by Damon Knight
Peter Renoir is an alien. He feels naked without his clothes. He equates morality with being uncomfortable. If only he were illiterate. We could save him if he were illiterate. The ways of official literacy do not equip people to know themselves, the past or the present.
Why doesn’t Peter Renoir understand as we understand? Why doesn’t he know the world has been conquered? Don’t you understand? The world has been conquered. What have they done to the earth and the people?
Who are they? I can explain me. I am a creature of the night-land. I am of the soil. I am people. That is who I am.
Who are they? They are technology. They are the aliens. Technology is the creature of the conquered world. The world, all my peoples, is the materials of technology, not its form.
The car did not do the work of the horse. It replaced it. Technology will not do the work of the people. It will replace them.
Semina is arrested for flaunting antisexual implications. Peter Renoir bails her out. They fall in love. They build it up to a severe emotional disturbance. However, as they realize that they are at last approaching a permanence and security unknown to them and their generation, Peter Renoir finds himself pursuing anti-cliche to anticlimax.
Semina catches him kissing himself. He defends himself by casually remarking, “When sex dies it is climax.”
She snubs him in the closing scene by proclaiming, “Others may call you sensibly adaptive but I think you are a faggot.”
The movie ends and we are left without a sense.
“Semina,” said Peter Renoir, moving toward her in a zoom, up angle. “Why don’t we do it?”
“You mean, uh, oh dearest!” said Semina. “You’ve finally discovered the secret! After millions of miles and one of your smiles, you’ve finally found out how to do it. I’m so proud of you!”
“Aw, shucks,” said Peter Renoir, blushing. “It wasn’t nothing special. I just watched television until I found out how they did it.”
“Nevertheless,” said Semina, “I’m impressed. How do we do it?”
“Well,” said Peter Renoir, blushing through every pore. “I believe the best way is for you to prop yourself up on that couch over there. Kind of slouch around and blink your eyes a lot. Then light up a cigarette.”
“Then what?” pole-vaulted Semina, arching enthusiastically over his every word.
“Then,” said Peter Renoir, with dramatic emphasis and a slight snigger, “I leap on top of you, your hand will become limp and the cigarette will drop to the floor. Later you will cry.”
“Why don’t we just forget the whole thing?” said Semina.
I am an sf fanzine editor. I am forty-nine years old and never have been kissed. I am a peeping tom, a chronic masturbator. The mirror is my staff of life, my totem, my life’s work. The window is my prey. What is my threat? What is my power?
My secret is that I am lonely and in that silence that surrounds me, I am able to pierce the windows with my mouth and make an unknowing partner of anyone in my eyes’ range. I am deeply involved in a current fan project to cure blindness with a whore’s spittle. My threat and my power is in my ability to motivate, to “show the donkey the carrot.”
MUTATIONS ARE ONLY POSSIBLE THE MOMENT ONE COES FROM ONE SET OF CONVENTIONS TO ANOTHER.
The science-fiction editor, in order to play his game with a full deck, is forced to accept only images that represent an orderly sequence. An image path that is familiar. That is why science fiction sometimes repeats itself itself itself itself itself itself itself and why this story will get thirty-five rejection slips. An Indian tells the story of his life from the day the world began. He will never tell his life’s story with any regard to chronology. He may work back or work forward or both. He will repeat himself many times and omit things frequently. Shall I apologize for this pagan mysticism, the willful obscurity about my craft? I want to withhold my skills from profane onlookers. I am, after all, repeating the works of nature.
Peter Renoir and Semina are hopelessly in love and they decide to kill each other. While on a visit to Renoir’s mother they decide to kill Mommy instead. Before they can carry it out, however, a semi-pro football team, turned cannibal after losing their league franchise, attacks the house. Peter Renoir is killed, as is his mother. Semina helps them eat the evidence of their intellectual dilemma, nearly choking on Renoir’s mother, who is tough and stringy. She joins the team as an outside linebacker. She is later benched and then raped by a referee. The film ends in a closeup on the fifty-yard line and we are left with a sense of loss.
From Reviews in Film:
Only a director of the stature of Peter Renoir could bring himself so consistently to face contemporary reality. The determination to show only what is real is clearly an aspect of Renoir’s wider determination to expose himself completely to the age in which we live. The scene in which an apple is stuffed up Peter Renoir’s anus in preparation for being butchered, cooked and eaten is an obvious attempt to tell us that what we are watching is more than a film but instead the very framework of everyday reality. At the end of the film, when the director allows us to actually see one of the corpses breathing, we are once again assured in the director’s unshakable faith in the unconquerorable human spirit.
Peter Renoir is leaving his rich wife because he is too comfortable. Semina is leaving Richmond, Indiana, because she is tired of sleeping with truck drivers. They meet and fall in love beside a tennis-ball factory. Semina is kidnapped on the first night they spend together by one of her old truck-driver friends. Peter Renoir pursues her the length and breadth of highway 101. He finds the semi-truck in which she was a prisoner. The truck is empty with the exception of the corpse of a midget named Russell.
He finally catches up with them in the men’s room of a truck stop in New Jersey. He realizes that he has lost her because the truck driver is built better. Peter climbs to the top of a ten-story building and dives off. Nine floors later he repents of his rash action but alas, too late. The movie ends and we are left with a sense of having seen it.
HOW YOU, THE READER, CAN APPRECIATE THIS STORY.
Begin like this. You the reader, somewhat awkward at first, begin reading this story with as much intelligence and sensibility as you can bring to it. In the passages where the theme (animal suffering) is most acute, you will be at least able to note the technique and methodology by which parts of the effect were achieved. But when the theme weakens, you will find yourself with a surplus of attention which you can profitably direct toward some other activity.
Preferably some quiet and fatal activity.
“I’ve got it for sure, this time,” said Peter Renoir.
Semina rolled her eyes. “I’ll see it first before I believe it. What do we do?”
“Well, we drop all our clothes on the floor and then we get under the sheets of the bed and we talk. Then I get up and go for a drive in my sports car. Later you will cry.”
“Is that it?”
“There’s more.” said Peter Renoir.
“Such as?”
“Well,” said Peter Renoir with a smile. “Then the Army comes in and rapes the hell out of both of us.”
“It’s just like a movie,” said Semina and she was deeply moved by it. It almost made her want to cry but she held it in. She wasn’t scheduled to cry until the next scene.
Now, class, why is this story worth studying?
Because it is metaphor as metamorphosis. It has become a story cut off from its name, habits, associations. Detached, it sees everything and nothing. It sees all things, swirling independently and then becoming gradually connected. The change of detachment. I am talking to you personally, because detached I become only a thing, an exercise, a creation, an amusement. I become the thing, in and of itself. It is disintegration into pure existence, and at that point, I the thing, I the writer, I the reason for this story, I all of these things, am free to become endlessly anything.
A literary critic peeping through the keyhole said, “The storm ove
r style and content will rage forever.”
Peter Renoir and Semina are trapped in an outhouse by two Dominican friars and several very irate forest rangers. Violence seems imminent. The priests are chanting, “We are only interested in the superficial.”
The forest rangers break down the door. The rangers make off with Semina, the priests disappear into the night with Peter Renoir. Semina reveals her pregnancy by word association and the rangers take her deep into the woods. They rape her and we are left with a sense of guilt. Peter Renoir is castrated in a frustrated rape attempt. We are left with a sense of accomplishment.
IN PIERSON’S ORCHESTRA
The dead shall live, the living die, And Music shall untune the sky.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Hallway to hallway to hallway I flit, like a bat in a mine. The lights are dimmed and the halls are empty, eerie grey slots. I cast long shadows from low light to light as I move along, next to the wall. I can feel my upper arms slide wetly against my ribs, and my heart’s allegro thumping. A voice within me sneers: “Time for your diamond, junkie.”
Dead sober will I see him, I promise myself again. My hand shakes, and I put it back in my pocket. Familiar halls now, and I slow down as if the air is getting thicker; still in color-blind greys, and the air is perhaps filled with dust, or smoke. It is past time for my next crystal. I have not slept for five days, I am continuing on the drive of my decision.
Home. VANCOUVER CONSERVATORY, the tall door announces. I turn the knob, give the door a push to get it started. It opens. I slip through, silently cross the entrance floor. Pierson’s hologramic statue stares down at me, a short ruby-red figure transparent in the dim light. I circle him warily, alive to his presence in the shadows between me and the ceiling. Hallways, again; then another door, the door: sanctum sanctorum. You remember the old animated film Fantasia? Suddenly I am Mickey Mouse, in Dukas’ The Sorcerer's Apprentice, about to interrupt the sorcerer over his cauldron. A deep bell clangs from the main hall and I jump. Midnight: time for the breaking of vows. I knock on the door, a mistake; I have the privilege of entering without knocking; but no, I have lost all that, I have revoked all that. An indistinct shout arrives from inside.
I push the door open and a slice of white light cuts into the hallway. In I go, blinking.
The Master is under the Orchestra, on his back, tapping away cautiously at the dent in the tuba tubing. The dent occurred at the end of the last grand tour, when one of the workmen helping to move it onto a rollcar tripped and kicked the tuba with his steel-tipped boot.
The Master looks up, white eyebrows rising like a bird’s crest. “Eric,” he says mildly, “why did you knock?”
“Master,” I say shakily, my resolve still firm, “I can no longer be your apprentice.”
Watch that sink in, like a hot poker in snow. He edges out from under the Orchestra, stands up; all slowly, so slowly. He is so old. “Why is this, Eric?”
I swallow. I have a lie all prepared, I have considered it for hours and hours; it is absurd, impossible. Suddenly I decide to tell him the truth. “I’m addicted to nepanathol.”
Right before my eyes his face turns a deep red. “You what?" he says, then almost shouts, “I don’t understand!”
“The drug,” I explain. “I’m hooked.”
Has the shock been too much for him? He trembles. He gets it out, calm and clear. “Why?”
It is all so complex. I shrug. “Master,” I say, “I’m sorry.”
With a convulsive jerk he throws the hammers in his hand, and I flinch; they hit the foam lining of the wall without a sound, then click against each other as they fall.
“You’re sorry!” he hisses, and I can feel his contempt. Why does one always whisper in this room? “You’re sorry! My God, you’d better be more than sorry! Three centuries, eight Masters of the Orchestra, you to be the ninth and you break the line for a drug? The greatest artistic achievement of all time—” he waves toward the Orchestra, but I refuse to look at it—“you choose nepanathol above it? How could you do it? I’m an old man, I’ll die in a few years, there isn’t time to train another musician like you—and you’ll be dead before I will!” True enough, in all probability. “I will be the last Master,” he cries out, “and the Orchestra will be silenced!”
With the thought of it he twists and sits down crosslegged on the floor, crying. I have never seen the Master cry before, never thought I would. He is not an emotional man.
“What have I done?” Echoless shrieks. “The Orchestra will end with me and they will say it was my fault, that I was a bad Master—”
“You are the best of them,” I get out.
He turns on me. “Then why? Why? Eric, how could you do this?”
I would have been the ninth Master of Pierson’s Orchestra. The heir to the throne. The crown prince. Why indeed? Such a joke.
As from a distance I hear myself. “Master,” I say, “I will stop taking the drug.”
I close my eyes as I say it. For an old man’s sake I will go through the withdrawal from nep. I shake my head, surprised at myself.
He looks up at me with—what is it, craftiness? Is he manipulating me? No. It’s just contempt. “You can’t,” he mutters angrily. “It would kill you.”
“No,” I say, though I am by no means sure of this. “I haven’t been addicted long enough. A few hours; eight, maybe; then it will be over.” It will be short; that is my only comfort. A very real voice inside me is protesting loudly: “What are you doing?" Pain. Muscle cramps, memory confusion, memory loss. Nausea. Hallucinations. A high possibility of sensory damage, especially to the ears, sense of smell, and eyes. I do not want to go blind.
“Truly?” the old man is saying. “When will you do this?”
“Now,” I say, ignoring the voice inside. “I’ll stay here, I think,” gesturing toward the Orchestra but still not looking in its direction.
“I too will stay—”
“No. Not here. In the recording booth, or one of the practice rooms. Or go up to your chambers, and come back tomorrow.”
We look at each other then, old Richard and young Eric, and finally he nods. He walks to the tall door, pulls it open. He turns his head back. “You be careful, Eric,” he says.
I nearly laugh, but am too appalled. The door clicks shut, and I am alone with Pierson’s Orchestra.
I can remember the first time I saw the Orchestra, in Sydney’s old sailboat of an opera house, around the turn of the century when my mother and I were living there. It was a special program for young people, and the Master—the same one, Richard Wolfgang Weber Yablonski, an old man even then—was playing pieces to delight the young mind: I can remember the 1812 Overture, Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, De Bruik’s Night Sea, and Debussy’s Claire de Lune. The Claire de Lune was a shock; used to my mother’s quick, workmanlike version, I barely recognized the Master’s; slow, simple, the solo piano supported at times by the strings; he started each phrase hesitantly, and exaggerated the rests, so that I felt as if the music had never been played before; that it was the result of the blue lights striking the fantastic tower of blue circles and glints, and long blue curves.
After the performance a few children, the ones being considered for the apprenticeship, came forward to talk with the Master. I walked down the aisle, my mother’s palm firm in the middle of my back, barely able to pull my eyes from the baroque monster of wood and metal and glass, to the mere mortal who played the thing. He spoke to us for a while, quietly, of the glories of playing an entire orchestra by oneself, watching our faces.
“And which did you like better,” he asked, “Pictures at an Exhibition played on the piano, or with the full orchestral arrangement?”
“Orchestra,” cried a score of voices.
“Piano,” I said, hitting a sudden silence.
“Why?” he asked politely, focusing on me for the first time. I shrugged nervously; I couldn’t think, I truly didn’t know; fingers digging into my back, I sear
ched for it—
It came to me. “Because,” I said, “it was written for piano.”
Simple. “But do you not like Ravel’s arrangement?” he inquired, interested now.
I thought. “Ravel changed a rough Russian piano score into a French romantic orchestration. He changed it.” Oh, I was a bright kid, no doubt about it, back in those days when I spent five hours a day at the keyboard and three in the books—and one in the halls, one desperately short hour, five o’clock to six o’clock every day in the halls burning up a day’s pent-up frustration—
“Have you compared the scores?” the Master asked me.
“Yes, Master, they are very similar. It is the instrumentation that makes the difference.”
The Master nodded his head, seeming to consider this. “I believe I agree with you,” he said.
Then the talk was over and we were on our way home. I felt sick to my stomach. “You did good,” my mother said. I was nine years old.
And here I am ten years later, sick to my stomach again. That is, I think I am. It is difficult to tell what is happening in my body —past time for my next crystal, that’s sure. The little twinges of dependence are giving me their warning, in the backs of my upper arms. At least it will be short. “Just like sex,” I remember an ex-addict saying in a high-pitched voice. “Short and sweet, with the climax at the end.” His friend nodded and flashed fingers at him.
I turn to the Orchestra. “Imagine all of the instruments of a full symphonic orchestra caught in a small tornado,” an early detractor said of it, “and you will have Pierson’s invention.” The detractor is now forgotten, and few like him exist now; age equals respectability, and the Orchestra now has three hundred years’ worth. An institution.
And imposing enough: eleven meters of instruments suspended in air, eleven meters of twisted brass and curved wood, supported by glass rods only visible because of the blue and red spotlights glinting from them. The cloud of violas, the broken staircase of trombones; a truly beautiful statue. But Pierson was a musician as well as a sculptor, a conductor as well as an inventor, and a genius to boot: an unfortunate combination.