Chris Beckett is a writer and now a university lecturer in Cambridge, England (though not at Cambridge University but at the “possibly marginally less famous” Anglia Polytechnic University). Until a couple of years ago he was a social worker. He has published twelve SF stories to date, all in Interzone, since 1990. “More stories of mine should appear in Interzone this year,” he says. “Admirable magazine! Great for people like me.” Last year a story of Beckett’s (“Valour”) was included in this anthology, and this year he appears again.
His short fiction to date is of high quality, thoughtful, tending to present complex philosophical problems on a human scale. “Although I am interested in science, and am the son of scientists, science and the future per se has never been the principal focus of my stories. I am interested in human beings and their struggles. This story, for example, is as much about intimacy (and how we both long for it and fear it) as it is about anything else.” This story is also about different kinds of knowledge.
“They say,” mused Clancy, looking down on a planet enmeshed by strands of light, “that Cosmopolis is the city on which the sun never sets. It’s true because the city encircles an entire planet. But in any case sunrise and sunset are an irrelevance in Cosmopolis because there is no one watching . The city’s inhabitants live in absorbing worlds of their own construction and have no attention to spare for that rather bare space under the sky which they call, dismissively, the surface .”
Here he paused.
“Have we finished dictation for now?” enquired Com.
“Wait,” said Clancy.
Com waited. Having no limbs, Com had no choice. Its smooth yellow egg-shape fitted comfortably into Clancy’s hand.
“I am a writer and a traveller,” continued Clancy, reclining on cushions in a small dome-shaped room, its ceiling a hemisphere of stars. “I am a typical Cosmopolitan soul in many ways, restless, unable to settle, hungry for experience, hungry to feed the gap where love and meaning should be.”
He considered.
“No. Delete that last sentence. And I’ve had a change of heart about our destination. Instruct Sphere to head for the Aristotle Complex. There are several worlds out there which I’ve been meaning to check out.”
Com did as it was asked in a three-microsecond burst of ultrasound.
“Message received and implemented,” said Sphere to Com, in the same high-speed code. “Shall I send standard notification?”
“Did you wish to notify anyone in the city about your new destination?” Com asked Clancy.
“Hmm,” said Clancy, with an odd smile, “that’s an interesting question. And the answer, interestingly, is no. Take another note, Com, for the book.”
He leant back with his hands behind his head.
“Ten thousand kilometres out,” he dictated, “I changed my destination so no one could find me if anything went wrong. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to dispense with the safety net, to get a sense of what it must have been like for those settlers in the fourth millennium, setting out on their one-way journey out into the unknown.”
He considered, then shrugged.
“Right, Com. At this point add a chapter about the Aristotle Complex. What we know of the early settlers, their motives, their desire to escape from decadence… and so on. Themes: finality, no turning back, taking risks, a complete break with the past.”
“Neo-romantic style?” “Neo-romantic stroke factual hard-boiled. Oh and include three poetic sharp-edge sentences. Just three. Low adjective count.”
“Okay. Shall I read it through to you?” said Com, having composed a chapter of 2,000 words without causing a gap in the conversation.
“Not now,” said Clancy. “I’m not in the mood. Get me a dinner fixed will you, and something to watch on screen. How long will it be till we reach the Complex?”
“The distance is about five parsecs. It’ll take three days.”
It was not the first voyage of this kind that Clancy had made. This was his career. He travelled alone to the “lost worlds,” he got to know them: their way of life, their myths, their beliefs. And then he returned with a book.
Returning with the book was his particular trademark. The completed book went on sale, in electronic form, at the exact same moment that he stepped out of his sphere. It had become a publishing event. He sold a million within an hour and became the city’s most talked-about celebrity. The literary spaceman: brave, elegant, alone. He attended all the most fashionable parties. He invariably embarked on a love affair with at least one beautiful and brilliant woman.
And when the love affair grew cold—as it always did, for there was a certain emptiness where his heart should be— and when he sensed that he had reached the end of the city’s fickle concentration span, he would go off once more into space.
He had a fear of being trapped, of being tied down, of becoming ordinary.
“The first approach to a settled planet,” said Clancy, “is a uniquely humbling experience. Here are human beings whose ancestors have gone about their lives without any reference to the universe outside for 30 generations. Invariably, in the absence of the vast pyramid of infrastructure on which modern society rests, their technology has become very basic. Invariably the story of their origins has been compacted into some legend. They have had more practical things to worry about for the last thousand years. My arrival, however it is managed, is inevitably a cultural bombshell. Their lives will never be the same again.”
He considered. They had reached the Aristotle Complex an hour ago. Sphere was now using the short cut of non-Euclidean space to leap from star to star and planet to planet, looking for inhabited worlds, very quickly but mechanically, like Com searching the Cosmopolitan Encyclopedia for a single word.
“Some say that for this reason I should not disturb them. This is surely poppycock. On that argument no human being would ever visit another’s home, no one would talk to another, let alone take the risk of love. Not that I ever do take that risk of course.”
He frowned. “Delete that last sentence.”
“Deleted. Sphere has found an inhabited planet.”
A fisher king was fishing in his watery world when the sphere came through the sky. Standing in the prow of his fine longboat, the tall, bearded upright king watched a silver ball, like a tiny, immaculate moon, descending towards his island home. And his household warriors, sitting at their oars, groaned and muttered, watching the sphere and then turning to look at him to see what he would do.
Aware of their gaze and never once faltering as he played his hereditary role, he ordered them to cut away the nets and row at once for the shore.
When Clancy emerged, his sphere perched on its tripod legs on the top of a tall headland, it was mainly women and children who were standing round him. Most of the men were out at sea.
He smiled.
“I won’t harm you,” he said, “I want to be your friend.”
The words didn’t matter much of course. After all this time these fisher-people had evolved a completely new language. It was salty as seaweed, full of the sound of water.
“Iglop!” they said. “Waarsha sleesh!”
Clancy smiled again. They were pleasant-looking people, healthy-looking and well fed. Men and women alike went bare from the waist up, and wore kilts of some seal-like skin.
“Sky!” said Clancy pointing upwards.
“Sea!” (he pointed) “Man!”
It took them a while to grasp the game, but then they did so with gusto, drawing closer to the strange man in his rainbow clothes, and to his strange silvery globe.
“Eyes,” said Clancy. “Nose. Mouth.”
“Erlash,” they called out. “Memaarsha. Vroom.”
Hidden in Clancy’s pocket, Com took all this in, comparing every utterance with its database of the language of the settlers before they set out a thousand years ago.
Com knew that there are regularities in the way that languages change. Sounds migrate together across the palate like flocks of birds. Meanings shift over the spectrum from particular to general, concrete to abstract, in orderly and measurable ways. Com formed 5,000 hypotheses a second, tested each one, discarded most, elaborated a few. By the time the fisher king arrived with his warriors and his long robe, Com was already able to have a go at translating.
It was as the king approached that Clancy first became really aware of the massive presence of the moon.
“I was on a rocky promontory of the island. Beyond the excited faces, beyond the approaching king, was a glittering blue sea dotted with dozens of other islands. But all this was dwarfed by the immense pink cratered sphere above, filling up a tenth part of the entire sky.
“What is our moon in Cosmopolis? A faint smudge in the orange gloom above a ventilation shaft? A pale blotch behind the rooftop holograms? We glance up and notice it for a moment, briefly entertained perhaps by the thought that there is a world of sorts outside our own, and then turn our attention back to our more engrossing surroundings.
“But this was truly a celestial sphere, a gigantic ball of rock, hanging above us, dominating the sky. I had known of its size before I landed but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of it.
“I had yet to experience the titanic ocean tides, the palpable gravity shifts, the daily solar eclipses, but I knew this was a world ruled over by its moon.”
Clancy paused and took a sip of red wine, seated comfortably in his impregnable sphere where he had retired, as was his custom, for the night. He had declined an invitation to dine with the King, saying that he would do the feast more justice the following evening. The truth was the first encounter was always extremely tiring and he needed rest. And alien food always played havoc with his digestion the first time round, guaranteeing a sleepless night.
“Com,” he said, “prepare me a database of lunar myths.”
He considered.
“And one on lunar poetry, and one on references to unusual moons round other inhabited worlds.”
“Done. Do you want me to…?”
“No, carry on with dictation.”
“The King is a genuinely impressive individual. His voice, his posture, his sharp grey eyes, everything about him speaks of his supreme self-assurance. He has absolutely no doubt at all about either his right or his ability to be in charge. And why should he? As he himself calmly told us, he is the descendant of an ancient union between sky and sea. He greeted me as a long-lost cousin…”
Clancy hesitated. A shadow crossed his mind.
“I pin them out like fucking butterflies!” he exclaimed. “I dissect them and pin them out! Why can’t I let anything just live?”
Com was sensitive to emotional fluctuations and recognized this one, not from the inside of course but from the outside, as a pattern it had observed before.
“The first day is always extremely tiring,” Com suggested gently. “In the past we’ve found that a cortical relaxant, a warm drink and sleep…”
“Yes, whatever we do, let’s not face the emptiness,” growled Clancy, but he seemed to acquiesce at first, collecting the pill and the drink dispensed by Sphere, and preparing to settle into the bed that unfolded from the floor…
Then “No!” he exclaimed, tossing the pill aside. “If I can’t feel at least I can fucking think. Come on, Com, let’s do some work on the theme. Listen, I have an idea…”
Lying with two of his concubines in his bed of animal skins, the fisher king was also kept awake by a hectic stream of thoughts. His mind was no less quick than Clancy’s but it worked in a very different way. Clancy thought like an acrobat, a tightrope walker, nimbly balancing above the void. But the king moved between large solid chunks of certainty. Annihilation was an external threat to be fought off, not an existential hole inside.
He thought of the power of the strange prince in his sphere. He thought about his own sacred bloodline and the kingdom which sustained it. All his life he had deftly managed threats from other island powers, defeating some in war, making allies of others through exchanges of gifts or slaves, or bonds of marriage. But how to play a visitor who came not from across the sea in the long-boat but down from the sky in a kind of silver moon?
He woke one of the concubines. (He was a widower and had never remarried).
“Fetch me my chamberlain. I want to take his advice!”
“There are three kinds of knowledge,” Clancy said, “let’s call them Deep Knowledge, Slow Knowledge and Quick Knowledge. Deep Knowledge is the stuff which has been hardwired into our brains by evolution itself; the stuff we are born with, the stuff that animals have. It changes in the light of experience, like other knowledge, but only over millions of years. Slow Knowledge is the accumulation of traditions and traditional techniques passed down from generation to generation. It too changes, evolving gradually as some traditions fade and others are slowly elaborated. But, at the conscious level, those who transmit Slow Knowledge see themselves not as innovators but as preservers of wisdom from the past. Quick knowledge is the short cut we have latterly acquired in the form of science, a way of speeding up the trial-and-error process by making it systematic and self-conscious. It is a thousand, a million times quicker than Slow Knowledge, and a billion, billion times speedier than Deep Knowledge. But unlike them it works by objectivity, by stepping outside a thing.
“Deep, Slow and Quick: we could equate them to rock and sea and air. Rock doesn’t move perceptibly at all. Sea moves but stays within its bounds…”
He laughed, “More wine, Com, this is good. Get this: Cosmopolitans are creatures of air, analytical, empirical, technological; lost-worlders are typically creatures of the sea. They all are, but these guys here are literally so. So here’s the book title: The Meeting of Sea and Sky. See? It ties in with the king’s origin myth!”
“That was a marriage of sea and sky,” observed Com.
Clancy had retired for the night atop a headland overlooking a wide bay, where a coastal village of wattle huts squatted near the water’s edge. But in the morning there was no sea in sight. A plain of mud and rocks and pools stretched as far as the horizon and groups of tiny figures could be seen wandering all over it with baskets on their backs.
The moon was on the far side of the planet, taking the ocean with it. The sky was open and blue. And when he climbed down the steps (watched by a small crowd which had been waiting there since dawn) Clancy found that he was appreciably heavier than he had been the previous day.
Followed closely by the fascinated crowd—made up mainly of children and old people—Clancy went down from the headland to what had been the bay. A group of women were just coming off the mud flats with their baskets laden with shellfish. He smiled at them and started to walk out himself onto the mud.
Behind him came gasps and stifled incredulous laughs.
Clancy stopped.
“Is there a problem?” Clancy had Com ask. (Everyone was diverted for a while by the wondrous talking egg). “Is there some danger that I should be aware of?”
“No, no danger,” they answered.
But why then the amazement? Why the laughter? They stared, incredulous.
“Because you are a man!” someone burst out at length. Clancy was momentarily nonplussed, then he gave a little laugh of recognition.
“I’ve got it, Com. Their reaction is exactly the one I would get if I headed into the women’s toilets in some shopping mall.”
He addressed the crowd.
“So men don’t go on the mud when the tide is out?”
People laughed more easily now, certain that he was merely teasing them.
“These things are different where I come from,” said Clancy. “You’re telling me that only women here go out on the mud?”
A very old woman came forward.
“Only women of course. That is a woman’s realm. Surely that is obvious?”
“And a man’s realm is where?”
The woman was irritated, feeling he was making a fool of her.
“To men belongs the sea under the moon,” she snapped, withdrawing back into the crowd.
“Sea and sky, sea and sky,” muttered Clancy to Com, “it’s coming together nicely.”
The book was the thing for him. Reality was simply the raw material.
That night the king piled the choicest pieces of meat on Clancy’s plate and filled his mug again and again with a thick brew of fermented seaweed. Clancy’s stomach groaned in anticipation of a night of struggling to unlock the unfamiliar proteins of an alien biological line, but he acted the appreciative guest, telling tales of Cosmopolis and other worlds, and listening politely as the king’s poets sang in praise of their mighty lord, the “moon-tall whale-slayer, gatherer of islands, favoured son of sky and sea.”
As he lay in the early hours, trying to get rest if not actual sleep, Clancy became aware of a new sound coming from outside—a creaking, snapping sound—and he got up to investigate.
He emerged from his sphere to an astonishing sight. Over at the eastern horizon, the enormous moon was rising over a returning sea. Brilliant turbulent water, luminous with pink moonlight, was sweeping towards him across the vast dark space where the women had yesterday hunted for crabs.
But the creaking, snapping sound was much nearer to hand.
“What is that?” Clancy asked.
The king had posted a warrior as guard-of-honour to Clancy’s sphere and the man was now sleepily scrambling to his feet.
“What is that sound?” Clancy asked him, holding out Com, his yellow egg.
The sound was so ordinary to the man that he could not immediately understand what it was that Clancy meant. Then he shrugged.
“It’s the moon tugging at the rocks.”
“Of course,” exclaimed Clancy, “of course. With a moon that size, even the rocks have tides that can be felt.”
He walked to the edge of the headland. He heard another creaking below him and a little stone dislodged itself and rattled down the precipice.
“Lunar erosion,” he observed with a smile.
The warrior had come up beside him.
“It tugs at your soul too,” he volunteered. “Makes you long for things which you don’t even know what they are. No wonder the women stay indoors under the moon. It tugs and tugs and if you’re not careful, it’ll pull your soul right out of you and you’ll be another ghost up there in that dead dry place and never again know the sea and the solid land.”
Having made this speech, the young man nodded firmly and wandered back to his post at the foot of Clancy’s steps.
“Wow,” breathed Clancy, “good stuff! Did you record all that?”
Of course Com had.
The moon had nearly cleared the horizon now. It towered above the world. The wattle huts below were bathed in its soft pink light and the water once more filled up the bay.
“Take a note, Com. I said we in Cosmopolis had forgotten our moon, but actually I think our moon has gobbled us up. After so many centuries of asking for the moon, we have…”
“…we have…?”
“Forget it. I think I’m going to be sick.”
“I visited a quarry,” Clancy dictated, a week into his stay, “a little dry dusty hollow at the island’s heart, where half a dozen men were facing and stacking stone. It was the middle of the day but quite dark, due to one of the innumerable eclipses, so they were working by the light of whale-oil flares. The chief quarryman was a short, leathery fellow in a leather apron, his hands white with rock dust. I asked him why he worked there rather than on the sea like most of the other men. He had some difficulty understanding what I was asking him at first, then shrugged and said his father had worked there, and his grandfather and great-grandfather. It was his family’s allotted role. (A slow knowledge approach to life, you see, a sea knowledge approach. Any Cosmopolitan would want to demonstrate that his job was chosen by himself.)
“But I realized that my question had left the man with some anxiety about how he was perceived. He stood there, this funny, leathery human mole, and stared intently at my face for a full minute as if there was writing there which he was trying to read.
“ ‘It isn’t on the sea,’ he said at length, ‘but it’s real moon work! No women are ever allowed here.’And he told me that there were some rocks they only attempted to shift right under the moon. The strain of the tide going through the rock made the strata more brittle. Hit the rock in the right place under the moon and it would suddenly snap. Hit it any other time and it remained stubbornly hard. With some rocks, he said, it is enough to heat the rocks with fire when the moon is up, and they fly apart into blocks. It was real moon work all right.
“So I told him that I had no doubts whatever about his manhood.”
Clancy paused.
“You know, Com, I think we’ve got nearly enough material already. We just need one more episode, one more event to somehow bring the themes alive. Whatever ‘alive’ is.”
He got up, paced around the tiny space of Sphere’s leisure room.
“What is the point of all this? Back and forth across empty space, belonging nowhere, an outsider in the lost worlds, an outsider in Cosmopolis, no one for company but a plastic egg. What are my books but mental wallpaper?”
Com conferred with Sphere by ultrasound, then suggested a glass of wine.
Clancy snorted. “You and Sphere always want to pour chemicals down me, don’t you? Come on, back to work. Resume dictation.”
Next day when the tide was out, Clancy got into conversation with harpooneer, a sly, sinuous, thin-faced man, with to fingers missing from an encounter with one of the big whale-like creatures which he hunted under every moon.
As with the quarryman, Clancy asked the man why he did the work he did, and received exactly the same answer: his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had done the same. Then Clancy asked him would he not like to have a choice of profession?
When Com translated, the man did not seem to understand.
“I know the word for choice in the context, say, of selecting a fish from a pile,” Com explained to Clancy. “But it does not seem to be meaningful to use this word in the context of a person’s occupation.”
“Okay,” said Clancy, “ask him like this. Ask him does he prefer his ale salty or sweet? Ask him whether he prefers whale meat fresh or dried? Ask him does he prefer to fish when the sun is hot or when it is cloudy? Then ask him, how would it be if someone had said to him when he was a child, would he rather be a quarryman, a harpooneer or a fisherman with nets?”
Com tried this. The old man replied to each question until the last. Then he burst out laughing.
“They simply have no concept of choosing their own way in life,” Clancy recorded later. “They follow the role allotted to them by birth and don’t resent it because it has not occurred to any of them that anything else could be a possibility. How would they react if they could come to the city, and see people who have chosen even their own gender, changed their size, their skin, the colour of their eyes?”
He considered.
“There is something idyllic about their position. In some respects, in any case, they are spared the burden of Free Will. Even marriage partners, I gather, are allocated according to complicated rules to do with clan and status, with no reference whatever to individual choice. I see no evidence that people here are less happy than in our city. In fact a certain kind of fretfulness, found everywhere in the city, is totally missing here, even though life is certainly not easy for those allocated the roles of slave, say, or concubine or witch…”
He considered this. Com waited.
“It is this idyll of an ordered, simple life (isn’t it?) which the city pays me so well to seek out. Not that anyone wants it for themself. This life would bore any Cosmopolitan to death in a week. But they like to know it is there, like childhood…
“By the way, one new thing the harpooneer told me. He asked me when I would meet the king’s daughters. I told him I didn’t know the king had daughters and he laughed and said there were three, and no one could agree which was the most beautiful.”
Clancy dined that evening on the high table in the hall of the king, with all the king’s warriors ranged on benches below. In the middle of the room the carcass of an entire whale was being turned on a spit by household slaves. The whole space was full of the great beast’s meaty, fatty heat.
“Wahita wahiteh zloosh,” chanted the king’s poets on and on, “wamineh weyopla droosh!…”
Clancy leant towards the king.
“Your majesty, I am told that you have three very beautiful daughters. I hope I will have the pleasure of meeting them.”
The effect of this on the king was unexpectedly electrifying. He jolted instantaneously into his most formal mode— and, seeing this, the entire hall full of warriors fell suddenly silent.
“Prince from the sky, I am most honoured that you should ask. They will be made ready at once.”
He called to a servant, gave urgent orders and dismissed him with an imperious wave. The warriors began their talking and their shouting once again.
“An hour passed,” Clancy dictated later, “and then a second. The warriors grew restless, wriggling on their benches like naughty children. The whale carcass, what was left of it, grew cold. The king and I, whose relationship consisted entirely of exchanging information, ran out of things to say to each other, and he eventually gave up all attempt at conversation, sinking into his thoughts, turning a gold ring round and round on his finger, and from time to time jolting himself awake and pressing more sea-weed ale on me.
“I began to wonder whether there had been some mistake. Surely it could not take that long for the princesses to be made ready? Had they been summoned from some other island? Had I perhaps completely misunderstood what was going on? But Com assured me that, yes, the king had said his daughters were being got ready.
“Another hour passed. I endured the king’s poets repeating their repertoire for the third time. (‘Wahita wahiteh zloosh/ wamineh weyopla droosh!…’ repeated after every one of 23 verses!)
“And then a door opened at the end of the dais, all the warriors lumbered to their feet, and the king’s three daughters were led in.”
At this point in his narration, Clancy asked for wine.
Sphere poured it for him.
“The harpooneer had not lied to me, all three princesses were indeed beautiful and it wasn’t hard now to see why they had taken so long. Their hair was plaited, ribboned and piled in elaborate structures on their heads, their bodies, bare to the waist, had been freshly painted in the most intricate designs of entwined sea plants and sea creatures.
“They came round the table and knelt behind my seat, the youngest first, her sisters behind. Then, at a word from the king, the youngest daughter stood up, offered her hand to me briefly and went to stand behind him. The second daughter did the same. And then the third, the oldest…”
Clancy gulped down his wine and went across to the dispenser for more. He was agitated, scared.
“What the hell is that feeling?” he demanded. “It’s not like lust at all, but you can’t call it love, not when you don’t know the person. It’s like a buried longing for some kind of sweetness, which we try to stifle beneath worldliness and weariness and all the busy pointless tasks we lay upon our selves. And suddenly a person touches it for some reason and it erupts, all focused on that one person, her lovely sad intelligent eyes, her unconscious grace…”
He checked himself.
“What a load of crap! What do I know about her except her face? What is it I want from that face? What can a face give me? What is a face except muscle and skin? Damn it, it means nothing, nothing! It’s all just a trick played on us by biology!”
“Are we still doing dictation?” Com politely enquired.
“No of course we aren’t, you plastic prat!”
Clancy swallowed the wine in one gulp and shoved the empty cup straight back into the dispenser for more.
“Okay, let’s admit it. The oldest daughter, Wayeesha. When I met her eyes it felt as if something passed between us, some recognition, some hope that it might not always be necessary to be so…so terribly alone. It’s all crap, of course: she’s not much more than half my age, she’s been brought up to marry some iron age warlord on some bleak little island. We don’t even speak the same language.”
He downed the third cup of wine in one, with a little shudder.
“All that we might possibly have in common is some kind of longing to escape …”
“Sometimes it helps to talk about what happened,” said Com, after a ten-microsecond conference with Sphere. “Perhaps if you finished the story…”
“Oh for God’s say spare me your second-hand wisdom you sanctimonious rattle!” exclaimed Clancy.
But in spite of that he sat down again and carried on.
“So then when all three women were standing behind the king’s chair, he smiled proudly at me and asked me whether or not they were indeed as beautiful as people had told me. Of course I said yes.
“ ‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘and now the choice is entirely yours.’
“I suppose I had been rather naïve, but until that point, I hadn’t understood that when I asked to see his daughters he had assumed that I wanted one of them for a wife.”
Again Clancy jumped to his feet.
“Damn it, Com, this is intolerable. One minute I was falling for a woman in a way that seemed scary and new to me, the very next minute I was being offered her hand in marriage. How could anyone deal with that? I played for time, of course. I said that in my own world a man sleeps on a decision like that… Delete that whole paragraph. You rewrite it. Leave out the nonsense about my personal feelings. Just describe her as very attractive and tempting. Generic rather than personal. Worldly rather than sentimental. Low adjective count.”
“Done. Shall I read it back to you?”
“Later…It’s maddening. This is precisely the event I needed to bring the book together. The marriage of sky and sea! The space traveller falls in love with the daughter of a fisher king. What could be better! Damn! Damn! Why has reality always got to be so awkward.”
“Go on,” said Com, who was a good listener.
“I mean it might make a good book, but if I marry her I can’t just go back to the city with the book, can I? I have to go back with her. How would it look if I bring back some kid half my age who doesn’t even know how to read or write? I’ll look like a dirty old man.”
“Don’t forget,” said Com, who had filed and indexed everything they’d learnt about the local culture, “that here it is the man who moves to live with the woman. Women are not allowed to cross the sea.”
“So I couldn’t take her back with me? Yes, that’s true. And if a marriage fails here a man returns to his own island doesn’t he?”
Clancy sat down, picked up the yellow egg and turned it over in his hands.
“You may look like a kid’s rattle, Com, but you have your uses. I could marry her here, and if things didn’t work out, which of course they won’t after a while, I can take off home. No harm done, a lovely honeymoon, and a nice sad end for the story. Sky and sea try to marry, but in the end they just don’t mix. Spaceman has to be free, even at the price of loneliness and alienation. Ocean princess has to be with her people…”
Then he frowned. He was very cold and empty inside, but not wholly without scruples. He was concerned, at any rate, with how his actions might be seen.
“But that is just using her, isn’t it? I can’t do that. My readers wouldn’t like it. They don’t expect me to be an angel, but they do expect a certain… integrity. Damn.”
He thought for a while.
“And anyway she is so beautiful, and so sad. I don’t want to…”
A thought occurred to him.
“By the way, I meant to ask you. When she shook my hand she said something, very quietly, so no one else could hear. What was it?”
“ Eesha zhu moosha —you have my heart. Do you want me to play it back as she said it?”
“No!” Clancy jumped up as if he had been stung. He was shaking with fear.
“Oh all right,” he whispered, shrinking back down, as if in anticipation of a blow, “go on, play it back.”
When he had heard it, he wept: just two tears, but tears all the same, such as he hadn’t shed for years.
“Damn it, Com, I’ll do it. In this culture marriage is all about using people. It won’t do her any harm to have been married to the sky man! I’m going to bloody do it. Do it and be damned for once.”
He glared at the yellow egg as if it had questioned his action.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll make the book come out right somehow.”
Down in the wattle-and-daub settlement the fisher king had a lookout post beside his hall. It consisted of two tree-trunks fixed cleverly end to end, with a small crows’-nest at the top. He invited Clancy up there on the night before the wedding to watch as the other grooms arrived from across the sea.
Weddings in the sea-world were communal affairs, taking place on a single day just once a year. Bonfires burned all along the beach. Under a huge half-moon that dwarfed the island and made the sea itself seem small, canoes appeared in the distance among the glittering waves, first of all as faint dark smudges and then gradually growing more distinct as they approached the land and the firelight. Each one was cheered as it approached and, as they drew close to the beach, the king’s warriors waded out into the sea to greet the new arrivals and help to drag the boats ashore.
Clancy turned to the king and smiled. It was a magnificent spectacle.
The king laughed.
“And now,” he said, “the burning of the boats.”
He raised his arms and gave a signal to his followers on the beach, who at once set to, dragging the canoes one after another onto the fires. The grooms objected ritually and had to be ritually restrained, but there was a lot of laughter. It was clearly all in fun.
Clancy frowned.
“Why do you do that?”
“When a man marries, his wandering days should end, isn’t that so?”
The king winked.
“That moon-boat of yours, it won’t burn quite so easily!”
“What do you mean?”
Clancy looked over to the headland where Sphere was perched on its tripod legs. A fire was burning beneath it.
“No!” he cried out, and then laughed at himself. How could mere fire harm a vessel designed to cope with space?
The king laughed good-naturedly with him, putting a friendly arm round the shoulders of his son-in-law to be.
“Those rocks are easily shattered under the moon,” he observed, “and we have fires in the caves below as well.”
When he heard Com translate this, it took Clancy a few seconds before he grasped the implications—and in that short time the first boulder had broken loose and crashed down into the sea.
“No,” Clancy shouted, “it’s my only way back!”
The king roared with laughter.
“I’m not joking!” cried Clancy, looking around for the rope ladder to get down. “Have the fires put out at once!”
Over on the headland a second boulder crashed down, then a third. And then the sphere itself tipped over, its surfaces glinting in the pink moonlight as it rolled onto its back, its tripod legs sticking up in the air as if it was a stranded sheep. Some more rocks exploded. In agonizing slow-motion, or so it seemed, Sphere went over the edge, crashing against the cliff—once…twice…—then hitting the sea with a mighty splash and sinking beneath the waves.
With one foot on the rope ladder, Clancy stared. And the king, still laughing, his face wet with tears, reached down, helped him kindly back onto the platform and gave him a warm, fishy hug.
“The boats are burnt! So now you can go to Wayeesha.”
Clancy walked over to the rough wooden rail at the edge of the platform, looked out at the bonfires, the glittering sea, the giant moon, and remembered Wayeesha waiting for him in the hall below.
As he had trained himself to do in even the most extreme situations, he examined his thoughts. What he found surprised him. He turned to the king with a smile.
“I’m going to regret this. And I fear that you, my friend, are going to be seriously disappointed. But right now, it’s strange, I feel as if I’ve put down a burden. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free!”
“A good ending for the book!” Com observed.
“What book, you idiot?” said Clancy. “Are we going to write it on seaweed, or carve it into the stones?”
Then he proffered the yellow egg to the king.
“Here,” he said, “it’s yours. I don’t need it, and I feel you ought to get something from your alliance with the stars. No need to translate that last sentence, Com.”
“Is this wise?” asked Com, as the king turned it over reverently in his large hands.
“No,” said Clancy. “In another month your battery will run out and you really will just be a plastic egg. Then what will the king think of my gift?”
He went to the rope ladder and began to lower himself, carefully avoiding looking down.