The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  The purple disk was quickly falling behind the horizon. For a moment crimson fires flared up: the last rays of the sun fractured on thousands of ice crystals. Then darkness fell.

  Zarubin went over to the control panel. He turned off the buzzer. The arrow pointed to zero. Zarubin turned the power regulator. The greenhouse was filled with the whine of the motors of the conditioning system. Zarubin turned the power regulator as far as it would go. He walked round the other side of the control panel, removed the lock, and turned the regulator twice more. The whine turned into a shrill, penetrating, ringing roar.

  The captain turned to the wall and sat down. His hands were shaking. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He leaned his cheeks against the cold glass.

  He would have to wait for the new powerful signal to reach the rocket and bounce back to him.

  Zarubin waited.

  He lost his sense of time. The mini-reactors roared, almost as if they were about to explode, the motors of the conditioning system howled and groaned. The fragile greenhouse walls shuddered….

  The captain waited.

  Finally, some power allowed him to stand up and go over to the control panel.

  The power indicator pointed into the green zone. The signals were now strong enough for him to control the rocket. Zarubin gave a weak smile and said: “So…,” then looked at the speed at which the power was being consumed. It was happening one hundred and forty times more quickly than had been factored into the calculation.

  That night the captain did not sleep. He worked out a program for the electronic navigator. He had to correct all the deviations that the temporary loss of contact had caused.

  The wind howled over the snowdrifts on the plain. The vague polar sun rose over the horizon. The crazed mini-reactors screamed as they gave off their energy. The energy that had been carefully parceled out to last fourteen years was now being thrown out into the surroundings with a generous hand….Uploading the program into the electronic navigator, the captain walked tiredly round the greenhouse. The stars shone above the transparent ceiling. Leaning against the control panel, the captain looked up into the sky. Somewhere above him, the Pole, gathering speed, was flying directly toward Earth.

  It was very late, but I went to see the chief archivist. I remembered that he had told me about some of Zarubin’s other paintings.

  The chief archivist was not asleep.

  “I knew you would come,” he said, quickly putting his glasses on. “Come on, it’s just through here.”

  In the next room, lit by fluorescent lamps, there hung two small pictures. For a moment I thought that the archivist was mistaken. I thought that Zarubin could not have painted these pictures. They were so different from what I had learned that day: they were not experiments with color, or images of fantastic subjects. They were normal landscapes. One showed a road and a tree, and the other was a picture of a forest.

  “Yes, they’re by Zarubin,” the archivist said, as though he had read my thoughts. “He stayed on the planet, you know that, of course. It was a risky way to escape, but it was a way nonetheless. I speak as an astronaut…as a former astronaut.”

  The archivist pushed his glasses up his nose, and paused.

  “Then Zarubin did what…you know…He gave off all the energy he’d had in reserve for fourteen years over the course of four weeks. He directed the rocket, kept the Pole on course. And then when the ship reached sub-light speed, it started to brake within normal gravitational parameters, and the crew could steer themselves. By this time, Zarubin had almost no energy left in his mini-reactors. And there was nothing he could do. Nothing. Zarubin did some paintings. He loved Earth, loved life….”

  The painting showed a road running between villages, heading over the brow of a hill. A mighty fallen oak lay by the road. He had painted in the style of Jules Dupré, in the style of the Barbizon School: earthy, knotted, full of life and power. The wind drives some ragged clouds across the sky. There is a boulder lying by the gully at the edge of the road; it looks as if some traveler has only recently sat there…each detail is carefully painted, lovingly, with an unusual richness of color and sense of light.

  The other painting is unfinished. It is a wood in springtime. Everything is filled with air and light and warmth….Surprising golden tones…Zarubin knew the best colors to use.

  “I brought these paintings back to Earth,” the archivist said quietly.

  “You?”

  “Yes.” The archivist’s voice sounded sad, almost guilty. “There is no proper end to the materials you have been looking at. They are part of other expeditions already….The Pole returned to Earth and a rescue mission was immediately sent out. They did everything to make sure that the rocket reached Barnard’s Star as quickly as possible. The crew agreed to fly at six g’s. They reached the planet and did not even find the greenhouse. They risked their lives ten times, but didn’t find…Then, and this was many years later—they sent me. There was an accident en route. So.” The archivist raised his hand to his eyes. “But we got there. We found the greenhouse, the paintings….We found a note from the captain.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Just four words: ‘Onward through the impossible.’ ”

  We looked at the pictures in silence. I suddenly realized that Zarubin had painted them from memory. He was surrounded by ice, the evil light of crimson Barnard’s Star, and he mixed warm sunny colors on his palette….In the twelfth point of the flight manual he could have with justice have written: “I enjoy…no, I have a love, a great love for Earth, for life on Earth, for the people who live there.”

  The empty corridors of the archive are quiet. The windows are half open; the sea breeze makes the heavy drapes move. The waves come in even and heavy. It seems that they are repeating the same four words: “Onward through the impossible.” And then they are quiet, and then they come again and dash themselves on the sand: “Onward through the impossible.” And then they are quiet again.

  I want to answer the waves: “Yes, onward, ever onward!”

  The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink

  ADOLFO BIOY CASARES

  Translation by Marian Womack

  Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) was a prominent Argentine writer and man of letters who became a major figure in world literature and who championed a Latin American tradition of literary fantasy and detective fiction that pushed back against a dominant culture of realism. In so doing, Bioy Casares helped to create a space for later generations of fantastical writers, including Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. His fiction emphasized the metaphysical and mysterious and had surreal, abstract elements, although he famously was not impressed meeting André Breton and did not consider himself a surrealist per se. Bioy Casares was also an avid sportsman who boxed and played rugby but especially enjoyed tennis. He cultivated a well-rounded, cosmopolitan lifestyle that included trips to Europe centered around art and book culture.

  A close friend and contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, Bioy Casares was married to the noted writer Silvina Ocampo. Ocampo’s sister Victoria founded and ran the Argentine literary magazine Sur, which would provide a home for many of the best short stories and essays by all three writers. Together Bioy Casares, Borges, and Ocampo would edit the classic, highly influential Antología de la Literatura Fantástica (1940), reprinted in an updated English-language version in 1988 as The Book of Fantasy. Borges and Bioy Casares also wrote short satirical fiction under the pen name H. Bustos Domecq, although their first collaboration was writing advertising copy for various health products targeting the sedentary.

  “The Invention of Morel” (1940) is Bioy Casares’s most famous work (a novella) and, among other surreal speculative elements, features a narrator who is invisible to the inhabitants of the island he visits. The novella came about as the result of Bioy Casares wanting to create something unique out of the standard adventure story. As a measure of his success, “The Invention of Morel” was the model for Alain Res
nais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s movie Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which changed the history of film. The novella has even been referenced in the television series Lost. Borges considered the work to be comparable in its influence and success to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Franz Kafka’s The Trial.

  Other works include El sueño del los héroes (1954; The Dream of Heroes, 1987), which examines a workman’s being saved from death by a mysterious figure, possibly supernatural, and the repetition of the same events years later; it was avowedly influenced by the time theories of J. W. Dunne. Dormir al sol (1973; Asleep in the Sun, 1978) features soul transplants and conflates the transformations of psychosurgery with totalitarianism.

  Bioy Casares fell out of favor during the various iterations of the Perón regimes in Argentina, his and Sur’s remit seen as not nationalistic enough and too elite. He was quietly and not so quietly an anti-Perónist; Borges and Bioy teamed up once again, under the pen name B. Suárez Lynch, to write savage satires of Perón and others of that political persuasion. Meanwhile, his family’s background as landowners grated against the populist origins of revolution in the 1970s. Close associates, such as Borges, were labeled “literary oligarchs,” even though, in literary terms, Bioy’s championing of nonrealistic fiction would always be out of step with the status quo. However, after the iniquities of that era and a return to democracy, Bioy Casares regained his iconic status as an important literary figure—largely due to the universal nature of his best fiction. In 1990, he received the Cervantes Prize, one of the highest honors for a Spanish-language author.

  “The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink,” presented here in a new translation—the first since the story’s inclusion in The Book of Fantasy—is a unique tale of alien contact.

  THE SQUID CHOOSES ITS OWN INK

  Adolfo Bioy Casares

  Translation by Marian Womack

  More has happened in this town over the last few days than in the whole of its history. To see the significance of what I am saying, you should remember that I am talking about one of the old towns of the area, one in which notable events are not rare: its foundation in the middle of the nineteenth century; the cholera outbreak—which fortunately did not lead to anything more serious—and the danger of surprise raids, which, even if they never actually occurred, kept the populace on edge for the best part of half a decade while neighboring regions suffered under Indian attacks. And after this heroic period, I will skip over the visits made by governors and parliamentarians and political candidates of all stripes, as well as comedians and one or two sporting giants. I will conclude this brief list by coming full circle, with the celebration of the Centenary of the Foundation, a true tournament of oratory and tributes.

  As I am called upon to relate a particularly significant event, I will offer the reader my credentials. A man of wide sympathies and advanced ideas, I devour any books that I may find in my friend the Spaniard Villaroel’s library, from Dr. Jung to Hugo, Walter Scott and Goldoni, not forgetting the final volume of Madrid Scenes. I am concerned with culture, but I am on the cusp of my “wretched thirties,” and I truly fear that I have more to learn than I already know. To sum up, I try to follow all modern movements and to enlighten my fellow citizens, all fine people, of the best stock, even if very given over to their siestas, a tradition which they have cherished since the middle ages, the period of obscurantism. I am a teacher—a schoolteacher—and a journalist. I ply my pen in certain modest local organs, at times as a factotum for El Mirasol, The Sunflower (a poorly chosen title, one which provokes unpleasant remarks and brings in a huge quantity of misdirected correspondence, as they take us for an agricultural digest), at times for Nueva Patria.

  This account has a peculiarity that I would not wish to omit: not only did this event take place in my town, but it actually happened on the block where I have spent my whole life, where are to be found my home and my school—my second home—as well as the bar of a hotel opposite the station, where night after night, into the small hours, we gather, the restless nucleus of local youth. The epicenter of the phenomenon, the focus if you so prefer, was Juan Camargo’s town house, which borders the hotel to the east, and the courtyard of my house to the north. A couple of circumstances, which not everyone would have connected to the event, served to announce it: I am of course referring to the order placed for books, and the removal of the pivot sprinkler.

  Las Margaritas, Don Juan’s own petit-hôtel, a real little chalet with its garden facing onto the street, takes up half the frontage and very little of the interior space of the town house, where a huge quantity of material is gathered like shipwrecks piled at the bottom of the sea. As for the pivot sprinkler, it always turned in the aforementioned garden, to the extent that it was one of the oldest traditions, one of the most interesting peculiarities, of our town.

  One Sunday, at the beginning of the month, the sprinkler was, mysteriously, not there. As after a week it had not reappeared, the garden had lost much of its color and brightness. While most people saw this without taking it in, there was one whose curiosity was piqued from the first. This individual provoked curiosity in others, and at night, in the bar, opposite the station, the group of young men seethed with questions and comments. And so, as the result of a simple, natural inquisitiveness, we discovered something that was not natural at all, a true surprise.

  We knew very well that Don Juan was not a man to cut off the water to his garden, carelessly, in a dry summer. We considered him a pillar of the town. The character of this fifty-year-old was true to type: tall and corpulent, his graying hair parted into two obedient halves, which traced parallel arcs to his mustache and, further down, his watch chain. Further details will reveal a gentleman of an old-fashioned style: breeches, leather leggings, ankle boots. In his life, ruled as it was by moderation and by order, nobody, as far as I can recall, detected any weakness, whether it be drunkenness, skirt-chasing, or clumsy political opinions. Even in his early years, which might with justice be forgotten—who among us, in his unformed youth, has not sown at least one wild oat?—Don Juan remained clean. Even the Cooperative auditors, and others, very disrespectable people, frankly shabby, recognized Don Juan’s authority. There must have been some reason why, in those thankless years, Don Juan’s large mustache was a handle onto which the respectable folk of the town could cling.

  It must be acknowledged that this paragon was possessed of old-fashioned ideas and that in our ranks, those of the idealists, there have not yet appeared figures of comparable consistency. In a new country, there is no tradition of new ideas. And as you are aware, without tradition there is no stability.

  There was no one who appeared above this figure in our daily hierarchy, save for Doña Remedios, the mother and unique adviser to her corpulent son. Between ourselves, and not only because she solved every conflict presented to her manu militari, we called her the Iron Lady. Although we were making fun of her, the nickname was meant affectionately.

  In order to complete the list of those who dwelled in the chalet all that is required is an indubitably minor addition, the godson, Don Tadeito, who took night classes at my school. As Doña Remedios and Don Juan welcomed very few people into their house, neither as guests nor as assistants, the child had piled on his head the titles of laborer and servant in the main house, as well as that of waiter in Las Margaritas. And in addition to that, the poor devil came regularly to my classes and so you will appreciate why I give short shrift to those people who, out of sheer ill spirit and malice, lumber him with some ridiculous nickname. That he was rejected out of hand for his military service does not matter to me, because I am not an envious man.

  The Sunday in question, at some time between two and four o’clock in the afternoon, someone knocked at my door with the deliberate aim, to judge from the blows, of breaking it down. I got up, shaking, and muttered, “It can only be one person,” then used words that do not sit well in the mouth of a teacher and then, as if this were not the time for disagreeable visits
, opened the door, sure that I would see Don Tadeito. I was right. There he was, my student, smiling, his face so thin that it served as no screen between me and the sun that shone right in my eyes. As far as I could understand him, he asked, point-blank and in his voice that trailed away at the end of the sentence, for first-, second-, and third-grade textbooks.

  I spoke to him in irritation:

  “May I ask why?”

  “Godfather wants them,” he replied.

  I handed the books over and forgot about the episode immediately, as if it were part of a dream.

  A few hours later, as I was heading toward the station and was taking a stroll in order to fill the time, I noticed the absence of the sprinkler in Las Margaritas. I mentioned it on the platform, while we were waiting for the 19:30 express from Plaza, which came through at 20:54, and I mentioned it that night, in the bar. I didn’t mention the books, far less did I connect one event with the other, because, as I have said, I barely even recalled the episode.

  I supposed that after such a busy day life would return to its normal tranquil path. On Monday, when time came for my siesta, I was thinking, “This time it will be a good one,” but the fringe of my poncho was still tickling my nose when the knocking started. Murmuring, “What does he want today? If I catch him kicking the door he’ll pay for it,” I put on my slippers and walked to the door.

  “Is it a habit now to wake your teacher?” I spat out as I took the pile of books.

  I was taken aback, as the only response was the following:

  “Godfather wants third-year and fourth- and fifth-year books.”

  I managed to say:

  “Why?”

  “Godfather wants them,” Don Tadeito explained.

  I gave him the books and went back to my bed, in search of sleep. I did sleep, I will admit it, but I did so, please believe me, poorly.