The Best of C. L. Moore

by C. L. Moore

  But before Bill could turn to her, Dunn’s voice broke in heavily over both the others. “Wait—I’ve made up my mind!” Billy fell back a little, turning to his Leader with a blaze of sudden hope. Bill stared. “As I see it,” went on Dunn, “the whole preposterous question hinges on the marriage you make. Naturally I can’t concede even to myself that you could possibly marry anyone but the woman you did marry— but if you honestly feel that there’s any question in your own mind about it, I’ll settle it for you.”

  He turned to nod toward a corner of the room in which he stood that was outside Bill’s range, and in a moment the blue-uniformed, staring crowd about him parted and a low, rakish barrel of blue-gleaming steel glided noiselessly forward toward that surface of the cube which was a window into the past-future that parted Bill and themselves. Bill had never seen anything like it before, but he recognized its lethal quality. It crouched streamlined down upon its base as if for a lunge, and its mouth facing him was a dark doorway for death itself. Dunn bent behind it and laid his hand upon a half-visible lever in its base.

  “Now,” he said heavily. “William Gory, there seems to be a question in your mind as to whether we could reach you with our weapons. Let me assure you that the force-beam which connects us can

  carry more than sight and sound into your world! I hope I shan’t have to demonstrate that. I hope you’ll be sensible enough to turn to that televisor screen in the wall behind you and call Marta Mayhew.”

  “M—Marta?” Bill heard the quiver in his voice. “Why—”

  “You will call her, and in our sight and hearing you are going to ask her to marry you. That much choice is yours, marriage or death. Do you hear me?”

  Bill wanted insanely to laugh. Shotgun wedding from a mythical future—”You can’t threaten me with that popgun forever,” he said with a quaver of mirth he could not control. “How do you know I’ll marry her once you’re away?”

  “You’ll keep your word,” said Dunn serenely. “Don’t forget, Gory, we know you much better than you know yourself. We know your future far more completely than you saw it. We know how your character will develop with age. Yes, you’re an honorable man. Once you’ve asked her to marry you, and heard her say yes—and she will—you won’t try to back out. No, the promise given and received between you constitutes a marriage as surely as if we’d seen the ceremony performed. You see, we trust your honor, William Gory.”

  “But—” Bill got no further than that, for explosively in his brain a sweet, high voice was sobbing:

  “Father, father, what are you doing? What’s happened? Why don’t you speak to me?”

  In the tension Bill had nearly forgotten Sue, but the sound of that familiar voice tore at him with sudden, almost intolerable poignancy. Sue—the promise to protect her had risen to his lips involuntarily at the very mention of danger. It was answer to an urgency rooted race-deep, the instinct to protect the helpless and the loved. For a moment he forgot the gun trained on him from the other window; he forgot Billy and the world behind him. He was conscious only of his daughter crying in terror for help—for help from him and for protection against him at once, in a dizzy confusion that made his head swim.

  “Sue—” he began uncertainly.

  “Gory, we’re waiting!” Dunn’s voice had an ominous undernote.

  But there was a solution. He never knew just when he first became aware of it. A long while ago, perhaps, subconsciously, the promise of it had begun to take shape in his mind. He did not know when he first realized that—but he thought he knew whence it came. There was a sureness and a vastness about it that did not originate in himself. It was the Cosmic Mind indeed in which his own small soul was floundering, and out of that unthinkably limitless Plan, along with the problem came at last the solution. (There must be balance. . . the force that swings the worlds in their orbits can permit of no question without an answer—)

  There was no confusion here; there had never been. This was not chance. Purpose was behind it, and sudden confidence came flooding into him from outside. He turned with resolution so calm upon his face that Billy sighed and smiled, and Dunn’s tense face relaxed.

  “Thank God, sir,” breathed Billy, “I knew you’d come to your senses. Believe me, sir, you won’t be sorry.”

  “Wait,” said Bill to them both, and laid his hand on the button beneath his desk that rang a bell in his laboratory. “Wait and see.”

  In three worlds and times, three people very nearly identical in more than the flesh alone—perhaps three facets of the same personality, who can say?—stood silent and tense and waiting. It seemed like a very long time before the door opened and Miss Brown came into the room, hesitating on the threshold with her calm, pleasant face questioning.

  “You want me, Dr. Gory?”

  Bill did not answer for a moment. He was pouring his whole soul into this last long stare that said good-by to the young son he would never know. For understanding from some vast and nameless source was flooding his mind now, and he knew what was coming and why it would be so. He looked across the desk and gazed his last upon Sue’s familiar face so like his own, the fruit of a love he would never share with pretty Sallie. And then, drawing a deep breath, he gulped and said distinctly:

  “Miss Brown, will you marry me?”

  Dunn had given him the key—a promise given and received between this woman and himself would be irrevocable, would swing the path of the future into a channel that led to no world that either Billy or Sue could know.

  Bill got his first glimmer of hope for that future from the way the quiet woman in the doorway accepted his question. She did not stare or giggle or stammer. After one long, deep look into his eyes—he saw for the first time that hers were gray and cool behind the lenses—she answered calmly.

  “Thank you, Dr. Gory. I shall be very happy to marry you.”

  And then—it came. In the very core of his brain, heartbreak and despair exploded in a long, wailing scream of faith betrayed as pretty

  Sue, his beloved, his darling, winked out into the oblivion from which she would never now emerge. The lazy green Eden was gone forever; the sweet fair girl on her knees among the myrtle leaves had never been—would never be.

  Upon that other window surface, in one last flash of unbearable clearness, young Billy’s incredulous features stared at him. Behind that beloved, betrayed face he saw the face of the Leader twisting with fury. In the last flashing instant while the vanishing, never-to-exist future still lingered in the cube, Bill saw an explosion of white-hot violence glare blindingly from the gun mouth, a heat and violence that seared the very brain. Would it have reached him—could it have harmed him? He never knew, for it lasted scarcely a heartbeat before eternity closed over the vanishing world in a soundless, fathomless, all-swallowing tide.

  ‘Where that world had stretched so vividly a moment ago, now Marta’s violet gaze looked out into the room through crystal. Across the desk Sallie’s lovely, careless smile glowed changelessly. They had been gateways to the future—but the gates were closed. There would never be such futures now; there never had been. In the Cosmic Mind, the great Plan of Things, two half-formed ideas went out like blown candle flames.

  And Bill turned to the gray-eyed woman in the doorway with a long, deep, shaken sigh. In his own mind as he faced her, thoughts too vast for formulation moved cloudily.

  “I know now something no man was ever sure of before—our oneness with the Plan. There are many, many futures. I couldn’t face the knowledge of another, but I think—yes, I believe, ours will be the best. She won’t let me neglect the work we’re doing, but neither will she force me to give it to the world unperfected. Maybe, between us, we can work out that kink that robs the embryo of determination, and then—who knows?

  “Who knows why all this had to happen? There was Purpose behind it—all of it—but I’ll never understand just why. I only know that the futures are infinite—and that I haven’t lost Billy or Sue. I couldn’t have done what I d
id without being sure of that. I couldn’t lose them, because they’re me—the best of me, going on forever. Perhaps I’ll never die, really—not the real me—until these incarnations of the best that’s in me, whatever form and face and name they wear, work out mankind’s ultimate destiny in some future I’ll never see. There was reason behind all this. Maybe, after all, I’ll understand—some day.”

  He said nothing aloud, but he held out his hand to the woman in the door and smiled down confidently into her cool, gray eyes.

  * * *

  No Woman Born

  She had been the loveliest creature whose image ever moved along the airways. John Harris, who was once her manager, remembered doggedly how beautiful she had been as he rose in the silent elevator toward the room where Deirdre sat waiting for him.

  Since the theater fire that had destroyed her a year ago, he had never been quite able to let himself remember her beauty clearly, except when some old poster, half in tatters, flaunted her face at him, or a maudlin memorial program flashed her image unexpectedly across the television screen. But now he had to remember.

  The elevator came to a sighing stop and the door slid open. John Harris hesitated. He knew in his mind that he had to go on, but his reluctant muscles almost refused him. He was thinking helplessly, as he had not allowed himself to think until this moment, of the fabulous grace that had poured through her wonderful dancer’s body, remembering her soft and husky voice with the little burr in it that had fascinated the audiences of the whole world.

  There had never been anyone so beautiful.

  In times before her, other actresses had been lovely and adulated, but never before Deirdre’s day had the entire world been able to take one woman so wholly to its heart. So few outside the capitals had ever seen Bernhardt or the fabulous Jersey Lily. And the beauties of the movie screen had had to limit their audiences to those who could reach the theaters. But Deirdre’s image had once moved glowingly across the television screens of every home in the civilized world. And in many outside the bounds of civilization. Her soft, husky songs had sounded in the depths of jungles, her lovely, languorous body had woven its patterns of rhythm in desert tents and polar huts. The whole world knew every smooth motion of her body and every cadence of her voice, and the way a subtle radiance had seemed to go on behind her features when she smiled.

  And the whole world had mourned her when she died in the theater fire.

  Harris could not quite think of her as other than dead, though he knew what sat waiting him in the room ahead. He kept remembering the old words James Stephens wrote long ago for another Deirdre, also lovely and beloved and unforgotten after two thousand years.

  The time comes when our hearts sink utterly,

  When we remember Deirdre and her tale,

  And that her lips are dust. -

  There has been again no woman born

  Who was so beautiful; not one so beautiful

  Of all the women born— That wasn’t quite true, of course—there had been one. Or maybe,

  after all, this Deirdre who died only a year ago had not been beautiful in the sense of perfection. He thought the other one might not have been either, for there are always women with perfection of feature in the world, and they are not the ones that legend remembers. It was the light within, shining through her charming, imperfect features, that had made this Deirdre’s face so lovely. No one else he had ever seen had anything like the magic of the lost Deirdre.

  Let all men go apart and mourn together— No man can ever love her. Not a man

  Can dream to be her lover. . . . No man say— What could one say to her? There are no words

  That one could say to her.

  No, no words at all. And it was going to be impossible to go through with this. Harris knew it overwhelmingly just as his finger touched the buzzer. But the door opened almost instantly, and then it was too late.

  Maltzer stood just inside, peering out through his heavy spectacles. You could see how tensely he had been waiting. Harris was a little shocked to see that the man was trembling. It was hard to think of the confident and imperturbable Maltzer, whom he had known briefly a year ago, as shaken like this. He wondered if Deirdre herself were as tremulous with sheer nerves—but it was not time yet to let himself think of that.

  “Come in, come in,” Maltzer said irritably. There was no reason for irritation. The year’s work, so much of it in secrecy and solitude, must have tried him physically and mentally to the very breaking point.

  “She all right?” Harris asked inanely, stepping inside.

  “Oh yes - . . yes, she’s all right.” Maltzer bit his thumbnail and glanced over his shoulder at an inner door, where Harris guessed she would be waiting.

  “No,” Maltzer said, as he took an involuntary step toward it. “We’d better have a talk first. Come over and sit down. Drink?”

  Harris nodded, and watched Maltzer’s hands tremble as he tilted the decanter. The man was clearly on the very verge of collapse, and Harris felt a sudden cold uncertainty open up in him in the one place where until now he had been oddly confident.

  “She is all right?” he demanded, taking the glass.

  “Oh yes, she’s perfect. She’s so confident it scares me.” Maltzer gulped his drink and poured another before he sat down.

  “What’s wrong, then?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Or . . . well, I don’t know. I’m not sure any more. I’ve worked toward this meeting for nearly a year, but now— well, I’m not sure it’s time yet. I’m just not sure.”

  He stared at Harris, his eyes large and indistinguishable behind the lenses. He was a thin, wire-taut man with all the bone and sinew showing plainly beneath the dark skin of his face. Thinner, now, than he had been a year ago when Harris saw him last.

  “I’ve been too close to her,” he said now. “I have no perspective any more. All I can see is my own work. And I’m just not sure that’s ready yet for you or anyone to see.”

  “She thinks so?”

  “I never saw a woman so confident.” Maltzer drank, the glass clicking on his teeth. He looked up suddenly through the distorting lenses. “Of course a failure now would mean—well, absolute collapse,” he said.

  Harris nodded. He was thinking of the year of incredibly painstaking work that lay behind this meeting, the immense fund of knowledge, of infinite patience, the secret collaboration of artists, sculptors, designers, scientists, and the genius of Maltzer governing them all as an orchestra conductor governs his players.

  He was thinking too, with a certain unreasoning jealousy, of the strange, cold, passionless intimacy between Maltzer and Deirdre in that year, a closer intimacy than any two humans can ever have shared before. In a sense the Deirdre whom he saw in a few minutes

  would be Maltzer, just as he thought he detected in Maltzer now and then small mannerisms of inflection and motion that had been Deirdre’s own. There had been between them a sort of unimaginable marriage stranger than anything that could ever have taken place before.

  “—so many complications,” Maltzer was saying in his worried voice with its faintest possible echo of Deirdre’s lovely, cadenced rhythm. (The sweet, soft huskiness he would never hear again.) “There was shock, of course. Terrible shock. And a great fear of fire. We had to conquer that before we could take the first steps. But we did it. When you go in you’ll probably find her sitting before the fire.” He caught the startled question in Harris’ eyes and smiled. “No, she can’t feel the warmth now, of course. But she likes to watch the flames. She’s mastered any abnormal fear of them quite beautifully.”

  “She can—” Harris hesitated. “Her eyesight’s normal now?”

  “Perfect,” Maltzer said. “Perfect vision was fairly simple to provide. After all, that sort of thing has already been worked out, in other connections. I might even say her vision’s a little better than perfect, from our own standpoint.” He shook his head irritably. “I’m not worried about the mechanics of the thing. Luckily they got
to her before the brain was touched at all. Shock was the only danger to her sensory centers, and we took care of all that first of all, as soon as communication could be established. Even so, it needed great courage on her part. Great courage.” He was silent for a moment, staring into his empty glass.

  “Harris,” he said suddenly, without looking up, “have I made a mistake? Should we have let her die?”

  Harris shook his head helplessly. It was an unanswerable question. It had tormented the whole world for a year now. There had been hundreds of answers and thousands of words written on the subject. Has anyone the right to preserve a brain alive when its body is destroyed? Even if a new body can be provided, necessarily so very unlike the old?

  “It’s not that she’s—ugly—now,” Maltzer went on hurriedly, as if afraid of an answer. “Metal isn’t ugly. And Deirdre. . . well, you’ll see. I tell you, I can’t see myself. I know the whole mechanism so well

  —it’s just mechanics to me. Maybe she’s—grotesque. I don’t know. Often I’ve wished I hadn’t been on the spot, with all my ideas, just when the fire broke out. Or that it could have been anyone but Deirdre. She was so beautiful— Still, if it had been someone else I think the whole thing might have failed completely. It takes more than just an uninjured brain. It takes strength and courage beyond

  common, and—well, something more. Something—unquenchable. Deirdre has it. She’s still Deirdre. In a way she’s still beautiful. But I’m not sure anybody but myself could see that. And you know what she plans?”

  “No—what?”

  “She’s going back on the air-screen.”

  Harris looked at him in stunned disbelief.

  “She is still beautiful,” Maltzer told him fiercely. “She’s got courage, and a serenity that amazes me. And she isn’t in the least worried or resentful about what’s happened. Or afraid what the verdict of the public will be. But I am, Harris. I’m terrified.”