The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  Auschwitz!

  THE MOTHER

  This machine is standing in isolation; it is surrounded by space on all sides. It is extremely large, standing almost a hundred feet high, and it is shaped like an elongated onion, tapering at the top to a high spire. From one side of the machine, from about ten feet up, a flaccid rubbery tube hangs down and outward to ground level.

  The onion-belly of the Mother is completely featureless, and light catches its curves; the tube is of a dull red shade.

  There are sounds coming from inside the metal body, soft but constant. But then, abruptly, they stop, and all is silent.

  At the top of the tube, a bulge becomes apparent, swelling outward all the time. Slowly, this bulge begins to travel inside the tube, away from the machine and down to the ground. While all this is going on, one obtains an impression of supreme effort, and, strangely, pain. Perhaps it is because the whole process is so slow. The object creeping down the tube will eventually reach the end and emerge into the light; one realizes this, and feels an almost claustrophobic impatience with the slowness of the event. There is a feeling too of compression and relaxation, and one finds one’s own muscles clenching in time to the imagined contractions.

  Eventually the bulge reaches the end of the tube at ground level. This is where the real struggle begins. One becomes aware that the end of the tube is beginning to dilate, slowly and rhythmically. The belly of the machine is as smooth and unevocative of any emotion as ever, but it is impossible for the observer not to feel that agonies are now being endured. One realizes that the process is completely irreversible; that there is no way of forcing the bulge back up the tube and inside the metal shell again.

  Wider and wider grows the aperture at the end of the tube, affording one an occasional glimpse of shiny moisture within. A glint of metal is now and then apparent.

  The tube dilates to its fullest extent, and a metal form is suddenly revealed, covered in dripping brown fluid. The rubber slides over its surface, releasing it more and more by the second. Abruptly it bursts free in a wash of amniotic oil.

  All is still.

  The oil begins to drain away, and the new machine stands there motionlessly as the liquid drains from its surfaces. It is a small mechanism on caterpillar tracks, with various appendages at its front end which seem to be designed for working metal, or stone.

  With a whirr, it jerks into action, and it moves softly away from the great Mother. There is a click from the parent machine, and the noises inside begin again.

  I have watched this mechanism for long periods, and it appears to create only two kinds of machine. They are both on the same basic design, but one appears to be made for erection, the other for demolition.

  The Mother has probably been working thus for hundreds of years.

  ELECTRONICS

  Electric machines stare at me with warm green eyes. I see nothing but bright plastic surfaces, inset with pieces of glass. These are still machines, active but unmoving, and in my ears is the faint hum of their life. The only movement here which indicates that the machines are in operation is the kicking of meters and the occasional jog of an empty tape spool.

  Their function is not apparent; they work here at nameless tasks, performing them all with electronic precision and smoothness.

  There are wires all over the room, and their bright, primary colors contrast strikingly with the overall pastel tones of the plastic bodies.

  In a small chamber to the rear of the room of electric machines, there are some more of a different kind. The door to this small room is of wood, with a square glass set into it. The room appears to have remained undisturbed for many years.

  They line three walls of the chamber, and are covered with switches and meters. They hum in strange configurations of sound, and appear to be making electric music together.

  DEATH OF MACHINES—1

  In this part of the hall, all is still. Spiked mounds of time rise round me, their hulks encrusted with brown decay. The floor is totally covered by a soft carpet of rust, and its acrid odor stings the nostrils. A piece detaches itself from one of the tall machines and drifts to the floor, a flake of time. Many such flakes have fallen here in this part of the hall.

  Time burns fire in my eyes, and I turn my head, looking for escape. But everywhere I see seconds and hours frozen into these red shapes. Here is a wheel, its rim completely eaten through; there a piston, its moveable parts now fixed in a mechanical rigor mortis. A reel of wire has been thrown into a corner, ages in the past, and all that remain are its circular traces in the dust.

  My feet have left prints in the rust-carpet.

  DEATH OF MACHINES—2

  I had come into the hall with my girl, and we had spent a long time wandering about, hand in hand, when we suddenly came on the remains of a machine.

  It stood about six feet in height, and I could see that at one time it had been of great complexity. For some reason my girl was not very interested, and went off to see something else, but I found that this particular machine made me feel very sad. It appeared to be entirely composed of needles of metal, arranged in a thick pattern. The largest of these needles was about three inches long, and there appeared to be no way for the machine to hold together. My guess is that when it was made, the needles were fitted in such a way that the whole thing struck an internal balance. The machine was now little more than a gossamer web of rust; it must have had tremendous stability to have remained standing for such a long time.

  It was fascinating to look closely at its construction, to see the red lines fitting together so densely. It was like looking into a labyrinth; a system of blood-red caves. With every movement of my head a whole new landscape was presented to me. I called my girl over, and we stood hand in hand, looking at the dead machine.

  I think that it must have been our body heat, for neither of us made an excessive movement, but at that moment the entire construction creaked, and sank a few inches. Then there was a sigh, and the whole thing dissolved into dust about our feet.

  Both of us felt very subdued when we left the hall.

  —

  I hope that the above information has enabled my readers to gain an impression of this very exciting hall. There is little that I can add, except the following point.

  You will remember from one of the accounts I have printed here, the one giving details of the creation of new machines, the following passages: “It is a small mechanism on caterpillar tracks, with various appendages at its front end which seem to be designed for working metal, or stone….[I]t appears to create only two kinds of machine…one appears to be made for erection, the other for demolition.” These two passages, together with some other material that I have not published here, suggest an interesting point.

  I believe that the machines mentioned are the same as those described in another account, in which the writer stood by one of the outer walls of the hall. He watched one set of machines building a wall about six inches further out than the old one, which was being torn down by the other mechanisms. This seems to be a process which is going on all the time, all over the hall; a new wall is built, slightly further out, and this in its turn will be demolished as another is put up.

  I believe that the hall has been, from the time of its creation, and always will be, increasing in size!

  However, only more research will be able to establish this radical idea as an incontrovertible fact.

  * * *

  * This machine consists of a flat surface of metal with a circular metal door which leads to a small chamber, called the “compressor,” or “pot.” Apart from this the wall is featureless except for a switch by the side of the door. This area seems to be the most dismal place in the entire hall.

  Soft Clocks

  YOSHIO ARAMAKI

  Translated by Kazuko Behrens and stylized by Lewis Shiner

  Yoshio Aramaki (1933– ) is a Japanese writer of science fiction who trained as an architect and owns both an art gallery and a construction compa
ny in Sapporo. Aramaki made his professional writing debut with the highly speculative fiction “Oinaru shogo” (“The Great Noon”) and his heavily theoretical science fiction manifesto “Jutsu no shosetsu-ron” (“Theory on the Fiction of Kunst”), an attempt to read Heinlein in the context of Kant, both published in Hayakawa’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1970. One of his early novellas, “Shirakabe no moji wa yuhi ni haeru” (“The Writing on the White Wall Shines in the Setting Sun”), won the 1972 Seiun Award, the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo Award. The publication of his first speculative meta-novel, Shirokihi tabidateba fushi (Setting Out on a White Day Leads to Immortality), was deeply influenced by the Marquis de Sade and selected as runner-up for the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, which was established in 1973 to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Kyōka Izumi, master of Japanese Gothic romance. Some of Aramaki’s shorter fiction has appeared in English in Interzone and the Lewis Shiner–edited antiwar anthology When the Music’s Over (1991).

  How did Aramaki become a science fiction writer? The noted critic Takayuki Tatsumi, an expert on Aramaki, writes in his introduction to the author’s Collected Works that in 1965, “Aramaki’s deep interest in science fiction led him to join the Hokkaido SF Club, in whose fanzine CORE (1965–67) Aramaki published a diversity of Existentialist and Psycho-Analytical essays on science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, Taku Mayumura, and Yasutaka Tsutsui, the pioneer of Japanese metafiction who first discovered Aramaki’s literary and critical genius.”

  Conflict occurred when Aramaki, as Tatsumi puts it, “engaged in a heated debate in the fanzine Uchujin (Cosmic Dust) between 1969 and 1970 with the young talent Koichi Yamano, the writer-editor of the first commercial speculative fiction quarterly NW-SF (1970–82), who actually shared much of the same radical New Wave–oriented perspective as Aramaki, but who could not help but attack Japanese science fiction writers as imitators of their Anglo-American colleagues in his famous essay ‘Japanese SF: Its Originality and Possibility’ originally published in 1969.”

  Aramaki in 1990 launched a much more mainstream entertainment series of “virtual reality war novels,” with Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a real-life naval commander during World War II, as a central character reincarnated in alternate history. After initial low sales, the advent of the Gulf War in 1991 soon helped the series attract a much wider audience, leading Aramaki to start a different series called Asahi no kantai (The Fleet of the Rising Sun); the two series, totaling some twenty-five volumes, have sold more than five million copies.

  “Soft Clocks” appeared in English in 1989 in Interzone and was later reprinted in a special issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (2002) entitled “New Japanese Fiction.” The first Japanese publication, however, was in 1968, during the apex of the New Wave movement in the US and UK. The story exists in loose dialogue with Aramaki’s René Magritte–influenced story, “Toropikaru” (subsequently published in 1991 in English as “Tropical” in Strange Plasma 4), and what Tatsumi calls Aramaki’s “magnum opus,” the 1978 Hieronymus Bosch–inspired novel Shinseidai (Sanctozoic Era).

  Influenced by the work of Salvador Dalí and Puccini’s “proto-Orientalist” opera Madame Butterfly, “Soft Clocks” is a transgressive, often disturbing speculative riff reminiscent of Breton-style surrealism and Decadent-era literature. It presents a much different take on expeditions to Mars than other stories in this anthology.

  SOFT CLOCKS

  Yoshio Aramaki

  Translated by Kazuko Behrens and stylized by Lewis Shiner

  When I look at the stars in the sky, they appear so small. Either I am growing larger or the universe is shrinking—or both.

  —SALVADOR DALÍ

  It was noon on Mars. The party was already in full swing under blinding equatorial sunshine. The theme was “Blackout in Daylight.” Our host was DALI, surrealist, paranoiac-critic, millionaire, technophobe. His estate covered an area of the Lunae Planum about the size of Texas.

  Gilbert, the producer of the affair, had left orders that all guests were to wear costumes taken from the paintings of the original Salvador Dalí. Even I could not get out of it. Nearly naked receptionists, their faces made up into masks, took away the business suit I’d worn from Earth and dressed me in a plastic costume with golden wings, taken from View of Port Lligat with Guardian Angels and Fishermen.

  I wandered out into the grounds, dazzled by the landscape. A pond of mercury and mirrors flowed at unsettling angles. A dimensionless black mountain reflected the Spanish seaside village, Port Lligat, where Dalí had spent so many years. Erotically shaped pavilions stretched to impossible horizons.

  “This is indeed surreal, is it not?” said a man’s voice behind me. I turned around. The man’s hair stood straight up, the Dalist trademark. His mustache was waxed and curled at the ends. He held a glass of Martian blue mescal, clearly not his first. “Oh, excuse me. What are you supposed to be? A donkey?”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  The man’s upper body weaved from side to side, though his feet were planted solidly in the red sand. “No, wait, I see it now, you’re a tiger….”

  Not just the mescal, I thought. The hallucinations were typical of Martian Disease, a form of low-grade encephalitis. According to the literature, the victim’s interpretations of an object shifted without the perception itself changing. The disease was responsible for an abnormally high level of neuronal activity and some even claimed it gave the victims telekinetic powers. The last was of course not verified.

  I couldn’t imagine what I must have looked like to him. He seemed to find it amusing enough.

  “I’m from Tokyo,” I said. “I am—or was—Vivi’s analyst. You sent me a letter—”

  “Ah, yes, doctor. Welcome. I’m the famous DALI OF MARS. How are you enjoying the party? Vivi should be with us soon.”

  “Good, that’s good,” I said. I’d known that coming here would mean seeing Vivi again. Now I found myself afraid of the idea.

  “Gilbert should be here somewhere. He produced all this. You’ll want to meet him.”

  “I don’t remember him being on the list,” I said. “Is he one of the…uh, candidates?”

  “Ah, the list. So you’re wanting to start work already, eh?” DALI was distracted by a young woman in a death’s head mask and a tight suit cut away to reveal her breasts and buttocks. His eyes bulged with a look of insatiable greed.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like to get started as soon as possible. It would be much easier if I could get back my normal clothes….”

  “Yes, of course,” DALI said. “The ‘candidates,’ as you put it, should be in the bar.” He pointed toward a building shaped like a snail’s shell lying on its side.

  “Thank you,” I said, but DALI was already walking toward the woman with the death’s head.

  Dressed like a normal person again, I made my way to the bar. Chairs were set up along the wide spiraling aisle, and leather bags full of mescal hung from the curved ceiling. Several of the guests were already drunk. As DALI would have put it, they looked like “snail meat marinated in good champagne.”

  I found a seat in a bulge of the wall, close enough to hear the conversation. As an outsider, it sounded to me like a herd of geese being stampeded by a pig. Highly symbolic words and phrases shot out of their mouths, one after another. There was a certain harmony to it, but it didn’t last. The loudest of the voices belonged to Pinkerton, the pig among the geese.

  His name and that of Professor Isherwood, the rheologist, were the first two on DALI’s list.

  “No, no, no,” he shouted. He was dressed as the artist’s self-portrait, in smock and beret. “You’re all wrong. The hatred of machines goes all the way back to my ancestor Salvador Dalí. His is the true paranoiac-critical view of technology. It’s my perfect understanding of this that Vivi so admires. That’s why the odds all show that I’m going to be picked for her husband. The odds are ninety-two point four percent, in fact
, calculated objectively.”

  “Fool,” said Isherwood. He sat across the table from Pinkerton, wearing a corduroy jacket over a sweater. “Loudmouthed fool.”

  “What?” Pinkerton came out of his chair, leaning across the table with both hands spread wide. “You’re nothing but a monkey, a simpering toady to technology. You haven’t got a prayer. Our engagement will be announced any day. Vivi’s husband will be Pinkerton, genius painter of Mars, new incarnation of the first, the original, Salvador Dalí!”

  Pinkerton settled back in his chair, checking his hair in a hand mirror. Isherwood stared at him, his hands shaking. There was a glass of mescal in one of them and it shattered with a transparent sound. Blood streamed onto the tablecloth.

  “Ah,” Pinkerton said. “This is true beauty. I think I’ll show this tablecloth in my next exhibition.”

  The other two at the table, Boccaccio the barber and Martin the movie actor, laughed without much conviction. Pinkerton seemed serious. “I think I’ll call it Jealous Donkey, with His Tail Caught in His Horseshoe, Insults an Angel.”

  “This is ludicrous,” Isherwood said. He got up, knocking his chair over, and started out.

  “Sir?” I said. I offered him my handkerchief.

  “Thank you,” he said. He wrapped the handkerchief over his cut and glanced back at Pinkerton. “The man is insane.”

  “Martian sickness,” I said. “Maybe he’s not in control of himself. Will you sit down?”

  Isherwood nodded and sat across from me. “I’ve never seen you before,” he said. “Are you from Earth?” When I nodded, he said, “You talk like a psychiatrist.”