The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  “Oh, I think that’s disgusting,” she said, with a disingenuous shudder. “Mice are so horrible. Little squirmy crawly things—ish!”

  “I’m afraid my sensibilities have become rather blunted.”

  “Do you have some here—on the ship?”

  “We keep some in cages in the laboratory, and there is a large supply of ova in the outer freezing vaults.”

  “Where mine are too?” she asked, wide-eyed.

  “Yes. But I’m sure there’s no chance of their becoming confused, if that’s worrying you.”

  As on Earth, all the ova of the women are kept on ice here. No one has yet been able to think of a better remedy for the problem resulting from immortal women with a finite number of ova, and without this rather crude expedient the menopause would be inescapable.

  “But just think—if they were! And if I had a baby, and it were a little mouse! Or would it be half-mouse and half-baby, like the Minotaur? Then I could run him through a maze. It all has to do with chromosomes, doesn’t it? And genes. Aspera says you know every gene a mouse has. You must be very brave. But what is there left for you to do, now that you know everything?”

  “Now that I know everything, I shall try to make an immortal mouse.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that until they’ve learned about birth control. You know what a problem we had until the Freezers opened, even with free pills for everyone.”

  “It’s not a present danger. Unfortunately, we’re a long way from realizing our aims.”

  “Unfortunately? Do you really identify with them so much then?”

  “I say unfortunately because if we knew how to make a mouse immortal we would be much nearer an understanding of the cause of our own mutation. And then we would be able to make the mortals on Earth immortal too. Though, Lord knows, if I came up with anything, I don’t see what good it will do, so far from Earth.”

  “And that’s why you worked forty years with mice, and why you’re working with them now?”

  “Yes. Except that, strictly speaking, I’m not working now. I’m on vacation, as it were.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t do that! If you have a talent you should use it, not hide it away. I’m only a dancer, of course, but I shall always use my talent.” I could not tell if this were more disingenuousness, or if she really were so very young as to believe what she said.

  “Can I come to your laboratory and see one of the mice some time?”

  “Any time you like.”

  “And touch one?”

  “Yes. At your own risk.”

  She clapped her hands. “Oh, Little Mother, Little Mother, do say you’ll let me go and touch Mr. Regan’s mouse!”

  Aspera was visibly annoyed with this display of childishness, which seemed almost to parody her own relationship with Sheila. But Little Mother could not, though she seemed to grow pale, withhold her consent.

  Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2084

  Aspera came around today with my mask. It is magnificent, and I overflowed with gratitude.

  Afterwards, we discussed Sheila. I criticized the girl’s faerie manner with more severity than I really felt or Sheila deserves. Aspera agreed, all too earnestly agreed, but insisted that she had redeeming virtues, though they might not be evident to me. I said that seemed doubtful.

  “Oh, I can assure you,” Aspera protested.

  “You know her very well, then?”

  “We have been rather close, in the course of analysis. Transference is a ticklish business between two women.”

  “I can imagine.” I did not go so far as to inquire what diagnostic tools she was employing in this ticklish business. It was understood.

  “You will leave her alone, won’t you, Oliver?”

  I promised. She kissed me on the cheek. “You’re a darling, and I love you very much.” And despite the smile with which she sought to temper this statement, I think it may be true. More’s the pity.

  Monday, Dec. 25, 2084

  And all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

  Two months! More. And what has the Star-Mouse been up to? Spying on the microcosm, making my fellow-mice immortal. Without, as yet, signal success.

  It is good, better, best to be at work again, to feel the familiar bite of that bug curiosity again. Sheila visits the lab regularly to exclaim over the freak mice that my experiments have produced, but so far I have been faithful to my promise to Aspera. My talk with Sheila has been limited to lectures in the field of my speciality. She is shockingly ignorant of the elements of science, but an apt—even an earnest—pupil.

  Hatoum has been present during some of these lessons and has fallen under the same enchantment. Sheila either has not seen this or refuses to recognize it. Her sights are fixed on me, and I take a spiteful pleasure in tormenting Hatoum with the spectacle of my pretended indifference. Where are your gibes now?

  New Year’s Day, 2085

  We have reached our terminal velocity, and now we just coast until we have to brake for our first stop, Tau Ceti, some dozen years off. There are nearer stars, of course, and even nearer stars with planets, but our itinerary has been planned with a view to spacing our stops as evenly as possible. Unless we find something better than our own barren solar system has had to offer us, we shall be passing by a total of twenty-six planeted suns in the next century and a half. With such a prospect, one does not greet the New Year with wild carousal.

  Friday, Jan. 6, 2085

  Against all expectation, there has been a casualty—Gene Shaw, one of our navigators and the concertmaster of our orchestra. Her helmet was insecurely fitted during lifeboat drill. Death was instant. After hearing the news, I went round to see Slade, knowing he’d once been in love with her. He showed no signs of emotion, though his very willingness for us to speak of something other than his dreams or my reading might be the equivalent, for him, of hysterics.

  He was puzzled by his own lack of response, and I told him of other people I’d known who had received the news of a friend’s death with the same coolness. I ventured the theory that the classic expressions of grief are only possible among those who have lived long and intimately with the notion of death and its dominion. If it becomes too rare an event, its meaning is unassimilable.

  Slade, I discover, is an historian, another odd speciality to bring aboard the Extrovert. Seldom has any society been so completely divorced from its antecedents as we. Slade claims that it is just this, the fact that we exist, as it were, without history, without any past but our own, that interests him. He thinks that it will become, as the voyage goes on, the most conspicuous feature of our lives.

  Monday, Jan. 9, 2085

  Despite all that homeostasis can do, changes occur, and sometimes they are unalterable.

  Poor Aspera. When the blow falls, it never falls gently, does it?

  This is what happened:

  I entered her cabin without knocking, knowing that the deliberate and unaccustomed rudeness would pleasure her. She had unrolled a mirror and was standing before it, in her silver mask and a ceremonial robe, preening herself. She started when I opened the door, seeming for a moment not to know who I was. I was masked, but surely she recognized this mask.

  “Aspera, my very own,” I said, without removing the mask. “Have I startled you?”

  She hung her head, refusing to meet my gaze, and I knew then with certainty—I had suspected as much from the first slight movement of her body—that it was not Aspera’s face behind the mask.

  “Forgive me for returning to this again, my dear, but you must give her up, you really must. If not for my sake, for your own; if not for your own sake, then for the child’s. Truly, she is lovely. I can understand your passion. I might even say that in a distant way, in silence, I share it. But you must relinquish her. I will say nothing of the scandal, for that’s of small account here. Though there may be some, the most fusty of us, who would consider less than professional in you, an abuse of the child’s confidence. They might whisper
—unjustly, of course—that perhaps it was no coincidence that your fame was won in dealing with children . . . Of course, Sheila is only relatively a child, relative to ourselves. But let’s not talk of scandal. I speak for the girl’s sake. You forget when you surrender to your maternal feelings—”

  The mask lifted far enough to betray a fleeting glimpse of blue eyes. I continued my charade unheedingly.

  “—when you allow yourself to play Pygmalion like this, you forget how young she is, how malleable. It is evident, Aspera, that she will never leave you voluntarily—even if she might have the desire, she would never be able to find the strength—and therefore I want you to promise me, Aspera . . . Aspera, look in my eyes.”

  Once more the mask lifted, and the two glistening shields confronted me boldly, behind those bland silver features.

  “You must promise me that you’ll see no more of her.”

  “Must I?”

  She knew of course that Aspera would have felt nothing but indignation at such a pigslop of blackmail and innuendo. She recognized my deceit, relished it, and joined me in these amateur theatricals.

  “Then I do,” she said, and put her hands about my neck, drawing me closer until our silver lips were pressed together in a passionate kiss.

  We consummated our double betrayal, suitably, in Aspera’s bed. Once the initial impetus of the deed had been exhausted, Sheila became her usual kittenish self. “Tell me some more about genetics,” she begged. “Tell me about my chromosomes and things like that.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know,” I complained lazily.

  “Tell me why your eyes are blue.”

  “Because my mother’s eyes were blue.”

  “And why did you make one little mousey with whiskers instead of eyes?”

  “It was an accident. So much of what I do is only trial and error. We know what each gene controls, we know their arrangement. But we know too little about what’s inside them. Despite the work of the molecular biologist, we’re still in the pre-atomic stage, so to speak. We can eliminate genes, or shuffle them around, but we have yet to study the morphology of the living gene to any significant degree.”

  “Poor Mousey! And was the Plague just another accident? Is it only an accident that I’m immortal? That would be sad.”

  “My dear, we’re all accidents. Of the Plague, who can say? It appeared, infected mankind, and vanished before the agent could be isolated and identified. It must have died out through having exhausted its supply of hosts. Most of the literature seems to favor the theory that it was an accident—a mutated virus. In the long run, it wouldn’t have been a viable mutation, since in rendering its hosts’ progeny immortal (and, presumably, immune) it shut off its own supplies.”

  “But there are still mortals, after all. What of Ireland, Madagascar, Taiwan? I was in love with an Irish fellow when I was sixteen. He was thirty and just starting to age. I couldn’t imagine anything more handsome at the time. Why didn’t the little bug get him?”

  “The mortals living now are all descended from infants who were in utero at the time of the Plague. Their mothers were infected, but survived to give them birth, without, however, passing on the genetic alteration. By the time such infants were born the Plague had passed on. It was over in less than two months, you know. Surely, you do know that much?”

  “Oh yes, I think science is just fascinating. I’m going to do a dance about genetics and the Plague. The wonderful thing about science is that it’s so logical. You don’t have a mole anywhere on your body, do you?”

  “No.”

  She sighed. “Aspera had a mole on her left cheek. It always made me feel decadent to kiss it.”

  Had she used the past tense deliberately? That is the entrancing thing about Sheila—that I shall never be able to answer such questions with any finality.

  When she had returned to her cabin, Aspera immediately noticed the damage that had been done to the two masks.

  “My dear Sheila,” she said with acidy sweetness, “let me make a present of this mask.”

  “Thank you, Little Mother. As you know, I’ve always admired it. I might even confess to have envied you.”

  “Oliver admires it too. For Oliver it’s a symbol not only of his mother, but of death. Oliver loves mothers and death.”

  “Ah, but Aspera,” I reminded her pleasantly, “—death itself is only a symbol.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling (for once again I had walked into one of her traps). “Of our lives here.”

  Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2085

  I have begun to work on the novel. Aspera suggested the title, and we are all in it.

  Afterword

  A year ago, in response to Harlan’s request for an afterword, I wrote something called “Why I’ve Stopped Writing Science-Fiction,” or some such. It was so awful that even then I could see it was pretty bad, so I sent Harlan only a letter explaining that I had written him an afterword, but that etc. Another afterword was forthcoming, I promised.

  Not only was the first afterword awful, but it turned out to be untrue. I have since then written some science-fiction, a little. However, the gist of it hasn’t changed—I can’t earn a living writing s-f at the standard rates for stories and novels that the field offers. I write too slowly these days.

  That was only half the truth, and that’s why it made such a poor afterword. The whole truth is that the standard story and novel that standard rates are paid for is a commodity I no longer have the stomach for. I think my most persuasive and candid argument in this respect would simply be the list of titles of all the s-f or fantasy stories I have no intention of writing. The list is about three years old, and even then I could see some of the things on the list were never going to be written, though any of them, I’m convinced, could have been published in one or another of the magazines in the field.

  The list:

  The Alien Anthology

  The Compassionator

  Among the Rednecks: a Report

  Cosmo in the Engines of Love

  from the Field

  The Cowboys

  Approximately Joe

  The Day the Curve Broke

  The Ball

  Diet of Worms

  The Exorcist in Spite of Himself

  The Orphan’s Birthday Party

  The General Theory of Electro-

  The Other Door to Dutch Street

  magnetic Tidal Waves and

  The People Eater

  Volcanoes

  The Reluctant Eavesdropper

  Ghost Story

  The Satyr

  Glad Hand

  The Servant Problem (or, The Fa-

  The Goldwater Experiment

  tal Passion of Lancelot Kramer)

  The Good Losers

  Strip Poker

  The Governor’s Temptations

  The Tarantists

  Grabenstein

  Three Square Parables

  The Hamadryad

  The Three-Masted Spaceship

  Horror and Lester McCune

  300 Pound Weakling

  An Investigation into the Activities

  The Time of the Assassin

  of My Body

  The Vicar’s List

  Joseph and the Empress

  Walt Little’s Soul

  The Little Family

  Wednesdays Off

  The Magic Square

  You Can’t Get There From Here

  Mind Donor

  (or, The Intersection)

  The Original June Bly

  WITH THE BENTFIN BOOMER BOYS ON LITTLE OLD NEW ALABAMA

  Richard A. Lupoff

  Introduction

  When preparing Dangerous Visions, I predicted that Philip José Farmer’s exciting and experimental “Riders of the Purple Wage” would cop the novella awards in the year of its eligibility. I was right, it did, but it didn’t take any special prescience on my part. The story was so outrageously different, and so controversial, it was inevitable that i
t would be the most talked-about item in the book.

  Now I predict that Richard Lupoff’s “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama” will cop the major awards next year. Again I load the gun in my favor. This story will enflame and infuriate the traditionalists; it will amaze and intimidate older, longer-established writers; it will confound and awe critics; it will become the subject of fanzine articles and bull sessions and convention panels; it will cause voices to rise, adrenaline to pump, editors to howl, imitators to scramble for their copy-riters. It will raise one hell of a noise.

  Friends, there has never been a thing like this one before, in or out of the field of sf.

  One expects some eye-openers when assembling a wild Frankincense creation like A,DV. I got them in DV and I expected some this time. Tiptree did it, and so did Anthony, and likewise Wilhelm, Vonnegut, Nelson, Bernott and Parra. But nothing like Dick Lupoff. He takes the solid gold award for Chutzpah Above and Beyond the Limits of Gall.

  “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys . . .” presents problems for foreign translators of this anthology that I see as virtually insurmountable. It defies most of the rules of storytelling that remained unbroken after Farmer’s novella. It is so audacious and extravagant a story that it becomes one of the three or four really indispensable reasons for doing this book. Frankly, had no other story than this one been written for A,DV—the book would be worth reading.

  And as you might expect, the story did not come to be a reality easily. Nor has its progression from first submission to final 36,000 word publication been easy. I’ll tell you some of the background. I understand it has already been the subject of some discussion through the sf underground.

  In 1968 I started sending out calls for submissions and Dick Lupoff queried me about this story, which he said he’d started but completion had been discouraged by not only editors, but by his own agent as well. I wrote back and said let me look at it. When it arrived, I was astounded that others had not seen in it the wonders I knew lay waiting on the unwritten pages. I wrote Dick a long letter in which I discussed what I’d like to see, and suggested he expand the concept and make it three times as long. He seemed pleased at the project and some months later I received the story in what Richard thought was a final form. There were still areas I wanted expanded—places in which entire chapters had only been hinted at. Dick and I discussed it by phone, and he was happy that the chance had been offered to do even more on the piece. We both realized that what we had on our hands was one of those rare stories that we were enjoying so much . . . we didn’t want it to end. So Dick took it back and expanded again. This was the most “editing” I did with any author in this book. As those who were along for the DV ride may remember, one promise I make the contributors to these volumes is that what they write will not be altered to suit artificial regulations of what I, as editor, might deem “the needs of the audience.” Every story in this book (and with only one minor editing presumption that was the case with DV as well) appears precisely as the author finally set it down, even to disparities in spelling (e.g., “color” in American, “colour” in British), which makes for derangement among Doubleday’s typesetters and proofreaders.