Damon Knight - Orbit 14

HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS

New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London

Copyright © 1974 by Damon Knight. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

FIRST EDITION

Designed by C. Linda Dingier

ISBN: 0-06-012438-5

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 73-18657

The lead story [in Astounding Stories, December 1933] was Nat Schachner’s “Ancestral Voices,” in which a time traveler, having returned to the past, happens to kill a ferocious Hun who, unknown to the traveler, is one of his own ancestors. This brings about the immediate nonexistence of the time traveler as well as that of many thousands of people throughout history. Above all, the Hun’s death causes the disappearance in 1933 of Hitler and numerous Nazis, along with an equally large number of Jews! Thus Schachner denounced the myth of the superiority of the “Aryan race” along with that of the “chosen people.” Jews or Nazis, all men are of the same race. This very courageous story, written at a time when Hitlerism had many supporters in the United States, caused a shock among the readers. Certain admirers of the Third Reich went so far as to threaten the editors with reprisals; adult science fiction was born.

—Jacques Sadoul, in Hier, I’An 2000 (Denoel, Paris, 1973)

“I owe what I am entirely to paperbacks. I am a PX and bus station author; and I’m lucky because people think of my books as science fiction, and they always print a lot of copies of science fiction.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, at the Bookworkers’ seminar on “Open Publishing,” New York, April 9, 1973 (reported in Publishers Weekly)

Here is the typical product of America, as seen by those who are repelled by America but who like the Americans. As an individual, he so perfectly represents that country, crammed with blinding faults and made up of often delightful people, that he seems a parody of it: the best conscience in the world, more extraverted than flesh and blood can be, a juvenile mentality furnished with an extravagant power (his talent), a purely visceral racism without any rational foundation, all this in the service of science fiction—it’s too much.

—Pierre Versins, Encyclopedic de I’Utopie et de la Science Fiction (L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1972)

We who hobnob with hobbits and tell tall tales about little green men are quite used to being dismissed as mere entertainers, or sternly disapproved of as escapists. But I think that perhaps the categories are changing, like the times. Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art. At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence. A scientist who creates a monster in his laboratory; a librarian in the library of Babel; a wizard unable to cast a spell; a space ship having trouble in getting to Alpha Centauri: all these may be precise and profound metaphors of the human condition. The fantasist, whether he uses the ancient archetypes of myth and legend or the younger ones of science and technology, may be talking as seriously as any sociologist—and a good deal more directly—about human life as it is lived, and as it might be lived, and as it ought to be lived. For, after all, as great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, accepting the National Book Award for Children’s Literature. New York, April 10, 1973

In Hans Christian Andersen’s immortal story, a tin soldier fell in love with a ballerina and passed through the fire for her. Their fate was cruel; but now, centuries later and light-years away, another tin soldier and his ballerina might have a second chance.

The ship drifted down the ragged light-robe of the Pleiades, dropped like a perfect pearl into the midnight water of the bay. And re-emerged, to bob gently in a chain of gleaming pearls stretched across the harbor toward the port. The port’s unsleeping Eye blinked once, the ship replied. New Piraeus, pooled among the hills, sent tributaries of light streaming down to the bay to welcome all comers, full of sound and brilliance and rash promise. The crew grinned, expectant, faces peering through the transparent hull; someone giggied nervously.

The sign at the heavy door flashed a red one-legged toy; tin soldier flashed blue below it. eat. drink, come back again. In green. And they always did, because they knew they could.

“Soldier, another round, please!” came over canned music.

The owner of the Tin Soldier, also known as Tin Soldier, glanced up from his polishing to nod and smile, reached down to set bottles out on the bar. He mixed the drinks himself. His face was ordinary, with eyes that were dark and patient, and his hair was coppery barbed wire bound with a knotted cloth. Under the curling copper, under the skin, the back of his skull was a plastic plate. The quick fingers of the hand on the goose-necked bottle were plastic, the smooth arm was prosthetic. Sometimes he imagined he heard clicking as it moved. More than half his body was artificial. He looked to be about twenty-five; he had looked the same fifty years ago.

He set the glasses on the tray and pushed, watching as it drifted across the room, and returned to his polishing. The agate surface of the bar showed cloudy permutations of color, grain-streak and whorl and chalcedony depths of mist. He had discovered it in the desert to the east—a shattered imitation tree, like a fellow traveler trapped in stasis through time. They shared the private joke with their clientele.

“—come see our living legend!”

He looked up, saw her coming in with the crew of the Who Got Her-709, realized he didn’t know her. She hung back as they crowded around, her short ashen hair like beaten metal in the blueglass lantern light. New, he thought. Maybe eighteen, with eyes of quicksilver very wide open. He smiled at her as he welcomed them, and the other women pulled her up to the agate bar. “Come on, little sister,” he heard Harkane say, “you’re one of us too.” She smiled back at him.

“I don’t know you . . . but your name should be Diana, like the silver Lady of the Moon.” His voice caught him by surprise.

Quicksilver shifted. “It’s not.”

Very new. And realizing what he’d almost done again, suddenly wanted it more than anything. Filled with bitter joy he said, “What is your name?”

Her face flickered, but then she met his eyes and said, smiling, “My name is Brandy.”

“Brandy . . .”

A knowing voice said, “Send us the usual, Soldier. Later, yes—?”

He nodded vaguely, groping for bottles under the counter ledge. Wood screeked over stone as she pulled a stool near and slipped onto it, watching him pour. “You’re very neat.” She picked nuts from a bowl.

"Long practice.”

She smiled, missing the joke.

He said, “Brandy’s a nice name. And I think somewhere I’ve heard it—”

“The whole thing is Branduin. My mother said it was very old.”

He was staring at her. He wondered if she could see one side of his face blushing. “What will you drink?”