Again, Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  Afterword

  My most precise recollection of grade-school catechism classes is the lesson that God created the human race in order that there might exist another, particular receptacle or receiver of his love. The memory lingers because, at the time, I took that concept of causality very much to heart.

  Through genetic manipulation, man participates in an especially ordered creative activity. It occurred to me that his motives, in the long run, might parallel that speculated divine motivation. As it is, domesticated animals are the objects of an often inordinate amount of human love and energy. This is logically even more true for mutated intelligent animals. Pets, after all, are easier to love than people.

  But "Test-Tube Creature" is a dangerous vision, and wasn't written to flatter animal lovers. The story is gently, even tenderly, told, but is tragic nevertheless, because the Everymen in it—the Toms and Marys—have failed to satisfy one another's human needs. Hillary succeeds, but only in an anthropomorphic sense. She is a substitute, a copy, for someone Tom can sincerely and happily love and, more importantly, who can return his love.

  The story, too, is an indirect sequel to Kate Wilhelm's "The Planners." I appreciate both her fine story and her quality of being a genuine lover of people.

  Introduction to

  AND THE SEA LIKE MIRRORS

  There is a vast difference between being an "unknown" writer, and being an "amateur" writer. It is hardly a subtle difference, yet most unpublished pencil-pushers find it impossible to understand the distinction. Not understanding is pernicious. It leads people who might otherwise be utterly happy as shoe clerks or computer programmers or dental technicians to wasted lives of unfulfilled dreams, pounding typewriters and scribbling in journals, and never ever finding the right words. The words that make a story or a screenplay or a play something special. So someone will want to buy it and stake an editorial reputation on it, and pay the highest possible compliment for the use of it: a check of money. That says, "You may be 'unknown,' but you are not 'amateur.' You have a talent, and your talent has created a thing of special properties that takes the reader somewhere he has never been before. I love it, and I want to publish it, and I want to be associated with it; I want to let some of the magic of this special thing rub off on me by my act of presenting it." That is the compliment, and it is hard-won. Failing to receive that compliment, thousands of amateurs every year send their amateur stories to magazines and anthologies, send their amateur plays to producers, send their amateur teleplays to agents and studios . . .and die when rejection follows. They have failed to perceive the disparity between amateur and unknown. They believe that being the latter is inherently noble, somehow umbilically linked with greatness, never realizing that if that linkage exists—if it exists, and not for a moment will I admit it does—but if it does, never understanding that being amateur severs the umbilicus. To be unknown is simply to be unknown. To be an amateur is to be tone-deaf, without rhythm, color-blind. It is as far from the state in which the compliment can be won as the chicken is from the eagle. Both are fowl, yet one will forever peck at the dirt, and the other will soar to mountaintops. They scrawl their dreams in journals, they pound on into the night behind typewriters, and they die when their dreams are rejected, never understanding that the amateur is doomed never to find the words.

  Greg Benford was, for a long time, unknown. He was never an amateur. He was unpublished, but he was ready. He wrote for fan magazines and he sent off manuscripts to the professional journals, but for a long time he was unpublished: he was unknown. But he was no amateur. He only needed the compliment to firm him up, to send him along, to put his dreams before readers.

  In 1965, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ran a poem by Doris Pitkin Buck (whose dangerous vision will appear in the third volume of this trilogy) in which the cases were made for the Univac and the unicorn, and it was hinted that proliferation of the former would spell doom for the latter. So intriguing was the idea, that the editor of F&SF initiated a contest for unpublished writers, soliciting stories in which both a Univac and a unicorn figured prominently.

  There were many entries. (I've been working on mine for seven years, and one day soon may complete it.) The winner of the contest was Greg Benford. At which point he was not only not an amateur, he was also not unknown.

  Since that time he has sold a number of stories and articles, and a novel, Deeper than the Darkness (Ace, 1970). (As a novelette, the story was both Hugo & Nebula finalist in 1970.) He regularly contributes a column on the science in science fiction to Amazing Stories.

  "And the Sea Like Mirrors" is a fine story. I love it, and I want to publish it, and I want to be associated with it; I want to let some of the magic of this special thing rub off on me by my act of presenting it.

  And having done so, all that remains is to present Mr. Gregory Benford.

  "I was born in a small town in southern Alabama in 1941. Parents were schoolteachers but my father was away during the War and in 1946 joined the Army as a career. Thus my twin brother and I were hauled to various exotic and chaotic parts of the world, including Japan, Germany, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma. The effects of all this on my psyche are unknown, but it may have been enough to send me over the deep end and into the morass of science fiction.

  "I suppose I was always more interested in the science in sf when I was a teenager; I'm probably one of the thousands who have been recruited to science & engineering by Heinlein's juveniles and a few other occasional books. At any rate I became interested in physics in high school, took a bachelors degree in it in 1963, moved to California and obtained my Masters in 1965 from the University of California. In 1967 I married Joan Abbe, of an old Boston family, and three months later (Nov) got my PhD from UC (La Jolla). There are a number of miscellaneous honors & stuff strewn along the path, though I don't think they mean a damn thing: Phi Beta Kappa, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, some scholarships.

  "At the moment I'm doing research (I'm a theoretical physicist) at the University of California and living in Laguna Beach.

  "I do a fair number of things. I surfed for years at La Jolla, have done some scuba diving (went on my second Caribbean jaunt last November), have some interest in ancient civilizations, travel a great deal (spent a good amount of time in a lot of European countries), fairly active politically, try to know as much about everything as possible, prefer trees and quiet and thus will probably become a lovable eccentric by the time I'm 40, love my wife, read everything.

  "I started writing a few stories in 1964 while a graduate student at La Jolla and won a short story contest in F&SF in 1965. Sold them 3 stories and quit to finish my thesis. I started a fanzine called Void with my brother (who is now an experimental physicist) when I was 14, and continued it with various coeditors (including Terry Carr and Ted White) until I was 21. I've written a lot of stuff for fanzines about sf, but didn't think it was worth writing the sort of thing that was being published until the recent resurgence in the field. I don't think of myself as a Writer, but as a guy who writes on the side. My life is oriented toward being creative, which is why I like to do research.

  "A good deal of the material in 'And the Sea Like Mirrors' is drawn from survival instruction I've had, although some of the things included are the subject of controversy (like drinking sea water) so they shouldn't be taken as the final word.

  "Hobbies: drinking wine, playing all racquet games, hiking, contemplating inanimate objects, mysticism, oriental religions, astrophysics."

  AND THE SEA LIKE MIRRORS

  Gregory Benford

  Warren wondered how long they had been drifting. Thirty-seven days, the regular cuts in the tree limb said. Rosa had checked each one with him. At noon each day they made the ritual slice with his worn pocket-knife, carefully memorizing each fresh gash as it was made, so they wouldn't confuse it with the others and think it was made the day before.

  "What ya lookin' at?" Rosa said, blinking out at him from beneath the low lean-to.

  "
Counting them," Warren said.

  "Thirty-seven," she said, and he knew from the sound of her voice that she didn't believe it either. Order, the beauty of number, structure—it was nothing out here. In all those days, how could they have gotten it right?

  One or two must have slipped by. Or in the days of delirium, hadn't he dreamed about sawing down the limb, forcing the days to pass, cutting until his knee slipped in the sweat and he fainted? He couldn't remember.

  "Go back to sleep," he said. "I'll be back in. Thought I heard something."

  She sat, listening to the hollow slap of waves against the bottom of the raft. There was only the murmur of the sea and an occasional rattling of metal as their rows of tin cans shifted on the deck. In a moment she lay down again and closed her dark eyes, shutting out the stark yellow of the tropical afternoon.

  Warren looked back at the limb lashed to the raft. Thirty-seven days since the Manamix went down. Thirty-seven intervals of blinding light, starvation, dread, thirst.

  There was a liquid rippling in the water and a deep thump against the raft. Rosa sat up. Warren gestured for silence and waited. The jumbled planks and logs of the raft creaked and worked against each other, and then the thump came again.

  They moved automatically to their positions. She squatted on a log near the edge, stripped off her white blouse and dipped it into the water. Warren brought out his stick, slotted the rubber strip through the end and braced a long crude arrow against the sling. The arrow was an inch-thick slat from the Manamix lifeboat, tapered slightly and with a long iron nail at its head.

  He slitted his eyes against the glare and looked out at the shallow troughs of the waves, trying to judge the pitch of the deck. The thumping came again. Warren was almost certain it was a Swarmer now, and not one of the large fish. There was something about the sound of their heads as they probed the underside of the raft, looking for a weakness . . .

  Suddenly a ripple caught his attention. Rosa was rhythmically weaving the blouse through the water, and past her scrawny breasts he could see the sea warp and lift slightly with new currents that broke the surface.

  That was their tactical error, the one they always made. Instinct told them to look first, gauge the target. Now the Swarmer was gliding back into the blue shadows under the raft, flipping over and coming around for the final pass. Warren tensed, sighted down the arrow.

  Rosa must have seen the form an instant earlier. She flicked the rag out with a quick jerk and the Swarmer put on a last, frantic burst of speed to: catch it.

  "Haeee!" Rosa screamed. His snout broke water, long thin mouth leering up, pearl white eyes focused on infinity.

  Warren let go the arrow and followed it automatically, scrabbling forward on all fours. The Swarmer had taken it under his gills, the nail buried deep in folds of slick green skin.

  Rosa snatched at the arrow's line. "Slow!" he said, lowering his chest-into the water. "Don't pull it out."

  The arrow was enough to stun the Swarmer, but that was all. In a moment he would thrash free of the line. Warren hung partly over the side of the raft and stretched out. He caught a ventral fin in one hand, then another. The Swarmer moved fitfully. Warren swung himself around, the wood cutting into his hip, and levered the body partly onto the raft.

  Rosa took a fin and pulled the Swarmer up, flipped it over onto its side and used a foot to roll it away from the water. It began to arch its back, twisting to gain leverage for a push over the side. Its eyes bulged and the thin gills rasped audibly as they flared open and closed.

  "Hurry!" Rosa shouted. Warren had his knife out and was weaving over the Swarmer, waiting for the right angle of attack. It slid away from him, toward the water. As it turned the knife came down, slipping into the soft tissues of the side and riding up against the spine. Warren slammed it down the length of the body, feeling the Swarmer convulse in an agony of pain. Then it straightened, gave a slight shiver and was dead.

  Rosa was moaning rhythmically, holding it by a fin. Warren stepped back, keeping his footing against the swell, and nudged her.

  "Get into the shelter," he said.

  She looked up at him blankly, paused and then scuttled under the plywood sheet that formed the roof of the lean-to. He looked after her with mild disgust.

  It was the same as the last three times they'd killed one, but this time she seemed more distant and harder to reach. It was as though the Swarmers threw her back into an earlier stage of life, like a child. She could only tolerate the kill if it was part of a ritual, an elaborate program of actions that, if perfectly followed, enabled her to completely shut out the reality of the event.

  Fluids were beginning to drain out of the Swarmer as it rocked on the deck. Warren cursed himself for his slowness and fetched the tin cans. He propped the Swarmer against a log, where the planking of the dismantled lifeboat joined the log and made a hollow. He jammed the cans against its body there, where most of the juices were dripping out, and braced the body against the swaying of the raft.

  The green skin was slick, like a seal's. The dorsal and ventral fins were sagging now, in death, but they helped guide the Swarmer through the water with incredible swiftness. In almost every detail it was like an ordinary fish. A little outsized, perhaps, almost four feet long.

  The head gave it away. It didn't taper and slant forward, but bulged with a large brain case. It carried the heavy bone forehead like a dolphin, and its face had the curiously squeezed look of some of the larger fish. But the thin mouth, large eyes and jutting jaw were alien. Earth had never evolved this particular combination.

  "Look!" Rosa called. Warren stared out into the hills and valleys of water in motion, following her gesture. A gray cylinder floated ten yards from the raft.

  The Swarmer was dribbling out the last drops from its lymphatic glands, and Warren knew that to get more would take both of them, hacking and sawing their way through the muscular hide, pressing the flesh for fluid. It wasn't worth the trouble of forcing Rosa into cooperation.

  He secured the cans and rolled the Swarmer over the side. Spray splashed into his face. His attention was focused on the cylinder and he did the job routinely for what seemed like the thousandth time, although it probably was somewhere in the twenties. Almost one for every day, he thought.

  "Pull it in," he ordered, moving back to the center of the raft. Rosa peered out at him from her shelter, uncomprehending.

  He snorted in frustration. Perhaps he should slap her into awareness, like the time before. But the cylinder was drifting slowly away.

  He moved gracefully to the tree limb and started unlashing it. His fingers were puffy from constant contact with water and the strips of bark slipped out of them.

  In a moment Warren had it free and was walking at a crouch toward the raft edge nearest the cylinder. He noted automatically that no slight ripples disturbed the surface, no green shapes flitted in the deeps below.

  It looked safe, just like the times before. If the Skimmers were laying a trap for him, they were taking their time about springing it.

  He stopped a foot short of the edge and balanced himself against the swell. The gray tube bobbed sluggishly in the trough of a wave and drifted away a bit more.

  Warren breathed deeply, curled his toes reflexively for balance, and leaned against the pitch of the deck, extending his arms out until his muscles popped. The limb was short at least a yard. He couldn't reach the tube.

  He swayed back, relaxing, and tried again.

  Still short. And the gap had widened by a foot.

  Warren closed his eyes against the biting afternoon glare and felt his leg muscles weaken. He mustn't allow himself to get depressed.

  If he let go, just once, he would be sucked into the same endless caverns Rosa was wandering. No, he had to hold on.

  Warren turned and walked back to the shelter. He realized now how badly he'd wanted that tube, how much he'd looked forward to it.

  He might have been able to understand this one. The second message had
been a real improvement over the first. There had even been three English words in that one. So this third . . .

  "Ah! Ah!" Rosa grunted, nudging him. She gestured frantically, clawing the air.

  Warren jerked his head around and searched where the tube had been. A dark blue form leaped out of the water near it. It was a little larger than a Swarmer and it skipped lightly over the greenish foam of a wave.

  Before Warren could move or even recognize the Skimmer, it ploughed into the water near the tube and submerged. An instant later it shot out again in an explosion of spray, caught the tube and threw it into the air with a smooth jerk of its head.

  Warren brought the limb around, but the Skimmer had turned with startling abruptness and was speeding away. It disappeared into the slope of a wave like green marble and thrashed through. In a moment it was lost in the endlessly changing topography of the southern Pacific.

  Rosa gave a dazed cry, but Warren ignored her and scrambled to the edge of the raft. The tube was only a few yards away and he quickly fished it in, noting in the back of his mind that the woman was cowering in the shelter, mumbling to herself.