Again, Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  "Coming back to today's dream, Vicki. The dream you feel Quentin originated and passed along to you. What's your thought as to why Quentin would bring me on the scene dressed in a loincloth?"

  "Nothing to it! You're the creator, he's the copycat and snitcher! The creative one's the potent one, right! The source of all the flow! The male in the loincloth's the walking epitome of potency, whereas the snotnose plagiarist is a kid in kid's sissy clothes who can do nothing with his puny little pencil but sit there while the real man talks and take impotent notes! It's so plain, no wonder the dumdum had to jump me and give me a working over! On the assumption that this humiliating picture was sent out by me, not you, of course."

  "I see."

  "Another thing I've been dying to ask you, Mr. Rengs. How come you know so much about synovial fluid?"

  I bit my tongue hard, at precisely the point where it was still sore from my biting it some days before.

  "Do I?"

  "Plenty. See, the other afternoon Ivar and I were chatting for a minute, and when I remarked about his cracking his knuckles so much he said it had something to do with synovial fluid. He said you'd explained the whole thing to him, that it has mucinlike ingredients, it's secreted by the synovial linings of bursae, articulations, and tendon sheaths. Well, I give you my word, that hit me hard. When I was an undergraduate I was set on being a doctor so I took the pre-med course, a lot of classes in physiology and such, so I know all about synovial fluid, but I wondered how a nonscientist would know so much. Where did you pick up all this technical information, Mr. Rengs?"

  "Here and there, I guess. Anybody who's a writer browses a lot."

  "You might know the name of the fluid, yes. But all that detailed information about bursae and articulations and mucin? It just doesn't figure, bright as a man like you must be."

  "Vicki, I once was friendly with the flamenco guitarist Segovia. He was a pre-med student before he gave up science in favor of his first love, the guitar. We spent many evenings together, talking about this and that, he gave me a lot of medical information that's stuck in my mind. Forgive me, it's been stimulating talking to you but I must go now, lecture to prepare—"

  "You going to lecture any more on the statistical distribution of broken bones in Hemingway? I'd sure like to hear you talk about that."

  "No, I've about covered that, what I'm tackling next is a more fluid subject, the incidence of ptomaine in the 19th-century literature of the Iberian Peninsula."

  "Ho. Wowie. Now that's irrevocably wild, Mr. Rengs. I had a dream way back there about ptomaine and Spain, one of my first dreams, if you don't believe me ask Dr. Wolands to look it up in the records. If you needed any more proof about the traffic between you and me and its direction—"

  "Yes. Goodbye, Vicki."

  "See you around, Mr. Rengs."

  "Right. I'll be the one wearing the loincloth."

  I'm sorry to be breaking a prime rule of the writing game. Everybody knows about the so-called obligatory scene. If you've been building to a confrontation, laid the groundwork for a showdown, you're obliged, it's said, to carry through. This is known as going from premise to payoff. Now, in this REMMY story I've been telling, so full of rapid eye movements, there are certainly the seeds of one more encounter between Victoria Paylow and myself, a bang-up, all-out, full-bodied encounter in which all foreshadowed can come to, well, pass. The encounter never took place, I'm obliged to report, and that's the extent of my obligation. It makes no difference how rapidly you're eyeing me. This is the point where make-believe and the undoctored particulars part company. On the stage, for example, you have to stick with your premises to the neatly packaged end. In real life, you can vacate any premises any time you want. This is the great advantage of actuality over art, and why many people prefer it. All I'm saying is, being more interested in guarding my hide than weaving a plot, I was under no obligation to come face to face with Victoria Paylow again, and didn't.

  There was one more phone call, however. The voltage flow being, I hardly have to note, from Vicki to me. I mean, she was the one who placed the call, and made the major waves, I assume of the alpha order; arousing much REM in me.

  "Mr. Rengs, I just wanted to tell you I got a new guitar, the Sleep Project paid for it, I'd love to show it to you."

  "Vicki, you're half my age."

  "So? Does that make me half your weight? Height? Body heat? Itch?"

  "It makes me twice as old as you."

  "I'm for all that separates the men from the boys. So I can get to the men without stepping around the boys and wasting valuable time."

  "Don't you care about the generation gap?"

  "I care about people who know how to hop it. Neither party has to travel the whole distance. I could meet you halfway. Or at any bar you care to name. For that matter, at your apartment. Say in about 15 minutes."

  "You're a fluid always ready to call a cab."

  "A good ossicle's hard to find. It's worth some road work."

  Behind every successful man, we're told, there has to be a woman. Yes, but a miniskirted graduate student of the incantatory arts with a guitar slung over her shoulder? Robert Graves may be right about the fount of all poetry being the primal Mother-Mate-Mistress-Muse, the chesty White Goddess fancied up with asps and corn shucks. But must she be putting all the words, every last one, in our mouths? What are we, then, sending stations, echo chambers?

  I had a wobbly picture of Vicki and myself lying side by side, togethered in bliss, her unconscious dictating all my books to my unconscious. I thought about her, in some ESP-oriented future, having legal claim to my royalties. Suing me. For plagiarism.

  "Vicki, you may be a fluid, but you're acting like several petrified forests on the move. Which, I'll make no bones about it, petrifies me. Which, I don't have to point out to your sharp mind, is not a good state for your purposes. My calcifications and your liquefactions, I'm afraid, are destined to remain forever unjoined. That's about the hard and the soft of it."

  "You're a flinty man, Mr. Rengs. That's what I like about you."

  "You're the sort of lymphy girl I vastly admire, Vicki. At a distance."

  "A gap?"

  "Agape."

  "I hear The Omen's recording a new number Ivar just wrote, something called, Ptomaine in Spain Falls Rainly in the Plains. Now, Jesus, Peter, Paul, and Mary, doesn't that prove—"

  "My cup runneth over. With a grateful dead of migraines, a loving spoonful of cold sweats, a holding company of grand-mal seizures. I wish you and your whole generation well, and godspeed, without traffic jams. Goodbye, Vicki."

  Leopard skin. Ho. Syllogism serenade sweatshirt. Hm.

  Afterword

  I haven't paid much attention to science fiction but the last time I thought about it, 11 43 P. M., October 29, 1948,1 didn't think much of it.

  It was a particularly smoggy day in Los Angeles. I wasn't in Los Angeles, I was in Greenwich Village reading a self-complacent report in the Herald-Trib on Angelenos about to breathe their last and observing with no complacency whatsoever that my window sills, desk, typewriter, manuscripts, and therefore, by logical inference, my lungs, were beady with soot.

  I remember what thoughts went through my head. That the poisoning of air, earth and all living creatures was not an invention of the writers of sf. That this infestation of a whole planet, quite beyond the wildest imaginings of sf writers, had been brought about altogether absentmindedly, as the merest byproduct, by the scientists. That science, in other words, turned out much better fiction than sf ever could.

  That was when I stopped thinking about sf and began to pay attention to science. As a writer of non-sf fiction I know how to go to the source.

  I saw the bad joke being staged when, on the occasion of our first landing on the moon, the "experts" asked to telecomment on the event were two deans of sf. They spoke emotionally, while, I imagine, the entire scientific community snickered, about how they had both prefigured this moon voyaging in their sf novels.
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  All they had prefigured was the physical displacement of human beings from earth to the moon, which meant that they had prefigured nothing. Not the diversionary nature of the gala, to take our minds off the unsatisfactory results of the displacement of U. S. citizens to Vietnam. Not the vomitous showbizz inanity. Not the PR milking of the solemn moment by Tacky Dick, the everybody-wants-to-get-into-the-act circus atmosphere. (Nixon had his PR reasons, of course. He badly needed to have his oily image associated with some real estate in the cosmos on which there was no static-making and bolixing Ho.)

  Not, certainly, the later commercial exploitation of the astronaut program, which began to suggest that the whole NASA spending spree was by way of giving enough big-science panache to Scott Carpenter so he could do all those commercials for Standard Oil pushing their fake F-310 gasoline additive as the surefire cure for air pollution, lumbago, and, possibly, impotence.

  The sf deans may have thought science had vindicated them but all it had done was show up the "avant-garde" fictioneers about science for the stragglers behind reality they always are. I continued with profit to go on not thinking about sf.

  This is by way of getting it straight that the two stories presented here are not sf. They are fiction, to be sure, about matters that embrace certain scientific considerations, but they are not sf, whose premise is that science embraces all matters and that therefore any sf work, which is about nothing but science or the superficialities of science deftly skimmed off, is by definition about everything. Sf is in the nature of things about things, sometimes disguised as people. A very different kind of fiction becomes necessary when you're interested in people not reduced to things.

  These stories should not be taken as anything more than finger exercises. It's sometimes relaxing and restorative for writers to do a story with the little finger after long periods of working with both fists. I can tell you from long experience that it's hard, and very tiring, to do any extended typing with both hands balled into fists. It results, among other things, in a lot of misspellings.

  These stories are in a minor, though I would hope not altogether trivial, key. One thing they are trying to say is that you can't get any fiction of consequence out of science unless you gain enough elevation over the subject to see that science is not coterminous with the human condition, however much its increasingly demonic and mindless energies seem nowadays to be devoted to curing that condition through the process of elimination. Which, to be sure, would eliminate science, too. But it takes somebody more or other than a scientist or sf writer to see that. It also requires a science-freed eye to see how plain fucking boring much of science is, a concept foreign to both scientists and sf writers.

  "The Bisquit Position" has to do with the reactions of a handsome Alaskan malamute to napalm—not the concept of napalm, the experience. Napalm is a direct product of science, again, one the sf people didn't manage to dream up in the head before the scientists got it sizzling in, and on, the flesh. The attitude of a goodlooking, intelligent dog to the experience of napalm, not the concept of it, does, I contend, go somewhat beyond the purlieus of sf, particularly since the sf people, being so busy writing their highly imaginative TV scripts for "Lost in Space" and "Star Trek," seldom get around to expressing much of an attitude toward napalm.

  This is a story much more about Vietnam, even, in the end, about human attitudes toward meat both human and animal, than about napalm and, therefore, science. Sf writers don't seem to be notably up in arms about the U. S.-stagemanaged bestialities in Vietnam. They don't seem to get into politics much at all.

  You'll never get science to stir up any real social conscience in scientists, they're much too busy smashing society and its environs under various military-industrial-complex contracts. But if science doesn't generate some pretty hot politics in sf writers they're clearly cases of tails wagging dogs.

  That rule can be broadened. If consciousness in general doesn't bring out some damned booming politics in writers in general, especially in these deadend times, the proof is in that said writers are unconscious.

  "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements," on the other hand, is a facetious, though perhaps not entirely beside the point, treatment of the thesis that rock lyricists, who put themselves forth as the free-est minds and souls, really dictate their lyrics to each other. The medium through which the dictation takes place (in this case, anyhow) is ESP during a period of REM, or deep-sleep dreaming, for both parties, which does put us in the realm of science of a sort. (In other more frequent cases the medium for the dictation is plagiarism, which can account for some very rapid eye movements indeed.)

  Somewhat below all this horseplay I am concerned, I think, with the ways in which officious parties of various sorts are now beginning to monitor our dreams, having run out of daylight activities to break and enter. The monitoring devices, again, are derived from the new sciences of eavesdropping and peeepingtometry, so I suppose for this reason too we might say the story at least brushes the science world, before recoiling in utter disgust.

  But the heroine of this story is both prescient and indifferent to science, having at her disposal means of reaching into other people's heads, particularly male ones, that came into being long before the wheel. She is, of course, none other than Robert Graves' White Goddess, whom I have taken the liberty of dressing in see-through blouse and tie-dyed bell-bottoms.

  One of the most discouraging things about scientists—as about the sf writers who dog them around hoping to catch a dropped idea—is that they've so completely lost sight of the W. G. who inspires us all as to imagine they themselves are responsible for their fancy and fevered imaginings. Now you know and I know it just doesn't work that way. I'm not giving you the dismal cliche about behind every successful man stands a woman. I don't know what self-respecting woman would be caught dead behind the scientists and sf writers of today. But some dire presence, some hag form of the proud old Muse, one of the Gorgons, Medusa, say, maybe all three Furies, has got to be tickling these people from behind. They just couldn't be the unassisted authors of their dread works. Nor can I see why they'd claim to be. If I had anything to do with work like that I'd sure want to claim some collaboration.

  I suppose we can't blame the scientists too much for this blind spot; they're too busy with their military contracts to look upward or backward, let alone inward. But sf writers are definitely to be faulted for such oversight. The Pale but Potent Lady, Graves has made very clear, inspires all art, for those who can open themselves to the communion. It's the sf writers' blindness to this Faded Femme Fatale, inherited from the scientists they so venerate and panhandle from, that prevents their work from being inspired. The droppings from science may give a writer thin formulas to play with; the electric emanations of the Unpushy Muse might give him fervor.

  Orwell's 1984 is taken by many to be a classic work of sf. The one thing we know for sure about 1984, whatever else in it may hold your masochistic interest, is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the year 1984 we'll all too soon be encountering.

  Orwell—and Bradbury after him—could extrapolate into the future no horrors more shivery than thought control and book-burning. We know now that thought has less and less to be controlled because it is being less and less engaged in. As for books, they won't have to be burned. Right now unsold paperbacks by the millions are being sold to road contractors to be used as fill under freeways.

  The way to get rid of troublemaking printed matter is simply to make more and more narcolepsis-producing films, up to the point at which all the image-makers and imager-consumers will sleepwalk to the polls to elect Marshall McLuhan president by acclamation.

  Repression is not in the future so much as more and more celluloid. Why scare people with horror stories about books being burned? Pretty soon you're not going to be able to give them away.

  I have somewhat arbitrarily given this brace of stories the overall title of "Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations" because I think science is workin
g very hard to make for us a world of collectivized dreaming and stepped-up missionary work—in other lands and on the home front, too—with updated weapons of instant cookery. Thanks to science, and the aura of untouchability given to it by sf, they'll be programmatically charcoaling our outsides (in the name of making the world safe for the ants, or some up-and-coming virus) while systematically trespassing on our insides (in the name of data collection, census taking, keeping the computers well-fed). This, or something very like it, is what capitalism offers us as it enters its amuck, apocalyptic phase.

  Science has from the beginning-been what it most spectacularly is now, the handmaiden of capitalism. Sf has all along been the handmaiden of, as well as the parasite on, science. This is a treason to the profession of writing, which in its serious forms can be a handmaiden of nothing but disdain for, and assault upon, that-which-is.

  They will, of course, improve their dream monitoring in order to make their cremations more strategic. With the technical assistance of the for-anybody's-hire scientists. And the gleeful sidelines cheers of their sf votaries.