“Is this intended to mock me, Socrates?”
“I feel only the deepest respect for you, friend Pizarro. But let me continue. I went to other wise men, and they too, though sure of their wisdom, could never give me a clear answer to anything. Those whose reputations for wisdom were the highest seemed to have the least of it. I went to the great poets and playwrights. There was wisdom in their works, for the gods had inspired them, but that did not make them wise, though they thought that it had. I went to the stonemasons and potters and other craftsmen. They were wise in their own skills, but most of them seemed to think that that made them wise in everything, which did not appear to be the case. And so it went. I was unable to find anyone who showed true wisdom. So perhaps the oracle was right: that although I am an ignorant man, there is no man wiser than I am. But oracles often are right without their being much value in it, for I think that all she was saying was that no man is wise at all, that wisdom is reserved for the gods. What do you say, Pizarro?”
“I say that you are a great fool, and very ugly besides.”
“You speak the truth. So, then, you are wise after all. And honest.”
“Honest, you say? I won’t lay claim to that. Honesty’s a game for fools. I lied whenever I needed to. I cheated. I went back on my word. I’m not proud of that, mind you. It’s simply what you have to do to get on in the world. You think I wanted to tend pigs all my life? I wanted gold, Socrates! I wanted power over men! I wanted fame!”
“And did you get those things?”
“I got them all.”
“And were they gratifying, Pizarro?”
Pizarro gave Socrates a long look. Then he pursed his lips and spat.
“They were worthless.”
“Were they, do you think?”
“Worthless, yes. I have no illusions about that. But still it was better to have had them than not. In the long run nothing has any meaning, old man. In the long run we’re all dead, the honest man and the villain, the king and the fool. Life’s a cheat. They tell us to strive, to conquer, to gain—and for what? What? For a few years of strutting around. Then it’s taken away, as if it had never been. A cheat, I say.” Pizarro paused. He stared at his hands as though he had never seen them before. “Did I say all that just now? Did I mean it?” He laughed. “Well, I suppose I did. Still, life is all there is, so you want as much of it as you can. Which means getting gold, and power, and fame.”
“Which you had. And apparently have no longer. Friend Pizarro, where are we now?”
“I wish I knew.”
“So do I,” said Socrates soberly.
“He’s real,” Richardson said. “They both are. The bugs are out of the system and we’ve got something spectacular here. Not only is this going to be of value to scholars, I think it’s also going to be a tremendous entertainment gimmick, Harry.”
“It’s going to be much more than that,” said Tanner in a strange voice.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Tanner said. “But I’m definitely on to something big. It just began to hit me a couple of minutes ago, and it hasn’t really taken shape yet. But it’s something that might change the whole goddamned world.”
Richardson looked amazed and bewildered.
“What the hell are you talking about, Harry?”
Tanner said, “A new way of settling political disputes, maybe. What would you say to a kind of combat-at-arms between one nation and another? Like a medieval tournament, so to speak. With each side using champions that we simulate for them—the greatest minds of all the past, brought back and placed in competition—” He shook his head. “Something like that. It needs a lot of working out, I know. But it’s got possibilities.”
“A medieval tournament—combat-at-arms, using simulations? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Verbal combat. Not actual jousts, for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t see how—” Richardson began.
“Neither do I, not yet. I wish I hadn’t even spoken of it.”
“But—”
“Later, Lew. Later. Let me think about it a little while more.”
“You don’t have any idea what this place is?” Pizarro said.
“Not at all. But I certainly think this is no longer the world where we once dwelled. Are we dead, then? How can we say? You look alive to me.”
“And you to me.”
“Yet I think we are living some other kind of life. Here, give me your hand. Can you feel mine against yours?”
“No. I can’t feel anything.”
“Nor I. Yet I see two hands clasping. Two old men standing on a cloud, clasping hands.” Socrates laughed. “What a great rogue you are, Pizarro!”
“Yes, of course. But do you know something, Socrates? You are too. A windy old rogue. I like you. There were moments when you were driving me crazy with all your chatter, but you amused me too. Were you really a soldier?”
“When my city asked me, yes.”
“For a soldier, you’re damned innocent about the way the world works, I have to say. But I guess I can teach you a thing or too.”
“Will you?”
“Gladly,” said Pizarro.
“I would be in your debt,” Socrates said.
“Take Atahuallpa,” Pizarro said. “How can I make you understand why I had to kill him? There weren’t even two hundred of us, and twenty-four millions of them, and his word was law, and once he was gone they’d have no one to command them. So of course we had to get rid of him if we wanted to conquer them. And so we did, and then they fell.”
“How simple you make it seem.”
“Simple is what it was. Listen, old man, he would have died sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t he? This way I made his death useful: to God, to the Church, to Spain. And to Francisco Pizarro. Can you understand that?”
“I think so,” said Socrates. “But do you think King Atahuallpa did?”
“Any king would understand such things.”
“Then he should have killed you the moment you set foot in his land.”
“Unless God meant us to conquer him, and allowed him to understand that. Yes. Yes, that must have been what happened.”
“Perhaps he is in this place too, and we could ask him,” said Socrates.
Pizarro’s eyes brightened. “Mother of God, yes! A good idea! And if he didn’t understand, why, I’ll try to explain it to him. Maybe you’ll help me. You know how to talk, how to move words around and around. What do you say? Would you help me?”
“If we meet him, I would like to talk with him,” Socrates said. “I would indeed like to know if he agrees with you on the subject of the usefulness of his being killed by you.”
Grinning, Pizarro said, “Slippery, you are! But I like you. I like you very much. Come. Let’s go look for Atahuallpa.”
The Reality Trip
This one also dates from January 1970. I was thirty-five years old and had spent just about half my life thus far intensely involved with the craft of writing; I had moved from an early apprenticeship as a tireless producer of prefabricated literary merchandise into a maturity of some literary distinction, and the rewards were arriving steadily now, not just financial ones but awards (the Nebula in 1969 for “Passengers,” a Hugo later that year for the novella version of “Nightwings,” and more to come) and accolades (I was named to the presidency of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1967-68, and I was asked to be the Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Heidelberg in 1970). I was about as well established as a writer could be; virtually everything I wrote was on commission now, and my writing time was committed well into the future while my agent fended off additional requests for contributions.
I should have been happy with what I had accomplished, and I suppose that much of the time I was. But there was trouble
ahead as I edged into the dreaded mid-life years. Already my extraordinary output of words was slackening from the legendary millions and millions of my youth: I managed only a trifling (for me) 668,000 words in 1969 and there was a further drop in production to 571,000 the next year. This was in part due to the increasing care I was devoting to my work, but also I was encountering mysterious resistances to writing at all—as is shown by the steep drop from 1970’s already reduced output to 1971’s even more sharply reduced 269,000 words, not much more than I would have been able to turn out in a single month in a wild year like 1963. In another few years I would find myself unable to write at all. There was a move to California in my future, too, and a marital breakup, and a host of other complexities were looming on the horizon for me as well. In 1970 I had only an inkling of what lay ahead, but it was enough to make me apprehensive and to intensify the already apparent darkening of the tone of my fiction, a development that would culminate in 1971’s The Book of Skulls and Dying Inside and the dramatic changes in my life that would follow later that year.
Some of that, perhaps, is already evident in “The Reality Trip,” which I wrote for Ejler Jakobsson, the new editor of Galaxy and If. Ejler published it, with amazing swiftness, in the May 1970 issue of If. It’s a lighthearted story with some very dark corners; and certainly it demonstrates that I had come a long way indeed from the simplicities of “Gorgon Planet” and “The Silent Colony” of nearly twenty years earlier, and even from the somber “Road to Nightfall” that stands as a strange beacon almost at the very beginning of my writing career. I see in it a foreshadowing of the volatility to come in my life. A time of changes lay ahead for me; and when it was done I would be a very different person living in a very different place.
I am a reclamation project for her. She lives on my floor of the hotel, a dozen rooms down the hall: a lady poet, private income. No, that makes her sound too old, a middle-aged eccentric. Actually she is no more than thirty. Taller than I am, with long kinky brown hair and a sharp, bony nose that has a bump on the bridge. Eyes are very glossy. A studied raggedness about her dress; carefully chosen shabby clothes. I am in no position really to judge the sexual attractiveness of Earthfolk but I gather from remarks made by men living here that she is not considered good-looking. I pass her often on my way to my room. She smiles fiercely at me. Saying to herself, no doubt, You poor lonely man. Let me help you bear the burden of your unhappy life. Let me show you the meaning of love, for I too know what it is like to be alone.
Or words to that effect. She’s never actually said any such thing. But her intentions are transparent. When she sees me, a kind of hunger comes into her eyes, part maternal, part (I guess) sexual, and her face takes on a wild crazy intensity. Burning with emotion. Her name is Elizabeth Cooke. “Are you fond of poetry, Mr. Knecht?” she asked me this morning, as we creaked upward together in the ancient elevator. And an hour later she knocked at my door. “Something for you to read,” she said. “I wrote them.” A sheaf of large yellow sheets, stapled at the top; poems printed in smeary blue mimeography. The Reality Trip, the collection was headed. Limited Edition: 125 Copies. “You can keep it if you like,” she explained. “I’ve got lots more.” She was wearing bright corduroy slacks and a flimsy pink shawl , through which her breasts plainly showed. Small tapering breasts, not very functional-looking. When she saw me studying them her nostrils flared momentarily and she blinked her eyes three times swiftly. Tokens of lust?
I read the poems. Is it fair for me to offer judgment on them? Even though I’ve lived on this planet eleven of its years, even though my command of colloquial English is quite good, do I really comprehend the inner life of poetry? I thought they were all quite bad. Earnest, plodding poems, capturing what they call slices of life. The world around her, the cruel, brutal, unloving city. Lamenting failure of people to open to one another. The title poem began this way:
He was on the reality trip. Big black man,
bloodshot eyes, bad teeth. Eisenhower jacket,
frayed. Smell of cheap wine. I guess a knife
in his pocket. Looked at me mean. Criminal
record. Rape, child-beating, possession of drugs.
In his head saying, slavemistress bitch, and me in
my head saying, black brother, let’s freak in together,
let’s trip on love—
And so forth. Warm, direct emotion; but is the urge to love all wounded things a sufficient center for poetry? I don’t know. I did put her poems through the scanner and transmit them to Homeworld, although I doubt they’ll learn much from them about Earth. It would flatter Elizabeth to know that while she has few readers here, she has acquired some ninety light-years away. But of course I can’t tell her that.
She came back a short while ago. “Did you like them?” she asked.
“Very much. You have such sympathy for those who suffer.”
I think she expected me to invite her in. I was careful not to look at her breasts this time.
The hotel is on West 23rd Street. It must be over a hundred years old; the façade is practically baroque and the interior shows a kind of genteel decay. The place has a bohemian tradition. Most of its guests are permanent residents and many of them are artists, novelists, playwrights, and such. I have lived here nine years. I know a number of the residents by name, and they me, but I have discouraged any real intimacy, naturally, and everyone has respected that choice. I do not invite others into my room. Sometimes I let myself be invited to visit theirs, since one of my responsibilities on this world is to get to know something of the way Earthfolk live and think. Elizabeth is the first to attempt to cross the invisible barrier of privacy I surround myself with. I’m not sure how I’ll handle that. She moved in about three years ago; her attentions became noticeable perhaps ten months back, and for the last five or six weeks she’s been a great nuisance. Some kind of confrontation is inevitable: either I must tell her to leave me alone, or I will find myself drawn into a situation impossible to tolerate. Perhaps she’ll find someone else to feel even sorrier for, before it comes to that.
My daily routine rarely varies. I rise at seven. First Feeding. Then I clean my skin (my outer one, the Earth-skin, I mean) and dress. From eight to ten I transmit data to Homeworld. Then I go out for the morning field trip: talking to people, buying newspapers, often some library research. At one I return to my room. Second Feeding. I transmit data from two to five. Out again, perhaps to the theater, to a motion picture, to a political meeting. I must soak up the flavor of this planet. Often to saloons; I am equipped for ingesting alcohol, though of course I must get rid of it before it has been in my body very long, and I drink and listen and sometimes argue. At midnight back to my room. Third Feeding. Transmit data from one to four in the morning. Then three hours of sleep, and at seven the cycle begins anew. It is a comforting schedule. I don’t know how many agents Homeworld has on Earth, but I like to think that I’m one of the most diligent and useful. I miss very little. I’ve done good service, and, as they say here, hard work is its own reward. I won’t deny that I hate the physical discomfort of it and frequently give way to real despair over my isolation from my own kind. Sometimes I even think of asking for a transfer to Homeworld. But what would become of me there? What services could I perform? I have shaped my life to one end: that of dwelling among the Earthfolk and reporting on their ways. If I give that up, I am nothing.
Of course there is the physical pain. Which is considerable.
The gravitational pull of Earth is almost twice that of Homeworld. It makes for a leaden life for me. My inner organs always sagging against the lower rim of my carapace. My muscles cracking with strain. Every movement a willed effort. My heart in constant protest. In my eleven years I have as one might expect adapted somewhat to the conditions; I have toughened, I have thickened. I suspect if I were transported instantly to Homeworld now I would be quite giddy, baffled by the lightness of everything. I wo
uld leap and soar and stumble, and might even miss this crushing pull of Earth. Yet I doubt that. I suffer here; at all times the weight oppresses me. Not to sound too self-pitying about it. I knew the conditions in advance. I was placed in simulated Earth gravity when I volunteered, and was given a chance to withdraw, and I decided to go anyway. Not realizing that a week under double gravity is not the same thing as a lifetime. I could always have stepped out of the simulation chamber. Not here. The eternal drag on every molecule of me. The pressure. My flesh is always in mourning.
And the outer body I must wear. This cunning disguise. Forever to be swaddled in thick masses of synthetic flesh, smothering me, engulfing me. The soft slippery slap of it against the self within. The elaborate framework that holds it erect, by which I make it move; a forest of struts and braces and servoactuators and cables, in the midst of which I must unendingly huddle, atop my little platform in the gut. Adopting one or another of various uncomfortable positions, constantly shifting and squirming, now jabbing myself on some awkwardly placed projection, now trying to make my inflexible body flexibly to bend. Seeing the world by periscope through mechanical eyes. Enwombed in this mountain of meat. It is a clever thing; it must look convincingly human, since no one has ever doubted me, and it ages ever so slightly from year to year, graying a bit at the temples, thickening a bit at the paunch. It walks. It talks. It takes in food and drink, when it has to. (And deposits them in a removable pouch near my leftmost arm.) And I within it. The hidden chess player; the invisible rider. If I dared, I would periodically strip myself of this cloak of flesh and crawl around my room in my own guise. But it is forbidden. Eleven years now and I have not been outside my protoplasmic housing. I feel sometimes that it has come to adhere to me, that it is no longer merely around me but by now a part of me.
In order to eat I must unseal it at the middle, a process that takes many minutes. Three times a day I unbutton myself so that I can stuff the food concentrates into my true gullet. Faulty design, I call that. They could just as easily have arranged it so I could pop the food into my Earthmouth and have it land in my own digestive tract. I suppose the newer models have that. Excretion is just as troublesome for me; I unseal, reach in, remove the cubes of waste, seal my skin again. Down the toilet with them. A nuisance.
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