The Essential Ellison Part 43

"You have to help me."

Le Braz looked at him. There had been such a depth of ocean in the words McGrath had spoken, such a descent into stony caverns that all casualness was instantly denied. "Help you?"

"Yes. Please. I can't bear what I'm feeling. I've been through so much, seen so much these last months, I..."

"Help you?" the old man said again, whispering the phrase as if it had been rendered in a lost language. "I cannot even help myself... how can I possibly help you, young man?"

McGrath told him. Everything.

At some point the blackened creature entered the room, but McGrath was unaware of its presence till he had completed his story. Then, from behind him, he heard it say, "You are a remarkable person. Not one living person in a million has ever seen the Thanatos mouth. Not one in a hundred million has felt the pa.s.sage of the soul. Not one in the memory of the human race has been so tormented that he thought it was real, and not a dream."

McGrath stared at the creature. It came lumbering across the room and stood just behind the old man's chair, not touching him. The old man sighed, and closed his eyes.

The creature said, "This was Josef Le Braz, who lived and worked and cared for his fellow man, and woman. He saved lives, and he married out of love, and he pledged himself to leave the world slightly better for his pa.s.sage. And his wife died, and he fell into a well of melancholy such as no man had ever suffered. And one night he woke, feeling a chill, but he did not see the Thanatos mouth. All he knew was that he missed his wife so terribly that he wanted to end his life."

McGrath sat silently. He had no idea what this meant, this history of the desolate figure under the lap robe. But he waited, because if no help lay here in this house, of all houses secret and open in the world, then he knew that the next step for him was to buy a gun and to disperse the gray mist under which he lived.

Le Braz looked up. He drew in a deep breath and turned his eyes to McGrath. "I went to the machine," he said. "I sought the aid of the circuit and the chip. I was cold, and could never stop crying. I missed her so, it was unbearable."

The creature came around the wingback and stood over McGrath. "He brought her back from the Other Side."

McGrath's eyes widened. He understood.

The room was silent, building to a crescendo. He tried to get off the low stool, but he couldn't move. The creature stared down at him with its one gorgeous blue eye and its one unseeing milky marble. "He deprived her of peace. Now she must live on, in this half-life.

"This is Josef Le Braz, and he cannot support his guilt."

The old man was crying now. McGrath thought if one more tear was shed in the world he would say to h.e.l.l with it and go for the gun. "Do you understand?" the old man said softly.

"Do you take the point?" the creature said.

McGrath's hands came up, open and empty. "The mouth...the wind..."

"The function of dream sleep, " the creature said, "is to permit us to live. To flense the mind of that which dismays us. Otherwise, how could we bear the sorrow? The memories are their legacy, the parts of themselves left with us when they depart. But they are not whole, they are joys crying to be reunited with the one to whom they belong. You have seen the Thanatos mouth, you have felt a loved one departing. It should have freed you."

McGrath shook his head slowly, slowly. No, it didn't free me, it enslaved me, it torments me. No, slowly, no. I cannot bear it.

"Then you do not yet take the point, do you?"

The creature touched the old man's sunken cheek with a charred twig that had been a hand. The old man tried to look up with affection, but his head would not come around. "You must let it go, all of it," Le Braz said. "There is no other answer. Let it go...let them go. Give them back the parts they need to be whole on the Other Side, and let them in the name of kindness have the peace to which they are ent.i.tled."

"Let the mouth open," the creature said. "We cannot abide here. Let the wind of the soul pa.s.s through, and take the emptiness as release." And she said, "Let me tell you what it's like on the Other Side. Perhaps it will help."

McGrath laid a hand on his side. It hurt terribly, as of legions battering for release on a locked door.

He retraced his steps. He went back through previous days as if he were sleepwalking. I don't see it here anywhere.

He stayed at the ranch-style house in Hidden Hills, and helped Anna Picket as best he could. She drove him back to the city, and he picked up his car from the street in front of the office building on Pico. He put the three parking tickets in the glove compartment. That was work for the living. He went back to his apartment, and he took off his clothes, and he bathed. He lay naked on the bed where it had all started, and he tried to sleep. There were dreams. Dreams of smiling faces, and dreams of children he had known. Dreams of kindness, and dreams of hands that had held him.

And sometime during the long night, a breeze blew.

But he never felt it.

And when he awoke, it was cooler in the world than it had been for a very long time; and when he cried for them, he was, at last, able to say goodbye.

A man is what he does with his attention.

John Ciardi

VIIIROCOCOTECHNOLOGY.

"There are writers who like being called science fiction writers... They're ent.i.tled to call themselves or their work whatever they please. By the same token, I should be permitted to call what I write what I choose to call it, which is Harlan Ellison stories."

"Starwind Interviews Harlan Ellison" by Rick Wyman and Bob Halloran, Starwind, Autumn 1977 Call it what you like: speculative fiction, futuristic fiction, science fiction. As long as you ignore the defamatory neologism "sci-fi," reviled by anyone who makes even a meager claim to literacy, you're on safe ground.

In the main, however, all of the foregoing terms are but easy handles for an ill-defined type of fiction, handles that have purpose only as a commercial marketing tool. Few genre labels-mystery, gothic, western, etc.-make any sense in these modern times when clever writers have experimented endlessly with transcending the limitations of the original molds.

Harlan has written science fiction stories. He will likely continue to write sf stories on occasion, but the majority of them are science fiction by label rather than by content, their technology decorative, rococo. The earlier ones made obvious use of sf's accepted paraphernalia, such as s.p.a.ceships and extraterrestrial creatures. This apparatus a.s.sured a quick sale to specialized genre magazines which, at that time, indiscriminately and voraciously gobbled up the works of hungry young writers.

Maturing rapidly, Harlan's fiction easily spilled over into the mainstream markets, but his reputation was established in a genre and the sf magazines continued to buy stories that were increasingly off-trail, fantasy-oriented or just downright uncla.s.sifiable. His accelerating disdain for restrictions and categorization led to his being regarded as an ungrateful gadfly by sf readers who relished their ghettoization with the fascination of zealots.

Of all the writers who have tilled in the field of science fiction, not one has managed to split readers into such sharply divided love/hate camps as has Harlan. This split, as well as the confusion over the "true" definition of science fiction, has never been more clearly demonstrated than by the 1981 nomination of his story "All the Lies That Are My Life" for the Hugo (the Science Fiction Achievement Award). The story is neither science fiction nor fantasy, and its recognition by the voters can best be attributed to their enjoyment of its qualities as a story.

The following works are science fiction, but science fiction that seldom fits comfortably within the traditional boundaries.

"The Sky is Burning" (1958) features an alien invasion which would have provided some artist a terrific chance to paint a gaudy, eyeball-singeing magazine cover of the type that delighted the kids and embarra.s.sed adult readers. The sf gimmick is there, all right, but it isn't the meat of the story. What makes the theme particularly interesting is that, for all its ambiguous nihilism, it cherishes the light in the eye of the delighted kid and serves as a warning to the adult to hang on to that " sense of wonder."

There is an odd history behind "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" (1967), a result of what Harlan calls "literary feedback." Robert Bloch's 1943 cla.s.sic, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," was the stepping-off point for his later "A Toy for Juliette," which Harlan bought for the hugely successful DANGEROUS VISIONS anthology. Bloch's second story took Jack the Ripper into the far future, and the concept so obsessed Harlan's own imagination that he wrote his own story for that book as a direct sequel.

If "Prowler" is, as Bloch says, "in the grand tradition of the Grand Guignol," is it then science fiction? Let's see now-time travel is a st.u.r.dy old sf concept, and Harlan's depiction of a future society is certainly grounded in the "if-this-goes-on" school. Yet the story isn't about time travel, and it isn't exactly about this future society. It might be about individual vs. collective reaction to social reform-or is that merely a side issue? Maybe it's about the power of evil-but do we really need to go years ahead to examine that? Then again, perhaps it's just about Jack the Ripper-but is that only speculation about the past? You get the idea, don't you? Science fiction's boundaries are getting a bit hazy.

"Along the Scenic Route" (1969) appeared in both a men's magazine and a science fiction magazine (as, alas, "Dogfight on 101"), yet it could have fit anywhere (and, in reprint, very nearly has). Ostensibly a gadget story, rather it says several pointed things about what technology is doing to us-Robert Silverberg's definition of sf's real value-and, perhaps, what we are doing to technology. Here is universal wish-fulfillment, neatly and succinctly garnished with high technology, futuristic slang, a slam-bang ending. Its matter-of-fact style lends it a startling and chilling plausibility.

After the sf revolution engendered by, many believe, the 1967 publication of DANGEROUS VISIONS, sf stories began to turn up in the oddest places. "The Song the Zombie Sang" (1970), co-auth.o.r.ed with Robert Silverberg, is another fine example of a story fitting the genre requirements, yet it appeared in the thoroughly mainstream Cosmopolitan. It concerns the life, the death-the living death-of the reanimated corpse of a famous musician, and is a tale complete with all manner of futuristic decor to justify the cla.s.sification: robots, weather control, the ultracembalo, the reanimated dead themselves.

The story is included here both as an example of Harlan's numerous collaborative efforts and for its own real merits. Nils Bekh's plight is filled with a desperation, a loneliness, a neglect that at first seems unique, utterly singular; then, as we think about it, it doesn't seem so unique after all. As with so much fine sf, only the circ.u.mstances, the framework, the decor are new, intriguingly different, even distracting. The underlying human truths are old, the whole tragedy a way of making us consider them again, from a new point of view, a new angle of feeling.

"Knox" (1974) appeared in Crawdaddy, a magazine purportedly specializing in rock music but not averse to reactionary commentary on nearly everything else. The story falls most easily into the uncla.s.sifiable category but can easily be shoehorned into sf under the guise of the social sciences. Social science fiction is nothing new-if Jonathan Swift had conceived of other worlds rather than other lands, Gulliver would have been one of the first sf heroes-but Harlan digs down to the root to find that social movements, while born in social circ.u.mstances, are most important in how they improve or disfigure the individual.

"With Virgil Oddum at the East Pole" (1984) is Harlan's impressive fiction contribution to the Medea project. Despite its exotic flourishes and extraterrestrial setting, it remains a story about accepting responsibility and following through. Yes, it's science fiction, and no, the label doesn't cla.s.sify it.

Science fiction is what it is because of what it does. Harlan Ellison is what he is because of what he does. Be careful and never confuse the two.

"Speculative fiction in modern times really got born with Walt Disneyin his cla.s.sic animated film,Steamboat Willie, in 1928. Sure it did.I mean: a mouse that can operatea paddle-wheeler?"

"Thirty-Two Soothsayers,"Introduction to DANGEROUS VISIONS,Doubleday, 1967 The Sky Is Burning They came flaming down out of a lemon sky, and the first day, ten thousand died. The screams rang in our heads, and the women ran to the hills to escape the sound of it; but there was no escape for them...nor for any of us. The sky was aflame with death, and the terrible, unbelievable part of it was...the death, the dying was not us!

It started late in the evening. The first one appeared as a cosmic spark struck in the night. Then, almost before the first had faded back into the dusk, there was another, and then another, and soon the sky was a jeweler's pad, twinkling with unnameable diamonds.

I looked up from the Observatory roof, and saw them all, tiny pinpoints of brilliance, cascading down like raindrops of fire. And somehow, before any of it was explained, I knew: this was something important. Not important the way five extra inches of plastichrome on the tail-fins of a new copter are important...not important the way a war is important...but important the way the creation of the Universe had been important, the way the death of it would be. And I knew it was happening all over Earth.

There could be no doubt of that. All across the horizon, as far as I could see, they were falling and burning" and burning. The sky was not appreciably brighter, but it was as though a million new stars had been hurled up there to live for a brief microsecond.

Even as I watched, Portales called to me from below. "Frank! Frank, come down here...this is fantastic!"

I swung down the catwalk into the telescope dome, and saw him hunched over the refraction eyepiece. He was pounding his fist against the side of the vernier adjustment box. It was a pounding of futility, and strange. ness. A pounding without meaning behind it. "Look at this, Frank. Will you take a look at this?" His voice was a rising inflection of disbelief.

I nudged him aside and slid into the bucket. The scope was trained on Mars. The Martian sky was burning, too. The same pinpoints of light, the same intense pyrotechnics spiraling down. We had alloted the evening to a study of the red planet, for it was clear in that direction, and I saw it all very sharply, as brightnesses and darkness again, all across the face of the planet.

"Call Bikel at Wilson," I told Portales. "Ask him about Venus."

Behind me I heard Portales dialing the closed circuit number, and I half-listened to his conversation with Aaron Bikel at Mt. Wilson. I could see the flickering reflections of the vid-screen on the phone, as they washed across the burnished side of the scope. But I didn't turn around; I knew what the answer would be.

Finally, he hung up, and the colors died: "The same," he said sharply, as though defying me to come up with an answer. I didn't bother snapping back at him. He had been bucking for my job as Director of the Observatory for nearly three years now, and I was accustomed to his antagonisms- desperately as I had to machinate occasionally, to keep him in his place.

I watched for a while longer, then left the dome.

I went downstairs, and tuned in my short-wave radio, trying to find out what Tokyo or Heidelburg or Johannesburg had to say. I wasn't able to catch any mention of the phenomena during the short time I fiddled with the sweep, but I was certain they were seeing it the same everywhere else.

Then I went back to the Dome, to change the settings on the scope.

After an argument with Portales, I beamed the scope down till it was sharp to just inside the atmospheric blanket. I tipped in the sweeper, and tried a fast scan of the sky, but continued to miss the bursts of light at the moment of their explosion. So I cut in the photo mechanism, and set a wide angle to it. Then I cut off the sweep, and started clicking them off. I reasoned that the frequency of the lights would inevitably bring one into photo focus.

Then I went downstairs, and back to the short-wave. I spent two hours with it, and managed to pick up a news broadcast from Switzerland. I had been right, of course.

Portales rang me after two hours and said we had a full reel of photos, and should he have them developed. This was too big to trust to his adolescent whims, and rather than have him fog up a valuable photo, I told him to leave them in the container, and I'd be right up, to handle it myself.

When the photos came out of the solution, I had to finger through thirty or forty of empty s.p.a.ce before I caught ten that had what I wanted.

They were not meteorites.

On the contrary.

Each of the flames in the sky was a creature. A living creature. But not human. Far from it.

The photos told what they looked like, but not till the Project s.n.a.t.c.h ship went up and sucked one off the sky did we realize how large they were, that they glowed with an inner light of their own and- that they were telepathic.

From what I can gather, it was no problem capturing one. The ship opened its cargo hatch, and turned on the sucking mechanisms used to drag in flotsam from s.p.a.ce. The creature, however, could have stopped itself from being dragged into the ship, merely by placing one of its seven-taloned hands on either side of the hatch, and resisting the sucker. But it was interested, as we learned later; it had been five thousand years, and they had not known we had come so far, and the creature was interested. So it came along.

When they called me in, along with five hundred-odd other scientists (and Portales managed to w.a.n.gle himself a place in the complement, through that old charlatan Senator Gouverman), we went to the Smithsonian, where they had had him installed, and marveled...just stood and marveled.

He-or she, we never knew-resembled the Egyptian G.o.d Ra. It had the head of a hawk, or what appeared to be a hawk with great slitted eyes of green in which flecks of crimson and amber and black danced. Its body was thin to the point of emaciation, but humanoid with two arms and two legs. There were bends and joints on the body where no such bends and joints existed on a human, but there was a definite chest cavity, and obvious b.u.t.tocks, knees, and chin. The creature was a pale, milky-white, except on the hawk's-crest which was a brilliant blue, fading down into white. Its beak was light blue, also blending into the paleness of its flesh. It had seven toes to the foot, seven talons to the hand.

The G.o.d Ra. G.o.d of the Sun. G.o.d of light.

The creature glowed from within with a pale, but distinct aura that surrounded it like a halo. We stood there, looking up at it in the gla.s.s cage. There was nothing to say; there it was, the first creature from another world. We might be going out into s.p.a.ce in a few years-farther, that is, than the Moon, which we had reached in 1963, or Mars that we had circ.u.mnavigated in 1966-but for now, as far as we knew, the Universe was wide and without end, and out there we would find unbelievable creatures to rival any imagining. But this was the first.

We stared up at it. The being was thirteen feet tall.

Portales was whispering something to Karl Leus from Caltech. I snorted to myself at the way he never gave up; for sheer guff and grab I had to hand it to him. He was a pusher all right. Leus wasn't impressed. It was apparent he wasn't interested in what Portales had to say, but he had been a n.o.bel Prize winner in '63 and he felt obligated to be polite to even obnoxious pushers like my a.s.sistant.

The army man-whatever his name was-was standing on a platform near the high, huge gla.s.s case in which the creature stood, unmoving, but watching us.

They had put food of all sorts through a feeder slot, but it was apparent the creature would not touch it. It merely stared down, silent as though amused, and unmoving as though uncaring.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen, may I have your attention!" the Army man caroled at us. A slow silence, indicative of our disrespect for him and his security measures that had caused us such grief getting into this meeting, fell through the groups of men and women at the foot of the case.

"We have called you here-" pompous a.s.s with his we, as if he were the government incarnate, "to try and solve the mystery of who this being is, and what he has come to Earth to find out. We detect in this creature a great menace to-" and he went on and on, bleating and parodying all the previous scare warnings we had had about every nation on Earth. He could not have realized how we scoffed at him, and wanted to hoot him off the platform. This creature was no menace. Had we not captured him, her, it-the being would have burnt to a cinder like its fellows, falling into our atmosphere.

So we listened him to the end. Then we moved in closer and stared at the creature. It opened its beak in what was uncommonly like a smile, and I felt a shiver run through me. The sort of shiver I get when I hear deeply emotional music, or the sort of shiver I get when making love. It was a basic trembling in the fibers of my body. I can't explain it, but it was a prelude to something. I paused in my thinking, just ceased my existence if Cogito Ergo Sum is the true test of existence. I stopped thinking and allowed myself to sniff of that strangeness; to savor the odor of s.p.a.ce and faraway worlds, and one world in particular.

A world where the winds are so strong, the inhabitants have hooks on their feet, which they dig into the firm green soil to maintain their footing. A world where colors riot among the foliage one season, and the next-are the pale white of a maggot's flesh. A world where the triple moons swim through azure skies, and sing in their pas. sage, playing on a lute of invisible strings, the seas and the deserts as accompanists. A world of wonder, older than Man and older than the memory of the Forever.

I realized abruptly, as my mind began to function once more, that I had been listening to the creature. Ithk was the creature's-name?-denomination?-gender?-something. It was one of five hundred hundred-thousand like itself, who had come to the system of Sol.

Come? No, perhaps that was the wrong word. They had been...

Not by rockets, nothing that crude. Nor s.p.a.ce-warp, nor even mental power. But a leap from their world-what was that name? Something the human tongue could not form, the human mind could not conceive?-to this world in seconds. Not instantaneous, for that would have involved machinery of some sort, or the expenditure of mental power. It was beyond that, and above that. It was an essence of travel. But they had come. They had come across the mega-galaxies, hundreds of thousands of light-years...incalculable distances from there to here, and Ithk was one of them.

Then it began to talk to some of us.

Not all of us there, for I could tell some were not receiving it. I don't attribute it to good or bad in any of us, nor intelligence, nor even sensitivity. Perhaps it was whim on Ithk's part, or the way he(?) wanted to do it out of necessity. But whatever it was, he spoke to only some of us there. I could see Portales was receiving nothing, though old Karl Leus's face was in a state of rapture, and I knew he had the message himself.

For the creature was speaking in our minds telepathically. It did not amaze me, or confound me, nor even shock me. It seemed right. It seemed to go with Ithk's size and look, its aura and arrival.

And it spoke to us.

And when it was done, some of us crawled up on the platform and released the bolts that held the case of gla.s.s shut; though we all knew Ithk could have left it at any second had it desired. But Ithk had been interested in knowing-before it burned itself out as its fellows had done-and it had found out about us little Earth people. It had satisfied its curiosity, on this instant's stopover before it went to hurtling, flaming destruction. It had been curious...for the last time Ithk's people had come here, Earth had been without creatures who went into s.p.a.ce. Even as pitifully short a distance into s.p.a.ce as we could venture.

But now the stopover was finished, and Ithk had a short journey to complete. It had come an unimaginably long way. for a purpose, and though this had been interesting, Ithk was anxious to join his fellows.

So we unbolted the cage-which had never really confined a creature that could be out of it at will-and Ithk was there! not there. Gone!

The sky was still flaming.

One more pinpoint came into being suddenly, slipped down in a violent rush through the atmosphere, and burned itself out like a wasting torch. Ithk was gone.

Then we left.

Karl Leus leaped from the thirty-second story of a building in Washington that evening. Nine others died that day. And though I was not ready for that, there was a deadness in me. A feeling of waste and futility and hopelessness. I went back to the Observatory, and tried to drive the memory of what Ithk had said from my mind and my soul. If I had been as deeply perceptive as Leus or any of the other nine, I might have gone immediately. But I am not in their category. They realized the full depth of what it had said, and so perceiving, they had taken their lives. I can understand their doing it.

Portales came to me when he heard about it.

"They just-just killed themselves!" he babbled. I was sick of his petty annoyances. Sick of them, and not even interested any longer in fighting him.