The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  “I began to write when I was sixteen, turning out veiled sexual allegories that got consistently banned from the school magazine. My first short story was published in 1966; I won’t say where, because it embarrasses me. The story, that is. I can’t tell you what direction my writing is taking because I don’t know yet.”

  Lamia Mutable

  TRACK ONE: AT THE BISTRO CALIFORNIUM.

  The burning takes place next day, on an amethyst and emerald lifting-platform, high up in gray turbulent air, drifting. The gathered crowd—in Happy-Day motley: yellow pantaloons, jewels, flame-red saris—roars and whispers, an inland sea of laughter, as oily smoke begins to rise from the gaudy pyre. Birkin Grif and Lamia, the woman without skin, are amused but unimpressed.

  “I was burned at Pompeii in such a jeweled gown. Man, these plebs have missed much, having been lost all these puritan centuries.” Her dentures twinkle, her beautiful arteries pulse. Birkin Grif eyes her patronizingly: skinless, she is not nude but naked, more naked ever than a woman can be when merely divested of clothes. He possesses her every function with his single eye, piratical.

  “True,” says he. “But Gomorrah was best, there was a good burning there.” She laughs, and her laugh is naked too. Sparks issue from the gemmed platform to an appreciative roar from the crowd. Birkin Grif slaps his titanium thigh in huge enjoyment.

  “Jeanne d’ Arc,” says the skinless woman.

  “Hiroshima,” he counters.

  “Virgil Grissom,” she laughs.

  “Buchenwald,” murmurs Birkin Grif.

  Lost in delightful reminiscence, they watch the platform with its cargo of burning emperor, two ancient lovers in a crowd; he old with debauchery, she young with it. A drunken woman, her head bejeweled from crown to forehead, staggers from the press.

  “Whoop!”

  “Indeed, madam,” says Birkin Grif, always the wag. “Were you not at Nagasaki in the Spring? Did I not see you there?” The drunken woman narrows her eyes.

  “How d’you spell it, baby?”

  Birkin Grif ogles her with his good eye.

  “G-U-I-L-T,” he intimates.

  Skinless Lamia sniffs petulantly and nudges him in the ribs.

  “Why are we here? Why are we here at all, this is not where it’s at. We have a date in Californium.”

  They leave the crowd to heave and sweat. The platform is being lowered so that the burning emperor’s retinue of harlots can be put aboard. Birkin Grif limps plausibly; his skinless sweetheart is a distillate of timeworn nakedness: false teeth and bijou eyebrows her slight concessions to fashion.

  PAUSE THE FIRST.

  Welcome to the chrome-plastic uterus of the Bistro Californium, haunt well-beloved and dear watering-place of all the intellectual parodies and artistic mock-ups of the splendid city.

  See: here is Kristodulos, the blind painter; a brush dipped in cochineal is placed behind his ear. He is listening to the color of his Negress, Charmian with the scarred ritual breasts. Here too is Adolf Ableson (Junior) the spastic poet of Viriconium. See how his chromium hand grips the pencil with metallic fervor, how his head nods, driven by some bent escapement in his neck. And here; here at this table, thirsting after the hungry snows; here is Jiro-San, the hermaphrodite lute-player—shut in a tower of loneliness, separated by the accusation of mutability from Mistress Seng, she of the lapis-lazuli eyes—carven, nay (no no no) graven, from a bronze sunburn.

  O you pedestrian seekers-after-color: come, gaze . . .

  Enter Birkin Grif and Lamia his skinless lover. They sit at a table of translucent rose glass, wink and nod knowingly at companions-in-knowingness. Faintly, the whisper of the crowd at the Incineration sifts into the Bistro Californium, soft little flakes of sound. Kristodulos colors it black, makes a mental note. The chromium poet scribbles and having writ, moves on. Only our lute-player is deaf, because—suntanned—he is occupied with his head full of snow.

  “Shall we take tea?”

  Smiling, they take tea out of gold-leaved porcelain.

  TRACK TWO: WHO IS DR. GRISHKIN?

  “It is I will conduct you.”

  Birkin Grif looks up. This voice owns a fat and oily face, faintly gray. In the face is placed with artistic but ungeometrical accuracy, a small rosebud mouth, attempting to beam. One understands immediately that the mouth is indigenous to this kind of face, but that the smile is not. There are violet oblique eyes; no eyebrows or hair. The voice has a body too: pear-shaped, draped in plum-colored suiting, and very plump. The plum-colored suit is slit to reveal a surgical window set into its owner’s stomach. Behind the window, interesting things are happening.

  This voice—along with its corpus—is the essence of every brothel and fornication of the universe: the voice of a glorious, immortal and Galactic pimp; the ultimate in carnal, carnival, and carnivorous invitations.

  “My friend,” says Birkin Grif. “Mon ami: have I not seen you before? A whorehouse in Alexandria? Istamboul? Birmingham? No?” The newcomer smiles with a sort of lecherous modesty.

  “Perhaps . . . ah, but that was a millennium hence, we have progressed since then, we have become . . . civilized.” He shrugs.

  “Does it matter?” asks Birkin Grif.

  “Nothing matters, my piratical friend: but that is not the point: I am Dr. Grishkin.”

  “Is that the point?”

  “No, that is something altogether different. May I join you?”

  And he sits down, learing at the woman without skin. This is a leer that makes her feel naked. There is a hiatus. He pours himself tea. He has a strong sense of drama, this Dr. Grishkin: he is well-versed in the technique of the dramatic pause. Birkin Grif becomes impatient.

  “Dr. Grishkin, we . . .”

  Grishkin raises an admonitory finger. He sips tea. He points to his surgical window. Birkin Grif watches it, fascinated.

  “The ash-flats,” intones Dr. Grishkin: and, having dropped his conversational bomb, sits back to watch its effect.

  Horror. Silence. Tension drips viscous from the Californium ceiling. Far off, the crowd whispers. Nothing so dramatic has happened in Californium for a decade.

  “I am to take you to the ash-flats of Wisdom.”

  Skinless Lamia shudders ever so slightly. Into the silence fall three perfect silver notes. Jiro-San has taken up his lute.

  “I think I have changed my mind,” she whispers.

  “It is too late, all is arranged,” says Dr. Grishkin. “You must come, now it is inevitable that you come.” There is the slightest edge of annoyance to his voice. This annoyance is persuasive. One feels that Dr. Grishkin had gone to much trouble to . . . bring things about. He does not wish to be disappointed.

  “But will He be there?” asks Birkin Grif, anxiously. “There is little sense in risking so much if He is not there.”

  Comes the answer: “There is little sense in anything, Mr. Grif. But He will be there. He has sent me.” He sips tea. It is so simple, the way he puts it, it seems already an accomplished fact: but then, his oily job is to simplify, to smooth the way. Lamia leans forward, speaks from the corner of her mouth, the perfect conspirator. Dr. Grishkin finds her skinned proximity delightfully disturbing, her aorta distinctly beautiful.

  “The Image-Police, Dr. Grishkin: what of them?”

  “Pure paranoia, dear lady. There is nothing very illegal about a little trip to the edge of Wisdom. Just to the edge, you understand, merely a sightseeing trip: a little pleasant tourism . . .” He leers. “Shall we go?”

  They leave. The fat man waddles. Birkin limps. The skinless lady is sinuous. As they pass Jiro-San’s table, he gazes wistfully. He finds Birkin very handsome.

  TRACK THREE: THE ASH-FLATS OF WISDOM.

  Wisdom is a wilderness. Long ago, there was a war here; or perhaps it was a peace. Most of the time there is but small difference between the two; love and hate lean so heavily upon one another, and both are possessed of a monstrous ennui. Certainly, something destroyed whatever Wisdom was: so well t
hat no one has known its former nature for two centuries. From its border one can see little but sense much.

  Birkin Grif and the skinless woman stand shivering there in a cold wind, peering through the mesh fence that separates city-ground and forbidden ash. Their cloaks—black for him, gray for her—flutter nervously. Soft flakes of ash fill the air about them with dark snow. Grishkin is huge in voluminous purple, talking animatedly to a grayface guard outside his olive-drab sentry box. Meanwhile, the desolation seems to whisper, You have no business here, everything here is dead.

  There is a bleak sadness to this waste, a bereavement: it mourns. Eidetic images of ghosts flit on this wind: women weeping weave shrouds at ebbtide; famine-children wail to old men at twilight. Here there are two kinds of chill, and cloaks will not keep out both.

  Abruptly, Grishkin takes out a small silver mechanism, and points it at he guard. There is an incredible blue flash. The body of the guard drops, improbably headless, jetting dark blood from the venturi of its neck. Dr. Grishkin vomits apologetically: a sick valediction. He returns, wiping his mouth on a canary-yellow handkerchief.

  “You see? There is no problem, as I have said.” He retches, his fat face white. “Oh dear. Excuse me, do excuse me. I grow old, I grow old you know. Poor boy. He has a mother in Australia. He was exported.”

  “How sad,” says Lamia. She is gazing at Dr. Grishkin’s heaving stomach through the surgical window. She feels quite sympathetic. “Sympathy is so quaint,” she tinkles. “Poor Dr. Grishkin.”

  Poor Dr. Grishkin, his spasm over, takes out his little glittering mechanism again, and aims it at the fence round Wisdom. The incredible-blue-flash performance is repeated, whereupon the mesh curls and congeals like burning hair.

  “Pretty,” observes the skinless woman.

  “Impressive,” admits Birkin Grif. In the charred sentry-box bells begin to ring.

  “Now we must hurry,” intimates Dr. Grishkin, and his voice is more than faintly urgent. “Leg it!” He begins to waddle hurriedly toward a charcoal dune. They follow him through the broken mesh. The wind rises, whipping up small, stinging cinders. Cloaks fluttering, they top the rise and drop flat, facing the way they have come. A great turmoil of ash-flakes hides the sentry-box.

  “The wind will have erased our tracks,” says Birkin Grif.

  “Correct as ever, mon frère,” returns fat Dr. Grishkin. “Officially, we have just died, nobody will bother us now.” He leers. “I have been dead these ten years.” He laughs mordantly. His stomach trembles behind its window. Birkin Grif and his skinless mistress are unamused.

  “Why does the ash never blow into the city?” asks Lamia.

  “Come,” orders Grishkin, eyeing the weather with distaste.

  PAUSE THE SECOND.

  FOR NARRATIVE PURPOSES THE ASH STORM ABATES.

  Led by the seraphic murderer Grishkin, they flit like majestic moths—purple, gray, black—over the long low swells of ash.

  This land is empty, composed visually of utterly balanced sweeps of gray, shading from the dead cream to the mystic charcoal. Slow watercourses cut the ubiquitous ash, silting swiftly, meandering, beds infinitely variable. Wind and water make Wisdom unchartable: age and the wind make it cripplingly lonely. Time is overthrown in Wisdom: its very mutability is immutable.

  Thinks Birkin Grif: This land is the ultimate vision of the Ab-real Eternity. Across it, we scuttle like three symbolic beetles without legs.

  TRACK FOUR: I REMEMBER CORINTH.

  Flitting minutiae on the broad back of the waste, they finally achieve their Heroic goal.

  Dr. Grishkin stops.

  He and Birkin Grif and the skinless woman stand—at the end of an erratic line of footprints—at the apparent center of an immense, featureless plain: the hub of a massive stasis, a vast silence. The horizon has vanished, there is no obvious convergence of ash and sky: both are flat, monochrome gray. Because of this, environment is shapeless; dimensions are unclear; the three suddenly exist without proper frame of reference, with the sole and inadequate orientation of their own bodies. The effect confuses; they become dream figures on a back-cloth of ab-space: unattached, divested of every vestige of their accepted and appropriate reality.

  “It is here we must wait,” says Dr. Grishkin, his fat voice devoid of expression, drained of expression by the single-tone emptiness.

  “But He is not here . . .” begins Birkin Grif, fighting to prevent the visual null from sucking up his very thoughts, speaking precisely only through mammoth effort.

  “We must wait,” repeats Grishkin.

  “Will He come, though?” demands Grif, thickly, struggling with the silence. “If this is a fool’s errand . . .” His implied threat falls flat, negated by the vacuum.

  “You have lived a fool’s errand for a millennium: why quibble now? Here we wait.” Slow steel in Grishkin’s voice; again he will not be denied. They wait. At this point of minimal orientation, without movement or sound, it seems that eons pass. They wait. Nothing happens for a million years. Finally, Grif speaks, his words harsh and congested with a sudden aged, neurotic ferocity. “I think I may kill you, Dr. Grishkin. He is not coming. All the way to nowhere, and He is not coming. I think I will kill you . . .” His face is distorted; his good eye winks, manic; this is a senile fury.

  “Shut up.” Grishkin is smiling his rosebud parody. “Shut up and look!”

  “. . . I think I will kill you . . .” hisses Grif, like a machine running down fixedly through a series of programmed spasms. But he looks.

  Skinless Lamia is dancing on the ash, magnificently naked once more. Her feet make no sound. She moves to a muted hum of her own making; an insistent, droning raga. She dances possessed, smiling in introspective wonder at her own movement, antithesis of the greater stillness. Her dance is a final destruction of orientation: almost, she floats.

  And she is changing.

  “Is this not the ultimate in body-schema illusions?” breathes Grishkin. “See: she is living her hallucination!” He is quite overtly touched by the poetry of it all.

  Her body elongates . . . contracts . . . flows . . . diminishes. A tail appears, flips archly, disappears. A jeweled dolphin exists whole for an instant, dissolves. The modal hum rises and falls. A golden salamander weaves, sloughs off its skin . . . becomes a bright proud bird, falters, shimmering at its edges . . . disembodies reluctantly . . .

  By turns the plastic Lamia is fish, fowl and beast, myth and dream. Then one shape steadies—

  And Lamia is no more.

  Dr. Grishkin releases his breath in one long sigh of artistic pleasure. Birkin Grif screams.

  For on the ash—cinders and dust adhering to its wet membrane—there lies a live human fetus.

  It kicks a little, stretching the membrane . . .

  Birkin Grif retches and moans: “O my God . . . what . . . ?”

  Dr. Grishkin is apologetic but unhelpful. “Don’t ask me, Grif mon vieux. I expected a snake. But O what poetry; such a metamorphosis . . . !” The fetus jerks. Grif whirls on Dr. Grishkin, hysterical, whining like a child.

  “Cheat! Liar! This is not what we came here for, this is not it at all, you have cheated . . . it isn’t fair!”

  Coldly, Grishkin, galactic pimp extraordinary, appraises him. His pleasure is quite gone away. His eyes impale the blubbering Grif.

  “Fair? You have yet to learn the rules of the game! Fair?” Grif is pinned to the inert landscape by those bleak, oblique eyes. “There is no fairness to inevitability. This was inevitable, Mr. Birkin Grif; inevitable because it has happened. Accept it because of that. Do not look to me for fairness.” He finds the word distasteful. He pauses to gaze speculatively at the drying fetus.

  Then: “You expect too much, my friend. You desire: and expect the universe to provide. But that is not the way of things. No indeed.” He appears pleased with this summary. Then he frowns suddenly, as if rediscovering an unpleasant reality. “It is a pity you have learned so late. Too late, in point of fact.”


  And his glittering, malevolent little device is out in a micro-second, a Birkin Grif throws himself frantically forward, horrid realization contorting his features. Thus dies Grif, last of the archetypal sybarites, while the fetus of his skinless lover lies twitching on the ground. He scarcely has time for a second scream.

  His enigmatic slayer shrugs and turns to the feebly struggling fetus Gazing, he shakes his hairless head. Such poetry. Reluctantly, he steps on it. For all his sensibility, he has a tidy mind. Casting a last glance at the smoking Birkin Grif—titanium thigh his sole remnant of personality—Dr. Grishkin, the Bringer with the Window, pulls his purple cloak around him and waddles off.

  Soon, only his footprints are left on the ash-flats of Wisdom.

  Afterword

  I wrote this story in March, 1967. At that time, it was all happening for me emotionally, which probably accounts for the exuberance of the piece. It was sparked by a thing called Go For Baroque by Jody Scott (I think it was Jody Scott . . . ); but I don’t believe Scott’s story influenced it—merely provided the literary flashpoint. There are echoes of Beckett there, and some quite deliberate references to the work of John Keats. On a secondary level, the Keats thing is rather important. “Lamia Mutable” stands on its own; but if you are familiar with Keats’ long narrative poem Lamia, you may get a good deal more out of the section subtitled I REMEMBER CORINTH.