His face was drawn and he seemed almost to bite out the next words slowly and with deliberation: ‘It’s not all pain. There are good moments, Jonl – there have to be good moments. But it’s not a question of what I want, or even what you want. If one has the ability to sense, then one has the duty to do so, to see with the mind right to the curtain which surrounds us, and, if possible, to understand what lies beyond that curtain …’
He had shut his eyes now, but the tears ran from under the closed lids, down over the girl’s fingers so that she shuddered and pressed closer, her own eyes smarting. Jonl sat with her hands clasped together in her lap, thinking: I know that he’s right and that I should try. But I am afraid – oh God’s star, I’m afraid … not only of the things I might find but of losing this, of destroying this wonderful ‘balance’ that exists between us … surely he understands that! She looked across at him, but swiftly and completely he had gone to sleep – his only sure refuge and anaesthetic. Sein wiped his face with her handkerchief, gazing meanwhile at his features with an intense concentration, as if trying to imprint them indelibly on her mind.
As the aircar touched down and ran towards its stop in the giant terminus, Coman awoke and said:
‘I’m sorry about the hysteria – some kind of reaction from coming home, I suppose.’ He looked at them thoughtfully, then said with a smile: I’m the most fortunate of men. Shall we go home now, or would you prefer to visit a place of entertainment first?’
When he smiled at them in that particular ways the almost frightening coldness in her eyes fell away, and they saw for an instant the person who existed deep within both their hearts.
‘Whatever you wish,’ said Jonl softly.
He waved a hand vaguely, ‘Very well. Let’s find a place where we can just sit together, and have a drink without interference …’
‘I know a pleasant place, without bloodshed or obscenity,’ said Sein.
He nodded. ‘Good. Where is it?’
‘One has to go to the roof of the City, to the gardens high above the Thames. There is a spot where we can sit and listen to an old-fashioned string orchestra, so atrocious that it delights, and look, if we wish, at ancient films preserved since before the Disaster. At night there is erected a telescopic bowl through which one can gaze at the stars. They seem so near, and while you were on Venus …’
He laughed for the first time since he had been back. ‘It sounds a very special place.’
‘You know how romantic she is,’ said Jonl. ‘I took her there once and she fell in love with it – said it reminded her of a trysting place in which lovers of olden times might have met.’
Sein wrinkled up her nose. ‘How significant that you were the one to introduce me to it!’
They left the aircar, and, after a short journey by belt, showed their passage cards to the electronic eyes at the exit and then entered a tube which would take them to the City centre.
The vehicle was crowded with people, many of whom cast curious eyes at the three of them and the tiny insignias they wore on their sleeves. Bond marks of this kind were unusual and indicated a belief, or at least a near belief, in love, which was regarded as a somewhat outdated and comical attitude in those enlightened days. With or without affection a man and a woman had sexual union – and a man and a man, a woman and a woman, and so on. But ‘love’, which indicated a multitude of ties and the mutual acceptance of invisible bonds – both in mind and body – was thought a foolish and unnecessary restriction, the adherents of which were considered simpletons or perverts. To see two young people with the accompanying was not uncommon, but it was rare to see adults linked in this manner, and the three of them, whether seen singly or together, never failed to arouse curiosity among their fellows – a curiosity composed sometimes of amusement and contempt and often of resentment, as if by their very existence they created a challenge to the accepted order of things.
Coman knew all this and it was his habit to step down the antennae of his senses while in a public place. Splendid to see men admiring the woman who bears the insignia showing she belongs to you only – not so pleasant to know the grubby thoughts of minds that compensate for envy by contemplating her imaginary ravishment. These things no longer irritated him as they had in the past and he shut them out more because of boredom than anything deeper. Long self-examination had brought him to a just assessment of his own thought processes – an examination which indirectly had been responsible for his telepathic gifts – and the fact that surface thoughts were automatic and of a purely illusory nature, important only in relation to the basic memory origins which triggered them, was an elementary lesson.
As the tube slid silently beneath the City, however, he was forced to take account of the general atmosphere of hysteria and fear which sat like a malignant miasma over the metropolis and its occupants, and seemed most heavy and oppressive at this level. It had been a long time since he was last situated on the floor of a city of any size – certainly on Venus there were none comparable to those on Earth – and he had expected to suffer to some extent from the mass consciousness with its primeval terrors, exultations and lusts, always present when large numbers of human beings were congregated; but this was like an evil tide of near madness that bore down against the walls of his mind, threatening to break in …
Here it seemed that, despite all the advances made in scientific research into the meaning of human behaviour, all the pills, the psychological treatment, direct and indirect, practised on the masses, human beings were just as afraid, unhappy, ill-adjusted and lonely as before and that reason itself perched on the edge of an abyss. The violence of the young, although but one factor on the stone of this civilisation, was being magnified and extended among the majority, threatening to become an integral part of the invisible computing mechanism which in history has so often incited great mobs, and even nations, to wholesale bloodshed and self-destruction.
He sat, highly receptive now – too much so – almost beyond the point of judgement, his skin crawling with the sense of evil and his stomach tensed as if expecting imminent disruption. Beads of sweat broke out upon his forehead, as he forced himself to endure the pain, to stay awake and alert, for he was able to sense danger in four or five different sections of this very vehicle: hidden danger behind the eyes of apparently inoffensive men and women, people who were not themselves aware of the fury and murder in their own hearts.
At length they reached the point of disembarkation and, resolving not to travel underground again for quite some time, he took the two girls by the arms and hurried them to the serried lifts. These each carried up to four people. After managing to get one to themselves, they fastened the safety belts provided and at the press of a button the spurred cube shot skywards at a speed of nearly a hundred miles an hour, the tiered metropolis outside with its myriad lighted channels and stone corridors, the many-coloured signs and faces winking, beckoning and waiting, flashing by the glass door in a grey soundless blur, until the floor of the cube seemed to take life of its own and push upwards like a giant hand.
They alighted and stood for a moment, breathing the clean air and gazing up at the blue dome of the sky, then together they walked slowly across the artificial parkland that stretched from one end to the other of the City’s roof.
The roof was the most peaceful part of the Twelfth City in those days, frequently by only a very few people. Furnished and prepared at the beginning of the century by men hankering after the green luxuriant vegetation of the years before the Atomic Disaster, it was now considered by most a dull and uninteresting place, a pathetic and somewhat shoddy dream, without taste or real meaning in an age which could provide, with its technological wisdom, diversions far superior and more practical. One only visited it if one were old and inhibited or for a joke – a sort of pseudo-genteel spree wherein one might imagine and pretend for a while that the real world did not exist, and that this vacuum was all.
‘It’s about two miles from here, I should think,’ sai
d Sein. ‘If we go across to the east parapet we should find our way from there easily.’
They stepped on a chairless belt moving at a moderate speed and proceeded through the false trees, with their shining ‘leaves’ and many-coloured bees and beetles, and then across the one dividing chasm in the roof. Protected from falling or committing suicide by an invisible, but none the less impregnable, wall on each side of the belt, one seemed to float in the air here for the few moments necessary to reach the opposite side, while far below, between the sheer walls of the City, the ribbon of the Thames, shrunk anyway to little more than a stream by the Disaster, wound through the metropolis like a gleaming, curled tinsel finally disappearing into the sea mud far to the west.
‘There – across the lake,’ said Sein.
The sun was now covered by cloud and it was apparently time for a rain period.
‘Let’s get off and walk,’ suggested Coman, and stepped on to the grass, watching them turn with surprise – Sein nearly losing her balance on the belt. Recovering themselves, they alighted and waited for him to catch up, and then Jonl said: ‘It’s going to rain, you idiot.’
‘So we’ll get wet.’
She said nothing for a moment, looking at him with an expression he valued and had remembered many times away from Earth.
‘I’m so glad you’re back,’ she said at last with a catch in her voice. He glanced about in mock alarm while Sein laughed and broke away from them, her body swaying to the music that floated across the still air.
‘Be careful, someone may hear.’
‘Who cares?’ said the dark girl, taking his arm as they skirted the ‘lake’ and walked towards the tables and chairs in the distance.
The sky had darkened considerably and coloured lights had appeared in the trees, giving the scene an almost fairy tale look. The romantic atmosphere par excellence, thought Coman, and, knowing too much of other more squalid imaginings, he let the feel of it and the soft thoughts it engendered in the women take and move his mood for their pleasure.
Like all those possessing the gift of telepathy, his nature was so complex and many-sided as to be indefinable in what was considered the ‘normal’ sense. Exposed almost continually to the conflicting thoughts, anxieties and pain pressures of those among whom they moved, such people were, in the first years of their own identity. Gradually, by trial and error, the strongest or wiliest of them managed to forge his or her own anchor to the flesh shell, but the very real danger of mental chaos, threatened by a permanent loss of orientation, although lessened by this achievement, was present throughout their lives. ‘Reality’, as conceived by their fellow men, meant nothing to them. They were, so to speak, in and out of so many different persons’ minds, watching, assessing and even accepting so many viewpoints and values of the same world, that reality did not exist except as a convenient lie and sometimes as a macabre joke.
And what indeed was that ‘same world’? Nobody knew, not even the clever Karns. He suspected it to be a mirage anyway, a many-sided façade, on the reverse of which true reality waited … and waited …
Therefore Coman took hold of his anchor line to sanity and, shaking off all vestiges of the terror which had gripped him below the City, became as nearly himself as was possible outside the shelter of his house. They approached the prettily fashioned place, with its six-piece orchestra beneath the trees. As they sat down it began to rain, the first big drops falling upon the multi-coloured umbrella that rose from the table centre and covered them with only an inch or two to spare.
Sein said: ‘The waitresses are human here, and they won’t serve us until the rain stops.’
‘It will only be for five minutes,’ Coman replied. ‘Just sit and relax, and listen to the music.’
This consisted of a plaintive, old-time waltz rendered by an odd-looking group of elderly musicians who might have stepped from the beginning of the twentieth century. Of course the whole setup had been contrived to give the illusion of an ancient period, but it had been done well, and was very effective if one did not look too closely at the surrounding ‘vegetation’ or at the costumes of fellow patrons. There were but a dozen of these, all sitting near the dais on which the musicians scraped and belaboured their instruments. Otherwise Coman and the two young women were alone in the pouring rain.
‘Well, do you like this little rendezvous?’ asked Sein.
He nodded. ‘We must come here again.’
They sat silent while he regarded the two of them: Sein watching the rain bouncing and dancing upon the ground by her feet, her small, oval face suddenly withdrawn and pensive, and Jonl gazing at her own hands clasped together on the tabletop, the long sensitive fingers with their almost translucent skin and the delicate blue veins surfacing near the knuckles.
Coman had perforce a wide experience of human beings, but he knew no one who possessed, as Jonl did, the capacity to puzzle and enchant him so deeply. She had been twenty-one years old when he had first met her, and immediately, with the barest preamble, they had come together. There had been other women in his life, but he had been the first man in hers, despite the fact that beneath her reserved attitude she was highly, almost inordinately, sexed. It was as if Jonl had been waiting for him, and nothing that her friends or relatives might say to prevent her from consolidating the affair could deter her from doing so. Of course she was a potential telepath – Coman had recognised that during the first weeks of living with her – but until now he had not mentioned the fact, or endeavoured to encourage a premature flowering of the faculty, being convinced in his mind that it would come in due course, and he would be there to make the going easier, to help her through the nightmare of the first months of awareness. However, it had not happened, and gradually he understood that the I, the final master in the centre of her being, was greatly afraid. Afraid of the madness which might come, the disintegration of the mind which, in fact, was a commonplace among human being on full realisation of the faculty.
It was partly this fear which had moved her to try to bring to complete fulfilment his and her sex potential by introducing Sein, into their relationship. This, her subconscious had told her, would serve not only to refine and sublimate the relationship but to complicate and obscure the real issue still more. It was a finesse which, though effective in one way, merely served to delay realisation of the power within herself without affecting its nature, and he had continued not to interfere, or show impatience – until today.
Involuntarily he reached out and put his hand on hers, feeling a great tenderness for her, willing her to look up into his eyes. But, although she did not move from him, and a small, wistful smile touched her lips, she would not meet his gaze.
It was evening as they flew under a red-streaked sky back to the cluster of buildings reaching upwards from the wasteland around Old Peckham. The aircar checked in at its terminal, and soon they were on the doorstep of the house situated so incongruously among the immense stone blocks housing the remainder of the town’s two million inhabitants. The locks clicked and spun while they were ‘recognised’ by the safety mechanisms, and in a moment or so they were inside.
Sein looked thoughtful as she took off her jacket and went into the living room in front of them.
‘Why should your old man be the only one to enjoy handmade cooking?’ she said, more to herself than to Jonl.
‘It was delicious,’ the other girl remarked, smiling, ‘and I’ve heard that the idea is becoming quite fashionable in the so-called upper echelons.’
‘Well, if that pretty-boy can do it – so can I.’
So saying, she left them, presumable in search of a suitable video-book on the subject.
‘That meal must have made a strong impression on her,’ commented Coman.
‘Well, you said it was wonderful, and I suppose she heard you.’
Jonl came up close to him and put her hand against his cheek. Her eyes were burning and the tip of her tongue showed between her lips. She was trembling. He put his hands in her sh
oulders and pushed them back almost roughly, so that the blades met behind and the swell of her breasts rose against him. But then he said softly: ‘I must have a session with the Connector. Best to get that over first —’
She closed her eyes, her nostrils contracted over so slightly, and then turned from him. ‘Karns?’
He nodded, watching her while she recovered her composure, marvelling not for the first time at the tremendous tension each of them could generate in the other in a matter of seconds.
‘I’m glad Karns isn’t a woman,’ said Jonl. ‘Don’t get caught up in another journey into space. Will you promise?’
‘I said we are to have a time together and I meant it … All the same, I may be some while in there —’
‘We can wait,’ she said.
K. Karns responding. Have you reached a conclusion?
C. Yes. I am for the idea.
K. Good. I wanted your opinion principally because you’ve been removed from this society long enough to view the present conditions more objectively than some of us. However, it confirms the majority opinions among keypeople, one that has crystallised and hardened during the last few hours. Would you be good enough to open your mind fully and allow me to see your reasons? Thank you … the main one has already been given by others, but I am not fully convinced … do you really believe that the idea could be turned to your advantage?
C. Why not? The hope of the race must lie within the minds and hearts of the young, whether staid and respectably included, or ‘wild and rebellious. I may be misguided, but I believe that it is from the second category that the homo sapiens of the future will come to unravel the complexities of Man’s existence.
K. You may be right, Coman, but some of these children have slain like mad animals.
C. What lies at the root of their madness? They, even more than their elders, sense and are touched by the absurdity of our lives, of life itself. Some will never come to terms and conquer their hopelessness, but others will do so, and these are of great value to us.
A Man of Double Deed Page 4
