The good old stuff, p.55
The Good Old Stuff, page 55
My new bubble had a top hole too and I went through it the same way I had the last. The next five bubbles were just the same too. I told myself that my routine was getting to be like that of a circus acrobat—except who stages shows inside black solidity?—except the gods maybe with the dreams they send us. The lava should be transparent, so the rim-wall peaks could admire.
At the same time I was thinking how if the biped humanoid shape is a good one for medium-size creatures on any planet, why so the spider shape is a good one for tiny creatures and apt to turn up anywhere and be copied in robots too.
The top hole in the sixth bubble showed me the stars, while one half of its rim shone white with sunlight. Panting, I lay back against the rock. I switched off my searchlight.
I didn’t hear any scratching.
The stars. The stars were energy. They filled the universe with light, except for hidey holes and shadows here and there.
Then the number came to me. With the butt of my Swift I rapped out five. No answer. No scratching either. I rapped out five again.
Then the answer came, ever so faintly. Five knocked back at me.
Six five five—Planck’s Constant, the invariant quantum of energy. Oh, it should be to the minus 29th power, of course, but I couldn’t think how to rap that and, besides, the basic integers were all that mattered.
I heard the scratching ...
I sprang and caught the rim and lifted myself into the glaring sunlight ...
and stopped with my body midway.
Facing me a hundred feet away, midway through another top-hole—he must have come very swiftly by another branch of the bubble ladder—he’d know the swiftest ones—was my green-crested crusoe. His face had a third eye where a man’s nose would be, which with his crest made him look like a creature of mythology. We were holding our guns vertically.
We looked like two of the damned, half out of their holes in the floor of Dante’s hell.
I climbed very slowly out of my hole, still pointing my gun toward the zenith. So did he.
We held very still for a moment. Then with his gun butt he rapped out ten. I could both see and also hear it through the rock.
I rapped out three. Then, as if the black bubble-world were one level of existence and this another, I wondered why we were going through this rigamarole. We each knew the other had a suit and a gun (and a lonely hole?) and so we knew we were both intelligent and knew math.
So why was our rapping so precious?
He raised his gun—I think to rap out one, to start off.
But I’ll never be sure, for just then there were two violet bursts, close together, against the fissure wall, quite close to him.
He started to swing the muzzle of his gun toward me. At least I think he did. He must know violet was the color of my explosions. I know I thought someone on my side was shooting. And I must have thought he was going to shoot me—because a violet dagger leaped from my Swift’s muzzle and I felt its sharp recoil and then there was a violet globe where he was standing and moments later some fragment t’winged lightly against my chest—a playful ironic tap.
He was blown apart pretty thoroughly, all his constants scattered, including-I’m sure—Planck’s.
It was another half hour before the rescue ship from Circumluna landed.
I spent it looking at earth low on the horizon and watching around for the spider, but I never saw it. The rescue party never found it either, though they made quite a hunt—with me helping after I’d rested a bit and had my batteries and oxy replenished. Either its power went off when its master died, or it was set to “freeze” then, or most likely go into a “hide” behavior pattern. Likely it’s still out there waiting for an incautious earthman, like a rattlesnake in the desert or an old, forgotten land mine.
I also figured out, while waiting in Gioja crater, there near the north pole on the edge of Shackleton crater, the only explanation I’ve ever been able to make, though it’s something of a whopper, of the two violet flashes which ended my little mathematical friendship-chant with the crusoe. They were the first two shells I squeezed offat him—the ones that skimmed the notch.
They had the velocity to orbit Luna, and the time they took—two hours and five minutes—was right enough.
Oh, the consequences of our past acfons!
The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth
Roger Zelazny
Like a number of other writers, the late Roger Zelazny began publishing in 1962 in the pages of Cele Goldsmith’s Amazing. This was the so-called “Class of ‘62,” whose membership also included Thomas M. Disch, Keith Laumer, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Everyone in that “class” would eventually achieve prominence, but some of them would achieve it faster than others, and Zelazny’s subsequent career would be one of the most meteoric in the history of SF. The first Zelazny story to attract wide notice was “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” published in 1963 (it was later selected by vote of the SFWA membership to have been one of the best SF stories of all time). By the end of that decade, he had won two Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards and was widely regarded as one of the two most important American SF writers of the ‘60s (the other was Samuel R. Delany).
His famous novel Lord of Light may have been one of the most popular, widely acclaimed, and hugely influential novels of that whole era. By the end of the ‘70s, although his critical acceptance as an important science fiction writer had dimmed, his long series of novels about the enchanted land of Amber—beginning with Nine Princes in Amber—had made him one of the most popular and bestselling fantasy writers of our time, and inspired the founding of worldwide fan clubs and fanzines.
Zelazny’s early novels, such as This Immortal and The Dream Masters, were, on the whole, well-received, but it was the strong and stylish short work he published in magazines like F&SF and Amazing and Worlds of If throughout the middle years of the decade of the 1960s that electrified the genre, and it was these early stories—stories like “This Moment of the Storm,” “The Graveyard Heart,” “He Who Shapes,” “The Keys to December,” “For a Breath I Tarry,” and “This Mortal Mountain,”—that established Zelazny as a giant of the field, and that many consider to be his best work. These stories are still amazing for their invention and elegance and verve, for their good-natured effrontery and easy ostentation, for the risks Zelazny took in pursuit of eloquence without ruffling a hair, the grace and nerve he displayed as he switched from high-flown pseudo-Spenserian to wisecracking Chandlerian slang to vivid prose-poetry to Hemingwayesque starkness in the course of only a few lines—and for the way he made it all look easy and effortless, the same kind of illusion Fred Astaire used to generate when he danced.
Unlike some of his peers, Zelazny’s fondness for fast-paced adventure writing never faded, which may be one reason for the dimming of his critical reputation in the ‘70s, as he continued to turn out what were dismissed as “routine Space Adventures” by hostile critics during a period that demanded more “serious” and “ambitious” work by its writers. Zelazny’s work was never “routine,” however, some of his books of this period were rather weak by his own standards, but in even the weakest of them, you could count on inventiveness, vivid color, scope, intricate plotting, quirky characters. and, of course, plenty of action.
One of the inspirations for the famous story that follows, as well as for the even-more famous “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” is clearly a loving nostalgia for the era of the pulp adventure story that was then widely supposed to be ending. By the time Zelazny wrote this story, he knew perfectly well that Venus was probably not an Earth-like planet girded by vast seas full of immense swimming dinosaur-like creatures, just as he knew that in all likelihood there were no canals and decadent, dying, ancient races of intelligent beings on Mars—so that these stories, which still feature the lushly romantic pulp version of those planets that had been popularized in tales from Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories decades before, can be seen as an homage, a deliberate act of retro nostalgia for those beloved worlds, written in the last possible tick of time before the hardest of hard proof—the actual visitation of those planets by exploring space probes, only a few years later—would come along to make those garish, melodramatic, and gorgeously colored pulp visions of what Venus and Mars were like totally untenable.
For a long time after this, it was considered to be no longer possible to write an adventure story or a Planetary Romance set on any of the planets of the solar system—which were now considered to be just sterile, lifeless balls of rock (especially after the first Viking lander mission in 1976 had found no trace of life in the soil of Mars), as unromantic and uninteresting and drab as a parking lot, settings that offered few opportunities for stories at all, let alone for John Carter-like swashbuckling—and indeed, few stories set on any planet of the solar system except for the Earth were written for the next decade.
It wasn’t until late in the ‘70s and the early ‘80s that new generations of writers would come along who began to find the solar system romantic and evocative just as it was, and began to write stories, even lush adventure stories, once again set on planets such as Venus and Mars. So even though Zelazny almost certainly intended “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” to be a Farewell to Fantastic Venus (to paraphrase an Aldiss anthology title), he was being premature—within another decade or so, writers would be back exploring Venus again; thanks to the notion of terraforming, even the seas of Venus would be back in some stories—although the monstrous, mountain-like Inky remains, so far, unique to the vivid story that follows.
Zelazny won another Nebula and Hugo Award in 1976 for his novella “Home Is the Hangman,” another Hugo in 1986 for his novella “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai,” and a final Hugo in 1987 for his story “Permafrost.” His other books include, in addition to the multi-volume Amber series, the novels This Immmortal, The Dream Master, Isle of the Dead, Jack of Shadows, Eye of Cat, Doorways in the Sand, Today We Choose Faces, Bridge of Ashes, To Die in Italbar, and Roadmarks, and the collections Four For Tomorrow, The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories, The Last Defender of Camelot, and Frost and Fire. Among his last books are two collaborative novels, A Fame to Be Reckoned With, with Robert Sheckley, and Wilderness, with Gerald Hausman, and, as editor, two anthologies, Wheel of Fortune and Warriors of Blood and Dream. Zelazny died—a tragically untimely death—in 1995.
A collaborative novel with Jane Lindskold, Donnerjack, was published recently, and another posthumous collaboration. Zelazny’s completion of an unfinished Alfred Bester novel entitled Psychoshop, has just been published.
I’m a baitman. No one is born a baitman, except in a French novel where everyone is. (In fact, I think that’s the tide, We Are All Bait, Pfft!) How I got that way is barely worth telling and has nothing to do with neo-exes, but the days of the beast deserve a few words, so here they are.
The Lowlands of Venus lie between the thumb and forefinger of the continent known as Hand. When you break into Cloud Alley it swings its silverblack bowling ball toward you without a warning. You jump then, inside that firetailed tenpin they ride you down in, but the straps keep you from making a fool of yourself. You generally chuckle afterwards, but you always jump first.
Next, you study Hand to lay its illusion and the two middle fingers become dozen-ringed archipelagoes as the outers resolve into greengray peninsulas; the thumb is too short, and curls like the embryo tail of Cape Horn.
You suck pure oxygen, sigh possibly, and begin the long topple to the Lowlands.
There, you are caught like an infield fly at the Lifeline landing area—so named because of its nearness to the great delta in the Eastern Bay—located between the first peninsula and “thumb.” For a minute it seems as if you’re going to miss Lifeline and wind up as canned seafood, but afterwards—shaking off the metaphors—you descend to scorched concrete and present your middle-sized telephone directory of authorizations to the short, fat man in the gray cap. The papers show that you are not subject to mysterious inner rottings and etcetera. He then smiles you a short, fat, gray smile and motions you toward the bus which hauls you to the Reception Area. At the R.A. you spend three days proving that, indeed, you are not subject to mysterious inner rottings and etcetera.
Boredom, however, is another rot. When your three days are up, you generally hit Lifeline hard, and it returns the compliment as a matter of reflex. The effects of alcohol in variant atmospheres is a subject on which the connoisseurs have written numerous volumes, so I will confine my remarks to noting that a good hinge is worthy of at least a week’s time and often warrants a lifetime study.
I had been a student of exceptional promise (strictly undergraduate) for going on two years when the Bright Water fell through our marble ceiling and poured its people like targets into the city.
Pause. The Worlds Almanac re Lifeline: “... Port city on the eastern coast of Hand. Employees of the Agency for Non-terrestrial Research compromise approximately 85% of its 100,000 population (2010 Census).
Its other residents are primarily personnel maintained by several industrial corporations engaged in basic research. Independent marine biologists, wealthy fishing enthusiasts, and waterfront entrepreneurs make up the remainder of its inhabitants.”
I turned to Mike Dabis, a fellow entrepreneur, and commented on the lousy state of basic research.
“Not if the mumbled truth be known.”
He paused behind his glass before continuing the slow swallowing process calculated to obtain my interest and a few oaths, before he continued.
“Carl,” he finally observed, poker playing, “they’re shaping Tensquare.” I could have hit him. I might have refilled his glass with sulfuric acid and looked on with glee as his lips blackened and cracked. Instead, I grunted a noncommittal.
“Who’s fool enough to shell out fifty grand a day? a.N.R?”
He shook his head.
“Jean Luharich,” he said, “the girl with the violet contacts and fifty or sixty perfect teeth. I understand her eyes are really brown.”
“Isn’t she selling enough face cream these days?” He shrugged.
“Publicity makes the wheels go ’round. Luharich Enterprises jumped sixteen points when she picked up the Sun Trophy. You ever play golf on Mercury?”
I had, but I overlooked it and continued to press.
“So she’s coming here with a blank check and a fishhook?”
“Bright Water, today,” he nodded. “Should be down by now. Lots of cameras. She wants an Ikky, bad.”
“Hmm,” I hmmed. “How bad?”
“Sixty day contract, Tensquare. Indefinite extension clause. Million and a half deposit,” he recited.
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“I’m Personal Recruitment. Luharich Enterprises approached me last month. It helps to drink in the right places.
“Or own them.” He smirked, after a moment.
I looked away, sipping my bitter brew. After awhile I swallowed several things and asked Mike what he expected to be asked, leaving myself open for his monthly temperance lecture.
“They told me to try getting you,” he mentioned. “When’s the last time you sailed?”
“Month and a half ago. The Corning.”
“Small stuff,” he snorted. “when have you been under, yourself?”
“It’s been awhile.”
“It’s been over a year, hasn’t it? That time you got cut by the screw, under the Dolphin?”
I turned to him.
“I was in the river last week, up at Angleford where the currents are strong. I can still get around.”
“Sober,” he added.
“I’d stay that way,” I said, “on a job like this.”
A doubting nod.
“Straight union rates. Triple time for extraordinary circumstances,” he narrated. “Be at Hangar Sixteen with your gear, Friday morning, five hundred hours. We push off Saturday, daybreak.”
“You’re sailing?”
“I’m sailing.”
“How come?”
“Money.”
“Ikky guano.”
“The bar isn’t doing so well and baby needs new minks.”
“I repeat—”
“... And I want to get away from baby, renew my contact with basics-fresh air, exercise, make cash “
“All right, sorry I asked.”
I poured him a drink, concentrating on H2SO4, but it didn’t transmute.
Finally I got him soused and went out into the night to walk and think things over.
Around a dozen serious attempts to land Ichthybor LeviosaurusLevianthus, generally known as “Ikky,” had been made over the past five years. When Ikky was first sighted, whaling techniques were employed. These proved either fruitless or disastrous, and a new procedure was inaugurated. Tensquare was constructed by a wealthy sportsman named Michael Jandt, who blew his entire roll on the project.
After a year on the Eastern Ocean, he returned to file bankruptcy.
Cad-ton Davits, a playboy fishing enthusiast, then purchased the huge raft and laid a wake for Ikky’s spawning grounds. On the nineteenth day out he had a strike and lost one hundred and fifty bills’ worth of untested gear, along with one Ichtbybrm Leviantbus. Twelve days later, using tripled lines, he hooked, narcotized, and began to hoist the huge beast. It awakened then, destroyed a control tower, killed six men, and worked general hell over five square blocks of Tensquare. Carlton was left with partial hemiplegia and a bankruptcy suit of his own. He faded into waterfront atmosphere and Tensquare changed hands four more times, with less spectacular but equally expensive results.
