I watched a lamplighter working his way slowly through the waterfront area. “Not necessarily,” I said. “He might have the same sort of limitation you do: you come here; he goes there.” But no: that made no sense either. “If somebody had developed that kind of technique, these people wouldn’t be living in little pre-industrial Revolution villages.”
“Help me up,” said Klein, stretching out a hand. A thin sheen of perspiration dampened his neck, despite the coolness of the night. “How do you lose the secret of the ages?” he asked rhetorically. “The answer is, that anyone smart enough to figure it out knows too much about human nature—or the nature of intelligent creatures—to let them get their hands on it. Or even to let them know it’s there.”
“Why?”
“Why?” His jaw tightened. “Don’t you read anything except poetry?” He held the devil’s mask in one hand and turned it slowly round. “Because,” he said, suddenly grinning, “the bedrooms of the universe would lie open. Have you considered what you and I could do were we not so high-principled? There’d be no defense, anywhere, against any who possessed the knowledge. Or at least there wouldn’t be once we got the damned thing working properly. And while we’re on the subject, has it occurred to you that we may not be the first visitors from Earth? Maybe one of your Greeks figured it all out, showed up here, and left some of his reading material in Colosia when he went home.”
The huge moon had finally disconnected itself from the horizon. Its northern tip was almost directly overhead: the last few stars had winked out.
“What the hell kind of moon is that?” I asked. It was banded, like Jupiter. And a huge, pale blue disc floated just above the equator.
“That’s Encubis,” said Klein. “We’re the moon.” We’d started down the hill, but he looked over his shoulder at the planet. “It’s a gas giant, of course. I don’t know how big it is, but we’re a little too close. This world has the highest tides you’ve ever seen, and the heaviest weather.” He squinted at the thing. “Goddam eyeball in the middle of it is a storm, like the one on Jupiter. Been there as long as people can remember. It’s a wonder everyone here isn’t a religious fanatic.”
Two of the creatures approached along the base of the hill, and passed. Young couple, I thought, judging by the fluidity of their movements, and the proximity they kept. We could smell the river in the night air.
We strolled down toward the trees without saying much, and after a time he looked at me curiously. “What’s so funny?”
I hadn’t realized my feelings showed. “We have an immortal with feet of clay.”
“You’re thinking of Aulis Tyr?”
I nodded. He said nothing further until we were back in the store room. Then he closed the storm door and smiled. “The plagiarist,” he said, “could just as easily be Sophocles.”
Klein provided me with a local copy of the Antigone, which is to say that it was a translation from the ancient Colosian into the language currently spoken in that part of Melchior which we’d visited. It was contained in a collection of eight plays by three major playwrights of the period. He added a dictionary and a grammar, and I set myself to acquiring some degree of facility, and did so within a few weeks.
There were substantial differences between .Tyr’s Antigone and Sophocles’ masterpiece, which, naturally, I was familiar with in the original Greek. Nevertheless, tone and nuance, character and plot, were similar beyond any possibility of coincidence.
Two other plays in the collection were credited to Tyr. They were works of subtle power, both (I felt) on a level comparable with the Antigone. I recognized neither at first; yet I felt I knew the characters.
The hero of one is a young warrior with a besieging army, who falls in love with the daughter of the enemy king. In an effort to stop the war, he allows himself to be lured into a chapel rendezvous during which he is murdered from ambush by the woman’s archer brother.
In the second drama, an old king apparently given to habitual dissembling meets a long-lost son. But neither recognizes the other, and their natural propensity for deceit (the son is not unlike the father) exacerbates the misunderstanding until, ultimately, they meet in combat by the sea. And the son is triumphant:
Death from the sea, and a warrior stricken in a chapeclass="underline" Odysseus on the beach, and Achilles. Only seven of Sophocles’ plays have survived, of more than a hundred known to have existed. Did I possess two more?
I read through each again and again, absorbed in the thrust,and delicacy of the language. I was at the time working on an analysis of irregular verbs in Middle English, and the contrast between Tyr’s iambs, drenched in sunlight and desire, and my own heavyfooted prose, was painfully evident. It is a terrible thing to have just enough talent to recognize one’s own mediocrity.
I had then, as I have now, a quarter-million word novel packed away in .three stationery boxes pushed onto a back shelf in the walk-in closet in my bedroom. It was tattered, the edges frayed by repeated mailings, the paper brittle and dry. My father lives in those pages, smoldering, silent, alcoholic; and Charlotte Endicott, whose bright green eyes have not yet entirely faded from my nights. And Kip Williams, who played third base with ferocity, rescued two children from a fire, and died in the war.
A quarter-million words, filled with the passions, and braced with the sensibilities, of a young lifetime. I called it The Trees of Avignon. And I knew it was utter trash.
All the years of writing commentary on Byron and Mark Twain, on Virgil and Yeats, had left me with too exquisite a taste not to recognize my own work for what it was. What would I not have given to possess the genius of the creator of Antigone?
And that, I knew, was precisely the temptation to which Aulis Tyr had succumbed. “There’s just no question,” I told Harvey. “It’s a clear case of plagiarism.”
Klein nodded thoughtfully. We were seated before a wide fireplace in his richly-paneled study, sipping daiquiris. Yes: a creature from a world with a taste for literature had seen an opportunity to be Sophocles. And had made it count. “Maybe,” mused Klein. “But I think we should withhold our opinion as to who stole what until all the evidence is in.”
I drained my glass. “Are you suggesting we go back?”
“We have a mystery, George.” The fire was dying, and he stared solemnly into the embers. “Would you like,” he asked, “to meet my contact on Melchior?’
“Your contact? You mean you’ve talked to one of them?”
“Where did you think I get my information? Yes: I know a man runs a bookshop.” He angled his watch to read it. “It's getting dark there now. Sun's down, and it’ll be a little while-before Encubus comes up.”