The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Jobs include art gallery manager, barman, electrician’s mate, Christmas tree feller in the lake district, lifesaver on the Isis in Oxford, dullage sorter on Liverpool docks, editor of three small circulation magazines, door to door vac salesman, seller of devotional articles—monstrances, chasubles, altar breads, prie dieux, etc., to the English Catholic public. A spell in Paris teaching English to foreigners and finally the same kind of teaching here in London.

  “Yesterdays’ Gardens” was commissioned for a French children’s magazine. ... By the time I got round to writing and translating it, it was no longer needed. It is dedicated to the son of Anselm Hollo, the Finnish poet who lives and works in England.

  * * * *

  YESTERDAYS’ GARDENS

  JOHNNY BYRNE

  Uncle Ernie sat in an armchair, his eyes vacantly held by a book. From time to time he said things softly to the child playing on the carpet. His niece had taken the roof off her doll’s house and was engrossed in arranging the tiny articles of furniture.

  “Can I play with the box, Uncle Ernie?” she asked him again. When he didn’t answer she sang a rhyme she had made up herself.

  “Uncle Ernie has

  hidden the box

  and now his tea

  is cold in the pot.

  “I met the man again today,” she added after a moment

  “What man?” Uncle Ernie was not really listening.

  “The man from the silver cup, the man in the silver cup who lives in our garden.”

  Uncle Ernie shuddered in spite of the heat. He laid down his book and stared in silence into the fire.

  “Your tea is cold,” she said accusingly. He didn’t answer and she jumped up, saying hopefully: “Give me the box and I’ll fill your cup with nice hot tea.” She filled one of her doll’s teacups, adding tiny amounts of milk and sugar. He handled it carefully when she put it in his hands. “Don’t forget to stir it, Uncle Ernie,” she sang, going back to her house.

  “Go to bed, go to bed.” He was almost pleading. Then he remembered something important. “You are going away tomorrow, go to bed.”

  “You must give me back the box first. The man said that you must. You took it and it’s mine. That’s not right.” Her voice was very serious.

  “There is no silver cup in my garden. Nobody can live in a silver cup.” Uncle Ernie tried to control himself. “And I told you never to go into the garden.” His voice rose to a tired shout.

  The child looked up happily. “Am I going home tomorrow?” She smiled. “Then I can take it to bed with me, can’t I, Uncle Ernie?” She was silent for a moment. “Am I going home tomorrow?”

  Uncle Ernie looked bleakly at nothing. “No, you’re not going home tomorrow. You are going to stay with Dr. Esslin and his wife. I’ve told you that you can’t go home again. Your house blew down in the night, remember?” He looked at her doubtfully, trying to decide if she was still young enough for this kind of talk. “They are calling for you early in the morning,” he added finally.

  The child altered carefully the position of a bed. She didn’t appear to hear him. “Why do you never go into the garden?” she said suddenly.

  “Gardens are bad for people. They’re bad for the hair, bad for the bone and worse for little children.” Uncle Ernie spoke as if he were remembering a well-remembered lesson. His niece echoed him parrotlike:

  “Little boys and

  girls should know

  that gardens in

  air are bad they

  give pain in the

  head pain in the

  bone and all the

  lovely hair is

  vanished by the

  nasty jealous air.

  “Why is the garden dry and yellow?” She never looked at him when she asked this question. “When I was little it was green and noisy. Why isn’t it noisy now?”

  “It’s quiet,” Uncle Ernie said absently. He was remembering and answered her questions from long habit. His eyes turned to the forgotten book once more, and he said several times, “Gardens are bad: they are yellow and full of dust.”

  Something in the way he said it made her angry. She kicked the house and the boom it made thundered hollowly round the solid rock walls of the room. She began to say and do things she knew would make him angry. “Why did you send the birds away?” She stopped and, pressing her arms tightly to her back, she pushed her neck stiffly forward and tried to imitate a sparrow. “When I was small I saw little birds that went like this. And wet things that used to crawl up tree trunks. Then when it was time for bed this is what the big black ones used to shout high in the sky at night.” She made loud shrilling noises and flapped her arms awkwardly.

  She calmed down and her voice lost its shrillness. “The man who gave me the box that you took from me couldn’t tell why the sky is always red. Jimmy Esslin made up a song about that,” she added and sang:

  “Red night, red day

  now is the time

  to go away.”

  “Gardens are poison,” said Uncle Ernie. “They’re bad for the hair, worse for the bone and a danger to little children.” He wasn’t listening.

  “Can you tell me the name of the dancing flower again? It had real silk on its wings. My daddy showed me how to hold it so carefully in my hand, just like that!” She held out her hand and showed him how. “It moved if you held it properly and when you opened your hand it danced all around you and then went home.”

  “Yellow and dust, bad,” said Uncle Ernie staring sightlessly at the pages in front of him. “Bad it is ... so bad.”

  “You told me a lie!” she remembered suddenly.

  Uncle Ernie looked up at her.

  “That place a long way down the tunnel. The place where you said Mama and Daddy are buried,” she pointed, “they are not there at all. The man from the silver cup told me that you lied. They were in the garden when the big light came the night they vanished. . . . Oh, it was very bright. I saw it through my bedclothes. And they were in the garden when it came and I heard them make a noise just before the windsong came pushing all the houses down. The garden was gone after, and I didn’t see them again. The man said that they burned up with the birds and trees all yellow like the grass. The man said that they were still in the garden only I couldn’t see them.”

  “There is no man in the garden. Nobody lives in my garden, gardens are bad.” Uncle Ernie spoke as if he were trying to convince himself.

  “You told me a lie,” she said relentlessly. “You told me a big lie.”

  Uncle Ernie came to life and snapped shut his book. “To bed with you. The Doctor will be calling early for you in the morning.”

  “The Doctor wants to do something to me. I don’t want to go.”

  He got cross with her. “Remember what happened to the little girl you played with last year. She went into the garden and stayed in the air. Remember! She didn’t go to the Doctor. Remember what happened to her afterward.”

  “I don’t want to go. I want to go home. Jimmy Esslin makes fun of me because of the marks on my face.”

  Uncle Ernie began to pack up her toys. “You won’t see Jimmy Esslin. You won’t see him again. He wouldn’t stay out of the air.”

  She began to plead with him for the box he had taken from her. “Will you tell me what is in it if I give it to you?” he asked her.

  “Nothing!” she answered, her voice too high.

  “And what were you doing with it the last time you had it?” Uncle Ernie had wanted to ask her this before.

  “Just playing!” she said. “Can I have it with me in bed, now? It’s mine,” she warned him. “The man said it was mine. He said everything I wanted was in it.”

  Uncle Ernie considered for a moment.

  “Will you go with Dr. Esslin in the morning?”

  “Only if you give me back the box.”

  He gave her the box. “I’ll be quiet,” she said. “You won’t hear a thing.” She held it tightly.

  It was small, black and re
ctangular and had a concealed lid. She shook it first and then opened it too quickly for him to see how. She showed him the inside. “Look, Uncle Ernie, there’s nothing in it, isn’t it nice?”

  He lifted up the doll’s house and took her to the bedroom. She undressed and got into bed still clutching the box. She kissed him and whispered, “Thank you, Uncle Ernie, thank you.”

  After he left she got out of bed and started to play again. She crept silently to the kitchen and got some hot water. She went back to her room and unpacked her tea service. Sitting on the floor she made a pot of tea, handling the water and tea grains with elaborate care. She began to chant softly:

  “Uncle Ernie has given me the box

  and now his tea is hot in the pot.”

  Almost happily she repeated this several times. Then her voice became a whisper and she started to coax: “Come out now, come out, Uncle Ernie, come out for your tea.” She was speaking to the box, which was on the floor beside her. Nothing happened, and she raised her voice just the tiniest fraction. “Uncle Ernie, come out for your tea this instant!”

  Uncle Ernie shuffled out and she helped him drink the tea. After he had finished she fussed over him for a while and then sent him back.

  Then she called the man—the man who had given her the box.

  They spoke for a long time and played games with the box. She cried when it was time for him to leave, and wanted to go with him.

  He stayed and told her about skies that were blue and suns that were white when you looked at them. He told her about rain that didn’t burn and fruit that grew and was good for the bone. He said that children looked beautiful with hair and she remembered. She was asleep when he left. She had a busy day tomorrow.

  <>

  * * * *

  Just now, there is no “Ladbroke Grove” here. Some such center somehow always accompanies a “literary quantum jump”—that unpredictable phenomenon that draws in new writers and new readers at the same time, and creates a new level of quality—to meet new critical standards—in its operative area.

  We have the writers; we have the markets; we have the readers. But nothing is happening to bring them together. Much of the best work is being done entirely away from the social-professional nexus of “science fiction.” (Witness Donald Barthelme and Harvey Jacobs in this volume . . . Stanley Elkin’s “Perlmutter at the East Pole” in the Saturday Evening Post . . . William Maxwell and Robert Henderson in The New Yorker . . . and how many others that I won’t even hear about till next year or the year after?)

  There is no lack of either talent or reader interest. But the combining force is not at work. There are no exchange centers of ideas and criticism. We have had such focal centers in the past; my guess is we will have some new ones soon. Because, for all my description of Ladbroke Grove as the center, it doesn’t work that way. Moorcock’s living-room-office is the place in London now—but the idea sparks are flying between Ladbroke Grove and Oxford; between both of those and the literary magazine Ambit, where George MacBeth and J. G. Ballard publish back-to-back; between MacBeth in London and Redgrove in Leeds, and through them both on BBC-3’s poetry programs, to a whole new audience—while Penguin Books, and, lately, Jonathan Cape have hooked into the process by using good surrealist and nonobjective art for their s-f jackets.

  Nor is a central physical meeting place absolutely necessary. John Campbell in 1940 and Anthony Boucher in 1950 each filled the role of host and mixer magnificently. With writers spread out all over the country, they did it primarily by mail—and by providing the most essential meeting place, the pages of a vital, growing magazine.

  For about five years, between 1958 and 1962, such a center seemed to be growing again at Ziff-Davis, where Cele Lalli (then Goldsmith) was editing Fantastic and Amazing: David R. Bunch, Thomas Disch, Larry Eisenberg, Phyllis Gotlieb, Keith Laumer, Robert Rohrer, Roger Zelazny, all came out of these pages. (Now Amazing and Fantastic have been sold, and the new policy seems to be primarily reprint.)

  The closest thing to it since then has been Fred Pohl’s new-writer-per-issue policy for If—where R. A. Lafferty, Larry Niven, and Norman Kagan first appeared. The policy continues to turn up good prospects: Jonathan Brand, Hayden Howard, Alexei Panshin, and Bruce McAllister might—any or all—develop interestingly. But the “combining force,” whatever it is, is not there—nor at F&SF, although it continues to attract, and select, superior new writers. (Since 1960, F&SF has come up with a number of exciting “Firsts,” among whom Vance Aandahl, Jane Beauclerk, Calvin Demmon, Sonya Dorman, Terry Carr, and Jody Scott come most readily to mind. Astounding/Analog turned up R. C. FitzPatrick, Richard Olin, Rick Raphael, and Norman Spinrad over the same period.)

  Possibly the new SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) will be able to supply the spark—as for some years it was supplied by Theodore Cogswell’s extraordinary pro-fan letter-journal, PITFCS (Proceedings of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies). Or perhaps some bright publisher will give Cele Laili a new magazine.

  In the meantime, two of the top graduates of Fantastic’s Class of ‘62 have just published their first novels: Zelazny’s This Immortal (Ace) and Disch’s The Genocides (Berkley). (Zelazny also took two of the first SFWA awards for 1965: for the novelette, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” in F&SF and the novella “He Who Shapes” in Amazing.)

  Tom Disch’s second novel (tentatively. White Fang Goes Dingo) will have been published by Ace before this Annual is out; and his short stories will have appeared in everything from Galaxy and Alfred Hitchcock to Mademoiselle, while he himself roams Europe, following the music festivals and writing between programs.

  * * * *

  THE ROACHES

  THOMAS M. DISCH

  Miss Marcia Kenwell had a perfect horror of cockroaches. It was an altogether different horror than the one which she felt, for instance, toward the color puce. Marcia Kenwell loathed the little things. She couldn’t see one without wanting to scream. Her revulsion was so extreme that she could not bear to crush them under the soles of her shoes. No, that would be too awful. She would run, instead, for the spray-can of Black Flag and inundate the little beast with poison until it ceased to move or got out of reach into one of the cracks where they all seemed to live. It was horrible, unspeakably horrible, to think of them nestling in the walls, under the linoleum, only waiting for the lights to be turned off, and then. . . . No, it was best not to think about it.

  Every week she looked through the Times hoping to find another apartment, but either the rents were prohibitive (this was Manhattan, and Marcia’s wage was a mere $62.50 a week, gross) or the building was obviously infested. She could always tell: there would be husks of dead roaches scattered about in the dust beneath the sink, stuck to the greasy backside of the stove, lining the out-of-reach cupboard shelves like the rice on the church steps after a wedding. She left such rooms in a passion of disgust, unable even to think till she reached her own apartment, where the air would be thick with the wholesome odors of Black Flag, Roach-It, and the toxic pastes that were spread on slices of potato and hidden in a hundred cracks which only she and the roaches knew about.

  At least, she thought, I keep my apartment clean. And truly the linoleum under the sink, the backside and underside of the stove, and the white contact paper lining her cupboards were immaculate. She could not understand how other people could let these matters get so entirely out-of-hand. They must be Puerto Ricans, she decided—and shivered again with horror, remembering that litter of empty husks, the filth and the disease.

  Such extreme antipathy toward insects—toward one particular insect—may seem excessive, but Marcia Kenwell was not really exceptional in this. There are many women, bachelor women like Marcia chiefly, who share this feeling, though one may hope, for sweet charity’s sake, that they escape Marcia’s peculiar fate.

  Marcia’s phobia was, as in most such cases, hereditary in origin. That is to say, she inherited it from her mother, who had a
morbid fear of anything that crawled or skittered or lived in tiny holes. Mice, frogs, snakes, worms, bugs—all could send Mrs. Kenwell into hysterics, and it would indeed have been a wonder if little Marcia had not taken after her. It was rather strange, though, that her fear had become so particular, and stranger still that it should particularly be cockroaches that captured her fancy, for Marcia had never seen a single cockroach, didn’t know what they were. (The Kenwells were a Minnesota family, and Minnesota families simply don’t have cockroaches.) In fact, the subject did not arise until Marcia was nineteen and setting out (armed with nothing but a high-school diploma and pluck, for she was not, you see, a very attractive girl) to conquer New York.

  On the day of her departure, her favorite and only surviving aunt came with her to the Greyhound terminal (her parents being deceased) and gave her this parting advice: “Watch out for the roaches, Marcia darling. New York City is full of cockroaches.” At that time (at almost any time really) Marcia hardly paid attention to her aunt, who had opposed the trip from the start and given a hundred or more reasons why Marcia had better not go, not till she was older at least.