Masterpieces

by Orson Scott Card

  “Look here. Consider the data. Joe, now: a creature with a brain of human capacity, but without a mind—a perfect Lockean tabula rasa, for Anglesey’s psibeam to write on. We deduced, correctly enough—if very belatedly—that when enough had been written, there would be a personality. But the question was: whose? Because, I suppose, of normal human fear of the unknown, we assumed that any personality in so alien a body had to be monstrous. Therefore it must be hostile to Anglesey, must be swamping him—”

  The door opened. Both men jerked to their feet.

  The chief surgeon shook his head. “No use. Typical deep-shock traumata, close to terminus now. If we had better facilities, maybe—”

  “No,” said Cornelius. “You cannot save a man who has decided not to live anymore.”

  “I know.” The doctor removed his mask. “I need a cigarette. Who’s got one?” His hands shook a little as he accepted it from Viken.

  “But how could he—decide—anything?” choked the physicist. “He’s been unconscious ever since Jan pulled him away from that . . . that thing.”

  “It was decided before then,” said Cornelius. “As a matter of fact, that hulk in there on the operating table no longer has a mind. I know. I was there.” He shuddered a little. A stiff shot of tranquilizer was all that held nightmare away from him. Later he would have to have that memory exorcised.

  The doctor took a long drag of smoke, held it in his lungs a moment, and exhaled gustily. “I guess this winds up the project,” he said. “We’ll never get another esman.”

  “I’ll say we won’t.” Viken’s tone sounded rusty. “I’m going to smash that devil’s engine myself.”

  “Hold on a minute,” exclaimed Cornelius. “Don’t you understand? This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning!”

  “I’d better get back,” said the doctor. He stubbed out his cigarette and went through the door. It closed behind him with a deathlike quietness.

  “What do you mean?” Viken said it as if erecting a barrier.

  “Won’t you understand?” roared Cornelius. “Joe has all Anglesey’s habits, thoughts, memories, prejudices, interests . . . oh, yes, the different body and the different environment, they do cause some changes—but no more than any man might undergo on Earth. If you were suddenly cured of a wasting disease, wouldn’t you maybe get a little boisterous and rough? There is nothing abnormal in it. Nor is it abnormal to want to stay healthy—no? Do you see?”

  Viken sat down. He spent a while without speaking.

  Then, enormously slow and careful: “Do you mean Joe is Ed?”

  “Or Ed is Joe. Whatever you like. He calls himself Joe now, I think—as a symbol of freedom—but he is still himself. What is the ego but continuity of existence?

  “He himself did not fully understand this. He only knew—he told me, and I should have believed him—that on Jupiter he was strong and happy. Why did the K-tube oscillate? An hysterical symptom? Anglesey’s subconscious was not afraid to stay on Jupiter—it was afraid to come back!

  “And then, today, I listened in. By now, his whole self was focused on Joe. That is, the primary source of libido was Joe’s virile body, not Anglesey’s sick one. This meant a different pattern of impulses—not too alien to pass the filters, but alien enough to set up interference. So he felt my presence. And he saw the truth, just as I did—

  “Do you know the last emotion I felt, as Joe threw me out of his mind? Not anger anymore. He plays rough, him, but all he had room to feel was joy.

  “I knew how strong a personality Anglesey has! Whatever made me think an overgrown child-brain like Joe’s could override it? In there, the doctors—bah! They’re trying to salvage a hulk which has been shed because it is useless!”

  Cornelius stopped. His throat was quite raw from talking. He paced the floor, rolled cigar smoke around his mouth but did not draw it any farther in.

  When a few minutes had passed, Viken said cautiously: “All right. You should know—as you said, you were there. But what do we do now? How do we get in touch with Ed? Will he even be interested in contacting us?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Cornelius. “He is still himself, remember. Now that he has none of the cripple’s frustrations, he should be more amiable. When the novelty of his new friends wears off, he will want someone who can talk to him as an equal.”

  “And precisely who will operate another pseudo?” asked Viken sarcastically. “I’m quite happy with this skinny frame of mine, thank you!”

  “Was Anglesey the only hopeless cripple on Earth?” asked Cornelius quietly.

  Viken gaped at him.

  “And there are aging men, too,” went on the psionicist, half to himself. “Someday, my friend, when you and I feel the years close in, and so much we would like to learn—maybe we, too, would enjoy an extra lifetime in a Jovian body.” He nodded at his cigar. “A hard, lusty, stormy kind of life, granted—dangerous, brawling, violent—but life as no human, perhaps, has lived it since the days of Elizabeth the First. Oh, yes, there will be small trouble finding Jovians.”

  He turned his head as the surgeon came out again.

  “Well!” croaked Viken.

  The doctor sat down. “It’s finished,” he said.

  They waited for a moment, awkwardly.

  “Odd,” said the doctor. He groped after a cigarette he didn’t have. Silently, Viken offered him one. “Odd. I’ve seen these cases before. People who simply resign from life. This is the first one I ever saw that went out smiling—smiling all the time.”

  ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

  “All You Zombies—”

  One of the titans of science fiction’s Golden Age, Robert Heinlein began writing science fiction in 1939 after a brief military career and soon became a prolific contributor to science fiction magazines, notably Astounding Science Fiction, which published most of the best of his early writing. His fiction was notable for its sense of a “lived-in” future. In stories such as “The Roads Must Roll,” “We Also Walks Dogs,” “Blowups Happen,” and others, Heinlein showed how pervasively future developments in science and technology would impact culture and civilization at every level. Most of the stories Heinlein collected in The Man Who Sold the Moon, The Green Hills of Earth, and Revolt in 2100 fit the scheme of Heinlein’s future-history series, which along with the novel was collected definitively in The Past through Tomorrow. Heinlein’s fiction is also renowned for its explorations of social and political themes and for its depiction in science fictional settings of societies where private and group interests are often at variance. Beyond This Horizon concerns a future world where eugenics has created the perfect society. Methuselah’s Children concerns a group of immortals, the product of selective breeding, who face annihilation at the hands of those not similarly gifted. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress vividly depicts the revolt of a colony on the Moon attempting to break free of control by the government on Earth. The Puppet Masters is his most famous study of the individual and collective consciousness, about Earth’s efforts to fight off invasion by aliens intent on absorbing humanity into its group mind. In the years immediately after World War II, Heinlein wrote influential science fiction novels for young adult readers, including Space Cadet, The Star Beast, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, and Starship Troopers, a controversial novel about a militaristic future where freedom and citizenship are predicated on training for the armed services. Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein’s 1962 novel about a messianic human raised on Mars who exposes the corruption and hypocrisy of civilization on Earth, was the first science fiction novel to reach the national bestseller list. Heinlein also wrote a number of groundbreaking modern fantasies, including Magic, Inc. and the stories collected in The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.

  2217 TIME ZONE V (EST) 7 Nov 1970 NYC—“Pop’s Place”: I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time—10:17 p.m. zone five, or eastern time, November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time & date; we must.

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nbsp; The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty-five years old, no taller than I am, childish features and a touchy temper. I didn’t like his looks—I never had—but he was a lad I was here to recruit, he was my boy. I gave him my best barkeep’s smile.

  Maybe I’m too critical. He wasn’t swish; his nickname came from what he always said when some nosy type asked him his line: “I’m an unmarried mother.” If he felt less than murderous he would add: “—at four cents a word. I write confession stories.”

  If he felt nasty, he would wait for somebody to make something of it. He had a lethal style of infighting, like a female cop—one reason I wanted him. Not the only one.

  He had a load on and his face showed that he despised people more than usual. Silently I poured a double shot of Old Underwear and left the bottle. He drank it, poured another.

  I wiped the bar top. “How’s the ‘Unmarried Mother’ racket?”

  His fingers tightened on the glass and he seemed about to throw it at me; I felt for the sap under the bar. In temporal manipulation you try to figure everything, but there are so many factors that you never take needless risks.

  I saw him relax that tiny amount they teach you to watch for in the Bureau’s training school. “Sorry,” I said. “Just asking, ‘How’s business?’ Make it ‘How’s the weather?’ ”

  He looked sour. “Business is okay. I write ’em, they print ’em, I eat.”

  I poured myself one, leaned toward him. “Matter of fact,” I said, “you write a nice stick—I’ve sampled a few. You have an amazingly sure touch with the woman’s angle.”

  It was a slip I had to risk; he never admitted what pen-names he used. But he was boiled enough to pick up only the last: “ ‘Woman’s angle!’ ” he repeated with a snort. “Yeah, I know the woman’s angle. I should.”

  “So?” I said doubtfully. “Sisters?”

  “No. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Now, now,” I answered mildly, “bartenders and psychiatrists learn that nothing is stranger than truth. Why, son, if you heard the stories I do—well, you’d make yourself rich. Incredible.”

  “You don’t know what ‘incredible’ means!”

  “So? Nothing astonishes me. I’ve always heard worse.”

  He snorted again. “Want to bet the rest of the bottle?”

  “I’ll bet a full bottle.” I placed one on the bar.

  “Well—” I signaled my other bartender to handle the trade. We were at the far end, a single-stool space that I kept private by loading the bar top by it with jars of pickled eggs and other clutter. A few were at the other end watching the fights and somebody was playing the juke box—private as a bed where we were.

  “Okay,” he began, “to start with, I’m a bastard.”

  “No distinction around here,” I said.

  “I mean it,” he snapped. “My parents weren’t married.”

  “Still no distinction,” I insisted. “Neither were mine.”

  “When—” He stopped, gave me the first warm look I ever saw on him. “You mean that?”

  “I do. A one-hundred-percent bastard. In fact,” I added, “no one in my family ever marries. All bastards.

  “Oh, that.” I showed it to him. “It just looks like a wedding ring; I wear it to keep women off.” It is an antique I bought in 1985 from a fellow operative—he had fetched it from pre-Christian Crete. “The Worm Ouroboros . . . the World Snake that eats its own tail, forever without end. A symbol of the Great Paradox.”

  He barely glanced at it. “If you’re really a bastard, you know how it feels. When I was a little girl—”

  “Wups!” I said. “Did I hear you correctly?”

  “Who’s telling this story? When I was a little girl—Look, ever hear of Christine Jorgenson? Or Roberta Cowell?”

  “Uh, sex-change cases? You’re trying to tell me—”

  “Don’t interrupt or swelp me, I won’t talk. I was a foundling, left at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945 when I was a month old. When I was a little girl, I envied kids with parents. Then, when I learned about sex—and, believe me, Pop, you learn fast in an orphanage—”

  “I know.”

  “—I made a solemn vow that any kid of mine would have both a pop and a mom. It kept me ‘pure,’ quite a feat in that vicinity—I had to learn to fight to manage it. Then I got older and realized I stood darn little chance of getting married—for the same reason I hadn’t been adopted.” He scowled. “I was horse-faced and bucktoothed, flat-chested and straight-haired.”

  “You don’t look any worse than I do.”

  “Who cares how a barkeep looks? Or a writer? But people wanting to adopt pick little blue-eyed golden-haired morons. Later on, the boys want bulging breasts, a cute face, and an Oh-you-wonderful-male manner.” He shugged. “I couldn’t compete. So I decided to join the W.E.N.C.H.E.S.”

  “Eh?”

  “Women’s Emergency National Corps, Hospitality & Entertainment Section, what they now call ‘Space Angels’—Auxiliary Nursing Group, Extraterrestrial Legions.”

  I knew both terms, once I had them chronized. We use still a third name, it’s that elite military service corps: Women’s Hospitality Order Refortifying & Encouraging Spacemen. Vocabulary shift is the worst hurdle in time-jumps—did you know that “service station” once meant a dispensary for petroleum fractions? Once on an assignment in the Churchill Era, a woman said to me, “Meet me at the service station next door”—which is not what it sounds; a “service station” (then) wouldn’t have a bed in it.

  He went on: “It was when they first admitted you can’t send men into space for months and years and not relieve the tension. You remember how the wowsers screamed?—that improved my chance, since volunteers were scarce. A gal had to be respectable, preferably virgin (they liked to train them from scratch), above average mentally, and stable emotionally. But most volunteers were old hookers, or neurotics who would crack up ten days off Earth. So I didn’t need looks; if they accepted me, they would fix my buck teeth, put a wave in my hair, teach me to walk and dance and how to listen to a man pleasingly, and everything else—plus training for the prime duties. They would even use plastic surgery if it would help—nothing too good for Our Boys.

  “Best yet, they made sure you didn’t get pregnant during your enlistment—and you were almost certain to marry at the end of your hitch. Same way today, A.N.G.E.L.S. marry spacers—they talk the language.

  “When I was eighteen I was placed as a ‘mother’s helper.’ This family simply wanted a cheap servant but I didn’t mind as I couldn’t enlist till I was twenty-one. I did housework and went to night school—pretending to continue my high school typing and shorthand but going to a charm class instead, to better my chances for enlistment.

  “Then I met this city slicker with his hundred-dollar bills.” He scowled. “The no-good actually did have a wad of hundred-dollar bills. He showed me one night, told me to help myself.

  “But I didn’t. I liked him. He was the first man I ever met who was nice to me without trying games with me. I quit night school to see him oftener. It was the happiest time of my life.

  “Then one night in the park the games began.”

  He stopped. I said, “And then?”

  “And then nothing! I never saw him again. He walked me home and told me he loved me—and kissed me good-night and never came back.” He looked grim. “If I could find him, I’d kill him!”

  “Well,” I sympathized, “I know how you feel. But killing him—just for doing what comes naturally—hmm . . . Did you struggle?”

  “Huh? What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Quite a bit. Maybe he deserves a couple of broken arms for running out on you, but—”

  “He deserves worse than that! Wait till you hear. Somehow I kept anyone from suspecting and decided it was all for the best. I hadn’t really loved him and probably would never love anybody—and I was more eager to join the W.E.N.C.H.E.S. than ever. I wasn’t disqualified, they didn’t i
nsist on virgins. I cheered up.

  “It wasn’t until my skirts got tight that I realized.”

  “Pregnant?”

  “He had me higher ’n a kite! Those skinflints I lived with ignored it as long as I could work—then kicked me out and the orphanage wouldn’t take me back. I landed in a charity ward surrounded by other big bellies and trotted bedpans until my time came.

  “One night I found myself on an operating table, with a nurse saying, ‘Relax. Now breathe deeply.’

  “I woke up in bed, numb from the chest down. My surgeon came in. ‘How do you feel?’ he says cheerfully.

  “ ‘Like a mummy.’

  “ ‘Naturally. You’re wrapped like one and full of dope to keep you numb. You’ll get well—but a Caesarian isn’t a hangnail.’

  “ ‘Caesarian,’ I said. ‘Doc—did I lose the baby?’

  “ ‘Oh, no. Your baby’s fine.’

  “ ‘Oh. Boy or girl?’

  “ ‘A healthy little girl. Five pounds, three ounces.’

  “I relaxed. It’s something, to have made a baby. I told myself I would go somewhere and tack ‘Mrs.’ on my name and let the kid think her papa was dead—no orphanage for my kid!

  “But the surgeon was talking. ‘Tell me, uh—’ He avoided my name. ‘—did you ever think your glandular setup was odd?’

  “I said, ‘Huh? Of course not. What are you driving at?’

  “He hesitated. ‘I’ll give you this in one dose, then a hypo to let you sleep off your jitters. You’ll have ’em.’

  “ ‘Why?’ I demanded.

  “ ‘Ever hear of that Scottish physician who was female until she was thirty-five?—then had surgery and became legally and medically a man? Got married. All okay.’

  “ ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

  “ ‘That’s what I’m saying. You’re a man.’

  “I tried to sit up. ‘What?’

  “ ‘Take it easy. When I opened you, I found a mess. I sent for the Chief of Surgery while I got the baby out, then we held a consultation with you on the table—and worked for hours to salvage what we could. You had two full sets of organs, both immature, but with the female set well enough developed for you to have a baby. They could never be any use to you again, so we took them out and rearranged things so that you can develop properly as a man.’ He put a hand on me. ‘Don’t worry. You’re young, your bones will readjust, we’ll watch your glandular balance—and make a fine young man out of you.’