Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (427 page)

“Yeah, but doesn’t
that
vary with the style of consciousness too? Who can judge in an absolute sense whether your stuff is artistically pleasing or not?”

“Jesus Christ, Bill, I can judge, can’t I?” Spiegelman said. “I know when a set of psychedelic specs is a successful work of art. It either pleases me or it doesn’t.”

It finally dawned on Watney that that was precisely what was eating at him. A psychedelic designer altered his own reality with a wide spectrum of drugs and then designed other psychedelics to alter other people’s realities. Where was anyone’s anchor?

“But don’t you see, Lennie?” he said. “We don’t know what the hell we’re doing. We’re taking the human race on an evolutionary trip, but we don’t know where we’re going. We’re flying blind.”

Spiegelman took a big drag on his joint. The kid was starting to get to him; he was whining too much. Watney didn’t want anything out of line—just certainty! “You want me to tell you there’s a way you can know when a design is right or wrong in some absolute evolutionary framework, right?” he said. “Well I’m sorry, Bill, there’s nothing but us and the void and whatever we carve out of it. We’re our own creations, our realities are our own works of art. We’re out here all alone.”

Watney was living through one of his flashes of dread, and he saw that Spiegelman’s words described its content exactly. “But that’s exactly what’s eating at me!” he said. “Where in hell is our basic reality?”

“There is no basic reality. I thought they taught that in kindergarten these days.”

“But what about the basic state? What about the way our reality was before the art of psychedelic design? What about the consciousness-style that evolved naturally over millions of years? Damn it, that was the basic reality, and we’ve lost it!”

“The hell it was!” Spiegelman said. “Our pre-psychedelic consciousness evolved on a mindless random basis. What makes that reality superior to any other? Just because it was first? We may be flying blind, but natural evolution was worse—it was an idiot process without an ounce of consciousness behind it.”

“Goddamn it, you’re right all the way down the line, Lennie!” Watney cried in anguish. “But why do you feel so good about it while I feel so rotten? I want to be able to feel the way you do, but I can’t.”

“Of course you can, Bill,” Spiegelman said. He abstractly remembered that he had felt like Watney years ago, but there was no existential reality behind it. What more could a man want than a random universe that was anything he could make of it and nothing else? Who wouldn’t rather have a style of consciousness created by an artist than one that was the result of a lot of stupid evolutionary accidents?

He says it with such certainty, Watney thought. Christ, how I want him to be right! How I’d like to face the uncertainty of it all, the void, with the courage of Lennie Spiegelman! Spiegelman had been in the business for fifteen years; maybe he
had
finally figured it all out

“I wish I could believe that,” Watney said.

Spiegelman smiled, remembering what a solemn jerk he had been ten years ago himself. “Ten years ago, I felt just like you feel now,” he said. “But I got my head together and now here I am, fat and happy and digging what I’m doing.”

“How, Lennie, for chrissakes,
how?”

“50 mikes of methalin, 40 mg. of lebemil and 20 mg. of peyotadrene daily,” Spiegelman said. “It made a new man out of me, and it’ll make a new man out of you.”

* * * *

“How do you feel, man?” Kip said, taking the joint out of his mouth and peering intently into Jonesy’s eyes. Jonesy looked really weird—pale, manic, maybe a little crazed. Kip was starting to feel glad that Jonesy hadn’t talked him into taking the trip with him.

“Oh wow,” Jonesy croaked, “I feel strange, I feel
really
strange, and it doesn’t feel so good…”

The sun was high in the cloudless blue sky; a golden fountain of radiant energy filling Kip’s being. The wood-and-bark of the tree against which they sat was an organic reality connecting the skin of his back to the bowels of the earth in an unbroken circuit of protoplasmic electricity. He was a flower of his planet, rooted deep in the rich soul, basking in the cosmic nectar of the sunshine.

But behind Jonesy’s eyes was some kind of awful gray vortex. Jonesy looked really bad. Jonesy was definitely floating on the edges of a bummer.

“I don’t feel good at all,” Jonesy said. “Man, you know the ground is covered with all kinds of hard dead things and the grass is filled with mindless insects and the sun is hot, man, I think I’m burning…”

“Take it easy, don’t freak, you’re on a trip, that’s all,” Kip said from some asshole superior viewpoint. He just didn’t understand, he didn’t understand how heavy this trip was, what it felt like to have your head raw and naked out here. Like cut off from every energy flow in the universe—a construction of fragile matter, protoplasmic ooze is all, isolated in an energy-vacuum, existing in relationship to nothing but empty void and horrible mindless matter.

“You don’t understand, Kip,” he said. “This is reality, the way it really is, and man it’s horrible, just a great big ugly machine made up of lots of other machines, you’re a machine, I’m a machine, it’s all mechanical clockwork. We’re just lumps of dead matter run by machinery, kept alive by chemical and electric processes.”

Golden sunlight soaked through Kip’s skin and turned the core of his being into a miniature stellar phoenix. The wind, through random blades of grass, made love to the bare soles of his feet. What was all this machinery crap? What the hell was Jonesy gibbering about? Man, who would want to put himself in a bummer reality like that?

“You’re just on a bummer, Jonesy,” he said. “Take it easy. You’re not seeing the universe the way it really is, as if that meant anything. Reality is all in your head. You’re just freaking out behind nothing.”

“That’s it, that’s exactly it, I’m freaking out behind nothing. Like zero. Like cipher. Like the void. Nothing is where we’re
really
at.”

How could he explain it? That reality was really just a lot of empty vacuum that went on to infinity in space and time. The perfect nothingness had minor contaminations of dead matter here and there. A little of this matter had fallen together through a complex series of random accidents to contaminate the universal deadness with trace elements of lift, protoplasmic slime, biochemical clockwork. Some of this clockwork was complicated enough to generate thought, consciousness. And that was all there ever was or would ever be anywhere in space and time. Clockwork mechanisms rapidly running down in the cold black void. Everything that wasn’t dead matter already would end up that way sooner or later.

“This is the way it really is,” Jonesy said. “People used to live in this bummer all the time. It’s the way it is, and nothing we can do can change it.”

“I can change it,” Kip said, taking his pillbox out of a pocket. “Just say the word. Let me know when you’ve had enough and I’ll bring you out of it. Lebemil, peyotadrene, mescamil, you name it.”

“You don’t understand, man, it’s real. That’s the trip I’m on, I haven’t taken anything at all for twelve hours, remember? It’s the natural state, it’s reality itself, and man, it’s awful. It’s a horrible bummer. Christ, why did I have to talk myself into this? I don’t want to see the universe this way, who needs it?”

Kip was starting to get pissed off—Jonesy was becoming a real bring-down. Why did he have to pick a beautiful day like this to take his stupid nothing trip?

“Then
take
something already,” he said, offering Jonesy the pillbox.

Shakily, Jonesy scooped out a cap of peyotadrene and a 15 mg. tab of lebemil and wolfed them down dry. “How did people
live
before psychedelics?” he said. “How could they stand it?”

“Who knows?” Kip said, closing his eyes and staring straight at the sun, diffusing his consciousness into the universe of golden orange light encompassed by his eyelids. “Maybe they had some way of not thinking about it.”

* * * *

Copyright © 1971 by Michael Moorcock.

(1915–1987)

There’s a certain irony that a woman who craved privacy as much as Alice Sheldon did is now one of the most studied figures in genre fiction. James Tiptree Jr. was a pseudonym for the late Dr. Alice Sheldon, who wrote under that name from 1967 until her murky suicide in 1987. Unlike most writers who use pseudonyms, her identity was not widely known to writers and knowledgeable fans until well into her career. Post-mortem, she’s become widely known for her contributions to writing about gender in science fiction; the Tiptree Award named for her is given to the writer who most contributes to the understanding of gender each year, in light of Sheldon’t work in breaking down the idea of stories being inherently “male” or “female.”

Born Alice Hastings Bradley to an attorney father and a mother who wrote travel literature, Tiptree was born in Chicago but traveled widely with her parents and spent much of her childhood in Africa and India. She was a divorced graphic artist at the outbreak of World War II, when she joined the U.S. Army Air Force, where she went to work in photo intelligence. By the end of the war she was a major (and married again, to Hugh Sheldon). Both of them were involved in the development of the CIA after the war.

After “retiring” in 1955, Tiptree earned a BA at American University in 1959 and a doctorate in experimental psychology from George Washington University in 1967. Opportunities for women with doctorates were sparse, so Tiptree turned to writing SF. (She’d been published before, beginning with a 1946 story in the New Yorker written as Alice Bradley.) She sold her first SF story to Astounding in 1968, and by the 1970s was an established short story writer. Though she kept her identity private, she did correspond with other writers and fans, which eventually led to her identity becoming known. (In an introduction to a 1975 collection of her short stories, Robert Silverberg wrote, “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.”)

Tiptree wrote some astonishingly powerful stories, winning a Nebula for “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death” in 1973, a Hugo for “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” the following year, another Nebula for “The Screwfly Solution” (written as Raccoona Smith), and both awards for “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” She had a knack for dark stories that took readers to uncomfortable places emotionally, even while some of them (like “The Only Neat Thing to Do,” the last story she wrote before her death) had surprisingly upbeat tones. In 1987, Tiptree shot her husband and then herself in the head in what may have been a suicide pact. Both had been suffering from health problems (she needed heart surgery; he was blind).

“Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” is one of the darkest Tiptree stories, if not the darkest. Although it’s not cyberpunk exactly (sort of proto-cyberpunk), it shares a lot structurally with the cyberpunk stories that came after it, including its nonlinear structure.

First published in
Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology
, 1974

—Deliverance quickens, catapults him into his boots on mountain gravel, his mittened hand on the rusty 1935 International truck. Cold rushes into his young lungs, his eyelashes are knots of ice as he peers down at the lake below the pass. He is in a bare bleak bowl of mountains just showing rusty in the dawn; not one scrap of cover anywhere, not a tree, not a rock.

The lake below shines emptily, its wide rim of ice silvered by the setting moon. It looks small, everything looks small from up here. Is that scar on the edge his boat? Yes—it’s there, it’s all okay! The black path snaking out from the boat to the patch of tulegrass is the waterway he broke last night. Joy rises in him, hammers his heart. This is it. This—is—
it
.

He squints his lashes, can just make out the black threads of the tules. Black knots among them—sleeping ducks. Just you wait! His grin crackles the ice in his nose. The tules will be his cover—that perfect patch out there. About eighty yards, too far to hit from shore. That’s where he’ll be when the dawn flight comes over. Old Tom said he was loco. Loco Petey. Just you wait. Loco Tom.

The pickup’s motor clanks, cooling, in the huge silence. No echo here, too dry. No wind. Petey listens intently: a thin wailing in the peaks overhead, a tiny croak from the lake below. Waking up. He scrapes back his frozen canvas cuff over the birthday watch, is oddly, fleetingly puzzled by his own knobby fourteen-year-old wrist. Twenty-five—no, twenty-four minutes to the duck season. Opening day! Excitement ripples down his stomach, jumps his dick against his scratchy longjohns. Gentlemen don’t beat the gun. He reaches into the pickup, reverently lifts out the brand-new Fox CE double-barrel twelve-gauge.

The barrels strike cold right through his mitts. He’ll have to take one off to shoot, too: it’ll be fierce. Petey wipes his nose with his cuff, pokes three fingers through his cut mitten and breaks the gun. Ice in the sight. He checks his impulse to blow it out, dabs clumsily. Shouldn’t have taken it in his sleeping bag. He fumbles two heavy sixes from his shell pocket, loads the sweet blue bores, is hardly able to breathe for joy. He is holding a zillion dumb bags of the
Albuquerque Herald
, a whole summer of laying adobe for Mr. Noff—all transmuted into this: his perfect, agonizingly chosen OWN GUN. No more borrowing old Tom’s stinky over-and-under with the busted sight. His own gun with his
initials
on the silver stock-plate.

Exaltation floods him, rises perilously. Holding his gun, Petey takes one more look around at the enormous barren slopes. Empty, only himself and his boat and the ducks. The sky has gone cold gas-pink. He is standing on a cusp of the Great Divide at ten thousand feet, the main pass of the western flyway. At dawn on opening day…What if Apaches came around now? Mescalero Apaches own these mountains, but he’s never seen one out here. His father says they all have TB or something. In the old days, did they come here on horses? They’d look tiny; the other side is ten miles at least.

Petey squints at a fuzzy place on the far shore, decides it’s only sagebrush, but gets the keys and the ax out of the pickup just in case. Holding the ax away from his gun, he starts down to the lake. His chest is banging, his knees wobble, he can barely feel his feet skidding down the rocks. The whole world seems to be brimming up with tension.

He tells himself to calm down, blinking to get rid of a funny blackness behind his eyes. He stumbles, catches himself, has to stop to rub at his eyes. As he does so everything flashes black-white—the moon jumps out of a black sky like a locomotive headlight, he is sliding on darkness with a weird humming all around. Oh, Jeeze—mustn’t get an altitude blackout, not now! And he makes himself breathe deeply, goes on down with his boots crunching hard like rhythmic ski turns, the heavy shell pockets banging his legs, down, going quicker now, down to the waiting boat.

As he gets closer he sees the open water-path has iced over a little during the night. Good job he has the ax. Some ducks are swimming slow circles right by the ice. One of them rears up and quack-flaps, showing the big raked head: canvasback!

“Ah,
you beauty,” Petey says aloud, starting to run now, skidding, his heart pumping love, on fire for that first boom and rush. “I wouldn’t shoot a sitting duck.” His nose-drip has frozen, he is seeing himself hidden in those tules when the flights come over the pass, thinking of old Tom squatting in the rocks back by camp. Knocking back his brandy with his old gums slobbering, dreaming of dawns on World War I airdromes, dreaming of shooting a goose, dying of TB. Crazy old fool. Just you wait. Petey sees his plywood boat heaped with the great pearly breasts and red-black Roman noses of the canvasbacks bloodied and stiff, the virgin twelve-gauge lying across them, fulfilled.

And suddenly he’s beside the boat, still blinking away a curious unreal feeling. Mysterious to see his own footprints here. The midget boat and the four frosted decoys are okay, but there’s ice in the waterway, all right. He lays the gun and ax inside and pushes the boat out from the shore. It sticks, bangs, rides up over the new ice.

Jeeze, it’s really thick! Last night he’d kicked through it easily and poled free by gouging in the paddle. Now he stamps out a couple of yards, pulling the boat. The ice doesn’t give. Darn! He takes a few more cautious steps—and suddenly hears the
whew-whew, whew-whew
of ducks coming in. Coming in—and he’s out here in the open! He drops beside the boat, peers into the bright white sky over the pass.

Oh
Jeeze
—there they are! Ninety miles an hour, coming downwind, a big flight! And he hugs his gun to hide the glitter, seeing the hurtling birds set their wings, become bloodcurdling black crescent-shapes, webs dangling, dropping like dive-bombers—but they’ve seen him, they veer in a great circle out beyond the tules, all quacking now, away and down. He hears the far rip of water and stands up aching toward them. You wait. Just wait till I get this dumb boat out there!

He starts yanking the boat out over the creaking ice in the brightening light, cold biting at his face and neck. The ice snaps, shivers, is still hard. Better push the boat around ahead of him so he can fall in it when it goes. He does so, makes another two yards, three—and then the whole sheet tilts and slides under with him floundering, and grounds on gravel. Water slops over his boot tops, burns inside his three pair of socks.

But it’s shallow. He stamps forward, bashing ice, slipping and staggering. A yard, a yard, a yard more—he can’t feel his feet, he can’t get purchase. Crap darn, this is too slow! He grabs the boat, squats, throws himself ahead and in with all his might. The boat rams forward like an icebreaker. Again! He’ll be out of the ice soon now. Another lunge! And again!

But this time the boat recoils, doesn’t ram. Darn
shit
, the crappy ice is so thick! How could it get this thick when it was open water last night?

‘Cause the wind stopped, that’s why, and it’s ten above zero. Old Tom knew, darn him to hell. But there’s only about thirty yards left to go to open water, only a few yards between him and the promised land. Get there. Get over it or under it or through it, go!

He grabs the ax, wades out ahead of the boat, and starts hitting ice, trying to make cracks. A piece breaks, he hits harder. But it doesn’t want to crack, the axhead keeps going in,
thunk.
He has to work it out of the black holes. And it’s getting deep, he’s way over his boots now. So what?
Thunk!
Work it loose.
Thunk!

But some remaining sanity reminds him he really will freeze out here if he gets his clothes soaked. Shee-it! He stops, stands panting, staring at the ducks, which are now tipping up, feeding peacefully well out of range, chuckling
paducah, paducah
at him and his rage.

Twenty more yards, shit darn, God-darn. He utters a caw of fury and hunger and at that moment hears a tiny distant crack. Old Tom, firing. Crack!

Petey jumps into the boat, jerking off his canvas coat, peeling off the two sweaters, pants, the gray longjohns. His fingers can barely open the icy knots of his bootlaces, but his body is radiant with heat, it sizzles the air, only his balls are trying to climb back inside as he stands up naked. Twenty yards!

He yanks the sodden boots back on and crashes out into the ice, whacking with the ax-handle, butting whole sheets aside. He’s making it! Ten more feet, twenty! He rams with the boat, bangs it up and down like a sledgehammer. Another yard! Another! His teeth are clattering, his shins are bleeding, and it’s cutting his thighs now, but he feels nothing, only joy, joy!—until suddenly he is slewing full-length under water with the incredible cold going up his ass and into his armpits like skewers and ice cutting his nose.

His hands find the edge, and he hauls himself up on the side of the boat. The bottom has gone completely. His ax—his ax is gone.

The ice is still there.

A black hand grabs him inside, he can’t breathe. He kicks and flails, dragging himself up into the boat to kneel bleeding, trying to make his ribs work and his jaws stop banging. The first sunray slicks him with ice and incredible goose bumps; he gets a breath and can see ahead, see the gleaming ducks. So close!

The paddle. He seizes it and stabs at the ice in front of the boat. It clatters, rebounds, the boat goes backward. With all his force he flails the ice, but it’s too thick, the paddle stem is cracking. No bottom to brace on.
Crack!
And the paddle blade skitters away across the ice. He has nothing left.

He can’t make it.

Rage, helpless rage, vomits through him, his eyes are crying hot ice down his face. So close!
So close!
And sick with fury he sees them come—
whew-whew! whew-whew-whew-whew!—
a
torrent of whistling wings in the bright air, the ducks are pouring over the pass. Ten thousand noble canvasbacks hurtling down the sky at him silver and black, the sky is wings beating above him, but too high, too high—they know the range, oh, yes!

He has never seen so many, he will never see it again—and he is standing up in the boat now, a naked bleeding loco ice-boy, raging, sweeping the virgin twelve-gauge, firing—BAM-BAM! both barrels at nothing, at the ice, at the sky, spilling out the shells, ramming them in with tearing frozen hands. A drake bullets toward him, nearer—it has to be near enough! BAM! BAM!

But it isn’t, it isn’t, and the air-riders, the magic bodies of his love beat over him yelling—canvasback, teal, widgeon, pintails, redheads, every duck in the world rising now, he is in a ten-mile swirl of birds, firing, firing, a weeping maniac under the flashing wings, white-black, black-white. And among the flashing he sees not only ducks but geese, cranes, every great bird that ever rode this wind: hawks, eagles, condors, pterodactyls—BAM! BAM! BAM-BAM!! in the crazy air, in the gale of rage and tears exploding in great black pulses—
black! light! black!
—whirling unbearably, rushing him up—

* * * *

—And he surfaces suddenly into total calm and dimness, another self with all fury shrunk to a tiny knot below his mind and his eyes feasting in the open throat of a girl’s white shirt. He is in a room, a cool cave humming with secret promise. Behind the girl the windows are curtained with sheer white stuff against the glare outside.

“Your mother said you went to Santa Fe.” He hears his throat threaten soprano and digs his fists into the pockets of his Levi’s.

The girl Pilar—Pee-lar, crazy-name-Pilar—bends to pick at her tanned ankle, feathery brown bob swinging across her cheek and throat.

“Um-m.” She is totally absorbed in a thin gold chain around her ankle, crouching on a big red leather thing her parents got in where, Morocco—Pilar of the urgently slender waist curving into her white Levi’s, the shirt so softly holding swelling softness; everything so white against her golden tan, smelling of soap and flowers and girl. So
clean
. She has to be a virgin, his heart knows it; a marvelous slow-motion happiness is brimming up in the room. She likes me. She’s so shy, even if she’s a year older, nearly seventeen, she’s like a baby. The pathos of her vulnerable body swells in him, he balls his fists to hide the bulge by his fly. Oh, Jeeze, I mean Jesus, let her not look, Pilar. But she does look up then, brushing her misty hair back, smiling dreamily up at him.

“I was at the La Fonda, I had a dinner date with René.”

“Who’s René?”

“I told you, Pe-ter.” Not looking at him, she uncurls from the hassock, drifts like a child to the window, one hand rubbing her arm. “He’s my cousin. He’s old, he’s twenty-five or thirty. He’s a lieute
nant
now.”

“Oh.”

“An
older man
.” She makes a face, grins secretly, peeking out through the white curtains.

His heart fizzes with relief, with the exultance rising in the room. She’s a virgin, all right. From the bright hot world outside comes the sound of a car starting. A horse whickers faintly down at the club stables, answered by the double wheeze of a donkey. They both giggle. Peter flexes his shoulders, opens and grips his hand around an imaginary mallet.