AirBody by Sameem Siddiqui (Clarkesworld, April 2020)1 opens with a young man preparing for an “AirBody” job from a “Desi aunty” the next day (the client, a fifty-nine-year-old woman from Karachi called Meena, will use his body for a short period of time—like Airbnb, but using the person’s body rather than their house).
After this promising start the story pretty much goes into reverse: when Meena takes possession of his body the next morning he watches her (he is still mentally present for safety and facilitation reasons) cook dal and answers any questions she has—when he is not contending with her snarky comments about the cleanliness of his kitchen. We also get a chunk of backstory about his own family and a failed relationship with a woman called Karla.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees him drive Meena to a house where she attempts to give another women the pot of dal: she has the door slammed in her face. Later, the woman turns up at his flat—and then she and Meena make love (apparently they used to be lovers). This scene—where the woman makes love to Meena while she inhabits someone else’s body—did not convince (and that is before you consider that the AirBody is of a different sex, and its owner could be watching you in action).
This is pretty much a mainstream story about cooking and relationships (not my favourite themes) which has some SF furniture in it. The ramifications of the technology are barely hinted at beyond the convenience of not having to travel.
* (Mediocre). 4,950 words. Story link.
1. This was the winner of the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021.
Shape by Robert Sheckley
Shape by Robert Sheckley (first published as Keep Your Shape, Galaxy, November 19531) sees a spaceship of shape-shifting Glom arrive in Earth orbit; they are on a mission to place a displacer in one of Earth’s atomic reactors to open up a wormhole for an invasion. Previous expeditions have failed.
Before they descend to the surface, the commander of the ship, Pid, addresses his crewmates Ger and Ilg:
“A lot of hopes are resting on this expedition,” he began slowly. “We’re a long way from home now.”
Ger the detector nodded. Ilg the radioman flowed out of his prescribed shape and molded himself comfortably to a wall.
“However,” Pid said sternly, “distance is no excuse for promiscuous shapelessness.”
Ilg flowed hastily back into proper radioman’s shape.
“Exotic shapes will undoubtedly be called for,” Pid went on. “And for that we have a special dispensation. But remember—any shape not assumed strictly in the line of duty is a device of The Shapeless One!”
Ger’s body surfaces abruptly stopped flowing.
This sets up the story’s conflict, which is that, although the aliens on Glom can assume any shape they want, there are strict caste rules which determine those they are allowed to adopt in society—and Pid has learned before his departure that his two crewmates may not be reliable in this respect:
“Ger, your detector, is suspected of harboring alterationist tendencies. He was once fined for assuming a quasi-hunter shape. Ilg has never had any definite charge brought against him. But I hear that he remains immobile for suspiciously long periods of time. Possibly, he fancies himself a thinker.”
“But sir,” Pid protested, “if they are even slightly tainted with alterationism or shapelessness, why send them on this expedition?”
The chief hesitated before answering. “There are plenty of Glom I could trust,” he said slowly. “But those two have certain qualities of resourcefulness and imagination that will be needed on this expedition.” He sighed. “I really don’t understand why those qualities are usually linked with shapelessness.”
After the three of them land on Earth they dissolve the ship (spoiler), and it isn’t long (there are some episodes that play out beside the reactor) before Ilg and Ger disappear. Pid later discovers that Ilg has become a tree and a thinker, and Ger a dog and hunter. Worse, Pid learns that another dog Ger was chasing earlier is a member of a previous Glom expedition.
The final section sees Pid eventually manage to get inside the reactor building, where the alarm is raised and he is pursued by guards. Then, plagued by thoughts about freedom of shape, and just as he is almost able to activate the displacer, he looks out a nearby window:
It was really true! He hadn’t fully understood what Ger had meant when he said that there were species on this planet to satisfy every need. Every need! Even his!
Here he could satisfy a longing of the pilot caste that went even deeper than piloting.
He looked again, then smashed the displacer to the floor. The door burst open, and in the same instant he flung himself through the window.
The men raced to the window and stared out. But they were unable to understand what they saw.
There was only a great white bird out there, flapping awkwardly but with increasing strength, trying to overtake a flight of birds in the distance.
This is a great finish to a good story, and puts this on my list of Sheckley’s best stories (Specialist, Pilgrimage to Earth, etc.).
One of the things that particularly struck me about this piece was how concisely and clearly written it is and, although there is a message here about social conformity, we aren’t continually bludgeoned with it (I shudder to think what a modern day, MFA’d version of this story would look like).
**** (Very Good). 4,550 words. Story links (see footnote 1).
1. The version of the story I read was in The Arbor House Book of Modern Science Fiction, but the original version in Galaxy magazine (as Keep Your Shape) is longer (5,900 words) and has a completely different ending (and one that makes it a much weaker and more pedestrian story).
In the latter version (the story changes from “He studied himself for a moment, bared his teeth at Ger, and loped toward the gate.” on p. 16 of Galaxy, section break bottom right/p. 67 of the Arbor House anthology) Pid first turns into a dog, and then a man, but can’t stand either shape, so eventually changes into a sparrow. As Pid flies towards the reactor building he is attacked by a hawk and, after slipping through its grasp, changes into a bigger hawk and scares it away. Then Pid drops the displacer and flies after the attacking hawk to find how it hovered in the air.
Theodore Sturgeon used to say something along the lines of, “Horace Gold could turn an average story into a good story, and an excellent story into a good story”. One wonders if this is an example.
Story link (Shape, Arbor House, recommended version).
Story link (Keep Your Shape, Galaxy).
Tell-Tale Tit by Margo Lanagan
Tell-Tale Tit by Margo Lanagan (New Worlds, 2022) is a short piece that begins with all of England’s dogs being brought together to feed on the tongues that have been cut from the mouths of “tattles” (“women, mostly, because telling tales has always been a woman’s offence”):
There is always some gentleman complaining in the parliament of the cost of this waiting, this gathering, this holding. Would it not be more efficient, he wonders, to take in smaller batches of tattles and of dogs, closer to the conviction dates, hard upon each assizes, and closer also to the district where the judgements are passed?
Whereupon other good sirs leap up to correct him: It is a national scourge, this betrayal, this calumny, and should be dealt with in a nationalised manner. The horror is not for the fact that a dog, any local dog, should have a taste of you, but that every dog in England shall have his little bit. A convicted tattle should never know whether any dog she meets thereafter contains a particle of herself. She has become dog, and that knowledge is brought home to her, not only by her silence but also by the sight of any representative of the creatures from wolfhound to lady’s lap dog, forever after. p. 115
The rest is not much more than a (grisly) description of how offenders’ tongues are surgically removed in the Cutting Hall, ground up, and then fed to the massed pack of dogs in the Distribution Hall (the narrator’s job is to ladle out the minced tongue meat to the animals). While the dogs eat, the punished and the public watch on.
There is no story here, just a descriptive account of a bizarre practice—but it is a striking and immersive piece for all that.
*** (Good). 2,750 words.
Angel’s Egg by Edgar Pangborn
Angel’s Egg by Edgar Pangborn (Galaxy, June 19511) opens with an exchange of letters between the FBI and local police about the death of a Dr Bannerman—and which also discusses his diary, an unsettling (or possibly crazed) account of the days and months before his death: this opens with a brief mention of a possible flying saucer sighting before reporting on the annual nesting activities of Bannerman’s favourite hen, Camilla:
This year she stole a nest successfully in a tangle of blackberry. By the time I located it, I estimated I was about two weeks too late. I had to outwit her by watching from a window—she is far too acute to be openly trailed from feeding ground to nest. When I had bled and pruned my way to her hideout she was sitting on nine eggs and hating my guts. They could not be fertile, since I keep no rooster, and I was about to rob her when I saw the ninth egg was nothing of hers. It was a deep blue and transparent, with flecks of inner light that made me think of the first stars in a clear evening. It was the same size as Camilla’s own. There was an embryo, but I could make nothing of it. I returned the egg to Camilla’s bare and fevered breastbone and went back to the house for a long, cool drink.
Later the egg hatches to reveal an “angel”, a tiny female humanoid covered in down and with wing stubs on her shoulders. Bannerman brings the angel inside that evening and, over the next few days, Bannerman discovers that it can communicate mentally with him while they are touching (when he holds her in his hands, etc.). To begin with this is takes the form of vague feelings, but she is soon sending him images of her home world and then, days later, more complex information:
It was difficult. Pictures come through with relative ease, but now she was transmitting an abstraction of a complex kind: my clumsy brain really suffered in the effort to receive. Something did come across. I have only the crudest way of passing it on. Imagine an equilateral triangle; place the following words one at each corner—“recruiting,” “collecting,” “saving.” The meaning she wanted to convey ought to be near the center of the triangle.
I had also the sense that her message provided a partial explanation of her errand in this lovable and damnable world.
Later (in amongst material that provides more background information about her people, how they travelled through space, their biology, and much more), she reveals that there are others like her on Earth (including her dying father). We eventually learn (in an oblique narrative) that they are here on Earth to help steer mankind away from self-destruction.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees the angel’s father die and, when Bannerman asks what she is going to do next, she presents two choices: she can stay with Bannerman, and teach and counsel him (and, when the angels learn more about human biology, possibly greatly improve his health—Bannerman has a spinal deformity2). Or he can have his life memories recorded and stored by her, and used by the angels to better understand and help humankind:
It seems they have developed a technique by means of which any unresisting living subject whose brain is capable of memory at all can experience a total recall. It is a by-product, I understand, of their silent speech, and a very recent one. They have practiced it for only a few thousand years, and since their own understanding of the phenomenon is very incomplete, they classify it among their experimental techniques. In a general way, it may somewhat resemble that reliving of the past that psychoanalysis can sometimes bring about in a limited way for therapeutic purposes; but you must imagine that sort of thing tremendously magnified and clarified, capable of including every detail that has ever registered on the subject’s brain; and the end result is very different. The purpose is not therapeutic, as we would understand it: quite the opposite. The end result is death. Whatever is recalled by this process is transmitted to the receiving mind, which can retain it and record any or all of it if such a record is desired; but to the subject who recalls it, it is a flowing away, without return. Thus it is not a true “remembering” but a giving. The mind is swept clear, naked of all its past, and along with memory, life withdraws also. Very quietly. At the end, I suppose it must be like standing without resistance in the engulfment of a flood time, until finally the waters close over.
Bannerman chooses to have his life “saved” (a term puzzlingly used by the angel to describe Camilla the hen when she dies earlier in the story), and the last part of the story see his memories stripped away over a three week period (during which Bannerman’s old dog Judy is also “saved”):
For it seems that this process of recall is painful to an advanced intellect (she, without condescension, calls us very advanced) because, while all pretense and self-delusion are stripped away, there remains conscience, still functioning by whatever standards of good and bad the individual has developed in his lifetime. Our present knowledge of our own motives is such a pathetically small beginning!—hardly stronger than an infant’s first effort to focus his eyes. I am merely wondering how much of my life (if I choose this way) will seem to me altogether hideous. Certainly plenty of the “good deeds” that I still cherish in memory like so many well-behaved cherubs will turn up with the leering aspect of greed or petty vanity or worse.
In Bannerman’s last moments the other angels visit and let him “see” (a vivid memory of the father if I recall correctly) the two moon night on their planet; then Bannerman gives up his final memories and dies.
Overall, this is a noteworthy piece, but the first half of this story has its problems: the angel material is, at times, a little on the fey side (occasionally the angel seems more like a fantasy fairy) or it is just plain clunky (we get a lot of genre detail about the angel’s world and biology—space travel while encysted, etc.—than we really need) and, around the midway point, it starts becoming dull. That said, it picks up again when the angel’s father dies and Bannerman is presented with the two choices, and the ending is very strong—a long and reflective section, profound even, on the shortcomings of humans individually and as a society.
I’d note that, even given all the genre elements in the piece, this feels like more of a mainstream piece (it is quite descriptive and introspective), certainly when compared with other SF stories of the period. I’d also note that there is also a noticeable religious subtext to the story (angels, sacrifice, saviours, the flood, etc.).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 15,300 words. Story link.
1. Damon Knight made these comments about the first publication of the story in his essay, Knight Piece, in Hell’s Cartographers, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss:
Gold had an incurable habit of overediting stories: as Lester once said, he turned mediocre stories into good ones, and excellent stories into good ones. He bought Edgar Pangborn’s beautiful ‘Angel’s Egg’ and showed it to several writers in manuscript, then rewrote some of its best phrases. He changed the description of the ‘angel’ (a visitor from another planet) riding on the back of a hawk ‘with her speaking hands on his terrible head’ to ‘with her telepathic hands on his predatory head’. According to Ted Sturgeon, when the issue came out and the story was read in the printed version, three pairs of heels hit the floor at that point and three people tried to phone Gold to curse him for a meddler. Sturgeon got in the habit of marking out certain phrases in his manuscripts and writing them in again above the line in ink. Gold asked him why he did that, pointing out that it made it difficult for him to write in corrections. ‘That’s why I do it,’ Sturgeon replied. p. 132
I read what looks like the non-Gold version in The Arbor House Modern Treasury of Science Fiction.
2. I wonder if Bannerman—which can also mean “standard bearer”—is a metaphor for humanity, and whether his twisted nature (the spinal deformity) is a metaphor for the human condition.