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The Caltraps of Time
David I. Masson
No copyright 2013 by MadMaxAU eBooks
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CONTENTS
Introduction by Christopher Priest
Traveller’s Rest
A Two-Timer
Not So Certain
The Transfinite Choice
Psychosmosis
The Show Must Go On
Doctor Fausta
Take It or Leave It
Mouth of Hell
Lost Ground
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AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
Now, when the frontiers of strict scientific hypothesis read like science fiction, but the conduct of global affairs reads like a set of fifth-rate films dreamt up by moronic scriptwriters, and humanity gets on with the business of running the Sixth Major Extermination of Species, I invite you to relax with the imaginations of a slightly more innocent decade.
The White Queen enjoyed believing in six impossible things before breakfast; here you can believe in a dozen, a few of which may be possible, or at least secrete a truth: the chaos at the heart of language; the fires beneath us; the dimensional complexities of time; parallel universes; the fragility of civilization.
David I. Masson, December 2002
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INTRODUCTION
The Caltraps of Time is a collection of short stories, the only book of fiction published by David I. Masson. He never wrote a novel, and every story that he published in his lifetime is in this volume. If for no other reason this is therefore a unique book. However, few writers with only one book to their name have ever come up with such startling and original material.
David Masson’s first story, the remarkable ‘Traveller’s Rest’, appeared in the September 1965 edition of New Worlds, which at the time was the leading SF magazine in the UK. The story of New Worlds and the development of the ‘New Wave’ has been told many times, but within that context Masson’s work was always in a class of its own. Many of the New Wave stories of that period were experiments with form, or with narrative structures, or with subject-matter. Not all these experiments succeeded. Masson was entirely different: he was involved with language itself, in particular with what he called the functions and effects of phonetic sound-patterning. He brought this fascination with language to the science fiction genre, and the results are all here.
In 1965, ‘Traveller’s Rest’ made a profound impact. Its completely original ideas about the mutability of language and meaning had a seminal influence on the small but extremely active group of writers, critics and readers who closely followed New Worlds. I was one of them — if I look back and remember my first encounter with this story, I am reminded of the imaginative vistas it opened up for me as a beginning writer: the apocalyptic war being fought across a time-dilated landscape, the feeling that time itself can influence human perception, and that experience of life is, like mass and energy, subject to the distortions of relativity. Nearly half a century later the story still has an extraordinary effect. It feels like a breakthrough, a pioneering work that has influenced many others, but it manages to retain its own lovely mystique.
Within a few months, Masson followed up with a series of similarly original stories, all different in tone and subject matter: some satires, a brilliant pastiche of 17th-century English, other explorations of the human psyche in extreme circumstances. All his stories create a spell: in particular a sense of strangeness, of otherness, in counterpoint to the banality of the ordinary. ‘Mouth of Hell’ describes the discovery of a huge hole in the world, one which must be explored at any cost. The difficulties are fantastic, and one team of explorers after another comes to grief. But in the end the hole gives up its secrets. What then happens is pure Masson.
Others are superficially less serious: ‘Not So Certain’ is a conversation piece about the difficulties human beings might have when they try to learn the language of an alien race, and in the midst of the expostulations and gleeful discoveries there are many serious arguments about language and phonetics. And in one or two of the stories (‘Doctor Fausta’ or ‘The Transfinite Choice’) the dazzling sequence of puns, allusions and neologisms will make you think you might have somehow backed inadvertently into the world of Masson’s contemporary, John Sladek.
The first seven Masson stories were published in 1968, under the present title, in a beautiful and highly collectible hardcover edition by Faber and Faber. A paperback followed a few years later, but both editions have long been out of print.
By the early 1970s, Masson’s burst of creativity had come to an end. He published no more stories after ‘Doctor Fausta’, in 1974.
David Irvine Masson was born in Edinburgh in 1915, to a family of distinguished academics and thinkers. He went to Merton College, Oxford, between 1934 and 1938, where he read English Language and Literature. After graduation he went to work as an assistant librarian at the University of Leeds. The Second World War interrupted: he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Mediterranean theatre, chiefly North Africa and Italy. After the war he became the curator of special collections at the University of Liverpool, but in 1956 he returned to Leeds to become curator of the Brotherton Collection.
Between 1951 and 1991 he published many articles on phonetic sound-patterning in poetry (especially in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke). His published works include three articles with the Princeton University Press publication Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965). Also notable is his paper, Poetic Sound-Patterning Reconsidered (Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, May 1976).
In 2002, my colleague David Langford and I decided the time had come for a complete collection of Masson’s stories. We knew that he had written three more stories after the Faber book, and these were little known. David Masson was then in his late 80s, and almost ridiculously happy to be remembered (little realizing, perhaps, how well he was remembered, and not just by Langford and myself). He enthusiastically collaborated with us on minor revisions and improvements to the Faber stories, and entered into a detailed correspondence with both of us about the less well known extra three. He actively involved himself not just with the quality of the text (which presented amazing demands to anyone who was not David Masson himself, a man proud to proclaim himself obsessed with a level of intricate detail that was above all pedantry) but also with the correct sequence in which the stories should be presented in the book. He wrote a short Foreword for our edition. The new collection was published in the USA as a print-on-demand book, which was unfortunately not widely distributed.
It is therefore not only a great pleasure to bring this book to the Masterworks series, but a genuine privilege to have been able to work with David Masson. He was a good and great man, and his sole book of fiction is a good and great work. More than that: it is memorably different and inspiring.
Christopher Priest
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Traveller’s Rest
It was an apocalyptic sector. Out of the red-black curtain of the forward sight-barrier, which at this distance from the Frontier shut down a mere twenty metres north, came every sort of meteoric horror: fission and fusion explosions, chemical detonations, a super-hail of projectiles of all sizes and basic velocities, sprays of nerve-paralysants and thalamic dopes. The impact devices burst on the barren rock of the slopes or the concrete of the forward stations, some of which were disintegrated or eviscerated every other minute. The surviving installations kept up an equally intense and nearly vertical fire of rockets and shells. Here and there a protectivized figure could be seen sprinting up, down or along the slopes on its mechanical walker like a frantic ant from an anthill attacked by flamethrowers. Som
e of the visible oncoming trajectories could be seen snaking overhead into the indigo gloom of the rear sight-curtain, perhaps fifty metres south, which met the steep-falling rock surface forty-odd metres below the observer’s eye. The whole scene was as if bathed in a gigantic straight rainbow. East and west, as far as the eye could see, perhaps some forty miles in this clear mountain air despite the debris of explosion (but cut off to west by a spur from the range) the visibility-corridor witnessed a continual onslaught and counter-onslaught of devices. The visible pandemonium was shut in by the sight-barriers’ titanic canyon walls of black, reaching the slim pale strip of horizon-spanning light at some immense height. The audibility-corridor was vastly wider than that of sight; the many-pitched din, even through left ear in helm, was considerable.
‘Computer-sent, must be,’ said H’s transceiver into his right ear. No sigil preceded this statement, but H knew the tones of B, his next-up, who in any case could be seen a metre away saying it, in the large concrete bubble whence they watched, using a plaspex window and an infrared northviewer with a range of some hundreds of metres forward. His next-up had been in the bunker for three minutes, apparently overchecking, probably for an appreciation to two-up who might be in station W now.
‘Else how can they get minutely impacts here, you mean?’ said H.
‘Well, of course it could be long range low-frequency — we don’t really know how Time works over There.’
‘But if the conceleration runs asymptotically to the Frontier, as it should if Their Time works in mirror-image, would anything ever have got over?’
‘Doesn’t have to, far’s I can see — maybe it steepens a lot, then just falls back at the same angle the other Side,’ said B’s voice; ‘anyway, I didn’t come to talk science: I’ve news for you, if we hold out the next few seconds here, you’re Relieved.’
H felt a black inner sight-barrier beginning to engulf him, and a roaring in his ears swallowed up the noise of the bombardment. He bent double as his knees began to buckle, and regained full consciousness. He could see his replacement now, an uncertain-looking figure in prot-suit (like everybody else up here) at the far side of the bunker.
‘XN 3, what orders then?’ he said crisply, his pulse accelerating.
‘XN 2: pick em-kit now, repeat now, rocket 3333 to VV, present tag’ — holding out a luminous orange label printed with a few coarse black characters — ‘and proceed as ordered thence.’
H stuck up his right thumb from his fist held sideways at elbow length, in salute. It was no situation for facial gestures or unnecessary speech. ‘XN 3, yes, em-kit, 3333 rocket, tag’ (he had taken it in his left glove) ‘and VV orders; parting!’
He missed B’s nod as he skimmed on soles to the exit, grabbed a small bundle hanging (one of fifteen) from the fourth hook along, slid down the greasy slide underground ten metres to a fuel-cell-lit cavern, pressed a luminous button in the wall, watched a lit symbol passing a series of marks, jumped into the low car as it ground round the corner, and curled up foetuswise. His weight having set off the door mechanism, the car shut, slipped down and (its clamps setting on H’s body) roared off down the chute.
Twenty-five seconds after his parting word H uncurled at the forward receiver cell of station VV nearly half a mile downslope. He crawled out as the rocket ground off again, walked ten steps onward in this larger version of his northward habitat, saluted thumb-up and presented his tag to two-up (recognized from helm-tint and helm-sign), saying simultaneously, ‘XN 3 rep, Relieved.’
‘XN 1 to XN 3: take this’ (holding out a similar orange tag plucked from his pocket) ‘and take mag-lev train down, in -seventy seconds. By the way, ever seen a prehis?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Spot through here, then; look like pteros but more primitive.’
The infrared telescopic viewer looking north-west passed through the forward sight-barrier which due north was about forty metres away here. Well upslope yet still well clear of the dark infrared-radiation barrier could be seen, soundlessly screaming and yammering, two scaly animals about the size of large dogs, but with two legs and heavy wings, flopping around a hump or boulder on the rock. They might have been hit on their way along, and could hardly have had any business on that barren spot, H thought.
‘Thanks; odd,’ he said. Eleven seconds of the seventy had gone. He pulled out a squirter-cup from the wall and took a drink from the machine through his helm. Seventeen seconds gone, fifty-three to go.
XN 1 to XN 3: how are things up there?’
Naturally a report was called for: XN 2 might never return, and communication up-time and down-time was nearly impossible at these latitudes over more than a few metres.
‘XN 3. Things have been hotting up all day; I’m afraid a burst through may be attempted in the next hour or so — only my guess, of course. But I’ve never seen anything like it all this time up here. I suppose you’ll have noticed it in VV too?’
‘XN 1, thanks for report,’ was all the answer he got. But he could hear for himself that the blitz was much more intense than any he had known at this level either.
Only twenty-seven seconds remained. He saluted and strode off across the bunker with his em-kit and the new tag. He showed the tag to the guard, who stamped it and pointed wordlessly down a corridor. H ran down this, arriving many metres down the far end at a little gallery. An underslung rail-guided vehicle with slide-doors opening into cubicles glided quietly alongside. A gallery-guard waved as H and two others waiting opened doors whose indicators were unlit, the doors slid to, and H found himself gently clamped in on a back-tilted seat as the mag-lev train accelerated downhill. After ten seconds it stopped at the next checkhalt; a panel in the cubicle ceiling lit up to state diversion, left, presumably because the direct route had been destroyed. The train now appeared to accelerate but more gently, swung away to left (as H could feel), and stopped at two more checkhalts before swinging back to right and finally decelerating, coming to rest and opening some 480 seconds after its start, by Had’s personal chronograph, instead of the 200 he had expected.
At this point daylight could again be seen. From the top bunker where XN 2 had discharged him, Had had now gone some ten miles south and nearly 3000 metres down, not counting detours. The forward sight-barrier here was hidden by a shoulder of mountain covered in giant lichen, but the southern barrier was evident as a violet-black fog-wall a quarter of a mile off. Lichens and some sort of grass-like vegetation covered much of the neighbouring landscape, a series of hollows and ravines. Noise of war was still audible, mingled with that of a storm, but nearby crashes were not frequent and comparatively little damage could be seen. The sky overhead was turbulent. Some very odd-looking animals, perhaps between a lizard and a stoat in general appearance, were swarming up and down a tree-fern near by. Six men in all got out of the mag-lev train, besides Had. Two and three marched off in two groups down a track eastward. One (not one of those who had got in at VV) stayed with Had.
‘I’m going down to the Great Valley; haven’t seen it for twenty days; everything’ll be changed. Are you sent far?’ said the other man’s voice in Had’s right ear through the transceiver.
‘I — I — I’m Relieved,’ tried Had uncertainly. ‘Well I’m ... disintegrated!’ was all the other man could manage. Then, after a minute, ‘Where will you go?’
‘Set up a business way south, I think. Heat is what suits me, heat and vegetation. I have a few techniques I could put to good use in management of one sort or another. I’m sorry — I never meant to plume it over you with this — but you did ask me.’
‘That’s all right. You certainly must have Luck, though. I never met a man who was Relieved. Make good use of it, won’t you. It helps to make the Game worthwhile up here — I mean, to have met a man who is joining all those others we’re supposed to be protecting — it makes them real to us in a way.’
‘Very fine of you to take it that way,’ said Had.
‘No — I mean
it. Otherwise we’d wonder if there was any people to hold the Front for.’
Well, if there weren’t, how’d the techniques have developed for holding on up here?’ put in Had.
‘Some of the Teccols I remember in the Great Valley might have developed enough techniques for that.’
‘Yes, but think of all the pure science you need to work up the techniques from; I doubt if that could have been studied inside the Valley Teccols.’
‘Possibly not — that’s a bit beyond me,’ said the other’s voice a trifle huffily, and they stood on in silence till the next cable-car came up and round at the foot of the station. Had let the man get in it — he felt he owed him that — and a minute later (five seconds only, up in his first bunker, he suddenly thought ironically and parenthetically) the next car appeared. He swung himself in just as a very queer-looking purple bird with a long bare neck alighted on the stoat-lizards’ tree-fern. The cable-car sped down above the ravines and hollows, the violet southern curtain backing still more swiftly away from it. As the time-gradient became less steep his brain began to function better and a sense of well-being and meaningfulness grew in him. The car’s speed slackened.
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