New Writings in SF 23 - [Anthology]
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New Writings in
SF: 23
Ed By Kenneth Bulmer
Proofed By MadMaxAU
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Kenneth Bulmer
The Lake of Tuonela by Keith Roberts
Wagtail in the Morning by Grahame Leman
Made to be Broken by E. C. Tubb
The Eternal Theme of Exile: Three Enigmas II by Brian W. Aldiss
The Five Doors by Michael Stall
Sporting on Apteryx by Charles Partington
Rainbow by David S. Garnett
Accolade by Charles Grey
The Seed of Evil by Barrington J. Bayley
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FOREWORD
Kenneth Bulmer
The response to the continuation of New Writings has been immediate and enthusiastic. There is a keen demand for the forward-looking, speculative, exciting and mind-provoking science fiction story as presented in this series. This volume contains nine stories dealing with a variety of themes and, in casting forward into the future, sf must inevitably highlight the dilemmas of today.
The problems of big city complexes are rapidly becoming perilously close to clichés in the non-sf media. The problems, their solutions and the fresh problems created by those solutions, are treated as almost-inescapable, as modern Erinyes—the so-called Furies. One major problem of cities is traffic with its attendant noise, dirt, pollution, smell, vibration and ever-present threat of accident and death. Fear of traffic is a deep psychological wound inflicted on us as soon as we learn to walk.
The other day on my way to a Board meeting of the Science Fiction Foundation I took the opportunity of walking through an old-fashioned high street that had been declared a pedestrian precinct. The place was cluttered, yet there was plenty of space for walking; the street was crammed with little shops with colourful window displays; borough market stalls provided opportunities for bargains; the air smelt clean; one or two supermarkets offered mass-production opportunities; the whole street delighted. I felt relaxed—and the shoppers did not to my eyes seem obsessed with that hurry hurry one associates with housekeeping shopping.
Back on the main road I was immediately and distastefully reminded of traffic as buses pounded past, cars and lorries hissed and vomited, motor cycles machine-gunned and fumes filled the air. The plunge towards zero on the gracious living chart was inescapable and edifying.
Science fiction has consistently advocated the use of all manner of pedestrian facilities in its use of pedways, roller-ways, flyovers; and yet in the era of the forty-ton truck and articulated trailer we are told that overhead pedestrian walks are out of fashion. The farcical attempts at reaching agreement on a plan to do-over Piccadilly Circus indicate this, or so we are told. Traffic is a killer. For the transit of goods from point to point in the country a system already existing, and needing puny amounts of money to modernise to reduce road loads, is the network of canals.
Yet as a motorist and a user of canals for recreation I can see the other side of the coin. A car is essential to me, and I have spent many happy hours—and excruciating moments —on the narrow canals. The commercial canals can get those essential but awful trucks off much of the overloaded road system in conjunction with the railways—but how to transport goods to the warehouse door of the supermarket and the high street shop ?
This is where another extravagant conception of the past can be called back into use. How would it be if you could lift your forty tons without expending energy, transport them at eighty miles an hour on relatively low-powered engines and drop them neatly down at the warehouse doorstep? As our American cousins would say—how does that grab you ?
The answer is, of course, that it sounds too good to be true. Although this is essentially a science fictional idea at the present time, it is being actively worked on by at least two practical concerns, and is a part of the forward-thinking policy of the Airship Association.
The Airship Association has been formed to make people aware that the airship is the transport vehicle of the future. The membership list of the association contains the names of distinguished people: practical people, designers, scientists and artists, members of parliament, lords of the realm, journalists and flyers—people who know that the airship can solve many of the complex problems pressing in on us. Much more of the Airship Association will be heard in the future.
Therefore, when I first read the Keith Roberts’ story that now leads off this volume of New Writings, I was immediately struck by the way in which the author, through the medium of sf, is able to parallel more than one of our twentieth-century problems while treating of an alien planet and canal system that is an analogue of our own. There is something about the peace and tranquillity of a canal that means a very great deal in the hurly burly of current life, and here Keith Roberts achieves a fine poetic intensity that says much of the way humanity is going.
The examination of dystopias is a task laid upon sf and here Grahame Leman does not shrink from opening blinkered eyes and of questioning the programming of unpredictable liveware. In volume 22 of New Writings Donald A. Wollheim in ‘The Rules of the Game’ indicated how the owner of the game can change the rules; here E. C. Tubb points out how a man faced with a soft science problem can similarly deal with the problem in non-superhuman terms.
Making his first appearance in these pages Charles Partington brings us face to face with the interlocking passions of love and hate set against an intriguing and tantalising background. Both Charles Grey and David Garnett make us look at the way men and women behave when faced with problems for which there appears no solution. In Barrington Bayley’s long story one is conscious of the extent of time and of the impermanence of mankind’s mark upon it, and in a deceptively simple way the author allows us to look into powers over and above those we take for granted, and which obsess so much of our current thinking. Michael Stall presents us with a hard-line depiction of a confrontation with forces of space in which the unravelment of the puzzle depends on sharpness of wit defeating fear. This is one for the aficionado.
New Writings in S-F is again fortunate in being able to present three more enigmas from Brian W. Aldiss and the penetration and brilliance of these contes continue. Brian Aldiss has been deeply involved in the back-breaking task of research, compilation and writing of an important new book about sf. The Billion Year Spree. This book, while undoubtedly being permeated by Brian Aldiss’s own personal and strongly acute views, will unquestioningly be of great value in the further understanding and evaluation of sf.
The theme linking many of these stories, which must of brutal necessity appeal to any thinking and sensitive inhabitants of our planet, is a preoccupation with the witting and unwitting destruction of the environment and of life going on all about us.
Science has given foolish and greedy men the opportunity of raising up the Erinyes—the Furies—against the world; is it too fanciful a notion to suggest that sf has taken on the role of Apollo, to plead the cause of men and women ? With a new toughened core of understanding of all the vision—so much fallen into disrepute of late—of the founding fathers of sf, perhaps the notion is not too fanciful, after all.
Kenneth Bulmer
Horsmonden,
January, 1973
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THE LAKE OF TUONELA
Keith Roberts
Filled with sensuous detail and the strange dreamlike quality of far-off places, this evocation of an alien planet gains a memorable stature from the haunting awareness of place and people, of shining water and the sliding dappled banks of canals under an alien sun. Kei
th Roberts turns the art of sf to a delicate appraisal of moods and inclinations and yearnings in which humanity’s own Bar-Ko drives on with relentless terrestrial force. Locking-up to Hy Antiel, the canal was like a road to the Summit—a road paved with good intentions...
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The dawn had been overcast; but by midmorning the weather had cleared. The small yellow sun of Xerxes burned in the planet’s blue-green sky, waking shimmers and sparks from the little bow-wave the long boat drove ahead of it. The banks of the canal, lower here, were clothed with bushes and some stouter trees. Mathis, leaning his forearms on sun-warmed wood, felt the shadows stroke his cheek, touches of light and heat combined.
Here, in the bows of the vessel, the thud of her big single-cylinder engine was muted. He glanced back along the tented cargo space, turned once more to lean over the craft’s side. The water was milky green; and some trick of light lent greater depth and perspective to the reflections than to the vegetation above. The tree leaves, small rounded sprays backlit to gold, passed smooth and silent fifty feet beneath the hull.
He studied the bow-wave, the fluctuating patterns within its stable form. The main crest curved from an inch or two before the vessel’s blunt stem. Behind it the concave slope of water was glassy and clear. Some six inches ahead a smaller ripple began; the ends of this wavered, flickering forward and back in some pattern that seemed at the same time random and predetermined. Into it flowed the detailed images of branches; behind it the blue and gold melted into streaks that vanished in the deep green shadow of the hull.
He moved his shoulders, feeling the aches from the day before in back and arms. Thirty locks, in three flights of ten, had taxed his strength to the limit. The gates, unused for years, were grass-grown, nearly too stiff to move; also leaks had started, round the heel plates and worn paddle gear. Chamber after chamber refused to fill; it had taken the weight of the boat, butting at the timbers, to force the gates back. Locking down, the problem would be aggravated; but he had no intention of turning back.
He glanced at the chronometer strapped to his wrist, stared ahead again. For two days the canal had paralleled the course of GEM tracks, raw swaths of earth curving through the scrub and marshland that comprised much of Xerxes’ Northern Continent; but the last of these had long since swung away. There were no signs of civilisation, either Terrestrial or Kalti, and no sounds save the sporadic piping of birds. The boat moved through a silence that the thudding of the engine only seemed to make the more complete.
He wondered, with something approaching interest, whether his absence had yet been noticed. A week had passed since leaving the lagoon that fringed Bran Gildo on the seaward side, climbing the vast lock flight that leads inland from the city. Mathis shrugged. If an alarm had been raised, it mattered little enough. Hidden for most of the time beneath the lapping tangle of branches, the boat would be invisible from a flyer; while the canals of the Southern Complex forked and meandered endlessly, joined by watercourse after watercourse, some natural, others artificial. The hamlets they had served, the mills and tiny manufactories, lay deserted now, the scrub growing up to and lapping across their walls; once lost in that complex, a spotter craft might search for a week and be no wiser at the end.
The air was humid beneath the trees. He wiped at his face and arms. On Earth, flies and midges would have made life burdensome; but the few flying insects of Xerxes, jewellike creatures resembling terrestrial dragonflies, had no interest in blood. He watched one now, darting and hovering beneath the miniature moss-grown cliff of the bank. The thing swooped, took something from the surface of the water, vanished with a bright blur of wings. The water, he noted, still flowed steadily. The current came via bypass sluices from the high Summit Level ahead. It was an encouraging sign.
In front of the boat a purple-flowered shrub hung low across the water. Her cabin passed beneath its branches with a scrape and rustle. A dozen times already she had been forced to a halt, while Mathis and his steersman used machetes to hack a way through the half-choked watercourse; but in the main the navigability of the canal after so many years disuse was a monument to the half-legendary Bar-Ab and his engineers.
Four Earth centuries ago, so ran the stories, Bar-Ab had been Prince of Bran Gildo, the palm-fringed city by the Salt Lagoon. He it was who in war after war had swept away the barbarous tribes of the interior, driving their remnants into reserves or into the sea; he also who had given to Xerxes the vast network of canals that till Terran Contact had remained the planet’s major transportation system. From his line the Kalti, the Boatmen of Xerxes, claimed descent; when they troubled to claim anything at all. From the first, Mathis had been intrigued by them; the little dumpy men and the little dumpy women with their wide-brimmed, round-crowned hats and suits of Sunday black. Though the Kalti were a fast-vanishing race themselves. In every direction, through the swamps, across the uplands with their mile on mile of spindly forest, ran the broad trackways of the Ground Effect Machines; their windy rushing was the night-sound of Xerxes now, replacing the churring of frogs and hunting birds.
Mathis shrugged, and lit a cigarette. From the hundred or so he had brought with him, he allowed himself just two a day. He smoked carefully and slowly, thinking back to his interview with Jefferson, the Bran Gildo Controller. Just ten days ago, now.
He’d pushed his request as far as a Behaviourist (Grade 2A) reasonably could; and been mildly surprised at the result. A small but important circus had assembled to consider the proposition; Ramsden, head of Biology; an Engineer/Controller from the survey section; and Figgins from Liaison, complete with Earth-style secretary. It had been Figgins who opened the attack; Figgins fat, and Figgins bearded.
‘John, I feel I must make one point at the outset. This sort of thing is hardly your Department’s concern.’
The Terran Complex, an air-conditioned cube of dural and glass, overlooked the brick-red ruins of the Old Palace; the place where Bar-Ab once sat, planning the network of waterways that would span a continent. A boat was passing, on the broad green moat that fronted the ruins, gliding above its mirror-image like a swan. A gay-striped awning covered it; on the foredeck lay a bare brown girl. Mathis shrugged. Difficult to keep his attention on the matter in hand. He said slowly, ‘I never claimed my Department was involved. It’s a personal project; and I’ve got a slab of leave come due.’
Figgins’ secretary crossed her legs, looking bored. Ramsden, a neat, bald, compact man, ran his finger across an ornamental carafe—Kalti work—and frowned. The engineer doodled on a scratchpad. A little wait, while the Controller decided not to speak; and Figgins carried on.
‘Speaking off the record,’ he said, ‘what would your object be in making a trip like this ? What would you hope to prove?’
Mathis said, ‘It’s all in the report.’
Another wait. Nobody helped him.
The boat was nearly out of sight. He turned back from the window, unwillingly. The words sounded dry; meaningless with repetition. He said, ‘We’ve been on Xerxes about one Earth generation. When we arrived we found a flourishing native culture. Backward on the sciences maybe but well up in the arts. We found a sub-culture, the Boatmen. They had a pictographic writing system like nothing we’d ever seen, and a religion we still haven’t properly understood. One generation, and that culture is dying. I don’t think we have that sort of privilege.’
Jefferson laid down the stylus he had been fingering. The click of metal on the rainbow-wood desk served to focus attention. Obscurely, Mathis wanted to smile.
The Controller said, ‘I think we’re rather wandering from the point. There are a lot of side effects to culture-shock that none of us much like. But they’re inevitable given the situation in which we find ourselves.’
He glanced at Mathis, eyes bright blue beneath shaggy brows. It was a standard mannerism; a look calculated to convey old-world kindliness combined with shrewdness. ‘We might not have learned as much as we ought from three hundred planets,’ he said, ‘
but this much we do know. The day we made contact with Xerxes, existing social patterns were doomed. Mr. Mathis, you mentioned privilege just now. Let’s all be logical.’ He turned briefly to the big coloured map that covered most of one wall. ‘The hinterland of the Northern Continent is largely swamp,’ he said. ‘In time, that swamp will be drained and reclaimed. Better standards of living are going to bring a higher birthrate, more mouths to feed. We shall need that land. As of this moment ... One Ground Effect Machine will traverse between Bran Gildo and Hy Antiel by any of half a dozen routes in a little under one day Planetary. It’ll carry the payload of between five and six Kalti longboats, each of which would take a month on the trip. As I see it, our job isn’t to resist a change that’s already an accomplished fact. We’re here to channel that change, help native cultures through a time of transition as smoothly and quickly as possible. In time, the Boatmen will learn new skills. Re-adapt. That’s the way it has to be.’
Mathis said, ‘In time, the Boatmen will cease to exist.’
The Controller nodded gravely. He said. ‘That’s also a possibility we must allow for.’ He leafed through the docket on his desk. He said, ‘You’re asking for permission to take a Kalti boat through the Southern Complex by way of Hy Antiel Summit. And you still haven’t answered Mr. Figgins’ question. What’s your ultimate object?’