Gold

by Isaac Asimov

  “Or like a snail on a layer 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 baritone.

  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.

  He strode toward him angrily. “What are you doing here?”

  It was Laborian, who answered quietly, “Watching.”

  “Our contract states—”

  “That I am to interfere in the proceedings in no way. It does not say I cannot watch quietly.”

  “You’ll get upset if you do. This is the way preparing a compu-drama works. There are lots of glitches to overcome and it would be upsetting to the company to have the author watching and disapproving.”

  “I’m not disapproving. I’m here only to answer questions if you care to ask them.”

  “Questions? What kind of questions?”

  Laborian shrugged. “I don’t know. Something might puzzle you and you might want a suggestion.”

  “I see,” said Willard, with heavy irony, “so you can teach me my business.”

  “No, so I can answer your questions.”

  “Well, I have one.”

  “Very well,” and Laborian produced a small cassette recorder. “If you’ll just speak into this and say that you are asking me a question and wish me to answer without prejudicing the contract, we’re in business.”

  Willard paused for a considerable time, staring at Laborian as though he suspected trickery of some sort, then he spoke into the cassette.

  “Very well,” said Laborian. “What’s your question?”

  “Did you have anything in mind for the appearance of the triple-being in the book?”

  “Not a thing,” said Laborian, cheerfully.

  “How could you do that?” Willard’s voice trembled as though he were holding back a final “you idiot” by main force.

  “Easily. What I don’t describe, the reader supplies in his own mind. Each reader does it differently to suit himself, I presume. That’s the advantage of writing. A compu-drama would have an enormously larger audience than a book could have, but you must pay for that by having to present an image.”

  “I understand that,” said Willard. “So much for the question, then.”

  “Not at all. I have a suggestion.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a head. Give the triple-being a head. The Parental has no head, nor the Rational, nor the Emotional, but all three look up to the triple-beings as creatures of intelligence beyond their own. That is the entire difference between the triple-beings and the three Separates. Intelligence.”

  “A head?”

  “Yes. We associate intelligence with heads. The head contains the brain, it contains the sense organs. Omit the head and we cannot believe in intelligence. The headless oysters or clams are mollusks that seem no more intelligent to us than a sprig of grass would be, but the related octopus, also a mollusk, we accept as possibly intelligent because it has a head—and eyes. Give the triple-being eyes, too.”

  Work had, of course, ceased on the set. Everyone had gathered in as closely as they thought judicious to listen to the conversation between director and author.

  Willard said, “What kind of head?”

  “Your choice. All you need is a bulge suggesting a head. And eyes. The viewer is sure to get the idea.”

  Willard turned away, shouting, “Well, get back to work. Who called a vacation? Where are the imagists? Back to the machine and begin trying out heads.”

  He turned suddenly and said, in an almost surly fashion, to Laborian. “Thank you!”

  “Only if it works,” said Laborian, shrugging.

  The rest of the day was spent in testing heads, searching for one that was not a humorous bulge, and not an unimaginative copy of the human head, and eyes that were not astonished circles or vicious slits. Then, finally, Willard called a halt and growled, “We’ll try again tomorrow. If anyone gets any brilliant thoughts overnight, give them to Meg Cathcart. She’ll pass on to me any that are worth it.” And he added, in an annoyed mutter, “I suppose she’ll have to remain silent.”

  Willard was right and wrong. He was right. There were no brilliant ideas handed to him, but he was wrong for he had one of his own.

  He said to Cathcart, “Listen, can you get across a top hat?”

  “A what?”

  “The sort of thing they wore in Victorian times. Look, when the Parental invades the lair of the triple-beings to steal an energy source, he’s not an impressive sight in himself, but you told me you could just get across the idea of a helmet and a long line that will give the notion of a spear. He’ll be on a knightly quest.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said, “but it might not work. We’ll have to try it out.”

  “Of course, but that points the direction. If you have just a suggestion of a top hat, it will give the impression of the triple-being as an aristocrat. The exact shape of the head and eyes becomes less crucial in that case. Can it be done?”

  “Anything can be done. The question is: will it work?”

  “We’ll try it.”

  And as it happened, one thing led to another. The suggestion of the top hat caused the voice-recorder to say, “Why not give the triple-being a British accent?”

  Willard was caught off-guard. “Why?”

  “Well, the British have a language with more tones than we do. At least, the upper classes do. The American version of English tends to be flat, and that’s true of the Separates, too. If the triple-being spoke British rather than English, his voice could rise and fall with the words—tenor and baritone and even an occasional soprano squeak. That’s what we would want to indicate with the three voices out of which his voice was formed.”

  “Can you do that?” said Willard.

  “I think so.”

  “Then we’ll try. Not bad—if
it works.”

  It was interesting to see how the entire group found themselves engaged in the Emotional.

  The scene in particular where the Emotional was fleeing across the face of the planet, where she had her brief set-to with the other Emotionals caught at everyone.

  Willard said tensely, “This is going to be one of the great dramatic scenes. We’ll put it out as widely as we can. It’s going to be draperies, draperies, draperies, but they must not be entangled one with the other. Each one must be distinct. Even when you rush the Emotionals in toward the audience I want each set of draperies to be a different off-white. And I want Dua’s drapery to be distinct from all of them. I want her to glitter a little, just to be different, and because she’s our Emotional. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said the leading imagist. “We’ll handle it.”

  “And another thing. All the other Emotionals twitter. They’re birds. Our Emotional doesn’t twitter, and she despises the rest because she’s more intelligent than they are and she knows it. And when she’s fleeing—” he paused, and brooded a bit. “Is there any way we can get away from the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’?”

  “We don’t want to,” said the soundman promptly. “Nothing better for the purpose has ever been written.”

  Cathcart said, “Yes, but we’ll only have snatches of it now and then. Hearing a few bars has the effect of the whole, and I can insert the hint of tossing manes.”

  “Manes?” said Willard, dubiously.

  “Absolutely. Three thousand years of experience with horses has pinned us down to the galloping stallion as the epitome of wild speed. All our mechanical devices are too static, however fast they go. And I can arrange to have the manes just match, emphasize, and punctuate the flowing of the draperies.”

  “That sounds good. We’ll try it.”

  Willard knew where the final stumbling block would be found. The last melting. He called the troupe together to lecture them, partly to make sure they understood what it was they were all doing now, partly to put off the time of reckoning when they would actually try to put it all into sound, image, and sublimination.