter, They called it
Song of a Mighty City;
it had three electronic orchestras, seventeen hit tunes and a regiment of pneuma-dancing girls. The solidization was jelled in the studios using the pastel shades deemed most appropriate, and they finally selected a more suitable city than Nunion for backgrounds. Ars Staykr, of course, did not come into it at all.

The Ultimate Millennia

Again we must use the symbol: Time passed. Time is stretched to its limits, extended almost beyond meaning, for Time now rolls down a gentle decline of innumerable centuries toward the sunset of Yinnisfar and its Galaxy.

It was a time of contrast. Those planets and systems which, while the Self-perpetuating War was in full spate, had once been linked by the bond of enmity had now not enough in common even to be rivals. It was a time of discovery and consolidation; of experiment and abdication; of hope and resignation; of the historian and the prophet. It was a time of the exploration of the inner resources of man: with his last frontiers tamed, man turned in toward the self. There he went on foot, alone, without that grey steed Science in which he had trusted for so long, alone into the labyrinth of his own devices.

Humanity had multiplied. Every world bore a mighty crowd of people, but the crowd no longer jostled and shouted. Each individual remained by choice to himself an island. It was the silver period of the Age of Splendour and Starlight. Soon only the starlight would remain.

Toward the end of a great pageant, it may be, the stage is at its most crowded; a sea of faces, brightly lit, greets us even as the curtains begin their final downward sweep. Toward the end of a symphony, it may be, the whole orchestra puts forth its full efforts only a minute before silence falls and the music becomes a memory.

Throughout one vast arena, silence was falling, the last silence of all.

1

You never knew the beginning of that train of events which led you to Yinnisfar and a world of shadows.

You never knew Shouter by name. He operated far from what most men reckoned as civilization, right out on the rim of the Galaxy, so that on his frequent sweeps from one planet to another he rarely saw stars on both sides of his cabin. There they would be, a whole galaxyful on one side, burning bright and high, and, on the other — a cliff of emptiness that stretched from eternity to eternity, the distant island universes only accentuating the gulf.

Shouter generally kept his eyes on the stars.

But not on this trip. Shouter was a spool-seller by trade; his little star craft was packed with rack upon rack of microspools. He stocked all kinds, new and antiquarian; philosophical, sociological, mathematical; if you went through them systematically, you could almost piece together the eon-old history of the Galaxy. It was not, however, on these learned spools that Shouter made his best money; they paid for the fuel, but not the drinks. The spools that really brought in the profits dealt with a subject older than history, and with figures more ineluctable than any in the mathematician’s vocabulary; their subject was Desire. Erotic spools depicting the devices of lust formed Shouter’s stock in trade; and because such items were illegal, Shouter stood in perpetual fear of the customs officials of a hundred worlds.

Now he was elated. He had just neatly outwitted the petty guardians of morality and sold about half his holdings under their very eyes.

That he took too much drink in celebration was to influence your entire life. An empty merrit bottle rolled by his feet. It was hot in the small cabin of his ship, and he dozed off, sprawling over the controls...

Shouter woke muzzily. He sensed something was wrong and his head cleared at once as he peered anxiously into the forward vision tanks. No clouds of accustomed stars were in view. Hurriedly, he flipped on rear vision: there lay the Galaxy like a tinsel disc — far behind him, Shouter swallowed, and checked fuel. Low, but enough to get back on. Fuel, however, was in better supply than air. His oxygen tanks had not been replenished in the hurry of his last departure. He would never get back to the Galaxy alive on the thimbleful that remained.