Modern classics of fanta.., p.13
Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 13
That was all. There was nothing left now but the swift vertiginous spin to the end-and-beginning, and then the wheel slowing as he came around again.
Rossi began to seethe. This was worse than dishwashing – his nightmare, the worst job he knew. Standing here, like a second hand ticking around the face of Time, while men who flickered and vanished threaded him with questions; a thing, a tool, a gyrating information booth!
Stop, he thought, and pushed – a costive pressure inside his brain – but nothing happened. He was a small boy forgotten on a carousel, a bug trapped between window and screen, a moth circling a lamp …
It came to him what the trouble was. There had to be the yearning, that single candle-cone focus of the spirit: that was the moving force, and all the rest – the fasting, the quiet, the rhymes – was only to channel and guide.
He would have to get off at the one place in the whole endless sweep of time where he wanted to be. And that place, he knew now without surprise, was the scarlet beach.
Which no longer existed, anywhere in the universe.
While he hung suspended on that thought, the flickering stopped at the prehistoric jungle; and the clearing with its copper dead man; and the log room, empty; the church, empty, too.
And the fiery room, now so fiercely ablaze that the hair of his forearms puffed and curled.
And the cool lawn, where the small boy stood agape
And the pavilion: the greybeard and the young man leaning together like blasted trees, livid-lipped.
There was the trouble: they had believed him, the first time around, and acting on what he told them, they had changed the world.
Only one thing to be done – destroy that belief, fuddle them, talk nonsense, like a ghost called up at a séance!
“Then you tell me to put all I have in land,” says greybeard, clutching the crucifix, “and wait for the increase!”
“Of course!” replied Rossi with instant cunning. “New York’s to be the biggest city – in the whole state of Maine!”
The pavilion vanished. Rossi saw with pleasure that the room that took its place was high-ceilinged and shabby, the obvious forerunner of his own roach-haunted cubby-hole in 1955. The long, panelled room with its fireplace and the youth dozing before it were gone, snuffed out, a might-have-been.
When a motherly looking woman lurched up out of a rocker, staring, he knew what to do.
He put his finger to his lips. “The lost candlestick is under the cellar stairs!” he hissed, and vanished.
The room was a little older, a little shabbier. A new partition had been added, bringing its dimensions down to those of the room Rossi knew, and there was a bed, and an old tin washbasin in the corner. A young woman was sprawled open-mouthed, fleshy and snoring, in the bed; Rossi looked away with faint prim disgust and waited.
The same room; his room, almost; a beefy stubbled man smoking in the armchair with his feet in a pan of water. The pipe dropped from his sprung jaw.
“I’m the family banshee,” Rossi remarked. “Beware, for a short man with a long knife is dogging your footsteps.” He squinted and bared his fangs; the man, standing up hurriedly, tipped the basin and stumbled half across the room before he recovered and whirled to the door, bellowing, leaving fat wet tracks and silence.
Now; now … It was night, and the sweaty unstirred heat of the city poured in around him. He was standing in the midst of the chalk marks he had scrawled a hundred billion years ago. The bare bulb was still lighted; around it flames were licking tentatively at the edges of the table, cooking the plastic cover up into lumpy hissing puffs.
Rossi the shipping clerk; Rossi the elevator man; Rossi the dishwasher!
He let it pass. The room kaleidoscope-flickered from brown to green; a young man at the washbasin was pouring something amber into a glass, gurgling and clinking.
“Boo!” said Rossi, flapping his arms.
The young man whirled in a spasm of limbs, a long arc of brown droplets hanging. The door banged him out, and Rossi was alone, watching the drinking glass roll, counting the seconds until …
The walls were brown again; a calendar across the room said 1965 MAY 1965. An old man, spidery on the edge of the bed, was fumbling spectacles over the rank crests of his ears. “You’re real,” he said.
“I’m not,” said Rossi indignantly. He added, “Radishes. Lemons. Grapes. Blahhh!”
“Don’t put me off,” said the old man. He was ragged and hollow-templed, like a bird-skull, coloured like earth and milkweed floss, and his mouth was a drum over porcelain, but his oystery eyes were burning bright. “I knew the minute I saw you – you’re Rossi, the one that disappeared. If you can do that –” his teeth clacked – “you must know, you’ve got to tell me. Those ships that have landed on the moon – what are they building there? What do they want?”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Please,” said the old man humbly. “You can’t be so cruel. I tried to warn people, but they’ve forgotten who I am. If you know; if you could just tell me …”
Rossi had a qualm, thinking of heat flashing down in that one intolerable blow that would leave the city squashed, glistening, as flat as the thin film of a bug. But remembering that, after all, the old man was not real, he said, “There isn’t anything. You made it up. You’re dreaming.”
And then, while the pure tension gathered and strained inside him, came the lake of obsidian.
And the jungle, just as it ought to be – the brown people carolling, “Hello, Mister Rossi, hello again, hello!”
And the savannah, the tall black-haired people reining in, breeze-blown, flash of teeth: “Hillo, Misser Rossi!”
And the beach.
The scarlet beach with its golden, laughing people: “Mista Rossi, Mista Rossi!” Heraldic glory under the clear sky, and out past the breakers the clear heart-stirring glint of sun on the sea; and the tension of the longing breaking free (stop), no need for symbols now (stop), a lifetime’s distillation of I wish … spurting, channelled, done.
* * * *
There he stands where he longed to be, wearing the same pleased expression, for ever caught at the beginning of a hello – Rossi, the first man to travel in Time, and Rossi, the first man to Stop.
He’s not to be mocked or mourned. Rossi was born a stranger; there are thousands of him, unconsidered gritty particles in the gears of history: the ne’er-do-wells, the superfluous people, shaped for some world that has never yet been invented. The air-conditioned utopias have no place for them; they would have been bad slaves and worse masters in Athens. As for the tropic isles – the Marquesas of 1800, or the Manhattan of 3256 – could Rossi swim a mile, dive six fathoms, climb a fifty-foot palm? If he had stepped alive onto that scarlet shore, would the young men have had him in their canoes, or the maidens in their bowers? But see him now, stonily immortal, the symbol of a wonderful thing that happened. The childlike golden people visit him every day, except when they forget. They drape his rock-hard flesh with garlands and lay little offerings at his feet; and when he lets it rain, they thump him.
* * * *
FRITZ LEIBER
Space-Time for Springers
With a fifty-year career that stretched from the “Golden Age” Astounding of the 1940s to the beginning of the 1990s, the late Fritz Leiber was an indispensable figure in the development of modern science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It is impossible to imagine what those genres would be like today without him, except to say that they would be the poorer for it. No other figure of his generation (with the possible exception of L. Sprague de Camp) wrote in as many different genres as Leiber, or was as important as he was to the development of each. Leiber can be considered one of the fathers of modern “heroic fantasy,” and his long sequence of stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser remains one of the most complex and intelligent bodies of work in the entire subgenre of “Sword & Sorcery” (which term Leiber himself is usually credited with coining). He may also be one of the best—if not the best—writers of the supernatural horror tale since Lovecraft and Poe, and was writing updated “modern” or “urban” horror stories like “Smoke Ghost” and the classic Conjure Wife long before the work of Stephen King engendered the Big Horror Boom of the middle 1970s and brought that form to wide popular attention.
Leiber was also a towering Ancestral Figure in science fiction as well, having been one of the major writers of both John W. Campbell’s “Golden Age” Astounding of the 1940s—with works like Gather, Darkness--and H. L. Gold’s Galaxy in die 1950s—with works like the classic “Coming Attraction” and the superb novel The Big Time, which still holds up as one of the best SF novels ever written. Leiber then went on to contribute a steady stream of superior fiction to the magazines and anthologies of the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, as well as powerful novels such as The Wanderer and Our Lady of Darkness. The Big Time won a well-deserved Hugo in 1959, and Leiber also won a slew of other awards: all told, six Hugos and four Nebulas, plus three World Fantasy Awards—one of them the prestigious Life Achievement Award—and a Grand Master of Fantasy Award.
As with Avram Davidson, I found it impossible to capture even a hint of the breadth of Leiber’s range with just one story. One of the best of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories follows, sword and sorcery at its absolute finest, but first here is Leiber in quite a different mood. Just as Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost” might fairly be said to have invented the “urban horror” story, so the sly and sprightly story that follows invented a whole new sub-genre as well, one that has spawned dozens if not hundreds of stories, novels, and anthologies in subsequent decades. “Space-Time for Springers,” however, is still probably the best story of its type, unrivaled even after more than a quarter of a century. As you will see, it’s no ordinary cat story, and it’s about no ordinary cat …
Fritz Leiber’s other books include The Green Millennium, A Specter Is Haunting Texas, The Big Time, and The Silver Eggheads, the collections The Best of Fritz Leiber, The Book of Fritz Leiber, The Changewar, Night’s Black Agents, Heroes and Horrors, The Mind Spider, and The Ghost Light, and the seven volumes of Fafhrd-Gray Mouser stories.
* * * *
Gummitch was a superkitten, as he knew very well, with an I.Q. of about 160. Of course, he didn’t talk. But everybody knows that I.Q. tests based on language ability are very one-sided. Besides, he would talk as soon as they started setting a place for him at table and pouring him coffee. Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra ate horsemeat from pans on the floor and they didn’t talk. Baby dined in his crib on milk from a bottle and he didn’t talk. Sissy sat at table but they didn’t pour her coffee and she didn’t talk—not one word. Father and Mother (whom Gummitch had nicknamed Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here) sat at table and poured each other coffee and they did talk. Q.E.D.
Meanwhile, he would get by very well on thought projection and intuitive understanding of all human speech—not even to mention cat patois, which almost any civilized animal could olav by ear. The dramatic monologues and Socratic dialogues, the quiz and panel-show appearances, the felidological expedition to darkest Africa (where he would uncover the real truth behind lions and tigers), the exploration of the outer planets—all these could wait. The same went for the books for which he was ceaselessly accumulating material: The Encyclopedia of Odors, Anthropofeline Psychology, Invisible Signs and Secret Wonders, Space-Time for Springers, Slit Eyes Look at Life, et cetera. For the present it was enough to live existence to the hilt and soak up knowledge, missing no experience proper to his age level—to rush about with tail aflame.
So to all outward appearances Gummitch was just a vividly normal kitten, as shown by the succession of nicknames he bore along the magic path that led from blue-eyed infancy toward puberty: Little One, Squawker, Portly, Bumble (for purring not clumsiness), Old Starved-to-Death, Fierso, Loverboy (affection not sex), Spook and Catnik. Of these only the last perhaps requires further explanation: the Russians had just sent Muttnik up after Sputnik, so that when one evening Gummitch streaked three times across the firmament of the living room floor in the same direction, past the fixed stars of the humans and the comparatively slow-moving heavenly bodies of the two older cats, and Kitty-Come-Here quoted the line from Keats:
* * * *
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; it was inevitable that Old Horsemeat would say, “Ah—Catnik!”
The new name lasted all of three days, to be replaced by Gummitch, which showed signs of becoming permanent.
The little cat was on the verge of truly growing up, at least so Gummitch overheard Old Horsemeat comment to Kitty-Come-Here. A few short weeks, Old Horsemeat said, and Gummitch’s fiery flesh would harden, his slim neck thicken, the electricity vanish from everything but his fur, and all his delightful kittenish qualities rapidly give way to the earth-bound singlemindness of a tom. They’d be lucky, Old Horsemeat concluded, if he didn’t turn completely surly like Ashurbanipal.
Gummitch listened to these predictions with gay unconcern and with secret amusement from his vantage point of superior knowledge, in the same spirit that he accepted so many phases of his outwardly conventional existence: the murderous sidelong looks he got from Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra as he devoured his own horsemeat from his own little tin pan, because they sometimes were given canned catfood but he never; the stark idiocy of Baby, who didn’t know the difference between a live cat and a stuffed teddy bear and who tried to cover up his ignorance by making goo-goo noises and poking indiscriminately at all eyes; the far more serious—because cleverly hidden—maliciousness of Sissy, who had to be watched out for warily—especially when you were alone—and whose retarded—even warped —development, Gummitch knew, was Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Heres deepest, most secret, worry (more of Sissy and her evil ways soon); the limited intellect of Kitty-Come-Here, who despite the amounts of coffee she drank was quite as featherbrained as kittens are supposed to be and who firmly believed, for example, that kittens operated in the same space-time as other beings—that to get from here to there they had to cross the space between —and similar fallacies; the mental stodginess of even Old Horsemeat, who although he understood quite a bit of the secret doctrine and talked intelligently to Gummitch when they were alone, nevertheless suffered from the limitations of his status—a rather nice old god but a maddeningly slow-witted one.
But Gummitch could easily forgive all this massed inadequacy and downright brutishness in his felino-human household, because he was aware that he alone knew the real truth about himself and about other kittens and babies as well, the truth which was hidden from weaker minds, the truth that was as intrinsically incredible as the germ theory of disease or the origin of the whole great universe in the explosion of a single atom.
As a baby kitten Gummitch had believed that Old Horsemeat’s two hands were hairless kittens permanently attached to the ends of Old Horsemeat’s arms but having an independent life of their own. How he had hated and loved those two five-legged sallow monsters, his first playmates, comforters and battle-opponents!
Well, even that fantastic discarded notion was but a trifling fancy compared to the real truth about himself!
The forehead of Zeus split open to give birth to Minerva. Gummitch had been born from the waist-fold of a dirty old terrycloth bathrobe, Old Horsemeat’s basic garment. The kitten was intuitively certain of it and had proved it to himself as well as any Descartes or Aristotle. In a kitten-size tuck of that ancient bathrobe the atoms of his body had gathered and quickened into life. His earliest memories were of snoozing wrapped in terrycloth, warmed by Old Horsemeat’s heat. Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here were his true parents. The other theory of his origin, the one he heard Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here recount from time to time—that he had been the only surviving kitten of a litter abandoned next door, that he had had the shakes from vitamin deficiency and lost the tip of his tail and the hair on his paws and had to be nursed back to life and health with warm yellowish milk-and-vitamins fed from an eyedropper—that other theory was just one of those rationalizations with which mysterious nature cloaks the birth of heroes, perhaps wisely veiling the truth from minds unable to bear it, a rationalization as false as Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat’s touching belief that Sissy and Baby were their children rather than the cubs of Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra.
The day that Gummitch had discovered by pure intuition the secret of his birth he had been filled with a wild instant excitement. He had only kept it from tearing him to pieces by rushing out to the kitchen and striking and devouring a fried scallop, torturing it fiendishly first for twenty minutes.
And the secret of his birth was only the beginning. His intellectual faculties aroused, Gummitch had two days later intuited a further and greater secret: since he was the child of humans he would, upon reaching this maturation date of which Old Horsemeat had spoken, turn not into a sullen torn but into a godlike human youth with reddish golden hair the color of his present fur. He would be poured coffee; and he would instantly be able to talk, probably in all languages. While Sissy (how clear it was now!) would at approximately the same time shrink and fur out into a sharp-clawed and vicious she-cat dark as her hair, sex and self-love her only concerns, first harem-mate for Cleopatra, concubine to Mhurbanipal.
