Again, Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  You want your juices to dry up in its heat, your skin to pop with blisters, you want me to draw taut your spinal cord with expectancy's arrow aimed at your heart.

  "Well, can I help it if—It's not my fault you know."

  Coercion is rationalized so that responsibility may be disclaimed.

  "It burns! Ay, tú, it burns."

  Though still, Elsbeth sweats. Outside snow falls. The only sound is the crackling of the fire. At the other end of the room where shadows move along the wall, Jarcha paces and turns. They honor the invisible bars keeping them apart, for they have learned that in due time their cages open. Some nights one cage, but not the other. Other nights nothing happens, each remains caged. Only once have they found themselves with no bars to constrain their freedom.

  Elsbeth starts slapping the dagger blade against her naked thigh. Jarcha stops to consider her actions. The flames make his eyes shine. Elsbeth steps from behind her desk, then takes another step. Her cage has opened. Her nipples sting. Jarcha's nostrils flare. Warm odors of flesh have stirred from folds of shadow. Elsbeth has squatted at the fireplace. She plays at cutting the flames with the dagger.

  "Today the orders came. By spring Oberweiler will have ceased to exist."

  "What will you do then to—"

  "The orders are precise. Nothing and no one remains."

  "And you?"

  "No doubt some higher-up has his orders. But—that seems the way of the world. All things come to an end."

  "The way of the world is to deceive. Its illusions make us believe we guide our own destinies. That is the great trick. To make us believe that when in fact there's always something higher manipulating the strings."

  Elsbeth turns her face from the fire. "The one thing that has come to bore me most, you are given to platitudes."

  "There lies the comic element. Each puppet-master concentrates so intently on manipulating his dolls that he never realizes the strings making him function."

  Elsbeth stands. Jarcha comes toward her, then stops. They seem bewildered, momentarily, and nervous. Then they sense that his cage has opened.

  "You can't let it end like this."

  "It always does, tú, it always does."

  There he lies, ensconced in death's far country. He has the bad habit of the condemned: conceiving himself in plurality. Such is the stuff of loneliness and dull conversation.

  "Well, now our moment of truth comes, eh?"

  A bit of pedantry you picked up in Spain that means nothing.

  "But we do know what arbitrary means, eh, we know that much. Remember Lisa? Perucho? For no better reason than she was a bore, remember how—"

  You phony intellectual. You speak as if your hands are clean. What of Jarcha Avicebron?

  "So! Again it comes to this, arguing guilt? Always the same. Always you. It's always you who must bear the guilt, tú, the other."

  Dentro el cielo y la tierra no hay nada oculto, as Jarcha would say.

  But, the future must yet occur.

  Afterword

  The original conception was to construct a fiction which synthesizes in the reader not vicarious but real experience. For example, a story about characters who set out on some kind of adventure only to get lost, but written so that the reader himself becomes lost in the story.

  In "Totenbüch" the characters and story serve as pawns in the happening between writer and reader. Ostensibly "Totenbüch" is about some characters discovering what it feels like to be powerless before forces that determine what will happen to them at a given time and place. Okay. The reader can get that in any number of fictions. I wanted him to feel the frustration first-hand, to feel screwed, exploited, manipulated, and to feel helpless to do anything about it, just as powerless, say, as a prisoner.

  "Totenbüch" is anti-pornography. My objection to pornography is that it seldom leaves anything to the imagination, so is dull to most people past their virginity. Pornography works best for innocents. To me serious, speculative fiction goes the other way, bringing to light the vision of evil. So in "Totenbüch" I promise the reader some pornographic specificity, tease him along with the promise of some sado-masochism. What he is supposed to get in the end is—nothing. Nothing except the real experience of frustration and maybe some insight into his own impulses.

  One thing I wanted to suggest in "Totenbüch" was that the impulse that generates atrocities and Nazism and perversion and concentration camps continues, like a virus, cropping up in different places, different times, and is not restricted to a few psychos. For this reason I shifted places and times (Germany/America) and changed names, if not characters—Jarcha/Elsbeth and Lisa/Perucho. But this is an area that left me dissatisfied: I wanted ambiguity (leaving open the possibility that Elsbeth and Jarcha escaped to South America, like Eichmann) but don't feel it came off.

  So. If I'm wrong in interpreting the reactions to the story, then it would be pointless to add anything, for that means the idea behind the story is wrong, it just doesn't work.

  On the other hand, if I am getting a true reading to your reaction (that is, you as reader experienced a sense of frustration in being promised a satisfaction that is withheld), this would suggest the concept operates, and nothing more is needed.

  One of the drawbacks of speculative fiction, no doubt, is the greater risk of falling flat on your ass.

  Introduction to

  THINGS LOST

  As children, often we saved the tastiest morsels for the end of the meal, torturing ourselves with expectation. As if some nether deity were looking over my shoulder in the preparation of this anthology, savoring like a good meal my anguish and agonies of writing introductions, the tastiest (to the demon) morsels—i.e., the toughest for me to write—would come at the flagging-energy last stride of the task.

  Tom Disch is the Devil's Dessert.

  You see, Tom Disch was the only writer I excluded from the first volume, Dangerous Visions, out of personal dislike. (I realize this brings you up short; I'm sorry to reveal to those of you who consider me unflawed, estimable in every way, that I am a capricious, cranky creature. I hope it won't ruin our relationship. After all we've meant to each other.) I was wrong, Lord how wrong I was. But to have to now crawl, to apologize, to abase myself before you, the readers, who were denied Disch earlier, and before Disch himself, who is too little the nobleman to eschew gloating, is a chore of hideous ugliness. Yet it must be done. And that is probably why I placed Tom's story so far to the rear of the book. No, no, don't hand me any of that logic about tagging-off the book with one's strongest entries; I know that's good policy, and I did it in DV and have done it here as well . . .but no, I cannot escape my responsibility and my guilt. I've put off Disch all through this book because of this very moment of fear. I sit before my typewriter, my fingers trembling and an eldritch tic twitching my right eye. Without hedging I must confess that Thomas M. Disch is a young colossus among writers of the imaginative. I must state clearly and without hope of absolution, that for base and mingy reasons I denied Disch his rightful place in the Dangerous Visions roll call. Mea bloody culpa!

  No good to protest that the two stories Disch sent for that first collection were awful; no good to protest that he was snotty and supercilious to me when first we met; no good to protest spite and malice motivated me. No good.

  All of that can be chalked up to my lack of perception, my inability to perceive what grandeur other, nobler writers found in Tom Disch.

  I am base clay, and deserve your sneers.

  Condemned to Hell, certainly. But at least by this public recanting I escape the limbo land of Purgatory. To Hell, of course, for my lousiness (a Hell, no doubt, where the imps will jab me with tridents and force me to read, over and over again, till the end of time, paperback copies of Tom's novelization of The Prisoner, from the TV series of the same name). Oh, hell!

  Yet in order to save my immortal soul, I must fulsomely praise the work of Disch, a writer of complex and experimental fiction, whom even those who loa
the the "new" writing find impossible to badmouth.

  And though it must pall on the A,DV reader by this time, my saying "such-and-such a writer is unlike anyone else," still it must be said again, about Disch.

  (It occurs to me that even though my hype for each writer singles him or her out as a rara avis, nothing I could say is closer to the core of truth; and nothing dispells more quickly all this "New Wave" nonsense; for each writer in this book is a rara avis. How the hell do you compare a Disch with a Vonnegut, or a Tiptree with a Wilhelm, or a Parra with an Anthony? Each one does his or her number in a manner that would be totally alien to all the others. I can't see Chad Oliver writing Joanna Russ's "When it Changed" or Ben Bova writing Gene Wolfe's "Against the Lafayette Escadrille." Each creator is a wave unto himself. They fly alone. They don't clump. They don't flock. It is in the nature of a miracle, that we have so many, so different, all at one time. But to say this anthology is representative of any single school of writing—why, that's the Monday morning quarterbacking of silly reviewers and sillier "critics" who must find their days and nights joyless indeed.)

  Tom Disch has created so many memorable stories, in such a short time, that it was inevitable he should be a featured luminary in the DV cast. And it was insanity for me to have excluded him, whatever the cause. And for those who like happy endings, Tom and I are friends now. So much so, that Tom even suggested I help him with a new title for "Things Lost" when it was called something else. I enter that tiny act on my part as amelioration for my original sin, in hopes Tom has some "in" with the Man at the Gate.

  And now, genuflecting all the way, I bow out and leave you with Mr. Thomas M. Disch.

  "Biography:

  "February 2, 1940. Des Moines, Iowa.

  "Grew up in Minnesota: St. Paul, Minneapolis, Onamia, Fairmont, St. Paul.

  "Two and a half years at NYU.

  "A year in advertising, all the other kinds of book-jacket jobs.

  "When we met, Harlan, it was the second Milford conference I'd come to, in Summer of '65. I was back at an ad agency briefly, after a long spell in Mexico writing The Genocides. In fall of '65 I set off for Europe with John Sladek. In Spain, and later in England, I did my share of the work on our collaborative novel, Black Alice.

  "(Which may be a movie, Paul Monash has optioned it; by the time A,DV goes into production we should know.)

  "And also those two stories that I submitted to Dangerous Visions. I insist that you mention both by name: they were 'I-A' and 'Linda and Daniel and Spike.' You hated them. 'Things Lost' was written only a couple months after those two stories, in February of '66. It was then the opening sequence of The Pressure of Time. I did another stint of writing on that book from April to June of '67, a portion of which appeared in Orbit 7. At the same time I did an extensive revision/expansion of 'Things Lost.'

  "For various reasons, personal and impersonal, I never got back to work on Pressure, and now I see I won't, alas. Since Camp Concentration (which took 8 months to write) I realize I can't afford to spend such a lot of time on a book that earns only a standard sf advance. To earn a living writing sf I'd have to speed up my rate of production by 3 or 4 times. No."

  Bibliography

  SF

  The Genocides (Berkley, 1965)

  Mankind Under the Leash (Ace, 1966)

  Echo Round His Bones (Berkley, 1966)

  Camp Concentration (Doubleday, 1969; Avon, 1971)

  The Prisoner (Ace, 1969)

  102 H-Bombs (Berkley, 1971) (short stories)

  Fun with Your New Head (Doubleday, 1971) (short stories)

  In collaboration with John Sladek:

  Black Alice (Doubleday, 1968; Avon, 1970) (under pseudonym of Thorn Demijohn)

  Magazines

  Stories in the sf magazines (but never Analog), Playboy, Knight, Escapade, Mademoiselle, Transatlantic Review, Paris Review. In all, some 60-plus pieces.

  Poetry in Epoch, Bones, Minnesota Review, Ronald Reagan, New Measure, and lots of little mags.

  THINGS LOST

  Thomas M. Disch

  Tuesday, April 31, 2084

  Yippy, the stars! An outburst of real enthusiasm.

  Though, at my age?

  Well, we must allow that it has been a very special occasion. There was even a parade, a work of the most meticulous archaeology, with military bands and bunting, with drum majorettes and such sententious speeches as I have not heard since my high school graduation. A camp—but what else is one to do for a launching, after all?

  The most memorable moment from the pageant: Traffic had bottle-necked and we, the astronauts, were stalled in the Saragossa of Piccadilly, where the raving thousands waved their flags and spread their banners and cheered and sang and wished to hell we'd move our asses on. But there was one little creature who was having no part of it all. She stood not five feet from our scallop shell—the saddest, smallest nymph (surely a mortal)—and stared at me so solemnly with her dark, credulous eyes, eyes much too large for so diminutive a face, but this is an agreeable fault in a child. Four or five or maybe a very untermensch six-year-old, and dressed all in the deepest mourning. (Again: a mortal? Or only prematurely in the vogue?) Her black-brown clustered curls were a proper rat-king tangle. Quite steeped in pathos, the darling. Right out of Dickens—Little Dorrit, perhaps. Better yet, Little Nell. The traffic unsnarled, and our scallop began to inch ahead. The crowd grew lively again, but she waved no goodbyes nor breathed a word of farewell but only stared and stared. What did she make of it all? Did she know who we were, where we were bound? How the image of her face sticks with me! As though those dark eyes were the emblem of everything we are leaving behind, earth and old mortality. Good-bye then, little sister. Forgive me if there was no time to explain. I ear there never will be, now. What, still staring after me? Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

  Then, reluctantly (and lushed to the gills) I turn to face the stars.

  Wednesday, May 1, 2084

  That wasn't the sort of opening I had had in mind for this journal. I would have preferred something at once more formal and less florid, an introduction that would say in a polite and orderly fashion that this is the journal of Oliver Wendall Regan, only son of Joseph and Hope Regan, age 92, astronaut, geneticist, novelist (unpublished). But if I had begun so, I would probably have found myself (as I find myself now) with nothing left to say.

  Nevertheless, sail on.

  Since coming on board the Extrovert I haven't left my cabin. For 24 hours I have merely fussed, disposing the contents of my little carton of Earth Fetishes about the cabin—the chessboard on this shelf; then, above it and a little to the left, my Authentic Souvenir Ashtray of Boston Massachusetts 1999; then this drawer for masks and this drawer for the tea service. At the conclusion of which I discover that there is no niche for my oboe, unless it shares the drawer with my shirts, so I have to begin all over again. Then I must decide where to hang the Rauschenberg litho (Inferno, Canto XII) and whether to hang Veronica's fakey engraving of Hohen-tübingen. Decisions, decisions. And all the while, of course, overriding this fuss and quite drowning it out, the delicious sense of imminent adventure, boundless possibility, endless journeying, so that I feel as if each beat of my heart were an explosion, and that it is only by the carefullest magic (this goes on this shelf, and that goes in that drawer) that I am able to keep myself from blowing up and splattering these immaculate walls. It is quite plain to see that I am in no shape yet to keep a journal—and probably won't be till we're quite outside the solar system.

  We passed the orbit of Mars this morning, and soon we can begin to count asteroids. (A memory: the game I used to play with my father when we would go out on long dull rides to Vermont for the family's vacation—Counting Cows. He'd count the cows on his side of the road, and I'd count the cows on my side of the road. Somehow I usually won. Did I cheat? Or did he cheat on my behalf?)

  Lord, how I ramble. No, I'm not in fit shape. Till such time as I am, I give you my very warmest hiatus.


  Sunday, May 12, 2084

  The stars, the silence, the cold. The growing sense that it is all—all that vastness out there—alien, empty, inimical. But there is also the sense of how cozy we are, we voyagers, in our snug little whalebelly.

  Snug and cozy we may be, but jolly we are not. The distances between the stars seem brief by contrast to the distances between each of us and his fellows. We will have, after all, a century or so to become acquainted. We feel no need to rush things.

  So that for these first two weeks the corridors have seemed to rustle with ghosts, who hurry past with, at most, a furtive glance through the eyeholes of their masks. Speaking of which, I must say that I have seldom seen so many exquisite pieces of craft. One that I especially admired, a woman's—full-face and crown in heavy tarnished silver, with the curls that ringed the face applied free-form with solder. Her eyes were dark brown, solemn. I smiled. Since I've been wearing a plain velvet domino, she could not help but see it. And did she smile too, beneath the silver mask?