The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II

by David G. Hartwell

  His only collection, The Rose (1966), was an obscure paperback original, containing the title novella and two other fine stories. Michael Moorcock, though, in an essay about “The Rose,” calls it Harness’s “greatest novel,” and says, “although most of Harness’s work is written in the magazine style of the time and at first glance appears to have only the appeal of colorful escapism, reminiscent of A. E. van Vogt or James Blish of the same period, it contains nuances and throw away ideas that show a serious (never earnest) mind operating at a much deeper and broader level than its contemporaries.”

  Moorcock goes on to say, “‘The Rose’ [is] crammed with delightful notions – what some SF readers call ‘ideas’ – but these are essentially icing on the cake of Harness’s fiction. [His] stories are what too little science fiction is – true stories of ideas, coming to grips with the big abstract problems of human existence and attempting to throw fresh, philosophical light on them.”

  “The Rose” was first published in a British SF magazine in 1953, at a time when not a hundred copies of such a publication were seen in the U.S., and not reprinted in America until 1966, long after the dust had settled from Flight into Yesterday. Except for the few new readers caught by the sixties paperbacks, the story, which deserves a place on the shelf next to the works of Cordwainer Smith, fell into obscurity. Here it is again, at last, one of the finest examples of “Grand Opera” science fiction.

  ———————————

  Chapter One

  Her ballet slippers made a soft slapping sound, moody, mournful, as Anna van Tuyl stepped into the annex of her psychiatrical consulting room and walked toward the tall mirror.

  Within seconds she would know whether she was ugly.

  As she had done half a thousand times in the past two years, the young woman faced the great glass squarely, brought her arms up gracefully and rose upon her tip-toes. And there resemblance to past hours ceased. She did not proceed to an uneasy study of her face and figure. She could not. For her eyes, as though acting with a wisdom and volition of their own, had closed tightly.

  Anna van Tuyl was too much the professional psychiatrist not to recognize that her subconscious mind had shrieked its warning. Eyes still shut, and breathing in great gasps, she dropped from her toes as if to turn and leap away. Then gradually she straightened. She must force herself to go through with it. She might not be able to bring herself here, in this mood of candid receptiveness, twice in one lifetime. It must be now.

  She trembled in brief, silent premonition, then quietly raised her eyelids.

  Sombre eyes looked out at her, a little darker than yesterday: pools ploughed around by furrows that today gouged a little deeper – the result of months of squinting up from the position into which her spinal deformity had thrust her neck and shoulders. The pale lips were pressed together just a little tighter in their defence against unpredictable pain. The cheeks seemed bloodless having been bleached finally and completely by the Unfinished Dream that haunted her sleep, wherein a nightingale fluttered about a white rose.

  As if in brooding confirmation, she brought up simultaneously the pearl-translucent fingers of both hands to the upper borders of her forehead, and there pushed back the incongruous masses of newly-grey hair from two tumorous bulges – like incipient horns. As she did this she made a quarter turn, exposing to the mirror the humped grotesquerie of her back.

  Then by degrees, like some netherworld Narcissus, she began to sink under the bizarre enchantment of that misshapen image. She could retain no real awareness that this creature was she. That profile, as if seen through witch-opened eyes, might have been that of some enormous toad, and this flickering metaphor paralyzed her first and only forlorn attempt at identification.

  In a vague way, she realized that she had discovered what she had set out to discover. She was ugly. She was even very ugly.

  The change must have been gradual, too slow to say of any one day: Yesterday I was not ugly. But even eyes that hungered for deception could no longer deny the cumulative evidence.

  So slow – and yet so fast. It seemed only yesterday that had found her face down on Matthew Bell’s examination table, biting savagely at a little pillow as his gnarled fingertips probed grimly at her upper thoracic vertebrae.

  Well, then, she was ugly. But she’d not give in to self-pity. To hell with what she looked like! To hell with mirrors!

  On sudden impulse she seized her balancing tripod with both hands, closed her eyes, and swung.

  The tinkling of falling mirror glass had hardly ceased when a harsh and gravelly voice hailed her from her office. “Bravo!”

  She dropped the practice tripod and whirled, aghast. “Matt!”

  “Just thought it was time to come in. But if you want to bawl a little, I’ll go back out and wait. No?” Without looking directly at her face or pausing for a reply, he tossed a packet on the table. “There it is. Honey, if I could write a ballet score like your Nightingale and the Rose, I wouldn’t care if my spine was knotted in a figure eight.”

  “You’re crazy,” she muttered stonily, unwilling to admit that she was both pleased and curious. “You don’t know what it means to have once been able to pirouette, to balance en arabesque. And anyway” – she looked at him from the corner of her eye – “how could anyone tell whether the score’s good? There’s no Finale as yet. It isn’t finished.”

  “Neither is the Mona Lisa, Kublai Khan, or a certain symphony by Schubert.”

  “But this is different. A plotted ballet requires an integrated sequence of events leading up to a climax – to a Finale. I haven’t figured out the ending. Did you notice I left a thirty-eight-beat hiatus just before The Nightingale dies? I still need a death song for her. She’s entitled to die with a flourish.” She couldn’t tell him about The Dream – that she always awoke just before that death song began.

  “No matter. You’ll get it eventually. The story’s straight out of Oscar Wilde, isn’t it? As I recall, The Student needs a Red Rose as admission to the dance, but his garden contains only white roses. A foolish, if sympathetic Nightingale thrusts her heart against a thorn on a white rose stem, and the resultant ill-advised transfusion produces a Red Rose . . . and a dead Nightingale. Isn’t that about all there is to it?”

  “Almost. But I still need The Nightingale’s death song. That’s the whole point of the ballet. In a plotted ballet, every chord has to be fitted to the immediate action, blended with it, so that it supplements it, explains it, unifies it, and carries the action toward the climax. That death song will make the difference between a good score and a superior one. Don’t smile. I think some of my individual scores are rather good, though of course I’ve never heard them except on my own piano. But without a proper climax, they’ll remain unintegrated. They’re all variants of some elusive dominating leitmotiv – some really marvellous theme I haven’t the greatness of soul to grasp. I know it’s something profound and poignant, like the liebestod theme in Tristan. It probably states a fundamental musical truth, but I don’t think I’ll ever find it. The Nightingale dies with her secret.”

  She paused, opened her lips as though to continue, and then fell moodily silent again. She wanted to go on talking, to lose herself in volubility. But now the reaction of her struggle with the mirror was setting in, and she was suddenly very tired. Had she ever wanted to cry? Now she thought only of sleep. But a furtive glance at her wrist-watch told her it was barely ten o’clock.

  The man’s craggy eyebrows dropped in an imperceptible frown, faint, yet craftily alert. “Anna, the man who read your Rose score wants to talk to you about staging it for the Rose Festival – you know, the annual affair in the Via Rosa.”

  “I – an unknown – write a Festival ballet?” She added with dry incredulity: “The Ballet Committee is in complete agreement with your friend, of course?”

  “He is the Committee.”

  “What did you say his name was?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Sh
e peered up at him suspiciously. “I can play games, too. If he’s so anxious to use my music, why doesn’t he come to see me?”

  “He isn’t that anxious.”

  “Oh, a big shot, eh?”

  “Not exactly. It’s just that he’s fundamentally indifferent toward the things that fundamentally interest him. Anyway, he’s got a complex about the Via Rosa – loves the district and hates to leave it, even for a few hours.”

  She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Will you believe it, I’ve never been there. That’s the rose-walled district where the ars-gratia-artis professionals live, isn’t it? Sort of a plutocratic Rive Gauche?”

  The man exhaled in expansive affection. “That’s the Via, all right. A six-hundred pound chunk of Carrara marble in every garret, resting most likely on the grand piano. Poppa chips furiously away with an occasional glance at his model, who is momma, posed au naturel.”

  Anna watched his eyes grow dreamy as he continued. “Momma is a little restless, having suddenly recalled that the baby’s bottle and that can of caviar should have come out of the atomic warmer at some nebulous period in the past. Daughter sits before the piano keyboard, surreptitiously switching from Czerny to a torrid little number she’s going to try on the trap-drummer in Dorran’s Via orchestra. Beneath the piano are the baby and mongrel pup. Despite their tender age, this thing is already in their blood. Or at least, their stomachs, for they have just finished an hors d’oeuvre of marble chips and now amiably share the pièce de résistance, a battered but rewarding tube of Van Dyke brown.”

  Anna listened to this with widening eyes. Finally she gave a short amazed laugh. “Matt Bell, you really love that life, don’t you?”

  He smiled. “In some ways the creative life is pretty carefree. I’m just a psychiatrist specializing in psychogenetics. I don’t know an arpeggio from a drypoint etching, but I like to be around people that do.” He bent forward earnestly. “These artists – these golden people – they’re the coming force in society. And you’re one of them, Anna, whether you know it or like it. You and your kind are going to inherit the earth – only you’d better hurry if you don’t want Martha Jacques and her National Security scientists to get it first. So the battle lines converge in Renaissance II. Art versus Science. Who dies? Who lives?” He looked thoughtful, lonely. He might have been pursuing an introspective monologue in the solitude of his own chambers.

  “This Mrs. Jacques,” said Anna. “What’s she like? You asked me to see her tomorrow about her husband, you know.”

  “Darn good looking woman. The most valuable mind in history, some say. And if she really works out something concrete from her Sciomnia equation, I guess there won’t be any doubt about it. And that’s what makes her potentially the most dangerous human being alive: National Security is fully aware of her value, and they’ll coddle her tiniest whim – at least until she pulls something tangible out of Sciomnia. Her main whim for the past few years has been her errant husband, Mr. Ruy Jacques.”

  “Do you think she really loves him?”

  “Just between me and you she hates his guts. So naturally she doesn’t want any other woman to get him. She has him watched, of course. The Security Bureau cooperate with alacrity, because they don’t want foreign agents to approach her through him. There have been ugly rumors of assassinated models . . . But I’m digressing.” He cocked a quizzical eye at her. “Permit me to repeat the invitation of your unknown admirer. Like you, he’s another true child of the new Renaissance. The two of you should find much in common – more than you can now guess. I’m very serious about this, Anna. Seek him out immediately – tonight – now. There aren’t any mirrors in the Via.”

  “Please, Matt.”

  “Honey,” he growled, “to a man my age you aren’t ugly. And this man’s the same. If a woman is pretty, he paints her and forgets her. But if she’s some kind of an artist, he talks to her, and he can get rather endless sometimes. If it’s any help to your self-assurance, he’s about the homeliest creature on the face of the earth. You’ll look like De Milo alongside him.”

  The woman laughed shortly. “I can’t get mad at you, can I? Is he married?”

  “Sort of.” His eyes twinkled. “But don’t let that concern you. He’s a perfect scoundrel.”

  “Suppose I decide to look him up. Do I simply run up and down the Via paging all homely friends of Dr. Matthew Bell?”

  “Not quite. If I were you I’d start at the entrance – where they have all those queer side-shows and one-man exhibitions. Go on past the vendress of love philters and work down the street until you find a man in a white suit with polka dots.”

  “How perfectly odd! And then what? How can I introduce myself to a man whose name I don’t know? Oh, Matt, this is so silly, so childish . . .”

  He shook his head in slow denial. “You aren’t going to think about names when you see him. And your name won’t mean a thing to him, anyway. You’ll be lucky if you aren’t ‘hey you’ by midnight. But it isn’t going to matter.”

  “It isn’t too clear why you don’t offer to escort me.” She studied him calculatingly. “And I think you’re withholding his name because you know I wouldn’t go if you revealed it.”

  He merely chuckled.

  She lashed out: “Damn you, get me a cab.”

  “I’ve had one waiting half an hour.”

  Chapter Two

  “Tell ya what the professor’s gonna do, ladies and gentlemen. He’s gonna defend not just one paradox. Not just two. Not just a dozen. No, ladies and gentlemen, the professor’s gonna defend seventeen, and all in the space of one short hour, without repeating himself, and including a brand-new one he has just thought up today: ‘Music owes its meaning to its ambiguity.’ Remember, folks, an axiom is just a paradox the professor’s already got hold of. The cost of this dazzling display . . . don’t crowd there, mister . . .”

  Anna felt a relaxing warmth flowing over her mind, washing at the encrusted strain of the past hour. She smiled and elbowed her way through the throng and on down the street, where a garishly lighted sign, bat-wing doors, and a forlorn cluster of waiting women announced the next attraction:

  “FOR MEN ONLY. Daring blindfold exhibitions and variety entertainments continuously.”

  Inside, a loudspeaker was blaring: “Thus we have seen how to compose the ideal end-game problem in chess. And now, gentlemen, for the small consideration of an additional quarter . . .”

  But Anna’s attention was now occupied by a harsh cawing from across the street.

  “Love philters! Works on male or female! Any age! Never fails!”

  She laughed aloud. Good old Matt! He had foreseen what these glaring multifaceted nonsensical stimuli would do for her. Love philters! Just what she needed!

  The vendress of love philters was of ancent vintage, perhaps seventy-five years old. Above cheeks of wrinkled leather her eyes glittered speculatively. And how weirdly she was clothed! Her bedraggled dress was a shrieking purple. And under that dress was another of the same hue, though perhaps a little faded. And under that, still another.

  “That’s why they call me Violet,” cackled the old woman, catching Anna’s stare. “Better come over and let me mix you one.”

  But Anna shook her head and passed on, eyes shining. Fifteen minutes later, as she neared the central Via area, her receptive reverie was interrupted by the outburst of music ahead.

  Good! Watching the street dancers for half an hour would provide a highly pleasant climax to her escapade. Apparently there wasn’t going to be any man in a polka dot suit. Matt was going to be disappointed but it certainly wasn’t her fault she hadn’t found him.

  There was something oddly familiar about that music.

  She quickened her pace, and then, as recognition came, she began to run as fast as her crouching back would permit. This was her music – the prelude to Act III of her ballet!

  She burst through the mass of spectators lining the dance square. The music stopped. She stared out in
to the scattered dancers, and what she saw staggered the twisted frame of her slight body. She fought to get air through her vacuously wide mouth.

  In one unearthly instant, a rift had threaded its way through the dancer-packed square, and a pasty white face, altogether spectral, had looked down that open rift into hers. A face over a body that was enveloped in a strange glowing gown of shimmering white. She thought he had also been wearing a white academic mortar board, but the swarming dancers closed in again before she could be sure.

  She fought an unreasoning impulse to run.

  Then, as quickly as it had come, logic reasserted itself; the shock was over. Odd costumes were no rarity on the Via. There was no cause for alarm.

  She was breathing almost normally when the music died away and someone began a harsh harangue over the public address system. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it is our rare good fortune to have with us tonight the genius who composed the music you have been enjoying.”

  A sudden burst of laughter greeted this, seeming to originate in the direction of the orchestra, and was counterpointed by an uncomplimentary blare from one of the horns.

  “Your mockery is misplaced, my friends. It just so happens that this genius is not I, but another. And since she has thus far had no opportunity to join in the revelry, your inimitable friend, as The Student, will take her hand, as The Nightingale, in the final pas de deux from Act III. That should delight her, yes?”

  The address system clicked off amid clapping and a buzz of excited voices, punctuated by occasional shouts.

  She must escape! She must get away!

  Anna pressed back into the crowd. There was no longer any question about finding a man in a polka dot suit. That creature in white certainly wasn’t he. Though how could he have recognized her?

  She hesitated. Perhaps he had a message from the other one, if there really was one with polka dots.

  No, she’d better go. This was turning out to be more of a nightmare than a lark.