The Canopy Of Time Part 12

Young lovers had come sweeping up a water lane in a powered float. They moored, stepped ash.o.r.e, and walked arm-in-arm across a mosaic walk to the nearest cafe. They chatted animatedly as they found a table. Background music changed tempo; the focus of attention slid from the lovers to the waiters. Their smoothness of manner while serving ("Certainly, madam, I will bring you a finger-bowl at once") was contrasted with their indifference when they were behind scenes, in the squalor and confusion of the kitchens ("Joe, some old cow wants a finger-bowl; where the h.e.l.l are they?") A close-up showed two elderly waiters pa.s.sing through the inter-communicating doors between dining-room and kitchen. One was going into the kitchen, one out. The one going in uttered with a wink this cryptic and sinister sentence: "He's eaten it!" A man at a nearby table, over-hearing the words, dropped his feeders and turned pale.

"Get the idea?" Harsch asked his audience. "Art is digging down. He's peeling off strata after strata of this, the mightiest city of all time. Before we're through, you're going to see some of the filth he found' at the bottom."

Hardly for a moment had he taken his lynx eyes off Mr. Smile P. Wreyermeyer, whose dead-pan counten-ance was partially hidden by wreaths of aphrohale smoke. The big chief now crossed his legs; that could be bad, a sign perhaps of impatience. Harsch, who had learnt to be sensitive about such things, thought it time to try a direct sounding. Coming to the edge of the stage, he leant forward and said ingratiatingly, "Can you see it building up yet, Smile?"

"I'm still sitting here," Mr. Wreyermeyer said. You could call it an enthusiastic response.

"Good!" Harsch said, turning briskly, 'gangling' to his yes men, raising a hand to Cluet. The image died behind him, and he stood fists on hips, legs apart, looking down at the occupants of the padded seats, making his facial lines soften. It was a triumph of deception.

"Those of you who never had the privilege of meeting Art," he said, "will already be asking, 'What sort of a man could reveal a city with such genius?' Not to keep you in suspense any longer, I'll tell you.

When Art was on this last consignment, I was just a fresh cub kid in the solid business, working under Art I guess I learnt a whole lot from him, in the matter of plain, solid humanity as well as technique. We're going to show you a bit of film now that a cameraman of Unit Two took of Art without him knowing. I believe you'll find it- kind of moving. O.K., Gluet, let her roll."

The solid was suddenly there, seeming to fill all the audience's vision. In a corner of one of Nunion's many s.p.a.ceports, Art Stayker and several of his doc.u.mentary team sat against junked oxygenatkm equipment, taking lunch. Art was perhaps forty-eight, a little over Harsch's present age. Hair blown over his eyes, he was devouring a gigantic kyfeff sandwich and talking to a pudding-faced youth with crew cut and putty nose. Looking round at the solid, Harsch identified his younger self with some embarra.s.sment and said, "You got to remem-ber this was shot all of twenty years back."

"You sure weren't so gangling in those days, boss," one of his rooters in the audience called.

Art was speaking. "Now Wreyermeyer has given us the chance to go through with this consignment," he was saying, "let's not botch it up by being glib. Anyone in a city this size can pick up interesting faces, or build up a. few snappy .architectural angles into a pattern with the help of background noise. Let's try to aim for some-thing deeper. What I want to find is what really lies at the heart of this metropolis."

"Supposing it hasn't got a heart, Mr. Stayker?" the youthful Harsch asked. "I mean-you hear of heartlesss men and women; could be this is a heartless city, huh?"

"That's just a semantic quibble," Art said. "All men and women have hearts, even the cruel ones. Same with cities-and I'm not denying Nunion isn't a cruel city in many ways. People who live in it have to fight all the while; you can see it in our line of business. The good in them gradually gets overlaid and lost.

You start good, you end bad just because you-oh, h.e.l.l, you forget, I suppose. You forget you're human."

"That must be terrible, Mr. Stayker," young Harsch said. "I'll take care never to get that way myself. I won't let Nunion beat me."

Art finished his sandwich, looking searchingly at the blank young face blinking into his, "Never mind watching out for Nunion," he said, almost curtly. "Watch out for yourself."

He stood up, wiping his big hands on his slacks. One of his lighting crew offered him an antaphrohale and said, "Well, that's about tucked up the s.p.a.ceport angle, Art; we've jelled all we need to jell here.

What sector do we tackle next?"

Art looked round smilingly, the set of his jaw notice-able. "We take on the politicians next," he said.

The youthful Harsch. scrambled to his feet. Evidently he had noticed the camera turned on them, for his manner was noticeably more aggressive.

"Say, Mr. Stayker, if we could clear up the legal rackets of Nunion," he said, "at the same time as we get our solids-why, we'd be doing everyone a favour. We'd get famous, all of us!"

"I was just a crazy, idealistic kid back in those days," the mature Harsch, at once abashed and delighted, pro-tested to the audience. "I'd still to learn life is nothing but a kind of co-ordination of rackets." He smiled widely to indicate that he might be kidding, saw that Mr. Wreyermeyer was not smiling, and lapsed into silence again.

On the screen, Unit Two was picking up its traps. The c.u.mbersome polyhedron of a trans-Burst freighter from far Papraca sank into the landing pits behind them and blew off steam piercingly.

"I'll tell you the sort of thing we want to try and capture," Art told his team as he shouldered a pack of equipment. "When I first came to this city to join Super-nova eight years ago, I was standing in the lobby of the Federal Justice building before an important industrial case was being tried. A group of local politicians about to give evidence pa.s.sed me, and I heard one say as they went in-I've never forgotten it-'Have your hatreds ready, gentlemen.' For me, it will always embody the way that prejudice can engulf a man. Touches like that we must have."

Art and his fellows trudged out of the picture, shabby, determined. The solid faded, and there before the screen stood Harsch Benlin, spruce, determined.

"It still doesn't begin to stack up, Harsch," Ruddigori said from his armchair. He was Mr.

Wreyermeyer's Personnel Manager, and a big shot in his own right. You had to be careful with a louse like that.

"Perhaps you don't get the subtleties, Ruddy, eh?" Harsch suggested sweetly. "The thing's stacking fine.

That little cameo has just demonstrated to you why Art never made the grade. He talked too much. He theorized. He shot off his mouth to kids like I was then. He wasn't hard enough in the head. He was nothing more nor less than just an artist, Ruddy. Right?"

"If you say so, Harsch, boy," Ruddy said levelly, but he turned at once to say something inaudible to Mr.

Wreyermeyer. The familiarity of it! Caught for a second off guard, Harsch glared stilettos at the studio chief; Mr. Wreyermeyer sat immobile as if made of stone, although now and again his throat bobbed like a frog's as he swallowed.

Harsch made a brusque signal to Cluet in the projec-tion box. He would swing this deal on Supernova if he had to stay here all afternoon and evening plugging it. He blew his nose and slipped a slimming tablet into his mouth under cover of the noserpula.

"Right," he said sharply. "You should have seen enough to grasp the general picture. Now we're going in for the kill. Are you story girls taking notes, down there?"

A babble of female a.s.sent rea.s.sured him.

"Right," he repeated automatically.

Behind him, Art Stayker's Nunion was recreated once more, a city which administered the might of Yinnisfar's growing dominance and swam in the wealth of a gigantic interplanetary sweepstake: a.s.sembled here as the mind of Art Stayker had visualized it two decades ago, a city acting at once as liberator and conqueror to its mult.i.tudinous inhabitants.

Now evening was falling over its concrete maze of canyons. The sun set, the great globes of atomic light tethered in the sky poured their radiance over thorough-fares moving with a new awareness. Cluet had dimmed down the original commentary, giving Harsch the oppor-tunity to provide his own.

"Here it is, night coming over our fabulous city, just as we've all seen it lots of times," he said briskly.

"Art caught it all as it's never been caught before or since. He used to tell me, I remember, that night was the time a city really showed its claws, so the boys spent a fortnight padding around looking for sharp, broken shadows that suggested claws. The craze for significant detail again. Some of their pickings are coming up now."

The clawed shadows moved in, fangs of light bit into the dark flanks of side alleys. An almost tangible restless-ness, like the noisy silence of a jungle, chittered across the ramps and squares of Nunion; even the present on-lookers could feel it. They sat more alertly in their places and despatched an underdog to inquire why the air-conditioning was not working better. Mr. Wreyermeyer stirred in his seat; that must mean something.

Behind a facade of civilization, the night life of Nunion had a primitive ferocity; the Jura.s.sic wore even-ing dress. In Art Stayker's interpretation of it, it was essentially a dreary world, the amalgam of the home-sicknesses and l.u.s.ts of the many thousand nations who had drifted to Yinnisfar. The individual was lost in this atom-lit wilderness where sixty million people could be alone together within a few square miles.

Art made it quite clear that the thronging mult.i.tude, queuing for leg shows and jikey joints were harmless.

Living in flocks, they had developed the flock mentality. They were too harmless to tear anything of value out of the flux of Nunion; all they asked for was a nice time. You could only really enjoy yourself by stepping hard on a thousand faces.

Art showed the hard-steppers. They were the ones who could afford to buy solitude and a woman to go with it. They drifted above the sparkling avenues in bubbles, they ate in undersea restaurants, nodding in brotherly fashion to the sharks watching them through the gla.s.s walls, they wined in a hundred little dives, they sat tensely over the gaming tables: and at the imperious signal of their eyes, there was always a serf to come running, a serf who sweated and trembled as he ran. That is how a galactic city runs; power must always remember it is powerful.

Now the scene changed again. The camera swept over the Old Jandanagger and began to investigate Bosphorus Concourse.

The Concourse lay at the heart of Nunion. Here the search for pleasure was tensest, intensest. Barkers cried their rival attractions, polyhermaphros beckoned, liquor flowed like a high tide, cinema vied with sinema, the women of the night were spiderishly busy, a thousand sensations-the perversions of a galaxy-were available at a price. Man, conscious as never before of consisting of cells, had invented a different thrill for each cell.

Harsch Benlin could not resist putting a word in.

"Have you ever seen such realism, gentlemen?" he demanded. "Here are ordinary folks-folks like you, like me-just getting down to having a whale of a good time. Think what wonderful propaganda these shots are for our little old capital! And where've they been these last twenty years? Why, lying down in our vaults, neglected, almost lost. n.o.body would ever have seen them if I hadn't hunted them up!"

Mr. Wreyermeyer spoke, "I've seen them, Harsch," he said throatily. "For my money, they're too sordid to have any popular appeal."

Harsch stood absolutely still. A dark stain rose in his face. Those few words told him-and everyone else present-exactly where he stood. He stood out on a limb. If he persisted as he wanted to persist, he would rouse the big chief's anger; if he backed down, he would lose face, and there was not a man here who, for their various reasons, would not like to see that. He was spiked.

In the solid behind Harsch, men and women queued tightly for admission to a horror show, "Death in Death Cell Six". Above them, dwarfing them, was a gigantic quasi-live jell of a man being choked, head down, eyes popping, mouth gaping. You could watch his epiglottis bob, it was a masterpiece of realism.

That show had actually been produced by Mr. Wreyermeyer himself in his younger days; Harsch had intended a pretty compli-ment about it, but now in his hesitation he let the moment slip.

"We needn't show all this sordid stuff, Smile, if you don't think so," he said, grinning as if in pain. "I'm just giving it a run over just to put the general idea before you. We'll-you'll settle on the final details later, naturally."

Mr. Wreyermeyer said nothing. He nodded his head once, neutrally. Scenting the way the wind blew-being half wolf, he was adept at that-Ruddigori spoke up.

"You're too sold on Art Stayker, Harsch," he said kindly. "He was only a common b.u.m with a camera, after all."

"Sure, Ruddy, sure," Harsch replied; he always knew when it was time to back away and slip in the crafty old betrayal routine. "Haven't I just told Mr. Wreyermeyer here that this is sordid stuff? Our job after will be to pick the good bits out of the junk."

"n.o.body could do that better than you, H.B.," Pony Caley called.

"Thanks, Pony," Harsch said, nodding cordially to him. Pony was his head yesman; the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was going to feel the axe afterwards, for not giving better backing. Why, he'd not spoken till now, just sat there leering at the stenographers.

Art Stayker's city was emptying now. Crumpled aphrohale packets, newscasts, tickets, programmes, preventatives, bills and flowers lay in the gutters. The revellers, sick and tired, were straggling home to sleep.

"Now, just watch this!" Harsch said, putting force into his voice, clenching his fists, gangling. "This is really a human doc.u.ment. This is where Stayker really came off the rails."

A fog settled lightly over Bosphorus Concourse, em-phasizing the growing vacancy of the place. A fat man, clothes all-unb.u.t.toned, reeled out of a bordel and made for the nearest lift. It sunk away with him like a ball falling down a drain.

From St. Bosphorus Cathedral three-thirty sounded, three-thirty sounded from Pla-to Court. Lights snapped off in a deserted restaurant, leaving on the retina an after-image of upturned chairs. One last prost.i.tute clattered wearily home, clutching her handbag tightly.

Yet still the Concourse was not entirely empty of humanity. The remorseless eye of the camera hunted down, in sundry doorways, the last watchers of the scene. They had stood there, motionless, not partic.i.p.ating, when the evening was at its height; they stood there still when the first milkman was stirring.

Watching the crowd, watching the stillness, watching the last wh.o.r.e hobble home, they stood in their doorways as if peering from a warren. From the shadows, the faces gleamed with a terrible, inexpressible tension. Only their eyes moved.

"These men," Harsch said, "really fascinated Stayker. I told you he was crazy in some ways. He reckoned that if anybody could lead him to this heart of the city he kept on gabbing about, these people could, these quaints in doorways. Night after night they were always there. Great To knows what they wanted! Stayker called them 'the impotent spectres of the feast'."

"They're still there," Ruddigori said unexpectedly. "You find them lurking in the doorways of any big city. I've wondered about them myself."

That was unexpected. It was not policy to wonder about anything not directly connected with Supernova. Harsch raised his hand to Cluet, a recrudescence of hope making him gangle again.

The solid screen blanked, then was filled with form once more. An overhead camera tracked two men down a ca.n.a.l-side walk; the two men were Art Stayker and his cub a.s.sistant, Harsch Benlin.

"In this shot," the mature Harsch told his audience, "you see me and Stayker going along to the home of one of these night-birds; I tagged along just for the laughs."

The two figures paused outside a little tailor's shop, looking doubtfully at the sign outside which read, simply, 'a. willitts tailor'.

"I have the feeling we are going to turn up some-thing big," Art was saying tensely as the sound came on. "We're going to hear what a city really is, from some-one who must have felt its atmosphere most keenly. We're digging right down into the heart of it. But it won't be pleasant I warn you, Harsch. You stay here if you'd prefer."

"Gee, Art," the youngster protested, "if something big's going to break, I naturally want to be in on it."

Art looked speculatively at his a.s.sistant.

"I don't suppose there'll be any money in this, son," he said.

"I know that, Art. I don't think only of money; what you take me for? This is something Philosophical, isn't it?"

"Yeah. I guess it is."

They went together into the little shop.

Darkness reigned inside. It seemed to seep out of the black G-suits which were the tailor's speciality; they hung stiff and bulky all round the walls, funereal in the gloom. The tailor, Willitts, was a little newt of a man; his features were recognizable as one of the Concourse night watchers. Art's underlings had trailed him to this lair.

Willitt's eyes bulged and glistened like those of a drowning rat. He was melancholy and undershot. He denied ever going to Bosphorus Concourse. When Art persisted, he fell silent, dangling his little fingers against the counter.

"I'm not a policeman," Art said. "I'm just curious. I want to know why you stand there every night the way you do."

"It's nothing to be ashamed of," Willitts muttered, dropping his eyes. "I don't do anything."

"That's just it," Art said eagerly. "You don't do any-thing. Why do you-and the others like you-stand there not doing anything? What are you thinking of?, What do you see? What do you feel?"

"I've got my business to attend to, mister," Willitts protested. "I'm busy. Can't you see I'm busy?,"

"Answer my questions and I'll go away."

"We could make it worth your while, Willitts," young Harsch insinuated, patting his breast pocket.

The little man's eyes were furtive. He licked his lips. He looked so tired, you would think there was not a spark of blood in him.

"Leave me alone," he said. "That's all I ask-just leave me alone. I'm not hurting you am I? A customer might come in any time. I'm not answering your questions. Now please beat it out of here."

"We've got ways and means of getting the answers we want," Harsch threatened.

"Leave me alone, you young thug. If you touch me, I'll call the coppers."

Unexpectedly, Art jumped on him, pinning the little fellow down backwards across the counter, holding him by his thin shoulders. Of the two, Art's face was the more desperate.

"Come on, Willitts," he said. "I've got to know. I've got to know. I've been digging down deeper into this cesspit of a city week after week, and you're the c.o.c.k-roach I've found creeping round at the bottom of it. You're going to tell me what it feels like down there or, so help me, I'll break your neck."

"How can I tell you?" Willitts demanded with sudden, mouse-like fury. "I can't tell you. I can't-I haven't got the words. You'd have to be-my sort before you could savvy."

And although Art knocked the little tailor about and pulled his hair out, he got nothing more from him than that. In the end they gave it up and left Willitts panting, lying behind his counter in the dust.

"I didn't mean to lose control of myself like that," Art said, pressing his brow, licking his knuckles as he emerged from the shop. He must have known the camera was on him, but was too preoccupied to care.

"Some-thing just went blank inside me. We've all got our hands far too ready, I guess. But I must find out. . . ."

His set face loomed larger and larger in the screen, eclipsing all else. One eyelid was flickering uncontroll-ably. He moved out of sight, still talking.

The screen went blank.

"Terrific stuff!" Pony Caley shouted, jumping up. "It should go over big. It should be real great, man!"

Everyone was talking in the audience now, except the big chief; they had all enjoyed the beating up.

"Seriously," Janzyez was saying, "that last scene did have something. You could replay it with proper actors, have a few bust teeth and things and it would really be solid. Maybe finish with the little guy getting knocked into the ca.n.a.l."

Timing his exits was a speciality with Harsch. He had them all awake and now he would show them no more. Hands in pockets, he came slowly down the few steps into the auditorium.