New Writings in SF 28 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

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  New Writings in

  SF: 28

  Ed By Kenneth Bulmer

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  What Happened to William Coombes by Angela Rogers

  The Way Erving Went by Grahame Leman

  The Banks of the Nile by Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman

  The Bones of Bertrand Russell by Brian W. Aldiss

  On the Inside by Robert P. Holdstock

  The Great Plan by Leroy Kettle

  Face to Infinity by E. C. Tubb

  The Call of the Wild by Manuel van Loggem

  Wordsmith by Bryn Fortey

  Manganon by Michael Stall

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  FOREWORD

  Kenneth Bulmer

  One of the delights of editing a collection of short stories is the discovery of a superb story just at the moment when the editor is convinced that there is no one left in the whole wide world who can write apart from those respected and reliable authors whose names have graced past volumes.

  Since the inception of New Writings in SF, more than ten years ago, as a showcase for new and original work in the sf field that would appeal to a wider audience, many new writers have made their mark in its pages. Just how many new readers have come to a refreshing discovery and appreciation of sf in that time it would be difficult to say. Exactly how many of them have gone on to become writers is even more complicated to judge, for so many components go to the makeup of a working writer that to trace individual sources of motivation and inspiration demands lengthy scholarship so far not undertaken.

  But the delight in reading a first-class story by an ‘unknown’ name is always immense-. Very often the writer turns out to be a polished practitioner in other, non sf, fields; the ‘unknown’ is unknown only to sf. To take the interesting case of lady writers in New Writings - I doubt they’d thank me for calling them authoresses - Volume 24 saw Cherry Wilder’s widely acclaimed the ark of james carlyle. I am happy to report that this story saw republication in Australia’s very first sf short story anthology, ‘Beyond Tomorrow’, edited by Lee Harding. The book was published to coincide with Australia’s first World Science Fiction Convention, and the hope is that it will be the beginning of an indigenous series to the benefit of Ozwriters. Vera Johnson, whose barbed and thought-provoking the day they cut off the power appeared in New Writings 27, has been singing and strumming from success to success, and I would draw your attention to her L.P. ‘Bald Eagle’, recorded live at the Black Horse Folk Club, from Sweet Folk All Recordings Ltd.

  It has been suggested that one of the differences between pre-nineteenth century literature and that which follows is that the former had to look for change in a spatial direction, whilst the latter could find it in a temporal. If this is true of mundane literature it is particularly true of one kind of sf and the literature of the imagination. In the old days change was so slow that to perceive it for the purposes of fiction with any kind of relevant immediacy one had to travel to another country or a fantasy world behind the moon. With sociological and scientific change increasing visibly in tempo, one has only to wait to perceive changes whirling along in the debris of time.

  So the story-submissions that come across my desk and the time-travelling editor at last reach a nodal point. One’s faith in the continuing good health of writing is re-established.

  The first story in this volume is by the third lady writer to grace the pages of New Writings in SF. what happened to william coombes is written with great style and distinction and captures a very great deal of the underlying unease of our culture, inter alia. This is one to treasure. As for Mr. Coombes himself, a most realistically-conceived old gentleman, it occurs to me that the readership may consider Angela Rogers to have been too hard on the old fellow, or too disbelieving of her own powers, about his final happening.

  Graham Leman’s story may strike a few chords out of its time-span; but once again sf is shown to be a master-medium in which humour can be employed in dealing, with a sobering malaise of modern life. Brian Aldiss is a writer who likes to go out and cut down the tall grass. And if he can lay his hands on a good scythe he will use that in preference to a little half-moon sickle. The name Aldiss appears on very many of the books generally considered by sf people to be in the very top class, those they would choose to be space-wrecked with. There is a good chance that the bones of bertrand russell may receive its premier at some upcoming world convention, and no prizes are offered for cast lists made up from your pet loves or aversions in the sf world.

  Robert Holdstock presents us with a story that appears to be one thing whilst actually being something entirely different. The single item that may bother most people about Mr. Holdstock will, inevitably, be - does Mr. Hold-stock keep Mrs. Holdstock in the closet? Like Robert Holdstock, Leroy Kettle has recently gone free-lancing, and his the great plan, a provocative story in which the writer’s well-known aversion to work is given a solid substratum of speculation, augurs well for his success in his chosen profession, and one looks forward to examples of Leroy Kettle’s handling of humour in the sf context. Bryn Fortey deals much more directly with the writer’s problems, and, incidentally, comes up with a beautiful notion in Black Art. May I add, on a personal note, that almost all Bryn Fortey has to say about editors is just about ninety nine percent accurate - if not in this world then in the one he posits here.

  With the seafarer in New Writings 26, Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman made their debut as professional science fiction writers. Now they present by the banks of the nile which is just as rich and exotic, filled with the iron clangour and decadent luxury of a future age consciously drawing upon the past and bending it to the unyielding demands of that future. This story marks a positive step forward, as was suggested in their own words quoted in the foreword to volume 26.

  Manuel van Loggem is a distinguished novelist of his native country, the Netherlands, and we are privileged to see his work here. This arose as a result of our meeting in Gent, and he has since visited sf gatherings in this country where his urbane appearance gave no inkling of the trenchancy of his conversation. The two aspects mingle most happily in the bite of the call of the wild. E. C. Tubb’s story can be seen as companion piece to his evane in New Writings 22, which was selected for the annual world’s best sf anthology published by DAWBooks of New York.

  Michael Stall is extending his mastery of different areas of the sf field, for the five doors, rice brandy and his present work herein presented, manganon, are all very different in tone and colour and in their emphases. With manganon Michael Stall transports us to a macabre world that is the subject of high-level thinking presented in an academically scientific fashion, quite different — as Michael Stall points out - from the actuality, where passion and blood must appear in close-up to participants for whom the author arouses like feelings.

  These ten stories, all new, three by writers new to New Writings in SF, continue the idea of the series, that of presenting a variety of sf themes to a wide audience as well as to lovers of sf of many years’ standing.

  Kenneth Bulmer.

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  WHAT HAPPENED TO WILLIAM COOMBES

  Angela Rogers

  The pattern existed, it was there, waiting to be deciphered; but what happened to Mr. Coombes demanded belief beyond mere credulity. After all, cats do survive, they prowl down plastic corridors as if they were in living jungle. They might touch the dust of Mars, really touch it, that is, and not just sense the feeling of it through plastic space-suit gloves. What Angela Rogers has to say in this articulate
and intensively evocative and sensitive story is probably not best summed up in her last line; but, then again, perhaps that is really what happened to William Coombes. I do not think so myself, and I fancy neither will you, at the end...

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  When William Coombes was a boy he thought that he could escape from enclosure into space. He ate his good food in the meal hall with his back pressed against another back and other arms brushing his, and watched soup run down the chin of the girl he faced. Or he lay awake next to his sleeping brother and heard each slight breath against the murmur of his parents’ voices and the continual soft sounds of people: walking past in the corridors, or turning on taps, or suddenly laughing behind their own unnoticed walls. He endured it easily because he knew he would stand alone on Mars and look across empty land to the horizon, or kneel and put his hand on the ground itself and dig his fingers into the sand.

  On his fifteenth birthday he enlisted and within six years he did stand alone on Mars and look at space through a faceplate. And he knelt quite easily in his flexible suiting and let handfuls of sand run through his fingers. What he touched was not sand but his protecting gloves.

  He learned that man is an animal adapted to live on Earth, and that when he pretends to leave it he must carry Earth with him in small, economical packets. He found that Earth on Mars was a cluster of pressure domes as clean and crowded as a Woburn community block, with the immigration programme always one step ahead of the expansion schedule. When he tried to walk away from Earth into Mars he could not. He was an alien in a space suit, still carrying his skin of Earth in a little envelope; not so economical as a dome but smaller, very small.

  He came to think of himself as physically tied to Earth, but by a running noose. He had stood on roofs in Woburn and felt himself lost in the distances of the universe; but soaring between planes he was only aware of bulkheads and pressure margins and cubic centimetres of occupied space. And it took months from his life to move from one inner planet to another; years to visit Neptune; a lifetime probably to pass the bounds of the Solar system. Since he was trapped, it came to seem perverse to let himself live and die in small traps within a trap, and Earth itself grew in his mind.

  He stayed with SPEC for thirty years. He was based with Supply, and spent most of the years doing social maths in small rooms. He was at Archangel for twelve years, Oban for three, Mauiai for six. He saw a lot of the world on short postings, but altogether he spent less than six years off-Earth: usually doing the same work in similar rooms. He had an unusual knack for logistics and moved up through the groups at great speed. That surprised me when he first mentioned it; but after seventeen years of Mr. Coombes’ reminiscences I know that Space Administration is mostly logistics and the supply of tranquilizers.

  Yet he did extraordinary things. He helped to build the Alpha Centaury, stacked the colonists, and saw it drift away from the Sun towards the dark. He was nearly assassinated on Mercury during the riots, or thought it wise to say so. He trained before the Eight Hour War of course, when things were opulent, and during one month he was taken again and again in a small winged transport high above the buildings, miles, he said, and told to jump into the air. Time after time he stepped out of the transport into the wind and swam above the earth, in a sense falling and yet afloat. At a certain height above the roofs he had to pull a cord and a parachute would snap him back to safety. That was before he got to Mars and he pulled the cord always without question, even with relief.

  Over the years he told me a lot about his life in SPEC, but for him the life was mainly logistics. He only mentioned what I would call adventures in passing, although he did talk of the training falls many times, and he returned obsessively to the experiments in Parker, and what happened to Rachel Kwe.

  Venus is so inimical we don’t even mine there now; but in Mr. Coombes’ time they still hoped to colonize. It took three tries to establish Parker, and when they did get it up they were held behind its walls. They shipped in autoprobes and began to survey, but the write-off rate was too high and there was strong pressure to try one or other of the human adaption techniques which various groups were working on.

  Mr. Coombes told me that they should have tried clones; but all work on clones had been banned after the Darkside riots. None of the alternatives was really viable, but they gave the contract to Unichem for a scheme which was no better conceived than the others, but was rather less ambitious. Probably someone said ‘Conservative’, and someone else ‘Ah! Safe’. So Unichem set up a unit at Parker and advertised for subjects.

  William Coombes should have known better, but he imagined himself wading away from the squat domes of Parker into an unspoiled world, and he would have volunteered. He only had two years left to serve, but by that time he was a Marshall, and acting as Supply Co-ordinator to the settlements, so he couldn’t get a clearance. He worked out his time, but he was obsessed with the experiments on Venus. He transferred his own control unit to Parker, which was substandard and so plagued by contamination alerts that they slept in their suits, and he waited on the project.

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  Unichem hoped to replace their subjects’ skin tissues with flexibly segmented carapaces similar to some successfully grown on Barbary apes. The Barbary tissue seemed to be completely impervious to the corrosive Venusian atmosphere, and impressively resistant to termites. It seemed at least possible that it would withstand High Zone pressures, and a most ingenious subcutaneous cooling process was also being discussed. There were problems. For a start men are not clinically interchangeable with Barbary apes. Then the impermeable carapace could not perform the normal functions of the skin, which had in some way to be continued artificially. Again, it was considered necessary to seal off all orifices except the nose and mouth. This required the replacement of the digestive and the destruction of the reproductive systems.

  The end in view was a man who could travel with only an air pack and a cooling unit. He would be fed intravenously at base, and his blood would be washed clean as he slept. There would have been little purpose to it if they had succeeded.

  Although the experiments were irresponsible, they were carried out with great care, so that when the first subject died only six had been processed at all, and the last one of those escaped relatively undamaged. The woman named Rachel Kwe was also still alive when Mr. Coombes left, but they had gone too far with her to be able to do more than keep her alive.

  Rachel Kwe lived at that time in a plexiglass tank which was filled with a clear glutinous liquid in which she could move freely if slowly. Her head was encased in a bubble helmet from which a welter of pipes and cables ran up out of the liquid to a life support system above the tank. They had not attempted to grow the new tissue on her because they knew that it would kill her, but they had already spoiled her for the air of Earth, so she was trapped there.

  He saw her once. She was drifting loosely upright in the middle of the tank; her body wasted, silvery and hairless; her face in its smaller case brown and impassive; her eyes closed. He had been told that she would ignore him; but when he had watched her for a long time her eyes opened and she looked at him and knew him. She drifted to the glass and her lips moved and the little speaker set in the tank said ‘Marshall’, and she put out her shadow hand and placed it on the glass as if to touch him. The glass was warm.

  His face could only have shown despair. They looked at each other through the glass until the little speaker said ‘It would have been worse anyway’, while her lips moved and her eyes closed, and he turned away.

  That was more than twenty years ago. Mr. Coombes was discharged and came home to Woburn. Rachel Kwe died ho doubt. Mr. Coombes was made Supply Officer then Manager at the Hockliff Plant, which like most plants at that time was damaged, obsolescent, and overburdened. It still is in fact, if you substitute the damage from twenty years’ wear for the damage from war, but we haven’t starved since he took over. We lived for four months on a kind of raw green gulp during the famine, but w
e did live.

  There is a holly of him in the block data bank, taken when he enlisted. It holds the head and shoulders of a round-faced boy, with lank mousecoloured hair, eyes front and features composed for posterity. There is little to learn from the image: he doesn’t seem enigmatic or eager or indifferent. It is just a boy’s head put into the records. I can see that it could be William Coombes, although the most characteristic thing about it is the impression it leaves of anonymity: any number of men might have looked like that when they were boys. Only if you look at the boy’s eyes you see that they are pale and colourless: not blue but a washed-out yellow brown, at that moment focussed on nothing and seeming to have neither surface nor depth. They give a distinction to the boy’s face which I never saw in Mr. Coombes’, since one avoids the eyes of a living man. Unless you already knew that he was a mad plant manager, you would hardly have noticed Mr. Coombes.

  I first met him when he started to walk home from the plant. That would be about two years after he came home. He had to report at the block office when he came in, and as he generally came in about twenty, and I had the evening shift, he usually reported to me. I was uneasy with him at first: this part of the world was badly hit during the Atlantic War - we are only fifty kilometres from Crater - and even now there is a general shelter order in force because of the radiation levels. Eighteen years ago the radiation levels were higher, the sick areas had only recently been closed, ‘clean’ air was even dirtier than it is now, and very few people went onto the roofs, let alone into the lanes. Mr. Coombes had asked permission to walk home regularly from the plant. To do it he would have to start by climbing through the highway, which was dangerous in itself, then make a long detour round Bryant, which is closed. He couldn’t hope to make the journey in much less than three hours: most of them spent below roof level.