Balook

by Piers Anthony

  "Just look out your window," Thor said. "See what my workers are doing to your trees."

  Turrell looked. "Those animals are destroying those trees!" he exclaimed. "At this rate—" He broke off, astonished. "You mean those rhinos?" Suddenly the numbers were percolating through the man's head; he had a sharp eye for costs and savings.

  "Put them in one of your power line corridors, install high electrified wires above the containing fences so the rhinos aren't tempted to stray, and they'll eat their way from one end to the other, leaving nothing within reach of the lines from a height of nine meters down. They don't require human guidance, except between corridors; they're a family. I think that pretty well covers your need. They could proceed right on to the neighboring power corridors, clearing them out too, and their manure fertilizing the grass below. It would be years before those trees encroach again, by which time—"

  The door burst open. Armed men crowded in.

  Turrell turned to face them. "Can't you see we're having a private conversation?" he snapped.

  Abashed, the men retreated.

  Turrell returned his attention to Thor. "You were saying?"

  "It would also be a nice public gesture," Thor continued. "Most people like the rhinos; they just want them kept out of the way of human beings, so that nobody gets hurt. Your power corridors are private property, all fenced off. You could run pictures of the big rhinos doing this public service that human beings won't touch, and I think it would be pretty good publicity. The company with a heart, and a terrific mascot. And you would be helping science too, because—"

  Turrell peered out the window. "But the danger! They trample children! We can't risk the liability suits if—"

  He had broken off because Fudgie, perched on Balook's back, had grown too bold. Now the child was standing up and doing an impromptu dance, wowing his audience.

  "Damn!" Thor breathed. "I told him to sit still and hold on!"

  "He doesn't look like a captive."

  "He's not. He came to us voluntarily, because—" Then Thor stopped. He had given away the secret of their hostage! Once the authorities knew that there was no threat to the child, they would have no reason to hold back.

  "Get down, Fudgie!" Barb called, alarmed.

  Too late. The little boy lost his balance, teetered a moment, and fell. Screaming, he slid down Balook's side.

  In a flash, Thor saw everything destroyed. A second injury to a child, or a second death—that would seal Balook's fate no matter what Mr. Turrell decided.

  Then Balook brought his head about, surprisingly quickly. He caught the child on his big humped nose. The boy grabbed on automatically, though his body continued to slide down. But Balook's head was lowering toward the ground, and by the time the boy dropped off, he was only a meter from the turf. He landed screaming but unhurt.

  "He saved that boy's life!" Turrell exclaimed.

  Thor realized that Balook had probably reacted to the sensation of the boy's slide down his side, and nosed him more from curiosity than aid. But he wasn't sure, because Balook had accepted the child as a rider, and did have a protective attitude toward those he accepted.

  Blooky was there, nuzzling the crying boy. Fudgie reached up to hug the little rhino, taking comfort. People were gaping from the nearby parking lot. Light flashed. Some fool was taking pictures!

  "Those rhinos are no danger to children!" Turrell said.

  "Not when they see them coming," Thor agreed, immensely relieved.

  Now Barb had dismounted and was with the child. It was all right.

  "Young man, I believe we can deal," Turrell said. "I believe those pictures, and the testimony of witnesses, will satisfy the Mayor that a pardon is in order. I shall suggest that to him."

  A pardon for Balook! There was the answer! The verdict of the judge could be set aside, and Balook would be free! But even as the joy of his success buoyed him, he felt the start of the great sadness of separation. Now neither he nor Barb would be needed; the Baluchitheria were to be self-employed.

  But as he approached Barb, after having Balook rescue him from the office, he remembered his notion about the freak zoo.

  "Balook and Theria and Blooky won't need us any more," he told her. "The power company is hiring them, and Balook will be pardoned. But there are other animals who do need us. We call it the freak zoo, and—"

  "The freak zoo?"

  "The failed experiments. I worked with them for two years while—" He shrugged. "There's Pooh, the miniature bear. He really needs a friend! Also Wormgear, the toothed worm. Nobody cares for them, because they aren't normal or pretty or smart. Even the regular personnel of the project really don't—"

  "Are you suggesting that I join you there, to work with those creatures?"

  "Well—" he said, suddenly uncertain. He had assumed that she would want to, and to be with him, but of course that was a big assumption.

  "Is there a lake there?" she asked.

  Then he knew it was all right.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  This short novel has a long history. It started with a picture in THE ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES, a four-volume set of popularized geology, zoology, paleontology, botany and anthropology that has fascinating and not very complicated articles on just about anything in the natural realm. One article is titled Giant Animals, with pictures and commentary on the extremes of reptiles, mammals, birds, fish and such. The biggest reptiles were the dinosaurs; the biggest bird was the Elephant Bird, twelve feet to the top of the head, but of course it didn't fly; the biggest flying bird was an extinct vulture with a twelve foot wingspread. But this was dwarfed by the reptile Pteranodon, with a 27 foot wingspread. I am foolishly fascinated by such items. There was a drawing, made to scale, showing the extremes of mammals, with a six foot man for comparison. Dwarfing even the largest fossil elephant was Baluchitherium, whose head was about as long as the entire body of the man, and far more massive. Wow!

  The thing that struck me about this drawing, upon reconsideration, was the pleasant expression on the face of the monster rhino. It looked as if it would be a nice creature to know. That nagged at me, because rhinos generally have a bad reputation. The truth, as another article explains, is that rhinos really aren't that mean when treated decently. So I formed this mental image of a really nice, huge rhino, who might be unfortunately misunderstood by ignorant folk of today. I carry such concepts around with me, and often that's as far as they go, just part of my private intellectual baggage, of no interest to sensible folk.

  Then in 1966 Data Processing Magazine sponsored a contest: $1,000 first prize plus publication in the magazine, for the best computer fiction entry. Three of the six judges had done science fiction writing, so it seemed legitimate. As it happened, my wife was then a computer programmer, a ready source of information, so this contest seemed made to order for me. With her information and my writing skill—well, it seemed well within the realm of possibility that I could win it, and that would be very nice. All I needed to do was to write the story. I needed something interesting to go with the computer detail; what could I draw on? Well, suppose computers were used to help formulate some extinct species of animal? Perhaps an impressively large creature.

  Thus "Balook" the 5,000 word story came to be. It featured Thor Nemmen, a computer programmer who worked with a computer system whose acronym was BLOOK, and his introduction to a young woman who looked just like my wife and just happened to have a background in genetics (it's amazing how such coincidences occur!), and their project to recreate Baluchitherium with the help of computer technology. But it also had a moral. It started with a quote from Mathew Prior, Solomon on the Vanity of the World: "Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn; and he alone is blessed who ne'er was born." The opening was the yelp of a dog, to whose tail laughing boys had tied a string of cans, terrifying it. There was part of the theme: man's cruelty to animals. I am a vegetarian in part to protest such cruelty: the cruelty of killing animals for meat. T
hus this story was close to home in several ways, for me.

  They crafted Balook, intended to promote the capacities of the computer. But Balook was a living creature, and they had not properly allowed for his nature in the modern world. A mean man saw him and took a potshot (I don't much care for hunters, either), injuring him. Mean children laughed. That made them realize the enormity of the social problem. They had collaborated with a computer to play God, resurrecting an extinct animal. What price would Balook pay for their success? Had they really done more than tie tin cans on a living creature's tail? It concluded: "Had they forgotten the human responsibility man owed to the mechanical genius of the machine? Thor rested his arm against the guiltless nose of Balook, and was afraid." I felt it was a fine story, moral and all.

  Indeed it must have been, because Data Processing held it nine months and returned it with a rejection slip. That gives you a notion of computer efficiency in those days. My wife and I have made babies in no more time than that! The magazine published the winners of the contest, and I read the top three. You want sour grapes? I've got them in bunches! All three were poor. The first was essentially "I Love Lucy" cast in a computer framework, the computer running the household to the frustration of the occupants. The second was a power-failure problem whose author did not even know how to paragraph; it was all in big mixed-text blocks. (Didn't the editors know, either?) The third was better, as I recall, but unmemorable. Were I an editor, I would have bounced all three.

  I tried it on the regular science fiction markets, hoping for more sensible reaction. There, at least, there was supposed to be some knowledge of literary and story values. The story bounced there too. But at least I got some comment—which is instructive in another fashion.

  Anthony Cheetham of Sphere Books in England wrote: "Perhaps I have a more optimistic view of human nature than you do but I feel that the two small boys in the story would have been more likely to treat [Balook] as a favorite pet rather than stone him because of his size."

  John W. Campbell of Analog wrote: "Sorry—the story doesn't seem to me to accomplish anything. Your hero might be pure ivory-tower-intellectual enough to be so naive as not to know what human beings are like—i.e., what the huge numbers on the lower slope of the distribution curve are like—but the heroine, as a psychologist-geneticist should have.

  "Jack Schoenherr, our artist, who's an ardent and competent amateur zoologist, well known and respected at the Bronx Zoo, was in on the autopsy of a hippo that died there suddenly two years ago. The autopsy revealed that somebody had tossed it a can of lye.

  "Must have made that guy feel real heroic to tear out the guts of a great big animal like that with a can of caustic.

  "Zoos have trouble with flamingos too. They have bright pink knees in long, thin legs. Boys like to try to hit them with stones. It breaks the flamingo's leg."

  This nicely demonstrates one of the problems writers have with editors: the same piece can be rejected for opposite reasons. Neither editor questioned the competence of the story; each bounced it because it did not conform to his ideological perspective for fiction. Not true enough to life—too true to life. I suspect we need less ideology in editing and more attention to straight story values. This was one of the reasons I finally left the story market and oriented almost wholly on novels. The book editors, while by no means perfect, were more tolerant of individual variance. Once I was able to express myself with less censorship, my career flourished. This, I think, is true for many writers: they have a better notion what the readers want than many editors do.

  Obviously there are all types of people in the world. Some would make a pet of Balook; others would act exactly as I showed in the story. My point was not to establish or question the existence of such people; it was to show that all types have to be considered before an innocent but unusual creature is thrown among them. With the best of intentions, my characters committed a crime against nature—because they failed to consider the human environment Balook would face.

  Ten editors found the story "Balook" unworthy. Did any of them understand it? I would say that Mr. Cheetham and Mr. Campbell came closest; both offered helpful commentary. I considered this commentary when I novelized it.

  I, you see, am ornery. When I have what I deem to be a worthy notion, I am reluctant to accept rejection. When it became evident that the story magazines simply were not going to let Balook see the light of modern day, I set about trying it on the more liberal novel editors. I have done this with "Omnivore" and "A Piece of Cake" [TRIPLE DETENTE] and "Ghost" and others. I work relentlessly not only to write a good story, but to bring it to print. Sometimes it takes many years, even decades, but gradually I am catching up on the backlog. Now it is Balook's turn.

  In 1967 I bought a British book, THE AGE OF MONSTERS by J. Augusta and Z. Burian, published by Paul Hamlyn of London. This had lovely pictures of the giants of the past. The seven foot tall Diatryma bird was the inspiration for the main character in my novel ORN. One picture showed a small herd of Indricotherium, the alternate name for Balook's species. Ah, joy! I set out to expand Balook into a family for the novel.

  As part of this effort I set out to sculpt a statue of Balook. I am a prolific writer, and because of this some readers condemn my work on the grounds that it must be hack, ground out without regard to quality. These readers are ignorant of the nature of the writers of this genre. Science fiction and fantasy are among the most creative and exacting of the literary genres, and not the natural refuge of lazy or indifferent writers. I'm here because I love the genre; it alone allows me the latitude to explore my farthest notions. I have a wide spread of interests, and most of them can be accommodated here. I turn out a lot because writing is my way of life. Garden variety folk may relax by watching television or vacationing on the beach or dining in restaurants or simply snoozing on the couch; they want to forget their paying work. I can't blame them; I tried a number of mundane employments, and certainly these are well worth forgetting. My dream was to be a writer; to spend my time in the realms of farthest imagination, and to shape the products of my interests into stories that others would appreciate, so that I could thereby earn my living. Once that dream was realized, I remained wholeheartedly in it; who, upon entering Paradise, will turn about and return to mundane life? (Come to think of it, that could be why you don't see folk returning from Heaven after they die. Those in Hell have no choice, of course.) Thus I relax by reading things like THE AGE OF MONSTERS, and I turn on by writing about them, animating such creatures for my readers. I do whatever I need to do to make those creatures come alive. A man who did nothing but drink beer would consume a lot of beer; I do almost nothing but research and dream and write, and so I turn out a lot. None of it is careless or primarily for money. Money is a means, not an end.

  I love Balook. I love writing. Anyone who reads this novel and perceives only hackwork is welcome to return it for his money back; obviously he does not understand what I'm doing. Part of that love was expressed in the sculpture. It happened that at this time I met Sterling Lanier, another writer and a former editor—he was the one that fought to put Frank Herbert's novel DUNE into print after other editors rejected it because of its length, and he gave up editing when the resistance of publishers to such fine projects became too extreme. He's a fine writer in his own right. But few can earn a living exclusively by writing; he was also a sculptor. He carved fine little figures in wax and used the lost-wax process to have them rendered into metal statuettes. He had a fine spread of paleontologic representations, but none, I think, of Baluchitherium. He was active in the preservation of the environment. He also had a little girl the age of mine, and a wife the age of mine. In short, he was a good man.

  Lanier showed me how to work with sculptor's wax, and I started in on Balook, pretty much as described in the novel. I had once aspired to be an artist, but gave it up in favor of words, the better medium for me. I had never really tried sculpting, but my dream of Balook hungered for more than words. I spe
nd many hours on it, slowly shaping the figure from the wax while I wrote the novel. It was to be a huge statue for this process, six inches tall at the shoulder, and I hoped, if I could afford it, to have it cast in copper or silver, so that it could be with me relatively untarnished for all time. I can't justify this effort commercially; it was just something I had to do.

  Meanwhile I marketed the novel on the basis of the first two chapters and a summary of the remainder. It happened that I had met another writer at this time, Dave van Arnam, who showed me how to market this way. (Dave also had a little girl the age of mine. It is easy to relate to such folk.) I had been writing my novels entire, and the book editors were being almost as persnickety about submissions as the story editors. It was also a time of recession, and I was also being blacklisted by some publishers because I had started legal action against one in order to obtain royalties owed me. Thus I piled up eight unsold novels. Comments by another writer, Ted White, and Dave van Arnam showed me the error of my ways. By marketing on the basis of summaries, I could recover the leverage. If no publisher bought a project, I simply would not write it. That single change in marketing strategy tripled my income. I have been condemned by the ignorant for writing for money; I like to quote Samuel Johnson on that: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." I love to write, but if I don't get paid for it, I starve; that's why I now pay attention to the commercial side of it. You who condemn that—do you also condemn the plumbers and accountants and doctors and all the others who perform services for money? You think they should work for the love of it, unpaid?

  So I marketed BALOOK from summary. But I was still new to this type of marketing, and a trifle uncertain. Suppose I got a contract, and a deadline for delivery—and then the novel didn't jell? So I kept on writing it. And a British editor liked it! He was ready to issue a contract, provided I did not have the characters refer to sex too specifically. Remember, this is a juvenile novel; teenagers may get pregnant and suffer venereal disease, but they may not read about sex. I agreed, and kept writing. Then the editor decided he'd rather see the whole novel first. Oh-oh; I had had experience with that sort of thing. "Not without a contract!" I said in essence to my agent. The publisher lost interest. I had seen it coming. I had almost completed writing the novel in pencil, but faced with this reneging, I halted work. Likewise the sculpture halted. I had to move on to other projects, because I had a family to support and money for writers is always close. I simply could not afford to put time into yet another unsold novel, however much I liked it. I had to cut my losses.