WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Compilations - The Library - Volume 03 - M to S - 242 fiction ebooks PDF HTM(L) RTF TXT DOC.zip/Shaw, Bob - Light Of Other Days.txt

Text File | 2001-03-03 | 19KB | 355 lines

"Light of Other Days" is one of the three short stories that
tied for first place in the penultimate ballot. Its author, Bob
Shaw, is a newspaper reporter who has sold a small but steady
stream of tales to the science fiction maga;.ines. He confesses
he is addicted to puns and whiskeyand the "e" in that
"whiskey" goes toward revealing something of his origins; for
Bob Shaw is a sturdy Irishman in his mid-thirties, Belfast
born and bred. He is married and has three children. He says
he admires the writing of Lawrence Durrell; the only science
fiction writer he will commit himself to naming is Anthony
Burgess. Though by no means as prolific a writer as Burgess,
Shaw is now working on his first novel, which has been
contracted for by Avon.

LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS

Bob Shaw

Leaving the village behind, we followed the heady sweeps of
the road up into a land of slow glass,
I had never seen one of the farms before and at first found
them slightly eeriean effect heightened by imagination and
circumstance. The car's turbine was pulling smoothly and
quietly in the damp air so that we seemed to be carried over
the convolutions of the road in a kind of supernatural silence.
On our right the mountain sifted down into an incredibly
perfect valley of timeless pine, and everywhere stood the great
frames of slow glass, drinking light. An occasional flash of
afternoon sunlight on their wind bracing created an illusion of
movement, but in fact the frames were deserted. The rows of
windows had been standing on the hillside for years, staring
into the valley, and men only cleaned them in the middle of
the night when their human presence would not matter to the
thirsty glass.
They were fascinating, but Selina and I didn't mention the
windows. I think we hated each other so much we both were
reluctant to sully anything new by drawing it into the nexus of
our emotions. The holiday, I had begun to realize, was a
stupid idea in the first place. I had thought it would cure
everything, but, of course, it didn't stop Selina being pregnant
and, worse still, it didn't even stop her being angry about
being pregnant.
Rationalizing our dismay over her condition, we had circu-
lated the usual statements to the effect that we would have
liked having childrenbut later .on,  at the proper time.
Selina's pregnancy had cost us her well-paid job and with it
the new house we had been negotiating for and which was far
beyond the reach of my income from poetry. But the real
source of our annoyance was that we were face to face with
the realization that people who say they want children later
always mean they want children never. Our nerves were
thrumming with the knowledge that we, who had thought
ourselves so unique, had fallen into the same biological trap
as every mindless rutting creature which ever existed.
The road took us along the southern slopes of Ben Cru-
achan until we began to catch glimpses of the gray Atlantic far
ahead. I had just cut our speed to absorb the view better when
I noticed the sign spiked to a gatepost. It said: "SLOW
GLASSQuality High, Prices LowJ. R. Hagan." On an
impulse I stopped the car on the verpe, wincing slightly as
tough grasses whipped noisily at the bodywork.
"Why have we stopped?" Selina's neat, smoke-silver head
turned in surprise.
"Look at that sign. Let's go up and see what there is. The
' stuff might be reasonably priced out here."
Selina's voice was pitched high with scorn as she refused,
but I was too taken with my idea to listen. I had an illogical
conviction that doing something extravagant and crazy would
set us right again.
"Come on," I said, "the exercise might do us some good.
Wf'" 'reen driving too long anyway."
She shrugged in a way that hurt me and got out of the car.
We walked up'a path made of irregular, packed clay steps
nosed with short lengths of sapling. The path curved through
trees which clothed the edge of the hill and at its end we found
a low farmhouse. Beyond the little stone building tall frames
of slow glass gazed out towards the voice-stilling sight of
Cruachan's ponderous descent towards the waters of Loch
Linnhe. Most of the panes were perfectly transparent but a
few were dark, like panels of polished ebony.
As we approached the house through a neat cobbled yard a
tall middle-aged man in ash-colored tweeds arose and waved
to us. He had been sitting on the low rubble wall which
bounded the yard, smoking a pipe and staring towards the
house. At the front window of the cottage a young woman in
a tangerine dress stood with a small boy in her arms, but she
turned disinterestedly and moved out of sight as we drew near.
"Mr. Hagan?" I guessed.
"Correct. Come to see some glass, have you? Well, you've
come to the right place." Hagan spoke crisply, with traces of
the pure highland which sounds so much like Irish to the
unaccustomed ear. He had one of those calmly dismayed
faces one finds on elderly roadmenders and philosophers.
"Yes," I said. "We're on holiday. We saw your sign."
Selina, who usually has a natural fluency with strangers,
said nothing. She was looking towards the now empty window
with what I thought was a slightly puzzled expression.
"Up from London, are you? Well, as I said, you've come to
the right placeand at the right time, too. My wife and I
don't see many people this early in the season."
I laughed. "Does that mean we might be able to buy a little
glass without mortgaging our home?"
"Look at that now," Hagan said, smiling helplessly. "I've
thrown away any advantage I might have had in the transac-
tion. Rose, that's my wife, says I never learn. Still, let's sit
down and talk it over," He pointed at the rubble wall then
glanced doubtfully, at Selina's immaculate blue skirt. "Wait till
I fetch a rug from the house." Hagan limped quickly into the
cottage, closing the door behind him.
"Perhaps it wasn't such a marvelous idea to come up here,"
I whispered to Selina, "but you might at least be pleasant to
the man. I think I can smell a bargain."
"Some hope," she said with deliberate coarseness. "Surely
even you must have noticed that ancient dress his.wife is
wearing? He won't give much away to strangers."
"Was that his wife?"
"Of course that was his wife."
"Well, well," I said, surprised. "Anyway, try to be civil with
him. I don't want to be embarrassed."
Selina snorted, but she smiled whitely when Hagan reap-
peared and I relaxed a little. Strange how a man can love a
woman and yet at the same time pray for her to fall under a
train.
Hagan spread a tartan blanket on the wall and we sat down,
feeling slightly self-conscious at having been translated from
our city-oriented lives into a rural tableau. On the distant slate
of the Loch, beyond the watchful frames of slow glass, a
slow-moving steamer drew a white line towards the south.
The boisterous mountain air seemed almost to invade our
lungs, giving us more oxygen than we required.
"Some of the glass farmers around here," Hagan began,
"give strangers, such as yourselves, a sales talk. about how
beautiful the autumn is in this part of Argyll. Or it might be
the spring, or the winter. I don't do thatany fool knows that
a place which doesn't look right in summer never looks right.
What do you say?"
I nodded compliantly.
"I want you just to take a good look out towards Mull,
Mr...."
"Garland."
"... Garland. That's what you're buying if you buy my
glass, and it never looks better than it does at this minute. The
glass is in perfect phase, none of it is less than ten years thick
and a four-foot window will cost you two hundred
pounds."
"Two hundred!" Selina was shocked. "That's as much as
they charge at the Scenedow shop in Bond Street."
Hagan smiled patiently, then looked closely at me to see if
I knew enough about slow glass to appreciate what he had
been saying. His price had been much higher than I had
hopedbut ten years thick! The cheap glass one found in
places like the Vistaplex and Pane-o-rama stores usually
consisted of a quarter of an inch of ordinary glass faced with
a veneer of slow glass perhaps only ten or twelve months
thick.
"You don't understand, darling," I said, already determined
to buy. "This glass will last ten years and it's in phase."
"Doesn't that only mean it keeps time?"
Hagan smiled at her again, realizing he had no further
necessity' to bother with me. "Only, you say! Pardon me, Mrs.
Garland, but you don't seem to appreciate the miracle, the
genuine honest-to-goodness miracle, of engineering precision
needed to produce a piece of glass in phase. When I say the
glass is ten years thick it means it takes light ten years to pass
through it. In effect, each one of those panes is ten light-years
thickmore than twice the distance to the nearest starso a
variation in actual thickness of only a millionth of an inch
would ..."
He stopped talking for a moment and sat quietly looking
towards the house. I turned my head from the view of the
Loch and saw the young woman standing at the window
again. Hagan's eyes were filled with a kind of greedy rever-
ence which made me feel uncomfortable and at the same time
convinced me Selina had been wrong. In my experience
husbands never looked at wives that way, at least, not at their
own.
The girl remained in view for a few seconds, dress glowing
warmly, then moved back into the room. Suddenly I received
a distinct, though inexplicable, impression she was blind. My
feeling was that Selina and I were perhaps blundering through
an emotional interplay as violent as our own.
"I'm sorry," Hagan continued, "I thought Rose was going
to call me for something. Now, where was I, Mrs. Garland?
Ten light-years compressed into a quarter of an inch
means..."
I ceased to listen, partly because I was already sold, partly
because I had heard the story of slow glass many times before
and had never yet understood the principles involved. An
acquaintance with scientific training had once tried to be
helpful by telling me to visualize a pane of slow glass as a
hologram which did not need coherent light from a laser for
the reconstitution of its visual information, and in which
every photon of ordinary light passed through a spiral tunnel
coiled outside the radius of capture of each atom in the glass.
This gem of, to me, incomprehensibility not only told me
nothing, it convinced me once again that a mind as nontechni-
cal as mine should concern itself less with causes than effects.
The most important effect, in the eyes of the .average
individual, was that light took a long time to pass through a
sheet of slow glass. A new piece was always jet black because
nothing had yet come through, but one could stand the glass
beside, say, a woodland lake until the scene emerged, perhaps
a year later. If the glass was then removed and installed in a
dismal city flat, the flat wouldfor that yearappear to
overlook the woodland lake. During the year it wouldn't be
merely a very realistic but still picturethe water would
ripple in sunlight, silent animals would come to drink, birds
would cross the sky, night would follow day, season would
follow season. Until one day, a year later, the beauty held in
the subatomic pipelines would be exhausted and the familiar
gray cityscape would reappear.
Apart from its stupendous novelty value, the commercial
success of slow glass was founded on the fact that having a
scenedow was the exact emotional equivalent of owning land.
The meanest cave dweller could look out on misty parks
and who was to say they weren't his? A man who really owns
tailored gardens and estates doesn't spend his time proving his
ownership by crawling on his ground, feeling, smelling, tast-
ing it. All he receives from the land are light patterns, and
with scenedows those patterns could be taken into coal mines,
submarines, prison cells.
On several occasions I have tried to write short pieces
about the enchanted crystal but, to me, the theme is so
ineffably poetic as to be, paradoxically, beyond the reach of
poetrymine at any rate. Besides, the best songs and verse
had already been written, with prescient inspiration, by men
who had died long before slow glass was discovered. I had no
hope of equaling, for example, Moore with his:
Oft in the stilly night,
Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light,
Of other days around me . . .
It took only a few years for slow glass to develop from a
scientific curiosity to a sizable industry. And much to the
astonishment of we poetsthose of us who remain convinced
that beauty lives though lilies diethe trappings of that
industry were no different from those of any other. There
were good scenedows which cost a lot of money, and there
were inferior scenedows which cost rather less. The thiebiess,
measured in years, was an important factor in the cost but
there was also the question of actual thickness, or phase.
Even with the most sophisticated engineering techniques
available thickness control was something of a hit-and-miss
affair. A coarse discrepancy could mean that a pane intended
to be five years thick might be five and a half, so that light
which entered in summer emerged in winter; a fine discrep-
ancy could mean that noon sunshine emerged at midnight.
These incompatibilities had their peculiar charmmany night
workers, for example, liked having their own private time
zonesbut, in general, it cost more to buy scenedows which
kept closely instep with real time.
Selina still looked unconvinced when Hagan had finished
speaking. She shook her head almost imperceptibly and I
knew he had been using the wrong approach. Quite suddenly
the pewter helmet of her hair was disturbed by a cool gust of
wind, and huge clean tumbling drops of rain began to spang
round us from an almost cloudless sky.
"I'll  give  you  a  check  now,"  I  said  abruptly,  and  saw
Selina's green eyes triangulate angrily on my face. "You can
arrange delivery?"
"Aye, delivery's no problem," Hagan said, getting to his
feet. "But wouldn't you rather take the glass with you?"
"Well, yesif you don't mind." I was shamed by his
readiness to trust my scrip.
"I'll unclip a pane for you. Wait here. It won't take long to
slip it into a carrying frame." Hagan limped down the slope
to'vards the seriate windows, through some of which the view
towards Linnhe was sunny, while others were cloudy and a
few pure black.
Selina drew the collar of her blouse closed at her throat.
"The least he could have done was invite us inside. There
can't be so many fools passing through that he can afford to
neglect them."
I tried to ignore the insult and concentrated on writing the
check. One of the outsize drops broke across my knuckles,
splattering the pink paper.
"All right," I said, "let's move in under the eaves till he gets
back." You. worm, I thought as I felt the whole thing go
completely wrong. I just had to be a fool to marry you. A
prize fool, a fool's fooland now that you've trapped part of
me inside you I'll never ever, never ever, never ever get away.
Feeling my stomach clench itself painfully, I ran behind
Selina to the side of the cottage. Beyond the window the neat
living room, with its coal fire, was empty but the child's toys
were scattered on the floor. Alphabet blocks and a wheelbar-
row the exact color of freshly pared carrots. As I stared in,
the boy came running from the other room and began kicking
the blocks. He didn't notice me. A few moments later the
young woman entered the room and lifted him, laughing
easily and whole-heartedly as she swung the boy under her
arm. She came to the window as she had done earlier. I
smiled self-consciously, but neither she nor the child re-
sponded.
My forehead prickled icily. Could they both be blind? I
sidled away.
Selina gave a little scream and I spun towards her.
"The rug!" she said. "It's getting soaked."
She ran across the yard in the rain, snatched the reddish
square from the dappling wall and ran back, towards the
cottage door. Something heaved convulsively in my subcon-
sious.
"Selina," I shouted. "Don't open it!"
But I was too late. She had pushed open the latched
wooden door and was standing, hand over mouth, looking
into the cottage. I moved close to her and took the rug from
her unresisting fingers.
As I was closing the door I let my eyes traverse the
cottage's interior. The neat living room in which I had just
seen the woman and child was, in reality, a sickening clutter
of shabby furniture, old newspapers, cast-off clothing and
smeared dishes. It was damp, stinking and utterly deserted.
The only object I recognized from my view through the
window was the little wheelbarrow, paintless and broken.
I latched the door firmly and ordered myself to forpet what
I had seen. Some men who live alone are good housekeepers;
others just don't know how.
Selina's face was white. "I don't understand. I don't under-
stand it."
"Slow glass works both ways," I said gently. "Light passes
out of a house, as well as in."
"You mean . . . ?"
"I don't know. It isn't our business. Now steady up
Hagan's coming back with our glass." The chorning in my
stomach was beginning to subside.
Hagan came into the yard carrying an oblong, plastic-cov-
ered frame. I held the check out to him, but he was staring
at Selina's face. He seemed to know immediately that our
uncomprehending fingers had rummaged through his soul.
Selina avoided his gaze. She was old and ill-looking, and her
eyes stared determinedly towards the nearing horizon.
"I'll take the rug from you, Mr. Garland," Hagan finally
said. "You shouldn't have troubled yourself over it."
"No trouble. Here's the check."
"Thank you." He was still looking at Selina with a strange
kind of supplication. "It's been a pleasure to do business with
you."
"The pleasure was mine," I said with equal, senseless
formality. I picked up the heavy frame and guided Selina
towards the path which led to the road. Just as we reached the
head of the now slippery steps Hagan spoke again.
"Mr. Garland!"
I turned unwillingly.
"It wasn't my fault," he said steadily. "A hit-and-run driver
got them both, down on the Oban road six years ago. My boy
was only seven when it happened. I'm entitled to keep
something."
I nodded wordlessly and moved down the path, holding my
wife close to me, treasuring the feel of her arms locked
around me. At the bend I looked back through the rain and
saw Hagan sitting with squared shoulders on the wall where
we had first seen him.
Pe was looking at the house, but I was unable to tell if
there was anyone at the window.