Can & Can'tankerous

by Harlan Ellison

  I had only one sib, my late sister. The men of my lifelong existence whom I would countenance as my brother are less than the number of dactyls on my left hand, and they know who they are.

  Apparently, Ray Bradbury and I are brothers.

  Not in some absurd catchall absurdity of vacuous gibber, but actually and really “we are brothers.”

  Whence cometh this assertion?

  From Ray Bradbury. That’s whence.

  “You know, Harlan,” he said to me, leaning in and grinning that Midwestern just-fell-off-the-turnip-truck grin, “we are brothers, y’know; you and I; together.”

  I grinned back at him with my hayseed Midwestern mien, onaccounta we are both paid liars, from Waukegan and Cleveland, and I played his straight-man by responding, “How’s that, Ray?”

  (The players freeze in situ as the Bloviating Narrator fills in the background data, thus slowing the movie and shamefacedly doing the necessary bricklaying:)

  The table across which Ray was leaning was in a booth at one of my and Ray’s all-time favorite restaurants, The Pacific Dining Car in downtown Los Angeles. The night was in 1965. Our dining companions had both gone off to the toilets. That is to say, she had gone off to one; her husband had gone off to another. Her name was Leigh Brackett; his name was Edmond Hamilton. The queen of fantasy writing. Great movies based on Hammett and Chandler. A legend in this life. The Eric John Stark Stories. A kind and imperially gracious woman. One of the best people ever known to me. Ed looked like something out of American Gothic. They called him the Galaxy Smasher—the true creator of the “space opera.” Dozens and dozens of stories all the way back to the advent of Gernsback: The Star King series. All those great comic books, and the Captain Future pulp novelettes. Droll, cosmically smart, one helluva plotter, and kind to tots like me and Ray. They were the Strophe and Antistrophe of our literary infancy.

  So, they’re gone, Bradbury and I are alone, grinnin’&schmoosin’ and he proceeds to explain to me that he and I are brothers. Not my word, his word. (Not to make this too clear, but I have a chasmlike abomination of bloviating sf fans who, upon the death of someone they once met in an elevator, begin to leak like WikiAnything, just to buy themselves the face-time at a memorial. “Oh, yes, I knew Isaac as if he were my brother…” / “Oh, lawdy, I pluckt up rootabuggas with Cliff Simak in de fields…” / “Yes, Octavia Butler and I were ever so close…”) This unlikely story I tell actually happened. Go ask Ray Bradbury if you think I’m fudging it. But better hurry…

  Anyhow, I says back to him, “How’s that, Ray?”

  And he says back to me, “Them.”

  And I says to him, “Ed and Leigh?”

  And he says back to me, “Our father and mother. They raised us.” I have no memory of the rest of the actual verbiage.

  Well, sir, wasn’t that a keen moment!

  You see, I was working at Paramount at the time, on one or another of the crippled creations Rouse and Greene had hired me to do for vast sums of money (I was in my “hot 15” at the time). And Leigh, whom I’d known since my teens in Ohio, was writing a dog for Howard Hawks called Red Line 7000, starring James Caan (who, coincidentally, played the role of “Harlan Ellison” in an Alfred Hitchcock Hour based on my MEMOS FROM PURGATORY only a year or so earlier). Also at Paramount.

  Our offices were near to hand.

  Ray doesn’t drive. I drive. Every time we both got booked into the same lecture gig at some jerkwater literary potlatch, I drove, Bradbury lectured.

  Me, he lectured. (Our politics are about as close as our faiths.)

  So, I was always the wheelman on the caper.

  Somewhichway, Leigh didn’t have (what she used to call, to mock James M. Cain) a “short” that night, and I can’t remember what Ed’s story was. But I wound up doing the driving down to The Pacific Dining Car, and we left straight from the studio. Ray must’ve come by cab: he met us at the Bronson Gate, and I did my thing downtown for a good big T-bone dinner. Also Bermuda Onion, Rondo Hatton’s-jaw sized tomatoes with Roquefort dressing, and zucchini Florentine. Ray drank; I never touch the stuff. We had an absolutely nova-squooshing dinner.

  Thus, before I run on at greater length, the answer to the question “Can you reminisce a bit about your Ray Bradbury ‘connection?’” is frozen in Ray’s asseveration: we’re brothers.

  He said so.

  But, not to make a big foofaraw of it, Ray has trouble remembering who I am, and who Harlan Ellison is. And then, he’ll remember, howl “Live Forever!” or somesuch impossibility at me, and recall me as “Ah, yes, the ‘Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang.’” and I’ll smile wanly, and scream back at him, “Nothing lives forever, Ray, you crazy old coot! Not the Great Pyramid of Gizah, not the Polar ice caps, not a single blade of green grass, you nut-bag!”

  And that is the link between us, the “connection.” Nobody ever writ it large on the Northern mastiff of Mt. Shazam…you gotta agree with your brother. You just got to love him.

  The next day, Monday, Susan and my associate

  went out to buy a computer. I went out, got the

  mail, walked back in to the foyer. I’m standing

  there, perfectly cogent, looking at the mail.

  The next second, I’m lying there

  looking up at the art deco wooden ceiling.

  No pain. No cracking of the head.

  No blood. No blurring of vision.

  No slurring of my tongue.

  Everything absolutely the same. In an instant—BAM!

  I checked the wrist watch on my left arm.

  No panic. No fright.

  Too stupid to be frightened,

  not knowing what has happened.

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE:

  THE TOAD PRINCE, OR,

  SEX QUEEN OF THE MARTIAN

  PLEASURE-DOMES

  A NOVELLA OF MANNERS

  This is THE GREAT MIND-SHATTERING “LOST!!” HARLAN ELLISON STAR-SPANNING NOVELLA OF 1940s THRILL-BLASTING SPACE ADVENTURE, YO! and it’s perhaps not so much “lost” as really and seriously misplaced. Not once, not twice, not even three times, but…well, let me tell you how it went.

  It was a harsher time. The Galactic Confederation had given sway to the gibbering, malevolent hordes of the Diphthong Parallax. Here at home, tsunamis had swallowed Portland and Wilkes-Barre.

  Ah, but I jest.

  Forgive me my jackanapery. (At my age, all I pray is that the wit and vocabulary don’t desert me; for when they do, I then instantly become only a crazed geezer who thinks he’s a whole lot funnier than he actually is.)

  It was 1957. I was about to get my ass drafted into the U.S. Army, but I didn’t know it. I was writing pulp fiction at a penny-a-word for every genre ever conceived, except spicy Asiatic Menace horror-mysteries. At a penny a word, one did a plethora of stuff, some good, some awful, some competent and workmanlike. Occasionally, something better than you knew you had in you…whatever it would be that eventually freed you and let you become a writer able to stand the gaff for more than fifty years.

  But then, at that moment, it was 1957, February or March, if I recall. I was writing 10,000 words a night for Paul Fairman at Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures. We wrote a lot of those stories—the rest of the ’50s cadre and I—fast, formulaically, and festooned with “he said, grinning around the thick, fat stub of the Cuban cigar,” instead of just “he said,” because he said was only 2¢ and the prolix prose was 12¢ and counting. Always counting. We did a lot of those stories around (and to fit) already-painted, lurid canvases, mostly by Ed Valigursky. I did one around a cover for something called “Blonde Cargo.” It was, as Typhoid Mary is recorded as having said, “not my finest hour.” You could look it up. FaceBook. Or ButtBook.

  Nonetheless, I wrote it. And what happened thereafter neither I nor the Eldritch Gods can say. It disappeared. I think I got paid for it. In fact, I know I got paid for it, because my impeccable career records list the sale to Amazing Stories, and I got $150.00 for the 15,000 words.
(The records also show that I was already in the Army when I wrote it. At Ft. Knox, in Kentucky.

  Anyhow…

  The story went

  somewhere

  and was never seen again.

  Until! (And this is where it gets interesting!) Three decades flash by in an instant, I learned to write a lot better and I was reborn. And “Blonde Cargo” surfaced, I can’t remember how or exactly the moment of why. But it was presumably written by me mine ownself either some years before I was born, or written recently in a pathetic spasm of nostalgia for the wild crap I enjoyed reading when I was a little kid. Either way, it got written to be published exactly as simulacrum of the original pulp magazine style and format. What I mean, Planet Stories or Thrilling Wonder or, yes, Amazing back before there was an Internet or voice mail or Britney Spears.

  Along about 1990, I sat down one day to write this bit of tomfoolery. Or maybe it was 1958, when I was stuck in Fort Knox. No, I think it was 1970, after I’d won my first few Hugos. Eighty-two, it was definitely 1982, when Shawna McCarthy was still at Asimov’s and offered me a lot of money to write a lead story for the magazine. No, it was fer shure either sometime before 1934 when I got borned, or it was 1991, when I actually sat down and wrote this story, and sent it to Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith at Pulphouse. May Allah praise their names! And I lied, and told them it was a new story, but a parody of pulp writing. I am a bad person.

  Because, you see, they had this odd co-.publication deal with Bantam Books, where Pulphouse would do cunning li’l hardcover volumes of cunning li’l novelettes, and then Bantam would reprint them as attractive, thin li’l paperbacks. And Kris/Dean said they loved it, just loved the gag—doing a modern straight-faced version of ’40s space opera—with art and typography unaltered—and they sent it on to the editor at Bantam who was ramrodding this series of novelette slimjims. And she loved it. But though she was ga-ga over the rip-roaring action-adventure of it all, she couldn’t figure out why Ellison and Kris/Dean wanted to muck it up with all that ridiculous ’40s-’50s nonsense. “Why act so disrespectful to such a serious piece of writing?” she wanted to know.

  Over the telephone, Kris/Dean in Oregon, me in California, the three of us looked at each other, with disbelief…say what!? Didn’t she understand this was a joke, a parody, a lovingly nostalgic practical joke in honor of a style and a time long gone, never to return? In short, didn’t she get it? (Forget that I was lying.)

  Well, no, she didn’t. And I guess my stunted ethics kicked in, I couldn’t, just could not validate the lie in such a duplicity. So I gave a pass to that payday—and it was a substantial one— because I had presumably written this as a funny, and how the hell could I defend writing it in the style of Ellison 1957, when I was now writing as Ellison 1991? So it sat there, lost and forlorn, my poor li’l love-child of a story, and the next thing I knew that poltroon Allen Steele had written just this kind of gag for Asimov’s (though the cover wasn’t nearly authentic enough), and he even won awards for it.

  Oh me, oh my, I lamented, in a lamentable sort of way, now if “The Toad Prince” ever sees print, everyone will think I’m emulating that blackguard Steele.

  But, as it must to all Good Souls, the divine moment came to me when the editor of Amazing Stories—which was, ironically, the absolutely correct venue for this exercise—came to me and said, “Oh great and wise Scrivener, dost thou have in thy kick somewhere a story that wouldst do us honor as includee in the big Millennium issue of the world’s oldest living sf magazine?”

  And I said, yes, I had such a dollop of tastiness, and I sold it, and they ran it on the cover, and that’s more than a decade ago, and so it is in this fine volume, as bright and shiny as one of the pennies I originally received for creating Sarna, my very own, apparently indestructible, sex queen of the Martian pleasure-domes.

  Here she is, naked and unashamed, and I only wish I’d lived to see it in print. You could look me up (as Dorothy Parker wrote).

  THE TOAD PRINCE,

  OR,

  SEX QUEEN OF THE MARTIAN

  PLEASURE-DOMES

  A NOVELLA OF MANNERS

  Once upon a time, in a golden kingdom far away, a kingdom dreaming of never-was but should-have-been, on an especially lovely day, a most exceptionally comely blonde princess, with eyes the color of skies toward which the noblest eagles yearn, chose to take a leisurely stroll at the veriest verge of the vast grounds bounding her father’s palace. This princess was heralded throughout the kingdom for her purity and compassion, her sagacity and sweetness of manner, as well as her breathtaking beauty. For many hours did the sweet creature walk the woods and meads of the palace wold; and when at last she came to the southernmost tip of the king’s gardens she found herself at the brink of a murky fen. As this slough was dark and most sorely troubling, the princess did make to turn and hasten back to the palace. It was at that very moment she heard a loud croak that arrested her attention and, casting about for its source, she did espy sitting on a blasted tree stump a huge and most hideous toad. “Ah,” the lovely princess said, “a vocal member of the family Bufonidae. Good morn to you, sir flycatcher.” Yet before she could make to leave, the creature croaked again, and then said, very distinctly, “Oh, most exquisite of all princesses, please save me.” The princess was taken aback for never, in all that brief number of years that had been her pleasant existence, amid all the marvels of the court, had she ever heard tales of, or indeed encountered, a toad or frog with the gift of human speech. Moving near, for her curiosity as you may imagine had been piqued, the princess saw the toad was staring directly at her with gaze unwavering. “I beg your pardon?” the princess said, for though the sight of the creature made her succulent lower lip tremble and a gelid spasm climb her spine, she had been reared in the royal fashion and had been tutored always to speak politely, no matter to whom the address. “I am not truly a frog,” the creature said, arching in a frightful fashion. “To be sure,” the princess replied, asseverating, “a frog and a toad are members of entirely different sub-orders.” The toad stared at her for a long moment, as if reconsidering its options. “Whatever,” it said. “In any event: because of runes toss’t and a magical spell cast upon me by an extremely cranky, not to mention demented, witch, I who was once a handsome prince have been changed into this monstrous warty thing you see before you. And so will I remain, lovely one, until that precise moment when a beautiful woman of pure lineage and unblemished goodness kisses me. Of her own free will.” Startled, the princess asked, “And shall you then be freed of this hideous curse, and be recongealed in the presentable form e’er held previously?” The toad croaked affirmation. And then—because in that golden land many strange and wonderful things did occur fairly regularly—the comely maiden stooped and, shuddering at the chill, clammy touch of the creature, did take the odious beast between thumb and forefinger, did lift the toad to her pouting, ruby lips, did close her eyes and, holding her breath against the fetid odor of its slimy body, did plant on its lipless mouth a sweet, warm kiss…

  CHAPTER ONE

  When Earthmen had settled Mars, they had called it the golden land, partially because there was gold in rich deposits all across the planet, and partially because of the yellow pigmentation of its natives, who were eulogized by Terran poets as The Golden People.

  Golden, as the Samoans, the Melanesians, had been…long ago on Earth. And as with those ancient peoples, the reavers had taken more than just the innocence of the alien culture: they had raped and dominated, savaged and strip-mined both Mars and its Golden People. Now, because of the mass rapes, there were two distinct social levels of Martian skin-tone.

  The half-breeds were merely yellow, no longer Golden.

  But that had been many years before. Now Mars was spotted by breather Domes, by Terran business enterprises, and by industry. The Golden People were simply called marties now, the term gooks having fallen into disuse.

  All the waves of explorers, entrepreneurs, and settl
ers had come and used Mars, and now it was “civilized.”

  There were even places like the Red Dog House.

  And there were women like Sarna.

  Sarna was not a Martian by birth, though she worked in what might loosely be termed a “home industry.” She was what the other girls in the house referred to as an imp. An imported prostitute from Earth. At first they had not liked her, for her beauty was a clear, clean thing and her manner was not yet sullied by the stains the profession soon brought. Her skin was pink, like an imp, not yellow, like a martie. Also, she drew more customers, and that cut the individual profits for the other girls. But soon they grew to respect her, for she respected herself. There were reasons why she was in the Red Dog House, and she kept them to herself, silently, secretly—not whining and shrilly cursing, as all the other girls did when in their cups, or after a rough miner from Delgamarville had left, or when business was dead and they had not gotten their fix-ration—but respecting herself, despite her profession. She was what she was, and she was in no way ashamed of it. So soon they learned to like her, even as they respected her.

  Her name was Sarna. She worked on Mars. Her profession was the oldest in the universe.

  A Yellow died in her bed one night, by unnatural causes, and that was what started her search for the Six.