The Dark Night of the Soul - James Blish, ebook, Temp
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
John W. Campbell, Jr., invented the rationale for this story, but then turned down the story proÂper because "Real talented people don't behave like small children." How he could have reached such a conclusion after what was then thirty years in science fiction, I cannot begin to imagine. I know he's been at s-f conventions. The point of the story, however, is not in the antisocial ways artists sometimes behave, but in whether society (in the form, say, of GreenÂwich Village policemen) can really afford to purge itself of its deviants.THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOULbyJames BlishThe fight began, really, with a simple comment that Mordecai Drover offered to nobody in particular while watching Dr. Helena Curtis, the Bartok Colony's resiÂdent novelist, trying to finish her research before nightÂfall. He couldn't fathom why the remark had set off such an explosion.After all, all he had said was, "I can never quite get used to it.""What?" Henry Chatterton asked abstractedly."Seeing a woman using an index. It's as outlandish a sight as a chimpanzee roller-skating."At this precise moment Callisto slid into Jupiter's shadow and the nighttime clamor of the Bartok Colony began to rise rapidly toward its sustained crescendo. Typewriters began to rattle one after the other, pianos to compete discordantly, a phonograph to grunt out part of Le Sacre du Printemps for Novgorod's choreography pawns, and collapsible tubes to pop air-bubbles as paint was squeezed onto palettes. The comÂputer, too, began humming deep in its throat, for Dr. Winterhalter of the Special Studies section was trying to make it compose a sonata derived entirely from information theory.The clamor would last four hours and 53.9 minÂutes before beginning to taper off.Helena, however, made no move toward her typeÂwriter. She closed her reference book with a savage snap, as though trying to trap a passing moth, and stood up. Mordecai, who had already plunged deep into Canto XVII of The Drum Major and the Mask, failed to notice her glare until he became aware of an unprecedented silence in the Commons Room. He looked up.Helena was advancing on him, step by step, each pace made more menacing by the peculiar glide CalÂlisto's slight gravity enforced. She was graceful under any circumstances; now she looked positively serpenÂtine, and her usually full lips were white. Alarmed, Mordecai put down his pen."Just what did you mean by that?" she asked.By what? Mordecai searched his memory franticÂally. At first all he could come up with was the last strophe he had written, only a few seconds ago, and as yet he had no idea what he meant by that: The thing was badly flawed and needed revision before even its author could know what it meant.Then he remembered the remark about women and indexes—indices?—already hours away in the fleet subÂjective time of Callistan night."Why, it wasn't anything," he said wonderingly. "I mean, you know how it is with chimpanzees—""Oh, I do, do I?""Well, maybe I didn't—what I mean is, they get to bevery skillful at unusual tasks—it's just that you don'texpect them to be—Helena, it was only a joke! Whatgood is a joke after it's explained? Don't be obstinate.""Meaning don't be obstinately stupid?" she saidthrough her teeth. "I've had enough of your nasty innuendos. If there's anything I loathe, it's a would-be genius with no manners."Henry Chatterton's smock was already spattered with egg tempera from top to bottom, and the painting on his canvas was nearly a quarter finished. Slashing away at one corner of it with a loaded brush, he said out of the corner of his mouth:"We've had to put up with that viper's tongue of yours long enough, Helena. Why don't you go hitch your flat frontispiece over your décolleté novel and let the rest of us work?""Now, wait a minute," John Rapaport said, flushing heavily and looking up from the dural plate on which he had been sketching. "By what right does an egg-coddler go out of his way to insult a craftsman, ChatÂterton? If you have to dip that brush of yours in blatherskite, save it for your daubs—never mind smearing it over Helena."Chatterton swung around in astonishment and then began to smirk."So that's how it's going to be! Well, Johnny boy, congratulations. But I predict that you'll find five hours makes a very, very long night. Don't say an expert didn't warn you."Rapaport swung. His engravers' point flew accurately at Chatterton's left eye. The painter ducked just in time; the tool stuck, quivering, in his canvas. He took one look at it and rushed on Rapaport, howling. MorÂdecai would have been out of the way with no difficulty if Helena's open hand had not caught him a stinging blow across the chops at the crucial moment. Then he and Chatterton went over.The noise quickly attracted the rest of the happy family. Only fifteen minutes after Mordecai's innocentremark, the Commons Room was untidily heaped with geniuses.It looked like a long night.Because Mordecai, a month before, had fumbled so long and so helplessly with his space suit until an imÂpatient crewman had decided to help him dog it down, he had almost been dumped out of the air lock, and the ship's captain barely gave him time to get clear before taking off again. Within a few seconds, it seemed, he had been more alone than he had ever been in his life.He had stood still inside the suit, because he could do nothing else, and fumed. Actually, he knew, he was more afraid than angry, though he was thoroughly furious with himself, and with Martin Hope Eglington, his mentor. It certainly hadn't been Mordecai's idea to come to Jupiter IV. He had never even been in space before, not even so far as the Moon, and had had no desire to go.Nevertheless, here he was, under a sky of so deep a blue that it was almost black, and full of sharp cold stars, even though it was midday. The Sun was a miniature caricature of itself, shedding little light and no apparent heat. There was nothing else to be seen but a wilderness of tumbled rocks, their sharp edges and spires protruding gauntly through deep layers of powdery snow, all the way to the near horizon. The fact that Mordecai could hear a faint sighing whistle outside his suit, as of the saddest and weakest of all winds, did not cheer him.It had begun, as such things usually did with MorÂdecai, with what had seemed an innocent question, this time one asked by someone else. Eglington had been helping him with the prosody of The Drum Major and the Mask, Mordecai's major poem thus far, cast as a sirvente to Wallace Stevens. They had swinked at it all day in Eglington's beautiful and remote VerÂmont home. Mordecai had now been Eglington's only protégé; there was a time when the Pulitzer Prize winÂner had maintained a sort of salon of them, but now he was too old for such rigors."That's enough for now," Eglington had said shortly after dinner. "It's really shaping up very well, MorÂdecai, if you could just get yourself past trying to compress everything you know into one phrase. In a poem of this length, at least a little openness of texture is desirable—if only to let the reader into it.""I see that now. Whew! When I first got started, noÂbody told me poetry could be such hard work.""All real poetry is hard work; that's one of the tellÂtales. Tell me something, Mordecai—when do you do most of your work? I don't mean your best work, necesÂsarily; at what hours of the day do you find that you work most easily, can concentrate best, put the most out?"That had been easy to answer. Mordecai's work habits had been fixed for fifteen years. "Between about eight at night and two in the morning.""I thought so. That's true of most creative people, including scientists. The exact hours vary, but the fact is that most of the world's creative work—and creative play; it's the same thing—is done at night.""Interesting," Mordecai had said. "Why is that, do you suppose?""Oh, I don't have to suppose. The answer is known. It's because, during those hours, the whole mass of the Earth is between you and the Sun. That protects you from an extremely penetrating kind of solar radiation, made up of particles called neutrinos. The protection is negligible statistically, because all matter is almost perfectly transparent to neutrinos, but it seems that the creative processes are tremendously sensitive to even the slightest shielding effect.""Too bad they can't be blocked off completely, then. I'd like to be able to work days. I just can't.""You can if you want to undergo some privations in the process," Eglington had said, almost idly. "Ever hear of the Bartok Colony?""Yes, it's a retreat of some sort. Never went in for that kind of thing much myself. I work better alone.""I see you don't know where it is. It's on Callisto."The notion had startled and somewhat repelled MorÂdecai, for whom the neutrinos had already been alÂmost too much. He would expect Eglington to know about such things—he was not called "the poet of physÂics" for nothing—but Mordecai had no interest in them. "On Callisto? Why, for heaven's sake?""Well, for two reasons," Eglington had said. "First of all, because at that distance from the Sun the raw neutrino flux is only about three point seven percent of what it is here on Earth. The other reason is that for nearly five hours of every two weeks—that is, every Callistan day—you have the small bulk of the satelÂlite plus the whole mass of Jupiter between you and the Sun. For that period you're in a position to work your creative engine with almost no neutrino static. I'm told that the results, in terms of productivity, are truly fantastic.""Oh," Mordecai had said. "It seems like an e...
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]