Shiva and Other Stories Read online

  Looking back upon that strange and tormented time, Posar had tried to make some sense of his own yearning, his need for an actress he had never known other than as a process or a machine, a yearning so palpable that even in the later years, after the new quickening, after his restoration, he had been unable to understand quite what had driven him there or how he had been able to desire her so much. This was after he had lost any true recollection of her features, was unable to bring her face to his mind, was unable to populate his memory with anything but the blunt outlines of her body and his own disaster. In this later stage, Posar was once more and as promised nothing other than himself, but still, pointlessly, he tried to clamber back into the past, a circumstance which he could neither apprehend nor truly shape.

  That was the way in which the aliens had prepared him. It was before this restoration or that, before the flawed knowledge which had become his custom and his comfort. Lying with her in the false space, her body enormous when glimpsed from this angle, Posar had felt a kind of peace to work in concord with the strands of his desire and somehow he had merged with the future, feeling some apprehension of that later time as he had impaled himself against her and slowly worked toward a kind of equivocal peak. Stunned by the span of his own need, the glare of the city refracted to small splinters and knives of dusk against his consciousness, Posar must have had some clearer understanding of what was to occur than anything he was able to find later. Or then again, perhaps he had understood nothing at all. He had always, no less than the botanic technicians who had placed him in this condition, been uncertain of his circumstance.

  But that woman, the actress, had been rehearsal for Posar, that was why he had thought of her as the actress: she was a means of exploring the device the aliens had made him, the device which, they said, was very much like the woman they had painted to his memory, but even more compliant. Lying with Constance in the wake of his return, he had felt himself in a position of conquest, not demonstration as the aliens had said, not an observed procedure. He was for those moments the man he had always wanted to be. The specifics of this collision he otherwise edited, no need with the assistance the drugs gave him, to bring the details to mind: all that he knew was that he had served necessity. Now memory colluded with circumstance and he found himself able, again and again, to engage in long, intense conversations with this real woman, Constance. Do you believe that this is happening? he asked, or is this another of the dreams they have settled upon me?

  How would I know? she said. I feel real to me. I can’t go any further than that. If this isn’t real, what is?

  They wouldn’t tell me, he said.

  Well, they wouldn’t tell me anything either. I don’t know anything more than you.

  But they said that I had to be prepared for you. They made me an actress and told me to rehearse. So you must have known things which I did not.

  You were wrong, she said. You are wrong now. I could be the actress herself. How do you know?

  Well, how did he? In the ferocity of her gaze, Posar felt himself exposed, felt the heat of his mortality, the dry bones of succession lying under the sun on an abandoned planet. I don’t know, he said. First this, then that. Why is one any more real than the other? She seemed real to me as well. Everything does, one way or the other.

  What does it matter? Constance said incuriously. Why try to make sense of it? It isn’t our world anymore.

  Posar tried to remember the name of the actress but could not. He could remember less of what had happened to him all the time, now he could not tell whether the aliens had dazzled him with implanted memory or whether it had only been consciousness itself which had been a burden. I don’t know, he said. I don’t know who she is or anyone.

  Stretched beside Constance on some enormous plane of consequence, he felt that she must have been important to him at some time, that the aliens must have had some scheme beyond taunting, but Posar could not for the life of him imagine what that might have been. He knew nothing; he had fallen from time, he had been placed in this darkness under the city, a lump of pure outcome, disconnected from motive and possibility.

  * * *

  Constance, thought earlier by Posar (who was not truly in control of his consciousness, even though it might have been the last on Earth) to have been a robot actress, but only human then as now, waited for the damaged Posar to return. She hoped for better or at least different transaction. Mislead by the aliens, lied to from the start, he had taken her to be metal and wire that first time around, given ambiance through processes only conquering aliens could understand. She had accepted that lie for his sake, hoping for a better or at least different connection. When she had known him in that earlier time, in the wake of cataclysm he had been first hopeful, then distant, finally doomed in ways which went to the center of his countenance and all of the secrets which had lain between.

  Do not question my effectiveness, he had whispered in what had turned out to be their practice sessions. Do not hurry me with questions. This Posar who had known her robot self had insisted that all of this would change, that they would learn the better lessons of their humanity and later resettle civilization. He had had all kinds of plans before he had become the distraught and aging man of her later incarnation.

  In that later time, he had taken her to that wilderness downrange, the forest just beyond that curve which cut all perspective and he had lost all certainty then, had sobbed with fever and helplessness. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, he had said, we were supposed to do it this way, then that. After long absence he had come back to her in this glacial condition, his soul bent against all reshaping and in that posture he had talked to Constance, had made love to her as if he were taking instruction, as if some external force was guiding him through the random motions of connection.

  It had not shaken Constance. There was little left within to be shaken. She had, like Posar, moved far beyond response to some stage of disenlightenment where nothing had mattered. Destroy the world, take away the world, take away her lover, her sanity, her fixtures and condition, all of that had been the same to her now, it no longer affected her. She was incapable, seemingly, of emotion.

  She could not be broken, she had thought. But when Posar had mumbled to her of the actress, of rehearsal, of hard, metal surfaces and postures which had taught him how to come to terms with her in this place, never realizing that the actress had been her, his thin confession had taken Constance beyond accommodation. She wondered if either of them was at all to be trusted, whether they had been able to withstand the battery of aliens, whether there was any verification possible.

  Or had it all been some rupture of sanity?

  Who knew? Who could tell? Her reluctant lover ambled toward her, his countenance shining an apocalyptic sheen, reached toward her in a gesture which mingled desire and departure, and she drifted toward him with equal casualness, anticipating once again that collision which he had rehearsed. A satisfactory enough stunt, then, this reworking of the world.

  And much later, then, Constance could still remember how he looked, how she dreamed as he came through the dusk, emerging in a sudden flare of color from the surrounding haze, reaching toward her, his arms lean and needful in the sudden influx of stunted light.

  And finally, she could remember how he had clutched her, his body an arc of yearning. Remembered as well the way in which she caved against him, her hollows filled with the insistence of his being. She remembered that clutch in the sun and shallow thunder of his breath, thinking: the aliens must have had their reasons, they must have had this worked out, it must have been purposeful.

  She should have told him: I am the actress. How could you not know this? Touch alone should tell you, if not reason. For whatever had been done to them, Posar and Constance still dwelt within a range of causality. A world where acts could not exist without antecedent. Stimulus-response: Posar’s hands always there.

  She could have said: but reason and reason’s counselor, memory, have been t
aken, leaving only that damaged, mechanical lover. And later than that, after he had had her one last time, she could have said: What poor versions of ourselves time or the aliens have made!

  But why blame the aliens? Constance remembered thinking: For how could it not have come to this? Even in Lydian scale: the music of the spheres. Even so damaged, she could have said, our touch was always music.

  Demystification of Circumstance

  HAWKINS LAY UNDER A ROCK. The rock was ten feet tall and twenty across, perhaps three feet through, although depth was of no interest to him at this time. The façade was what concerned him. The rock, as all mineral formations on this minor asteroid, ate and drank the atmosphere, conversed endlessly, seemed to have no need whatsoever of sleep. Perhaps at a later stage. It was apparently a very young rock. “You won’t be able to keep this up much longer,” it pointed out to Hawkins in its high flutelike voice. “Sooner or later you’ll have to fall asleep and I’ll gobble you up for a meal just like everything else. It’s been twenty-two hours now and you’re approaching your fatigue limits. Why don’t you just tell me the attack plans and we can bring an end to all of this?”

  “No,” Hawkins said. He shook his head. His only hope was that his wrecked craft would be visually sighted and the rescue fleet would come but the administrators had, as the rock had pointed out, a major attack to worry about and would hardly be looking for an isolated scout at the present time. Nevertheless, pride held him back and an admiration for consistency: he would not be a traitor and reveal to the rock the exact time and nature of the attack, facts which were desperately needed, of course, so that the sentient minerals of this place, all in constant contact, could protect themselves. It would cost him his life, he knew; if he was not eventually eaten by the rock, which had pinioned him by his right ankle since he had crawled from the downed craft, he would perish in the attack itself . . . but one had limits. You were what you were or nothing. “I won’t tell you,” he said, “and I really wish you’d stop with this incessant chatter. It won’t get you anywhere, you know.”

  “Oh, it passes the time,” the rock said cheerfully, “and besides it’s keeping you awake. If you fall asleep for an instant, that’s the end of you, you know. It isn’t often that I get a chance to talk to a different life form, you understand, although I must say that I find you quite dull and so xenophobic about everything. Don’t your kind do anything besides hate?”

  “We hate the likes of you,” Hawkins muttered. This was quite true; the sentient minerals of the Sirius asteroids had, for the last several decades, exerted powerful influence upon plans to profitably settle the terrain; they had eaten twenty or thirty explorers and had driven several hundred more, unprepared for singing stones and chattering boulders, quite mad; and they had then begun to transmit a series of ultimatums demanding that the Sirius system be abandoned. The circumstances left no alternative: a pulverizing attack had been planned and at this very moment several hundred ships were massing behind invisible screens to deliver the long-delayed blow which would destroy all of the asteroids; but Hawkins, unfortunately, sweeping the terrain to see if the sentient minerals had devised any counterforce of their own, had had the misfortune to crash and to fall into the interrogative arms or, putting it another way, the interrogative ledge of the rock. The rock appeared to know that an attack was in the offing but, unless it could deduce the actual timing, could not mass defense, which meant that Hawkins’s task was quite clear . . . still, he was in an awkward position, quite tired and beginning to fear death more than he had thought was possible through his training. Perhaps it was because he did not think that he would end his life in early middle age bantering with a rock.

  “You are so silly,” the rock said, “you say that you understand everything but you understand nothing at all. Do you really think that we posed any danger to you? We merely did not like our own terrain being invaded, and you were conveying many of us to museums and laboratories for study. We have feelings, you know; we are just as viable as are you. Come on,” the rock said innocently, “tell us the time and the nature of the attack. I’ll release you and you can even call for help. There’s no reason why you have to take such a strong position.”

  “No,” Hawkins said again. For the hundredth time he put his hands around his ankle and squeezed, trying to free it from the obstruction formed at the interception of the ledge and surface, but it remained firmly in place. The surface, also sentient, grumbled in reproof, and Hawkins disgustedly gave up and tried to assume a more comfortable position. Circulation had been cut off for a long time, and he assumed that the foot was gangrenous and would probably have to be replaced, but this seemed to be the least of his problems at the present time. “You can’t make me,” he said; “at least I can hold onto that. I won’t be a traitor.”

  “You’re all so stuffy,” the rock said after a pause. “You’re so involved with abstractions, when what you should realize, as we have, is that your existence is the hub from which the spokes of all being radiate. But I guess you don’t want to become philosophical.”

  “Definitely not,” Hawkins said, “and I’m not a theoretical person, anyway.”

  “Which makes you dull for conversation,” the rock said. It paused again, as it was wont to do; long periods would go by and then the dialogue would begin as if no time had elapsed at all. Perhaps the sentient minerals worked within a different frame or, then again, had to restock themselves. How they spoke, let alone in comprehensible language, was a mystery to Hawkins; he was not a technological sort, either, but more or less a simple man of action. “Anyway,” the rock said after some time, “there is no need for any of this. Actually, we deduced the attack time and method some time ago. We simply put you into a semiconscious state and extracted the information under hypnosis, then removed the memory of that confession from your conscious mind so that when you awoke you thought of time as continuous and the information as secret. I’ve merely been going on in this fashion to amuse myself. As you can imagine, there isn’t much to occupy the time here; we can’t move around much, and very rarely is there anyone to talk to other than minerals who are all parts of the same intelligence.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Hawkins said.

  “You wouldn’t,” said the rock, “and there’s no reason why you should. But, really, does it make any difference whether you do or not? Whatever will happen has already happened; we believe in the inalterability of time and the absence of chaos, here. Note the firmament, for instance. Go on, your ankle has nothing to do with your line of sight. Look up there.”

  Hawkins did so, craning his neck at an uncomfortable angle. The bowl of the sky appeared to be lit with many small fires which alternately flared and sputtered, and beyond the fires he could see a deep golden haze. The haze shimmered toward transparency, and he thought he could see dimly the outlines of many ships.

  “Our force screens,” the rock said rather proudly. “They are being maintained in place by collective energy. At such time as detonating devices hit them, they will self-destruct and explode anything above them to a distance of five hundred miles. So much for your fleet.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Hawkins said weakly. “This is a hallucination. You’re lying to me. You don’t have the means to do this, and even if you did, I’d never under any kind of hypnosis betray the whereabouts of the fleet or the time of the attack. My conditioning forbids it.”

  The rock seemed to shrug, a difficult gesture without hands or shoulders, accomplished through shadow play, perhaps. “That may well be,” it said. “All of this may be hallucinatory, conjured to impress you; but if we have the power to so hallucinate, we certainly have the power to extract secret material from your mind, wouldn’t you think? You’d better face the realities of the matter,” it said rather bitterly. “You’re dealing with a superior form of life here and you always were. If you had shown us a little consideration, it wouldn’t have come to this, but you regarded us as mere stones and rubble, curiosa for your te
chnicians. But there are ultimate equalizing forces, and you had better face up to it; you weren’t going to get away with this forever.”

  “I’m going to be in a great deal of trouble,” Hawkins said. “They’ll never forgive me for this.” He wrenched his ankle free and stood, tottering. “What is this?” he said, only then the significance of this act reaching him. “What is going on here?”

  “Oh, you were never really trapped,” the rock said. “That was all in your imagination. You hallucinated imprisonment out of your subconscious guilt. You could have gone at any time, but you were driven by your own uncertainty to construct a situation where you would confess. As a matter of fact,” the rock confided after another of its characteristic pauses, “your craft was never wrecked either. You landed here voluntarily and wandered over seeking to betray the time and nature of the attack. Of course your conscious mind couldn’t handle that, and so you constructed a fantasy of wrecked craft, boulders, and so on. Your defense mechanisms are amazing.”

  The flames sputtered above. Hawkins heard the dull boom of artillery. That was dumb, he thought at least in light of the repelling devices. If there were repelling devices. It all might be a lie, of course.

  “In fact,” the rock said with alarming casualness, “you hallucinated sentience itself. We’re perfectly inert and senseless; you’ve just projected upon us your own ambivalence about your course of conquest. Sorry to hit you with all this,” the rock apologized as Hawkins scuttled desperately for cover. “I did want you to understand the truth before you destroy yourself.”