Anticipations

by Christopher Priest

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “This man is my friend, Shi Tok. His name is Edward. Edward this is my brother, Shi Tok. He is a great artist.”

  “You probably don’t care much for art, do you?” Shi Tok asked.

  “Why, yes, I have a great respect for works of art—and for artists.”

  “I see. The usual crappy worthless lip service. Why don’t you get honest and say that you hate and fear art and artists?”

  “Because he does not wish to be as rude as you,” Felicity said. “Give Edward a pam-and-lime or something.”

  “No, I’d better be going, Zenith. I can see I’m not welcome here.”

  “Why’s he calling you Zenith, Felicity? Say, Edward, while you’re here, why don’t you come and see what I’m currently working on? With all that enthusiasm for art, you might get a buzz.”

  Despite himself, Edward found himself being pushed into a small room where the three of them formed a crowd—perhaps because of the way in which brother and sister jostled and gestured, continually getting in each other’s way—she trying to produce beverages, he to produce art-works.

  The table was piled with boxes full of plaques. Another plaque stood in a vice attached to the edge of the table. Shi Tok spun the vice open and held the plaque out to Edward, who accepted it reluctantly. The plaque was a rectangle about the size of an envelope and not much thicker. It was cream in colour.

  “I haven’t finished that one yet. Know what it is?”

  “Is it ivory?”

  Shi Tok laughed harshly. “I didn’t mean what is it made of. I mean what does it represent. But no, of course it is not ivory. It’s just a block of garsh, one of the new palloys. Ivory! Stars above! Don’t you know that all the tariffs and duties stacked against the zodiacal planets by Earth make it almost prohibitive to import ivory to Fragrance? Not that I could afford ivory even at Mother Earth prices. I’m a poor artist, Edward, a creator, not a civil servant, or whatever secure dull little job you hold down—no, don’t tell me. That sort of information makes me feel bad, puts me off my work . . . This is only a block of garsh, manufactured just a light-second away on one of the Ingratitudes. You know what it is?”

  Since there seemed to be no answer to this question, Edward took the glass which Felicity offered with some gratitude and said, “I’m not against art, although it’s true I have a secure job. I’m a sort of artist myself, in a way—although perhaps not in a way you might recognize. What form does your art take?” Felicity’s brother looked upwards at the low ceiling and made grunting noises of despair. “This is my art-form.” He waved the garsh under Edward’s nose. “And these boxes are stacked with more of them, masterpieces every one. Look!” He stirred up the boxes, pulling out rectangular plaques at random. Each block had a band incised and painted across it. The bands varied slightly in width, colour and positioning, but there was never more than one band to a plaque.

  “They’re all named on the back, and signed by me,” Shi Tok explained. “Here you are: A Clutch of Underground Cathedrals, The Last Bite of an Unseen Shrapnel, Legs Trapped in an Embroidered Sea, Suntans of an Inoffensive Moon, The Spirit of the Male Climacteric Regards Narcissus, Friction Between Skull and Prisoner Brain . . . Take your pick.”

  “Um . . . do you sell these?” Edward asked.

  “Of course I sell them . . . when I can . . . They go to rich dolts in your country or mine with more cash than brains. I rook ’em for what I can get. Like you, they hate and fear art, but they think it impresses other people, so I turn out this real junk for the pleasure of making fools of them.”

  Edward sipped his pam and looked at the floor. “Is it pleasurable to make fools of people?”

  “They were fools long before I got to them. Why give them the real thing when they can’t appreciate it? Art’s as dead in China as it is in America. The artists helped kill it—they don’t know what the hell they’re doing either. The stupid oafs worked themselves into a dead end.”

  Edward gnawed his lip and scratched his leg.

  Felicity said, “Edward is going to visit Earth soon,” and was ignored.

  “Well,” Shi Tok said, throwing the plaques back in the box, “why don’t you say something? Don’t you like my works of art?”

  “It’s not for me to say,” Edward muttered.

  “Why not? I’m asking you, aren’t I? You did come here uninvited, didn’t you? What do you think of them, you a sort of artist and all that?”

  Edward looked at him and felt a blush steal round his ears and cheeks. “I think nothing of them, if you want the truth. Which appears to be exactly what you think of them. I’m sorry that you can claim to be an artist and yet know that what you produce is worthless, however much you get paid for it. You must be aware of the contradiction there. Perhaps it’s that which makes you so angry all the time.”

  The stripes rippled on Shi Tok’s face. He raised a clenched fist, as much for emphasis as attack. “I sell these for what I can get. No one respects the real artist these days. Even the lousy critics—”

  “I’d better be going, Felicity,” Edward said, setting his glass down on the table close to the vice. “Thank you both for the drink.”

  “It’s all very well for you to be superior, you don’t suffer—”

  She followed Edward to the door, despite the roaring of her brother. At the door, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.

  “You’re just wonderful,” she said. “A real man.”

  XV

  Despite all the efforts to glamorize it, getting to Earth was just hell.

  It started being hell at Fragport, where passengers for Earth had to go through long examinations in Customs, Medical, Expatriation, and Ecology, as well as the space line’s Check In—where great exception was taken to Edward’s PM, although he had all the requisite documents, and some small exception to his lin, which was only allowed through because it was an obsolete model (and he had only brought it to spite his sister).

  Several people had come to interview Edward before he left Fragrance.

  He was cornered by a plump shiny young man with a sharp-bladed nose, who shook Edward’s hand and said he was proud to meet him.

  “My name is Sheikh Raschid el Gheleb, and I lecture in Predestination at Cairo University. That’s Cairo, Earth, of course. I’ve been trying to catch up with you for some while. Of course I am personally interested in your attempts to build a Predestination Machine.”

  “Kind of successful attempts,” Edward said.

  “So I understand. Spare me a moment of talk, please. What interests me is that Predestination is a pretty new thing in the West. Perhaps it is merely because I am Arab that I equate the outgoing capitalism of the West over the last few centuries with a firm belief in free will. The religion of the West, Christianity, lays heavy emphasis on choice.”

  “Ah, the either-orness of Heaven and Hell,” Edward murmured, remembering the teaching of his Tui-either-norness phase.

  “Now that Christianity is dying out and the West, faced with Chinese supremacy and the World State, has fewer alternatives, the peoples of the West—in the United States in particular—are turning more and more to predestination. This seems to me interesting, because the Chinese, in a sense, have always believed in predestination. So both sides of the world are becoming philosophically more ready for union. Do you see it that way?”

  Edward hesitated. He liked discussions; they made him feel important; but he also wanted to board the Ether Breather and be alone with Felicity. “No, Sheikh, I don’t quite see it that way. The impetus that moves the West towards predestination is mainly scientific and technological. It’s the running down of ready sources of energy which has given the average man fewer alternatives. Better scientific knowledge of the workings of the brain and the genetic system has simply ruled out the old notion of free will. We really are programmed—it is that knowledge makes a PM possible.”

  “I see, a diametrically opposed approach to the Chine
se, in a way. I wonder if the Chinese will object to your turning what they have regarded as a philosophical outlook into a mechanistic one. May I ask you if your PM takes coincidences into account?”

  “We are still in the prototype stage, you understand. But of course predictions can be thrown badly wrong by coincidence until such time as we fully understand the working of chance; there will then be no random factors, and coincidence will cease to exist, just like free will.”

  “Do you personally believe in coincidence, Mr Maine?”

  “Not in its old sense of a freak and rather unsettling concurrence of events, no. It is only under an Aristotelian system of logic that coincidences appear unaccountable.”

  “Mr Maine, thank you. May we ask which ship you are taking to Earth?”

  “We shall be on the Ether Breather. If you will excuse me.”

  “I see—a real-life case of ether-or eh? . . .”

  XVI

  The Ether Breather had come in from the Tolerances, and was already crowded. Edward and Felicity found adjacent couches in the Soft Class lounge and strapped themselves in.

  There was a fifty-minute wait till blast-off; no foggers or sniffers were permitted.

  “Shall I tell you a story?” asked the lin, ever-solicitous, from under Edward’s couch. “I have one called ‘Familiar Struggle’.”

  “At least the title sounds appropriate at the moment.” Felicity said.

  “ ‘Familiar Struggle’. Bishop Cortara stood on heavy stone. ‘Struggle is as sure as death or spring: so be leopards while the high valleys flower.’ But the squalid photographers had heard too many promises. Musical weaving-mills burned. Pacific courts decayed. The pretty regiments came. He put his arms round a returning falcon and floated above the familiar windows of the Pacific.”

  Edward fell asleep. When he woke, they were nosing out of the hangar in a mild cuddle of acceleration.

  Passengers had the option of listening to music or of using the small screen-table before them either to watch a current film, generally Chinese or Japanese, or to view the panorama beyond the ship as seen from the captain’s monitor. Most people opted for the film—Confessions of the Love Computer—but Edward and Felicity switched over to the spectacle of space.

  Flying among the Zodiacal Planets provided a superb visual experience. The planetoids glittered all about, like a galaxy built of poker chips, their palloy hulls and domes giving them a high albedo. They circled Earth like a swarm of floodlit mosquitoes. There were hundreds of them, given life by the thermonuclear ardours of the sun.

  Most of them had been constructed three and four decades earlier, in ambitious response to the Great Power Crisis. Energy was here for the taking—but energy always at a price. Many of the zeepees had been built under private enterprise, by large corporations of all kinds. At first, when enthusiasm was high and expertise rare, the failure rate was formidable. There were romantic tales of half-finished zeepees, of ruined zeepees, of zeepees unregistered at Lloyd’s, of zeepees filled with water or poisonous gases, in which renegades and pirates lived; such things were the standard fare of scatter shows. Eventually, governments had stepped in when death tolls grew high enough to rouse public opinion. Later, groups of zeepees had formed alliances, often slightly altering their orbit to do so, and now governed themselves like so many city states.

  Independent zeepees still existed; but they were mainly the poorer ones. Even the alliances fell increasingly into the hands of terrestrial nations as tariffs nibbled away their profitability. All came more and more under the Chinese hegemony. The Chinese owned—if only at second- or third-hand—the essential space routes and most of the space lines. Chinese artefacts and fashions ruled increasingly on even the most strenuously independent zeepees.

  There were pessimists who claimed that the great days of the Zodiacal Planets were already over. Optimists claimed that the great days had hardly begun, and that the time would come when zeepees equipped themselves with their own fleets—a nucleus existed already—and towed themselves to new orbits round Venus, away from terrestrial interference. Nonsense, said the pessimists (who as usual in these cases called themselves realists); in a cytherean orbit, solar emissions would prove lethal and, in any case, the zeepees were only economically viable as it was because they were not too far from Earth. We don’t need Earth any more, cried the optimists. The day will come, said the realists, when all our beautiful new worlds will float silent and deserted about the mother planet, stripped of their luxury and machineries—and that in our lifetime. Never, said the optimists, upping their insurance.

  “We’re lucky to be the generation that enjoys all this beauty,” Edward said. “But I’m looking forward to the sight of an Earth landscape again. To gazing at distant horizons. Myopia has become such a fashionable zeepee complaint. Of course, much will have altered since I was there last, because of the energy shortage. It’s fifteen years in my case.”

  “Only five in mine, but things will have changed,” Felicity said. “Do you know what they have now? Sailing ships again! Big ones!”

  “So I heard.”

  “They are so short of horsepower. One horsepower will shift only one kilo in the air or nine kilos on land, but over five thousand kilos by water. So now all cargoes go by the oceans, just as in earlier centuries. In Shanghai and Canton, the shipyards have built huge windjammers with five masts which travel at seventeen knots—as fast as the old mammoth tankers.”

  “They must need huge crews. The profession of sailor has returned.”

  “No, it hasn’t, Edward. These windjammers are quite solitary, with no crew aboard except just one technician. The constant sail-changing is now fully automated and controlled by computer in response to weather-readings taken on-ship and from weathersats. Isn’t that romantic—those great white ships sailing the oceans all alone, each managing its own lonely course?”

  “Marvellous!” he said. “Like albatrosses . . .”He sat relishing the picture she conjured up in his mind, thinking how much of life he had missed by his concentration on work for Callibrastics. And he thought too of a model yacht he had had as a boy. He launched it on a pond near home and it sailed to the far bank, with a brave wooden sailor standing by its mast.

  “I’d really like to see one of those ships,” he said. Oh, the early days of life, before the machineries of the brain took charge. The dragon-haunted seas of Earth and youth . . . A wave of poignance cut through him, so that he could have wept. In his early teens, he had once loved a girl whose father was a seaman in the navy. She had written him a mad twelve-page letter describing Montevideo, exorcism, the secret parts of her body, and many other interesting things, and then had disappeared from his life. The oceans of the world were beyond all prediction.

  Finally, he turned to Felicity, fragile in her couch, and gazed into her deep, dark eyes.

  “We know such different things about each other. I know about you internally, but nothing about your circumstances, although I had the pleasure of meeting your brother—”

  She burst into laughter, hiding her pleasant mouth with a hand.

  “You hated my brother, just as he hated you! Why are you always so polite?”

  “I was taught that one should be polite to Chinese girls.” He smiled.

  She clutched his hand, giggling. “Don’t be polite much longer, Edward.”

  He thought he caught her meaning. Turning to her hungrily, he said, “Tell me more about yourself, where you’ve come from, what you want from life, what you think about, what happened to you when you were surrounded by real seas, not artificial ones!”

  Felicity told him of a life lived mainly in the Province of Chekiang, of their holidays by the sea, of camping in the mountains, of her father’s rise in the civil service, and of his promotion to Peking. She was most happy in Peking when she joined a girls’ Whole Diet Circle, which was established in a small rural township that was wholly self-supporting; there she had learnt fish-farming and other ecological arts. During thos
e happy days, catastrophe overtook the family. Their mother became increasingly difficult, family quarrels an everyday occurrence. A favourite younger daughter was run over through the mother’s neglect. The family polarized, Shi Tok siding with his mother, Felicity with her father. They felt scandal close about them. The father was given a post in the city of Hangchow but, in a fit of rage, he sent Shi Tok off to the zeepees to work for his living.

  “And it was all predictable,” Felicity said. “My mother was suffering from a brain tumour, as we should have diagnosed. She died suddenly, only a few weeks after Shi Tok had left home. My father became a very sad man, particularly when Shi Tok would not communicate with him, believing that mother’s death came through his neglect. I volunteered to go and see Shi Tok, but it is expensive to travel in space and, with having to support Shi Tok, I might never have saved enough money to return if you had not come along . . .”

  He tried to hold her story in mind, but his sense of injury won.

  “You only came with me because you wanted to get back to your father!”

  “That is not so, and I am very grateful to you. You know that; I have shown you.”

  He remained uneasy.

  Ether Breather was not designed for high stress. Its structure was built from various of the metal-plastic alloys. To get down to Earth, at the bottom of its steep gravity well, passengers had to change into a much stouter ferry.

  Accordingly, they disembarked when they were 5,700 kilometres from Earth, alighting for a couple of hours at a dutyfree way-station called Roche’s Limit.

  As they stood at one of the great windows of the way-station, looking out on the tremendous bowl of Earth below them, Edward said suddenly, “I will take you to China. We’ll go together. First, I must visit Cleveland, Ohio, to see my only surviving relations. You can come with me, and then we will visit your country. I have an errand for the corporation, after which we shall be free to do what we like.”