The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg

by Barry N. Malzberg

  They pay brisk money for this crap?

  — Raymond Chandler,

  letter to H. N. Swanson,

  Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank McShane

  I CHECKED out with K 19 on Alabaran III. On the portico, moving slowly against the cracked and ruined spaces of the enclosure, watching the slow, dangerously signatory implosions from the outer ring, I could feel not only the collapse of the project, but my own, more imminent ruin.

  Ruin will not be enough, Google had warned me. If it were only a matter of ruin, it would have been accomplished a long time ago. They want to smear us, they want us utterly defaced.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I said. “What do I do now?”

  She said nothing looking back at me, the high panels of her face drawn tightly as if to prohibit speech, block it at the source. They will respond to direct questions but are no good on abstractions, on open-ended cries of despair. As I well know. That should have been all right; all my life the abstract has been well dismissed. “How much longer?” I said, trying again. “Enough time to get clear?”

  K 19 shrugged. In this guise she was a tall and intense young woman, her brain packed with deadly secrets which one by one her mouth would promise to impart … but no such knowledge would issue, that was not the program and I would hammer again on those panels to no outcome. “I do not understand the concept,” she said. “What is time? What is your conception of that?” A horrid precision now in her step, she moved toward an unshrouded viewplate. “Out there, in here,” she said, pointing. “No difference.”

  She froze in that position. I could see the slow enclave of psychic ice glazing her and then she was silent. In my side pocket the heat bar ticked faintly, sent slivers of warmth through the thin fabric, but I was still fixated on K 19, still touched by the possibility that somewhere in her closed and deadly face there would lurk the answer, an answer to take me from the portion, silence the Brylls. Not the heat bar or the poltext, then. A true answer.

  “Do you remember?” I said. “You made a promise —”

  “I remember nothing. There is no memory, there is only this.”

  Looking at her so, locked to that lesser desire which still intimated possibility, I could see that this was truth, came to understand in that concentrated moment that all along there had been nothing else, no imminence, grandeur, possibility, or disclosure, only this denial. And knowing that at last, I felt the beginnings of release, the snap of that fine and tensile emotional rope that bound us. Testing the force of that insight, I moved away from her, ducked under the refractory bands cast by the high binding rings , and stepped out throughthe crummalite hatch, seized instantly by the vacuum that snapped and skulked at the perilous enclosure.

  Now, against the blurred firmament itself, undefended by the thin expanse of the dome. I could feel the half-forgotten swaddled in those caverns we make, I could feel the awful power of the heavens, understand that what stood between us and retrieval was little more than a set of assumptions, assumptions which at any time could be blotted as thoroughly as K 19 had destroyed whatever compact we had. Knowing this did not strengthen nor change a thing but the acceptance was in itself a kind of control. The Brylls have come a long way, worked hard, dedicated themselves, applied all of their awful technology, but that cunning of effort has not yet succeeded in taking from us all recollection. So we are sport for the trajectory of the Brylls’ conquest.

  Now and then there are these pure moments of recovery, and outside the enclosure, K 19 still behind, I had another, turned the power on my 22 Model Sirius Hardtop, watching the sheaves of light curl from the element, now drawing pure solar heat at reversed amperage, seeking the internal source that we had dragged from the vacuum.

  What joys we had from the cosmos before the Brylls! Our Sirian hardtops, galactic entertainments, bustling travel, our dolefully comic cries: oh, cascades of stars, nebulae of grandeur thus informing our spirit and possibilities until those Brylls came to show us the real force of universal law and to illustrate the limitations of our own condition. Crammed in the vehicle, feeling the tremors of the engine, I thought too of the easy, gliding weight of the hardtop when it had made fast passage from Peking Festival to the port of Macon, the wharfs of Brooklyn to the Empyrean Tower. Times when I had chanted mantras of speed to the hardtop, before the change, the emergence, the debarkation of the Brylls … and these shards of memory were knives, slaughterhouse of memory. I cocked the timejector in secondary and felt the rush, the sense of distances opening and then as the hardtop lifted —

  I waded through the bright blue manda grass toward the beckoning Bryll, feeling the pull of the mud as I tried to clamber away, retain balance. This more than anything else they enjoy, taking our dignity, making us cartoons, yanking from us the solemnity of our distress and placing us on a flat and colorful map where we deal with pale, exploded forms who may or may not be representative of the Brylls themselves. We do not know if it is submission or some parody of conquest. My breath froze into pink pretzels as I squeaked.

  Beyond the rise, the ape snickered and pointed; the Sirius fell with a whoop and I could hear the ape’s chuckling. “So little,” it said in that mechanical voice, as refractory in its burning as the fire beyond the portico. “So little and so strong, so ugly and so nice, so nice and so distressed. What do you want?” They toy with us; if this is our vision of purgatory I think that it must be theirs of transcendence.

  Here is where they want to go when they die, one might have said, and now all of them through the eons are dead. “Nice!” the ape said and I bounced, then fell to ooze. Stumbling for balance, I flicked on the heat bars. They had not plundered before the transfer; in their eagerness to bring me to the pink pretzels they had left weaponry behind and suddenly it was in my hand, the feel of it steady and reassuring.

  Yes, I thought. I can at least take the ape. If this is my purgatory, then perhaps I can block their transcendence. We live in small snatches, now and then we are granted a glimpse of recovery. The ape waved with a scanty claw, winking, and then there were others, jolting presences. No longer alone. The Brylls ran swiftly on five legs from all directions.

  It was as if in my focusing of the weapon I had panicked them, made them show their true aspect. Ringing me on all sides, almost offhandedly, they attacked. I could feel the imminence of their horror and then, once again, the darkness.

  “They are treacherous,” one said.

  “No,” I offered. “Listen to this. We are not treacherous. We are driven. You gave us no choice, you gave us at the end no dignity.” But having spoken, knew it was unheard, knew that there was no way in which connection could be made, was locked once again in that place so well known to K 19 from which there was no emergence.

  “Using their other two to send out crylon vibrations,” the ape said, and this time I could see, in the flooding light I could see the bowl of roof, beyond that transparency the stricken and venomous sun, and I tried to move but found myself locked into place. At the edge of vision the ape was talking to something else, oblivious. “They die,” one said, “they die and they die and it is not enough.”

  “Of course it’s enough,” I said, as if they could hear me.

  “It’s always enough, it was a sufficiency when we began,” and tried to wave, tried to show them through the intensity of movement the thorough nature of my distress, but they wouldn’t acknowledge me, I might have indeed been dead and they large solemn demons, blank devil and primate, assessing larger goals. “It wasn’t enough for Google,” it said again, “and it’s not enough for you.”

  The strangulation, as if an arm were laid across my throat.

  The pressure was almost unbearable but the heat bar was there, they still had not taken it through all their insistence.

  Somehow, yanked to a seated position, I felt the pain seize me like a fist but l caught the range on my wrist computer and said, “Listen here! Listen to me! You must not turn away from this, we susp
ire, we are creatures, we live and suffer.”

  Through the transparent cysicites of the atmosphere I felt as if I had caught their attention, told myself that I had their attention at last, could somehow break through.

  “You’ve broken us,” I said. “You’ve done it now.”

  “It’s never enough—” The gorilla moved deliberately, its companion turning now.

  The Brylls were coming.

  I pressed the trigger.

  “Now what?” K 19 said.

  She lay against me in terrain like knives, ice and slice sending tender, necessary slivers of pain, the two of us stretched one by one on heavy mesh like metal. We were in an enclosure, the air stale and heavy, and the thin violet glow was ice-cold against the rust-colored mountains in the distance.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Her skin lay damp and open under my fingers, rising in small response as I clutched. “We’re somewhere else now. We’ve been taken away.”

  “What did we do?”

  “We were taken. They turned our breath into pink pretzels.”

  “Yes, but what did we do?” Once we had lain together in transaction, hovering, mild connection, but now, even as I felt her stillness, it was as if this had not happened. Far from me, distilling loss with every breath, K 19 said, “You have destroyed us.”

  “We were already destroyed.”

  “My name is Linda. Call me that, give me my name.”

  “It was over, Linda. Wherever we are, whatever has been done, it was over.”

  I could feel the stirring and then there were many sounds, perspective cleared, breath again began to pretzel. Looking toward the sounds, I could see the little forms, could see them scuttle, could see the Brylls shrank to half an inch long, hopping, scuttling. They ringed us with the eagerness of their necessity, showed us their incessancy.

  “What is it?” Linda said. “Where are they?”

  I pointed, drew the line of her attention, and then with her breath, her first frozen and intense knowledge, I reacted instinctively, did what some of us had tried at the beginning, and I worked fast stepping on them, lunging somehow to a standing position. Linda screamed as she saw what I was doing, pointed at the rust-colored sky, and I ignored the heat bars, consigned them to darkness along with the rest of my life, no transaction left now, and began to fight with thepoltex; the small rubber flange opening like a petal as I beat at them. If this was to be the final battle (and it was, my time was over, I knew that now), it would be as deprived of dignity as the rest but at least I could right the balance, struggle on.

  Even as Linda tried pathetically to crawl away, I found myself pitched against them, grunting, heaving with that sole weapon left, seeing them pulp, listening to their brisk and intermittent cries as some — but not too many — of them died.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  The sudden brightness swung me around and Linda, the mask clamped tightly, was holding the heat bar, aiming at me, maniacal and concentrated laughter pouring through.

  Pouring through as fuel of my destruction.

  And it was at that moment, then, and not an instant earlier nor a flash later, that I came to understand what had happened, the true nature of the Brylls, the deadly and insistent nature of their circumstance and plans.

  “And the Fourth Moon had already risen,” the thing in the mask said, “and it was time then, time for us if not for you and it would always in that extreme be enough.”

  If I had understood what was happening, I might have hadexactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator of the heat bar.

  But even then —

  “And Google had told me it wasn’t enough,” I said. I believe I had lost control. I believe I had really lost control.

  That flush of abandonment, the surge of separation, the conviction of utter disaster —

  “Not for you,” the thing that had been Linda K 19 said.

  “Not for you, perhaps. But it is for us.”

  He was right.

  Corridors

  RUTHVEN USED TO have plans. Big plans: turn the category around, arrest the decline of science fiction into stereotype and cant, open up the category to new vistas and so on. So forth. Now, however, he is, at fifty-four, merely trying to hold on; he takes this retraction of ambition, understanding of his condition as the only significant change in his inner life over two decades. The rest of it—inner and outer too—has been replication, disaster, pain, recrimination, self-pity and the like: Ruthven thinks of these old partners of the law firm of his life as brothers. At least, thanks to Replication & Disaster, he has a brief for the game. He knows what he is and what has to be done, and most of the time he can sleep through the night, unlike that period during his forties when 4 A.M. more often than not would see him awake and drinking whiskey, staring at his out-of-print editions in many languages.

  The series has helped. Ruthven has at last achieved a modicum of fame in science fiction and for the first time—he would not have believed this ever possible—some financial security. Based originally upon a short novel written for Astounding in late 1963, which he padded for quick paperback the next year, The Sorcerer has proven the capstone of his career. Five or six novels written subsequently at low advances for the same firm went nowhere, but: the editor was fired, the firm collapsed, releasing all rights, the editor got divorced, married a subsidiary rights director, got a consultant job with her firm, divorced her, went to a major paperback house as science fiction chief and through a continuing series of coincidences known to those who (unlike Ruthven) always seemed to come out a little ahead commissioned three new Sorcerers from Ruthven on fast deadline to build up cachet with the salesmen. They all had hung out at the Hydra Club together, anyway. Contracts were signed, the first of the three new Sorcerers (written, all of them in ten weeks) sold 150,000 copies, the second was picked up as an alternate by a demented Literary Guild and the third was leased to hardcover. Ruthven’s new, high-priced agent negotiated a contract for five more Sorcerers for $100,000.

  Within the recent half decade, Ruthven has at last made money from science fiction. One of the novels was, a Hugo finalist, another was filmed. He has been twice final balloted for a Gandalf. Some of his older novels have been reprinted. Ruthven is now one of the ten most successful science fiction writers: he paid taxes on $79,000 last year. In his first two decades in this field, writing frantically and passing through a succession of dead-end jobs, Ruthven did not make $79,000.

  It would be easier for him, he thinks, if he could take his success seriously or at least obtain some peace, but of this he has none. Part of it has to do with his recent insight that he is merely hanging on, that the ultimate outcome of ultimate struggle for any writer in America not hopelessly self-deluded is to hang on; another part has to do with what Ruthven likes to think of as the accumulated damages and injuries sustained by the writing of seventy-three novels. Like a fighter long gone from the ring, the forgotten left hooks taken under the lights in all of the quick-money bouts have caught up with him and stunned his brain. Ruthven hears the music of combat as he never did when it was going on. He has lost the contents of most of these books and even some of their titles but the pain fingers. This is self-dramatization, of course, and Ruthven has enough ironic distance to know it. No writer was ever killed by a book.

  Nonetheless, he hears the music, feels the dull knives in his kidneys and occipital regions at night; Ruthven also knows that he has done nothing of worth in a long time. The Sorcerer is a fraud; he is far below the aspirations and intent of his earlier work, no matter how flawed that was. Most of these new books have been written reflexively under the purposeful influence of Scotch and none of them possesses real quality. Even literacy. He has never been interested in these books. Ruthven is too far beyond self-delusion to think that the decline of his artistic gifts, the collapse of his promise, means anything either. Nothing means anything except holding on as he now knows. Nonetheless, he used to feel that the quality of work made some difference.
Didn’t he? Like the old damages of the forgotten books he feels the pain at odd hours.

  He is not disgraced, of this he is fairly sure, but he is disappointed. If he had known that it would end this way, perhaps he would not have expended quite so much on those earlier books. The Sorcerer might have had a little more energy; at least he could have put some color in the backgrounds.

  Ruthven is married to Sandra, his first and only wife. The marriage has lasted through thirty-one years and two daughters, one divorced, one divorced and remarried, both far from his home in the Southeast. At times Ruthven considers his marriage with astonishment: he does not quite know how he has been able to stay married so long granted the damages of his career, the distractions, the deadening, the slow and terrible resentment which has built within him over almost three decades of commercial writing. At other times, however, he feels that his marriage is the only aspect of his life (aside from science fiction itself) which has a unifying consistency. And only death will end it.

  He accepts that now. Ruthven is aware of the lives of all his colleagues: the divorces, multiple marriages, disastrous affairs, two- and three-timing, bed-hopping at conventions; the few continuing marriages seem to be cover or mausoleum—but after considering his few alternatives Ruthven has nonetheless stayed married and the more active outrage of the earlier decades has receded. It all comes back to his insight: nothing matters. Hang on. If nothing makes any difference then it is easier to stay with Sandra by far. Also, she has a position of her own; it cannot have been marriage to a science fiction writer which enticed her when they met so long ago. She has taken that and its outcome with moderate good cheer and has given him less trouble, he supposes, than she might. He has not shoved the adulteries and recrimination in her face but surely she knows of them; she is not stupid. And she is now married to $79,000 a year, which is not inconsiderable. At least this is all Ruthven’s way of rationalizing the fact that he has had (he knows now) so much less from this marriage than he might have, the fact that being a writer has done irreparable damage to both of them. And the children. He dwells on this less than previously. His marriage, Ruthven thinks, is like science fiction writing itself: if there was a time to get out that time is past and now he would be worse off anywhere else. Who would read him? Where would he sell? What else could he do?