The parents seldom stay together in the cities. Life there is not lived by twos, but in groups. They drift apart, following friends, pursuits, professions, and see each other now and then. The children stay at first with one parent or the other, but after a while they too want to be on their own and go off to live in one of the warrens of young people, the communal houses, the dormitories of the colleges. Young men and women live together, as do grown men and women. Gender is not of much import where there is no sexuality.
For they do everything under the sun in the Cities Under the Sun, except make love.
They love, they hate, they learn, they make, they think hard, work hard, play; they enjoy passionately and suffer desperately, they live a full and human life, and they never give a thought to sex—unless, as Kergemmeg said with a perfect poker face, they are philosophers.
Their achievements, their monuments as a people, are all in the Cities under the Sun, whose towers and public buildings, as I saw in a book of drawings Kergemmeg showed me, vary from stern purity to fervent magnificence. Their books are written there, their thought and religion took form there over the centuries. Their history, their continuity as a culture, is all there.
Their continuity as living beings is what they see to in the North.
Kergemmeg said that while they are in the South they do not miss their sexuality at all. I had to take him at his word, which was given, hard as it might be for us to imagine, simply as a statement of fact.
And as I try to tell here what he told me, it seems wrong to describe their life in the cities as celibate or chaste: for those words imply a forced or willed resistance to desire. Where there is no desire there is no resistance, no abstinence, but rather what one might call, in a radical sense of the word, innocence. They don’t think about sex, they don’t miss it, it is a non-problem. Their marital life is an empty memory to them, meaningless. If a couple stays together or meets often in the South it is because they are uncommonly good friends—because they love each other. But they love their other friends too. They never live separately from other people. There is little privacy in the great apartment houses of the cities—nobody cares about it. Life there is communal, active, sociable, gregarious, and full of pleasures.
But slowly the days grow warmer; the air dryer; there is a restlessness in the air. The shadows begin to fall differently. And the crowds gather in the streets to hear the Year Priests announce the solstice and watch the sun stop, and pause, and turn south.
People leave the cities, one here, a couple there, a family there…It has begun to stir again, that soft hormonal buzz in the blood, that first vague yearning intimation or memory, the body’s knowledge of its kingdom coming.
The young people follow that knowledge blindly, without knowing they know it. The married couples are drawn back together by all their wakened memories, intensely sweet. To go home, to go home and be there together!
All they learned and did all those thousands of days and nights in the cities is left behind them, packed up, put away. Till they come back South again…
“That is why it was easy to turn us aside,” Kergemmeg said. “Because our lives in the North and the South are so different that they seem, to you others, incoherent, incomplete. And we cannot connect them rationally. We cannot explain or justify our Madan to those who live only one kind of life. When the Bayderac came to our plane, they told us our Way was mere instinct and that we lived like animals. We were ashamed.”
(I later checked Kergemmeg’s “Bayderac” in the Encyclopedia Planaria, where I found an entry for the Beidr., of the Unon Plane, an aggressive and enterprising people with highly advanced material technologies, who have been in trouble more than once with the Interplanary Agency for interfering on other planes. The tourist guidebook gives them the symbols that mean “of special interest to engineers, computer programmers, and systems analysts.”)
Kergemmeg spoke of them with a kind of pain. It changed his voice, tightened it. He had been a child when they arrived—the first visitors, as it happened, from another plane. He had thought about them the rest of his life.
“They told us we should take control over our lives. We should not live two separate half-lives, but live fully all the time, all the year, as all intelligent beings did. They were a great people, full of knowledge, with high sciences and great ease and luxury of life. To them we truly were little more than animals. They told us and showed us how other people lived on other planes. We saw we were foolish to do without the pleasure of sex for half our life. We saw we were foolish to spend so much time and energy going between South and North on foot, when we could make ships, or roads and cars, or airplanes, and go back and forth a hundred times a year if we liked. We saw we could build cities in the North and make homesteads in the South. Why not? Our Madan was wasteful and irrational, a mere animal impulse controlling us. All we had to do to be free of it was take the medicines the Bayderac gave us. And our children need not take medicines, but could have their being altered by the genetic science of Bayder. Then we could be without rest from sexual desire until we got very old, like the Bayderac. And then a woman would be able to get pregnant at any time before her menopause—in the South, even. And the number of her children would not be limited…They were eager to give us these medicines. We knew their doctors were wise. As soon as they came to us they had given us treatments for some of our illnesses, that cured people as if by a miracle. They knew so much. We saw them fly about in their airplanes, and envied them, and were ashamed.
“They brought machines for us. We tried to drive the cars they gave us on our narrow, rocky roads. They sent engineers to direct us, and we began to build a huge Highway straight through the Middle Land. We blew up mountains with the explosives the Bayderac gave us so the Highway could run wide and level, south to north and north to south. My father was a workman on the Highway. There were thousands of men working on that road, for a while. Men from the southern homesteads…Only men. Women were not asked to go and do that work. Bayder women did not do such work. It was not women’s work, they told us. Women were to stay home with the children while men did the work.”
Kergemmeg sipped his ü thoughtfully and gazed off at the glimmering sea and the star-dusted sky.
“Women went down from the homesteads and talked to the men,” he said. “They said to listen to them, not only to the Bayderac…Perhaps women don’t feel shame the way men do. Perhaps their shame is different, more a matter of the body than the mind. It seemed they didn’t care much for the cars and airplanes and bulldozers, but cared a great deal about the medicines that would change us and the rules about who did which kind of work. After all, with us, the woman bears the child, but both parents feed it, both nurture it. Why should a child be left to the mother only? They asked that. How could a woman alone bring up four children? Or more than four children? It was inhuman. And then, in the cities, why should families stay together? The child doesn’t want its parents then, the parents don’t want the child, they all have other things to do…The women talked about this to us men, and with them we tried to talk about it to the Bayderac.
“They said, ‘All that will change. You will see. You cannot reason correctly. It is merely an effect of your hormones, your genetic programming, which we will correct. Then you will be free of your irrational and useless behavior patterns.’
“But we answered, ‘But will we be free of your irrational and useless behavior patterns?’
“Men working on the Highway began throwing down their tools and abandoning the big machines the Bayderac had provided. They said, ‘What do we need this Highway for when we have a thousand ways of our own?’ And they set off southward on those old paths and trails.
“You see, all this happened—fortunately, I think—near the end of a Northern Season. In the North, where we all live apart, and so much of life is spent in courting and making love and bringing up the children, we were—how shall I put it—more short-sighted, more impressionable, more vulnerable. We
had just begun the drawing together, then. When we came to the South, when we were all in the Cities Under the Sun, we could gather, take counsel together, argue and listen to arguments, and consider what was best for us as a people.
“After we had done that, and had talked further with the Bayderac and let them talk to us, we called for a Great Consensus, such as is spoken of in the legends and the ancient records of the Year Towers where history is kept. Every Ansar came to the Year Tower of their city and voted on this choice: Shall we follow the Bayder Way or the Manad? If we followed their Way, they were to stay among us; if we chose our own, they were to go. We chose our way.” His beak clattered very softly as he laughed. “I was a halfyearling, that season. I cast my vote.”
I did not have to ask how he had voted, but I asked if the Bayderac had been willing to go.
“Some of them argued, some of them threatened,” he said. “They talked about their wars and their weapons. I am sure they could have destroyed us utterly. But they did not. Maybe they despised us so much they didn’t want to bother. Or their wars called them away. By then we had been visited by people from the Interplanary Agency, and most likely it was their doing that the Bayderac left us in peace. Enough of us had been alarmed that we agreed then, in another voting, that we wanted no more visitors. So now the Agency sees to it that they come only to this island. I am not sure we made the right choice, there. Sometimes I think we did, sometimes I wonder. Why are we afraid of other peoples, other Ways? They can’t all be like the Bayderac.”
“I think you made the right choice,” I said. “But I say it against my will. I’d like so much to meet an Ansar woman, to meet your children, to see the Cities Under the Sun! I’d like so much to see your dancing!”
“Oh, well, that you can see,” he said, and stood up. Maybe we had had a little more ü than usual, that night.
He stood very tall there in the glimmering darkness on the verandah over the beach. He straightened his shoulders, and his head went back. The crest on his head slowly rose into a stiff plume, silver in the starlight. He lifted his arms above his head. It was the pose of the antique Spanish dancer, fiercely elegant, tense, and masculine. He did not leap, he was after all a man of eighty, but he gave somehow the impression of a leap, then a deep graceful bow. His beak clicked out a quick double rhythm, he stamped twice, and his feet seemed to flicker in a complex set of steps while his upper body remained taut and straight. Then his arms came out in a great embracing gesture, toward me, as I sat almost terrified by the beauty and intensity of his dance.
And then he stopped, and laughed. He was out of breath. He sat down and passed his hand over his forehead and his crest, panting a little. “After all,” he said, “it isn’t courting season.”
A Few Kind Words for A. E. Van Vogt
RICHARD CHWEDYK
Richard Chwedyk lives in Chicago, Illinois. Last year we featured his story “The Measure of All Things” in Years Best SF 7. This year he published a fine long sequel, “Bronte’s Egg.” He often reads in the Chicago area, most recently at the Twilight Tales reading series at the Red Lion Pub. His poetry has recently been published in Tales of the Unanticipated and Tales from the Red Lion, but has also appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Oyez Review, Paul Hoover’s legendary Oink! (now called New American Writing), and The Best of Hair Trigger anthology, among even older publications. He teaches creative writing classes at Oakton Community College, but his day job is doing layout and copyediting for a chain of newspapers in the Chicago suburbs.
“A Few Kind Words for A. E. Van Vogt,” from Tales of the Unanticipated, is a lyric poem about one of the titanic figures of SF, who was given the Grand Master Award by the SFWA only after he had succumbed to Alzheimer’s. This poem is about the night he stood up in front of the audience at the annual Nebula Awards banquet to accept the award. I was there; the description is accurate. It is also about his powerful contributions to genre SF and to literature in the 20th century (note the allusion to Mishima).
An irony in physics rendered him mute
as he stood to receive his award
in the darkened arena.
He looked at the assembled audience with
gratitude, but also with undisguised
bewilderment, a little apprehension.
His eyes were liquid, opened wide,
forehead furrowed, confounded with
his inarticulation.
His speech was read for him by an old, good friend.
His wife stood just a step behind him.
His hair was combed straight back.
He dressed like an accountant and it was not inappropriate,
for it was this disguise that was his work.
It was not, in a word, original:
Plato, De Quincey, Borges, Christian mystics, Eastern monks,
all hinted at the notion that each object in this world
is a secret symbol for an object in another,
and nothing is in itself merely itself.
Of course, then, he wore the uniform of a “plain” man.
Of course, he wondered at the crowd
and what this all was really about.
He was looking, perhaps, for Cayle Clark,
or Jommy, or Gosseyn,
out there in the dark, the audience up,
out of their seats. He seemed to look past them all.
He’d torn open the bag that held his dreams
and let them all pour out
at a penny or two a word. And what a surprise
it must have been, when the contents fell
to the page, how many people recognized those objects
as their own.
It wasn’t eloquent. It wasn’t pristine.
At times his vessel seemed hardly seaworthy.
But to have made it so would have betrayed the secret:
There is a secret world one train stop further on,
across the highway, past the chain-link fence,
on the other side of the woods. A secret neighborhood.
A secret room. The fate of the universe, of time itself,
is weighed against this discovery.
There is something important at the other end of this gaze,
and we better find out what it is.
But for now, don’t say a word.
And he didn’t.
And when my dour, self-absorbed, ascetic, “literary”
friend asks me (and pronounces the name
like a gummy cough) “About this van Vogt,”
that he read of in a biography of Mishima,
I tell him nothing, betray nothing.
An accident of semantics, an irony of physics,
a brief attack of poetry, renders me mute.
The skeleton of the world I saw
when I left that dark arena
was a cast-off from the bag of dreams.
And Cayle, and Jommy and Gilbert Gosseyn
were standing by the newspaper boxes, in their dark suits,
each holding a finger up to his lips.
Halo
CHARLES STROSS
Charles Stross (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi) lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. A dyed-in-the-wool science fiction writer in the tradition of Bruce Sterling, he is so full of ideas and energy that at times he seems to be a fizzing, popping conduit, a high-powered cable full of lightning bolts and showering sparks. He is of the same social circle as Iain M. Banks and Ken McLeod, and the three of them are being called (not entirely unjustly) the Scots SF Renaissance. Stross has been publishing for the past four years in Spectrum SF and Interzone, and recently in Asimov’s, but had a hit in 2001 in writing circles with his story “Lobsters.” By the time of the world SF convention in San Jose in 2001, SF people were eager to meet Stross. His collection Toast (2002) appeared in a print-on-demand edition last year. His first SF novel will appear in 2003.
“Halo” is part of a series of energetic showpieces in the first person present te
nse that have appeared in Asimov’s over the last two years—the Manfred Maxx series, set in a near future that is undergoing continuing revolution in the biological sciences, after a computer revolution, after a techno-economic revolution. And there’s more to come. This one has a sympathetic teenage protagonist, Amber, Manfred’s cyborg super-competent daughter, who is desperate to get out from under the authority of her control-freak mother, and away from her cat. And what better place than outer space to be free?
Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship’s drive stinger: orange and brown and muddy gray streaks slowly ripple across the bloated horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant’s lethal magnetic field; static discharges flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship’s VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is cranked up to maximum mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a fission rocket but thrusting at maximum as the assembly creaks and groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea, Jupiter’s fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the Gossamer ring). They’re not the first canned primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they’re one of the first wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few mechanical dinosaurs left behind by NASA or ESA. They’re so far from the inner system that a good chunk of the ship’s communications array is given over to caching: the news is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets out here.
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