The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

  “I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

  “Even as I stand here,” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened—I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”

  Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

  Harrison’s scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

  Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

  He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

  “I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”

  A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

  Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy.

  Last of all, he removed her mask. She was blindingly beautiful.

  “Now—” said Harrison, taking her hand. “Shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.

  The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”

  The music began. It was normal at first—cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

  The music began again, and was much improved.

  Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while—listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

  They shifted their weight to their toes.

  Harrison placed his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

  And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

  Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

  They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled and spun.

  They leaped like deer on the moon.

  The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.

  It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.

  They kissed it.

  And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

  It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

  Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

  It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.

  Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

  George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel, watching her wipe her tears. “Yup,” she said. “What about?” he said.

  “I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”

  “What was it?” he said.

  “It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.

  “Forget sad things,” said George.

  “I always do,” said Hazel.

  “That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head.

  “Gee—I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.

  “You can say that again,” said George.

  “Gee—” said Hazel— “I could tell that one was a doozy.”

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  This Moment of the Storm – Roger Zelazny

  Although he didn’t even publish a dozen stories in F&SF, Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) was a major contributor to our magazine in the 1960s, with two serialized novels and several other stories that emblazoned themselves on our minds, including “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” and two Buddha stories that went on to form part of his novel Lord of Light. I decided to include this story in this book partly because I think it’s overlooked too often and partly because this story left a huge impression on me when I was thirteen.

  Back on Earth, my old philosophy prof—possibly because he’d misplaced his lecture notes—came into the classroom one day and scrutinized his sixteen victims for the space of half a minute. Satisfied then, that a sufficiently profound tone had been established, he asked:

  “What is a man?”

  He had known exactly what he was doing. He’d had an hour and a half to kill, and eleven of the sixteen were coeds (nine of them in liberal arts, and the other two stuck with an Area Requirement).

  One of the other two, who was in the pre-med program, proceeded to provide a strict biological classification.

  The prof (McNitt was his name, I suddenly recall) nodded then, and asked:

  “Is that all?”

  And there was his hour and a half.

  I learned that Man is the Reasoning Animal, Man is the One Who Laughs, Man is greater than beasts but less than angels, Man is the one who watches himself watch himself doing things he knows are absurd (this from a Comparative Lit gal), Man is the culture-transmitting animal, Man is the spirit which aspires, affirms, loves, the one who uses tools, buries his dead, devises religions, and the one who tries to define himself. (That last from Paul Schwartz, my roommate—which I thought pretty good, on the spur of the moment. Wonder whatever became of Paul?)

  Anyhow, to most of these I say “perhaps” or “partly, but—” or just plain “crap!” I still think mine was the best, because I had a chance to try it out, on Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan...

  I’d said, “Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes he had done, or hadn’t.”

  Stop and think about it for a minute. It’s purposely as general as the others, but it’s got room in it for the biology and the laughing and the aspiring, as well as the culture-transmitting, the love, and the room full of mirrors, and the defining. I even left the door open for religion, you’ll note. But it’s limiting, too. Ever met an oyster to whom the final phrases apply?

  Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan—delightful name.

  Delightful place too, for quite a while...

  It was there that I saw Man’s definitions, one by one, wiped from off the big blackboard, until only mine was left.

  ... My radio had been playing more static than usual. That’s all.

  For several hours there was no other indication of what was to come.

  My hundred-thirty eyes had watched Betty all morning, on that clear, cool spring day with the sun pouring down its honey and lightning upon the amber fields, flowing through the streets, invading western store-fronts, drying curbstones, and washing the olive and umber buds that speared the skin of the trees there by the roadway; and the light that wrung the blue from the flag before Town Hall made orange mirrors out of windows, chased purple and violet patches across the shoulders of Saint Stephen’s Range, some thirty miles distant, and came down upon the forest at its feet like some supernatural madman with a million buckets of paint—each of a different shade o
f green, yellow, orange, blue and red—to daub with miles-wide brushes at its heaving sea of growth.

  Mornings the sky is cobalt, midday is turquoise, and sunset is emeralds and rubies, hard and flashing. It was halfway between cobalt and seamist at 1100 hours, when I watched Betty with my hundred-thirty eyes and saw nothing to indicate what was about to be. There was only that persistent piece of static, accompanying the piano and strings within my portable.

  It’s funny how the mind personifies, engenders. Ships are always women: You say, “She’s a good old tub,” or, “She’s a fast, tough number, this one,” slapping a bulwark and feeling the aura of femininity that clings to the vessel’s curves; or, conversely, “He’s a bastard to start, that Sam!” as you kick the auxiliary engine in an inland transport-vehicle; and hurricanes are always women, and moons, and seas. Cities, though, are different. Generally, they’re neuter. Nobody calls New York or San Francisco “he” or “she.” Usually, cities are just “it.”

  Sometimes, however, they do come to take on the attributes of sex. Usually, this is in the case of small cities near to the Mediterranean, back on Earth. Perhaps this is because of the sex-ridden nouns of the languages which prevail in that vicinity, in which case it tells us more about the inhabitants than it does about the habitations. But I feel that it goes deeper than that.

  Betty was Beta Station for less than ten years. After two decades she was Betty officially, by act of Town Council. Why? Well, I felt at the time (ninety-some years ago), and still feel, that it was because she was what she was—a place of rest and repair, of surface-cooked meals and of new voices, new faces, of landscapes, weather, and natural light again, after that long haul through the big night, with its casting away of so much. She is not home, she is seldom destination, but she is like unto both. When you come upon light and warmth and music after darkness and cold and silence, it is Woman. The oldtime Mediterranean sailor must have felt it when he first spied port at the end of a voyage. I felt it when I first saw Beta Station—Betty—and the second time I saw her, also.

  I am her Hell Cop.

  ... When six or seven of my hundred-thirty eyes flickered, then saw again, and the music was suddenly washed away by a wave of static, it was then that I began to feel uneasy.

  I called Weather Central for a report, and the recorded girlvoice told me that seasonal rains were expected in the afternoon or early evening. I hung up and switched an eye from ventral to dorsal-vision.

  Not a cloud. Not a ripple. Only a formation of green-winged skytoads, heading north, crossed the field of the lens.

  I switched it back, and I watched the traffic flow, slowly, and without congestion, along Betty’s prim, well-tended streets. Three men were leaving the bank and two more were entering. I recognized the three who were leaving, and in my mind I waved as I passed by. All was still at the post office, and patterns of normal activity lay upon the steel mills, the stockyard, the plast-synth plants, the airport, the spacer pads, and the surfaces of all the shopping complexes; vehicles came and went at the Inland Transport-Vehicle garages, crawling from the rainbow forest and the mountains beyond like dark slugs, leaving tread-trails to mark their comings and goings through wilderness; and the fields of the countryside were still yellow and brown, with occasional patches of green and pink; the country houses, mainly simple A-frame affairs, were chisel blade, spike-tooth, spire and steeple, each with a big lightning rod, and dipped in many colors and scooped up in the cups of my seeing and dumped out again, as I sent my eyes on their rounds and tended my gallery of one hundred-thirty changing pictures, on the big wall of the Trouble Center, there atop the Watch Tower of Town Hall.

  The static came and went until I had to shut off the radio. Fragments of music are worse than no music at all.

  My eyes, coasting weightless along magnetic lines, began to blink.

  I knew then that we were in for something.

  I sent an eye scurrying off toward Saint Stephen’s at full speed, which meant a wait of about twenty minutes until it topped the range. Another, I sent straight up, skywards, which meant perhaps ten minutes for a long shot of the same scene. Then I put the auto-scan in full charge of operations and went downstairs for a cup of coffee.

  I entered the Mayor’s outer office, winked at Lottie, the receptionist, and glanced at the inner door.

  “Mayor in?” I asked.

  I got an occasional smile from Lottie, a slightly heavy, but well-rounded girl of indeterminate age and intermittent acne, but this wasn’t one of the occasions.

  “Yes,” she said, returning to the papers on her desk.

  “Alone?”

  She nodded, and her earrings danced. Dark eyes and dark complexion, she could have been kind of sharp, if only she’d fix her hair and use more makeup. Well...

  I crossed to the door and knocked.

  “Who?” asked the Mayor.

  “Me,” I said, opening it, “Godfrey Justin Holmes—’God’ for short. I want someone to drink coffee with, and you’re elected.”

  She turned in her swivel chair, away from the window she had been studying, and her blonde-hair-white-hair-fused, short and parted in the middle, gave a little stir as she turned—like a sunshot snowdrift struck by sudden winds.

  She smiled and said, “I’m busy.”

  “Eyes green, chin small, cute little ears—I love them all”—from an anonymous Valentine I’d sent her two months previous, and true.

  “... But not too busy to have coffee with God,” she stated. “Have a throne, and I’ll make us some instant.”

  I did, and she did.

  While she was doing it, I leaned back, lit a cigarette I’d borrowed from her canister, and remarked, “Looks like rain.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “Not just making conversation,” I told her. “There’s a bad storm brewing somewhere—over Saint Stephen’s, I think. I’ll know real soon.”

  “Yes, Grandfather,” she said, bringing me my coffee. “You old timers with all your aches and pains are often better than Weather Central, it’s an established fact. I won’t argue.”

  She smiled, frowned, then smiled again.

  I set my cup on the edge of her desk.

  “Just wait and see,” I said. “If it makes it over the mountains, it’ll be a nasty high-voltage job. It’s already jazzing up reception.”

  Big-bowed white blouse, and black skirt around a well-kept figure. She’d be forty in the fall, but she’d never completely tamed her facial reflexes—which was most engaging, so far as I was concerned. Spontaneity of expression so often vanishes so soon. I could see the sort of child she’d been by looking at her, listening to her now. The thought of being forty was bothering her again, too, I could tell. She always kids me about age when age is bothering her.

  See, I’m around thirty-five, actually, which makes me her junior by a bit, but she’d heard her grandfather speak of me when she was a kid, before I came back again this last time. I’d filled out the balance of his two-year term, back when Betty-Beta’s first mayor, Wyeth, had died after two months in office. I was born five hundred ninety-seven years ago, on Earth, but I spent about five hundred sixty-two of those years sleeping, during my long jaunts between the stars. I’ve made a few more trips than a few others; consequently, I am an anachronism. I am really, of course, only as old as I look—but still, people always seem to feel that I’ve cheated somehow, especially women in their middle years. Sometimes it is most disconcerting...

  “Eleanor,” said I, “your term will be up in November. Are you still thinking of running again?”

  She took off her narrow, elegantly trimmed glasses and brushed her eyelids with thumb and forefinger. Then she took a sip of coffee.

  “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “I ask not for press-release purposes,” I said, “but for my own.”

  “Really, I haven’t decided,” she told me. “I don’t know...”

  “Okay, just checking. Let me know if you do.”

&
nbsp; I drank some coffee.

  After a time, she said, “Dinner Saturday? As usual?”

  “Yes, good.”

  “I’ll tell you then.”

  “Fine—capital.”

  As she looked down into her coffee, I saw a little girl staring into a pool, waiting for it to clear, to see her reflection or to see the bottom of the pool, or perhaps both.

  She smiled at whatever it was she finally saw.

  “A bad storm?” she asked me.

  “Yep. Feel it in my bones.”

  “Tell it to go away?”

  “Tried. Don’t think it will, though.”

  “Better batten some hatches, then.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt and it might help.”

  “The weather satellite will be overhead in another half hour. You’ll have something sooner?”

  “Think so. Probably any minute.”

  I finished my coffee, washed out the cup.

  “Let me know right away what it is.”

  “Check. Thanks for the coffee.”

  Lottie was still working and did not look up as I passed.

  Upstairs again, my highest eye was now high enough. I stood it on its tail and collected a view of the distance: Fleecy mobs of clouds boiled and frothed on the other side of Saint Stephen’s. The mountain range seemed a breakwall, a dam, a rocky shoreline. Beyond it, the waters were troubled.

  My other eye was almost in position. I waited the space of half a cigarette, then it delivered me a sight:

  Gray, and wet and impenetrable, a curtain across the countryside, that’s what I saw.

  ... And advancing.

  I called Eleanor.

  “It’s gonna rain, chillun,” I said.

  “Worth some sandbags?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Better be ready then. Okay. Thanks.”

  I returned to my watching.

  Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan—delightful name. It refers to both the planet and its sole continent.

  How to describe the world, like quick? Well, roughly Earth-size; actually, a bit smaller, and more watery. —As for the main landmass, first hold a mirror up to South America, to get the big bump from the right side over to the left, then rotate it ninety degrees in a counter-clockwise direction and push it up into the northern hemisphere. Got that? Good. Now grab it by the tail and pull. Stretch it another six or seven hundred miles, slimming down the middle as you do, and let the last five or six hundred fall across the equator. There you have Cygnus, its big gulf partly in the tropics, partly not. Just for the sake of thoroughness, while you’re about it, break Australia into eight pieces and drop them about at random down in the southern hemisphere, calling them after the first eight letters in the Greek alphabet. Put a big scoop of vanilla at each pole, and don’t forget to tilt the globe about eighteen degrees before you leave. Thanks.