The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales - [SSC] Page 7

  The trail went on. I wasn’t alone in following it. There was a black angel, from a world called Inferno, who crossed my path three times—too often for our meetings to be called coincidence. He never mentioned my father, but angels never talk about their intended victims. The angel’s name was Gabriel Hart, and although he had been born human he had gladly forsaken his humanity in order to become an agent of an alien justice that no human could understand. He had nothing to do with law—he wasn’t a policeman or a judge, or an executioner—but merely a servant of an alien ideal that I couldn’t pretend to understand.

  I tried to talk to Hart about my father, but he was perpetually evasive. I was afraid of him, at first, determined to tell him nothing which might assist him in his search for Hawker Fagan, but I came to realize that such an attitude was ridiculous. There was nothing I could do that might hinder a black angel in the pursuit of justice. Eventually, I conceived a certain fascination for Hart, which magnified him to superhuman proportions. I couldn’t like him, though, because I was obliged to fear him. I began to fear that his very existence might be a kind of curse upon my quest, a premonition of its failure.

  And yet, the quest seemed to proceed as well as might be expected. As the years and the worlds went by, I found more and more clear indications of Hawker Fagan’s recent presence. It wasn’t simply that there were people who remembered him, and more clearly, but that the worlds he had visited retained more of him. The impressions that he left on the course of events were deeper and clearer. I wasn’t forced to deal solely in distant and unreliable memories. I found houses in which he’d lived. I found broken, abandoned ships in which he’d flown. I found the stains of his sweat and his blood. I found things he had written and I saw the consequences of crimes that he’d committed. I dealt less often with his admirers than with his victims. I even found his children: my half-brothers and my half-sisters. In none of them could I find any hint of familiarity. None of them looked like me. There was no distinctive feature that they shared between themselves. I remembered all their faces, but there was nothing that I could sort out of a composite image of those faces that could tell me what Hawker Fagan might actually look like.

  The other children were all younger than me, of course. One of the older boys—he was sixteen, perhaps, or a little less—wanted to join me in my quest, but I could see that it was only a fragile adolescent whim. He didn’t have my determination, or my need. I wasn’t surprised. I had found no trace of other searchers of my own ilk: children of his that were older than me. Hawker Fagan’s other adult sons were evidently content simply to be his sons. Only I, Malachi, needed to find the man, to touch him, to partake of his reality.

  The clearer the memories of my father became, the starker became the contradictions and the paradoxes in the stories. He had left not one trail but many. To different people, he was different things. He was one man’s lunatic, another’s paragon of sanity and strength. He was one man’s hero and another’s image of evil incarnate. He was one man’s friend and another’s most treacherous and bitterly feared enemy. He was one man’s savior and another’s betrayer and murderer. He was one woman’s lover and another woman’s violator. He was one man’s defeat and another man’s victory. He was life and promise, despair and poison.

  Perhaps it wasn’t all true—but I felt that it was all real. The person for whom I was hunting had become Protean, capable of shifting his form and his identity. It is a mistake to assume that legends are reduced to human dimensions as we approach them more closely.

  On the day when my quest finally came to its not-so-inevitable end, I disembarked from a freighter on which my extensive familiarity with the vagaries of Ultra had qualified me to serve as its inter-dimensional co-pilot. The world on which the ship set down was called Calo, and I knew that my father had landed there not long before. When I discovered his latest—and last—ship enshrined in a launch reactor, primed for a takeoff that would never happen, I knew that I was nearing the end of my search.

  I asked about Captain Fagan all over the spaceport, until I found a man named William Johnston, who claimed to be his friend.

  “Can you take me to him?” I asked.

  He nodded, but his eyes didn’t dip with his head. They remained cool and hard, fixed on mine. He didn’t understand why I’d come. He hated me.

  “How is he?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “He’s dying.”

  There was no apology, no embarrassment. It was a simple statement of a simple fact.

  “Where?”

  “Let’s go,” he said. “It’s about sixty or seventy miles.” He didn’t want to take me, but he knew that I would go anyway.

  We walked slowly out into the sunlight, and I looked around. The city might have been a busy port on any one of a thousand worlds. It wore the uniform of human conception and human occupation, the indelible imprint of human thinking and human microbiality. I had hated hundreds of similar ports, purely and simply because of their similarity; they had conspired to give me the illusion that my quest was getting nowhere. They had implied that I would be forever locked into the same landscape, just as I was forever locked into the same space, whenever I came back from Ultra, no matter how long I chose to follow my dream. I no longer hated such places, though. I knew that I’d finally beaten the drabness and the narrowness of human imagination. I’d succeeded in finding what I needed to find.

  Johnston’s car was an open-topped affair with big tractor-like wheels. It was a standard cross-country vehicle, but the road was even and comfortable, and an ordinary car would have been adequate.

  We drove in silence. There was nothing I had to say to Johnston that I had not said before, on other worlds, at other times, to men who were intrinsically no different. He had nothing to tell me, nothing to ask me.

  The sun sank swiftly to the horizon and left us driving through a dim and silent twilight. Pale tresses of atmospheric halo-light fell from the dark sky like soft silver rain. There was no absolute night on Calo.

  The strange light gave the plain over which we drove the appearance of green jade shot through with streaks of purple and brown. The road was rutted with cart-tracks, and the land sloped away gently on either side. All around us I could see tiny sparks of light forming and fading, as specks of polished material reflected the strange luminosity.

  We passed through a number of small villages built around the road—shanty towns of broken brick, rough-hewn stone and wood. The people we saw were mostly human, but there were a good many aliens of a dozen different races. I guessed that the planet was a dumping ground for forced emigrants from the civilized, crowded planets in the local volume of space. There were no signs of heavy industry or extensive planned farming. The machines had not yet followed the people. It was an infant world, a world that no one wanted—yet.

  Johnston pulled up in one of the villages, in front of a well-sculptured house that looked a great deal better than any of its neighbors. It was older, made completely of wood, and testified to the investment of far more effort than the rest of the village.

  Johnston just sat still, relaxing in the driver’s seat. As I got out, he said casually; “The angel’s here already.” He had expected to surprise me, but he was disappointed. I nodded calmly.

  “I’ll wait for you,” he said, with a hint of malice. “You won’t be long.”

  “You’re very kind,” I said.

  I went inside, without knocking. The angel, Gabriel Hart, was sitting beside a bed, but the man lying in the bed appeared not to have noticed his presence. The man in the bed looked up when I came in, though. Hart rose to his feet and went outside, without a word or a gesture.

  Oddly enough, the man on the bed didn’t look much older than me. Even lying there, obviously dying, he looked young and strong, lie wasn’t a wasted man. He didn’t seem tired. He wasn’t falling apart. There was no sign of pain or of disease or of decrepitude; there was merely an irresistible impression that he was carrying a heavy, intol
erable load. Hawker Fagan was dying, but I had never seen death like it.

  “I’m your son, Captain Fagan,” I said to him. “My name is Malachi. I’ve been following you for ten years.”

  “Why?” he asked. His eyes shifted from my face to a spot on the scarred ceiling. He affected disinterest.

  “Isn’t it enough that you’re my father?”

  “No.”

  “Can you remember where you were thirty-four years ago?” I asked him.

  “No. I don’t remember anything.”

  “A world called Wayland. A house on a cliff. A vast grey ocean. Slow waves and sour spray. A small woman with thin features. Delicate and pretty.”

  “There was nothing delicate and pretty,” said the man on the bed, scornfully. “I never had any sons. Not one.”

  “You’ve had twenty and more,” I told him, quietly.

  “No,” he said. Bitterness oozed out of him.

  “Why do you say that?” I demanded. “Because you left them all behind you? Because you left everything behind you? Because you had to keep going in order to maintain your sense of being?” Clever Malachi. He knew it all. He had guessed it all.

  Hawker Fagan laughed, choking on the laughter. “I brought it all with me,” he said. “Everything. I left nothing behind. I carried it all. Every last word. Every last thought. Every last idea.”

  I wasn’t really wrong. It doesn’t matter where you think everything is. Leaving it all behind you is the same as carrying it all with you. It all depends where you are - inside or outside. That’s the paradox of Ultra. That’s the nature of the impotent god-men who are its natives, its navigators, its rulers.

  I took his hand in mine, and he snatched it back instantly. “No!” he said. “You can’t take it away. Not the words from my mouth, not the touch from my hand. It’s all mine. Everything. None of it belongs to you or to anyone else. You can’t take any of it.”

  “It’s killing you,” I told him. “You’re full to overflowing. You can’t hold all that. Even the universe is too big to fit inside one tiny microbial man, let alone Ultra. No man’s mind is big enough to be outside of it all. Your mind is breaking, and your body too. Let it go—some of it, at least. Give it to me, or give it to the black angel. I want it. He needs it. You can’t hold on to it.”

  “It’s mine,” he said. “It has to be mine. If the universe is bigger than a man, then a man is less than a microbe. He’s nothing.”

  “You’re not nothing,” I told him. “You’ve found your way through Ultra. You’ve done enough.”

  He laughed again, and coughed again. He still seemed relaxed and comfortable. The coughing wasn’t a symptom of affliction. “All or nothing,” he told me, “Ultra is all or nothing. So am I.”

  I sat down beside him on the bed, and his eyes flashed with anger. “You’re my father,” I said. “I can’t let you die alone. Whatever you think and whatever you feel. I’m your son and I’m going to stay here with you.”

  “I have no sons,” he said. “And I’ll die alone whatever you do.”

  We sat in silence for some time, while I thought about what he said.

  It was true. I couldn’t touch him if he wouldn’t yield to the touch. I couldn’t be with him if he wouldn’t let me be there.

  Eventually, I stood up, and went out. I hoped that he wouldn’t let me go, but he made no move. Everything that he said, he believed, however crazy it might be.

  Gabriel Hart was waiting for me outside. Beyond him, William Johnston was sitting in the car, patient and uncaring.

  “Is that justice?” I asked Hart. “Your kind of justice? That a man, a legend, like Hawker Fagan can end his life in that kind of chaos?”

  Hart nodded. “What is it that makes you humans think you’re the lords of creation?” he asked. “What makes you imagine that all the stars are yours. Alien worlds, alien life, alien thought—not just space, but Ultra too, not to mention the span of time and the smile of chance. You can’t have it all. If you try, it will kill you. That’s justice.”

  “You’re human too,” I accused him.

  “No. It doesn’t happen to me. It doesn’t happen to the blind, the deaf, the stupid, the cynical, the insane, the despairing and the immovable. We’re safe, because we never look the universe in the face. What about you, Malachi? Do you really want to be human? Wouldn’t you settle for something less? You can choose. You can be like him, and it will kill you. You can settle for less, and die on your own terms.”

  I walked past him, back to the car. “You’re apologizing for your own inadequacies,” I told him. “We have no choice. You and I could never be like him.”

  “Yes I could,” the angel said.

  Johnston started the car.

  Captain Fagan died alone.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE FACE OF AN ANGEL

  When Mrs. Allison had gone, taking the photo-quality A4 sheet from the printer with her, Hugo Victory took another look at the image on his computer screen, which displayed her face as it would appear when the surgery she had requested had been carried out.

  The software Victory used to perform that task had started out as a standard commercial package intended as much for advertisement purposes as to assist him to plan his procedures, but he had modified it considerably in order to take aboard his own innovations and the idiosyncrasies of his technique. Like all great artists, Victory was one of a kind; no other plastic surgeon in the world plied his scalpels with exactly the same style. He had been forced to learn programming in order to reconstruct the software to meet his own standards of perfection, but he had always been prepared to make sacrifices in the cause of his art.

  Victory considered the contours of Mrs. Allison’s as-yet-imaginary face for six minutes, using his imagination to investigate the possibility that more might be done to refresh her fading charms. He decided in the end that there was not. Given the limitations of his material, the image on the screen was the best attainable result. It only remained to reproduce in practice what the computer defined as attainable. He only had to click the mouse twice to replace the image of the face with an image of the musculature beneath, already marked up with diagrammatic indications of the required incisions, excisions and reconnections. Some were so delicate that he would have to use a robotic arm to carry out the necessary microsurgery, collaborating with the computer in its guidance.

  Victory printed out the specifications, and laid the page in the case-file, on top of his copy of the image that Mrs. Allison had taken with her. Then he buzzed Janice and asked her whether his next potential client had arrived.

  There was a slight tremor in the secretary’s voice when she confirmed that a Mr. Gwynplaine had indeed arrived. Victory frowned when he heard it, because the first duty of an employee in her situation was to remain pleasantly impassive in the face of any deformation—but he forgave her as soon as the client appeared before him. If ever there was a man in need of plastic surgery, Victory thought, it was the man who had replaced Mrs. Allison in the chair on the far side of his desk. And if there was one man in the world who could give him exactly what he needed. Victory also thought, it was Dr. Hugo Victory.

  “I’m sorry you had to wait so long for an appointment, Mr. Gwynplaine,” Victory said, smoothly. “I’m a very busy man.”

  “I know,” said Gwynplaine, unsmilingly. Victory judged that the damage inflicted on Gwynplaine’s face—obviously by fire—had paralyzed some muscles while twisting others into permanent contraction, leaving the man incapable of smiling. The injuries were by no means fresh; Gwynplaine might not be quite as old as he looked, but Victory judged that he must be at least fifty, and that the hideous scars must have been in place for at least half his lifetime. If he’d acquired the injuries in the Falklands, the army’s plastic surgeons would have undone at least some of the damage, and all employers had to carry insurance against injuries inflicted by industrial fires, so the accident must have been a private affair. Victory had never s
een anyone hurt in quite that way by a house fire—not, at any rate, anyone who had survived the experience.

  “Your problem is very evident,” Victory said, rising to his feet and readying himself to take a closer look, “but I wonder why you’ve left it so long before seeking treatment.”

  “You mistake the reason for my visit, Doctor,” Gwynplaine said, in a voice that was eerily distorted by his inability to make full use of his lips, although long practice had evidently enabled him to find a way of pronouncing every syllable in a comprehensible manner. When Victory glanced down at the note Janice had made, the slightly monstrous voice added: “As your secretary also did. I fear that I allowed her to make the assumption, rather than state my real business, lest she turn me away.”

  As he spoke, the paragon of ugliness lifted the briefcase that he had brought with him and snapped the catch.