by Brian Aldiss
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The Papua rocket has landed. Schwartz, leaning across the narrow table in the skyport’s lounge, says to the stewardess in a low, intense tone, ‘My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—as playing chess.’
‘How awful,’ Dawn whispers gently.
‘You can see why. You go all over the world, you see a thousand skyports a year. Everything the same everywhere. The same clothes, the same slang, the same magazines, the same styles of architecture and decor.’
‘Yes.’
‘International homogeneity. Worldwide uniformity. Can you understand what it’s like to be an anthropologist in a world where there are no primitives left, Dawn? Here we sit on the island of Papua—you know, headhunters, animism, body-paint, the drums at sunset, the bone through the nose—and look at the Papuans in their business robes all around us. Listen to them exchanging stock-market tips, talking baseball, recommending restaurants in Paris and barbers in Johannesburg. It’s no different anywhere else. In a single century we’ve transformed the planet into one huge sophisticated plastic western industrial state. The TV relay satellites, the two-hour inter-continental rockets, the breakdown of religious exclusivism and genetic taboo, have mongrelized every culture, don’t you see? You visit the Zuni and they have plastic African masks on the wall. You visit the Bushmen and they have Japanese-made Hopi-motif ashtrays. It’s all just so much interior decoration, and underneath the carefully selected primitive motifs there’s the same universal pseudo-American sensibility, whether you’re in the Kalahari or the Amazon rain forest. Do you comprehend what’s happened, Dawn?’
‘It’s such a terrible loss,’ she says sadly. She is trying very hard to be sympathetic, but he senses she is waiting for him to finish his sermon and invite her to share his hotel room. He will invite her; but there is no stopping him once he has launched into his one great theme.
‘Cultural diversity is gone from the world,’ he says. ‘Religion is dead, true poetry is dead, inventiveness is dead, individuality is dead. Poetry. Listen to this.’ In a high monotone he chants:
In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above and about me I walk
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty
He had begun to perspire heavily. His chanting has created an odd sphere of silence in his immediate vicinity; heads are turning, eyes are squinting. ‘Navaho,’ he says. ‘The Night Way, a nine-day chant, a vision, a spell. Where are the Navaho now? Go to Arizona and they’ll chant for you, yes, for a price; but they don’t know what the words mean, and chances are the singers are only one-fourth Navaho, or one-eighth, or maybe just Hopi hired to dress in Navaho costumes, because the real Navaho, if any are left, are off in Mexico City hired to be Aztecs. So much is gone. Listen.’ He chants again, more piercingly even than before :
The animal runs, it passes, it dies. And it is the great cold.
It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark. The bird flies, it passes, it dies. And it is—
‘JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE IS NOW UNLOADING ON CONCOURSE FOUR,’ a mighty mechanical voice cries.
—the great cold. It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.
‘JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE—’
The fish flees, it passes, it dies. And—
‘People are staring,’ Dawn says uncomfortably.
‘—ON CONCOURSE FOUR.’
‘Let them stare. Do them some good. That’s a Pygmy chant, from Gabon, in equatorial Africa. Pygmies? There are no more Pygmies. Everybody’s two meters tall. And what do we sing? Listen. Listen.’ He gestures fiercely at the cloud of tiny golden loudspeakers floating near the ceiling. A mush of music comes from them: the current popular favorite. Savagely he mouths words: ‘Star…far… here… near. Playing in every skyport right now, all over the world.” She smiles thinly Her hand reaches toward his, covers it, presses against the knuckles. He is dizzy. The crowd, the eyes, the music, the drink. The plastic. Everything shines. Porcelain. Porcelain. The planet vitrifies. ‘Tom?’ she asks uneasily. ‘Is anything the matter?’ He laughs, blinks, coughs, shivers. He hears her calling for help, and then he feels his soul swooping outward, toward the galactic blackness.
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With the Antarean not-male beside him, Schwartz peered through the viewport, staring in awe and fascination at the seductive vision of the Capellans coiling and recoiling outside the ship. Not all the passengers on this voyage had cozy staterooms like his. The Capellans were too big to come on board; and in any case they preferred never to let themselves be enclosed inside metal walls. They traveled just alongside the starship, basking like slippery whales in the piquant radiations of space. So long as they kept within twenty meters of the hull they would be inside the effective field of the Rabinowitz Drive, which swept ship and contents and associated fellow travelers toward Rigel, or the Lesser Magnellanic, or was it one of the Pleiades toward which they were bound at a cool nine lights?
He watched the Capellans moving beyond the shadow of the ship in tracks of shining white. Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, they coiled and swam, and every track was a flash of golden fire. ‘They have a dangerous beauty,’ Schwartz whispered. ‘Do you hear them calling? I do.’
‘What do they say?’
‘They say, “Come to me, come to me, come to me !” ‘
‘Go to them, then,’ said the Antarean simply. ‘Step through the hatch.’
‘And perish?’
‘And enter into your next transition. Poor Schwartz! Do you love your present body so?’
‘My present body isn’t so bad. Do you think I’m likely to get another one some day?’
‘No?’
‘No,’ Schwartz said. ‘This one is all I get. Isn’t it that way with you?’
‘At the Time of Openings I receive my next housing. That will be fifty years from now. What you see is the fifth form I have been given to wear.’
‘Will the next be as beautiful as this?’
‘All forms are beautiful,’ the Antarean said.‘‘You find me attractive?’
‘Of course.’
A slitted wink. A bobbing nod toward the viewport. ‘As attractive as those?’
Schwartz laughed. ‘Yes. In a different way.’
Coquettishly the Antarean said. ‘If I were out there, you would walk through the hatch into space?’
‘I might. If they gave me a spacesuit and taught me how to use it.’
‘But not otherwise? Suppose I were out there right now. I could live in space five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I am there and I say, “Come to me Schwartz, come to me !” What do you do?’
‘I don’t think I’m all that self-destructive.’
‘To die for love, though! To make a transition for the sake of beauty.’
‘No. Sorry.’
The Antarean pointed toward the undulating Capellans. ‘If they asked you, you would go.’
‘They are asking me,’ he said.
‘And you refuse the invitation?’
‘So far. So far.’
The Antarean laughed an Antarean laugh, a thick silvery snort. ‘Our voyage will last many weeks more. One of these days, I think, you will go to them.’
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‘You were unconscious at least five minutes,’ Dawn says. ‘You gave everyone a scare. Are you sure you ought to go through with tonight’s lecture?’
Nodding, Schwartz says. ‘I’ll be all right. I’m a little tired, is all. Too many time-zones this week.’ They stand on the terrace of his hotel room. Night is coming on, already, here in late afternoon; it is midwinter in the Southern Hemisphere, though the fragrance of the tropic blossoms perfumes the air. The first few stars have appeared. He has never really known which star is which. That bright one, he thinks, could be Rigel, and that one Sirius
, and perhaps this is Deneb over there. And this? Can this be red Antares, in the heart of the Scorpion, or is it only Mars? Because of his collapse at the skyport he has been able to beg off the customary faculty reception and the formal dinner; pleading the need for rest, he has arranged to have a simple snack at his hotel room, a deux. In two hours they will come for him and take him to the University to speak. Dawn watches him closely. Perhaps she is worried about his health, perhaps she is only waiting for him make his move toward her. There’s time for all that later, he figures. He would rather talk now. Warming up for the audience, he seizes his earlier thread:
‘For a long time I didn’t understand what had taken place. I grew up insular, cut off from reality, a New York boy, bright mind and a library card. I read all the anthropological classics, Patterns of Culture and Coming of Age in Samoa and Life of a South African Tribe and the rest, and I dreamed of field trips, collecting myths and grammars and folkways and artifacts and all that, until when I was twenty-five I finally got out into the field and started to discover I had gone into a dead science. We have only one worldwide culture now, with local variants but no basic divergences: there’s nothing primitive left on Earth, and there are no other planets. Not inhabited ones. I can’t go to Mars or Venus or Saturn and study the natives. What natives? and we can’t reach the stars. All I have to work with is Earth. I was thirty years old when the whole thing clicked together for me and I knew I had wasted my life.’
She says, ‘But surely there was something for you to study on Earth.’
‘One culture, rootless and homogeneous. That’s work for a sociologist, not for me. I’m a romantic, I’m an exotic, I want strangeness, difference. Look, we can never have any real perspective on our own times and lives. The sociologists try to attain it, but all they get is a mound of raw indigestible data. Insight comes later—two, five, ten generations later. But one way we’ve always been able to learn about outselves is by studying alien cultures, studying them completely, and defining ourselves by measuring what they are that we aren’t. The cultures have to be isolated, though. The anthropologist himself corrupts that isolation in the Heisenberg sense when he comes around with his camera and scanners and starts asking questions; but we can compensate, more or less, for the inevitable damage a lone observer causes. We can’t compensate when our whole culture collides with another and absorbs and obliterates it. Which we technological-mechanical people now have done everywhere. One day I woke up and saw there were no alien cultures left. Hah! Crushing revelation! Schwartz’ occupation is gone!’
‘What did you do?’
“For years I was in an absolute funk. I taught, I studied, I went through the motions, knowing it was all meaningless. All I was doing was looking at records of vanished cultures left by earlier observers and trying to cudgel new meanings. Secondary sources, stale findings: I was an evaluator of dry bones, not a gatherer of evidence. Paleontology. Dinosaurs are interesting, but what do they tell you about the contemporary world and the meaning of its patterns? Dry bones, Dawn, dry bones. Despair. And then a clue. I had this Nigerian student, this Ibo—well, basically an Ibo, but she’s got some Israeli in her and I think Chinese—and we grew very close, she was as close to me as anybody in my own sixness, and I told her my troubles. I’m going to give it all up, I said, because it isn’t what I expected it to be. She laughed at me and said, What right do you have to be upset because the world doesn’t live up to your expectations? Reshape your life, Tom: you can’t reshape the world. I said, But how? And she said, Look inward, find the primitive in yourself, see what made you what you are, what made today’s culture what it is, see how these alien streams have flowed together. Nothing’s been lost here, only merged. Which made me think. Which gave me a new way of looking at things. Which sent me on an inward quest.
It took me three years to grasp the patterns, to come to an understanding of what our planet has become, and only after I accepted the planet—’
It seems to him that he has been talking forever. Talking. Talking. But he can no longer hear his own voice. There is only a distant buzz.
‘After I accepted—’
A distant buzz.
‘What was I saying?’ he asks.
‘After you accepted the planet—’
‘After I accepted the planet,’ he says, ‘that I could begin—’ Buzz. Buzz. ‘That I could begin to accept myself.’
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He was drawn toward the Spicans too, not so much for themselves—they were oblique, elliptical characters, self-contained and self-satisfied, hard to approach—as for the apparently psychedelic drug they took in some sacramental way before the beginning of each of their interminable ritual dances. Each time he had watched them take the drug, they had seemingly made a point of extending it toward him, as if inviting him, as if tempting him, before popping it into their mouths. He felt baited; he felt pulled.
There were three Spicans on board, slender creatures two and a half meters long, with flexible cylindrical bodies and small stubby limbs. Their skins were reptilian, dry and smooth, deep green with yellow bands; but their eyes were weirdly human, large liquid brown eyes, sad Levantine eyes, the eyes of unfortunate medieval travelers transformed by enchantment into serpents. Schwartz had spoken with them several times. They understood English well enough—all galactic races did; Schwartz imagined it would become the interstellar lingua franca as it had on Earth—but the construction of their vocal organs was such that they had no way of speaking it, and they relied instead on small translating machines hung round their necks that converted their soft whispered hisses into amber words pulsing across a screen.
Cautiously, the third or fourth time he spoke with them, he expressed polite interest in their drug. They told him it enabled them to make contact with the central forces of the universe. He replied that there were such drugs on Earth, too, and that he used them frequently, that they gave him great insight into the workings of the cosmos. They showed some curiosity, perhaps even intense curiosity; reading their eyes was difficult and the tone of their voices gave no clues. He took his elegant leather-bound drug-case from his pouch and showed them what he had: learitonin, psilocerebrin, siddharthin, and acid-57. He described the effects of each and suggested an exchange, any of his for an equivalent dose of the shrivelled orange fungoid they nibbled. They conferred. Yes, they said, we will do this. But not now. Not until the proper moment. Schwartz knew better than to ask them when that would be. He thanked them and put his drugs away.
Pitkin, who had watched the interchange from the far side of the lounge, came striding fiercely toward him as the Spicans glided off. ‘What are you up to now?’ he demanded.
‘How about minding your own business? Schwartz said amiably.
‘You’re trading pills with those snakes, aren’t you?’
‘Let’s call it field research.’
‘Research? Research? What are you going to do, trip on that orange stuff of theirs?’
‘I might,’ Schwartz said.
‘How do you know what its effects on the human metabolism might be? You could end up blind or paralyzed or crazy or—’
‘—or illuminated,’ Schwartz said. ‘Those are the risks one takes in the field. The early anthropologists who unhesitatingly sampled peyote and yage and ololiuqui accepted those risks, and—’
‘But those were drugs that humans were using. You have no way of telling how—oh, what’s the use, Schwartz? Research, he calls it. Research.’ Pitkin sneered. ‘Junkie !’
Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. ‘Economist!’
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The house is a decent one tonight, close to three thousand, every seat in the University’s great horseshoe-shaped auditorium taken, and a video relay besides, beaming his lecture to all of Papua and half of Indonesia. Schwartz stands on the dais like a demigod under a brilliant noglare spotlight. Despite his earlier weariness he is in good form now, gestures broad and forceful, eyes commanding, voice deep and resonant
, words flowing freely. ‘Only one planet,’ he says, ‘one small and crowded planet, on which all cultures converge to a drab and depressing sameness. How sad that is! How tiny we make ourselves, when we make ourselves to resemble one another!’ He flings his arms upward. ‘Look to the stars, the unattainable stars! Imagine, if you can, the millions of worlds that orbit those blazing suns beyond the night’s darkness! Speculate with me on other peoples, other ways, other gods. Beings of every imaginable form, alien in appearance but not grotesque, not hideous, for all life is beautiful; beings that breathe gases strange to us, beings of immense size, beings of many limbs or of none, beings to whom death is a divine culmination of existence, beings who never die, beings who bring forth their young a thousand at a time, beings who do not reproduce—all the infinite possibilities of the infinite universe !
‘Perhaps on each of those worlds it is as it has become here: one intelligent species, one culture, the eternal convergence. But the many worlds together offer a vast spectrum of variety. And now: share this vision with me! I see a ship voyaging from star to star, a spaceliner of the future, and aboard that ship is a sampling of many species, many cultures, a random scoop of the galaxy’s fantastic diversity. The ship is like a little cosmos, a small world, enclosed, sealed. How exciting to be aboard it, to encounter in that little compass such richness of cultural variation! Now our own world was once like that starship, a little cosmos, bearing with it all the thousands of Earthborn cultures, Hopi and Eskimo and Aztec and Kwakiutl and Arapesh and Orokolo and all the rest. In the course of our voyage we have come to resemble one another too much, and it has impoverished the lives of all of us, because—’ He falters suddenly. He feels faint, and grasps the sides of the lectern. ‘Because—’ The spotlight, he thinks. In my eyes. Not supposed to glare like that, but it’s blinding. Got to have them move it. ‘In the course… the course of our voyage—’ What’s happening? Breaking into a sweat, now. Pain in my chest. My heart? Wait, slow up, catch your breath. That light in my eyes—
