v2.0 – fixed format, garbled & missing text, broken paragraphs;
by peragwinn 2005-04-09
Nebula Award Stories 17
1981
JoeHaldeman, editor
INTRODUCTION
Joe Haldeman
This is the only foreign story in this anthology. I'm pretty sure it's the only one whose writing began on a cramped little tray hemmed in by smoked reindeer meat and cold Finnish beer. Seven miles over the Arctic Ocean, I'm writing in the warm belly of a Finnair DC-10, while below me unrolls a thoroughly hostile chiaroscuro of black water lanes crazing through blinding snow, as the icepack shivers apart in concession to spring. If we were exposed down there, we would die in minutes if not seconds, and the only thing keeping us alive is a complex smorgasbord of loud machinery that gives disconcerting shudders and lurches every now and then. Yet for the first time in a couple of weeks I feel quite safe and comfortable: I've been two weeks in the Soviet Union.
Which is true but not fair. Intourist and the Soviet Writer's Union, in the process of shuffling our group of science fiction writers and fans from Moscow to Kiev to Leningrad, went out of their way to make us feel wanted and important. And some warm times, as you sat digesting your fifth shot of vodka, as you smoothed yet another incredible pile of caviar
onto fine-grained black bread-as you tested cultures by trading jokes and photographs-some warm times you felt almost at home. But then there would be a look. There would be a word said or, more often, not said. And the look or the word was a wall.
You are the aliens here.
We want your understanding, yes. But don't try to make us understand you. We already know what you are.
Part of this feeling was certainly projection on my part. No American my age, born at the end of World War It and growing up in the Cold one, can look at the hammer and sickle and see simply a warm symbol of workers' solidarity. No one whose main exposure to the Russian language has been the scary, inflexible rhetoric of Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev can hear its musical lilt with simple pleasure. And those of us who carry Russian lead in our bodies, mementos of the late unpleasantness, might be excused for finding uncomfortable the sight of thousands of Soviet soldiers massed for May Day celebration.
But it wasn't only projection of my own generation's fears and prejudice and memories; the others felt it too, with birthdates from 1901 to 1964, black and white, VFW to NOW. It was not just culture shock or linguistic isolation. It was real. It was a wall.
And despite all of my preparation, it took me by surprise, which 1 think is the point of this essay.
I have been not quite around the world in the service of science fiction, which is to say in self-service to my own career. (I hope next year to complete the circle with China.) With and without interpreters, I've sat with foreign cohorts and tried to penetrate the barriers of Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, Hungarian, and every common European tongue. By and large we have been able to communicate, because we share the metalanguage of science fiction. Let me give you some rules of its grammar:
All things change.
There is no thought that cannot be challenged.
Philosophy does not change reality.
The past is a closed and dusty volume. The future is real but malleable.
Die Gedanken sind frei: thoughts are free.
Soviet science fiction can be good, but it applies a different grammar. Some things do not change. Some truths are not to be questioned. Phenomena inconsistent with Marxism do not exist. The past is our guide to the future; its essential character was predetermined by the wisdom of Marx and Lenin. And your thoughts are only free so. long as you keep them to yourself.
Not all Soviet writers feel this way, of course. Just the ones who get published.
I found out that not much of my own work is publishable in the Soviet Union, even though it is generally critical of American values and often sympathetic to socialism. It sometimes treats things that don't exist, though, such as homosexuality,* and it is often negative if not downright seedy.
The one word that kept cropping up when we discussed science fiction with Soviet critics, editors, and publishers was kind. This was emphasized in every formal meeting, and also came up when we were just sitting around our hotel rooms, speaking clearly into the television set. A work of art must be kind. I finally objected, while meeting with a children's publisher in Leningrad. I asked the translator what they meant by kind-in English, I explained, it is a rather broad word, encompassing shades of accommodating, empathetic, polite, benevolent, considerate, merciful. She said, "Yes, of course," which was an answer we got to a great variety of questions, and told me the Russian word: dobreya, amplifying the translation by saying it meant "good will." My Russian dictionary at home adds the helpful definition "nice."
In one of the books 1 read preparatory to visiting Russia, the author tells of being shown a classroom full of third-graders who were diligently practicing their handwriting. Something about the sight bothered him, and after a moment he caught it: Where were all the left-handers? he asked the teacher. "Oh;" she said with a smile, "we have no left-handed children."
Most science fiction in the Soviet Union seems to be published under the rubric of "children's literature." When we asked whether that meant it was relegated to a second-class status, we got the same protestation everywhere (indeed it sometimes felt as if an approved script had preceded us from city to city)-children's literature must be good literature; its standards must be even higher than those imposed on literature for adults. I'd never deny that this can be true-if I've ever invented a character half as good as Long John Silver or Huck Finn, I'm not aware of it-but it doesn't really answer the question. A better answer was provided by the oftenrepeated assertion that one of the most valuable functions of science fiction is to instill an enthusiasm for science in the young, and prepare them for careers in science and engineering. Also repeated was the pleasant term "moral guidance."
People familiar with the history of American science fiction will hear the ghost of Hugo Gernsback in those two statements of purpose, but it's not the old-fashionedness of the attitude that is disturbing. Gernsback was just one brilliant, cranky man, and the only power he had to enforce his attitudes was the rejection slip. A Soviet writer's manuscript is judged not only by an editorial board, but by committees of people whose primary interest in the work is not literary. If they reject your manuscript, you can't just mail it out to another publisher. If they reject it with enough force, you may find yourself in a place where the postage rates are rather high.
Politics aside (as much as possible), this root assumption, that the moral content of a story has to be consistent with a predetermined formal dialectic, seems absolutely antithetical to the spirit of science fiction. A lot of good science fiction-I would like to think most of it-makes its philosophical points obliquely and even .outrageously. There is strong moral content in Delany's Dhalgren; in Ballard's Crash; in Wolfe's The Claw of the Conciliator-and if the truths we find in such works are not very comfortable, if they are unkind, they are no less true.
To mitigate that a little, it has to be conceded that any writer-any artist-creates his work within a framework of approved values characterizing the moral and ethical consensus of the most powerful stratum of his society, and all of his work . is at least unconsciously affected by that consensus. You might -' even go so far as to say that most serious work is centrally' concerned with such conventions, either reinforcing them or" questioning them. Limiting the artist's universe to reinforcement, then, doesn't in theory prevent him from doing serious work. I would chafe under the restriction-probably find another way of making a living-and so would most of the writ- e ers I know. But we didn't grow up in so tightly controlled a society. It could be that a Soviet writer accepts political conformity as a condition of employment just as easily as I accept ' the condition that my work must be entertaining (when in my heart I would rather that it be important), with neither of us` thinking too much about it in the day-to-day production of work. A cage can be made of exceedingly fine mesh.
I wish I could have talked freely with a Soviet writer. That was "not possible," another phrase we got used to. We' met them only in very public circumstances, with translators and others monitoring what was said. The people we talked to' in private were publishers, critics, and copyright-office people who spoke good English, had traveled to foreign countries, and were allowed to come up to our rooms unaccompanied. They didn't earn such privileges by voting Republican. If any,. writers were similarly privileged, they either weren't interested in talking to us or their English wasn't up to the job.
" We were told that English was virtually the second language of the Soviet Union, with some 70 percent studying it in school. But outside of Intourist’s control. I made better use of German; very few people could, or would, . answer the simplest question in English. This is not necessarily sinister. Foreign language is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition, and there aren't many opportunities for an ordinary Russian citizen to practice English.
It seems to me that a Soviet fiction writer must have a hell of a job in front of him, serving three masters at once. The work has to be ideologically correct, of course, but if the writer is a serious one, he has to juggle that with the obscure yet compelling demands of an artist's sensibility and conscience. While those two balls are in the air, he has to add a third one, a crumpled-up balance sheet, because-sad shade of capitalism-if a writer's books don't sell, he stops getting published. If he doesn't publish for a few years, the State compels him to take a useful job somewhere.
The State has some compassion, though; it does make allowances for illness, family problems, and age. In terms of material comfort and security, at least according to the picture the Writer's Union painted for us, a Soviet fiction writer is better off than his average American counterpart. He gets paid according to a simple formula that takes into account the length of the book and what type of book it is, and he gets paid again promptly for each subsequent edition. This has to make his financial life a lot more manageable than an American writer's. He may never become a millionaire, but neither will he ever spend months bickering over the size of an advance, and then more months waiting for the publisher to come through. He has no worries about health care, insurance, libel laws. His union maintains large, comfortable clubs in all the major cities, and vacation retreats at the seashores, spas, and mountains. In many ways, it sounds like a good life.
I would love to compare notes with one of them, talk honestly about the tensions and compromises that lie between the thought and the book, compare the satisfactions and troubles that each of our systems offers its servants. The formal differences seem profound, but I suspect that in the most important parts of our lives, in the business of properly ordering thoughts and putting them down in just the right sequence of words-and then living with the rest of the human race, away from our typewriters-we go down the same tortuous road.
There are several annual "Best SF of the Year" anthologies, but this is the only one that throws a sop to democracy. Most of the stories contained herein were chosen by the six hundred-odd (yes, odd) members of the Science Fiction Writers of America, rather than by one eccentric editor.
Any member of the SFWA can nominate a story, and the stories with the most nominations go on a final ballot. A fivemember Nebula Jury (of which I was a part this year) can add at most one entry to each category on the final ballot. This is to give a chance to deserving stories that appeared in expensive hardcovers or obscure journals.
This book contains an excerpt from the novel that won the Nebula Award, the novelette and novella winners, and most of the short stories that made it to the final ballot.'
This volume is somewhat reactionary in that it's almost all fiction. In recent years, the Nebula anthology has become (in my humble yet temporarily all-powerful opinion) somewhat top-heavy with essays. My own feeling is that the Nebula volume has an important archival function, not just for the prizewinning stories but, perhaps more important, for those watershed stories that mark the emergence of new talents-
Unfortunately, it doesn't include the winning short story, "The Bone Flute" by Lisa Tuttle. Ms. Tuttle refused the award in protest against some members' campaign practices: they or their editors mailed out copies of their stories to the membership, which from Ms. Tuttle's viewpoint amounts to discrimination against members who can't afford the Xerox bill, or don't have accommodating editors. Under the circumstances, she couldn't allow her story to be in this volume. (Please do find it somewhere else, though; it's quite good.)
I'm not unsympathetic with her stance-if I were, this footnote wouldn't be here-but feel that the practice is a self-correcting one, since members who receive these copies are aware of the element of de facto discrimination, and react to it. I tend to turn the copies over and use them as scratch paper.
Normal campaign practices for the Nebula, for those interested in such gossip, don't go beyond making sure your friends know you have a story on the ballot that's the best damned thing since Heinlein was a pup. Of course this does give an element of "popularity contest" to the Nebulas, but that's,"also true of Emmys and Oscars and school-board elections. All you can do is grumble, and make sure your vote is based on merit alone. Except, of course, when your own story is on the ballot. Then you don't even have to read the others.
[These are] stories that drew the attention of fellow writers and stayed in their memories, whether the authors were well known or obscure. I've included survey articles by two experts as well as this obligatory essay, but the rest of the book is the real stuff, the stuff of wonder.
Be glad, with me, that we have it. I don't think there will be a Soviet edition.
Pusher
John Varley
John Varley didn't send any biographical information with his manuscript; when I called him he said he didn't believe in that sort of thing. Just make something up. Oh, the temptation. For the sake of the publisher's legal department, though, I won't yield to it.
Varley is generally considered to have been one of the two or three most important writers to emerge in the 1970s. His novella "The Persistence of Vision" won both Hugo and Nebula awards, and provides the title for his collection of short stories. His latest novel, Demon, completes the trilogy started with Titan and Wizard. He lives in a land where the river runs backwards and he is named after an herb.
Things change. Ian Haise expected that. Yet there are certain constants, dictated by function and use. Ian looked for those and he seldom went wrong.
The playground was not much like the ones he had known as a child. But playgrounds are built to entertain children. They will always have something to swing on, something to slide down, something to climb. This one had all those things, and more. Part of it was thickly wooded. There was a swimming hole. The stationary apparatus was combined with dazzling light sculptures that darted in and out of reality. There were animals too: pygmy rhinoceros and elegant gazelles no taller than your knee. They seemed unnaturally gentle and unafraid.
But most of all, the playground had children.
Ian liked children.
He sat on a wooden park bench at the edge of the trees, in the shadows, and watched them. They came in all colors and all sizes, in both sexes. There were black ones like animated licorice jellybeans and white ones like bunny rabbits, and brown ones with curly hair and more brown ones with slanted eyes and straight black hair and some who had been white but were now toasted browner than some of the brown ones.
Ian concentrated on the girls. He had tried with boys before, long ago, but it had not worked out.
He watched one black child for a time, trying to estimate her age. He thought it was around eight or nine. Too young. Another one was more like thirteen, judging from her shirt. A possibility, but he'd prefer something younger. Somebody less sophisticated, less suspicious.
Finally he found a girl he liked. She was brown, but with startling blond hair. Ten? Possibly eleven. Young enough, at any rate.
He concentrated on her and did the strange thing he did when he had selected the right one. He didn't know what it was, but it usually worked. Mostly it was just a matter of looking at her, keeping his eyes fixed on her no matter where she went or what she did, not allowing himself to be distracted by anything. And sure enough, in a few minutes she looked up, looked around, and her eyes locked with his. She held his gaze for a moment, then went back to her play.
He relaxed. Possibly what he did was nothing at all. He had noticed, with adult women, that if one really caught his eye so he found himself staring at her, she would usually look up from what she was doing and catch him. It never seemed to fail. Talking to other men, he had found it to be a common experience. It was almost as if they could feel his gaze. Women had told him it was nonsense, or if not, it was just reaction to things seen peripherally by people trained to alertness for sexual signal's. Merely an unconscious observation penetrating to the awareness; nothing mysterious, like ESP.
Perhaps. Still, Ian was very good at this sort of eye contact. Several times he had noticed the girls rubbing the backs of their necks while he observed them, or hunching their shoulders. Maybe they'd developed some kind of ESP and just didn't recognize it as such.
Now he merely watched her. He was smiling, so that every time she looked up to see him-which she did with increasing frequency-she saw a friendly, slightly graying man with a broken nose and powerful shoulders. His hands were strong too. He kept them clasped in his lap.
Presently she began to wander in his direction.
No one watching her would have thought she was coming toward him. She probably didn't know it herself. On her way, she found reasons to stop and tumble, jump on the soft rubber mats, or chase a flock of noisy geese. But she was coming toward him, and she would end up on the park bench beside him.
He glanced around quickly. As before, there were few adults in this playground. It had surprised him when he arrived. Apparently the new conditioning techniques had reduced the numbers of the violent and twisted to the point that parents felt it safe to allow their children to run without supervision. The adults present were involved with each other. No one had given him a second glance when he arrived.
That was fine with Ian. It made what he planned to do much easier. He had his excuses ready, of course, but it could be embarrassing to be confronted with the questions representatives of the law ask single, middle-aged men who hang around playgrounds.
For a moment he considered, with real concern, how the parents of these children could feel so confident, even with mental conditioning. After all, no one was conditioned until he had first done something. New maniacs were presumably being produced every day. Typically, they looked just like everyone else until they proved their difference by some demented act.
Somebody ought to give those parents a stern lecture, he thought.
"Who are you?"
Ian frowned. Not eleven, surely, not seen up this close. Maybe not even ten. She might be as young as eight.
Would eight be all right? He tasted the idea with his usual caution, looked around again for curious eyes. He saw none.
"My name is Ian. What's yours?"
"No. Not your name. Who are you?"
"You mean what do I do?"
"Yes."
"I'm a pusher."
She thought that over, then smiled. She had her permanent teeth, crowded into a small jaw.
"You give away pills?"
He laughed. "Very good," he said. "You must do a lot of reading." She said nothing, but her manner indicated she was pleased.
"No," he said. "That's an old kind of pusher. I'm the other kind. But you knew that, didn't you?" When he smiled, she broke into giggles. She was doing the pointless things with her hands that little girls do. He thought she had a pretty good idea of how cute she was, but no inkling of her forbidden eroticism. She was a ripe seed with sexuality ready to burst to the surface. Her body was a bony sketch, a framework on which to build a woman.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"That's a secret. What happened to your nose?"
"I broke it a long time ago. I'll bet you're twelve."
She giggled, then nodded. Eleven, then. And just barely.
"Do you want some candy?" He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pink-and-white-striped paper bag.
She shook her head solemnly. "My mother says not to take candy from strangers."
"But we're not strangers. I'm Ian, the pusher."
She thought that over. While she hesitated, he reached into the bag and picked out a chocolate thing so thick and gooey it was almost obscene. He bit into it, forcing himself to chew. He hated sweets.
"Okay," she said, and reached toward the bag. He pulled it away. She looked at him in innocent surprise.
"I just thought of something," he said. "I don't know your name. So I guess we are strangers."
She caught on to the game when she saw the twinkle in his eye. He'd practiced that. It was a good twinkle.
"My name is Radiant. Radiant Shining star Smith."
"A very fancy name," he said, thinking how names had changed. "For a very pretty girl." He paused, and cocked his head. "No. I don't think so. You're Radiant . . . Starr. With two r's. . . . Captain Radiant Starr, of the Star Patrol."
She was dubious for a moment. He wondered if he'd judged her wrong. Perhaps she was really Miz Radiant Fainting heart Belle, or Mrs. Radiant Motherhood. But her fingernails were a bit dirty for that.
She pointed a finger at him and made a Donald Duck sound as her thumb worked back and forth. He put his hand to his heart and fell over sideways, and she dissolved in laughter. She was careful, however, to keep her weapon firmly trained on him.
"And you'd better give me that candy or I'll shoot you again."
The playground was darker now, and not so crowded. She sat beside him on the bench, swinging her legs. Her bare feet did not quite touch the dirt.
She was going to be quite beautiful. He could see it clearly in her face. As for the body . . . who could tell?
Not that he really gave a damn.
She was dressed in a little of this and a little of that, worn here and there without much regard for his concepts of modesty. Many of the children wore nothing. It had been something of a shock when he arrived. Now he was almost used to it, but he still thought it incautious on the part of her parents. Did they really think the world was that safe, to let an eleven year-old girl go practically naked in a public place?
He sat there listening to her prattle about her friends-the ones she hated and the one or two she simply adored-with only part of his attention.
He inserted um's and uh-huh's in the right places.
She was cute, there was no denying it. She seemed as sweet as a child that age ever gets, which can be very sweet and as poisonous as a rattlesnake, almost at the same moment. She had the capacity to be warm, but it was on the surface. Underneath, she cared mostly about herself. Her loyalty would be a transitory thing, bestowed easily, just as easily forgotten.
And why not? She was young. It was perfectly healthy for her to be that way.
But did he dare try to touch her?
It was crazy. It was as insane as they all told him it was. It worked so seldom. Why would it work with her? He felt a weight of defeat.
"Are you okay?"
"Huh? Me? Oh, sure, I'm all right. Isn't your mother going to be worried about you?"
"I don't have to be in for hours, and hours yet." For a moment she looked so grown-up he almost believed the lie.
"Well, I'm getting tired of sitting here. And the candy's all gone." He looked at her face. Most of the chocolate had
ended up in a big circle around her mouth, except where she had wiped it daintily on her shoulder or forearm. "What's back there?"
She turned.
"That? That's the swimming hole."
"Why don't we go over there? I'll tell you a story."
The promise of a story was not enough to keep her out of the water. He didn't know if that was good or bad. He knew she was smart, a reader, and she had an imagination. But she was also active. That pull was too strong for him. He sat far from the water, under some bushes, and watched her swim with the three other children still in the park this late in the evening.
Maybe she would come back to him, and maybe she wouldn't. It wouldn't change his life either way, but it might change hers.
She emerged dripping and infinitely cleaner from the murky water. She dressed again in her random scraps, for whatever good it did her, and came to him, shivering.
"I'm cold," she said.
"Here." He took off his jacket. She looked at his hands as he wrapped it around her, and she reached out and touched the hardness of his shoulder.
"You sure must be strong," she commented.
"Pretty strong. I work hard, being a pusher."
"Just what is a pusher?" she said, and stifled a yawn.
"Come sit on my lap, and I'll tell you."
He did tell her, and it was a very good story that no adventurous child could resist. He had practiced that story, refined it, told it many times into a recorder until he had the rhythms and cadences just right, until he found just the right words not too difficult words, but words with some fire and juice in them.
And once more he grew encouraged. She had been tired when he started, but he gradually caught her attention. It was possible no one had ever told her a story in quite that way. She was used to sitting before the screen and having a story shoved into her eyes and ears. It was something new to be able to interrupt with questions and get answers. Even reading was not like that. It was the oral tradition of storytelling, and it could still mesmerize the nth generation of the electronic age.
"That sounds great," she said, when she was sure he was .through.
"You liked it?"
"1 really truly did. 1 think I want to be a pusher when I grow up. That was a really neat story."
"Well, that's not actually the story I was going to tell you. That's just what it's like to be a pusher."
"You mean you have another story?"
"Sure." He looked at his watch. "But I'm afraid it's getting late. It's almost dark, and everybody's gone home. You'd probably better go too."
She was in agony, torn between what she was supposed to do and what she wanted. It really should be no contest, if she was who he thought she was.
"Well . . . but-but I'll come back here tomorrow and you-'
He was shaking his head.
"My ship leaves in the morning," he said. "There's no time."
"Then tell me now! I can stay out. Tell me now. Please please please?"
He coyly resisted, harrumphed, protested, but in the end allowed himself to be seduced. He felt very good. He had her like a five-pound trout on a twenty-pound line. It wasn't sporting. But, then. he wasn't playing a game.
So at last he got to his specialty.
He sometimes wished he could claim the story for his own. but the fact was he could not make up stories. He no longer tried to. Instead, he...
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