Edges (ssc), page 1
21-12-2023
EDGES
GLIMPSES:
—of disaster too great to believe
—of a captured quantum creature
VISIONS:
—of a lover never known
—of a sweetheart forever lost
JOURNEYS:
—to the last days of a dying empire
—to the land of lust and lost gods
—to an awesome world of earth and sky
URSULA K. LE GUIN and VIRGINIA KIDD
Two of speculative fiction’s most respected anthologists present an original collection of entertaining and provocative stories by thirteen of the field’s most gifted talents.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Virginia Kidd Editors
EDGES
THIRTEEN NEW TALES FROM
THE BORDERLANDS OF
THE IMAGINATION
PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK
“The Ballad of Bowsprit ‘Bearstead” copyright © 1980 by Damien Broderick
“Omens” copyright © 1980 by Carol Emshwiller
“Touch the Earth” copyright © 1980 by Scott Sanders
“The Other Magus” copyright © 1980 by Avram Davidson
“Peek-A-Boom” copyright © 1980 by Sonya Dorman
“Suzanne Delage” copyright © 1980 by Gene Wolfe
“The Finger” copyright © 1980 by Naomi Mitchison
“Barranca, King of the Tree Streets” copyright © 1980 by Lowry Pel
“Thomas in Yahvestan” copyright © 1980 by Estate of George P. Elliott
“The Vengeance of Hera” copyright © 1980 by Thomas M. Disch
“Falling” copyright © 1980 by Raylyn Moore
“Father Returns from the Mountain” copyright © 1980 by Inis Urrea
“The Oracle” copyright © 1980 by M. J. Engh
Another Original publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of
GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020
Copyright © 1980 by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y, 10020
ISBN: 0-671*83532-7
First Pocket Books printing November, 1980
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
POCKET and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster.
Printed in the U.S.A.
Contents:-
The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear’s Stead
Omens
Touch the Earth
The Other Magus
Peek-A-Boom
Suzanne Delage
The Finger
Barranca, King of the Tree Streets
Thomas in Yahvestan
The Vengeance of Hera -
Falling
Father Returns from the Mountain
The Oracle
Virginia’s half is dedicated to Virginia’s third—
Ben Blish
INTRODUCTION
Edges are strange; very different from middles. Edges are first cousins of thresholds, yet they can cut the hand that holds them. An edge is twofaced; it may force one to stop yet forbid one to stay. An edge may make one edgy. Artists are often—by no means always, but often—found on edges: peering anxiously over; rapturously admiring the view; putting up signs saying You are about to fall off! Stop!; sneaking by at night to knock holes in the protective fence; planning marvels of one legged bridge engineering; dancing; going for a walk. Long ago someone remarked that it is not an easy thing to walk the razor’s edge.
Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Fantasy, though all very hard to define, are by definition on the edge: not central, not in the Main Stream of Unqualified, unmodified
Fiction, but (pejoratively) marginal, or (optimistically) on the leading edge, or (descriptively) slightly elsewhere —a bit off thataway.
The most solid and desirable residences are not as a rule to be found on the edge of town, out where the West begins, but downtown, close to the First National Bank. People who live out at the edge are frontiersmen, frontierswomen; not perfectly respectable, not fully reliable. You can’t quite put your fingers on them.
Even on the frontier, towns, of course, get built—very quickly, sometimes very cheaply. The bank, the saloon, tiie jail, the whorehouse, some kind of church, there they are overnight, white frame popups, and there are the prosperous and thriving inhabitants living at First and Washington and planning to rebuild next year in brick, with two cupolas and a gazebo. It always happens, even in the Outback and the Elsewhere, even in crazy literature. SF-Fantasy is currently a boomtown, and on Main Street all the faces are familiar, known ’em since Ah wuz so high, the brave starship captain, the loyal robot, the cute alien, the rescuable princess, the wise old daddyman, the sword-slinging barbarian from out of town, and all of them making a real good living, yes sirree bob. But if you keep on walking West, towards the edge of town, things begin looking quite strange at last; there aren’t any used car lots, and you start to see faces you never saw before.
Some of the faces belong to the people in the stories in this book, stories by people who live out on the edge of the edge.
It is hard to categorize them. As writers they are not, I think, what you could properly call avant-garde (smile when you say that, podner). An avant-garde implies progress, as in an army marching forever forward, forward, a new wave forever breaking. These are people who tend rather to move sideways, or out, or away, or even unexpectedly back home. They are not experimentalists, because they seem to know what they are doing, and do it very well. They are, certainly, storytellers. Some of them are famous in SF-Town, and some in the Big City (home of Critical Towers and the Great Novel Building). Some of them, on the other hand, are rank, shameless outsiders. In fact, fame or no fame, I believe they are all outsiders, threshold people, artists of the liminal, edge-dwellers.
Some—Engh, Mitchison, Sanders, Dorman—write of existences at the limits of civilization/the comprehensible/ the known, that gleaming uneasy ground where two kinds or cultures meet, or fail to meet: the boundary, no man’s or woman’s land. Wolfe, and Pei, and Emshwiller tell of lives lived on the edge of hope, or a little over the edge. Broderick plays knucklebones at the mad fringe of Time, and Davidson teeters genially on the margins of the Real; Moore crouches at the verge of Panic, while Disch, smiling, whets Irony’s fine-edged scalpel. Urrea climbs to the farthest edge of all and the nearest, the line, what line, between life and death; and Elliot returns from somewhere off the edge of the map to say what existence is like where no angels are, those crossers of boundaries, messengers from the unimaginable.
For there are limits to the human imagination; though, on such evidence as this, one might well wonder where they are.
* * *
Virginia will present each story as we go around the circle of writers gathered here; I have agreed to introduce the book entire.
Seeking a summation or motto for this anthology, I found various scraps of quotations hanging around my mind: bits, orts, jetsam, none of which I was quite sure was right. So I went and looked for them under Edge and Edges in my Familiar Quotations (Oxford, not Bartlett, because the Oxford was much cheaper in the used book store where I got it), and there was one of the edges I had been groping after—from Matthew Arnold:
.., down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, the cheerful, cozy Victorians, yes indeed. Then there is always one from the Bible:
The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.
And the almost equally dependable Edward Lear:
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon…
But none of these was quite right for this book. The next listing seemed a mere cliche: “Even to the e. of doom,” it said. You mean there was a first person who said “the edge of doom”? I looked it up, and smote my brow. Of course it would be Shakespeare. And one of the greatest of the Sonnets. And since as he used the words they are not melodramatic or ominous but gallant against all odds, I put his lines here for our motto, chance-struck and so all the more appropriate to these thirteen tales:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
Ursula K. Le Guin Portland,
Oregon 1980
EDGES
Damien Broderick was born in 1944 in Melbourne, Australia, the eldest of six. He spent two years in a Junior Seminary of The Blessed Sacrament Fathers, and thereafter five years at Monash University, Victoria. He has done two short-story anthologies in Australia, in 1970 (in the U.S.) a sword and sorcery novel, and in 1980 the novel Dreaming Dragons from Pocket Books.
Broderick may or may not have raised turnips while cultivating his garden, but it can be assumed he never locked his tender places up in bands of prohibition,
The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear’s Stead
BY DAMIEN BRODERICK
I was there, my smalls, when empire came crashing down about the ears of the old galactics. This is what the wickedest man in the galaxy told his wife at the time:
“When the entire universe is blowing itself to buggery, the only prudent cour
He was capable of coarse epigrams, and atypical in that, as well: his patricians were prolix, and adorned themselves with names fished from a ridiculous pool of gnomes and proverbs. Those I’ll paraphrase. Translations would only confuse. Beneath a dawn sky invariably the hue of clotted blood, the shepherd’s warning was a hortation of a different colour.
The Emperor kept one cave-browed eye cocked on posterity. That was pretty remarkable, under the circum- stances, since he had more than an inkling that the history he represented was about to be shrugged off like a tattered old coat. Not that the old galactics were big on coats. They were, if you’ll forgive me, a hairy people.
I torqued into the High Imperial demesne in full ceremonial drag, and the stinky heat wrenched open every pore of my body. Humid summer’s sun, on that fabled world, was a fat hot peach drifting in watered claret. For a while I just stood there gasping, letting the sweat run into my mouth. Off to one side of the clearing was a monstrous sail, a flat leaning deformed tetrahedron woven all of straw and decorated on its face with faces: gargoyle shields in rank on row, lofting fifty meters to the structure’s pointed tip. At its base was a hut, the lower swelling of the sail, with two pert pierced nipples for leaving and entering. All the foliage of the ferns and trees beyond the clearing was hard somber green, tricking the eye to see varieties of black. It took me some effort to pick out the hunched servant at work on his shrubs and herbs in the garden.
I sighed, finally, and went to see what he was doing. Undoubtedly he was the filthiest old man I’d ever set eyes on, his tawny pelt thick with greasy emulsions on those patches where the hair had not been plucked out and his hide cicatrized with welts and gouges, nothing like the delicate tattoos which grace your mother’s upper lips. He had a ripe aroma, like a wormy cheese left to warm beside the hearth, and I was obliged to turn my head aside and regain myself. When I looked again over his preoccupied shoulder, shielding my eyes against the orange sun, I saw that his hands moved through a pale haze of sapphire light, a streaky weft of blue radiance. My telephone rang.
Entranced by the light, I fumbled for the receiver at my belt. “Yep?”
“This is Roger, your Life Support System.”
“What is it, Roger?” I said patiently.
“Let go of your nose and start the recorders. That’s Cerenkov radiation.”
“How extraordinary.” I did as the Liss suggested, and the holofield’s subdued ticking came on. It was hardly necessary to give public notice that a recording was being made, since the gardener had no way of knowing I was there (which, strictly speaking, I wasn’t), but the equipment had been designed to conform to standing regulations. “Roger, what’s a servant doing with tachyon manipulation? I thought magic was strictly reserved to Imperial citizens.”
“So he’s a citizen,” the telephone deduced acerbically. “Maybe he just likes pottering with flowers. Bowsprit, that’s not all. There’s a raft of meron activity coming from the jungle to your right.”
“Vacuum fluctuations?” The dirty old beast was still fiddling with the damp soil, his stubby fingers drifting through blue pale webs. “Roger, have you been thoroughly serviced lately? The barbarians are still several light-hours away, and you know how these people feel about physical technology.”
“Have it your own way,” the Liss said sulkily. “Every single sensor in my pack reports singularity flux not half a kilometer from here, and coming closer, but if you wish to insist that—Bowsprit, the tachyons are gone.”
“So I see.” My eyes stung with sweat, but I’d noticed the sapphire haze flick out. With a grunt and a groan the old fellow got up off his knees and turned in my direction. Uncannily, he seemed to glance straight into my eyes. He placed his grubby hands on the crown of his head and lowered them to his cheeks, whining loudly, and barked like a dog.
Ah, you jump and squeal, my sproggies. Imagine my reaction! My belly turned over and little mice did cartwheels in it. Every lock of my beard bit at my throat and the sweat laving my flesh turned to beads of crisp dew. Before I could gather my wits, the grimy derelict dropped his arms, regarded me with a quizzical moue, and fell into that squatting posture we know so well. Stupefied, I watched him brush the fingers of his right hand (bronze-furred, the nails ragged and blackened) across the palm of his left, watched him brush right palm with left digits. My will bobbed away from my mind, and I found myself without deliberation on my own haunches, respectfully brushing my palms in greeting. The claws on the paws of my sacred garb fell together with a rattle. I babbled some nonsense in our own tongue, while my mind whirled to catch up with my well-bred instincts. Then I rose, with what dignity I could, and gave the old man my name in his people’s Vocal Tongue. The telephone was ringing; I ignored it, and it stopped.
“Neither wild animal nor man, eh?” the Neanderthal said. His hand stroked lightly my borrowed pelt. “And no star barbarian either, to judge by your phenotype.” He tugged at my beard, which in those sprightly days came only to the midpoint of my breast. “Your eyes are not crooked, young man, and your skin has a curious pallor. But come, let me show you an unusual vegetable, as rare perhaps in its kingdom as you are in ours.” And he crouched down again into his plot of turned soil, and fetched me down beside him.
I knew these people for great workers of magic, my smalls, and I was not appalled to find a mass of stems, densely packed and decked with yellow, where a minute earlier had been only naked earth and flimmery sapphire. What dried my tongue was the simple fact of his seeing me, addressing me. We were, by every law of physics known to me, mutual ghosts: he in his time, I in mine. Under the shelter of Heisenberg, I was a skein of virtual particles, instanton fluctuations in the zero-energy state. Yet my chin smarted from his tug to my whiskers. It was all quite impossible. If possible, it was horrendous.
He delved into his garden miracle and snapped off a bloom in one hand, a leaf in the other. The leaf was deepest green, heavily veined, like the tissue of a stretched scrotal sac. The old man touched it with his tongue, chewed, grimaced, spat it out. He held up the flower to me, detailing its salient features.
“I haven’t altered its genome much, though it craved a cooler climate. It has four petals, not terribly attractive, and four sepals. Here is its pistil, and you will find six stamens. Evidently one of the Cruciferae, the mustards, you know. Marx calls it Brassica rapa, but Smith insists it’s a rutabaga.” He popped the flower into his mouth, munched without pleasure, and discarded it. “Pity. I was informed that it’s edible. Are you a keen gardener yourself?”
Wordless, I shook my head. I realized, then, that he would not recognize the gesture, but I was wrong. He shot me a hard look.
“How may I serve you, then, sir? I had imagined that you were here to view my horticulture.”
The telephone rang. I screamed with frustrated rage and snatched the receiver up.
“God damn it!” I covered the mouthpiece with my palm and told the Neanderthal, “Excuse me for a moment.”
’This is Roger, your Life Support System.”
“I guessed. Listen, Roger, I’m in the middle of—”
