Damon Knight - Orbit 20

I tried to argue him out of his foolish stand, but he was adamant. I was positive that Pan Dan Chee liked me; and I shrank from the idea of killing him, as I knew that I should. He was an excellent swordsman, but what chance would he have against the master swordsman of two worlds? I am sorry if that should sound like boasting; for I abhor boasting—I only spoke what is a fact. I am, unquestionably, the best swordsman that has ever lived.

—John Carter, in Liana of Gathol, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

But No Flowers on Mother’s Day

Eddore was—and is, huge, dense, and hot. Its atmosphere is not air, as we of small, green Terra know air, but is a noxious mixture of gaseous substances known to mankind only in chemical laboratories. Its hydrosphere, while it does contain some water, is a poisonous, stinking, foully corrosive, slimy and sludgy liquid.

And the Eddorians were as different from any people we know as Eddore is different from the planets indigenous to our space and time. They were, to our senses, utterly monstrous; almost incomprehensible. They were amorphous, amoeboid, sexless. Not androgynous or parthenogenetic, but absolutely sexless; with a sexlessness unknown in any Earthly form of life higher than the yeasts. Thus they were, to all intents and purposes and except for death by violence, immortal; for each one, after having lived for hundreds of thousands of Tellurian years and having reached its capacity to live and to learn, simply divided into two new individuals, each of which, in addition to possessing in full its parent’s mind and memories and knowledge, had also a brand-new zest and a greatly increased capacity.

—First Lensman, by

E. E. Smith, Ph. D.

Also Known as Redneck Delight

Their courses were built into their guidance system, in a way that nobody had figured out; you could pick a course, but once picked that was it—and you didn’t know where it was going to take you when you picked it, any more than you know what’s in your box of Cracker-Joy until you open it.

—Gateway, by Frederik Pohl

If Only We Could Train Ours Like That

Outside in the growing darkness the animals were on their nightly peregrinations, moving in from the woods, beginning to circle the house. The dogs could sometimes be seen from the house, running in packs wild as wolves. Cats bristled and spat in the hedges when they went out to the privy or to fetch more wood for the dying fire.

—Comet, by Jane White

Spawning God Knows What Tufts and Armpits

Her eyes had been enlarged, and her naturally small chin further diminished, in accordance with the fashion dictates of the time, even as Hagen’s dark eyebrows had been grown into a ring of hair that crossed above his nose and went down by its sides to meld with his moustache.

—“To Mark the Year on Azlaroc,” by Fred Saberhagen, in Science Fiction Discoveries

"Your techniques of shivering and coughing are quite good. Your technique of throwing out all your food, while a bit drastic for my taste, may well be warranted here. However, your technique of falling senseless to the ground and then lying there limp, while your consciousness retreats into an imaginary world, is inefficient in the extreme.”

The last night we spent in the high country, we climbed up to the top of one of those large flat buttes and sat near the edge. From there we watched the campfires come on, one by one, all around the great lake and for miles and miles along the road leading to it. The effect was of a large number nine of fire, and the festival of Our Lady of the Lake was begun.

After a while the master broke the silence. It was not often that he did so, for he spoke only when necessary. In fact, he was meticulous about the expenditure of energy in any form.

He was a delicate little man with hair and beard like white puffs of cloud floating away from his face and dissolving into the air. Spry as an elf. And he was old, so old; no one knew how old he was, but there was something about him all the same that was frightening, a certain austerity, or sharpness, a quality of power. When he spoke, you listened.

He raised his hand to be sure he had my attention, then he spoke in a high, shrill voice.

“I know you are excited. Nevertheless, you must use all your power to listen with a calm mind. Do not add anything or subtract anything. I have arranged what I wish to say to you into a list for your convenience.

“One. We will go to the festival.

“Two. You will fight for the championship.

“Three. We will gain the prize money.

“Four. If you are alert, you will have the opportunity to leam much.”

Stunned, I waited for him to continue, but he sat quietly, looking into my eyes, smiling in his strange, distant manner, his hands now folded in his lap.

His eyes closed. Perhaps he meditated; perhaps he slept.

“I never dreamed,” I stammered. “I mean, we haven’t been to a city in five years, to win the purse, to fight for the championship of Our Lady; I never dreamed that when I spent those years training in the martial arts, that I was training for this.”

He opened his eyes and held out his arm to silence me.

“I find it necessary to speak again,” he said. “This time when I finish speaking, you must, unless I request you to answer, remain completely silent in contemplation of what I have just said. This rule should apply in your relationship with intelligent people throughout your life and, should some theory such as reincarnation prove correct, throughout your future lives as well.

“I have asked you to listen carefully to what I say. Neither add nor subtract from it. At no point did I say, for instance, that all your training in the martial arts was toward the goal of defeating this champion. To carry it further, at no point have I suggested that your training in the martial arts had any goal whatever. It is an example of your adding to my teaching, to infer that you are being trained for something, when for all I have told you, you may be just expending energy in one form as opposed to expending it in a different manner. Your habit of adding to everything is your only obstacle in life. You must let go of it.”

He closed his eyes. Now I thought perhaps he had gone to sleep. My mind was filled to the bursting point with myriads of conflicting, agitating thoughts, visions, conjectures.

I took my blanket from my pack and lay down on it. Gradually my thoughts, locked in their death-struggle of duality, sank under a wave of weariness, into another dimension, where they fought on as my dreams. The last thing I saw, as I drifted off to sleep, was the image of the old man, sitting crosslegged before the fire, erect as always, relaxed as always: asleep, I wondered, or meditating?

I seemed to be struggling against something in vain. Perhaps I had been tied up. I looked down at my wrists, and sure enough, long, indistinct hemp ropes trailed away from my wrists into smoke. I began to jerk at them frantically, but I could not get loose. Something struck me across on the shoulders and I came awake with a terrible start.

It was just before dawn, and the master was standing over me with his staff raised, ready to strike me again if necessary. He looked furious, but I suspect that was only to impress me with my failure.

“You should be discouraged from taking inferior action in your dreams, as well as in your waking life,” he had told me once. Also: “Your dream dilemmas are the result of lack of awareness, the same as your waking dilemmas.”

Now, with the rim of the sun beginning to rise over the edge of the distant, flat-topped mountains, with the first bright flashes of gold and purple, we stood in the position of commencement of the early-morning form. Then we began to move slowly and carefully through the form, oiling our joints, limbering up our muscles, our sense of balance, our basic techniques; preparing our bodies for any movement they might be required to make later in the day; also measuring the wind currents, the altitude, adjusting to the resistance of today’s particular ocean of air.