The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Come, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings...

In a year of much violence and tension, many displays of courage both wise and foolhardy—and a large number of shocking public deaths—too many by violence—the most profound shock and loss, to me, was the peaceful passing of Richard McKenna, who died in his sleep at the age of fifty-one of no known cause. Mac had published only a handful of short stories; I had the honor of reprinting the first one, “Casey Agonistes,” in an earlier Annual. He had written one fairy-tale-successful book, The Sand Pebbles, which he himself regarded as his “apprentice novel.” He did not live long enough to finish the second. What follows is from a speech he delivered at the University of North Carolina, in December, 1962:

“Any human life from birth to death can be understood as a gestalt in time. The linear sequence of any man’s experience and behavior forms a meaningful pattern, just as do the sequential notes of a musical composition. They form a mosaic distributed in time rather than in space. The arrangement is governed by the same principles as a spatial gestalt and closure can come only with death. A human life is an integrated whole which is more than the sum of its parts. But the wholeness is not achieved, nor is the final degree of integration achieved, until death. Therefore any experience, no matter how far back it seems to lie along the time-track, is not complete either. It will not be complete until the gestalt is closed and each experience making it up is given its final significance by virtue of its place in, and contribution to, the whole.

“The individual human past is not immutable. Everything in it is still happening and will not cease to happen until the gestalt is closed. Every past experience is subject to change, as the configuration of the forming whole is changed. Each man of us is living his own personal work of art, cannot avoid doing so, cannot evade artistic responsibility for his product, because that is one of the fundamental consequences of being human.

“When I first met that thought, I found it a very huge one. I have since improved my grip upon it by alternate approaches through existential philosophy, but it is still the scientific formulation of it which for me affords the most conviction. It is not a new thought. ... It is contained in the proverb, “While there’s life, there’s hope.”

I think that can be stated inversely. Most religions, probably all revolutions, have based their philosophy on the postulate: While there is hope, there is life. If the hope outlasts the individual’s life-span (as it may well do, in religion, in revolution, in any life of dedication to creativity), perhaps the final configuration of the life itself remains open to change, when the body is already in decay.

Jake came running out of the mine like all hell and stopped just outside and looked back inside and stood panting into the mouth of the cave for a good while. Jake’s eyes were wide open and his face was white under the dirt, just like he was scared. As a matter of fact, he was scared.

Jake stood there looking into the mine with his shirt front going up and down and the hair on his neck going mostly up, and the mine was dark so Jake could not see a damned thing, which was fine with him. He’d seen enough ee-nough.

Finally, when it looked like nothing was going to come out of the mine and get him, Jake stopped panting and started thinking. This was a bad move, especially for Jake, and the situation got pretty unhealthy. Jake started thinking that maybe he was crazy. He was getting old, and he’d been living out there on the edge of the desert for a long time with this mine that didn’t look like it was going to be any great shakes, and he started thinking, “Well, maybe I’m goin’ crazy.” After all, you don’t see a chunk of rock get up and walk away just every day. You don’t see anything like that at all, unless you’re sort of off, so Jake started thinking, “Maybe I’m goin’—crazy.”

Jake was standing there thinking and his old mule was standing there thinking, too, Jake had one of those old mules just like every dried-up prospector has, and Jake said to the mule, “Mule, I think mebbe I’m goin’ crazy.”

Mule said, “Mebbe y’are, Jake.”

Jake said, “Gawd!” and he ran pretty quick into his shack. When he’d closed the door he sat down on that half-rotten cot he had and he began to think some more, and things got unhealthy again. Jake started pulling his hair out and hitting himself on the head; he was tolerably upset.

Finally Jake got up enough grit to look out the window of his shack and see if Mule was still out there. There was Mule, standing out on the dead orange ground, chewing on something that Jake couldn’t imagine what it was because all the food was in the back of the shack.

Mule looked up at Jake with two solid black eyes and hollered, “Hey Jake, where’s muh food, I’m hongry.”

Jake yelled out the window, “You ain’t gonna get no food from me, you dam’ mule!”

“Aw-w-w,” said Mule, and turned into a trickle of water and went splish-splash into the mine.

Jake said, “Gawd!” and was about ready to stand on his head when he thought, “Hold on there, Jake, get a-holt of yourself,” which was the first healthy thought he’d had in a good time. “There’s gotta be one o’ them logical explanations for this, asides that I’m loco, which mebbe I am,” he thought, and he sat down on the dirt floor and concentrated, hard.

After a while he started a headache from all that hard thinking, and he still couldn’t figure out a logical explanation for a rock getting up and walking off, or a mule talking and then turning into water. Jake muttered, “That ain’t no way for a ol’ mule to act,” and he kept on thinking, that ain’t no way for a ol’ mule to act, that ain’t no way for a of mule to act; and then he got a pretty good-sized idea for his type brain. Maybe that mule he saw out there wasn’t a mule.

Jake jumped up and went around back of the shack where he kept Mule hitched up, and sure enough, Mule’s bridle was there all hitched to the hitching post and dangling in the air, and there were some white mule-bones lying on the hard baked earth.

Jake got a nasty look on his face and said, “Somebody et my mule.” He and Mule had been pretty good friends. Mule was the only one left from the old days before the others had died, and now Mule was gone and old Jake was all alone. Jake was pretty mad, and he stomped around past the three crosses to the front of the shack again because he wanted to get his old shotgun.

He stopped cold before he went inside because somebody had written in big red-crayon letters across the face of the shack, “I’M HUNGRY.” This made Jake pretty sure that there was some no-good lout out there who was running around eating mules and who ought to have his head blown off, so Jake walked into the shack and loaded up his shotgun and put the box of shells in his pocket.

Just when he was about to go outside again, there were a couple of knocks on the door, and Jake shot his gun straight at the door. That pretty well tore the door to hell, and Jake didn’t hear anybody yelling so he cussed because he figured he’d missed and ruined the door for nothing.

He loaded up again and pushed open what was left of that door. Right away his mouth fell open, because out there on the ground in big red clear block-type letters was “I’M HUNGRY!” There were even a block-type exclamation point and a block-type underline.