Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

by Isaac Asimov

  Laborian shook his head. “I avoided that. “

  “You realize, of course, that I can’t.” Laborian nodded. “Yes.”

  Willard heaved another sigh and said, “Look, Mr. Laborian, assuming that I agree to do such a compu-drama-and I have not yet made up my mind on the matter-I would have to do it entirely my way. I would tolerate no interference from you. You have ducked so many of your own responsibilities in writing the book that I can’t allow you to decide suddenly that you want to participate in my creative endeavors.”

  “That’s quite understood, Mr. Willard. I only ask that you keep my story and as much of my dialogue as you can. All of the visual, sonic, and subliminal aspects I am willing to leave entirely in your hands.”

  “You understand that this is not a matter of a verbal agreement which someone in our industry, about a century and a half ago, described as not worth the paper it was written on. There will have to be a written contract made firm by my lawyers that will exclude you from participation.”

  “My lawyers will be glad to look over it, but I assure you I am not going to quibble.”

  “And, “ said Willard severely, “I will want an advance on the money you offered me. I can’t afford to have you change your mind on me and I am not in the mood for a long lawsuit.”

  At this, Laborian frowned. He said, “Mr. Willard, those who know me never question my financial honesty. You don’t know me so I’ll permit the remark, but please don’t repeat it. How much of an advance do you wish?”

  “Half,” said Willard, briefly.

  Laborian said, “I will do better than that. Once you have obtained the necessary commitments from those who will be willing to put up the money for the compu-drama and once the contract between us is drawn up, then I will give you every cent of the hundred thousand dollars even before you begin the first scene of the book.”

  Willard’s eyes opened wide and he could not prevent himself from saying, “Why?”

  “Because I want to urge you on. What’s more, if the compu-drama turns out to be too hard to do, if it won’t work, or if you turn out something that will not do-my hard luck-you can keep the hundred thousand. It’s a risk I’m ready to take.”

  “Why? What’s the catch?”

  “No catch. I’m gambling on immorality. I’m a popular writer but I have never heard anyone call me a great one. My books are very likely to die with me. Do Three in One as a compu-drama and do it well and that at least might live on, and make my name ring down through the ages,” he smiled ruefully, “or at least some ages. However-”

  “Ah,” said Willard. “Now we come to it.”

  “Well, yes. I have a dream that I’m willing to risk a great deal for, but I’m not a complete fool. I will give you the hundred thousand I promised before you start and if the thing doesn’t work out you can keep it, but the payment will be electronic. It : however, you turn out a product that satisfies me, then you will return the electronic gift and I will give you the hundred thousand globo-dollars in gold pieces. You have nothing to lose except that to an artist like yourself, gold must be more dramatic and worthwhile than blips in a finance-card. “ And Laborian smiled gently.

  Willard said, “Understand, Mr. Laborian! I would be taking a risk, too. I risk losing a great deal of time and effort that I might have devoted to a more likely project. I risk producing a docudrama that will be a failure and that will tarnish the reputation I have built up with Lear. In my business, you’re only as good as your most recent product. I will consult various people-” “On a confidential basis, please.”

  “Of course! And I will do a bit of deep consideration. I am willing to go along with your proposition for now, but you mustn’t think of it as a definite commitment. Not yet. We will talk further.”

  Jonas Willard and Meg Cathcart sat together over lunch in Meg’s apartment. They were at their coffee when Willard said, with apparent reluctance as one who broaches a subject he would rather not, “Have you read the book? “

  “Yes, I have.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cathcart peering at him from under the dark, reddish hair she wore clustered over her forehead. “ At least not enough to judge.”

  “You’re not a science fiction buff either, then?”

  “Well, I’ve read science fiction, mostly sword and sorcery, but nothing like Three in One. I’ve heard of Laborian, though. He does what they call ‘hard science fiction.”‘

  “It’s hard enough. I don’t see how I can do it. That book, whatever its virtues, just isn’t me.”

  Cathcart fixed him with a sharp glance. “How do you know it isn’t you?”

  “Listen, it’s important to know what you can’t do.”

  “And you were born knowing you can’t do science fiction?”

  “I have an instinct in these things.”

  “So you say. Why don’t you think what you might do with those three undescribed characters, and what you would want subliminally, before you let your instinct tell you what you can and can’t do. For instance, how would you do the Parental, who is referred to constantly as ‘he’ even though it’s the Parental who bears the children? That struck me as jackassy, if you must know.”

  “No, no,” said Willard, at once. “I accept the ‘he.’ Laborian might have invented a third pronoun, but it would have made no sense and the reader would have gagged on it. Instead, he reserved the pronoun, ‘she,’ for the Emotional. She’s the central character, differing from the other two enormously. The use of ‘she’ for her and only for her focuses the reader’s attention on her, and it’s on her that the reader’s attention must focus. What’s more, it’s on her that the viewer’s attention must focus in the compu-drama.”

  “Then you have been thinking of it. “ She grinned, impishly. “I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t needled you.”

  Willard stirred uneasily. “ Actually, Laborian said something of the sort, so I can’t lay claim to complete creativity here. But let’s get back to the Parental. I want to talk about these things to you because everything is going to depend on subliminal suggestion, if I do try to do this thing. The Parental is a block, a rectangle.”

  “A right parallelepiped, I think they would call it in solid geometry.”

  “Come on. I don’t care what they call it in solid geometry. The point is we can’t just have a block. We have to give it personality. The Parental is a ‘he’ who bears children, so we have to get across an epicene quality. The voice has to be neither clearly masculine nor feminine. I’m not sure that I have in mind exactly the timbre and sound I will need, but that will be for the voice-recorder and myself to work out by trial and error, I think. Of course, the voice isn’t the only thing.”

  “What else?”

  “The feet. The Parental moves about, but there is no description of any limbs. He has to have the equivalent of arms; there are things he does. He obtains an energy source that he feeds the Emotional, so we’ll have to evolve arms that are alien but that are arms. And we need legs. And a number of sturdy, stumpy legs that move rapidly.”

  “Like a caterpillar? Or a centipede?”

  Willard winced. “Those aren’t pleasant comparisons, are they?”

  “Well, it would be my job to subliminate, if I may use the expression, a centipede, so to speak, without showing one. Just the notion of a series of legs, a double fading row of parentheses, just on and off as a kind of visual leitmotiv for the Parental, whenever he appears.”

  “I see what you mean. We’ll have to try it out and see what we can get away with. The Rational is ovoid. Laborian admitted it might be egg-shaped. We can imagine him progressing by rolling but I find that completely inappropriate. The Rational is mind-proud, dignified. We can’t make him do anything laughable, and rolling would be laughable.”

  “We could have him with a flat bottom slightly curved, and he could slide along it, like a penguin belly-whopping.”

  “Or like a snail on a laye
r of grease. No. That would be just as bad. I had thought of having three legs extrude. In other words, when he is at rest, he would be smoothly ovoid and proud of it, but when he is moving three stubby legs emerge and he can walk on them.”

  “Why three?”

  “It carries on the three motif; three sexes, you know. It could be a kind of hopping run. The foreleg digs in and holds firm and the two hind legs come along on each side.”

  “Like a three-legged kangaroo?”

  “Yes! Can you subliminate a kangaroo?” “I can try.”

  “The Emotional, of course, is the hardest of the three. What can you do with something that may be nothing but a coherent cloud of gas?”

  Cathcart considered. “What about giving the impression of draperies containing nothing. They would be moving about wraithlike, just as you presented Lear in the storm scene. She would be wind, she would be air, she would be the filmy, foggy draperies that would represent that.”

  Willard felt himself drawn to the suggestion. “Hey, that’s not bad, Meg. For the subliminal effect, could you do Helen of Troy?” “Helen of Troy?”

  “Yes! To the Rational and Parental, the Emotional is the most beautiful thing ever invented. They’re crazy about her. There’s this strong, almost unbearable sexual attraction-their kind of sex-and we’ve got to make the audience aware of it in their terms. If you can somehow get across a statuesque Greek woman, with bound hair and draperies-the draperies would exactly fit what we’re imagining for the Emotional-and make it look like the paintings and sculptures everyone is familiar with, that would be the Emotional’s leitmotiv.”

  “You don’t ask simple things. The slightest intrusion of a human figure will destroy the mood.” “You don’t intrude a human figure. Just the suggestion of one. It’s important. A human figure, in actual fact, may destroy the mood, but we’ll have to suggest human figures throughout. The audience has to think of these odd things as human beings. No mistake.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Cathcart, dubiously.

  “Which brings us to another thing. The melting. The triple-sex of these things. I gather they superimpose. I gather from the book that the Emotional is the key to that. The Parental and Rational can’t melt without her. She’s the essential part of the process. But, of course, that fool, Laborian, doesn’t describe it in detail. Well, we can’t have the Rational and Parental running toward the Emotional and jumping on her. That would kill the drama at once no matter what else we might do.”

  “I agree.”

  “What we must do, then, and this is off the top of my head, is to have the Emotional expand, the draperies move out and enswathe (if that’s the word) both Parental and Rational. They are obscured by the draperies and we don’t see exactly how it’s done but they get closer and closer until they superimpose.”

  “We’ll have to emphasize the drapery,” said Cathcart. “We’ll have to make it as graceful as possible in order to get across the beauty of it, and not just the eroticism. We’ll have to have music.”

  “Not the Romeo and Juliet overture, please. A slow waltz, perhaps, because the melting takes a long time. And not a familiar one. I don’t want the audience humming along with it. In fact, it would be best if it comes in occasional bits so that the audience gets the impression of a waltz, rather than actually hearing it.”

  “We can’t see how to do it, until we try it and see what works.”

  “Everything I say now is a first-order suggestion that may have to be yanked about this way and that under the pressure of actual events. And what about the orgasm? We’ll have to indicate that somehow.”

  “Color.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Better than sound, Jonas. You can’t have an explosion. I wouldn’t want some kind of eruption, either. Color. Silent color. That might do it.”

  “What color? I don’t want a blinding flash, either. “

  “No. You might try a delicate pink, very slowly darkening, and then toward the end suddenly becoming a deep, deep red.”

  “I’m not sure. We’ll have to try it out. It must be unmistakable and moving and not make the audience giggle or feel embarrassed. I can see ourselves running through every color change in the spectrum, and, in the end, finding that it will depend on what you do subliminally. And that brings us to the triple-beings.”

  “The what?”

  “You know. After the last melting, the superimposition remains permanent and we have the adult form that is all three components together. There, I think, we’ll have to make them more human. Not human, mind you. Just more human. A faint suggestion of human form, not just subliminal, either. We’ll need a voice that is somehow reminiscent of all three, and I don’t know how the recorder can make that work. Fortunately, the triple-beings don’t appear much in the story.”

  Willard shook his head. “ And that brings us to the rough fact that the compu-drama might not be a possible project at all.”

  “Why not? You seem to have been offering potential solutions of all kinds for the various problems.”

  “Not for the essential part. look! In King Lear, we had human characters, more than human characters. You had searing emotions. What have we got here? We have funny little cubes and ovals and drapery. Tell me how my Three in One is going to be different from an animated cartoon?”

  “For one thing, an animated cartoon is two-dimensional. Even with elaborate animation it is flat, and its coloring is without shading. It is invariably satiricial-”

  “I know all that. That’s not what I want you to tell me. You’re missing the important point. What a compu-drama has, that a mere animated cartoon does not, are subliminal suggestions such as can only be created by a: complex computer in the hands of an imaginative genius. What my compu-drama has that an animated cartoon doesn’t is you, Meg.”

  “Well, I was being modest. “

  “Don’t be. I’m trying to tell you that everything -everything- is going to depend on you. We have a story here that is dead serious. Our Emotional is trying to save Earth out of pure idealism; it’s not her world. And she doesn’t succeed, and she won’t succeed in my version, either. No cheap, happy ending.”

  “Earth isn’t exactly destroyed.”

  “No, it isn’t. There’s still time to save it if Laborian ever gets around to doing a sequel, but in this story the attempt fails. It’s a tragedy and I want it treated as one-as tragic as Lear. No funny voices, no humorous actions, no satirical touches. Serious. Serious. Serious. And I’m going to depend on you to make it so. It will be you who makes sure that the audience reacts to the Rational, the Emotional, the Parental, as though they were human beings. All their peculiarities will have to melt away and they’ll have to be recognized as intelligent beings on a par with humanity, if not ahead of it. Can you do it?”

  Cathcart said dryly, “It looks as though you will insist I can.” “I do so insist.”

  “Then you had better see about getting the ball rolling, and you leave me alone while you’re doing it. I need time to think. Lots of time.”

  The early days of the shooting were an unmitigated disaster. Each member of the crew had his copy of the book, carefully, almost surgically trimmed, but with no scenes entirely omitted.

  “We’re going to stick to the course of the book as closely as we can, and improve it as we go along just as much as we can,” Willard had announced confidently. “ And the first thing we do is get a hold on the triple-beings.”

  He turned to the head voice-recorder. “How have you been working on that?” “I’ve tried to fuse the three voices. “

  “Let’s hear. All right, everyone quiet.”

  “I’ll give you the Parental first,” said the recorder. There came a thin, tenor voice, out of key with the blockish figure that the Image man had produced. Willard winced slightly at the mismatch, but the Parental was mismatched-a masculine mother. The Rational, rocking slowly back and forth, had a somewhat self-important voice; enunciation over-careful, and it was a light bariton
e.

  Willard interrupted. “Less rocking in the Rational. We don’t want the audience to become seasick. He rocks when he is deep in thought, and not all the time.”

  He then nodded his head at Dua’s draperies, which seemed quite successful, as did her clear and infinitely sweet soprano voice.

  “She must never shriek,” said Willard, severely, “not even when she is in a passion.”

  “She won’t,” said the recorder. “The trick is, though, to blend the voices in setting up the triple- being, in having each one distantly identifiable.”

  All three voices sounded softly, the words not clear. They seemed to melt into each other and then the voice could be heard enunciating.

  Willard shook his head in immediate discontent. “No, that won’t do at all. We can’t have three voices in a kind of intimate patchwork. We’d be making the triple-being a figure of fun. We need one voice which somehow suggests all three.”

  The voice-recorder was clearly offended. “It’s easy to say that. How do you suggest we do it?”

  “I do it,” said Willard, brutally, “by ordering you to do it. I’ll tell you when you have it. And Cathcart-where is Cathcart?”

  “Here I am,” she said, emerging from behind her instrumentation. “Where I’m supposed to be.”

  “I don’t like the sublimination, Cathcart. I gather you tried to give the impression of cerebral convolutions.”

  “For intelligence. The triple-beings represent the intelligence-peak of these aliens.”

  “Yes, I understand, but what you managed to do was to give the impression of worms. You’ll have to think of something else. And I don’t like the appearance of the triple-being, either. He looks just like a big Rational.”

  “He is like a big Rational,” said one of the imagists.

  “Is he described in the book that way?” asked Willard, sharply. “Not in so many words, but the impression I get-”

  “Never mind your impression. I’ll make the decisions.”

  Willard grew fouler-tempered as the day wore on. At least twice he had difficulty controlling his passion, the second time coming when he happened to notice someone watching the proceedings from a spot at one edge of the lot.