The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  “Right now?” I asked, somewhat worriedly. I still hadn’t fed the cat.

  “No, but soon,” she reassured me.

  “Oh,” I said.

  We sat there in silence. After a bit, she cleared her throat. “I think . . .” she began slowly, then she trailed off.

  “That’s nice,” I said, but she didn’t hear me.

  “. . . I think that the world exists only as a reflection of our minds. It exists the way it does only because that’s the way we think it does.”

  “I think—therefore I exist,” I said. But she ignored me. She told me to be quiet.

  “Yes, you exist,” she confirmed. (I’m glad she did—I was beginning to be a bit worried—and this was the wrong day for it. The last time I looked this was Tuesday.) “You exist,” she said, “because you think you do. And the world also exists because you think it does.”

  “Then, when I die—the world ends with me . . . ?” I asked hopefully, making a mental note not to die.

  “No—that’s nonsense. No sane and rational man believes in solipsism.” She scratched at her eyeball with a fork and went on.

  “When you die—you cease to exist,” she said. “But the world goes on—it goes on because everybody else who’s still alive still believes that it exists. (The only thing they’ve stopped believing in is you.) You see, the world is a collective figment of all of our individual imaginations.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said stiffly. “I do not believe in collectivism.” I unbent a little so as to sit up. “I am a staunch Republican.”

  “Don’t you see?” she said, ignoring my interruption. “This mass hallucination that the world is real just keeps on going because of its own inertia. You believe in it because that’s the way it was when you first began to exist—that is when everybody else first began to believe you existed. When you were born, you saw that the world followed a certain set of rules that other people believed in, so you believed in them too—the fact that you believe in them just gives them that much more strength.”

  “Oh,” I said. I lay there listening to her, trying to figure out some way to leave gracefully. My eye was starting to hurt and I couldn’t see the ceiling any more. The fog was rolling in again.

  “Look at the church!” she said suddenly.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Look at the church!” she said it again, insistent.

  I tried to. I lifted my head and tried to look at the church, but the fog was too thick. I couldn’t even see my toes.

  “Look at it,” she said. “Faith is the basic precept of religion—faith that what they’re telling you is true! Don’t they tell you to have faith in the church, that faith can work miracles?!! Well, I’ll tell you something—it can! If enough people believe in something, it becomes reality!”

  By now, my eye was throbbing most painfully. I tried to sit up, but her strong hands held me back. She leaned closer and whispered intensely, “Yes! It’s true. It is.”

  “If you say so,” I nodded.

  She went on, “Fortunately, the church long ago abandoned miracles in favor of conservatism—now, it’s fighting to preserve the status quo! The church is one of the last bastions of reality—it’s one of the few things holding back chaos!”

  “Chaos?”

  “Yes, chaos.”

  “Oh.”

  “The world is changing,” she explained. “Man is changing it”

  I nodded. “Yes, I know. I read the newspapers too.”

  “No, no! That’s not what I meant! Man is changing his world unconsciously! More and more people are starting to believe that they really can change their environment—and the more they believe it, the more drastically it changes. I’ll give you an example—fossils!”

  “Fossils?”

  “Yes, fossils. Nobody ever discovered any fossils until people started believing in evolution—then when they did start to believe in it, you couldn’t turn around without tripping over fossils.”

  “You really believe this?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do!” she said intensely.

  “Then it must be so,” I said.

  “Oh, it is,” she agreed and I knew that she really did believe it. She made a very convincing case. In fact, the more she talked, the more I began to believe it too.

  “Why did you tell me all this?” I asked.

  “Because we’re in great danger. That’s why.” She whispered fiercely, “The world isn’t changing uniformly. Everybody is starting to believe in different things and they’re forming pockets of non-causality.”

  “Like a pimple?” I offered.

  “Yes,” she said and I could see a small one forming on the tip of her nose. “It works this way: a fanatic meets another fanatic, then the two of them meet with some other people who share the same hallucinations and pretty soon there are a whole bunch of fanatics all believing the same thing—pretty soon, their delusions become real for them—they’ve started to contradict the known reality and replaced it with a node of non-reality.”

  I nodded and concentrated on wrapping a swirl of the fog securely around me.

  “The more it changes, the more people believe in the changes, and the stronger they become. If this keeps up we may be the only sane people left in the world—and we’re in danger—”

  “They’re outnumbering our reality?” I suggested.

  “Worse than that—all of their different outlooks are starting to flaw the structure of space! Even the shape of the Earth is changing! Why, at one time, it was really flat—the world didn’t turn round until people started to believe it was round.”

  I turned round then and looked at her, but she had disappeared into the fog. All that was left was her grin.

  “But the world is really pear shaped,” I said. “I read it in Scientific American.”

  “And why do you think it’s changing shape?” the grin asked. “It’s because a certain nation is starting to believe that it’s really bigger than it is. The Earth is bulging out to accommodate them.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It’s the fault of the news media—television is influencing our image of the world! They keep telling us that the world is changing—and more and more people keep believing it.”

  “Well,” I said. “With the shape of the world the way it is today, any change has got to be for the—”

  “Oh, God—not you too! All you people keep talking about the world going to pieces—falling apart at the seams—”

  And then even the grin was gone.

  I was left there. I was also right. Other people had begun to notice it too. Great chunks of the surface had gone blotchy and holes had appeared in it. More and more pieces were falling out all the time, but the waters had not yet broken through from the other side.

  I poked my finger through one of the holes and I could feel the soft gelatinous surface behind. Perhaps it hadn’t completely thawed out yet.

  So far, nothing had been accomplished about my eye—not only was it beginning to ache something fierce, but my I was beginning to twinge a bit also and I had a feeling that that too might be going opaque.

  “Have you found yourself yet?!!” one of the speakers in the park demanded. (I hadn’t even looked—and remembering my previous experiences with looking for things, I certainly was not going to initiate any kind of a search.) I walked on.

  Farther on, there was another speaker—this one on a soup box. “We should be thankful for this great nation of ours,” the speaker woofed and tweetered, “where so many people are allowed to believe in so many different things.”

  I rubbed at my eye. I had an uneasy queasy feeling that great cracks were opening in the ceiling.

  “Anyone can get up and speak for his cause—any group can believe in anything they choose—indeed we can remake the world if we want to! And in our own images!”

  Things were teetering right and left—also write and wrong.

  “But the truly great thing about it,” he continued, “is that no m
atter how much we contradict each other, we are all working together for the common good! Our great democratic system lets us minimize our differences so that we can all compromise ourselves. Only by suggesting all the alternatives to a problem can we select the best possible solution. In the long run, this ultimate freedom and individuality will help all of us to achieve the most good for the most people!”

  It sounded good to me.

  When I got home, the workmen were just finishing with the wallpaper. It was amazing how solid the surface looked once all the cracks and flaws in it had been covered with a gaudy flowered facade.

  I could no longer tell where the plaster had given way—and the bare surface of the understructure had disappeared into the fog. Indeed, the only thing was that the ceiling seemed to be much lower than before.

  I paused long enough to stroke the cat. He waved as I came in. “Like—hello, man,” said the cat. “Give me a J.”

  “I can’t. I’m having trouble with my I.”

  “Well, then give me a dollar.”

  “What for?”

  “For a trip,” he said.

  “Oh.” I gave him a dollar, waited for the trip.

  He dropped the bill into his mouth, lit it, picked up his suitcase and quickly rose to a cruising level of thirty thousand feet. Then he headed west. I did not quite understand this. The fog had gotten much worse and the controllers were just not letting any traffic through.

  There had been something I had wanted to ask, but I had forgotten it. Oh, well—it couldn’t have been very important. But I wish I could figure out—

  The man on the TV was a Doctor. He sat on top of it with his feet dangling in front of the screen (his cleats were scratching the image) and said that the drugs were destroying the realities. Drugs could destroy a person’s sanity by altering his perceptions of the world until he could no longer perceive reality at all.

  “Just so long as it doesn’t change what he believes in,” I muttered and turned him off. Then I turned him out. It was getting late and I wanted to get some sleep. However, I did make a mental note not to have my prescription refilled. Already the wallpaper was peeling.

  In fact, by now, only the framework of the structure is left, and it looks like it’s made out of chocolate pudding. Maybe it is. Perhaps it is the drugs. Maybe they are altering our collective fogments—but I haven’t noticed anything.

  Afterword

  I’ve often wondered just what the difference is between a madman and a politician, I suspect it has something to do with the number of followers that either has.

  For instance, what would Mao Tse-Tung be without 700 million Chinese under him? Just another cranky old man.

  I remember once seeing a cartoon showing a psychiatrist looking out of his office window at an arriving patient. There below him, on the street, was a royal coach drawn by four ornately harnessed thoroughbreds. There was a coachman, two footmen, and a very regal looking set of guards—all very loyally aiding a man dressed disturbingly like Napoleon.

  That cartoon says it better than any set of words. When we start taking our madmen seriously, we’re in trouble. Look what happened when Germany started listening to a deranged paper-hanger.

  Too many of our insanities are tolerated because they are harmless on an individual level—but multiply them by a millionfold and you have a nation that is culturally sick. These things stem from each individual’s conception of himself—which he arbitrarily assumes to be the nature of the world as well. These conceptions are haphazardly picked up during youth—along with all of the other opinions, neuroses, hangups and etceteras common to the human animal.

  (Sometimes I wonder how some people can do some of the things they do to impressionable children—don’t they realize it’s not the child they’re hurting, but the adult who will stem from that child? Ah, but that’s a rhetorical question—)

  As yet, there doesn’t seem to be any way to prove that any one person’s set of conceptions, opinions, neuroses, hangups and etceteras are any more correct than anyone else’s set—let alone sane. (Define sanity.)

  Keeping this in mind about all human beings—and especially those who consider themselves leaders—I ask, shouldn’t we concentrate on ascertaining just what the questions are before we decide on the answers?

  IN THE BARN

  Piers Anthony

  Introduction

  More than any other writer, Piers Anthony is responsible for there being an Again, Dangerous Visions and a forthcoming final volume in (what has now become a) trilogy. I talked about that a bit in the general introduction to this book, but I think it bears repeating here, in Piers’s own little section preceding “In the Barn,” which is very much the kind of story that was being sought when DV was first conceived.

  In the introduction to David Gerrold’s story, which you’ve just read, if you’re dealing with this literary entity sequentially, I noted that David had come to sf not through the traditional channels accepted by the old-line aficionados, but via TV, a totem and a route of his times. Rather than struggling up through the pulp magazines, writing crap at a penny-a-word for ten years, or pounding out witless action paperbacks for a grand-and-a-half (for four months’ work), Gerrold got his break into sf paid handsomely for a different kind of dreaming. But not till he had written those penny-a-word stories for the magazines—in some ways lesser work than his TV script—was he accepted by the cadre. The mass of sf readers and fans are a fickle people. They don’t take to newcomers all that quickly, though the editors and their fellow-writers do. The fans seem loath to raise to the heights too quickly, those new writers constantly banging on the doors and breaking the windows of the house of sf glory.

  Most frequently, the fans will have known about a writer for some time, will have followed his life and his career, particularly if he started out in the ranks of fandom, writing for the amateur magazines, finally selling a story here, a story there. And eventually, when a fan turned writer has paid sufficient dues in the eyes of the omniscient observers, they will grudgingly admit him to the ranks of the professionals, even though he may have been selling for ten years. It is a peculiar kind of peer-group acceptance, and it’s as Robert Silverberg once said: for that kind of writer, his public progress in the craft is like that of the Chambered Nautilus, the cephalopod that moves through the various rooms of its shell till it emerges and dies. In effect, it carries its past on its back. So, too, do sf writers who have to win the approbation of sf fans. The fans never forget. They find it difficult to deal with the reality of a writer today, as he is. They see him still as eighteen years old and trying to effect the metamorphosis from amateur to pro. It can be a killing thing, forever shadowed in the eyes of one’s “audience” by the ineradicable record of what one has been. Some writers never outgrow the need to win the praise of that tiny coterie of vocal fans. And there are writers in our genre whose work has been stunted forever because fans did not want them to move forward, change, expand. If you doubt the truth of these remarks—and I await with a certain stoicism the inevitability of fan magazine response to these harsh criticisms of The Faithful—you need only ask Isaac Asimov how he feels when fans tell him the best thing he’s ever written is “Nightfall,” published in 1941, years before the first of his hundred-plus books. You need only ask Philip K. Dick or James Schmitz or Robert Heinlein or any of the many other writers who avoid contact with fandom, why they have chosen to absent themselves from close contact with organized fans and their publications. You need only ask Kurt Vonnegut why he fought so hard to have the words “science fiction” disassociated from his work. That is, if you can track them down.

  Only rarely in our field does a writer emerge quickly and totally, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, whole and complete, writing the way he or she wants to write, and giving very little of a damn for the opinions of the fans with their frequently already-formed conceptions of what is acceptable in the genre.

  It happened with Sheckley, and it happened with Ursula L
e Guin, and it happened with Lafferty, and it happened with Norman Spinrad, and it happened with Tom Disch . . .

  And it happened with Piers Anthony.

  He came into being between the closing of Dangerous Visions to contributors, and the book’s publication. In that one year—1967—Piers Anthony’s Chthon (pronounced thōon) was published by Betty Ballantine (whose antennas for new writers are supersensitive and almost always amazingly accurate) and was an immediate sensation. It was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula in that year, and though it missed copping the awards, the name Piers Anthony was suddenly a first-rank one. His work began appearing in all the top magazines, and more important, what he wrote was talked about. He became a focal point of controversy, and when his contentiously exciting replies to critics began appearing in the fanzines, it was apparent here was a man who was willing to stand toe-to-toe with all the self-styled little literary dictators, and punch the shit out of them when their opinions were muddle-headed or impertinent or uninformed. And often when they weren’t.

  I met Piers A. D. Jacob at Damon Knight’s 1966 Milford (Penna.) Writers’ Workshop, and while it took some time till later for us to become what each of us would call “friends,” we developed instant respect for one another. I know I did for him, and he assures me the reverse was true. Though I don’t recall Piers ever raising his voice at that workshop—a situation in which obsidian idols would become hysterical—his presence was felt, and he had the strength of personal conviction to attack with solid literary judgments some of the gods in attendance. When we all went out to dinner at one of the lesser dining spas in Milford, Piers ordered a special vegetarian meal (with some difficulty), and my respect for him increased at the manner in which he handled the remarks and stares of his fellow writers. It was clear that Piers was his own kind of man, that he had decided in what way he could best support the kind of life he felt he needed to enrich himself, and in the most laudatory senses of the word he was a “strange” man. In some ways he is the most interesting of all the interesting people who write sf. The fascination of the man, incidentally, carries over strongly into his work, and—if I can be pardoned equating the writer with what he writes—where his soul resides in life has much to do with the depth of his stories.