Damon Knight - Orbit 15

“I used to think you were all power and affection,” said Mac. “Like a father. Power and affection make a strange mixture, but you never lose either completely. I was wrong. You’re a demon.”

“You had me figured out,” said Jennings. “You thought so, anyway. I let you think so. But you knew I let you. And I let you know that, too. You can’t catch up. You can’t really understand. That’s why I give the lectures and you take the notes.”

“You’re a demon,” said Mac.

Jennings laughed. “Everybody has what he wants. Except me. I’m dead.”

“What about them?” Mac waved a hand toward the window.

“Sam and Willie? They have what they want. They’re walking out the front gate, just about now. They have each other. They have what they want.”

“You’re not going to stop them?” asked Mac.

“Stop them from doing what? They don’t mean anything. They could have gone anytime.”

“What about me?”

“What about you, Mac? Do you mean, are you worth anything? I won’t answer that. You figure it out. You’re good at that. You have what you want, don’t you?”

“Do I?”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No,” said Mac.

“And you’re not. What do you feel like doing?”

“Sleeping,” said Mac. He stretched out again, yawned, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Jennings was gone. Mac was sure that he had not dreamed the conversation. “It was another Sevenday illusion, like the movies,” he thought. “I can figure it out. And I have all night to do it. Jennings’ murder might have been a Sevenday illusion. This entire week might have been ...” Mac took a deep breath and smiled. Jennings was right. Everyone had received what he wanted.

Without getting undressed, Mac slid beneath the blankets on his cot. The gray winter light was failing, and the room was dim. Mac felt warm and comfortable. “Nama, Nama Sebesio,” he murmured, not knowing what the words meant. He was soon asleep.

It was the second week in December; the weather was actually fairly mild, bright, clear, temperature in the high fifties. The yard was brown and grassless. Where rain had made mud a few days before, there were hard, dry ridges of a lighter buff color. The high gray walls around the yard were close and cold.

R. A. Lafferty (“Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread”) was born in Neola, Iowa, fifty-eight years ago but has lived most of his life in Oklahoma, with time out for World War II, which he spent in Texas, North Carolina, Florida, California, Australia, New Guinea, Morotai Island (then Dutch East Indies, now part of Indonesia), and the Philippines. “I am forever a Catholic, a bachelor, a political independent, a lone badger (lone wolves are a legend, they are always in groups, but even the bachelor badger digs himself a hole and spends most of his time in it).”

Doris Piserchia (“Pale Hands”) rides horses, takes care of a large noisy household, and writes. “I sold two books and ten stories this year [1973] so I guess I can call myself a writer. I’m a little reluctant to, though. Other writers’ comments sound so darned confident, as if they really have it made, and I know damned well I haven’t got anything made, so I wonder. Ginn & Co., Mass., bought one from Fred [Pohl]’s Best SF for 1972; it’s the third time I’ve sold it and each time I get more money. That makes no sense, but then I take all this business too seriously and would be better off if I ignored a lot of it.” “Pale Hands” was written on commission for another editor, who asked Mrs. Piserchia for a story about mass masturbation, then rejected the finished manuscript because it was “just too much of a sex story.”

To a new writer who asked if he thought it was all right for him to use the title “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” we wrote: “No problem about the title unless there is a possibility of confusion, and Gibbon’s was in 12 volumes, so don’t worry.”

Kate Wilhelm (“Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang”) takes her own warnings seriously—she grows a vegetable garden, bakes bread, brews beer, and makes wine. Her stories are sometimes prophetic, but with such a short lag that by the time they are published, they look as if they had been inspired by last month’s headlines. “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang” is the fourth in a series of connected stories that began with “The Red Canary” (Orbit 12) and continued with “The Scream” (Orbit 13) and “A Brother to Dragons, a Companion of Owls” (Orbit 14).

We received a submission from a literary agency in Searcy, Arkansas, which calls itself Infinity Ltd.

Gene Wolfe (“Melting”) recently wrote, “I have been considering joining the Procrastinators’ Association, but I keep putting it off.”

In October we wrote to the St. Petersburg Times: “The members of the Citizens’ Commission on Education, who profess to believe that children learn their profanity from dictionaries, are leery busnacks (suspicious busybodies), grumpish old busters (sour-faced oldsters), sticky-beaks (inquisitive persons) and noodles (simpletons). Here’s a ripe Richard (raspberry) for them.” The Commission later gave up its attack on the school libraries where it had found copies of Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional Language (Librarians 1, Wowsers 0).

Michael Bishop (“In the Lilliputian Asylum”) was in college when he first thought of writing a story from the viewpoint of a Lilliputian after Gulliver’s departure. He tried writing it as a novel in 1969 but didn’t like the result and put it aside until 1973, when it began to re-emerge as a series of poems. Ballantine has accepted his first novel: it is called A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire.

We heard from W. T. March, Cdr. USN (Ret.), that he has been reading science fiction since 1926 and that “this so-called SF that you and Ellison are anthologizing is enough to make John W. Campbell, Wells, etc., turn over in their graves. There isn’t 99 out of 100 of this Clarion bunch that are fit to empty Isaac Asimov’s chamber pot.”

Lowell Kent Smith (“Ernie”) is an assistant professor of biology at the University of Redlands, Redlands, California, where he specializes in biomedical computing and biological modeling; he is a consultant on these subjects and on water pollution. Earlier in his career, as a first lieutenant in the artillery, he taught the employment of nuclear weapons as a member of the teaching staff of the Tactics and Combined Arms Department of the U.S. Army Artillery and Missile School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. This is his first story.

Brian W. Aldiss (“Live? Our Computers Will Do That for Us”) was guest of honor at Beneluxcon 1 in Ghent, Belgium, in the spring of 1973. In the summer he and his wife, with another couple, rented a villa at Rovinj, Yugoslavia. Then they came home and he wrote this story, which is one of a projected series about the Zodiacal Planets.

To a talented young writer we wrote: “Am probably not qualified to say anything about the topic (because it does not turn me on much) but I could not figure out why if your guy digs corpses he would not wait until the woman was dead. (That’s how I’d do if I was a necrophile.) And my advice to him would be to give up kidnaping anybody & just get a job in a funeral parlor.”