The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  I was not, it seemed, going to be spending the night with Carmen. But she had given me an idea. I ran to the phone and called Professor Isherwood.

  The next morning I woke up with a pounding head and queasy stomach. I hadn’t realized the aftereffects of Martian beer would be so devastating. I took a hot shower and lurched downstairs just in time for breakfast. DALI was in an extremely good mood. He had already begun eating.

  “Why don’t you try one?” he said.

  When I saw what was on the plate he offered, I panicked. I had meant Isherwood to give the soft clocks to Vivi to eat. DALI must have taken them from her.

  I had no choice. I picked out a small pocket watch and ate it. It was cool and crisp, like an English wheat biscuit.

  “I like to eat a full meal in the morning,” DALI said. The cook brought in a sizzling alarm clock on a tray. The clock was deformed and spread out to the edge of plate, but was still keeping time.

  DALI stabbed it with a fork as if to murder it and cut it into bite-sized pieces. His face was radiant with joy. Brown sauce dripped from his mouth and stained his napkin. “Doctor, this is wonderful.”

  “Perhaps,” I suggested, “Vivi would like to try one.”

  “I don’t want any,” Vivi said.

  “Please, Vivi,” I begged her. “It’s a gift from Professor Isherwood. He asked especially that you try it.”

  “No,” she said. “I have no appetite. I don’t want any, I tell you!”

  My idea had been to warm her to the idea of technology with the soft clocks. They were so friendly and harmless looking. I had hoped she might use them to begin to overcome her technophobia. But I hadn’t counted on the intensity of her anorexia.

  At lunch and dinner she again refused to eat. Her loathing for the soft clocks was so intense that I was afraid she might attempt suicide with her fork. Her personal physician was forced to give her an intravenous injection of protein simply to keep her alive.

  The next day I returned to Earth. I had one last plan. Isherwood had given me copies of all his notes and a range of samples of the rheoprotein, and I took them to Sony’s research and development laboratory. If Vivi’s mechanical organs could be replaced with organs made of the rheoprotein, so close to living tissue, her subconscious self-hatred might be brought under control. Her gratitude to Isherwood would seal their marriage.

  I had to hurry. If Vivi’s anorexia continued to get worse she would even refuse the injections, and then she would surely die.

  The Sony scientists were ecstatic at what I’d brought them. Within a week they’d developed prototype organs and made arrangements for them to be implanted as soon as possible. Isherwood’s patent applications were filed, and I was assured that he would soon be a millionaire several times over.

  I sat alone in my office with a flask of warm sake. It was bitter and sweet at the same time. I had probably saved Vivi’s life and made it possible for her to be married to the man I had chosen for her. I had fulfilled my mission.

  Why was I miserable? Was it possible that I still loved her? Was it more than some childish infatuation?

  But if I truly loved her I would wish only for her happiness. I would see her in her bridal gown. She would leave for her honeymoon with Isherwood. I would see them off. I would have the gratitude of the happy couple.

  Gratitude! I smashed the sake cup against the floor. I staggered off to bed and lay there, sleepless, until long after the sun had come up.

  My job, I soon learned, was not over. A telegram arrived from Vivi. “GRANDFATHER GOES MAD. MARS IS MELTING.”

  Isherwood was there to meet me at the abandoned shuttleport. I got into his jeep and we drove into the Martian desert, toward DALI’s mansion.

  “What’s happening? Where is everyone?” I asked him.

  “He should never have eaten the soft clock,” Isherwood said. “The results have been beyond anything anyone could imagine. It’s a disaster, a catastrophe.”

  The desert was melting, reshaping itself. It formed two humanlike figures, which sank waist-deep in the sand and began to melt into each other. A twisted tree grew up to support the woman’s head as it became soft and began to topple over. No, not a tree, I realized. A crutch. I recognized the scene from Salvador Dalí’s painting Autumn Cannibalism.

  “The rheoprotein mixed with DALI’s digestive fluid, with his entire body chemistry. By the time it passed through his system the protein had absorbed his genetic message. Now everything that comes in contact with the protein becomes part of DALI and part of his madness.”

  “The Martian sickness,” I said. “He can telekinetically control the entire desert.”

  “Not control, exactly,” Isherwood said. “The desert has become a vast theater of his unconscious.”

  The sand under the jeep began to undulate. The jeep itself seemed to soften. I sank deeper into the seat. Isherwood shouted, “No!” and drove even faster. As our speed picked up the tires were less and less in contact with the ground, and the effects diminished.

  “The entire space-time structure is being affected,” Isherwood said. “DALI is insane, bulimic. And as this insanity spreads, his insane world becomes edible. The more he eats, the worse it becomes. His gluttony is devouring time itself.”

  Vivi stood outside the palace, waiting for us. Around her was an island of solidity. As I got out of the jeep she ran toward me, but stopped short of putting her arms around me. “You came,” she whispered. “I’m so glad you’re safe.”

  “Of course I came,” I said. She was even thinner than when I had left. She was a skeleton, barely covered with skin. And yet she had a radiant, spiritual beauty that I could not deny.

  I looked back into the desert. A herd of giant elephants, led by a white horse, was charging toward us. Their legs were impossibly long and distorted, like the legs of spiders. I recognized them from Salvador Dalí’s Temptation of Saint Anthony.

  “We’d better get inside,” I said. “Where is your grandfather?”

  “Eating,” Vivi said. Isherwood ran for the house. I took Vivi’s hand and pulled her in after us.

  “Eating what?” I asked.

  “Anything he finds. Desks, chairs, beds, he’s even cooking telephones. He’s started on the wall of the dining room. Soon he will have eaten the entire house.”

  I suddenly noticed the house. DALI had once predicted that the buildings of the future would be soft and hairy. Here at least it was coming true. As I watched, the walls swelled and softened and moved gently in and out, as if they were breathing. Fine black hairs began to grow from the walls and ceilings. I shuddered away from them.

  “First the house,” Isherwood said, “and then the entire planet. Perhaps the entire universe.”

  I didn’t believe him until I saw DALI.

  He was ten feet tall. Sitting with his legs crossed, his head nearly touched the ceiling. He was eating the mantelpiece when we walked in.

  “So you’re back,” DALI said. “Will you join me?” He offered me a leftover chair leg.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  He continued to eat. He ate with more than mere hunger. He was not eating just to sustain himself, but with endless, thoughtless greed. It was the ultimate materialism, the ultimate desire to possess, to control, to own. To make the entire external universe a part of DALI.

  “Mars has become the fantasy he inherited from his ancestor,” I said to Vivi. “When he was a child Salvador Dalí wanted to be a cook. As he grew older his hero became Napoléon. Now DALI OF MARS has become both. The imperialist glutton. Worlds not only to conquer, but devour.”

  I pictured DALI floating in space, large as a planet, Mars in one hand like an apple that had been eaten to the core.

  Vivi shook her head. “It’s horrible,” she said. “How can he stand it? To eat so much. To become so huge.”

  And then I saw it. Vivi’s anorexia was the antidote to DALI’s madness.

  It made perfect sense. Classical anorexia nervosa is very much tied to
the patient’s concept of space. A previous anorexic patient of mine used to feel ashamed whenever anyone entered the area around her, which she defined as her personal space. On occasion she would have to spend time at her father’s restaurant. If any of the customers touched her, it would send her into ecstasies of self-loathing. In time her bashfulness extended from being touched to being seen, and finally she could not bear to be seen even by inanimate objects, such as dishes.

  Vivi’s fear of things crossing her personal boundaries was the exact opposite of her grandfather’s gluttony.

  There were also her personal feelings for DALI. In fact I was beginning to see that her anorexic self-hatred was just a displacement of her Oedipal hatred for her grandfather. As Vivi grew up, the closed world of her inner space began to reach toward the outer world. The dining room played an important role in this. Receiving nutrition from one’s family is like receiving trust. But the atmosphere at DALI’s table, between his gluttony and Vivi’s fear of him, was hardly suited to normal development.

  This all came to a head with the artificial organ transplant. The anorexia was just another form of technophobia, a rejection of the outer world. Because her subconscious realized the presence of a piece of the outer world—her artificial organs—inside her, the contradiction began to tear her apart. She rejected not only food, but the bridegroom candidates, anyone or anything that tried to cross her personal boundaries.

  “Professor Isherwood,” I said. “Do you still have any of those soft clocks?”

  “Well,” he said unhappily, “there is just one. I was keeping it as a souvenir.”

  “You must let me have it. It’s our only hope.”

  DALI had eaten through the back of the house. He was now consuming the lawn furniture, and growing steadily larger. Within minutes he would be heading into the desert.

  Isherwood handed me the clock. It was a small wall model with red enamel, not much larger than my hand. Vivi, as if suspecting what was about to happen, shrank from me.

  “Vivi—” I said.

  “No,” she said. I put the soft clock in her hand. “I can’t even look at it,” she said. “It’s shameful, embarrassing.”

  “Vivi, you must be strong. You must eat it.”

  “No, I can’t. It’s shameful. I’d rather die.”

  “It’s not just your life. It’s the lives of everyone on Mars.” I hesitated, and then I said, quietly, “It’s my life too.”

  “All right,” she said. She was crying. “I’ll do it. But Professor Isherwood must turn his back.”

  “Professor?”

  “Yes, all right.”

  Isherwood turned away. Vivi slowly brought the clock to her lips. She flushed with shame. Her eyes filled with tears. I looked away. The clock crunched slowly as she bit into it, like a cookie. From the corner of my eye I could see her chewing, slowly, keeping it in the front of her mouth.

  She swallowed. “All of it?” she asked.

  “As much as you can. At least a few more bites.”

  When I looked back she had eaten half of it. The second hand swept around to the missing half and then disappeared. Thirty seconds later it reappeared at the other edge. Vivi shook her head. “No more,” she said.

  “Very well. There’s something I have to tell you. You should hear this too, Professor. Vivi, when you came to Earth you were in a terrible accident. You were in surgery for many days.”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “Please. This is difficult for me.” I was sweating. “In order to save your life, your heart and lungs—”

  “No!” Vivi screamed.

  “—and stomach had to be replaced—”

  “No!” She tried to run, but I held her arms.

  “—replaced with artificial implants. Mechanical substitutes—” I couldn’t go on. Vivi was screaming too loudly. I let her go. Immediately her eyes wrinkled shut and her throat began working. I saw her mechanical stomach heaving. I got out of her way.

  She ran for the bathroom and flung the door closed behind her. It shut with a fleshy sound. I looked at Professor Isherwood as we heard Vivi being violently sick.

  “You did that on purpose,” Isherwood said.

  “The rheoprotein has mixed with her digestive juices. Vivi has infected the house with her anorexia, just as it was earlier infected with DALI’s bulimia.” I smiled tentatively at Isherwood. “Now the battle commences.”

  We ran outside. I could see DALI in the distance, running into the melting desert, thirty feet tall, devouring boulders and handfuls of red sand.

  “Doctor!” Isherwood shouted. I ran to where he stood, at the edge of a pond. A naked woman floated facedown in the water. Her body had turned soft and her fingers and toes had begun to melt into long, thin tendrils. I helped Isherwood pull her body onto the shore and turn her over.

  It was Carmen, from the pub.

  “She must have come back to steal something more valuable,” I said. I couldn’t look away. Her softness was ripe, erotic, intoxicating. Her full, glistening breasts wobbled provocatively. The soft flesh of her thighs rubbed against the damp blackness of her pubic hair.

  Isherwood was captivated too. He bent over her and gently touched one arm. “The bones are still there.”

  “She still has her ‘objectivity,’ as DALI would say. There may be time to save her.”

  “Her, perhaps,” Isherwood said, “but what about Pinkerton?”

  He pointed into the desert. A gigantic hand had risen from the dunes. Its fingers held a cracked egg with a flower growing out of it. The form of the hand was reflected in the form of a huge man, crouching in the sand. The scene was from Salvador Dalí’s painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus. The face of the crouching man belonged to Pinkerton.

  As I watched, Pinkerton’s mouth seemed to form the words “Help me.” But it was too late.

  Vivi walked out onto the porch of the now firm, lifeless house. A wave of solidity flowed from her and rippled out into the desert. Carmen stirred and sat up. “Where am I?”

  “Safe,” I said. “Safe, for now.”

  —

  They finally found DALI, deep in the desert of the Lunae Planum. He had been transformed into a hundred-foot-tall replica of one of Salvador Dalí’s earliest paintings, Self-Portrait with Easel, and frozen there.

  Vivi returned to Earth with me for the operation that replaced her mechanical organs with living organs of rheoprotein. Almost immediately she began to gain weight. It was a symbolic cure, but effective; my previous anorexic had been cured by a tonsillectomy.

  She was willing to honor her grandfather’s last wishes and marry Professor Isherwood, though she knew she didn’t love him. Isherwood, however, had changed his mind. Maybe it was the fact that Vivi had asked him to turn away from her, there at the end of the madness on DALI’s estate. Maybe it was something else. In any case, he had fallen in love with Carmen, and the last we heard, he was more like a bullfighter than a poet.

  As for Vivi and myself, I learned to stop fighting my feelings. I completed my contract and selected myself as Vivi’s bridegroom. The decision seemed to please everyone.

  Someday, perhaps, we will have children, and one day we may take them to Mars to see the statue of their great-grandfather. But for the moment we are in no hurry.

  Three from Moderan

  DAVID R. BUNCH

  David R. Bunch (1925–2000) was a prolific US fiction writer and poet who specialized in short fiction and whose real name may have been David Groupe. A cartographer for the US Air Force, Bunch became associated with the American New Wave due to his inclusion in Harlan Ellison’s iconic Dangerous Visions anthology. Bunch’s fiction shares some similarities with that of R. A. Lafferty, Stepan Chapman, and Kurt Vonnegut, but his is much more kinetic and punchily lyrical.

  Although little-known, Bunch was among the most original voices in the science fiction field in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of his work appeared in literary magazines before he turned to speculative fi
ction. His first published science fiction story may have been “Routine Emergency” (IF, 1957). “That High-Up Blue Day That Saw the Black Sky-Train Come Spinning” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1968) is one of his best stand-alone stories. The adventurous Cele Goldsmith is credited with championing Bunch by taking many of his stories for Amazing and Fantastic when she was the acquiring editor for those publications. (Fantastic also took work by J. G. Ballard and Harlan Ellison considered too outré for other genre publications.)

  Bunch himself famously stated in the June 1965 issue of Amazing Stories, “I’m not in this business primarily to describe or explain or entertain. I’m here to make the reader think, even if I have to bash his teeth out, break his legs, grind him up, beat him down, and totally chastise him for the terrible and tinsel and almost wholly bad world we allow…The first level reader, who wants to see events jerk their tawdry ways through some used and USED old plot—I love him with a hate bigger than all the world’s pity, but he’s not for me. The reader I want is the one who wants the anguish, who will go up there and get on that big black cross. And that reader will have, with me, the saving grace of knowing that some awful payment is due…as all space must look askance at us, all galaxies send star frowns down, a cosmic leer envelop this small ball that has such Great GREAT pretenders.” Perhaps it’s no surprise that Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers wrote that Bunch’s stories “met with varying degrees of outrage.”

  Bunch’s most recent collection was Bunch! (1993). However, Bunch’s first book, published in 1971, remains his best-known: Moderan, a mosaic novel consisting of linked fable-like tales written in a surreal, almost experimental mode. These tales of Moderan describe a radical future world of automation and factories where, after a nuclear holocaust, humans have been transformed into cyborgs, the surface of Earth is plastic, and communities exist underground.

  Nothing quite like the Moderan stories had been written before and nothing like them has been written since. In their intensity and their structural spiraling they at times resemble prose-poems. Yet they convey an astonishing amount of information, characterization, and plot beneath their hyperreal exterior. The only comparable experience exists in sections of Stepan Chapman’s novel The Troika, which includes the story of a man named Alex who turns into a machine. The Moderan stories are also notable because of their increasing relevance in a world of scarcity and growing alarm about climate change and what humankind has done to the planet.