Джек Макдевитт - Translations from The Colosian

During the years when the first starships were crawling out from Earth, I sat one night in an open-air theater under strange constellations, watching a performance of Antigone ?

The title was different, of course. And the characters had different names. I didn’t understand the language, the playwright was somebody named Tyr, and Creon had fangs. For that matter, so did Antigone, and the guy sitting immediately to my right. But you can’t miss the stark cadence of that desperate drama. I'd have known it in Swahili. The old passions don’t change: even there, on that far world, where the Milky Way is only a point of light visible on clear nights; even there, reflected on the faces of a species that would have sent those early Hellenic audiences screaming into the woods, I knew them. Inexorably, while Harvey Klein and I watched through the narrow slits of our masks, the tragedy played itself out. And if I’d had any doubts about the nature of the creatures among whom I was spending the evening, they dissipated during the performance. The spectators held their breath in the right places, and gasped and trembled on cue. When it was over, they filed out thoroughly subdued, some surreptitiously wiping their eyes. They had been a damned good audience, and I admired them, fangs, fur, snouts, and all.

I think quite often about that evening, and wonder how something that began so well could have gone so wrong. It’s more than twenty years now: but I remember the theater as though it were only last weekend. Basically, it was a brick platform with wings, balconies, and oil lamps. After the show, we climbed a hill behind it, and stood in the flicker of summer lightning, watching workers draw large squares of canvas over the stage. Klein looked around to be sure we were alone, coughed consumptively, pulled back his hood, and removed the mask. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Well,” he asked,-“was I right?”

I nodded, and then realized he couldn’t see the gesture. “Yes,” I said, taking off my own headpiece. The horns glinted in the light of an enormous green and yellow disc that arced over the entire eastern horizon. “Yes, it is Sophocles.”

“You’ll be interested in knowing,” said Klein, “that the thing we watched tonight was written over two thousand years ago, our time, during this world’s political and literary golden age.”

“Not possible,” I said. My sandals hurt. The best footwear that Klein had been able to come up with on short notice was Japanese. I was wearing false fur on my insteps, and the thong ran up between my second and third toes, rubbing the furpiece into my flesh.

It was a long ride from Glen Ellyn to that pleasant park, two million light years or so. But I felt at home among its deep glades and flat-bladed ferns that smelled vaguely of mint. The grass was freshly cut, and neatly trimmed hedges bordered gravel walks.

Klein looked puzzled. “You don’t seem surprised, George,” he said. “I would have thought that seeing a Greek play out here would come as something of a shock.”

That was a laugh. A few hours earlier I’d walked with Klein through the windowless, crooked storeroom nailed to the back of his two-story frame house. We’d entered from the kitchen, and we’d come out here .

“Where, precisely, are we?”

“I’m not too sure,” he said. “Somewhere in M32, which is one of the Local Group of galaxies. The inhabitants call the place Melchior.” A cool breeze blew across the brow of the hill. Klein looked unwell in the torpid light of the monster moon. He’d had a long history of high blood pressure and diabetes, and he occasionally mixed his insulin with rum. “How do you account for it?” he asked. “How does it happen that these people are watching Sophoclean drama?”

“One thing at a time,” I said. “How did we get here? What’s the point of having starships that take years to go to places like this if we can simply walk across?”

“Oh,” he smiled, “no starship will ever come here.”

“Why not?”

“We’re much too far.” He pulled his robe up around his knees and lowered himself awkwardly onto the ocher-colored grass. “How much physics do you know?”

“Not much.”

Klein glanced tolerantly toward the dark forest pressing on the far side of the park. “George, it’s all a matter of perception. We live in a queer universe, which is both physical and conceptual. Stone and shadow.” He picked up a dry branch which lay beside him, and examined it. Then he snapped it in two. “The hill we’re sitting on is really here, but our perception holds it in place. Imposes order, as Brooking might say. Or Emerson. That branch is only partly wood. It’s also an idea.

“Space is subject to the same laws. It’s influenced by the observer.”

“How does that connect your back door with this place?”

“Distance is a function of the mind,” he said.

I looked at him, trying to understand, wondering whether he was amusing himself at my expense. “Are you trying to say there’s no such thing as space? That it doesn’t really exist?”

“Of course not, George. What I am saying is that the intelligent observer has a much larger role in ordering things than we ever before realized. We used to think of ourselves as standing outside somewhere inspecting a huge machine. Now we know that we’re part of the machine. No: more than that, we’re part of the fuel.” He glanced at the sky. Most of the stars had begun to fade in the growing light of the rising disc. “It’s distance that is an illusion, a convention, a linear measurement of a quality whose reality we establish. Listen, I know that’s not easy to understand. It’s hard to explain. But it works. You’re here.”

“Yes, I’m here. But where? In a place where they perform classical drama? How the hell does that happen?”

“I don’t know. I wanted you to tell me.”

Well, I damn sure had no idea, and I told him so. Having settled that, I got up to go, but he wasn’t anxious to leave. I realized finally that he was ill, and trying to conceal the fact. Curious: Klein could stroll between the galaxies, but he couldn’t do a thing about his high blood pressure. “Can you go anywhere ?” I asked.

“Hell, I can’t even go into Chicago.” He laughed. “It’s true. I have to take the train down to the Institute. I’m jammed in three mornings a week with all those commuters for three-quarters of an hour.” His chin had sunk onto his knees, and he seemed to be losing substance inside the robe. “The truth is, I only seem to be able to come out here. I have access to about a dozen star systems, all in this neighborhood. I don’t know why that should be.”

We sat awhile. Here and there, below us, lights moved through the gloom. He slapped at a flying insect. We were on a long, diamond-shaped island at the confluence of two broad rivers, one of which was obviously too rough for navigation. A half-dozen shallow-draft vessels were anchored in a small wharf-lined harbor. Several barges floated alongside short piers, piled high with casks and crates. Away from the waterfront area, which was commercial in aspect, were numerous clusters of small homes of a distinctly Bavarian flavor. These were interspersed with brightly illuminated shops and wide courtyards. “Maybe,” I said, “the way you get around explains all this. Antigone, I mean.”

“How’s that?”

“Maybe this playwright, what’s his name, Tyr, might have understood about, uh, traveling, whatever. Maybe he took his vacations in Athens. You know, go to the theater, see the Olympics. Would he have had the technology? Do you have to have a store room?”

Klein grinned.