Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

My auctorial specialty is the short-short story. I have had the world’s shortest published, “Cosmic Report Card: Earth.” You may guess the one failing letter of the alphabet that the flying saucer sociologists give Earth.

I’ve collaborated on short stories with Catherine L. Moore, Robert W. Lowndes, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. van Vogt, among others. Why didn’t it occur to me while there was still time to ask Avram if he’d consider collaborating with me on a sequel to “Cosmic Report Card”? After all, I sold it five times for a total of five hundred dollars and it’s been translated into eight languages.

But enough of my ambling along in this preamble, this is a collection of Davidson stories, not Ackermanuscripts. I’m delighted that the word “friend” was found after my name in Avram’s address book and therefore I was contacted to write an introduction to “While You’re Up.”

I had only finished the first sentence when I realized something was wrong, inexplicably anachronistic. Undoubtedly you will too when you wonder why anyone would include Maxfield Parrish as a compatriot (dare I, with a bow to Avram, say com paint riot?) of da Vinci and Rembrandt?

Warm wine?

Crystal bowls for divining — not balls?

Aprons outlawed?

Handkerchiefs archaic?

What’s going on here?

And when Sexton — But, no, I’ll leave you to read the shock yourself.

Avram, you marva rascal, you’ve done it again!

THE SCENE MIGHT HAVE been painted by Maxfield Parrish, perhaps the best of painters during that rich, lost era that also gave the world Leonardo and Rembrandt. While the latter two have their spokesmen, nay, their devotees, even they would have to concede that neither ever painted so blue a sky, and that there are those who deny that such blue skies ever indeed existed is (as Sexton often explained) beside the point. “They ought to have existed,” Tony said now to the few friends, to Mother Ruth — his wife of many years — all sitting in the large front room to which his preeminence and seniority entitled him. “They ought to have existed, for, as we see now, sometimes they almost do — and — look! a cloud!”

Mother Ruth, who had certainly seen clouds from this room before, merely smiled and murmured something soft and inaudible; the others craned and clearly spoke of their delight and good fortune. All, except of course, for Samjo, who continued sitting with his mouth open. Tony Sexton more than once had said, though — they could all well remember—“Don’t ever underestimate Samjo. He sees more than you think, and he adds things up, too.”

“The wine should be warm enough to drink in a few minutes,” Sexton said now. “We brought it up from the cellar several hours ago.”

Barnes, from his chair with the wooden arms, declared, hands sweeping the air, “Good friends, a good view, good thoughts, and — good wine, too.” Overfamiliarity may have perhaps tarnished the quotation, but Barnes’s enthusiasm was always contagious.

Maria said, “This moment, with the view and the blue and the cloud and, shortly, the wine — will be a moment that I shall always remember.” She peered forward, probably seeking to look into Mother Ruth’s eyes, for such was Maria’s habit; when she said something worthy, she felt, of notice, she sought someone’s eyes and, as it were, sought to bring forth an evident approval: a smile, a nod, an expression of the face, a gesture. But this time it was not forthcoming. Perhaps Maria, for all she knew, was just a bit annoyed.

Perhaps Tony understood all this, for he smiled his famous Sexton smile, and said, “Mother Ruth often looks into her apron as the ancient sibyls did into their crystal bowls.” For it was true, Mother Ruth dared to wear the antique apron, so long outlawed; and almost it did seem to make her look like something from antique eras.

Barnes picked up the metaphor and asked — Barnes often asked very odd!questions—“Father, were those crystal bowls empty when the sybils looked into them, or did they contain something, a…a liquid, perhaps?”

Tony Sexton very slightly pursed his lips. “Wine, I suppose, would have been too precious for such a use; water would always be in short supply. What, then? A thick soup would surely have interfered with the visioning, so — broth perhaps?”

Barnes in a moment went bright: A new concept! Then the brightness went. “One never knows when you are making a joke,” he muttered.

“I wanted to have a few friends over,” Sexton said, lightly leaving the subject. “Wine and five glasses waiting, a day with a lot of blue, and, if we were lucky…and I felt we would be lucky…even a cloud. A day to be remembered.”

Murmurs from all assured him that the day would surely be remembered. With an effect most odd, Sexton’s face turned gray, and his body seemed to fall in upon itself. For a second only, his face — like a dim, thin, crusted mask — rested on what seemed a pile of ashes; then it, too, dissolved.

The reaction of the others was varied. Maria started to rise, fell back, composed herself, looked about with a rueful air. Mother Ruth sagged. “Oh, Tony, Tony,” she said, her voice very small. Barnes exclaimed loudly, beat his hands upon the costly arms of his chair. “He didn’t renew! ” cried Barnes. “Time and time again, I asked, I begged — much good that will do now,” he said, deeply annoyed. He bent over, removed from the still settling pile the small tag of malleable substance, read aloud, “Your warranty expires on or about the hour of noon on the 23rd of April, 2323.” Several voices declared that Tony Sexton had timed it just about right — leave it to Sexton! they said.

Maria now rose all the way. “I think,” she said, “that now is just the time to drink that container of wine Sexton was saving; he’d want that, wouldn’t he?”

“Bound to!” exclaimed Barnes. “Absolutely!”

Mother Ruth looked up from her lap. “Maria, dear. While you’re up. Would you mind also bringing back with you the dustpan and the broom? Thank you, dear.”

Samjo had as usual seemed to have been thinking of nothing at all; as often, this semblance was deceptive. He had been wiping, first his eyes, then his nose, with an article of cloth quite as archaic as Mother Ruth’s apron. Then he spoke. “Only four glasses now, Maria,” said he.

Who could help chuckling?

“The Spook-Box of Theobald Delafont De Brooks,” Avram’s last story published before his death, came to me via a literary agent. But when it was published, he wrote to Kandis Elliot, my Production Manager and, in this case, illustrator, to say how much he liked the illustrations, and could he have them? What I don’t think he knew was that Kandis composed them on her computer, so it was no trouble at all to run off a complete set and send them to him. But he was dead by then.

Avram and I go back a long way. At one point, when we were both selling men’s hairy-chested “true” adventures, we even were collaborators, in the sense that we often talked about it, and fully intended to do it. The problem became that Avram’s stories were true, whereas mine were “true,” and we finally decided against it. But when he published Masters of the Maze, about a hack who wrote “true” adventure stories, he mentioned my invariable working title: “Love-Starved Arabs Raped Me Often.” And when I became editor-in-chief of Regency Books, I published an excellent collection— Crimes and Chaos —of Avram’s true adventure tales.