The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Other voices objected. The crowd moved in.

  Mrs. LaFarge shielded Tom. “This is my son; you have no right to accuse him of anything. We’re going home right now!”

  As for Tom, he was trembling and shaking violently. He looked very sick. The crowd thickened about him, putting out their wild hands, seizing and demanding.

  Tom screamed.

  Before their eyes he changed. He was Tom and James and a man named Switchman, another named Butterfield; he was the town mayor and the young girl Judith and the husband William and the wife Clarisse. He was melting wax shaping to their minds. They shouted, they pressed forward, pleading. He screamed, threw out his hands, his face dissolving to each demand. “Tom!” cried LaFarge. “Alice!” another. “William!” They snatched his wrists, whirled him about, until with one last shriek of horror he fell.

  He lay on the stones, melted wax cooling, his face all faces, one eye blue, the other golden, hair that was brown, red, yellow, black, one eyebrow thick, one thin, one hand large, one small.

  They stood over him and put their fingers to their mouths. They bent down.

  “He’s dead,” someone said at last.

  It began to rain.

  The rain fell upon the people, and they looked up at the sky.

  Slowly, and then more quickly, they turned and walked away and then started running, scattering from the scene. In a minute the place was desolate. Only Mr. and Mrs. LaFarge remained, looking down, hand in hand, terrified.

  The rain fell upon the upturned, unrecognizable face.

  Anna said nothing but began to cry.

  “Come along home, Anna, there’s nothing we can do,” said the old man.

  They climbed down into the boat and went back along the canal in the darkness. They entered their house and lit a small fire and warmed their hands. They went to bed and lay together, cold and thin, listening to the rain returned to the roof above them.

  “Listen,” said LaFarge at midnight. “Did you hear something?”

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  “I’ll go look anyway.”

  He fumbled across the dark room and waited by the outer door for a long time before he opened it.

  He pulled the door wide and looked out.

  Rain poured from the black sky upon the empty dooryard, into the canal, and among the blue mountains.

  He waited five minutes and then softly, his hands wet, he shut and bolted the door.

  Baby HP

  JUAN JOSÉ ARREOLA

  Translated by Larry Nolen

  Juan José Arreola (1918–2001) was an influential Mexican writer and academic best known for his experimental and fantastic short stories. Jorge Luis Borges described his work as the “freedom of an unlimited imagination, governed by a lucid intelligence.” A master of the humorous story-essay, Arreola has been compared to satirical writers such as Jonathan Swift, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Edgar Allan Poe. Trained as an actor, Arreola had a fervent belief in the spoken word, which shaped the style of his fiction, which usually takes the form of short-shorts.

  Notorious for appearing in the late-1960s Alejandro Jodorowsky movie Fando y Lis that was censored in Mexico, Arreola redeemed himself in the 1970s as the recipient of the National Prize in Letters in Mexico City. Other awards include the Literatura Latinoamericana y del Caribe Juan Rulfo Prize, the Alfonso Reyes Prize, and the Ramón López Velarde Prize. By the 1960s and 1970s Arreola wrote less and less and was largely forgotten as other more influential Mexican writers came onto the scene. Some of his work now seems dated and/or portrays women in less than exemplary ways (for example, “Anuncio” [México en la cultura, 1952], about the Plastisex, an artificial woman).

  Some of Arreola’s more typical tales are short enough to include in an author note—for example, “A Theory on Dulcinea,” which, translated here by Larry Nolen, skewers Cervantes.

  In a lonely place whose name is beside the point there was a man who spent his life avoiding real women. He preferred the solitary enjoyment of reading, and he congratulated himself smugly each time a knight errant in those pages challenged to a fencing duel one of those vague feminine phantasms, made of virtues and overlapping skirts, that awaits the hero after four hundred pages of exploits, lies, and nonsense.

  At the threshold of old age, a woman of flesh and bone besieged the hermit-like knight in his cave. Under some pretext she entered his chamber and filled it with the strong aroma of sweat and wool typical of a young peasant woman overheated by the sun.

  The knight lost his head, but far from being trapped by the woman in front of him, he instead threw himself headlong in pursuit, through pages and pages, of a pompous fantasy monster. He walked many leagues, speared sheep and windmills, pruned a few oaks, and did three or four leaps into the air, clapping his shoes together.

  Upon returning from this fruitless endeavor, however, death awaited him at the door of his house. The knight only had time to dictate a cavernous will, from the bottom of his parched soul. A shepherdess’s dusty face was washed with true tears, but it was a useless gleam before the tomb of the mad knight.

  Arreola preferred fantasy and wrote very few science fiction short stories but built them, like the rest of his work, using detailed prose and a taste for the bizarre, combined with elements of magic realism and satire. Three of them appear in his best-known collection, Confabulario (1952), including “En verdad os digo” (“In Truth I Tell You”), about a scientist who promises the salvation of rich people’s souls because he is able to disassemble a camel and make it pass through the eye of a needle in a stream of electrons, defying the words of the Bible.

  The other two stories criticize consumerism—in particular the tale reprinted here in a new translation, “Baby HP,” in which Arreola offers up a way for every family to take advantage of their own children’s excess energy.

  BABY HP

  Juan José Arreola

  Translated by Larry Nolen

  To the Lady of the House: Convert your children’s vitality into an energy force. We now have on sale the marvelous Baby HP, a device that is set to revolutionize the domestic economy.

  The Baby HP is a very durable and lightweight metal structure that adapts perfectly to a child’s delicate body through the use of comfortable belts, bracelets, rings, and brooches. The attachments on this supplementary skeleton absorb each of the child’s movements and accumulate in a Leyden bottle that can be placed on the back or chest, as needed. A gauge shows when the bottle is full. Then you, madam, detach it and plug it into a special receptacle to be unloaded automatically. This receptacle can be placed in any corner of the house, making for a precious piggy bank of electricity available at all times for lighting and heating purposes, as well as to power any of the innumerable devices that now invade homes.

  From now on you will see with new eyes the exhausting bustle of your children. And you won’t even lose patience before one of their convulsive tantrums, thinking that it’s a rich source of energy. The kicking of a breast-feeding baby throughout the day is transformed, thanks to Baby HP, into some useful seconds for running the blender or into fifteen minutes of radio music.

  Large families can satisfy all their electricity demands by installing a Baby HP on each one of their offspring, enabling them to run a small and lucrative business of transmitting to their neighbors some of their leftover energy. In apartment high-rises, they can satisfactorily cover lapses in public utilities by linking together the families’ receptacles.

  The Baby HP causes no physical or psychological trauma in children, because it neither constrains nor disturbs their movements. On the contrary, some doctors believe that it contributes to the body’s harmonious development. And as far as the spirit is concerned, you can awaken the children’s individual ambitions by awarding them with small prizes when they surpass their usual records. For this end, sugary treats are recommended, as they return your investment with interest. The more calories added to a child’s diet, the more kilowatts saved on the electric
bill.

  Children should wear their Baby HPs day and night. It is important that they always wear them to school so that they don’t lose the precious hours of recess, from which they will return with tanks overflowing with energy.

  The rumors about some children being electrocuted by the current that they themselves generate are completely irresponsible. The same can be said regarding the superstitious fear that infants outfitted with a Baby HP attract lightning bolts. No accidents of this nature can occur, above all if the instructions that accompany each device are followed to the letter.

  The Baby HP is available in fine stores in different sizes, models, and prices. It is a modern, durable, and trustworthy device and all of its joints are extendable. It comes with a manufacturer’s guarantee from the company of J. P. Mansfield & Sons, of Atlanta, Illinois.

  Surface Tension

  JAMES BLISH

  James Blish (1921–1975) was a US writer of science fiction and fantasy, sometimes with religious themes, who studied biology in college. Blish also published a substantial body of nonfiction and was one of the prominent science fiction critics of the 1950s in particular. His early fiction appeared in Super Science Stories in 1940, and after World War II he eventually earned enough from his stories and novels to become a full-time writer. Blish achieved significant success for his “Okies” stories (collected in the Cities in Flight series, 1950–62) and made a minor claim to astronomic fame by creating the term “gas giant” for his story “Solar Plexus” (Beyond Human Ken, a 1952 anthology edited by Judith Merril).

  If this were the extent of Blish’s involvement in science fiction, he would remain a well-regarded figure in the field. But he also pushed well beyond “center genre” with novels like A Case of Conscience—and the infernal Black Easter and The Day After Judgment, inspired by the work of the poet T. S. Eliot and John Milton, a famous apocalyptic English poet from the 1600s who used supernatural imagery.

  In this context, it is ironic that major figures in the New Wave movement of the 1960s, such as M. John Harrison, attacked Blish as a member of the old guard. With the advantage of time and distance, this seems in part to be a misunderstanding. Blish studied literature at Columbia and had a certain amount of disdain for pulp fiction and shoddy editing. In addition, Blish’s most avant-garde work features conflicted, nuanced characters and situations, and has more in common with New Wave fiction than with traditional “sense of wonder” pulp adventure tales. He was enough of a “man of letters” to have been a useful and formidable advocate for new ways of approaching science fiction—but also exactly what the counterculture New Wave–ists saw as the enemy. Ironically, in the 1940s, Blish had been part of a group that founded a new amateur press association that, as Robert A. W. Lowndes puts it in his introduction to The Best of James Blish (1979), wanted to “write intelligently about something other than the latest contents of Astounding or nostalgia for the ‘good old days,’ ‘sense of wonder,’ fan reminiscences.”

  Blish achieved even more fame for his “pantropy” stories, the term coined to describe the concept of human genetic modification for the purpose of survival outside of the planet Earth. Clifford D. Simak’s story “Desertion” (also included in this anthology) is considered the earliest story to use this concept, predating Blish’s work.

  In the pantropy stories, collected in The Seedling Stars (1957)—admittedly more traditional than Blish’s edgier work—human modification is deemed easier and less intrusive than terraforming for colonizing other worlds. “Surface Tension” (1952) is the third (and most popular) story in the pantropy series—a sprawling, exciting, and complex tale that seems even more relevant today, in the context of human life on our own planet. “Surface Tension” was selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1970 as one of the best stories published before the Nebula Awards were created. It was also reprinted in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One: 1929–1964.

  SURFACE TENSION

  James Blish

  PROLOGUE

  Dr. Chatvieux took a long time over the microscope, leaving la Ventura with nothing to do but look at the dead landscape of Hydrot. Waterscape, he thought, would be a better word. From space, the new world had shown only one small, triangular continent, set amid endless ocean; and even the continent was mostly swamp.

  The wreck of the seed-ship lay broken squarely across the one real spur of rock which Hydrot seemed to possess, which reared a magnificent twenty-one feet above sea level. From this eminence, la Ventura could see forty miles to the horizon across a flat bed of mud. The red light of the star Tau Ceti, glinting upon thousands of small lakes, pools, ponds, and puddles, made the watery plain look like a mosaic of onyx and ruby.

  “If I were a religious man,” the pilot said suddenly, “I’d call this a plain case of divine vengeance.”

  Chatvieux said: “Hmn?”

  “It’s as if we’d been struck down for—is it hubris? Pride, arrogance?”

  “Hybris,” Chatvieux said, looking up at last. “Well, is it? I don’t feel swollen with pride at the moment. Do you?”

  “I’m not exactly proud of my piloting,” la Ventura admitted. “But that isn’t quite what I mean. I was thinking about why we came here in the first place. It takes a lot of arrogance to think that you can scatter men, or at least things very much like men, all over the face of the galaxy. It takes even more pride to do the job—to pack up all the equipment and move from planet to planet and actually make men, make them suitable for every place you touch.”

  “I suppose it does,” Chatvieux said. “But we’re only one of several hundred seed-ships in this limb of the galaxy, so I doubt that the gods picked us out as special sinners.” He smiled. “If they had, maybe they’d have left us our ultraphone, so the Colonization Council could hear about our cropper. Besides, Paul, we don’t make men. We adapt them—adapt them to Earthlike planets, nothing more than that. We’ve sense enough—or humility enough, if you like that better—to know that we can’t adapt men to a planet like Jupiter, or to the surface of a sun, like Tau Ceti.”

  “Anyhow, we’re here,” la Ventura said grimly. “And we aren’t going to get off. Phil tells me that we don’t even have our germ-cell bank anymore, so we can’t seed this place in the usual way. We’ve been thrown onto a dead world and dared to adapt to it. What are the pantropes going to do with our recalcitrant carcasses—provide built-in waterwings?”

  “No,” Chatvieux said calmly. “You and I and all the rest of us are going to die, Paul. Pantropic techniques don’t work on the body; that was fixed for you for life when you were conceived. To attempt to rebuild it for you would only maim you. The pantropes affect only the genes, the inheritance-carrying factors. We can’t give you built-in waterwings, any more than we can give you a new set of brains. I think we’ll be able to populate this world with men, but we won’t live to see it.”

  The pilot thought about it, a lump of cold blubber collecting gradually in his stomach. “How long do you give us?” he said at last.

  “Who knows? A month, perhaps.”

  The bulkhead leading to the wrecked section of the ship was pushed back, admitting salt, muggy air, heavy with carbon dioxide. Philip Strasvogel, the communications officer, came in, tracking mud. Like la Ventura, he was now a man without a function, and it appeared to bother him. He was not well equipped for introspection, and with his ultraphone totally smashed, unresponsive to his perpetually darting hands, he had been thrown back into his own mind, whose resources were few. Only the tasks Chatvieux had set him to had prevented him from setting like a gelling colloid into a permanent state of the sulks.

  He unbuckled from around his waist a canvas belt, into the loops of which plastic vials were stuffed like cartridges. “More samples, doc,” he said. “All alike—water, very wet. I have some quicksand in one boot, too. Find anything?”

  “A good deal, Phil. Thanks. Are the others around?”

  Strasvogel poked his head out and hallooed. Other voices ra
ng out over the mudflats. Minutes later, the rest of the survivors of the crash were crowding into the pantrope deck: Saltonstall, Chatvieux’s senior assistant, a perpetually sanguine, perpetually youthful technician willing to try anything once, including dying; Eunice Wagner, behind whose placid face rested the brains of the expedition’s only remaining ecologist; Eleftherios Venezuelos, the always-silent delegate from the Colonization Council; and Joan Heath, a midshipman whose duties, like la Ventura’s and Phil’s, were now without meaning, but whose bright head and tall, deceptively indolent body shone to the pilot’s eyes brighter than Tau Ceti—brighter, since the crash, even than the home sun.

  Five men and two women—to colonize a planet on which “standing room” meant treading water.

  They came in quietly and found seats or resting places on the deck, on the edges of tables, in corners. Joan Heath went to stand beside la Ventura. They did not look at each other, but the warmth of her shoulder beside his was all that he needed. Nothing was as bad as it seemed.

  Venezuelos said: “What’s the verdict, Dr. Chatvieux?”

  “This place isn’t dead,” Chatvieux said. “There’s life in the sea and in the freshwater, both. On the animal side of the ledger, evolution seems to have stopped with the crustacea; the most advanced form I’ve found is a tiny crayfish, from one of the local rivulets, and it doesn’t seem to be well distributed. The ponds and puddles are well stocked with small metazoans of lower orders, right up to the rotifers—including a castle-building genus like Earth’s Floscularia. In addition, there’s a wonderfully variegated protozoan population, with a dominant ciliate type much like Paramoecium, plus various sarcodines, the usual spread of phyto-flagellates, and even a phosphorescent species I wouldn’t have expected to see anywhere but in saltwater. As for the plants, they run from simple blue-green algae to quite advanced thallus-producing types—though none of them, of course, can live out of the water.”