Another World

by Gardner Duzois

And now there was time for me to think. Since I’d spoken of the red eyes to Max there had been no time for anything but to listen and to remember and to act. Now there was time for me to think.

  My first thoughts were: This is ridiculous! I saw something strange and frightening, sure, but it was in the dark, I couldn’t see anything clearly, there must be some simple natural explanation for whatever it was on the fire escape. I saw something strange and Max sensed I was frightened and when I told him about it he decided to play a practical joke on me in line with that eternal gag he lives by. I’ll bet right now he’s lying on my bed and chuckling, wondering how long it will be before I—

  The window beside me rattled as if the wind had suddenly risen again. The rattling grew more violent—and then it abruptly stopped without dying away, stopped with a feeling of tension, as if the wind or something more material were still pressing against the pane.

  And I did not turn my head to look at it, although (or perhaps because) I knew there was no fire escape or other support outside. I simply endured that sense of a presence at my elbow and stared unseeingly at the book in my hands, while my heart pounded and my skin froze and flushed.

  I realized fully then that my first skeptical thoughts had been the sheerest automatic escapism and that, just as I’d told Max, I believed with my whole mind in the black dog. I believed in the whole business insofar as I could imagine it. I believed that there are undreamed of powers warring in this universe. I believed that Max was a stranded time-traveller and that in my bedroom he was now frantically operating some unearthly device to signal for help from some unknown headquarters. I believed that the impossible and the deadly was loose in Chicago.

  But my thoughts couldn’t carry further than that. They kept repeating themselves, faster and faster. My mind felt like an engine that is shaking itself to pieces. And the impulse to turn my head and look out the window came to me and grew.

  I forced myself to focus on the middle of the page where I had the book open and start reading.

  Jung’s archetypes transgress the harriers of time and space. More than that: they are capable of breaking the shackles of the laws of causality. They are endowed with frankly mystical “prospective” faculties. The soul itself, according to Jung, is the reaction of the personality to the unconscious and includes in every person both male and female elements, the animus and anima, as well as the persona or the person’s reaction to the outside world. . . .

  I think I read that last sentence a dozen times, swiftly at first, then word by word, until it was a meaningless jumble and I could no longer force my gaze across it.

  Then the glass in the window beside me creaked.

  I laid down the book and stood up, eyes front, and went into the kitchen and grabbed a handful of crackers and opened the refrigerator.

  The rattling that muted itself in hungry pressure followed. I heard it first in one kitchen window, then the other, then in the glass in the top of the door. I didn’t look.

  I went back in the living room, hesitated a moment beside my typewriter, which had a blank sheet of yellow paper in it, then sat down again in the armchair beside the window, putting the crackers and the half carton of milk on the little table beside me. I picked up the book I’d tried to read and put it on my knees.

  The rattling returned with me—at once and peremptorily, as if something were growing impatient.

  I couldn’t focus on the print any more. I picked up a cracker and put it down. I touched the cold milk carton and my throat constricted and I drew my fingers away.

  I looked at my typewriter and then I thought of the blank sheet of green paper and the explanation for Max’s strange act suddenly seemed clear to me. Whatever happened to him tonight, he wanted me to be able to type a message over his signature that would exonerate me. A suicide note, say. Whatever happened to him . . .

  The window beside me shook violently, as if at a terrific gust.

  It occurred to me that while I must not look out of the window as if expecting to see something (that would be the sort of give-away against which Max warned me) I could safely let my gaze slide across it—say, if I turned to look at the clock behind me. Only, I told myself, I musn’t pause or react if I saw anything.

  I nerved myself. After all, I told myself, there was the blessed possibility that I would see nothing outside the taut pane but darkness.

  I turned my head to look at the clock.

  I saw it twice, going and coming back, and although my gaze did not pause or falter, my blood and my thoughts started to pound as if my heart and mind would burst.

  It was about two feet outside the window—a face or mask or muzzle of a more gleaming black than the darkness around it. The face was at the same time the face of a hound, a panther, a giant bat, and a man—in between those four. A pitiless, hopeless man-animal face alive with knowledge but dead with a monstrous melancholy and a monstrous malice. There was the sheen of needlelike white teeth against black lips or dewlaps. There was the dull pulsing glow of eyes like red coals.

  My gaze didn’t pause or falter or go back—yes—and my heart and mind didn’t burst, but I stood up then and stepped jerkily to the typewriter and sat down at it and started to pound the keys. After a while my gaze stopped blurring and I started to see what I was typing. The first thing I’d typed was:

  the quick red fox jumped over the crazy black dog . . .

  I kept on typing. It was better than reading. Typing I was doing something, I could discharge. I typed a flood of fragments: “Now is the time for all good men—”, the first words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Winston Commercial, six lines of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” without punctuation, Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “Mary had a big black—”

  In the middle of it all the face of the electric clock that I’d looked at sprang into my mind. My mental image of it had been blanked out until then. The hands were at quarter to twelve.

  Whipping in a fresh yellow sheet, I typed the first stanza of Poe’s “Raven,” the Oath of Allegiance to the American Flag, the lost-ghost lines from Thomas Wolfe, the Creed and the Lord’s prayer, “Beauty is truth; truth, blackness—”

  The rattling made a swift circuit of the windows—though I heard nothing from the bedroom, nothing at all—and finally the rattling settled on the kitchen door. There was a creaking of wood and metal under pressure.

  I thought: You are standing guard. You are standing guard for yourself and for Max. And then the second thought came: If you open the door, if you welcome it in, if you open the kitchen door and then the bedroom door, it will spare you, it will not hurt you.

  Over and over again I fought down that second thought and the urge that went with it. It didn’t seem to be coming from my mind, but from the outside. I typed Ford, Buick, the names of all the automobiles I could remember, Overland Moon, I typed all the four-letter words, I typed the alphabet, lower case and capitals. I typed the numerals and punctuation marks, I typed the keys of the keyboard in order from left to right, top to bottom, then in from each side alternately. I filled the last yellow sheet I was on and it fell out and I kept pounding mechanically, making shiny black marks on the dull black platen.

  But then the urge became something I could not resist. I stood up and in the sudden silence I walked through the hall to the back door, looking down at the floor and resisting, dragging each step as much as I could.

  My hands touched the knob and the long-handled key in the lock. My body pressed the door, which seemed to surge against me, so that I felt it was only my counter-pressure that kept it from bursting open in a shower of splintered glass and wood.

  Far off, as if it were something happening in another universe, I heard the University clock tolling One . . . two . . .

  And then, because I could resist no longer, I turned the key and the knob.

  The lights all went out.

  In the darkness the door pushed open against me and something came in past me like a gust of c
old black wind with streaks of heat in it.

  I heard the bedroom door swing open.

  The clock completed its strokes. Eleven . . . twelve . . .

  And then . . .

  Nothing . . . nothing at all. All pressures lifted from me. I was aware only of being alone, utterly alone. I knew it, deep down.

  After some . . . minutes, I think, I shut and locked the door and I went over and opened a drawer and rummaged out a candle, lit it, and went through the apartment and into the bedroom.

  Max wasn’t there. I’d known he wouldn’t be. I didn’t know how badly I’d failed him. I lay down on the bed and after a while I began to sob and, after another while, I slept.

  Next day I told the janitor about the lights. He gave me a funny look.

  “I know,” he said. “I just put in a new fuse this morning. I never saw one blown like that before. The window in the fuse was gone and there was a metal sprayed all over the inside of the box.”

  That afternoon I got Max’s message. I’d gone for a walk in the park and was sitting on a bench beside the lagoon, watching the water ripple in the breeze when I felt something burning against my chest. For a moment I thought I’d dropped my cigarette butt inside my windbreaker. I reached in and touched something hot in my pocket and jerked it out. It was the sheet of green paper Max had given me. Tiny threads of smoke were rising from it.

  I flipped it open and read, in a scrawl that smoked and grew blacker instant by instant:

  Thought you’d like to know I got through okay. Just in time. I’m back with my outfit. It’s not too bad. Thanks for the rearguard action.

  The handwriting (thought-writing?) of the blackening scrawl was identical with the salutation above and the signature below.

  And then the sheet burst into flame. I flipped it away from me. Two boys launching a model sailboat looked at the paper flaming, blackening, whitening, disintegrating . . .

  I know enough chemistry to know that paper smeared with wet white phosphorus will burst into flame when it dries completely. And I know there are kinds of invisible writing that are brought out by heat. There are those general sorts of possibility. Chemical writing.

  And then there’s thoughtwriting, which is nothing but a word I’ve coined. Writing from a distance—a literal telegram.

  And there may be a combination of the two—chemical writing activated by thought from a distance . . . from a great distance.

  I don’t know. I simply don’t know. When I remember that last night with Max, there are parts of it I doubt. But there’s one part I never doubt.

  When the gang asks me, “Where’s Max?” I just shrug.

  But when they get to talking about withdrawals they’ve covered; rearguard actions they’ve been in, I remember mine. I’ve never told them about it, but I never doubt that it took place.

  AFTER THE

  MYTHS

  WENT HOME

  Robert Silverberg

  In spite of our modern pretense of cooled-out logical pragmatism and think-tank rationality, we still need myths. In fact, in a world where most of the age-old props—religion, morality, tradition, culture, family—have been knocked out from under us we may need them more urgently than ever. Denied the traditional gods and heroes and demons of the past, we instinctively endeavor to replace them with a pantheon of our own devising, rough-hewing our myths out of whatever archetypical material comes most readily to hand: JFK, Evel Knievel, Jaws, Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, James Bond, and the Godfather.

  Here Hugo- and Nebula-winner Robert Silverberg—SF’s most acidulous and elegant satirist—examines an effete future society that has forgotten the value of myth, although they are able to crank out gods and heroes to order in any desired quantity, a society that has made the possibly fatal mistake of confusing the substance with the show.

  FOR A WHILE in those years we were calling great ones out of the past, to find out what they were like. This was in the middle twelves—12400 to 12450, say. We called up Caesar and Antony, and also Cleopatra. We got Freud and Marx and Lenin into the same room and let them talk. We summoned Winston Churchill, who was a disappointment (he lisped and drank too much), and Napoleon, who was magnificent. We raided ten millennia of history for our sport.

  But after half a century of this we grew bored with our game. We were easily bored, in the middle twelves. So we started to call up the myth people, the gods and the heroes. That seemed more romantic, and this was one of Earth’s romanticist eras we lived in.

  It was my turn to serve as curator of the Hall of Man, and that was where they built the machine, so I watched it going up from the start. Leor the Builder was in charge. He had made the machines that called the real people up, so this was only slightly different, no real challenge to his talents. He had to feed in another kind of data, full of archetypes and psychic currents, but the essential process of reconstruction would be the same. He never had any doubt of success.

  Leor’s new machine had crystal rods and silver sides. A giant emerald was embedded in its twelve-angled lid. Tinsel streamers of radiant platinum dangled from the bony struts on which it rose.

  “Mere decoration,” Leor confided to me. “I could have made a simple black box. But brutalism is out of fashion.”

  The machine sprawled all over the Pavilion of Hope on the north face of the Hall of Man. It hid the lovely flicker-mosaic flooring, but at least it cast lovely reflections into the mirrored surfaces of the exhibit cases. Somewhere about 12570, Leor said he was ready to put his machine into operation.

  We arranged the best possible weather. We turned the winds, deflecting the westerlies a bit and pushing all clouds far to the south. We sent up new moons to dance at night in wondrous patterns, now and again coming together to spell out Leor’s name. People came from all over Earth, thousands of them, camping in whisper-tents on the great plain that begins at the Hall of Man’s doorstep. There was real excitement then, a tension that crackled beautifully through the clear blue air.

  Leor made his last adjustments. The committee of literary advisers conferred with him over the order of events, and there was some friendly bickering. We chose daytime for the first demonstration, and tinted the sky light purple for better effect. Most of us put on our youngest bodies, though there were some who said they wanted to look mature in the presence of these fabled figures out of time’s dawn.

  “Whenever you wish me to begin—” Leor said.

  There were speeches first. Chairman Peng gave his usual lighthearted address. The Procurator of Pluto, who was visiting us, congratulated Leor on the fertility of his inventions. Nistim, then in his third or fourth successive term as Metabolizer General, encouraged everyone present to climb to a higher level. Then the master of ceremonies pointed to me. No, I said, shaking my head, I am a very poor speaker. They replied that it was my duty, as curator of the Hall of Man, to explain what was about to unfold.

  Reluctantly I came forward.

  “You will see the dreams of old mankind made real today,” I said, groping for words. “The hopes of the past will walk among you, and so, I think, will the nightmares. We are offering you a view of the imaginary figures by means of whom the ancients attempted to give structure to the universe. These gods, these heroes, summed up patterns of cause and effect, and served as organizing forces around which cultures could crystallize. It is all very strange for us and it will he wonderfully interesting. Thank you.”

  Leor was given the signal to begin.

  “I must explain one thing,” he said. “Some of the beings you are about to see were purely imaginary, concocted by tribal poets, even as my friend has just told you. Others, though, were based on actual human beings who once walked the Earth as ordinary mortals, and who were transfigured, given more-than-human qualities, raised to the pantheon. Until they actually appear, we will not know which figures belong to which category, but I can tell you how to detect their origin once you see them. Those who were human beings before they became myths will have a slight aura,
a shadow, a darkness in the air about them. This is the lingering trace of their essential humanity, which no mythmaker can erase. So I learned in my preliminary experiments. I am now ready.”

  Leor disappeared into the bowels of his machine. A single pure note, high and clean, rang in the air. Suddenly, on the stage looking out to the plain, there emerged a naked man, blinking, peering around.

  Leor’s voice, from within the machine, said, “This is Adam, the first of all men.”

  And so the gods and the heroes came back to us on that brilliant afternoon in the middle twelves, while all the world watched in joy and fascination.

  Adam walked across the stage and spoke to Chairman Peng, who solemnly saluted him and explained what was taking place. Adam’s hand was outspread over his loins. “Why am I naked?” Adam asked. “It is wrong to be naked.”

  I pointed out to him that he had been naked when he first came into the world, and that we were merely showing respect for authenticity by summoning him back that way.

  “But I have eaten the apple,” Adam said. “Why do you bring me back conscious of shame, and give me nothing to conceal my shame? Is this proper? Is this consistent? If you want a naked Adam, bring forth an Adam who has not yet eaten the apple. But—”

  Leor’s voice broke in: “This is Eve, the mother of us all.”

  Eve stepped forth, naked also, though her long silken hair hid the curve of her breasts. Unashamed, she smiled and held out a hand to Adam, who rushed to her, crying, “Cover yourself! Cover yourself!”

  Surveying the thousands of onlookers, Eve said coolly, “Why should I, Adam? These people are naked too, and this must be Eden again.”

  “This is not Eden,” said Adam. “This is the world of our children’s children’s children’s children.”

  “I like this world,” Eve said. “Relax.”

  Leor announced the arrival of Pan the Goat-footed.

  Now, Adam and Eve both were surrounded by the dark aura of essential humanity. I was surprised at this, since I doubted that there had ever been a First Man and a First Woman on whom legends could be based; yet I assumed that this must be some symbolic representation of the concept of man’s evolution. But Pan, the half-human monster, also wore the aura. Had there been such a being in the real world?