An Alien Heat dateot-1

by Michael Moorcock

  "Mrs. Amelia Underwood. I love you. You know that I would do anything for you."

  "Mr. Carnelian, we agreed…"

  He raised his hand. "But I put it to you, dear lady, that this environment you have had me create has become just a little boring, to say the least. Do you not feel like a change?"

  "A — change? But, sir, this is a proper house. You told me yourself that you wished me to live as I had always lived. This is very similar, now, to my own house in Bromley. A little larger, perhaps, and a little better furnished — but I could not resist that. I saw no point in not taking the opportunity to have one or two of the things I might not have had in my — my past life."

  With a deep sigh he contemplated the fireplace with its mantelplace crammed with little china articles, the absolutely tiny aspidistras and potted palms, the occasional tables, the sideboard, the thick carpets, the dark wallpaper, the gas-mantles, the dull curtains (at the windows), the pictures and the motifs which read, in Mrs. Underwood's people's own script VIRTUE IS ITS OWN REWARD or WHAT MEAN THESE STONES?

  "A little colour," he said. "A little light. A little space."

  "The house is very comfortable," she insisted.

  "Aha." He returned his attention to the animal flesh and unseasoned vegetables before him (reminiscent, he feared, of Mongrove's table).

  "You told me how delighted you were in it all," she said reasonably. She was puzzled by his despondent manner. Her voice was sympathetic.

  "And I was," he murmured.

  "Then?"

  "It has gone on," he said, "for a long time now, you see. I thought this was merely one of the environments you would choose."

  "Oh." She frowned. "Hm," she said. "Well, we believe in stability, you see, Mr. Carnelian. In constancy. In solid, permanent things." She added apologetically: "It was our impression that our way of life would endure pretty much unchanged for ever. Improving, of course, but not actually altering very much. We visualised a time when all people would live like us. We believed that everyone wanted to live like us, you see." She put down her knife and fork. She reached over and touched his shoulder. "Perhaps we were misguided. We were evidently wrong. That is indisputable to me, of course. But I thought you wanted a nice house, that it would help you…" She removed her hand from his shoulder and sat back in her mahogany chair. "I do feel just a little guilty, I must say. I did not consider that your feeling might be less than gratified by all this…" She waved her hands about to indicate the room and its furnishings. "Oh, dear."

  He rallied. He smiled. He got up. "No, no. If this is what you want, then it is what I want, of course. It will take a bit of getting used to, but…" He was at a loss for words.

  "You are unhappy, Mr. Carnelian," she said softly. "I do not believe I have ever seen you unhappy before."

  "I have never been unhappy before," he said. "It is an experience. I must learn to relish it, as Mongrove relishes his misery. Though Mongrove's misery seems to have rather more flair than mine. Well, this is what I desired. This is what is doubtless involved in love — and Virtue, too, perhaps."

  "If you wish to send me back to Mr. Mongrove…" she began nobly.

  "No! Oh, no! I love you too much."

  This time she made no verbal objection to his declaration.

  "Well," she said determinedly, "we must make an effort to cheer you up. Come —" She stretched out her hand. Jherek took her hand. He thrilled. He wondered.

  She led him into the parlour where the piano was. "Perhaps some jolly hymn?" she suggested. "What about 'All Things Bright and Beautiful'?" She smoothed her skirt under her as she sat down on the stool. "Do you know the words now?"

  He could not get the words out of his mind. He had heard them too often, by night as well as by day. Dumbly he nodded.

  She struck a few introductory chords on the piano and began to sing. He tried to join in, but the words would not come out. His throat felt both dry and tight. Amazed, he put his hand to his neck. Her own voice petered out and she stopped playing, swinging round on the stool to look up at him. "What about a walk?" she said.

  He cleared his throat. He tried to smile. "A walk?"

  "A good brisk walk, Mr. Carnelian, often has a palliative effect."

  "All right."

  "I'll get my hat."

  A few moments later she joined him outside the house. The grounds of the house were not very large either, now. The prairie, the buffalo, the cavalrymen and the parrots had been replaced by neat privet hedges (some clipped into ornamental shapes), shrubs and rock gardens. The most colour was supplied by the rose garden which had several different varieties, including one which she had allowed him to invent for her, the Mrs. Amelia Underwood, which was a bluish green.

  She closed the front door and put her arm in his. "Where shall we go?" she said.

  Again the touch of her hand produced the thrill and the thrill was, astonishingly, translated into a feeling of utter misery.

  "Wherever you think," he said.

  They went up the crazy-paving path to the garden gate, out of the gate and along the little white road in which stood several gas lamps. The road led up between two low, green hills. "We'll go this way," she said.

  He could smell her. She was warm. He looked bleakly at her lovely face, her glowing hair, her pretty summer frock, her neat, well-proportioned figure. He turned his head away with a stifled sob.

  "Oh, come along now, Mr. Carnelian. You'll soon feel better once you've some of this good, fresh air in your lungs." Passively he allowed her to lead him up the hill until they walked between lines of tall cypresses which fringed fields in which cows and sheep grazed, tended by mechanical cowherds and shepherds who could not, even close to, be told from real people.

  "I must say," she told him, "this landscape is as much a work of art as any of Reynolds' pictures. I could almost believe I was in my own, dear Kent countryside."

  The compliment did not relieve his gloom.

  They crossed a little crooked bridge over a tinkling stream. They entered a cool, green wood of oaks and elms. There were even rooks nesting in the elms and red squirrels running along the boughs of oaks.

  But Jherek's feet dragged. His step became slower and slower and at last she stopped and looked closely up into his face, her own face full of tenderness.

  And, in silence, he took her awkwardly in his arms. She did not resist him. Slowly the depression began to lift as their faces drew closer together. Gradually his spirits rose until, at the very moment their lips touched, he knew an ecstasy such as he had never known before.

  "My dear," said Mrs. Amelia Underwood. She was trembling as she pressed her precious form against him and put her arms around him. "My own, dear, Jherek…"

  And then she vanished.

  She was gone. He was alone.

  He gave a great scream of pain. He whirled, looking everywhere for some sign of her. "Mrs. Amelia Underwood! Mrs. Amelia Underwood!"

  But all there was of her was the wood, with its oaks and its elms, its rocks and its squirrels.

  He rose into the air and sped back to the little house, his coat-tails flapping, his hat flying from his head.

  He ran through the overfurnished rooms. He called to her but she did not reply. He knew that she would not. Everything she had had him create for her — the tables, the sofas, the chairs, the beds, the cabinets, the knick-knacks, seemed to mock him in his grief and thus increase the pain.

  And at last he collapsed upon the grass of the rose garden and, holding a rose of a peculiar bluish-green, he wept, for he knew very well what had happened.

  Lord Jagged? Where was he? Lord Jagged had told Jherek that it would happen like this.

  But Jherek had changed. He could no longer appreciate the splendid irony of the joke. For everyone but Jherek would see it as a joke and a clever one.

  My Lady Charlotina had claimed her vengeance.

  10. The Granting of Her Heart's Desire

  My Lady Charlotina would have hidden Mrs. Amelia Un
derwood very well. As he recovered a little of his composure Jherek began to wonder how he might rescue his love. There would be no point in going to My Lady Charlotina's (his first impulse) and simply demanding the return of Mrs. Underwood. My Lady Charlotina would only laugh at him the more. No, he must visit Lord Jagged of Canaria and seek his advice. He wondered now, why Lord Jagged had not come to visit him since he had taken up with Mrs. Amelia Underwood. Perhaps Jagged had stayed away out of a rather overdeveloped sense of tact?

  With a heavy heart Jherek Carnelian went to the outbuilding where, at Mrs. Underwood's suggestion he had stored his locomotive.

  The door of the outbuilding was opened with a key, but he could not find the key. Mrs. Underwood had always kept it.

  He was reluctant to disseminate the outbuilding now (she had been a stickler about observing certain proprieties of her own day and the business of keys and locks was one of the chief ones, it seemed), for all that it was frightfully ugly. But, with her disappearance, everything of Mrs. Underwood's had become sacred to him. If he never found her again this little Gothic house would stand in the same spot forever.

  At length, however, he was forced to disseminate the door, order the locomotive out, and remake the door behind him. Then he set off.

  As he flew towards Lord Jagged's the thought kept recurring to him that My Lady Charlotina would have seen nothing particularly wrong in disseminating Mrs. Amelia Underwood completely and irrevocably. It was unlikely that My Lady Charlotina would have gone that far — but it was possible. In that case Mrs. Underwood might be gone forever. She could not be resurrected if every single atom of her being had been broken down and spread across the face of the Earth. Jherek kept this sort of thought back as best he could. If he brooded on it there was every chance, he feared, of his falling into a depressive trance from which he would never wake.

  The locomotive at last reached Lord Jagged's castle — all bright yellow, in the shape of an ornamental bird cage and a modest seventy-five feet tall — and began to circle while Jherek sent a message to his friend.

  "Lord Jagged? Can you receive a visitor? It is I, Jherek Carnelian, and my business is of the gravest importance."

  There was no reply. The locomotive circled lower. There were various "boxes" suspended on antigravity beams in the birdcage. Each box was a room used by Lord Jagged. He might be in any one of them. But, no matter which room he occupied, he would be bound to hear Jherek's request.

  "Lord Jagged?"

  It was plain that Lord Jagged was not at home. There was a sense of desertion about his castle as if it had not been used for several months. Had something happened to the Lord of Canaria?

  Had My Lady Charlotina taken vengeance on him, too, for his part in the theft of the alien?

  Oh, this was savage!

  Jherek turned his locomotive toward the North and Werther de Goethe's tomb, expecting to find that his mother, the Iron Orchid, had also vanished.

  But Werther's tomb — a vast statue of himself lying serenely dead with a gigantic Angel of Death hovering over his body and several sorrowing women kneeling beside him — was still occupied by the black pair. They were, in fact, on the roof near the feet of the reclining statue but Jherek did not see them at first, for both they and the statue were completely black.

  "Jherek, my sorrow!" His mother sounded almost animated. Werther merely glowered and gnawed his fingernails in the background as the locomotive landed on the flat parapet, bringing a startling dash of colour to the scene. "Jherek, what ill tidings bring you here?" His mother produced a black handkerchief and wiped black tears from her black cheeks.

  "Ill tidings, indeed," he said. He felt offended by what at the present moment seemed to him to be a mockery of his real anguish. "Mrs. Amelia Underwood has been abducted — perhaps destroyed — and My Lady Charlotina is almost certainly the cause of it."

  "Her vengeance , of course!" breathed the Iron Orchid, her black eyes widening and a certain kind of amusement glinting in them. "Oh! Oh! Woe! Thus is great Jherek brought low! Thus is the House of Carnelian ruined! Oi moi! Oi moi!" And she added, conversationally, "What do you think of that last touch?"

  "This is serious, mother, who brought me precious life…"

  "Only so that you might suffer its torments! I know! I know! Oh, woe!"

  "Mother!" Jherek was screaming. "What shall I do?"

  "What can you do?" Werther de Goethe broke in. "You are doomed, Jherek. You are damned! Fate has singled you out, as it has singled me out, for an eternity of anguish." He uttered his bitter laugh. "Accept this dreadful knowledge. There is no solution. No escape. You were granted a few short moments of bliss so that you might suffer all the more exquisitely when the object of your bliss was snatched from you."

  "You know what happened?" Jherek asked suspiciously.

  Werther looked embarrassed. "Well, My Lady Charlotina did take me into her confidence a week or two ago…"

  "Devil!" cried Jherek. "You did not try to warn me?"

  "Of the inevitable? What good would it have done? And," said Werther sardonically, "we all know how prophets are treated these days! People do not like to hear the truth!"

  "Wretch!" Jherek turned to confront the Iron Orchid. "And you, mother, did you know what Charlotina planned?"

  "Not exactly, my misery. She merely said something about granting Mrs. Underwood her heart's desire."

  "And what is that? What can it be but a life with me?"

  "She did not explain." The Iron Orchid dabbed at her eyes. "She feared, not doubt, that I would betray her plan to you. After all, we are of the same fickle flesh, my egg."

  Jherek said grimly: "I see there is nothing for me to do but confront My Lady Charlotina herself."

  "Is this not what you wanted?" said Werther, sitting on a ledge above their heads, leaning his black back against his statue's marble knee and moodily swinging his legs. "Did you not court disaster when you courted Mrs. Underwood? I seem to recall some plan…"

  "Be silent! I love Mrs. Underwood more than I love myself!"

  "Jherek," said his mother reasonably, "you can take these things too far, you know."

  "There it is! I am thoroughly in love. I am totally in love. My passion rules me. It is no longer a game!"

  "No longer a game!" Even Werther de Goethe sounded shocked.

  "Farewell, black, black betrayers. Traitors in jet — farewell!"

  And Jherek swept back to his locomotive, pulled the whistle and hurled his aircar high into the dark and cheerless sky.

  "Do not struggle against your destiny, Jherek!" he heard Werther cry. "Shake not your fist against uncompromising Fate! Plead not for mercy from the Norns, for they are deaf and blind!"

  Jherek did not reply. Instead he let a great sob escape his lips and he murmured her name and the sound of her name brought all the aching anguish back to his soul so that at last he was silent.

  And he came to Lake Billy the Kid, all serene and dancing in the sunlight, and he had a mind to destroy the Lake and Under-the-Lake and My Lady Charlotina and her menagerie and her caverns — to destroy the whole globe if need be. But he contained his rage, for Mrs. Amelia Underwood might even now be a prisoner in one of those caverns.

  He left his locomotive drifting a few inches above the surface of the lake and he went through the Gateway in the Water and came to the cave with the walls of gold and the roof and floor of mirrored silver and My Lady Charlotina was waiting for him, knowing that he would come.

  "I knew that you would come, my victim," she purred.

  She was dressed in a gown of lily-coloured stuff through which her soft, pink body might be observed. And her pale hair was piled upon her head and secured by a coronet of platinum and pearls. And her face was serene and stern and proud and her eyes were narrowed and pleased and she smiled at him. She smiled at him. And she lay upon a couch covered in white samite over which white roses had been strewn. All the roses were white save one and that one she fingered. It was a rose of a peculiar blu
ish-green colour. Even as he approached her she opened her mouth and, with sharp ivory teeth, plucked a petal from the rose and tore that petal into tiny pieces which flecked her red lips and her chin and fell upon her bodice.

  "I knew you would come."

  He stretched out his arms and his hands became claws and he walked on stiff legs with his eyes on her long throat and would have seized her had not a force barrier stopped him, a force barrier of her own recipe which he could not neutralise.

  He paused then.

  "You are without wit, or charm, or beauty, or grace," he said sharply.

  She was taken aback. "Jherek! Isn't that a little strong?"

  "I mean it!"

  "Jherek! Your humour! Where is it? Where? I thought you'd be amused at this turn of events. I planned it so carefully." She had the air of disappointed hostess, of someone who had given a party like that of the Duke of Queens (which nobody, of course, had forgotten or would forget until the Duke of Queens, who was still upset by it, managed to conceive some really out of the ordinary entertainment).

  "Yes! And all knew of the plan, save myself and Mrs. Amelia Underwood."

  "But that, naturally, was an important part of the jest!"

  "My Lady Charlotina, you have gone too far! Where is Mrs. Amelia Underwood? Return her to me at once!"

  "I shall not!"

  "And, for that matter, what have you done with Lord Jagged of Canaria? He is not in his castle."