The good old stuff, p.59
The Good Old Stuff, page 59
“Shut up! She’s busy!”
“Was that Carl?”
“Yeah,” I called. “Talk later,” and I cut it. Why did I do that?
“Why did you do that?” I didn’t know. “I don’t know.”
Damned echoes! I got up and walked outside. Nothing. Nothing.
Something?
Tensquare actually rocked! He must have turned when he saw the hull and started downward again. White water to my left, and boiling. An endless spaghetti of cable roared hotly into the belly of the deep. I stood awhile, then turned and went back inside. Two hours sick. Four, and better. “The dope’s getting to him.”
“Yeah.”
“What about Miss Luharich?”
“What about her?”
“She must be half dead.”
“Probably.”
“what are you going to do about it?”
“She signed the contract for this. She knew what might happen. It did.”
“I think you could land him.”
“So do I.”
“So does she.”
“Then let her ask me.”
Ikky was drifting lethargically, at thirty fathoms.
I took another walk and happened to pass behind the Slider. She wasn’t looking my way.
“Carl, come in here!”
Eyes of Picasso, that’s what, and a conspiracy to make me Slide ... “It that an order?”
“Yes—No! Please.”
I dashed inside and monitored. He was rising.
“Push or pull?”
I slammed the “wind” and he came like a kitten.
“Make up your own mind now.”
He balked at ten fathoms.
“Play him?”
“No!”
She wound him upwards—five fathoms, four ...
She hit the extensors at two, and they caught him. Then the graffles.
Cries without and a heat lightning of flashbulbs.
The crew saw Ikky.
He began to struggle. She kept the cables tight, raised the graffles ...
Up.
Another two feet and the graffles began pushing.
Screams and fast footfalls.
Giant beanstalk in the wind, his neck, waving. The green hills of his shoulders grew.
“He’s big, Carl!” she cried.
And he grew, and grew, and grew uneasy ...
He looked down.
He looked down, as the god of our most ancient ancestors might have looked down. Fear, shame, and mocking laughter rang in my head. Her head, too?
“Now!”
She looked up at the nascent earthquake.
“I can’t!”
It was going to be so damnably simple this time, now the rabbit had died. I reached out.
I stopped.
“Push it yourself.”
“I can’t. You do it. Land him, Carl!”
“No. If I do, you’ll wonder for the rest of your life whether you could have. You’ll throw away your soul finding out. I know you will, because we’re alike, and I did it that way. Find out now!”
She stared.
I gripped her shoulders.
“Could be that’s me out there,” I offered. “I am a green sea serpent, a hateful, monstrous beast, and out to destroy you. I am answerable to no one.
Push the Inject.”
Her hand moved to the button, jerked back.
“Now!”
She pushed it.
I lowered her still form to the floor and finished things up with Ikky.
It was a good seven hours before I awakened to the steady, sea-chewing grind of Tensquare’s blades.
“You’re sick,” commented Mike.
“How’s Jean?”
“The same.”
“Where’s the beast?”
“Here.”
“Good.” I rolled over. “... Didn’t get away this time.”
So that’s the way it was. No one is born a baitman, I don’t think, but the rings of Saturn sing epithalamium the sea-beast’s dower.
Mother In The Sky With Diamonds
James Tiptree, Jr.
As most of you probably know by now, multiple Hugo—and Nebula—winning author James Tiptree, Jr.—at one time a figure reclusive and mysterious enough to be regarded as the B. Traven of science fiction—was actually the pseudonym of the late Dr. Alice Bradley Sheldon, a semi-retired experimental psychologist who also wrote occasionally under the name of Raccoona Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon’s tragic death in 1987 put an end to “both” authors’ careers, but, before that, she had won two Nebula and two Hugo Awards as Tiptree, won another Nebula Award as Raccoona Sheldon, and established herself, under whatever name, as one of the best writers in SF.
Although “Tiptree” published two reasonably well-received novels—Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls From the Sky—she was, like Damon Knight and Theodore Sturgeon (two writers she aesthetically resembled, and by whom she was strongly influenced) more comfortable with the short story, and more effective with it. She wrote some of the very best short stories of the ‘70s: “The Screwfly Solution,” “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” “The Women Men Don’t See,” “Beam Us Home,” “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side,” “I’m Too Big But I Love to Play,” “The Man Who Walked Home,” “Slow Music,” “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.” Already it’s clear that these are stories that will last. They—and a dozen others almost as good—show that Alice Sheldon was simply one of the best short-story writers to work in the genre in our times. In fact, with her desire for a high bit-rate, her concern for societal goals, her passion for the novel and the unexpected, her taste for extrapolation, her experimenter’s interest in the reactions of people to supernormal stimuli and bizarre situations, her fondness for the apocalyptic, her love of color and sweep and dramatic action, and her preoccupation with the mutability of time and the vastness of space, Alice Sheldon was a natural SF writer. I doubt that she would have been able to realize her particular talents as fully in any other genre, and she didn’t even seem particularly interested in trying. At a time when many other SF writers would be just as happy—or happier—writing “mainstream” fiction, and chaffed at the artistic and financial restrictions of the genre, what she wanted to be was a science fiction writer; that was her dream, and her passion.
Sheldon clearly loved space adventure and Space Opera, even of the most basic, junk-food, lowest-common-denominator sort—the kind of stuff you can consume with guilty pleasure although you know it is Bad for you, and is probably clogging your arteries—and worked variations on slambang space adventure motifs into many of her stories and both of her novels, although often they were played in a discordant, somber—sometimes unrelievedly bleak—minor key, with lots of curious fluting and eccentric fingerings. (In the ‘80s, toward the end of her life, she would make a deliberately “retro” attempt to write Nostalgic Space Opera with tales like “The Only Neat Thing To Do” and “Collision,” later collected in The Starry Rift. Although they contain much excellent material, the tone of these stories is perhaps too self-conscious to match the power of her earlier, less mannered, more naive and genuine—if sometimes considerably rawer and clumsier—explorations of the form.)
Tiptree’s considerable impact on future generations of science fiction writers was especially pronounced on the cyberpunks—with stories like “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” directly ancestral to that form—but I think that she had a good deal of impact on the future evolution of the space adventure tale as well. For instance, although it’s not one of her better-known stories, rarely if ever remarked on by critics, I think that I can see the footprints of “Mother in the Sky with Diamonds” on a lot of subsequent work, from John Varley’s stuff a few years later, to Bruce Sterling’s early Shaper/Mechanist stories such as “Swarm,” and on to the Modern Baroque Space Opera of the ‘90s.
It’s an inelegant story in some ways, so jammed with new ideas and packed with plot that it’s almost claustrophobic, a sweaty, dense, exhausting read, brutally and ruthlessly paced, with no changes of mood or breathing spaces, that might have worked better as a novella (John W. Campbell reportedly referred to this story as a “condensed novel” in his rejection letter—and he was probably right about that, anyway).
But look at the thinking that’s going on in the background, as Sheldon reinvents the familiar Asteroid Belt civilization of past science fiction from top to bottom, replacing it with a bizarre and fascinating society of her own, featuring remote-controlled cyborg slaves, biologically-altered people adapted for living in space, spaceships made of monomolecular bubbles of “quasi-living cytoplasm,” degenerate drug-runners, and, most importantly, an entire psychological set radically different both from our own and from that of the Asteroid Belt-dwellers of earlier science fiction stories. You’re going to see these tropes show up again and again in the science fiction of the ‘80s and ‘90s, as will, increasingly, the idea that the people who live in the future will be different from you and me, with different perspectives, goals, and ethics, shaped by technology and the social changes driven by that technology, and by new environments. In a brutally compressed context of less than 10,000 words, this little story contains within it many of the seeds that will blossom and cross-fertilize and mutate into a rich crop of Story in the years to come ...
As James Tiptree, Jr Alice Sheldon also published nine short-story collections: Ten-Thousand Light Years from Home, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Star Songs of an Old Primate, Out of the Everywhere, Tales of the Quintana Roo, Byte Beautiful, The Starry Rift, the posthumously published Crown of Stars, and the recent retrospective collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.
“Signal coming in now, ‘Spector.”
The Coronis operator showed the pink of her tongue to the ugly man waiting in the Belt patrolboat, half a megamile downstream. All that jky old hair, too, she thought. ISck. She pulled in her tongue and said sweetly, “It’s from—oh—Franchise Twelve.”
The man in the patrolboat looked uglier. His name was Space Safety Inspector Gollem and his stomach hurt.
The news that a Company inspector was in pain would have delighted every mollysquatter from Deimos to the Rings. The only surprise would be the notion that Inspector Gollem had a stomach instead of a Company contract tape. Gollem? All the friends Gollem had could colonize a meson and he knew it.
His stomach was used to that, though. His stomach was even getting used to working for Coronis Mutual, and he still hoped it might manage to survive his boss, Quine.
What was murdering him by inches was the thing he had hidden out beyond Franchise Fourteen on the edge of Coronis sector.
He scowled at the screen where Quine’s girl was logging in the grief for his next patrol. Having a live girl-girl for commo was supposed to be good for morale. It wasn’t doing one thing for Gollem. He knew what he looked like and his stomach knew what the flash from Twelve could be.
When she threw it on the screen he saw it was a bogy complaint, all right. Ghost signals on their lines.
Oh, no. Not again.
Not when he had it all fixed.
Franchise Twelve was West Hem Chemicals, an itchy outfit with a jill-abuck of cyborgs. They would send out a tracker if he didn’t get over there soon. But how? He had just come that way, he was due upstream at Franchise One.
“Reverse patrol,” he grunted. “Starting Franchise Fourteen. Purpose, uh, unscheduled recheck of aggregation shots in Eleven plus expedited service to West Hem. Allocate two units additional power.”
She logged it in; it was all right with her if Gollem started with spacerot. He cut channel and coded in the new course, trying not to think about
the extra power he would have to justify to Quine. If anyone ever got into his console and found the bugger bypass on his log he would be loading ore with electrodes in his ears.
He keyed his stomach a shot of Vageez and caught an error in his code which he corrected with no joy. Most Belters took naturally to the new cheap gee-cumulator drive. Gollem loathed it. Sidling around arsy-versy instead of driving the can where you wanted to go. The old way, the real way. I’m the last machine freak, he thought. A godlost dinosaur in space ...
But a dinosaur would have had more sense than to get messed up with a dead girl.
And Ragnarok.
His gee-sum index was wobbling up the scale, squeezing him retrograde in a field stress-node—he hoped. He slapped away a pod of the new biomonitor they had put in his boat and took a scan outside before his screens mushed. Always something to see in the Belts. This time it was a storm of little crescents trailing him, winking as the gravel tumbled.
In the sky with diamonds ..
From Ragnarok’s big ports you could see into naked space. That was the way they liked it, once. His Iron Butterfly. He rubbed his beard, figuring: five hours to Ragnarok, after he checked the squatter nest in Fourteen.
The weathersignal showed new data since he’d coded in the current field vortices and fronts. He tuned up, wondering what it must be like to live under weather made of gales of gas and liquid water. He had been raised on Luna.
The flash turned out to be a couple of rogue males coming in from Big J’s orbit. Jup stirred up a rock now and then. This pair read like escaped Trojans, estimated to node downstream in Sector Themis.
Nothing in that volume except some new medbase. His opposite number there was a gigglehead named Hara who was probably too busy peddling mutant phage to notice them go by. A pity, Trojans were gas-rich.
Feeding time. He opened a pack of Ovipuff and tuned up his music. His music. Old human power music from the frontier time. Not for Gollem, the new subliminal biomoans. He dug it hard, the righteous electronic decibels.
Chomping the paste with big useless teeth, the cabin pounding.
I can’t get no—satisFACTION.
The biomonitor was shrinking in its pods. Good. Nobody asked you into Gollem’s ship, you sucking symbiote.
The beat helped. He started through his exercises. Not to let himself go null-gee like Hara. Like them all now. Spacegrace? Shit. His unfashionable body bucked and strained.
A gorilla, no wonder his own mother had taken one look and split. Two thousand light-years from home.
what home for Gollem? Ask Quine, ask the Company. The Companies owned space now.
It was time to brake into Fourteen.
Fourteen was its usual disorderly self, a giant spawn of mollybubbles hiding an aggregate of rock that had been warped into synch long before his time. The first colonists had done it with reaction engines.
Tough. Now a kid with a gee-cumulator could true an orbit.
Fourteen had more bubbles every time he passed—and more kids. The tissue tanks that paid the franchise were still clear but elsewhere the bubbles were layers deep, the last ones tethered loose. Running out of rock for their metabolite to work on. Gollem hassled them about that every time he passed.
“Where are your rock nudgers?” he asked now when the squatterchief came on his screen.
“Soon, soon, ‘Spector Gollem.” The squatterchief was a slender skinhead with a biotuner glued to one ear.
“The Company will cancel, Juki. Coronis Mutual won’t carry you on policyholder status if you don’t maintain insurable life-support.”
Juki smiled, manipulated the green blob. They were abandoning the rocks all right, drifting off into symbiotic spacelife. Behind Juki he saw a couple of the older chiefs.
“You can’t afford to cut the services the Company provides,” he told them angrily. Nobody knew better than Gollem how minimal those services were, but without them, what? “Get some rock.”
He couldn’t use any more time here.
As he pulled away he noticed one of the loose bubbles was a sick purple.
Not his concern and not enough time.
Cursing, he eased alongside and cautiously slid his lock probes into the monomolecular bubbleskin. When the lock opened a stink came in.
He grabbed his breather and kicked into the foul bubble. Six or seven bodies were floating together in the middle like a tangle of yellow wires.
He jerked one out, squirted oxy at its face. It was a gutbag kid, a born null-gee. When his eyes fanned open Gollem pushed him at the rotting metabolite core.
“You were feeding it phage.” He slapped the boy. “Thought it would replicate, didn’t you? You poisoned it.”
The boy’s eyes crossed, then straightened. Probably didn’t get a word, the dialect of Fourteen was drifting fast. Maybe some of them truly were starting to communicate symbiotically. Vegetable ESP.
He pushed the boy back into the raft and knocked the dead metabolite through the waster. The starved mollybubble wall was pitted with necrosis, barely holding. He flushed his CO2 tank over it and crawled back to his boat for a spare metabolite core. When he got back the quasi-living cytoplasm of the bubbleskin was already starting to clear.
It would regenerate itself if they didn’t poison it again with a CO2-binding mutant. That was the way men built their spacehomes now, soft heterocatalytic films that ran on starlight, breathed human wastes.
Gollem rummaged through the stirring bodies until he found a bag of phage between a woman and her baby. She whimpered when he jerked it loose. He carried it back to his boat and pulled carefully away, releasing a flow of nutrient gel to seal his probe-hole. The mollybubble would heal itself.
At last he was clear for Ragnarok.
He punched course for Twelve and then deftly patched in the log bypass and set his true trajectory. The log would feed from his cache of duplicates, another item nobody had better find. Then he logged in the expendables he’d just used, padding it a piece as always.
Embezzlement. His stomach groaned.
He tuned up a rock storm to soothe it. There was an old poem about a man with a dead bird tied around his neck. Truly he had his dead bird.
All the good things were dead, the free wild human things. He felt like a specter, believe it. A dead one hanging in from the days when men rode machines to the stars and the algae stayed in pans. Before they cooked up all the metabolizing Martian macromolecules that quote, tamed space, unquote.
