Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  “Do you wish I hadn’t told you?

  “Rondo can’t help you, Freddy, unless you take courage from his. And doctors can’t help you unless they develop a foolproof way to regulate the flow of growth hormone from your pituitary.

  “I can almost guarantee you that Rondo wasn’t your daddy, though. His acromegaly often shut him down as a lover. Even if he’d had Casanova’s staff and stamina, he never wanted any kids, for fear—a foolish one, I’m told—they’d inherit his affliction. So don’t look to Rondo or to yesterday’s medicine for your salvation, baby, ’cause it just won’t come from either place. It just won’t.

  “Give me your hand. Maybe Mabel can help you. I know how you feel. Grief feels terribly like fear, and I’ve come through mine to a certain calm. So why don’t you stay for dinner? I’ll boil some shrimp, and while we eat, you can tell me your story.”

  EXT. A PACIFIC ISLAND—INFINITE DAY

  Hangdog and naked, he steps into a coracle that carries him westward to the sky island, Rapanui. On its shore, he beaches this boat and stalks inland, up the grassy slopes to the great stone heads standing like sentinels above the sea. Recognizing himself in every tall face, he offers a prayer of gratitude—gratitude that the sculptors of these artifacts did not afflict them with either feet or hands.

  BRIGHTEN TO INCANDESCENCE

  A Lingering Incandescence: Notes About the Stories

  BACK IN 2001, A REVIEWER UPBRAIDED ANDY DUNCAN for disclosing too much in the endnotes to his award-winning inaugural collection, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. This reviewer felt—no doubt sincerely—that Duncan’s remarks discharged the stories of some of their mystery and radiance.

  I disagreed. Good stories do not cease to stir us simply because the author elects to write about their origins, the fuel in their engines, or their influence, if any, on the world at large. Granted, neither gossip nor analysis nor self-praise will redeem a bad or an indifferent story, but they may sometimes create a sense of privileged familiarity that heightens rather than diminishes our esteem, breeding gratitude rather than contempt.

  I like personal notes in story collections, whether Harlan Ellison’s signature rants, or Thomas Pynchon’s wry self-putdowns, or the stew of manifestos, aw-shuckses, and reminiscences flavoring the back pages of the annual Best American Short Stories volumes. Such notes tickle, bemuse, or annoy, depending on how the author’s hat and eye are cocked. If nothing else, they prove that flawed, self-doubting writers can sometimes shrug so craftily inside their skins that wings of silken beauty break through the rents. (At other times, of course, an unplaceable odor may escape, but we might like a good anecdote about that as well.)

  So if you share my passion for story notes, read on. If you don’t, how did you get this far? Here, however, let me warn you that I placed these notes at the end of my book on the assumption that you would read them after reading the stories. If you read them before the stories, in one or two cases you may spoil, or at least compromise, a surprise embedded in the narrative. But suit yourself.

  Initially, publisher Gary Turner and I envisioned Brighten to Incandescence as a Best of compendium, not as a gathering of uncollected stories. It evolved into the latter once editor Marty Halpern began reviewing the available stories and decided that a book of uncollected tales would make the more attractive commercial package. (Besides, Gary had already noted that hostile critics could decoct, from our provisional subtitle The Best of Michael Bishop, the daisy-cutter acronym BOMB.) And I was pleased to find that I had written enough stories to fill a seventh collection without reprinting a title from the previous six short-fiction volumes or, forgive me, immolating Quality on the altar of All-Inclusiveness.

  Marty helped me separate sheep from goats, sorghum from sawdust. Several stories that I still like—”In Rubble, Pleading,” “Spiritual Dysfunction and Counterangelic Longings,” “Three Dreams in the Wake of a Death,” and “Cyril Berganske”—did not get in because either Marty or I adjudged them less successful than stories that made the cut. On another day, though, we might have chosen differently.

  Of the seventeen stories in Brighten to Incandescence, “A Tapestry of Little Murders” leapt the earliest from my brain and my gray IBM Selectric (which I junked regretfully in 1986 for a word processor). Even in 1970, I had long wanted to write a psychological horror story with the kind of intricate and haunting pattern evident in the late British writer A. E. Coppard’s “Arabesque: The Mouse.” Coppard first drew my attention in a thick blue trade paperback from Simon & Schuster called Reading I’ve Liked edited by Clifton Fadiman. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early 1960s, I bought this 908-page doorstop in its thirteenth printing for $2.25. Fadiman included two other pieces by Coppard, “Felix Tincler” and “Dusky Ruth,” but, as fine as they are, neither stunned me as did “Arabesque: The Mouse.” Here are its first two sentences:

  In the main street amongst tall establishments of mart and worship was a high narrow house pressed between a coffee factory and a bootmaker’s. It had four flights of long dim echoing stairs, and at the top, in a room that was full of the smell of dried apples and mice, a man in the middle age of life sat reading Russian novels until he thought he was mad.

  How could anyone, mad or sane, not read on?

  “A Tapestry of Little Murders” does not rival “Arabesque: The Mouse” in either style or concision, but I still like it for its presumption, and I’ve revised it a little, as I have three or four other stories, for its appearance here. When I submitted “Tapestry” to Edward Ferman at Fantasy ö Science Fiction in 1970, I did so without using quotation marks to indicate dialogue. Ed added them to keep from irking or confusing anyone, but I have never thought dialogue without quotation marks, if skillfully done, irksome or perplexing, and so I have restored their … absence. Besides “Tapestry,” I shaped and sold seven stories while a commissioned instructor of English at the Air Force Academy Preparatory School near Colorado Springs, Colorado.

  However, I wrote “The Tigers of Hysteria Feed Only on Themselves,” my tenth sale, in 1973 in a drafty clapboard rental house in Athens, Georgia. I recall little about the writing other than that it came quickly and that I could not avoid structuring it as a parable about our self-destructive involvement in Vietnam. It appeared in F&SF in early 1974, well over a year before the North Vietnamese army captured Saigon, but I claim no rare insight or prescience. The war had seemed endless, if not altogether lost, as far back as the Tet Offensive of 1968. My father, nicknamed “Sonny,” and my step-grandfather, Cody Philyaw, provided the templates for Sonny and Trapper Catlaw, whose monikers still evoke the men for me. (Both died over a decade ago.) My setting, an isolated farm in Arkansas, also derives from family history.

  “Of Crystalline Labyrinths and the New Creation” owes everything but its original maddening length to that cunning fantasist and oversized leprechaun, R. A. Lafferty. When Virginia Kidd, then my agent, sent it to Robert Silverberg, a Lafferty admirer and the editor of the top-flight hardcover anthology series New Dimensions, Silverberg winced and called it a “stunt.” Roy Torgeson, a Lafferty admirer and the editor of the second-tier paperback anthology series Chrysalis, proved more receptive, or more gullible. He bought the story at almost twice its new wordage, ran it in the final spot in Chrysalis 7, and declared me in his introduction the author of the “only genuine Lafferty ever written by anyone other than ‘The Man’ himself” and as “a genius … of sorts.” (Punch of sorts.) In 1979, out of respect for a writer now shamefully neglected, I had written my so-called Lafferty in logorrheic high spirits, but what it really needed was a ruthless blue-penciling. Twenty-two years later, I’ve given it one.

  Not long after I wrote the foregoing paragraph, Ray Lafferty died—on Monday, March 18, 2002, in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Although he allegedly stopped writing twenty years ago, Lafferty left to posterity some of the funniest stories and most lyrical oddball novels in the history of our field. In his hilarious novella Space Chantey (1968), he created a classic scie
nce-fictional pastiche of Homer’s Odyssey long before the Coen brothers transposed that story to the Depression Era South, as they do in their hit film O Brother, Where Art Thou? First published as half of an Ace Double, Space Chantey is now sadly out of print and exasperatingly hard to find. My copy disappeared from my shelves years ago. His major collections—Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970), Strange Doings (1972), Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? (1974), and Lafferty in Orbit (1991)—feature dozens of his most inventive and flamboyant tales, but try to find any of them nowadays without recourse to the Internet. (Thank God for Lafferty’s fans, who have done yeomen work to keep his memory alive.)

  I have Lafferty’s signature on two or three of my copies of his work, but I recall meeting him only once, at a convention in either Memphis or New Orleans. He had fallen asleep on a sofa in the hotel lobby, and his head had slumped forward, pressing his chins into his chest. As Jeri and I walked through the lobby, I paused to look at him and resisted with all my will an incongruous impulse to kiss his naked pate. Today, I wonder why I didn’t simply do it.

  SF and fantasy writers seem to collaborate more often than do mystery, romance, or western writers. Think Kuttner and Moore, Pohl and Kornbluth, Niven and Pournelle, Ellison and Everyone. This volume contains two collaborations, “Murder on Lupozny Station” with Gerald W. Page and “‘We’re All in This Alone’” with Paul Di Filippo (with whom, as “Philip Lawson,” I have also written two mystery novels, Would It Kill You to Smile? and Muskrat Courage), but other partners have included Craig Strete (“Three Dream Woman”), Ian Watson (Under Heaven’s Bridge), my cousin-in-law Lee Ellis (“The Last Child into the Mountain”), and, again, Jerry Page (“Scrimptalon’s Test”). In this field, far from an extraordinary showing.

  Some collaborations, especially on novels, begin deliberately. The writers converge, brainstorm, and knock out the necessary words. Other collaborations, often on short stories, arise when a writer gets stuck and calls on another for help. If I remember correctly, both the sf novella “Murder on Lupozny Station” and the serial-killer fantasy “‘We’re All in This Alone’” evolved from a cry-for-help impasse. Jerry Page, author of many fine solo stories, including “The Happy Man,” and editor for several years of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, approached me in 1979 with a locked-room space-station mystery that he had not yet finagled into a finished-feeling shape. I read Jerry’s story, hit upon the idea of adding an enigmatic alien pilot, and ran from there. We both liked the results, as did Ed Ferman at F&SF, for many years a low-key but stalwart patron of my work.

  “‘We’re All in This Alone’”—forgive me this violation of chronology—grew from an abortive effort of mine. In the spring of 2001, I cried for help. I mailed a manuscript titled “Squawk” to Paul Di Filippo in the hope that he could rescue it from the desk drawer in which it had moldered for five-odd years. Paul advised an operatic overhaul, featuring more crime-oriented melodrama and less of Lingenfelter’s moody intellectualizing. His suggestions triggered a fresh burst of enthusiasm and some frenzied reactive plotting. I press-ganged the work of the late, still controversial British artist Francis Bacon into our story and spent three or four hours on-line viewing photographs of Bacon’s unsettling paintings. Several of the “squawks” in this version appeared without byline in a daily feature in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called “The Vent.” None, so far as we know, precipitated a murder.

  “O Happy Day,” also the title of a very different story by Geoff Ryman, appeared in the fall of 1981 in a short-lived magazine edited by Eric Vinicoff, Rigel Science Fiction. Ellen Datlow, fiction editor at Omni and a reliable friend of my work, had passed on it for exploiting a one-note “gimmick,” the transposition of humans and rats. So why include it here? First, I have an irrational fondness for it. Second, the switch in perspectives freaks out many readers. Third, the story owes many of its effects and intermittently even its tone to my favorite book, Gulliver’s Travels. Fourth, without a whisker of evidence, I like to think that “O Happy Day” mystically inspired James Patrick Kelly’s classic story “Rat.” (It didn’t.) And, fifth, I have an irrational fondness for it.

  Nearly every science-fiction writer who came of age in the late 1950s or the 1960s had to write a rock ’n’ roll story. Some excelled at these. Think Gregory Benford (“Doing Lennon”), George R. R. Martin (The Armageddon Rag), Lewis Shiner (Glimpses), Howard Waldrop (“Flying Saucer Rock & Roll”), Pat Cadigan (“Rock On”), Michael Swanwick (“The Feast of Saint Janis”), and legions of others. Me, I first heard the Beatles melodiously caterwauling “I Saw Her Standing There” in Payne Hall, a dilapidated dormitory on the University of Georgia campus, in December 1963. Life changed. The Brits invaded. If you weren’t the Beach Boys, the Supremes, or James Brown, you had better hail from the British Isles or you couldn’t get no airplay, much less no satisfaction.

  Oddly, I didn’t write the first of my own rock ’n’ roll sf stories until 1983, two-plus years after John Lennon fell to a murderer’s bullet outside the Dakota apartment building in New York City. Ed Ferman featured “With a Little Help from Her Friends” as lead novelette in the February 1984 issue of F&SF, with a striking quasi-psychedelic cover by Ron Walotsky. I revised it late in 2000 for an eight-story packet of electronic offerings from Fictionwise.com, and, in 2001, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard translated this new version into Danish along with two other stories, “Saving Face” and “The Bob Dylan Tambourine Software & Satori Support Services Consortium, Ltd.” George Harrison’s death of brain cancer in October 2001 shatters it as prediction, of course, but I never saw it as prophecy, preferring to view it as a parallel-timeline tribute and eulogy. Besides, its real protagonist is Eleanor Riggins-Galvez.

  I wrote “Thirteen Lies About Hummingbirds” in 1990 or ’91 for Charles L. Grant’s anthology Final Shadows. The first two Shadows volumes had contained my stories “Mory” and “Seasons of Belief,” respectively, and I did not want to miss out on an appearance in this valedictory collection. The title comes—obviously, I suppose—from the famous Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” As in “A Tapestry of Little Murders,” I tried to weave a series of anxiety-inducing events into a strange but evocative pattern. Today I believe that “Thirteen Lies” almost works, and I fret about its falling just shy of elegance.

  Sometimes I enjoy writing a story on the basis of a specific editorial assignment, rather like a newspaper reporter. Some fiction writers shun or deride this practice, on the grounds that it stifles the muse or produces hackwork for hire. Occasionally, it does both, and the resultant stories reflect well on neither their flailing authors nor their out-of-options editors. In my case, if I like an editorial assignment, I often write stories that gratify my aesthetic sense and also my dread-tinged longing to confront and master a challenge.

  On four occasions, the first in the mid-’80s, Byron Preiss approached me with assignments that I could not refuse. For a lovely fact-and-fiction volume titled The Universe, I took his dare to write a science-fiction story about quasars, although I had only a layperson’s inkling of what quasars must look like, consist of, or do. My fervor and my research, however, resulted in “For Thus Do I Remember Carthage,” a tale bringing together quasars, Augustine of Hippo, and an alternate Roman North Africa. Then, for a companion anthology called The Microverse, I fashioned a meditative story about littleness, “The Ommatidium Miniatures.” After “Miniatures,” for The Ultimate Frankenstein, I stitched together a grotesque brute of a story called “The Creature on the Couch,” which, however, led me to write my own favorite among my category novels, a homage to Mary Shelley and baseball called Brittle Innings.

  And “Herding with the Hadrosaurs”? This time, with Robert Silverberg as co-editor of The Ultimate Dinosaur, Preiss challenged me to write a story using the latest paleoecological discoveries about “dinosaur migrations.” I applied myself to the literature and then adopted the venerable, if hokey, sf convention of the time-slip to dispatch
a family of “pioneers” into the Late Cretaceous to do battle, sort of, with big extinct beasties. Frankly, I rank this story third among my efforts for Preiss. Again, a reasonable person might ask, why include it here? Because many readers extol it, finding it a fast-paced hoot. Both “For Thus Do I Remember Carthage” and “The Ommatidium Miniatures” tend to the cerebral, but “Herding” unrolls as an exotic, danger-beset, first-person journey.

  “Simply Indispensable” arose from my perception that not a few people—myself shamefully included?—find the idea of self-extinction less menacing than they do the notion that the universe will proceed just fine without them. They desire immortality less than they do a taste of cosmic indispensability. These thoughts triggered the hypothesis of alien energy beings—Joe Way and the su’lakle—whose “recurrent key observations at the quantum level” sustain the entire cosmos. Michael Morrison, whom I met at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Florida in 1994, gave me good-humored advice and the straight skinny about quantum physics, even bestowing upon me a textbook that he had written. Thus, I dedicated the story to him; here, I absolve him of any scientific errors that it may commit. (Incidentally, the name su’lakle derives from that of an indispensable sf-and-fantasy writer, and my decision to use a Levantine setting predates our attack-inspired preoccupation with matters Islamic and apocalyptic.)

  Although hardly an opinion of apocalyptic dimensions, I find Chihuahuas both silly and obnoxious. I like dogs in general, but this breed inspires only my irritation, a bigotry requiring painful atonement, either now or posthumously. Once, in the late 1960s, when our friends Mike and Claudia Brown accompanied us to a party in Colorado Springs, the host answered our knock and three Chihuahuas stampeded toward us yapping like tiny demons. “Here come the rats,” Mike observed, memorably. A few years later, here in Pine Mountain, Jeri and I often visited an elderly neighbor who lived in one room in a large Victorian house, her only companion a trembling, bug-eyed Chihuahua that bared its teeth at us while prancing about on her tufted bedspread. Maybe I should have admired Paco’s courage, but I always wound up contemplating how he might sound if I imprisoned him in a coalscuttle.