Damon Knight: Orbit 16

Institute for Applied Research,

testifying before the Subcommittee

on State Energy Policy of the California

State Assembly, Charles Warren,

Chairman, February 1, 1974 (excerpted

in Not Man Apart, Mid-May 1974,

under the title “ Nothing Can

Possibly Go Wrong, Go Wrong, Go Wrong”)

By 1919 the German bourgeoisie must have felt any means to be justified in the defense of its power. As of this time, myths and magic moved out of the drawing-rooms and coffee-houses to light against reason and revolution. The flood of pseudo-scientific pamphlets and treatises became overwhelming, sf, read by the social classes that were not reached by pseudo-scientific and philosophic pamphlets, also succumbed to such irrationality. The idea that the time was ripe for a “spiritual re-orientation” in literature too was ceaselessly suggested by such authors. They called for sensations and imaginative fantasies that would help to conquer gross “materialism” and its literary counterpart, realism. One seemingly non-political articulation of these tendencies went as follows:

There are many indications that mechanistic materialism—derived from the exact sciences—which has impressed its stamp on the last decade, is at last dying out, due to the recent spiritual revolution. Obviously, the transcendental longings of the majority of humanity cannot be suppressed in the long run. . . . To begin with, we have again arrived at the point of view of “wonder”—i.e., we no longer dismiss as nonsense all things that are not explicable in terms of the known laws of physics. Mysterious connections between human beings, independent of spatial and temporal separation, spooks, the appearance of ghosts, all are again in the realm of the possible.

This quotation comes from the magazine Der Orchideengarten, which was devoted to publishing only fantastic fiction and drawings—analogous to American “weird” and “fantasy” sf magazines. Max Valier, the later rocket pioneer and chairman of the “Society for Space-Flight,” who toured the country lecturing about the end of the world, about Atlantis and Lemuria, about Glacial Cosmogony and the breakthrough into Space, and in 1929 made an unsuccessful attempt to interest Hitler in the military potential of rockets, was even more explicit—

Our present time, more than any other, requires a truly cosmic source and center for spiritual orientation. We need a tremendous, even super-Terran shock, in order to regain a sense of our identity which we have lost in the whirlpool of everyday selfishness. . . . On the basis of a new theory of cognition we will seek a more profound knowledge; and for our emotions, we will seek sensations of truly primeval shock, so that even the end of the world and of this Karth shall be a constructive experience.

—”sf, Occult Sciences, and Nazi

Myths,” by Manfred Nagel, Science-Fiction

Studies , Spring 1974 (excerpted and

translated from Nagel’s Science Fiction

in Deutschland (Tübinger Vereinigung

fur Volkskunde, Tubingen, 1972)

The king, the smith and the alien all loved her:

and she? She loved all three.

All day I have lain below the cliff. I can’t move, except to turn my head or twitch two fingers; I think my back is broken. I feel as if my body is already dead, but my head aches, and grief and shame are all the pain I can bear. Remembering Etaa . . .

Perhaps the elders are almost right when they say death is the return to the Mother’s womb, and in dying we go back along our lives to be reborn. Between wakings I dream, not of my whole life, but sweet dreams of the time when I had Etaa, my beloved. As though it still happened I see our first summer together herding shenn, warm days in fragrant up­land meadows. We didn’t love each other then; she was still a child, I was hardly more, and for our different reasons we kept ourselves separated from the world.

My reason was bitterness, for I was neaa, motherless. The winter before, I had lost my parents to a pack of kharks as they hunted. My mother’s sister’s family took me in, as was the custom, but I still ached with my own wounds of loss, and was always an outsider, as much from my own sullenness as from any fault of my kin. I questioned every belief, and could find no comfort. Sometimes, alone with just the grazing shenn, I sat and wept.

Until one day I looked up from my weeping to see a girl, with eyes the color of new-turned earth and short curly hair as dark as my own. She stood watching me somberly as I wiped at my eyes, ashamed and angry.

—What do you want? I signed, looking fierce and hoping she would run away.

—I felt you crying. Are you lonely?

—No. Go away. She didn’t. I frowned. —Where did you come from, anyway? Why are you spying on me?

—I wasn’t spying. I was across the stream, with my shenn. I am Etaa. She looked as if that explained everything.

And it did; I recognized her then. She belonged to another clan, but everyone talked about her: Etaa, her name-sign, meant “blessed by the Mother,” and she had the keenest eyesight in the village. She could see a bird on a branch across a field, and thread the finest needle; but more than that, she had been born with the second sight, she felt the Mother’s presence in all natural things. She could know the feeling and touch the souls of every living creature, some­times even predict when rain would fall. Others in the village had the second sight, but not as clearly as she did, and most people thought she would be the next priestess when she came of age. But now she was still a child, minding the flocks, and I wished she would leave me alone. —Your shenn will stray, O blessed one.

Old hurt pinched her sun-browned face, and then she was running back toward the stream.

—Wait! I stood up, startled, but she didn’t see my sign. I threw a stone; it skimmed past her through the grass. She stopped and turned. I waved her back, guilty that my grief had made me hurt somebody else.

She came back, her face too full of mixed feeling to read.

—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you unhappy too. I’m Hywel. I sat down, gesturing.

Her smile was as sudden and bright as her disappointment, and passed as quickly. She dropped down beside me like a hound, smoothing her striped kilt. —I wasn’t showing off ... I don’t mean to. ... Her shoulders drooped; I had never thought before that blessedness could be a burden like any­thing else. —I just wanted to— Her fingers hesitated in mid-sign. —To know if you were all right. She looked up at me through her long lashes, with a kind of yearning.

I glanced away uncomfortably across the pasture. —Can you watch your shenn from here? They were only a gray-white shifting blot to me, even when my eyes were clear, and now my eyes were blurred again.

She nodded.

—You have perfect vision, don’t you? My hands jerked with pent-up frustration. —I wish I did!

She blinked. —Why? Do you want to be a warrior, like in the old tales? Some of our people want to take the heads of the Neaane beyond the hills for what they do to us. I think in the south some of them have. Her eyes widened.

The thought of the Neaane, the Motherless ones, made me flinch; we called them Neaane because they didn’t believe in the Mother Earth as we did, but in gods they claimed had come down from the sky. We are the Kotaane, the Mother’s children, and to be neaa was to be both pitiful and accursed, whether you were one boy or a whole people. —I don’t want to kill people. I want to be farsighted so I can be a hunter and kill kharks, like they killed my parents!