Stories for Chip (35 page)

Two of Fift's bodies were out through the door and into the corridor. Frill and Squell put her onto her feet and smoothed her robes.

Smistria sighed loudly, and stalked over to where her third body sat. He held out his hand.

“It's true!” Miskisk wailed. “You're too cowardly and too comfortable! You'd rather she end up
sisterless
than endure the discomfort of her Supplanting!”

{What's “sisterless?”} Fift asked her agents.

{That is not a word we say} sent the social nuance agent primly.

{
Sister
is an archaic word for sibling} added the context advisory agent.

{But lots of people are Only Children} Fift sent. {Grobbard and Arevio and Smistria are….}

{It is one of the great social crises of our time} her context advisory agent sent.

In the corridor, Fift shivered. In the anteroom, in her last body, she stayed seated, looking away from Smistria, looking at Miskisk. Her Father was crying—that was nothing, her Bail Fathers cried all the time—but this was different. Something was wrong here; Miskisk was serious. A chill raced down from her necks and settled in her stomachs.

Smistria shook his hand in Fift's face. “Come on,” he growled. “You're going to be late anyway, for this…this circus of yours!”

Pupolo drew a shocked breath, because one shouldn't make fun of the Long Conversation like that. Smistria snorted.

“Smistria,” Miskisk pled, “you agree with me—you know it's too early for this—that Fift deserves a little more time at home to run and play and wear more colors than white, before—”

Smistria pushed his hand at Fift, glaring, and Fift had to take it. She pulled herself to her feet.

“Do I agree with you that Pip is bossy, and that everyone here is all too eager to postpone
any
argument…especially in the matter of Sibling Number Two? Of course I do. Do I think you should be allowed to keep Fift here as a baby, dressed up in bangles and zooming about—to satisfy your selfish wish for a Bailchild? No, Miskisk, I do not.” He pulled Fift toward the door. Grobbard came with them, expressionless.

“You are crushing my heart,” Miskisk said, tears dripping from his chin. “I cannot do this anymore. I cannot—”

“We have a
pledge
,” Pupolo said in horror.

Miskisk covered his eyes with his hands.

“If I may,” Pip said coldly—and then the door closed behind them. Fift closed her eyes tried to listen and look with the feed, to see what Pip and Miskisk and Pupolo were saying in the anteroom. But the feed was opaque. Where that room should be was a blank silence. Someone had told the apartment not to show her what was happening there.

“Come on now, little stalwart,” Frill said. “You won't be late if we hurry. You're ready and there's plenty of time.”

“What about Pip?” Squell said.

“She's also already on the way from her client in Temereen,” Frill said, pulling Fift along doublebodied towards the front door of the apartment, “she was planning to come doublebodied anyway—it's not far—perhaps, since she's busy here, one will have to do—Grobby is here, and you're going to do fine!”

Father Grobbard walked beside them, silent. She didn't look upset, or worried. She walked as if she was in the morning hush of a forest on the surface, watching for unpurposed surface animals, the way they once had on a trip they took…up the long elevators, thousands of bodylengths through the deep dark bedrock…to the surface forest, quiet and cold and damp and strange….

This was like that now, maybe. A trip somewhere new. A trip to the Long Conversation, which was secret and important and grownup and Staid.

{What pledge?} Fift asked her agents.

{A pledge is a promise that people make} began the context advisory agent.

{That's not what I asked} Fift sent. {You know what I mean! What pledge did my parents make? Tell me or I'm going to remove you!}

Fift took Grobbard's hands, and they all went out through the apartment door, through the corridor, and onto the surface of Foo.

{Your parents all pledged to stay together for all twenty-two years of your First Childhood} sent the context advisory agent, reluctantly. {To all sleep in the same apartment once a month at the least, to attend family meetings, various such requirements. They had to. The neighborhood approval ratings for your birth weren't high enough otherwise.}

{But this is not at all unusual} the social nuance agent assured Fift.

Just above them was the glistening underside of Sisterine habitation, docking-spires and garden-globes and flow-sluices arcing away. In front of them was the edge of Foo. Their neighborhood, Slow-as-Molasses, was at the end of one spoke of Foo's great, slowly rotating wheel—and beyond it, this time of year, was a great empty vault of air…and then fluffy Ozinth and the below-and-beyond strewn with glittering bauble-habitations…and beyond that, habitation after habitation, bright and dim, smooth and spiky, shifting and still, all stretching away toward the curve of Fullbelly's ceiling.

There are a trillion people in the world, Fift thought. And only ten in our house. And if Father Miskisk breaks the pledge, we'll be only nine, and that's not enough. Her legs, under the new white shift, felt cold and rubbery.

They came to the edge of the neighborhood, the main slideway to the center of Foo.

“All right, little cubblehedge,” Squell said, dropping down on one knee to hug Fift. “Time for Frill and I to turn back. You are in our hearts.”

Frill rubbed Fift's scalp one more time. “Knock ‘em on their backs, little one!” He grinned, and slapped his knife-belt. “Metaphorically.”

Fift looked up into his face and took a deep breath.
The outcome affects our whole cohort.
“Father Frill, what if I
don't
do well? What will happen?”

Frill and Squell's faces went a little stiff, and even Grobbard blinked. Fift realized then—they weren't in the apartment anymore, they weren't just on the house feed. Everyone in the world could see and hear them now, if they wanted to.

But Frill smiled then, and crouched down next to Fift, in a tinkling of bells. “Then we'll manage, Fift,” he said. “We're a strong cohort and we'll triumph. You have a Mother and Father to hold you safe at the center, and Fathers enough to range around you, to protect and enliven…”

{Will you hurry up?} sent Smistria, from back at the apartment, to all of them. {Fift will be late!}

Frill rolled his eyes, and grinned a crooked grin. “Goodbye,” he said, and “Goodbye,” Squell said, and Fift took Grobbard's hand and stepped onto the slideway.

{Father Miskisk} Fift sent, but she didn't know what else to send. {Father Miskisk…I'll do my best!}

If she did well enough, maybe Father Miskisk would stay.

The slideway whooshed them off, towards the center of Foo, where they could transfer to another spoke; toward the wooden floor, and the spoons, and the First Gate of Logic, and white gowns and responsibility, and no more zooming. Fift held tight to Grobbard's hand, and waited, hoping, for Father Miskisk to reply.

Thomas M. Disch

What blacks and whites, what greys and purplish browns!

BERNARD BERENSON

Often enough Rubens may have quietly taken stock of all previous Italian art at this time, especially of the Venetian school, the knowledge of which had had so little influence on other northern artists. Though scarcely one immediate reminiscence of Titian can be discovered in Rubens's later work, whether of objects or of single forms, he had learned to see with Titian's eyes. He found the whole mass of Tintoretto's work intact, and much of it still free of the later blackening of the shadows which makes it impossible for us to enjoy him, but he may well have been repelled by the touch of untruthfulness and lack of reticence in him, and by the crudity of a number of his compositions. It is obvious that his deepest kinship by far was with Paolo Veronese; here two minds converged, and there have been pictures which might be attributed to either, for instance, a small, but rich Adoration of the Magi which the present writer saw in early, uncritical years and has never been able to forget.

JACOB BURCKHARDT

I.

I can hear him, in the next room but one, typing away. An answer to Pamela's special delivery letter perhaps? Or lists of money-making projects. Possibly even a story, or a revised outline for
Popcorn
, in which he will refute the errors of our age.

Wishing to know his age, I went into the communicating room.

“Jim?” I called out. “Jim?” Not in his office. I called downstairs. No reply. I returned here, to this desk, this typewriter. Now there are noises: his voice, the slow expository tone that he reserves for Dylan.

He is twenty-three. He will be twenty-four in December. For his age he is fantastically successful. I envy his success, though it isn't a personal thing—I can envy almost anyone's. I need constant reassurance. I crave your admiration. Is candor admirable? Is reticence even more admirable. I want to read this to someone.

Chip said, on the phone last night, that Algis Budrys called him the world's greatest science-fiction writer. I certainly did envy that. Jane said afterward that Chip is coming up here at the end of the week, possibly with Burt. (Burt?) Marilyn is still in San Francisco. I feel resentful.

I don't think that I am alone in being obsessed with the idea of success. We all are. But though we may envy the success of our friends, we also require it. What kind of success would we be if our friends were failures?

This isn't the story. This is only the frame.

◊

Pieter Saenredam

Pieter Jansz. Saenredam; painter of church interiors and topographical views.

Born in Assendelft 9 June, 1597, son of the engraver Jan Saenredam. He went as a child to Haarlem and became a pupil in May 1612 of Frans Pietersz. de Grebber, in whose studio he remained until 1622. In 1623 he entered the painters' guild at Haarlem and spent most of his life there. He was buried at Haarlem, 31 May, 1665.

He was in contact with the architects Jacob van Campen and Salomon de Bray, and perhaps also Bartholomeus van Bassen. He was one of the first architectural painters to reproduce buildings with fidelity (that is to say, in his drawings; in his pictures, accuracy is often modified for compositional reasons).

In his bedroom, which also served him as a studio, the curtains were always drawn. The cats performed ovals and sine curves in the bedclothes, a gray cat, a calico cat. Most of the furniture has been removed. The remaining pieces are placed against the wall.

The pleasures of iconoclasm. Destruction as a precondition of creation. Our burning faith.

The same painting over and over again. The high vaults and long recessions. The bare walls. The slanting light. Bereft of figures. (Those we see now have, for the most part, been added by other hands.) Nude. White.

He opened his present. Each box contained a smaller box. The last box contained a tin of Mixture No. 79, burley and Virginia. From that young scapegrace, Adriaen Brouwer (1605-1638).

It was an exciting time to live in. Traditions were crumbling. Fortunes were made and destroyed in a day.

The columns in the foreground have been made to appear much wider and taller, and the arches borne by them have been suppressed.

◊

His first letter:

RFD 3

Iowa City, Iowa

May 66

Dear Mr. Disch—

Twenty minutes ago I finished
The Genocides
. And should have finished it days ago,but I kept drawing it out, going back over things, taking it a few pages at a time: because I didn't want it to be over with, sure but mainly because I felt there was so much to take in—the structure, the pitch and tone of the narrative, the interflow of situations—and I wanted to give myself every chance I could ….

From a letter two months later:

… I am touched, Tom, by your extremely kind offer. To show my things to Moorcock. If they were only good stories, I'd take you up on it in a minute. But they're not, and I know it, which makes things different, almost embarrassing. But I may still put you in the compromising position, after thinking it over a while. I
could
use the sale (money, ego-boost, a beginning), and some of ‘em aren't really
that
bad … and so on. But for now: I thank you very much. No way of expressing my gratitude—not only for the offer, but for your proffered friendship as well, your demonstrated openness ….

And this, when I had asked him for a self-portrait:

His Whilom. Born in Helena, Arkansas. Parents uneducated. Spoiled because was so hard to conceive him, wrecked mother's health to bear him against the advice of doctors. One brother, seven year older; philosopher, PhD, teacher. Spent his youth on banks of Twain's Mississippi and in Confederate woods banking his small town. Became interested in conjuring when about twelve, an interest which persists. During high school edited some small magic mags, composed and formed chamber groups, took music lessons (against his parents' wishes, who thought playing in the band was enough, and regardless of their lack of funds), had few friends. Spent summer between 11th and 12th grade doing independent research under guide of National Science Foundation, it being his ambition at that time to become a biochemist. Was oppressed that summer by the routine boredom of checks and balances, began to write poetry under the inspiration of cummings. In his 12th school year, wrote plays, directed plays, acted in plays, won dramatic prizes, became very depressed about not having the money to go to Princeton, became a dandy and discovered girls. Decided he was a poet.

The Exterior Symbolic. Am tall, very thin with a beer belly and matchstick legs. A disorder of the lower back has left me slightly stooped and given me a strange, quite unique walk. Wear wire-frame glasses. Dress in either corduroy coat or black suit, with dark or figured or flowered shirt and black or figured tie. An angular, long face. Black curly hair that sticks out like straw and generally needs a cutting.