The Moment of Eclipse Read online

  'You're acting as unwilling host to a now adult parasitic worm of peripatetic habit and a known preference for subcu­taneous tissue. It's the cause of these tumours. They're a sort of allergic reaction.'

  'So I don't have what you might call a psychosomatic dis­order?'

  He laughed. 'The worm is real right enough. What's more, it can live in your system up to fifteen years.'

  'Fifteen years! I'm to be haunted by this dreadful succubus for fifteen years!'

  'Not a bit of it! We'll treat you with a drug called diethyl-carbamazine and you'll soon be okay again.'

  That marvellous optimism - 'soon be okay again!' - well, it was justified in his sense, although his marvellous drug had some unpleasant side effects. Of that I would never complain; all of life has unpleasant side effects. It may be - and this is a supposition I examine in the film I am at present making - that consciousness itself is just a side effect, a trick of the light, as it were, as we humans, in our ceaseless burrowings, accidentally surface now and again into a position and a moment where our presence can influence a wider network of sensations.

  In my dark subterranean wanderings, I never again met the fatal Christiania (to whom my growing aversion was not strong enough to attract me further!); but her son, Petar, sports in the wealthier patches of Mediterranean sunshine still, surfacing to public consciousness now and again in magazine gossip columns.

  The Day We Embarked for Cythera...

  The ruined hillside above the lake was an idyllic place for con­versation and fete. We could see the town but not the palace, and the river beyond the town, and flowers grew in the warm bank on which we sat. The pines were shattered, the dells in­credible, the scents of acacia all that mid-June could demand. I had forgotten my guitar, and my stout friend Portinari insisted on wearing his scarlet conversing-jacket.

  So he was conversing on grandiose scarlet themes, and I was teasing him. 'Mankind lives between animal and intellectual worlds by reason of its cerebral inheritance. I am mathematician and scholar. I am also dog and ape.'

  'Do you live in the rival worlds alternately or both in the same moment?'

  He gestured, looking down the hillside to where young men fought with yellow poles. 'I am not speaking of rival worlds. They are complementary, one to another, mathematician, scholar, dog, ape. all in one capacious brain.'

  'You surprise me.' I took care to look unsurprised as I spoke. 'The mathematician must find the antics of the dog tedious, and does not the ape revolt against the scholar?'

  'They all fight it out in bed,' said Clyton, cuttingly. We thought he had left our conversation to our own devices, for he squatted at our feet under one of the shattered tombstones, pre­senting the fantastic patterns of his satin-covered back to us as he examined the ancient graves.

  'They fight it out in science,' offered Portinari: less a correc­tion than a codicil.

  'They truce it out in art,' I said: less a codicil than a coda.

  'How about this fossil of art?' Clyton asked. He rose, smiling at us under his Punchinello mask, and held out the fragment of tomb he had been scrutinizing.

  It bore a human figure crudely outlined in stone, blurred further by lichen, one patch of which had, with mycotic irony, provided the figure with a fuzz of yellowing pubic hair. In one hand the figure clutched an umbrella; the other hand, offered palm outwards, was enlarged grotesquely.

  'Is he supplicating?' I asked. 'Or welcoming?' Portinari asked. 'If so, welcoming what?' 'Death?'

  'He's testing for rain. Hence the umbrella,' Clyton said. We laughed.

  Through the low hills, screams rang.

  Nothing here attracted life, for the drought of some centuries' standing had long since withered all green things. The calm was the calm of paralysis, which even the screams could not break. Through the hills, making for the edge of a distant horizon, ran the double track of a railway line. Along this line, a giant steam locomotive fled, screaming. Behind it, pursuing, came the carni­vores.

  There were six carnivores, their headlights blazing. They were now almost abreast of their quarry. Their klaxons echoed as they called to each other. It could be only a short while before they pulled their victim down.

  The locomotive was untiring. For all its superb strength, it could not outdistance the carnivores. Nor was there any help for it here; the nearest station was still many hundreds of miles away.

  Now the leading carnivore was level with its cab. In despera­tion, the locomotive suddenly flung itself sideways, off the con­fining rails, and charged into the dried river bed that lay on one side. The carnivores halted for a moment, then swung to the side also and again roared in pursuit. Now the advantage was more than ever with them, for the locomotive's wheels sank into the ground.

  In a few minutes, it was all over. The great beasts dragged down their prey. The locomotive keeled heavily on to its side, thrashing out vainly with its pistons. Undeterred, the carnivores hurled themselves on to its black and vibrating body.

  Through the hills, screams rang.

  Though the king had decreed a holiday, we still had our wards strapped to our wrists. I punched for Universal Know­ledge and asked about rainfall in the area four centuries previously. No figures. Climate reckoned equable.

  'Machines are so confoundedly imprecise,' I complained.

  'But we live by imprecision, Bryan! That's how Portinari's mathematician and puppy dog manage to co-exist in his well-endowed head. We made the machines, so they bear our impress of imprecision.'

  'They're binary. What's imprecise about either-or, on-off?'

  'Surely either-or is the major imprecision! Mathematician-dog. Scholar-ape. Rain-fine. Life-death. It's not the imprecision in the things but in the hiatus between them, the dash between the either and the or. In that hiatus is our heritage. Our heritage the machines have inherited.'

  While Clyton was saying this, Portinari was brushing away the pine-needles on the other side of the tomb (or perhaps I might make that stout friend of mine sound more mortal if I said on the opposite side of the tomb). A metal ring was revealed. Portinari pulled it, and dragged a picnic basket from the earth.

  As we were exclaiming over the basket's contents, pretty Columbine arrived. She kissed us each in turn and offered to lay a picnic for us. From the top of the basket, she produced a snowy cloth and, spreading it out, commenced to arrange the viands upon it. Portinari, Clyton, and I stood about in pictur­esque attitudes and watched the four-man fliers flapping their way slowly across the blue sky above our heads.

  Outside the wall of the town, a silver band played for the princess's birthday. Its notes came faintly up to us, preserved in the thin air. One could almost taste them, like the thin beaten sheets of silver in which duckling is cooked.

  'It's so beautiful today - how fortunate we are that it will have an end. Permanent happiness lies only in the transitory.'

  'You're changing the subject, Bryan,' Portinari said. 'You were being taxed on imprecision.'

  I clutched my heart in horror. 'If I am to be taxed for im­precision, then it is not the subject but the king who must be changed!'

  Just a fraction late, Clyton replied, 'Your tributary troubles make for streams of mirth.'

  Columbine laughed prettily and curtsied to indicate that our spread was ready.

  The savannas ended here, were superseded abruptly by a region of stone, a semi-desert place where jew of the giant herbivores ever ventured. The same heavy sky lowered over all. Sometimes the rain fell for years at a time.

  Compared with the slow herbivores, the carnivores were fleet. They ranged down their terrible black road, which cut through savanna and desert alike.

  One lay by the edge of the roadside slowly devouring a two-legged thing, its engine purring. Fitful sun marked its flanks.

  As we sat down to our picnic, removing our masks, one of the hill-dwarfs came springing up in his velvet and sat on the sward beside us, playing his electric dulcimer for Columbine to dance to. He had a face like a
human foetus, hanging over the strings, but his voice was clear and true. He sang an old ditty of Cae­sura's :

  'I listened to every phrase she uttered Knowing, knowing they'd be recorded only In my memory - and knowing, knowing my memory Would improve them all by and by....'

  To this strain, Columbine did a graceful dance, not without its own self-mocking quality. We watched as we ate iced melon and ginger, in which were embedded prawns, and silver carp and damson tart. Before the dance was over, boys in satins carrying banners and a tiny black girl with a tambor came scurrying out of the magnolia groves to listen to the music. With them on a chain they led a little green-and-orange dino­saur which waltzed about on its hind legs. We thought this party must be from the court.

  A plump boy was with them. I remarked him first because he was dressed all in black; then I noticed the leathery flying creature on his shoulder. He could have been no more than twelve, yet was monstrously plump and evidently boasted ab­normally large sexual appendages, for they were hung before him in a yellow bag. He gave us greeting, doffing his cap, and then stood with his back to the frolic, looking across the valley to the far woods and hills. He provided an agreeable foil to the merriment, which we watched as we ate.

  Everyone pranced to the song of the hill-dwarfs dulcimer.

  The carnivores ran along endless roads, indifferent to whether the land through which they passed was desert, savanna, or forest. They could always find food, so great was their speed.

  The heavy skies overhead robbed the world of colour and time. The lumbering grass-eaters seemed almost motionless. Only the carnivores were bright and tireless, manufacturing their own time.

  A group of them were converging on a certain crossroads in an area of heath. One of their number had made a kill. It was a big grey beast. Its radiator grill was bared in a snarl. It sprawled at its leisure on the roadside, devouring the body of a young female. Two others of her kind, freshly killed, lay nearby, to be dealt with at will.

  This was long before internal parasites had labyrinthed their way into the mechanisms of eternity.

  'Come now, Bryan,' Portinari said as he opened up a second bottle of new wine. 'Clyton here was quizzing you on impre­cision. You twice evaded the point, and now pretend to be absorbed in the antics of these dancers!'

  Clyton leaned back on one elbow, gesturing lordly in the air with a jellied chicken-bone. 'What with the smell of the acacia blossom and the tang of this new vintage, I've forgotten the point myself, Portinari, so we'll let Bryan off for once. He's free to go!'

  'To be let off is not necessarily to be free,' I said. 'Besides, I am capable of liberating myself from any argument.'

  'I believe truly you could slip out of a cage of words,' said Clyton.

  'Why not? Because all sentences contain contradictions, as we all contain contradictions, in the way that Portinari is mathe­matician and dog, ape and scholar.'

  'All sentences, Bryan?' Portinari asked, teasingly.

  We smiled at each other, the way we did when preparing verbal traps for each other. The party of children from the court had gathered round to hear our talk, all except the plump boy dressed in black, who now leaned against an aspen trunk and regarded the blue distances of the landscape. With sweet gestures, the others lolled against one another to decide if we talked wisdom or nonsense.

  Of course Columbine was not listening. More of the velvet-clad dwarfs had arrived. They were singing and dancing and making a great noise; only the first-comer of their tribe had laid down his dulcimer and was fondling and kissing the lovely bare shoulders of Columbine.

  Still smiling, I passed my glass towards Portinari and he filled it to the brim. We were both of us relaxed but alert, com­ing to the test.

  'How would you describe that action, Portinari?'

  They all waited for his answer. Cautiously, smiling yet, he said, 'I shall not be imprecise, dear Bryan. I poured you some newly-bottled wine, that was all!'

  A toad hopped under one of the broken tombstones. I could hear its progress, so quiet had our circle become.

  ' "I poured you some newly-bottled wine"', I quoted. 'You provide a perfect contradiction, my friend, as I predicted. At the beginning of your sentence, you pour the wine, yet by the end of the sentence it is newly-bottled. Your sequence contra­dicts utterly your meaning. Your time-sense is so awry that you negate what you did in one breath!'

  Clyton burst out laughing - even Portinari had to laugh - the children squeaked and fluttered - the dinosaur plunged - and as Columbine clapped her pretty hands in mirth, the hill-dwarf flipped out of her corsage the two generous orbs of her breasts. Clutching them, she jumped up and ran laughing through the trees towards the lake, her pet fawn following her, the dwarf chasing her.

  Over the lush grass rain swept in curtains of moisture. It seemed to hang in the air rather than descend, to soak every­thing between ground and sky. It was an enormous summer shower, silent and fugitive; it had lasted for tens of thousands of years.

  Occasionally the sun broke through clouds, and then the moving moistures of the air burst into violent colour, only to fade to a drab brass tint as the clouds healed their wound.

  The metal beasts that drove through this perpetual shower hooted and snarled on their way. Outwardly, they shone as if impervious, paintwork and chromework as bright as knives; but, below their armour, the effects of the water, dashing up for ever from their spinning wheels, were lethal. Rust crept into every moving part, metal's cancer groping for the heart.

  The cities where the beasts lived were surrounded by huge cemeteries. In the cemeteries, multitudinous carcasses, no longer to be feared, lapsed into ginger dust, into poor graves.

  As we were draining the wine and eating the sweetmeats, the dwarfs and boys danced on the sward. Some of the youths leapt on their goose-planes and pedalled up above our heads for aerial jousting-matches. All the while, the black-clad plump boy stood in lonely contemplation. Portinari, Clyton, and I laughed and chatted, and flirted with some country wenches who passed by. I was pleased when Portinari explained my paradox of impreci­sion to them.

  When the girls had gone, Clyton, rising, swept his cloak about him and suggested we should move back to the ferry.

  'The sun inclines towards the west, my friends, and the hills grow brazen to meet its glare.' He gestured grandly at the sun. 'All its trajectory is dedicated, I am certain, towards proving Bryan's earlier aphorism, that the only permanent happiness lies in transitory things. It reminds us that this golden afternoon is merely of counterfeit gold, now wearing thin.'

  'It reminds me that I'm wearing fat,' said Portinari, strug­gling up, belching, and smoothing his stomach.

  I picked up Clyton's figured fragment from the tombstone and offered it to him.

  'Yes, perhaps I'll keep this umbrella-bearing shade until I find someone to throw light on him.'

  'Is he supplicating you to?' I asked.

  'Or welcoming you to?' Portinari.

  'He's testing for rain.' Clyton. We laughed again.

  Almost hidden by a nauseous haze of its own manufacture, a pride of machines lay by the side of the road, feeding.

  The road was like a natural feature. The great veldt, which stretched almost planet-wide, ended here at last. It appeared to terminate without reason. As inexplicably, the mountains began, rising from the dirt like icebergs from a petrified sea. They were still new and unsteady. The road ran along their base, a hem on the mighty skin of plain.

  It was a twenty-two lane highway, with provision for both mach-negative and mach-positive traffic. The pride lay in one of the infrequent rest-places, gorging itself on the soft red-centred creatures that rode in the machines. There were five machines in the pride, perpetually backing and revving engines as they scrambled for better positions.

  Juice spurted from their radiator grills, streamed over their cowling, misted their windscreens. The tainted blue of their breath hung over them. They were devouring their young.

  'So we retre
at from our retreat!' said Clyton, shouldering his stone. The rabble still frolicked among the trees.

  As we were moving off, it chanced I was just behind my friends. On impulse, I plucked the sleeve of the plump boy in black and asked him, 'May a stranger inquire what has pre­occupied your thoughts all through this sumptuous afternoon?'

  When he turned his face to me and removed his mask, I saw how pale he was; the flesh of his body carried no echo on his face: it resembled a skull.

  He looked at me long before he said, slowly, 'Perhaps truth is an accident.' And he cast his gaze to the ground.

  His words caught me by surprise. I could find no rejoinder. perhaps because his manner was grave enough to forbid re­partee.

  Only as I turned to leave did he add, 'It may hap that you and your friends talked truth all afternoon-long by accident. Perhaps indeed our time-sense is awry. Perhaps the wine is never poured, or forever poured. Perhaps we are contradictions, each one in himself. Perhaps ... perhaps we are too imprecise to survive '

  His voice was low, and the other party was still making its merry noise - the dwarfs would continue to dance and frolic long after sunset. Only as I hurried away through the saplings after Portinari and Clyton did his words actually register on me: 'Perhaps we are too imprecise to survive--'

  A melancholy thing to say on a gay day!

  And there was the ferry, floating on the dark lake, screened by tall cypresses and so rather gloomy. But already lanterns twinkled along the shore, and I caught the sound of music and singing and laughter aboard. Back at the tavern, our sweethearts would be waiting for us, and our new play would open at midnight. I had my role by heart, I knew every word, I longed to walk out of the wings into the glittering lights, cynosure of all eyes....

  'Come on, my friend!' cried Portinari heartily, turning back from the throng and catching my arm. 'Look, my cousins are aboard - we shall have a merry trip homewards! Will you sur­vive?'

  Survive?

  Survive?

  Survive?

  Orgy of the Living and the Dying