Modern Classics of Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  They went back to Narrow Valley. Robert Rampart was still chanting dully: “I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife.”

  Nina Rampart came chugging up out of the narrow ditch in the camper and emerged through that little gate a few yards down the fence row.

  “Supper’s ready and we’re tired of waiting for you, Robert,” she said. “A fine homesteader you are! Afraid to come onto your own land! Come along now; I’m tired of waiting for you.”

  “I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife!” Robert Rampart still chanted. “Oh, there you are, Nina. You stay here this time. I want my land! I want my children! I want an answer to this terrible thing.”

  “It is time we decided who wears the pants in this family,” Nina said stoutly. She picked up her husband, slung him over her shoulder, carried him to the camper and dumped him in, slammed (as it seemed) a dozen doors at once, and drove furiously down into the Narrow Valley, which already seemed wider.

  Why, that place was getting normaler and normaler by the minute! Pretty soon it looked almost as wide as it was supposed to be. The psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome had collapsed. The continental fault that coincided with the noospheric fault had faced facts and decided to conform. The Ramparts were in effective possession of their homestead, and Narrow Valley was as normal as any place anywhere.

  “I have lost my land,” Clarence Little-Saddle moaned. “It was the land of my father Clarence Big-Saddle, and I meant it to be the land of my son Clarence Bare-Back. It looked so narrow that people did not notice how wide it was, and people did not try to enter it. Now I have lost it.”

  Clarence Little-Saddle and the eminent scientist Willy McGilly were standing on the edge of Narrow Valley, which now appeared its true half-mile extent. The moon was just rising, so big that it filled a third of the sky. Who would have imagined that it would take a hundred and eight of such monstrous things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead, and yet you could sight it with sighters and figure it so.

  “I had a little bear-cat by the tail and I let go,” Clarence groaned. “I had a fine valley for free, and I have lost it. I am like that hard-luck guy in the funny-paper or Job in the Bible. Destitution is my lot.”

  Willy McGilly looked around furtively. They were alone on the edge of the half-mile-wide valley.

  “Let’s give it a booster shot,” Willy McGilly said.

  Hey, those two got with it! They started a snapping fire and began to throw the stuff onto it. Bark from the dog-elm tree – how do you know it won’t work?

  It was working! Already the other side of the valley seemed a hundred yards closer, and there were alarmed noises coming up from the people in the valley.

  Leaves from a black locust tree – and the valley narrowed still more! There was, moreover, terrified screaming of both children and big people from the depths of Narrow Valley, and the happy voice of Mary Mabel Rampart chanting, “Earthquake! Earthquake!”

  “That my valley be always wide and flourish and such stuff, and green with money and grass!” Clarence Little-Saddle orated in Pawnee chant style, “but that it be narrow if intruders come, smash them like bugs!”

  People, that valley wasn’t over a hundred feet wide now, and the screaming of the people in the bottom of the valley had been joined by the hysterical coughing of the camper car starting up.

  Willy and Clarence threw everything that was left on the fire. But the word? The word? Who remembers the word?

  “Corsicanatexas!” Clarence Little-Saddle howled out with confidence he hoped would fool the fates.

  He was answered not only by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning, but also by thunder and raindrops.

  “Chahiksi!” Clarence Little-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn’t think it would. It will be all right now. I can use the rain.”

  The valley was again a ditch only five feet wide.

  The camper car struggled out of Narrow Valley through the little gate. It was smashed flat as a sheet of paper, and the screaming kids and people in it had only one dimension.

  “It’s closing in! It’s closing in!” Robert Rampart roared, and he was no thicker than if he had been made out of cardboard.

  “We’re smashed like bugs,” the Rampart boys intoned. “We’re thin like paper.”

  “Mort, ruine, écrasement!” spoke-acted Cecilia Rampart like the great tragedienne she was.

  “Help! Help!” Nina Rampart croaked, but she winked at Willy and Clarence as they rolled by. “This homesteading jag always did leave me a little flat.”

  “Don’t throw those paper dolls away. They might be the Ramparts,” Mary Mabel called.

  The camper car coughed again and bumped along on level ground. This couldn’t last forever. The car was widening out as it bumped along.

  “Did we overdo it, Clarence?” Willy McGilly asked. “What did one flat-lander say to the other?”

  “Dimension of us never got around,” Clarence said. “No, I don’t think we overdid it, Willy. That car must be eighteen inches wide already, and they all ought to be normal by the time they reach the main road. The next time I do it, I think I’ll throw wood-grain plastic on the fire to see who’s kidding who.”

  SAMUEL R. DELANY

  Driftglass

  I picked up Samuel R. Delany’s first published novel, The Jewels of Aptor, in 1962, as soon as it hit the newsstands (I even remember which newsstand, one on the platform in a subway station under what had once been Scolley Square, in Boston; memory is a funny thing), and, although it was packaged no differently than dozens of other Ace Doubles I’d read with only low-key interest in other years – same garish and ugly pulp cover, same overheated pulp blurbs – I felt a thrill of excitement with the very first page, an almost physical tingle, as though a small electric current was passing through the paper, and I knew at once that I was in contact with a very uncommon talent indeed.

  Throughout the early years of the ’60s, I bought every Delany book as it appeared, and with each book that feeling was sharper, and my conviction grew that here was a Master of the form. It was a conviction shared by just about no one else in those days, perhaps because Delany’s books were published, with maximum obscurity, as garish and pulpy-looking Ace Doubles, the bottom of the novel market, and perhaps because a hurried and unsympathetic look at the plot-synopsis teasers on the inside page – or even a dip inside, if your glance happened to fall on, for instance, a character named “Comet Jo” – would lead you to assume that this was standard, lowest-common-denominator space opera of the most fundamental kind.

  Well, it was space opera – and it wasn’t. That was one of the things I loved about Delany, his ability to mix the most outrageous of space opera shticks (including some as wild and cosmic as anything seen since the “superscience” era of the ’30s) with the most subtle of philosophies and metaphysics. As his talent grew throughout the first half of the decade, so did my admiration for the intensity and clotted eloquence of his prose, for his psychologically complex characterizations, for his radical insight into the workings of social systems, and also for the feeling I got from him – growing more powerful with every book – that here was the authentic view from the other side, a perspective from beyond the confining provincial world whose boundaries and sharply limited vistas I chafed against. (By the mid-’60s, Delany’s talent had deepened so that I imagined him to be some white-bearded sage – perhaps even forty! – steeped in years and wisdom; when I found out instead that he was only a few years older than I was – having started selling novels when he was nineteen – the shock was considerable.)

  So I went around for a few years pushing copies of Delany novels on friends, who pushed them away with indifference, until he hit big with 1966’s Babel-17, and everyone else went galloping retrospectively back through his earlier work, while I stood by smiling smugly. (I had the identical experience, at just about the same time, with Le Guin’s work – it frequently pays to keep your eye on what’s happening on the botto
m of the heap.)

  Delany went on to become one of the two most critically acclaimed new American SF writers of the ’60s (the other being Roger Zelazny). He won the Nebula Award in 1966 for Babel 17, won two more Nebulas in 1967, for The Einstein Intersection and for his first short story, “Aye, and Gomorrah…” and his 1968 novella “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” won both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award. His monumental novel Nova was, in my opinion, one of the best SF novels of the ’60s, and its appearance prompted critic Algis Budrys to hail him as “the best science-fiction writer in the world” – an opinion it would have been possible to find a great deal of support for by the end of the decade, at least on the American side of the Atlantic.

  Delany only ever wrote a handful of short stories – unlike Zelazny, he made his biggest impact on the field with his novels – but they deserve to be numbered among the best short work of the ’60s. Aside from the stories already named – and the one that follows – they include the marvellous novella “The Star Pit,” the ornately titled “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line,” “Corona,” and “Dog in a Fisherman’s Net.” Almost all of his short fiction was assembled in the landmark collection Driftglass.

  Here he gives us an evocative, richly colored glimpse of a vividly realized future world, one complexly in flux … and elementally unchanged.

  After Nova, Delany fell silent for seven years, and when he did return, it was with work that no longer had as broad an appeal within the genre, like the immense, surreal Dhalgren … which did, however, become a bestseller outside of the usual genre boundaries, and help gain him wide new audiences. Although he continued to publish a series of ornate and somewhat abstract intellectual fantasy novels throughout the rest of the ’70s and the ’80s, his most direct subsequent impact on SF has probably been as a critic. But it is evident that his ’60s work was one of the most powerful direct influences on the Cyberpunk movement of the mid-80s. (Delany once told me that as a young writer he was trying “to do Bester for the ’60s, to write a book that would be as exciting to a twenty-five-year-old as Bester’s The Stars My Destination had been to me when I was fourteen” – and William Gibson once admitted to me that at least part of what he was trying to accomplish with his work was “to do Delany for the ’80s”.)

  Delany’s other works include the novels Triton, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, The Fall of the Towers, The Ballad of Beta 2, Empire Star, Flight from Neveryon, The Bridge of Lost Desire, Tales of Neveryon, and the critical works The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, The Straits of Messina, Starboard Wine, and The American Shore.

  1

  Sometimes I go down to the port, splashing sand with my stiff foot at the end of my stiff leg locked in my stiff hip, with the useless arm a-swinging, to get wet all over again, drink in the dives with cronies ashore, feeling old, broken, sorry for myself, laughing louder and louder. The third of my face that was burned away in the accident was patched with skin-grafts from my chest, so what’s left of my mouth distorts all loud sounds; sloppy sartorial reconstruction. Also I have a hairy chest. Chest hair does not look like beard hair, and it grows all up under my right eye. And: my beard is red, my chest hair brown, while the thatch curling down over neck and ears is sun-streaked to white here, darkened to bronze there, midst general blondness.

  By reason of my being a walking (I suppose my gait could be called headlong limping) horror show, plus a general inclination to sulk, I spend most of the time up in the wood and glass and aluminum house on the surf-sloughed point that the Aquatic Corp ceded me along with my pension. Rugs from Turkey there, copper pots, my tenor recorder which I can no longer play, and my books.

  But sometimes, when the gold fog blurs the morning, I go down to the beach and tromp barefoot in the wet edging of the sea, searching for driftglass.

  * * *

  It was foggy that morning, and the sun across the water moiled the mists like a brass ladle. I lurched to the top of the rocks, looked down through the tall grasses into the frothing inlet where she lay, and blinked.

  She sat up, long gills closing down her neck and the secondary slits along her back just visible at their tips because of much hair, wet and curling copper, falling there. She saw me. “What are you doing here, huh?” She narrowed blue eyes.

  “Looking for driftglass.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a piece.” I pointed near her and came down the rocks like a crab with one stiff leg.

  “Where?” She turned over, half in, half out of the water, the webs of her fingers cupping nodules of black stone.

  While the water made cold overtures between my toes, I picked up the milky fragment by her elbow where she wasn’t looking. She jumped, because she obviously had thought it was somewhere else.

  “See?”

  “What … what is it?” She raised her cool hand to mine. For a moment the light through the milky gem and the pale film of my own webs pearled the screen of her palms. (Details like that. Yes, they are the important things, the points from which we suspend later pain.) A moment later wet fingers closed to the backs of mine.

  “Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”

  “I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”

  “They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”

  “Ohhh!” she breathed as the beauty of the blunted triangular fragment in my palm assailed her like perfume. Then she looked at my face, blinking the third, aqueous-filled lid that we use as a correction lens for underwater vision.

  She watched the ruin calmly.

  Then her hand went to my foot where the webs had been torn back in the accident. She began to take in who I was. I looked for horror, but saw only a little sadness.

  The insignia on her buckle – her stomach was making little jerks the way you always do during the first few minutes when you go from breathing water to air – told me she was a Biological Technican. (Back up at the house there was a similar uniform of simulated scales folded in the bottom drawer of the dresser and the belt insignia said Depth Gauger.) I was wearing some very frayed jeans and a red cotton shirt with no buttons.

  She reached for my neck, pushed my collar back from my shoulders and touched the tender slits of my gills, outlining them with cool fingers. “Who are you?” Finally.

  “Cal Svenson.”

  She slid back down in the water. “You’re the one who had the terrible … but that was years ago! They still talk about it, down.…” She stopped.

  As the sea softens the surface of a piece of glass, so it blurs the souls and sensibilities of the people who toil beneath her. And according to the last report of the Marine Reclamation Division there are to date seven hundred and fifty thousand who have been given gills and webs and sent under the foam where there are no storms up and down the American coast.

  “You live on shore? I mean around here? But so long ago…”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “I was two years older than you when the accident happened.”

  “You were eighteen?”

  “I’m twice that now. Which means it happened almost twenty years ago. It is a long time.”

  “They still talk about it.”

  “I’ve almost forgotten,” I said. “I really have. Say, do you play the recorder?”

  “I used to.”

  “Good! Come up to my place and look at my tenor recorder. And I’ll make some tea. Perhaps you can stay for lunch –”

  “I have to report back to Marine Headquarters by three. Tork is goin
g over the briefing to lay the cable for the big dive, with Jonni and the crew.” She paused, smiled. “But I can catch the undertow and be there in half an hour if I leave by two-thirty.”

  On the walk up I learned her name was Ariel. She thought the patio was charming and the mosaic evoked, “Oh look!” and “Did you do this yourself?” a half-dozen times. (I had done it, in the first lonely years.) She picked out the squid and the whale in battle, the wounded shark and the diver. She told me she didn’t get time to read much, but she was impressed by all the books. She listened to me reminisce. She talked a lot to me about her work, husbanding the deep-down creatures they were scaring up. Then she sat on the kitchen stool, playing a Lukas Foss serenade on my recorder, while I put rock salt in the bottom of the broiler tray for two dozen Oysters Rockefeller, and the tea water whistled. I’m a comparatively lonely guy. I like being followed by beautiful young girls.

  2

  “Hey, Juao!” I bawled across the jetty.

  He nodded to me from the center of his nets, sun glistening on polished shoulders, sun lost in rough hair. I walked across to where he sat, sewing like a spider. He pulled another section up over his horny toes, then grinned at me with his mosaic smile: gold, white, black gap below, crooked yellow; white, gold, white. Shoving my bad leg in front I squatted.

  “I fished out over the coral where you told me.” He filled his cheek with his tongue and nodded. “You come up to the house for a drink, eh?”

  “Fine.”

  “Just – a moment more.”

  There’s a certain sort of Brazilian you find along the shore in the fishing villages, old yet ageless. See one of their men and you think he could be fifty, he could be sixty – will probably look the same when he’s eighty-five. Such was Juao. We once figured it out. He’s seven hours older than I am.