Galaxies Page 15
The characters, too, deserve it.
XLVIII
For in the infinity of all time and all space, anything is possible if only once. Anything may happen if only at a given time, and as Skipstone trembles with the power of its transition, as time shifts and they are vomited from that black hole, Lena and her dead fall into infinity. They become bound to it. They scurry like the hand of a drunken painter over the vast canvas of all possibility, cleaving through the burlap of the galaxies.
Now here they are in the Antares Cluster, flickering like a bulb, the ship power shuddering as they plunge toward the dead star, and now here they are again momentarily at the heart of Sirius, the core heat a series of blows to the drowned metal; now yet again they move through some slip in time to find themselves in ancient Rome, possibly in an arena watching gladiators, brutish men with stupid faces reflecting pain, struggle in an abattoir, then moving in the air like some machine of prophecy watching another man haul wood up a high mountain…
And they do not know what they have seen, of course, certain myths being nonrecurring, traditions being reconstituted every few centuries, but even as they attempt to take in the significance of that, the ship moves again, shedding various levels of reality just as it sheds space and time, and they plunge a billion years across the flat, dead span of the universe, cling briefly to a hundred thousand habitable planets, and on each of them, infinity encompassing all, there is a mountain with a man carrying wooden bulk, and on each of them they see this, although memory is abolished along with context, and for each of them witness is as the first time. There is no history nor is there accumulation.
It is impossible to say how long this goes on or whether time can be said to apply to it at all. All that can be known is that Skipstone moves, and its occupants and author alike tremble on the verge of an epiphany and that epiphany is this: they cannot partake of the infinite; the equipment Which receives this is so limited as to cancel consequence and we are after all merely human. We must reconstruct from all the pathways of the possible, then, that frail gestalt which is all that we can know. Lena, Skipstone, John, the prostheses, the dead themselves cannot become other than what they are but must only recapitulate themselves over and again. Trapped within the consciousness of the writer, the penitentiary of his being, much as the writer himself has been trapped within the Skipstone of his mortality, Lena and her dead emerge.
They emerge into a known sector of the universe.
And this is where they are.
XLIX
They emerge in the year 1975, July 1975, in the town of Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, floating to the cobbled and bleak surfaces of that town in a haze which absorbs all matter and there, by the laws of energy conservation and probability, they come to inhabit the bodies of the fifteen thousand souls of that town. They merge with them, become part of their consciousness so that they cannot be distinguished, they assume not only the flesh but the persona, the jobs, the loves and lives and memories of the residents of this little town, and there they remain and there they will be. There they are; there they are now.
And now and now and yet and yet: dwelling, amidst the refineries, strolling on Main Street past the Rialto Theatre, queuing at the theater to see films at reduced prices, shopping in the supermarkets, pausing in the gas stations, pairing off and clutching one another, some of them, in the imploded stars of their beds at the very moment at which the author, that cosmic accident himself, writes this about them.
Yes, it seems unimaginable that they would come, Lena and the dead, from the heart of the black galaxy to reconstruct and tenant the town of Ridgefield Park, New Jersey … but there is something less imaginable which makes, finally, this difficult resolution just for all.
For how can this be? How can it be? That from all the Ridgefield Parks of our time we will assemble to build the great engines which will take us to the stars … and some of the stars will bring death and others will bring life and then there are those which will bring us nothing at all, but the engines will continue, they will go on forever.
And so, in a fashion, after our fashion, will we.
If you've enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you'll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.
For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …
For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …
Visit the SF Gateway.
www.sfgateway.com
Also by Barry N. Malzberg
Chorale
Conversations
Dwellers of the Deep
Galaxies
Gather in the Hall of the Planets
Guernica Night
Herovit's World
In the Enclosure
On a Planet Alien
Overlay
Revelations
Scop
Tactics of Conquest
The Cross of Fire
The Day of the Burning
The Destruction of the Temple
The Empty People
The Falling Astronauts
The Gamesman
The Last Transaction
The Men Inside
The Remaking of Sigmund Freud
The Sodom and Gomorrah Business
Universe Day
Barry N. Malzberg (1939 –)
Barry N. Malzberg is an American writer, editor and agent, whose prolific career has spanned numerous genres – most notably crime and science fiction. Malzberg was particularly active in the science fiction scene of the early seventies, although he became disillusioned with the market forces defining the field, and has rarely published SF works since. His most recent activity in the field has been in the form of advice columns for writers in the quarterly magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Barry N. Malzberg has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Barry N. Malzberg 1975
All rights reserved.
The right of Barry N. Malzberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10231 6
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk