The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  “He muttered these words over and over, drunkenly getting more and more turned on. He rolled me over, made me squat on my knees with my butt in the air. He grabbed me with his arms, tried to enter me. I was very dry and it hurt. I let him do it despite the pain because I wanted to feel it, I wanted to know what it was like, I didn’t want to let him down.

  “Even before then, before the pain, I had withdrawn. I was no longer aroused, or not much. I liked his being strong because I wanted to be dominated, but as he got more and more excited, I lost the sense that I was anything at all. I was a man, but I might just as easily have been a woman, or a dog, or even a tube lined with something from the butcher. I felt like nothing; I was out of my body and growing cold. I did not even feel the power of having brought him to his climax. If it wasn’t me, it would have been something else….”

  I stopped. The woman was quiet for a while.

  “So what’s your point?” she asked at length.

  “I’m wrong to think he didn’t need me. Or someone to do what he wanted. To take it without question.”

  “He hurt you.”

  “In a way I pity him. But also, I admire his determination.”

  She was upset. “So you think you know what it’s like to be a woman? Because of that story, even if it did happen like you said, you think you know?”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said. “Except that when I think about it I always seem to know more about what it is to be a woman than what it is to be a man.”

  —

  Having a penis, my friend said. That’s what I like best. It reminds me of a patient I once had, a middle-aged man with diabetes. He took insulin injections twice a day, was careful with his diet, and still he suffered the consequences of that disease. Most debilitating to him was the loss of his sex life.

  “I can’t get it up,” he told me. “Not for more than a minute or two.”

  I asked if he came. Diabetes can be quite selective in which nerves it destroys.

  “Sometimes. But it’s not the same. It feels all right, it feels good, but it’s not the same. A man should get hard.”

  I nodded, thinking that he should be grateful, it could be worse. “At least you can come. Some people can’t even do that.”

  “Don’t you have a shot, doctor? Something so I can get it up.”

  I said no, I didn’t, it wasn’t a question of some shot, it was a question of his diabetes. We agreed to work harder at keeping it under control, and we did, but his inability to get an erection remained. He didn’t become depressed, as many do, nor did he get angry. He was matter-of-fact, candid, even funny at times. He told me that his wife liked him better the way he was.

  “I don’t run around,” he explained. “It’s not that I can’t…the ladies, they don’t seem to mind the way I am. In fact, they seem to like it. I just don’t want to, it doesn’t feel right, I don’t feel like a man.”

  “So the marriage is better?”

  He shrugged. “She’s a prude. She’d rather not have sex anyway. So how about a hormone shot, doc? What do we got to lose?”

  His optimism was infectious, and I gave him a shot of testosterone. And another a few weeks later. It didn’t change anything. The next time I saw him he was carrying a newspaper clipping.

  “I heard about this operation.” He handed me the article. “They got something they put in your penis to make it hard. A metal rod, something like that. They also got this tube they can put in. With a pump, so you can pump it up when you’re ready and let it down when you’re finished. What do you think, doc?”

  I knew a little about the implants. The rods were okay, except the penis stayed stiff all the time. It was a nuisance, and sometimes it hurt if it got bent the wrong way. The inflatable tubes were unreliable, sometimes breaking open, other times not deflating when they were supposed to. I told him this.

  “It’s worth a try,” he said. “What do we got to lose?”

  It was four or five months before I saw him again. He couldn’t wait to get me in the examining room, pulling down his pants almost as soon as I shut the door. Through the slit in his underwear his penis pointed at me like a finger. His face beamed.

  “I can go for hours now, doc,” he said proudly. “Six, eight, all night if I want. And look at this….” He bent it to the right, where it stayed, nearly touching his leg. Then to the left. Then straight up, then down. “Any position, for as long as I want. The women, they love it.”

  I sat there, marveling. “That’s great.”

  “You should see them,” he said, bending it down in the shape of a question mark and stuffing it back in his pants. “They go crazy. I’m like a kid, doc. They can’t keep up with me.”

  I thought of him, sixty-two years old, happy, stiff, humping away on an old mattress, stopping every so often to ask his companion that night which way she wanted it. Did she like it better left or right, curved or straight, up or down? He was a man now, and he loved women. I asked about his wife.

  “She wants to divorce me,” he said. “I got too many women now.”

  —

  The question, I think, is not so much what I have in common with the banded krait of India, him slithering through the mud of that ancient country’s monsoon-swollen rivers, me sitting pensively in a cardigan at my desk. We share that certain sequence of nucleic acids, that gene on the Y chromosome that makes us male. The snake is aggressive; I am loyal and dependable. He is territorial; I am a faithful family man. He dominates the female of his species; I am strong, reliable, a good lover.

  The question really is how I differ from my wife. We lie in bed, our long bodies pressed together as though each of us were trying to become the other. We talk, sometimes of love, mostly of problems. She says, my job, it’s so hard, I’m so tired, my body aches. And I think, that’s too bad, I’m so sorry, where is the money to come from, be tough, buck up. I say, I am insecure at work, worried about being a good father, a proper husband. And she says, you are good, I love you, which rolls off of me like water. She strokes my head and I feel trapped; I stroke hers and she purrs like a cat. What is this? I ask, nervous, frightened. Love, she says. Kiss me.

  —

  I am still so baffled. It is not as simple as the brains of rats. As a claw, a fang, a battlefield scarred with bodies. I want to possess, and be possessed.

  One night she said to me, “I think men and women are two different species.”

  It was late. We were close, not quite touching.

  “Maybe soon,” I said. “Not quite yet.”

  She yawned. “It might be better. It would certainly be easier.”

  I took her hand and squeezed it. “That’s why we cling so hard to one another.”

  She snuggled up to me. “We like it.”

  I sighed. “It’s because we know someday we might not want to cling at all.”

  * * *

  *1 Stephen Wachtel, H-Y Antigen and the Biology of Sex Determination (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1983), 170.

  *2 Ibid., 172.

  *3 H. Gordon, in Genetic Mechanisms of Sexual Development, ed. H. L. Vallet and I. H. Porter (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 18.

  *4 I. E. Rudolf et al., Whither the Male?: Studies in Functionally Split Identities (Philadelphia: Ova Press, 1982).

  Gorgonoids

  LEENA KROHN

  Translated by Hildi Hawkins

  Leena Krohn (1947– ) is a critically acclaimed Finnish author, perhaps the most well-known Finnish writer of her generation. Her large and varied body of work—showcased in English in the enormous Collected Fiction (2015)—includes novels, short stories, children’s books, and essays. She often deals with such topics as the relationship between imagination and morality, the evolution of synthetic forms of life, and the future of humankind in the context of the natural world. Krohn has received such prestigious honors as the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland (1997; returned in protest for ethical reasons) and the Aleksis Kivi Fund award for lifetime achiev
ement (2013). Her short novel Tainaron: Mail from Another City was a World Fantasy Award finalist in 2005 and her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her fiction has been included in such English-language anthologies as The Weird, Sisters of the Revolution, and The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy.

  Krohn’s usual form is a kind of “mosaic” novel, in which short chapters advance the overall story arc but also form complete tales in and of themselves. The rate of ideas and images conveyed in a typical chapter, even when playful, has a density that might overwhelm in longer increments but seems layered and useful at the short length. There is also a puzzle aspect respectful of reader intelligence and imagination, as the reader pieces together the final form of the novel chapter by chapter.

  Her justly celebrated novel Tainaron exemplifies the worth of this approach: not only is there an interesting symbolism in chapters that include a hillside immolation of beetles and another with sand lions, but the insect characters themselves have an intrinsic meaning beyond that mere symbolism.

  Krohn is also one of our foremost thinkers about not just the present but the future. The novel Pereat Mundus (1998 in Finnish; published in English in Collected Fiction) details the lives of a series of cloned biotech versions of the same person—exploring what it means to be human. In this work and others, Krohn’s exploration of biotech and artificial intelligence occurred well before it became trendy in English-language fiction, and if Pereat Mundus had entered the English-language canon in the 1990s it would have been received as groundbreaking work. (Krohn also used digital tools in her literary work well before they became popular in mainstream literary circles—perhaps best exemplified in her experimental novel Sphinx or Robot.)

  As Peter Berbegal noted in his profile of Krohn for the New Yorker website, “Krohn offers up the narrated inner lives of characters trying to make sense of their environments, and of the other people whom they encounter. Many of the works are set in cities, but the worlds that Krohn’s characters inhabit never feel concrete: everything is mediated through particular characters’ perceptions. The reader is left with the sense of having intruded on someone’s dream, in which symbols are revelations of intimate details.”

  “Gorgonoids” is a self-contained excerpt from another important Krohn novel, Mathematical Creatures or Shared Dreams, which won Finland’s most prestigious literary award, the Finlandia Prize, in 1993. Mathematical Creatures was Krohn’s seventh novel for adults and consists of twelve prose pieces that straddle the line between fiction and essay, in a way similar to some of Alfred Jarry’s and Jorge Luis Borges’s work. They are linked thematically by a discussion of the relationship between self and reality. “Gorgonoids” is among the most playful selections in this anthology, demonstrating to great effect how Krohn’s imagination and attention to detail help make her exploration of abstract ideas so interesting.

  GORGONOIDS

  Leena Krohn

  Translated by Hildi Hawkins

  The egg of the gorgonoid is, of course, not smooth. Unlike a hen’s egg, its surface texture is noticeably uneven. Under its reddish, leather skin bulge what look like thick cords, distantly reminiscent of fingers. Flexible, multiply jointed fingers, entwined—or, rather, squeezed into a fist.

  But what can those “fingers” be?

  None other than embryo of the gorgonoid itself.

  For the gorgonoid is made up of two “cables.” One forms itself into a ring; the other wraps round it in a spiral, as if combining with itself. Young gorgonoids that have just broken out of their shells are pale and striped with red. Their colouring is like the peppermint candies you can buy at any city kiosk.

  In the mature gorgonoid, the stripes darken. It develops a great lidless eyeball whose iris is blood-red.

  I spoke of a leather skin, but that is, of course, not an accurate description. In fact, it is completely erroneous. It is simply, you understand, that the eggshell looks like leather. It isn’t actually leather, of course, or chitin, or plaster. Or any other known material. Note: it is not made of any material at all. These creatures are not organic, but neither are they inorganic. For gorgonoids are immaterial, mathematical beings. They are visible, all the same: they move, couple, and multiply on our computer terminals. Their kin persist on our monitor screens, and their progeny mature to adulthood in a few seconds. But how they exist, how—if at all—they live, is a different question entirely. The gorgonoid is merely and exclusively what it looks like—as far as we know.

  But what have I said; am I not now contradicting myself? Didn’t I say that the eggshell of the gorgonoid looks like leather, but is not leather? There is some inconsistency here, something that troubles me. Perhaps I should have said: the gorgonoid appears to be only that which it appears to be. What it really is, one hardly dares attempt to say.

  Not everything that is visible is material. Gorgonoids are visible but immaterial creatures. In that respect, they belong in the same category as all images and dreams, although they are not located only in an individual mind. We, on the other hand, are visible and material. In addition, there exists matter that is invisible, as astrophysicists have shown. They believe that the entire universe is full of such cold, dark mass, that there is infinitely more of it than of visible matter. Frail filaments of visible matter glimmer amid the darkness….

  But about that which is both invisible and immaterial, they too know nothing. It is completely unattainable, uncategorisable. It is not merely unknown; it is unknowable. We cannot sense creatures of such a category, but that is no reason to dispute their existence—if not for us.

  —

  Besides the gorgonoid, I have had the opportunity to trace the development of the tubanide, the pacmantis, and the lissajoune. The tubanide looks a little like certain ammonites of the Mesozoic era. It is a mathematical model for Nipponites mirabilis, which lives in a sea of ammonia.

  The spherical figures of the lissajoune have charmed me most. Whenever we wish, the precise flower-spheres of the lissajoune blossom forth on our terminals. They grow in irregular spirals, in which the outline of each figure eventually returns to its starting point. The curve is always closed, unless irrational numbers come into play. And that happens extremely seldom.

  Oh how dazzlingly beautiful is the odourless geometry of the lissajoune! Its beauty is not natural beauty, but the flawless logical enchantment of abstract necessity, with which nothing human or material can compare. And yet these figures are merely simulations of material life and natural growth.

  And that is what most people in the institute thought: that the gorgonoid, the pacmantis, and the lissajoune were nothing more than models simulating atomic structures. But there were others who believed that, if they were not already alive, they were in the process of stepping across the threshold that separates existence from life.

  “Would you like to be like them?” Rolf, the other assistant, asked me once.

  “What do you mean? Like them in what sense?”

  “Without free will,” Rolf said. “They never have to make a choice. That is a great advantage. Everything they do, they have to do. And they never want anything other than what they do.”

  “You amaze me,” I said to Rolf. “You don’t really think they want and don’t want? And that there could exist intention that is bound?”

  “I mean,” Rolf said, “that for them action and intention are the same thing.”

  “That they lack internal contradiction, unlike us, you mean? But perhaps, still, they feel as if they make choices….”

  He shrugged his shoulders, and left. His words affected me deeply.

  I remembered once looking at a dark hawk moth lying on a pine trunk. I asked myself, then, how the hawk moth knows how to make the right choice. Why does it always choose a trunk covered in dark bark, and not, for example, a pale birch? Does it know what colour it is?

  The hawk moth cannot see itself, but we can. Nevertheless, it always makes the right choice, but human beings do not. Why is t
hat which we call instinct more accurate than that which we call reason? In its flawlessness, the perfection of its life, the gorgonoid—to which we have granted neither inborn instinct nor the possibility of rationality—is more like the hawk moth than ourselves.

  But we, the reason we lose our way so often is that we are freer to err, and because we watch ourselves instead of what lies ahead.

  Certainly there were moments when I should have liked to have exchanged my life for that of the gorgonoid, or, even better, the lissajoune, in order to be as flawless, precise, and beautiful as they.

  And another reason why I should have liked to be like them is that they could at any moment—true, the moment was defined by us, but this they could hardly have known—cease to exist, and then come back just the same as before. We were not allowed to pause for breath, we had to live without stopping. Sleep was not real absence, it was not enough. Everything continued through the nights: the stream of images was ceaseless, it merely took place in different surroundings, without need of eyes or light. And when the night was over and we returned to our desks, we were not quite the same creatures who had left in the evening, for even our dreams changed us. And our changes were always irreversible, whereas they could start again from the beginning—or from the exact point at which they had left off.

  How I should have loved to go away, even for a moment, if it could have been done by pressing a key, to come back later. But for us there was no temporary death, whereas the gorgonoid—when the glow of the monitor was extinguished—ceased to exist in the place where it was, but without going anywhere else.

  Inconceivable that something that has existed in some place can no longer exist in any place. How can we help asking, when someone dies, “Where has he gone?”

  The gorgonoid does not fall ill, age, or necessarily ever die. Such are the privileges of creatures that do not live in the flesh or in time. They can be transferred to other programs and be copied endlessly.