Nebula Awards Showcase 2010

by Bill Fawcett

  He threw his head back and laughed, merrier than I’d seen him in days. “Oh, you do me good, Gav!” he said.

  The picture he drew was fantastic yet terribly vivid, compelling my belief. “But how will you reach the farm slaves, the city house slaves?” I asked, trying to sound practical, knowledgeable.

  “That’s the strategy: exactly. To reach into the houses, into the barracks and the slave villages, send men to talk to them—catch them in our net! Show them what they can do and how to do it. Let them ask questions. Get them to figure it out for themselves, make their own plans—so long as they know they must wait for our signal. It’ll take time to do that, to spread the net, set up the plan all through the city and the countryside. And yet it can’t be too slow in building, because if it goes on too long, word will leak out, fools will begin to blab, and the masters will get jumpy—What’s all this talk in the barracks? What are they whispering in the kitchen? What’s that blacksmith making there?—And then the great advantage of surprise is lost. Timing is everything.”

  It was only a tale to me, his Uprising. In his mind it was to take place in the future, a great revenge, a rectification of the past. But in my mind there was no past.

  I had nothing left but words—the poems that sang themselves in my head, the stories and histories I could bring before my mind’s eye and read. I did not look up from the words to what had been around them. When I looked away from them I was back in the vivid intensity of the moment, now, here, with nothing behind it, no shadows, no memories. The words came when I needed them. They came to me from nowhere. My name was a word. Etra was a word. That was all; they had no meaning, no history. Liberty was a word in a poem. A beautiful word, and beauty was all the meaning it had.

  Always sketching out his plans and dreams of the future, Barna never asked me about my past. Instead, one day, he told me about it. He’d been talking about the Uprising, and perhaps I’d answered without much enthusiasm, for my own sense of emptiness sometimes made it hard for me to respond convincingly. He was quick to see such moods.

  “You did the right thing, you know, Gav,” he said, looking at me with his clear eyes. “I know what you’re thinking about. Back there in the city . . . You think, ‘What a fool I was! To run off and starve, to live in a forest with ignorant men, to slave harder than I ever did in my master’s house! Is that freedom? Wasn’t I freer there, talking with learned men, reading the books of the poets, sleeping soft and waking warm? Wasn’t I happier there?’—But you weren’t. You weren’t happy, Gav. You knew it in your heart, and that’s why you ran off. The hand of the master was always on you.”

  He sighed and looked into the fire for a little; it was autumn, a chill in the air. I listened to him as I listened to him tell all his tales, without argument or question.

  “I know how it was, Gav. You were a slave in a great house, a rich house, in the city, with kind masters who had you educated. Oh, I know that! And you thought you should be happy, because you had the power to learn, read, teach—become a wise man, a learned man. They let you have that. They allowed it to you. Oh yes! But though you were given the power to do certain things, you had no power over anyone or anything. That was theirs. The masters. Your owners. And whether you knew it or not, in every bone of your body and fibre of your mind you felt that hand of the master holding you, controlling you, pressing down on you. Any power you had, on those terms, was worthless. Because it was nothing but their power acting through you. Using you . . . They let you pretend it was yours. You filched a bit of freedom, a scrap of liberty, from your masters, and pretended it was yours and was enough to keep you happy. Right? But you were growing into a man. And for a man, Gav, there is no happiness but in his own freedom. His freedom to do what he wills to do. And so your will sought its full liberty. As mine did, long ago.”

  He reached out and clapped me on the knee. “Don’t look so sad,” he said, his white grin flashing in his curly beard. “You know you did the right thing! Be glad of it, as I am!”

  I tried to tell him that I was glad of it.

  He had to go see about affairs, and left me musing by the fire. What he said was true. It was the truth.

  But not my truth.

  Turning away from his tale, I looked back for the first time in—how long? I looked across the wall I’d built to keep me from remembering. I looked and saw the truth: I had been a slave in a great house, a rich house, in the city, obedient to my masters, owning no freedom but what they allowed me. And I had been happy.

  In the house of my slavery I had known a love so dear to me that I could not bear to think about it, because when I lost it, I lost everything.

  All my life had been built on trust, and that trust had been betrayed by the Family of Arcamand.

  Arcamand: with the name, with the word, everything I had forgotten, had refused to remember, came back and was mine again, and with it all the unspeakable pain I had denied.

  I sat there by the fire, turned away from the room, bent over, my hands clenched on my knees. Someone came near and stood near me at the hearth to warm herself: Diero, a gentle presence in a long shawl of fine pale wool.

  “Gav,” she said very quietly, “what is it?”

  I tried to answer her and broke into a sob. I hid my face in my arms and wept aloud.

  Diero sat down beside me on the stone hearth seat. She put her arms around me and held me while I cried.

  “Tell me, tell me,” she said at last.

  “My sister. She was my sister,” I said.

  And that word brought the sobbing again, so hard I could not take breath.

  She held me and rocked me a while, until I could lift my head and wipe my nose and face. Then she said again, “Tell me.”

  “She was always there,” I said.

  And so one way and another, weeping, in broken sentences and out of order, I told her about Sallo, about our life, about her death.

  The wall of forgetting was down. I was able to think, to speak, to remember. I was free. Freedom was unspeakable anguish.

  In that first terrible hour I came back again and again to Sallo’s death, to how she died, why she died—all the questions I had refused to ask.

  “The Mother knew—she had to know about it,” I said. “Maybe Torm took Sallo and Ris out of the silk rooms without asking, without permission, it sounds as if that’s what he did. But the other women there would know it—they’d go to the Mother and tell her—Torm-dí took Ris and Sallo off, Mother—they didn’t want to go, they were crying—Did you tell him he could take them? Will you send after them?—And she didn’t. She did nothing! Maybe the Father said not to interfere. He always favored Torm. Sallo said that, she said he hated Yaven and favored Torm. But the Mother—she knew—she knew where Torm and Hoby were taking them, to that place, those men, men who used girls like animals, who—She knew that. Ris was a virgin. And the Mother had given Sallo to Yaven herself. And yet she let the other son take her and give her to—How did they kill her? Did she try to fight them? She couldn’t have. All those men. They raped her, they tortured her, that’s what they wanted girls for, to hear them scream—to torture and kill them, drown them—When Sallo was dead. After I saw her. I saw her dead. The Mother sent for me. She called her ‘our sweet Sallo.’ She gave me—she gave me money—for my sister—”

  A sound came out of my throat then, not a sob but a hoarse howl. Diero held me close. She said nothing.

  I was silent at last. I was mortally tired.

  “They betrayed our trust,” I said.

  I felt Diero nod. She sat beside me, her hand on mine.

  “That’s what it is,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Do you keep the trust, or not. To Barna it’s all power. But it’s not. It’s trust.”

  “They had the power to betray it,” I said bitterly.

  “Even slaves have that power,” she said in her gentle voice.

  SCIENCE FICTION IN THE FIFTIES: THE REAL GOLDEN AGE

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  Hist
orians of science fiction often speak of the years 1939-42 as “the golden age.” But it was more like a false dawn. The real golden age arrived a decade later, and—what is not always true of golden ages—we knew what it was while it was happening.

  That earlier golden age was centered entirely in a single magazine, John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, and the war aborted it in midstride. Campbell steered a middle course between the heavy-handed science-oriented stories preferred by the pioneering s-f magazine editors Hugo Gernsback and T. O’Conor Sloane and the cheerfully lowbrow adventure fiction favored by pulp editors Ray Palmer and Mort Weisinger. He wanted smoothly written fiction that seriously explored the future of science and technology for an audience of intelligent adult readers—and in the four years of that first golden age he found an extraordinary array of brilliant new writers (and reenergized some older ones) to give him what he wanted: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Jack Williamson, Clifford D. Simak, L. Sprague de Camp, and many more.

  The decade of the fifties is often thought nowadays to have been a timid, conventional, straitlaced time, a boring and sluggish era that was swept away, thank heaven, by the free-wheeling, permissive, joyous sixties. In some ways, that’s true. For science fiction, no. The decade of the fifties, staid as it may have been in matters of clothing, politics, and sexuality, was also a period that saw the first artificial space satellites placed in orbit around the Earth; the beginning of the end of legal racial segregation in the United States; and, in the small world of science fiction, a grand rush of creativity, a torrent of new magazines and new writers bringing new themes and fresh techniques that laid the foundation for the work of the four decades that followed. An exciting time for us, yes: truly a golden age.

  The disruptions of the Second World War scattered Campbell’s talented crew far and wide. Some, like Asimov, van Vogt, and Simak, managed to provide Campbell with an occasional story during the war years, as did some lesser figures of the first Campbell pantheon who now were reaching literary maturity—Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, Eric Frank Russell. Others—Heinlein, Williamson, de Camp—vanished from science fiction “for the duration,” as the phrase went then. They all came back after the war, and with their aid, Campbell attempted, with moderate success, to restore Astounding. Somehow, though, the magazine never quite became the dazzling locus of excitement that it had been a decade earlier.

  And then, suddenly, the fifties arrived—and with the new decade came a host of new science fiction magazines and a legion of gifted new writers. The result was a spectacular out-pouring of stories and novels that swiftly surpassed both in quantity and quality the considerable achievement of the Campbellian golden age.

  Many of Campbell’s original stars were still in their prime, indeed had much of their best work still ahead. But now there was the new generation of writers, most born between 1915 and 1928. They had been too young to have been major contributors to the prewar Astounding, but now they came blossoming into literary maturity all at once. I mean such writers as Jack Vance, James Blish, Poul Anderson, Damon Knight, “William Tenn,” Frederik Pohl, Arthur C. Clarke, C. M. Kornbluth, Ray Bradbury, Alfred Bester, and, a little later, Algis Budrys, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Philip Jose Farmer, Walter M. Miller Jr., James E. Gunn, and others.

  Most of these newcomers had learned what they knew about science fiction by reading Campbell’s magazine. Nearly all (Bradbury was the major exception) subscribed to Campbell’s insistence that even the most speculative of science fiction stories ought to be founded on a clear understanding of real-world science and human psychology and his belief in the importance of employing a lucid, straightforward narrative style.

  But most of these new writers did their best work for editors other than Campbell. That was a significant change. In the forties, Campbell was the only market for serious science fiction; those who could not or would not write the relatively sophisticated sort of fiction that Campbell wanted to publish wrote simple, low-pay action-adventure stories for his gaudy-looking pulp-paper competitors, such magazines as Planet Stories, Super Science Stories, and Startling Stories.

  As the fifties dawned, two of the pulps, Startling and Thrilling Wonder Stories, were beginning to welcome science fiction of the more complex Campbellian kind under the editorship of Sam Merwin Jr. But the basic task of most of them still was to supply simple adventure fiction to an audience primarily made up of boys and half-educated young men.

  The first harbinger of the new era was The Magazine of Fantasy , a dignified-looking magazine in the small “digest-sized” format that Astounding had adopted during the war. The first issue, on sale in the autumn of 1949, sold for the premier price of thirty-five cents a copy, ten cents more than Astounding, and contained a mixture of new short stories, more fantasy than science fiction, by such people as Theodore Sturgeon and Cleve Cartmill (the latter a minor Campbell writer), and classic reprints by British writers like Oliver Onions, Perceval Landon, and Fitz-James O’Brien, that gave the magazine a genteel, almost Victorian tone. But right at the back of the magazine was an astonishing, explosive science fiction story by the poet Winona McClintock: science fiction, yes, but nothing that John Campbell would ever have published, for it was profoundly anti-scientific in theme, and exceedingly literary in tone. It was closest in manner to the sort of fiction that Ray Bradbury had begun to publish in just about every American magazine from Weird Tales to Harper’s, but never in Astounding.

  The Magazine of Fantasy, by all appearances, was the sort of quiet little literary quarterly that would find a quiet little audience and expire after two or three issues. But its second issue, though still in the same elegant format, showed a notable transformation. The name of the magazine now was The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and—though there still were a couple of nineteenth-century reprints—most of the issue was science fiction. Not Campbellian science fiction, to be sure: nothing that explored and even extolled the coming high-tech future. Ray Bradbury himself was on hand, with a tale of hallucinatory spaceflight (“The Exiles”), and two of Campbell’s regulars, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, with a funny little fantasy. Damon Knight and Margaret St. Clair, writers just beginning their careers, contributed stories that, though they fit almost anyone’s definition of science fiction, Campbell would surely have rejected for their frivolity and their scientific irrelevance. The whole tone of the magazine was light, playful, experimental.

  And yet one of Campbell’s own regulars was in charge: Anthony Boucher, the author of a baker’s dozen of stories for Astounding and its short-lived fantasy companion, Unknown Worlds, between 1942 and 1946. He and his coeditor, J. Francis McComas, were familiar with Campbell’s objectives and were quite willing to concede the high-tech audience to him, staking out a position for themselves among readers whose orientation lay more in the direction of general literature, fantasy, even detective fiction, but who had a liking for the vivid concepts of science fiction as well.

  F&SF, as the magazine came to be known, prospered and grew in the fifties, quickly going from quarterly to bimonthly publication and then to monthly. Its pages were a home for scores of writers new and old who chafed at John Campbell’s messianic sense of the function of science and his growing literary dogmatism. Bradbury was a frequent contributor. So was Sturgeon. Alfred Bester, a peripheral figure in the Campbell Astounding , produced a group of remarkable short stories in a unique pyrotechnic style. Poul Anderson, a Campbell discovery in 1947 and a regular in his magazine ever since, gave Boucher and McComas dozens of stories that went beyond Campbell’s ever-narrowing editorial limits. So did James Blish and C. M. Kornbluth, who had served their apprenticeships in the prewar pulp magazines but whose talents were coming now into their real flowering. And for a multitude of new writers launching what would prove to be spectacular careers—Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Avram Davidson, Richard Matheson, J. T. McIntosh, and on and on and on—the amiab
le, sympathetic Boucher-McComas style of editing proved to be so congenial that they rarely if ever offered stories to Campbell at all.

  While F&SF was hitting its stride in the first months of the new decade, another Campbell protégé was busily readying the first issue of his new science fiction magazine—one intended not to be a genteel literary adjunct to Campbell’s Astounding, but as its direct and ferociously aggressive competitor. He was Horace L. Gold; his magazine was Galaxy Science Fiction, which became the dominant and shaping force of this decade of science fiction as Astounding had been for the last one.

  Gold, a fiercely opinionated and furiously intelligent man, had begun writing science fiction professionally in his teens, publishing stories even before Campbell’s ascent to the editorial chair in 1937, and had worked as an associate editor for a pulp-magazine chain just before the war. He had written some outstanding stories for Campbell in those years too; but then he went off to service, and when he returned it was with serious war-related psychological disabilities from which he was years in recovering.

  By 1950, though, Gold was vigorous enough to want to make a head-on attack on Campbell’s editorial supremacy: to edit a magazine that would emulate the older editor’s visionary futuristic range while at the same time allowing its writers a deeper level of psychological insight than Campbell seemed comfortable with. His intention was to liberate Campbell’s best writers from what was now widely felt to be a set of constrictive editorial policies, and to bring in the best of the new writers as well; and to this end he offered his writers a notably higher rate of pay than Astounding had been giving them.

  The first issue of Galaxy, resplendent in a gleaming cover printed on heavy coated stock, was dated October 1950. Its contents page featured five of Campbell’s star authors—Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown—along with the already celebrated newcomers Richard Matheson and Katherine MacLean. The second issue added Damon Knight and Anthony Boucher to the roster; the third, another recent Campbell star, James H. Schmitz. A new Asimov novel was serialized in the fourth issue; the fifth had a long story by Ray Bradbury, “The Fireman,” which would be the nucleus of his novel Fahrenheit 451. And so it went all year, and for some years thereafter. The level of performance was astonishingly high. Every few months Galaxy brought its readers stories and novels destined for classic status: Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (called “Gravy Planet” in the magazine), Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, James Blish’s “Surface Tension,” Wyman Guin’s “Beyond Bedlam,” and dozens more. Though the obstreperous Gold was a difficult, well-nigh impossibly demanding editor to work with, he and his magazine generated so much excitement in the first half of the fifties that any writer who thought at all of writing science fiction wanted to write for Galaxy.