The Tchi could not be blamed for suspecting that something was up and were even more than typically offensive in their questioning when Carlson's turn came again.
* * * *
Following the lead the others had set on his instruction, Carlson failed to produce any new work by the deadline, and therefore had to endure the savaging of a favorite old work of his, which included questions like, “Exactly how many hair follicles did Suzie have?” and, “What was Professor Clump's blood pressure at this time?”
It took everything Carlson had to sit through the interrogation, but he did, surprising his hosts by not pretending to break down.
Instead, he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You know, you're right. You're absolutely right. The human literary tradition is inferior to yours. But it's not the only one that could stand improvement.”
A murmur rippled through the gathered Tchi literati. “Specify,” Garkh said.
“I've been reading some of your great classics, like A Thousand Futilities, and Anarchy, and The Dust in the Purg-Farmer's Restroom, and while I'm astounded at their brilliance and their wealth of detail, it occurs to me that your canon lacks the fresh, cleansing spirit of innovation necessary to keep any great art form alive. I believe that the addition of allusion and implication, wielded by an expert hand, can drive a volume with as much nested detail as even the greatest Tchi novels of all time, in but a fraction of the space. Indeed, now that my eyes have been opened, I believe that I'm about to produce a work as meritorious as even your immortal Vlurkh-Bom's Nostril, and that I'm going to fill it with all the verve and emotional truth and compelling relevance that has always been so praised among our own great writers. In short, give me one week and I promise you that I will come up with something capable of doing the great names of the Tchi literary tradition proud.”
The room erupted. There were cries of “impossible!” and “one week?” and “a human?” and so on, not to mention a few scattered boos, but Carlson had expected that, and he continued to stand firm, his head held high, his chin outthrust as far as his rather flabby chin could thrust. In the human gallery at the back of the room, Everett Finn scowled, Vera Lugoff coughed into a handkerchief, and Sandra Jaagin beamed, her faith in the enterprise now so overpowering that it was enough to dispel all the dark clouds of negativity emitted by their combined patrons and tormentors.
Resisting the urge to wink may have been the single most self-sacrificial moment of Carlson's life.
Eventually, the hubbub died. Garkh emerged from a huddle with some of his colleagues, strode back to the podium, and sneered, “One week. You say that you can best our greatest literary works in one week.”
“Yes,” said Carlson. “I believe I can.”
“We do not believe it, Brian Carlson. No human novelist has the brilliance or the subtlety to pull off such an unprecedented feat. But you have dictated the terms of your own challenge. We will meet back here in one week, where you will either read a composition as remarkable as your claims, or admit the inherent inferiority of not only your own narrative traditions but also the very creative potential of your species.”
“Agreed,” Carlson said, with reckless abandon. “On the condition that you put all responsibility for that question on my shoulders. Whether I succeed or fail, you must pay my colleagues the remainder of their honoraria, release them from the remainder of their contracts, and provide their transportation back to their respective points of origin.”
Another colloquy, and Garkh returned again. “Agreed. With the understanding that by cutting off all further debate you allow the entire literary reputation of your species to rest on your own inadequate shoulders.”
Carlson could barely contain his mirth. “In that case I had better get started. Thank you for your time.” He stepped away from the podium, bowed, and strode down the center aisle, pausing at the exit so the rest of the human writers in attendance could join what had now become a mass exodus.
Everett Finn, who had maneuvered himself close to him, repeated his previous warning. “You had better be right.”
Carlson kept his smile fixed. “Oh, shut up.”
* * * *
The week that followed was an exercise in inexorably building tension, as the humans awaited the moment of truth and their hosts trumpeted the importance and the finality of the showdown to come.
Carlson didn't subject himself to much of what the Tchi media had to say about him, but he caught some of it by accident, and the big issue seemed to be just which of the culture's many superstar academics would eviscerate his work with the cruelest eloquence. The snottiest of the bunch were as famous as sports stars, their visages captured on collectable cards sold in packs along with a mucus-like gel the Tchi prized for its sweetness and chewability. The upcoming destruction of Carlson's reputation was such an eagerly-awaited occasion that it had even drawn a number of the field's all-stars out of retirement, prompting much speculation over whether the most incisive condemnations would come from masters like Khludt and Kyael, or such upstarts as Phyeyilii.
Nobody on the Tchi side seemed to think that Carlson's upcoming opus could possibly be anything but a disaster. Which was pretty much how Carlson wanted it. He didn't talk about it much with the rest of the human writers, with the exception of one conversation he had with Sandra over waffles.
It was, it followed, the last thing he wanted to talk about, since it had been years since she'd made him waffles.
But she said, “You know they're lying in wait for you, right? That they're pulling out every stop to make this humiliating?”
He had been in the act of pouring his maple syrup, a moment that had possessed significant sensual pleasure all by itself, since it had been years since he'd indulged his famous passion for maple syrup and found extreme significance in the very fact that Sandra had managed to obtain some for him, here on the Tchi homeworld. “We've talked about this, my love. The more effort they put into destroying, the further I can throw them with my own brilliant rhetorical ju-jitsu.”
“I'm just saying that you don't have to go through this just to impress me.”
His fork hovered over the treasure on his plate. “Do you really think I'm doing this just to impress you?”
She colored. “Well, aren't you? At least a little?”
Carlson put down his fork while it still remained unwaffled. “I'm crazy about you, Sandra. I'll always be crazy about you, and I'll always count driving you away as the second worst mistake I ever made, directly behind that liability clause in my second novel contract. And it's a near thing, even there. But if you think I'm doing this for you, you're wrong. I'm doing this for Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Ibsen, Chekhov, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Rowling, X'uffasch, Dawntreader, and everybody else those people have locked outside the city gates and thrown garbage at. I'm doing this because I want past those gates so the trash starts landing on the right heads for a change and because I happen to be the one who thought of a way to build a big wooden horse in the shape of a manuscript. Impressing you is just a wonderful added benefit.”
Sandra's lips moved without emitting sound. Then she found her voice and said, “Eat up. Your waffles are getting cold.”
He picked up the fork again, suppressing a helpless grin.
That was about as good as it got, until the day itself.
* * * *
On the day itself, the final confrontation was held, not in the modest seminar room of the earlier Q & A sessions, but in a vast off-campus auditorium, lit by balloons full of tumescent vapor, and filled to the very last seat with Tchi luminaries radiating waves of full-bore disapproval. The stage was furnished not only with the lectern where Carlson was expected to stand, but also two long tables, occupied by several of the venerable names Carlson had learned about from the collectable cards, their expressions already dour and puckered and suggestive of long unpleasant lives spent scraping disagreeable substances from the soles of their shoes.
Garkh absented himself from the
carnage being plotted on the dais and strode to the lectern, where he was greeted by polite applause from the two rows of gathered human writers and energetic hissing from the remainder of the great hall's population. He said, “My fellow sentients, we are gathered here today to judge the work of the human being Brian Carlson, who has claimed himself capable of redeeming the sloppy and barely intelligible prose of his species with a work that incorporates and improves upon the finest accomplishments of our own. He has refused to submit his work for prior review, saying that he can only present it in its entirety this evening. If, like me, you doubt that this can be anything but proof of his self-deluded inadequacy, you will humor his madness in coming here with a reception as warm as the one you have given me. Gentlebeings, the human being Brian Carlson.”
More applause. More hissing. Carlson strode to the podium, waited for the tumult to die down, and scanned the first row for the pair of eyes most important to him.
Sandra gave him a thumbs-up.
So did Everett Finn, who had taken the seat beside her. His poor opinion of Carlson had not changed, but he knew enough to root for his team, and had wished Carlson luck earlier that morning, with a final, begrudged, Gotta hand it to you, Brian. You sure do know how to go out in style.
Carlson smiled at both of them, communicating the absolute confidence he felt at that moment, then adopted his academic face and said, “Good evening, everybody.
“My name is Brian Carlson.
“I'm here, on this occasion, because I believe that I've completed a work that combines the vibrant narrative power of the best human fiction with the all-inclusive detail of the best Tchi work: a work that by implication captures every salient feature of an entire imaginary world, from the smallest blade of grass to the jagged peaks of its most majestic, snow-capped mountains. It is a world as richly imagined as the ones described in such pivotal Tchi works as Pebble and Sleeping Fungus and Intestinal Distress, yet as filled with drama and conflict as the greatest works on the Hom sap bookshelf: a book that has been pared down to its most essential facts, that nevertheless contains all the others as subtext and implication. I feel entirely justified in resting the reputation of all my race's finest accomplishments on this, the most important story I've ever written. It's called The Rock, and it's my supreme honor to present it to you, my colleagues, for the very first time.”
He took a deep breath, allowed the silence to build build build, and then placed the manuscript on the lectern before him.
“The Rock by Brian T. Carlson.
“The Rock," he said, again pausing, imparting all the possibilities inherent in that one sad moment of silence, “sat imbedded in mud beneath a gray, twilit sky.”
Pause pause pause.
You could hear a pin drop.
Then Carlson took a deep breath and added, “The end.”
Then he stepped away from the podium and bowed, waiting for the inevitable tidal wave of disbelief and rage.
It didn't take long. All at once, the audience exploded, humans with awestruck cheers and Tchi with helpless astonishment. One of the learned figures on the dais performed a perfect spit-take. Another reared back so violently he hit the back of his head on the backdrop. Unprepared for the suddenness of their cue, they glared at each other and at him and at the audience before getting it together enough to pelt him with incredulous questions.
“What?”
“Is that it?”
“Is that the whole thing?”
“Is this a joke?”
“Have you taken leave of your senses, man?”
“What kind of world does this take place on?”
“Is it inhabited?”
“Is there a civilization?”
“What's the average yearly rainfall?”
“Is this a big rock or a small rock?”
“How many grams does it weigh?”
“Is it igneous, sedimentary, or compound?”
“Are there ants on it?”
“How many ants?”
“What's the precise chemical breakdown of that mud?”
“How deep is it?”
“Is the water potable?”
“You haven't answered my question about the ants!”
And so on, and so forth, a veritable torrent of angry questions, pelting Carlson's bowed shoulders with all the force of a light spring rain.
Aware that his enemies thought they already saw their own victory on the horizon, when that prize was his the instant he elected to grasp it, Carlson basked in the moment, reflecting that his colleagues should have been able to do what he was about to do, as soon as they became aware of the trap they'd fallen into; certainly, storytellers had taken the same out since the first caveman told the first mammoth-hunting anecdote around the first fire, and writers had been performing the same trick at academic conferences ever since. For some, it had even been the entire basis of their careers. It should have been just as obvious for those trapped here on the Tchi homeworld. Instead, Sandra and the others had acted like writers confronted by other writers, never once considering that the true solution to their woes had always rested in taking the traditional out so favored by writers confronted by academics and critics.
And yet it was simple. By the end of this day, Garkh and the others would be competing with each other to answer the very same questions they'd just been asking of him.
Content, already victorious in his heart, he waited for the weight of all those unanswerable questions to reach critical mass.
Then he fired his ultimate weapon.
He gave the learned figures on the dais the most incredulous look he could muster and demanded, “You mean to tell me you don't know?"
Copyright © 2009 Adam Troy-Castro
* * * *
This one's for the Members of the South Florida Science Fiction Society Writer's Workshop.
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Science Fact: GEOLOGY, GEOHISTORY, AND “PSYCHOHISTORY": THE (CONTINUING) DEBATE BETWEEN UNIFORMITARIANS AND CATASTROPHISTS
by Richard A. Lovett
Nobody knows why J Harlan Bretz ("J” was his full first name) first came to the scablands of eastern Washington. It was 1922 and he and a group of University of Chicago students were heading for the glaciers of the North Cascades when for some reason they stopped early.
Whatever the impetus, it was a decision that would reshape geology and ultimately play a major role in our understanding of Mars. First, though, it would get Bretz snubbed by his profession in a debate with intriguing parallels to Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series (written more than two decades later).
Both for Bretz and Asimov, the issue was one of gradualism versus rapid change. In Foundation, the gradualists were engaged in the hypothetical science of psychohistory, which held that while individual human actions are variable, large groups of us respond predictably to social, psychological, and economic forces. But there was also a character called the Mule, a mutant with telepathic abilities that allowed him, individually, to bend the course of history.
Intellectually, Asimov appears to have sided with the gradualists, but was aware that unexpected events (the birth of the Mule) could undermine their predictions.
Bretz's gradualist colleagues (known in geology as uniformitarians) weren't as generous.
* * * *
The scablands are a region where the rich soil of Washington's wheat country is interrupted by raw gashes carved into the dark, basaltic bedrock. Bretz would later describe them as “wounds only partially healed—great wounds in the epidermis of soil with which Nature protects the underlying rock.”
These wounds baffled him. Summer after summer he returned, endlessly hiking: mapping, mapping, mapping. The more he mapped, the odder it looked. There were places where, in the words of Bretz's biographer, John Soennichsen, the hills seemed “V-ed off” at one end, as though they had once been half-eroded islands.[1] Elsewhere, valleys seemed half-formed, as though erosion had started, then
abruptly ceased.
There were also giant rock basins that looked for all the world like river-bottom potholes. “But potholes are typically a few meters across at most,” says Victor Baker of the University of Arizona. “These are a hundred meters across and maybe fifty meters deep.”
It looked like the aftermath of an immense flood. A Noah-scale flood. The type of thing his fellow geologists would instantly pooh-pooh. The type of thing nobody would believe.
* * * *
Uniformitarianism says that geological processes occur slowly, over the course of what author John McPhee once dubbed “deep time,"[2] in manners we see happening around us, day to day. Thus, the Grand Canyon wasn't dug by one catastrophic gully-washing rain: It was formed millimeter by millimeter, by millions of years of perfectly ordinary spring floods.
To the geologists of Bretz's era this principle had nearly the force of religious dogma. In part, that was an outgrowth of science-and-religion debates in which scientists didn't want to resort to miraculous-sounding cataclysms to explain what they saw. But it was more than that. Many early geologists were devout Christians. “I think that distinction has been very much overplayed,” Baker says.
Rather, he believes uniformitarianism was a reaction to the type of scientific snobbery that sees field sciences like geology as poor relations to laboratory sciences like physics and chemistry. To counter this, geologists wanted a fundamental principle on which to base their science.
“Uniformitarianism was to make the science respectable compared to physics,” Baker says. Physicists can perform lab experiments. Geologists don't have that luxury. “So people thought you needed a principle, to ground the science in something strong.”
Soennichsen thinks it stemmed from a deep-set inferiority complex. “[Geologists] weren't guys in lab coats with test tubes—you were chipping away at rocks, which a five-year-old can do. The inferiority complex led them to latch onto this fundamental principle.”
* * * *
As I was writing this article, I took a hike in Oregon's Columbia River Gorge. A 4,000-foot-deep gash through the Cascade Mountains, it's a place all of Bretz's water had to flow through en route to the sea.
Analog SFF, May 2009 Page 4
