World of Arlesia
Fantasy & Science Fiction – Winter-Spring 1950
(1950)*
Margaret St. Clair

	"That's odd," you said, looking up from the financial page. "It seems Lunar Mines is going to declare a dividend on its common stock this year after all I heard keeping the workers in space suits all the time was running their production costs up too high, and there was supposed to be some engineering reason why they couldn't put the mines under a universal dome. But Lunar always had clever technicians. The article says they expect to cut a juicy melon at Christmas time." You folded the evening paper and looked at me. "Are we going anywhere tonight?"

	"Oh, if we can find a good picture, something we haven't seen ... We've been to all the good ones, Bill."

	"Let's see," you said, "something caught my eye in the inside pages. Here." You spread the paper open again and pointed.

	There was a drawing of a woman's head, wide-eyed, flat-nosed, with subtly-smiling mouth, the filmy hair streaming out all around the head in a circle, and little fishes darting in and out through the floating meshes. "World of Arlesia," I read, "in a double bill with Diabolique. The strangest pictures ever filmed. A unique visit to another world."

	"World of Arlesia," I repeated reflectively. "I think I've heard of it. They used a special filming process, and there's some reproduction of tactile sensations and smells. It's new."

	"I remember the name, too," you agreed. "It's about a radio operator on a motor ship. He keeps getting messages for which he can't account. It turns out that they're coming from the people of Arlesia, the underwater world. It was filmed by some small independent company."

	The theatre was in a remote part of the city, a small building, not one of the usual picture houses. Inside, the seats spread out in a semi-circle around a low stage; the walls were pale cream and the draperies dull red, of heavy velvet. The audience was of fair size.

	After an interval, a woman came out and stood before the velvet curtains. She was slender, tall, with a dead-white skin and very dark red hair. She wore a quiet, well-tailored suit. She was carrying a square black box.

	"Good evening," she said, bowing politely toward the audience. "Tonight I will perform for you WORLD OF ARLESIA."

	She seated herself at a table to the left of the stage with the black box before her. At a slight movement of her hand, the curtain slid back from the stage and the house lights went out.

	A slow play of colors began to move across the stage. After a little while the tempo accelerated; the colors grew more and more bright. They began to hurt my eyes, and I kept looking away. I noticed, Bill, that you were gazing with fixed attention at the screen, as if fascinated.

	The movement on the screen reached a whirling climax and then started to slacken again. The colors dimmed and dulled; finally, with a last slow circling, they faded out ...

	You and I were driving uphill. It was a sunny afternoon, the air pleasant and warm. We're really in the picture, I thought with dreamy satisfaction as we followed the winding road up, but it's very different from what I expected it would be.

	At the top of the hill, you stopped the car and got out. I followed you. Together we walked down a brick path toward a house in the hollow.

	A man came out toward us. He bowed slightly and smiled. "You're the radio operator, I suppose," I said to him. Perhaps he would tell us about his adventures, or perhaps he would take us with him on the ship.

	He raised his eyebrows slightly, as if in surprise. "No," he answered, "I'm your guide." He led us down into the garden. There was a shelf built against the side of the house, and on it were three underwater masks and simple respirators.

	"Do you see that shimmering ahead?" he asked, pointing through the trees. "That's where the underwater world of Arlesia begins. You are to put on your masks and respirators, and we will go hunting fish."

	I hesitated. "Oh, it's perfectly safe," the guide urged. "Overhead there are tons and tons of water, of course, but the masks are of special design. See, your husband has already put his on." I looked toward you and saw you, faintly grotesque in your new accouterment, listening eagerly to what the guide said.

	When I had put on my mask, he handed us each a slender spear. "We catch the fish with these," he said. "Come on." He led us forward.

	The water seemed to thicken about our limbs, and we moved more slowly as we advanced. Ahead, there were opalescent swirlings in the sunny water, vagrant rainbow plays of color that might have been the motions of schools of fish. We toiled painfully after them over the level ocean floor.

	You were excited. Through the thick glass of your mask I could see you smile, and once you turned to me in triumph, saying, "See the one I caught then!" and held out your bare spear for me to see.

	I soon tired of the fruitless sport. I stood watching you and the guide flounder after the elusive water-whirls, feeling myself divided between dreamy acceptance of everything and a faint uneasiness which might even grow into fright.

	"That's enough," the guide said at last. "Now we'll go on in." He led us through the darkening waters along a narrow path that ran between lumps of what might have been coral. A greenish building loomed up ahead.

	"Excuse me," the guide said. "I want to speak to the people inside." He opened a door and called out something to the women who were standing within in the greenish dusk or moving dully at some unknown task. None of them wore respirators or masks.

	Then ... "This isn't underwater," I said, facing the guide. "There aren't tons of water overhead. If there were, you couldn't have opened the door just now; those people would have drowned. And we couldn't talk to each other underwater without a radio. I don't like it here."

	"Oh, yes, yes, it is underwater," the guide replied quickly, urgently. "It's all underwater, everything. What gives you such a strange idea? This is Arlesia, the underwater world." He pointed upward, to where the light was coming down thickened, as through layers of greenish gauze. "See how the light is, filtered through those fathoms and fathoms of water above us? Now do you believe this is what I say it is?"

	I looked down at my hands, my feet. I wasn't even wet. "No," I replied.

	"I'll have one of the women finish showing you about," the guide said with agitated haste. "As soon as you've seen more, you'll be convinced." He motioned to one of the women in the room and she came drifting up to us, her face a dim, brownish oval. "Take her on in," he bade her. "See that she sees enough. Be sure."

	The woman put her hand on my wrist and began to draw me into a corridor. "Where's my husband?" I asked, looking back.

	"He's being taken on in," she replied in a monotone. "He's all right. Don't worry. He's perfectly all right."

	We moved down a long dim passage toward a heavy door. "Come in here," she said. "After you've been in here, you'll understand things better. It won't be any trouble for you to believe." She pushed the door open with her shoulder and tried to draw me inside.

	I pulled back. I had caught a glimpse of complicated machines, of a huge screen on which coruscated just such dazzling colors as those I had already seen in the theatre. An inhuman gobbling and whirring came from the room.

	"I won't," I said. "You're trying to do something to me, something to my mind. I won't go in there."

	"Ah, well," she said. She dropped my wrist and was silent. She looked at me with a vague half-smile. "You get tired of living underwater all the time," she said in a tone of tremulous confiding.

	She clasped her long fingers around my wrist once more. I followed her reluctantly. Was this the picture, World of Arlesia? Wasn't the pretence, rather, that I was in some fantastic place designed to hide from me the fact that this was real, that something real and bad was going on?

	"You ought to've gone in that room," my guide said, turning to me in faint reproach. "You'd've understood everything better then. But see." She held open another door for me to look within. Under a flickering blueish-green light, with the sharp smell of ozone in the air, I saw naked women lying on couches, row after row of them, tier after tier. There seemed to be some sort of electrical terminals at their heads and at their feet. In the difficult light I fixed my eyes on the face of one nearest me; her face was tense and contorted, deathly white, and blood trickled slowly from her lips,

	"What are you doing to them?" I cried. "She's being hurt! What are you doing?"

	"Why, they're having the most beautiful dreams," the woman said, wearing a faint smile. She lowered her voice. "I heard them talking about it once. They said something about transmitting them, or something like that."

	Still leading me by the wrist, she took me through the long rooms into another of only slightly smaller size. Stacked up in layers against its sides were what I at first took to be brocaded rolls of silk. Then I saw that they were the swaddled bodies of women, shrunken and dry.

	"What has happened to them?" I demanded, shrinking back and pointing at the piles. "Are they dead? They look dried up, as if all the blood has been sucked out of them."

	"Oh, no, of course not. They're learning to be mermaids, dear."

	"To be mermaids? That's ridiculous." I felt faint.

	The woman came close to me, her eyeballs swiveling from side to side as she looked agitatedly around the room. She put her face close to my ear. "Once I heard a leader say," she breathed, her voice a mere shred of sound, "that they had been transmitted to the moon. To work in the mines. They don't need air or food. They're part on the moon and part here."

	"On the moon? What—"

	"Hush, hush! They're learning to be mermaids, dear. That's the way it really is."

	She led me on through the room and out into another corridor. We stopped at a little door near an ascending stair.

	"Go in there and take off your things, dear," she bade me. "All of them. Then we'll go back." She gave me a little push and a dim smile.

	I clutched the door jamb. "I won't," I said. "I won't go in there. I want my husband back. I want out of here." I began to cry.

	"But you've got to!" She pulled at my wrist, using an unsuspected strength. She was speaking from between clenched teeth. "You've just got to! You can't act like this!"

	I tried to pull away. Then I saw a woman hurrying down the stair toward us. She looked brisk and wide-awake; she almost seemed normal. It seemed to me she was some sort of a matron or wardress. Diamonds glittered at her ears, her neck, her plump wrists.

	"What's all this, Xenia?" she snapped. "What are you doing? Using force? I won't have that, it's too dangerous."

	"She won't take her things off," the other woman whined. "She doesn't want to—to start dreaming."

	"Won't take her things off?" She was close to me, frowning. "Then how did she get in as far as this?"

	I was sick with fright. But I tried not to show it, to stop crying.

	"I want out of here," I said. "I want my husband back. Now!"

	"But, child, that's impossible." Her voice was reasonable, kind, even, but her eyes glittered with a colder fire than did her diamonds. "You must see that. You can't be processed if you're unwilling. And if you stay here, you might raise the sleepers. And that would start something it would be hard to stop."

	"You could exhaust her," Xenia said eagerly. "She wouldn't have to be willing ... for that."

	I felt the stout woman's plump hand under my chin, saw her cold eyes boring into mine.

	"Perhaps. Hmmn." She shook her head. "No. Not this type. She would be of no use to us whatever. And what would we do with the body?"

	I tried to keep the eagerness and the terror out of my voice. "You could let me go. It's not impossible. Don't you see, no one would believe that this was anything except the movie, World of Arlesia? All this is in the picture, isn't it? I saw what I was meant to see—the radio operator's adventures—the fish-hunting."

	It was no use. The stout woman shook her head.

	"You're clever, girl," she said. "You would be, of course. And you've seen too much. Very much too much. We can't have you free, to give away trade secrets."

	"Then you'll have to kill me," I cried. "I—I won't give in—I won't let you do—whatever you want to do to me!"

	"You'll suffer for this, Xenia!" The stout woman's arm shot out, pulling Xenia violently toward her. She shook her so hard I thought Xenia's spine would crack. "You'll have no more of—of what you need! I'll take it away from you. Forever! Forever, do you hear?"

	The listless Xenia was suddenly filled with energy. She pulled herself free and her face contorted with desperate anger.

	"Then I'll tell them about her. I'll tell the one who always hurts. You'll get yours, then. The penalty for mismanagement."

	The stout woman bit her lip savagely. "All right, then! Let her go. Take her out, all the way! I will settle with you, later."

	My knees began to shake, then, and I wanted to run. Xenia's dusky hands were pushing me out, away from there, but I wouldn't go.

	"I won't go without my husband. I want him back!"

	"Hush!" the stout woman almost screamed. Her face was murderous. "You'll get him. Take him out, too, Xenia. Hurry, now, before—before they find out!"

	We were sitting in the theater again. Everyone else had gone; the building was chilly, and only a few dim lights burned. You yawned and stretched.

	"I certainly got cramped sitting still so long," you said. "But the picture was interesting, didn't you think?"

	"Yes," I replied.

	"It was all so real. I like that part about catching the fish—remember all those big fish I caught, twenty or so, all colors, and some even with stripes?"

	"Yes, that was fun."

	"And all those mermaids, swimming around? When the guide went into the cave to talk to them? That was really beautiful." 

	"Yes, I liked that."

	"It was quite a picture," you said. "But I thought the ending was too abrupt. They were just about to turn me into a merman, with gills and everything, so I could enjoy being in Arlesia without having to wear a mask and respirator, and then it just stopped. Didn't you think the ending was a little too abrupt, Marie? It would have been more artistic to have us become underwater people like the others in Arlesia."

	"Oh, I don't know," I replied. My voice was a trifle unsteady, but I don't think you noticed it. "I'm just as glad it ended when it did, I think."

The End