The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  He turned a sadly smiling face toward me and bowed slightly. After stroking the dogpillar’s head a little, I left the park.

  I came out on the main street, but there was only a ridiculous number of passing cars: pedestrians were few. A cattree, about thirty to forty centimeters high, was planted next to the sidewalk.

  Sometimes I come across a catpillar that has just been planted and still hasn’t become a cattree. New catpillars look at my face and meow or cry, but the ones where all four limbs planted in the ground have vegetized, with their greenish faces stiffly set and eyes shut tight, only move their ears now and then. Then there are catpillars that grow branches from their bodies and put out handfuls of leaves. The mental condition of these seems to be completely vegetized—they don’t even move their ears. Even if a cat’s face can still be made out, it may be better to call these cattrees.

  Maybe, I thought, it’s better to make dogs into dogpillars. When their food runs out, they get vicious and even turn on people. But why did they have to turn cats into catpillars? Too many strays? To improve the food situation by even a little? Or perhaps for the greening of the city…

  Next to the big hospital on the corner where the highways intersect are two mantrees, and ranged alongside these trees is a manpillar. This manpillar wears a postman’s uniform, and you can’t tell how far its legs have vegetized because of its trousers. It is male, thirty-five or thirty-six years old, tall, with a bit of a stoop.

  I approached him and held out my envelope as always.

  “Registered mail, special delivery, please.”

  The manpillar, nodding silently, accepted the envelope and took stamps and a registered-mail slip from his pocket.

  I looked around quickly after paying the postage. There was no one else there. I decided to try speaking to him. I gave him mail every three days, but I still hadn’t had a chance for a leisurely talk.

  “What did you do?” I asked in a low voice.

  The manpillar looked at me in surprise. Then, after running his eyes around the area, he answered with a sour look, “Won’t do to go saying unnecessary things to me. Even me, I’m not supposed to answer.”

  “I know that,” I said, looking into his eyes.

  When I wouldn’t leave, he took a deep breath. “I just said the pay’s low. What’s more, I got heard by my boss. Because a postman’s pay is really low.” With a dark look, he jerked his jaw at the two mantrees next to him. “These guys were the same. Just for letting slip some complaints about low pay. Do you know them?” he asked me.

  I pointed at one of the mantrees. “I remember this one, because I gave him a lot of mail. I don’t know the other one. He was already a mantree when we moved here.”

  “That one was my friend,” he said.

  “Wasn’t that other one a chief clerk or section head?”

  He nodded. “That’s right. Chief clerk.”

  “Don’t you get hungry or cold?”

  “You don’t feel it that much,” he replied, still expressionless. Anyone who’s made into a manpillar soon becomes expressionless. “Even I think I’ve gotten pretty plantlike. Not only in how I feel things, but in the way I think, too. At first, I was sad, but now it doesn’t matter. I used to get really hungry, but they say the vegetizing goes faster when you don’t eat.”

  He stared at me with lightless eyes. He was probably hoping he could become a mantree soon.

  “Talk says they give people with radical ideas a lobotomy before making them into manpillars, but I didn’t get that done, either. Even so a month after I was planted here I didn’t get angry anymore.”

  He glanced at my wristwatch. “Well, you better go now. It’s almost time for the mail truck to come.”

  “Yes.” But still I couldn’t leave, and I hesitated uneasily.

  “You,” the manpillar said. “Someone you know didn’t recently get done into a manpillar, did they?”

  Cut to the quick. I stared at his face for a moment, then nodded slowly.

  “Actually, my wife.”

  “Hmm, your wife, is it?” For a few moments he regarded me with deep interest. “I wondered whether it wasn’t something like that. Otherwise nobody ever bothers to talk to me. Then what did she do, your wife?”

  “She complained that prices were high at a housewives’ get-together. Had that been all, fine, but she criticized the government, too. I’m starting to make it big as a writer, and I think that the eagerness of being that writer’s wife made her say it. One of the women there informed on her. She was planted on the left side of the road looking from the station toward the assembly hall and next to that hardware store.”

  “Ah, that place.” He closed his eyes a little, as if recollecting the appearance of the buildings and the stores in that area. “It’s a fairly peaceful street. Isn’t that for the better?” He opened his eyes and looked at me searchingly. “You aren’t going to see her, are you? It’s better not to see her too often. Both for her and you. That way you both forget faster.”

  “I know that.”

  I hung my head.

  “Your wife?” he asked, his voice turning slightly sympathetic. “Has anyone done anything to her?”

  “No. So far nothing. She’s just standing, but even so—”

  “Hey.” The manpillar serving as a postbox raised his jaw to attract my attention. “It’s come. The mail truck. You’d better go.”

  “You’re right.”

  Taking a few wavering steps, as if pushed by his voice, I stopped and looked back. “Isn’t there anything you want done?”

  He brought a hard smile to his cheeks and shook his head.

  The red mail truck stopped beside him. I moved on past the hospital.

  Thinking I’d check in on my favorite bookstore, I entered a street of crowded shops. My new book was supposed to be out any day now, but that kind of thing no longer made me the slightest bit happy.

  A little before the bookstore in the same row is a small, cheap candy store, and on the edge of the road in front of it is a manpillar on the verge of becoming a mantree. A young male; it is already a year since it was planted. The face had become a brownish color tinged with green, and the eyes are tightly shut. Tall back slightly bent, the posture slouching a little forward. The legs, torso, and arms, visible through clothes reduced to rags by exposure to wind and rain, are already vegetized, and here and there branches sprout. Young leaves bud from the ends of the arms, raised above the shoulders like beating wings. The body, which has become a tree, and even the face no longer move at all. The heart has sunk into the tranquil world of plants.

  I imagined the day when my wife would reach this state, and again my heart winced with pain, trying to forget. It was the anguish of trying to forget.

  If I turn the corner at this candy store and go straight, I thought, I can go to where my wife is standing. I can see my wife. But it won’t do to go, I told myself. There’s no telling who might see you: if the woman who informed on her questioned you, you’d really be in trouble. I came to a halt in front of the candy store and peered down the road. Pedestrian traffic was the same as always. It’s all right. Anyone would overlook it if you just stand and talk a bit. You’ll just have a word or two. Defying my own voice screaming “Don’t go!” I went briskly down the street.

  Her face pale, my wife was standing by the road in front of the hardware store. Her legs were unchanged, and it seemed as if only her feet from the ankles down were buried in the earth. Expressionlessly, as if striving to see nothing, feel nothing, she stared steadily ahead. Compared with two days before, her cheeks seemed a bit hollow. Two passing factory workers pointed at her, made some vulgar joke, and passed on, guffawing uproariously. I went up to her and raised my voice.

  “Michiko!” I yelled right in her ear.

  My wife looked at me, and blood rushed to her cheeks. She brushed one hand through her tangled hair.

  “You’ve come again? Really you mustn’t.”

  “I can’t help coming.” />
  The hardware store mistress, tending shop, saw me. With an air of feigned indifference, she averted her eyes and retired to the back of the store. Full of gratitude for her consideration, I drew a few steps closer to Michiko and faced her.

  “You’ve gotten pretty used to it?”

  With all her might she formed a bright smile on her stiffened face. “Mmm. I’m used to it.”

  “Last night it rained a little.”

  Still gazing at me with large, dark eyes, she nodded lightly. “Please don’t worry. I hardly feel anything.”

  “When I think about you, I can’t sleep.” I hung my head. “You’re always standing out here. When I think that, I can’t possibly sleep. Last night I even thought I should bring you an umbrella.”

  “Please don’t do anything like that!” My wife frowned just a little. “It would be terrible if you did something like that.”

  A large truck drove past behind me. White dust thinly veiled my wife’s hair and shoulders, but she didn’t seem bothered.

  “Standing isn’t really all that bad.” She spoke with deliberate lightness, working to keep me from worrying.

  I perceived a subtle change in my wife’s expressions and speech from two days before. It seemed that her words had lost a shade of delicacy, and the range of her emotions had become somewhat impoverished. Watching from the sidelines like this, seeing her gradually grow more expressionless, it’s all the more desolating for having known her as she was before—those keen responses, the bright vivacity, the rich, full expressions.

  “These people,” I asked her, running my eyes over the hardware store, “are they good to you?”

  “Well, of course. They’re kind at heart. Just once they told me to ask if there’s anything I want done. But they still haven’t done anything for me.”

  “Don’t you get hungry?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s better not to eat.”

  So. Unable to endure being a manpillar, she was hoping to become a mantree even so much as a single day faster.

  “So please don’t bring me food.” She stared at me. “Please forget about me. I think, certainly, even without making any particular effort, I’m going to forget about you. I’m happy that you come to see me, but then the sadness drags on that much longer. For both of us.”

  “Of course you’re right, but—” Despising this self that could do nothing for his own wife, I hung my head again. “But I won’t forget you.” I nodded. The tears came. “I won’t forget. Ever.”

  When I raised my head and looked at her again, she was gazing steadily at me with eyes that had lost a little of their luster, her whole face beaming in a faint smile like a carved image of Buddha. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile like that.

  I felt I was having a nightmare. No, I told myself, this isn’t your wife anymore.

  The suit she had been wearing when she was arrested had become terribly dirty and filled with wrinkles. But of course I wouldn’t be allowed to bring a change of clothes. My eyes rested on a dark stain on her skirt.

  “Is that blood? What happened?”

  “Oh, this.” She spoke falteringly, looking down at her skirt with a confused air. “Last night two drunks played a prank on me.”

  “The bastards!” I felt a furious rage at their inhumanity. If you put it to them, they would say that since my wife was no longer human, it didn’t matter what they did.

  “They can’t do that kind of thing! It’s against the law!”

  “That’s right. But I can hardly appeal.”

  And of course I couldn’t go to the police and appeal, either. If I did, I’d be looked on as even more of a problem person.

  “The bastards! What did they—” I bit my lip. My heart hurt enough to break. “Did it bleed a lot?”

  “Mmm, a little.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  Michiko, who had been so proud before now, showed just a little sadness in her face. I was shocked by the change in her. A group of young men and women, penetratingly comparing me and my wife, passed behind me.

  “You’ll be seen,” my wife said anxiously. “I beg of you, don’t throw yourself away.”

  “Don’t worry.” I smiled thinly for her in self-contempt. “I don’t have the courage.”

  “You should go now.”

  “When you’re a mantree,” I said in parting, “I’ll petition. I’ll get them to transplant you to our garden.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I should be able to.” I nodded liberally. “I should be able to.”

  “I’d be happy if you could,” my wife said expressionlessly.

  “Well, see you later.”

  “It’d be better if you didn’t come again,” she said in a murmur, looking down.

  “I know. That’s my intention. But I’ll probably come anyway.”

  For a few minutes we were silent.

  Then my wife spoke abruptly.

  “Good-bye.”

  “Umm.”

  I began walking.

  When I looked back as I rounded the corner, Michiko was following me with her eyes, still smiling like a graven Buddha.

  Embracing a heart that seemed ready to split apart, I walked. I noticed suddenly that I had come out in front of the station. Unconsciously, I had returned to my usual walking course.

  Opposite the station is a small coffee shop I always go to called Punch. I went in and sat down in a corner booth. I ordered coffee, drinking it black. Until then I had always had it with sugar. The bitterness of sugarless, creamless coffee pierced my body, and I savored it masochistically. From now on I’ll always drink it black. That was what I resolved.

  Three students in the next booth were talking about a critic who had just been arrested and made into a manpillar.

  “I hear he was planted smack in the middle of the Ginza.”

  “He loved the country. He always lived in the country. That’s why they set him up in a place like that.”

  “Seems they gave him a lobotomy.”

  “And the students who tried to use force in the Diet, protesting his arrest—they’ve all been arrested and will be made into manpillars, too.”

  “Weren’t there almost thirty of them? Where’ll they plant them all?”

  “They say they’ll be planted in front of their own university, down both sides of a street called Students Road.”

  “They’ll have to change the name now. Violence Grove, or something.”

  The three snickered.

  “Hey, let’s not talk about it. We don’t want someone to hear.”

  The three shut up.

  When I left the coffee shop and headed home, I realized that I had begun to feel as if I was already a manpillar myself. Murmuring the words of a popular song to myself, I walked on.

  I am a wayside manpillar. You, too, are a wayside manpillar. What the hell, the two of us, in this world. Dried grasses that never flower.

  The IWM 1000

  ALICIA YÁNEZ COSSÍO

  Translated by Susana Castillo and Elsie Adams

  Alicia Yánez Cossío (1929– ) is a journalist, fiction writer, poet, and professor of literature who is widely considered to be one of Ecuador’s most notable twentieth-century literary figures. Her poetry and fiction are highly regarded in her home country and, despite the difficulty Ecuadorian writers have had in reaching international audiences in the past, increasingly highly regarded internationally. She was the first Ecuadorian to win the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (1996). In 2008, Cossío received Ecuador’s highest prize in literature, the Premio Eugenio Espejo, for her lifetime of work. She has written three novels, Bruna, soroche y los tíos (1970), Yo vendo unos ojos negros (1979), and La cofradia del mullo del vestido de la virgen Pipona (1985).

  Themes in Cossío’s work include corruption, social injustice, the role of women, the excesses of consumer-driven societies, and the dangers of technology. Many of her stories
also focus on life in Ecuador’s central range of the Andes, where her characters are conflicted by the push and pull between their colonial past histories and the dehumanization of modern society’s materialistic tendencies.

  In general, Cossío is deeply interested in telling stories about characters who are trying to figure out their place in modern society and how much of their past taboos and traditions they should keep or let go of in order to create a better life for themselves and others. Throughout her career, Cossío also has cultivated an interest in parody and satire.

  She has not written much science fiction, but her interest in the dangers of technology is closely aligned with the concerns of many science fiction writers. The story reprinted here, “The IWM 1000,” is a clever and prescient take on information technology, presaging the rise of Google. It is also an excellent example of the Latin American tradition of the science fiction tale, sharing similarities to the work of Silvina Ocampo and Juan José Arreola included in this volume. This story first appeared in her 1975 collection, El beso y otras fricciones.

  THE IWM 1000

  Alicia Yánez Cossío

  Translated by Susana Castillo and Elsie Adams

  A man is only what he knows.

  —FRANCIS BACON

  Once upon a time, all the professors disappeared, swallowed and digested by a new system. All the centers of learning closed because they were outmoded, and their sites were converted into living quarters swarming with wise, well-organized people who were incapable of creating anything new.

  Knowledge was an item that could be bought and sold. A device called the IWM 1000 had been invented. It was the ultimate invention: it brought an entire era to an end. The IWM 1000 was a very small machine, the size of an old scholarly briefcase. It was very easy to use—lightweight and affordable to any person interested in knowing anything. The IWM 1000 contained all human knowledge and all the facts of all the libraries of the ancient and modern world.

  Nobody had to take the trouble of learning anything because the machine, which could be hand-carried or put on any piece of household furniture, provided any information to anybody. Its mechanism was so perfect, and the data it gave so precise, that nobody had dared to prove it otherwise. Its operation was so simple that children spent time playing with it. It was an extension of the human brain. Many people would not be separated from it even during the most personal, intimate acts. The more they depended on the machine, the wiser they became.