Again, Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  Let's face it: very little in life makes much sense to a rational man. We are all soldiering in those ignorant armies that clash by night. Some people accept this and don't worry about it. They seem to adopt a utilitarian and canine attitude and evaluate the human condition with "if you can't eat it or drink it or screw it, piss on it." Some people try to paint or dance or sing or love or drink or smoke some sense into life. Writers try to impose form on it.

  And when you extend the purview of life into the great unknowns of eschatology and the future, the preoccupations of science fiction and fantasy, what a challenge it becomes! Then it is that reader and writer alike feel like

  . . .some watcher of the skies

  When a new planet swims into his ken;

  Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

  He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

  Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

  Introduction to

  EMPIRE OF THE SUN

  Again, another first sale writer. Andrew Weiner, from England. Never met him, don't know him, got the story in totally without warning and read it out of what editors call "the slush pile." Bought it, which should dispel any ideas paranoid amateurs have about closed shops in these books.

  All I know about Weiner is what he writes below, and the fact that "Empire of the Sun" is an oddly eschatological tale that instantly commanded me to buy it.

  From Mr. Weiner comes this, unfortunately written in 1969 and not brought up-to-date . . .but it should give at least a clue:

  "Dear Mr. Ellison,

  "As to my biography there's really very little to tell. I am twenty years old; I lived my first eighteen years in the suburbs of North London. I have spent most of the last two years in Brighton; I am a student at the University of Sussex, where I have done two out of three years for a degree in Social Psychology. I will be twenty-one next June, which is also when I finish University. I have no idea what I will do then.

  "When I was younger I read a great deal of science fiction. I read very little now. My favourite authors (they are not really 'influences,' my stories are just not good enough to claim relation to theirs) are Mailer, Chandler, Greene, Ballard, Dick, Ross MacDonald. I have written perhaps eight stories in four years. 'Empire Of The Sun' is the first I have sold. In its original form it was only about the second worthwhile thing I ever wrote. The first draft was written in December 1967, your version in September 1968.

  "My favourite biographical note is the Algis Budrys one in the English edition of 'Who?': 'I have seen Adolf Hitler, Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt . . .I have shaken Harry Truman's hand . . .' I personally have seen Jimi Hendrix, Arthur Brown and the Stones; and once I interviewed the Pink Floyd. Who's to say which is least?

  "There is a quote I always wanted to use in a story:

  " 'I'm 20 years old and one-third of my life has gone, and I don't know whats Happening.'—P. F. Sloan, composer of 'Eve Of Destruction.' "

  EMPIRE OF THE SUN

  Andrew Weiner

  ONE

  Kaheris, the unknown astronaut, existential hero, moves through the crowded streets, toward his apartment. The fair-skinned people around him hasten about their lives, never looking up. Above, the sky burns white with the glare of a swollen sun.

  Giant loudspeakers, the extension voice of death, boom out the countdown, one thousand hours to total zero. Kaheris fears the coming nova. Sees himself trapped here, at the end of the Main Sequence. Gratefully he enters his soundproofed apartment. The Man In The Mask rises to greet him, dead eyes staring through slits in the hammered metal. Kaheris screams, slips once more through space and time.

  TWO

  Earth, year 1990, falls victim to the history-bending project of the Sirius Syndicate. Travelers in time establish a network of communication satellites around the globe, and open the Martian War. Continuous 'Martian' broadcasters promise destruction, total war, liquidation, war without limits, to the terrified Earth populace. TV channels are jammed with further images of death. The United Nations is revived, as the World Draft Board. Military elements seize control, promising "the War of all Wars." A space armada is to be constructed. The first troop draft is announced; twenty millions. Draft rioting in China is vigorously suppressed.

  THREE

  The huge crowd waited. And then the General appeared. Their hero, Carter, Chairman of the Draft Board, scourge of the Martians. From the roof of the hall floated down colored balloons, cascading in thousands around him. The cheering grew to a deafening crescendo. Then he raised his hand, and suddenly there was silence.

  Above, high above on the roof, Kaheris aimed his rifle through the skylight.

  Carter had begun to speak. "The War will go on. I promise you that. There will be no weakness. I know how to win."

  He paused, stared with meaning. "You have nothing to fear from the army. It is the civilians you should distrust." They roared in approval.

  "You were swindled. But not any more. The Marts can't tell us what they are going to do. We will show them what they have taken on.

  "We are already at war with Mars, and the only solution is victory."

  Suddenly he turned his eyes upwards, staring at Kaheris through a mask of hammered metal. Act out your dreams, Kaheris thinks, trying to squeeze the trigger, blacking out. As the doctor said, why this sudden obsession with death?

  FOUR

  Transition to a dirty room in London. A question: "How long do you think you have?" He delays answering the girl, readjusts to his environment. The walls are pasted with newspaper cuttings, gorilla pictures, faded posters. Empty cans litter the floor. A badly tuned transistor plays military music.

  "How long . . . ?"

  "Before the Draft gets you. It can't be much longer." The idea seemed to please her.

  "They won't send me. I'm psychotic. They can't send me."

  "The dreams, you mean?" she asks with contempt. "They send anyone to Mars, particularly those whom no one will miss. Because there are no Martians and this is no War. The War is an invention of the World Draft Board to institute and maintain its power. Nothing else."

  FIVE

  "They're not dreams. Don't you see? That I'm the link, the intersectional man?"

  He brushed past her, descended the stairs to the street. He wandered through the streets of a London deserted of traffic, beneath the giant posters of Carter, beneath pictures of the horrifying Martian enemy. Occasionally he passed hungry and frightened people.

  As he walked he tried to recall his former life. Had he been an astronaut, a scientist? He seemed to recall the coral reefs, the concrete zone of the rocket ranges, the murmur of air-conditioning. Mostly, that life was a void to him. That had been before he became aware of other places, when he had been able to think clearly.

  A sudden clear image penetrates his mind. He is sitting down, in a darkened room. A man in a white coat stands over him.

  "Isolation does funny things, Kaheris. Come on now, what happened in orbit? What spoke to you?"

  Kaheris stares in front of him.

  "What did it say?"

  Kaheris laughs.

  SIX

  Trancelike in thought, he fails to notice the gathering dusk, the early winter night closing around him. Suddenly they block his way, Draft Police. He turns to run. An electric whip flicks out. "Wait, mister." A strange accent. The night patrol. High grade sadists.

  "Where are you going?"

  "I don't know. The zoo."

  "No zoo around here. All the animals are eaten up, anyway." Casually he flicks the whip at Kaheris' stomach. Kaheris doubles up.

  "Yank, yeh. We have a draft here too, know that? Just as good. Maybe even better." He searched quickly through Kaheris' pockets, removing his little remaining currency. Then he hit him in the face, with his fist.

  "No papers. Take you in on suspicion. All the way to a nice red planet."

  SEVEN

  The Draft Station. Bored inter
rogators, minor tortures. Internment. Transportation to the training camp. A month's practice with empty, obsolete weapons. Issue of the uniform. Long train journey. Spaceport, departure for Mars, the one-way ticket.

  The evangelist shot by spaceport police, yelling, "Listen to the stars. That's the way through."

  The trip. Issue of bullets. Discomfort, overcrowding in the troop ship. Sickness from the space drive. Three days to Mars. For what? "After we finish the Marts, let's fight A Centauri."

  EIGHT

  Suddenly nightfall, the night of a younger world; in the distance the glowing volcanic skyline. The silver spheres surround him, messages flow. Levitating wizard shoots the sky, through halls of blue fires. "I see a new order for all."

  The prophet comes. "I have looked into the darkness and seen doom. We are betrayed."

  Advance of the birdmen. The ancient city wavers in the haze. The giant robot storms from its tomb.

  Out of the fog comes the Man In The Mask.

  NINE

  "The Marts are clever, you understand. They assume human form. Don't be fooled. Aim to kill. OK?"

  The briefing continued in the dim light. Kaheris ran the red dust through his fingers. How did they still breathe? Someone must have fixed it; the War must go on. Surgery? He couldn't recall. Or was this really Mars? Above, the sun seemed a shrunken disc.

  How many troops here? Ten million, a hundred million? The War was "the turning point in our history" as the newspapers had all said. For those at home, maybe. A hundred million, and who ever came back.

  "The Marts hold that hill, 770. We must have it."

  Why? Why not?

  TEN

  Noise, gunfire, screams. Bombs, shells, mortar.

  Like the comic books.

  Kaheris weaves his way through the dead and up to the summit of the hill, adrenalin driving him on, blind to his terror. The hill must be taken. Sure. One of the enemy sprang from a dug-out. Tossing aside an empty gun, it came at him with a knife. Physically, it looked human.

  It screamed "Dirty Mart" as Kaheris shot it, through the head. A trick? He was beyond thinking. Nausea welled up. He sank to his knees.

  Weight of numbers told. The Marts were swept from the hill. Some escaped through their network of tunnels.

  Later, perhaps much later, a medic comes to Kaheris. Looming into the blur of his mind. Kaheris was moaning to himself, something he could not hear.

  The medic speaks. For Kaheris it is sudden thunder.

  "Man, what turned you on?"

  His eyes leap into focus. The features of the medic slip, change, and then harden into a mask of hammered metal.

  Kaheris vomits. Mars flickers, and is gone.

  ELEVEN

  Kaheris is a giant, two hundred feet high. He strides between tilted, melting apartment blocks, crushing automobiles under foot. He kicks a railway bridge out of his path.

  It is Earth-future, the countdown world. The loudspeakers are fused junk heaps. Above him, the sun approaches nova, flinging its debris outwards, like a sunflower. Time is suspended. The colors around him are unnaturally bright.

  Noise reaches an unbearable level. The pneumatic garden. The roads become a great mirror, reflecting the exploding sun.

  TWELVE

  Fear grips him. He is running, in the dry ocean basin, amid the salt storms. He is running. A jungle of metal pylons rusts away, in the static factories of Detroit. He seeks help. Where is Henry Ford? Where is Superman? But there is no one.

  He wanders among blocks of stone, collapsed archways. They crumble to his touch, the sand maker. Behind him, the Man comes, from the dissolving green carpet hills. The Man comes, in the rainstorm upon the wasteland, past the camps guarded with electric fences, now deserted. Kaheris waits.

  THIRTEEN

  Kaheris sees the high steps, cut in the infinite mountains, up to the burning sky. For a moment he is back at the institution, in the desert. White Sands. They are asking him, over and over, what happened to him in orbit, why he tried to crash the capsule. Once he told them that something spoke to him. But not what it was, what it said.

  Dream of escape, past frozen jailors, down the paths of time. The count-down world. The War with Mars. How could it matter? Who was the Man In The Mask?

  The sun swells in the sky, a light for the death of all. He shouts a question, "Where does dreaming end?" There is no reply.

  He is on the beach, reads a message, scrawled on the blocks at the edge of the sea.

  And who is the Man In The Mask? Myself. Or absolutely no one. Fear incarnate. What I became, in the sky.

  Who spoke to me? Who do they think?

  FOURTEEN

  He climbs the sky, fills the heart of the sun. His tendrils spread from the vortex, consuming all.

  Whirlpool man, boiling like the quicksilver rain, grasping for the stars. Awaiting nova.

  Afterword

  This story, considered at the superficial level, reads like a parody of science fiction; the War with Mars, the concluding nova, are among the oldest and most tired of all possible cliches. I hope that this was intentional. While I find it difficult to reconstruct exactly what I was trying to do, it seems to me that I have written a kind of tribute to the comic books, the literary level below science fiction, where things happen without real explanation, a world of bright colors and loud noises, which fitted with the distorted perceptions of the astronaut Kaheris. The initial image at least, that of the countdown-world, I got from an old edition of the "Justice League Of America." (The planet, of course, was not Earth, and I have no recollection of how the heroes escaped.) Kaheris is a character cut from cardboard, an animated shadow in a sequence of disasters. As I wrote the story, the images grew rather larger than I had wanted, pushed Kaheris further and further back; although I had never intended to define his position clearly. The assassination sequence is an inversion of the nomination of Goldwater. The War with Mars is not the Vietnam War, it's just any war, the kind you can read about in any comic.

  Introduction to

  OZYMANDIAS

  In 1967, Terry Carr, then a junior editor at Ace Books, managed to convince that publishing house to begin a series of science fiction "specials" (a designation devised by the late A. A. Wyn, founder of the company, and capitalizing on the then-popular TV "specials" the networks were pushing). Terry was at first nominally in charge, but soon became the senior editor on the series. In the years between 1967 and 1971 when—under unpleasant circumstances that reflect poorly on Ace—Terry left the company, the Ace Specials became the most prestigious series of books ever published in the field. They garnered more Hugos and Nebulas for Ace than any company in the history of sf publishing, brought to first publication such novelists as R. A. Lafferty, Gordon Eklund, Joanna Russ, Alexei Panshin, D. G. Compton and John Sladek (in the United States), Bob Shaw and others . . .and became a sought-after showcase by writers who knew Terry promoted the books as few other paperback houses would.

  More than merely a random group of titles submitted by agents and unsolicited through slush pile, the Specials were the brainchild of Terry Carr; they were lovingly crafted and packaged with stunning elegance. (Leo & Diane Dillon, whom DV readers will remember as the artists of that first anthology, created not merely commercial cover paintings but works of genuine Fine Art that made the hearts of the authors burst with joy.)

  Terry devised innovations in packaging that made the Specials books worth keeping after insuring they were books no one could keep from purchasing. For instance, instead of mere hype cover copy or précis of plot (usually misleading or annoyingly revelatory of the story within), Terry took the time and trouble to work far enough ahead so galleys of forthcoming titles could be sent to well-known sf authors whose works were tonally like those of the book in question, and he solicited unpaid comment for use on the covers. Most companies do that sort of thing from time to time, but usually they either pay for the comments—thereby throwing their validity into question—or they make sure only good comment
will be forthcoming, by any number of methods. Terry, on the other hand, always made it perfectly clear that he wanted only honest opinion, and if a writer who received a set of galleys found the book less than pleasurable, Terry understood and never tried to bulldoze an author into altering his opinion, or even into providing something noncommittal that could be edited with those deadly ellipses.