by Ben Bova
I didn’t see if the unicorn said goodbye to Molly and Schmendrick, and I didn’t see when it went away. I didn’t want to. I did hear Schmendrick saying, “A dog. I nearly kill myself singing her to Lir, calling her as no other has ever called a unicorn—and she brings back, not him, but the dog. And here I’d always thought she had no sense of humor.”
But Molly said, “She loved him too. That’s why she let him go. Keep your voice down.” I was going to tell her it didn’t matter, that I knew Schmendrick was saying that because he was so sad, but she came over and petted Malka with me, and I didn’t have to. She said, “We will escort you and Malka home now, as befits two great ladies. Then we will take the king home too.”
“And I’ll never see you again,” I said. “No more than I’ll see him.”
Molly asked me, “How old are you, Sooz?”
“Nine,” I said. “Almost ten. You know that.”
“You can whistle?” I nodded. Molly looked around quickly, as though she were going to steal something. She bent close to me, and she whispered, “I will give you a present, Sooz, but you are not to open it until the day when you turn seventeen. On that day you must walk out away from your village, walk out all alone into some quiet place that is special to you, and you must whistle like this.” And she whistled a little ripple of music for me to whistle back to her, repeating and repeating it until she was satisfied that I had it exactly. “Don’t whistle it anymore,” she told me. “Don’t whistle it aloud again, not once, until your seventeenth birthday, but keep whistling it inside you. Do you understand the difference, Sooz?”
“I’m not a baby,” I said. “I understand. What will happen when I do whistle it?”
Molly smiled at me. She said, “Someone will come to you. Maybe the greatest magician in the world, maybe only an old lady with a soft spot for valiant, impudent children.” She cupped my cheek in her hand. “And just maybe even a unicorn. Because beautiful things will always want to see you again, Sooz, and be listening for you. Take an old lady’s word for it. Someone will come.”
They put King Lir on his own horse, and I rode with Schmendrick, and they came all the way home with me, right to the door, to tell my mother and father that the griffin was dead, and that I had helped, and you should have seen Wilfrid’s face when they said that! Then they both hugged me, and Molly said in my ear, “Remember—not till you’re seventeen!” and they rode away, taking the king back to his castle to be buried among his own folk. And I had a cup of cold milk and went out with Malka and my father to pen the flock for the night.
So that’s what happened to me. I practice the music Molly taught me in my head, all the time, I even dream it some nights, but I don’t ever whistle it aloud. I talk to Malka about our adventure, because I have to talk to someone. And I promise her that when the time comes she’ll be there with me, in the special place I’ve already picked out. She’ll be an old dog lady then, of course, but it doesn’t matter. Someone will come to us both.
I hope it’s them, those two. A unicorn is very nice, but they’re my friends. I want to feel Molly holding me again, and hear the stories she didn’t have time to tell me, and I want to hear Schmendrick singing that silly song:
Soozli, Soozli,
speaking loozli,
you disturb my oozli-goozli.
Soozli, Soozli,
would you choozli
to become my squoozli-squoozli…?
I can wait.
POETRY: THE RHYSLING AWARD WINNERS
The Rhysling Awards are presented by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Although they are not a Nebula or an SFWA award, poetry is as much a part of the science fiction and fantasy genre as prose, and our anthology would not be complete if it did not include the year’s Rhysling winners.
In addition to the winners for the short poem and long poem awards, in this volume we present for the first time the winner of a new category, the Dwarf Stars Award, which is for poems less than ten lines in length.
Joe Haldeman is one of the most respected and versatile writers in the science fiction field, a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner, as well as one of the field’s leading poets and a past winner of the Rhysling Award.
SCIENCE FICTION POETRY
JOE HALDEMAN
Say “science fiction poetry” to the average science fiction reader, and you might get a cautious nod. Most of them at least know it exists, and a significant number of them read it.
Say “science fiction poetry” to the average poet, though, and you may feel a distinct chill in the room. “Of course you can write about anything you want,” he or she might articulate, “but why would you choose to write about Han Solo and little hobbits and planets exploding? Why not write about something interesting?”
This sort of thing doesn’t happen in a venue where you can sit down and explain things. It’s usually a faculty cocktail party, where you can’t hear yourself think for the din of academic survival going on, or a book “do” where the poet you’re talking to is engaged in a different kind of survival game. But suppose it was otherwise, some kind of neutral ground—suppose you’re at a high school reunion (not your own, but one your wife dragged you to) and you’re bored and you sit down next to a stranger who’s also bored, and you just start to chat, and she says she’s a poet. You say, “That’s an odd coincidence; I’m a poet, too.” And about one minute later, you admit that you write science fiction poetry, and she offers the above question. This time you can answer.
First you define the line (which you know to be a fuzzy border) between real science fiction and the stuff that Hollywood markets under our name. She does know about Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. LeGuin, and maybe Doris Lessing. But isn’t most of it pretty horrible? You tell her Sturgeon’s Law—“Ninety percent of everything is crap”—and ask her what percentage of published academic poetry would she characterize as crap. She ruefully agrees with you and Sturgeon, and might also agree that any genre deserves to be evaluated by its best.
(At this point you could just whip out a copy of The 2006 Rhysling Anthology and lay it on her. But under the circumstances, you’re unlikely to have a copy with you. Tux and all.)
I would offer to refresh her drink and then offer this: Science fiction is a literary genre, true, but unlike most other genres it’s also a way of thinking. A way of solving problems, of looking at the universe. That’s as true in poetry as in prose. (I wouldn’t offer the uncomfortable corollary that a work can be mediocre or even bad writing and still be good science fiction, if its idea is new and interesting.)
To that observation I’d add one that she already knows, being a poet. There’s a basic difference between a story and a poem, regardless of genre. A story usually proceeds in a more or less algorithmic way—a series of situations, scenes, that finally add up to a conclusion. Poetry is completely different, even narrative poetry. You do read it one line at a time, but what it adds up to is not a conclusion, in the sense of a problem being solved. It has a “radiative” quality; at best, a kind of epiphany that couldn’t have been produced by mere prose.
Combine that with the peculiar worldview of science fiction—that the universe is the province of change, and the province of wonder—and you have something uniquely worthwhile, both in poetry and in science fiction.
At this point, if she isn’t backing away slowly with a look on her face that says, “Oh, please God, save me from this übergeek,” you might tell her about the Rhysling Awards and anthology, and whip out your pocket computer and use Google and Amazon to send her a copy. She might be a better poet for it.
The Rhysling Award (named after Heinlein’s blind poet in “The Green Hills of Earth”) has three categories, long poem, short poem, and Dwarf Stars; the winners are reprinted here. To give you an idea of the variety of subjects and approaches science fiction poetry subsumes, let me list a precis of the winners and runners-up here:
Short Poem Category
Winner: “The Strip Search” by Mike All
en. A clever riff on “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter”—the author dies and demons detect a shred of hope not abandoned, and dissect him to find it.
Second Place: “Tsunami Child” by David C. Kopaska-Merkel. Chilling evocation of a revenant “survivor” of the tsunami.
Third Place: “South” by Marge Simon. A complete science fiction story told in twenty-five lines, of a couple who stay behind when the rest of the population flees global cooling.
Long Poem Category
Winner: “The Tin Men” by Kendall Evans and David C. Kopaska-Merkel. An ambitious epic whose nine irregular stanzas and epilogue describe the fates of a number of starships, some with cryonic crews and some mechanical throughout, as they explore the cosmos and find a variety of fates.
Second Place: “Old Twentieth: A Century Full of Years” by Joe Haldeman. This poem provides the subtext for the novel of the same name. It’s a rhymed double sestina, a dauntingly complex form. I only know of two others, Swinburne’s “The Complaint of Lisa” and part of John Ashbery’s 1991 book, Flow Chart, where he copied out the end words of Swinburne’s poem and wrote his own. Mine provides a history of the twentieth century by examining its twelve most important years in twelve lines each.
Third Place: “First Cross of Mars” by Drew Morse. A delicate mixture of religious and erotic meditation, set on a thoroughly realistic Mars.
If you’d like to see more of this kind of work, or are interested in writing science fiction poetry yourself, you could get in touch with the Science Fiction Poetry Association, at www.sfpoetry.com.
RHYSLING SHORT POEM WINNER
THE STRIP SEARCH
MIKE ALLEN
The Gate said “Abandon All Hope.”
I thought I’d tossed all my hope away,
but when I stepped through the Gate, it still pinged.
One of the guards slithered out of its seat,
snarling as it drew forth a wand.
C’mere, it hissed,
it seems you’re still holding out hope.
Its crusted hide was a Venus landscape up close.
It brushed that cold black wand all over my skin,
put it in places I don’t want to talk about.
Snaggle fangs huffed in my face:
Sir, step over here, please.
Then the strip search began.
My flesh rolled up & tossed aside for mushy sifting.
Bones X-rayed, stacked in narrow rows, marrow
sucked out, tested, spit back in.
They made me open mind, heart, soul, shook them out
like sacks of flour, panned the contents
for every nugget of twinkling hope, glistening courage;
applying lethal aerosol
to any motion that could be ascribed to love or will
or malingering dreams—
sparing only a few squirming morsels
for later snacking.
Once they were done
they made me pick up my own pieces
(I did the best I could without a mirror),
then my guard kicked me out—
with a literal kick—
sent me rolling down the path to my final destination.
I’ll be honest with you, it’s no picnic here.
But, my friends, I still have hope. I do.
I’m not going to tell you
where I hid it.
RHYSLING LONG POEM WINNER
THE TIN MEN
KENDALL EVANS and DAVID C. KOPASKA-MERKEL
This is what the Tin Men perceive:
Matter tortured, colorized
By the event horizons
Of singularities
Into metallic multi-iridescence
Ringed worlds, ringed stars and
Strobing, glowing plasma jets
Pulsing forth from polar extremities
Of cryptic shrouded quasars
Rapidly rotating black holes
Asteroids, moons and planets crater-pocked
By ancient collisions
Cataclysmic origins
Multi-hued gas giants, gulfs of dark matter
The twined purple veins and braided striae
Of supernova remnants
Bubbled concentric stellar shells of energy/matter
Infrared and orange
Full-spectrum electromagnetic
Splendors—
This is what the Tin Men perceive
And, though they are neither tin
Nor men,
These are their chronicles
I.
So much time has slipped past (Think of yellow dwarf stars
Turned to ember and ash)
So many stars recede aft
(As if matter is nothing but red-shifted gossamer)
One of the starships eventually goes solipsistic
Thinking that it is / All that there is
A universe unto itself
The crew long dead, cryogenic sleepers
Now nothing more than corpses, cold and lifeless
Though still bathed in nitrogen liquid
Their frozen stares fixed, unvarying
There’s no one left to contradict, it believes itself to be
An omnipresent deity
Convinces itself (quite logically)
The compass of its consciousness
Draws the circle of the cosmos, and all the levels
Of Ultimate Reality—
Though there is this most annoying thing
Like a buzz or a persistent ringing
In the information it receives
And thoughts, perceptions lapsing all too frequently
As it devolves toward its artificial analog
Of senile dementia
II.
Some ships are captured
Or perhaps one should say
Allow themselves to be taken prisoner
Long millennia of purposeless flight
Breeding the desire for company
Even for that of transient biologic forms
One ship deliberately orbited a planet
Bearing the decaying alien colony
Of a defunct empire
Although the denizens of this world
Retained the capacity to reach orbit
And thus entered the Tin Man
Using intrusive and violent means
The boarding party a virtual horde of the aliens
Their appearance evocative of winged monkeys
Swarming through the corridors and chambers of the ship
Pirating advanced technology
That they could not build for themselves
Stealing trophies, destroying the ship’s systems
And meanwhile the Tin Man could only wonder
At the manner in which they compromised
Their planet’s delicately balanced ecology
Alas, in continuing devolution
From their once star-faring state
They lost the capacity for flight
No longer able to reach the orbiting starship
They abandoned it
And the ship, in its loneliness and dependency
Mourned the end of their rapine
And the illuminating pain that it engendered
III.
The relativity of velocity
Means some of the clocks on some of the ships
Tick more slowly than others
This also means some of the clocks must tick more rapidly
And somewhere in the cosmos, therefore, there must exist
Aboard a ship, upon a planet,
(Or perhaps residing at some random point in space and time)
The fastest clicking-ticking clock of all
Which clock, one guesses, is motionless (relatively speaking)
And thus possesses zero velocity—
Otherwise time’s dilation would slow it;
Yet if an object’s velocity is truly relative,
How can this be possible?
The conundrum drives one Tin Man
Into a deep distraction and beyond;
“Zero velocity is inherently contradictory”
It sometimes mutters to itself,
Its mind meshed in a Moebius loop of thought that won’t let go
Hypnosis everlasting
IV.
One ship thought it was a man
But it was another starship,
A heartless Tin Man
Coasting from star to star, thinking
The whole way, it had nothing else to do—
Automatic data collection requiring no more thought
Than computations suited to a hand-held calculator
Do starships pray? Do they pray
For the unexpected catastrophe
That might test their mettle?
Do they decide to run a test
To make sure their contingency plans and hardware
And software and so on are adequate?
What if a starship inadvertently
Traveled through a dusting of post-planetary debris
(Perhaps the residue of a global war)
At interstellar speeds? Could the ship
Survive? Could it still carry out its vital mission?
This ship’s inquiring mind
Wanted to know—
Alas it could not
At least, not with 27th-century technology
And all that the state of that art entails.
V.
Ezekiel’s Wheel, a scientific probe
Purely robotic, over thirty meters long
Constructed in lunar orbit, successfully
Launched circa 2250
Enmeshed in its own idiosyncratic madness
(Priding itself with the thought of how easily
It could break any of Asimov’s arbitrary laws)
Poses a question, mid-voyage
