Tag: F&SF

What of the Night by Manly Wade Wellman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

What of the Night by Manly Wade Wellman (F&SF, March 1980) opens with a man called Parr taking shelter in a disused Southern Highlands house when his car breaks down. After he eats he falls asleep on the dank and dirty sofa.
When he wakes he sees a glow of light, and a young woman called Tolie asks if he is alright. Parr is instantly smitten by her, and then he notices that the surroundings are clean and in good order. Tolie introduces Parr to the owner of the house, Mr Addis, and another man called Fenton. The latter serves them all a thimbleful of drink (they toast “unity and Sitrael”), and then Parr is invited to see Addis’s room. There, Parr sees Addis has books on magic (one is by John Dee, “the Queen’s Sorceror”) and also has a pentacle painted on his desk, “to help his work”.
After this the pair return to the living room for a second round of drinks and toasts, and then Parr visits Tolie and Fenton’s rooms. When Parr is in the latter’s room, he realises that Fenton is in love with Tolie and jealous of him.
During this experience Parr asks twice if he is dreaming, and also learns that the occupants of the house do not know what he means by “Korea” and “telephone”. He eventually asks them if they are haunting the house: Addis partially dodges the question and suggests they have their fifth drink. As they prepare to do so, Fenton declares his feelings for Tolie and knocks the drink out of Parr’s hands: he tells Parr if he has the fifth drink he will be trapped here. Parr flees.
Some time later Parr stumbles into to a local town, where he learns that the house has been deserted for ninety years. He also learns of Addis’s strange habits and death, and the deaths of Tolie and Fenton when they stayed overnight at the house.
Most haunted house tales would stop there, but there is an effective coda in this story where the local preacher takes Parr back to the house to recover his car (no-one else from the town will take him). When they go inside the gloomy house Parr asks the preacher to perform an exorcism. The preacher says that isn’t a ritual he knows, but he conducts a baptism, a communion (both for Parr), and then the rites for the dead: each of these acts unburdens and lightens the house:

Finally they both stood and Preacher Ricks repeated the service for the burial of the dead. The gloom seemed to thicken itself around them. But at last the hushed voice came to, “Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you.” Then light suddenly stole into the room. Parr, looking sidelong at the open door, saw sunshine in the yard that had been so shadowed.
Preacher Ricks cleared his throat. “Do you think it looks sort of different in here?” he asked Parr. “Like as if it had somehow cleared up?”
“In here and outside both,” replied Parr. “Maybe you’ve truly put those spirits to rest.”
“Let’s devoutly hope so.”
They walked out. No haze, no shadows.
“Bring your car along behind mine, back to Sky Notch,” said Preacher Ricks. “We’ll see if some kind soul there won’t let us have some breakfast.”  p. 64

A quietly effective and atmospheric piece.
*** (Good). 5,100 words.

The Lordly Ones by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lordly Ones by Keith Roberts1,2 (F&SF, March 1980) is not so much a story but an extended character portrait of the narrator, Tom, and it begins with his childhood memories of driving a pedal car in the family’s garden:

Wherever I traveled though, I would always end up in my favorite place of all. I called it Daisy Lane, from the big mauve clumps of Michaelmas daisies that grew close by each year. Here, by careful reversing, I could slide myself right out of sight between tall bushes. Once in position I could not be seen from the house at all, but I could see. I could stare down through the gaps in the hedge at the men working in the field, easing the car backward a little by the pressure of a pedal if one of them paused and seemed to glance my way.  p. 141

Tom’s shyness (or solitariness) is further limned when he is put in a special class at school—although Tom can read and write perfectly well, an inability to answer questions and his physical clumsiness give the impression that he is “slow”.
When Tom later enters the world of work he is first employed, courtesy of his gardener father, at the council nurseries. However, things do not go well (he is always breaking pots and then there is trouble with one of the women that works there) and, after that, Tom works at the town tip and then as a binman. Finally, at the age of 45, he becomes a lavatory attendant at “The Comfort Station”.
Tom describes his job at the lavatory in some detail—we learn how he cleans and repairs the facility until it is spotless and in good order—and we are briefly introduced to a couple of other (fleeting) characters: there is the woman who takes care of the other side of the facility (a distant figure), and Mr Ireland, Tom’s sympathetic and helpful supervisor who takes to visiting him on a semi-regular basis.
For most of the story, however, Tom is at the comfort station on his own (he has taken to living in one of the storerooms), and there are disturbing signs from the start of the story that society has experienced some sort of cataclysm: apart from the fact that no-one has come to the comfort station or its bucolic surroundings in the country for some time (including Tom’s co-worker), he has also seen bodies in the deserted nearby town where he goes to get food and supplies; there are also lights in the distant hills during the hours of darkness.
Later on (spoiler) we get a few hints as to what may have happened (and an insight to some of the social problems of UK society in the late 1970s):

I do not know why the Trouble happened. There was a lot on the telly about the black people fighting the whites and the unions trying to take over, but I could never understand it. I do not know why black people and white people should fight. I knew a black man once when I was on the carts. He was a very quiet person and used to bring small fruit pies to work that his wife had made. He shared them with me sometimes. They were very nice.

Tom starts looking after the other side of the comfort station as well as his own, and later goes into town later to stock up on as many supplies as he can find. Then the sounds of battle draw closer, and the water comes back on for a while. But, despite all this, it appears as if Tom is suspended in time:

I supposed it will sound funny, but I felt at peace. I have been feeling like that a lot since everybody went away. I cannot really find the right words to describe it.
When I wake up in the mornings, the sun makes a patch low down on the wall by my head, always in the same place. Birds are singing in the trees by the stream, and I know if I go to the window the sun will be on the brick wall round the car park, and the hills. As it moves round through the day, all the shadows change until they point the other way. Sometimes, if there is a wind, the dust blows across the car park in little whirls. When I lock the doors last thing at night, the moon is coming up. The moon makes shadows too of course, and they change as well, as it goes across the sky. The moonlight makes the car park look nearly white, but the shadows by the stream are black, like velvet. At night it always seems you can smell the water more clearly. The mist usually comes when it is starting to get light. It makes long streaks that reach as high as the bridge parapet. Nothing else happens. I do not want anything else to happen, ever again.  pp. 152-153

One night, however, he finds signs of blood in the lavatories; then, shortly afterwards, he is surrounded, and guns fire through the windows. Tom is told to come out by unseen characters. As he leaves the comfort station, Tom wishes he was back in his pedal car again:

I have had a silly thought, the silliest of all. I would like my little car back again now. I always felt safe in it; I could pedal it through the door and they would laugh. They would see I was only a little child after all.  p. 156

This penultimate paragraph not only links back to the opening passage, but perhaps distils Tom’s shy and uncomplicated character, outlined over the course of the story, into one line.
When I first read this story in the 1980s I didn’t think much of it—I suspect I was impatient at the amount of description and the lack of a plot—but this time around I enjoyed it a lot more. Some of the description is particularly evocative (there are a number of passages that I would like to have quoted) and the unusual protagonist and setting make for an original piece: there aren’t many End-of-the-World stories that take place away from the main events and feature lavatory attendants.
One that I will reread again at some point.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

1. This story was Keith Roberts’ only Hugo finalist—it placed 4th in 1981 behind The Cloak and the Staff by Gordon R. Dickson, Savage Planet by Barry B. Longyear, and Beatnik Bayou by John Varley, and ahead of The Autopsy by Michael Shea and The Ugly Chickens by Howard Waldrop.
Roberts also wrote a sequel to this story, The Comfort Station, which appeared two months later in the May 1980 issue of F&SF.

2. The story’s title comes from a song that is referenced in the story:

There was a song we had to learn at school, about the Lordly Ones. Miss Chaston, who taught us music, said that meant the fairies. It was a strange song and puzzled me very much at first. It said they lived in the hollow hills but I thought the other children were singing “the Harlow hills” and that all fairies lived at a place called Harlow, wherever that might be. I often used to make mistakes like that.
I did not think about the song again for years. Then, when I was working on the dust carts there was a man called Smudger. I never knew his proper name. He was a big man, much bigger than I, and had a lot of friends. I used to go with him sometimes to a hotel near the town center to have a drink. I would never have dared go to such a place on my own. The public bar was up the yard, and to get to it you had to pass a room lit by candles where all the guests were eating their dinner. The first time I looked in I thought some of the ladies were the most beautiful I had ever seen, and for some reason I remembered the song at once. I knew they were not fairies of course, just very rich people, but afterwards whenever I went there, the song always started in my mind.
Then when I had my flat I used to sit quite a lot looking down over the cathedral wall at the grass and driveways inside, especially if there was a wedding there or some other big function, which often happened. The people who came were very grand. Some of them even wore top hats like in the films. So I thought they must be the Lordly Ones too. So, although I was always getting shouted at for being clumsy or in the way, I thought if I could get the job at the Station, some of them might come there and see the towels all clean and soap in the dispensers, and be pleased. I wonder if Mr. Ireland knew that, and that was why he set me on.  p. 147

Secrets of the Heart by Charles L. Grant

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Secrets of the Heart by Charles L. Grant (F&SF, March 1980) opens with the child narrator all alone in a house (“the others are gone”, “some of them died”, “it wasn’t my fault though”) when five adults turn up at her door. They have had a car accident and need to use the phone, etc., so the girl invites them in and lets them make a call and asks if they want coffee.
This domestic routine continues for a while, but the telegraphing at the start of the story is then fleshed out. First, the girl tells the adults about her “rules”, then she makes one of the adults stop breathing, and then none of them are able to open the doors or windows, or leave the house.
Later on (spoiler), one of the men asks if she is a telepath or telekinetic before she eventually lets them go (although they do not know she has arranged for a truck to crash into them when they get back to their car). The story ends with her deciding that she will leave the house and make the outside world obey her rules.
This reads like a slightly muddled version of Jerome Bixby’s It’s a Good Life and, if you have read that story, there won’t be much new for you here.
** (Average). 3,600 words.

Buoyant Ascent by Hilbert Schenck

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Buoyant Ascent by Hilbert Schenck (F&SF, March 1980) opens with its protagonist, Izzy Kaplan, trying to play possum:

The phone rang steadily in the dark bedroom and Molly Kaplan blearily brought her wristwatch dial close to a sticky eye. “Jesus, three thirty!” She waited, knowing it was a wrong number. Yet the damn thing kept going. “Shit!” She fumbled for the receiver in the dark, got it, reversed it twice, and finally managed a “Yeah?”
“Dr. Israel Kaplan, please. Cmdr. B.J. Smith calling, U.S. Navy.”
Molly could hardly believe it. “Listen, buster, it’s three-fucking-thirty in the morning!” she shouted in the general direction of the receiver.
A pause. “I understand that . . . is it Mrs. Kaplan? . . . but we have a very urgent emergency. I certainly wouldn’t call you at this time for any other reason.”
Molly, her temper thinning steadily, leaned over and flicked on the bedside light. A soft yet handsome woman in her late forties, she managed to squeeze her bowed, full lips into a fearsomely thin line as she stared at the silent form of her husband.
Izzy Kaplan was not, in fact, asleep, but he had convinced himself that a position of utter passivity coupled with an absolute minimum of respiratory activity would see him through whatever was stirring up his wife.
“Izzy!” shouted Molly, now running at full volume. “It’s the fucking Navy with some kind of super emergency for you. What the hell are you doing with them now? What’s going on?”  pp. 6-7

We learn that Izzy is a hyperbaric specialist, and the Navy have phoned him because one of their submarines has had an accident and is now lying at an angle 940 feet under the sea. There is bad blood between Kaplan and the Navy, but he agrees to help as one of his ex-students is on board, and is now in command after the death of the captain. After brief sex with his wife Izzy drives out to Quonset airbase to catch a helicopter to the USS Tringa, the huge catamaran mother ship for the DSRV (Deep Sea Rescue Vessel) the Navy hope to deploy. However, if that method isn’t feasible, an alternative method using ascent suits may have to be used:

Kaplan could now think of nothing but a high-speed ascent in the water column; the head back in the suit, the gas gushing up the throat, the continuous surge and snap and ripple of the fabric from the tremendous velocity drag. But the throat was the key. Form a tube. Think of forming a tube! The rain pattered steadily on the windows and the slick, black road curved smoothly, almost empty in the glare of the street lights.
Turning east for Quonset, Izzy considered the exit circle of error on the sea surface. How large would the arrival-location uncertainty be? Nine hundred and forty-feet times what angle? If they had to draw the rescue vessels back too far, an embolized escapee might die before they got him out of the water and into a decompression chamber. That data must exist, thought Izzy, at least for some six hundred-footers. We can extrapolate it.  p. 12

The rest of the story sees Izzy arrive on the Tringa only to have the Admiral in charge stonewall Izzy’s suggestion of a rehearsal for a backup buoyant ascent procedure (there is previous bad blood between the pair, and too much money has been spent on the DSRV project). Izzy therefore contacts his wife who works for (and is having an affair with) a Senator. During this conversation Izzy threatens to contact the press about the couple’s dalliance if the Senator doesn’t co-operate and lean on the Admiral.
Once Izzy gets his way, he is flown by fast jet to London Heathrow (which, apparently, has grown an “RAF runway”) to speak to a contact who can provide similar suits, and thereafter flies north to a diving company at Lochstrom in Scotland. There they put dummies in the suits, take them down to nine hundred feet, and troubleshoot the procedure. On the first ascent there is a pressure spike that would kill the escapees, but the very smart owner of the facility eventually (spoiler) works out that the flutter valves in the suit are slowing down the escaping air and modifies them.
The final, exciting part of the story sees Izzy back at the site of the accident to see the buoyant ascents (the DSRV has been unsuccessful). The first escapee, a woman, survives almost unscathed, but later there are casualties, some fatal; the last one out, after a period during which the weather has deteriorated and they have had to revise their surface rescue procedure, is Izzy’s student, Commander Ferguson. He suffers a spinal embolism and dies, even though Izzy enters the decompression chamber to treat him.
The final scenes see an overwrought Izzy lose his temper with the Admiral (who should have started the buoyant ascent rescue earlier), his wife, and the Senator (ill-chosen comments from both) before he goes to do the post mortem on his friend.
If you are up for a fast-paced, near-future techno-thriller with larger than life, shouty (and consequently non-PC) characters, and which oozes verisimilitude, then this will be right up your street. (PS It’s exactly the kind of story you should find in Analog).
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 17,550 words. Story link.

Come the Revolution by Ian Tregillis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Come the Revolution by Ian Tregillis (F&SF, March-April 2020) opens with Mab, a female servitor or robot, coming to consciousness in the Forge. We later learn that this is where the Clockmakers create their alchemical automatons before sending them out to serve in an alternate medieval world where the Netherlands is the dominant power (and winning its war with France).
Mab is subsequently sent to crank a pump handle “in the darkness under the city”, a job she does for 18 years. During this period we learn that the servitors are compelled by the geasa implanted in them to follow human instructions (the geasa are analogous, in part, to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics): if the servitors do not comply with these geasa, however, they experience pain. We also discover that Mab is different to other servitors when she tries to speak to Perch (a visiting maintenance servitor) using human language. When Perch replies, but she doesn’t understand the clicks and buzzes the servitors normally use, he relents and speaks to her the same way she spoke to him. He tells her many things about the world she inhabits and then says, before he leaves, that he will return to teach her how to speak the servitors’ language in eighteen months.
Perch never returns, and seven years pass before a visitor from the Clockmakers arrives with a writ demanding that she returns to the forge:

For every moment of the past eighteen years, an ineradicable compulsion has ensured she did nothing but operate a pump. That geas vanishes the instant she sees the embossed seal of the Rosy Cross, but the pain does not. A new geas takes its place. Life, she realizes, is neither miracle nor mystery: it is a series of consecutive agonies joined at airtight seams.

Back at the Forge Mab watches the Clockmakers’ many repair and assembly procedures, and likens the place to a charnel house before realising that she is a chattel, and that her body is not her own.
The rest (and the bulk) of the story takes place at her next place of service, the house of the wealthy van Leers (they have a lucrative franchise to supply the secretive Clockmakers—who are particularly protective of their arts—with the tools they require). Here Mab becomes a milkmaid as she is considered to be a mute by the other servitors (she still cannot speak their clicking language). She still finds out, however, that the mistress of the house is soon to give birth, and later discovers, when a servitor called Jig visits her milking stall, that this is causing the master of the house sleepless nights:

He points at the pail. “The master of the house suffers from insomnia. He believes a draught of warm milk will fix that.” The newcomer crouches next to her, clearly waiting for her to finish. His body noise grows louder. Remembering how Perch had gone out of his way not to interfere with her crank-turning geas, she speeds up. He continues, speaking loudly as his body noise builds to a crescendo of tormented clockworks, “I believe that until the thing growing inside her decides to pop out of our mistress’s belly, pink-faced and hale, nothing short of a hefty dose of laudanum or”—now he sounds ready to shake apart—“the swift blow of a claw-hammer between the eyes will do the trick.”
The punishment is explosive. Volcanic. She’s never experienced searing heat like this outside the Forge. The overt sedition ignites a firestorm from the rules stamped upon her soul. Wracked by the worst agony she’s ever known, her body jackknifes at the waist, hard enough to head-butt the floor.
The startled cow kicks the pail, sending a spray of milk slopping over the brim. The spillage incites yet more admonishment from her geasa. Desperate to lessen the torment, she blurs forward to right the tipping pail. The cows in the other stalls start lowing, alarmed by the noisy way her visitor writhes in the hay. The pain doesn’t fade until she considers that he may be severely defective and charts the quickest route to alert a human.
When she can speak again, she says, “Are you insane? Why would you do that to us? It wasn’t very nice.”
He straightens, indicating the manor house with a jerk of his head. “There’s a lot of speculation about just how different you might be.” He plucks a tuft of hay from his skeleton and holds it aloft. “I drew the short straw.”

After this Mab meets a friendlier servitor called Maikel, who eventually teaches her how to speak the clicking language.
Years pass, and various set-piece scenes deliver information about the house, the servitors and the world Mab lives in (e.g., while Maikel and Mab are pulling a carriage for their mistress they see a papist couple apprehended by two Stemwinders—mechanical centaurs with four arms—and the man killed). Eventually, the mistress’s baby son Piet grows from a spoiled and greedy infant into a spoiled and greedy young man. Then, during a drunken shooting party (spoiler), he decides to use Maikel as a target. When he damages the servitor—part of Maikel’s skull is blown off—he and his friend Roderik make the mistake of going for a closer look at what is inside Maikel’s head:

He isn’t rendered inert: The shot didn’t scour the sigils from his forehead. That would have been a mercy. Instead, he’s lost a great deal of function, including the ability to speak. But the hierarchical metageasa are relentless. More and more clauses are activated as his body attempts to assess the situation: the severe-damage geas, demanding Maikel notify his leaseholder that the terms of his lease require he go immediately to the Forge, either under his own power or shipped at his owners’ expense if his locomotion is too compromised for the journey; the technology-protection metageasa, demanding he recover every piece of his body and return them safely to the Clockmakers lest they fall into enemy hands; the human-safety metageasa, requiring him to assess whether any shrapnel from his body has harmed the bystanders, and render immediate aid if necessary. . . .

When Piet and Roderik see more than they should, Maikel is driven by the technological metageasa to strangle them both.
Later on, a repaired Maikel returns from the Forge and, after talking to him, Mab determines she needs to return there. She searches for parts of Maikel at the scene of the shooting and, when finds some, returns under the compulsion of the same geas that drove Maikel to kill the two men.
When Mab arrives at the Forge she is sent to a Clockmaker called Gerhard for experimentation. His final investigation on her involves the use of a lens made from pineal glass, which releases Mab from all her geasa. She grabs Gerhardt and asks him if he knows what the pain of a geas feels like before sticking his head in the furnace used to make the lens.
The story ends with Mab returning to the van Leers’ house, where she kills Jig before telling the other servitors to tell their masters, “Queen Mab was here”.
This is a well told piece with a neat central idea and an intriguing parallel world background. I particularly liked how Tregillis dribbles out the details of this peculiar alternate world (Huygens inventing alchemical robots and the Dutch taking over the world!) without slowing down the pace of the story or making it otherwise intrusive. The only problem I have is with the ending, which has a couple of problems: first of all, I don’t understand why Mab killed Jig (why would she particularly want to avenge herself on a fellow servitor, even one who had not treated her well?) and, secondly, the story is open-ended (although I assume that the results of Mab’s actions are dealt with in the related trilogy1).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 16,500 words.

1. The trilogy comprises The Mechanical (2015), The Rising (2015), and The Liberation (2016). Much as I liked this I am not sure I am interested in another 1,300 pages worth.

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler (F&SF, May-June 2020) opens on a colony planet that has a distinct Deathworld vibe1 (i.e. it is inimical to human life), and sees Mauled by Mistake treating the wounds of her apprentice Sedef, who has just been attacked by a lashvine. However, once Mauled is finished applying the nanobot medical patches, Mauled tells Sedef that (a) she herself has also been badly wounded in the attack, (b) they are out of medical supplies, and (c) Sedef will have to go back to the depot and get more.
The rest of the story sees the inexperienced Sedef make her way to the depot before returning to treat Mauled. During her journey we see that the human settlers have colonised an exotic and brightly illuminated world where anything that isn’t brightly lit is food. Consequently, humans have to wear lightsuits to protect themselves on the surface. As Sedef makes her way to the depot we also learn something about the colony’s history, that most humans retreated underground after arrival, and now only wayfinders like Mauled and Sedef go out on the surface. Light relief is provided by flashback passages which limn the pair’s mentor/student relationship:

“We need to be at the depot before dark [said Mauled]. Changeover is the most dangerous time to be out. As the forest modulates its glow for sundark, any slight suit anomaly is particularly visible.”
“We learned that. And there are animals, [our tutor] Beyazit said, that specialize in hunting during changeover. Some of which no one has ever seen. Predators we haven’t even—”
“Predators?” Mauled by Mistake gave out an incredulous bark, followed by a stream of intricate profanity. Sedef had heard that the wayfinders had a whole second language of profanity so inventive it was almost unintelligible to others. She couldn’t understand all of this expression—something about Beyazit’s father being born in a quiver of nightwing penises? Could that be right?  p. 68

The subject of predators comes up again when the pair meet another wayfinder in a shelter:

“Beyazit is telling the prospects to beware of predators,” Mauled by Mistake said in the young man’s direction.
“Beyazit should start each day by eating a bowl of his own entrails,” the young man said without looking up. “He almost got me killed once.”
“Who of us has he not almost gotten killed?”
Later, over a cold dinner of nutrient broth and noodles Sedef had made and packeted herself, Mauled by Mistake said, “The first thing to understand is that there are no predators in the forest. This old word does not fit. Only the ignorant use it.”
“But death is always waiting,” Sedef protested. “The forest is filled with teeth.”
“Yes,” Mauled by Mistake said. “You know your recitations well. The forest is filled with teeth. Death is waiting. Always. And so on. But there are no predators. There are only scavengers. When they attack you, and they will—and when they kill you someday, which they likely will—it will be by accident.”
“But the suit lights are a defense against attack. They indicate we are dangerous.”
The young man released a stream of profanity involving something about Beyazit attempting to whistle through a mouthful of various parts of his relatives’ anatomy. “The suits don’t indicate we are dangerous: They simply indicate we are alive.”  pp. 69-70

(Mauled is supposed to be a woman, but it is hard to visualise this character as anything other than a grumpy, mansplaining, 50-year-old bloke.2)
The story (spoiler) comes to an exciting climax when Sedef realises that she won’t get back to where Mauled is before Changeover, when there is a chance that the arrival of sundark and its accompanying EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) may knock out her suit lights . . . . This subsequently happens, and then a “puma” appears: Sedef’s solution to this terminal problem is ingenious, and provides the story with a neat pay-off line.
This is a hugely appealing story, particularly so for those attracted to old-school SF.
**** (Very Good). 5,650 words.

1. Deathworld by Harry Harrison (Astounding Science Fiction, January-March 1960).

2. Mauled can’t be a man because, of course, that would turn Mauled and Sedef’s relationship a dreadfully patriarchal one. And if you have both Mauled and Sedef as men there will be no women left in the story. The horror!

Winter Solstice by Mike Resnick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Winter Solstice by Mike Resnick (F&SF, October-November 1991) doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Winter Solstice but, instead, tells of the wizard Merlin, who in this story is quite a different creature from the one of myth—a man experiencing his life in reverse, starting from a point in the far-future where he could “pass among the stars and galaxies”. Unfortunately, his memories are slipping away from him, so he is of little help when he is called upon to deal with the problems of the present:

An old woman comes to see me in the early afternoon. Her arm is torn and miscolored; the stench of it makes my eyes water; the flies are thick around her.
I cannot stand the pain any longer, Merlin, she weeps. It is like childbirth, but does not go away. You are my only hope, Merlin. Cast your mystic spell, charge me what you will, but make the pain cease.
I look at her arm, where the badger has ripped it with his claws, and I want to turn my head away and retch. I finally force myself to examine it. I have a sense that I need something—I am not sure what—something to attach to the front of my face; or, if not my whole face, then at least across my nose and mouth, but I cannot recall what it is.
The arm is swollen to almost twice its normal size, and although the wound is halfway between her elbow and her shoulder, she shrieks in agony when I gently manipulate her fingers. I want to give her something for her pain. Vague visions come to mind, images of something long and slender and needle-like flash briefly before my eyes. There must be something I can do, I think, something I can give her, some miracle that I employed when I was younger and the world was older, but I can no longer remember what it is. I must do more than mask her pain; this much I still know, for infection has set in. The smell becomes stronger as I probe, and she screams. Gang, I think suddenly: the word for her condition begins with gang—but there is another syllable, and I cannot recall it; and even if I could recall it, I can no longer cure it.  p. 134

The story is told in a near stream of consciousness style which yo-yos between Merlin’s fragmentary memories of the future and his present concerns, one of which is what to do, if anything, about Launcelot and his illicit affair with King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. This particular problem comes to a head when (spoiler) Arthur seeks out Merlin for advice on the matter towards the end of the story. Merlin realises that Arthur is more worried about his own death, and this makes Merlin reflect on what the future (or past) holds for him:

I decided to try once more to look into the future, to put his mind at ease. I close my eyes and I peer ahead, and I see not a mindless, babbling old man, but a mindless, mewling baby, and that baby is myself.
Arthur tries to look ahead to the future he fears, and I, traveling in the opposite direction, look ahead to the future I fear, and I realize that there is no difference, that this is the humiliating state in which man both enters and leaves the world, and that he had better learn to cherish the time in between, for it is all that he has.  p. 142

Merlin finally tells Arthur that he will die the death he wants.
There isn’t really any story here, but it’s not a bad mood piece.
*** (Good). 5,050 words.

Christmas Trombone by Raymond E. Banks

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Christmas Trombone by Raymond E. Banks (F&SF, January 1954) is set in a future world where Venusian creatures called “singing cones” can curate and produce “wafer thin discs of Venusian heavy water” which store perfect musical recordings. The story’s main character, Shorty, is an ex-musician who was put out of work by the cones, and the tale begins with him grabbing his trombone from the cupboard and going down to the church on Christmas Eve. On his way there, the chief of police, who has previously warned Shorty about playing in public (“disturbing the peace” in this new musical world), confiscates the instrument.
Shorty continues on to the church to exchange gifts with the clergyman, Dr Blaine, who asks if he will be coming to the service. Shorty tells him no, as Blaine has a singing cone to provide music:

Dr. Blaine took him by the arm and led him into the nave.
Across from them rested the only true singing cone in Blessington. It was almost eight feet high, a tapering mound of pure whiteness, just as it had been on Venus. It “lived” on sound, not talking voices, not explosions or discords. It “lived” on music adding every sweet sound it heard to its repertoire until all its water was solidified and it could no longer hear and remember.
[. . .]
“Here,” said Dr. Blaine, “I’ve got all the great artists who ever recorded Christmas music, Shorty. The best voices, the best arrangements.”
“I know.”
“People need the solemn pageantry of the greatest church music to find the Christmas spirit in these commercial times.”
“Yeah.”
“This cone was a foot-high mound on Venus the night Christ was born in Bethlehem, Shorty. It’s been on earth now for twenty years, adding only the purest and best church music to its being.”
“It’s only been in Blessington five years,” said Shorty, “while I been here 45, man, boy and molecule.”
Dr. Blaine sighed. “Nobody wants the old choir and organ anymore, Shorty. When the cone plays we go back along the centuries to Bethlehem, we watch the miracles beside the Red Sea, we are in the room where the Last Supper was served and we walk with Christ up that final hill—”
“A couple of times I got ’em pretty excited with that old organ you got stashed in the basement.”
“Then play for the cone, Shorty,” said Dr. Blaine. “Play for the cone and make it hear and remember your notes alone with the world’s best musicians.”  pp. 120-121

Shorty doesn’t engage, and tells Blaine his air car needs a new rotor blade (Shorty now works as a mechanic).
The next part of the story sees Shorty arguing with his wife Edith, who tells him he needs to move on, and stop being so bitter about the fact that he has been replaced by the cones. Shorty angrily leaves the apartment and goes to the police station where, after some chit-chat with the desk cop, he slugs him and retrieves his trombone.
The last scene (spoiler) sees Shorty go up a hill near the town and play his trombone, a few notes of Joy to the World. Then he hears the cone at the church play a few of his notes back to him. Shorty starts playing Silent Night:

The cone was silent, listening. He could feel its presence in the background. A moment before it had been scouring out the valley with its sound. Now it was comparing his notes with all the wonderful music stored in its memory.
Softly, you son-of-a-bitch, he told himself. This is final. Shorty, by God, now we’ve got to do the thing!
For 45 seconds he reached the great plane of art that he’d been trying to reach all his life. For 45 seconds he made music that no human or nonhuman agency had ever made before or would ever make again. It was one of those moments. It was clear and clean, human but not gooey. It was one tiny notch more than satisfactory.  pp. 124-125

After Shorty has finished and listens to the cone playing his music back to him, he realises that, after comparing his performance to everything it has stored, the cone has changed nothing (“In Bethlehem, on Venus and beyond to outer space it was a thing of perfect uniqueness.”)
Shorty, finally at peace with himself, throws his horn away.
The story’s cone gimmick is a little artificial (and confusing to begin with) but the last scene is very good, and the story’s arc of a troubled soul finding solace works well in this Christmas tale. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ lists, perhaps.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 3,900 words. Story link.

Santa Clause by Robert F. Young

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Santa Clause by Robert F. Young (F&SF, January 1959)1 starts with Ross requesting his own personal Santa Claus from the devil (who he has just summoned). The devil agrees, but says he can’t subdivide “childhood fantasy”.
Ross subsequently gets the Xmas presents he wants, including a pretty blonde wife called Candy, but things starts going awry almost at once: she refuses to have anything to do with him after she has kissed him goodnight and shuts him out of her bedroom; then Jack Frost appears to ice the windows; the Sandman throws sand in his eyes before he sleeps; and a Guardian Angel—a guitar playing cowboy with wings—appears. Later on, Candy becomes pregnant (even though Ross still hasn’t been near her).
Eventually, after a few more months of these childhood fantasies (and the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc.), the Stork comes tapping at the window. Ross decides he has had enough, and once more summons the Devil: Ross tells him he wants out of the deal. The Devil agrees to modify their contract so that he won’t live in a world of childhood fantasy—but again specifies it will be for life, and apply retrospectively.
The final twist of the story (spoiler) has Ross loathing Candy, when he thinks of her, “almost as much as his mother”.
I guess the wife-mother psychosexual tangle made sense to 1950s Freudians, but it seems quite quaint today.
** (Average). 3,600 words.

1. I initially wondered if this story had first appeared in Playboy and, when I learned not, whether it was written with that magazine in mind.

The Wild Wood by Mildred Clingerman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Wild Wood by Mildred Clingerman (F&SF, January 1957)1 opens with a family trailing around town looking for a Christmas tree. Margaret, the mother/narrator, has had enough, but their insistent four-year-old daughter drags them down a side street, and they end up at “Cravolini’s Christmas Tree Headquarters”.
While her husband and daughter go into the depths of the barn-like structure to find the perfect tree, Margaret is surprised by the owner, Cravolini, who touches her forearm—this gives Margaret a brief vision of the pair of them in a cabin, and the feeling that they have met before. Her husband interrupts the encounter before she can make sense of it, and she goes to join the rest of them:

Don led her down one of the long aisles of trees to where Bonnie and Bruce were huddled beside their choice. Margaret scarcely glanced at the tree. Don was annoyed with her—half-convinced, as he always was, that Margaret had invited the pass. Not by any overt signal on her part, but simply because she forgot to look busy and preoccupied.
“Don’t go dawdling along in that wide-eyed dreamy way,” he’d said so often. “I don’t know what it is, but you’ve got that look—as if you’d say yes to a square meal or to a panhandler or to somebody’s bed.” pp. 124-125

The sexual frankness here is not the first instance of this in the story—during an earlier embrace, her “frank desire” is referred to—and both pale in comparison to the second encounter between her and Cravolini while she is looking at four blue candles:

“Do you like those candles?” he asked softly.
“Where is my husband?” Margaret kept her eyes on Bruce’s fine blond hair. Don’t let the door open any more. . . .
“You’re husband has gone to bring his car. He and your daughter. The tree is too large to carry so far. Why are you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid. . . .” She glanced fleetingly into the man’s eyes, troubled again that her knowledge of his identity wavered just beyond reality. “Have we met before?” she asked.
“I almost saw you once,” Cravolini said. “I was standing at a window. You were reflected in it, but when I turned around you were gone. There was nobody in the room but my sister . . . the stupid cow. . . .” Cravolini spat into the sawdust. “That day I made a candle for you. Wait.” He reached swiftly behind the stacked packing boxes that held the candles on display. He had placed it in her hand before she got a clear look at it. Sickeningly pink, loathsomely slick and hand-filling. It would have been cleaner, more honest, she thought, if it had been a frank reproduction of what it was intended to suggest. pp. 125-126

The rest of the story tells of further visits over the years, with Cravolini repeating his behaviour and Margaret unable to tell her husband. Then, on the climactic visit (spoiler) she meets the sister at the door of the store, who directs her to a bed at the back. When Margaret gets there she realises she is now the body of the sister, and she watches herself leave the shop with her husband and family. Cravolini has “the proud, silly spirit” he desired.
I’m not sure the possession ending makes much conventional sense, but the story works on a dreamlike/nightmare level, and is notable for its unconcealed sexuality.
*** (Good). 3,450 words. Story link.

1. I recently bought this writer’s collected short story volume, The Clingerman Files (Amazon UK £2.99). I suppose I should really get into it, but I rather like coming across stories like this, and Stair Trick (F&SF, August 1952), one by one in the wild.