The Best of C. L. Moore by C. L. Moore

Author:C. L. Moore [Moore, C. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction
Published: 2011-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

On the television screen Mary of Scotland climbed the scaffold to her doom, the gown of traditional scarlet clinging warmly to supple young curves as anachronistic in their way as the slippers beneath the gown, for—as everyone but playwrights knows—Mary was well into

middle age before she died. Gracefully this latter-day Mary bent her head, sweeping the long hair aside, kneeling to the block.

Maltzer watched stonily, seeing another woman entirely.

“I shouldn’t have let her,” he was muttering. “I shouldn’t have let her do it.”

“Do you really think you’d have stopped her if you could?” Harris asked quietly. And the other man after a moment’s pause shook his head jerkily.

“No, I suppose not. I keep thinking if I worked and waited a little longer maybe I could make it easier for her, but—no, I suppose not. She’s got to face them sooner or later, being herself.” He stood up abruptly, shoving back his chair. “If she only weren’t so - . . so frail. She doesn’t realize how delicately poised her very sanity is. We gave her what we could—the artists and the designers and I, all gave our very best—but she’s so pitifully handicapped even with all we could do. She’ll always be an abstraction and a. . . a freak, cut off from the world by handicaps worse in their way than anything any human being ever suffered before. Sooner or later she’ll realize it. And then—” He began to pace up and down with quick, uneven steps, striking his hands together. His face was twitching with a little tic that drew up one eye to a squint and released it again at irregular intervals. Harris could see how very near collapse the man was.

“Can you imagine what it’s like?” Maltzer demanded fiercely. “Penned into a mechanical body like that, shut out from all human contacts except what leaks in by way of sight and sound? To know you aren’t human any longer? She’s been through shocks enough already. When that shock fully hits her—”

“Shut up,” said Harris roughly. “You won’t do her any good if you break down yourself. Look—the vaude’s starting.”

Great golden curtains had swept together over the unhappy Queen of Scotland and were parting again now, all sorrow and frustration wiped away once more as cleanly as the passing centuries had already expunged them. Now a line of tiny dancers under the tremendous arch of the stage kicked and pranced with the precision of little mechanical dolls too small and perfect to be real. Vision rushed down upon them and swept along the row, face after stiffly smiling face racketing by like fence pickets. Then the sight rose into the rafters and looked down upon them from a great height, the grotesquely foreshortened figures still prancing in perfect rhythm even from this inhuman angle.

There was applause from an invisible audience. Then someone came out and did a dance with lighted torches that streamed long,

weaving ribbons of fire among clouds of what looked like cotton wool but was most probably asbestos.

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