The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “A marriage counselor, right now,” I said. “I was trained in psychiatry. But there aren’t many openings these days. Not on Earth, anyway.”

  “My name is Isherwood.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve read your articles on the rheoprotein.”

  Isherwood raised one eyebrow, but didn’t take the bait. “You’re here as a tourist?”

  “I’m studying Martian Disease,” I said. It was the cover story DALI had instructed me to use. “I want to see if there’s any truth to this mind-over-matter business.”

  “Odd work for a marriage counselor,” Isherwood said. “I think maybe you’re here to test the various suitors for Vivi’s hand. What do you say to that?”

  I looked down. My training was in psychiatry, not espionage. I didn’t know how to go about deceiving him.

  “Good,” Isherwood said. “So I’m to be the first. Tell me, what are my chances?”

  “I couldn’t tell you yet. There have to be tests and interviews, I have to compare your test data with Vivi’s….”

  “You already have Vivi’s data then?”

  One thing was already clear. Isherwood was in love with Vivi. I only had to speak her name to arouse his jealousy.

  “I treated Vivi personally while she was studying on Earth,” I said.

  “Personally?”

  “Needless to say, we were just doctor and patient, nothing more.” His stare cut into me. I found myself rushing to explain. “She suffered from acute technophobia. It’s different on Earth than it is here. There are machines everywhere. You can’t get away from them. Computers and televisions and video cameras in every room. It’s bad enough for an ordinary person coming from Mars, but with Vivi’s special—”

  Isherwood cut me off. “That’s true. She has a very delicate nervous system. It was a mistake to send her to Earth in the first place.”

  “But your work is technological. Don’t you think it would be a mistake for the two of you to marry?”

  “Well, I don’t think so, of course. I’ll be with her no matter what happens.”

  “But you have powerful enemies. And are you sure she cares for you? You’re old enough to be her father.”

  “I don’t know,” Isherwood said sadly. “My Beatrice’s mind is more mysterious to me than the construction of Phobos.”

  “So she hasn’t refused you completely, then?”

  He looked theatrically at the curved ceiling. “No, she only smiles like the Mona Lisa.” I wondered if he meant da Vinci’s or Dalí’s.

  We moved to his office so we could have privacy for the formal tests. I gave him TAT, Improved Rorschach, Super Association Test, Differential Color Test, Abnormal Sentence Completion, and everything went well. There’s often a problem with defensiveness in this sort of testing, but Isherwood was open and friendly, often showing a childlike innocence.

  I’d almost told him about Vivi in the bar, but he’d interrupted me. Now, the longer I put it off, the harder it was to bring the subject up again.

  I’d found out about it during her analysis in Tokyo three years before. It was early summer when she first came to my office. I could see crystalline sunlight through the green leaves outside my window. By the end of June the heat and monoxide would turn everything to gray and brown.

  Vivi was a student at the art college near my office. She was a referral from the local hospital, where she’d been taken after she tried to disembowel herself with an ancient short sword.

  When I saw her medical records things became clearer. The plane bringing her to Tokyo had crashed, and only the replacement of her heart, lungs, and stomach with artificial constructs had kept her alive. Knowing her technophobic background, the surgeons had kept the information from her. But her subconscious had evidently at least suspected the truth.

  She was only eighteen, beautiful as a butterfly. I was twenty-seven, just out of medical school, without even a nurse or a secretary, trying to make a living from referrals. I suppose I loved her immediately. Of course, I realized my position. It would have been improper for me to take advantage of our relationship as doctor and patient. More than that, though, I simply didn’t have any confidence that I could make Vivi happy. A conservative attitude, but then I was young and hadn’t established myself, and my future was far from certain.

  I saw her for over a year, and helped her, I think. Maybe I should have told her the truth, that the technology she hated was the only thing keeping her alive. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Her feelings were too delicate, like fine glasswork.

  There were other problems I was able to help her with. The worst of them was her relationship with her grandfather. Her father had died when she was three years old. She suspected, perhaps with reason, that DALI had then had an incestuous relationship with her mother. DALI became both substitute father and rival for her mother’s love. I had persuaded her to confront some of these Oedipal conflicts and begin to resolve them.

  When she left to go back to Mars I thought I would never see her again. And then the letter arrived from DALI. Vivi was twenty-one now, old enough for marriage, but she rejected every man who even broached the subject. DALI had decided that she was to marry, and I was to choose from his list of candidates. The thought of selecting her husband was distasteful to me, but it would mean seeing Vivi again. I accepted.

  And so far, the first candidate was doing well. There was only one serious problem. Vivi was still technophobic, and Isherwood’s occupation as rheologist naturally involved machines. I tried to delicately express my concerns, but Isherwood ignored me, instead indulging in still more poetry.

  “I’m the one who really loves her. Pinkerton is only thinking of DALI’s fortune. A square inch of any of his paintings is worth more than a hundred square feet in Manhattan. I’m different. Vivi has taught me the meaning of life. She is a heliotrope, blooming in the red desert of Mars.”

  “But you must see that Pinkerton is the more obvious choice. He is younger and, forgive me, better looking. As an artist, his career would not be so threatening to her. And he seems very confident of his appeal….”

  “So you think so, too? But there are things I can offer her. Wonderful toys. Delights for the imagination. Just look.”

  He reached into a desk drawer and took out a soft clock. It was the size of a dessert plate, and it hung limply over his hand. He set it on the edge of the desk, and the rim of the clock bent and drooped toward the floor.

  “That’s amazing,” I said. I touched it with one finger and it gave slightly. The second hand moved continuously around the dial, following the deformations of the clock. “Just like in Dali’s Persistence of Memory.”

  “Made entirely of rheoprotein,” Isherwood said. “Accurate to within a few milliseconds, and calibrated for the slightly shorter Martian hour. It must be kept reasonably cool, or it will melt, just like chocolate.”

  “This seems impossible,” I said.

  “It would be, with an inorganic mechanism. The problem is that the gears, for example, must resist other gears and yet be flexible under pressure from gravity or an external touch. The protein resembles a universal joint, only on a molecular level. Plus there is an information-carrying component, like RNA, that allows it to recognize other rheoproteins and respond appropriately to them.”

  “A very complicated toy,” I said.

  “It’s not just a toy,” Isherwood said. “It could bring an industrial revolution on Earth. Maybe you’ve seen some reference to it—they’re calling it Flabby Engineering. Some journalist’s idea of a joke, I imagine. Anyway—an internal combustion engine could be produced in virtually any shape—long and thin, like a broomstick, or twisted, like a spiral. Not to mention cybernetics. Energy or movement can be passed on—or reacted to—with the kind of smoothness you see in living tissue.”

  “I even find it interesting, from a psychiatric standpoint. The contrast between the hardness of machines and the softness of human beings…”

  Isherwood didn’t
seem to be listening. “In factories this kind of material could contain, or even harness, the force of accidental explosions. Cars and planes would be infinitely safer.” The mention of airplanes made me think of Vivi. “Submarines could be built to mimic the swimming of dolphins. With flexible machine parts all these six-decimal-point tolerances would become meaningless.”

  He held up his hands. “The possibilities are…well, beyond anything we could imagine.”

  For the rest of that day and all of the next I interviewed the remaining candidates. Boccaccio had little intelligence and no imagination. Martin, the actor, was driven by vanity and greed. Conrad, a well-known athlete, revealed a basic hostility toward women.

  I interviewed Pinkerton late on the second day. As with all the others, I approached him in conversation and only later resorted to formal testing. He seemed eager to make a good impression once he found out what I was really up to. But under the relentless light of the personality tests he showed himself to be nothing but a dreamer and a braggart, completely self-obsessed. By the end of our session he was screaming and cursing me.

  Of all of them only Isherwood was stable and sincere enough to be worthy of Vivi. His paternal nature would go well with her delicate personality and sensibilities. The only problem was Vivi’s technophobia. If she married Isherwood, it might very well send her over the edge.

  The party lasted two days. The last guests were gone by the time I finished with Pinkerton. The butler showed him to the door and I was alone in DALI’s huge cathedral of a house.

  I had no sooner showered and changed than the butler came to my room with an invitation. “My master wishes you to join him for dinner, if that would be convenient.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I followed him down to the lobby. Through a bronze door I could see a hallway that seemed to curve upward and over itself in defiance of gravity. When I looked closer I saw it was only an illusion.

  The mansion was full of them. There were so many false rooms and staircases and corridors that the false parts seemed to put pressure on the real things, distorting them into nightmare shapes.

  The dining room was so large it seemed a deliberate insult to rationality. Black-and-white checkered tiles receded to infinity in all directions.

  “Welcome,” DALI said, “please sit down.” He was at the head of the long, narrow table. His favorite crutch leaned against the side of his red-velvet armchair. But I hardly noticed him. At the far end of the table sat his granddaughter, Vivi.

  She was ethereally beautiful. Her golden hair was cut within an inch of her head. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes hollow, and the muscles of her neck stood out like marble ornaments. It was obvious to anyone that she was critically anorexic. I smiled at her, and she smiled back with what seemed to be great pleasure.

  The first chair I touched collapsed and then sprang back into shape. It was clearly not meant to support my weight.

  DALI smiled. “One of Mr. Gilbert’s designs. They are part of his Revenge Against the Machine Age series. You see, if the function of a tool is removed, you have Art. Very witty, don’t you think?”

  I found a chair that would support my weight, and the dinner began.

  DALI explained that shellfish had long been the object of his family’s gluttony. “The bones, you see, are the objectivity of the animal. The flesh is madness. We carry our objectivity inside us and wear our madness for all the world to see. But the shellfish, the shellfish is an enigma. Objective outside, mad within.”

  He then proceeded to eat an astounding quantity of oysters, mussels, lobsters, crab, and conch. Unlike the classic bulimic he did not pause to purge himself, but kept on eating with undiminished appetite.

  Vivi, meanwhile, did not even taste the small portion she had been served. “Grandpa won’t listen to me,” she said, her voice glistening like olive oil. “Please, doctor, won’t you speak in your own behalf?”

  I smiled uneasily, unsure what she was asking.

  “This child wants everything,” DALI said, breaking through the shell of a monstrous shrimp and attacking the soft, buttery meat inside. “I have always given her whatever she wanted.” He looked at me meaningfully.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but—”

  “No!” Vivi said. “Doctor, tell him that I only want to be with you! I want you to take me back to Tokyo with you!”

  I was completely at a loss. It was natural for a girl like Vivi to become infatuated with her doctor during treatment. It is a common hazard of psychoanalysis. But such feelings are shallow and temporary. Vivi needed a strong father figure, someone to love her faithfully and protect her. Someone like Professor Isherwood.

  “Vivi, I—”

  DALI grabbed his crutch and stood up. “Vivi! You will go to your room! Immediately, do you hear me?” He turned to me. “Please try to make her understand, doctor.”

  “No,” Vivi said, “no, no, no!” She lunged for a table knife and brought it up to stab herself in the chest. I saw that I could not reach her in time and snatched away DALI’s crutch. With the crutch I knocked the knife from Vivi’s hands. She sank back into her chair, weeping.

  I looked back at DALI. It was as if I had taken his sanity when I took the crutch away from him. “Give me that!” he shouted, and tore it from my hands.

  I already knew the crutch was both physical and psychological. It appeared in many of Salvador Dalí’s paintings. It was the symbolic tool he needed to support his soft world. DALI and Vivi stared at each other across the table. The anger and jealousy sparked in the air between them. Vivi recovered first and ran from the room, covering her face with both hands.

  We all have our crutches, I thought. Sometimes they are powerful weapons and sometimes they become dangerous dependencies. The dinner was over.

  I found the butler and asked him where Vivi had gone. He said she had just taken her car into town. “Probably to the Narcissus. It’s a pub where the artists all go.” He gave me directions and the key to one of DALI’s cars.

  The pub smelled of tobacco, marijuana, mescal, amyl nitrate, beta-carboline. The Chiriconians meditated silently in the center of the room. A naked couple, tattooed with birds and snakes, wandered around until they finally found two seats by themselves. Two contending groups of monochromists formed living sculptures, the blues horizontal in a dark corner, the reds vertical under a bright light. The futurists walked rapidly around the edges of the room, talking in a truncated language which I could not understand. A pop artist, wrapped in dirty bandages like a mummy, smelled of rotten sausage.

  A fauvist woman, dressed as Matisse’s Lady in Blue, approached me. “Buy a girl a drink?” she said. I nodded and signaled to the waitress. “So what group are you?” she asked.

  “I am as you see me.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. Non-artist. What a drag. Too practical, no dreams.” She drained her absinthe in a single swallow. “Oh,” she said. “Here comes my friend.” I was a little relieved when she left me for the old man, who moved with robotic stiffness. A cubist, apparently. I had heard the rumor that fauvists were obsessed with wolves. Just as the thought came into my head, the woman in the blue dress turned back to me and smiled, showing cosmetically implanted fangs.

  I looked away. Martian Disease; everyone was affected to some degree. If I stayed too long, it would begin happening to me. The pub reminded me of the mental hospital in Tokyo where I’d been an intern.

  “Are you alone?” a woman said. “May I sit here?”

  She had a firm, beautiful body, covered by a Tahitian dress out of a painting by Gauguin. There were red tropical flowers in her hair.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “My name is Carmen. We met the day before yesterday at DALI’s mansion.”

  “Ah, yes, you were one of the receptionists. I was here looking for Vivi, actually. Have you seen her?”

  “She went for a ride with some of DALI’s disciples.”

  “Where do you think they went?
I really need to find her.”

  “Give it up. The desert is too big. She’ll be all right.”

  I let her convince me. After all, I thought, if she was with friends, they would take care of her.

  I bought Carmen a glass of champagne and ordered a beer for myself. The beer tasted like mouse piss. Martian water and hops were not up to the job. But it had a lot of alcohol in it, and I quickly became drunk.

  Martian women were notoriously loose, and Carmen was no exception. I felt the pressure of her hips against mine. I was a long way from home, and her interest was warming me faster than the beer.

  The champagne was clearly affecting her. “I have to make a confession,” she said. “I have a terrible habit and I can’t seem to stop it. I’m a kleptomaniac. I steal things.”

  It wasn’t the confession I’d wanted to hear, but I nodded sympathetically.

  “The guilt is really terrible,” she said. “I’m suffering so much pain from it. Please, spank me, doctor.” She started to cry.

  No one seemed to care except a man at the next table, who said, “Why don’t you just go ahead and hit her? That’s what she wants.” He was wearing a bowler and waistcoat and a short beard. He tipped the hat to Carmen. “Hey, Carmen, did you steal anything worth money this time?”

  “You cheap old bastard!” Carmen shouted.

  “Bitch!”

  The man yanked her away from me, and then both of them fell onto the floor. The man straddled her waist, backwards; lifted her dress; and began to spank her shapely buttocks. I got up to pull him away and felt a hand on my arm. It was the Lady in Blue. “That’s Carmen’s pimp,” she said. “You’d do better to stay out of it.”

  The pimp opened her purse and felt inside it. “This bitch, she steals the most worthless shit. What the hell is this?” The thing he pulled out hung down through his fingers like chewing gum.

  It was one of Isherwood’s soft clocks.

  “You thief!” Carmen shouted. Without warning she threw the clock into her mouth, chewed it, and swallowed it.