OTHER ANTHOLOGIES BY TERRY CARR
The Best Science Fiction of the Year New Worlds of Fantasy New Worlds of Fantasy #2
New Worlds of Fantasy #3
On Our Way to the Future The Others
Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction This Side of Infinity Universe 1
Universe 2
WITH DONALD A. WOLLHEIM
World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965-1971 (7 volumes)
A N
EXALTATION OF STARS
Transcendental Adventures in Science Fiction
COMPILED AND EDITED BY
TERRY CARR
SIMON AND SCHUSTER • NEW YORK
Copyright © 1973 by Terry Carr
The Feast of St. Dionysus copyright © 1973 by Robert Silverberg
’Kjwalll’kje’k’koothaïlll’kje’k copyright © 1973 by Roger Zelazny
My Brother Leopold copyright © 1973 by Edgar Pangborn
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form Published by Simon and Schuster Rockefeller Center, 630 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10020
First printing
SBN 671-21469-1
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-89253
Designed by Edith Fowler Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
INTRODUCTION - Terry Carr
THE FEAST OF ST. DIONYSUS - Robert Silverberg
‘KJWALLL’KJE’K’KOOTHAÏLLL’KJE’K - Roger Zelazny
MY BROTHER LEOPOLD - Edgar Pangborn
INTRODUCTION
Science fiction is a literature of rationality. In its “pure” form, in stories based solidly on logical extrapolation of known scientific principles, it is the most rigorously rational form of literature we’ve ever had.
Yet, seemingly paradoxically, science fiction has always been fascinated by the irrational, the numinous and transcendental. I suppose this is because science fiction likes to ask large questions: not simply How? but Why? And what are the implications? So we’ve had novels such as James Blish’s A Case of Conscience, Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. Even so purely a “hard-science-fiction” writer as Arthur C. Clarke has long been fascinated by the possibilities of transcendental experience…readers of his early novel Childhood’s End could not have been too surprised that 2001 ended as it did.
Science fiction concerns itself, ultimately, with cosmology. Explicitly or implicitly, the questions at the core of most serious SF stories have to do with the nature of our entire reality, the reaches of the universe…and what this means for mankind. Origins are as important to the scientific mind as to the religious one, though for different reasons: the religious man’s interest in the beginning is really a question about the end: what is our Purpose, why are we here? whereas the rationalist asks about beginnings because he wants to learn about his possibilities—he searches for his limits, the limits of his universe, and hopes to find none.
For this book I asked three of SF’s most thoughtful writers to effect a blending of the science-fiction genre with questions of transcendental experience. Each responded with a story outside the everyday mode of science fiction, yet each story in its own way remains true to SF’s greater traditions. Aside from the additional creative spark that seems to have gone into these stories, you may find as I did that the methods by which these three authors reconciled and joined the rational and the irrational are impressive and rewarding.
Robert Silverberg, in The Feast of St. Dionysus, tells of an astronaut returned alone and guilt-ridden from Mars, his mates dead on that other world; and with careful delineation of thought and emotion Silverberg shows us one man’s way out of his own dark night toward a Light.
Roger Zelazny’s novella considers the forms spiritual ecstasy might take not only for a man, but for an entirely different form of life. His conclusions are thought-provoking, and all the more so for being embodied in a story of such a pragmatic thing as murder.
Edgar Pangborn returns us to human religion in My Brother Leopold, but he addresses not the transcendental experience alone, but its effects and implications. Here, in a future postholocaust North America whose civilization is only now rebuilding itself out of dark ages, wc meet a man who has felt the Presence, and we sec the results of his attempt to relate a higher knowledge to earthly reality.
Three very different approaches, and three sharply contrasting stories. But you may find it most rewarding to consider the similarities that run through them: these stories aren’t about the gathering of mere data, but rather of experience; they offer not pat answers, but well-formulated questions. And their focus is always, as it should be, on human beings: what might religion come to mean to us under new circumstances?
The questions are rational* the experiences aren’t. Isn’t that how it happens in life?
Terry Carr Oakland, California
THE FEAST OF ST. DIONYSUS
Robert Silverberg
Sleepers, awake. Sleep is separateness; the cave of solitude is the cave of dreams, the cave of the passive spectator. To be awake is to participate, carnally and not in fantasy, in the feast; the great communion.
—Norman O. Brown: Love’s Body
This is the dawn of the day of the Feast. Oxenshuer knows roughly what to expect, for he has spied on the children at their catechisms, he has had hints from some of the adults, he has spoken at length with the high priest of this strange apocalyptic city; and yet, for all his patiently gathered knowledge, he really knows nothing at all of today’s event. What will happen? They will come for him: Matt, who has been appointed his brother, and Will and Nick, who are his sponsors. They will lead him through the labyrinth to the place of the saint, to the god-house at the city’s core. They will give him wine until he is glutted, until his cheeks and chin drip with it and his robe is stained with red. And he and Matt will struggle, will have a contest of some sort, a wrestling match, an agon: whether real or symbolic, he does not yet know. Before the whole community they will contend. What else, what else? There will be hymns to the saint, to the god—god and saint, both are one, Dionysus and Jesus, each an aspect of the other. Each a manifestation of the divinity we carry within us, so the Speaker has said. Jesus and Dionysus, Dionysus and Jesus, god and saint, saint and god, what do the terms matter? He has heard the people singing:
This is the god who burns like fire
This is the god whose name is music
This is the god whose soul is wine
Fire. Music. Wine. The healing fire, the joining fire, in which all things will be made one. By its leaping blaze he will drink and drink and drink, dance and dance and dance. Maybe there will be some sort of sexual event—an orgy perhaps, for sex and religion are closely bound among these people: a communion of the flesh opening the way toward communality of spirit.
I go to the god’s house and his fire consumes me
I cry the god’s name and his thunder deafens me
I take the god’s cup and his wine dissolves me
And then? And then? How can he possibly know what will happen, until it has happened? “You will enter into the ocean of Christ,” they have told him. An ocean? Here in the Mojave Desert? Well, a figurative ocean, a metaphorical ocean. All is metaphor here. “Dionysus will carry you to Jesus,” they say. Go, child, swim out to God. Jesus waits. The saint, the mad saint, the boozy old god who is their saint, the mad saintly god who abolishes walls and makes all things one, will lead you to bliss, dear John, dear tired John. Give your soul gladly to Dionysus the Saint. Make yourself whole in his blessed fire.
You’ve been divid
ed too long. How can you lie dead on Mars and still walk alive on Earth?
Heal yourself, John. This is the day.
From Los Angeles the old San Bernardino Freeway rolls eastward through the plastic suburbs, through Alhambra and Azusa, past the Covina Hills branch of Forest Lawn Memorial Parks, past the mushroom sprawl of San Bernardino, which is becoming a little Los Angeles, but not so little. The highway pushes onward into the desert like a flat gray cincture holding the dry brown hills asunder. This was the road by which John Oxenshuer finally chose to make his escape. He had had no particular destination in mind but was seeking only a parched place, a sandy place, a place where he could be alone: he needed to recreate, in what might well be his last weeks of life, certain aspects of barren Mars. After considering a number of possibilities he fastened upon this route, attracted to it by the way the freeway seemed to lose itself in the desert north of the Salton Sea. Even in this overcivilized epoch a man could easily disappear there.
Late one November afternoon, two weeks past his fortieth birthday, he closed his rented apartment on Hollywood Boulevard. Taking leave of no one, he drove unhurriedly toward the freeway entrance. There he surrendered control to the electronic highway net, which seized his car and pulled it into the traffic flow. The net governed him as far as Covina; when he saw Forest Lawn’s statuary-speckled hilltop coming up on his right, he readied himself to resume driving. A mile beyond the vast cemetery a blinking sign told him he was on his own, and he took the wheel. The car continued to slice inland at the same mechanical velocity of 140 kilometers per hour. With each moment the recent past dropped from him, bit by bit.
Can you drown in the desert? Let’s give it a try, God. I’ll make a bargain with You. You let me drown out there. All right? And I’ll give myself to You. Let me sink into the sand, let me bathe in it, let it wash Mars out of my soul, let it drown me, God, let it drown me. Free me from Mars and I’m yours, God. Is it a deal? Drown me in the desert and I’ll surrender at last. I’ll surrender.
At twilight he was in Banning. Some gesture of farewell to civilization seemed suddenly appropriate, and he risked stopping to have dinner at a small Mexican restaurant. It was crowded with families enjoying a night out, which made Oxenshuer fear he would be recognized. Look, someone would cry, there’s the Mars astronaut, there’s the one who came back! But of course no one spotted him. He had grown a bushy, sandy moustache that nearly obliterated his thin, tense lips. His body, lean and wide-shouldered, no longer had an astronaut’s springy erectness; in the nineteen months since his return from the red planet he had begun to stoop a little, to cultivate a roundedness of the upper back, as if some leaden weight beneath his breastbone were tugging him forward and downward. Besides, spacemen are quickly forgotten. How long had anyone remembered the names of the heroic lunar teams of his youth? Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. Scott, Irwin, and Worden. Each of them had had a few gaudy weeks of fame, and then they had disappeared into the blurred pages of the almanac—all, perhaps, except Armstrong; children learned about him at school. His one small step: he would become a figure of myth, up there with Columbus and Magellan. But the others? Forgotten. Yes. Yesterday’s heroes. Oxenshuer, Richardson, and Vogel. Who? Oxenshuer, Richardson, and Vogel. That’s Oxenshuer right over there, eating tamales and enchiladas, drinking a bottle of Double—X. He’s the one who came back. Had some sort of breakdown and left his wife. Yes. That’s a funny name, Oxenshuer. Yes. He’s the one who came back. What about the other two? They died. Where did they die, Daddy? They died on Mars, but Oxenshuer came back. What were their names again? Richardson and Vogel. They died. Oh. On Mars. Oh. And Oxenshuer didn’t. What were their names again?
Unrecognized, safely forgotten, Oxenshuer finished his meal and returned to the freeway. Night had come by this time. The moon was nearly full; the mountains, clearly outlined against the darkness, glistened with a coppery sheen. There is no moonlight on Mars except the feeble, hasty glow of Phobos, dancing in and out of eclipse on its nervous journey from west to east. He had found Phobos disturbing; nor had he cared for fluttery Deimos, starlike, a tiny rocketing point of light. Oxenshuer drove onward, leaving the zone of urban sprawl behind, entering the true desert, pockmarked here and there by resort towns: Palm Springs, Twentynine Palms, Desert Hot Springs. Beckoning billboards summoned him to the torpid pleasures of whirlpool baths and saunas. These temptations he ignored without difficulty. Dryness was what he sought.
Once he was east of Indio he began looking for a place to abandon the car; but he was still too close to the southern boundaries of Joshua Tree National Monument, and he did not want to make camp this near to any area that might be patrolled by park rangers. So he kept driving until the moon was high and he was deep into the Chuckwalla country, with nothing much except sand dunes and mountains and dry lakebeds between him and the Arizona border. In a stretch where the land seemed relatively flat he slowed the car almost to an idle, killed his lights, and swerved gently off the road, following a vague northeasterly course; he gripped the wheel tightly as he jounced over the rough, crunchy terrain. Half a kilometer from the highway Oxenshuer came to a shallow sloping basin, the dry bed of some ancient lake. He eased down into it until he could no longer see the long yellow tracks of headlights on the road, and knew he must be below the line of sight of any passing vehicle. After turning off the engine, he locked the car—a strange prissiness here, in the midst of nowhere!—took his backpack from the trunk, slipped his arms through the shoulder straps, and, without looking back, began to walk into the emptiness that lay to the north.
As he walked he composed a letter he would never send. Dear Claire, I wish I had been able to say goodbye to you before I left Los Angeles. I regretted only that: leaving town without telling you. But I was afraid to call. I draw back from you. You say you hold no grudge against me over Dave’s death, you say it couldn’t possibly have been my fault, and of course you’re right. And yet I don’t dare face you, Claire. Why is that? Because I left your husband’s body on Mars and the guilt of that is choking me? But a body is only a shell, Claire. Dave’s body isn’t Dave, and there wasn’t anything I could do for Dave. What is it, then, that comes between us? Is it my love, Claire, my guilty love for my friend’s widow? Eh? That love is salt in my wounds, that love is sand in my throat, Claire. Claire. Claire. I can never tell you any of this, Claire. I never will. Goodbye. Pray for me. Will you pray?
His years of grueling NASA training for Mars served him well now. Powered by ancient disciplines, he moved swiftly, feeling no strain even with forty-five pounds on his back. He had no trouble with the uneven footing. The sharp chill in the air did not bother him, though he wore only light clothing-slacks and shirt and a flimsy cotton vest. The solitude, far from oppressing him, was actually a source of energy: a couple of hundred kilometers away in Los Angeles it might be the ninth decade of the twentieth century, but this was a prehistoric realm, timeless, unscarred by man, and his spirit expanded in his self-imposed isolation. Conceivably every footprint he made was the first human touch this land had felt. That gray, pervasive sense of guilt, heavy on him since his return from Mars, held less weight for him here beyond civilization’s edge.
This wasteland was the closest he could come to attaining Mars on Earth. Not really close enough, for too many things broke the illusion: the great gleaming scarred moon, and the succulent terrestrial vegetation, and the tug of Earth’s gravity, and the faint white glow on the leftward horizon that he imagined emanated from the cities of the coastal strip. But it was as close to Mars in flavor as he could manage. The Peruvian desert would have been better, only he had no way of getting to Peru.
An approximation. It would suffice.
A trek of at least a dozen kilometers left him still unfatigued, but he decided, shortly after midnight, to settle down for the night. The site he chose was a small level quadrangle bounded on the north and south by spiky, ominous cacti—chollas and prickly pears—and on the cast by a maze
of scrubby mesquite; to the west, a broad alluvial fan of tumbled pebbles descended from the nearby hills. Moonlight, raking the area sharply, highlighted every contrast of contour: the shadows of cacti were unfathomable inky pits and the tracks of small animals—lizards and kangaroo rats—were steep-walled canyons in the sand. As he slung his pack to the ground two startled rats, browsing in the mesquite, noticed him belatedly and leaped for cover in wild, desperate bounds, frantic but delicate. Oxenshuer smiled at them.
On the twentieth day of the mission Richardson and Vogel went out, as planned, for the longest extravehicular on the schedule, the ninety-kilometer crawler jaunt to the Gulliver site. “Goddamned well about time,” Dave Vogel had muttered when the EVA okay had at last come floating up, time-lagged and crackly, out of far-off Mission Control. All during the eight-month journey from Earth, while the brick-red face of Mars was swelling patiently in their portholes, they had argued about the timing of the big Marswalk—pursuing an argument that had begun six months before launch date. Vogel, insisting that the expedition was the mission’s most important scientific project, had wanted to do it first, to get it done and out of the way before mishaps might befall them and force them to scrub it. No matter that the timetable decreed it for Day 20. The timetable was too conservative. “We can overrule Mission Control,” Vogel said. “If they don’t like it, let them reprimand us when we get home.” Bud Richardson, though, wouldn’t go along. “Houston knows best,” he kept saying. He always took the side of authority. “First we have to get used to working on Mars, Dave. First we ought to do the routine stuff close by the landing site, while we’re getting acclimated. What’s our hurry? We’ve got to stay here a month until the return window opens, anyway. Why breach the schedule? The scientists know what they’re doing, and they want us to do everything in its proper order,” Richardson said. Vogel, stubborn, eager, seething, thought he would find an ally in Oxenshuer. “You vote with me, John. Don’t tell me you give a crap about Mission Control! Two against one and Bud will have to give in.” But Oxenshuer, oddly, took Richardson’s side. He hesitated to deviate from the schedule. He wouldn’t be making the long extravehicular himself in any case; he had drawn the short straw, he was the man who’d be keeping close to the ship all the time. How then could he vote to alter the carefully designed schedule and send Richardson off, against his will, on a risky and perhaps ill-timed adventure? “No,” Oxenshuer said. “Sorry, Dave, it isn’t my place to decide such things.” Vogel appealed anyway to Mission Control, and Mission Control said, “Wait till Day 20, fellows.” On Day 20 Richardson and Vogel suited up and went out. It was the ninth EVA of the mission, but the first that would take anyone more than a couple of kilometers from the ship.
An Exaltation of Stars (1973) Anthology Page 1
