Damon Knight - Orbit 17

I can see my prick. It looks wrinkled and shrunken, even smaller than Cunningham’s. This is a hell of a time to be thinking about pricks! My shoulder hurts worse than my gut. I can feel blood on the ground under my back. I’ve rested long enough.

What’s that noise? Sounded like a twig cracking somewhere in the darkness. What if it’s a coyote? I wonder if it will attack me. Probably not. Do coyotes react to the smell of blood the way sharks do?

Footsteps. Not a coyote. People. More than one. I’m saved! Up yours, Camehan!

There are four of them: four redheaded young men who don’t look a day over twenty. Four perfect faces that I used to think were overwhelmingly beautiful—until I saw the face of that dead winged thing. But I did see it. And I had to cover it because the beauty was too painful to look at.

Four magnificent bodies that only a few days ago would have sent the blood rushing to my penis—if I hadn’t seen the pale body of the winged creature, all the more beautiful because it was sexless. A body I knew would have gleamed had it been alive.

Now these four faces seem drab and plain and the four bodies might belong to trolls.

But the eyes! They stand around me, watching me with eyes I still think beautiful because the winged creature’s eyes were closed in death.

Those four pairs of beautiful, bland eyes look at me the same way Camehan looks at an apple he’s been saving for a special occasion.

Kathleen M. Sidney (“The Anthropologist”) teaches retarded children in New Jersey, but doesn’t like it there and plans to move to Oregon. “My father was born in Poland and spent most of his childhood and early adult years wandering around Europe. My mother was raised in an orphanage in Montreal. If this were about either of them it would be much more interesting.” This is her first published story.

Gardner Dozois wrote in October, “I’ve just finished going through all the papers I’m lending to Temple [University], an odd and unsettling experience which makes me feel simultaneously very young and a million years old. Can it really have been six years ago that I stumbled and gawked into the Anchorage for the first time? Can I really have been corresponding with you for seven years? Good Lord. And suddenly I’m not a promising new writer anymore, I’m a crunched-awkwardly-in-the-middle-and-mildewing-not-so-young-anymore writer, watching with dismay the approach of the young turks and muttering about ‘barbarians.’ Move Over Dad, they honk, but I wave my cane at them anyway as I go down, just to be pettish.”

Felix C. Gotschalk (“The Man With the Golden Reticulates”) is a clinical psychologist who lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “At one time or another, I have been expert at Mercedes and Porsche matters, pre-Castro cigars, Himalayan cats, baroque organs, WWI aircraft, and musicology. After 16 years of retirement from the music business, I am fighting my way through the Chopin Polonaises again, and playing for small groups of friends. Artur Rubinstein is twice my age, so I figure there is plenty of time left.”

A contributor who had better remain anonymous wrote in November:

“How would you feel about buying a story that began: ‘Under the rather insipid pale-green sky the late afternoon sun laid its bars of umber and orange across the backs of the violet-hued leaves, veined red, that topped the jungle spreading, far as the eye could see, each side of the narrow road, little better than an unmetalled track. / Like great wild-grown cabbages the cumbersome leaves clumped themselves at the top of the ribbed and pulpy spineless trunks, each different variety of tree little differentiated from the rest in the overall blue-greenness and made still more inconspicuous by the uniform pallid red-blueness caused by the light of the drooping sun striking across and through the exhaled haze of the trees’ once-daily breath. / Beneath the lowering of clusters the orange light lit fitfully the dried yellow grasses and bright shiny fever green shrubs, the stalks’ shadows tiger-striping the low and gloomy tunnels of stillness.’

“Got that? The first three lines (and paragraphs) of the novel Dunes of Pradai by Tony Russell Wayman (Curtis Books). I ripped out the first page and use it above my typewriter as a reminder that anyone can make a living from writing SF.”

Jeff Duntemann (“The Steel Sonnets”), now in his early twenties, started writing when he was fifteen and has turned out a story every eight weeks ever since. He describes himself as “utterly middle-middle-middle class suburban normal”; he has never worked on a shrimp boat, played the guitar or driven a bulldozer. “I do, however, have a collection of about 3500 Chicago bus transfers in old detergent boxes.”

We wrote to a Clarion student in December, “The basic idea of the story is unacceptably grungy (blech, blech!) and also unbelievable. If you were starved for decent food, you might want to eat people (although they are full of chemical additives too), but surely you wouldn’t start with the guts. What about a nice ham or chop?”

Jeff Millar (“Toto, I Have a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore”), a young Texas newspaperman, is the author of the syndicated comic strip “Tank McNamara.”

As we write this, it is January 10, a sunny day in Florida, and the back yard is full of robins scoffing up insects. They have drunk a gallon of water out of the bird bath since this morning. (Probably to keep the bugs from wriggling.) Birds are among the most easily observable of the aliens with whom we share this planet. They are irascible, absurd, and hopeful, like the rest of us.

Steve Chapman (“Autopsy in Transit”) lives in the back of a forest-green pickup truck, mostly around Arizona. He welcomes correspondence, c/o 925 Ravine Road, Winnetka, Illinois 60093.

John Barfoot (“House”) was born in Southall, London, and now lives in Stoke Newington. He works as a civil servant in the headquarters of the Department of Health and Social Security, but, ceteris paribus, would rather be a bootblack, short order cook, or lumberjack.

Raylyn Moore (“Fun Palace”) lives in Pacific Grove, California, which she considers the very last outpost of civilization. Her latest book is Wonderful Wizard, Marvelous Land, a critical biography of L. Frank Baum, published by Bowling Green University Popular Press in 1974.

A writer we know got a rejection note, forwarded by her agent, from an editor who complained that “some of her sentances are cunberson.”

Dave Scal (“When We Were Good”) sent us a clipping from the Washington Post about a TV executive who was complaining about the sameness of television dramas: “There are only so many times Dracula can have a stake driven through his head,” she said.

Murray Yaco (“The Winning of the Great American Greening Revolution,” Orbit 14) wrote to thank us for a copy of a newspaper review of the book. “It helped cheer an otherwise solemn Christmas. I broke my leg under circumstances much too embarrassing to report in detail.”

Seth McEvoy (“Which in the Wood Decays”), fresh out of high school, aided the successful congressional campaign of Don Rie-gle, Jr., and later worked in his office as a congressional intern. He was one of the chief executives of a spoof organization, the National Hamiltonian Party: it offered a return to aristocratic rule, under which only the educated landowning gentry would be allowed to vote. He recently finished a novel, Willie the Worm.

R. A. Lafferty (“Great Day in the Morning”) wrote a long time ago, “We’ll meet somewhere one of these years. Then you’ll say or think what many of the kids met at conventions say in disappointment: ‘Ah hell, you’re not Lafferty.’ No, I’m not really: I always intended to be but it didn’t work out.”