Dancers at the End of Time Read online

  THE DANCERS AT THE END OF TIME

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  Science Fiction Masterworks Volume 53

  eGod

  Enter the SF Gateway

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Book 1 - An Alien Heat

  Prologue

  1 A Conversation with the Iron Orchid

  2 A Soirée at the Duke of Queens

  3 A Visitor Who is Less than Entertaining

  4 Carnelian Conceives a New Affectation

  5 A Menagerie of Time and Space

  6 A Pleasing Meeting: The Iron Orchid Devises a Scheme

  7 To Steal a Space-Traveller

  8 A Promise from Mrs. Amelia Underwood: A Mystery

  9 Something of an Idyll: Something of a Tragedy

  10 The Granting of Her Heart's Desire

  11 The Quest for Bromley

  12 The Curious Comings and Goings of Snoozer Vine

  13 The Road to the Gallows: Old Friends in New Guises

  14 A Further Conversation with the Iron Orchid

  Book 2 - The Hollow Lands

  1 In Which Jherek Carnelian Continues to be in Love

  2 Playing at Ships

  3 A Petitioner at the Court of Time

  4 To the Warm Snow Peaks

  5 On the Hunt

  6 The Brigand Musicians

  7 A Conflict of Illusions

  8 The Children of the Pit

  9 Nurse's Sense of Duty

  10 On the Bromley Road Again

  11 A Conversation on Time Machines and Other Topics

  12 The Awful Dilemma of Mrs. Amelia Underwood

  13 Strange Events in Bromley One Night in the Summer of 1896

  14 A Scarcity of Time Machines

  15 Entrained for the Metropolis

  16 The Mysterious Mr. Jackson

  17 A Particularly Memorable Night at the Café Royale

  18 To the Time Machine, At Last!

  19 In Which Jherek Carnelian and Mrs. Amelia Underwood Debate Certain Moral Problems

  Book 3 - The End of All Songs

  1 In Which Jherek Carnelian and Mrs. Amelia Underwood Commune, to some Degree, with Nature

  2 In Which Inspector Springer Tastes the Delights of the Simple Life

  3 A Lower Devonian Tea

  4 A Fresh Quest — On the Trail of the Hamper

  5 At the Time Centre

  6 Discussions and Decisions

  7 En Route for the End of Time

  8 All Travellers Returned: A Celebration

  9 The Past is Honoured: The Future Reaffirmed

  10 In Which The Iron Orchid is not Quite Herself

  11 A Few Quiet Moments in the Menagerie

  12 In Which Lord Mongrove Reminds Us of Inevitable Doom

  13 The Honour of an Underwood

  14 Various Alarums, a Good Deal of Confusion, a Hasty Excursion

  15 In Which Jherek Carnelian and Mrs. Underwood find Sanctuary of Sorts, and Mr. Underwood Makes a New Friend

  16 The Skull Beneath the Paint

  17 Some Confusion Concerning the Exact Nature of the Catastrophe

  18 In Which Truths are Revealed and Certain Relationships are Defined

  19 In Which Differences of Opinion are Expressed and Relationships Further Defined

  20 In Which Lord Jagged of Canaria Exhibits a Frankness not Previously Displayed

  21 A Question of Attitudes

  22 Inventions and Resurrections

  23 Amelia Underwood Transformed

  24 The Vision in the City

  25 The Call to Duty

  26 Wedding Bells at the End of Time

  27 Conversations and Conclusions

  About the Author

  Acknowledgement

  Bibliography

  Book 1

  An Alien Heat

  The silver lips of lilies virginal,

  The full deep bosom of the enchanted rose

  Please less than flowers glass-hid from frosts and snows

  For whom an alien heat makes festival.

  Theodore Wratislaw

  Hothouse Flowers

  1896

  PROLOGUE

  The cycle of the Earth (indeed, the universe, if the truth had been known) was nearing its end and the human race had at last ceased to take itself seriously. Having inherited millennia of scientific and technological knowledge it used this knowledge to indulge its richest fantasies to play immense imaginative games, to relax and create beautiful monstrosities. After all, there was little else left to do. An earlier age might have been horrified at what it would have judged a waste of resources, an appalling extravagance in the uses to which materials and energies were put. An earlier age would have seen the inhabitants of this world as "decadent" or "amoral," to say the least. But even if these inhabitants were not conscious of the fact that they lived at the end of time some unconscious knowledge informed their attitudes and made them lose interest in ideals, creeds, philosophies and the conflicts to which such things give rise. They found pleasure in paradox, aesthetics and baroque wit; if they had a philosophy, then it was a philosophy of taste, of sensuality. Most of the old emotions had atrophied, meant little to them.

  They had rivalry without jealousy, affection without lust, malice without rage, kindness without pity. Their schemes — often grandiose and perverse — were pursued without obsession and left uncompleted without regret, for death was rare and life might cease only when Earth herself died.

  Yet this particular story is about an obsession which overtook one of these people, much to his own astonishment. And because he was overtaken by an obsession that is why we have a story to tell. It is probably the last story in the annals of the human race and, as it happens, it is not dissimilar to that which many believe is the first.

  What follows, then, is the story of Jherek Carnelian, who did not know the meaning of morality, and Mrs. Amelia Underwood, who knew everything about it.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Conversation with the Iron Orchid

  Dressed in various shades of light brown, the Iron Orchid and her son sat upon a cream-coloured be
ach of crushed bone. Some distance off a white sea sparkled and whispered. It was the afternoon.

  Between the Iron Orchid and her son, Jherek Carnelian, lay the remains of a lunch. Spread on a cloth of plain damask were ivory plates containing pale fish, potatoes, meringue, vanilla ice-cream and, glaring rather dramatically, from the centre of it all, a lemon.

  The Iron Orchid smiled with her amber lips and, reaching for an oyster, asked: "How do you mean, my love, 'virtuous'?" Her perfect hand, powdered the very lightest shade of gold, hovered for a second over the oyster and then withdrew. She used the hand, instead, to cover a small yawn.

  Her son stretched on his soft pillows. He, too, felt tired after the exertions of eating, but dutifully he continued with the subject. "I'm not thoroughly sure what it means. As you know, most devastating of minerals, most enchanting of flowers, I have studied the language of the time quite extensively. I must possess every tape that still exists. It provides considerable amusement. But I cannot understand every nuance. I found the word in a dictionary and the dictionary told me it meant acting with 'moral rectitude' or in conformity with 'moral laws' — 'good, just, righteous.' Bewildering!"

  He did take an oyster. He slid it into his mouth. He rolled it down his throat. It had been the Iron Orchid who had discovered oysters and he had been delighted when she suggested they meet on this beach and eat them. She had made some champagne to go with them, but they had both agreed that they did not care for it and had cheerfully returned it to its component atoms.

  "However," he continued, "I should like to try it for a bit. It is supposed to involve 'self-denial' " — he forestalled her question — "which means doing nothing pleasurable."

  "But everything, body of velvet, bones of steel, is pleasurable!"

  "True — and there lies our paradox! You see the ancients, mother, divided their sensations into different groupings — categories of sensations, some of which they did not find pleasurable, it seems. Or they did find them pleasurable and therefore were displeased! Oh, dearest Iron Orchid, I can see you are ready to dismiss the whole thing. And I despair, often, of puzzling out the answer. Why was one thing considered worth pursuing and another not? But," his handsome lips curved in a smile, "I shall settle the problem in one way or another, sooner or later." And he closed his heavy lids.

  "Oh, Carnelian!"

  She laughed softly and affectionately and stretched across the cloth to slip her slender hands into his loose robe and stroke his warmth and his blood.

  "Oh, my dear! How swift you are! How ripe and rich you are today!"

  And he drew himself to his feet and he stepped over the cloth and he laid his tall body down upon her and he kissed her slowly.

  And the sea sighed.

  When they awoke, still in each other's arms, it was morning, though no night had passed. For their own pleasure someone had doubtless been engaged in rearranging time. It was not important.

  Jherek noticed that the sea had turned a deep pink, almost a cerise, and was clashing dreadfully with the beach, while on the horizon behind him he saw that two palms and a cliff had disappeared altogether. In their place stood a silver pagoda, about twelve storeys high and glittering in the morning sun.

  Jherek looked to his left and was pleased to see that his aircar (resembling a steam locomotive of the early 20th century, but of about half the size, in gold, ebony and rubies) was still where they had left it.

  He looked again at the pagoda, craning his neck, for his mother still relaxed with her head against his shoulder. His mother, too, turned to look as a winged figure left the roof of the pagoda and flew crazily away towards the east, swerving and dipping, circling back, narrowly missing the sharp edge of the pagoda's crest, and at last disappearing.

  "Oh," said the Iron Orchid getting to her feet. "It is the Duke of Queens and his wings. Why will he insist that they are successful?" She waved a vague hand at the departed duke. "Goodbye. Playing one of his solitary games, again, I suppose." She looked down at the remains of the lunch and made a face. "I must clear this away." With a wave of the ring on her left hand she disseminated the lunch and watched the dust drift away on the air. "Will you be going there, this evening? To his party?" She moved her slender arm, heavy with brown brocade, and touched her forehead with her fingertips.

  "I think so." He disseminated his own pillows. "I have a great liking for the Duke of Queens."

  His lips pursed a trifle, Jherek Carnelian pondered the pink sea. "Even if I do not always appreciate his colour sense."

  He turned and walked over the crushed bone beach to his aircar. He clambered into the cabin.

  "All aboard, my strong, my sweet, Iron Orchid!"

  She chuckled and reached up to him.

  From the footplate he reached down, seized her waist and swung her aboard.

  "Off to Pasadena!"

  He sounded his whistle.

  "Shuffle off to Buffalo!"

  Responding to the sonic signal, the little locomotive took magnificently to the air, shunting up the sky, with lovely, lime-coloured steam puffing from its smokestack and from beneath its wheels.

  "Oh, they gave him his augurs at Racine-Virginia," sang Jherek Carnelian, donning a scarlet and cloth-of-gold engineer's cap, "saying steam-up, you're way behind time! It ain't '98, it's old '97. You got to get on down that old Nantucket line!"

  The Iron Orchid settled back in her seat of plush and ermine (an exact reproduction, she understood, of the original) and watched her son with amusement as he opened the firedoor and shovelled in the huge black diamonds which he had made specially to go with the train and which, though of no particular use in fuelling the aircar, added aesthetic texture to the recreation.

  "Where do you find all these old songs, Carnelian, my own?"

  "I came across a cache of 'platters,' " he told her, wiping honest sweat from his face with a silk rag.

  The train swept rapidly over a sea and a range of mountains. "A form of sound-storage of the same period as the original of this aircar. A million years old, at least, though there's some evidence that they, themselves, are reproductions of other originals. Kept in perfect condition by a succession of owners."

  He slammed the firedoor shut and discarded the platinum shovel, joining her upon the couch and staring down at the quaintly moulded countryside which Mistress Christia, the Everlasting Concubine, had begun to build a while ago and then abandoned.

  It was not elegant. In fact it was something of a mess. Two-thirds of a hill, in the fashion of the 91st century post-Aryan landscapers, supported a snake-tree done after the Saturnian manner but left uncoloured; part of an 11th century Gothic ruin stood beside a strip of river of the Bengali Empire period.

  You could see why she had decided not to finish it, but it seemed to Jherek that it was a pity she had not bothered to disseminate it. Someone else would, of course, sooner or later.

  "Carrie Joan," he sang, "she kept her boiler going. Carrie Joan, she filled it full of wine. Carrie Joan didn't stop her rowing. She had to get to Brooklyn by a quarter-past nine!"

  He turned to the Iron Orchid.

  "Do you like it? The quality of the platters isn't all it could be, but I think I've worked out all the words now."

  "Is that what you were doing last year?"

  She raised her fine eyebrows. "I heard the noises coming from your Hi-Rise." She laughed. "And I thought it was to do with sex." She frowned. "Or animals." She smiled. "Or both."

  The locomotive began to spiral down, hooting, towards Jherek's ranch. The ranch had taken the place of the Hi-Rise. A typical building of the 19th century, done in fibafome and thatch, each corner of its veranda roof was supported by a wooden Indian, some forty feet high. Each Indian had a magnificent pearl, twelve inches in diameter, in his turban, and a beard of real hair. The Indians were the only extravagant detail in the otherwise simple building.

  The locomotive landed in the corral and Jherek, whose interest in the ancient world had, off and on, sustained itself for ne
arly two years, held out his hand to help the Iron Orchid disembark. For a moment she hesitated as she attempted to remember what she must do. Then she grasped his hand and jumped to the ground crying:

  "Geronimo!"

  Together they made for the house.

  The surrounding landscape had been designed to fit in with the ranch. The sky contained a sunset, which silhouetted the purple hills, and the black pines, which topped them. On the other side was a range containing a herd of bison. Every few days there would emerge from a cunningly hidden opening in the ground a group of mechanical 7th cavalrymen who would whoop and shout and ride round and round the bison shooting their arrows into the air before roping and branding the beasts. The bison had been specially grown from Jherek's own extensive gene-bank and didn't seem to care for the operation although it should have been instinctive to them. The 7th cavalry, on the other hand, had been manufactured in his machine shop because he had a distaste for growing people (who were inclined to be bad-mannered when the time came for their dissemination).

  "What a beautiful sunset," said his mother, who had not visited him since the Hi-Rise days. "Was the sun really as huge as that in those days?"

  "Bigger," he said, "by all accounts. I toned it down rather, for this."

  She touched his arm. "You were always inclined to be restrained. I like it."

  "Thank you."

  They went up the white winding staircase to the veranda, breathing in the delicious scent of magnolia which grew on the ground beside the basement section of the house. They crossed the veranda and Jherek manipulated a lever which, depressed, allowed the door to open so that they could enter the parlour — a single room occupying the whole of this floor. The remaining eight floors were given over to kitchens, bedrooms, cupboards and the like.

  The parlour was a treasure house of 19th century reproductions, including a magnificent pot-bellied stove carved from a single oak and a flowering aspidistra which grew from the centre of the grass carpet and spread its rubbery branches over the best part of the room.