Glory Road (38 page)

Why was I wearing that thing? I explained that gentlemen wore swords.

If I would tell them what movie company I was with, a phone call could clear it up. Or was it television? The Department cooperated but liked to be notified.

Did I have a license for concealed weapons? I said it wasn’t concealed. They told me it was—by that scabbard. I mentioned the Constitution; I was told that the Constitution sure as hell didn’t mean walking around city streets with a toad sticker like that. A cop whispered to the sergeant, “Here’s what we got him on, Sarge. The blade is longer than—” I think it was three inches. There was trouble when they tried to take the Lady Vivamus away from me. Finally I was locked up, sword and all.

Two hours later my lawyer got it changed to “disorderly conduct” and I was released, with talk of a sanity hearing.

I paid him and thanked him and took a cab to the airport and a plane to San Francisco. At the port I bought a large bag, one that would take the Lady Vivamus cater-cornered.

That night in San Francisco I went to a party. I met this chap in a bar and bought him a drink and he bought me one and I stood him to dinner and we picked up a gallon of wine and went to this party. I had been explaining to him that what sense was there in going to school to learn one way when there was already a better way? As silly as an Indian studying buffalo calling! Buffalos are in zoos! Acculturated, that’s what it was!

Charlie said he agreed perfectly and his friends would like to hear it. So we went and I paid the driver to wait but took my suitcase inside.

Charlie’s friends didn’t want to hear my theories but the wine was welcome and I sat on the floor and listened to folk singing. The men wore beards and didn’t comb their hair. The beards helped, it made it easy to tell which were girls. One beard stood up and recited a poem. Old Jocko could do better blind drunk but I didn’t say so.

It wasn’t like a party in Nevia and certainly not in Center, except this: I got propositioned. I might have considered it if this girl hadn’t been wearing sandals. Her toes were dirty. I thought of Zhai-ee-van and her dainty, clean fur, and told her thanks, I was under a vow.

The beard who had recited the poem came over and stood in front of me. “Man, like what rumble you picked up that scar?”

I said it had been in Southeast Asia. He looked at me scornfully. “Mercenary!”

“Well, not always,” I told him. “Sometimes I fight for free. Like right now.”

I tossed him against a wall and took my suitcase outside and went to the airport—and then Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska, and wound up at Elmendorf AFB, clean, sober, and with the Lady Vivamus disguised as fishing tackle.

Mother was glad to see me and the kids seemed pleased—I had bought presents between planes in Seattle—and my stepdaddy and I swapped yarns.

I did one important thing in Alaska; I flew to Point Barrow. There I found part of what I was looking for: no pressure, no sweat, not many people. You look out across the ice and know that only the North Pole is over that way, and a few Eskimos and fewer white people here. Eskimos are every bit as nice as they have been pictured. Their babies never cry, the adults never seem cross—only the dogs staked-out between the huts are bad-tempered.

But Eskimos are “civilized” now; the old ways are going. You can buy a choc malt at Barrow and airplanes fly daily in a sky that may hold missiles tomorrow.

But they still seal amongst the ice floes, the village is rich when they take a whale, half starved if they don’t. They don’t count time and they don’t seem to worry about anything—ask a man how old he is, he answers: “Oh, I’m quite of an age.” That’s how old Rufo is. Instead of good-bye, they say, “Sometime again!” No particular time and again we’ll see you.

They let me dance with them. You must wear gloves (in their way they are as formal as the Doral) and you stomp and sing with the drums—and I found myself weeping. I don’t know why. It was a dance about a little old man who doesn’t have a wife and now he sees a seal—

I said, “Sometime again!”—went back to Anchorage and to Copenhagen. From 30,000 feet the North Pole looks like prairie covered with snow, except black lines that are water. I never expected to see the North Pole.

From Copenhagen I went to Stockholm. Majatta was not with her parents but was only a square away. She cooked me that Swedish dinner, and her husband is a good Joe. From Stockholm I phoned a “Personal” ad to the Paris edition of the
Herald-Tribune
, then went to Paris.

I kept the ad in daily and sat across from the Two Maggots and stacked saucers and tried not to fret. I watched the ma’m’selles and thought about what I might do.

If a man wanted to settle down for forty years or so, wouldn’t Nevia be a nice place? Okay, it has dragons. It doesn’t have flies, nor mosquitoes, nor smog. Nor parking problems, nor freeway complexes that look like diagrams for abdominal surgery. Not a traffic light anywhere.

Muri would be glad to see me. I might marry her. And maybe little whatever-her-name was, her kid sister, too. Why not? Marriage customs aren’t everywhere those they use in Paducah. Star would be pleased; she would like being related to Jocko by marriage.

But I would go see Star first, or soon anyhow, and kick that pile of strange shoes aside. But I wouldn’t stay; it would be “sometime again” which would suit Star. It is a phrase, one of the few, that translates exactly into Centrist jargon—and means exactly the same.

“Sometime again,” because there are other maidens, or pleasing facsimiles, elsewhere, in need of rescuing. Somewhere. And a man must work at his trade, which wise wives know.

“I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees.” A long road, a trail, a “Tramp Royal,” with no certainty of what you’ll eat or where or if, nor where you’ll sleep, nor with whom. But somewhere is Helen of Troy and all her many sisters and there is still noble work to be done.

A man can stack a lot of saucers in a month and I began to fume instead of dream. Why the hell didn’t Rufo show up? I brought this account up to date from sheer nerves. Has Rufo gone back? Or is he dead?

Or was he “never born”? Am I a psycho discharge and what is in this case I carry with me wherever I go? A sword? I’m afraid to look, so I do—and now I’m afraid to ask. I met an old sergeant once, a 30-year man, who was convinced that he owned all the diamond mines in Africa; he spent his evenings keeping books on them. Am I just as happily deluded? Are these francs what is left of my monthly disability check?

Does anyone ever get two chances? Is the Door in the Wall always gone when next you look? Where do you catch the boat for Brigadoon? Brother, it’s like the post office in Brooklyn:
You can’t get there from here!

I’m going to give Rufo two more weeks—

I’ve heard from Rufo! A clipping of my ad was forwarded to him but he had a little trouble. He wouldn’t say much by phone but I gather he was mixed up with a carnivorous Fräulein and got over the border almost
sans calottes
. But he’ll be here tonight. He is quite agreeable to a change in planets and universes and says he has something interesting in mind. A little risky perhaps, but not dull. I’m sure he’s right both ways. Rufo might steal your cigarettes and certainly your wench but things aren’t dull around him—and he would die defending your rear.

So tomorrow we are heading up that Glory Road, rocks and all!

Got any dragons you need killed?

AFTERWORD
Heinlein by Samuel R. Delany

Robert A. Heinlein was born July 7, 1907, and grew up principally in Kansas City. At Annapolis, where in 1929 he graduated twentieth in a class of 243, he excelled in fencing. Some of this sword-fighting expertise was to go into the experience of “Oscar” Gordon, the hero of his 1963 novel,
Glory Road.

Science fiction’s history is littered with prodigies, from Asimov and Silverberg to Brunner and Gawron—all of whom published their first work before age 20. Heinlein did not begin publishing science fiction (nor, one suspects, did he seriously consider writing it) until 1939, when he was 32 years old and
Thrilling Wonder Stories
sponsored the contest that also seduced Alfred Bester into the SF precinct. (The prize? Fifty dollars!) This comparatively late start begins Heinlein’s career on a pattern more like that of Ursula K. Le Guin, or even—in another pulp field—Raymond Chandler. Heinlein’s energy, output, and consistent quality are even more remarkable, then, since it is during the period between 18 and 30 years of age that most science fiction writers are garnering the dozen to three dozen novels and dozens of short stories that will fill out their bibliographies, before, sometime in their middle thirties or later, they settle down to a series of concerted efforts to make the SF novel into what they believe it should be. Heinlein is the originator of, among other things, the term
speculative fiction,
which held brief currency in the middle 1960s, when it was resurrected by Michael Moorcock and the other writers around the British SF magazine
New Worlds.
(Heinlein had first used the term in a 1951 guest-of-honor speech at a world science fiction convention.) There is little one can say about the man—by and large a very private person—that suggests the import of his work to the SF genre.

Heinlein’s influence on modern science fiction is so pervasive that modern critics attempting to wrestle with that influence find themselves dealing with an object rather like a sky or an ocean. In many respects Heinlein’s limits are the horizons of science fiction. The bulk of his most influential work was done largely before any academic scholarship in the field got its methodological legs fully under itself in the 1960s. And that bulk
is
large. To come to terms with Heinlein one must be prepared to examine deeply over 20 of his more than 40 published volumes; nor does this mean slighting any of the rest. Basically, however, what he has provided science fiction with is a countless number of rhetorical figures for dramatizing the range of SF concerns. These are the rhetorical turns that still provide most SF readers with the particular thrill that is science fiction’s special pleasure: a fact about a character (her race, his gender, whether or not someone happens to be wearing clothes) that current society considers of defining import is placed at such a point in the narrative that it not only surprises the reader, but also demonstrates how unimportant such concerns have become to this particular future world; a historical reference is casually dropped that lets the reader know that some present historical trend has completely reversed; another reference, made by a character, suddenly reveals that the future world has completely misinterpreted or forgotten some historical fact that is a commonplace of our world, and the fallibility of “history” is pointed out. These are Heinlein’s.

Heinlein’s first published story, “Life-Line,” embeds, Dos Passoslike, a collection of newspaper headlines, telegrams, and court transcripts within its narrative in order to tell its tale. The story’s specifically science-fictional accomplishment is the image of the branching pink vine with which it effects its major informative exposition. Rhetorical variety was a concern for Heinlein from the beginning. But it was in later works that he was to add to this received rhetoric a whole new battery of his own creation. And every SF writer, when negotiating some particular expository lump, must feel in competition with Heinlein’s purely informative skill—one of his hallmarks from the outset.

The concept that a necessary and socially acceptable violence rises as leisure rises was an idea first presented in science fiction in Heinlein’s
Beyond This Horizon
(1942). This has been a continuing attribute in the presentation of science fiction’s alternative societies ever since. A writer like Joanna Russ uses such an idea both in an unpleasant picture of Earth, in
And Chaos Died,
and in an idyllic picture of the planet Whileaway, in
The Female Man.
This is an example of the kind of thinking that separates the science-fictional presentation of alternative societies from the schematic utopian thinking of the nineteenth century and before. I believe it was Damon Knight who first traced out for me, in a 1966 conversation during my first Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference, some of the influences Heinlein’s novella
Gulf
(1949) has exerted on everything from James Bond (
Gulf
is
the
model for the SF oriented espionage tale) to an almost distressing number of things in my own work that I had inadvertently lifted from it! In “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies—” Heinlein single-handedly almost exhausted the time-paradox story. David Gerrold’s
The Man Who Folded Himself
presents itself as a virtual
homage
to the Heinlein tales. Any time-tangled narrative has to be compared with them. That such comparisons are usually so invidious is the main reason such tales are now almost extinct.