Дэймон Найт: Orbit 4

Tatja smiled at Cor and Svir—the same scornful, bitter smile they had seen so often before. “You never were very bright, were you, Svir? It’s possible that I’ll take over the world. As a matter of fact I probably will. It will be a by-product of my other plans. I chose Crownesse very carefully. The country has immense physical resources. If there are large heavy-metal deposits anywhere, they are in Crownesse. The government is talented and dedicated. Most administrative posts are awarded on the basis of civil-service tests. And the entire Bureaucracy is fanatically dedicated to one person—the legal holder of the Crown. They served Tar Benesh and his evil for twenty years, and they will serve me just as faithfully. I will not be bothered with coups and elections, as I might if I took over one of the archipelagates.

“We’ve reached a very critical point in the development of civilization—in case you don’t realize it. In the past century there have been a number of really basic scientific discoveries made in all parts of the world. The pharmacists of the Tsanart Islands are very close to immortality drugs. A physicist in the Osterlei Archipelagate developed that picture-maker we use. All over the world, revolutionary advances are being made. Sometimes I think that organizations like Tarulle are responsible for this. For centuries they spread ideas from island to island until finally scientists stopped thinking of them as fantasy and actually invented what writers described. I’m making a gift of that Fantasie collection to Tarulle, by the way.”

“That’s big of you,” snapped Svir. Grimm ignored him.

“All these inventions and techniques are going to have effects far beyond what is obvious. Just think what that picture-taker will do for parallax astronomy. You’ll be able to make pictures of all observations. If these inventions were brought together and worked over intensively, the changes would be even more spectacular. But you people out in the islands are too lazy to do that. The people of Crownesse are not. They’ve had to work awfully hard just to stay alive here on The Continent. They will take your inventions and use them and develop more inventions—until they control the entire planet.”

Tatja looked up into the sky, at Seraph and the bright star Prok. “You know, there is a very common legend among the Wildmen at the center of The Continent. The legend says that man originally came from the stars, that he landed on The Continent and lost his magical arts to the storm and wind. Sounds like a Fantasie story, doesn’t it? But imagine—if it is true, then the races of men live among the stars, their empires so vast that they can ‘forget’ whole planetary systems. They may have colonized Seraph at the same time as Tu. We are not alone.” As she spoke to them, Tatja’s voice changed, lost its authority and its spite. Now she spoke softly, sadly. Her shoulders slumped. For a moment she wasn’t the master of events, but a young girl, very much alone, and very lonely. “No, Svir, ruling this world does not interest me, except for one thing. I’ve never found anyone I can talk to, anyone that can understand the things I often want to say. When I call you stupid—~I mean it, even though you’re of above-average intelligence, and even though I just say it to make you angry.” She turned to look at Svir and Cor. Her eyes were soft, and her lower lip almost seemed to tremble. Her vast intelligence had crippled her, just as surely as if she had had no arms. In point of fact there was no person on Tu who was her equal. Svir suddenly understood the meaning of her scornful, hostile smile. It was the bitter, hopeless envy of a woman seeing well-adjusted people all around her and not being one herself.

“And that is why I am going to turn this world upside down, and regain the ancient arts that mythology said we once had. For somewhere in this universe there must be what I need most ... a man.” The fallen goddess turned away from the parapet and the gay crowds. She didn’t look up as she walked slowly away.

James Sallis, 23, is a Southerner educated at Tulane. Until recently he lived in rural Iowa with his wife, a painter and medical illustrator, and their son Dylan, 3. At present he is living in London, where he is fiction editor of New Worlds. With Thomas M. Disch and Samuel R. Delany, he typifies the emerging new generation of science fiction writers.

Almost to a man, the writers of “new wave” science fiction deny that there is any such thing as a new or old wave; they say there are only good stories and bad ones. Nevertheless, the new writers form a distinctive group. They are trained in the arts, particularly in poetry and music, rather than in science or engineering, and it shows in their work. (Some of the older writers majored in English, but went ahead and wrote pulp just the same;

Like Disch and Delany, Sallis uses all the resources of English, not just those few that have trickled down our side channel in the last forty years. “A Few Last Words” is an end-of-civilization story, if you like, but it owes much more to Eliot than to Wells or Wyndham. Its domain is not the great out-there of conventional science fiction, but the poetic intensity of right-here, right-now:

Is this how it feels, the instant of desertion?

What is the silence

a. As though it had a right to more

—W. S. Merwin

Again: the dreams.

He was eating stained glass and vomiting rainbows. He felt he was being watched and looked up and there was the clock moving toward him, grinning, arms raised in a shout of triumph over its head. The clock advanced; he smelled decay; he was strangled to death by the hands of time . . . The scene changed. He was in red room. The hands of the clock knocked knocked knocked without entering . . . And changed again. And the hours had faces, worse than the hands. He choked it was all so quiet quiet only the ticking the faces were coming closer closer he gagged screamed once and—

Sat on the edge of the bed. The hall clock was ticking loudly, a sound like dried peas dropping into a pail. This was the third night.

The pumpkin-color moon was arrested in motion, dangling deep in the third quadrant of the cross-paned window about three-quarters out along the diagonal. Periodically clouds would touch the surface and partly fill with color, keeping it whole. Dust and streaks on the window, a tiny bubble of air, blurred its landscape; yellow drapes beside it took on a new hue.

He had watched it for hours (must have been hours). Its only motion was a kind of visual dopplering. It sped out into serene depths, skipped back in a rush to paste itself against the backside of the glass, looking like a spot of wax. Apogee to perigee to apogee, and no pause between. Rapid vacillation, losing his eyes in intermediate distances, making him blink and squint, glimmering in the pale overcast. And other than that, it hadn’t moved. Abscissa +, ordinate +. Stasis. This was the third night.

His wife stirred faintly and reached to touch his pillow, eyelids fluttering. Hoover quickly put out his hand and laid it across her fingers. Visibly, she settled back into blankets. In the hall, the clock ticked like a leaking faucet. The moon was in its pelagic phase, going out.

The third night of the dreams. The third night that lying in bed he was overcome by: Presence. In the dark it would grow around him, crowding his eyes open, bunching his breath, constricting—at last driving him from the bed, the room. He would pace the rugs and floors, turn back and away again on the stairs, wondering. He would drink liquor, then coffee, unsure which effect he wanted, uneasy at conclusions—certain only of this sense of cramping, of imposition. In the dark he was ambushed, inhabited, attacked again from within.