Universe 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

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  Universe 7

  Edited By Terry Carr

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  A Rite of Spring fritz leiber

  My Lady of the Psychiatric Sorrows brian w. aldiss

  Probability Storm julian reid

  People Reviews robert chilson

  Ibid. george alec effinger

  The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton gene wolfe

  Brain Fever Season r. a. lafferty

  The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs carter scholz

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  Science fiction is difficult to define: every time someone offers a new definition, a dozen students of the genre come forth grinning to point out famous sf stories that would be excluded by it, or stories it would include which are obviously not science fiction. Even such a simple rule as “Science fiction stories must stem from extrapolations of currently accepted science” begs too many questions, for what are we to call stories written about a jungle-covered Venus before our knowledge of that planet made the setting clearly impossible, or of trips to the microcosm of the atom based on the theories of nineteenth-century scientists? Can a story be science fiction one year and change to fantasy the next without a word being altered?

  Fritz Leiber, who has won awards for every kind of story from sword-and-sorcery (III Met in Lankhmar) to “pure” science fiction (The Wanderer), doesn’t concern himself with definitions—except, perhaps, to flout them playfully. Here he offers a delightful novelette about a young genius in a top-secret research installation who explores the implications of a great scientist’s theories. Authentic science fiction, you say? Even if the theories are those of Pythagoras?

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  A RITE OF SPRING

  Fritz Leiber

  This is the story of the knight in shining armor and the princess imprisoned in a high tower, only with the roles reversed. True, young Matthew Fortree’s cell was a fabulously luxurious, quaintly furnished suite in the vast cube of the most secret Coexistence Complex in the American Southwest, not terribly far from the U.S. Government’s earlier most secret project, the nuclear one. And he was free to roam most of the rest of the cube whenever he wished. But there were weightier reasons which really did make him the knight in shining armor imprisoned in the high tower: his suite was on the top, or mathematicians’, floor and the cube was very tall and he rarely wished to leave his private quarters except for needful meals and exercise, medical appointments, and his unonerous specified duties; his unspecified duties were more taxing. And while he did not have literal shining armor, he did have some very handsome red silk pajamas delicately embroidered with gold.

  With the pajamas he wore soft red leather Turkish slippers, the toes of which actually turned up, and a red nightcap with a tassel, while over them and around his spare, short frame he belted tightly a fleece-lined long black dressing gown of heavier, ribbed silk also embroidered with gold, somewhat more floridly. If Matthew’s social daring had equaled his flamboyant tastes, he would in public have worn small clothes and a powdered wig and swung a court sword at his side, for he was much enamored of the Age of Reason and yearned to quip wittily in a salon filled with appreciative young Frenchwomen in daringly low-cut gowns, or perhaps only one such girl. As it was, he regularly did wear gray kid gloves, but that was partly a notably unsuccessful effort to disguise his large powerful hands, which sorted oddly with his slight, almost girlish figure.

  The crueler of Math’s colleagues (he did not like to be called Matt) relished saying behind his back that he had constructed a most alluring love nest, but that the unknown love bird he hoped to trap never deigned to fly by. In this they hit the mark, as cruel people so often do, for young mathematicians need romantic sexual love, and pine away without it, every bit as much as young lyric poets, to whom they are closely related. In fact, on the night this story begins, Math had so wasted away emotionally and was gripped by such a suicidally extreme Byronic sense of futility and Gothic awareness of loneliness that he had to bite his teeth together harshly and desperately compress his lips to hold back sobs as he knelt against his mockingly wide bed with his shoulders and face pressed into its thick, downy, white coverlet, as if to shut out the mellow light streaming on him caressingly from the tall bedside lamps with pyramidal jet bases and fantastic shades built up of pentagons of almost paper-thin, translucent ivory joined with silver leading. This light was strangely augmented at irregular intervals.

  For it was a Gothic night too, you see. A dry thunderstorm was terrorizing the desert outside with blinding flashes followed almost instantly by deafening crashes which reverberated very faintly in the outer rooms of the Complex despite the mighty walls and partitions, which were very thick, both to permit as nearly perfect soundproofing as possible (so the valuable ideas of the solitary occupants might mature without disturbance, like mushrooms in a cave) and also to allow for very complicated, detection-proof bugging. In Math’s bedroom, however, for a reason which will be made clear, the thunderclaps were almost as loud as outside, though he did not start at them or otherwise show he even heard them. They were, nevertheless, increasing his Gothic mood in a geometrical progression. While the lightning flashes soaked through the ceiling, a point also to be explained later. Between flashes, the ceiling and walls were very somber, almost black, yet glimmering with countless tiny random highlights like an indoor Milky Way or the restlessly shifting points of light our eyes see in absolute darkness. The thick-piled black carpet shimmered similarly.

  Suddenly Matthew Fortree started up on his knees and bent his head abruptly back. His face was a grimacing mask of self-contempt as he realized the religious significance of his kneeling posture and the disgusting religiosity of what he was about to utter, for he was a devout atheist, but the forces working within him were stronger than shame.

  “Great Mathematician, hear me!” he cried hoarsely aloud, secure in his privacy and clutching at Eddington’s phrase to soften a little the impact on his conscience of his hateful heresy. “Return me to the realm of my early childhood, or otherwise moderate my torments and my loneliness, or else terminate this life I can no longer bear!”

  As if in answer to his prayer there came a monstrous flash-and-crash dwarfing all of the storm that had gone before. The two lamps arced out, plunging the room into darkness through which swirled a weird jagged wildfire, as if all the electricity in the wall-buried circuits, augmented by that of the great flash, had escaped to lead a brief free life of its own, like ball lightning or St. Elmo’s fire.

  (This event was independently confirmed beyond question or doubt. As thousands in the big cube testified, all the lights in the Coexistence Complex went out for one minute and seventeen seconds. Many heard the crash, even in rooms three or four deep below the outermost layer. Several score saw the wildfire. Dozens felt tingling electric shocks. Thirteen were convinced at the time that they had been struck by lightning. Three persons died of heart failure at the instant of the big flash, as far as can be determined. There were several minor disasters in the areas of medical monitoring and continuous experiments. Although a searching investigation went on for months, and still continues on a smaller scale, no completely satisfactory explanation has ever been found, though an odd rumor continues to crop up that the final monster flash was induced by an ultrasecret electrical experiment which ran amuck, or else succeeded too well, all of which resulted in a permanent increment in the perpetual nervousness of the masters of the cube.)

  The monster stroke was the last one of the dry storm. Two dozen or so seconds passed. Then against the jagged darkness and the ringing silence, Math heard his door’s mechanical bel
l chime seven times. (He’d insisted on the bell being installed in such a way as to replace the tiny fish-eye lens customary on all the cube’s cubicles. Surely the designer was from Manhattan!)

  He struggled to his feet, half blinded, his vision still full of the wildfire (or afterimages) so like the stuff of ocular migraine. He partly groped, partly remembered his way out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind him, and across the living room to the outer door. He paused there to reassure himself that his red nightcap was set properly on his head, the tassel falling to the right, and his black robe securely belted. Then he took a deep breath and opened the door.

  Like his suite, the corridor was steeped in darkness and aswirl with jaggedy, faint blues and yellows. Then, at the level of his eyes, he saw two brighter, twinkling points of green light about two and a half inches horizontally apart. A palm’s length below them was another such floating emerald. At the height of his chest flashed another pair of the green points, horizontally separated by about nine inches. At waist level was a sixth, and a hand’s length directly below that, a seventh. They moved a bit with the rest of the swirling, first a little to the left, then to the right, but maintained their positions relative to each other.

  Without consciousness of having done any thinking, sought any answers, it occurred to him that they were what might be called the seven crucial points of a girl: eyes, chin, nipples, umbilicus, and the center of all wonder and mystery. He blinked his eyes hard, but the twinkling points were still there. The migraine spirals seemed to have faded a little, but the seven emeralds were bright as ever and still flashed the same message in their cryptic positional Morse. He even fancied he saw the shimmer of a clinging dress, the pale triangle of an elfin face in a flow of black hair, and pale serpents of slender arms.

  Behind and before him the lights blazed on, and there, surely enough, stood a slim young woman in a long dark-green grandmother’s skirt and a frilly salmon blouse, sleeveless but with ruffles going up her neck to her ears. Her left hand clutched a thick envelope purse sparkling with silver sequins, her right dragged a coat of silver fox. While between smooth black cascades and from under black bangs, an elfin face squinted worriedly into his own through silver-rimmed spectacles.

  Her gaze stole swiftly and apologetically up and down him, without hint of a smile, let alone giggle, at either his nightcap and its tassel, or the turned-up toes of his Turkish slippers, and then returned to confront him anxiously.

  He found himself bowing with bent left knee, right foot advanced, right arm curved across his waist, left arm trailing behind, eyes still on hers (which were green), and he heard himself say, “Matthew Fortree, at your service, mademoiselle.”

  Somehow, she seemed French. Perhaps because of the raciness of the emeralds’ twinkling message, though only the top two of them had turned out to be real.

  Her accent confirmed this when she answered, “ ‘Sank you. I am Severeign Saxon, sir, in search of my brother. And mooch scared. ‘Scuse me.”

  Math felt a pang of delight. Here was a girl as girls should be, slim, soft-spoken, seeking protection, calling him sir, not moved to laughter by his picturesque wardrobe, and favoring the fond, formal phrases he liked to use when he talked to himself. The sort of girl who, interestingly half undressed, danced through his head on lonely nights abed.

  That was what he felt. What he did, quite characteristically, was frown at her severely and say, “I don’t recall any Saxon among the mathematicians, madam, although it’s barely possible there is a new one I haven’t met.”

  “Oh, but my brother has not my name…” she began hurriedly, then her eyelashes fluttered, she swayed and caught herself. “Pardonne,” she went on faintly, gasping a little. “Oh, do not think me forward, sir, but might I not come in and catch my breath? I am frightened by ze storm, I have searched so long, and ze halls are so lonely…”

  Inwardly cursing his gauche severity, Math instantly resumed his courtly persona and cried softly, “Your pardon, madam. Come in, come in by all means and rest as long as you desire.” Shaping the beginning of another bow, he took her trailing coat and wafted her past him inside. His fingertips tingled at the incredibly smooth, cool, yet electric texture of her skin.

  He hung up her coat, marveling that the silky fur was not so softly smooth as his fingertips’ memory of her skin, and found her surveying his spacious sanctum with its myriad shelves and spindly little wallside tables.

  “Oh, sir, this room is like fairyland,” she said, turning to him with a smile of delight. “Tell me, are all zoze tiny elephants and ships and lacy spheres ivory?”

  “They are, madam, such as are not jet,” he replied quite curtly. He had been preparing a favorable, somewhat flowery, but altogether sincere comparison of her pale complexion to the hue of his ivories (and of her hair to his jets), but something, perhaps “fairyland,” had upset him. “And now will you be seated, Miss Saxon, so you may rest?”

  “Oh, yes, sir… Mr. Fortree,” she replied flusteredly, and let herself be conducted to a long couch facing a TV screen set in the opposite wall. With a bob of her head she hurriedly seated herself. He had intended to sit beside her, or at least at the other end of the couch, but a sudden gust of timidity made him stride to the farthest chair, a straight-backed one, facing the couch, where he settled himself bolt upright.

  “Refreshment? Some coffee perhaps?”

  She gulped and nodded without lifting her eyes. He pushed a button on the remote control in the left-hand pocket of his dressing gown and felt more in command of the situation. He fixed his eyes on his guest and, to his horror, said harshly, “What is your number, madam… of years?” he finished in a voice less bold.

  He had intended to comment on the storm and its abrupt end, or inquire about her brother’s last name, or even belatedly compare her complexion to ivory and her skin to fox fur, anything but demand her age like some police interrogator. And even then not simply, “Say, would you mind telling me how old you are?” but to phrase it so stiltedly… Some months back, Math had gone through an acute attack of sesquipedalianism—of being unable to find the simple word for anything, or even a circumlocution, but only a long, usually Latin one. Attending his first formal reception in the Complex, he had coughed violently while eating a cookie. The hostess, a formidably poised older lady, had instantly made solicitous inquiry. He wanted to answer, “I got a crumb in my nose,” but could think of nothing but “nasal cavity,” and when he tried to say that, there was another and diabolic misfire in his speech centers, and what came out was, “I got a crumb in my navel.”

  The memory of it could still reduce him to jelly.

  “Seven—” he heard her begin. Instantly his feelings did another flip-flop and he found himself thinking of how nice it would be, since he himself was only a few years into puberty, if she were younger still.

  “Seventeen?” he asked eagerly.

  And now it was her mood that underwent a sudden change. No longer downcast, her eyes gleamed straight at him, mischievously, and she said, “No, sir, I was about to copy your ‘number of years’ and say ‘seven and a score.’ And now I am of a mind not to answer your rude question at all.” But she relented and went on with a winning smile, “No, seven and a decade, only seventeen—that’s my age. But to tell the truth, sir, I thought you were asking my ruling number. And I answered you. Seven.”

  “Do you mean to tell me you believe in numerology?” Math demanded, his concerns doing a third instant flip-flop. Acrobatic moods are a curse of adolescence.

  She shrugged prettily. “Well, sir, among the sciences—”

  “Sciences, madam?” he thundered like a small Doctor Johnson. “Mathematics itself is not a science, but only a game men have invented and continue to play. The supreme game, no doubt, but still only a game. And that you should denominate as a science that… that farrago of puerile superstitions—! Sit still now, madam, and listen carefully while I set you straight.”

  She crouched a little, her eyes app
rehensively on his.

  “The first player of note of the game of mathematics,” he launched out in lecture-hall tones, “was a Greek named Pythagoras. In fact, in a sense he probably invented the game. Yes, surely he did—twenty-five centuries ago, well before Archimedes, before Aristotle. But those were times when men’s minds were still befuddled by the lies of the witch doctors and priests, and so Pythagoras (or his followers, more likely!) conceived the mystical notion”—his words dripped sarcastic contempt—”that numbers had a real existence of their own, as if—”

  She interrupted rapidly. “But do they not? Like the little atoms we cannot see, but which—”

  “Silence, Severeign!”

  “But Matthew—”

  “Silence, I said!—as if numbers came from another realm or world, yet had power over this one—”

  “That’s what the little atoms have—power, especially when they explode.” She spoke with breathless rapidity.

  “—and as if numbers had all kinds of individual qualities, even personalities—some lucky, some unlucky, some good, some bad, et cetera—as if they were real beings, even gods! I ask you, have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous than numbers—mere pieces in a game—being alive? Yes, of course—the idea of gods being real. But with the Pythagoreans (they became a sort of secret society) such nonsense was the rule. For instance, Pythagoras was the first man to analyze the musical scale mathematically—brilliant!—but then he (his followers!) went on to decide that some scales (the major) are stimulating and healthy and others (the minor) unhealthy and sad—”