THE APERTURE MOMENT by Brian W. Aldiss WAITING FOR THE UNIVERSE TO BEGIN Chin Ping Neverson went through the indignities of Customs and emerged into a bustling street. Color fountains flared. There were no views of Outside. He was in the heart of the urbstak. He caught a petulent and moved according to the map he had been given. At Indigo Intersection, a man in a frilled blouse bumped into him. “You in a hurry, sunshine?” Chin Ping asked. “It’s the whole going human concern.” It was the correct password. They turned off together into an afrohale parlor. The man ordered two double nostrils of polkadot aframosta, and they sniffed. Floating, they moved into the gents’ room. Nobody else was there, except a guy flat out in the drying chamber, being massaged by a molycomp. “Hand it over, Earthie.” “Let’s see my inducement.” The man in the frilled blouse wore a flesh mask, a tissue of sentient, symbiotic skin that clung to the outlines of his face, making him unidentifiable. Chin Ping scanned the eyes, but they gave nothing away. They did not even have a color. Unblinkingly, they watched Chin Ping as their owner extended a jewel to him. Chin Ping whipped a pen from his pocket, snapped it open, and peered through it at the jewel. “Spectral signature says it’s a doppler,” he agreed. “Now the goods.” Going over to a splash basin, Chin Ping ran warm water around his skull and brow. He brought a damp tissue from a cachet and rubbed it on the same area. Then he peeled off his toupee. Stuck to the underside of the toupee was a thin envelope. He flung the toupee into a trash basket and handed the envelope to the man in the frilled blouse. The man took it, passed over the doppler, and was gone. And Chin Ping was free to visit his father. * * * * Two men were working amid an organized clutter of machines. So intent were they on what they were doing that speech was rare between them. The main noises were electronic hums and sighs, the flicker of figures through various synthesizers, and the occasional clatter as data readouts moved up on a monitor screen. They were near the end of one stage of their work; a certain intensity in their attitudes revealed the fact. The room was a mixture of workshop and luxurious rest room. The machines were grouped at one end, with coaxial cable and flow charts littering the floor. The other end of the room contained thick plummy floor sofas, a bar, still and movie projectors, and a screen. There was a tall window with striking views of the great outer sweep of the urbstak of Magnanimity IX, on which the sun always shone. On one wall hung a large oil painting. It represented a historical scene. A Roman soldier clad in armor and gripping a spear stood on guard at the entrance to a narrow alley; or perhaps it was part of a gateway. Over his shoulder, in the street behind the gateway, a scene of terror and chaos was observable. Molten lava and cinder rained from darkened skies, overwhelming people who tried to escape from what was apparently a doomed city. A man and a woman struggled down the littered way in panic. Only the sentry stood fast. Orders to leave his post had not reached him, and he remained on duty, eyes turned apprehensively to the sky. Copies, charts, dissections, and abstractions of this picture lay about the room, often in stacks. Magnetic lettering on a whiteboard announced aperture moment for faithful unto death, with color charts and diagrams appended. “We’re ready, Archie,” Hazelgard Neverson said. “Switch on the processor.” Archie depressed a key. A new humming note. The two men went and stood together, looking down at a delivery chute in the side of the fax-prod machine. Neverson lit a mescahale. Ten seconds passed. Neverson was a tall man with an air of battered calm about him. Although solidly built, he could look flimsy at will. Friends who knew him, women who loved him, claimed they loved but never knew him. Color slides clicked neatly down the chute, stacking themselves for presentation. When there were twelve of them, Archie switched off the instrument and picked out the slides. He took them over to the other end of the room and inserted them in the projector. Neverson dimmed the lights. On the screen, volcanic ash leaned steeply up against the walls of a town, while a volcano distantly jetted fire. An inconsequential view of a gate, lit by fire, part veiled by smoke. A view of two Roman soldiers, one about to leave. A street, an old man with his robes aflame. A building toppling, partly covering the corpse of a young girl. The sentry at his gate, looking up apprehensively, horror in the background. Dark shot of a tavern interior, with an aged woman huddled in a corner, trying to quiet a frightened dog. The sentry again, at the other end of the passageway, stones and ash falling about him. A knot of people, hurrying, led by a man with a gray beard. The graybeard trying to pull the sentry from his post. The street again, its houses burning, more fire raining from the clouds, with a flaming cart. The sentry, overcome by fumes, sprawled unconscious in the darkening passageway. The pictures were crude, constructed by a pointillistic technique that proved, on close inspection, to consist of myriads of tiny squares. The two men stared at each other. Finally Archie rose and held out his hand. “Congratulations, Hazelgard. It is going to work.” “We’ve a long way to go yet,” Neverson said. “Let’s have a drink.” He stood gazing out at the curve of Magnanimity IX. “The frozen present,” he said. “An illusion of the Zodiacal Planets, just because they have no diurnal revolution.” “More than that. They have no diurnal revolution because we built them in our image. They are the expression of our inward state.” “You know, I don’t feel that at all.” “Nevertheless, even for you the present is frozen, Archie!” “And when your paintings move, will that free you from the ice?” “A start has to be made somewhere. We have made that start.” They spoke passionlessly, sipping their drinks at the same time. They had had this conversation many times before in the course of the present project. In the same indifferent tone, Neverson said, “Let’s have the rest of the day free. You can go and join the junketing in the streets. I have to go to my life adviser.” “Don’t forget, your son is supposedly arriving on Magnanimity today.” “I’m so busy . . .” The two men looked each other in the eyes. “Archie, you have reservations about the tremendous developments we are cooking up here, haven’t you? Don’t you see we are opening new dimensions of art? Why won’t you understand?” The younger man cast his eyes down and said, “Our sets of values may be very different, sir.” * * * * Neverson encountered his son in the hall, and did not bother to conceal his annoyance. “I’m off to the life adviser, and I’m late already.” “Your usual loving welcome, Father! I’ll come along with you, if I may.” “Please yourself.” As he and Chin Ping climbed into the feeder, he said, “Why are you wearing that absurd uniform?” “It happens to be all the fashion on Earth, Father. Why are you living on Magnanimity IX under an assumed name?” “When one registers as one-year resident or inhabitant, it is customary on a Zodiacal Planet to change one’s terrestrial name. It is the courteous thing, let’s say. As to why I’m here, I believe that Aldo Wattis Karmon is one of the best life advisers anywhere, and so I settled near him.” “Does he make you feel any happier, Father?” Neverson stared into the distance. “He is helping me to live with myself.” His look was so weary that silence fell between them. The feeder had been programmed, and was traveling now in fast tube along the outer surface of the man-made planetoid. Below them, they could see festivity, which Chin Ping watched through binoculars. A long procession was wending its way through a public place, bearing effigies of a beaked creature, either animal or bird. The vehicle branched into a slower tube and entered a pile-apt, slowing as it went. “How did you get here from Earth?” Neverson said. “The fare’s expensive. You haven’t been . . . ?” “No more theft offenses, Father,” Chin Ping said bitterly. “I’m on bigger things now.” “I don’t know what’s to become of you. I’ve done my best.” “You . . .” Chin Ping checked whatever he was about to say. The feeder had arrived at the heart of the building, had signaled, and had been admitted into an apartment. Father and son climbed out, and Neverson announced them at an elevator door. As they were cleared, the door opened; they entered, and were carried down one floor. “If you’ve never been in a life adviser’s before, you may find this one interesting.” “I’ve never had need of one, thank God.” “Just keep thanking him.” The receptionist who greeted them was a standard polyclone female. “Herr Karmon won’t be long,” she said, showing them into a dim room with crimson draperies. Electronic music played faintly. They sank into lounges. “Are you writing any more fiction?” Chin Ping asked. “No.” “I’m sorry.” “You needn’t be. I’m involved in something much more important. Do you understand how petrified we all are in time? The popular understanding of time is that it flows, that present moments always turn into past moments, that days and weeks slide by. That idea is erroneous. We age, our brains store and lose information, but that is change, not time, and is internal, not external. Time, I believe, is frozen. We are inside an iceberg. We do not know it, but we are waiting for the universe to begin. The Big Bang has yet to occur and set cosmic time in process. Till then, we retain in our heads merely the broken dreams of a past universe.” “How, then, do we live, converse, have children?” “We do not. We merely dream that we do. Our belief that we eat, talk, procreate, is false, a belief shaped by distorted legends of greater and more meaningful acts that we as instruments will be able to accomplish when time does finally begin. We cannot fully understand yet.” Chin Ping was silent. Then he said, “Father, I did not mean to speak sharply to you. Please forgive me. I never seem to give you the correct password. I was upset by the journey here.” “It is absurd to believe that one generation follows another. They all coexist, like cards in a new pack. As yet, time is congealed, unidimensional. Do you understand me?” “You’ve been overworking.” The polyclone reappeared. “Herr Karmon will see you now, Mr. Neverson.” “Will you wait here for me, Chin Ping?” Neverson asked, rising. “Of course, if you want me to.” “I shall be a long while. You’ll be gone when I come out.” “No, I won’t.” “Well, we’ll see.” * * * * Aldo Wattis Karmon was a slight man who managed to combine a cold, reserved manner with outgoing facial expressions. It was difficult to tell whether it was the cold, reserved manner or the outgoing facial expressions that had been acquired, or both. He wore a long silvery alchemical gown, trimmed with fur, under which were black trousers and a white shirt. A whimsical figure, but still a considerable one. One end of his long consulting room was given over to his finches, fifty of them, which fluttered about in bursts of color. “How’s the animation going?” he asked. “We’ve had the first crude results in this morning. They do suggest that eventually I shall be able to achieve complete sequential high-probability animation for any painting I wish.” “Or any photograph?” “My interests at present lie entirely in Victorian paintings of what I call the Aperture Moment variety.” “All the same, your company will have to develop. And you will need funds and investments at all stages.” Neverson made no answer. After a silence he said, “Let us talk about my soul rather than my work.” “By all means. Though they are not readily separable.” Karmon crossed to a screen, and it lit at a wave of his hand. He pointed to a line of figures on it. “As you will observe, we have now analyzed your schizophrenia group. You are a Schizo AM 26a, which is rather a rare group. We have examined the enzyme content of platelets in your blood samples, and determined the percentages of monoamine oxidase, or MAO—” “Just a minute. What has monoamine oxidase to do with the state of my soul? I told you, since my wife died, I just need a madwoman, or a succession of madwomen. Something a little violent.” “Your obsession with copulation with the insane is directly related to MAO. Deficiency of MAO is directly related to a number of schizoid states. The MAO deficiency index in your brain has affected your response to temporal stimuli to such an extent that—” Neverson held up his hand. “I admit I’m sick. I admit I’m in need of help. That’s why I came to you. I’m in pain and misery and depression. All the same, you’d better not forget that I’m a dedicated artist, and my work—my genius, if you like—means more to me ultimately than my happiness. I’m in a state of rapture. I’m not having you tamper with my enzymes, even if it ‘cures’ me, so—” “The treatment would be quite painless and entirely trouble-free. You must have been subject to a genetic weakness, and in the grief of your wife’s death, your secretion of MAO fell below normal. A monthly booster shot—” “Normal? My dear Herr Karmon, don’t make me teach you the facts of life! Normality is a statistical fiction. I’m proud to belong to my schizoid group if it means I can see farther than other people in some directions. My art relies upon what you call my response to temporal stimuli. I’m glad of your diagnosis, but you can keep your cure.” The physician nodded in mandarin fashion. He went to sit on a dais close to the finches and rested his hands on his knees. “Such was what I anticipated your answer would be. It is entirely characteristic of your schizoid group. We grow to love our chains. Freedom is for suckers. So I have prepared to help you in another way, which I hope you will find more acceptable.” “I’ll listen, of course.” He lit a mescahale. “The finch-alternative method is for you. By rejecting a cure, you have, in effect, chosen a certain mode of living, of engaging with future events, the course that will conform to your group, bearing in mind a number of other factors. Had you accepted the offer of cure, then you would have chosen an alternative course. You understand?” “Continue.” “The course you will take through life will not be random. We could chart it absolutely, given all the other life factors you will encounter. Naturally, we are not given those factors, but we have enough data on you—your age, weight, disposition, predilections, financial circumstances, history, ancestry, etc.—to give us a very good idea of what the future may hold for you. You understand?” “The process you outline sounds not dissimilar to certain techniques I am investigating myself. You are going to synthesize all these factors through a computer and give me, in effect, later timephase versions of my present self?” Smiling, Karmon said, “I do not use a computer. My birds are my computer. These homeopathic finches, as you know, have a life cycle of two days. I have four of them already prepared, their systems loaded with toxics that will influence their actions in such a way that, when released, they will perform flight paths to correspond with the possible paraments of your later career.” “Ah. Now you’ve lost me!” “We shall find you, Mr. Neverson, a number of years from now.” He walked over to the desk and fanned the bell contact. In came the polyclone, bearing a plasite box containing four inert finches. Karmon, meanwhile, pulled back a curtain to reveal a large glass-fronted cage, three sides of which were covered with small square shutters lined in rank after rank. The shutters were painted in various colors, apparently at random. Taking the plasite box over to the cage, Karmon pressed a plunger on its upper surface, releasing a crimson gas into the box, where it immediately disappeared. He placed the box on the bottom of the cage before the finches could revive. As the birds came to life, they struggled to their feet. The lid of the box sprang open. Out flew the birds. In strange, erratic flight, they darted this way and that with a great flutter of wings. Whenever their plunging bodies touched a shutter, it fell open, revealing a number underneath. “This is where the calculator comes in,” Karmon said. “It is noting the numbers in the order that they are revealed, and keying them to a behavioral code. Watch—the birds are almost exhausted now.” The finches were flying more slowly, making more frequent attempts to settle on the bottom of the cage. They fluttered up, releasing more shutters. Then they fell dead to the floor in four untidy little mouthfuls of feather. The polyclone tore a printout from the compterminal on Karmon’s desk and gave it to him. He read it, striking out a line here and there, nodding as he did so, frowning, pushing his bottom lip far out over his top lip. “And what has this mumbo-jumbo proved?” Neverson asked sarcastically, after a moment’s silence. “Oh, perhaps I let you think that the method was totally reliable. Of course, it cannot be. We do have errors. . . . I’m sure this time we have an error.” “Why?” Karmon cleared his throat and stroked his chin. He also looked at his watch and nodded dismissively toward the polyclone. “The homeopathic finches appear to forecast so many disasters for you. People’s lives are not full of disaster—only in films and cinecasts—however much they may want them to be. I think we must have a few more sessions, and then we will try again. I reject these projections.” In a stride, Neverson was at the other’s side and had grasped him by the wrist. Immediately, a stinging shock ran up his arm, and he staggered back. Nursing his hand, he said, “Since I have no intention of believing this mumbo-jumbo, you’d better tell me what it says.” “Just keep your hands off me. You will be worse injured next time. My body electricity is marshaled to repel foreign bodies. The finch-alternative method, if you insist on knowing, predicts that you will very shortly meet the sort of woman you are hoping to meet, and she will fulfill—and more—all your wishes. Your friend and helper will turn against you, eventually to reveal himself as one of your unassuageable enemies. You will manage to turn your present theories into reality through the strength of your obsessions. But those obsessions will cause the emotional ruin and perhaps worse of those who depend on you. Moreover, your success will prove a disaster for the very art you vociferously claim to love. I have also to tell you that I see here your death—blood and a flight of shallow steps are involved, somewhere in the open air—at the hands of the woman who you think loves you dearly.” “Give me that rubbish!” Neverson jumped forward and snatched the strip of paper from Karmon’s grasp, sustaining another shock as he did so. “You damned quack, you’re just trying to scare more money out of me!” He screwed up the scroll and flung it at the finch cage. “You’d better come back next week and hear the rest!” Karmon exclaimed, but his patient was already bursting out of the door. * * * * The feeder took them back to Neverson’s pile-apt. Traffic-flow control directed the vehicle down to lower levels, so that they slid evenly among gigantic structures. “I gather the guy in the cloak upset you,” Chin Ping said, interpreting his father’s silence. “That was a real nuthouse in there— you shouldn’t take stick from anyone in a shower like that.” “Why don’t you talk correct English? That slobby talk is only an affectation, and you know it. How did you manage to get here to Magnanimity, in any case?” “If I told you I was smuggling go-go, you’d believe me, wouldn’t you?” “I wouldn’t put it past you. You know it’s criminal.” There was silence between them. They threaded their way through a square where dancing and festivity were going on to the sound of a band. Some of the onlookers carried effigies of a white, beaked animal. “What are they all feeling so good about?” Chin Ping asked. “This is a great day on several Zodiacal Planets. They are sporting their domesticity emblem, Donald the Duck. This is his day.” “Never heard of him.” “A matter of mythology—not your strong point.” “Uh . . . like you, Father, I’m waiting for the universe to begin. . . . Do we have to be at each other’s throats like this? Let’s take that white bird for a symbol of peace. I came here because I genuinely wanted to see you. I understood you were ill.” “You understood correctly. Did you also understand you could cure me?” Chin Ping waved his arms a bit. “Look, defreeze, will you? See me real, will you? Like, I didn’t kill Mother, I am not responsible for her death, and you can’t make me be! I grieve for her more than you do. You killed her with your lack of concern—did your phony life adviser ever happen to tell you that?” “Ah, here we are now at my home,” Neverson said pleasantly, as the feeder slowed. “I’m sure you won’t want to come in?” They climbed out into the hall and stood looking at each other, both locked in the hopeless complexity of their relationship. “You’re caught in yesterday’s cobwebs, Father. Step out of them, step right out of them and go on living again! Before it’s too late for both of us.” “What does that mean, exactly?” The boy hung his head. “Life isn’t easy for me either.” “You always made things difficult for yourself.” Archie appeared, putting on the flowery outer coat that he affected. He looked surprised. “Are you back already? It’s later than I thought. I’ve been running the Faithful slides through again. Are you going to stay with your father, Chin Ping?” “No, he is returning to Earth immediately,” Neverson said. “I’m sorry, Chin Ping, but I’ve just had a disturbing diagnosis, and your presence upsets me too much. You must go.” “If you want it that way. Don’t forget, I’ve warned you.” Archie put a hand on Neverson’s arm, which was immediately withdrawn. “Hazelgard, he is your son—” But the outer door slammed. Chin Ping had left. Neverson turned away. “You know the boy loves you. . . .” “Don’t reproach me, Archie—I can’t bear to be reproached. Perhaps I was too standoffish, but I have just been informed that I’m liable to be murdered by a woman. Why isn’t there just work? Why all this other side of life, this messy side? I love him, too, but there’s time enough to sort all that out when our work here is done.” “There may not be time enough for your son. Not all of us live in your frozen time, Hazelgard.” Neverson stood stiffly, his face grim. “For all your money, you’re my assistant, not my life adviser. Why don’t you see if Karmon has a job open for you?” He hastened toward his workshop and the safety of his art. Outside, the beaked creatures went by unnoticed, people thronged the streets, solar energy beamed down almost inexhaustibly. * * * * BUT WITHOUT ORIFICES Keith Road said to Miss Brangwyn and her daughters, “I’ve traveled a long, long way. . . .” The words hung for a while in Miss Brangwyn’s living room, and were finally removed by a molycomp. “A curious reaction to the only genuine Tiepolo-Neff inside or outside an art gallery!” said Miss Brangwyn. Her manners were always formal. “Oh, I do like it . . .I admire it immensely,” Keith said. “It’s all that Tiepolo is, and oh, how much besides!” She switched it off; the screen went blank, and hanging on the wall was merely a bulkily framed Tiepolo etching, Castle Scene with Penitents. She stood silently by. Her daughters, Polly and Polkadot, stood silently by her, half-looking at Keith Road, as if aware that all four of them were merely a study for some ideal group of four, arranged with careful regard for the long-unused light of evening coming horizontally through the glass wall behind them. “Why I said what I said was that ... the Tiepolo-Neff seemed to sum up for me the distances of my life. That’s why I said I’d come a long way. It was purely in admiration of your Neff, Miss Brangwyn.” “I understand,” said Miss Brangwyn. “Neff gave this work to my grandmother, Faith Brangwyn. That is how it came into my possession.” The room was full of precious porcelain. “Mr. Road has traveled a long way, Mother,” Polkadot said. She was the one Keith liked. “Yes, and by road, too,” said Polly. She was the one Keith did not like. Both girls wore blue. “I’ll walk with him back to his car,” Polkadot said. “You’ll probably be glad to get out of the Experimental Experience area, won’t you, Mr. Road?” “Oh, I like it... I mean, yes, it is my first time in an EE area, yes, Miss Brangwyn. I’ve been among the Zodiacal Planets.” “What were you doing there?” inquired Miss Brangwyn. “I was on a rerethinking course, Miss Brangwyn.” He tried to copy their correctness. * * * * He walked through the grounds with Polkadot. “It was great of your mother to let me see her treasure, Polkadot, I mean, Miss Brangwyn. I do much appreciate the privilege.” “Shit, we pretend to keep up conventional behavior—it’s all the rage—but you go too shit-holing far, Mr. Road. Don’t you want to seduce me or something, or not even so much as get a finger up?” Sunlight made her dress blink. “Yuh, uh, well, you’re a pretty girl, Miss Brangwyn, I mean Polkadot, but I mean, why, we only just been reprod . . . uh, introduced.” “Fuck that, do you want to lay me, or do you want to lay me not?” The grounds were beautiful. There were stately pink flamingos walking by the lakeside, not a dozen paces away. “‘Course I bastarding well want to lay you!” he shouted. He clutched her. Their lips met. Her mother’s and sister’s applause came faintly to their ears. Her arms went around his neck, her hair curled against his cheek. His hands ripped away the blue dress. He groaned with pleasure and got her down on the lawn. The grass was thick with flamingo shit. * * * * There ends, unfortunately, the last story ever to fall from the computer of Hazelgard Neff. The fragment has a title: “But Without Orifices.” It leaves us with a mute surmise, as does Charles Dickens’ Mystery of Edwin Drood, also uncompleted at death. Was Polkadot to prove without orifices? Would she prove to be a simulacrum (artifice-fiction—the so-called “artifiction”—of the third decade of the twenty-first century is full of simulacra)? Or does Neff’s title refer to some event as yet unrevealed, as seems more likely? Neff’s son, Chin Ping Neff, reminds us that Neff’s earliest work was The Golden Orifice, and here the word was used in a metaphorical sense. Neff refers more than once to “the fudged vents of the soul,” a phrase later plagiarized by other writers. Chin Ping says, “Miss Brangwyn was probably an amalgam of women that Father knew, right? One of them was almost certainly Catherine Cleeve, known in certain circles as Capodistria Kate. They were lovers at one period, despite the somewhat cagey tone of their first meeting, see.” * * * * Neff: “I like your dress.” Cleeve: “Do you? This is the first time I’ve worn it.” Neff: “It’s beautiful.” Cleeve: “The boutique where I bought it called it ‘tres cad, presque snob.’“ Neff: “There’s a split in the seam by your left shoulder.” Cleeve: “It’s designed for looks, not durability, darling.” Neff: “That goes for a lot of us.” Cleeve: “I have to be going myself now.” The conversation has come down to us because both Neff and Catherine Cleeve were wired for sound. Both had a mania for recording the transient; indeed, Neff’s whole life was directed toward imposing order on the fleeting moment and banishing impermanence; it was the fulcrum of his art. This obsession it was that brought him and Catherine together. Her two daughters were already grown up and living in EE cities, Vienna, Austria, and Trieste, Italy. NeffPanimation was the brain child of Neff and Catherine and their computers. The mating of their computers, charged as they were with life data, was fully as traumatic as the mating of the two human beings. And NeffPanimation exploited to the full that Neffian obsession with the transient. “This all happened before I was locked away for antiexperimental behavior,” Chin Ping says, inserting the thumb of his right hand in his left ear. “Father had this thing about Victorian paintings, which were very fashionable again in the 2020’s. He saw in them what he called the Aperture Moment, a frozen moment of time typically defined by artists from John Martin’s day to Sickert’s. Their whole range of pictures just doesn’t make sense unless and until you ask yourself the sort of extra-artistic question ‘What happens next?’ right? “I mean, like take one of the most famous paintings of the period, Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, well, it’s not just a composition featuring some Victorian skirt rising from a piano—at least, it’s only that from the narrow old academic art tradition. It’s an Aperture Moment, my father said, where Hunt makes you expand a whole new section of your mind—new in Victorian times, I mean— and say to yourself, ‘What happened before now? How did this skirt get in this predicament at the piano with her boyfriend? How long did they know each other? Why doesn’t she like his tune, right?’ And the Aperture Moment also makes you think about the future, right? So you say to yourself, ‘What happened after this? Did she give the guy the brush? Who got the house? What’s that cat doing eating the pigeon? Was the artist there looking on all the time, like God?’ What you’d call metaphysical questions, right? “And Father said that it was by inventing—or at least perfecting, we’d better say, and accelerating, if you follow me—this Aperture Moment that the Victorian artists reflected the new dimensions of the age in which they lived, as exemplified by Darwin’s theories, which widened the stage of human affairs, back far into the past and forward into the future. So painters like Hunt helped ordinary slobs to appreciate the new expansion of the mind of which we are capable.” Chin Ping Neff was shot on Tuesday, May 1, 2051, two centuries to the day after the opening of the Great Exhibition. The execution was carried out in 577 Buki Tinghi Street, Singapore, before a member of the World Judiciary. * * * * “Sure, I remember the dress,” Catherine Cleeve said. She was still beautiful in a Socratic fashion. She spoke without gesture, sitting absolutely composedly. A chill radiated from her. “It was a nice dress. There was a split in the seam by the left shoulder the very first time I wore it. No, the right shoulder. It came from a boutique in Singapore. The girl who sold it to me said it was ‘très cad, presque manic,’ or something.” “You worked with Neff on his first Animation, I believe.” “Maybe it was the left shoulder. I know Hazelgard commented on it. Sure, I worked with him. Panimating Hunt’s Awakening Conscience was my idea. Or my computer’s, at least. He had done a Poynter before that, which he destroyed. I had a turquoise Tanzyme 5505 All-Digit. It never gave me any trouble. What we did, we fed into Hazelgard’s big computer all the data we could get concerning Hunt’s painting. Centrally, the data about the picture itself, of course, so that the comp could match color values and everything—the proportions, relationships of figures to background, light readings, dynamism with frame—together with details about objects in picture, structure, type, make, material used, style, period, and so on. Great fun to do. A lot of research needed. We were lovers at the time. My daughters still took up much of my life.” Remaining immobile, she changed only the focus of her eyes, so as to gaze into some inaccessible distance. “Hazelgard had always longed for an affair with a madwoman. And I was certified mad at the time. It is perfectly true that I had killed my brother to terminate our long and rather intense incestuous relationship. Oh, I can face the facts now. Hazelgard was marvelous. I owe my life to him. I can only say he treated me like a brother, in every way. . . . “We both had a mania for the transient. He was waiting for the universe to begin. That was what brought us together. No, it was the seam on the right shoulder that went. Mind you, the side seam split the second time I wore it. I know I told Hazelgard that it was designed for appearance rather than permanence, and he said, ‘Aren’t we all!’ Very funny, I thought it was. His whole life was directed toward a study of the fleeting moment, with all its chaos and mystery. That was all he wanted from life.” “That was why you animated Holman Hunt?” “Basically, yes. We also fed the computer all the possible parameters of Hunt’s life. First, his painterly techniques, complete data on palette, brushes, mode of work, analysis of lengths of brushstroke, all that kind of thing. Then his other pictures. Facts about his personal life, why he was blackmailed, how he ate the original scapegoat that died, his Christianity and his involvement with the slums through his mistress, Annie Miller—a very Victorian story! It all went in, together with a stack of information on the other Pre-Raphaelites and the society of the time.” She sat stock-still, not speaking, not thinking. Her hands were long and narrow. “That business about the flamingo shit. A complete fabrication. I believe there was a goose turd somewhere, but nowhere near Bobbie and me.” “And when you had fed all the data into the computer?” “It was programmed on strict probability transference to produce a sequence of 4,320 reproductions of The Awakening Conscience, using Hunt’s original as central Aperture Moment, and using time as a factor of variance. These were to be projected in the form of film. At sixteen frames per second, we had a four-and-a-half-minute film that was in all respects a genuine Hunt original.” “I believe there has been some argument on that score, Miss Cleeve.” “Believe what you will. It was a genuine Hunt, its subject matter enduring in time linearly as well as instantaneously. The brushwork was Hunt’s, and everything. Oh, I know what Sir Archibald McTensing said, but other critics were entirely on our side. Archie was a dirty little man, for all that he was the Big Panjandrum on Art. He buggered Eskimo boys, it was well known.” “At least the film was a great success.” “Success? Success! My dear girl, it was a revolution! It was ... it was a new art form, and we had invented it. It’s the schizos who explore and extend the world. Yes, Archie actually buggered them in the snow, if you can believe it. In the end, he caught frostbite where he least wanted it.” “What did your Hunt film show?” “It showed The Awakening Conscience as it really would have been if Hunt had had access to our manipulative techniques. It was Hunt’s film, not ours. The lady rises from the piano stool, where she has been playing ‘Home, Sweet Home’ with the man she loves. No, ‘Come into the Garden, Maude.’ She goes to the door, opens it, walks into the hall, and . . .” For a moment her immobility is broken, she bends double in the chair to utter a coarse laugh. “. . . and she nips into the lavatory for a pee! Ha ha ha. . . .” * * * * The interviewer reaches out and slaps the aging lady on the face, hard, three times, left cheek, right cheek, left cheek. “Think what you are saying, Kate, you old bitch! You aren’t in Capodistria now, or Koper either! This is Vienna, Austria, nor are we out of it, so you’d better answer my questions properly. Who am 1, for a start?” Catherine looked blearily up at her questioner. The woman was possibly in her late thirties, attractive, well-built, a splendid head of tawny hair. Something hard about her mouth. “I know we’ve met before.” “Of course we’ve met before. I’m Polkadot, your daughter. Remember me now?” The older woman in the wheelchair began to cry. “You’re trying to make me unhappy. I don’t have any daughters. I had two, but they died when they were small. I remember burying them in their party dresses, I remember how pretty they looked and how I cried—” “You remember, you remember! Jesus Christ, is that all the human race ever does? Why not forget for a change? What about the future, what about what’s going to happen? Doesn’t that excite your intellectual curiosity just one little titsy bit?” “Not half as much as the past does, darling.” Catherine had pulled herself up in the wheelchair and was affecting a deep masculine drawl. “Besides, you forget I’m mad, baby, and madness is all to do with the past, isn’t it? You must have read your Freud and your Stekel and your Stockmeyer and your Rhukaiser if you’re any sort of a daughter of mine! The little webs in the grass, functional long after the spider’s dead, the old fridge on the waste lot, still trapping kids. . . . Come on, will you? Why isn’t there any air in here? You breathing it all?” “In your presence I never breathed. You were always a suffocating presence, even when Polly and I were small. I remember running out into the fresh air and panting, clinging to the big old Spanish chestnut and just trying to get the whole atmosphere of you out of my lungs.” “Didn’t do your asthma any good, did it?” “You see, you do remember me! You aren’t mad, you’ve never been mad! You’re just sick, aren’t you?” “Why do I have to remember you, just because you’re my mother?” Polkadot screamed and made a filthy face. “I’m not your stinking mother, I’m your daughter! Oh, Jesus, why do you make me live, why is there all this mess blowing around all the time, like I can never get free of it? I was mad to come here at this of all times, just when . . .” She walked about the room, big and bleak, behind the wheelchair, gesturing as she went. “. . . just when I’m in this dreadful emotional state, and my whole psyche seems to be breaking up. Do you know what I dreamed last night? I dreamed my little girl came all the way from Sacramento in a pink frock, and she just went to the Rowlandsons’ house next door to get her dolly, and she wouldn’t come to me at all, and I thought she was coming, but when she got as near as the gate, she hitched a lift from a car and was gone, and I ran out to stop her, screaming ‘Dorothy, Dorothy!’ and there was her little dolly lying in the gutter, all bleeding and broken.” She broke into convulsive sobs. Catherine started to laugh. “Hazelgard had bad dreams too. He’d tell me about them at breakfast, and we’d laugh at them over the grapefruit.” Choking back her tears, Polkadot came around to confront her mother and said, “You killed Hazelgard, didn’t you? You shot him!” “What gives you that idea? I liked him as well as any man I’ve ever known. He loved me, and he was faithful to me. Faithful unto me, Faithful Unto Death—that’s the title of Poynter’s dreadful Pompeii canvas, the first thing Hazelgard ever worked on. . . .” “His Panimation exhibition was so badly received that you shot him, didn’t you? There are several nasty streaks in you, Mother, but the worst is that while you’re a failure yourself, you can’t bear failure in others, can you? You think I’m a failure, don’t you?” The older woman lit a mescahale. “Go back to your husband, if he’ll have you. I shouldn’t think you’re much of a lay. I know you’re a failure. What’s even more boring is that you keep on coming around every so often, begging me to tell you so. As for Hazelgard, he wasn’t like you, he was a real man, he had a strong will to success, something every artist should have. When it seemed as if everyone turned against his invention, he couldn’t bear that. He shot himself more in anger than sorrow. I was there, my dear child, I saw him run out on the terrace and do it. I went to him, but he’d blown half his head off. Before I had strength enough to call for help, I went back into the living room, and I remember his coffee still stood there, the cup half full. It wasn’t cold yet.” “If he shot himself, then why are you in this criminal institution?” She was looking into the distance again. “You know what Hazelgard always said? That reality was designed for looks, not durability! I really liked that remark. It was one of the things that won me to him. ‘Kate,’ he’d say ‘reality is designed for looks, not durability.’ And the reality that killed him wasn’t at all enduring. If only he’d sweated it out a bit. . . . The tide of opinion soon turned. People were soon on his side. They wanted the product. . . . Poor Hazelgard! I loved him like a brother. . . .” Fidgeting, Polkadot said, “Well, that’s my cue to leave, Mother dearest. We all know you killed your brother.” “Do you remember that? I didn’t think you were born then. Funny how you get confused about such matters. Well, give my love to little Dotty. . . .” “I have a job now, Mother, believe it or not. I do women’s features for Eurovision. I’m going to write up this interview for them.” “Want a picture of me?” “I have one. Shows you with your hair as you used to do it when we were at Salzburg.” “Oh, I remember. That big antique tortoiseshell comb I had.” “Was it genuine tortoiseshell?” “The man said it was. And you and your sister used to wear black-velvet bows in your hair. Fashions were so pretty then.” “I guess that 2035 was about my favorite year.” “That was the year we had those donkeys!” “Oh, the donkeys! And that holiday in the Amundsen Sea!” “Wasn’t that fun, with the Polynesian music?” “Lovely! Oh, Mother, let’s do it all again sometime! You’re not too old.” “Of course I’m not! I’m still wired for sound. Just you wait till they let me out of here—you’ll see!” “I’ll wheel you back to your cell now.” * * * * AIMEZ-VOUS HOLMAN HUNT? The private viewing of the NeffPanimation Exhibition was well under way, and some of the reporters and critics were already glancing tipsily toward the exit, when Valery Mallarmaine entered with Polly Neff and Sir Archibald McTensing. Quimpax, Sir Archie’s young Eskimo valet, followed close behind the trio. The two celebrated critics were having a loud and sophisticated conversation. “He was a terribly talented young man, and I dearly loved him,” Sir Archie was saying. “You know he was one of the founders of EE, one of the first to realize that whereas a majority of the population cling to Traditional Experience, there is nevertheless a considerable minority who prefer Experimental Experience, and that the two groups would be happier when separated. The New Renaissance dates from that perception.” “A touch of Leonardo and Dirac about him, I agree.” Sir Archie smirked. “And Beardsley. . . .” “He and his sister Kate did really have it off together?” “Not a doubt! They were both so proud of it that they set many incidents on film. Careful what you say, though, Val—she’ll be here, Kate’ll be here, hanging on friend Neff’s arm. He always said he yearned for an affair with a madwoman.” They tittered. A gallery assistant brought them both catalogs. The men watched the beaten-silver pages turn themselves over. “No expense spared,” Sir Archie murmured. “Neff always liked to impress,” Val said, catching sight of the artist in the far corner of the room, wearing a silver alchemist’s gown. Catherine Cleeve was with him. “I see he’s included Poynter’s Faithful Unto Death. Temperamental affinity, I always thought,” said Sir Archie. “Neff’s like Pompeii—all very quiet and Roman and enduring for a long while, then suddenly, puff, the volcano erupts and everyone has to run from the boiling lava.” “Of course, you used to work with him—you should know.” “That was donkeys’ years ago. I bear no grudges. I doubt if he even remembers me.” “We’d better go over and be nice to him.” “He’s okay if you give him the right password.” He gestured to the valet to follow. There were ten Panimations on display in the exhibition, embodying single works by Turner, Egg, Wallis, Burne-Jones, Millais, Waller, Poynter, and Sickert, and two by Holman Hunt. The private showing was a fashionable one, among those present being Naseem Bata, V. T. P. Naipaul, Anna Kavan, Francis Parkinson Hunt, and two especial friends of Catherine Cleeve’s, Freddie Rhukaiser and Frank Krawstadt. Slightly apart from the others stood Heinlette van Ballison, the leading writer of artifiction, his android close behind him. For once, many of the guests were paying closer attention to the exhibits than to each other. Although the attic in Gray’s Inn with Chatterton dying caused some excitement, most of the interest centred on Hazelgard Neff’s earliest completed creation, The Awakening Conscience. * * * * Albert is playing the piano. The soft tinkling notes of Edgar Lear’s “Tears, Idle Tears” come from the stuffy little room, over which the eye roves among dull indigoes and reds. All is overfurnished; even the window open onto spring trees discloses only a claustrophobic little garden. Suddenly there is a break in the music. Annie Miller has pulled the sheet off the stand. “You are in a pet this afternoon,” Albert says. “That’s what comes of lying in bed so late of a Sunday morning instead of going to church like a respectable girl.” “You know why I was late getting up,” she says, half-sulking, half-coquettish. He sniggers and starts to play “Oft in the Stilly Night.” The rosewood piano tinkles a little. She perches on the arm of his chair and sings with him. The tabby cat bursts savagely in through the window, a sparrow in its mouth. Her embroidery is unfinished. The wallpaper pattern of corn and vine is oppressive; thieving birds prey on the fruit. He always had longed to have an affair with a madwoman. Old webs capture prey long after the spider has gone. A slight breeze stirs the net curtain. A copy of Noel Humphrey’s The Origin and Progress of the Art of Writing lies in elaborate binding on the table. Albert’s novel The Golden Oriole has stuck on chapter six, at the words “. . . hoped that there would be more alternatives than his life had so far offered. . . .” Annie’s voice falters and stops. She rises, moisture trembling on her eyelashes like dew in grass. “Come on, Annie! Let’s hear you! The eyes that shone, Now dimmed and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken . . .” But Annie moves away, tall in her sad, silly, complex dress. Her face is a study in pained intensity. In Ruskin’s words, her eyes are filled “with the fearful light of futurity and with tears of ancient days.” She strides from the room, closing the door behind her. The hall is dark. She passes a tall hall stand, crammed with coats and brushes; visiting cards lie on a little silver tray. A mirror catches a dim glimpse of her as she passes. She goes to a rear door and unlocks it, bending slightly to do so. There is a frosted panel of glass in the door, set around by lozenges of various colors. Annie lets herself into the garden. There is an attempt at lawn, but the garden is east-facing, and a high brick wall keeps out sunlight, so that the grass is thin or strangled by moss. Sun catches the boughs of their single plane tree. Two daffodils flower in a far corner. She closes her eyes, squeezing out a tear, and commences to walk back and forth. Once, a word comes from her lips, either a curse or perhaps the word “Mother.” An inquisitive small boy peers at her over the wall from the next-door garden. He wears a deerstalker hat. He clutches a hoop. The tinkle of the piano is thin in the Victorian air. At the window, Albert appears, grinning. He rests his face on one hand and lets his jaw hang down in a mockery of Annie’s dejection. “Come on! Cheer up! I’ll give you a drink, old girl!” She hesitates, then looks toward him. Smiling, she begins her return to the house. All in genuine Holman Hunt brushstrokes. * * * * “It seemed to go quite well,” Neff said. “I wonder how many of them realized that they were attending the birth of a new world of art?” Catherine said. They were riding together on donkeys, moving steadily through the extensive grounds of the asylum. Huge black or white screens had been erected here and there to set off special trees or clumps of trees. Lights burned underground. A few people walked, many of them alone. It was very early. The odor of cigars still hung about him from the night before; flat champagne cluttered his kidneys, making him pensive. “See the schizos taking their exercise! They’re our kind, yet not like us. The ability to turn sickness into art is a survival trait.” “The schizos are exploring the real world, the world of artifice. You spoke to Van Ballison last night, I hope?” He was watching an inmate who had walked up to his donkey and was frowning as they rode by. “Funny thing about reality. There’s a split in the seam by the shoulder. It’s designed for looks, not durability.” She said dreamily, turning the donkey’s head for home, “Reality’s for machines. We’re coming to realize that now. Humans were never happy there. They just had to live there because we had no alternatives before. Now, with EE and all the rest of it, we have alternatives.” His cloak was gray, her robe saffron. The long gold strikes of the early sun made them both the same color. There was dew underfoot, and little clever webs made of minute pearls, which the hooves of the animals broke. The grass bent and sprang upright again as they passed. Catherine sang wordlessly under her breath. “Are you happy, Catherine?” “I’m never happy, Hazelgard. We live so long, and we have to live so many lives, so many broken bits of miscellaneous lives. My daughters’ lives . . . Are you going to be able to face what the critics say?” He gave no answer for a while. They rode back along an avenue of poplars, where sunlight painted the shadows behind their eyes red and green. The android at the stables took charge of their mounts. As they climbed the shallow steps into Neff’s living room, he said, “Rapture. That’s what I always feel. Used it not to mean ‘possession’? In that case, I’m possessed. Sometimes I think I really am a considerable artist, on that score alone. Whether happy or miserable, I am always in a state of rapture. . . .” “You don’t care that these steps were the scene of a foul murder last week?” He paused, looking into her eyes. Her face, her expression, still and always gave him a shock. There had never been anyone like her. The spider had created its web and left forever. “No, I recall no murder here.” “Perhaps it’s next week,” she said. In anyone else, the reply would have rung like a feeble joke; from Catherine, the remark was merely confusing. For a moment Neff saw dirty arterial blood everywhere. It stained the walls and curtains as he entered the living room. There he turned and confronted her. “You can no more take my rapture from me than I can take your madness from you.” “Isn’t that why our relationship is impermanent? You always wanted an affair with a madwoman, but I as a person am meaningless to you. Only my madness awakes a response. Isn’t that so?” He cast his gaze down. “Isn’t it enough that . . . ?” The sentence was never completed. “Let’s see what the critics have to say,” Catherine said. She walked over to the fax machine, which had delivered six duplos. Looking through them, she selected one, pushed it into the go slot, and switched on. The words of Sir Archibald McTensing spoke from the morning edition of The European Times. * * * * What the NeffPanimation studio has achieved is little short of a miracle. Yesterday evening, I saw a new Holman Hunt. In many respects, it was a genuine Holman Hunt. It was our old friend The Awakening Conscience, that mawkish bit of kitsch of the Pre-Raphaelite school, which shows a woman having a touch of remorse about the things that were. I have never admired the quality of the thought or the handling of this picture. The paint surface is meretricious. But yesterday evening we were not invited to dwell on such exacting considerations, or to stretch our minds far toward an aesthetic response to an aesthetic act. What we were invited to do was to admire—and admire we did—the ingenuity of NeffPanimation in endowing the Holman Hunt with life. This was a world of peep shows, not painting. Accordingly, we saw the woman and her lover at the piano. We heard the piano playing, as the fancy man (wearing his gloves, mark you) gave us “I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight” and the woman sang. Then she broke off, went outside, and walked about the garden until the fancy man called her in again. All this in the peculiarly beastly palette of Holman Hunt, in suffocating pinks and indigoes. It was a Holman Hunt we were watching, a Holman Hunt given the extra dimension of time. You may think there was nothing particularly momentous in what we saw, that this was just one more tiresome technical trick. I disagree. I believe I have never seen anything so momentous. We were witnessing the death of art, nothing less. As photography killed the portrait, so now the computer has killed the whole aesthetic of pictorial composition. I was assured by Mr. Neff that his computer could have been programmed to produce the whole life story of Hunt’s wretched woman and her banal involvements. All he needs is backers; and can we doubt that in an age like ours, backers will be forthcoming? When painting is transformed overnight into a tarted-up version of the comic strip, can we doubt that the Philistines will be there in their hordes? For what we see here may be, in many respects, a genuine Holman Hunt; but it entirely subverts the artist’s original intention, which was precisely that his subjects and subject matter should not move, that the piano should make no sound, that the light at the window should be forever frozen. Only thus could he achieve his intention of forcing the viewer to reflect on such profundities and delights as he, Hunt, had to offer. There was room, even in Hunt’s limited art, for the connoisseur. Now the connoisseur is banished forever. Thanks to Hazelgard Neff’s computer, the connoisseur has been elbowed out of the way by the rubberneck. It would be vain to claim much majesty for Hunt’s original conception, but at least he strove to present us, as honestly as he could, with the dilemma of a fallible woman. All that has been banished now. Instead, we have the privilege of following her into the toilet. There are nine other pictures in this exhibition, all of which have been subjected to the same perverted ingenuity. One may watch—to name the most saddening victims of Neff’s new technique—the horses led off and the old house closed in Samuel Waller’s Day of Reckoning; Chatterton, the golden boy, quaff down his poison as dawn comes up in those hues uniquely Henry Wallis’; Poynter’s Roman sentry overcome by the disaster at Pompeii; and J. M. W. Turner’s little steam train cross a viaduct in a storm and its passengers alight at Maidenhead station. As yet, we may remain, if not entirely calm, at least composed. For, as yet, the Neff studios have desecrated no major artist, with the exception of Turner. But I give warning now. Rembrandt, Giotto, El Greco, Botticelli, Titian, Tiepolo—none can rest easy in their graves. Within five years I predict, we shall have the Mona Lisa smiling and waving at us, and shall be able to follow her as she trips away to sweep down her back porch. The long struggle between art and science is at last over. Science has won. Given a few more years, it alone will possess the field. * * * * Hazelgard Neff took off his cloak without speaking. Catherine walked over to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “How’s the rapture, honey?” she asked. “There’s a split in the seam,” he said. He hid his face in his hands. “You try to give . . . you try to give . . . You devote your life to it. And they don’t understand.” She clutched at him, but he brushed her away. “That is the artist’s role—to strike out always for something new, to break away, to defy, to ... to grapple with the unfamiliar . . .” He staggered out to the terrace, confronted the long shallow steps, stared toward the ever-changing aspect of parkland. Only the familiar ghosts confronted him, the deserted webs of other lives, other epochs. She went to make some coffee. * * * * Brian W. Aldiss writes: My story is about a current preoccupation—the future of the arts in a world where technology increasingly intrudes on the personal. I have written several such stories, but this one embodies the future art machine that pleases me most, though the fulcrum of the story is not so much the machine as possible responses to it. The format of the story is a tripartite one I have been using increasingly of late. By telling three overlapping stories that the reader is able to read all together, a greater density and complexity can be achieved. Writers mainly fall into two groups; either they are forest clearers or explorers. Some like to tidy the world and reduce it to a clear and understandable diagram. Others prefer to wander in the wilderness, rejoicing in it for its own sake. I like the wilderness. I have tried to put down a few human ambiguities without attempting to tidy them away.