Catch a Falling Star Read online

  CATCH A FALLING STAR

  John Brunner

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Website

  Also by James Blish

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  I

  Desperate for fear the whim that had made the man in gold accept his inspired half-true invitation might evaporate in face of his kind’s ineffable contempt for things of today, Creohan silently cursed the doorway of his house for being so slow to open and admit them. There seemed to be a sullen reluctance about the withdrawal of the protective zareba of poisoned thorns, as though the house were growing senile.

  Yet perhaps it was only the terror in his mind, bred of his unshared knowledge, that was making seconds feel like hours, minutes like a foretaste of eternity.

  The instant the gap was wide enough to admit them, he caught his companion by the arm and hurried him through. Automatically the man in gold resisted; no one could have laid hands on a gold-clad noble of the Lymarian Empire and not felt the chill stroke of just such a jewelled poignard as this counterfeit wore at his waist. But counterfeit he was, all said and done. The resistance was a mere token. Besides, his curiosity had been aroused by Creohan’s way of phrasing his invitation.

  Inwards, then, to the heart of the house, by a moss-floored passage walled with soft-gleaming excrescences shedding an even light, then as they aged deliquescing into a honey-thick substance uttering a delicate fragrance to the air. And, in the midst of the house, the great chamber where the image-field of Creohan’s telescope depicted the black sky full of stars.

  Too full of stars, by one…

  Before and after his encounter with the man in gold who alone of all the citizens abroad on the streets tonight had yielded to his importunities, Creohan had been rehearsing in his mind words to bite deep through the armour of indifference. Against this long hoped-for moment he had planned gestures, declamations, masterly word-pictures to convey the same sense of disaster looming as dominated all his own thoughts. Yet now, coming upon the event in reality rather than imagination, all he could find to say was simply: “Look!”

  The man in gold complied, his face showing plainly that he expected more and had no idea what to prepare himself for. A span of time wore away, and he glanced half-angrily back at Creohan.

  “This, then, is your device for seeing into the years to come?” he asked. “And this is all that it will show?”

  “That star,” Creohan said, and pointed. “You never saw it in the sky over your beloved Lymarian Empire, did you?”

  “I? How should I know? In that great age men had better things to do o’ nights than stare their fill of stars! You cheated me—you lied! You told me you had a way of looking into the future, and I followed you in hopes it might compare with looking at the past. But this—this is nothing!”

  Abruptly fury at the smallmindedness of this fellow unlocked Creohan’s tongue.

  “Is it nothing to know that star will pass so close to Earth that the seas will boil and the land will parch, cities rise in smoke and flame towards the sky—that all the hopes and aspirations of a thousand centuries will be consumed and leave our planet as a barren ball? Is that nothing?”

  His vehemence took aback the man in gold, who retreated a step, hand falling for reassurance to the hilt of his poignard. “Show me this thing, I say!” he challenged.

  Creohan sighed, but he knew already he had failed. “I cannot bring it your sight like the empire whose clothes and manners you affect”—he had almost said: bad manners. “But it will surely come about, and in a much lesser space of time in the future than your Lymarians lie into the past.”

  “How soon?” There was almost greed in the eyes of the man in gold.

  “In less than three hundred years.”

  The man’s unease vanished like mist on a sunny morning. He relaxed with a sneer. “Three hundred years? Write it down for your grandchildren to read, then, you fool—by that time Ill be dead, and you, and what shall we know of it? Bah! I should never have believed the promise you made to lure me here.”

  “I have given you the chance to see into the future,” Creohan snapped. “Is it my fault that you lack the wit and will to profit by that chance?”

  Very nearly, the sting of the insult caused the man in gold to drag his poignard from its scabbard. But he was no more than a Historicker—a man who spent his life gazing into the dead past with a voyeur’s lust—and reason prevailed. They were in Creohan’s house, and everyone knew, though few had lived to report, what a house of this kind could do to protect its owner against attack. The Lymarians had had no acquaintance with such homes, but he was not a Lymarian. Clad like one, armed like one, he was still counterfeit.

  He spun on his heel, cape swinging out on the air, and strode away muttering curses. Behind him Creohan clutched the supports of the telescope mirror and felt his brain reel under a tidal wave of despair.

  Could nothing breach that monstrous wall of human indifference, before the air seared their throats and the hair burned crackling on their heads?

  Across the object mirror of the telescope the image of the stellar runaway crawled. As yet it was tiny. He might never have paid it any special attention, but for Molichant.

  That small, dark, astute man was a Historicker likewise, but of a kind Creohan found bearable: not an addict consumed by jealousy for some long-distant day when, as he deluded himself, he could have found outlets in real life for some quality of heroism or some fancied skill, but one concerned to know how things became as they were, conducting a rational quest among the mazes of the past for the cause of this, or that, or the other contemporary phenomenon.

  Perhaps because the majority of his fellows were indeed addicts, over the past year or two he had taken to calling on Creohan occasionally to discuss what he had learned. To talk of his discoveries with other Historickers would, in Creohan’s cynical view, have been fruitless; argument would rapidly have degenerated into vain screaming, and perhaps even fighting, over the comparative virtues of a dozen great periods of history.

  In return, Molichant suffered Creohan’s talk about the stars with good grace, and even sometimes furnished him with useful information about the changing patterns of the sky as they appeared over the accessible range of millennia. And, lately, he had happened to mention that this star now so bright had not been visible in the time of the Mending of Men, a scant ten centuries before.

  Intrigued, Creohan had indulged in a few measurements, a little calculation—the sort of thing he loved. He had catalogued the local proper motions long before, and disregarded this particular star as having nothing remarkable to attract his attention. And an increase in brightness over the decade or so of his studies was too marginal to be significant; there were many stars whose radiation fluctuated by the odd per cent either way.

  A thousand years, though, gave an adequate baseline for computation. And last night, out of idle curiosity, he had made use of it.

  Until dawn he had sat checking and re-checking the figures, eliminating every possibility of error;
drugged himself at last to sleep in the faint, faint hope that today he would prove himself wrong; woken again and gone back, foodless, haggard, to repeat the entire series of equations. There was no mistake. In two hundred and eighty-eight years that star would cross the limits of the solar system. It would be drawn inwards to circle the sun in a dwindling spiral until the two united in a giant hell of flames.

  Only there would be no one to see it—on Earth.

  Confronted, alone with that intolerable burden of knowledge, Creohan had wished fervently he could have been born a Historicker by inclination, or a Druggist, or a Coupler—anything that would have saved him from having to meddle with the knowledge of reality. Perhaps he had gone briefly mad, for there was a gap in his memory; from his table at home he seemed to have passed directly to the streets of the city, without decision to move.

  All afternoon and evening he had walked the streets, accosting strangers, being rebuffed or laughed away. The man in gold had been his last hope. A flash of inspiration had supplied the promise of a glimpse into the future, and the man—a sensation-seeker above all—had taken the bait.

  To no purpose.

  Creohan clenched his fists in impotent rage. Did these people feel no gratitude to Earth, which had brought forth the manifold richness they turned to their unworthy ends? Was their power of vision wholly limited to the span of their selfish little lives? Had they lost all love for the planet which bore them? If he brought himself to believe that, he could not endure to go on living! It would not seem worth being a member of the human race.

  Surely, somewhere, if not in this city then in another, he must find a companion who would feel with him for a disaster which would not occur in his own lifetime. There were, ‘ after all, so many people, and of so many different kinds… His tumultuous mind calmed a little. Given a link to the quiet, reasonable days of the vanished past (was it only yesterday when that past ended? It seemed like an eon ago!), he was able to order his thoughts. He had hit on a subject he had frequently discussed with Molichant, in ordinary conversational style. He commanded the house to conjure up the man’s likeness in the air, and—having gathered an excellent impression of him on his repeated visits—the house complied so effectively that Creohan all but addressed his friend aloud.

  If only he could have been here in person…

  But at their last meeting Molichant had expressed his intention of trailing some triviality—the form of a current word, maybe, or a snatch of melody: Creohan had forgotten what—into the very deep past indeed, and from a trip of that order he would not return in less than twenty days. And if he were physically present, 1 think I might-Shocked and horrified, Creohan chopped the thought off in the instant of its conception. To revenge himself on a friend for facts which were the fault of the universe—no, that was a shameful impulse, such as he was dismayed to find in himself. It could not be better to linger in blissful ignorance, though he might wistfully envy the fortune of those who had no inkling of the doom awaiting this planet. Molichant had done him a service by guiding him to his discovery, and indeed, provided all spirit had not been j leached out of the people of this modern age, might have j done a service for the whole of mankind. |

  Concentrating on that argument, Creohan composed him- | self with his eyes fixed on the image of his friend and reviewed the common course of the many chats they had had on what for the moment seemed an all-important theme.

  II

  “Have you not thought”—so Creohan would customarily say—”that in another few centuries men like yourself will be yearning back towards this day and age, our own, and finding it superior to theirs? Yet you, and all those who share your passion for Historicism, turn aside from it, neglect it, think it beneath your notice! I’ll wager you know more of the way the world wagged in the time of the Mending of Men than of what is going on abroad this very instant”

  He had thought Molichant, specializing in a period less than ten centures ago—moderation as Historicism went—would be vulnerable to such an argument. But it seemed to slide past him, and he accorded it no more than a chuckle, the kind with which one acknowledges a casual witticism.

  “Find this bland age superior? Why, compared to theirs, maybe it will appear so! Maybe each age is indeed inferior to its predecessors.”

  Then, noticing the stony look on Creohan’s face which disdained joking, he would hunch forward, both hands clasped around a mug of that particular wine offered by his hosts home which he preferred, it not being secreted by his own house, and shift to a marginally more serious tone.

  “Oh, there is much evidence one can advance for such a view! It has been established, for example, that these houses which so cosset and protect us are not a product of the natural order of life, but cunningly fashioned by subtle tampering with vegetable heredity; where today can you find me such an artificer as he who contrived the first of them? Likewise the lights that hover nightly in the sky, and render us independent of the fixed return of the sun—there was an age, not overlong since, when the air was empty of them and men had perforce to stumble around bearing torches if they wished to venture abroad after sundown. All this you must grant me, must you not?”

  “I cede it willingly,” was Creohan’s reply. “For it digs a deep pitfall across the pathway of your logic. Consider! You choose a time to expend your attention on which, by the clock of the universe, lies a mere eyeblink into the past. Another who goes with you to the Houses of History will sneer at the time of the Mending of Men, and linger only when he encounters the Brydwal, claiming that their exploitation of the senses of the human body represented the pinnacle of all our millennia of achievement; a second will envy the abdication of personal responsibility achieved by the Gerynts, and mock the excessive concern the Brydwal exhibited with the subjective responses of the individual; still a third will class both these as extremist, and maintain that the Minogovaristo were ideal, as having hit upon the balanced compromise. Is it not so?”

  And, on Molichant’s cautious nod of agreement, he uttered in triumph his insoluble paradox. “On your argument that each age declines from its predecessors, why does not every Historicker go back as far as possible?”

  Molichant shrugged. “In the last resort it’s something unsusceptible of definition which lures a man to the Houses of History. Had you even a spark of what we feel by instinct, as it were, I’d not need to sit here and argue over it. You might, however, say that some people, owing to their ancestry and their way of thinking, feel better suited to ages other than their own. The infinite variety of cultures and societies which our imagination has brought about must hold something for everyone by now.”

  “No, that cannot be so. Otherwise how account for such as I, who feel no least attraction from what I’m told of any bygone age?”

  “Perhaps I was exaggerating,” Molichant admitted after a pause. “An alternative occurs to me: that the lure may lie in the security one feels when experiencing an age of which one knows the outcome.”

  “Is there, then, so much insecurity in this modern age?” Creohan countered. “From what can it stem? Anciently it derived from the fear of hunger, or the threat of storm and winter-cold. Who today risks starvation, who is stricken by poverty? Why, even the ultimate shadow of death is lessened by the knowledge that through the Houses of History another may endlessly re-witness one’s most petty doings!”

  “Why, then, look on it as an antidote to boredom,” Molichant said in a cross tone. “Apparently nothing closer to the truth will penetrate the armour of your preconceptions!”

  At which point the dispute would hang fire, unresolved. Creohan had often suspected that at bottom Molichant was still smarting from his original failure to persuade his friend that he ought to sample, at least, the experiences which for him were the entire reason for living, and he had no wish to re-open a stale argument for fear of spoiling the liking that had grown up between them on other grounds.

  Coming back from memory, he dismissed the image of the Historicker, and as it faded thought again of one justification he had advanced for his pursuits. Now the outcome of this age that he and Molichant and everyone else lived in was known: did that make it more acceptable? Would Molichant become more secure, sharing Creohan’s knowledge? Of course not! He and all his kind would flee further and more often into years gone by.