Our story told it as it should have happened. The insistence of Dr. Hillis that he pilot the craft, that he restore the fair name of his industries. We helped him unwillingly, but we could not refuse the great man's wishes.
I admit the hint of scandal. His grave illness was common knowledge, and the autopsy machines showed the drugs in his body. Luckily, his doctor admitted that Hillis had been using them for months to fight the pain.
I think there is little doubt in most people's minds that he meant to crash. But it is all in the spirit of the age, my dear MacLuhan. People are generous to the sublime gesture. Dr. Hillis went down fighting, struggling with a machine on the cutting edge of science. He went down defending his good name.
As for Somps and myself, the response has been noble. The mailnet has been full of messages. Some condemn me for giving in to the old man. But most thank me for helping to make his last moments beautiful.
I last saw poor Somps as he and Claire Berger were departing for Osaka. I'm afraid he still feels some bitterness. "Maybe it was best," he told me grudgingly as we shook hands. "People keep telling me so. But I'll never forget the horror of those last moments."
"I'm sorry about the aircraft," I said. "When the notoriety wears off, I'm sure it will be a great success."
"I'll have to find another backer," he said. "And then put it into production. It won't be easy. Probably take years."
"It's the yin and yang," I told him. "Once poets labored in garrets while engineers had the run of the land. Things change, that's all. If one goes against the grain, one pays the price."
My words, meant to cheer him, seemed to scald him instead. "You're so damned smug," he almost snarled. "Damn it, Claire and I build things, we shape the world, we try for real understanding! We don't just do each other's nails and hold hands in the moonlight!"
He is a stubborn man. Maybe the pendulum will one day swing his way again, if he lives as long as Dr. Hillis did. In the meantime he has a woman to stand by him and assure him that he is persecuted. So maybe he will find, in the good fight, some narrow kind of sublimity.
So, my dear MacLuhan, love has triumphed. Leona and I will shortly return to my beloved Seattle, where she will rent the suite next to my own. I feel that very soon we will take the great step of abandoning carezza and confronting true physical satisfaction. If all goes well then, I will propose marriage! And then, perhaps, even children.
In any case, I promise you, you will be the first to know.
Yours as always, de K.
TELLIAMED
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1984.
Monsieur Benoit de Maillet, formerly His Majesty's grand consul in Egypt, now retired, tottered down the slope of the beach on the arm of his manservant, Torquetil. When they reached the usual spot beside the great striped rock, de Maillet leaned on his cane, breathing heavily. The walk was a hard one for a man in his eighties. De Maillet's wig was askew, and his wise old face was pinched with concealed suffering. Torquetil unfolded the campstool. De Maillet sat on it with a brief sigh of relief. Torquetil set up the parasol. It was an immense and gaudy parting gift from the Sultan of Egypt, and de Maillet was particularly proud of it. The servant set a wicker basket of provisions by the old philosopher's swollen knees. "Will there be anything else, monsieur?"
"When you get back, have the carriage master come and examine those straps," de Maillet said firmly. He opened his wicker box and pulled out a black-ribboned pair of spectacles. He sat upright again with an effort and put his hand to the side of his substantial paunch. "And tell the cook -- no more curries!"
"Very well, monsieur." The young Breton bounded back up the slope toward the carriage.
De Maillet balanced the spectacles on his large and fleshy nose. He reached into the basket for a letter, and broke its wax seal with his thumb.
Pont Gardeau, Suriname February 12, 1737
To the Sieur Benoit de Maillet, Grand Consul and Envoy Plenipotentiary, ret'd., in Marseille.
Cher Monsieur:
Please forgive this execrable handwriting, which, I know, is almost as bad as your own. It seems that my secretary has fallen ill with one of the manifold agues of this pestilential region. Without the aid of this invaluable boy my studies of natural theology have fallen into a lamentable state. I myself am not so well as I should be; but it is nothing serious. I imagine that neither of us can claim the vigor we had in those faraway days in Egypt.
I regret that I am unable to send you the samples of rock you requested; during the past several months I have been upriver, in the interior, humbly struggling for the propagation of His Catholic Majesty's most perfect Faith. During such time I collected a number of very curious worms and insects, with which I hope to confound the pedantic System of the infidel Linnaeus.
The natives of the interior are stubbornly set in their heathen errors, yet full of remarkable stories of men with tails, ancestral giants, and the like, which I hope to convey to you when I have more thoroughly mastered their language.
And now I must chide you. A friend of mine in the Royal Society of London, a colleague in natural theology (though very lamentably a Protestant), has told me that he has read a certain manuscript circulated secretly among the savants of France and England, which he called Telliamed; or, Discourses On the Diminution of the Sea. He was full of praise for this manuscript, which, he being an infidel, does nothing for the sanctity of your reputation. And you need not protest your innocence; for a child could see that the supposed Indian sage, named Telliamed, who narrates this new System of Geology, merely has your own name spelled backward.
Perhaps the sea really has diminished; I should find this hard to deny, since I, too, have seen the desert of petrified ships in the Bahar-Balaama west of Cairo. But this should not be interpreted to go against Revelation. As your spiritual adviser, I must warn you, my old friend: you are no longer so young as to be able to neglect the very pressing matter of the salvation of your soul. In the end the Dogma must triumph, and no amount of sophistical "evidences," "hypotheses," or "deductions" will save you when you argue before the Throne of Judgment.
I should hate to think that the collections of rocks and fossils that I have sent you had been used for an impious purpose. Yet I cannot leave you without a gift of some sort; and knowing your fondness for snuff, I have sent you some of the aboriginals' own nasal aliment, which they derive from a number of curious bushes and vines. It is not tobacco, but upon the use of it, they receive the word of the Faith more readily, with excitement and rejoicing; so I cannot think that it is bad. I include the small birdbone snuffing tool with which they inhale the substance, for your collection.
In return, I ask that you burn a few candles for the repose of the soul of poor Berard Procureur; and please try to go to confession with regularity. I pray for you,
Your ancient friend,
Fr. Gerard le Bovier de Fuillet, S.J.
De Maillet smiled. "It is not at all a bad thing to have one's spiritual adviser in another country," he mused aloud. He pulled from within the heavy envelope another, smaller envelope, which rustled. He peeled the gummed endpaper loose, and the snuff within the packet released a pleasant, faintly bitter aroma of exotic spices.
The smell unlocked a chain of memories within de Maillet's mind: cones of black incense smoldering in a perforated silver bowl, dark coffee in a china cup, the nude rump of an Egyptian courtesan spread across a brocade pillow. With these unexpected and pleasant memories came a sudden comfortable loosening in de Maillet's bowels. He felt a brief sense of animal well-being, a warm flickering from the ashen coals of youth.