Anywhen
Authors: James Blish
ANYWHEN
James Blish
ARGONAUT
ePUB Edition (v1.0)
This is a strange, compelling collection of seven short stories about the Universe and some of its oddities. The stories, all written during the 1960s, are carefully presented and never allow one to lose sight of the humanity behind each circumstance.
A STYLE IN TREASON presents a future in which treason has been organized to supplant diplomacy. In a believable and understated manner THE WRITING OF THE RAT demonstrates man's place in the Universe. AND SOME WERE SAVAGES is a rationale of why we sterilize space vehicles and why we should continue to do so. With fantastic overtones, NONE SO BLIND is an almost straight description of the world of the blind. No JOKES ON MARS tells of blackmail and efforts to conserve life. Sanitation, or lack of it, is the
basis for A DUSK OF IDOLS and in How BEAUTIFUL WITH BANNERS, a dedicated scientist is caught between new life and old and unwittingly is the core of revolution.
James Blish, who has written more than fifteen novels and several collections of short stories, is a particularly imaginative and well-respected writer; his latest novel is BLACK EASTER. Mr. Blish lives in England with his wife Judy, and is currently working on a history of witchcraft.
Book Club Edition
ANYWHEN
James Blish
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
A much shorter version of "A Style in Treason" was published in
Impulse,
March 1966, as "A Hero's Life"; that version © 1966 by
Impulse.
That same text plus a new prologue (not included in this book) and with the present title was published in
Galaxy,
June 1970; that version © 1970 by Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation.
"The Writing of the Rat," first published in
Galaxy,
June 1956; © 1956 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.
"And Some Were Savages," first published in Amazing
Stories,
November 196o; © 196o by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.
"None So Blind," first published by
Fantasy & Science Fiction,
May 1962, as "Who's In Charge Here?"; © 1962 by Mercury Press, Inc.
"No Jokes on Mars," first published by
Fantasy & Science Fiction,
October 1965; © 1965 by Mercury Press, Inc.
"A Dusk of Idols," first published in Amazing
Stories,
March 1961; © 1961 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.
"How Beautiful With Banners," first published in
Orbit i, ©
1966 by Berkley Publishing Corporation.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1970 by James Blish
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
to
HARRY HARRISON
a good companion
Each of the stories in this book was directly commissioned by a magazine editor, an opportunity I used in each case to try an experiment of one kind or another. I've used this collection to second-guess one of the experiments, as follows:
In September of 1965, Kyril Bonfiglioli found himself host in Oxford to five science-fiction writers (Brian W. Aldiss, Poul Anderson, James G. Ballard, Harry Harrison, and myself) and an artist (Judith Ann Lawrence), and commissioned from us all material for what was to be the first issue of
Impulse,
a successor (now defunct) to England's long-established professional magazine
Science-Fantasy.
The five stories and the cover were all to develop the theme of a man who sacrifices his life for a cause—or who doesn't. Except for this bare statement, which as I recall was Mr. Aldiss' suggestion, we had no other instructions except (for the writers) to stay inside ten thousand words.
My contribution to that "OxCon issue" was a novelette called "A Hero's Life." It was written in a vast hurry to meet Mr. Bonfiglioli's deadline, and I didn't realize
until too late to start something else that I had too much material to fit comfortably inside ten thousand words. Hence, I've taken the opportunity to rewrite it, as the novella which leads off this book. The original sketch which appeared in
Impulse
has never been published in the United States.
JAMES BUSH
Alexandria, Virginia
1967
The
Karas,
a fragile transship—she was really little more than a ferry, just barely meriting a name—came fluttering out of the interstitium into the Flos Campi system a day late in a ball of rainbows, trailing behind her two gaudy contrails of false photons, like a moth unable to free herself of her cocoon. The ship's calendar said it was Joni 23, 5914, which was probably wrong by at least ten years; however, nobody but a scholar of that style of dating could have been precise about the matter; the
Karas
was a day later than she should have been; just
what
day was at best only a local convention.
In the salon, Simon de Kuyl sighed and laid out the tarots again. Boadacea, the biggish fourth planet of the Flos Campi array and Simon's present port of call, was yet a week ahead in urspace, and he was already tired. He had reasons. His fellow passengers had been dull beyond belief, with the possible—because wholly unknown—exception of the entity who had spent the entire voyage in his cabin, with a diplomatic seal spidered over the palm plate on its door; and Simon suspected that they would have bored him even had he not
had to present himself to them as a disillusioned Sagittarian mystic, embittered at himself for ever having believed that the Mystery that lay (or didn't lie) at the galactic center would someday emerge and set the rest of the universe to rights, and hence in too unpredictable a temper to be worth being polite to. Conceivably, indeed probably, some of the other passengers were trying to be as repellent to strangers as was Simon, but the probability did not make their surfaces any more diverting.
But of course none of these things—the ship, the delay, the passengers, the pose—was more than marginally to blame for his weariness. In these days of treason, politeness, easy travel, and indefinitely prolonged physical vigor, everyone was tired, just a little but all the time. After a while, it became difficult to remember who one was supposed to be—and to remember who one was, was virtually impossible. Even the Baptized, who had had their minds dipped and then rechannelled with only a century's worth of memories, betrayed to the experienced eye a vague, tortured puzzlement, as though still searching in the stilled waters for some salmon of ego they had been left no reason to suspect had ever been there. Suicide was unconcealedly common among the Baptized, and Simon did not think the reason (as the theoreticians and ministers insisted) was really only a minor imperfection in the process, to be worked out in time.
There was plenty of time; that was the trouble. People lived too damn long, that was all. Erasing the marks, on the face or in the mind, did not unwind the years; the arrow of entropy pointed forever in the same direction; virginity was a fact, not just a state of membrane or memory. Helen, reawakening in Aithra's Egyptian bed flensed of her history, might bemuse Menelaus for a while,
but there will always be another Paris, and that without delay—time past is eternally in time present, as Ezra-Tse had said.
The ten-thousand-year-old analogy came easily to him. He was supposed to be, and in fact was, a native of High Earth; and in his
persona
as a Sagittarian (lapsed) would be expected to be a student of such myths, the more time-dimmed the better—hence, in fact, his interminable shipboard not-quite-game of tarot solitaire. Staying quite automatically in character was in his nature, as well as being one of his chiefest skills.
And certainly he had never allowed himself to be Baptized, though his mind had been put through not a few lesser changes in the service of High Earth, and might yet be forced into a greater one if his mission on Boadacea went awry. Many of his memories were painful, and all of them were painfully crowded together; but they were his, and that above all was what gave them their worth. Some professional traitors were valuable because they had never had, and never could have, a crisis of identity. Simon knew without vanity—it was too late for that—that High Earth had no more distinguished a traitor than he, precisely because he had such crises as often as once a year, and hadn't lost one yet.
"Your indulgence, reverend sir," said a voice at his back. A white hand, well-kept but almost aggressively masculine, came over his shoulder and moved the Fool onto the Falling Tower. "It is boorish of me to intervene, but it discomforts me to see an implication go a-begging. I fear I am somewhat compulsive."
The voice was a new one: therefore, belonging to the person who had been sequestered in the diplomatic cabin up to now. Simon turned, ready to be surly.
His next impulse was to arise and run. The question of
who
the creature was evaporated in recognition of just
what
it was.
Superficially, he saw a man with a yellow page-boy coiffure, wearing pale-violet hose, short russet breeches, and a tabard of deeper violet, as well as a kangaroo-shiv, a weapon usually affected only by ladies. A duplicate of the spider on the doorseal was emblazoned in gold on his left breast. Superficially; for Simon was fortunate—in no way he could explain—to be able to penetrate this seeming.
The "diplomat" was a vombis, or what in those same myths Simon had been thinking of earlier was called a Proteus: a creature which could imitate perfectly almost any life-form within its size range. Or nearly perfectly; for Simon, like one in perhaps five thousand of his colleagues, was sensitive to them, without ever being able to specify in what particular their imitations of humanity were deficient. Other people, even those of the sex opposite to the one the vombis had assumed, could find no flaw in them. In part because they did not revert when killed, no human had ever seen their "real" form—if they had one—though of course there were legends aplenty. The talent might have made them ideal double agents, had it been possible to trust them—but that was only an academic speculation, since the vombis were wholly creatures of the Green Exarch.
Simon's third impulse, like that of any other human being in like circumstances, was to kill this one instantly upon recognition, but that course had too many obvious drawbacks, of which the kangaroo-shiv was the least important. Instead, he said with only moderate ungraciousness: "No matter. I was blocked anyhow."
"You are most kind. May I be seated?"
"Since you're here."
"Thank you." The creature sat down gracefully, across the table from Simon. "Is this your first trip to Boadacea, reverend sir?"
Simon had not said he was going to Boadacea, but after all, it was written on the passenger list for anyone to see.
"Yes. And you?"
"Oh, that is not my destination; I am for deeper into the cluster. But you will find it an interesting world—especially the variations in the light; they make it seem quite dreamlike to a native of a planet with only a single, stable sun. And then, too, it is very old."
"What planet isn't?"
"I forget, you are from High Earth, to whom all other worlds must seem young indeed. Nevertheless, Boadacea is quite old enough to have many curious nations, all fiercely independent, and a cultural pattern which overrides all local variations. To this all the Boadaceans are intensely loyal."