G. W. Russell

"Germinal"

1. A Stranger to the End of Time

Upon the shore of a glowing chemical lake, peering through a visor of clouded Perspex, a stranger stood, her dark features showing profound awe and some disapproval, while behind her there rustled and gibbered a city, half-organic in its decadence, palpitating with obscure colours, poisonous and powerful. And overhead, in the sallow sky, a small old sun spread withered light, parsimonious heat, across the planet's dissolute topography.

"Thus it ends," murmured the stranger. She added, a little self-consciously, "What pathetic monuments to mankind's Senility!"

As if for reassurance, she pressed a gloved hand to the surface of her time machine, which was unadorned and boxlike, smooth and spare, according to the fashions of her own age. Lifting apparently of its own volition, a lid at the top opened and a little freckled head emerged. With a frown she gestured her companion back, but then, changing her mind, she helped the child, which was clad in a small suit and helmet matching her own, from the hatch.

"Witness this shabby finale, my son. Could I begrudge it you?"

Guilelessly the child said, "It is awfully pretty, mama."

It was not her way to contradict a child's judgement. She shrugged. "I am fulfilled, I suppose, and unsurprised, though I had hoped, well, for Hope." From the confusion of her private feelings she fled back to practicality. "Your father will be anxious. If we return now we can at least report to the committee tonight. And report success!" A proud glove fell upon her son's shoulder. "We have travelled the limit of the machine's capacity! Here, Time has ceased to exist. The instruments say so, and their accuracy is unquestionable." Her eye was caught by a shift of colour as the outline of one building appeared to merge with another, separate, and re-form. "I had imagined it bleaker, true."

The city coughed, like a giant in slumber, and was silent for a while.

The boy made to remove his helmet. She stopped him. "The atmosphere! Noxious, Snuffles, without doubt. One breath could kill."

It seemed for a moment that he would argue with her opinion. Eye met grey-blue eye; jaws set; he sighed, lowering his head and offering the side of the machine a petulant kick. From the festering city, a chuckle, causing the boy to whirl, defensive and astonished. A self-deprecating grin, the lips gleaming at the touch of the dampening tongue; a small gauntlet reaching for the large one. An indrawn breath.

"You are probably correct, mama, in your assessment."

She helped him back into their vessel, glanced once, broodingly, at the shimmering city, at the pulsing lake, then followed her son through the hatch until she stood again at her controls in the machine's green-lit and dim interior.

As she worked the dials and levers, she was studied by her son. Her curly brown hair was cut short at the nape, her up-curving lips gave an impression of amiability denied by the sobriety and intensity of her large, almond-shaped brown eyes. Her hands were small, well-formed, and, to a person from the 20th century, her body would have seemed slight, in proportion with those hands (though she was thought tall and shapely by her own folk). Moving efficiently, but with little instinctive feel for her many instruments, considering each action rapidly and intelligently and carrying it through in the manner of one who has learned a lesson thoroughly but unenthusiastically, she adjusted settings and figures. Her son seated himself in his padded chair, tucked beneath the main console at which his mother stood, and used his own small computer to make the simpler calculations required by her for the re-programming of the machine so that it could return to the exact place and almost the exact time of its departure.

When she had finished, she withdrew a pace or two from the controls, appraised them and was satisfied. "We are ready, Snuffles, to begin the journey home. Strap in, please."

He was already safely buckled. She crossed to the chair facing him, arranged her own harness, spread gloved fingers across the seven buttons set into the arm of the chair, and pressed four of them in sequence. The green light danced across her visor and through it to her face as she smiled encouragement to her son. She betrayed no nervousness; her body and her features were mastered absolutely. It was left to her child to display some anxiety, the upper teeth caressing the lower lip, the eyes darting from mother to those dials visible to him, one hand tugging a trifle at a section of the webbing holding his body to the chair. The machine quivered and, barely audible, it hissed. The sound was unfamiliar. The boy's brows drew closer together. The green light became a faint pink. The machine signalled its perplexity. It had not moved a moment or a centimetre. There was no reason for this; all functions were in perfect operation.

Permitting herself no sign of a reaction, she re-set the buttons. The green light returned. She repeated the preliminary code, whereupon the light grew a deeper pink and two blue lamps began to blink. She returned all functions to standby, pulled the harness from her body, rose to her feet and began to make her calculations from the beginning. Her original accuracy was confirmed. She went back to her seat, fastened her webbing, pressed the four buttons in sequence. And for the third time the machine stated its inability to carry out the basic return procedure.

"Is the time machine broken, mama?"

"Impossible."

"Then someone is preventing us from leaving."

"The least welcome but the likeliest suggestion. We were unwise not to bring protection."

"The baboons do not travel well."

"It is our misfortune. But we had not expected any life at all at the End of Time." She fingered her ear. "We shall have to rule out metaphysical interference."

"Of course." He had been brought up by the highest standards. There were some things which were not mentioned, nor, better yet, considered, by the polite society of his day. And Snuffles was an aristocrat of boys.

She consulted the chronometer. "We shall remain inside the machine and make regular attempts to return at every hour out of twenty hours. If by then we have failed, we shall consider another plan."

"You are not frightened, mama?"

"Mystified, merely."

Patiently, they settled down to let the first hour pass.

2. An Exploratory Expedition

Hand in hand and cautiously they set their feet upon a pathway neither liquid nor adamantine, but apparently of a dense, purple gas which yielded only slightly as they stepped along it, passing between forms which could have been the remains either of buildings or of beasts.

"Oh, mama!" The eyes of the boy were bright with unusual excitement. "Shall we find monsters?"

"I doubt if it is life, in any true sense, that we witness here, Snuffles. There is only a moral. A lesson for you — and for myself."

Streamers of pale red wound themselves around the whispering towers, like pennants about their poles. Gasping, he pointed, but she refused the sight more than a brief glance. "Sensation, only," she said. "The appeal to the infantile imagination is obvious — the part of every adult that should properly be suppressed and which should not be encouraged too much in children."

Blue winds blew and the buildings bent before them, crouching and changing shape, grumbling as they passed. Clusters of fragments, bloody marble, yellow-veined granite, lilac-coloured slate, frosted limestone, gathered like insects in the air; fires blazed and growled, and then where the pathway forked they saw human figures and stopped, watching.

It was an arrangement of gallants, all extravagant cloaks and jutted scabbards. It stuck legs and elbows at brave angles so the world should know its excellence and its self-contained beauty, so that the collective bow, upon the passing of a lady's carriage, should be accomplished with a precision of effect, swords raised, like so many tails, behind, heads bent low enough for doffed plumes to trail, and be soiled, upon the pavings.

Calling, she approached the group, but it had vanished, background, carriages and all, before she had taken three paces, to be replaced by exotic palms which forever linked and twisted their leaves and leaned one towards the other, as if in a love dance. She hesitated, thinking that she saw beyond the trees a plaza where stood a familiar old man, her father, but it was a statue, and then it was a pillar, then a fountain, and through the rainbow waters she saw three or four faces which she recognized, fellow children, known before her election to adult status, smiling at her, memories of an innocence she sometimes caught herself yearning for; a voice spoke, seemingly into her ear (she felt the breath, surely!): "The Armatuce shall be Renowned through you, Dafnish…" Turning, clutching her son's hand, she discovered only four stately birds walking on broad, careful feet into a shaft of light which absorbed them. Elsewhere, voices sang in strange, delicate languages, of sadness, love, joy and death. A cry of pain. The tinkling of bells and lightly brushed harp strings. A groan and deep-throated laughter.

"Dreams," said the boy. "Like dreams, mama. It is so wonderful."

"Treachery," she murmured. "We are misled." But she would not panic.

Once or twice more, in the next few moments, buildings shaped themselves into well-known scenes from her recent past. In the shifting light and the gas it was as if all that had ever existed existed again for a brief while.

She thought: "If Time has ceased to be, then Space, too, becomes extinct — is all this simply illusion — a memory of a world? Do we walk a void, in reality? We must consider that a likelihood."

She said to Snuffles: "We had best return to our ship."

A choir gave voice in the surrounding air, and the city swayed to the rhythm. A young man sang in a language she knew:

And she paused to listen, against the nagging foreboding at the back of her brain, while an old man sang:

Telling herself that her interest was analytical, she bent her head to hear more, but though the singing continued, very faintly, the language had changed and was no longer in a tongue she could comprehend.

"Oh, mama!" Snuffles glanced about him, as if seeking the source of the singing. "They tell of a great air battle. Is it that which destroyed the folk of this city?"

"… without which the third level is next to useless …" said an entirely different voice in a matter-of-fact tone.

Rapidly, she shook her head, to clear it of the foolishness intimidating her habitual self-control. "I doubt it, Snuffles. If you would seek a conqueror, then Self-Indulgence is the villain who held those last inhabitants in sway. Every sight we see confirms that fact. Oh, and Queen Sentimentality ruled here, too. The song is her testament — there were doubtless thousands of similar examples — books, plays, tapes — entertainments of every sort. The city reeks of uncontrolled emotionalism. What used to be called Art."

"But we have Art, mama, at home."

"Purified — made functional. We have our machine-makers, our builders, our landscapers, our planners, our phrasemakers. Sophisticated and specific, our Art. This — all this — is coarse. Random fancies have been indulged, potential has been wasted…"

"You do not find it in any way attractive?"

"Of course not! My sensibility has long since been mastered. The intellects which left this city as their memorial were corrupt, diseased. Death is implicit in every image you see. As a festering wound will sometimes grow fluorescent, foreshadowing the end, so this city shines. I cannot find putrescence pleasing. By its existence this place denies the point of every effort, every self-sacrifice, every martyrdom of the noble Armatuce in the thousand years of its existence!"

"It is wrong of me, therefore, to like it, eh, mama?"

"Such things attract the immature mind. Children once made up the only audience a senile old man could expect for his silly ravings, so I've heard. The parallel is obvious, but your response is forgivable. The child who would attain adult status among the Armatuce must learn to cultivate the mature view, however. In all you see today, my son, you will discover a multitude of examples of the aberrations which led mankind so close, so many times, to destruction."

"They were evil, then, those people?"

"Unquestionably. Self-Indulgence is the enemy of Self-Interest. Do not the School Slogans say so?"

"And 'Sentimentality Threatens Survival'," quoted the pious lad, who could recall perfectly every one of the Thousand Standard Maxims and several score of the Six Hundred Essential Slogans for Existence (which every child should know before he could even consider becoming an adult).

"Exactly." Her pride in her son helped dispel her qualms, which had been increasing as a herd of monstrous stone reptiles lumbered past in single file while the city chanted, in what was evidently a version of her own tongue, something which seemed to be an involved scientific formula in verse form. But she shivered at the city's next remark:

"… and Dissipation is Desecration and Dishonours All. Self-denial is a Seed which grows in the Sunlight of Purified something or other … Oh, well — I'll remember — I'll remember — just give me time — time … It is not much that a man can save On the sands of life, in the straits of time, Who swims in sight of the great third wave that never a swimmer shall cross or climb. Some waif washed up with the strays and spars That ebb-tide shows to the shore and the stars; Weed from the water, grass from a grave, A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme … Rapid cooling can produce an effect apparently identical in every respect, and this leads us to assume that, that, that … Ah, yes, He who dies serves, but he who serves shall live forever … I've got the rest somewhere. Available on Requisition Disc AAA4. Please use appropriate dialect when consulting this programme. Translations are available from most centres at reasonable swelgarter am floo-oo chardra werty …"

"The Maxims, mother! The city quotes the Maxims!"

"It mocks them, you mean! Come, we had best return to our craft."

"Is the city mad, mama?"

With an effort she reduced the rate of her heart beat and increased the width of her stride, his hand firmly held.

"Perhaps," he said, "the city was not like this when Man lived here?"

"I must hope that."

"Perhaps it pines."

"The notion is ridiculous," she said sharply. As she had feared, the place was beginning to have a deteriorating influence upon her son. "Hurry."

The hulls of three great ships, one in silver filigree, one in milk-jade, one in woven ebony, suddenly surrounded them, then faltered, then faded.

She considered an idea that she had not passed through Time at all, but was being subjected by the Elders of Armatuce to a surprise Test. She had experienced four such tests since she had become an adult, but none so rigorous, so complex.

She realized that she had lost the road. The purple pathway was nowhere to be seen; there was not a landmark which had retained its form since she had entered the city; the little niggardly sun had not, apparently, changed position, so offered no clue. Panic found a chink in the armour of her self-control and poked a teasing finger through.

She stopped dead. They stood together beside a river of boiling, jigging brown and yellow gas which bounded with what seemed a desperate gaiety towards a far-off pit which roared and howled and gulped it down. There was a slim bridge across this river. She placed a foot upon the first smooth step. The bridge was a coquette; it wriggled and giggled but allowed the pressure to remain. Slowly she and the boy ascended until they were crossing. The bridge made a salacious sound. She flushed, but marched on; she caught a trace of a smile upon her boy's lips. And she shivered for a second time. In silhouette, throbbing crimson, the city swayed, its buildings undulating as if they celebrated some primitive mass. Were the buildings actually creatures, then? If so, did they enjoy her discomfort? Did she and her son represent the sacrifice in some dreadful post-human ritual? Had the last of the city's inhabitants perished, mad, as she might soon be mad? Never before had she been possessed by such over-coloured terrors. If she found them a touch attractive, nothing of her conscious mind would admit it. The bridge was crossed, a meadow entered, of gilded grass, knee-high and harsh; the sounds of the city died away and peace, of sorts, replaced them. It was as if she had passed through a storm. In relief she hesitated, still untrusting but ready to accept any pause in order to recover her morale, and found that her hand was rising and falling upon her son's shoulder, patting it. She stopped. She was about to offer an appropriate word of comfort when she noted the gleam in his eye, the parted lips. He looked up at her through his little visor.

"Isn't this jolly, though, mama?"

"J —?" Her mouth refused the word.

"What tales we'll have to tell. Who will believe us?"

"We must say nothing, save to the committee," she warned. "This is a secret you must bear for the rest of your boyhood, perhaps the rest of your life. And you must make every effort to — to expunge — to dismiss this — this…"

"Twa-la! The time twavellers, doubtless. Even now Bwannaht seeks you out. Gweetings! Gweetings! Gweetings! Welcome, welcome, welcome to the fwutah!"

Looking to her right she drew in such a sharp gasp of oxygen that the respirator on her chest missed a motion and shivered; she could scarce credit the mincing young fantastico pressing a path for himself with his over-ornamented dandy-pole through the grass, brushing at his drooping, elaborate eyebrows, which threatened to blind him, primping his thick, lank locks, patting at his pale, painted cheeks. He regarded her with mild, exaggerated eyes, fingering his pole as he paused.

"Can you undahstand me? I twust the twanslatah is doing its stuff. I'm always twisting the wong wing, y'know. I've seahched evewy one of the thiwty-six points of the compass without a hint of success. You haven't seen them, have you? A couple of lawge hunting buttahflies? So big." He extended his arms. "No? Then they've pwobably melted again." He put index finger to tip of nose. "They'd be yellah, y'know."

A collection of little bells at his throat, wrists and knees began to tinkle. He looked suddenly skyward, but he was hopeless.

"Are you real?" asked Snuffles.

"As weal as I'll evah be."

"And you live in this city?"

"Only ghosts, my deah, live in the cities. I am Sweet Ohb Mace. Cuwwently masculine!" His silks swelled, multicoloured balloons in parody of musculature.

"My name is Dafnish Armatuce. Of the Armatuce," said she in a strangled tone. "And this is Snuffles, my son."

"A child!" The dreadful being's head lifted, like a swan's, and he peered. "Why, the wohld becomes a kindehgahten! Of couwse, the otheh was actually Mistwess Chwistia. But weah! A gweat pwize foh someone!"

"I do not understand you, sir," she said.

"Ah, then it is the twanslatah." He fingered one of his many rings. "Shoroloh enafnisoo?"

"I meant that I failed to interpret your meaning," said Dafnish Armatuce wearily.

Another movement of a ring. "Is that bettah?"

She inclined her head. She was still less than certain that this was not merely another of the city's phantasms, for all that it addressed them and seemed aware that they had travelled through Time, but she decided, nonetheless, to seek the help of Sweet Orb Mace.

"We are lost," she informed him.

"In Djer?"

"That is the city's name?"

"Oah Shenalowgh, pewhaps. You wish to leave the city, at any wate?"

"If possible."

"I shall be delighted to help." Sweet Orb Mace waved his hands, made a further adjustment to a ring, and created something which shone sufficient to blind them for a moment. Of course they recognized the black, spare shape.

"Our time craft!" cried Snuffles.

"My povahty of imagination is wenowned, I feah," said Sweet Orb Mace blithely. "It's all I could come up with. Not the owiginal, of coahse, just a wepwoduction. But it will sehve us as an aih cah."

They entered, all three, to find fantasy within. Gone were the instruments and the muted lights, the padded couches, the simple purity of design, the austere dials and indicators. Instead, caged birds lined the walls, shuffling and twittering, their plumage vulgar beyond imagining; there was a carpet which swamped the legs to the calves, glowing a violent lavender, a score of huge clocks with wagging pendulums, a profusion of brass, gold and dark teak.

Noting her expression, Sweet Orb Mace said humbly: "I saw only the extewiah. I had hoped the inside would sehve foh the shoht time of ouah flight."

With a sob, she collapsed into the carpet and sat there with her visor resting upon her gauntlets while Snuffles, insensitive to his mother's mood, waggled youthful fingers and tried to get a macaw to reveal its name to him.

"A mattah of moments!" Sweet Orb Mace assured her. He tapped at a clock with his cane and they were swinging upwards into the sky. "Do not, I pway you, judge the wohld of the End of Time by yoah impwession of me. I am weckoned the most bohwing being on the planet. Soon you shall meet people much moah intewesting and intelligent than me!"

3. A Social Lunch at the End of Time

"Look, mama! Look at the food!" The boy shuddered in his passion. "Oh, look! Look!"

They descended from the reproduction time machine. They were in a long broad meadow of blue and white grass. The city lay several miles away, upon the horizon.

"An illusion, my dear." Her voice softened in awe. "Perhaps your desires project…"

He began to move forward, tugging at her hand, through the patchwork grass, with Sweet Orb Mace, bemused, behind, to where the long table stood alone, spread with dishes, with meats and fruits, pastes and breads. "Food, mama! I can almost smell it. Oh, mama!"

He whimpered.

"Could it be real?" he entreated.

"Real or false, we cannot eat." No amount of self-control could stem the saliva gathering upon her palate. She had never seen so much food at one time. "We cannot remove our helmets, Snuffles." For a second, her visor clouded at her breath. "Oh…"

In the distance the city danced to a sudden fanfaronade, as if exulting in their wonderment.

"If you wish to begin…" murmured their guide, and he gestured at the food with his cane.

Her next word was moaned: "Temptation…" It became a synonym, on her lips, for fulfilment. To eat — to eat and be replete for the first time in her life! To sit back from that table and note that there was still more to eat — more food than the whole of the Armatuce, if they ate absolutely nothing of their rations for a month, could save between them. "Oh, such wickedness of over-production!"

"Mother?" Snuffles indicated the centre of the table.

"A pie."

They stared. As the voices of the Sirens entranced the ancient Navigators, so were they entranced by flans.

"A vewy simple meal, I thought," said Sweet Orb Mace, uncomfortable. "You do not eat so much, in yoah age?"

"We would not," she replied. "To consume it, even if we produced it, would be disgusting to us." Her knees were weak; resistance wavered. Of all the terrors she had anticipated in the future, this was one she could not possibly have visualized, so fearsome was it. She tried to avert her eyes. But she was human. She was only one woman, without the moral strength of the Armatuce to call on. The Armatuce and the world of the Armatuce lay a million or more years in the past. Her will drooped at this knowledge. A tear started.

"You cannot pwoduce it? Some disastah?"

"We could. Now, we could. But we do not. It would be the depths of decadence to do so!" She spoke through clenched teeth.

She and the boy remained transfixed, even when others arrived and spoke in reference to them.

"Time travellers. Their uniforms proclaim their calling."

"They could be from space."

"They are hungry, it seems. Let them eat. You were speaking of your son, maternal Orchid. This other self, what?"

"He lives through her. He tells me that he lives for her, Jagged! Where does he borrow these notions? I fear for his — 'health', is it?"

"You mean that you disapprove of his behaviour?"

"I suppose so. Jherek 'goes too far'."

"I relish the sound of your words, Iron Orchid. I never thought to hear them here."

"In Djer?"

"In any part of our world. My theories are confirmed. One small change in the accepted manners of a society and the result is hugely rich."

"I cannot follow you, allusive lord. Neither shall I try … The strangers do not eat! They only stare!"

"The twanslatahs," cautioned Mace. "They opahwate even now."

"I fear our visitors find us rude."

Dafnish Armatuce felt a soft touch upon her shoulder and turned, almost with relief, from the food to look up into the patrician features of a very tall man, clothed in voluminious lemon-coloured lace which rose to his strong chin and framed his face. The grey eyes were friendly, but she would not respond (daughter to father) as her emotions dictated. She drew away. "You, too, are real?"

"Ah. Call me so."

"You are not one of the illusions of that city?"

"I suspect that I am at least as real as Sweet Orb Mace. He convinces you?"

She was mute.

"The city is old," said the newcomer. "Its whimsicalities proliferate. Yet, once, it had the finest of minds. During those agitated centuries, when beings rushed willy-nilly about the universe, all manner of visitors came to learn from it. It deserves respect, my dear time traveller, if anything deserves it. Its memory is uncertain, of course, and it lacks a good sense of its identity, its function, but it continues to serve what remains of our species. Without it, I suspect that we should be extinct."

"Perhaps you are," she said quietly.

His shoulders moved in a lazy shrug and he smiled. "Oh, perhaps, but there is better evidence supporting more entertaining theories." His companion came closer, a woman. "This is my friend the Iron Orchid. We await other friends. For lunch and so on. It is our lunch that you are admiring."

"The food is real, then? So much?"

"You are obsessed with the question. Are you from one of the religious periods?"

She trusted that the child had not heard and continued hastily. "The profusion."

"We thought it simple."

"Mama!" Tugging, Snuffles whispered, "The lady's hand."

The Iron Orchid, long-faced with huge brown eyes, hair that might have been silver filigree, peacock quills sprouting from shoulder blades and waist, had one hand of the conventional, five-fingered sort, but the other (which she flourished) was a white-petalled, murmuring goldimar poppy, having at the centre scarlet lips like welts of blood.

"And I am called here Lord Jagged of Canaria," said the man in yellow.

"Mama!" An urgent hiss. But no, she would not allow the lapse, though it was with difficulty she redirected her own gaze away from the goldimar. "Your manners, lad," she said, and then, to the pair, "This is my boy, Snuffles."

The Iron Orchid was rapturous. "A boy! What a shame you could not have arrived earlier. He would have been a playmate for my own son, Jherek."

"He is not with you?"

"He wanders Time. The womb, these days, cannot make claims. He is off about his own affairs and will listen to no-one, his mother least of all!"

"How old is your son?"

"Two hundred — three hundred — years old? Little more. Your own boy?"