He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch.
“Should be there in an hour,” he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought: “Wonder if the computer’s finished its run? It was due about now.”
Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky.
“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
JAMES BLISH
A Work of Art
James Blish is respected as a writer who brought intellectual complexity to familiar science fiction themes. A member of the Futurians, the famed science fiction organization, Blish began publishing science fiction in 1940. Shortly after, he published his short story “Sunken Universe” (one of several he would eventually pull together as his novel The Seedling Stars); it is an early exploration of the ramifications and consequences of genetic engineering, in which humanity seeds the stars with biologically altered versions of itself tailored to fit alien environments and inevitably must come to terms with the psychological, sociological, and biological standards by which humanity is defined. Cities in Flight comprises four separate novels—They Shall Have Stars, Life for the Stars, Earthman Come Home, and The Triumph of Time—all of which project a future where entire cities of people migrate across the galaxy in search of more favorable opportunities, but find mostly instead the ineluctable and repeating problems of history. Blish’s best-known single work is undoubtedly the Hugo Award–winning novel, A Case of Conscience, a landmark exercise in eschatology about a missionary to another planet who discovers an alien species free of original sin and thus a challenge to the tenets of his Earth-based religion. Blish’s stories, which regularly wrestled with such weighty themes as godhood, aesthetics, special relativity, and the nature of human consciousness, have been collected in Galactic Cluster, So Close to Home, and Anywhen. His work as a novelist includes the historical novel Doctor Mirabilis and Black Easter and its sequel The Day of Judgment, pointed studies of biblical good and evil in a dark fantasy context. Among his most important contributions to science fiction are the critical studies and reviews of science fiction published under his William Atheling byline and collected in the volumes The Issue at Hand, More Issues at Hand, and The Tale That Wags the God.
INSTANTLY, HE REMEMBERED dying. He remembered it, however, as if at two removes—as though he were remembering a memory, rather than an actual event; as though he himself had not really been there when he died.
Yet the memory was all from his own point of view, not that of some detached and disembodied observer which might have been his soul. He had been most conscious of the rasping, unevenly drawn movements of the air in his chest. Blurring rapidly, the doctor’s face had bent over him, loomed, come closer, and then had vanished as the doctor’s head passed below his cone of vision, turned sideways to listen to his lungs.
It had become rapidly darker, and then, only then, had he realized that these were to be his last minutes. He had tried dutifully to say Pauline’s name, but his memory contained no record of the sound—only of the rattling breath and of the film of sootiness thickening in the air, blotting out everything for an instant.
Only an instant, and then the memory was over. The room was bright again, and the ceiling, he noticed with wonder, had turned a soft green. The doctor’s head lifted again and looked down at him.
It was a different doctor. This one was a far younger man, with an ascetic face and gleaming, almost fey eyes. There was no doubt about it. One of the last conscious thoughts he had had was that of gratitude that the attending physician, there at the end, had not been the one who secretly hated him for his one-time associations with the Nazi hierarchy. The attending doctor, instead, had worn an expression amusingly proper for that of a Swiss expert called to the deathbed of an eminent man: a mixture of worry at the prospect of losing so eminent a patient, and complacency at the thought that, at the old man’s age, nobody could blame this doctor if he died. At eighty-five, pneumonia is a serious matter, with or without penicillin.
“You’re all right now,” the new doctor said, freeing his patient’s head of a whole series of little silver rods which had been clinging to it by a sort of network cap. “Rest a minute and try to be calm. Do you know your name?”
He drew a cautious breath. There seemed to be nothing at all the matter with his lungs now; indeed, he felt positively healthy. “Certainly,” he said, a little nettled. “Do you know yours?”
The doctor smiled crookedly. “You’re in character, it appears,” he said. “My name is Barkun Kris; I am a mind sculptor. Yours?”
“Richard Strauss.”
“Very good,” Dr. Kris said, and turned away. Strauss, however, had already been diverted by a new singularity. Strauss is a word as well as a name in German; it has many meanings—an ostrich, a bouquet; von Wolzogen had had a high old time working all the possible puns into the libretto of Feuersnot. And it happened to be the first German word to be spoken either by himself or by Dr. Kris since that twice-removed moment of death. The language was not French or Italian, either. It was most like English, but not the English Strauss knew; nevertheless, he was having no trouble speaking it and even thinking in it.
Well, he thought, I’ll be able to conduct The Love of Danae, after all. It isn’t every composer who can premiere his own opera posthumously. Still, there was something queer about all this—the queerest part of all being that conviction, which would not go away, that he had actually been dead for just a short time. Of course, medicine was making great strides, but . . .
“Explain all this,” he said, lifting himself to one elbow. The bed was different, too, and not nearly as comfortable as the one in which he had died. As for the room, it looked more like a dynamo shed than a sickroom. Had modern medicine taken to reviving its corpses on the floor of the Siemanns-Schukert plant?
“In a moment,” Dr. Kris said. He finished rolling some machine back into what Strauss impatiently supposed to be its place, and crossed to the pallet. “Now. There are many things you’ll have to take for granted without attempting to understand them, Dr. Strauss. Not everything in the world today is explicable in terms of your assumptions. Please bear that in mind.”
“Very well. Proceed.”
“The date,” Dr. Kris said, “is 2161 by your calendar—or, in other words, it is now two hundred and twelve years after your death. Naturally, you’ll realize that by this time nothing remains of your body but the bones. The body you have now was volunteered for your use. Before you look into a mirror to see what it’s like, remember that its physical difference from the one you were used to is all in your favor. It’s in perfect health, not unpleasant for other people to look at, and its physiological age is about fifty.”
A miracle? No, not in this new age, surely. It is simply a work of science. But what a science! This was Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and the immortality of the superman combined into one.