Sandra did want to be here but she is not. She has been feeling weak all year and now at last they have a diagnosis: she will have a hysterectomy soon. Knowing what being guest of honor meant to him Sandra had offered to go regardless, stay in the room if she could not socialize, but Ruthven had told her not to. He knew that she did not want to come, was afraid of the crowds and the hysteric pulse and was for the first time in her life truly afraid of dying. She is an innocent. She considers her own death only when she feels very ill.
Not so many years ago, being alone at a large convention, let alone as guest of honor, would have inflamed Ruthven. He would have manipulated his life desperately to get even a night away alone, a Labor Day weekend would have been redemption … but now he feels depressed. He can take no pleasure from the situation and how it occurred. He is afraid for Sandra and misses her a little too, wishes that his daughters, who have never understood him or his work, could have seen him just this once celebrated. But he is alone and he is beginning to feel that it is simply too late for adultery. He has had his opportunities now and then, made his luck, but well past fifty and into what he thinks of as leveling out, Ruthven has become resigned to feeling that what he should have done can be done no more — take the losses, the time is gone. There are women of all ages, appearance and potential here, many are alone, others in casual attachments, many—even more than he might imagine, he suspects—available. But he will probably sleep alone all the nights of this convention, either sleep alone or end up standing in the hotel bar past four with old friends drinking and remembering the fifties. The desperation and necessity are gone: Sandra is not much, he accepts this, but she has given him all of which she is capable, which makes her flaws in this marriage less serious than Ruthven’s because he could have given more. His failure comes from the decision, consciously, to deny. Perhaps it was the science fiction that shut him down. He just does not know.
Ruthven stands in the center of the large welcoming party, sipping scotch and conversing. He feels detached from the situation and from his own condition; he feels that if he were to close his eyes other voices would overwhelm him … the voices of all the other conventions. Increasingly he finds that he has more to hear from — and more to say to—the dead than to the living. Now with his eyes closed, rocking, it is as if Mark Clifton, Edmond Hamilton, Kuttner and Kornbluth are standing by him glasses in hand, looking at one another in commiseration and silence. There is really no need for any of them to speak. For a while none of them do.
Finally, Ruthven says as he has before, “It hurts, doesn’t it? It hurts.” Kuttner nods, Kombluth raises a sardonic eyebrow. Mark Clifton shrugs. “It hurts,” Clifton says, “oh it hurts all right, Henry. Look at the record.” There seems nothing more to say. A woman in red who looks vaguely like Felicia touches his arm. Her eyes are solemn and intense. She has always wanted to meet him, she says; she loves his work. She tells Ruthven her name and that she is a high school English teacher in Boston.
“Thank you,” he says, “I’m glad you like the books.” Everybody nods. Hamilton smiles. “You might as well,” Kombluth says with a shrug, “I can’t anymore and there’s really nothing else.” Ruthven shrugs. He tells the woman that the next scotch is on him or more properly the committee. He walks her over to the bar. Her hand is in his. Quickly, oh so quickly, her hand is in his.
At eight-fifteen the next evening Ruthven delivers his guest-of-honor speech. There are about three thousand in the large auditorium; convention attendance is just over ten thousand but 30 percent is not bad. Most attendees of modern world conventions are not serious readers now; they are movie fans or television fans or looking for a good time. Ruthven has thought for months about this speech and has worked on it painfully.
Once he thought — this was, of course, years ago that if he were ever guest of honor at a major convention he would deliver a speech denunciatory of science fiction and what it did to its writers. Later, when he began to feel as implicated as anyone, the speech became less an attack than an elegy for the power and mystery that had been drained by bad writing and editing, debased by a juvenile audience. But after The Lies of Science Fiction had been put away and the edge of terror blunted, the very idea of the speech seemed childish. He was never going to be guest of honor and if he were, what right did he have to tell anyone anything? Science fiction was a private circumstance, individually perceived.
Nonetheless he had, when the time came to plan, considered the speech at length. What he decided to do, finally, was review his career in nostalgic terms, dropping in just enough humor to distract the audience from the thrust of his intention because after bringing his career up to date he wanted to share with them his conviction that it did not matter. Nothing mattered except that it had kept him around until the coincidence of The Sorcerer, and The Sorcerer meant nothing except that Ruthven would not worry about money until he was dead. “Can’t you see the overwhelming futility of it?” he would ask. “The Lies of Science Fiction” seemed a good title except that it would be printed in the convention book and be taken as a slap at the committee and indeed the very field which was doing him honor. Better to memorialize his book through the speech itself. Anyway, the title would have alerted the audience to the bitterness of his conclusion. He wanted to spring it on them.
So he had called it “Me and the Cosmos and Science Fiction,” harmless enough, and Ruthven delivers the first thirty-two minutes of his thirty-five minute address from the text and pretty much as he had imagined. Laughter is frequent; his anecdotes of Campbell, Gold and Roger Elwood are much appreciated. There is applause when he speaks of the small triumph of the science fiction writer the day Apollo landed. “We did that” he remembers telling a friend, “at three cents a word.” The audience applauds. They probably understand. This much, anyway.
Then, to his astonishment and disgust, Ruthven comes off the text and loses control. He has never hated himself so. Just as he is about to lift his head and explain coldly that none of it matters his voice falters and breaks. It has happened in the terrible arguments with Sandra in the old days and in the dreams with Kombluth, Hamilton, Kuttner and Clifton, but never before in public, and Ruthven delivers the last paragraphs of his speech in a voice and from a mood he has never before known:
“We tried,” he says. “I want you to know that, that even the worst of us, the most debased hack, the one-shot writer, the fifty-book series, C the hundreds and thousands of us who ever wrote a line of this stuff for publication: we tried. We tried desperately to say something because we were the only ones who could, and however halting our language, tuneless the song, it was ours.
“We wanted to celebrate, don’t you see? We wanted to celebrate the insistent, circumstantial fact of the spirit itself, that wherever and in whatever form the spirit could yet sing amidst the engines of the night, that the engines could extinguish our lives but never our light, and that in the spaces between we could still thread our colors of substantiation. In childhood nights we felt it, later we lost it, but retrieval was always the goal, to get back there, to make it work, to justify ourselves to ourselves, to give the light against the light. We tried and failed; in a billion words we failed and faded again, but throughout was our prayer and somewhere in its center lived something else, the mystery and power of what might have been flickering.
“In these spaces, in all the partitions, hear our song. Let it be known that while given breath we sang until it drew the very breath from us and extinguished our light forever.”
And then, in hopeless and helpless fury, Ruthven pushes aside the microphone and cries.
Icons
MY Hemingway keeps mumbling about the ultimate nada, Smith said “and the darkness and the light.” It keeps trying to go upstairs to lock
itself in the bathroom with my carbine. I have to shut off the power but one of these days I’m not going to be home when it happens.
Jones nodded glumly. “My Hemingway wants to go running with the bulls,” he
said, “calls it the ultimate quest and so on but what it really wants is to be gored. It keeps on looking out the window staring at the pavement and I have to pull it back inside.
I shrugged. There was no point in admitting that my Hemingway slipped off while I was at the slaughtering docks yesterday and put a hole in its Plexiglas head. I had the same warnings as Smith and Jones. No one to blame. “Not good.” I said.
“It’s always the same damned things.” Jones said bitterly. “They send these things out glistening with their white beards and leery eyes and they’re marvelously entertaining for a few weeks typing and drinking away and speaking of the clean and just and next thing you know they’re off in corners whispering about telescopic sights. I say it’s disgusting.”
“Design defect.” Smith said knowingly, “built in the machines. Planned obsolescence. Self-destruction. Good turnover. A need for replacements all the time. It’s all planned.”
“Well I won’t take it anymore.” Jones said, “You have take a position make a stand.”
“That’s the ticket.” Smith said. “Draw the line. Fight for truth. Stand up to the bastards once and for all.”
They looked at me expectantly. I have their trust. In a way I am a the ringleader by unspoken consensus.
“Agreed gentlemen,” I said. “One must take a stand.”
We left the Juicer and took the tramway to the central offices of Icons Inc. located in the packing district. As soon as we arrived we could see the dimensions of the problem. The offices were ringed by thousands of demonstrators chanting in an ugly way for justice. Barricades had been established and the police were restraining the crowd. Many had brought their defective or imploded Hemingways to wave above their heads. The problem as we had suspected was quite widespread.
”Who would have known?” Smith said reverently. “There is still some spirit left in us— and outrage.
“There are limits.” Jones agreed. “They cannot sell us defective Icons indefinitely. We can only take this stuff for so long.”
We established positions at the rear and joined in the chant. Smith’s face flushed with accomplishment. Jones seemed timorous, he lacks physical courage — a quality that he had hoped his Hemingway might have given him, more the pity.
“New Hemingways,” we shouted. “Hemingways that live, not Hemingways that die.” Gunshots were heard as here and there in the crowd defective Hemingways found their masters’ weapons and did away with themselves on the spot.
An employee of Icons In., came out on a balcony. Even from this distance we could see him shaking. They usually assign a minor functionary to address rioters. “Be reasonable” the junior shouted. “Disperse. You are breaking the law.”
“Justice!” we shouted. The police with their weapons holstered stood looking in the opposite direction. After all many of them had Hemingways too. “Go home!” the junior said but he was pelted by debris. He recoiled under a hail of garbage.
“All right,” he bellowed suddenly, “we’ll make an adjustment.”
“No adjustments!” we shouted, quite caught up in the moment. “Justice.” We knew that we would prevail. We always do in these confrontations. After all Icons is dependent upon our goodwill. Remember the Monroe riots and their outcome.
“Very well.” The junior said. “We accept return of all Hemingways. For full credit.”
We cheered.
“And we will apply the full cost of each toward the purchase of a Kennedy. Only taxation differential will be due.”
We cheered again. Everyone thinks of the Kennedy with anticipation. Rumors are that models had been in production for years but were being help back purposely to manipulate greater demand.
“A Kennedy for everyone!” The junior screamed. “Everyone, all of you will know that they will fight any battle share any cause in the struggle for freedom. Friend and foe alike will know that a new generation forged from a hard and bitter peace —”
But he could no longer be heard so great now were the cheers.
I can’t wait for my Kennedy. He will put strength in my spine sparkle in my eyes purpose in each dreary day. It will be like the early days with Hemingway before the terrible design defect manifested itself.
Smith tears, however that the Kennedy will also prove detective. “You can’t trust these corporaton.” He points out. “They probably have an obsolescence factor in the Kennedy as well. But Icons is clever.”
“What do you mean? I ask.
“I mean, this time when it breaks down they’ll have it arranged so it looks like our fault.” Smith says bitterly. “Wait and see.”
Jones and I however, disgusted with Smith’s pessimism have threatened to do him damage if he doesn’t shut up. If you can’t trust a Kennedy what then?
Something from the Seventies
BUT why me? Winogrand said, this was in the interrogation room, a gadget-strewn place which reminded him of the way his industrial-arts classroom had looked in high school. Maybe a little more threatening because the industrial-arts guy was not a spotted alien with what appeared to be a heavy-duty space weapon of an advanced type. I don’t remember anything about the seventies, Winogrand said. I slept through the whole decade. The sixties blew me out. It wasn’t the drugs, he added, trying a fetching, self-deprecating moue, just the intensity of the time. The assassinations and the sex and all of that stuff. But really most of it’s a blur to me.
Strange, the interrogator said, that’s what we hear from the rest of you that we’ve checked out on this. But, really, we can’t accept excuses here. We’re trying to do some kind of comprehensive history and we can’t have a ten-year gap in the Amurrican century. That’s what you call it, right? The Amurrican century. That guy, Booth, that was his name for it.
Luce, Winogrand said. Henry Luce, the guy from Time. It’s not Amurrican, it’s American. Actually, United States. America refers to a bigger place. Where do you want me to start? Winogrand said. He peered over to the shadowed corners of the room in which there seemed to be torture devices, strange implements of an alien sort which he was convinced could do terrible things to Amurrican extremities. That was the trouble with alien invasion and interrogation, it seemed like a joke in the abstract but when you got right to circumstances, they weren’t so funny at all. One morning a simple account executive for Universal Steel, the next somewhere in the bowels of what he guessed was an alien spaceship, talking to some multitentacled creature who wanted to obtain information on a dry, senseless time, a decade during which, as he tried to look back upon it, Winogrand had not had four minutes of continuous pleasure. Strung end to end as moments of pleasure never were, he might have had two hours of fun through the internment of the hostages. How could this make him an expert on the period and why had the alien snatched him of all people and put him to this horrid condition? He looked at the implements in the shadows again and shuddered. It was remarkable how plans seemed to unravel, tiny plans hardly voiced even to the self, and then your life was atomized into the chemical stink of an alien interrogation room. Well, that was the decade for you. There was the malaise speech, Winogrand said, that was in the summer of 1979. Right after the second gas shortage, the first having been in 1973, and just before the hostages got snatched in Iran. Carter said that it was all our fault, that the country had a stalking malaise because of the sixties assassinations and all the cynicism. He said we needed a spiritual revival. It didn’t go over too well. You understand, most of us had spent June and July trying to get a tankful of gas, they reran that November and December of 1973 energy scam right past us again. What we didn’t need was some guy shouting at us that our lousy lives were all our fault. It cost him the election.
Not the hostages? the alien said. Somewhere, the greenly tentacled creature seemed to have picked up a little history on its own; perhaps this was not a true interrogation but one of those traps which sneaky aliens were likely to pull, Winogrand thought. The papers had been full of sidebar stories after the invasion, dealing with the sne
akiness and duplicity of the aliens. They told lies about their planet of origin and loved to load up the fade line at craps in the casinos. Perhaps deception like entropy was interstellar. We thought it was the hostages swept up at the American embassy in Iran who couldn’t be rescued which were responsible for the troubles of your president.
Don’t think so, Winogrand said. Look, when you’ve spent all summer trying to get a tank of gas and fighting 20 percent inflation, you don’t need to hear some guy in a sweater telling you that it’s all your own fault. Of course, that’s just my theory, Winogrand said. Nothing is sure with this stuff, you know. Stupid politics, though.
So how did this Carter get to be president in the first place? the alien said. If he was so stupid, how did he become president?
Boy, Winogrand thought hopelessly, these creatures are really out of it, either that or they were faking a consummate stupidity which was hard to believe. Of course it could merely be a display of alien cunning. Watergate, Winogrand said, the presidential resignation in August of 1974. Then Ford pardoned Nixon. You know who these people are? You know what I’m talking about? The alien made quivering motions of agreement. Well, then, the pardon sunk Ford, Winogrand said. That was in September of 1974, exactly one month after Nixon had resigned on August 9 which led people to think that there had been some kind of a strict deal in the first place. Ford never got over the pardon and then in the first debate in October of 1975 he said that a bunch of Communist satellite countries in Eastern Europe were really free. That pretty much did him in since he did not have a major reputation for intellect in the first place. His idea for beating inflation was to make a speech in the summer of 1975 saying that they were going to print up a whole bunch of buttons saying WIN for WHIP INFLATION NOW, you get it? and everyone should wear one. That was his idea of high policy. I don’t even want to think of low policy. Do you understand any of this?
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 28