The Kyben Stories
Page 21
The old ones. Gawd, it was just swell. Just...swell.
And I was a hero. Like my Grampa Louie.
I got a citation, and a month Earthside.
They snapped me back through inverspace, and I got scrip for a thirty-day repple-depple, and I went home.
It was all I could do to face my family. I wanted to puke. They couldn't stop showing me off to the neighbors. And when the ghosters came to interview me, I just said I was too whacked to talk, and they ran all that bullshit my family put on like the Sunday tablecloth, and I just sat there and stared.
For a day and a half I didn't have the guts to go up and see Grampa Louie. But finally, when I couldn't stand it any more, I knew I had to go tell him I wasn't like him, that I'd come to hate it, and take what he had to say, and just swallow it. But I knew in my heart that I was no more a hero like him than I was an angel. So I went up.
At first he wouldn't unlock the door.
"Grampa, jeezus, I got to talk to you! I'm in Hell, Grampa!"
And he opened the door, and looked at me with his last good eye, and the bullet train scars so red and painful looking, and he was a lot older and closer to the dust than I'd ever seen him. And he was crying. He was crying for me.
And I came through and his old, thin body was around me, him hugging and whispering stuff, and I just laid my head on his shoulder and let it all go.
After a long time we sat down on the edge of his bed, and he told me to tell him all of it. So I did, with snot running down my face, and my hands making these stupid gestures in the air, me trying to grab onto something wasn't there, and Grampa Louie overflowing, too.
And when I got done, and couldn't even gasp any more, he said, "It was a long time ago, and I don't know if it was Pope Gregory XI or Innocent II, I've heard it both ways; but it was in the tenth century sometime. They invented the hand crossbow. It was so awful a weapon that the Pope, whichever one it was, he said, 'This weapon is so horrible that it will surely end all wars,' and he wouldn't let them use it. At least for a while. Then they decided that as terrible as it was, Christians couldn't use it against each other...but they could kill the lousy Mohammedans with it."
He looked at me. "You know what I'm telling you, Del?"
I said I knew perfectly, what he was telling me.
Then he told me something no one else but him in the whole galaxy knew. Something he'd wanted to take to the grave.
And I loved him more, and hated him more, and suffered with him more, and despised him more, than I had ever loved and hated and suffered with or despised anyone in my life, except myself. "What'm I gonna do, Grampa?"
So he told me what to do. What he would've done twenty years ago, but didn't have the courage to do, especially since he was a hero.
And that's what I did, you Officers and Gennulmen. I cut out during Molkey's Ash, and I kept going. Maybe before you toss me into the starfire chamber you'll confide how it was you tracked my ass down, and maybe you'll keep it to yourself. But I'll make you a deal.
You tell me how you found me, and I'll tell you what Grampa Louie told me that was a secret. Whaddaya say?
Aw, hell, c'mon. What've you got to lose?
We got a deal?
You'll keep your word? Sure, I know you will. You're Officers and Gennulmen, and we're all just grunts in the TEF, right? So, okay, here it is:
Grampa Louie just hated it when I'd drool over his model up there on the Wall. Used to drag my scrawny kid's ass away as fast as he could, not because he really gave a damn that someone might spot him and make a big who-struck-John about him being the hero of the Pleiades, but because he knew he was a fraud. He was a killer, and you're killers, and me, I was a killer, too.
He hadn't gotten those blast scars in battle. He'd gotten them from the Kyban woman he was trying to stick it up the ass of. There wasn't any sex in it. He was just horny, and he'd been out there forever, and he didn't give a shit what it would do to her, or anything. He was just the kind of guy you train us to be. Real grunts.
And she burned him. And he stomped in her head with a boot just like that boot he's wearing up there on the Wail you all admire and drool over so much. He just smashed in her head like that Kyban battle bonnet on the sculpture.
My Grampa Louie was just like me. Just like me. One of the few, the proud. The shit you made believe all that hail to us ain't we the best in the universe crap!
Get out, Del. That's what my Grampa Louie told me. Get out before they make you what I am, before they kill you and you never get a chance to say you're sorry. Because there's no way to say I'm sorry. And there's no way to get over hating yourself for being so goddam dumb that you buy into all that kill the Mohammedans bullshit. Get out, kid. Hightail it, get out, and don't stop.
So now I'm getting hoarse, and that's my tale, Sirs.
Now you gonna tell me how you tracked me?
You gonna tell me in exchange for the honor of my Grampa Louie, who put a squirtgun on that goddam Wall the week after I shipped out again, and blew a chunk out of it before the cops wasted him, not knowing he was the guy up there on the sculpture? You ready to tell me?
Well?
Whaddaya say? I'm waiting.
What...? You what!?
Why, you sonsofbitches, you no-good rotten bastards?
Right into the starfire?
You bastards!
You lied to me! You lied to me.
Night and the Enemy
There are other Telling Boxes in the detritus of the War. And perhaps one day these descendants of that surviving species will learn more of the tales from those times. But now, here, in the ruins, they know all they can know.
And now they will send their light into the transmat that will devolve them from their godlike state. And they will learn which their fathers, which their mothers . . . Kyban or Human. . .
Neither! To the last entity both races were erased. And in the five million years since the last spark of Human and Kyben intelligence was extinguished, only that creature come down to us from the Devonian seas, only that creature once mindless eating machine, only that creature capable of evolving and transcending its own nature — a feat beyond Human or Kyban — only that beast of deep seas could rise to aspirations of pure energy, pure intellect, pure godliness.
The lesson has been learned.
The Kyben Stories
Ellen Weil, Gary K. Wolfe
But other editors did have clearer notions of what science fiction was supposed to be, and while this didn't really dampen Ellison’s passion, it did help to move him in the direction of the more traditional tropes of the time. Ellison's second published story, “Life Hutch” (If, April 1956), for example, was his version of the ingenious-spaceman-solving-a-puzzle tale. Like “Glowworm,” “Life Hutch" is a one-character story describing the plight of a wounded spaceman who finds refuge in a “life hutch,” a kind of automated rescue station on a remote asteroid, only to be trapped by a faulty service robot that attempts to destroy anything that moves. After three days of terrified immobility, the spaceman realizes that by shining his flashlight beam on the electronic computer console that conceals the remote-controlled robot's brain, he can trick the robot into destroying its own command center. “Life Hutch” is a neat little science fiction puzzle story that could almost have been written by Isaac Asimov. The entrapment here is, as in much science fiction of the period, less an existential condition than a problem to test the protagonist’s ingenuity. We expect the problem to be solved, and it is, because that is the formula inherited from stories in the Campbell tradition. Like too many puzzle stories, the plot of “Life Hutch” is more than a bit contrived—it wouldn’t work unless the robot were conveniently a remote unit and unless the “brain” happened to be in the same room. But it nevertheless stumbles upon an interesting conundrum that would later occupy philosophers of mind such as Daniel Dennett and David Hawley Sanford, namely, is the “robot” located in the brain or in its remote-controlled body? Ellison's first compu
ter story, like most of his later ones, show almost no real understanding of how computers work (though computers in general were still rare in science fiction in1956), but suggests an intuitive knowledge of the issues that their presence raises—and perhaps more important, introduces a theme of entrapment that would later become almost endemic to Ellison's fiction, although increasingly less amenable to such easy fixes.
More significant in terms of Ellison‘s attempts to conform to science fiction conventions is the fact that “Life Hutch” is the first of what would come to be a series of “Kyben war" stories, about an ongoing intergalactic war between humans and a dimly understood race of aliens called the “Kyben." Ellison's only series of linked stories, the Kyben sequence is of interest more for what it reveals about Ellison’s attempts to write “normal” science fiction than for consistency, or even coherence, of theme. The stories, Ellison later wrote, "are not, in truth, linked by anything except the background of The War.” “It was convenient, when I first became a professional writer, to use such a device. But it was never intended as anything more potent than a framework. An Orient Express, on which Agatha Christie could locate a murder. An intergalactic Ship of Fools against which l could examine the human stories (and alien stories) that interested me" (Night and the Enemy, endpaper). But the stories interested Ellison enough that, long after the initial sequence was published in 1956 and I957, he returned to this background in 1974 (with an undistinguished story called “Sleeping Dogs") and again in I987, when he provided an overall framework for the series in a “graphic novel" adaptation of several of the stories entitled Night and the Enemy. The most recent Kyben story, “The Few, the Proud," appeared in his I997 collection Slippage.
For a writer working in a highly competitive market, the series story has always been a means of developing reader loyalty, continuing sales, and a kind of brand-name identity. For the writer of science fiction short stories, it has been a kind of godsend, obviating the work of establishing a background milieu for each new tale, thus freeing up precious wordage for development of plot, character, or theme. Ellison was well aware of the reputations that authors such as lsaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury had developed through series of linked stories, and the idea of an ongoing galactic war with an alien race must have seemed particularly well suited for Ellison’s emerging characteristic themes of violence and betrayal. It was also a theme particularly appropriate for a 1950's audience already steeped in cold war propaganda about a mysterious and powerful enemy with brutal imperialistic goals. But for some reason—most likely Ellison's own profound lack of interest in the idea of a continuing series—the Kyben stories never came together as anything more than a group of essentially unrelated stories with little in common other than the use of the name Kyben and the occasional description of the aliens as golden-skinned and tentacle-fingered. Only two stories actually devoted much attention to the war itself, and one of these, “Trojan Hearse" (Infinity, August I956), is little more than a trick-ending short-short story. “Run for the Stars” (Science Fiction Adventures, June I957) is thus the only real Kyben story to imply a larger scenario of ongoing galactic war. One of the longest stories Ellison had published, “Run for the Stars" has also proved to be one of Ellison’s favorites from among his early stories. It was the lead story in his first science fiction collection, A Touch of Infinity (1960), was reprinted again in his 1969 collection The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, was the lead story again in Night and the Enemy, and was reprinted as part of a Tor SF Double in 1991.
Like many of these early stories, “Run for the Stars"—described by Russell Letson when it was reissued in 1991 as "a violent, head-bashing, alien-zapping tale cast in an overwrought, neo-tough guy mode" (50)—is remarkable only when viewed in the context of the science fiction of the time. Again, the competent hero is replaced by a coward and a victim, and in fact none of the story’s characters are in the least sympathetic. ln the sixteenth year of the war with the Kyben, Benno Tallent, a dope addict and petty criminal on an outpost planet called Deald's World, is busy looting a food store when he is captured by retreating Earth forces, who decide to use him as a human time bomb to delay the Kyben conquest of the planet, thus giving them time to warn the Earth. They surgically implant a “sun bomb" in his abdomen and warn the advancing Kyben of his presence on the planet, hoping that the delay caused by the Kyben searching for him will give them the time they need. But Tallent proves more resourceful than they had expected. He survives several battles with the Kyben, losing a hand in the process, and then captures a Kyben doctor and forces him toremove the bomb and graft it onto his stump, where he can detonate it at will. He then takes over the Kyben fleet to create a renegade army of his own, with Earth as its first target.
The idea of a dope addict and looter as hero was unusual enough in the pages of Science Fiction Adventures, but the revenge motif—which would quickly become an Ellison trademark—effectively turned what might have been a conventional alien war story on its head. Tallent is dehumanized—literally turned into a bomb—not by a cruel enemy but by the even more cruel military establishment of his own people. His need for revenge motivates him not only to overcome his addiction to “dream-dust” but to become a skilled guerrilla fighter and finally a godlike leader with absolute power of life and death over his followers. Far from becoming the unlikely hero who saves Earth from its enemies, he becomes Earth's worst enemy himself. We never learn what becomes of Tallent’s plans for revenge, but we get a bracing lesson in the power of the victim who becomes the victimizer.
The effects of victimization are also the theme of another Kyben story, “The Untouchable Adolescents” (Super Science Fiction, February 1957), but here the motivating response is not revenge but distrust. The adolescents of the title are an immature race of telepaths whose planet is about to be nearly destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions. Scientists on board an orbiting Earth ship have discovered this and try to warn the inhabitants, who have become fearful of outsiders because of an earlier invasion by the Kyben. They reject offers of help and are unable to reestablish contact with the Earthmen when the destruction begins. Again, the topic is the effects of betrayal on the betrayed; again, the expected science fiction set-up of a world-saving scenario is reversed as the would-be rescuers are unable to win the trust of the natives and later unable to hear their telepathic cries for help.
But by far the most interesting of the Kyben stories takes place on the planet Kyba itself and has very little to do with the war against Earth. “The Crackpots" (If, June l956) depicts a society of lunatics, descendants of those “unfit” individuals left behind eleven centuries earlier when the Kyben abandoned their home planet to set about conquering the galaxy. The main character, Themis, is a “Watcher,” a low-level bureaucrat assigned to monitor and report on the odd behavior of Kyba’s inhabitants, who regard the “normal” Kyben as “Stuffed-Shirts.” Themis witnesses a series of bizarre and apparently pointless acts: A beggar demands a handout, then refuses the coin Themis offers and demands a lesser coin in Themis’s pocket. An old woman rips out a sewer pipe that seems to have clear water running in one direction and sewage in the other. Another woman paints over the numbers written on the wall of a phone booth, only to write new numbers over the fresh paint. Invited by a young woman to a mysterious place called the Cave, Themis there meets the leaders of this lunatic society and learns that, in fact, the crackpots represent the intellectual and creative elite of Kyben society, that they had, in fact, expelled the bureaucrats rather than been abandoned centuries earlier, and that all the apparent random acts are coded messages of new discoveries and inventions, deliberately staged so that Watchers will report on them and analysts later interpret them. The story clearly looks forward to Ellison's more famous “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (I965) in its view of social outsiders and oddballs as the creative force in an otherwise regimented conformist society—a view that must have set well with the young science fiction fans
who read it at the time.
Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever
Ellen Weil, Gary K. Wolfe
Ohio State University Press: December 2001
First Appearances
*Life Hutch
Worlds of If, Apr, 1956
The Crackpots
Worlds of If, Jun, 1956
*Trojan Hearse
Infinity Science Fiction, Aug, 1956
*The Untouchable Adolescents
Super Science Fiction, Feb, 1957
Deeper Than the Darkness
Infinity Science Fiction, Apr, 1957
*Run For the Stars
Science Fiction Adventures, Jun, 1957
The Human Operators (w. Van Vogt)
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan, 1971
*Sleeping Dogs
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Oct, 1974
The Few, the Proud
Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, Mar, 1989
Demon With a Glass Hand
Graphic novel (illust. - Marshall Rogers), Jan, 1986
Night and the Enemy
Graphic novel (illust. - Ken Steacy) Nov, 1987
Includes these stories * plus
Whispers from the Telling Box
Night and the Enemy
Demon With a Glass Hand
Outer Limits - Oct, 1964
The Human Operators
Outer Limits - Mar, 1999
Cutter's World