"What will your men do now?" she asked him fiercely, and the triton-mask turned toward that challenge. "Oh, come, come, signore. I know. Do you think I'm a fool?"
"Don't risk being a dead fool."
"Shall I not? They failed to get near him." A wild, spur of the moment plan rose up in her mind, a last brazen chance, even with her hand held prisoner, and she took it. "Signore Rafetto!" she called out above the music. "Signore Rafetto! Di Verona hates you! But you know that. His assassins are in the crowd!"
"Fool!" di Verona cried, and the music died in discord, frightened couples seeking the edges of the ballroom, places less in a line between her voice and the Doge and his men.
"You asked me to marry you, Signore Rafetto! And I accept!"
It was embarrassment, public embarrassment, that deadliest thing to di Verona, that thing he could not survive. The crowd murmured in fear and astonishment as the Doge stepped forward a pace.
"Giacinta!"
"Fool, I say!" Di Verona wrenched her arm, making her spill a little of the wine. It splashed, dark, on her bosom. And suddenly there was racket on the sides of the hall, armed conflict that sent guests fleeing back to the floor, and toward the shelter of the foyer. But city police were there, armed, and in force, sealing the doors.
Di Verona saw it, too, and his grip faltered. Giacinta turned and smiled at him, Nonna's kind of smile, when they had left Milano, Nonna's smile when they had faced the rundown house and the weed-choked garden.
"Drink to the Doge," she said, cold as the depths of the canals. "Take my cup. It's your escape. They won't laugh, if you drink it."
"Damn you," di Verona said. Silence had fallen about the edges of the hall. There were other police, one might think, behind the masks in the crowd. There were weapons in this hall besides those di Verona had brought.
She offered the cup up to him. "They won't laugh," she said, as she would have said it to herself. "They won't arrest you, or take you to the prison."
Di Verona seized it from her hand, wine slipping over its edge. His hand was white-knuckled on the cup, as if he would crush it. She thought he would fling it at her. Black and red harlequins were moving toward them both, shouldering guests aside.
But he drank, all at a draft, and flung the cup at them instead. The harlequins pulled his hand from her, and began to take him away. A bridge led from the Palazzo to the prisons. This hall was sometimes a court, so she heard.
He did not go beyond a few steps before he fell, and they carried him. There was, she had promised it, no laughter, only stunned silence throughout the hall.
Her arm was bruised and wrenched. The police would have seized her, too, but Antonio himself pushed through their rank and took her in charge, took her in his arms, hugged her tight against him.
"I have your ring," she said against his neck, in the murmuring of the crowd, and showed it to him. "Shall I give it back, harlequin?"
"A trade," he proposed to her, her Antonio, alive, forewarned, and well-defended, her prince of merchants. He took her burned hand in his and kissed it, and made the exchange, the little diamond circlet for his heavy signet. "It fits better. Giacinta, Giacinta, your poor hand."
They kissed, deeply, passionately. The crowd surrounded them. She took off the bauta, let it fall on its ribbon, and put her arms about him and kissed him back. The voices around them cheered the Doge, cheered their freedom, cheered the luck of young lovers.
Floods might come. The great flood always threatened. La Repubblica Serenissima still kept her suitor at bay.
Giacinta Sforza had no such intention.
VISIBLE LIGHT
This one is a very personal account—as my odd short stories come out of a very eclectic set of interests, and a very diverse set of studies and experiences. In composing a book, it seemed hard to find anything in common among these stories, except me—so I decided to greet the reader as a voyager, which I am, an inveterate traveler, curious about all manner of very strange things. My college studies involved ancient languages, Roman law and the ethnology and immigration patterns of Bronze Age Greece, along with the rise of technology and the evolution of world view—I'm lately fascinated with Egypt—and what do I do but write science fiction?
I'm not a person who stands still well. But then the earth is always in motion, and I like keeping up with it. I don't wont just to exist. I want to know. I want to see. I want to understand.
Hence my own character, the traveler in time and space. I indulged my personal whim, and hope you enjoy the story around the stories.
CJC
1986
Introduction
In a collection like this the writer has the rare chance to do a very old-fashioned thing: to speak to the audience, like the herald coming out before the ancient play to explain briefly what the audience is about to see—and perhaps to let the audience peek behind the scenes—Down this street, mark you, lies the house of the Old Man, and here the wineseller—
Well, on this street lives a bit of fantasy and a bit of science fiction, here reside stories from my first years and some from not so long ago—
I introduce one brand new tale, because that's only fair.
I have gathered the rest by no particular logic except the desire to present some balance of early and later material, some mixture of science fiction and fantasy, and in a couple of instances to preserve work that has never appeared in any anthology.
One of the additional benefits of walking onto the stage like this is the chance to lower the mask and give the audience an insight into the mind behind the creation. So stop here, ignore all the intervening passages, and go straight to the stories if you simply enjoy my craft and care nothing for the creator— being creator, I am no less pleased by that. Go, sample, enjoy.
For those who want to know something of me, myself, and what I am—well, let me couch this introduction in a mode more familiar to me: let me set a scene for you. I sit on a crate on a dockside, well, let's make it a lot of baggage, a battered suitcase and a lot of other crates round about, with tags and stickers abundant. see earth first, one sticker says, quite antique and scratched. And this is a metal place, full of coolant fumes and fuel smells. Gears clash, hydraulics wheeze, and fans hum away overhead, while our ship is loading its heavier cargo.
You sit there on your suitcase just the same as I, and I suppose our boarding call is what we're waiting for. Passers-by may stop. But it's mainly you and me.
"What do you do?" you ask, curious about this woman, myself, who am the ancient mariner of this dockside: I have that look—a little elsewhere, a little preoccupied, baggage all scarred with travels. I rarely give the real answer to that question of yours. "I'm a writer," I usually say. But the clock sweeps into the small hours—starships have no respect for planet time—and we talk together the way travelers will who meet for a few hours and speak with absolute honesty precisely because they are absolute strangers. I am moved by some such thing, and I take a sip of what I have gotten from the counter yonder and you take a sip of yours and we are instantly philosophers.
"Call me a storyteller," I say, recalling another mariner. "That's at least one of the world's oldest professions, if not the oldest."
"You write books?" you ask. "Are you in the magazines?"
"Oh," say I, "yes. But that's not the important part. I tell stories, that's what I do. Tonight in New Guinea, in New Hampshire, in Tehuantepec and Ulaanbaatar, quite probably someone is telling a story: we still build campfires, we still watch the embers and imagine castles, don't we—down there? They weave stories down there, the same as they did around the first campfire in the world; they still do. Someone asks for the story of the big snow or the wonderful ship—there's very little difference in what we do. You just have to have a hearer." :
"Do you have to?"
"I'm not sure about that. I wrote about something like that—people called the elee who knew their world was dying. And they had rather make statues than spaceships, though they knew no eye
would ever see them."
"It would last."
"On a dead world. Under a cinder of a sun. It's an old question, isn't it, whether art created for the void has meaning—whether the tree falling in solitude makes a sound or not. What's a word without a hearer? Without that contact, spark flying from point to point across space and time, art is void—like the art of the elee, made for the dark and the silence."
"Then it matters what somebody else thinks of it?"
"It matters to somebody else. It matters to me. But that it matters to him hardly matters to me the way it does to him."
"That's crazy."
"I don't live his life. But I'm glad if he likes what I do. I'm sorry if he doesn't. I hope he finds someone who can talk to him. Everyone needs that. I do all I can. Perhaps the elee have a point."
"You mean you don't write for the critics?
"Only so far as they're human. And I am. Let me tell you, I don't believe in systems. I only use them."
"You mean all critics are crooked?"
"Oh, no. It's only a system. There are good critics. The best ones can point out the deep things in a book or a painting: they can see things you and I might miss. They have an insight like a writer's or an artist's. But their skill isn't so much adding to a book as helping a reader see ideas in it he might have missed. But there are various sorts of critics. And some of them do very dangerous things."
"Like?"
"Let me tell you: there's criticism and there's faultfinding. A tale is made for a hearer, to touch a heart. To criticize the quality of the heart it touches—that's a perilously self-loving act, isn't it? Criticizing the message itself, well, that might be useful. But the critic properly needs as much space to do it in as the writer took to develop it. And then the critic's a novelist, isn't he? Or a painter. He's one of us. And many of us are, you know. The best of us are. But criticism as a science—" I take here another sip. Thoughts like this require it. "Criticism is always in danger of becoming a system. Or of submitting to one."
"You said you don't believe in systems."
"Oh, I believe they exist. They exist everywhere. And more and more of them exist. The use of art, the manipulation of art and science by committees and governments, by demographics analysts and sales organizations, by social engineers, oh, yes—and by academe—all of this—It's happening at a greater pace and with more calculation than it ever has in all of history."
"And that worries you."
"Profoundly. I wrote a book about it. About art and the state. Art is a very powerful force. And the state would inevitably like to wield the wielder. It wants its posterity. Most of all it wants its safety."
"You write a lot about that?"
"That I write is about that. Do you see? It isn't fiction. It isn't illusion. That I write is a reality. Life is art and science. Look at your hand. What do you see? Flesh? Bone? Atoms? It's all moving. Electrons and quarks exist in constant motion. You think you know what reality is? Reality is an artifact of our senses."
"Artifact? Like old arrowheads?"
"A thing made. Your reality is an artifact of your senses. Your mind assembles the data you perceive in an acceptable order. Do you think this floor is real? But what is it, really? A whirl of particles. Matter and energy. We can't see the atoms dance: we can scarcely see the stars. We're suspended between these two abysses of the infinitely small and the infinitely vast, and we deceive ourselves if we believe too much in the blue sky and the green earth. Even color, you know, is simply wavelength. And solidity is the attraction of particles."
"Then it's another system."
"You've got it. Another system. Here we sit, an intersection of particles in the vast now. Past and future are equally illusory."
"We know what happened in the past."
"Not really."
"You mean you don't believe in books either."
"I don't believe in history."
"Then what's it all worth?"
"A great deal. As much as my own books are worth. They're equally true."
"You said it was false!"
"Oh, generally history is fiction. I taught history. I know some facts of history as well as they can be known. I've read original documents in the original languages. I've been where the battles were fought. And every year history gets condensed a little more and a little more, simplified, do you see? You've heard of Thermopylae. But what you've heard happened there, is likely the average of the effect it had, not the meticulous truth of what went on. And remember that the winners write the histories. The events were far more yea and nay and zig and zag than you believe: a newspaper of the day would have deluged you with contradictory reports and subjective analyses, so that you would be quite bewildered and confounded by what history records as a simple situation—three hundred Spartans standing off the Persians. But were there three hundred? It wasn't that simple. It was far more interesting. The behind-the-scenes was as complicated as things are in real life: more complicated than today's news ever reports anything, with treacheries and feuds going back hundreds of years into incidents and personalities many of the men on that field would have been amazed to know about. Even they didn't see everything. And they died for it."
"Anyone who tried to learn history the way it was— he'd go crazy."
"He'd spend a billion lifetimes. But it doesn't matter. The past is as true as my books. Fiction and history are equivalent."
"And today? You don't think we see what's going on today either."
"We see less than we ought. We depend on eyes and ears and memory. And memory's very treacherous. Perception itself is subjective, and memory's a timetrip, far trickier than the human eye."
"It all sounds crazy."
"The totality of what's going on would be too much. It would make you crazy. So a human being selects what he'll see and remember and forms a logical framework to help him systematize the few things he keeps."
"Systems again."
"I say that I distrust them. That's what makes me an artist. Consider: if it's so very difficult to behold a mote of dust on your fingertip, to behold the sun itself for what it truly is, how do we exist from day to day? By filtering out what confuses us. My stories do the opposite. Like the practice of science, do you see? A story is a moment of profound examination of things in greater reality and sharper focus than we usually see them. It's a sharing of perception in this dynamic, motile universe, in which two human minds can momentarily orbit the same focus, like a pair of vastly complex planets, each with its own civilization, orbiting a star that they strive to comprehend, each in its own way. And when you talk about analyzing governments and not single individuals: as well proceed from the dustmote to the wide galaxy. Think of the filters and perceptual screens governments and social systems erect to protect themselves."
"You distrust governments?"
"I find them fascinating. There was an old Roman, Vergilius Maro—"
"Vergil."
"Just so. He said government itself was an artform, the same as great sculpture and great books, and practiced in similar mode—emotionally. I think I agree with the Roman."
"Isn't that a system?"
"Of course it's a system. The trick is to make the system as wide as possible. Everything I think is just that: thinking; it's in constant motion. It, like all my component parts, changes. It has to. The universe is a place too wonderful to ignore."
"You think most of us live in ignorance?"
"Most of us are busy. Most of us are too busy about things that give us too little time to think. I write about people who See, who See things differently and who find the Systems stripped away, or exchanged for other Systems, so that they pass from world to world in some lightning-stroke of an understanding, or the slow erosion and reconstruction of things they thought they knew."
"But does one man matter?"
"I think two kinds of humanity create events: fools and visionaries. Chaos itself may be illusion. Perhaps what we do does matter. I think it's a chanc
e worth taking. I hate to leave it all to the fools."
"But who's a fool?"
"Any of us. Mostly those who never wonder if they're fools."
"That's arrogance."
"Of course it is. But the fools aren't listening. We can never insult them."
"You think what you write matters?"
"Let me tell you: for me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction."
"It's escapist."
"It's romance. It's the world as it can be, ought to be—must someday, somewhere be, if we can only find enough of the component parts and shove them together. Science fiction is the oldest sort of tale-telling, you know. Homer; Sinbad's story; Gilgamesh; Beowulf; and up and up the line of history wherever mankind's scouts encounter the unknown. Not a military metaphor. It's a peaceful progress. Like the whales in their migrations. Tale-telling is the most peaceful thing we do. It's investigatory. The best tale-telling always has been full of what-if. The old Greek peasant who laid down the tools of a hard day's labor to hear about Odysseus's trip beyond the rim of his world—he wasn't an escapist. He was dreaming. Mind stretching at the end of a stultifying day. He might not go. But his children's children might. Someone would. And that makes his day's hard work worth something to the future; it makes this farmer and his well-tilled field participant in the progress of his world, and his cabbages have then a cosmic importance."
"Is he worth something?"
"Maybe he was your ancestor. Maybe he fed the ancestor of the designer who made this ship."
"What's that worth? What's anything worth, if you don't believe in systems?"
The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh Page 24
