The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  Was he sad, oh, was he sad! He came on, this little toad-down man, tap-tap, mince-mince, step-walk-step, but with tense carefulness in his slowness, as if every inch-mince were some slipping up on a bird. It made me itch just to see him, and to think how walking should be, great striding, big reaching, tall up with steel things clanking long-down by your side and other weapons in leather with which to defy your world. And your wagons coming up with maces and hatchets on end. Though I go not that way myself, truth to say, for I am of Moderan, where people have “replacements.” I walk with a hitch worse than most, an inch-along kind of going, clop-clip-clap-clop, over the plastic yards, what little I walk, for I still have bugs in the hinges. I was an Early, you know, one of the first of Moderan. But I remember. Something in the pale green blood of my flesh-strips recalls how walking should be—a great going out with maces to pound up your enemies’ heads, and a crunchy bloody jelly underfoot from the bones and juices of things too little even to be glanced at under your iron-clad feet.

  But this guy! Hummph. He came like a lily. Yes, a white lily with bell-cone head bent down. I wondered why my warner even bothered with him. But yes, I knew why my warner bothered with him. My warner tells me of all movement toward my Stronghold, and sometimes the lilies—“Stand by for decontamination!” He was at my Outer Wall now, at the Screening Gate, so I directed my decontaminators and weapons probers to give him the rub-a-dub. To be truthful, two large metal hands had leaped out of the wall to seize him and hold him directly in front of the Screening Gate, so my call to “stand by for decontamination!” was merely a courtesy blab. When the Decontamination and the Weapons Report both gave him a clean bill I thumbed the gates back in all my eleven steel walls and let the lily man mince through.

  “Hello, and welcome, strange traveler from Far Wide.” He stood trembling in his soft-rag shoes, seeming hard put on how actually to stop his inch-mince walk. “Forgive me,” he said, “if I seem nervous.” And he looked at me out of the blue of his flesh-ball eyes while he tugged at a cup-shaped red beard. And I was appalled at the “replacements” he had disallowed, the parts of himself he had clung to. For one wild blinding moment I was almost willing to bet that he had his real heart, even. But then I thought ah, no, not at this late year and in Moderan. “This walking,” he continued, “keeps going. You see, it takes a while to quiet. You know, getting here at last, I cannot, all of me, believe I am really here. My mind says yes! My poor legs keep thinking there’s still walking to do. But I’m here!”

  “You’re here,” I echoed, and I wondered, What next? what goes? I thought of the mice I had nailed and the new cat waiting and I was impatient to get on with my Joys. But then, a visitor is a visitor, and a host most likely is a victim. “Have you eaten? Have you had your introven?”

  “I’ve eaten.” He eyed at me strange-wide. “I didn’t have introven.”

  I began to feel more uneasy by the minute. He just stood there vibrating slightly on thin legs, with those blue-flesh-ball eyes peeking my way, and he seemed to be waiting for me to react. “I’m here!” he said again. And I said, “Yes,” not knowing what else to say. “Would you wish to tell me about your trip,” I asked, “the trials and tribulations?”

  Then he started his recital. It was mostly a dreary long tune of hard going, of almost baseless hopes concerning what he hoped to find, of how he had kept coming, of how he had almost quit in the Spoce Mountains, of how something up ahead had kept him trying, something like a gleam of light through a break in an iron wall. “Get over the wall,” he said, “and you have won it, all that light. Over the wall!” He looked at me as though this was surely my time to react.

  “Why did you almost quit in the Spoce Mountains?”

  “Why did I almost quit in the Spoce Mountains!? Have you ever tried the Spoce Mountains?” I had to admit that I had not. “If you have never tried the Spoce Mountains—” He fell into a fit of shaking that was more vivid than using many words. “Where are all the others?” he asked when the shaking had stopped a little.

  “All the others? What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, yes. There must be great groups here. There must be long lists waiting.” His white cone-shaped face lit up. “Oh, they’re in the Smile Room. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  My big steel fingers itched to crush him then like juicing a little worm. There was something about him, so soft, so trustful and pleading and so all against my ideas of the iron mace and the big arm-swing walk. “There’s no Smile Room here,” I blurted. “And no long lists waiting.”

  Unwilling to be crushed he smiled that pure little smile. “Oh, it must be such a wonderful machine. And so big! After all the other machines, the One, the ONE—finally!”

  Great leaping lead balls bouncing on bare-flesh toes! What had we here? A nut? Or was he just lost from home? “Mister,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re driving at. This is my home. It’s where I wall out danger. It’s where I wall in fun. My kind of fun. It’s a Stronghold.”

  At the sound of that last word his blue eyes dipped over and down in his whitewash face; his head fell forward like it was trying to follow the eyes to where they were falling. And out of a great but invisible cloud that seemed to wrap him round his stricken mouth gaped wide. “A Stronghold! All this way I’ve come and it is a Stronghold! You have not the Happiness Machine at a Stronghold. It could not be.

  “Oh, it is what kept me going—the hope of it. I was told. In the misty dangerous weird Spoce Mountains when the big wet-wing Gloon Glays jumped me and struck me down with their beaks I arose and kept coming. And on one very sullen rain-washed hapless morning I awoke in a white circle of the long-tusk wart-skin woebegawngawns, and oh it would have been so much easier, so very much less exacting, to have feigned sleep while they tore me and opened my soul case with death. But no! I stood up, I remembered prophecy. I drew my cloak around me. I walked. I walked on. I left them staring with empty teeth. I thought of my destination. And now— It was a dream! I am fooled! Take me to your Happiness Machine!”

  He was becoming hysterical. He blabbed as how he wanted to go and sit in some machine gauged to beauty and truth and love and be happy. He was breaking down. I saw I must rally him for one more try, to get him beyond my walls. “Mister,” I said, “you have, no doubt, known the big clouds and the sun failing and the rain-washed gray dawn of the hopeless time. You have—I believe it—stood up in disaster amid adversity’s singing knives and all you had going for you was what you had brought along. There were no armies massing for you on other fields, no uncles raising funds in far countries across seas; perhaps there were no children, even, coming for Daddy in the Spoce Mountains, and with death not even one widow to claim the body and weep it toward the sun. And yet you defied all this, somehow got out of disaster’s tightening ring and moved on down. I admire you. I truly am sorry I do not have what you want. And though you are a kind of fool, by my way of thinking, to go running around in flesh looking for a pure something that perhaps does not exist, I wish you luck as I thumb the gates back and make way for your progress. You may find, up ahead somewhere, across a lot of mountains, and barren land, these Happiness Machines for which you cry.” He trembled when I spoke of mountains, but he moved out through the gates.

  And though I was sure he would find nothing the way he was going, I have not been entirely able to forget him. What would prompt such a creature, obviously ill equipped for any great achievement, to hope for the ultimate and impossibly great achievement, happiness? And such an odd way to expect it, happiness dispensed by some magic machine gauged to beauty and truth and love. In a resplendent place at the end of a long trip.

  To hear him talk you’d think happiness could be based on lily-weak things. How weird. Power is joy; strength is pleasure; put your trust only in the thick wall with the viewer and the warner. But sometimes, in spite of myself, I think of this little flesh-ridden man and wonder where he is.

  And when I’m at my ease, feeding my flesh-strips the complicated
fluids of the introven, knowing I can live practically forever with the help of the new-metal alloys, a vague uneasiness comes over me and I try to evaluate my life. With the machines that serve me all buzzing underneath my Stronghold and working fine—yes, I am satisfied, I am adequate. And when I want a little more than quiet satisfaction, I can probe out and destroy one of my neighbor’s walls perhaps, or a piece of his warner. And then we will fight lustily at each other for a little while from our Strongholds, pushing the destruction buttons at each other in a kind of high glee. Or I can just keep home and work out some little sadistic pleasure on my own. And on the terms the flesh-man wanted—truth, beauty, love—I’m practically sure there is no Happiness Machine out there anywhere at all. I’m almost sure there isn’t.

  Let Us Save the Universe

  (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy)

  STANISŁAW LEM

  Translated by Joel Stern and Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek

  Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) was a world-renowned Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire whose books have appeared in more than thirty countries and sold millions of copies. Over half a century, he published a flurry of influential and groundbreaking fiction and nonfiction books.

  In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. If true, this was in part because Lem was a genius but also because Lem often adopted the form of the short tall tale or folktale for his science fiction, speaking therefore in a near-universal language. Yet the intellectual rigor of his fiction is second to none, spanning such areas as advanced technology, human intelligence, community, and the nature of alien life. Much of his work exists within a continuum also occupied by idiosyncratic, brilliant writers such as Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Leena Krohn.

  He is perhaps most famous for writing the classic 1961 novel Solaris, translated into film thrice, most notably by Andrei Tarkovsky. But Lem’s adventures with nonfiction are just as breathtaking, especially Summa Technologiae (1964), a brilliant and risky survey of possible informational, A.I., and ecological advances, interwoven with musings of a biological and technological nature.

  Parts of the American science fiction community did not particularly get along with Lem. He became the epicenter of a controversy involving the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1973 when he was awarded, and then denied, an honorary membership with the organization; some saw it as a rebuke to his mostly negative opinion of American science fiction, which he thought was too commercially driven. Even when Lem praised an American writer—one Philip K. Dick—it caused difficulties. Dick reported Lem to the FBI, believing that “Lem” was a front for a communist agent trying, somehow, to undermine the United States. Thereafter, Lem can hardly be blamed for having nothing to do with the science fiction community—especially given that he had his own difficulties with the Communist Party in his country. (Thankfully, his international popularity allowed Lem more leeway than most writers in the Soviet bloc.)

  Although most of the Lem canon is well worth reading, his stories featuring Ijon Tichy, described as the hapless Candide of the Cosmos, are particularly hilarious and rich in detail. Tichy pilots his single-seat rocket through deep space, encountering time warps, weird intergalactic civilizations, and black holes. Whether it is killer potatoes who love to eat spaceships or robot theologians living in catacombs, Lem’s imagination is superlative in these beloved tales. As translator Michael Kandel noted in The Star Diaries (1976), these stories include playful anecdotes, pointed satire, and outright philosophy. But rather than innovating, as Kandel believed, Lem was renovating—by bringing the conte philosophe approach used by early twentieth-century science fiction into the modern era and thus allying himself with writers such as Alfred Jarry and Paul Scheerbart.

  “Let Us Save the Universe” (1971), first published in English in The New Yorker (1981), is one of the last Tichy tales, and as such encapsulates many of the joys of the series, even as it also includes a note of sadness. In revisiting his favorite places, Tichy finds too much has been polluted or transformed. “Tichy” is pronounced “Tee-khee” and suggests the Polish word for “quiet.”

  LET US SAVE THE UNIVERSE

  (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy)

  Stanisław Lem

  Translated by Joel Stern and Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek

  After a long stay on Earth I set out to visit my favorite places from my previous expeditions—the spherical clusters of Perseus, the constellation of the Calf, and the large stellar cloud in the center of the galaxy. Everywhere I found changes, which are painful for me to write about, because they are not changes for the better. There is much talk nowadays about the growth of cosmic tourism. Without question tourism is wonderful, but everything should be in moderation.

  The eyesores begin as soon as you are out the door. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is in deplorable condition. Those monumental rocks, once enveloped in eternal night, are lit up now, and to make matters worse, every crag is carved with initials and monograms.

  Eros, the particular favorite of lovers, shakes from the explosions with which self-taught calligraphers gouge inscriptions in its crust. A couple of shrewd operators there rent out hammers, chisels, and even pneumatic drills, and a man cannot find an untouched rock in what were once the most rugged areas.

  Everywhere are graffiti like it was love at first sight on this here meteorite, and arrow-pierced hearts in the worst taste. On Ceres, which for some reason large families like, there is a veritable plague of photography. The many photographers there don’t just rent out space suits for posing but cover mountainsides with a special emulsion and for a nominal fee immortalize on them entire groups of vacationers. The huge pictures are then glazed to make them permanent. Suitably posed families—father, mother, grandparents, children—smile from cliffs. This, as I read in some prospectus, creates a “family atmosphere.” As regards Juno, that once beautiful planetoid is all but gone; anyone who feels like it chips stones off it and hurls them into space. People have spared neither nickel-iron meteors (which have gone into souvenir signet rings and cufflinks) nor comets. You won’t find a comet with its tail intact anymore.

  I thought I would escape the congestion of cosmobuses, the family portraits on cliffs, and the graffiti doggerel once I left the solar system. Was I wrong!

  Professor Bruckee from the observatory complained to me recently that both stars in Centaurus were growing dim. How can they not grow dim when the entire area is filled with trash? Around the heavy planet Sirius, the chief attraction of this system, is a ring like those of Saturn, but formed of beer bottles and lemonade containers. An astronaut flying that route must dodge not only swarms of meteors but also tin cans, eggshells, and old newspapers. There are places where you cannot see the stars, for all the rubbish. For years astrophysicists have been racking their brains over the reason for the great difference in the amounts of cosmic dust in various galaxies. The answer, I think, is quite simple: the higher a civilization is, the more dust and refuse it produces. This is a problem more for janitors than for astrophysicists. Other nebulae have not been able to cope with it, either, but that is small comfort.

  Spitting into space is another reprehensible practice. Saliva, like any liquid, freezes at low temperatures, and colliding with it can easily lead to disaster. It is embarrassing to mention, but individuals who fall sick during a voyage seem to consider outer space their personal toilet, as if unaware that the traces of their distress will orbit for millions of years, arousing in tourists bad associations and an understandable disgust.

  Alcoholism is a special problem.

  Beyond Sirius I began counting the huge signs advertising Mars vodka, Galax brandy, Lunar gin, and Satellite champagne, but soon lost count. I hear from pilots that some cosmodromes have been forced to switch from alcohol fuel to nitric acid, there being nothing of the former left to use for takeoff. The patrol service says that it is difficult to spot a drunken person from a distance: peop
le blame their staggering on weightlessness. And the practices of certain space stations are a disgrace. I once asked that my reserve bottles be filled with oxygen, after which, having traveled no more than a parsec, I heard a strange burbling and found that I had been given, instead, pure cognac! When I went back, the station director insisted that I had winked when I spoke to him. Maybe I did wink—I have a stye—but does that justify such a state of affairs?

  Confusion reigns on the main routes. The huge number of accidents is not surprising, considering that so many people regularly exceed the speed limit. The worst offenders are women: by traveling fast they slow the passage of time and age less. Also, one frequently encounters rattletraps, like the old cosmobuses that pollute the length of the ecliptic with their exhaust.

  When I landed on Palindronia and asked for the complaint book, I was told that it had been smashed the day before by a meteorite. And the supply of oxygen is running short. Six light-years from Beluria it cannot be obtained anywhere, people who go there to sightsee are forced to freeze themselves and wait, reversibly dead, for the next shipment of air, because if alive they would have not a thing to breathe. When I arrived, there was no one at the cosmodrome; they were all hibernating in the coolers. But in the cafeteria I saw a complete assortment of drinks—from pineapples in cognac to pilsner.