Tag: Science Fantasy

With Clean Hands by John Rackham

Posted on by Paul Fraser

With Clean Hands by John Rackham (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) opens on a planet called Malin, where a planetary Governor called Ingersoll is hosting two anthropologists who have been living among the natives. The setting, though, is pretty much like the 1950’s British Empire in space, as can be seen from comments that Ingersoll’s wife’s Martha makes to one of the visitors later on:

“If you’re going to try to talk shop, Robert, take them into your study,” Martha got up. I’ve got work to do, as always. Stay single, my dear,” she shook her head archly at Olga. “Once you marry, well, you can’t really do anything else, afterwards. Children, housework, meals—it’s never ending. . .” and she went to the door to ring a hand-bell for servants.  p. 89

After Marta leaves, Ingersoll and his two visitors discuss a native plant called Gleez, the basis for a sought after fabric which also has a special place in Malinese society and religion. Then, when one of the Malinese servants brings in a native version of coffee, Ingersoll learns that the native’s “cough”, a normally untreatable and eventually fatal disease, has been cured by another native he refers to as The Healer. Ingersoll later phones the Chief of Police asks him to investigate.
At dinner that night Ingersoll and his guests discuss the natives’ evensong before Daniels, the policeman, gets back to Ingersoll and tells him that has tracked down the healer. He reports that his preaching “sounds like a cross between Christianity and Socialism”, and adds that his ideas are catching on, something which has led to labour problems in some areas. Daniels also says that he has bugged his accommodation.
We later see Ingersoll’s son develop a cough, initially assumed by the parents to be a normal, human one until Martha comes and shows Ingersoll blood on a handkerchief—when it appears that their son has caught the native disease. Finally, in the middle of all this drama, Olga (one of the anthropologists) visits Ingersoll one evening and sits on his lap! They have a conversation about interdependence before kissing.
The second half of the story sees all these plot elements merge together (spoiler) and, after further unrest on the planet, the native chiefs demand to see Ingersoll. When they are let in, Ingersoll sees that they have brought the healer before him and say they want him crucified (they need Ingersoll’s permission as he has banned public executions). Then, during the meeting, his son bursts in and is cured by the healer.
Ingersoll later questions the healer in private about his activities, and tells him that he can’t continue causing the same level of disruption. Ingersoll adds that he will be left alone to teach if he tones down his message and stops causing trouble for the native chiefs. The healer refuses.
Later, when the pressure to have The Healer crucified becomes overwhelming, Ingersoll once more meets the chiefs, this time asking for a bowl of water and a towel before consciously doing a Pontius Pilate act. After the chiefs take the healer away to his fate Ingersoll tells Daniels to slip the healer something that will help with the pain of crucifixion—and arranges for the native’s body to be spirited away afterwards.
Ingersoll later tells the anthropologists that he has arranged for the removal of the healer’s body from its burial place as he wants to help spread his message on Malin. Later, of course, Daniels finds the body has vanished. The story ends with Ingersoll telling Olga that he is going to send his wife and son back to Earth; Olga says she will stay on the planet with him.
Most of the first half of this story is an amalgam of colonial and social clichés from the 1950s, but the last part is an engagingly weird, if predictable, alien Messiah/crucifixion variant1—with an atypical side helping of adultery and marital breakdown.
** Average. 11,500 words. Archive.org link

1. One of the most famous of these alien crucifixion stories is Harry Harrison’s The Streets of Ashkelon, published in Science Fantasy’s sister magazine New Worlds a year earlier (#122, September 1962). One wonders if Rackham saw Harrison’s story before writing his own.

The Dolphin and the Deep by Thomas Burnett Swann

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dolphin and the Deep by Thomas Burnett Swann (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) is, like nearly all of Swann’s work, a mythological fantasy. This one is set in Cretan times, and tells of a young man called Bear and his travels around the Mediterranean and Africa.
The story itself opens with Bear asking the captain of the ship he is travelling on to let him visit a passing island. After Bear swims ashore he explores, and later discovers a deserted palace. Then, while swimming back to the ship, he is accosted by a playful triton (merman) called Astyanax. When they start talking, Astyanax asks Bear if he was searching for Circe—the goddess who used to live there a long time ago:

A hundred years ago—so the dolphins say—a galley came for her, rowed by pygmies. Bears and rabbits gathered to say good-bye. She smiled at them and spoke a few words—multiply, don’t eat each other, and that kind of thing. When she boarded the galley, a black boy fanned her with ostrich feathers, and a crimson canopy shielded her from the sun. One of the bears—you will love this part—jumped into the water and swam after her, but she waved him back and disappeared into the misty south.”
“Did the bear get back to shore?”
“Oh, yes. His friends helped him up the stairs. He became, in fact, something of a hero.” [Astyanax] hesitated and smiled sheepishly. “I made up the bear because I thought he would please you.”
“It was a charming touch. But tell me more about Circe. Was she still beautiful? Odysseus knew her many centuries ago.”
“The dolphins say she was like the sun, white and burning. When she left it was the sun sinking into the sea.”  p. 6

After learning more about Circe, Bear decides to set off to Libya to search for her, and he convinces Astyanax to come with him.
The passage above is a good example of the kind of material that follows, which is mostly a series of gentle, episodic adventures with a growing band of companions—but there are several setbacks en route, beginning with Bear overhearing a sailors’ plot to sell himself and the triton into slavery. The pair dive off the ship to escape, and Astyanax cuts loose the dinghy for Bear’s use. However, an albino dolphin (who Bear noticed at the island) appears and overturns the dinghy, and the boat’s crew quickly recaptures them.
When the pair eventually arrive at the slave market, Astyanax is quickly sold but, before his new (and scary) female owner can take possession, the triton is stolen by two brothers. Bear escapes during the confusion and quickly manages to track down Astyanax, who has been taken by two northern brothers called Balder and Frey. The two turn out to be innocents but, as Bear negotiates Astyanax’s freedom, they are found by the sailors who were trying to enslave them. A fight ensues and then, after they see off their attackers, Bear, Astyanax and the brothers approach a young man called Arun with a view to buying his boat, Halcyon. Arun decides instead that he wants to go with them on their quest, so they all set off together. They are joined by Atthis the albino dolphin, who, Astyanax says, only meant to surface near their dinghy not underneath it.
A month later they reach Artemis, reprovision, and set off for The Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar). During this journey a comradeship develops, and Bear becomes increasingly infatuated by the thought of Circe:

Lit by the torch, the mast seemed a burning tree; somewhere ashore a wolf cub howled in hunger and, very close, a lamb bleated in terror. I thought of Circe, the end of all my voyages, the last and the loveliest of the will-o-the-wisps I had chased through twenty-five years. A hyacinth over the hill, a murex at the bottom of the sea: the distant and the perilous. I had sometimes loved in the past, for a week or a month; one girl had tired me with tears, another with laughter; I had tired of red hair and dark and hair the colour of barley when the harvesters come with their scythes; and most of all, of the waiting which love demands, the standing still while the moon curves up the sky and the birds fly south. But who could weary of Circe? Only Odysseus had left her, because of home.  p. 24

More adventures ensue when they pass out of the Mediterranean: a Carthaginian vessel warns them not to go further south, but they continue anyway. Later they see a phoenix on the beach, and go onshore to investigate, and see if they can maybe get a feather. Frey wanders off and is captured by two harpies, who fly off with him. The rest of them catch a third harpy and force her to take them to their nest. They eventually rescue Frey, but only with the help of the harpy they captured, who ends up dead like the others.
Later they begin close in on Circe, or what remains of her, when Atthis brings a Cretan sword up from the depths. Bear’s exploration of the wreck—with Atthis’s assistance—provides a passage that illustrates Swann’s ability to combine reality, history, and myth:

I straddled her back and held [Atthis’s] dorsal fin. Her tail flashed up and down, and we foamed toward the sunken ship while Astyanax trailed in our wake. Elephants along the bank, lifting water in their sinuous trunks, stared at us with lordly indolence. Beyond the mouth of the river we paused and circled. Directly below us a galley wavered in the lucid depths.
Then she dove. On the floor of the sea, anemones pulsed their tentacles in a purple twilight. Diminutive lantern fish, with rows of luminescent spots, twinkled from our path. In a forest of rockweed a blood starfish curled its crimson legs. Redbeard sponges clung to the planks of the ship, which rested as lightly on the bottom as if it had settled at anchor. We circled the deck and found the cabin, whose roof lay open to the water. Hurriedly we searched the room.
The furnishings were Cretan: a terra cotta priestess with snakes in her hands; a tiny gold frog embedded with pearls; a tall-backed chair in the shape of a throne. I opened a chest and lifted a woman’s robe, with a bell-like skirt, puffing sleeves, and a tight bodice cut low to expose the breasts. For an instant, as the gown unfolded, Circe herself seemed to rise, a ghost, to greet me. Atthis shared my discovery. She caught the skirt in her beak and wrapped it around her flanks, as if to savour its richness and regret its inevitable destruction by the sea. Yes, this was Circe’s ship. It had sunk not hundreds of years ago but less than a hundred and, since there were no skeletons, Circe and her crew had presumably escaped.  p. 36-37

After this underwater expedition Atthis leaves: the dolphin is upset that Bear brought back presents from the wreck for the boys but not for her and, more than that, she is jealous. However, when the ship is pursued by female pygmies she returns with a pod of dolphins who help them escape by pushing the ship. Bear makes amends:

I wanted to go to her myself, but my going must not, like my parting, seem thoughtless and crude. I must go to her partly as suppliant and partly as friend; indebted but not obsequious; grateful and gracious. With love and a gift which betokened love. I searched my mind for something which, even though belated, should not seem too late. I remembered the gown she had fondled in the sunken galley. I had no gowns or women’s cloaks, I had no jewels, no bracelets of amber stars nor necklaces of hammered gold. But I owned one object more precious to women than pearls: a bronze mirror with a handle like the neck of a swan.
Mirror in hand, I called to Atthis from the deck. She did not move; she waited on the surface, watchful, poised for flight (and also, no doubt, appraising the mirror). Guessing my intention, Astyanax left her and returned to the ship. I swam to her side.
Treading water, I held the mirror in front of her. She looked at the bronze and, seeing her image, recoiled; returned, and this time lingered. She tilted her head, she opened her beak, she rolled on her side with an artless and touching vanity. Then, having shown her delight, she spoke her gratitude—and her forgiveness—with a simple and eloquent gesture: she rested her beak on my shoulder.  p. 41

There is one more short adventure before Bear finally finds Circe, when a siren lures Astyanax away. Although they go ashore and free him, they are finally captured by the female pygmies.
When Bear and Circe finally meet she appears before him as a corn maiden, and asks why he has come. Bear says it is because of her, but she says he is in love with a dream. Later, after they talk of love and friendship, she tells him that if he wants to stay with her he must send his friends away. After some agonising he says he cannot, and the goddess tells him that he has made the right choice—if he had chosen her she would have killed him: “You have chosen the dolphin and not the deep.”
She goes on to tell him about the long line of men that have pursued her, before telling him she “could have loved him once.”
When Bear goes back to the ship he finds that Circe has changed Atthis into a young woman, and that Astyanax has been changed too. When Bear looks back at Circe he sees an old woman leaning on a cane, waving a slow farewell.
This story is, for the most part, an episodic and sometimes sentimental tale that places its characters in little real jeopardy (and the boy-gets-dolphin ending won’t appeal to everyone)—but I think it is a charming piece with some wonderfully descriptive passages. I also thought the ending, where Bear chooses friendship over infatuation, lifts the story to a higher level. If you like Swann’s work, you’ll love this one.
**** (Very Good). 20,150 words.

The Hades Business by Terry Pratchett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Hades Business by Terry Pratchett (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) opens with its protagonist, Crucible, arriving home and finding smoke in the hallway of his house. When he takes a bucket of water to the source of the fire in the study and charges the stuck door, it opens suddenly and he flies through the air. He ends up unconscious in the fireplace and then, when he comes around, finds the Devil leaning over him.
During their subsequent conversation the Devil tells Crucible that no-one has arrived in the Other Place for almost two thousand years, and that he wants to hire Crucible to head up an advertising campaign. After the Devil leaves, Crucible thinks about the offer and concludes he wants the money—but doesn’t want Lucifer running around. So he visits his local church.
The next part of the story involves Crucible’s journey to a (dilapidated) Hell:

A battered punt was moored by the river. The Devil helped Crucible in and picked up the skulls—pardon me—sculls.
“What happened to what’s-his-name—Charon?”
“We don’t like to talk about it.”
“Oh.”
Silence, except for the creaking of the oars.
“Of course, you’ll have to replace this by a bridge.”
“Oh, yes.”
Crucible looked thoughtful.
“A ha’penny for them.”
“I am thinking,” said Crucible, “about the water that is lapping about my ankles.”  p. 70

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees the Devil do a lot of advertising appearances in an effort to promote Hell as a tourist destination, and the Other Place soon resounds to the general bedlam of humanity: the sounds of its many visitors’ jazz and pop music, their motorcycles, the click of slot machines, etc.
After a few weeks of this the Devil has had enough, at which point God appears out of a thunderstorm and asks him if he wants to come back up to Heaven. The Devil accepts the offer.
God then thanks Crucible, who has planned the whole endeavour with this outcome in mind.
This is a cutesy story, but it’s neatly and amusingly done—and it is a particularly impressive debut for a 14 year old. I wonder what became of this writer.1
** (Average). 3,650 words.

1. Yes, joking: Terry Pratchett’s ISFDB page. I got about twenty books into the Discworld series (about half way through) before the increasingly bloated size of some of the volumes started wearing me out (he always seemed to be incapable of efficiently wrapping up the story). Still, I must go back and re-read some of the better ones.

Same Time, Same Place by Mervyn Peake

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Same Time, Same Place by Mervyn Peake (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) is one of two stories that appeared in the magazine that year as a result, I believe, of Michael Moorcock’s friendship with the writer (Moorcock brought them to Ted Carnell’s attention, and also provided a short essay on Peake in the same issue in which this piece of fiction appears).
The story itself begins with a description that evokes the grimness of post-war Britain:

That night, I hated father. He smelt of cabbage. There was cigarette ash all over his trousers. His untidy moustache was yellower and viler than ever with nicotine, and he took no notice of me. He simply sat there in his ugly armchair, his eyes half closed, brooding on the Lord knows what. I hated him. I hated his moustache. I even hated the smoke that drifted from his mouth and hung in the stale air above his head.
And when my mother came through the door and asked me whether I had seen her spectacles, I hated her too. I hated the clothes she wore; tasteless and fussy. I hated them deeply. I hated something I had never noticed before; it was the way the heels of her shoes were worn away on their outside edges—not badly, but appreciably. It looked mean to me, slatternly, and horribly human. I hated her for being human—like father.  p. 57

When the narrator’s mother starts nagging him he feels suffocated, and leaves the house, getting on a bus to The Corner House restaurant in Piccadilly. There he befriends a woman, and he goes back to meet her on subsequent nights (although he wonders why she is always already there when he arrives, and remains seated when he leaves). Eventually, they arrange to marry.
The final section provides (spoiler) a nightmarish denouement—when his bus arrives late at the registrar’s office he sees, from the upper floor of the vehicle, a group of freakish individuals in the room where he is to be wed:

To the right of the stage (for I had the sensation of being in a theatre) was a table loaded with flowers. Behind the flowers sat a small pin-striped registrar. There were four others in the room, three of whom kept walking to and fro. The fourth, an enormous bearded lady, sat on a chair by the window. As I stared, one of the men bent over to speak to her. He had the longest neck on earth. His starched collar was the length of a walking stick, and his small bony head protruded from its extremity like the skull of a bird. The other two gentlemen who kept crossing and re-crossing were very different. One was bald. His face and cranium were blue with the most intricate tattooing. His teeth were gold and they shone like fire in his mouth. The other was a well-dressed young man, and seemed normal enough until, as he came for a moment closer to the window I saw that instead of a hand, the cloven hoof of a goat protruded from the left sleeve.
And then suddenly it all happened. A door of their room must have opened for all at once all the heads in the room were turned in one direction and a moment later a something in white trotted like a dog across the room.
But it was no dog. It was vertical as it ran. I thought at first that it was a mechanical doll, so close was it to the floor. I could not observe its face, but I was amazed to see the long train of satin that was being dragged along the carpet behind it.
It stopped when it reached the flower-laden table and there was a good deal of smiling and bowing and then the man with the longest neck in the world placed a high stool in front of the table and, with the help of the young man with the goat-foot, lifted the white thing so that it stood upon the high stool. The long satin dress was carefully draped over the stool so that it reached to the floor on every side. It seemed as though a tall dignified woman was standing at the civic altar.  p. 63

The narrator stays on the bus and, after riding around for a while, eventually goes home. He now loves his mother and father, and never goes out again.
I wondered if this was an allegory about leaving home, only to see horror in the outside world (he variously refers to members of the group he saw as “malignant” and “evil”), and then wanting to return to an earlier time (Peake was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen).
An interesting piece, but perhaps rather too dream-like to be completely satisfying.
** (Average). 3,500 words.

1. Mervyn Peake’s Wikipedia page.

Party Piece by Steve Hall

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Party Piece by Steve Hall (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) begins with some prefatory material about the President of the Midnight Club, Vance Seaton, organising the entertainment for the members’ Xmas dinner.
When the club’s science fiction, fantasy and horror writer members finally meet, and after they have finished their meal, Seaton introduces the first act—a magician called Levito and his daughter/assistant Gloria. After a series of tricks Levito finishes the act with his daughter floating in mid-air: the magician then moves his arms with a complicated flourish and she disappears.
Levito soon makes it clear to Seaton that Gloria wasn’t supposed to vanish, so Seaton gets the other act, a hypnotist, to go on while he and Levito discuss the matter. Seaton then conducts an examination:

Under Seaton’s directions, [Levito] gradually lowered the lighter from a point well above the warped space, where it was clearly visible to Seaton on the other side, until it moved into eclipse behind it. For a moment the flame seemed to wink out of existence, then it abruptly re-appeared and extended itself into a flaring, flickering curtain, as if distorted by some grotesque lens.
“Walk behind it yourself,” instructed [Seaton].
As Levito traversed the full length of the uncanny region, which was about waist high, the mid-section of his body seemed to expand and contract in an eye-wrenching fashion; at times it disappeared altogether, leaving his torso and legs to continue, apparently unconnected.
“Light doesn’t go through it,” muttered Seaton clinically, “it goes around it. I think I know what we’ve got here.”
“What is it?”
“It’s something like a Klein Bottle.”  p. 81-82

Further discussions suggest that the enclosed space is a form of three dimensional Möbius strip (I think), and that Gloria may quickly run out of air or overheat.
When the Seaton finally reveals the dilemma to the club members, and asks for suggestions on how to free her, one of them suggests (spoiler) that Levito should move his arms in the opposite manner to unlock the space. However, when the magician tries to do this he cannot remember exactly what he did. Enter the hypnotist, who puts Levito into a trance . . . .
When Gloria finally reappears there is rapturous applause (some of the members think it is part of the act), and she reveals that virtually no time at all had passed inside the space (Seaton observes in passing that you probably can’t distort Space without affecting Time).
This probably sounds like a fairly slight piece, and a contrived one too—but it’s well told, and the hypnotist idea is a neat one.
*** (Good). 3,400 words.

The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with a man called Justin on the fourteenth floor of a deserted tower block. He is obviously stressed and inadvertently tears the bannister off his landing, watching it fall to the ground below. The next day sees Justin move boxes of canned food and books from the lobby up to his apartment, while doing some OCD number counting (there are 198 steps, and there are various other arithmetical episodes throughout the tale). The impression given is that this is a ‘last man on Earth’ piece.
Justin then receives a phonecall from a woman. During their conversation we learn that he is an ex-astronaut, his (dead) wife’s name is Lidia, and that he isn’t sure whether or not the woman calling him is real or whether he is going mad. Later we learn that her name is Justine, so what with (a) the feminine form of his name (b) the fact he hasn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time, and (c) all the counting—more likely the madness.
Further conversations see Justine accuse Justin of being responsible for the apocalypse:

“What about the millions—”
“The millions?” he interrupted her.
“—of dead,” she said. “All of them dead. Everyone dead. Because of you and the others like you. The football captains and the soldiers and all the other heroes.”
“I didn’t do it. I wasn’t even here when it happened. You can’t blame me.”
“Well, I am blaming you, baby. Because if you’d been ordered to, you would have done it. You’d do it now—when there’s just the two of us left. Because somewhere deep in your atrophied soul you want to.”
“You’d know that territory better than me. You grew up there.”
“You think I don’t exist? Maybe you think the others didn’t exist either? Lidia—and all the millions of others.”
“It’s funny you should say that.”
She was ominously quiet.
He went on, intrigued by the novelty of the idea. “That’s how it feels in space. It’s more beautiful than anything else there is. You’re alone in the ship, and even if you’re not alone you can’t see the others. You can see the dials and the millions of stars on the screen in front of you and you can hear the voices through the earphones, but that’s as far as it goes. You begin to think that the others don’t exist.”
“You know what you should do?” she said.
“What?”
“Go jump in the lake.”  p. 163 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

After some more background material about the automated world continuing on after the neutron bomb war, Justine phones him again and says she is coming over. When she (supposedly) knocks on the door (spoiler), he jumps off the balcony.
This isn’t badly done, but a ‘last man’ story which ends with a suicide makes for pretty pointless and nihilistic reading. Very new wave.
* (Mediocre). 3,350 words.

See Me Not by Richard Wilson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

See Me Not by Richard Wilson (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with the narrator, Avery, waking up and discovering he is invisible:

He lay on his back for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling. There was something different about the way it looked. No, it wasn’t the ceiling that was different, but his view of it. A perfectly clear, unobstructed view. Then he realized that what was missing was the fuzzy, unfocused tip of nose which had always been there, just below the line of vision, and which became a definite object only when he closed one eye.
Avery closed one eye. No nose. His hand came up in alarm and felt the nose. It was there, all right. That is, he could feel it. But he couldn’t see the fingers or the hand.  p. 9 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

The next seven pages describe his attempts to avoid his wife (who has just sent the kids off to school), but she eventually corners him in the shower. After she gets over her initial shock at his condition she calls Dr Mike.
This introductory section rather exemplifies the story’s main problem, which is that it is done at too great a length (and its mostly inconsequential light comedy produces few real laughs). That said there are one or two neat bits in this sequence—the inability to see his nose, his wife wanting to join him in the shower (more risqué than normal for genre SF of the time), and the fact he looks like a ghost when she sees his invisible body with water vapour coming off it). Slim pickings for seven pages though.
The next part of the story sees Dr Mike arrive, and some doctor-patient banter between him and Avery. Then Avery’s son turns up (more chatter), followed by his daughter (she faints). Then, when the family are having dinner that evening, they see what is happening to the food Avery is eating and he is forced to dress (apparently he has been wandering around naked because he is invisible). We are now twenty pages into the story.
The second half of this sees: Avery visible again the next morning; a disastrous trip out for breakfast where he becomes invisible again; crowds and the media following them home and waiting outside; an ill-judged attempt by Avery to go out and torment the crowd (which sees him caught before the police arrive to free him); the arrival of a specialist from a drug company called Lindhof, who manages to make part of Avery visible; and then a (baffling) argument between Avery and Dr Mike about the former’s refusal to see the specialist again. This all ends with his wife going to Lindhof—and when she returns she is invisible too. Avery changes his mind (and it later materialises that his invisibility was caused by the Lindhof-made pills he took the day before becoming invisible).
This story reminded me of one of those corny 1940’s movies or 1950’s sitcoms and, even though it is breezily told, it’s based on dumb science and is hugely bloated, mostly with endless and sometimes pointless conversations (the argument between Avery and Mike). If this was edited down to about three quarters of its length there might be a half-decent story here, but I got quite irritated with its flabbiness on the way through. More patient readers may have better luck.
* (Mediocre). 13,850 words.

The Sound Sweep by J. G. Ballard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Sound Sweep by J. G. Ballard (Science Fantasy #39, February 1960) opens with Madame Gioconda, an ageing and out of work opera diva, suffering a headache which is worsened by the sounds of flyover traffic and then, later, by the phantom applause that comes from the auditorium around her apartment on the sound stage of a disused radio station—applause that later turns into boos and catcalls. At midnight a man called Magnon, a mute who can “hear” sound residues, arrives with his “sonovac”:

Understanding her, he first concentrated on sweeping the walls and ceiling clean, draining away the heavy depressing underlayer of traffic noises. Carefully he ran the long snout of the sonovac over the ancient scenic flats (relics of her previous roles at the Metropolitan Opera House) which screened-in Madame Gioconda’s makeshift home—the great collapsing Byzantine bed (Othello) mounted against the microphone turret; the huge framed mirrors with their peeling silverscreen (Orpheus) stacked in one corner by the bandstand; the stove (Trovatore) set up on the program director’s podium; the gilt-trimmed dressing table and wardrobe (Figaro) stuffed with newspaper and magazine cuttings. He swept them methodically, moving the sonovac’s nozzle in long strokes, drawing out the dead residues of sound that had accumulated during the day.
By the time he finished the air was clear again, the atmosphere lightened, its overtones of fatigue and irritation dissipated. Gradually Madame Gioconda recovered. Sitting up weakly, she smiled wanly at Mangon. Mangon grinned back encouragingly, slipped the kettle onto the stove for Russian tea, sweetened by the usual phenobarbitone chaser, switched off the sonovac and indicated to her that he was going outside to empty it.  p. 205 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

When Magnon empties the sonovac there is only the usual sound detritus, and it becomes obvious that the audience that Madame Gioconda claims to hear is only imaginary. But Magnon is an admirer of the singer and hopes to win her favour—he visits every day to clean the apartment of sound residues, serve her tea, and listen to her tales of a comeback and revenge—so he keeps this information to himself.
In the next part of the story we learn more about her obsolescence (normal music was replaced by ultrasonic music which can’t be heard by humans but has an emotional effect) and her plans to stage a comeback by blackmailing a wealthy producer called LeGrande who is going into politics (she drunkenly relates she has intimate photographs of them together as well as a “no holes barred” memoir).
The rest of the story follows quite an involved plot, which adds another character, Ray Alto, a client and friend of Magnon’s who is an ultrasonic composer, and Madame Gioconda’s discovery of the fact that Magnon can not only hear sound residue but can distinguish snatches of conversation. This latter ability eventually sees Magnon and Madame Gioconda go the “sound stockades”—a dumping ground for all the city’s sonic waste—and sieve through the detritus for fragments of conversation which will let them blackmail Le Grande. During this search Magnon recovers his powers of speech.
All of this eventually rolls towards a climax where (spoiler) Madame LeGrande is scheduled—after her blackmail attempt is successful—to sing alongside a debut performance of Alto’s ultrasonic Opus Zero, much to the composer’s fury. Alto then plots with Magnon (who has subsequently been brutally snubbed by Gioconda after she got what she wanted) to hide a sonovac at the performance to hoover up her voice before it gets to the mike (a voice which sounds like, according to Alto, a “cat being strangled” because “what time alone hasn’t done to her, cocaine and self-pity have.”) But, of course, during the performance Magnon (who has by now lost his voice again) decides to revenge himself by letting the world hear her:

Mangon listened to her numbly, hands gripping the barrell of the sonovac. The voice exploded in his brain, flooding every nexus of cells with its violence. It was grotesque, an insane parody of a classical soprano. Harmony, purity, cadence had gone. Rough and cracked, it jerked sharply from one high note to a lower, its breath intervals uncontrolled, sudden precipices of gasping silence which plunged through the volcanic torrent, dividing it into a loosely connected sequence of bravura passages.
He barely recognized what she was singing: the Toreador song from Carmen. Why she had picked this he could not imagine. Unable to reach its higher notes she fell back on the swinging rhythm of the refrain, hammering out the rolling phrases with tosses of her head. After a dozen bars her pace slackened, she slipped into an extempore humming, then broke out of this into a final climactic assault. Appalled, Mangon watched as two or three members of the orchestra stood up and disappeared into the wings. The others had stopped playing, were switching off their instruments and conferring with each other. The audience was obviously restive; Mangon could hear individual voices in the intervals when Madame Gioconda refilled her lungs.
[. . .]
Satisfied, he dropped the sonovac to the floor, listened for a moment to the caterwauling above, which was now being drowned by the mounting vocal opposition of the audience, then unlatched the door.  pp. 242-243 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

This is an original piece and a pretty good one too. I note, however, that it feels like early Ballard: not only does the sonovac and ultrasonic music subject matter feel more like something you would find in Barrington Bayley’s later work, but the story also has a conventional plot. That said, it does have Ballard’s distinctive style.
If the final scene had been clearer, and the miraculous speech recovery in the middle of the story less awkwardly placed, I would have probably rated this higher. That said, these are minor criticisms, and it is well worth a read.
I note in passing that there are a significant number of drug references for the time.
***+ (Good to very good). 14,500 words. Story link.