Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  “Go, Gallinger. Dip your bucket in the well, and bring us a drink of Mars. Go, learn another world—but remain aloof, rail at it gently like Auden—and hand us its soul in iambics.

  And I came to the land where the sun is a tarnished penny, where the wind is a whip, where two moons play at hot rod games, and a hell of sand gives you incendiary itches whenever you look at it.

  * * * *

  I rose from my twisting on the bunk and crossed the darkened cabin to a port. The desert was a carpet of endless orange, bulging from the sweepings of centuries beneath it.

  “I am a stranger, unafraid—This is the land—I’ve got it made!”

  I laughed.

  I had the High Tongue by the tail already—or the roots, if you want your puns anatomical, as well as correct.

  The High and Low tongues were not so dissimilar as they had first seemed. I had enough of the one to get me through the murkier parts of the other. I had the grammar and all the commoner irregular verbs down cold; the dictionary I was constructing grew by the day, like a tulip, and would bloom shortly. Every time I played the tapes the stem lengthened.

  Now was the time to tax my ingenuity, to really drive the lessons home. I had purposely refrained from plunging into the major texts until I could do justice to them. I had been reading minor commentaries, bits of verse, fragments of history. And one thing had impressed me strongly in all that I read.

  They wrote about concrete things: rock, sand, water, winds; and the tenor couched within these elemental symbols was fiercely pessimistic. It reminded me of some Buddhists texts, but even more so, I realized from my recent recherches, it was like parts of the Old Testament. Specifically, it reminded me of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

  That, then, would be it. The sentiment, as well as the vocabulary, was so similar that it would be a perfect exercise. Like putting Poe into French. I would never be a convert to the Way of Malann, but I would show them that an Earthman had once thought the same thoughts, felt similarly.

  I switched on my desk lamp and sought King James amidst my books.

  Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all if vanity. What profit hath a man…

  * * * *

  My progress seemed to startle M’Cwyie. She peered at me, like Sartre’s Other, across the tabletop. I ran through a chapter in the Book of Locar. I didn’t look up, but I could feel the tight net her eyes were working about my head, shoulders, and rapid hands. I turned another page.

  Was she weighing the net, judging the size of the catch? And what for? The books said nothing of fishers on Mars. Especially of men. They said that some god named Malann had spat, or had done something disgusting (depending on the version you read), and that life had gotten underway as a disease in inorganic matter. They said that movement was its first law, its first law, and that the dance was the only legitimate reply to the inorganic…the dance’s quality its justification,—fication…and love is a disease in organic matter—Inorganic matter?

  I shook my head. I had almost been asleep.

  “M’narra.”

  I stood and stretched. Her eyes outlined me greedily now. So I met them, and they dropped.

  “I grow tired. I want to rest for awhile. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  She nodded, Earth’s shorthand for “yes,” as she had learned from me.

  “You wish to relax, and see the explicitness of the doctrine of Locar in its fullness?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You wish to see a Dance of Locar?”

  “Oh.” Their damned circuits of form and periphrasis here ran worse than the Korean! “Yes. Surely. Any time it’s going to be done I’d be happy to watch.”

  I continued, “In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to ask you whether I might take some pictures-”

  “Now is the time. Sit down. Rest. I will call the musicians.”

  She bustled out through a door I had never been past.

  Well now, the dance was the highest art, according to Locar, not to mention Havelock Ellis, and I was about to see how their centuries-dead philosopher felt it should be conducted. I rubbed my eyes and snapped over, touching my toes a few times.

  The blood began pounding in my head, and I sucked in a couple deep breaths. I bent again and there was a flurry of motion at the door.

  To the trio who entered with M’Cwyie I must have looked as if I were searching for the marbles I had just lost, bent over like that.

  I grinned weakly and straightened up, my face red from more than exertion. I hadn’t expected them that quickly.

  Suddenly I thought of Havelock Ellis again in his area of greatest popularity.

  The little redheaded doll, wearing, sari-like, a diaphanous piece of the Martian sky, looked up in wonder—as a child at some colorful flag on a high pole.

  “Hello,” I said, or its equivalent.

  She bowed before replying. Evidently I had been promoted in status.

  “I shall dance,” said the red wound in that pale, pale cameo, her face. Eyes, the color of dream and her dress, pulled away from mine.

  She drifted to the center of the room.

  Standing there, like a figure in an Etruscan frieze, she was either meditating or regarding the design on the floor.

  Was the mosaic symbolic of something? I studied it. If it was, it eluded me; it would make an attractive bathroom floor or patio, but I couldn’t see much in it beyond that.

  The other two were paint-spattered sparrows like M’Cwyie, in their middle years. One settled to the floor with a triple-stringed instrument faintly resembling a samisen. The other held a simple woodblock and two drumsticks.

  M’Cwyie disdained her stool and was seated upon the floor before I realized it. I followed suit.

  The samisen player was still tuning it up, so I leaned toward M’Cwyie.

  “What is the dancer’s name?”

  “Braxa,” she replied, without looking at me, and raised her left hand, slowly, which meant yes, and go ahead, and let it begin.

  The stringed-thing throbbed like a toothache, and a tick-tocking, like ghosts of all the clocks they had never invented, sprang from the block.

  Braxa was a statue, both hands raised to her face, elbows high and outspread.

  The music became a metaphor for fire.

  Crackle, purr, snap…

  She did not move.

  The hissing altered to splashes. The cadence slowed. It was water now, the most precious thing in the world, gurgling clear then green over mossy rocks.

  Still she did not move.

  Glissandos. A pause.

  Then, so faint I could hardly be sure at first, the tremble of winds began. Softly, gently, sighing and halting, uncertain. A pause, a sob, then a repetition of the first statement, only louder,

  Were my eyes completely bugged from my reading, or was Braxa actually trembling, all over, head to foot.

  She was.

  She began a microscopic swaying. A fraction of an inch right, then left. Her fingers opened like the petals of a flower, and I could see that her eyes were closed.

  Her eyes opened. They were distant, glassy, looking through me and the walls. Her swaying became more pronounced, merged with the beat.

  The wind was sweeping in from the desert now, falling against Tirellian like waves on a dike. Her fingers moved, they were the gusts. Her arms, slow pendulums, descended, began a counter-movement.

  The gale was coming now. She began an axial movement and her hands caught up with the rest of her body, only now her shoulders commenced to writhe out a figure-eight.

  The wind! The wind, I say. O wild, enigmatic! O muse of St. John Perse!

  The cyclone was twisting around those eyes, its still center. Her head was thrown back, but I knew there was no ceiling between her gaze, passive as Buddha’s, and the unchanging skies. Only the two moons, perhaps, interrupted their slumber in that elemental Nirvana of uninhabited turquoise.

  Years ago, I had seen the Devadasis is India, the st
reet-dancers, spinning their colorful webs, drawing in the male insect. But Braxa was more than this: she was a Ramadjany, like those votaries of Rama, incarnation of Vishnu, who had given the dance to man: the sacred dancers.

  The clicking was monotonously steady now; the whine of the strings made me think of the stinging rays of the sun, their heat stolen by the wind’s halations; the blue was Sarasvati and Mary, and a girl named Laura. I heard a sitar from somewhere, watched this statue come to life, and inhaled a divine afflatus.

  I was again Rimbaud with his hashish, Baudelaire with his laudanum, Poe, De Quincy, Wilde, Mallarme and Aleister Crowley. I was, for a fleeting second, my father in his dark pulpit and darker suit, the hymns and the organ’s wheeze transmuted to bright wind.

  She was a spun weather vane, a feathered crucifix hovering in the air. a clothes-line holding one bright garment lashed parallel to the ground. Her shoulder was bare now, and her right breast moved up and down like a moon in the sky, its red nipple appearing momentarily above a fold and vanishing again. The music was as formal as Job’s argument with God. Her dance was God’s reply.

  The music slowed, settled; it had been met, matched, answered. Her garment, as if alive, crept back into the more sedate folds it originally held.

  She dropped low, lower, to the floor. Her head fell upon her raised knees. She did not move.

  There was silence.

  * * * *

  I realized, from the ache across my shoulders, how tensely I had been sitting. My armpits were wet. Rivulets had been running down my sides. What did one do now? Applaud?

  I sought M’Cwyie from the corner of my eye. She raised her right hand.

  As if by telepathy the girl shuddered all over and stood. The musicians also rose. So did M’Cwyie.

  I got to my feet, with a Charley Horse in my left leg, and said, “It was beautiful,” inane as that sounds.

  I received three different High Forms of “thank you.”

  There was a flurry of color and I was alone again with M’Cwyie.

  “That is the one hundred-seventeenth of the two thousand, two hundred-twenty-four danced of Locar.”

  I looked down at her.

  “Whether Locar was right or wrong, he worked out a fine reply to the inorganic.”

  She smiled.

  “Are the dances of your world like this?”

  “Some of them are similar. I was reminded of them as I watched Braxa-but I’ve never seen anything exactly like hers.”

  “She is good,” M’Cwyie said. “She knows all the dances.”

  A hint of her earlier expression which had troubled me…

  It was gone in an instant.

  “I must tend my duties now.” She moved to the table and closed the books. “M’narra.”

  “Good-bye.” I slipped into my boots.

  “Good-bye, Gallinger.”

  I walked out the door, mounted the jeepster, and roared across the evening into night, my wings of risen desert flapping slowly behind me.

  II

  I had just closed the door behind Betty, after a brief grammar session, when I heard the voices in the hall. My vent was opened a fraction, so I stood there and eavesdropped;

  Morton’s fruity treble: “Guess what? He said ‘hello’ to me awhile ago.”

  “Hmmph!” Emory’s elephant lungs exploded. “Either he’s slipping, or you were standing in his way and he wanted you to move.”

  “Probably didn’t recognize me. I don’t think he sleeps any more, now he has that language to play with. I had night watch last week, and every night I passed his door at 0300—I always heard that recorder going. At 0500 when I got off, he was still at it.”

  “The guy is working hard,” Emory admitted, grudgingly. “In fact, I think he’s taking some kind of dope to keep awake. He looks sort of glassy-eyed these days. Maybe that’s natural for a poet, though.”

  Betty had been standing there, because she broke in then:

  “Regardless of what you think of him, it’s going to take me at least a year to learn what he’s picked up in three weeks. And I’m just a linguist, not a poet.”

  Morton must have been nursing a crush on her bovine charms. It’s the only reason I can think of for his dropping his guns to say what he did.

  “I took a course in modern poetry when I was back at the university,” he began. “We read six authors—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Stevens, and Gallinger—and on the last day of the semester, when the prof was feeling a little rhetorical, he said, ‘These six names are written on the century, and all the gates of criticism and hell shall not prevail on them.’

  “Myself,” he continued, “I thought his Pipes of Krishna and his Madrigals were great. I was honored to be chosen for an expedition he was going on.

  “I think he’s spoken two dozen words to me since I met him,” he finished.

  The Defense: “Did it ever occur to you,” Betty said, “that he might be tremendously self-conscious about his appearance? He was also a precocious child, and probably never even had school friends. He’s sensitive and very introverted.”

  “Sensitive? Self-conscious?” Emory choked and gagged. “The man is as proud as Lucifer, and he’s a walking insult machine. You press a button like ‘Hello’ or ‘Nice day’ and he thumbs his nose at you. He’s got it down to a reflex.”

  They muttered a few other pleasantries and drifted away.

  Well bless you, Morton boy. You little pimple-faced, Ivy-bred connoisseur! I’ve never taken a course in my poetry, but I’m glad someone said that. The Gates of Hell. Well now! Maybe Daddy’s prayers got heard somewhere, and I am a missionary, after all!

  Only…

  …Only a missionary needs something to convert people to. I have my private system of esthetics, and I suppose it oozes an ethical by-product somewhere. But if I ever had anything to preach, really, even in my poems, I wouldn’t care to preach it to such low-lifes as you. If you think I’m a slob, I’m also a snob, and there’s no room for you in my Heaven—it’s a private place, where Swift, Shaw, and Petronius Arbiter come to dinner.

  And oh, the feasts we have! The Trimalchio’s, the Emory’s we dissect!

  We finish you with the soup, Morton!

  * * * *

  I turned and settled at my desk. I wanted to write something. Ecclesiastes could take a night off. I wanted to write a poem, a poem about the one hundred-seventeenth dance of Locar; about a rose following the light, traced by the wind, sick, like Blake’s rose, dying…

  I found a pencil and began.

  When I had finished I was pleased. It wasn’t great—at least, it was no greater than it needed to be—High Martian not being my strongest tongue. I groped, and put it into English, with partial rhymes. Maybe I’d stick it in my next book. I called it Braxa:

  In a land of wind and red, where the icy evening of Time

  freezes milk in the breasts of Life, as two moons overhead—

  cat and dog in alleyways of dream—scratch and scramble

  agelessly my flight…

  his final flower turns a burning head.

  I put it away and found some phenobarbitol. I was suddenly tired. When I showed my poem to M’Cwyie the next day, she read it through several times, very slowly.

  “It is lovely,” she said. “But you used three words from your own language. ‘Cat’ and ‘dog,’ I assume, are two small animals with a hereditary hatred for one another. But what is ‘flower’?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’ve never come across your word for ‘flower,’ but I was actually thinking of an Earth flower, the rose.”

  “What is it like?”

  “Well, its petals are generally bright red. That’s what I meant, on one level, by ‘burning heads.’ I also wanted it to imply fever, though, and red hair, and the fire of life. The rose, itself, has a thorny stem, green leaves, and a distinct, pleasing aroma.”

  “I wish I could see one.”

  “I suppose it could be arranged. I’ll check.”

 
“Do it, please. You are a—” She used the word for “prophet,” or religious poet, like Isaias or Locar. “—and your poem is inspired. I shall tell Braxa of it.”

  I declined the nomination, but felt flattered.

  This, then, I decided, was the strategic day, the day on which to ask whether I might bring in the microfilm machine and the camera. I wanted to copy all their texts, I explained, and I couldn’t write fast enough to do it.

  She surprised me by agreeing immediately. But she bowled me over with her invitation.

  “Would you like to come and stay here while you do this thing? Then you can work day and night, any time you want—except when the Temple is being used, of course.”

  I bowed.

  “I should be honored.”

  “Good. Bring your machines when you want, and I will show you a room.”

  “Will this afternoon be all right?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then I will go now and get things ready. Until this afternoon…”

  “Good-bye.” I anticipated a little trouble from Emory, but not much. Everyone back at the ship was anxious to see the Martians, poke needles in the Martians, ask them about Martian climate, diseases, soil chemistry, politics, and mushrooms (our botanist was a fungus nut, but a reasonably good guy)—and only four or five had actually gotten to see them. The crew had been spending most of its time excavating dead cities and their acropolises. We played the game by strict rules, and the natives were as fiercely insular as the nineteenth-century Japanese. I figured I would meet with little resistance, and I figured right.

  In fact, I got the distinct impression that everyone was happy to see me move out.

  I stopped in the hydroponics room to speak with our mushroom master.

  “Hi, Kane. Grow any toadstools in the sand yet?”

  He sniffed. He always sniffs. Maybe he’s allergic to plants.

  “Hello, Gallinger. No, I haven’t had any success with toadstools, but look behind the car barn next time you’re out there. I’ve got a few cacti going.”