The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  And the Swarmers were coming more frequently now. They were beginning to get two, sometimes three in a day.

  The second message gave him fuel for the burning rationality that consumed him. Again a long blue body, a blur of motion, dropped it near the raft just after a Swarmer kill, as though the Skimmers were using it as a diversion.

  GEFAHRLICH GROSS SOLID MNXXL%8

  ANAXLE”.UNS. NORMEN 286 W!! SCATTER

  FORTUNE LILAPA XEROT.

  Warren wished for writing implements, if only to keep track of the endless permutations he made on the messages. GEFAHRLICH—danger, dangerous? GROSS: big, great. UNS again, German for US.

  He tried to scratch marks on the rolled sheets, but the surface wouldn’t take an impression. If there were some way to communicate with them, to ask questions, he might get an idea of what the Skimmers wanted. To negotiate? What would be a sign of peaceful intent?

  In the back of his mind Warren was beginning to frame theories to explain the messages. Occasionally he recoiled from the alienness of it, but those impulses were getting easier to control.

  He understood without ever admitting to himself that his absorption in planning, detail and the cold beauties of logic was as much a comforting distraction as Rosa’s primitive chant. So the messages were necessary to his balance.

  But he knew it was pointless unless he could fathom the confused lines set out with such rigid neatness on the thin sheets he held.

  He squatted, peering at the third message with tired red eyes for long, dragging minutes. Time, he needed time.

  “Heh! Wa-Warren!” Rosa called. He followed her gesture.

  There was a dot on the horizon. It danced into visibility over the ragged waves, bobbing with random jerks, but it was there.

  “Land,” Warren breathed deeply.

  Rosa’s eyes swelled and she barked out a sharp cackling laughter through drawn lips. “Land! Land!” she cried, bouncing on her calloused feet in an erratic jig.

  Warren blinked and forced his eyes to focus. He estimated the current and measured the angle the dot made with their course. They could reach it by dark, perhaps sooner. He took his club and began knocking out the supports of the plywood lean-to. In the center of the raft he knelt, measured with hands and fingers, and began constructing a series of supports for a vertical beam.

  The work did not take long. Setting a loose-fitting collar into the deck took all Warren’s remaining nails, but the large plywood sheet belted easily to the vertical beam he erected in the collar. Wire passed through holes in the sheet held it to the beam, and trailing lines at the corners allowed him to tack with it from a position at the rear of the raft. It made a passable sail.

  He dragged out a makeshift rudder he’d fashioned weeks before and fitted it into the housing he had laboriously carved out near the back edge of the raft. It was weak and clumsy, but with it he could impart a slight side motion to the raft, and hopefully steer toward the island ahead.

  It had to be an island. Their chances of ever encountering another were negligible. The chance to stand on firm ground again . . .

  Warren held his hand up against the buttery afternoon glare. Firm ground. No continual sickening pitch of the deck. Solid.

  SOLID.

  Could the Skimmers mean the island? GEFAHRLICH GROSS SOLID. Dangerous great island. SCATTER. Leave? To scatter was to rebound off something. Avoid the island?

  Warren smiled to himself. There was a key to it. Some beauty, some order that would lift him up out of this stinking raft.

  He pulled slowly on the wires and canted the plywood sheet at an angle to the breeze. The rudder creaked as he adjusted it and held it in place with a wooden chock.

  The island was nearer and he could see a low ridge running down the middle of it. It didn’t look very high. He did a mental calculation and decided they would arrive sooner than he’d expected. The wind was picking up, too.

  Rosa was moving about the raft, humming to herself and eating from the food tins that remained. Warren felt a twinge of anger. She was eating out of turn.

  She seemed calm, once she’d seen the land. She passed near him and looked up, grinning wildly, and said, “Okay?” Warren nodded.

  Okay. They would make the island. But he wasn’t satisfied, not yet. He was bringing them in to graze along the southern shore, to have a look before they beached.

  Southern? What was there . . .

  WSW. West south west. UNS B WSW.

  WE BE WSW?

  On the WSW part of the island? We—the Skimmers.

  He noticed Rosa squatting at the front of the raft, dipping it down slightly into the rushing bluegreen swell and throwing thin sheets of hissing foam over the planks. She knew it wasn’t good for the raft to ride like that. It was slowing them down.

  But he didn’t say anything to her. He needed the time. The Skimmers were all he had out here and they had tried to tell him something.

  They were different. They didn’t have Swarms, they didn’t attack. Their bodies were thinner and they carried a larger brain case.

  A vague thought flitted across Warren’s mind, a half-defined guess. Was this all a kind of warfare, the Swarms out of control, attacking and isolating the continents while the Skimmers tried to stop them? Something like a race war between political factions?

  The island grew and a dim shadow caught Warren’s eye. It lay low in the water around the island, a brown line throwing up white rushes of surf that caught the light.

  A reef. The island was going to be harder to reach. He would have to bring the raft in and loop around it, trying to find a path into the lagoon. Either that or smash into the reef that ringed the island.

  CIRCLE STEIN NONGO. STEIN was—rock! DON’T GO INTO THE CIRCLE.

  Warren slammed the tiller over full.

  It was all there. The Skimmers were telling him, leading him.

  Rosa grunted and looked back at him. She had noticed the change in the raft’s direction. He ignored her and pulled in the wires to cant the plywood sheet further into the wind.

  It was all there! SMALL YOUTH SCHLECT UNS. The Skimmers had misspelled SCHLECHT, German for BAD. SMALL YOUTH BAD US. Were the Swarmers a lower stage of development? Just out of the egg, primitive, running wild in a different environment from the home world?

  THE SWARMERS ARE BAD FOR US. US—the Skimmers. Or was Warren included? He must be.

  Rosa stumbled toward him and the island seemed to grow.

  “Wha’? Land! We go there!”

  He wrinkled the salt-caked skin around his eyes, focusing on her face, but it looked different, strange. He didn’t know this woman. She was nothing to him.

  She stepped closer and he hit her. She whimpered and sat on the deck, peering up at him in confusion.

  He ignored her, feeling elated and calm. He gauged the small shifts in the wind and sighted in on the dark mass ahead. The reef stood out clearly now. And . . .

  There was something moving on the beach.

  Even at this distance he could make them out. Long green bodies lay in the sand, moving slowly inland. They were crawling with painful effort, dragging themselves along, but a few had already made it to the green margin of vegetation.

  Swarmers. A Swarm that was learning to crawl out of the sea, practicing on a deserted island in the Pacific. Swarmers entering the next stage of their development.

  The island was suddenly nearer and Rosa was pounding at him weakly, shrieking. He had been standing there, numb, trying to think, to understand.

  “Crazy? Crazy? We die out here.”

  “What?” he said, distracted. The raft was veering, but it would come close to the reef.

  “You ‘fraid! ‘Fraid the rocks.” She gaped at him, eyes bulging. “No man would . . .”

  “Shut up.” They were rushing down on the island and the current was picking up.

  “Na . . . na, I won’t. Gimmie.” She looked around wildly. “I swim.”

  She scrabbled along the deck, picking at the
planking. In a moment she found a larger board and tried to pry it up.

  Warren breathed deeply and felt a calm swell up from his chest. He would do one last thing for her, and then be alone.

  He walked over to the struggling woman, judged the correct angle and levered the board out of the deck with a rasping of nails. She snatched at it.

  They were running by the reef now and Warren could see the forms on the beach clearly. They had stubby thick fins at the side that worked slowly against the sand. They crawled like turtles.

  No, land wasn’t the answer. The Swarmers were on the land now. They’d take it eventually, just as they’d taken the oceans. A man who clung to the land was finished. No, the answer . . .

  Warren turned and looked out to sea. The rim of the world was an irregular line in the dusk. A sweeping circular arc, broken here and there by clouds. Clean, free. WSW.

  Rosa went over the side with a splash. There was a narrow path through the reef no more than fifty yards away and she made for it, floating partially on the board.

  Warren automatically studied the water, but no green forms followed her. If the Swarm wasn’t large here they might not notice her before she reached the beach.

  He ran an eye along her probable path, estimating, and worked it out. It was good to be calculating again. Rosa would make the shore in a few more minutes.

  It was surprisingly difficult to see her, though, for darkness was falling rapidly now. Under the wind the sea was breaking up into oily facets that reflected the dull orange of the sunset on the clouds. An ocean of mirrors.

  He peered down at the water. Mirrors. What did he see there?

  “No man . . . ” she’d said. Maybe not Maybe he was something more, now. The Skimmers could tell him that.

  He felt the tug of the lines in his hand and made a slight correction in the heading to steady a yaw in the raft.

  He was gathering speed. When the thin scream came out of the dusk behind him he did not turn around.

  Afterword

  Ever since Heinlein, the most frequent hero to appear in science fiction has been The Competent Man. That’s only natural—SF is the most optimistic genre in the literary world. But I’ve always felt The Competent Man was presented a little naively. He’s usually a scientist or engineer, but most of the scientists I know are far more complex in their competence than the people you’ll meet in science fiction.

  In this story I’ve tried to deal a little more realistically with the classic theme of encounter between man and extraterrestrials. The focus isn’t on the Swarmers and Skimmers themselves, but on the fact that they are alien: their motivations cannot be understood except perhaps by analogy, and it is their very strangeness that gives them such psychic impact on the human race.

  It may well be that the most important first adjustment mankind will make to an alien intelligence will be emotional. It’s a totally new problem. We don’t know how to deal with it and our gut response may decide everything.

  One thing is certain: we will have to make compromises. The man who is rigid and can’t compromise his own self image won’t avoid this—he will instead run the risk of losing much of what makes him human.

  Generally when a man stresses one aspect of his personality he pays a price. How high can it go?

  In this story the price he pays is high. I’ve tried to get the reader to buy as much of Warren’s point of view as possible, to accept his universe as valid. It isn’t hard to believe. That’s the horror of it.

  Because you see, the alien doesn’t have to be some extraterrestrial life form. Every person on this planet is undergoing a continuous encounter with the incredibly strange world our technology is creating for us just around the corner. It is alien. We have to come to terms with it. So we adjust, we change, we accept. And often we don’t know what price we have had to pay, either.

  BED SHEETS ARE WHITE

  Evelyn Lief

  Introduction

  The last few years, with the snowballing acceptance of speculative fiction in the groves of Academe, a number of sf writers—myself included—have been tapped to teach at various college writing workshops in sf and fantasy. From these workshops have come an amazing number of talented new writers. Most of whom teach us new tricks.

  The best of these workshops was started at Clarion College in Pennsylvania, by Professor Robin S. Wilson (who under the name Robin Scott has a story just a little further on in this volume, thereby proving that we “teachers” have to keep renewing our credentials with our “students”). In 1968, ‘69 and ‘70 the Workshop was held at Clarion, and in 1971 it was moved to Tulane in New Orleans. From these four years of Clarion/Tulane alone, several dozen writers have emerged whose names appear with pleasing regularity in the magazines of the field. Some of them are in this book: Ed Bryant, Joan Bernott, and Evelyn Lief. Others will appear in The Last Dangerous Visions. But right now, let me tell you a thing about Evelyn.

  When I got to Clarion in 1968, I’d only guest-lectured at one Workshop previously, and I was unsure of myself. Deciding my terror could be put to good advantage, I formulated the policy of terrorizing my students. On the first day of class, I was presented for workshopping a selection of stories written toward the end of the previous week, stories written while yet another sf writer had been in guest-lecturer attendance. These stories were, for the most part, undistinguished, sloppy, ungrammatical, devoid of originality, hackneyed, imaginatively constipated, lacking in meaningful characterization, self-indulgent and badly-typed.

  In short, the usual nonsense one finds at workshops when the students are larking.

  (PAUSE FOR A WORD FROM THE SPONSOR.

  (My fellow instructors at Clarion/Tulane are the best goddamed bunch of writing teachers the world has ever known. I’ve been at other workshops where the “talent” imported to do the teaching was on a much higher reputational level, and if three out of a hundred conferees turned out to be saleable, turned out to derive even the slightest worth from their two, four or six week stay at the workshop, it was in the nature of a miracle. Out of a hundred students at Clarion/Tulane in the four years of its existence, more than half have sold, continue to sell, and seem on their way to making successful careers at writing what they want to write. It is not by chance that so many Clarion/Tulane graduates are included in the DV series. I am a cold and heartless sonofabitch when it comes to buying stories for these books, and I assure you they could torture my mother with the Boot and thumbscrews before I’d buy a story on the basis of friendship or any other ground than that I thought it was a good story.

  (Thus, be apprised that my fellow instructors—Fritz Leiber, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Robin Scott Wilson, Frederik Pohl and James Sallis—are the very best. Bar none.

  (Even so, they are—to a person—gentler souls than your editor. I conceive of writing as a holy chore, and it is my feeling that students who come to a workshop for a six-week crash program are there for one reason and one reason only: to write. I push them. I chivvy and harass them and work them around the clock. They write a story a day and they workshop for hours and write through the night, until . . . by the end of my week’s stint as visiting tormenter . . . they collapse and have their barriers down totally for the soothing teaching of whomever follows me. My fellow teachers understand my tactic—and Damon hates following me because he then has to deal with a corps of quivering basket cases—but it seems to get results, and they do write.

  (So when I say the manuscripts were not the best, at my arrival, I cast no badmouth at whichever instructor it was who preceded me that year. He or she was simply easier on them than I am. Nonetheless, shock tactics were in order.)

  I selected one of the bad batch and decided to use it as a hideous example to the other students.

  It happened to be a story by Evelyn Lief.

  It took me the better part of an hour to tear that little 1000-word short story to shreds. To flay it, to masticate it, to denounce its author in the vilest
possible terms. “This piece of shit isn’t fit to line the bottom of a bird cage. Miss Lief, you aren’t a writer, you’re a ghoul. You should have worked with Burke and Hare. This wretched abomination has as much charm and grace and symmetry as a thalidomide baby. As a writer I’m offended, as an editor I’m repelled, as a human being I’m nauseated. This is a grotesquerie unsullied by the presence of beauty in any form whatsoever. It is unstructured, illogical, moronic, ungrammatical, despicable in the extreme. Rather than simply tearing it to shreds and stomping on it—” which I proceeded to do, to the horror of the class and Robin Wilson “—I should stuff it up whatever available orifice in your body I might find, including the anal one from which it clearly emerged. You are a talentless creature, an affront to anyone seriously considering writing a craft, a chacma baboon in human guise. If you ever dare to submit something as noxious as this again, I will beat the crap out of you. Is that clear? Stop crying and answer me! Is that clear, is that perfectly, crystal clear?”

  Evelyn Lief went back to her room, with fury and ferocity scrawled a note that said something like FUCK YOU HARLAN ELLISON YOU DON’T KNOW SO GODDAM MUCH! and she put it up over her typewriter and started writing.

  The next day she handed in “Bed Sheets are White,” I kissed her with deep affection, and bought the story for Again, Dangerous Visions.

  Here it is, and here is what one of the most talented young writers I know, Evelyn Lief, has to say for herself:

  “I’m twenty five years old, five feet and two inches with brown hair and brown eyes. In the winter of 1967 I started reading science fiction, and started writing stories that summer. In the fall I won second prize in a short story contest judged by Fred Pohl and during the summer of 1968 I attended the first Clarion Workshop in Fantasy and Science Fiction. That year I sold my first story, ‘Bed Sheets are White.’ I sold my second story to David Gerrold for his anthology in the fall of 1968. It is called ‘Every Fourth House.’ I attended the Clarion Workshop again during the summer of 1969, but didn’t sell another story until September 1970. I sold that one, ‘The Inspector,’ to Robin Wilson for the Clarion anthology (Signet, 1971).