Orbit 19 - [Anthology] Read online

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  Orbit 19

  By Damon Knight

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  Contents

  They Say

  Lollipop and the Tar Baby

  John Varley

  State of Grace

  Kate Wilhelm

  Many Mansions

  Gene Wolfe

  The Veil Over the River

  Felix C. Gotschalk

  Fall of Pebble-Stones

  R. A. Lafferty

  The Memory Machine

  Tomus

  Stephen Robinett

  Under Jupiter

  Michael W. McClintock

  To the Dark Tower Came

  Gene Wolfe

  Vamp

  Michael Conner

  Beings of Game P-U

  Phillip Teich

  Night Shift

  Kevin O’Donnell, Jr.

  Going Down

  Eleanor Arnason

  The Disguise

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  Arcs & Secants

  * * * *

  They Say

  In some remarks about [Robert] Silverberg published elsewhere I found occasion to cause him mild pain by calling him five feet seven inches tall and “the best writer in English.” I am happy to set the record straight for the audience that this collection will entertain: Silverberg is five feet ten (although his compaction and grace is such that to a hulking type like me he seems shorter), and he may be listed among the best writers in English, a club of no more than ten members to which I would also admit Vladimir Nabokov, Evan S. Connell, Jr., Norman Mailer, Robert Coover, Richard Yates, Philip Roth, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, and Bernard Malamud. Whether or not he is the best of this awesome company is a matter for specialists; the point is that names such as these must be invoked in order to indicate his current position in literature. In ten years if he and you, to say nothing of the world, can remain in place, he may be in a category where no names at all other than his own can be mentioned. Until that day I am content to stand by this more modest judgment.

  —”Thinking About Silverberg,” by Barry N. Malzberg, in The Best of Robert Silverberg (Pocket Books, 1976)

  C. S. Lewis rejected a religious interpretation of sf advanced by Roger Lancelyn Green, adding: “If he had said simply that something which the educated receive from poetry can reach the masses through stories of adventure, and almost in no other way, then I think he would have been right.” Lewis’s statement points to the paradoxical nature of science fiction as that which contains something akin to poetry, and yet is set apart from it by an aesthetic deficit. This longing for poetry in science fiction (as expressed in many reviews) is only surpassed by a prevalent taste for bad poetry, much as the enthusiasm for science among many sf writers is often overridden by their ignorance of it. In my opinion, science fiction is best described by such paradoxes, by the deep desire for the unattainable, only natural in a field of writing where ambition and publicly proclaimed aims so often exceed real potential and abilities.

  —The Science Fiction Book, An Illustrated History, by Franz Rottensteiner (Seabury Press, 1975)

  According to one American astronomer, whole volumes of the Encyclopedia Galactica may be winging their way towards us, packed with all the scientific knowledge that an advanced and benevolent society might consider important—the secrets of longevity and peaceful coexistence, the answer to malignant diseases, perhaps new sources of power that dwarf even the atom’s explosive stockpile. Interspersed with these electrifying revelations could be instructions for learning Galactic, the language of interstellar communication—an open invitation to us to answer the call.

  But would the possible dangers of answering a call from another civilization outweigh the likely benefits? The Czech-British astronomer Zdenek Kopal has visualized our confrontation with extraterrestrial beings intelligent enough to have discovered our existence: “We might find ourselves in their test tubes or other contraptions set up to investigate us as we do guinea pigs. ... If the space phone rings,” he pleads, “for God’s sake let us not answer it.”

  —Worlds Beyond, A Report on the Search for Life in Space, by Ian Ridpath (Harper & Row, 1976)

  Machine-buffs are easy to cater to. Early sf magazines are full of outrageous machines, all cogs and rivets and columns and winking lights and trailing cables, so that the characters are perpetually tripping through a gigantic Meccano landscape. But the relation to reality is not as remote as might be supposed. You invent futures by magnifying pasts. Many outrageous futurist machines derive from a great age of invention, when diabolical engines proliferated—Brunton’s drilling machine of the eighteen-seventies, for example, would be perfectly at home in some subterranean horror planet designed by Harry Harrison or John Sladek.

  Most inventors cared for invention itself, not the social consequences of the invention; this myopia is what one might call the Frankenstein syndrome. Horrific experiments, like the attempts of a French surgeon to preserve the dead by electroplating them, are the stuff of sf, even when they take place in real life. The illustration of Dr. Varlot’s experiment which appeared in the Scientific American in 1891 is real Mad Scientist stuff, complete with Moronic Laboratory Assistant, and could serve as an Amazing cover (indeed, mutatis mutandis, it often did so serve!). To have one’s dear ones electroplated by return and at no great cost is not an unreasonable ambition; like much else which might—ironically or not—be termed Progress, the idea seems to encompass hope and fear in roughly equal proportions.

  —Science Fiction Art, by Brian Aldiss (Bounty Books, 1975)

  Viewed as an animal, man must continue to expand his domain, to extend his ecological range, to push out his territory; or he must find an innocuous ecological niche in another society, like the ant or the housefly, where he is too difficult or too expensive to eradicate; or he must ingratiate himself into a superior culture, like the dog or the cat; or he must die. Such has been the evolutionary history of Earth, of which man is a part. Both evolutionary and recorded history confirm a picture of man as a creature which must be dominant, which eliminates competing species, which has found ways of existing wherever endurance, adaptability, or intelligence can fit him to the environment or environment to him. This is science fiction’s traditional vision of man as he faces the universe.

  —Alternate Worlds, The Illustrated History of Science Fiction, by James Gunn (Prentice-Hall, 1975)

  For all its persistence, the custom of Man eating Man (and vice versa) has never become really common . . . One problem is that widespread enthusiasm for the practice tends to be self-limiting, if not self-extinguishing. Another is that if the enthusiasm doesn’t infect the intended donors, their uncooperative behavior leads to no end of wrangling and bitterness. And then there is the problem of disease.

  Now, lumberjacks catch neither the Chestnut Blight nor the Dutch Elm Disease. Lobstermen are likewise immune to the ills that afflict their crustacean prey. But some diseases of poultry can be caught by their keepers; and with mammalian livestock, matters are much worse. When Man is both predator and prey, everything is catching, from the Common Cold on up to the Black Plague even before the donor is dispatched, along with a variety of ailments which can be ingested with the meal itself.

  Some, like Tuberculosis, are quite rare, especially if one exercises reasonable care in selecting one’s prey. Hepatitis is more common; more difficult to detect without an elaborate routine of testing and questioning of the donor, which tends to alarm him prematurely; and in the case of some virulent strains, almost impossible to destroy without burning the meat to a cinder and sometimes not even then. As for Trichinosis, one study has shown about a 2% infestation
of pork and a 20% infestation of people. In theory, one could limit one’s diet to devout Buddhists and Orthodox Jews; in practice, however, one can never be sure that the donor isn’t a late convert. The usual precaution is simply to cook Man very thoroughly, as with pork only more so.

  —To Serve Man: A Cookbook for People, by Karl Würf (Owlswick Press, 1976)

  >

  * * * *

  LOLLIPOP AND THE TAR BABY

  The tale of a talking black hole, a cloned

  woman alone outside the orbit of Pluto, and a mirror

  that reflected another’s face.

  John Varley

  “Zzzzello.Zzz. Hello. Hello.” Someone was speaking to Xanthia from the end of a ten-kilometer metal pipe, shouting to be heard across a roomful of gongs and cymbals being knocked over by angry giant bees. She had never heard such interference.

  “Hello?” she repeated. “What are you doing on my wavelength?”

  “Hello.” The interference was still there, but the voice was slightly more distinct. “Wavelength. Searching, searching wavelength . . . get best reception with . . . Hello? Listening?”

  “Yes, I’m listening. You’re talking over ... my radio isn’t even . . .” She banged the radio panel with her palm in the ancient ritual humans employ when their creations are being balky. “My goddamn radio isn’t even on. Did you know that?” It was a relief to feel anger boiling up inside her. Anything was preferable to feeling lost and silly.

  “Not necessary.”

  “What do you mean, not—who are you?”

  “Who. Having . . . I’m, pronoun, yes, I’m having difficulty. Bear with. Me? Yes, pronoun. Bear with me. I’m not who. What. What am I?”

  “All right. What are you?”

  “Spacetime phenomenon. I’m gravity and causality-sink. Black hole.”

  * * * *

  Xanthia did not need black holes explained to her. She had spent her entire eighteen years hunting them, along with her clone-sister, Zoetrope. But she was not used to having them talk to her.

  “Assuming for the moment that you really are a black hole,” she said, beginning to wonder if this might be some elaborate trick played on her by Zoe, “just taking that as a tentative hypothesis—how are you able to talk to me?”

  There was a sound like an attitude thruster going off, a rumbling pop. It was repeated.

  “I manipulate spacetime framework . . . no, please hold line . . . the line. I manipulate the spacetime framework with controlled gravity waves projected in narrow ... a narrow cone. I direct at the speaker in your radio. You hear. Me.”

  “What was that again?” It sounded like a lot of crap to her.

  “I elaborate. I will elaborate. I cut through space itself, through-hold the line, hold the line, reference.” There was a sound like a tape reeling rapidly through playback heads. “This is the BBC,” said a voice that was recognizably human, but blurred by static. The tape whirred again, “gust the third, in the year of our Lord nineteen fifty-seven. Today in—” Once again the tape hunted.

  “chelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of the ether, by ingeniously arranging a rotating prism—” Then the metallic voice was back.

  “Ether. I cut through space itself, through a—hold the line.” This time the process was shorter. She heard a fragment of what sounded like a video adventure serial. “Through a spacewarp made through the ductile etheric continuum—”

  “Hold on there. That’s not what you said before.”

  “I was elaborating.”

  “Go on. Wait, what were you doing? With that tape business?”

  The voice paused, and when the answer came the line had cleared up quite a bit. But the voice still didn’t sound human. Computer?

  “I am not used to speech. No need for it. But I have learned your language by listening to radio transmissions. I speak to you through use of indeterminate statistical concatenations. Gravity waves and probability, which is not the same thing in a causality singularity, enables a nonrational event to take place.”

  “Zoe, this is really you, isn’t it?”

  * * * *

  Xanthia was only eighteen Earth-years old, on her first long orbit into the space beyond Pluto, the huge cometary zone where space is truly flat. Her whole life had been devoted to learning how to find and capture black holes, but one didn’t come across them very often. Xanthia had been born a year after the beginning of the voyage and had another year to go before the end of it. In her whole life she had seen and talked to only one other human being, and that was Zoe, who was one hundred and thirty-five years old and her identical twin.

  Their home was the Shirley Temple, a fifteen thousand tonne fusion-drive ship registered out of Lowell, Pluto. Zoe owned Shirley free and clear; on her first trip, many years ago, she had found a scale-five hole and had become instantly rich. Most hole hunters were not so lucky.

  Zoe was also unusual in that she seemed to thrive on solitude. Most hunters who made a strike settled down to live in comfort, buy a large company or put the money into safe investments and live off the interest. They were unwilling or unable to face another twenty years alone. Zoe had gone out again, and a third time after the second trip had proved fruitless. She had found a hole on her third trip, and was now almost through her fifth.

  But for some reason she had never adequately explained to Xanthia, she had wanted a companion this time. And what better company than herself? With the medical facilities aboard Shirley she had grown a copy of herself and raised the little girl as her daughter.

  * * * *

  Xanthia squirmed around in the control cabin of The Good Ship Lollipop, stuck her head through the hatch leading to the aft exercise room, and found nothing. What she had expected, she didn’t know. Now she crouched in midair with a screwdriver, attacking the service panels that protected the radio assembly.

  “What are you doing by yourself?” the voice asked.

  “Why don’t you tell me, Zoe?” she said, lifting the panel off and tossing it angrily to one side. She peered into the gloomy interior, wrinkling her nose at the smell of oil and paraffin. She shone her pencil-beam into the space, flicking it from one component to the next, all as familiar to her as neighborhood corridors would be to a planet-born child. There was nothing out of place, nothing that shouldn’t be there. Most of it was sealed into plastic blocks to prevent moisture or dust from getting to critical circuits. There were no signs of tampering.

  “I am failing to communicate. I am not your mother, I am a gravity and causality—”

  “She’s not my mother,” Xanthia snapped.

  “My records show that she would dispute you.”

  Xanthia didn’t like the way the voice said that. But she was admitting to herself that there was no way Zoe could have set this up. That left her with the alternative: she really was talking to a black hole.

  “She’s not my mother,” Xanthia repeated. “And if you’ve been listening in, you know why I’m out here in a lifeboat. So why do you ask?”

  “I wish to help you. I have heard tension building between the two of you these last years. You are growing up.”

  Xanthia settled back in the control chair. Her head did not feel so good.

  * * * *

  Hole hunting was a delicate economic balance, a tightrope walked between the needs of survival and the limitations of mass. The initial investment was tremendous and the return was undependable, so the potential hole hunter had to have a line to a source of speculative credit or be independently wealthy.

  No consortium or corporation had been able to turn a profit at the business by going at it in a big way. The government of Pluto maintained a monopoly on the use of one-way robot probes, but they had found over the years that when a probe succeeded in finding a hole, a race usually developed to see who would reach it and claim it first. Ships sent after such holes had a way of disappearing in the resulting fights, far from law and order.

  The demand for holes was so grea
t that an economic niche remained which was filled by the solitary prospector, backed by people with tax write-offs to gain. Prospectors had a ninety per cent bankruptcy rate. But as with gold and oil in earlier days, the potential profits were huge, so there was never a lack of speculators.

  Hole hunters would depart Pluto and accelerate to the limits of engine power, then coast for ten to fifteen years, keeping an eye on the mass detector. Sometimes they would be half a light-year from Sol before they had to decelerate and turn around. Less mass equalled more range, so the solitary hunter was the rule.

  Teaming of ships had been tried, but teams that discovered a hole seldom came back together. One of them tended to have an accident. Hole hunters were a greedy lot, self-centered and self-sufficient.