The Many Worlds of Poul Anderson

by Roger Elwood

  The hero realizes his own limitations:

  James Mackenzie knew he was not much more than average bright under the best of conditions… . His achievements amounted to patchwork jobs carried out in utter confusion or to slogging like this and wishing only for an end to the whole mess… . Hero? What an all-time laugh!

  (“No Truce With Kings”)

  There is no glamor in heroic adventures: war is only “hunger, thirst, exhaustion, terror, mutilation, death, and forever the sameness, boredom grinding you down like an ox” (“No Truce With Kings”). The lack of glamor in heroism is such a common Anderson motif that it even occurs in a colorful action tale like “The High Crusade.” Even David Falkayn, the Polesotechnic popinjay (The Trouble Twisters 1966), and Dominic Flandry find their exploits more grubby than glamorous in the execution.

  Personal virtue is not a prerequisite for heroism. A man need not be a saint to perform useful, and even great deeds. In “Robin Hood’s Bam,” a waspish, conniving government commissioner provides an escape hatch for faltering humanity by deceit. Pleasure-loving MacLaren and brutish Sverdlov are just as heroic as their more “respectable” crewmates in “We Have Fed Our Sea.”

  Moreover, good men are not necessarily the most effective heroes. The rebel admiral’s moral righteousness brings himself and his followers to ruin in The Rebel Worlds. Wily, self-indulgent Nicholas Van Rijn solves the problems in “The Man Who Counts”/War of the Wing-Men (1958). Therefore the heroine bestows herself on him, rather than his clean-cut, conventionally “heroic” young subordinate. The considerable good accomplished by Van Rijn’s escapades is always presented as an incidental byproduct of his greed. Not until “Satan’s World” does he awkwardly admit concern for the welfare of others.

  To Anderson fanaticism is “the ugliest sin of all,” for the well-meaning fanatic has been the cause of most human misery. “ ‘Don’t you realize that deliberate scoundrels do little harm, but that the evil wrought by sincere fools is incalculable?’” asks the hero of ‘The Double-Dyed Villains” in echo of Ortega y Gasset. Fanatics are also the villains in the UN-Man series, “Progress,” “A Plague of Masters”/Earthman, Go Hamel (1961), Shield, “No Truce With Kings,” The Star Fox, “Operation Changeling” (1969), and There Will Be Time. No amount of sincerity can justify the fanatic’s crimes. He knows no mercy, compassion, or self-doubt. “The face in the screen grew altogether inhuman. It was a face Banning knew—millennia of slaughter-house history knew it—the face of embodied Purpose” (“Brake”). And unlike Delany, Anderson does not allow his evil fanatics the excuse of insanity. They are fully culpable for their wrongdoing.

  Men must bear the responsibility for their deeds and this responsibility inevitably entails guilt. After leading a military coup against his best friend, “Fourré reached out and closed the darkened eyes. He wondered if he would ever be able to close them within himself” (“Marius”). Even alien manipulators feel remorse: “‘Do you think … when we see the final result … will the blood wash off us?’ ‘No. We pay the heaviest price of all* ” (“No Truce With Kings”). Pain is inescapable. Good is always flawed. “I didn’t know. Wherever I turned, there were treason and injustice. However hard I tried to do right, I had to wrong somebody” (“Inside Earth”). Computer simulations demonstrate the impossibility of social perfection in ‘The Fatal Fulfillment” (1970). Man can devise no one set of rigid answers to ease his struggles.

  Sunt lacrimae rerum …. The tears of things pervade the cosmos. The terror of infinite spaces haunts the silent stars. Planets reproach their conquerors in every windsong. The more time and circumstance change man, the more he remains the same—frail and sadly fallible.

  The enemy was old and strong and crafty, it took a million forms and could never be quite slain. For it was man himself— the madness and sorrow of the human soul, the revolt of a primitive animal against the unnatural state called civilization and freedom.

  (“The UN-Man”)

  What then is a man to do? “We must try, or stop claiming to be men” (“What’ll You Give?”/“Que Donn’rez Vous?” 1963). The unending challenge must be met with steadfast dignity. A devout Protestant declares: “‘Our part is to take what God sends us and still hold ourselves up on both feet’ ” (“We Have Fed Our Sea”).

  Anderson’s superb Norse fantasy The Broken Sword is a forceful statement of one man’s response to fate. The hero is absolutely unflinching in the best pagan tradition: “There is no other road than the one we take, hard though it be. And no man outlives his weird. Best to meet it bravely face to face.’ ” His courage illuminates his tragic life. When he perishes, he dies neither as a pawn of the Aesir nor of destiny. He dies an indomitable man.

  Valiant effort matters more than success, for no victory is eternal. Anderson gives “one grey command: Endure” (‘The UN-Man”). But in the last analysis, why bother? Life, as stated in The Star Ways, “has no extrinsic purpose or meaning; it’s just another phenomenon of the physical universe, it simply is.” Or as the author says in his own voice: “There is no scientific reason to believe that life was ever intended; it is simply a property of matter under certain conditions” (Is There Life on Other Worlds?).

  Viewing intelligence as a purely pragmatic development rather than a mystical goal of Nature means rejecting such ideas as those of Teilhard de Chardin. Instead, Anderson favors a nonrigorous, intuitive response which is not an answer.

  I still see the same blind cosmos governed by the same blind laws. But suddenly it matters. It matters terribly, and means something. What, I haven’t figured out yet. I probably never will. But I have a reason for living, or dying if need be. Maybe that’s the whole purpose of life: purpose itself.

  (“We Have Fed Our Sea”)

  Anderson’s heroes find the meaning of life in the living and the seeking of mystery and beauty and love. Boldly living, bravely dying, man finds his purpose in struggling against the endless challenges life provides: “Our pride is that nevertheless, now and then, we do our best. A few times we succeed. What more dare we ask for?” ([Ensign Flandry).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  for “Challenge and Response”:

  A slightly different version of this essay appeared in the Riverside Quarterly, IV, No. 2 (January 1970), pp. 80-95.

  I would like to thank Patrick McGuire for helpful criticism.

  NOTES

  Footnotes to “Challenge and Response”:

  1. Titles and dates given are those of the first complete publication with title changes indicated as necessary.

  2. In internal chronological order: “Marius” (1957), “The UN-Man” (1953), “The Sensitive Man” (1953), “The Big Rain” (1954), “Quixote and the Windmill” (1950), “Out of the Iron Womb” (1955), “Cold Victory” (1957), “The Snows of Ganymede” (1955), “Brake” (1957), “The Troublemakers”

  (1953) , and “Question and Answer”/Planet of No Return (1954) . The last story was not intended to be part of the series, but it fits in nevertheless. The author has allowed it to be added, post hoc.

  3. “The Life of Your Time” (1965), “In the Shadow” (1967), “The Alien Enemy” (1968).

  4. “The Star Plunderer” (1952), “Sargasso of Lost Starships” (1952), “The People of the Wind” (1973), Ensign Flandry (1966), “Outpost of Empire” (1967), A Circus of Hells (1969), The Rebel Worlds (1969), The Day of Their Return (1973), Agent of the Terran Empire (1965), Flandry of Terra (1965), “A Tragedy of Errors” (1968), Let the Spacemen Beware! (1963), “The Sharing of Flesh” (1968), and “Starfog” (1967).

  5. James Blish, “Poul Anderson: The Enduring Explosion,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1971, 54.

  Journeys End

  —doctor hill & twinges in chest hut must he all right maybe indigestion & dinner last night & wasn’t audrey giving me the glad eye & how the hell is a guy to know &• maybe i can try and find out & what a fool i can look if she doesn’t— —goddam idiot & they shouldn’t let some people d
rive & oh all right so the examiner was pretty lenient with me i haven’t had a had accident yet & christ blood all over my blood let’s face it i’m scared to drive hut the buses are no damn good & straight up three paces & man in a green hat fir judas i ran that red light— In fifteen years a man got used to it, more or less. He could walk down the street and hold his own thoughts to himself while the surf of unvoiced voices was a nearly ignored mumble in his brain. Now and then, of course, you got something very bad, it stood up in your skull and shrieked at you.

  Norman Kane, who had come here because he was in love with a girl he had never seen, got to the corner of University and Shattuck just when the light turned against him. He paused, fetching out a cigarette with nicotine-yellowed fingers while traffic slithered in front of his eyes.

  It was an unfavorable time, four-thirty in the afternoon, homeward rush of nervous systems jangled with weariness and hating everything else on feet or wheels. Maybe he should have stayed in the bar down on San Pablo. It had been pleas-andy cool and dim, the bartender’s mind an amiable cud-chewing somnolence, and he could have suppressed awareness of the woman.

  No, maybe not. When the city had scraped your nerves raw, they didn’t have much resistance to the slime in some heads.

  Odd, he reflected, how often the outwardly polite ones were the foully twisted inside. They wouldn’t dream of misbehaving in public, but just below the surface of consciousness … Better not think of it, better not remember. Berkeley was at least preferable to San Francisco or Oakland. The bigger the town, the more evil it seemed to hold, three centimeters under the frontal bone. New York was almost literally uninhabitable.

  There was a young fellow waiting beside Kane. A girl came down the sidewalk, pretty, long yellow hair and a well-filled blouse. Kane focused idly on her: yes, she had an apartment of her own, which she had carefully picked for a tolerant superintendent. Lechery jumped in the young man’s nerves. His eyes followed the girl, Cobean-style, and she walked on … simple harmonic motion.

  Too bad. They could have enjoyed each other. Kane chuckled to himself. He had nothing against honest lust, anyhow not in his liberated conscious mind; he couldn’t do much about a degree of subconscious puritanism. Lord, you can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, if they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly.

  —the trouble is, he thought, they hurt me, but i cant tell them that, they’d rip me apart and dance on the pieces, the government the military wouldn’t like a man to be alive who could read secrets but their fear-inspired anger would be like a baby’s tantrum beside the red blind amok of the common man (thoughtful husband considerate father good honest worker earnest patriot) whose inward sins were known, you can talk to a priest or a psychiatrist because it is only talk & he does not live your failings with you— The light changed and Kane started across. It was clear fall weather, not that this area had marked seasons, a cool sunny day with a small wind blowing up the street from the water. A few blocks ahead of him, the University campus was a splash of manicured green under brown hills.

  —flayed & burningburningburning moldering rotted flesh & the hones the white hard clean hones coming out gwtjklfmx— Kane stopped dead. Through the vertigo he felt how sweat was drenching into his shirt.

  And it was such an ordinary-looking man!

  “Hey, there, buster, wake up! Ya wanna get killed?”

  Kane took a sharp hold on himself and finished the walk across the street. There was a bench at the bus stop and he sat down till the trembling was over.

  Some thoughts were unendurable.

  He had a trick of recovery. He went back to Father Schliemann. The priest’s mind had been like a well, a deep well under sun-speckled trees, its surface brightened with a few gold-colored autumn leaves … but there was nothing bland about the water, it had a sharp mineral tang, a smell of the living earth. He had often fled to Father Schliemann, in those days of puberty when the telepathic power had first wakened in him. He had found good minds since then, happy minds, but never one so serene, none with so much strength under the gentleness.

  “I don’t want you hanging around that papist, boy, do you understand?” It was his father, the lean implacable man who always wore a black tie. “Next thing you know, you’ll be worshiping graven images just like him.”

  “But they aren’t—”

  His ears could still ring with the cuff. “Go up to your room! I don’t want to see you till tomorrow morning. And you’ll have two more chapters of Deuteronomy memorized by then. Maybe that’ll teach you the true Christian faith.”

  Kane grinned wryly and lit another cigarette from the end of the previous one. He knew he smoked too much. And drank—but not heavily. Drunk, he was defenseless before the horrible tides of thinking.

  He had had to run away from home at the age of fourteen. The only other possibility was conflict ending with reform school. It had meant running away from Father Schliemann too, but how in hell’s red fire could a sensitive adolescent dwell in the same house as his father’s brain? Were the psychologists now admitting the possibility of a sadistic masochist? Kane knew the type existed.

  Give thanks for this much mercy, that the extreme telepathic range was only a few hundred yards. And a mind-reading boy was not altogether helpless; he could evade officialdom and the worst horrors of the underworld. He could find a decent elderly couple at the far end of the continent and talk himself into adoption.

  Kane shook himself and got up again. He threw the cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with his heel. A thousand examples told him what obscure sexual symbolism was involved in the act, but what the deuce … it was also a practical thing. Guns are phallic too, but at times you need a gun.

  Weapons: he could not help wincing as he recalled dodging the draft in 1949. He’d traveled enough to know this country was worth defending. But it hadn’t been any trick at all to hoodwink a psychiatrist and get himself marked hopelessly psychoneurotic—which he would be after two years penned with frustrated men. There had been no choice, but he could not escape a sense of dishonor.

  —haven t we all sinned every one of us is there a single human creature on earth without his burden of shame?— A man was coming out of the drugstore beside him. Idly, Kane probed his mind. You could go quite deeply into anyone’s self if you cared to, in fact you couldn’t help doing so. It was impossible merely to scan verbalized thinking: the organism is too closely integrated. Memory is not a passive filing cabinet, but a continuous process beneath the level of consciousness; in a way, you are always reliving your entire past. And the more emotionally charged the recollection is, the more powerfully it radiates.

  The stranger’s name was—no matter. His personality was as much an unchangeable signature as his fingerprints. Kane had gotten into the habit of thinking of people as such-and-such a multidimensional symbolic topography; the name was an arbitrary gabble.

  The man was an assistant professor of English at the University. Age forty-two, married, three children, making payments on a house in Albany. Steady sober type, but convivial, popular with his colleagues, ready to help out most friends. He was thinking about tomorrow’s lectures, with overtones of a movie he wanted to see and an undercurrent of fear that he might have cancer after all, in spite of what the doctor said.

  Below, the list of his hidden crimes. As a boy: tormenting a cat, well-buried Oedipean hungers, masturbation, petty theft … the usual. Later: cheating on a few exams, that ludicrous fumbling attempt with a girl which came to nothing because he was too nervous, the time he crashed a cafeteria line and had been shoved away with a cold remark (and praises be, Jim who had seen that was now living in Chicago) … still later: wincing memories of a stomach uncontrollably rumbling at a formal dinner, that woman in his hotel room the night he got drunk at the convention, standing by and letting old Carver be fired because he didn’t have the courage to protest to the dean … now: youngest child a nasty whining little snotnose, but you
can’t show anyone what you really think, reading Rosamond Marshall when alone in his office, disturbing young breasts in tight sweaters, the petty spite of academic politics, giving Simonson an undeserved good grade because the boy was so beautiful, disgraceful sweating panic when at night he considered how death would annihilate his ego— And what of it? This assistant professor was a good man, a kindly and honest man, his inwardness ought to be between him and the Recording Angel. Few of his thoughts had ever become deeds, or ever would. Let him bury them himself, let him be alone with them. Kane ceased focusing on him.

  The telepath had grown tolerant. He expected little of anyone; nobody matched the mask, except possibly Father Schliemann and a few others … and those were human too, with human failings; the difference was that they knew peace. It was the emotional overtones of guilt which made Kane wince. God knew he himself was no better. Worse, maybe, but then his life had thrust him to it. If you had an ordinary human sex drive, for instance, but could not endure to cohabit with the thoughts of a woman, your life became one of fleeting encounters; there was no help for it, even if your austere boyhood training still protested.

  “Pardon me, got a match?”

  —lynn is dead / i still cant understand it that i will never see her again & eventually you learn how to go on in a chopped-off fashion hut what do you do in the meantime how do you get through the nights alone— “Sure.”—maybe that is the worst: sharing sorrow and unable to help & only able to give him a light for his cigarette— Kane put the matches back in his pocket and went on up University, pausing again at Oxford. A pair of large campus buildings jutted up to the left; others were visible ahead and to the right, through a screen of eucalyptus trees. Sunlight and shadow damascened the grass. From a passing student’s mind he discovered where the library was. A good big library—perhaps it held a clue, buried somewhere in the periodical files. He had already arranged for permission to use the facilities: prominent young author doing research for his next novel.