New Writings in SF 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  “You know what he wanted to do? He was going to give those books to the Eskimoes. He said only an Eskimo could understand St. Francis nowadays. He must have thought they were poor, I guess. Insane! So, naturally, I went along for the ride. There aren’t many Eskimoes left on Baffin Island—not real Eskimoes—but at last he found one. He became awfully upset, because this Eskimo already had a copy of The Little Flowers and wouldn’t take another. The two of them, Eddie and the Eskimo, talked up a storm all night, and the next morning Eddie takes his fleet with all its books twenty miles out into Hudson Bay and, one by one, he sinks each ship. What a sight! For miles, you couldn’t see anything but The Little Flowers bobbing in the water, and then they all sank. It was sort of sad.

  “We still had a little money left—it was mine—so we rented this shack-”

  “Miss Colt, please watch your language.”

  “Well, that’s all it was, a shack. We stayed there the whole summer, until those men my uncle had hired came around and brought me back home. I can’t imagine how Eddie made it back, because he didn’t have any money. While it lasted it was the best summer. During the day, Eddie would go out in his garden or fishing, and I’d stay inside and cook and wash clothes and even sew up holes in his old clothes....”

  “Miss Colt, if you continue to speak in this manner, you will be held in contempt of court.”

  “Sorry, Your Honour. But really—it was fun. And at night, before we went to bed, he taught me to read. I can still do it. He had brought along some books of his, and he’d read them by the hour. It’s funny, you know, but I think he actually loved those books.”

  “You may leave the stand, Miss Colt.”

  A man in a white coat rose from the gallery and walked to the side of the witness. Carefully he led her from the stand and out of the courtroom to the limousine waiting to take her back to the Golden Rest Mental Hospital, to which her family had had her committed.

  * * * *

  The Prosecution rose to deliver its closing speech amid a whirlwind of renewed speculation in the gallery. Miss Colt’s appearance on the stand had raised the odds for acquittal, and the Accused’s refusal to testify in his own defence had left the bookies in a buzz of uncertainty. They didn’t know which way to change the odds.

  The Judge called for order.

  Like periscopes rising from deep waters the eyes of the Prosecution lifted out of their burrows of pink flesh to stare morosely at the jury.

  “Gentlemen of the Jury,” the Prosecution began:

  “The Accused, Edwin Lollard, is guilty of many crimes. Today you will be asked to judge only one of them. You may think the crime for which he is being tried is not the gravest of those of which he is guilty. But the Law, gentlemen, is strict, and under the Law, Edwin Lollard is guilty of only one crime.

  “He is not guilty of literacy, for literacy is not a crime. Some of the noblest figures in the history of this nation have been literate: the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D. Eisenhower—to name only a few. Books are not necessarily a corrupting influence, and I would like to say, for the sake of the record, that personally I approve of books. I have read many—often with appreciation—and I do not look down on the man who has read more than I.

  “Of course, like many good things, the reading of books may be carried to excess, and anything done to excess becomes an evil. It is likely that, in the case of the Accused, literacy had become a vice. But it is not a vice punishable under the Law. I must ask you to bear this in mind, gentlemen, when you are arriving at your verdict.

  “The Accused is not guilty of bankruptcy. If he were, there would be a redeeming feature in this sordid case, for it would reveal some scrap of dignity. But dignity is a feature that the Accused has never evidenced. You are all probably familiar with the story of Billie Sol Estes, one of the leading spirits of the twentieth century. At his moment of glory, Estes owned nothing, but he owed millions. The Accused, however, owes no more than he owns. He is nothing more nor less than a pauper.

  “The Accused is not guilty, under the Law, of robbery or malfeasance. The money he squandered so wildly was not in a sense his own—it belonged to the Brotherhood of St. Francis. But by a legal fiction the Brotherhood can own no property. The Accused committed a gross breach of trust when he sold their properties and sank his ships, but he did not commit a crime. How can I ask you, gentlemen, to ignore this most ignoble act when you are deliberating his fate? Yet I must. The Law is strict and sometimes, gentlemen, it is powerless.

  “Will Edwin Lollard escape the penalty of the Law— because of the casuistry of the courts, the inelasticity of the Law and the foibles of logic? Can he be saved through loopholes? No, gentlemen—happily he cannot. For Edwin Lollard is guilty of a most despicable crime, and the Law recognizes his guilt. So, gentlemen, will you.

  “The Accused is guilty, most culpably guilty, of criminal poverty.

  “It is incredible to think that in an age such as ours—an age of enlightenment—that in a society such as ours—a society of affluence and ever-increasing prosperity—that any man, however mean of spirit, could be poor! Centuries ago there was such a thing as unemployment. Poverty was so common that no one dared recognize its essentially criminal nature. But no man today need be poor. Modern science and the wonders of automation have eliminated not only the poor but the merely well-off. Today all men are rich—or they are poor by a premeditated and criminal action. An action, gentlemen, such as that of Edwin Lollard.

  “Gentlemen of the Jury, consider the evidence before you: a man is raised by wealthy parents, in a home very much like your own. No want is unsatisfied and no request denied him. An average childhood—an ideal childhood. He attends college where already his criminal nature begins to reveal itself. He is aggressive, competitive, surly. You have seen for yourselves how he respects the woman who devoted a year of her life to his education. Like all the good things that have been given him he rejects this goodness too.

  “He marries and finds a good job. But he cannot long endure goodness. He leaves his job and forces his wife to leave him. He is bankrupt. Except for a strange and fateful coincidence, that would have been the end of his exploits. As we have heard, it was only the beginning. He joins a society which—again we see an evidence of the leniency of the Law—is allowed to spread its corrupting gospel in a democratic society. A religion, it is called! Yet even this notorious fellowship is not corrupt enough for the tastes of this man. He must betray it.

  “This society has provided him with greater wealth than he had ever dreamed of possessing. Accompanied by a woman of certified insanity and certain viciousness, the Accused commits his final incredible action. He converts his new-found wealth into shiploads of worthless trash and then jettisons the whole mass of his folly into Hudson Bay, where I would suggest it is better off.

  “An act of insanity? So absolute an evil must always appear insane to persons of moral discernment. Edwin Lollard was aware, however, of the consequences of his action. He knew that he had made himself a pauper.

  “It is probably unnecessary to explain to any of you the enormity of Lollard’s crime. It strikes at the heart of social order. It invokes an age of nightmarish Need. St. Francis of Assisi is the apt symbol of such an age: a thin man, dressed in rags, kissing the hand of a leper. Strong language, gentlemen, but nothing less will express the meaning of poverty.

  “Its essential evilness has been expressed most aptly by that prophetic spirit of the twentieth century—who had seen poverty at first hand—George Bernard Shaw. Shaw spoke of, ‘the irresistible natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: to wit, that the greatest of our evils, and the worst of our crimes is poverty, and that our first duty, to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor. Security, the chief pretence of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone’s head.’

  “Society cannot tolerate a pauper! The Holy Bible says—
Thou shalt burn a witch, by which is certainly meant a pauper.

  “Society cannot say—’If a man so wills, let him be poor.’ Shaw exposed the fallacy of such ill-founded toleration, and, in conclusion, I cannot improve upon his words: ‘Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? It means let him be weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him have rickety children. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let the undeserving become less deserving; and let the deserving lay up for himself, not treasures in heaven, but horrors in hell upon earth.’

  “Gentlemen of the Jury, as you value the country in which you have your homes, as you value affluence and as you value truth, you must find Edwin Lollard guilty of criminal poverty.”

  * * * *

  Edwin Lollard was found guilty of criminal poverty and sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment in the Blue Forest Prison Colony on the outskirts of Quebec City. For two years he had striven to this one goal and at last he had obtained it.

  It isn’t easy to break into prison. Murderers receive the death penalty; thieves and other criminals motivated by avarice are seldom prosecuted; the few felons that do not fit these categories are usually judged insane and lobotomized. Except for paupers. Paupers are transported to the Quebec City prison. Poverty, however, is hard to achieve in a truly affluent society and still harder to prove. Edwin Lollard had achieved it.

  Now, he thought with quiet joy as he rode in the back of the prison van—now at last he would be able to live the life he’d always dreamed of: free from affluence, free from the soul-deadening bondage of the consumer; free to do as he pleased—to read, to relax, to be poor. Blessed are the poor, he thought (somewhat inaccurately), for they shall be comfortable.

  He felt a moment’s passing tenderness for Jillian. A shame that he would never see her again. He hoped she would be as happy at Golden Rest as he expected to be at Blue Forest.

  He didn’t expect much, and precisely for that reason he expected to be happy. A spare diet, hard work through the day and, at night, his bare cell. A wooden cot, a lamp, a book and utter solitude. In twenty-five years he could read all the books he had never had time for: Gibbon and Toynbee, Virgil and Dante, Tolstoi, Joyce and Gaddis, Firboth and McCallum.

  He felt like a newlywed and he imagined rapturously all the delights awaiting his tender explorations beneath the rags of his Lady Poverty, his bride.

  Like most men of that time, he knew virtually nothing about penology. Blue Forest was going to be a great surprise.

  A prison has two functions: to detain and to punish. Blue Forest detained admirably: escape was impossible from its system of walls, fences and minefields. But the Warden, an enlightened man, with an enormous annual budget to get rid of, saw no reason to inflict senseless and degrading punishments upon the criminals under his charge. His prisoners ate well—five satisfying meals a day during the week and a special twelve-hour banquet on Sundays; they slept in rooms that could have graced the pages of Modern Living; they watched teevee in an enormous stadium and their robo-sports arena was second to none. The Warden was proud of the Blue Forest Choral Society, in which all the convicts participated. The Choral Society had recorded three successful albums: Songs of Good Cheer, What Do You Want for Xmas? and Music to Go to Sleep By. A new Physical Therapy and Massage wing was under construction.

  All the convicts were happy and uncomplaining. They lived every bit as well as they had on the outside. They were especially happy, however, because the food they ate gave them no choice. It contained Deleriomycin.

  There was no library.

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  * * * *

  A TASTE FOR DOSTOEVSKY

  Brian W. Aldiss

  As can be expected from one of Britain’s foremost science-fiction writers, Brian W. Aldiss presents one of the most unusual time-travelling stories yet written.

  * * * *

  He was nearly at the spaceship now, had slithered down the crater wall and was staggering across the few feet of broken rock that separated him from safety. He moved with the manic action of someone compensating for light gravity, his gauntleted hands stretched out before him.

  He blundered clumsily against the outcropping teeth of rock, and fell on them. The knee joint of his suit snagged first on the rock, bursting wide. Still tumbling, the man grasped at his knee, feebly trying to clamp in the escaping oxygen-nitrogen mixture.

  But help was at hand. They had been tracking his progress through the ship’s viewer. The hatch was cycling open. Two men in spacesuits lowered themselves to the lunar surface and hurried over to the fallen figure.

  Grasping him firmly, they pulled him back into the ship. The hatch closed on them. The audience applauded vigorously; they loved the old corn.

  In the spaceship cabin, relaxing, the two rescuers lit mescahales and sat back. Eddie Moore sprawled on the floor, gasping. It had been a close one that time. He thought they were never coming for him. Slowly he sat up and removed his helmet. The others had gone by then; there were just a few technicians backstage, clearing up.

  Still breathing heavily, Moore climbed to his feet and headed for the dressing room. The lunar gravity did not worry him at all—he had lived here ever since his mother died, three years ago.

  When he had changed, tucking himself into his ordinary everyday one-piece, he made his way towards the players’ exit. Half-way there, he changed his mind and climbed down through the airlock of the mocked-up twentieth-century rocketship.

  Most of the audience had left the big hall now; there were just a few of them at the gallery at the far end, admiring the cleverly recreated lunar landscape. Eddie trudged through the mock pumice, head down, hands in pockets.

  Funny the way it wasn’t until the whole moon surface was built over and the artificial atmosphere working that people had recalled the terrific aesthetic pleasure they had derived from the old primeval landscape of the moon—and had been forced to recreate it here out of artificial materials. That was the way things went. They didn’t appreciate his once nightly performance as the dying spaceman; he so fully empathized with his role that he knew one day he would die of oxygen-failure even while breathing it—and then there might be those, the discerning ones, who would hold the name of Eddie Moore dear, and realize that they had once been in the presence of a great artist.

  Looking up, he saw that a solitary figure stood on a ridge of rock, staring moodily up at the fake heavens. He identified it as Cat Vindaloo, the Pakistani director of their show, and called a greeting to him.

  Cat nodded sourly and altered his position without actually coming any nearer to Moore.

  “We went over well tonight,” Moore said.

  “They still pay to come and watch,” Cat said.

  “Your trouble is, you’re obsessed with being a failure, Cat. Come on, snap out of it. If there’s anything wrong with the show, it is that it’s too realistic. I’d personally like to see less of a dying fall to end with—maybe a grand finale such as they’d have had at the end of last century, with all the crew parading outside the ship, taking a bow.”

  As if the words were dragged out of him by compulsion, Cat said, “You’re beginning to over-act again, Eddie.” Moore realized the director was not standing here purely by accident; he knew that Moore, alone of the troupe, often preferred to trudge home the hard way.

  “Let me tell you, I’m the only one of the whole damned batch who still throws himself into the part. You can have no idea of the sort of life I lead, Cat! I’m an obsessive, that’s what, like a character out of Dostoevsky. I live my parts. My life’s all parts. Sometimes I hardly know who I really am....” He saw the beginnings of a glazed expression on Cat’s face and grabbed his tunic in an effort to retain his attention. “I know I’ve told you that before, but it’s true! Listen, it gets so bad that sometimes—sometimes I’m you—I mean, I sort of take your role, because I worry about you so much. I m
ean, I suppose I am basically afraid —it’s silly, I know—afraid you may be going to sack me from the cast. I must tell you this, though of course it’s embarrassing for us both. I—don’t you sometimes feel I am being you?”

  Cat did not seem particularly embarrassed, a fact that disconcerted Moore. “I was aware you were unbalanced, Eddie, of course. We all are in this game, and I suppose I may as well confess—since you are bound to forget every word I tell you—that my particularity is suffering any sort of insult people like to heap on me. So that’s why I attract your attentions, I suppose; it’s destiny. But I fail entirely to see how you mean you are being me.”

  “If you don’t understand, it’s no good explaining. What I mean to say is that sometimes for days at a time I think myself—though I’m pure English—to be an Indian like you, living in India!”

  “I am a Pakistani, Eddie, as I have told you many times. You are choosing your own way to insult me again, aren’t you, taking advantage of the fact that I fundamentally have this degrading urge to be insulted. How can you live like an Indian here ? And why should I care if you do ? Your life is your own to make a fool with if you care to!”