by Anthology
Lasten twisted the dial, heard its faint scraping clearly in the suddenly silent vault. Turn, turn, and seasons flowed by, more and more time was marked off. Years, years. He kept turning the dial, waiting for the time-lock to release. (Maybe he was turning it the wrong direction? But no; it wouldn’t turn at all the other way.)
All around him he tasted fear. He stood in semidarkness as the torch-bearers edged away; shadows sprang up to claim more of the vault. Even Sooleyrah and Kreech had moved away, toward the door.
Then the floor of the vault began to rise.
There was a section of the flooring, twice as long as the height of a man and half as wide, that was separate from the rest; Lasten had searched for and found the edges of that section when he’d been on hands and knees earlier. Now the section was rising out of the floor, accompanied by a low subterranean hum of machinery. It was a block of heavy plastoid, and as Lasten and the others stared in wonder and terror it raised itself steadily to a height almost up to their shoulders.
It was a compartment, transparent-sided; inside it lay the body of an Immortal—or a demon, a god, a monster. He was huge, twice the size of Lasten or Sooleyrah or any of the rest of them; they could see that even while he was lying down, in the moving shadows of torchlight.
The mechanisms of the compartment were whirring to life; Lasten saw the top of the case lifting off, smelled stale air as it was released from the case, saw a needle-thin marker on the side of the compartment leap to the end of its dial, and at the same time the giant’s body convulsed, back arching, muscles quivering. It settled back, but again the dial-marker leaped, and the huge body with it.
This time there came a moan, low and weak, and the monster’s head rolled onto its side. Its mouth was open, slack; the eyes fluttered; the hands shook and moved.
Needles and tubes withdrew from the body, sinking back into their seats within the case. The dials settled to rest.
The Immortal’s eyes opened and stared emptily at them.
Hell hell hell hell hell big monstrous inhuman devil hell hell kill us all kill us no no!
The eyes opened wider, and the creature moaned again, louder now. It was a deep growl, half-choked, and it echoed from the walls.
Hate us hate us all kill us kill me me me me no!
And the giant tried to sit up.
Its hands scratched at the sides of the case, lacking coordination, lacking strength. The creature grunted and fell back; it breathed in pain-wracked gobbets of air, making harsh gasping sounds deep in its throat.
Kreech screamed. He threw himself at the men standing frozen in the doorway and fought his way through them, still screaming. He sent others reeling backward as he burst through, and several followed him, adding their screams to his. Sooleyrah yelled after him, started to run too but hesitated.
Lasten stood rooted in fright, his whole being filled with terror, both from himself and from the flood of panic in the minds around him. Red, bursting fear, splashing white-hot into his stomach, his chest . . .
Kill me kill me kill me me me me kill—
The giant sat up, and it was monstrous. Twice the height of a man, it swayed and moaned above them in the dark vault. Its fingers scrabbled spasmodically; it slipped back onto one elbow; its eyes rolled as it stared down at them. And it spoke.
“God . . . oh God . . . what are you? What are you?”
A weak, thin voice. Frightened.
“Help me . . . please, help—”
Suddenly it tumbled over, falling off the side of its mount, headfirst onto the floor at Lasten’s feet. It crashed heavily and noisily, sending Lasten staggering back in fright. The monster writhed there on the floor, hands clutching air, legs jerking, spittle falling from its mouth. And then it slumped, and sobbed weakly, hopelessly. “Oh God, please . . .”
Kill me kill me me me kill kill and Lasten suddenly had a large stone in his hands and he ran forward and brought it down with all his strength on the monster’s face. It smashed in one eye, a side of the head, and thin red blood spurted. The giant thrashed about wildly, arms flung up and feet kicking spasmodically, and faint little sobs came from its gaping mouth. Lasten hit it again, and again, and again, and he was screaming now, screaming to drown out the cries of the monster, and he hit it again, and again, and harder . . .
And at last there were only his own screams in the vault. The monster, the Immortal, the inhuman giant lay silent and destroyed at his feet. Sooleyrah and the rest had fled. Lasten choked off his cries and dropped the slippery red stone. He fell against the case, hardly noticing the blood that covered his legs and hands.
I’m alive I’m alive, alive . . . I’m alive . . .
It was more than an hour later when Sooleyrah and Kreech crept back up to the vault. There had been silence for all that time, and the monster had not come out after them.
Kreech carried a torch; he thrust it before him through the doorway. He saw the demon-monster, and he recoiled; but then he realized that it lay completely still and there was blood all around its smashed head.
Sooleyrah pushed past him and entered the vault. He saw Lasten standing beside the monster’s case, a dark stone in his hands. Lasten brought the stone down once, twice, and the molding broke; pieces showered to his blood-caked feet. He reached into the recesses of the case, yanked, and brought forth a handful of wires, red, yellow, blue, green.
He looked up and saw Sooleyrah, and smiled.
And giggled.
And said, “Come on, Sooleyrah. Come on, little dancer leader. No demon left to hurt you now, oh no, no demon, no monster. Devil scared you? But I killed him—me. Don’t be scared, dancer, don’t be scared; come inside. Plenty of stuff here, oh plenty. And in other vaults too.”
He held up the fistful of many-colored wires.
“Pretty?”
Afterword
I’m strictly a spare-time writer these days, and not at all a prolific one; I write a couple of short stories a year, that’s all. Not much of an output, but it does give me one advantage: before I actually sit down to write a story, I’ve usually been mulling it over in my head for months or sometimes years, with the result that my original story idea may have been carried much further out than I’d expected, and a lot of undertones may have crept into the story.
“Ozymandias” happened like that. Originally it was just a notion that came when I’d been reading about cryogenics: Where would they store all the bodies? Maintenance would be prohibitive over the long haul, unless it were automated. And if it were automated, then you’d have a self-contained unit, a modern tomb sufficient unto itself, a scientific version of the elaborate tombs of ancient Egypt.
Well, why not? Those Egyptian tombs were designed to insure the immortality of pharaohs, nobles and anyone else with enough money and power; today the criteria are the same, and so is the purpose. So . . . put a bunch of cryogenics tombs together and you’ve got a new Valley of the Kings.
It was an eerie image, and I carried it around in the back of my head for several months. Then an apparently different story idea came to me: Cryogenics is, in a sense, a method of time travel, so mightn’t it one day come to be used specifically for that purpose? Rich men and women shut themselves in their tombs and set the mechanism to awaken them in time for, say, the turn of the millennium, or a century later, and another century, traveling forward in these time-leaps.
But if the future of the world should turn out to be as grim as some trends are warning us, then those cryogenic time-tombs could be used not just to travel forward but to escape from something—armageddon, maybe. For the rich, even an atomic war might be just something else to sleep through.
And there I had another analogy to the tomb: a retreat designed to carry a person through death for a reawakening on the other side. And I was back again in the Valley of the Kings, for now it was even reasonable to assume that these people might store in their tombs quantities of tools, weapons, power sources, food . . . whatever they felt they might need on the oth
er side of the catastrophe. Like the pharaohs, who stored food, possessions and wealth for use in the afterlife.
For the pharaohs this inevitably meant that their tombs would be violated by tomb-robbers, because it’s the way of the world that those who need will take from those who have, if they can. And after an atomic war, anyone left alive would probably be very desperately in need, so those cryogenic tombs would become natural prey for robbers, or scavengers.
That was the background I had in mind when I began to put the actual story together; the rest is elaboration in terms of story, character, imagery and even symbolism. The symbolism, frankly, just happened as the story took form; it was an unconscious thing on my part, and I was surprised when I read over the final manuscript to see how many details had a little touch of extra referents . . . nothing major, nothing crucial to the story, but they’re there if you have that turn of mind.
I’d almost finished the story before I realized that it should be titled “Ozymandias.” This story is a comment on modern achievements in much the same way that Shelley’s poem was a refutation of the vainglorious boasts of pharaohs: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
This time a new Ozymandias awakes to look on his own works, but the reaction is the same.
THE MILK OF PARADISE
James Tiptree, Jr.
Introduction
This is the last introduction in the book. I have been at it, more off than on, for three months. It looks to be about 60,000 words of copy. That’s a novel. For those of you who hate my introductions, you’ll have decided to forego them all to this point, and you’ll have no carp because you’re paying for about 250,000 words of stories and the extra sixty grand of words is thrown in as a bonus. But for those of you who like to sense the people behind the fictions, I hope it has been as stimulating and pleasant an experience for you as it has for me. But in no way as exhausting.
Keep watch, there’ll be a final volume in this trilogy, as I’ve noted elsewhere herein. It’ll be titled The Last Dangerous Visions and the name is intended to be taken literally.
But for now, the best has been saved for the last.
In an earlier introduction I made sport of the concept of holding an anthology’s strongest entry for the closeout spot. I did it in that introduction for the humorous effect. (What’s that? Well, you’re not so hot, yourself, smartass.) In Dangerous Visions I knew my best pick was Samuel R. Delany’s award-winning “. . . Aye, and Gomorrah.” When I bought it, Chip Delany hadn’t published many short stories, though his novels were already coming to prominence. So it wasn’t an award-winner then. But it was quite clearly the eye-opener of the book—though Phil Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” was so close there wasn’t air between them. It just howled award-winner. And so it was.
I kept hoping, as I assembled A,DV, for another smasher like the Delany, for the rideout position here. For many months good stories came in, some even breath-catchers—the Lupoff, the Vonnegut, the Filer, others—but not one that propelled itself, shoving aside all other contenders, into this slot. Then James Tiptree’s story came to my desk.
I had been reading Tiptree for some time. He’s a fairly recent addition to the corps of sf writers, and he hadn’t had all that much published—not even a novel as of this writing—but what I’d seen had impressed me considerably, and so I wrote asking for a submission.
In came “The Milk of Paradise.”
I simply could not believe I had been given the chance to buy a story that stunning. That kind of thing always winds up in some other guy’s hands, and he becomes known as the editor who published such-and-such by so-and-so. But here it was, and it was mine, all mine, and without a glance at any of the other stories it went past go, collected all the marbles, avoided jail, and nestled here in signoff country. It was the big winner, the grand finale, the “Saints Go Marching In” with all horns blaring and emotional and intellectual pinwheels and luck had held. As I predicted earlier in this collection that Lupoff’s novella would cop the mid-length awards, so I now stake what little rep I have left that this Tiptree story will cop the short story awards. And the sf world at large will realize what those who’ve read this story in manuscript and galley have come to realize: we have a new Giant in the genre.
Tiptree is the man to beat this year.
Wilhelm is the woman to beat, but Tiptree is the man.
All of this ferocity of flack is offered not merely because I am so high on this story, but because it is the favored spot, as said, and because, ironically, James Tiptree refuses to provide any personal data on himself.
That he lives in the state of Virginia and does a good deal of traveling (for a purpose I don’t know) is all I have on him.
His reasons for remaining private seem to me deeply and sincerely motivated, so I won’t defy them. But as a mark of a writer who may not even suspect how good he is—and for that reason may be that good—here is an excerpt from the letter that accompanied return of the signed contracts for this marvelous, memorable, goodbye-to-A,DV story. Here is Tiptree:
“. . . You have given me to think about the value, to an editor, of an author with no personal data, no desire to be quotes ‘showcased,’ and every intention of impersonating a Döppler shift if threatened with anything like awards. And who kicks over displays with his name on the cover. It had never, you see, occurred to me that such would happen. I had planned on several years of quietly collecting rejection slips. And then came Fred Pohl who understood and never made a fuss. Now he has gone and probes are coming in all around the horizon and for reasons which I trust are quite unclear they cannot get answered. What to do? A pseudonym and a P.O. box and start over?”
The Milk of Paradise
She was flowing hot and naked and she straddled his belly in the cuddle-cube and fed him her hard little tits. And he convulsed up under her and then was headlong on the waster, vomiting.
“Timor! Timor!”
It was not his name.
“Sorry.” He retched up more U4. “I warned you, Seoul.”
She sat up where he’d thrown her, purely astonished.
“You mean you don’t want me? But everyone in this station—”
“I’m sorry. I did warn you.” He began to struggle into his gray singlet, long-sleeved, puffed at elbows. “It’s no good. It’s never any good.”
“But you’re Human, Timor. Like me. Aren’t you glad you were rescued?”
“Human.” He spat in the waster. “That’s all you can think of.”
She gasped. He was pulling on long gray tights, pleated at knee and ankle.
“What did they do to you, Timor?” She rocked on her bottom. “How did they love you I can’t?” she wailed.
“It’s what they were, Seoul,” he said patiently, arranging his dove-gray cuffs.
“Did they look like that? All gray and shiny? Is that why you wear—”
He turned on her, chunky gray-covered boy, hot eyes in a still face.
“I wear these to conceal my hideous Human body,” he said tightly. “So I won’t make myself sick. Compared to them I was a—a Crot. So are you.”
“Oh-h-h-h—”
His face softened.
“If you could have seen them, Seoul. Tall as smoke, and they were always in music, with . . . something you can’t imagine. We haven’t—” He stopped tugging at his gray gloves, shuddered. “Fairer than all the children of men,” he said painfully.
She hugged herself, eyes narrowed.
“But they’re dead, Timor. Dead! You told me.”
He went rigid, turned away from her with his hand on his gray slipper.
“How could there be better than Humans?” she persisted. “Everyone knows there’s only Humans and Crots. I don’t think it’s your crotty Paradise at all, I think—”
He wrenched at the privacy lock.
“Timor, wait! Timor?”
The sound that was not his name followed him into the bright c
orridors, his feet carrying him blindly on the dry hardness. Fight to breathe evenly, to control the fist that shook him from within.
When he slowed he saw that he was in a part of this station still strange to him. But they were all alike, all like hospital and Trainworld. Parched prisms.
An aged she-Crot wheeled by, grinning vacuously, trailing skin. His stomach churned again at the red scurf. The local Crots were high-grade, equivalent to Human morons. Caricatures. Subhumans. Why let them in the stations?
A drone warned him of the air plant ahead and he veered away, passed a flasher: HUMANS ONLY. Beyond it was the playroom where he had met Seoul. He found it empty, jagged with rude games and mechanical throats. What the lords of the Galaxy called music. So jealous of their ugliness. He passed the U4 bar, grimaced, and heard water splashing.
It drew him powerfully. There had been water on Paradise . . . such water . . . he came into the station pool.
Two heads shot out of the water, tossed black hair.
“Heyo, the newboy!”
He stared at the wetness, the olive boy-flesh.
“He flows! Come on in, newboy!”
For a moment he held aloof, a gray-clad stranger. Then his body prodded and he stripped again, showed the hateful dry pink.
“Heyo, he really flows!”
The water was clear and wrong but he felt better.
“Ottowa,” one boy told him.
“Hull.” They were twins.
“Timor,” he lied, rolling, sluicing in the wet. He wanted—wanted—
Olive hands on his legs in the bubbling.
“Good?”
“In the water,” he said thickly. They laughed.
“Are you sub? Come on.”
He flushed, saw it was a joke and followed them.
The pool cube was dim and moist and it was almost good. But their flesh grew greasy-hot and presently he could not do what they wanted.
