The Triumph Of Time Read online

  By night in the walkways of New Manhattan, it was cats, catching with sudden claw at floating cloak or fashionable sandal streamer. Through the air of the town sizable and brightly colored creatures flew and glided: singing birds, squawking birds, talkers and mutes, but pets. every last one of them. Amalfi loathed them all.

  When he walked anywhere and he walked almost everywhere now that the city's aircabs were no more he more than half expected to have to free himself from the embraces of a burbling citizen or a barking dog before he got where he was going. The half century old fad for household pets had arisen after the landing, and after his effectual abdication. What time wasting quirk had moved so many pioneers' descendants to adopt the damnable svengalis as pets was beyond Amalfi.

  He made it home from the Hazletons' without any such encounter; instead, it rained. He wrapped his cloak more tightly around him and hastened, muttering, for his own square uncompromising box of a dwelling before the full force of the storm should be let loose; his house and grounds were sheltered by a 0.02 per cent spindizzy field the New Earthmen called the household device a "spindilly," a name which Amalfi loathed but put up with for the sake of, as Dee had once put it, "not knowing enough to come out of the rain." He had growled at her so convincingly for that that she had never brought up the subject again, but she had put her finger on it all the same.

  Amalfi reached his entrance lane and laid his palm on the induction switch which softened the spindilly field just enough to let him through in a spatter of glistening drops, and noted with the grim dissatisfaction that was becoming natural to him that the storm had slacked off and would be over in minutes. Inside, he made a drink and stood, rubbing his hands, looking about him. If his house was an anachronism, well, he liked it that way, insofar as he liked anything on New Earth.

  "What's wrong with me?" he thought suddenly. "People's pets are their own business, after all. If practically everybody else likes weather, what difference does it make if I don't? If Jake doesn't even take an interest, nor Mark either for that matter"

  He heard the distant, endlessly comforting murmur of the modified spindizzy under his feet alter momentarily; someone else had chosen to come in out of the rain. His visitor had never been there at that hour before, and had indeed never been there before alone, but he knew without a moment's doubt who had followed him home.

  CHAPTER TWO: Nova Magellanis

  "You'll have to make me more welcome than that, John," Dee said.

  Amalfi said nothing. He lowered his head like a bull contemplating a charge, spread his feet slightly, and clasped his hands behind him.

  "Well, John?" Dee insisted gently.

  "You don't want me to go," he said baldly. "Or, you suspect that if I do go; Mark just may throw up the managership and New Earth along with it and take off with me."

  Dee walked slowly all the way across the room and stood, hesitating, beside the great deep cushion. "Wrong, John, on both counts. I had something else altogether in mind. I thought well, I'll tell you later what I thought. Right now, may I have a drink?"

  Amalfi was forced to abandon his position, which by being so firm had imparted a certain strength to his desire to oppose her, in order to play host. "Did Mark send you, then?"

  She laughed. "King Mark sends me on a good many errands, but this wouldn't be a very likely one for him." She added bitterly, "Besides, he's so wrapped up in Gifford Bonner's group that he ignores me for months on end."

  Amalfi knew what she meant: Dr. Bonner was the teacher-leader of an informal philosophical group called the Stochastics; Amalfi hadn't bothered to inform himself in detail on Bonner's tenets, but he knew in general that Stochasticism was the most recent of many attempts to construct a complete philosophy, from esthetics to ethics, using modern physics as the metaphysical base. Logical positivism had been only the first of those; Stochasticism, Amalfi strongly suspected, would be far from the last.

  "I could see something had been keeping his mind off the job lately," he said grimly. "He might do better to study the doctrines of Jorn the Apostle. The Warriors of God control no less than fifteen of the border planets right now, and the faith doesn't lack for adherents right here on New Earth. It appeals to the bumpkin type and I'm afraid we've been turning out a lot of those lately."

  If Dee recognized this as in part a shaft at the changes in New Earth's educational system which she had helped to institute, she showed no sign of it.

  "Maybe so," she said. "But I couldn't persuade him, and I wonder if you could either. He doesn't believe there's any real threat; he thinks that a man simpleminded enough to be a Fundamentalist is too simpleminded to hold together an army."

  "Oh? Mark had fetter ask Bonner to tell about Godfrey of Bouillon."

  "Who was?"

  "The leader of the First Crusade."

  She shrugged. Possibly only Amalfi, as the only New Earthman who had actually been born and raised on Earth, could ever have heard of the Crusades; doubtless they were unknown on Utopia.

  "Anyhow, that isn't what I came here to talk about, either."

  The wall treacher opened and floated the drinks out. Amalfi captured them and passed one over silently, waiting.

  She took her glass from him but, instead of sinking down with it as he had half pictured her doing, she walked nervously back to the door and took her first sip as if she might put it aside and be leaving at any moment.

  He discovered that he did not want her to go. He wanted her to walk some more. There was something about the gown she was wearing

  That there were fashions again was a function of being earthbound. One simple utilitarian style had sufficed both men and women all their centuries aloft when there had been the unending demands of the city's spaceworthiness to keep all hands occupied. Now that the ex-Okies were busily fulfilling Franklin's law that people will breed to the point of overpopulating any space available to them, they were also frittering away their time with pets and flower gardens and fashions that changed every time a man blinked. Women were floating around this year of 3995 in diaphanous creations that totaled so much yardage a man might find himself treading on their skirts. Dee, however, was wearing a simple white covering above and a clinging black tubular affair below that was completely different. The only diaphanous part of her outfit was a length of something gossamer and iridescent that circled her throat under a fold of the white garment and hung down between her still delicate, still gently rounded breasts, as girlish in appearance as the day Utopia had sent her out to New York, in a battleship, to ask for help.

  He had it. "Dee, you looked just as you look now when I first saw you!"

  "Indeed, John?"

  "That black thing"

  "A sheath skirt," she interpolated helpfully.

  "I noticed it particularly when you came aboard. I'd never seen anything like it. Haven't seen anything like it since." He refrained from telling her that during all the centuries he had loved her, he had pictured her in that black thing, turning to him instead of Hazleton. Would the course of history have been any different, had she done so? But how could he have done anything but reject her?

  "It took you long enough to notice it tonight," she said. "I had it made up especially for this evening's dinner. I've been tired of all this float and flutter for a year. Essentially I'm still a product of Utopia, I guess. I like stern clothes and strong men and a reasonably hard life."

  She was certainly trying to tell him something, but he was still adrift. The situation was impossible, on the face of it. He was not in the habit of discussing fashion with his best and oldest friend's wife at an hour when all sensible planetbound pioneers were abed. He said, "It's very pretty."

  To his astonishment, she burst into tears. "Oh, don't be stuffy, John!" She put the glass down and reached for her cloak.

  "All right, Dee." Amalfi put the cloak out of her reach. "Your 'King Mark' sounds reasonably stern and hard. Suppose you sit down and tell me what this is all about."

  "I want to go with y
ou, John. You won't be the mayor of NewYork, you won't be bound by the old rules, if you take the city aloft now. I want to"

  It was weeks before he got her to state that ultimate desire. They had talked without ceasing after that blundering beginning. When it finally penetrated his cautious bald head that the message all his senses had been clamoring from the moment of her arrival was not another daydream from the chilly past, but warm actuality, he had folded her in his arms and they had been silent for a time. But then the flow of words began again and could not be checked. They had reminisced endlessly and how-it-might-have-beens and even of certain ways it had been. He was amazed to discover that she had taken into her household however briefly every companion whose bed he had honored during the officially celibate years; in her position as First Lady of New Earth, during the intensive family years, she could have installed twenty nursemaids simultaneously without attracting undue notice, just as she launched every new fashion and many of the fads that made New Earth what it was. That Dee had been cruelly bored had simply never occurred to him.

  But she told him the full tale of that discontent, more indeed than he wanted to hear. They quarreled like giddy young lovers except that their first and worst quarrel followed a complaint he could have wept to hear wrung from her.

  "John," she said, "aren't you ever going to take me to bed?"

  He spread his hands in exasperation. "I'm not at all sure I want to take Mark's wife to bed. Besides," he added, knowing he was being cruel, "you've already had it. You've pumped every woman I resorted to in half a thousand years. I should think I would bore you in actuality as much as everything else does."

  Their reconciliations were not much like those of young love; they were more and more like the creeping home of a rebellious daughter to her father's arms. And still he held off. Now that he had for the taking what he had only dreamed of wanting for so many years, he made the Adamic discoveries all over again: there is wanting the unobtainable, and there is the obtaining of desire, and the greatest of these is the wanting. Especially since the object of desire always turns out to exist only in some other universe, to be mocked by actuality.

  "You don't believe me, John," she said bitterly. "But it's true. When you go, I want to go with you all the way, don't you understand? I want to. I want to bear you a child."

  She looked at him through a film of tearssomehow he had never, in all the centuries of fancy, imagined or seen her in tears, but the actuality wept as predictably as New Earth's skies and waited. She had shot her bolt, he saw. This was the supreme thing that Dee Hazleton wanted to give him.

  "Dee, you don't know what you're saying! You can't offer me your girlhood all over againthat's irretrievably Mark's, and you know it. Besides, I don't want"

  He stopped. She was weeping again. He had never wanted to hurt her, although he knew he had done so unintentionally more times than he would ever know.

  "Dee, I've had a child."

  Now she was listening, wide-eyed, and he winced as he saw pity take the place of resentment. He laid the encysted pain bare like a surgeon before her. "When the population balance shifted after the landing and there were all those excess females remember? Do you also remember the artificial insemination program? They asked me to contribute. The good old argument against it was supposed to be bypassed by the assurance that I'd never know which children carried my genes only the doctors supervising the program would know. But there was an unprecedented wave of miscarriages and stillbirths and some survivors that shouldn't have survived, all with the same set of ... disadvantages, I was told about it; as mayor. I had to decide what was to be done with them."

  "John," she whispered. "No. Stop."

  "We were taking over the Cloud," he continued implacably. Presenting him with a wizened, squalling, scarlet, normal baby boy was one favor she could not do him, and there was no way to tell her so but this. "We couldn't afford bad genes. I ordered the survivors . . . dealt with; and I had a brief conference with the genetics team. They had planned not to tell me they were going to keep up the farce, like goodhearted dolts. But I'd been in space too long; my germ plasm is damaged beyond hope; I am no longer a contributor. Do you understand me, Dee?"

  Dee tried to draw his head down on her breast. Amalfi moved violently away. It irritated him unreasonably that she still thought she had anything to give him.

  "The city was yours," she said tonelessly. "And now it's grown up and gone away and left you. I saw you grieving, John, and I couldn't bear it, oh, I don't mean that I was pretending. I love you, I think I always have. But I should have known that the time for us had gone by. There's nothing at all left for me to give you that you haven't had in full measure."

  She bowed her head, and he stroked her hair awkwardly, wishing it had never begun, since it had to end like this. "And what now?" he said. "Now that life with father has turned out to be nothing more than that? Can you leave home again and go to Mark?"

  "Mark? He doesn't even know I've been . .. away. As his wife, I'm dead and buried," she said in a low voice. "Living seems to be a process of continually being born again. I suppose the trick is to learn how to make that crucial exit without suffering the trauma each time. Goodbye, John."

  She didn't look as if she were being too successful at mastering the trick, John made no move to help her. She was going to have to find her own way back; she was beyond his aid now.

  He thought that what she had said was probably the truth for a woman, For a man. he knew, life is a process of dying, again and again; and the trick, he thought, is to do it piecemeal, and ungenerously.

  For the first time in weeks, he walked the streets of New Manhattan again. He had never felt so utterly done with the purpose he had sowed in his people. Now that it was coming to fruition, he urgently needed to be seeking some purpose far removed from theirs.

  Inevitably, he found himself leaving cats, birds, svengalis, dogs and Dee for the dilapidated streets of the Okie city. He was almost all the way down to the banks of the City Fathers, when a suspicion that he was again being followed turned into a certainty. For a panic moment he feared it might be Dee, spoiling both her exit and his; but it was not.

  "All right, who is it?" he said. "Stop skulking and name yourself."

  "You wouldn't remember me, Mr. Mayor," a frightened voice said in several registers at once.

  "Remember you? Of course I do. You're Webster Hazleton. Who's your friend? What are you doing here in the old city? It's off limits for children."

  The boy drew himself up to his full height.

  "This is Estelle. She and I are in this together." Web appeared to have some difficulty in going on. "There's been talk, I mean, Estelle's father, he's Jake Freeman, kind of hinted about it that is, if the city's really going up again. Mr. Mayor"

  "Maybe it is. I don't know yet. What of it?"

  "If it is, we want on," the boy said in a rush.

  Amalfi had had no further plans to try and convert Jake, who certainly appeared to be as lost a cause as Hazleton himself; but the Freeman-Hazleton partnership represented by Web and Estelle meant that he would have to broach the subject again to Jake sooner or later. Of course it was out of the question that the children should be allowed to go and yet it was not within the bounds of fairness to forbid them out of hand, without knowing what their elders thought of it. Children had gone adventuring on Okie cities many a time before; but of course that had been back in the old days, when the cities had been as well equipped as any earthbound community to take good care of them, at least most of the time. Every thread he touched these days, it seemed to Amalfi, had knots in it.

  Temporarily, however, the fates allowed him to shelve that part of the problem; for Jake was waiting for him again in the computation section, in a state of excitement so febrile that the sight of his daughter and Web tagging behind Amalfi barely raised his eyebrows.

  "You're just in time," he said as though there had been some prior appointment. "You recall the nova I was talking to you ab
out? Well, it isn't a nova at all, and at this point it's no longer an astronomical problem; in fact, it's your problem."

  "What do you mean?" Amalfi said. "If it isn't a nova, what is it?"

  "Just what I was asking myself," Jake said. One of his more irritating failings was his inability to get to a point by any but a pre-selected route. "I have a remarkable collection of spectrographs for this thing; if you looked at them without any clue as to what they were, you'd think they represented a stellar catalogue, rather than a single object and a catalogue containing stars from all over the Russell diagram, too. On top of which, all of them show a blue shift in the absorption lines, particularly in the lines contributed by New Earth's own atmosphere, which made no sense whatsoever, up to now."

  "It still doesn't make any sense to me," Amalfi admitted.

  "All right," Jake said, "try this on for size; when the spectra turned out to be far too dim for an object of the apparent magnitude of this thing remember, it's been getting brighter all the time. I asked Schloss and his crew to neglect antimatter long enough to do a wavetrap analysis of the incoming light. It turns out to be about seventy-five per cent false photons; the thing must be leaving behind a tremendous contrail, if we were only in a position to see it"