Robert Silverberg - The Second Trip

If they came to attack her now—but what comes is dawn. A brightening. Finding her place in the universe under a friendly sky. She seems taller. Older, though no less beautiful; voluptuous, though cooler than before; in command of herself, beyond doubt Venus ascendant. A totally different self each few minutes.

What machinery is at work beneath that figure’s supple skin? How is this cycle of transformations propelled? Watching it, the constantly shifting play of emotions and impressions, the subtle mutations of posture and attitude, Macy feels awed and overpowered but also vaguely cheated. He had not known what to expect of the art of his former self, other than that it would be dramatic and impressive. But is this really art, this clever robot? Will all this mechanical trickery be able to stand alongside the true artistic achievements of the ages? He is no critic, in truth he knows nothing at all, yet the intense realism of the sculpture that is its outstanding characteristic makes it seem aesthetically primitive to him, a toy, a stunt, a triumph of craft, not art.

But even so. But even so. Impossible not to respond to the power of the thing. How thoroughly Lissa has been captured in those gears and cogs; not his Lissa, not the broken dazed girl he knows, but Nat Hamlin’s glorious Lissa, whose caved-in shell has fallen to Hamlin’s successor. What Hamlin has created here may be simpleminded next to Leonardo and Cellini and Henry Moore, but behind the superficial superficiality may lie a carefully masked profundity, Macy suspects. He could stand here studying the figure for hours. Days. As others seem to be doing. Those students muttering notes into hand recorders, and that one, holographing the work from every conceivable angle—they are trapped by it too, plainly. A masterpiece. Undoubtedly a masterpiece.

With an effort he turned away from it, feeling an almost audible snap as the sightlines of his contact with the sculpture broke, and glanced at Lissa. She was drawn back, hunched against the wall, lips parted, eyes fixed and glassy, caught by the mesmerism of her overpowering simulacrum up there. A gasp frozen on her face. What currents of identity, he wondered, were flowing from her to the sculpture, from the sculpture to her? What draining of self was going on, and what recharging? What must it be like to behold yourself made into such a work of art?

And where was Hamlin? Why wasn’t he jumping and cavorting in pride before his wondrous achievement, as he had that first day in Harold Griswold’s office? Hamlin was quiescent. Not absent, though. Macy became gradually aware of him glowing far below the surface, embedded deep in his brain. A thorn in his paw. A pebble in his hoof. Macy hadn’t expected Hamlin to remain bolted inside his dungeon for long.

Nor did he. Rising slowly now, bubbling toward the top. Evoked into consciousness by the Antigone 21. That’s all right, Macy thought. Let him come up. I can handle him. Bracing himself, battening down, Macy waited for his other self to finish drifting toward the surface. Not hostile, this time. Not even aggressive. A prevailing air of calmness about him. No resentment apparent over his defeat in their last battle. Perhaps a strategy of deception, though. Get me off guard, then make another quick leap for the speech centers. I’m ready, whatever he tries. But when Hamlin opened their inner conversation, his tone was easy, civil:

—What do you think of it?

Impressive. I didn’t know you had it in you.

—Why? Do I seem second-rate to you, Macy?

The only aspect of you that I know is the violence, the criminality. It turns me off. I don’t associate great art with that kind of personality.

—What a load of bourgeois crap that is, friend.

Is it?

—Item one, a man can be a thief, a killer, a baby-buggerer, anything, and still be a great artist. The quality of his morals has nothing to do with the quality of his perceptions, hip? You’d be surprised how much of the stuff in this museum was produced by absolute bastards. Item two, I happened to have been a pretty fair artist fifteen years before I became what they call an enemy of society. This piece you see here was entirely finished before I had my breakdown. Item three, since you never knew me, you don’t have any goddam right to judge what kind of person I was.

I concede item two and maybe item one. But why should I yield on number three? I know you plenty well, Hamlin. You’ve knocked me down, you’ve played games with my heart, you’ve attempted to seize sections of my brain, you’ve threatened outright to kill me. Should I love you for that? This is the first time since you surfaced that you’ve seemed even halfway civilized. You come on like a thug; do you blame me for being surprised you could produce a sculpture like this?

—You really think I’m a villain?

You’re a convicted criminal.

—Forget that shit I mean my relationship to you. You think I’m acting out of evil impulses?

What else can I think?

—But I’m not, Macy. I don’t dislike you, I don’t want to harm you, I have no negative feelings toward you at all. It just happens that you’re in the way of a man who’s fighting for his life.

Meaning you.

—Exactly. I want to be myself again. I don’t want to stay submerged inside you.

The court decreed —

—Fuck the court. The whole Rehab system is hysterical nonsense. Why wipe me out? Why not rehabilitate me in the real sense of the word? I wasn’t hopelessly insane, Macy. Shit, yes, I did a lot of awful things, I admit that freely, I was off my head. But in the year 2007 they could have some better way of coping with insanity than the death sentence.

But —

—Let me finish. It was a death sentence, wasn’t it? To rip me out of my own body and throw me away, and pour someone else into my head? What happened to my whole accumulation of experiences? What happened to my skills and talents? What happened to me, damn it, what happened to me? Killed. Killed. Nothing but a zombie body left. It’s only by the merest fluke that I’m still here, even in this condition, hanging on inside you. What kind of humanitarianism is that? What are they saving, when they keep the body and throw away the soul?

I didn’t make the laws.

—Agreed, Macy. But you’re no fool. You can see how flagrantly unjust Rehab is. They want to separate me from society because I’m dangerous, okay, I agree, I agree, put me away, try to fix me, drain all the poison out of me. Right. But instead this. The super resources of modern science are employed to murder a great but somewhat deranged sculptor and invent a dumb holovision commentator to replace him.

Thank you.

—What else can I say? Look up there, at my Antigone. Could you do that? Could anybody else do that? I did it. My unique gift to mankind. And fifty others almost as good. I’m not bragging, Macy, I’m being as objective as hell. I was somebody valuable, I had a special gift, I had intensity, I had humanity. Maybe my gift drove me crazy after a while, but at least I had something to offer. And you? What are you? Who are you? You’re nothing. You have no depth You have no texture. You have no past. You have no reality. I’ve been sitting here inside you, taking an inventory. I know what you’re made of, Macy, and it’s all ersatz. You have no purpose in existing. You can’t do anything that a robot couldn’t do better. A holovision commentator? They can program a machine with pear-shaped tones, and it’ll broadcast you off the map.

I admit all this, Macy replied. He stood stiffly, pretending to study the sculpture. He wondered how much time had elapsed during his colloquy with Hamlin. Five seconds? Five minutes? He had lost track of external things. Granted that you were a genius and I’m a nobody, what am I supposed to do about it?