"Go on!" I cried. "Continue!"
"No, not now," she said, lowering her head into her hands. "I'm an old woman, and tired. Come back again tomorrow."
So I went away, and returned again the next day.
But it was even more dangerous than usual to pass through the streets of the Jewish quarter. The Jewish garments that kept Jewish knives away from me now invited attack not only from the Greeks, but from the Roman soldiers in Vespasian's army, now commanded by the general's son, Titus, since the father had become our new emperor. They had defeated the Jews in Jerusalem, but not before many a good Roman had lost his life, and the sight of a Jew could make a soldier draw his sword, particularly if the soldier was drunk. Titus was young, and the troops did not fear him as they did his father.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I was (as I thought) safely inside the filthy little hole where Old Miriam lived, and sat down to wet my ink and unroll my scroll.
It was then that a great pounding at the door destroyed any feeling of safety I might have had, and a loud, drunken voice shouted out in Latin, "Open the door, you filthy Jew bastard! We know you're in there!"
They must have followed me, I realized with horror.
"If you won't open the door," came another brutal voice, "we'll break it in!"
Calmly Miriam stepped toward the door.
"Wait!" I shouted, and drew my sword.
But as the soldiers burst in she pushed between me and them, saying scornfully, "How many times shall my Jesus and I be betrayed? How can they hurt us? Are we not immortal spirits?" And a moment later my chance to fight had passed and we were both dragged roughly into the street and bound.
Have you ever seen a man nailed to a stake? The crowd cares not how that man has lived, only how he dies, so that the most vicious, brutal, stupid murderer can win the favor of the mob if only he can say something defiant or simply keep silent and not cry out when the nails go through his wrists. Miriam died well, even after torture. Though her eyes had been put out with hot irons, still she said to the man who drove the nails, "It is not I, but you who are the prisoner."
As for me, I thought at first to do honor to Miriam's Jesus by saying something worthy of a gentleman, when my time came.
But instead I . . .
Instead I . . .
Instead I screamed and pleaded and wept and begged and shouted, as the nails went through my flesh and the crowd of drunken Romans and Greeks cheered. "It's all a mistake! I'm not a Jew! I'm not a Christian! I'm an Egyptian and a Roman citizen! No! No! Don't! For God's sake don't do it!"
Soon I could no longer form words, but only screams, like an animal in labor, but nobody listened to me. They only laughed at me, and drank, and threw empty wine jugs at me.
And finally, with a gesture of contempt, one of the soldiers buried his spear in my belly.
To be pierced! To be pierced! Oh, my God, have you any idea what it feels like to be pierced? Yet there's some good in it. There's some good. Because it is a pain that brings release from pain, one big pain that ends all the little ones.
I stood, after a while, on a vast empty plain beneath a gray, overcast sky. I was naked, and it was cold. Some distance ahead of me was a crossroads, with paths that led away from it in all directions like strands in a gigantic spiderweb. There were no trees, no grassy areas, no hills or mountains or streams or bodies of water; just bare dust in all directions as far as the eye could see.
But wait. There was something.
A lone figure was walking slowly toward me from the opposite side of the crossroads. As the figure drew closer I could see that it had wings on its back, and then, a moment later, I could make out that it had a sword in one hand and a silver cup in the other. It had long dark hair, but I could not tell for sure whether it was a man or a woman. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps neither.
It was my angel.
"Drink," said the angel, stopping and holding out the cup to me.
"First tell me, Angel, what's in the cup!"
"Forgetfulness."
"There's nothing I want to forget," I said quickly.
The angel smiled. "Not even what you have done?"
I thought a moment. "No," I answered, but this time with hesitation.
"Not even what was done to you?"
"No."
"Not even the pain?"
I paused. Being pierced. If I could forget that . . .
"You must forget all or nothing," said the angel, apparently reading my thoughts.
So. Then what is "being-pierced," after all? Every day dead things enter my mouth and pass through my body and out my asshole. In every life my spirit pierces a new body and passes through it, coming out the other side.
"Don't you understand?" said the angel. "I am only trying to protect you."
"From what?"
"From the knowledge of good and evil. Only gods and angels can stand to know what evil there is in the best of earthly things. For you it is a forbidden fruit, so drink. Drink and forget."
I needed time to think. Stalling, I asked, "Where are we?"
"This is the land of Woomtoom, beyond time and outside space. All these paths lead back into the world, at different points in history."
"There seem to be thousands of them," I said.
"But all are for your feet and yours alone," said the angel. "Now drink, and return to your body."
"No," I said softly.
"So be it," said the angel, pouring out the cup in the dust at his feet. I stepped forward and the angel raised his sword.
"You cannot return now," said the winged being. "You must remain here. You can never return to the world."
But then I remembered again that according to the Bible it was possible to wrestle with angels, and win! I pretended to lunge forward, and the angel's sword swung downward toward me, but at the last possible split-second I sidestepped and avoided the sword at the same time as I leaned close and grabbed the angel's arm. To his intense amazement, I threw him, with a simple Judo spring-hip throw, then threw myself onto him from the rear, in spite of his wildly thrashing wings. The sword flew harmlessly from his hand and skittered into the dust well out of arm's reach, while I leaned in between his two wings, passed my right arm around his neck and snapped the hand back toward me so that it grasped my left arm just above the elbow. Then I placed the palm of my left hand against the back of the angel's head, pressing forward with it while pulling back with the other.
"Give up?" I demanded.
The angel only struggled all the harder.
I tightened the choke hold.
"What do you say now?" I asked coldly.
There was no answer, only more thrashing and writhing. I squeezed harder, and the struggling grew weaker and finally ceased. I held the choke a little longer, just to make sure, then let go. The angel rolled over in the dust, completely limp.
I listened for his heartbeat, felt for his pulse.
There was nothing. The angel was dead.
I picked up the sword and the empty cup and, choosing a direction at random, began walking.
I opened my eyes and looked up at the Hindu hypnograph on the lower face of the upper bunk above me. Nearby the tape spun uselessly in my tape recorder. Flap flap flap flap.
I sat up and turned the machine off.
By the clock only about an hour had passed. It seemed more like two thousand years.
I was still pretty high, but I knew, somehow, that the peak of the "trip" had passed. I got dressed and went downstairs.
The mail had come. It was lying next to the front door, under the mail slot. I picked it up and glanced over it. There were two form letters, one from the John Birch Society and one from the Peace and Freedom Party. They both wanted me to join their organizations. Each wanted my help in fighting the other.
I took a coin from my pocket and looked at it for a while, smiling to myself.
Then I flipped it.
Afterword
I have not written much science fiction in the
last few years, though the little I have written has been well-received. The reason for this is simple. In spite of regularly repeated claims that the science fiction field enjoys a freedom of thought and speech greater than that found in any other field, my own experience has been that this boasted freedom is a pure illusion. In spite of the courageous efforts of such pioneers as Avram Davidson, Damon Knight, Phil Dick and Judith Merril, not one of my stories has reached print without either minor or major deletions designed to mollify the bluenoses.
There is a constant cry from editorial circles for new ideas and new writing approaches, but when this demand is answered by stories which dare to indicate that the sexual morality or the political system we now enjoy may not last forever, or that even today there may be a rather large leap from where things are to where they officially are said to be, the call for "something new" is instantly replaced by calculations of what middle-western high-school librarians might consider proper. I love the science fiction field. I have loved it ever since childhood, but it seems to me that science fiction only rarely does more than scratch the surface of its potential, so long as it remains contained within the boundaries imposed by such calculations, so, even though, or perhaps because, I love the genre so well, I have turned my hand to other fields for the most part.
It is possible that, had not Harlan dared to break through the Middle-westernlibrarian Barrier, I would never have written another science fiction story. His anthology, Dangerous Visions, is the first ray of real hope I have seen in this country. One of the standard cornball plots in the field is the one where one man saves the whole universe. I used the plot once, in Eight O'Clock in the Morning, but I never really believed in it until now. It may well turn out that one man, Harlan Ellison, actually will save the dying universe of science fiction writing.
In literature there is only one unforgivable sin, and that is not the portrayal of sex or violence or unpopular religious and philosophical ideas. The one unforgivable sin is boredom. And science fiction, in recent years, has become boring. There have been signs of life in England, but up until Dangerous Visions the U.S. has gradually been sinking into the mud. Made-up jargon has passed for technology, allowing the old entrenched fan to feel smug while making the story almost impossible for the new reader to understand. Story after story has revolved around phony "plants" of unimportant or incorrect tidbits of science. Story after story has marched the same old WASP engineer paperdoll through the same old story lines, most of which were very good when they were used by H. G. Wells, but which are now showing signs of wear.
"Time Travel for Pedestrians" is a story I have had in my head for several years, ever since some experiences with LSD and numerous other drugs that showed me, among other things, how limited my views and the views of other SF writers were. When, at the annual science fiction convention in Oakland, Harlan mentioned that he was looking for stories for a second volume of Dangerous Visions, I instantly left the convention, went home and wrote "Time Travel" at one sitting, in an ecstasy of freedom and creative delight. I have been off drugs for over a year now, but in writing this story I got zonked out of my mind all over again. I still feel pretty high now, as I write this.
But what I'm high on is hope, the hope that now that Harlan has broken the ice we'll see some real fireworks again in the field . . .we'll see some controversy, some brilliance, some writing that has a real sense of life, some real guts and glory. I like Star Trek a lot, but I can't see tying down magazine and book science fiction to what could easily be broadcast over family TV. Even Star Trek, which feeds off ideas tried and proven in the magazine field, will eventually go stale unless there is a massive influx of new approaches and ideas in the field as a whole. Like, it's no use picking a blank mind.
But now I'm high on hope, fellow fans.
Zonked out of my mind.
Please, baby, don't bring me down.
Introduction to
CHRIST, OLD STUDENT IN A NEW SCHOOL
Ladies and gentlemen, a man who needs no introduction . . .
Probably no other writer in this book could I get away with introducing in that way. But who in the civilized, book-reading world doesn't know the name Ray Bradbury? When the time came to write a few words to preface Ray, I suddenly was struck with the impossibility of the act. There have been whole treatises written on Bradbury, his poetic images, his humanity, his blue period, his chrome period . . .who the hell was I to write about him?
Well, I'm a Bradbury fan, and that's not bad for openers. Not only because it indicates an affection for the man and his work that stretches back over twenty-one years to that first reading of "Pillar of Fire" in a copy of August Derleth's excellent The Other Side of the Moon anthology I'd pilfered from the Cleveland Heights High School library, but because too many chuckleheads have taken to balming their own mingey little egos by mumbling Bradbury ain't as good as we thought he was. I sneer at them; may the milk of their mothers turn to yogurt; may all their children be harelipped; may they (in the words of an ancient Yiddish curse) be so poor they come to me for a loan and may I be so poor I haven't got it!
Ray Bradbury is very probably better than we ever imagined him to be in our wildest promotion of him as the first sf writer to escape the ghetto and win approbation from such as Isherwood, Wilder, Fadiman, Algren, Gilbert Highet, Graham Greene, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffault and Bertrand Russell, for God's sake!
Let's face it, fellow sf readers, we've been living off Ray Bradbury's success for twenty years. Every time we try to hype some non-believer into accepting sf and fantasy as legitimate literature, we refer him or her to the works of Ray Bradbury. Who the hell else have we produced who has approached the level of Bradbury for general acceptance? I mean, there's a Viking Portable Library edition of RAY BRADBURY. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov are well-known and much-beloved, but if you go out on the street and buttonhole the average shmendrik, and ask him to name a dozen famous American writers, if he isn't a dullard who'd name Erich Segal and Leon Uris and Jacqueline Whatshername, he'll rattle off Hemingway, Steinbeck, Mickey Spillane, maybe Faulkner, and very probably Bradbury. That's a load of ego-boost for all of us, and it's about time someone said it. When we do the conversion bit with scoffers, we whirl them over to the meager sf racks in most bookstores and we may find no Delany, no Lafferty, no Knight or Disch or Dickson, but by God we always find The Martian Chronicles.
And we say, "Here try this. You'll love it." And the chances are we've handed the reluctant one "Small Assassin" or "Mars is Heaven!" or "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" or Fahrenheit 451 or "I Sing the Body Electric" or "The Veldt" or "The Long Rain" or "A Sound of Thunder" or "The Jar" or . . .jeezus, once you get started it's impossible to stop remembering all those great moments you had from all those fine Bradbury stories, and I don't just mean excitement like seeing "The Kilimanjaro Machine" in Life or seeing "The Jar" done so it scared the piss out of you on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. I mean those private blessed moments when you lay up on your back under a tree or on a sofa or down on the floor, and started reading something that began, "It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man."
I mean come on, all you smartass literary cynics who make points off other men's careers, can you ever really forget that thing that called to the foghorn from the sea? Can you really forget Uncle Einar? Can you put out of your mind all the black folk leaving for Mars, years before the black folk started telling you they wanted out? Can you forget Parkhill in "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright" doing target practice in one of the dead Martian cities, "shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers"? There aren't many guys in our game who've given us so many treasurable memories.
And the really lovely thing about Bradbury is that he started out a fan, a runny-nosed, hungry-to-make-it fan like so many of us. Hung up on Lovecraft and Burroughs and Poe and Weird Tales and Walt Disney and Hemingway and Saroyan and Dickens and Malory's Morte d'Arthur, homage to
all of whom he has paid in his fictions. But he had it, he had that extra spark that fired him, and he made it; big enough and good enough and forever enough that now we take him a bit too much for granted.
We see The Illustrated Man made into a not-too-distinguished film, and Fahrenheit 451 and the not-yet-released Picasso Summer and maybe even some day (if they lick the script) The Martian Chronicles, and it becomes very chic to dismiss Ray Bradbury as though he were a literary snail like Segal. Well, not here, my friends. Here, Ray Bradbury gets his praise, because . . .well, it's my book in large part, and twice I've been in Bradbury's company where great things happened, and anybody wants to put down the author of "Henry IX" (which, under the title "A Final Sceptre, a Lasting Crown" I tried to buy for DV), well they got to fight me first. And I'm mean.
Again, Dangerous Visions Page 27