Orbit 3 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Night

  * * * *

  Letter To A Young Poet

  by James Sallis

  Dear James Henry,

  This morning your letter, posted from Earth over two years ago, at last reached me, having from all indications passed through the most devious of odysseys: at one point, someone had put the original envelope (battered and confused with stampings and re-addressings) into another, addressed it by hand, and paid the additional postage. You wonder what word suits the clerk who salvaged your letter from the computer dumps and took it upon himself to do this. Efficiency? Devotion? Largesse? Gentilesse?

  At any rate, by the time it finally reached me here, the new envelope was as badly in need of repair as your own. I can’t imagine the delay; I shouldn’t think I’d be so hard a man to find. I move around a lot, true, but always within certain well-defined borders. Like Earth birds that never stray past a mile from their birth tree, I live my life in parentheses ... I suppose it’s just that no one especially bothers to keep track.

  For your kind words I can only say: thank you. Which is not enough, never enough, but what else is there? (Sometimes, as with our mysterious and gracious postal patron, even that is impossible.) It makes me happy to learn that my poems have brought you pleasure. If they’ve given you something else as well, which you say they have, I am yet happier. You have expressed your joy at my sculpture. That also makes me happy. Thank you.

  In brief answer to your questions, I am now living in Juhlz on Topfthar, the northernmost part of the Vegan Combine, though I don’t know how much longer I shall be here. Political bickering breeds annoying restrictions and begins to throw off a deafening racket—and after four years the Juhlzson winter is at last creeping in (I’m sitting out on my patio now; I can see it far off in the hills). The two together, I’m afraid I can’t withstand.

  The hours of my day hardly vary. I rise to a breakfast of bread and wine, pass the day fiddling at my books. I rarely write, sculpt even less, the preparation is so difficult . . . Night is a time for music and talking in Juhlz cafes, which are like no others. (The casual asymmetry of Juhlzson architecture always confounds the Terran eye. The people are like the buildings, off-center, beautiful. You never know what to expect.) I have taken up a local instrument—the thulinda, a kind of aeolian harp or perhaps dulcimer, fitted to a mouthpiece—and have got, I am told, passably good. I play for them and they teach me their songs.

  (The sky’s just grown gray cumulus beards and a voice like a bass siren. It should snow, but won’t. My paper flaps and flutters against the table. Darkness begins to seep around the edges. This is dusk on Juhlz, my favorite time of day.)

  As to your other questions, I was born on Earth: my first memories are of black, occluded skies and unbearable temperatures, and my parents fitting filters to my face when, rarely, we went outside (my poem, Eve Mourning).

  My father was a microbiologist. Soon after I was born, he became a Voyager; I remember him hardly at all, and his hands mostly, at that. My mother, as you probably know since one of my publishers made a thing of it quite against my wishes, was Vegan, a ship’s companion, a woman whose gentle voice and quiet hands could do more than any medic to soothe a hurt, salve a scar. They met during a Voyage my father took in place of a friend —his first—and were together always after that. One of my early sculptures, Flange Coupling, was realized as a memorial to my parents. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. The last I heard, it was in a private collection on Rigel-7. But that was years and years ago.

  My early life was spent in comfort, in my grandparents’ home on Vega and other times in crèches on Earth. When I was seven, my parents were killed in Exploration; shortly after, I was sent to the Academy at Ginh, where I passed my next twelve years and for which the Union provided funds and counsel. My Letters Home, which I’ve come in past years to misdoubt, was an attempt to commemorate that time, at least to invest it with private worth.

  I don’t know what command you have of Vegan history; I suppose when I was a young man I cared nothing for history of any sort. But these were the years of the Quasitots, who supposed themselves a political group and spent their time and talents in metaphorical remonstrance against the mercenary trends of Vegan-Outworld affairs. (If I am telling you things you already know, please forgive me, but what looms large on my horizon may be unseen from yours: I have no way of knowing.)

  In one of the “Letters” I quoted Naevius, an early Roman poet (my interest in Latin being perhaps the sole solid tie I have with my father’s world) . . . “Q. Tell me, how was your great commonwealth lost so quickly? A. We were overrun by a new lot of orators, a bunch of silly youngsters.” I believe we thought that fitted us. We answered their declarations and old speeches with avantgarde aesthetics; we thought we would be the “silly youngsters” who’d usher in a new order. I suppose, vaguely, we believed that artists should inherit the universe.

  One of my friends at the Academy took to composing symphonies of odor, the foulest odors he could find and produce, dedicating each work to the two governments. Another created an artificial flower which would wilt if touched; yet another gathered dung and baked it into likenesses of the Heads of State. My own contribution (halfhearted at best, I suppose) was the sculpting of single grains of sand, using the tools of my father, then scattering my invisible beauty in handfuls wherever I walked.

  I’m not certain any longer what we really thought we were accomplishing. In our own words we were reacting, we were speaking out, we were being ourselves, we were caring. At any rate, this activity channeled our energies, made us work, made us think, let us live off of each other’s various frenzies. It taught some of us, a few, that words and gestures get nothing done. Maybe somewhere, somehow, it accomplished something larger; I don’t know. (I understand, by the way, that microsculpture is quite the thing in the academies today.) Such, anyway, was the temper and tempo of my youth.

  When I was twenty, I left Ginh with my degrees and came to live in a small room up four flights of stairs here on Juhlz (my poem, Crown of Juhlz). I worked for a while as a tutor, then held a position at the old Empire Library, but came very soon to realize that I was unable to fit myself to a job of any sort.

  I fled to Farthay, where I wrote my first novel and married. She was a young, small thing with joy in her heart and light in her eyes, a Vegan. Two years with me, and without the comfort of a child, was all she could bear. She left. It was best for both of us. We had already spent too much of our separate selves.

  The rest of my life (I am 84) has been spent in forming and breaking idle patterns. I travel a lot, settle for short periods, move on (your letter retraced, and made me remember, many years of my life). What money I have comes through the kindness of friends; and from other, distant friends who buy my books.

  My books: you ask after them. Thank you. Well, there’s Letters Home, which I’ve already mentioned and which you’ve probably read. Quite against my own preferences and wishes, it has proved my most popular book; I’ve been told that it’s taught in literature and sociology classes round about the Union.

  There are the novels: Day Breaks; Pergamum (a sort of eulogy for my marriage); A Throw of the Dice; Fugue and Imposition; one or two others I’d just as soon not admit to.

  Essays: Pillow Saint; Halfway Houses; Arcadias; Avatars and Auguries. Two volumes of letters between the Vegan poet Amdto and myself, concerning mostly Out-world poetry, entitledRosebushes and Illuminations.

  A collection of short stories, three volumes, Instants of Desertion.

  And of course, the poems . : .Overtures and Paradiddles; Misericords; Poems; Negatives; Abyssinia; Poems again;Printed Circuits; Assassins of Polish. Some while back, I received a check with a letter informing me that a Collected Poems was to be issued through Union Press. I can’t remember just how long ago that was, and can’t know how long the message took to find me, so I don’t know whether the book is available.

  And coming at last to the poems you’ve sent, what am I to say? All critical
intent is beyond me, I fear. I’ve been constantly bemused and confounded by what critics have found to praise and damn in my own work: I was aware neither that I had “narrowly ordered my sensibilities” nor that I “struck out boldly into the perilous waters that lie between a poetry of device and the poetry of apocalypse” (which another renders as aiming between “a poem of sentiment and one of structure”). Give me always the Common Reader, the sensitive ignorance.

  (“The perilous waters” . . . had I known there was danger of drowning, I might never have begun to write.)

  You want Authority; I can give you none. Let me instead look up at these winter-blurred hills and say this: the poems you’ve sent, and which I return with this letter —they are not unique, but they speak of something which may come, something which may become yours alone. Perhaps you have it now. But two years is a very short time.

  They are direct, compact, all the flourishes are beneath the surface—things greatly to be praised in a young writer. In one line you are content to give shape, in another you pause and form; always something comes easy, to the ear, the eye, the tongue, the mind, the heart. Also to be admired.

  You evidently achieve control with little struggle, effective structure with somewhat more difficulty (precision and accuracy are often separate things). But you have patience, and this will come. Your diction draws crisp, sharp lines around a poem, while imagery and resonance make what is contained soft and yielding. This is at least a proper direction. And I think you are right to work from the outside in, the way you seem to do.

  Two years ago, when you wrote the letter, you were looking for an older, wiser, gentler voice than your own. I am sorry that I have been so long in admitting that I cannot provide it. Perhaps you’ve already found one, in some academy, some cafe. Or perhaps you no longer need it; edges have a way of wearing off. Peace, calm—but what I can give you is closer to a stillness.

  I was quite moved by the Betelgeuse mood poems in particular: I should say that. I envy you these poems. Because of a late-developing nervous disorder, a clash in my mixed parentage, I am confined pretty much to Vega. I’ve not been outside the Combine since the day I came here. Something in the specific light complements my affliction, and I can go on in good health. But I believe I shall have to return to dark Earth before I die, that at least, in spite of all.

  It occurs to me that you obviously know about writing, and I think you must have known the worth of your poems, so I can only assume that you are really asking about living. And I have one thing to say, a quiet thing: Ally yourself to causes and people, and you’ll leave bits of yourself behind every step you take; keep it all, and you’ll choke on it. The choice is every man’s, for himself.

  The day is wearing down, burning near its end. Lights have gone on, then off again, in the houses around me. Everyone is feeling alone.

  So as darkness and winter move in, hand-in-hand, let me wish you the best of luck in your ambitions, apologize again for the delay, and bring to a close this letter, longer than any letter has a right to be.

  And in closing, please accept again my thanks for your kind words. They are given so easily, yet mean so much, always.

  Night now. Juhlzson birds Have come off the lakes and out of forests, and are throbbing softly around me. The moons are sailing in and out of clouds. In a moment I shall move off the patio into the house. In a moment.

  Yours,

  Samthar Smith

  <>

  * * * *

  Here is an exuberant and funny story about death.

  * * * *

  Here Is Thy Sting

  by John Jakes

  Sometimes, too, warmed by the fire, Shakespeare stayed downstairs all night . . .

  “Rest, rest, don’t fight so,” Judith whispered to him once.

  “I can’t rest,” he answered, “while the black beast waits for me.”

  —Robert Payne, The Roaring Boys

  I

  His brother came home from the Moon in an economy coffin, on a night when the meteorological bureau decided on rain. Something went wrong, as it frequently did. The April mist turned to a black, blinding downpour.

  Through the shed’s thick windows all peppered with rain, Cassius could just discern the vertical pillars of fire that grew thinner, thinner still, then flamed out. Rain hummed and slashed. It was a foul night for such a painful, intensely personal errand.

  As the transport rocket settled into its concrete bed far out there, a dozen haul trucks raced from all directions toward its unfolding ramps. Then there seemed to be a collision. Headlamps tilted crazily. Men ran this way and that. A controller wigwagged his glowing red wands hysterically.

  “Wild buncha cowboys,” grumbled the Freight Customs official. “Next? Hey, you.”

  Parcels, crates, cylinders, drums were spilling down a dozen chutes from the rocket. Which was Timothy? Cassius turned from the window as the official called out again. He stepped up to the booth. The official’s uniform was damp, wool-stinking. His expression was cross. Cassius recalled hearing the man ahead of him argue loudly with the official. He felt he should have chosen another queue, but it was too late.

  “Okay, buddy, what’s yours?”

  “I’m picking up my brother,” Cassius said.

  The official mugged his disgust. “Oh for Christ’s—the next shed is passenger, mister.”

  Cassius said, “You don’t understand. My brother was —that is, he’s dead. His body is on the rocket.”

  “Oh.” The official blinked. “Name?”

  “Cassius Andrews. Here’s my News Guild card and my personal digit card if you need identification.”

  “His name, his name.”

  “The Reverend Timothy Andrews.” Cassius tried to scan the upside-down manifest on the counter. “Maybe the shipment is listed under the Ecumenical Brothers. They paid his stipend at the Moon camp. He was stabbed trying to break up a knife fight between two miners, and the Brothers arranged to ship his—”

  Reading down the lines, the official waved his hand to cut off the talk. Cassius felt sheepish. What did the man care about details of a family death? Nothing, of course.

  When at last the official had ticked off the proper box with a checkmark and raised his dull eyes to stare through the wicket, he was no longer merely bored. He was plainly resentful. Of my mentioning dead people on such a miserable night? Cassius wondered.

  “Mister,” said the official, almost triumphantly, “whoever prepaid the body at Moonramp made a mistake. Underweighed by thirty-six pounds. There’s extra duty due. Dozen point five credits.”

  Cassius fumbled inside his raincloak. “I’ll be glad to pay it.”

  “You gotta see the adjustments manager. Three doors down. Next!”

  The dismissal was so peremptory that Cassius, ordinarily a mild-tempered man, flushed. He was about to make a nasty retort. Then he recalled his own recurring dream. It tormented him twice or three times a week, regularly. He sighed and took the punched card from the official’s hand.

  Nobody liked to be bothered with death. Especially not in such rotten, depressing weather. Cassius could understand how the official felt.

  Out another window he noticed that the haul truck tangle had been straightened out. The various crates, parcels and containers were being picked up by vehicles operated by the big and small land freight companies. Cassius had made no arrangements for transportation. But he’d been told that an on-the-spot haul service was for hire. He intended to send Timothy’s body directly to the headquarters of the Brothers, where they had a chapel.

  After the memorial service due all missionaries who died violent deaths—and many still did, in the lonely, rotgut-happy camps on the Moon and around Marsville Basin—Timothy would be interred with their mother and father in the family plot in Virginia. Timothy would have been, let’s see, two years younger than Cassius, who was forty-two.

  The adjustments manager had another client. Cassius lingered in the hall. He tried to restra
in his impatience, then his anger. He had the eerie feeling that official stupidity was conspiring against him to delay the obligatory reunion with his brother.

  After spending twenty minutes in the corridor, Cassius finally got to see the adjustments manager. The idiot didn’t have the appropriate rate book at hand. That took another five minutes. Cassius paid the excess duty, watched while the manager thumbed his Hilton Bank card into a machine along with a triplicate invoice. At last he was given a pass to the pickup area.

  He walked across the concrete in the slashing rain. He had already decided that he’d damn well write an expose of the mismanagement at Dulles Interplanetary and file it with the feature editor. God, there was enough bumbling bureaucracy here for ten exposes.