by Roger Elwood
FRONTIERS 1
Tomorrow’s
Alternatives
ORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION
edited by ROGER ELWOOD
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Tomorrow's Alternatives? - FRANK HERBERT
Those Wonderful Years - BARRY N. MALZBERG
Univac: 2200 - CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
Mommy Loves Ya - DAVID H. CHARNEY
Peritonitis - GENE WOLFE
Ship-Sister, Star-Sister - ROBERT SILVERBERG
Harriet - STEPHEN GOLDIN and C. F. HENSEL
Mutation Planet - BARRINGTON J. BAYLEY
Jacob's Bug - RICHARD POSNER
Getting Around - K. M O'DONNELL
The Answer - TERRY CARR
In Outraged Stone - R. A. LAFFERTY
The Morning Rush or Happy Birthday Dear Leah - LEE SAYE
Landmarks
Cover
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022
Collier-Macmillan Canada Ltd., Toronto, Ontario
Frontiers 1: Tomorrow’s Alternatives is also published in a hardcover edition by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-6060
First Collier Books Edition 1973
Printed in the United States of America
Preface
The best anthologies are those that afford authors the opportunity to bring into being brand-new stories. Certainly for the compiler it is most stimulating to work on all original anthologies—such as the present volume.
There are problems, to be sure: one quite well-known author has a habit of not making deadlines; another will not write a story unless it can have at least one pornographic scene in it. I try not to deal with such authors as the first; and I never deal with the second. (As far as I am concerned, science fiction that must depend upon sexual explicitness is built upon a pretty poor foundation.) Compiling an anthology properly is an agonizing job; only you, the reader, can judge if this book is a good one. But, I assure you, it was put together slowly and carefully.
The authors represented herein are a “mix.” Some are long-time professionals; others are newer authors; at least one is a complete beginner. But all have one thing in common: masterly storytelling abilities.
Stylistically, there is great diversity. The Silverberg approach, as indicated by “Ship-Sister, Star-Sister,” is certainly much different from that of Clifford D. Simak’s in “Univac: 2200.” Stephen Goldin and C. F. Hensel have combined definite social commentary with bittersweet qualities; and “Mommy Loves Ya” by David H. Charney is a survival story with a tender thread running through it. Lafferty is pure Lafferty with “In Outraged Stone.” And Malzberg is pure Malzberg with “Those Wonderful Years.”
Gene Wolfe’s story, “Peritonitis,” is one of his best; “Getting Around” by K. M. O’Donnell is top-drawer (we hope you agree); Lee Saye’s “Morning Rush” is both amusing and chilling; Terry Carr’s “The Answer” seems a change of pace for this well-known author. And Richard Posner, one of the brightest of the newer authors, does a fine job with “Jacob’s Bug,” a story with a surprise ending that we don’t think you will guess. Then Barrington Bayley comes on strong, showing he deserves his reputation, with “Mutation Planet.”
You will probably find Frank Herbert’s introduction to be far meatier than most; it offers some challenging thoughts about tomorrow’s alternatives, and deserves to be read, and studied, as a separate and worthy work in its own right.
Just what does tomorrow hold? What are the alternatives to today? Will life improve? Or will it simply deteriorate to a level more nightmarish than any encountered today?
These stories tackle such questions, as well as others. Some are fanciful in their projections; others are deadly serious. All were written with an awareness of the fact that you, the modern science fiction reader, demand not bug-eyed monsters and invasions from space but stories that are thought provoking and meaningful.
A special debt of thanks to my editor, Fred Honig: a patient man, and someone whose views have been of tremendous service toward the compilation of a better book.
Roger Elwood
Introduction: Tomorrow's Alternatives?
FRANK HERBERT
A fable for our times (about half past tomorrow).
If you believe you recognize in this fable any dolls living or dead,
you could be suffering from a warped reality.
Once upon a time there was a factory operated by dolls. The factory was called Reality and it was built in the land of Possible where improbable things often occurred. The factory manufactured guns and dolls, and it supposedly operated on a self-limiting principle. When there were too many dolls, the factory turned out more guns, which were intended to reduce the doll population.
An improbable thing happened, however. At the end of each supposedly self-limiting cycle, Possible found itself with more dolls and more guns than had existed before the start of the cycle.
This unexpected relationship between dolls and guns did not make itself immediately apparent to the factory’s doll managers, who were a select group within the regular output of Reality. Even when some dolls began to suggest such a relationship, their speculations were made the object of laughter. Everyone knew Reality had been designed on a self-limiting loop of the Universal Continuum and that the factory's controls had been left in the hands of the dolls by the Original Builder.
It came to pass then that the dolls of Possible found Reality straining to its limits. The cycles turned faster and faster. The entire process developed odd wobbles and eccentricities. Parts of Reality often were attacked and sometimes damaged. The factory's managers took to shoring up their structure which, through long addition and revision, appeared rambling and haphazard. The repairs were sometimes makeshift and improbable. Everyone from the highest managerial circles to the lowliest laboring dolls felt beleaguered, the target of threats too large to be understood.
Possible’s dolls began more and more to question self-limiting as a principle. Some sneered at doll control. Great blocs of dolls even openly denied that there had been an Original Builder. They substituted the Theory of the Grand Accident, sometimes called The Enormous Dichotomy.
All of this time, Reality seethed with questions about how to produce more guns and/or more dolls, or better dolls or better guns. Many splinter groups formed. Some argued for limiting guns, others for limiting dolls. An organizational schism developed within the factory. A large body of dolls revised an ancient concept called Deterrent Defense and named it now Sacred Security. Each splinter group developed its own factions. Many argued for such programs as speeding up the cycles or aiming for improbable goals of doll efficiency and gun efficiency. Gun to doll and doll to gun ratios were examined with fine attention to detail. Doll support and gun support became issues of the moment while the effects of such eccentric alternation reverberated throughout Possible.
A curious transformation began to occur in the dolls flowing from the factory. Some of the managers called it a manufacturing flaw and argued for new and better controls on doll production. Discontinuance of entire lines of dolls was proposed and some tried to carry out such programs, but the curious transformation continued. It assumed a major form called Variants. They were divided primarily into two categories: dolls intended for functions concerned mainly with doll quality and welfare began doing things which increased the production of
guns; gun-oriented dolls began to deny the principles beneath their function. It frequently was difficult to tell a doll-doll from a gun-doll.
In all of Possible there now remained only a few small doll voices saying: “Let us re-examine the whole function of Reality. Perhaps we have been blinded to important parts of the system by our belief in improbable principles.”
So few dolls paid attention to these warnings, however, that the mad cycles continued unabated—faster and faster, more and more eccentric. Finally, the whole system came crashing down in one last paroxysm of dolls and guns. Reality was left in ruins and Possible, stripped of all its dolls, reverted to a barren wilderness where chaotic improbabilities reigned supreme.
Moral: If you were built to prefer either dolls or guns, perhaps you were intended only for a limited function.
THE FUTURE THAT ISN'T
When I was quite young, long before I became perfect (a perfected thing), I began to suspect there must be flaws in my sense of reality. It seemed to my dim sense of confusion that things often blended, one into another, and the Law of the Excluded Middle merely opened up a void wherein anything was possible. But I had been produced to focus on objects (things) and not on systems (processes). This left so much unexplained that no thing behaved invariably as intended, provided that such a concept as intention could be entertained even for an instant.
What was even more important, I had somehow acquired an obvious predilection for excluding myself from all considerations about the world around me. A thing? Me? How awful!
This led naturally to a belief that I could be the sole exception to any rule which I detected. Rules were made for things, not for me, possessor of absolute free will.
In some odd fashion, all of the fellow humans I encountered appeared to have this same belief. Not a one of them seemed to suspect that our universe might be larger, more complex and subtle than our presumptive little Laws assumed. I reasoned that an unspoken (or unrecognized) assumption might be a signpost at the outer limits of where we humans ventured, but this personal exclusion principle confused me. It made it difficult to question the authenticity of any Law because the arguments kept returning to things which needed “no further explanation” and which “everybody” knew.
Except me—I didn't know.
This did little more than make me feel stupid and force me into actions which were asinine, to say the least: either I agreed hypocritically that “sure, everybody knows that” or I just joined all the rest of my kind in refusing to examine such disturbing areas. After all, what were the assumption signposts set up for?
Thus, I was taught to believe utterly and unquestioningly in principles and even more so in First Principles, the ones from which there could be no exclusions (except me). It was a universe of absolutes which provided me with an infinite source of comforting reassurances. It said: “All questions have answers.”
However, with my core of confusion—an unprincipled attitude—I suspected a flaw in the fabric of the universe: a question, one at the very least, without any answer whatsoever.
Despite what my fellow humans, western variety, employed as consensus reality, my own set of local beliefs; came to contain more and more naked kings. This was ai series of very traumatic experiences.
The frustrations of these early traumas led me to formulate five assumptions for my own study of reality. Because I want many of the words which follow to be a shared exploration of possible futures (alternative realities) with emphasis on humankind’s Utopian dreams, it seems only fair to begin the sharing with a brief statement of these assumptions.
Assumption I: There exists a kind of self-reflexive laugh reaction in humankind which often releases tensions and links us to that balance which we call sanity. (If I cannot laugh at myself, I risk turning the whole future and sanity business over to non-laughers.) Assumption II: Many Academic/Scientific Futurists who supposedly are guiding our philosophic and technologic trip through Time have a monkey on their backs, a burden of memories and concepts which contain alternate, often mutually exclusive versions of reality. (A monkey on the back sometimes can be detected by its characteristic chattering.) Assumption III: If we define Futurism as an exploration beyond accepted limits, then the nature of limiting systems becomes the first object of exploration. (Some people who say they are talking about a future are only talking about their own self-imposed limits.) Assumption IV: A prominent and commonly accepted reality matrix by which Futurism and Reality are interpreted suffers from false assumptions about control. The false assumptions can be described thusly: that manipulation can be absolute, and that power is not subject to relativistic influences.
Assumption V: Implications of Relativity Theory have not been applied to the ways humans relate to each other or to the ways humans relate to the universe. (We tend to project the future onto a screen whose subtitle says: “It’s better to live in a box than to face up to infinity.”) Five assumptions represent a weak arsenal with which to go up against thousands of years of reality production. It’s one thing to recognize that consensus reality (our ideas about common belief) includes errors. It’s quite another thing to put on Don Quixote’s armor, take up the Lance of the Five Assumptions, and charge forth to do battle with a dystopic universe. Rebellion can make you just as drunk as pot or alcohol, and there’s no guarantee that recognition of error will direct you to a proper correction of that error.
A city planner once told me his job was to seek “a compromise between the impossible and the improbable.”
This aphorism tied off a long harangue in which he had detailed his frustrations over trying to prevent a housing development on a flood plain which had been taken over by real estate speculators.
I asked him if he had even once looked at the problem from the point of view of the speculators, whose assumptions and the context defined by those assumptions had led them into this "anti-social” behavior. He dismissed my question as "politically naive.”
Our scientific culture, like the Victorian-industrial culture before it, sets sharp limits on what it will accept as a reality experience. Step outside those limits and the influence they have on the kinds of futures the society says it will permit, and you get cut off.
There’s obvious fallacy in the concept that you can deal with any problem as an isolated bit all of whose consequences can be anticipated and "controlled.” But consensus reality, reinforced by conformity, language and conditioning, continually traps us into positions where we deny that awareness by our actions.
My five assumptions tell me there are no facts, only observational postulates in an endlessly regenerative mish-mash of predictions—some faulty, some accurate . . . for the time being. To plan for the future, to attempt guiding humankind into "the better life” which our Utopian dreams define, we are involving ourselves with the monitoring and manipulation of change. This means inevitably that we change our frame of reference, our consensus reality.
But all around us exist societies demanding fixed frames of reference. In a multilevel universe, there can be no absolute fixed frames of reference and thus no absolute consensus reality. A relativistic universe makes it impossible to test the reliability of any expert by requiring him to agree with another expert. Both can be correct— within their individual frames of reference.
The city planner and the real estate speculator are both correct. Richard Nixon and the Students for a Democratic Society are correct—each in his own context. Mao and Nixon are both right.
Comes now the Futurist and the Ecologist, each with his bag of expertise, each making new demands and asking new questions. Comes now the SDS (and other “radicals”) accusing: “You won’t give us a better world because you’re bad.”
Each is right and each is wrong.
The five assumptions suggest to me that we are making many pointless demands and are asking many meaningless questions. We often do this after developing an “expertise” within a frame of reference which has little or no relationship to the frame of r
eference within which the questions are asked or the demands are made.
It is as pointless for the SDS to ask Nixon “Why are you so bad?” as it is for Nixon to demand of the SDS “Why are you so crazy?” Each bedazzled by his own rightness and the other’s wrongness fails to see a larger system whose dynamics have us all resonating.
The dolls are jumping. They are performing in response to a multitude of system-influences, most of which are only dimly understood by the performers. Advice comes from all sides, each bundle of pronouncements translated from a specialized expertise (local reality) which sets the whole system bouncing, often in unexpected ways. The leaders of each frame of reference guide that framework as though it were the only exception to all of the rules they have discovered. It appears to be an odd amplification of the personal exclusion principle.
It would seem that a Futurist concerned with our Utopian dreams needs to listen, to observe and to develop expertise to fit the problems, not the other way around. But that is not our dominant approach.
Let us pause a moment and advance a tentative postulate based on my Assumption V (and the Special Theory of Relativity).
Postulate I: When taken out of a larger system of dynamic relationships, all inertial frames of reference are equivalent.
According to this postulate, both Pakistan and India are equally right, and equally wrong. The same applies to Democrats and Republicans, to Left and Right, to Israel and the Arab states, to Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics. The latter would appear in this view still to be resonating to the Battle of the Boyne with consequences no less bloody than those of the original.