The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  August 16: 1600 hours

  …To the person who finds this notebook. I request that you send it to the following address: The Central Asia Department, The Hermitage, Leningrad.

  On August 14 at 0900 hours I, Boris Yanovich Lozovsky, was taken by a black helicopter and brought here, to the Visitors’ camp. Until today I have tried as best I can to make a note of all my observations […a few lines are erased…] and four cars. My basic conclusions. 1. These Visitors are from elsewhere, from Mars or Venus or some other planet. 2. The Visitors themselves are extremely complex and perfectly put-together machines, and their spaceship works automatically.

  The Visitors have examined me, undressed me, and, I believe, recorded images of me. They have not caused me any harm and after their initial studies they have not paid me any attention. I was left in complete liberty….

  The ship is, to all appearances, preparing to depart, since this morning all three black helicopters and five of the Visitors were taken to pieces in front of me. My food was loaded on board. All that has been left on the landing stage is a few pieces from the construction of the tower and one of the GAZ-69s. Two Visitors are still scrabbling around under the ship and two are strolling around nearby. I sometimes see them at the top of a hill….

  I, Boris Yanovich Lozovsky, have decided to climb on board the Visitors’ ship and fly with them. I’ve thought it all through. I have enough food at least for a month: I don’t know what will happen then, but I need to fly. I think I will climb on board the ship, find the cow and the sheep, and stay with them. First of all, they will be company for me, and secondly, they are a source of meat if necessary. I don’t know what to do about water. But I have a knife, and if necessary I can drink blood….[Crossed out] If I manage to survive—and I am pretty sure I will—then I will use all my efforts to try to make contact with the Earth and come back along with the Controllers of the Visitors. I think I should be able to come to some agreement with them….

  To Mariya Ivanovna Lozovskaya: My dearest Mashenka, my love! I hope that these lines will reach you when everything is already sorted out. But if the worst does happen, then do not judge me. I can do nothing else. Just remember that I have always loved you, and forgive me. Give Grishka a kiss. When he grows up, tell him about me. Maybe I was not such a bad person after all, not so bad that my son will not feel proud of his father. What do you think? That’s it. One of the Visitors who was running around on the cliffside has just come back to the ship. So. Lozovsky, time to get to work! It’s scary. Or maybe that’s nonsense. They are machines, and I’m a man….

  At this point the manuscript breaks off. Lozovsky obviously never went back to the car. He did not go back because the ship took off. Skeptics may talk about an accident, but then they do that: they’re skeptics. Right from the start I was sincerely and perfectly sure that our “Bossman” is alive and is seeing things we have never dreamed of.

  He will return, and I will envy him. I will always envy him, even if he does not return. He’s the bravest man I know.

  Yes, it’s a fact that not everyone is capable of such a feat. I have spoken to a lot of people about him. A few of them have said, openly, that they would be too scared to do what he did. Most of them say: “I don’t know. It all depends on the circumstances.” I would not be able to act as he did. I saw one of the “spiders,” and even now, now that I know they are nothing but machines, I still don’t feel I could face them. And the terrible black helicopters…Imagine yourself in the bowels of an alien spaceship, surrounded by unliving mechanisms, imagine yourself flying over an icy desert—without any hope, unsure where you are going—flying for days, months, maybe even years, imagine all of this and you can see what I’m thinking.

  And that is all. A few words about some things that happened a long time ago. In the middle of September, Professor Nikitin’s commission came from Moscow, and all of us—me, Dzhamil, Kolya the driver, the two workers—were made to fill reams of paper and give answers to thousands of questions.

  It took us about a week to do this, then we returned to Leningrad.

  Maybe the skeptics are right, and we will never know anything about the nature of our guests from the beyond, about how their spacecraft was put together, about their marvelous machines that they sent to visit us on Earth, about—this is the most important of all—the reason for their unexpected visit, but whatever the skeptics say, I think that the Visitors will return. Boris Yanovich Lozovsky will be their first interpreter. He will know the language of these distant neighbors perfectly: he will be the only one who can explain to them what caused a car in perfect condition to end up alongside fragments of a pitcher sixteen centuries old.

  Pelt

  CAROL EMSHWILLER

  Carol Emshwiller (1921– ) is a notable US writer of science fiction who has won the Nebula Award and Philip K. Dick Award, among others. She grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and in France until she was a teenager, making her “hopelessly confused” between English and French. In college, she took classes with Anatole Broyard, Kay Boyle, and the poet Kenneth Koch. She began to sell short stories while still a student, to literary magazines, and then discovered science fiction magazines. Damon Knight published her in his Orbit anthologies and she also appeared frequently in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her science fiction novels include Carmen Dog (1988) and The Mount (2002), which won the Philip K. Dick Award and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. In 2005, she was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, spanning Emshwiller’s entire fifty-year career, was published in 2011.

  Emshwiller’s husband, Ed Emshwiller, started out as an abstract expressionist painter and experimental filmmaker and became an influence on his wife, who herself explored experimental writing and “what others called the New Wave.” (Ed illustrated Harlan Ellison’s iconic Dangerous Visions anthologies.) Together, the Emshwillers lived a bohemian life in the 1960s, soaking up the counterculture and getting to know a number of musicians, painters, poets, and filmmakers as they traveled abroad, including a trip back to France. Throughout this period, her interest in postmodern literature grew, and her fiction has ever since existed in a space that synthesizes experimental approaches, mainstream literary modes, and speculative subject matter, often from an overtly feminist perspective. The result has been truly interesting and unique fiction.

  Ursula K. Le Guin has called Emshwiller “a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.” Karen Joy Fowler said of Emshwiller, “She still defies imitation. But it is my contention that sometime in the last fifteen to twenty years, she has become stealthily influential.”

  Emshwiller has given her own assessment of her work: “A lot of people don’t seem to understand how planned and plotted even the most experimental of my stories are. I’m not interested in stories where anything can happen at any time. I set up clues to foreshadow what will happen and what is foreshadowed does happen. I try to have all, or most of the elements in the stories, linked to each other. [My husband,] Ed, used to call it, referring to his experimental films, ‘structuring strategies.’ How I write is by linking and by structures, and by, I hope, not ever losing sight of the meaning of the story. My favorite writer is Kafka. He kept everything linked and together and full of meaning.”

  “Pelt” is on the surface one of Emshwiller’s more traditional stories, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1958. The story was submitted and critiqued at the Milford Writer’s Workshop at Michigan State University, which was founded by Damon Knight, and also the Turkey City writer’s workshop.

  At the time of its publication, “Pelt” was considered to exemplify a strand of “literary” science fiction that bridged the gap between mainstream realism and core science fiction. In the modern era, of course, “Pelt” would not be considered anything other than an excellent and unusual science fiction story, one that deals with
issues of the environment and how humans view other species. It is the kind of story that has become only more relevant, and better, with the passage of time.

  PELT

  Carol Emshwiller

  She was a white dog with a wide face and eager eyes, and this was the planet, Jaxa, in winter.

  She trotted well ahead of the master, sometimes nose to ground, sometimes sniffing the air, and she didn’t care if they were being watched or not. She knew that strange things skulked behind iced trees, but strangeness was her job. She had been trained for it, and crisp, glittering Jaxa was, she felt, exactly what she had been trained for, born for.

  I love it, I love it…that was in her pointing ears, her waving tail…I love this place.

  It was a world of ice, a world with the sound of breaking goblets. Each time the wind blew they came shattering down by the trayful, and each time one branch brushed against another, it was: Skoal, Down the hatch, To the queen…tink, tink, tink. And the sun was reflected as if from a million cut-glass punch bowls under a million crystal chandeliers.

  She wore four little black boots, and each step she took sounded like two or three more goblets gone, but the sound was lost in the other tinkling, snapping cracklings of the silver, frozen forest about her.

  She had figured out at last what that hovering scent was. It had been there from the beginning, the landing two days ago, mingling with Jaxa’s bitter air and seeming to be just a part of the smell of the place, she found it in crisscrossing trails about the squatting ship, and hanging, heavy and recent, in hollows behind flat-branched, piney-smelling bushes. She thought of honey and fat men and dry fur when she smelled it.

  There was something big out there, and more than one of them, more than two. She wasn’t sure how many. She had a feeling this was something to tell the master, but what was the signal, the agreed-upon noise for: We are being watched? There was a whisper of sound, short and quick, for: Sighted close, come and shoot. And there was a noise for danger (all these through her throat mike to the receiver at the master’s ear), a special, howly bark: Awful, awful—there is something awful going to happen. There was even a noise, a low, rumble of sound for: Wonderful, wonderful fur—drop everything and come after this one. (And she knew a good fur when she saw one. She had been trained to know.) But there was no sign for: We are being watched.

  She’d whined and barked when she was sure about it, but that had got her a pat on the head and a rumpling of the neck fur. “You’re doing fine, baby. This world is our oyster, all ours. All we got to do is pick up the pearls. Jaxa’s what we’ve been waiting for.” And Jaxa was, so she did her work and didn’t try to tell him any more, for what was one more strange thing in one more strange world?

  She was on the trail of something now, and the master was behind her, out of sight. He’d better hurry. He’d better hurry or there’ll be waiting to do, watching the thing, whatever it is, steady on until he comes, holding tight back, and that will be hard. Hurry, hurry.

  She could hear the whispered whistle of a tune through the receiver at her ear and she knew he was not hurrying but just being happy. She ran on, eager, curious. She did not give the signal for hurry, but she made a hurry sound of her own, and she heard him stop whistling and whisper back into the mike, “So, so, Queen of Venus. The furs are waiting to be picked. No hurry, baby.” But morning was to her for hurry. There was time later to be tired and slow.

  That fat-man honeyish smell was about, closer and strong. Her curiosity became two pronged—this smell or that? What is the big thing that watches? She kept to the trail she was on, though. Better to be sure, and this thing was not so elusive, not twisting and doubling back, but up ahead and going where it was going.

  She topped a rise and half slid, on thick furred rump, down the other side, splattering ice. She snuffled at the bottom to be sure of the smell again, and then, nose to ground, trotted past a thick and tangled hedgerow.

  She was thinking through her nose now. The world was all smell, crisp air and sour ice and turpentine pine…and this animal, a urine and brown grass thing…and then, strong in front of her, honey-furry-fat man.

  She felt it looming before she raised her head to look, and there it was, the smell in person, some taller than the master and twice as wide. Counting his doubled suit and all, twice as wide.

  This was a fur! Wonderful, wonderful. But she just stood, looking up, mouth open and lips pulled back, the fur on the back of her neck rising more from the suddenness than from fear.

  It was silver and black, a tiger-striped thing, and the whitish parts glistened and caught the light as the ice of Jaxa did, and sparkled and dazzled in the same way. And there, in the center of the face, was a large and terrible orange eye, rimmed in black with black radiating lines crossing the forehead and rounding the head. That spot of orange dominated the whole figure, but it was a flat, blind eye, unreal, grown out of fur. At first she saw only that spot of color, but then she noticed under it two small, red glinting eyes and they were kind, not terrible.

  This was the time for the call: Come, come and get the great fur, the huge-price-tag fur for the richest lady on earth to wear and be dazzling in and most of all to pay for. But there was something about the flat, black nose and the tender, bow-shaped lips and those kind eyes that stopped her from calling. Something masterlike. She was full of wondering and indecision and she made no sound at all.

  The thing spoke to her then, and its voice was a deep lullaby sound of buzzing cellos. It gestured with a thick, fur-backed hand. It promised, offered, and asked; and she listened, knowing and not knowing.

  The words came slowly. This…is…world.

  —

  Here is the sky, the earth, the ice. The heavy arms moved. The hands pointed.

  We have watched you, little slave. What have you done that is free today? Take the liberty. Here is the earth for your four shoed feet, the sky of stars, the ice to drink. Do something free today. Do, do.

  Nice voice, she thought, nice thing. It gives and gives…something.

  Her ears pointed forward, then to the sides, one and then the other, and then forward again. She cocked her head, but the real meaning would not come clear. She poked at the air with her nose. Say that again, her whole body said. I almost have it. I feel it. Say it once more and maybe then the sense of it will come.

  But the creature turned and started away quickly, very quickly for such a big thing, and disappeared behind the trees and bushes. It seemed to shimmer itself away until the glitter was only the glitter of the ice and the black was only the thick, flat branches.

  The master was close. She could hear his crackling steps coming up behind her.

  She whined softly, more to herself than to him.

  “Ho, the queen, Aloora. Have you lost it?” She sniffed the ground again. The honey-furry smell was strong. She sniffed beyond, zigzagging. The trail was there. “Go to it, baby.” She loped off to a sound like Chinese wind chimes, businesslike again. Her tail hung guiltily, though, and she kept her head low. She had missed an important signal. She’d waited until it was too late. But was the thing a man, a master? Or a fur? She wanted to do the right thing. She always tried and tried for that, but now she was confused.

  She was getting close to whatever it was she trailed, but the hovering smell was still there too, though not close. She thought of gifts. She knew that much from the slow, lullaby words, and gifts made her think of bones and meat, not the dry fishy biscuit she always got on trips like this. A trickle of drool flowed from the side of her mouth and froze in a silver thread across her shoulder.

  She slowed. The thing she trailed must be there, just behind the next row of trees. She made a sound in her throat…ready, steady…and she advanced until she was sure. She sensed the shape. She didn’t really see it…mostly it was the smell and something more in the tinkling glassware noises. She gave the signal and stood still, a furry, square imitation of a pointer. Come, hurry. This waiting is the hardest part.

  He fo
llowed, beamed to her radio. “Steady, baby. Hold that pose. Good girl, good girl.” There was only the slightest twitch of her tail as she wagged it, answering him in her mind.

  He came up behind her and then passed, crouched, holding the rifle before him, elbows bent. He knelt then, and waited as if at a point of his own, rifle to shoulder. Slowly he turned with the moving shadow of the beast, and shot, twice in quick succession.

  They ran forward then, together, and it was what she had expected—a deerlike thing, dainty hoofs, proud head, and spotted in three colors, large gray-green rounds on tawny yellow, with tufts of that same glittering silver scattered over.

  The master took out a sharp, flat-bladed knife. He began to whistle out loud as he cut off the handsome head. His face was flushed.

  She sat down nearby, mouth open in a kind of smile, and she watched his face as he worked. The warm smell made the drool come at the sides of her mouth and drip out to freeze on the ice and on her paws, but she sat quietly, only watching.

  Between the whistlings he grunted and swore and talked to himself, and finally he had the skin and the head in a tight, inside-out bundle.

  Then he came to her and patted her sides over the ribs with the flat, slap sound, and he scratched behind her ears and held a biscuit to her on his thick-gloved palm. She swallowed it whole and then watched him as he squatted on his heels and himself ate one almost like it.

  Then he got up and slung the bundle of skin and head across his back. “I’ll take this one, baby. Come on, let’s get one more something before lunch.” He waved her to the right. “We’ll make a big circle,” he said.

  She trotted out, glad she was not carrying anything. She found a strong smell at a patch of discolored ice and urinated on it. She sniffed and growled at a furry, mammal-smelling bird that landed in the trees above her and sent down a shower of ice slivers on her head. She zigzagged and then turned and bit, lips drawn back in mock rage, at a branch that scraped her side.