Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  In an upper room on Olive Street in St. Louis, Missouri, a half-and-half couple were talking half-and-half.

  "The rez has riser'd," the man said. "I can sung it like brishindo. Let's jal."

  "All right," the wife said, "if you're awa."

  "Hell, I bet I can riker plenty bano on the beda we got here. I'll have kakko come kinna it saro."

  "With a little bachi we can be jal'd by areat," said the wife.

  "Nashiva, woman, nashiva!"

  "All right," the wife said, and she began to pack their suitcases.

  In Camargo in the Chihuahua State of Mexico, a shade-tree mechanic sold his business for a hundred pesos and told his wife to pack up—they were leaving.

  "To leave now when business is so good?" she asked.

  "I only got one car to fix and I can't fix that," the man said.

  "But if you keep it long enough, he will pay you to put it together again even if it isn't fixed. That's what he did last time. And you've a horse to shoe."

  "I'm afraid of that horse. It has come back, though. Let's go."

  "Are you sure we will be able to find it?"

  "Of course I'm not sure. We will go in our wagon and our sick horse will pull it."

  "Why will we go in the wagon, when we have a car, of sorts?"

  "I don't know why. But we will go in the wagon, and we will nail the old giant horseshoe up on the lintel board."

  A carny in Nebraska lifted his head and smelled the air.

  "It's come back," he said. "I always knew we'd know. Any other Romanies here?"

  "I got a little rart in me," said one of his fellows. "This narvelengero dives is only a two-bit carnival anyhow. We'll tell the boss to shove it up his chev and we'll be gone."

  In Tulsa, a used-car dealer named Gypsy Red announced the hottest sale on the row:

  "Everything for nothing! I'm leaving. Pick up the papers and drive them off. Nine new heaps and thirty good ones. All free."

  "You think we're crazy?" the people asked. "There's a catch."

  Red put the papers for all the cars on the ground and put a brick on top of them. He got in the worst car on the lot and drove it off forever.

  "All free," he sang out as he drove off. "Pick up the papers and drive the cars away."

  They're still there. You think people are crazy to fall for something like that that probably has a catch to it?

  In Galveston a barmaid named Margaret was asking merchant seamen how best to get passage to Karachi.

  "Why Karachi?" one of them asked her.

  "I thought it would be the nearest big port," she said. "It's come back, you know."

  "I kind of felt this morning it had come back," he said. "I'm a chal myself. Sure, we'll find something going that way."

  In thousands of places fawney-men and dukkerin-women, kakki-baskros and hegedusies, clowns and commission men, Counts of Condom and Dukes of Little Egypt parvel'd in their chips and got ready to roll.

  Men and families made sudden decisions in every country. Athinganoi gathered in the hills above Salonika in Greece and were joined by brothers from Serbia and Albania and the Rhodope Hills of Bulgaria. Zingari of North Italy gathered around Pavia and began to roll towards Genoa to take ship. Boemios of Portugal came down to Porto and Lisbon. Gitanos of Andalusia and all southern Spain came to Sanlúcar and Málaga. Zigeuner from Thuringia and Hanover thronged to Hamburg to find ocean passage. Gioboga and their mixed-blood Shelta cousins from every cnoc and coill of Ireland found boats at Dublin and Limerick and Bantry.

  From deeper Europe, Tsigani began to travel overland eastward. The people were going from two hundred ports of every continent and over a thousand highroads—many of them long forgotten.

  Balauros, Kalo, Manusch, Melelo, Tsigani, Moro, Romani, Flamenco, Sinto, Cicara, the many-named people was traveling in its thousands. The Romani Rai was moving.

  Two million Gypsies of the world were going home.

  At the Institute, Gregory Smirnov was talking to his friends and associates.

  "You remember the thesis I presented several years ago," he said, "that, a little over a thousand years ago, Outer Visitors came down to Earth and took a sliver of our Earth away with them. All of you found the proposition comical, but I arrived at my conclusion by isostatic and eustatic analysis carried out minutely. There is no doubt that it happened."

  "One of our slivers is missing," said Aloysius Shiplap. "You guessed the sliver taken at about ten thousand square miles area and no more than a mile thick at its greatest. You said you thought they wanted to run this sliver from our Earth through their laboratories as a sample. Do you have something new on our missing sliver?"

  "I'm closing the inquiry," Gregory said. "They've brought it back."

  It was simple really, jekvasteskero, Gypsy-simple. It is the gadjo, the non-Gypsies of the world, who give complicated answers to simple things.

  "They came and took our country away from us," the Gypsies had always said, and that is what had happened.

  The Outer Visitors had run a slip under it, rocked it gently to rid it of nervous fauna, and then taken it away for study. For a marker, they left an immaterial simulacrum of that high country as we ourselves sometimes set name or picture tags to show where an object will be set later. This simulacrum was often seen by humans as a mirage.

  The Outer Visitors also set simulacra in the minds of the superior fauna that fled from the moving land. This would be a homing instinct, inhibiting permanent settlement anywhere until the time should come for the resettlement; entwined with this instinct were certain premonitions, fortune-showings, and understandings.

  Now the Visitors brought the slice of land back, and its old fauna homed in on it.

  "What will the—ah—patronizing smile on my part—Outer Visitors do now, Gregory?" Aloysius Shiplap asked back at the Institute.

  "Why, take another sliver of our Earth to study, I suppose, Aloysius," Gregory Smirnov said.

  Low-intensity earthquakes rocked the Los Angeles area for three days. The entire area was evacuated of people. Then there was a great whistle blast from the sky as if to say, "All ashore that's going ashore."

  Then the surface to some little depth and all its superstructure was taken away. It was gone. And then it was quickly forgotten.

  From the TWENTY-SECOND-CENTURY COMPREHENSIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA, Vol. 1, page 389-

  ANGELENOS. (See also Automobile Gypsies and Prune Pickers.) A mixed ethnic group of unknown origin, much given to wandering in automobiles. It is predicted that they will be the last users of this vehicle, and several archaic chrome-burdened models are still produced for their market. These people are not beggars; many of them are of superior intelligence. They often set up in business, usually as real estate dealers, gamblers, confidence men, managers of mail-order diploma mills, and promoters of one sort or other. They seldom remain long in one location.

  Their pastimes are curious. They drive for hours and days on old and seldom-used cloverleafs and freeways. It has been said that a majority of the Angelenos are narcotics users, but Harold Freelove (who lived for some months as an Angeleno) has proved this false. What they inhale at their frolics (smog-crocks) is a black smoke of carbon and petroleum waste laced with monoxide. Its purpose is not clear.

  The religion of the Angelenos is a mixture of old cults with a very strong eschatological element. The Paradise Motif is represented by reference to a mystic "Sunset Boulevard." The language of the Angelenos is a colorful and racy argot. Their account of their origin is vague:

  "They came and took our dizz away from us," they say.

  Afterword:

  We are all cousins. I don't believe in reincarnation, but the only system of reincarnation that satisfies justice is that every being should become successively (or sometimes simultaneously) every other being. This would take a few billion lifetimes; the writer with a feel for the Kindred tries to do it in one.

  We are all Romanies, as in the parable here, and we have a built-in homing to a
nd remembrance of a woollier and more excellent place, a reality that masquerades as a mirage. Whether the more excellent place is here or heretofore or hereafter, I don't know, or whether it will be our immediate world when it is sufficiently animated; but there is an intuition about it which sometimes passes through the whole community. There is, or there ought to be, these shimmering heights; and they belong to us. Controversy (or polarity) is between ourselves as individuals and as members of the incandescent species, confronted with the eschatological thing. I'd express it more intelligently if I knew how.

  But I didn't write the story to point up this notion, but to drop a name. There is a Margaret the barmaid—not the one in the story, of course (for we have to abide by the disavowal "Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental"), but another of the same name—and she is a Romany. "Put my name in a story, just Margaret the barmaid," she told me. "I don't care what, even name a dog that." "But you won't know it," I said, "you don't read anything, and none of the people you run around with do." "I will know it exactly," she said, "when someone else reads it someday, when they come to the name Margaret the barmaid. I know things like that."

  Not from me, but from someone who reads it here, Margaret will receive the intuition, and both parties will know it. "Hey, the old bat did it," Margaret will say. I don't know what the reader-sender caught in the middle will say or think.

  I am pleased to be a member of this august though sometimes raffish company playing here in this production. It has an air of excellence, and some of it will rub off on me. We are, all of us, Counts of Con-dom and Dukes of Little Egypt.

  Introduction to

  THE RECOGNITION:

  I have this theory. In point of fact I have a barnhouse full of theories, but I've got this particular theory about the men who wind up as leaders of movements. It would not surprise me to find out (through the discovery of some new Dead Sea Scrolls perhaps) that allofasudden Jesus turned around (so to speak) on the cross and looked down and said, "How the hell did I get into this?" Did he really think he was going to become the head of a big-deal Movement? Did Gandhi? Did Hitler? Yeah, well, maybe him, but what can you expect from a short ugly plasterer? Did Stokeley Carmichael? Did J. G. Ballard? Oh! There we are!

  Jim Ballard, who seems to me to write peculiarly Ballardian stories—tales difficult to pin down as to one style or one theme or one approach but all very personally trademarked Ballard—is the acknowledged leader of the "British school of science fiction." I'm sure if you said this to Ballard (who chooses to pronounce it Buh-lard), he would stare at you as if you were daft. He certainly doesn't write like the leader of a movement, for a movement generally involves easily cited examples, jingoism, obviousness and a strong dose of predictability. None of these is present in the work of J. G. Ballard.

  Among his highly celebrated books are The Drowned World, The Wind from Nowhere, Terminal Beach, The Voices of Time, The Burning World, Billenium and The Crystal World. None of these contains ideas so revolutionary or arresting that they should comprise a rationale for being a "new movement." Yet in totality they present a kind of enriched literacy, a darker yet somehow clearer—perhaps the word is "poignant"—approach to the materials of speculative writing. There is a flavor of surrealism to Ballard's writing. No, it's not that, either. It is, in some ways, serene, as oriental philosophy is serene. Resigned yet vital. There appears to be a superimposed reality that covers the underlying pure fantasy of Ballardian conception. Frankly, Ballard's work defies categorization or careful analysis. It is like four-color lithography. The most exquisite Wyeth landscape, when examined more and more minutely, begins to resemble pointillism, and finally nothing but a series of disconnected colored dots. So do Ballard's stories, when subjected to the unfeeling scrutiny of cold analysis, break down into disconnected parts. When read, when assimilated as they stand, they become something greater than the sum of the parts.

  One such story is the one you are about to read. It is a prime example of Ballard at his most mysterious, his most compelling. The story says all that need be said about Ballard the writer. As for Ballard the man, the information is as sparse as the stories: he was born in Shang-hai, China, in 1930, of English parents; during WWII he was interned in a Japanese prison camp and in 1946 was repatriated to England; he later studied medicine at Cambridge University.

  As stated elsewhere in this book about another story, I have no idea whether this is science fiction, or fantasy, or allegory, or cautionary tale. All I know for certain is that it is immensely entertaining, thought provoking and fits perfectly something Saul Bellow said about the excuse for a story's existence. He said it in 1963:

  " . . .a story should be interesting, highly interesting, as interesting as possible—inexplicably absorbing. There can be no other justification for any piece of fiction."

  THE RECOGNITION

  by J. G. Ballard

  On Midsummer's Eve a small circus visited the town in the West Country where I was spending my holiday. Three days earlier the large travelling fair which always came to the town in the summer, equipped with a ferris wheel, merry-go-rounds and dozens of booths and shooting galleries, had taken up its usual site on the open common in the centre of the town, and this second arrival was forced to pitch its camp on the waste ground beyond the warehouses along the river.

  At dusk, when I strolled through the town, the ferris wheel was revolving above the coloured lights, and people were riding the carousels and walking arm in arm along the cobbled roads that surrounded the common. Away from this hubbub of noise the streets down to the river were almost deserted, and I was glad to walk alone through the shadows past the boarded shopfronts. Midsummer's Eve seemed to me a time for reflection as much as for celebration, for a careful watch on the shifting movements of nature. When I crossed the river, whose dark water flowed through the town like a gilded snake, and entered the woods that stretched to one side of the road, I had the unmistakable sensation that the forest was preparing itself, and that within its covens even the roots of the trees were sliding through the soil and testing their sinews.

  It was on the way back from this walk, as I crossed the bridge, that I saw the small itinerant circus arrive at the town. The procession, which approached the bridge by a side road, consisted of no more than half a dozen wagons, each carrying a high barred cage and drawn by a pair of careworn horses. At its head a young woman with a pallid face and bare arms rode on a grey stallion. I leaned on the balustrade in the centre of the bridge and watched the procession reach the embankment. The young woman hesitated, pulling on the heavy leather bridle, and looked over her shoulder as the wagons closed together. They began to ascend the bridge. Although the gradient was slight, the horses seemed barely able to reach the crest, tottering on their weak legs, and I had ample time to make a first scrutiny of this strange caravan that was later to preoccupy me.

  Urging on her tired stallion, the young woman passed me—at least, it seemed to me then that she was young, but her age was so much a matter of her own moods and mine. I was to see her on several occasions—sometimes she would seem little more than a child of twelve, with an unformed chin and staring eyes above the bony cheeks. Later she would appear to be almost middle-aged, the grey hair and skin revealing the angular skull beneath them.

  At first, as I watched from the bridge, I guessed her to be about twenty years old, presumably the daughter of the proprietor of this threadbare circus. As she jogged along with one hand on the reins the lights from the distant fairground shone intermittently in her face, disclosing a high-bridged nose and firm mouth. Although by no means beautiful, she had that curious quality of attractiveness that I had often noticed in the women who worked at fairgrounds, an elusive sexuality despite their shabby clothes and surroundings. As she passed she looked down at me, her quiet eyes on some unfelt point within my face.

  The six wagons followed her, the horses heaving the heavy cages across the camber. Behind the bars I caught a glimpse of wor
n straw and a small hutch in the corner, but there was no sign of the animals. I assumed them to be too undernourished to do more than sleep. As the last wagon passed I saw the only other member of the troupe, a dwarf in a leather jacket driving the wooden caravan at the rear.

  I walked after them across the bridge, wondering if they were late arrivals at the fair already in progress. But from the way they hesitated at the foot of the bridge, the young woman looking to left and right while the dwarf sat hunched in the shadow of the cage in front of him, it was plain they had no connection whatever with the brilliant ferris wheel and the amusements taking place on the common. Even the horses, standing uncertainly with their heads lowered to avoid the coloured lights, seemed aware of this exclusion.