by Anthology
Man warring on himself an old tale is;
But Man discovering the source of all his sorrow
In himself,
Finding his left hand and his right
Are similar sons, are children fighting
In the porchyards of the void?!
His pulse runs through his flesh,
Beats at the gates of wrist and thigh and rib and throat,
Unruly mobs which never heard the Law.
He answers panic thus:
Now in one vast sad insucked gasp of loss
Man pries, pulls free one hand from cross
While from the other drops the mallet which put in the nail.
Giver and taker, this hand or that, his sad appraisal knows
And knowing writhes upon the crucifix in dreadful guilt
That so much time was wasted in this pain.
Ten thousand years ago he might have leapt off down
To not return again!
A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips;
The laughter sets him free.
A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries.
That Fool is me!
And with one final shake of laughter
Breaks his bonds.
The nails fall skittering to marble floors.
And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle
As Man steps down in amiable wisdom
To give himself what no one else can give:
His liberty.
And seeing there the Son who was in symbol vast
Their flesh and all,
Hands him an empty cup and bades Him drink His fill
And Christ, gone drunk on laughter,
Vents a similar roar,
Three billion voices strong,
That flings the bells in belfries high
And slams, then opens, every sanctuary door;
The bones in vaults in frantic vibrancy of xylophone
Tell tunes of Saints, yes, Saints not marching in but out
At this hilarious shout!
And having given wine to dissolve thrice ancient hairballs
And old sin,
Now Man puts to the lips and tongue of Christ
His last Salvation crumb,
The wafer of his all-accepting smile,
His gusting laugh, the joy and swift enjoyment of his image:
Fool.
It is most hard to chew.
Christ, old student in a new school
Having swallowed laughter, cannot keep it in;
It works itself through skin like slivers
From a golden door
Trapped in the blood, athirst for air;
Christ, who was once employed as single son of God
Now finds himself among three billion on a billion
Brother sons, their arms thrown wide to grasp and hold
And walk them everywhere,
Now weaving this way, now weaving that in swoons,
Snuffing suns, breathing in light of one long
Rambled aeon endless afternoon. . . .
They reach the door and turn
And look back down the aisle of years to see
The rail, the altar cross, the spikes, the red rain,
The sad sweet ecstasy of death and hope
Abandoned, left and lost in pain;
Once up the side of Calvary, now down Tomorrow’s slope,
Their palms still itching where the scar still heals,
Into the marketplace where, so mad the dances
And the reels, Christ the Lord Jesus is soon lost
But found again uptossed now here, now there
In every multi-billioned face! There! See!
Some sad sweet laughing shard of God’s old Son
Caught up in crystal blaze fired out at thee.
Ten thousand times a million sons of sons move
Through one great and towering town
Wearing their wits, which means their laughter
As their crown. Set free upon the earth
By simple gifts of knowing how mere mirth can cut the bonds
And pull the blood spikes out;
Their conversation shouts of “Fool!”
That word they teach themselves in every school,
And, having taught, do not like Khayyam’s scholars
Go them out by that same door
Where in they went,
But go to rockets through the roofs
To night and stars and space,
A single face turned upward toward all Time,
One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace.
The cross falls into dust, the nails rust on the floor,
The wafers, half-bit through, make smiles
On pavements
Where the wind by night comes round
To sit in aisles in booths to listen and confess
I am the dreamer and the doer
I the hearer and the knower
I the giver and the taker
I am the sword and the wound of the sword.
If this be true, then let the sword fall free from hand.
I embrace myself.
I laugh until I weep
And weep until I smile
Then the two of us, murderer and murdered,
Guilty and he who is without guile
Go off to Far Centauri
To leave off losings, and take on winnings,
Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings,
In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.
Afterword
What to say about this poem? Say that it is a metaphor of Christ and Man and the fact of man finding himself trapped in a flesh where the Beast rends Human and the Human tries to tame the Beast. Out of this stuff comes War. The trial of man trying to become truly Human over the centuries, in spite of his blood-lust, forces him to weep for his lost opportunities, his many murders, his dead children, done in by those Wars. Christ is the symbol of that failure, and the promise of new opportunities to have a final winning. So Bradbury says.
KING OF THE HILL
Chad Oliver
Introduction
One night in College Station, Texas, in the company of Chad Oliver—almost a legendary name in science fiction because of the scarcity and impossibly high quality level of his stories—I demolished a restaurant and turned a formal banquet at which I was speaking into a scene of loot and pillage.
Now. You hear these myth fables about writers. About Scott Fitzgerald’s “crazy Sunday” in which he threw himself into the pool at a producer’s mansion. About Hemingway tossing his first novel, the one before The Sun Also Rises, overboard on the ship back from Paris, because he felt a writer should never publish his first novel. About Steinbeck going into deadly barrooms on the Jersey docks and challenging whole groups of wallopers to bare knuckle contests. About Faulkner when he worked in one of the Hollywood studios, sitting there for hours typing over and over again on the same sheet of paper, “Boy gets girl, boy gets girl, boy gets girl . . .” And there are stories told about your Gentle Editor—who does not for one moment publicly cop to an ego that puts him in the same league with the gentlemen noted above—and these are stories of rape and ruin that sound like the purest bullshit. Some of them are. But some actually happened, and there is always one person who was there and saw it: Silverberg was there when the drunken giant Puerto Rican came at me with the broken quart beer bottle; Avram Davidson was there when I walked into the middle of a street gang in Greenwich Village as they were getting ready to stomp us; a girl named Toni Feldman was there when I dragged an old woman out of a burning car after it had crashed into a fence and before it blew up; Norman Spinrad was there when I got the crap kicked out of me by a guy who was the muscle for a gang of ripoff artists in Milford, Pennsylvania; and Chad Oliver was there when I mobilized the restaurant.
I treasure these people. Not only because they are the unimpeachable verification that the contretemps in which I find my
self actually took place—thereby staving off the label of righteous liar I might otherwise wear—but because they are reference points for me, enabling me to distinguish between the colorful lies I tell about myself to enhance my own image of myself, and the truly unbelievable things that actually happen.
It is my most fervent wish that these people stay alive and well, because if they go, then with them go the few pieces of reality to which I cling ferociously.
So ask Chad about that evening.
It was the only time we’ve ever been in each other’s company, and exhausts my anecdotes about Chad. Except that he is a big, charming, pipe-smoking dude. The rest he can relate for himself:
“DEMOGRAPHIC DOPE. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1928. All male Olivers were doctors (father, grandfather, uncle). I am therefore a mutant. Moved to Crystal City, Texas, when I was a sophomore in high school. I loved it—played football, edited the school paper, made friends that are still with me. (It’s the town used as background in Shadows in the Sun.) Moved around some in Texas since (Galveston, Kerrville, now Austin) but I guess it’s fair to say that Texas is Home. Married a Texas girl in 1952; she is known variously as Betty Jane, Beje, and B.J. Have two children: daughter Kim, 17 years, and son Glen, 5½. You might call that spacing them out.
“ACADEMIC. I got my B.A. and M.A. at the University of Texas. Took my Ph.D. (in anthropology) at UCLA. I’m a cultural anthropologist, with particular interests in cultural ecology, the Plains Indians, and the ethnology of East Africa. My rank is Full Professor, not that anyone cares, and I am Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. I am peculiar in that I happen to like to teach, especially undergraduates. I normally teach several hundred students each semester; out of that number, maybe 3 or 4 know that I write science fiction. I can recognize them by their beady little eyes.
“WRITING. I discovered science fiction when I was a kid, back in the Paleolithic. I remember the story that hooked me: Edmond Hamilton’s ‘Treasure on Thunder Moon’ in the old, fat Amazing. I hopped on my bicycle and went back to the newsstand and bought every science fiction magazine I could find. I bought a second-hand typewriter and—aged 15—began to Write. Seven years later, Tony Boucher bought my first story. I’ve sold virtually everything I have written since then—mostly science fiction, but also a few historical westerns for Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. I fear I have not been terribly prolific—it comes to around 50 short stories and novelettes, most of which have been anthologized.
“Books include Mists of Dawn (1952), Shadows in the Sun (1954), Another Kind (1955), The Winds of Time (1957), Unearthly Neighbors (1960), and The Wolf Is My Brother (1967). The latter won the award as Best Western Historical Novel of 1967 from the Western Writers of America. I have a new science fiction novel, The Shores of Another Sea, from NAL (Signet) and a new collection, The Edge of Forever (Sherbourne), both published in 1971.
“All of this, I guess, tells you very little about me. Maybe that is just as well. I am serious about my writing and I try to write as well as I can. If there is anything about me worth knowing, I hope it can be found somewhere in all those words I have struggled to put on paper.”
And finally, these three items. 1) The full name is Symmes Chadwick Oliver. In anthropology he uses Symmes C. Oliver; for fiction, he uses Chad. 2) Publishers’ Weekly for 3 May 71 announces, “Sherbourne Press of Los Angeles has signed Chad Oliver for his first hardcover collection of science fiction short stories. All of the stories have an anthropological theme.” See above. 3) “King of the Hill” is one of the best, tightest, most memorable stories Chad has ever written and I am deeply honored he sold his first short story in years to this anthology. Now go and enjoy it.
King of the Hill
She floated there in the great nothing, still warm and soft and blue-green if you could eyeball her from a few thousand miles out, still kissed under blankets of clouds.
Mama Earth. Getting old now, tired, her blankets soiled with her own secretions, her body bruised and torn by a billion forgotten passions.
Like many a mother before her, she had given birth to a monster. He was not old, not as planets measure time, and there had been other children. But he was old enough. He had taken over.
His name?
You know it: there are no surprises left. Man. Big Daddy of the primates. The ape that walks like a chicken. Homo sap. Ah, the tool-maker, flapper of tongues, builder of fires, sex fiend, dreamer, destroyer, creator of garbage . . .
You know me, Al.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall—
Ant is the name, anthill is the game.
There were many men, too many men. They have names.
Try this one on for size: Sam Gregg. Don’t like it? Rings no bells? Not elegant enough? Wrong ethnic affiliation?
Few among the manswarm, if any, cared for Sam Gregg. One or two, possibly, gave a damn about his name. A billion or so knew his name.
Mostly, they hated his guts—and envied him.
He was there, Sam Gregg, big as life and twice as ugly.
He stuck out.
A rock in the sandpile.
They were after him again.
Sam Gregg felt the pressure. There had been a time when he had thrived on it; the adrenaline had flowed and the juices bubbled. Sure, and there had been a time when dinosaurs had walked the earth. Sam had been born in the year that men had first walked on the moon. (It had tickled him, when he was old enough to savor it. A man with the unlikely name of Armstrong, no less. And his faithful sidekick, Buzz. And good old Mike holding the fort. Jesus.) That made him nearly a century old. His doctors were good, the best. It was no miracle to live a hundred years, not these days. But he wasn’t a kid anymore, as he demonstrated occasionally with Lois.
The attacks were not particularly subtle, but they were civilized. That meant that nobody called you a son of a bitch to your face, and the assassins carried statistics and platitudes instead of knives and strangling cords.
Item. A bill had been introduced in Washington by good old Senator Raleigh, millionaire defender of the poor. Stripped of its stumbling oratorical flourishes, it argued that undersea development was now routine and therefore that there should be no tax dodges for phony risk capital investment. That little arrow was aimed straight at one of Sam’s companies—at several of them, in fact, although the somewhat dim-witted Raleigh probably did not know that. Sam could beat the bill, but it would cost him money. That annoyed him. He had an expensive hobby.
Item. Sam retained a covey of bright boys whose only job it was to keep his name out of the communications media. They weren’t entirely successful; your name is not known to a billion people on a word-of-mouth basis. Still, he had not been subjected to one of those full-scale, no-holds-barred, dynamic, daring personal close-ups for nearly a year now. One was coming up, on Worldwide. The mystery man—revealed! The richest man in the world—exposed! The hermit—trapped by fearless reporters! Sam was not amused. The earth was sick, blotched by hungry and desperate people from pole to shining pole. There had never been an uglier joke than pinning man’s future on birth control. A sick world needs a target for its anger. Sam’s only hope was to be inconspicuous. He had failed in that, and it would get him in the end. Still, he only needed a little more time . . .
Item. The U.N. delegate from the Arctic Republic had charged that Arctic citizens of Eskimo descent were being passed over for high administrative positions in franchises licensed to operate in the Republic. “We must not and will not allow,” he said, “the well-known technical abilities of our people to serve as a pretext for modern-day colonial exploitation.” The accusation was so much rancid blubber, of course; Sam happened to like Eskimos as well as he liked anybody, and in any event he was always very careful about such things. No matter. There would be a hearing, facts would have to be tortured by the computers, stories would have to be planted, money would be spent. The root of all evil produced a popular shrub.
Ther
e were other items, most of them routine. Sam did not deal with them himself, and had not done so for fifty years. (“Mr. Gregg never does anything personally,” as one aide had put it in a famous interview.) Sam routed the problems down to subordinates; that was what they were for. Nevertheless, he kept in touch. A ruler who does not know what is going on in his empire can expect the early arrival of the goon squad that escorts him into oblivion. There were the usual appeals to support Worthy Causes, to contribute to Charity, to help out Old Friends. Sam denied them all without a qualm and without doing anything; his lieutenants had their orders. A penny saved . . .
Sam was not really worried; at worst he was harassed, which was the chronic complaint of executives. They were not on to him yet. There was no slightest hint of a leak where it counted. If that one ever hit the air cleaner there would be a stink they could smell in the moon labs.
Still, he felt the pressure. He was human, at least in his own estimation. There was a classic cure for pressure, known to students of language as getting away from it all. It was a cure that was no longer possible for the vast majority of once-human beings, for the simple reason that there was nowhere to go.
(“To what do you attribute your long and successful life, Mr. Gregg?” “Well, I pension off my wives so that I always have a young one, and I see to it that she talks very little. I drink a lot of good booze, but I never get drunk. I don’t eat meat. I count my money when I get depressed. If I feel tense, I knock about the estate until I feel better. I try to break at least three laws every day. I owe it all to being a completely evil man.”)
Sam Gregg could take the cure, and he did.
He did not have to leave his own land, of course.
Sam never left his Estate. (Well, hardly ever.)
He took the private tube down from his suite in the tower and stepped outside. That was the way he thought of it, but it was not precisely true. There was a miniature life-support pod that arched over a thousand acres of his property. It was a high price to pay for clean air, but it was the only way. Sam needed it and so did the animals.
There were two laws that he broke every day. In a world so strangled by countless tons of human meat that land per capita was measured in square feet, Sam Gregg owned more than a thousand acres. Moreover, he did nothing useful with that supremely illegal land. He kept animals on it. Even dogs and cats had been outlawed for a quarter of a century, and what passed for meat was grown in factory vats. When people are starving, wasting food on pets is a criminal act. (Who says so? Why, people do.) Most of the zoos were gone now, and parks and forests and meadows were things of the past.
