“I can get it for you fast if you let me go,” said Rat. “Ten minutes, fifteen. You look like you need it.”
“What are you talking about?” The fed’s bravado started to crumble, and Rat knew he had the man. The fed wanted the dust for himself. He was one of the dead.
“Don’t make it hard on yourself,” said Rat. “There’s a terminal in my nest. By the crack. Ten minutes.” He started to pull himself toward the nest. He knew the fed would not dare stop him; the man was already deep into withdrawal. “Only ten minutes and you can have all the dust you want.” The poor fool could not hope to fight the flood of neuroregulators pumping crazily across his synapses. He might break any minute, let his weapon slip from trembling hands. Rat reached the crack and scrambled through into comforting darkness.
The nest was built around a century-old shopping cart and a stripped subway bench. Rat had filled the gaps in with pieces of synthetic rubber, a hubcap, plastic greeting cards, barbed wire, disk casings, Baggies, a No Parking sign, and an assortment of bones. Rat climbed in and lowered himself onto the soft bed of shredded thousand-dollar bills. The profits of six years of deals and betrayals, a few dozen murders, and several thousand dusty deaths.
The fed sniffled as Rat powered up his terminal to notify Security. “Someone set me up some vicious bastard slipped it to me I don’t know when I think it was Barcelona…it would kill Sarah to see…” He began to weep. “I wanted to turn myself in…they keep working on new treatments you know but it’s not fair damn it! The success rate is less than…I made my first buy two weeks only two God it seems…killed a man to get some lousy dust…but they’re right it’s, it’s, I can’t begin to describe what it’s like…”
Rat’s fingers flew over the glowing keyboard, describing his situation, the layout of the rooms, a strategy for the assault. He had overridden the smart door’s recognition sequence. It would be tricky, but Security could take the fed out if they were quick and careful. Better risk a surprise attack than to dicker with an armed and unraveling dead man.
“I really ought to kill myself…would be best but it’s not only me…I’ve seen ten-year olds…what kind of animal sells dust to kids…I should kill myself and you.” Something changed in the fed’s voice as Rat signed off. “And you.” He stooped and reached through the crack.
“It’s coming,” said Rat quickly. “By messenger. Ten doses. By the time you get to the door, it should be here.” He could see the fed’s hand and burrowed into the rotting pile of money. “You wait by the door, you hear? It’s coming any minute.”
“I don’t want it.” The hand was so large it blocked the light. Rat’s fur went erect and he arched his spine. “Keep your fucking dust.”
Rat could hear the guards fighting their way through the clutter. Shelves crashed. So clumsy, these men.
“It’s you I want.” The hand sifted through the shredded bills, searching for Rat. He had no doubt that the fed could crush the life from him—the hand was huge now. In the darkness he could count the lines on the palm, follow the whorls on the fingertips. They seemed to spin in Rat’s brain—he was losing control. He realized then that one of the capsules must have broken, spilling a megadose of first-quality Algerian Yellow dust into his gut. With a hallucinatory clarity, he imagined sparks streaming through his blood, igniting neurons like tinder. Suddenly the guards did not matter. Nothing mattered except that he was cornered. When he could no longer fight the instinct to strike, the fed’s hand closed around him. The man was stronger than Rat could have imagined. As the fed hauled him—clawing and biting—back into the light, Rat’s only thought was of how terrifyingly large a man was. So much larger than a rat.
Vestibular Man
by Felix C. Gotschalk
Introduction
One of the diseases that the academic—literary establishment has brought to American storytelling is elitism. Young writers-to-be rise up through English classes in high school and on to literature courses in college, where they are invariably taught that the truly great literature can only be understood when it has been properly explained by an academic. Thus the young student labors through Moby-Dick and As I Lay Dying years before he is mature enough to understand them—years before he is ready to become part of their natural audience. He learns the obvious lesson that truly great literature is hard to read; that one must work to receive it properly; and because he is too young to grasp the story well enough to respond with strong, immediate emotion, he learns that the proper response of the reader is to admire.
So far, this is simply the accidental by-product of a natural tendency in all teachers—the desire to teach the “best stuff” to students who aren’t ready for it. Historians do it, trying to discuss fine points of historiography with undergraduates who don’t yet know the difference between the Thirty and the Hundred Years Wars. Mathematicians did it on a national basis when the New Math stole basic arithmetic skills from a generation of baffled American children, who are now terrific at sets and lousy at deficits.
Where the academic-literary establishment becomes perniciously elitist is in their rejection of stories that are not difficult. I have often declared to English teachers my firm belief that Gone with the Wind is the great American novel of the twentieth century, as Huckleberry Finn was the great American novel of the nineteenth. Most ignore me; some get angry; a few, though, candidly admit that, on my evidence, I might be right. The story has shown its staying power and its universality; it deals with themes of poverty, slavery, exploitation, and power with great honesty and sophistication. Yet these professors invariably say the same thing. “You’re right—Gone with the Wind is a very important book. But I can’t teach it because I have nothing to say about it.”
There it is—the reason for elitism. Professors can only “teach” the stories that need mediation—the stories that can’t be understood without training. Therefore, only the stories that need mediation will be taught at the university. But this is never explained to the students. No, the students are left with the clear implication—and, often, the explicit statement—that the stories taught at the university are the only ones worth teaching, and therefore the only ones worth reading; and, for those students who have ambitions to become writers themselves, the only kind of story worth emulating.
If in fact the universities and their step-children, the high schools, taught all the classics, all the stories with staying power, all the stories that matter, then their position as arbiters of American literary value might be defensible. But the truth is just the opposite. Many of the greatest works of American literature, the stories that spoke most deeply and enduringly to the American soul, are still in print even though they are almost never required reading for any class. They are read solely by volunteers. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men; Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind; Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur; Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan of the Apes; until recently, Lloyd Douglas’s The Robe. Many of these are now dismissed as “category fiction”—Ben-Hur and The Robe as religious fiction; Tarzan and Alcott’s works as children’s literature; Gone with the Wind as a “bodice-ripper” or, more politely, a “women’s historical romance.” Yet all these works have had far more influence on the American mind and soul than anything by Faulkner or Melville, not only because of the sheer numbers of readers—Harold Robbins has probably had more—but also because of the great importance these books have in the memories of their readers. Little Women and Tarzan and Gone with the Wind are thrust into the hands of young readers because their parents or grandparents or librarians or friends have read them and treasured them. These are stories designed, not to be admired, but rather to be experienced and then held in memory forever.
And so skillful was the artistry of these authors that even after the passage of several generations, the stories can still be received without mediation. In that sense they are still subversive—if these stories were recognized as literature, then we would discover that we did not need professors of lite
rature to teach us how to read. In fact, we would begin to wonder if some of the unreadable books were really so great after all. We might even suspect that the real lesson of Faulkner’s and Joyce’s experimental fiction is that their experiments did not work, that after writers of great ability did their best, such stories remained inaccessible, thus proving that these techniques were not viable tools for future storytellers.
Yet today’s academic-literary establishment teaches young writers that the goal of fiction writing is to be admired, not just by anybody, but by critics and professors of the establishment; that great fiction must be written in such a way as to require decoding; that stories that can be immediately apprehended by the reader are inferior—mere “popular literature,” beneath the dignity of serious writers; that good writing must be daring and experimental—but only so long as the experiments fall into time-honored categories, and only so long as the writer does not dare to speak to an audience that has not been properly indoctrinated by the establishment.
Thus the establishment is able to enroll many talented writers and convince them that their slavish conformity is “revolutionary,” that their stylistic self-indulgence is “art,” and that the absence of any worthwhile story in their work is a sign that they refuse to pander to the masses. When someone like me accuses such deliberately obscurantist, omphaloskeptic writers of being elitist, however, they immediately howl that I’m trying to make them “conform to one way of writing,” when in fact I’m trying to liberate them from their blind, self-destructive conformity and open up the possibility of dialogue with a real live audience of volunteers who might actually read their stories with passion instead of calculation.
But does this mean that every writer who attracts a wide audience is therefore virtuous, and every writer whose audience is small must be elitist? No indeed. What I’m saying is that a good storyteller will never make his story unnecessarily difficult; that a good storyteller will never deform his story by pandering to anyone, be it the mass audience or the academic—literary establishment.
It is inevitable that some of our finest storytellers will have such original vision, such painful or surprising stories to tell, that even when the tale is told with perfect clarity, in exactly the way it must be told, only a few people will be capable of receiving it. Moby-Dick is, in fact, as good as the professors say it is—but it is a book that must be discovered, not forced. When a reader is ready for it, it will be a delight; until then Moby-Dick is difficult, and its rewards often invisible.
Felix Gotschalk can be a difficult writer. This is not because he sets out to be, or because he has been taught that obscurity is a virtue. His stories aren’t difficult because he puts barriers in the reader’s way, or because he spends all his time on symbolism or style, ignoring the tale itself. On the contrary, he focuses his attention exclusively on the tale, and his style reflects the attitude and voice of the point-of-view character in such a way that story and character are inseparable. Above all, Gotschalk writes with almost supernatural clarity. But Gotschalk’s angle of vision is so quirky and strange that it is often hard for the reader to understand what he’s seeing—like those super-close-up photographs of common household objects that you can’t for the life of you recognize until at last somebody says, “It’s a can opener!” or “It’s the base of a lightbulb!” Then, of course, you see clearly what it is; you laugh in delight and say, “I never saw it that way before.”
I promise you that you have never seen anything the way that Gotschalk sees it. But after reading this story of a man who takes pride in the very fleshiness of his flesh and despises those who have machine parts, you will look at your own body and say, “I never saw it that way before.” This is fiction that will change you, if you’re ready to receive it.
Derek Carlson grew up in the subtropical marshlands of the deep southern U.S. He had never seen anything more mountainous than a fire-ant mound until he went on a class trip to Old Orleans Park with his group of pubescent age-peers one typical steamy day in late spring of the year 2800. There the boys marveled at the simulated hill, some thirty feet high, constructed in the 1930s, for the half-serious and half-whimsical purpose of letting young children see what a real hill looked like. The Old Orleans area was below sea level, flat and green and mossy as the top of a billiard table, and soggy-springy-resilient, so that digging down as little as a foot or two in the richly impacted loam invariably yielded sulfurous water.
For Derek, visual horizons seemed always to be at eye level and higher, a linearity to defer to, to look up at; and for him to stand just below the grassy crest of the levee when the great river was at flood stage was to see threateningly high aquatic horizons, as if the entire earth were awash. It was very much like being at sea.
Derek’s vestibular organs were set snugly inboard of his slightly flared ear-funnels, the well protected semicircular canals giving him the comfortable signals of equilibratory quiescence, as well as the infinitely varied topological cues of his precise relationship to his flat spongy home at the bottom of the continent. With low barometric pressure, high heat and humidity, and minimal changes in elevation, Derek’s vestibular system had fed him mostly tranquil cues for years. Then puberty school was over, and he was marshaled into warrior training at a camp set high in the Brevard Mountains, a jagged range of new topographic ridges along the famous fault line that had been dormant until the great earthquake of the year 2714. This part of the country was so topographically different from any other part that it triggered an alien sense of fear in Derek, though he had never been there. Now it was to be home for him, at least for a while.
The speeding landskimmer was filled with forty fresh warrior plebes, each young man encapsulated in an impact-neutralizer amniotic sack, and there was a babble of talk as the wedge-shaped skimmer rode on its silicon foils, angled deep down into the energy trough that was now called Azimuth 95, and had been the ancient U.S. Highway 11 that ran from the southwest corner of Virginius all the way to the collapsed Huey Long Bridge in Old Orleans.
“Hey, my ears just popped,” a dark-skinned plebe said.
“Swallow hard,” said his rack-mate, “it’s just the air pressure at these higher levels.” Derek swallowed and felt the pops in his own ears. The sensation was faintly pleasurable, but then also ominous. He looked out at the leavening, swollen, whitish cliffsides looming up from a slate-colored Alabamus River, and realized with exhilarating perceptual clarity that he was actually looking down on the broad mantle of the land, something new in his experience. It gave him a sense of power and pleasure to look out and down on the smooth hills, pine forests, ghost towns, ICBM concrete plains, meandering rivers, filigreed agricultural plots, and geodesic domes. In some areas the kudzu carpet was ten feet deep, like a latticed lava flow of thick vines and leaves.
The skimmer sped straight up the face of the earth, ever nearer to the true, absolute horizontality of the North Pole, accruing latitudinal increments as it swept along; and yet, visually, the generic flatness of the land still cued comfortable and new signals into Derek’s perceptual matrices, safe signals that the land was still basically flat, and that he was looking down at it.
“It’s like climbing up out of a bowl,” Derek said to his rack-mate.
“We’re about a thousand feet above sea level already,” another plebe said. “That’s the same as hanging a thousand feet straight up in the air over the Superdome.”
“Denver is five thousand feet above the sea,” another said, “and some parts of Mexicalus are nine thousand feet up.”
‘Wonder how high up the warrior camp is,” Derek said.
“About three thousand feet, I hear,” a plebe put in.
“God, the top of the world!” yet another voice came through the audio.
“Don’t forget the Himalayan chain,” a quietly assertive voice came in. “That’s thirty thousand.” A silence fell over the group, and then the return of the generalized babble, small talk, predictions, jocular rumors, expectations—a
ll the young bull-psyching-up for the manhood rituals and trials that were to come, the programmed experiences codified for all the young men of the area.
Now the skimmer shot along the straight chute at the base of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee Territory, clipped through the northwest corner of Georgia, and began to arc and bend through the gentle mountain domes at the lower end of the old Appalachian Mountains. The air was pure and clear, and far off in the eastern sky, Derek could already see the sawtooth peaks of the Brevard chain, cutting bold purple points up into the vista. These were very new mountains, geologically agonized up out of the earth, rocky extrusions of slate and quartz and granite. Ragged though they looked from this great distance, they were actually soft and treacherous to move upon, terrestrially neophytic, brash sharp embryos among Methuselaic counterparts. Derek wondered why a warrior camp was built in so precarious and isolated a spot, but then knew that some archetypal castles and monasteries were built high in the Swiss Alps and in the Himalayas.
Derek closed his eyes for a few seconds, angled his head just slightly, right and left, and felt the reassuring vestibular fluid level activate the cilia higher up in his semicircular canals, and the corresponding exposure of cilia where the fluid lowered. It continued to fascinate him that this system of closed buds and fluids could make him aware, almost to the exact degree, of the angled position of his head and body. Somesthetic-proprioceptive gravity awareness was very important to him. It articulated his relationship to the graviton matrix, kept him at a proper ninety-degree angle to the flat earth, and defined such factors as gait patterns, postures, setting and hunkering and squatting, slumping or stiffening; the vulnerability of supine sleep, the security of the dextral-fetal curl, or the mashed-face ventrality of prone slumber. To do side-straddle hops in calisthenics class was to splash the vestibular tincture about, like shaking heavy dregs in yellow tea, and this fed back diffuse and disturbing somesthetic cues. To do sit-ups or touch-the-toes was overly pressurizing to the canals, and it was only when the body was at rest that, like heavy oil in sealed beakers, the vestibular fluids sought their gravity-mediated basal quietude of horizontal rest.
Future on Fire Page 33