The Best of Science Fiction 12

So, when the dialogues started, I kept my own counsel, in time came to understand my delusion, and began to be taught my real profit. The shape I would sin under was not going to be left up to me; this they call resignation. Almost as with us, except for that subdivision which was still to be understood, there was One creature here only. And as I lay there now, I practiced ever newer dreams of this being, manufactured out of fresher, more sophisticated dissatisfactions — give or take a tusk or two, subtract a horn there. And after an hour or two of this pleasantest of siesta occupations, I made an accordingly new discovery. Posture! Perhaps only a One of an essentially gyroscopic people, used to the luxury of moving pavements in which trolley grooves We may incline all at the same comfortable angle, can appreciate how basic is posture here to the rhythms of philosophy, and indeed to the practice of ideals. How sensitively I was getting to understand you. It was not wholly comfortable then, to lie too long prone.

And no sooner had I discovered this, than I felt myself pulled powerfully upright, as eager for action as if I had just bounded out of the crater. At home, my line of action would have been ready for me; here it took only nominally longer for posture to suggest one. Carefully, very carefully this time, I approached the door. At this point in my education I had never really seen one up close; what has instantaneity to do with doors? Answer: it learns to reason itself through them, just as you, by reverse process, will soon find yourselves flashily able to do forever without them. At a certain distance, I found that, even when thinking the most lethargic thoughts and overcasting myself with the heaviest feelings I yet knew, there was still an unnatural tension between door and me, which boded ill. Then suddenly the source of it occurred to me; my electrical field was being opposed by another. Even their doors wear them, I thought. And perhaps not only their doors, perhaps all other objects which might offer resistance of any kind are required to be clothed so, while they themselves walk nakedly proudly among these obeisant; what aristocrats they are! And I — ?

And I. When Here, do as Here does. But be sure to emulate those who are in power. I must run no risk of having them confuse me with low-grade matter. It requires only a particular thought for us to discard our Field, the trouble being only that it is such a particular one, and illegal too. Perhaps it wouldn't work as well here. Taking a cautious breath, I found that since the last time I had practiced this heresy, the wholesomely coarse air of Yours had so clogged the finer pores that I was enabled to sustain a thought without fairly recognising that I was doing it — and that this furthermore seemed to add substantially to my weight. Sure enough, shortly I began to feel the familiar chilliness which always comes of lowering one's protective field, and happening to shiver, this inched me slightly doorwards — and sure enough, the door inched slowly and equally toward me. Some thoughts must be illegal anywhere. For good measure, I made so bold as to half hum it, meanwhile keeping my real thoughts trolleying along a loftier neighbourhood; there's always some niche of the intelligence that one must keep to oneself.

"I am ... " I murmured," ... I am ... an Original." This time the door didn't budge. But by dint of trial I found that as I moved forward, and only under the influence of this, the door would move compatibly outward. What courtesy, even in inferior matter, here! Slowly, majestically dipping my angle at a nice compromise between a taking-this-for-granted and a thank-you, I inched myself along without accident, until the door and I were in equipoise. I was almost outside it. Outside, on Here.

By hook or crook then, I was almost safely through the second phase of my journey. For, awesome as the interstellar reaches may be to the lone traveler, or even to the caravan which must track those Saharas of cosmic dust, there had come a point in my journey when it was the destination which became the dread. Did they really have water in a liquid state? I could not survive without it. Should I have trusted them, when they reported themselves as beings with the same needs as I, molded by the same natural forces? Not that I was suspicious of their intent — but after all, they were only a third-generation star. Young as they were, must one not have a low view of intellectual powers which had taken all of their history to discover other presences, and the possible pulsings between them? Granted We and They had mutually significant symbols and meanings, but imagine Our dismay when informed that they still read and wrote! Could beings like Us, who are in Ourselves practically all electronic meaning, go backward as far as these beings on the other side of their 'Milky Way' thought they had gone forward; could we mutate enough, and quickly so, to touch arc on their planet? To dare to do this, I had gone against all home Opinion. And so far, with the help of arrangements-in-waiting, plans had gone remarkably. But, as I peered outside that glass door, I remembered my misgivings just a few moments before landing. Behind me, improbably far along the empyrean reaches, Ours, that long teardrop of a planet, lay somewhere shrouded as I had last seen it, nestling deep in its filtered atmospheres, a jewel once upon a time massively wept. As I had reined in on Yours, a mere toy ball lost on its cloud stubble, waiting to be picked up again in play — my last thought had been: yes, I can land Here — but can I live?

Such thoughts as one can have behind a door here! Just beyond the threshold the air was heavy, but I reminded myself now much I myself had changed during my weeks here. When, by infinite creepings I found myself still alive and breathing, no more WHAM's and the door still courteous, I made the last inch or two; behind me, the door modestly retired — and shut. I had no thought at the time of whether it would readmit me, or where I was going. All the prospect of your world was before me terminated in the distance — according to the limits of sight here, to which mine was fast declining — by a pergola. I remained for some minutes as I was, faintly chilly, daring nothing, taking stock. I was Here. I was Outside. And I was naked as the day Yours are born ...

Can you take another word? Two, really: criticism and category. They are why you probably never heard of Ellipsia before. Critics like categories. Some critical categories are: Pop, science fiction, avant-garde, mainstream, black humour. Hortense Calisher has a distinctive reputation as a mainstream writer — sub-category, female, One critic found the book wanting in a survey of Ladies' Novels; another put it down as inadequate neo-Joyce; one who did not review it thought it could have been an avant-garde hit if someone like William Burroughs had written it. S-f critics, who would have loved it, never saw it. The category it actually fits had not yet been invented.

I must admit that my enthusiasm for fabulation as a term is rather greater than for The Fabulators as a book. Prof. Scholes grants at the outset that his survey is not inclusive. He concentrates on Durrell, Vonnegut, Southern, Hawkes, Murdoch and Barth, and at least mentions Nabokov, Heller, Beckett, Donleavy, Purdy, and Friedman. One is of course less than startled to find he knows nothing of writers like Sturgeon, Ballard, Leiber, and Cordwainer Smith (let alone Disch, Delany, Zelazny); but it is surprising to find no mention of Calisher, Updike, or Burroughs, for instance — and downright painful not to find Borges or I. B. Singer anywhere.

Nevertheless: —

The shoe fits, and baby needs shoes. The need for such a category for critical straphangers is urgent, because fabulation is the future of the (published) fiction form. In spite of his hot/cool hashup, McLuhan's point about TV-viewers' participation-involvement vs. book-readers' detachment is both accurate and important. The printed page will never again be able to compete with the screen for realistic storytelling; but it will take an as yet undiscovered technique to make the tube into a suitable medium for satire, fable, or allegory — all of which require an audience suspended at that precise focal point which provides optimum discernment of the essential interplay between figure and background.