Again, Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  This voice—along with its corpus—is the essence of every brothel and fornication of the universe: the voice of a glorious, immortal and Galactic pimp; the ultimate in carnal, carnival, and carnivorous invitations.

  "My friend," says Birkin Grif. "Mon ami: have I not seen you before? A whorehouse in Alexandria? Istamboul? Birmingham? No?" The newcomer smiles with a sort of lecherous modesty.

  "Perhaps . . .ah, but that was a millennium hence, we have progressed since then, we have become . . .civilized." He shrugs.

  "Does it matter?" asks Birkin Grif.

  "Nothing matters, my piratical friend: but that is not the point: I am Dr. Grishkin."

  "Is that the point?"

  "No, that is something altogether different. May I join you?"

  And he sits down, learing at the woman without skin. This is a leer that makes her feel naked. There is a hiatus. He pours himself tea. He has a strong sense of drama, this Dr. Grishkin: he is well-versed in the technique of the dramatic pause. Birkin Grif becomes impatient.

  "Dr. Grishkin, we . . ."

  Grishkin raises an admonitory finger. He sips tea. He points to his surgical window. Birkin Grif watches it, fascinated.

  "The ash-flats," intones Dr. Grishkin: and, having dropped his conversational bomb, sits back to watch its effect.

  Horror. Silence. Tension drips viscous from the Californium ceiling. Far off, the crowd whispers. Nothing so dramatic has happened in Californium for a decade.

  "I am to take you to the ash-flats of Wisdom."

  Skinless Lamia shudders ever so slightly. Into the silence fall three perfect silver notes. Jiro-San has taken up his lute.

  "I think I have changed my mind," she whispers.

  "It is too late, all is arranged," says Dr. Grishkin. "You must come, now it is inevitable that you come." There is the slightest edge of annoyance to his voice. This annoyance is persuasive. One feels that Dr. Grishkin had gone to much trouble to . . .bring things about. He does not wish to be disappointed.

  "But will He be there?" asks Birkin Grif, anxiously. "There is little sense in risking so much if He is not there."

  Comes the answer: "There is little sense in anything, Mr. Grif. But He will be there. He has sent me." He sips tea. It is so simple, the way he puts it, it seems already an accomplished fact: but then, his oily job is to simplify, to smooth the way. Lamia leans forward, speaks from the corner of her mouth, the perfect conspirator. Dr. Grishkin finds her skinned proximity delightfully disturbing, her aorta distinctly beautiful.

  "The Image-Police, Dr. Grishkin: what of them?"

  "Pure paranoia, dear lady. There is nothing very illegal about a little trip to the edge of Wisdom. Just to the edge, you understand, merely a sightseeing trip: a little pleasant tourism . . ." He leers. "Shall we go?"

  They leave. The fat man waddles. Birkin limps. The skinless lady is sinuous. As they pass Jiro-San's table, he gazes wistfully. He finds Birkin very handsome.

  TRACK THREE: THE ASH-FLATS OF WISDOM.

  Wisdom is a wilderness. Long ago, there was a war here; or perhaps it was a peace. Most of the time there is but small difference between the two; love and hate lean so heavily upon one another, and both are possessed of a monstrous ennui. Certainly, something destroyed whatever Wisdom was: so well that no one has known its former nature for two centuries. From its border one can see little but sense much.

  Birkin Grif and the skinless woman stand shivering there in a cold wind, peering through the mesh fence that separates city-ground and forbidden ash. Their cloaks—black for him, gray for her—flutter nervously. Soft flakes of ash fill the air about them with dark snow. Grishkin is huge in voluminous purple, talking animatedly to a grayface guard outside his olive-drab sentry box. Meanwhile, the desolation seems to whisper, You have no business here, everything here is dead.

  There is a bleak sadness to this waste, a bereavement: it mourns. Eidetic images of ghosts flit on this wind: women weeping weave shrouds at ebbtide; famine-children wail to old men at twilight. Here there are two kinds of chill, and cloaks will not keep out both.

  Abruptly, Grishkin takes out a small silver mechanism, and points it at he guard. There is an incredible blue flash. The body of the guard drops, improbably headless, jetting dark blood from the venturi of its neck. Dr. Grishkin vomits apologetically: a sick valediction. He returns, wiping his mouth on a canary-yellow handkerchief.

  "You see? There is no problem, as I have said." He retches, his fat face white. "Oh dear. Excuse me, do excuse me. I grow old, I grow old you know. Poor boy. He has a mother in Australia. He was exported."

  "How sad," says Lamia. She is gazing at Dr. Grishkin's heaving stomach through the surgical window. She feels quite sympathetic. "Sympathy is so quaint," she tinkles. "Poor Dr. Grishkin."

  Poor Dr. Grishkin, his spasm over, takes out his little glittering mechanism again, and aims it at the fence round Wisdom. The incredible-blue-flash performance is repeated, whereupon the mesh curls and congeals like burning hair.

  "Pretty," observes the skinless woman.

  "Impressive," admits Birkin Grif. In the charred sentry-box bells begin to ring.

  "Now we must hurry," intimates Dr. Grishkin, and his voice is more than faintly urgent. "Leg it!" He begins to waddle hurriedly toward a charcoal dune. They follow him through the broken mesh. The wind rises, whipping up small, stinging cinders. Cloaks fluttering, they top the rise and drop flat, facing the way they have come. A great turmoil of ash-flakes hides the sentry-box.

  "The wind will have erased our tracks," says Birkin Grif.

  "Correct as ever, mon frère," returns fat Dr. Grishkin. "Officially, we have just died, nobody will bother us now." He leers. "I have been dead these ten years." He laughs mordantly. His stomach trembles behind its window. Birkin Grif and his skinless mistress are unamused.

  "Why does the ash never blow into the city?" asks Lamia.

  "Come," orders Grishkin, eyeing the weather with distaste.

  PAUSE THE SECOND. FOR NARRATIVE PURPOSES THE ASH STORM ABATES.

  Led by the seraphic murderer Grishkin, they flit like majestic moths—purple, gray, black—over the long low swells of ash.

  This land is empty, composed visually of utterly balanced sweeps of gray, shading from the dead cream to the mystic charcoal. Slow watercourses cut the ubiquitous ash, silting swiftly, meandering, beds infinitely variable. Wind and water make Wisdom unchartable: age and the wind make it cripplingly lonely. Time is overthrown in Wisdom: its very mutability is immutable.

  Thinks Birkin Grif: This land is the ultimate vision of the Ab-real Eternity. Across it, we scuttle like three symbolic beetles without legs.

  TRACK FOUR: I REMEMBER CORINTH.

  Flitting minutiae on the broad back of the waste, they finally achieve their Heroic goal.

  Dr. Grishkin stops.

  He and Birkin Grif and the skinless woman stand—at the end of an erratic line of footprints—at the apparent center of an immense, featureless plain: the hub of a massive stasis, a vast silence. The horizon has vanished, there is no obvious convergence of ash and sky: both are flat, monochrome gray. Because of this, environment is shapeless; dimensions are unclear; the three suddenly exist without proper frame of reference, with the sole and inadequate orientation of their own bodies. The effect confuses; they become dream figures on a back-cloth of ab-space: unattached, divested of every vestige of their accepted and appropriate reality.

  "It is here we must wait," says Dr. Grishkin, his fat voice devoid of expression, drained of expression by the single-tone emptiness.

  "But He is not here . . ." begins Birkin Grif, fighting to prevent the visual null from sucking up his very thoughts, speaking precisely only through mammoth effort.

  "We must wait," repeats Grishkin.

  "Will He come, though?" demands Grif, thickly, struggling with the silence. "If this is a fool's errand . . ." His implied threat falls flat, negated by the vacuum.

  "You have lived a fool's errand for a mille
nnium: why quibble now? Here we wait." Slow steel in Grishkin's voice; again he will not be denied. They wait. At this point of minimal orientation, without movement or sound, it seems that eons pass. They wait. Nothing happens for a million years. Finally, Grif speaks, his words harsh and congested with a sudden aged, neurotic ferocity. "I think I may kill you, Dr. Grishkin. He is not coming. All the way to nowhere, and He is not coming. I think I will kill you . . ." His face is distorted; his good eye winks, manic; this is a senile fury.

  "Shut up." Grishkin is smiling his rosebud parody. "Shut up and look!"

  " . . .I think I will kill you . . ." hisses Grif, like a machine running down fixedly through a series of programmed spasms. But he looks.

  Skinless Lamia is dancing on the ash, magnificently naked once more. Her feet make no sound. She moves to a muted hum of her own making; an insistent, droning raga. She dances possessed, smiling in introspective wonder at her own movement, antithesis of the greater stillness. Her dance is a final destruction of orientation: almost, she floats.

  And she is changing.

  "Is this not the ultimate in body-schema illusions?" breathes Grishkin. "See: she is living her hallucination!" He is quite overtly touched by the poetry of it all.

  Her body elongates . . .contracts . . .flows . . .diminishes. A tail appears, flips archly, disappears. A jeweled dolphin exists whole for an instant, dissolves. The modal hum rises and falls. A golden salamander weaves, sloughs off its skin . . .becomes a bright proud bird, falters, shimmering at its edges . . .disembodies reluctantly . . .

  By turns the plastic Lamia is fish, fowl and beast, myth and dream. Then one shape steadies—

  And Lamia is no more.

  Dr. Grishkin releases his breath in one long sigh of artistic pleasure. Birkin Grif screams.

  For on the ash—cinders and dust adhering to its wet membrane—there lies a live human fetus.

  It kicks a little, stretching the membrane . . .

  Birkin Grif retches and moans: "O my God . . .what . . . ?"

  Dr. Grishkin is apologetic but unhelpful. "Don't ask me, Grif mon vieux. I expected a snake. But O what poetry; such a metamorphosis . . . !" The fetus jerks. Grif whirls on Dr. Grishkin, hysterical, whining like a child.

  "Cheat! Liar! This is not what we came here for, this is not it at all, you have cheated . . .it isn't fair!"

  Coldly, Grishkin, galactic pimp extraordinary, appraises him. His pleasure is quite gone away. His eyes impale the blubbering Grif.

  "Fair? You have yet to learn the rules of the game! Fair?" Grif is pinned to the inert landscape by those bleak, oblique eyes. "There is no fairness to inevitability. This was inevitable, Mr. Birkin Grif; inevitable because it has happened. Accept it because of that. Do not look to me for fairness." He finds the word distasteful. He pauses to gaze speculatively at the drying fetus.

  Then: "You expect too much, my friend. You desire: and expect the universe to provide. But that is not the way of things. No indeed." He appears pleased with this summary. Then he frowns suddenly, as if rediscovering an unpleasant reality. "It is a pity you have learned so late. Too late, in point of fact."

  And his glittering, malevolent little device is out in a micro-second, a Birkin Grif throws himself frantically forward, horrid realization contorting his features. Thus dies Grif, last of the archetypal sybarites, while the fetus of his skinless lover lies twitching on the ground. He scarcely has time for a second scream.

  His enigmatic slayer shrugs and turns to the feebly struggling fetus Gazing, he shakes his hairless head. Such poetry. Reluctantly, he steps on it. For all his sensibility, he has a tidy mind. Casting a last glance at the smoking Birkin Grif—titanium thigh his sole remnant of personality—Dr. Grishkin, the Bringer with the Window, pulls his purple cloak around him and waddles off.

  Soon, only his footprints are left on the ash-flats of Wisdom.

  Afterword

  I wrote this story in March, 1967. At that time, it was all happening for me emotionally, which probably accounts for the exuberance of the piece. It was sparked by a thing called Go For Baroque by Jody Scott (I think it was Jody Scott . . .); but I don't believe Scott's story influenced it—merely provided the literary flashpoint. There are echoes of Beckett there, and some quite deliberate references to the work of John Keats. On a secondary level, the Keats thing is rather important. "Lamia Mutable" stands on its own; but if you are familiar with Keats' long narrative poem Lamia, you may get a good deal more out of the section subtitled I REMEMBER CORINTH.

  I wrote the story as an allegorical illustration of a philosophy (a few tenets of which are contained in Grishkin's last speech); as a piece of grotesque comedy relevant to certain 20th Century obsessions—black humor, if you like; and as a snide parody of London intellectual life. You can find a Bistro Californium on every street corner in swinging Chelsea or with-it Hampstead: and each one is crowded with aging ravers like Birkin Grif who spend their somewhat pointless lives trying to convince themselves that they have artistic natures and colorful personalities.

  My intention was to pose as many unanswered questions as possible, to imply rather than to make statements: thus, conceptually, it is a sprawling and multivalent story, full of blind windows and paranoiac alleys. But its underlying structure is nice and tight, and the thing has—within its own lunatic context—a satisfying rationality. "Lamia Mutable" is tentatively dedicated to Jerry Cornelius.

  Introduction to

  LAST TRAIN TO KANKAKEE

  Ultimately, when the history of these last ten tumultuous years of sf is chronicled, Robin Scott Wilson's name will be listed alongside those of John W. Campbell, Jr., Horace L. Gold, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas as one of the men most responsible for helping to create new writers in speculative fiction. The former gentlemen were all writers and editors, and in their capacities as assemblers of many issues of their respective magazines, they molded, as a matter of daily course, talents without number. Campbell, of course, was the master: from the Thirties well on into the Fifties he gathered around him, and around Astounding/Analog, most of those we call Greats today: Asimov, Kuttner, Heinlein, Hubbard, De Camp, del Rey, Sturgeon, Blish, etc. Gold developed yet another kind of writer, and from Galaxy we read Sheckley, Tenn, Budrys, Simak, Wyman Guin, Kornbluth, Bester, Knight and a host of others. Tony Boucher and Mick McComas brought the literary values of sf into sharper focus and developed Avram Davidson, J. T. McIntosh, Leiber, Idris Seabright, Matheson, Chad Oliver, Poul Anderson, Zenna Henderson and others; though many had written for other magazines, they became what we now behold in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  Robin Scott Wilson, though a writer of considerable talent, as you will discover (if you haven't met him elsewhere already), is only by default an editor. (His anthology of the best stories from the Clarion Workshops, Clarion [Signet, 1971], has already become a critically-acclaimed necessity for every other sf workshop in the country.) No, by rigorous judgment, Robin is not an editor, and so it is remarkable that his name should be found with those of the acknowledged "forces" in the genre.

  The reason for comradeship with the aforementioned germinal influences is all in a name, already dropped:

  Clarion.

  In 1967, Robin Scott Wilson showed up at Damon Knight's workshop conference for sf professionals in Milford, Pennsylvania. He was a pleasant man, good-looking but essentially bland, the way a good CIA agent should be. (We learned later he had worked for that skulking organization. It explained the crepe-soled shoes and the suspicious bulges in his clothes, bulges we had attributed to malformations of the body about which gentlefolk do not speak, bulges that later turned out to be service automatics, tape recorders, a plenitude of eavesdropping bugs, a two-way radio, harness rigs of explosives and other items of doom, and a very thick, buckram-bound collection of Snoops: The CIA House Organ, 1950–66 much marginally-annotated in a childlike scrawl.)

  He nosed about, speaking to Damon, to Kate Wilhelm, to Fritz Leiber, to me and to o
thers. For a while there, we were pricing cabins in Cuba. Finally, however, he took us into his confidence and admitted the paraphernalia was just a matter of habit. CIA men are apparently like old fire-horses. They never get over the thrill of playing G-Man. (Which probably explains J. Edgar Hoover, but that's a horrid of another choler.)

  (Sorry about that.)

  He further confessed, under threat of having to analyze a Tom Disch story, that he was in the English department of a small liberal arts college, Clarion College in Clarion, Pennsylvania—and he wanted to start a sf workshop for unknown writers. He left, as did we all, when Milford ended two weeks later, and he promised to get in touch with some of us who might care to come in as "visiting faculty." Till that time, there had only been sporadic, usually ineptly-staffed sf classes in a very few colleges and universities. We didn't hold out much hope, but it had been a pleasant encounter.