Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  I tell them I am more than a little familiar with their operations, owing to previous acquaintance with one of their administrators. When I say this Gutrun smiles briefly, but wipes the expression clean when she catches my eye. Just such annoying, unfathomable smiles used to flit across Suvinha’s face (although there were no smiles the last time I saw her.) Is this smug expression an occupational disability peculiar to Tempix employees?

  Continuing, I tell the technicians that I understand what the theories are as much as anyone can whose specialization is not Temporal Mechanics. I am aware of the acrimonious debate over whether the experience is objectively real or merely subjectively convincing in the extreme—a debate that has more than once threatened Tempix’s legal status. I further assure them that I do not care which is true. I desire only a safe and interesting experience. I would have been just as happy at one of the fantasy factories, which make no pretense to realism. I chose a Tempix trip and that is that.

  Despite my careful disclaimer, Gutrun nevertheless insists on explaining things. Although I will be fully aware of my own self at all times during the trip, there are built-in governors to protect me as a time-traveler. I will speak the language fluently—indeed, thanks to the curious mechanics of the host-body methods, I will in some manner even think in that language. I will have a certain inherent knowledge of the customs and mores of the setting, as well as complete referral possession of the specific memories of my host-body. These memories, even the likes and dislikes, will in no way impinge on my own personality, Gutrun hastens to assure me, except in those cases where the preferences of the host-body are linked to physical constraints such as allergies or other limitations of the flesh. I can act freely. If this is a true place and a real experience, it is one of an infinite number of quantum pasts, and thus nothing I do will affect reality as I know it, and as I will return to it.

  As the shunt is connected and the technicians carefully calibrate their galaxy of instruments, I reflect on these last explanations. Such omniscience toward the host-body’s mental substance argues to me against the possibility of true time-travel—against the actual physical existence of the experienced phenomena, but I know the Tempix people will never confirm that suspicion.

  I recall that during happier times I had asked Suvinha once to tell me, since she must have known—indeed, for that matter, must know now, I abruptly realize. Is she somewhere nearby? Does she know I am here today?—whether the time-travel experience was purely subjective or whether the journey was in some way real, as is so strenuously hinted at in Tempix’s exhortations to those weary of the infinite but shallow variations of the fantasy factories. Suvinha, amused I suppose by my uncharacteristic interest in her work, teased that she would never violate her geneprinted loyalty oath for a mere man. More seriously, she added that there were certainly many questions still, even among Tempix’s top designers, but that she could not tell me the company’s official internal stance on the subject. The oath was real, she said; it had to do with the difficulty of programming the governors if the traveler knew too much about the nature of the experience.

  Strangely enough, this mundane discussion ended in an argument. I suggested that if the experience were in any way real, even in a quantum, infinite-possibilities sense, the government would never leave it to the vagaries of the private sector. If nothing else, it would be more useful for running simulations than even the best of current generators. How did I know, she demanded angrily, that my beloved government was not already using it themselves? And what did I know about real things, anyway?

  As I said, an argument ensued. Although we had sexual relations afterward that were strangely satisfying, I think it should be obvious why I did not often inquire about her work.

  Gutrun intrudes on my thoughts to inform me that the preparations are nearly finished. She explains that I will experience a few moments of synaesthesia as the transfer begins. I tell her that I have heard of the synaesthetic fugue, the temporary confusion of sensory input, and that I am not concerned. She responds that although it is virtually impossible to predict how much subjective time I will experience, at the end of the three days needed to complete my physical rehabilitation at ResRehab I will be summoned back; that return transfer process will also be signaled by a bout of synaesthesia. She tells me this for my edification only, she explains—there will be nothing I can do to aid or hinder the re-transfer.

  As she finishes, favoring me with another smile—this one of the blander, more professional variety—one of the nameless technicians says something to his companions. A number of touchpads are skinned in succession. The room slowly fills with a bland, sweet odor; only moments later do I realize that its source is the bank of light-panels that constitute the ceiling, panels which had been ... white? The word seems suddenly inappropriate. A sharp, tangy odor that ebbs and returns, ebbs and returns, is the sleeve of Gutrun's one-piece passing in and out of my field of my field of vision as she reassuringly strokes my chest. I feel scintillant, blue-sparkling beads of light that must be sweat on my forehead. My unexpected fear is a crackling hiss in my nostrils.

  ~~~~~

  I have been tricked.

  If that is too harsh a word, then I will amend it to this: I have been manipulated. Even in my anger I cannot help but appreciate the irony. I suspect I know all too well the author of my manipulation.

  Everything becomes clear to me only moments after passing through the synaesthetic state, past a moment of darkness and into growing light. I find that I am lying in a huge, too-soft bed, surrounded by a curtain. I feel air—cool, damp, unprocessed air—on my skin. A vast figure looms, shaking me. I tell him to go away, to let me go back to sleep: my transition has left me feeling limp as a cleaning rag (whatever a cleaning rag might be) and I do not wish to be disturbed. The great, fat man—whose name I suddenly know is Georges de La Tremoille, tells me I may not. May not!

  Startled into greater wakefulness, I feel the full flood of alien memories wash over me, settling into unexpected cracks and fissures in my own being. The perfidy of Suvinha—or the slipshod nature of Tempix's operation—immediately becomes clear.

  I am in the royal bedroom at Chinon. My name is Charles; I am the seventh king of that name in France. I am also the least powerful monarch in all of Christendom—that is to say, as Aibek sees it, among the nations that worship the same avatar of their one god. How quickly these foreign concepts come shouldering in!

  As a king, I am a nonentity. I am not really even Charles the Seventh, since I cannot properly be crowned in the custom of this time. The English and the Burgundians own half my country; even my mad, obese mother has sided with the invaders. My own court titters at my impotence.

  As a final fillip, a last slap from unkind chance (or from a vindictive former bond-mate), I am ugly. Aibek the Manipulator never worried about such things, but was not—is not—unpleasant to look at. I had thought that at the very least this time-trip would find me possessor of rude animal health and physical spirits; a warrior-king in his chariot or automobile, leading his pliant minions. Instead, I am short-legged, knock-kneed, long of nose and sallow of face. I am ill, my new memories tell me, nearly as often as I am not. And my people would not follow me anyway.

  So much for the exercise of pure power in a simple, primitive setting. So much for a weary Manipulator’s much-needed relaxation. These Tempix people have never dreamt of a storm such as I will bring down on them! At the very least, even if my ex-bond-mate has engineered this all by herself, the company is guilty of negligence on a grossly criminal scale.

  But why should Suvinha risk her career to do such a thing to me? What fantasy of wrong has she constructed? It makes no sense.

  ~~~~~

  It was over half a year ago now, at the end of the final killing week of the Cygnus-B3 fiasco, that I returned home exhausted to my apt to find nothing of Suvinha left but a message on the holo. In my absence she had changed her hairstyle to the mannish topside-and-tails. Her image looked quite diff
erent from how I had seen her last, very determined. She was dressed for travel.

  The holo-Suvinha said that she understood how difficult my work was, knew its importance to the government. She said that she knew a Manipulator could never know when an off-world crisis might happen, that these crises had to be dealt with when they happened and that the projects took priority.

  She, too, she said, was often called on by Tempix for unpredictable, all-absorbing emergencies. The difference, she said—or her strangely masculine new image did—was that she resented this subsuming of her real life by work, but I did not. I made no contact with her even during the periods when I might have taken time to do so without harming the projects, she said, and when a project was over I seemed to be waiting impatiently for another crisis, as though I needed and wanted to escape from the apt and our bond. As the image of Suvinha said this her eyes—she has very large, deep eyes; they are either black or very dark brown—were hard as windows.

  This was a shame, she continued, because it had seemed at times that there might be a real future for us as a bonded couple, if I had only been more willing to connect, to take a chance, to invest myself. There had been moments, she said, and then trailed off without explaining what she meant.

  It was true that besides the occasional tension there had also been periods of understanding and peace between us—of happiness, I suppose, and what sometimes seemed even more. I do not tend to trust such ephemera, since it runs counter to both my training and my nature, and as I watched her farewell holo-message I became even more convinced I had been right to withhold that trust. What if I had become more deeply attached and then she had opted out of our contract, as she was doing now? My work would have been devastated and I would no doubt have suffered emotional pain as well.

  Then the holo-Suvinha added something which surprised me: she claimed that our sexual life was no longer satisfying. This I was not prepared for. Other women have never complained about my sexual performance—in fact, Suvinha and I have gone many times without synthetics of any type, skinskinning as I’ve heard other Manipulators call the practice when they (on a few rare occasions) discuss their outside lives. I have never been so intimate with any woman, casual or bond-mate, and I had understood Suvinha to say the same about the men in her life. Now, against all experience and logic, she was telling me something had been wrong. But not really the physical part, her holo carefully added—which, needless to say, mystified me even more. What other aspects might exist and be somehow unattended to, she would not or could not explain.

  That night, alone in the empty apt, I had an unsettling dream in which Suvinha was trying to drag me down a long corridor toward something very old and powerful which crouched at the far end. I resisted, but her grip was terrifyingly strong.

  Thinking back on all this, trapped now in the unsatisfactory body of Charles, I wonder if I have somehow contributed to this woeful situation myself. It is a disturbing thought, but a Manipulator must never turn from a potentially important truth, no matter how unlikely or how unpalatable. I could have undergone my rehabilitative therapies in peace, drifting in glowing white harmony. Instead I elected to experience a Tempix trip, knowing full well that it was Suvinha’s place of business. But who could have dreamed that she would violate her trust in this way, out of something as petty as spite?

  No, I decide, it is not my fault. I am the innocent victim of a woman’s irrational obsession. I am not to blame.

  ~~~~~

  La Tremoille insists again that I get up. I realize he has the right, even the power, to insist. He has held what little kingdom I have together. I owe him tens of thousands of livres, a staggering sum of money. I owe everybody money. A curse on the house of Tempix!

  La Tremoille brings his wide, handsome head down close to me, like a father giving a naughty child final warning.

  "The visitor is here," he says. "Do you not remember?"

  And I do. A religious maniac of some sort, one who I ... Charles ... have been manipulated into meeting, much against my will. What I would rather do, I realize suddenly, or what Charles would rather do, is die. Not painfully or quickly; not even soon—I do find enjoyment in the fleshly pleasures my position permits me—but since my father's death seven years earlier in lunacy and filth and my mother's horrid decline into the worst sort of abasement, life has held nothing larger for me than the next rich meal, the next courtly amusement. I am a small man who is becoming smaller, afraid of things and people I do not know. Being dragged from my bed to meet some crazed, god-struck woman is no answer to any of the problems of Charles or France.

  La Tremoille stands by patiently while my manservants dress me. I instruct them to avoid my most ostentatious garb and put on me instead simple clothes. Today, with the gray February light seeping in at the high windows, the weight of brocade and gilt will be too much.

  "Did this woman not claim," I ask La Tremoille as we move down the hallway from the residence, "that she would know me from among all men?"

  "Girl, Sire, not woman," he corrects me cheerfully. "I have seen her. Yes, she has said this."

  "Then take in the Count of Clermont and tell her he is myself; I will follow shortly behind."

  La Tremoille hesitates, perhaps fearing that I will disappear altogether, then finally agrees. He too is as curious as all the court about this strange young woman and her claims. I am not—or at least Aibek is not. Whether the subject intrigues Charles at all is hard to say. He seems largely ambivalent. We both, as far as I can still find the demarcation between us, hope that she guesses wrongly and is laughed out of the great hall. Then we can go back to bed.

  I stop outside one of the side doors. The hall is full of lights and packed with hundreds of courtiers dressed in every color of the spectrum. They are all here to witness this heralded exception to courtly routine, this spectacle of a young woman who claims she is sent by God to have me crowned at last, and to lift the siege of Orleans.

  The crowd beyond the doorway hushes and from my place I can feel a poised tension, a rustle of expectation. Above the whispering, then, I hear a high, clear voice, but the words are indiscernible. When the voice stops an excited murmuring breaks out. Compelled, I step through the doorway, finding myself a place behind the courtiers who line the tapestried walls. I am virtually hidden from anyone in the room's center; even the elegantly gowned ladies before me do not mark their king's entrance, so quiet am I, and so fixed are they on the personage in the middle of the hall…a small figure, dressed in rough black, who stands beside Louis, Count of Vendôme. I am astonished.

  Suvinha! I try to shout. What are you doing in this place? But the words will not pass my lips—something prevents these anachronistic sounds from sullying the virgin air of Chinon. A moment later my astonishment fades. Perhaps it is not her after all. Still, the girl who stares at the Count of Clermont as he slinks back to the crowd (having evidently failed to fool her) is much like Suvinha. Her hair is different, of course, cut in a masculine bowl and shaved above the ears, black as a raven's tail. As she turns to scan the surrounding faces I feel sure I see other differences, too. She is far younger than my ex-bond-mate, my will-not-be-wife. The nose, perhaps, is too long, the cheekbones not so high. Still, the resemblance seems too strong for mere coincidence…

  Then she sees me, fixes me with those disturbingly deep eyes—gold-flecked brown eyes, like a diffident forest goddess, like a sacred deer surprised at its drinking pool. She walks toward me and her stare never leaves my face. The crowd between us melts away. How can those not be Suvinha's eyes? I am almost terrified when she stops an arm's-length away, doffs her black cap and kneels.

  "God give you good life, gentle king." Her voice is calm, but there is subtle music in it.

  "It is not I who is king," I stammer. I point to one of the young barons, whose costume indeed far outstrips mine for beauty. "There is the king."

  The girl's eyes are locked to mine. "In God's name, gentle prince,"—she is smiling as she speaks—"it i
s you and no other."

  And as I stand transfixed amid the quiet muttering of the court, I remember that her name is Joan, this farm girl with Suvinha's eyes. "If I am the king, what would you have of me, maid?"

  Her smile fades, to be replaced by a look of immense solemnity, a look so profound as to resemble almost a child play-acting. "Lord Dauphin, I am sent by God to bring succor to you and your kingdom." Her eyes narrow as she stares at me, awaiting my response. When I, suddenly in depths I had not expected, can think of no words to say, her smile returns—a small one that looks as though it accompanies pain.

  "My lord has not yet given you to believe me," she says sadly. "Very well, then, let me tend to you one further sign, to show you that my sweet God knows your secret heart."

  She draws near to me, resting on hand lightly on my arm; I flinch. She brings her mouth close to my ear so that others will not know her words. Her cool breath on my cheek smells of apples.

  "You feel yourself a lost traveler," she whispers, "trapped in a world that is not as it should be. Like blessed France, you are divided, weary." Her hand tightens on my arm. "Only trust in me, in the power that sends me, and all shall be put right ... made whole. I bring your happiness—and your completion."

  She steps back and kneels again. Her eyes are indeed deep pools, and the me I seem to see reflected in them is a creature of great beauty. I am enthralled. Charles is enthralled would be more accurate, of course. Enthralled.

  We walk together through the overgrown gardens of Chinon and she tells me of the voices of Saint Catherine and Saint Michael, the sublime voices that have brought her to me. The dank February is only a backdrop now, a gray jewel-cask to set off this sturdy pearl of purity. Courtiers gape from the casements above, watching the King and the Maid in rapt dialogue. I need only trust, she tells me. Because God wills it, she will don armor like a man and go with my armies to break the siege of Orleans. I will be anointed and crowned king at Rheims. To all my objections, my confused questions, this farm girl, this pretty shepherdess with my Suvinha's gaze answers only: "Have faith in me, and the power that I serve."