Tiger I by Tanith Lee (Asimov’s SF, mid-December 1995) opens with a woman in a self-driving car en route to a house in the middle of the desert. When she arrives at the gate she talks to Mary Sattersley, the owner, over the intercom and gains admittance. On the short walk to the house the narrator sees a tame lynx and two tigers.
When the pair arrive the narrator and Sattersley have a drink and talk. Sattersley tells the narrator that she is pregnant and will give birth that night, and then invites her to watch. The narrator also learns that the cats on the property can’t speak but they can understand what is being said to them (as she sees when she asks the cheetah on Sattersley’s lap to open and close its eyes).
Later on, after the narrator has had a swim in the pool, the pair meet again and have dinner. The narrator hears Sattersley’s life story, which involves sexual abuse at an early age, many sexual partners during her youth, and then a tryst with an old man just before he dies. She inherited his fortune, and then learned that she was pregnant for the first time. Subequently she has given birth on several other occasions.
The final scene (spoiler) sees Sattersley deliver a tiger cub.
An odd, surreal tale that left me clueless as to what it was supposed to be about.
* (Mediocre). 4,700 words.
Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp
Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp (Analog, April 1967) begins with a lively exchange between Lionel Prellen, a planetary administrator, and Lieutenant Sinclair, a Space Navy officer. Sinclair has been tasked to build an FTL landing grid on Verdammt to land a ship carrying an ambassador to the Unbekannt, the planet’s natives. Sinclair is not happy, and both he and his Admiral think the construction project is a waste of the military’s time.
The middle part of the story sees Sinclair become increasingly disgruntled, partly due to the Unbekannt clumping around on the top of the dome he is staying in (although when he goes out he sees nothing but a blur disappearing into the forest), and also because of the arguments he continues to have about the Unbekannt with Prellen and a psychologist called Wald. Although the two men try to convince Sinclair that the Unbekannt are unlike anything they have ever encountered before—the aliens seem to exist in their own reality—he in unmoved, and becomes more even annoyed when he finds the ambassador is bringing five women with him.
This all comes to a head when the Unbekannt once again clamber over Sinclair’s dome and he goes out and tries to thump one with a titanium rod. Not only is he momentarily stunned in the altercation but, after he recovers, he finds the rod has been bent into an intricate design—in the space of a few seconds. Intrigued, he decides to follow the alien into the bush.
The final part of the story sees Sinclair wander through the forest until he comes to an area where there appears to be a constantly changing reality. This transcendent experience is almost beyond his ability to comprehend, and he comes close to being overwhelmed:
Bewilderingly his surroundings achieved apparently impossible transpositions from the gloomy shadows of some huge Satanic complex to the white-hot negativeness of an isolated point of desert, then to an icy darkness punctuated by random colored shards so unimaginably out of perspective that he had to close his eyes in order to suffer them. And again the images blended and blurred and reformed, gaining substance and alien, incomprehensible meaning by keying some nonhuman semantic trigger which racked him with emotions which his body was not constructed to experience.
[. . .]
For a frantic moment he felt a single point of understanding with the Unbekannt, but in experimentally allowing his mind license to follow it, he lost the concept and found himself in a wilderness of unchartable madness.
His senses were screaming from the overload of unpredictable sensations, which gave rise to great fatigue and a sense of imminent collapse. His feet were restrained by a nightmare leadenness, and the whole structure of concept and analogy, which he had built for himself as a protective rationalization, was beginning to split open about his head. He knew that, if he cracked now and allowed the mad disorder to flow into his mind unfiltered, he would lose touch with reality and be forced to retreat down paths from which there might be no returning. pp. 80-81 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)
Fortunately Wald the psychologist reaches him in time and shoots him full of mescaline.
When the ambassador finally arrives (spoiler) we find out it is Prellen’s twenty-seven day old son: the hope is that by bringing the child up in the presence of the Unbekannt he will learn how to communicate with them. Wald also reveals that a crystalline structure he was examining earlier in the story is probably an Unbekannt embryo given to the humans for the same reason.
This is a very much an old school SF story (it feels like something from a decade or so earlier) and it’s not entirely convincing—but the scene where Sinclair experiences the Unbekannt reality isn’t bad, for all its hand-wavium. Maybe I just have a soft spot for Kapp’s work.
**+ (Average to Good). 6,950 words.
The Man Who Never Was by R. A. Lafferty
The Man Who Never Was by R. A. Lafferty (Magazine of Horror, Summer 1967) opens with Mihai Lado, telling Raymond Runkis that he is happy to make one his lies come true:
“There’s a thousand to choose from,” Runkis said. “I could make you produce that educated calf you brag about.”
“Is that the one you pick? I’ll whistle him up in a minute.”
“No. Or I could call you on the cow that gives beer, ale, porter and stout each from a separate teat.”
“You want her? Nothing easier. But it’s only fair to warn you that the porter might be a little too heavy for your taste.”
“I could make you bring that horse you have that reads Homer.”
“Runkis, you’re the liar now. I never said he read Homer; I said he recited him. I don’t know where that pinto picked it up.”
“You said once you could send a man over the edge, make him disappear completely. I pick that one. Do it!” pp. 85-86 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)
After some hesitation Lado agrees to make Jessie Pidd, who is sitting at the end of the bar, disappear and, over the next few days, Pidd eventually does so, becoming progressively more transparent. When Lado says he can’t bring him back (Pidd was apparently an illusion Lado created) the town has a hearing in front of the town sheriff and a state commissioner. During this, Lado (who identifies as a “new man”) reiterates that Pidd never existed and challenges those listening to find any documentary evidence of Pidd’s life.
When nothing can be found the officials tell Lado that they’ll eventually find Pidd’s body, and then he will hang. The townsfolk, who don’t believe Lado’s claims to be an illusionist, eventually lynch him. The story ends with odd comments from the townfolks about “future types” waiting for them in the times to come.
For the most part this is a pleasantly quirky story but it gets a little dark at the end, and the last passage feels at odds with the rest of the story—unless this is meant to be, perhaps, some sort of allegory about change or the future. Whatever, it didn’t entirely work for me.
** (Average). 3,400 words.
Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany
Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany (If, June 1967) opens with its thirty-ish narrator, Cal Svenson, meeting a young woman called Ariel while beach-combing. During their conversation, she asks him what he is looking for:
“Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”
“I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”
“They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through a piece in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral.
When the pieces dry they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.” p. 48 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)
During this encounter1 we learn that both of them are modified to live in the ocean (gills, webbed feet and hands, etc.). Ariel also asks Svenson about the underwater accident he had twenty years earlier, which left him permanently disfigured and living on the land.
The next part of the story sees Svenson visit a friend, a widower called Juao, whose children Svenson has encouraged to join the Aquatic Corp. They talk about a man called Tork, who is planning to lay cable through an volcanic region of the sea floor called the Slash (where Svenson had his accident). Then, that evening, Ariel vists Svenson at his house and takes him down to a beach party where he meets Tork. Tork quizzes Svenson about the Slash, and tells him they are going to lay a power cable there tomorrow. Later on the aqua men and the boat-bourne villagers go out to sea to hunt marlin.
The final section (spoiler) sees Svenson saying goodbye to Juao’s kids as they get onto the bus to go to Aquatic college. While he is doing this he sees a commotion down at the quayside, and it turns out that several aquamen have been killed in an underwater eruption, including Tork. Svenson goes to the beach to find Ariel.
This is an evocatively written piece (the description and characters are much better than that of other 1960s SF) but it isn’t much more than a slice of life piece with an artificial climax grafted onto the end (and not a particularly convincing one either—it’s a silly idea to lay power cable in a known volcanic zone, and too convenient to have an explosion while Tork is there). Notwithstanding this the story is a good read for those that want something with more depth than usual.
*** (Good). 6,750 words.
1. One of the other members of my group read pointed out (it went over my head, or I just forgot) that the driftglass may be a metaphor for how life shapes people. If that is the case, it’s a pity that the story didn’t end more organically with Tork succeeding, and the observation that some material is polished (Tork), and some is left broken and jagged (Svenson).
The Man Who Never Grew Young by Fritz Leiber
The Man Who Never Grew Young by Fritz Leiber (Night’s Black Agents, 1947) has a narrator who stays the same age as time flows backwards around him. Various events are described, and the most striking of these is a passage where a grieving widow waits for her husband to be disinterred and come back to life:
There were two old women named Flora and Helen. It could not have been more than a few years since their own disinterments, but those I cannot remember. I think I was some sort of nephew, but I cannot be sure.
They began to visit an old grave in the cemetery a half mile outside town. I remember the little bouquets of flowers they would bring back with them. Their prim, placid faces became troubled. I could see that grief was entering their lives.
The years passed. Their visits to the cemetery became more frequent. Accompanying them once, I noted that the worn inscription on the headstone was growing clearer and sharper, just as was happening to their own features. “John, loving husband of Flora. . . .”
Often Flora would sob through half the night, and Helen went about with a set look on her face. Relatives came and spoke comforting words, but these seemed only to intensify their grief.
Finally the headstone grew brand-new and the grass became tender green shoots which disappeared into the raw brown earth. As if these were the signs their obscure instincts had been awaiting, Flora and Helen mastered their grief and visited the minister and the mortician and the doctor and made certain arrangements.
On a cold autumn day, when the brown curled leaves were whirling up into the trees, the procession set out—the empty hearse, the dark silent automobiles. At the cemetery we found a couple of men with shovels turning away unobtrusively from the newly opened grave. Then, while Flora and Helen wept bitterly, and the minister spoke solemn words, a long narrow box was lifted from the grave and carried to the hearse.
At home the lid of the box was unscrewed and slid back, and we saw John, a waxen old man with a long life before him.
Next day, in obedience to what seemed an age-old ritual, they took him from the box, and the mortician undressed him and drew a pungent liquid from his veins and injected the red blood. Then they took him and laid him in bed. After a few hours of stony-eyed waiting, the blood began to work. He stirred and his first breath rattled in his throat. Flora sat down on the bed and strained him to her in a fearful embrace.
But he was very sick and in need of rest, so the doctor waved her from the room. I remember the look on her face as she closed the door. I should have been happy too, but I seem to recall that I felt there was something unwholesome about the whole episode. pp. 233-235 (The Dark Side, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)
There is then reference to the reversal of world events, starting with what may be a nuclear holocaust (which may have caused time to start flowing backwards in the first place), before the narrator describes the unwinding of time back to the Egyptian era. The story concludes with the narrator and his wife setting out with their flock, as he reflects on what lies ahead:
Maot is afire with youth. She is very loving.
It will be strange in the desert. All too soon we will exchange our last and sweetest kiss and she will prattle to me childishly and I will look after her until we find her mother.
Or perhaps some day I will abandon her in the desert, and her mother will find her.
And I will go on. p. 241 Ibid.
This brief piece has some striking passages, but I’m not sure it’s much more than a very well written notion.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 2,650 words.
Casey Agonistes by Richard McKenna
Casey Agonistes by Richard McKenna (F&SF, September 1958) has a narrator who has just arrived in a Tuberculosis ward for terminal patients and, from the very beginning, he tells his story in a strange, nihilistic and anti-authoritarian voice:
You can’t just plain die. You got to do it by the book.
That’s how come I’m here in this TB ward with nine other recruits. Basic training to die. You do it by stages. First a big ward, you walk around and go out and they call you mister. Then, if you got what it takes, a promotion to this isolation ward and they call you charles. You can’t go nowhere, you meet the masks, and you get the feel of being dead. p. 182 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)
I found out they called the head doc Uncle Death. The fat nurse was Mama Death. The blond intern was Pink Waldo, the dark one Curly Waldo, and Mary was Mary. Knowing things like that is a kind of password.
They said Curly Waldo was sweet on Mary, but he was a poor Italian. Pink Waldo come of good family and was trying to beat him out. They were pulling for Curly Waldo. p. 184, Ibid.
We got mucho sack time, training for the long sleep. p. 185, Ibid.
On the ward the narrator meets a former shipmate called Slop Chute (a sailor who could have come out of the writer’s later mainstream novel The Sand Pebbles), and next to him is Roby who, later on, “doesn’t make it,” i.e. he recovers enough to go back into the main ward in the hospital.
The other significant character in the story is Carnahan, who tells the narrator that he can see an ape:
“He’s there,” Carnahan would say. “Sag your eyes, look out the corners. He won’t be plain at first.
“Just expect him, he’ll come. Don’t want him to do anything. You just feel. He’ll do what’s natural,” he kept telling me.
I got where I could see the ape—Casey, Carnahan called him—in flashes. Then one day Mama Death was chewing out Mary and I saw him plain. He come up behind Mama and—I busted right out laughing.
He looked like a bowlegged man in an ape suit covered with red-brown hair. He grinned and made faces with a mouth full of big yellow teeth and he was furnished like John Keeno himself. I roared.
“Put on your phones so you’ll have an excuse for laughing,” Carnahan whispered. “Only you and me can see him, you know. p. 186, Ibid.
Eventually all the men in the ward are sharing what appears to be a consensual hallucination and laughing at Casey’s antics, mostly when the medical staff appear on their rounds. Later, however, the ape seems to take on some sort of reality, something that becomes apparent when arrangements are made to move one of the men to a quiet side room to die. At this point Casey appears and apparently causes the head doctor to stagger. Then, when Slop Chute’s condition worsens and the staff try to move him, the ape’s intervention prevents this from happening.
Over the next few days Slop Chute deteriorates and has a series of haemorrhages, which the men clean up to hide from the staff. Finally (spoiler), in the climactic scene, the narrator sees “a deeper shadow high in the dark” start to descend on Slop Chute. Casey fights the darkness and initially manages to push it back up to the ceiling, but it eventually envelops both him and Slop Chute. Slop Chute passes away, and Casey disappears—but reappears on the ward a couple of days later wearing Slop Chute’s grin.
This is an interesting piece—it has a distinctive narrative voice, and the subject matter is very different from the other SF of the time—but I’m not sure that the story ultimately amounts to much. Still, a noteworthy piece for its anti-authoritarian characters and bleak, inverted view of death (which I suspect would have been quite transgressive at the time).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,200 words.
Nellthu by Anthony Boucher
Nellthu by Anthony Boucher (F&SF, August 1955) is a page and a half long squib that sees a man meet a woman from his schooldays. Although she was originally homely and untalented, she now has it all: wealth, beauty, talent, etc. When a servant brings the man coffee he realises it is a demon, and quizzes the creature on how she managed to get so much from three wishes. It turns out (spoiler) she did it with one—she made the demon fall “permanently and unselfishly” in love with her. A notion, not a story.
* (Mediocre). 450 words.
The Golem by Avram Davidson
The Golem by Avram Davidson (F&SF, March 1955) opens with an android arriving at the porch of an elderly Jewish couple and sitting down on one of their chairs. As he tries to deliver his apocalyptic warnings the pair variously kvetch, interrupt and ignore him:
The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous.
“When you learn who—or, rather, what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.
“Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”
“You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.
“Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”
“All mankind—” the stranger began.
“Shah! I’m talking to my husband. . . . He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”
“Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, complacently.
“You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich, I suppose he came to California for his health.”
“Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to—”
Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.
“Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”
“I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.
“Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him.”
“I am not a human being!”
“Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right, I heard you the first time. pp. 113-114 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)
Later the android says something rude to the wife and the man slaps it across the face and breaks it. Then the couple talk about golems, and the man sorts the internal wiring exposed when he hit the creature. The golem is more submissive when it is repaired, and the man tells it to mow the grass.
This is quite amusing to start with but it tails off at the end.
*** (Good). 1,800 words.
The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham by H. G. Wells
The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham by H. G. Wells (The Idler, May 1896) opens with an old man called Elvesham offering a young medical student called Eden the chance to become his heir. After several medical examinations demanded by Elvesham, and (unusual) discussions about Eden assuming Elvesham’s identity after the latter dies, there is a celebratory dinner one evening. During this, the old man sprinkles a pinkish powder on their after dinner liqueurs.
When Eden later walks home he feels quite odd, and experiences phantom memories when he looks at the shops that line the street. That evening he takes another powder given to him by Elvesham before retiring. Later he awakes from a strange dream and feels even more disoriented, eventually realising that, not only is he in a strange room, but (spoiler) he is in Elvesham’s body!
The rest of the story limns Eden’s horror at this turn of events and his subsequent attempts to extricate himself from his predicament. This involves, among other things, a search of the rooms and desks at the property in the hope that he can find a way to contact Elvesham (via his solicitor, etc.). Eden doesn’t find anything of use, although he does find volumes of notes about the psychology of memory along with pages of ciphers and symbols. Then, after he flies into a rage and is put under permanent restraint by Elvesham’s staff and doctors, he finds a bottle of poison. After writing an account of what has happened to him, Eden takes his own life.
There is a final postscript which describes the finding of “Elvesham’s” manuscript, and the fact that “Eden” never survived to inherit Elvesham’s fortune (he is knocked down by a cab, presumably to comply with Victorian morality).
This is an okay if dated piece, and it briefly comes alive in the section where the young man is trapped in the old man’s body (a piece of body horror that will resonate with many older readers who think this is what has happened to them):
I tottered to the glass and saw—Elvesham’s face! It was none the less horrible because I had already dimly feared as much. He had already seemed physically weak and pitiful to me, but seen now, dressed only in a coarse flannel nightdress that fell apart and showed the stringy neck, seen now as my own body, I cannot describe its desolate decrepitude. The hollow cheeks, the straggling tail of dirty grey hair, the rheumy bleared eyes, the quivering, shrivelled lips, the lower displaying a gleam of the pink interior lining, and those horrible dark gums showing. You who are mind and body together at your natural years, cannot imagine what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me. To be young, and full of the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught, and presently to be crushed in this tottering ruin of a body. . . . p. 136-137 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)
**+ (Average to Good). 6,850 words.
c/o Mr. Makepeace by Peter Phillips
c/o Mr. Makepeace by Peter Phillips (F&SF, February 1954) opens with a Captain Makepeace receiving a letter addressed to an E. Grabcheek, Esq. at his address—but no one of that name lives there. When Makepeace tries to return the letter the postman refuses, and says he has delivered other such letters previously.
Makepeace later attempts to send the letters back to the Post Office, and then the Postmaster General, only to have them returned. Eventually he decides to open one of two letters delivered and finds a sheet of blank paper inside. After he angrily tears it up he goes to get the other letter, only to find it has disappeared. Then, when he goes back to dispose of the one he has torn up, he finds that has gone too.
Up until this point the story has an intriguing fantasy set-up, but it slowly turns into more of a psychological piece. This begins when we see a worried Makepeace at a nearby public house, where his mind starts wandering, and we pick up hints of an altercation with his father years before. Then we learn of Makepeace’s mental problems after a shell burst near him during the war, and of his eventual medical pension.
This psychological darkness becomes considerably more pronounced when he waits for the postman one morning and rushes out into the garden when he sees him:
He waited until the postman was about to open his front garden gate, then hurried to meet him.
E. Grabcheek, Esq.,
c/o Tristram Makepeace,
36, Acacia Avenue.
Makepeace was aware of the cold morning air, the gravel underfoot, a blackbird singing from the laurel bushes, milk bottles clinking together somewhere nearby, the postman’s stupid unshaven face; and, faintly, from a neighboring house, “This is the B.B.C. Home Service. Here is the eight o’clock news. . . .”
“Found out who he is yet?” asked the postman.
“No.”
Tristram Makepeace turned back along the path towards his house. It was waiting for him. The door into the everdusty hallway was open. It was the mouth of the house, and it was open.
The eyes of the house, asymmetrical windows, were blazing, yellow and hungry in the early sun.
He wanted to run after the postman and talk with him; or go up the road to the milkman and ask him about his wife and children, talking and talking to reassert this life and his living of it.
But they would think he was mad; and he was not mad. The cold began to strike through his thin slippers and dressing gown, so he walked slowly back up the gravel pathway into the mouth of the house, and closed the door behind him.
He opened the envelope, took out the blank sheet, tore it through. The equal halves fluttered to the floor. He tried to keep his brain as blank as the sheet of paper. It would be nice, came the sudden thought, if he could take his brain out and wash it blank and white and clean under clear running water.
A dark, itching foulness compounded of a million uninvited pictures was trying to force its way into his mind . . . strike your god, your father, see him stand surprised with the red marks of your fingers on his cheek . . . and your lovely virgin mother. . . . pp. 105-106 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)
The steady stream of letters (spoiler) eventually leads to Makepeace’s breakdown and his admission to an asylum, where he is diagnosed as schizophrenic. He spends his time writing to Grabcheek and eventually, one day, receives a letter to Grabcheek c/o him at the asylum. The doctors can’t work out how Makepeace managed to post the letter to himself, but one doctor posits that his dissociated personality has an “objective existence”. Later on, however, when no-one is around, the letter floats into mid-air and disappears. Someone laughs.
This is an interesting character piece—the account of Makepeace’s psychological breakdown and his troubled past are pretty well done—but it’s not a particularly satisfactory fantasy story (even given the hints that the dead father may be revenging himself on the son). Phillips only wrote another three stories after this one—I wonder if he was beginning to find SF or fantasy too limiting.
** (Average). 3,650 words.