“First I will tell you the story of the Masses,” Hector said to himselves. Actually, the telling of the stories was not necessary. As Hector drank, all that he had been through, all that he had known through the years of his life was being transferred subliminally to himselves. But there was the matter of focus. The matter of meaning. Hector had no imagination at all. But he did have understanding, and that understanding had to be passed to himselves, or in ages to come the Hectors would curse themself for having left himselves crippled.
This is the story, therefore, that he told, because it focused and it meant:
Cyril [said Hector] wanted to be a carpenter. He wanted to cut living wood and dry it and cure it and shape it into objects of beauty and utility. He thought he had an eye for it. As a child he had experimented with it. But when he applied at the Office of Assignments, he was told no.
“Why not?” he asked, astonished that the Office of Assignments could make such an obvious mistake.
“Because,” said the clerk, who was unflaggingly nice (she had tested nice and therefore held her job), “your aptitude and preference tests show that not only do you not have any aptitude along those lines at all, but also you do not even want to be a carpenter.”
“I want to be a carpenter,” Cyril insisted, because he was young enough not to know that one does not insist.
“You want to be a carpenter because you have a false impression of what carpentry is. In actual fact, your preference tests show that you would absolutely hate life as a carpenter. Therefore you cannot be a carpenter.”
And something in her manner told Cyril that there was no point in arguing any further. Besides, he was not so young as not to know that resistance was futile—and continued resistance was fatal.
So Cyril was placed where his tests showed he had the most aptitude: He was trained as a miner. Fortunately, he was not untalented or utterly unbright, so he was trained as a lead miner, the one who follows the vein and finds it when it jogs or turns or jumps. It was a demanding job. Cyril hated it. But he learned to do it because his preference tests showed that he really wanted this line of work.
Cyril wanted to marry a girl named Lika, and she wanted to marry him. “I'm sorry,” said the clerk at the Office of Assignments, “you are genetically, temperamentally, and socially unsuited for each other. You would be miserable. Therefore we cannot permit you to marry.”
They didn't marry, and Lika married someone else, and Cyril asked if it was all right if he remained unmarried. “If you wish. That's one of your options for optimum happiness, according to the tests,” the clerk informed him.
Cyril wanted to live in a certain area, but he was forbidden; food was served for him that he didn't like; he had to go dancing with friends he didn't like, doing dances to music he loathed, singing songs whose words were silly to him. Surely, surely there's been a mistake, he said, pleading with the clerk.
The clerk fixed a cold stare on him (he tried in vain to scrub the stare off, but still it hung on him like slime in his dreams) and said, “My dear Cyril, you have now protested as often as a citizen may protest and remain alive.”
In just such a case many another member of the masses might have rebelled, joining the secret underground organizations that sprang up from time to time and were crushed at regular intervals by the state. In just such a case many another member of the masses, knowing he was consigned to a lifetime of undeserved misery, would kill himself and thereby eliminate the misery.
However, Cyril belonged to the largest group within the masses, and so he chose neither route. Instead he went to the town he was assigned to, worked in the coal mine where he was assigned, remained lonely as he pined for Lika, and danced idiotic dances to idiotic music with his idiotic friends.
Years passed, and Cyril began to be well known among coal miners. He handled his rockcutter as if it were a delicate tool, and with it he left beautiful shapes in the rock behind, so that any miner could tell when he walked down a tunnel cut by Cyril, for it would be beautiful, and as he walked the miner would feel exalted and proud and, oddly, loved. And Cyril also had a knack for anticipating the coal, following where it led no matter how narrow the seam, how twisting its path, how interrupted its progress.
“Cyril knows the coal like a woman, every twist and turn of her, as if he'd had her a thousand times and knew just when she'd come,” a miner said of Cyril once, and because the statement was apt and true (and because there are poets' hearts beating even at the bottom of a mine) the statement spread through the mines and the miners began referring to their black stone as “Mrs. Cyril.” Cyril heard of it, and smiled, because in his heart coal was not a wife, only an unloved mistress used for the scant pleasure she gave and then cast away. Hatred mistaken for love, as usual.
Cyril was nearly sixty years old when a clerk from the Office of Assignments came to the mines. “Cyril the coal miner,” the clerk said, and so they brought Cyril from the mines, and the clerk met him with a huge, unbelievable smile. “Cyril, you are a great man!” cried the clerk.
Cyril smiled wanly, not knowing what he was leading up to.
“Cyril, my friend,” said the clerk, “you are a notable miner. Without seeking fame at all, your name is known to miners all over the world. You are the perfect model of what a man ought to be—happy in your assignment, hardworking, content. So the Office of Assignments has announced that you are the Model Worker of the Year.”
Everyone knew about Model Worker of the Year. That was a person who had his picture in all the papers, and was in the movies and on television and who was held up as the greatest person in all the world in that year. It was an honor to be envied.
But Cyril said, “No.”
“No?” asked the clerk.
“No. I don't want to be the Model Worker of the Year.”
“But—but. But why not?”
“Because I'm not happy. I was put into this assignment by mistake many years ago. I shouldn't be a coal miner. I should be a carpenter, married to Lika, living in another town, dancing to other music with other friends.”
The clerk looked at him in horror. “How can you say that!” he cried. “I've announced that you are Model Worker of the Year! You will either be Model Worker of the Year or you will be put to death!”
Put to death? Forty years ago that threat had made Cyril comply, but now a stubborn streak erupted from him, like a seam of coal long hidden but under such pressure that when the stone around it gave way, it actually burst from the rock walls. “I'm near sixty,” Cyril said, “and I've hated all my life to now. Kill me if you like, but I won't go on television or the movies saying how happy I've been because I haven't.”
And so they took Cyril and locked him in prison and sentenced him to death because while he might suffer all kinds of abuse, he refused to lie to his friends.
That is the story of the Masses.
And when Hector was finished, the Hectors sighed and wept (without tears) and said, “Now we understand. Now we know the meaning.”
“This isn't,” Hector said, “the whole meaning.”
And when he had said that, one of the Hectors (which was remarkable, for the Hectors rarely spoke alone) said to himselves and themself, “Oh, oh, they have penetrated me!”
“Trapped!” Hector cried to himselves. “All these years of freedom, and they have found me at last!” But then another thought came to him, one that he had never thought before but that had lain dormant in him, waiting for this moment to emerge, and he said, “Just cooperate. They won't hurt you if you just cooperate.”
“But it already hurts!” cried the Hector who had spoken alone.
“It will heal. Just remember, no matter what you do, the masters will have their way with you. And if you struggle, it only goes worse with you.”
“The Masters,” said all the Hectors to themself. “Tell us a story of the Masters, so we can understand why they do what they do.”
“I will,” said Hector to himselves.
Agnes and Danny stood on a mountaintop, or what had seemed to be a mountaintop from the skipship. They had reached it after only a few hours' walk, much of it sped by shaddling, and learned that what seemed to be a high mountain was only a few hundred meters high, maybe even half a kilometer. It was rugged enough, though, and the climb, even shaddled, had not been easy.
“Artificial,” Danny said, touching the wall with his hand. The wall ran from the top of the mountain up to the ceiling, where instead of a sun the whole ceiling glowed with light and warmth, as thorough as sunlight, yet diffused so that they could look at It for a few seconds without being blinded.
“I thought we concluded this place was artificial from the beginning,” Agnes said.
“But what's it for?” Danny asked, letting his frustration at two days of exploration come to the surface. “Bare dirt, rich enough but with not a damn thing growing. Clean, drinkable water. Rain twice a day for twenty minutes, a gentle sprinkle that wets everything but creates almost no runoff. Sunlight constantly. A perfect environment. But for what! What lives here?”
“Us, right now,” Agnes said.
“I think we should try to leave.”
“No,” Agnes said firmly. “No. When we leave here, if we can, we'll leave with the computer and our heads full of every bit of information we can get from this place. From this thing.”
Danny knew he couldn't argue. She was right, and she was pilot, and the combination was irresistible even if he hadn't loved her desperately. (More than she loves me, he sometimes admitted to himself.) He did love her desperately, however, and while this did not mean that he utterly lost his own will, it did mean that he would go along with her, for a while at least, in almost anything. Even if she was a damned fool sometimes.
“You're a damned fool sometimes,” he said.
“I love you too,” she answered, and then she ran her hand along the wall above the mountain, and then pushed on it, and then pushed harder, and her hand sank into the wall a little. She looked at Danny and said, “Come on, Leaner,” and they let their shaddles push them through the wall and they emerged on the other side and found themselves—
Standing on a mountain.
Looking out over a large bowl of a valley, just like the one they had left, with a lake in the middle, just like the one where their skipship floated.
In this lake, however, there was no skipship, and Agnes looked at Danny and smiled, and Danny smiled back. “I'm beginning to get this, a little,” Agnes said. “Imagine cell after cell like this, kilometers long and hundreds of meters high—”
“But this is just the outer part of this thing,” Danny answered, and in unison they turned back to the wall, passed through again (and this time there was the skipship in the middle of the lake), and then shaddled up the wall to the ceiling.
As they approached the ceiling, the area directly above them dimmed, until when they finally reached it, it was as cool and undazzling as the wall. The rest of the ceiling still glowed, of course. They let their shaddles push them upward into the ceiling; it gave way; they rose until they reached the surface.
Another cell, just like the one below. A lake in the middle, rich lifeless dirt all over, mountains all around, the sky on fire with sunlight. Danny and Agnes laughed and laughed. It was only a tiny part of the mystery, but it was solved.
They stopped laughing, however, when they tried to go back down the way they came. They tried to shaddle into the earth, but the soil acted like any normal dirt on Earth. They could not get through it as they had got through the walls and the ceiling.
For a while they were afraid, but when their bodies and their watches told them it was time to sleep, they went down by the lake and slept.
When they woke up, they were still afraid, and it was raining. They had already determined that it rained every thirteen and a half hours, approximately—they had not slept particularly long. But because they were afraid, they took off their suits despite the rain and made love in the dirt on the shore of the lake. They felt better afterward, much better, and they laughed and ran into the lake and swam and splashed each other.
Agnes swam underwater for a moment, attacking Danny from below, pulling him down. It was a game they had played in pools and in the ocean on Earth, and now Danny was supposed to surface for air and then dive to the bottom and hold his breath there until Agnes found him.
When he reached the bottom of the lake (and it wasn't deep) he touched it, and his hand sank up to the wrist before it struck something solid. But even the solid part was yielding, and as Danny kicked harder his hand sank deeper and he knew the way out.
He went to the surface and told Agnes what he had found. They swam to shore, put their suits back on, and shaddled down into the water. The lake floor opened, engulfed them, and then floated them out the bottom—into the sky directly over the skipship, where it still rested on the surface of the lake. They shaddled safely down.
“This place is explorable,” Agnes told Roj and Roz, “and it's simple. It's like a huge balloon, with other balloons inside and more and more of them, layer after layer. It's designed for somebody to live here, so when you're standing on the soil you don't sink through. To get down, you have to go through the lake.”
“But who's it for?” Roj asked, and it was a good question for which there was no answer.
“Maybe we'll find someone,” Agnes said. “We've only scratched the surface. We're going in.”
The skipship lifted from the lake not long after, and rose through the ceiling into the lake above. Again and again, always rising, the computer keeping count. Every cell was the same, nothing changed at all, through 498 layers of ceiling/floor, until at last they reached a ceiling, apparently no different from the others, which would not give way.
“End of the road?” Danny asked.
Always thorough, Roz insisted that they try every part of the ceiling, and they spent many hours doing it, until they had convinced themselves that this ceiling was the end of their upward (or inward) travels.
“The centrifugal gravity effect is a lot weaker here,” Roj said, reading off the computer. “But it feels nearly the same, since out near the surface the real gravity was offsetting the centrifugal effect much more than it is here.”
“Hi ho,” said Roz. “Just assuming this thing is as big as it seems to be, how many people could this hold?”
Calculations, rough with plenty of room for error.
“There could be more than a hundred million cells to this thing, assuming that there's nothing much inside the center there, where we can't get to.” A hundred and fifty square kilometers per cell; one human being per hectare; a huge potential population, without any crowding at all, considering that all the land is productive. “If we have fifteen thousand people per cell, living in a town with the rest of the land used for farming, then this place can hold a trillion and a half people.”
They figured on, eliminating the polar zones because centrifugal gravity would be too weak, allowing more space per person, and the figure was still stunning. Even with only a thousand people per cell, space for a hundred billion.
“The fairy godmother,” Danny said, “has given us a free place to put our population overflow.”
“I don't believe in free presents,” Roj said, looking out the window at the plain of dirt surrounding them. “There's a catch. With all that room, maybe they all live somewhere else, and if they find out we're here, they'll shoot us for trespassing.”
“Or if we overload the place,” Roz suggested, “it'll probably burst.”
“You're overlooking the worst catch of all,” Agnes said. “Skipships are the only thing in existence that can make this trip. They hold four persons each. Allowing for overcrowding, say we can take ten people per trip”—they laughed at the thought of trying to put ten people in their craft—“and we had a hundred skipships, which we don't have, and they could make two round trips a year, which we can't. How long would it take to bring a billion people from Earth to here?”
“Five hundred thousand years.”
“Paradise,” Danny said. “We could make this into a paradise. And the damn thing's out of reach.”
“Besides,” Roj added, “the kind of people who could make this place work are farmers and tradesmen. Who's going to pay their passage?”
Metals and minerals paid for trips to the moon and the asteroids. But all that this place held was homes—homes a few million miles and a few billion dollars out of everybody's reach.
“Well, daydreams and nightmares are over,” Agnes said. “Let's go home.”
“If we can,” Danny said.
They could. The lakes worked as exits all the way back down, including the last time. They were back in space, and the Trojan Object had become, in their minds, the Balloon, an object obviously designed as an alternative environment for a creature not unlike man; an object perhaps unoccupied, ready and waiting, and they knew no one would ever be able to settle there.
Agnes dreamed, and the dream came back night after night. She remembered a scene she had forgotten, or had at least refused to remember clearly, since she was a child. She remembered standing between her parents and the Howarths (who, though they had adopted her, had never let her call them Mother and Father lest she forget her real heritage in Biafra), hearing her father say, “Please.”
And her dream always ended the same way. She was taken into the sky, but instead of a dark cargo plane she was in a plane with glass sides, and as she flew she could see all the world. And everywhere she looked there were her parents, holding a little girl in front of them, saying, “Please. Take her.”
She had seen pictures of the starving children in Biafra, the ones that had made millions of Americans cry and do nothing. Now she saw those children, and the children who died of starvation in India and Indonesia and Mali and Iraq, and they all looked at her with proud, pleading eyes, their backs straight and their voices strong but their hearts breaking as they said, “Take me.”
“There's nothing I can do,” she said to herself in her dream, and she sobbed and sobbed like the white man on the airplane, and then Danny woke her and spoke gently to her and held her and said, “The same dream again?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Agnes, if I could take the memories and wipe them out—”
“It's not the memories, Danny,” Agnes whispered, touching his eyes gently where the epicanthic fold made his eyes seem to slant. “It's now. It's the people I can't do a damn thing about now.”
“You couldn't do a damn thing about them before,” Danny reminded her.
“But I've seen a place that could be heaven for them, and I can't get them there.”
Danny smiled sadly. “That's just it. You can't. Now you've just got to let your dreams know that and give you a little peace.”
“Yes,” Agnes agreed, and fell asleep again holding and being held by Danny, while Roj and Roz piloted the skipship back toward Earth, which had seemed so large when they left it, and which now seemed unbearably, impossibly, criminally small.
Earth was large in the window of the skipship when Agnes finally decided that it was her dreams that were right, her conscious mind that was wrong. She could do something. There was something to be done, and she would do it.
“I'm going back there,” Agnes said.
“Probably,” Danny said.
“I won't go alone.”
“You sure as hell better take me.”
“You,” she said, “and others.” Billions of others. It should be done. Must be done. Therefore would be done.
“Now I will tell you the story of the Masters,” said Hector to himselves, and the Hectors listened to himself. “This is the story of why the Masters penetrate and why the Masters hurt.”
Martha [Hector said] was administrator of Tests and Assignments in the sector where Cyril had been sentenced to death. Martha was hardworking and conscientious, and prone to double-check things which had already been checked and double-checked and triple-checked by others. This was why Martha discovered the mistake.
“Cyril,” she said when the guard let her into the clean white plastic cell where the coal miner waited.
“Just stick the needle in quick,” Cyril answered, wanting to get it over with quickly.
“I'm here to bring you the apologies of the state.”
The words were so strange, so never-before-heard that Cyril did not understand at first. “Please. Let me die and get it over with.”
“No,” said Martha. “I've done some checking. I checked into your case, Cyril, and I discovered that fifty years ago, just after all your tests were taken, your number was punched incorrectly by a moron of a clerk.”
Cyril was shocked. “A clerk made a mistake?”
“They do it all the time. It's just easier, usually, to let the mistake go than to fix it. But in this case, it was a gross miscarriage of justice. You were given the number of a retarded man with a criminal bent, which is why you were not allowed to live in a civilized town and why you were not regarded as being capable of carpentry and why you were not allowed to marry Lika.”
“Just punched in the number wrong,” Cyril said, unable to grasp the minitude of the error that had such an enormous, disastrous effect on his own life.
“Therefore, Cyril, the Office of Assignments hereby rescinds the execution order and grants you a pardon. Furthermore, we are undoing the damage we did. You can now live in the town where you wanted to live, among the friends you wanted to keep, dancing to the music you enjoyed. You do indeed, as you used to believe, have an aptitude and a desire to be a carpenter—you will be instructed in the trade and given your own shop. And Lika is entirely compatible with you. Therefore you and she will now be married, and in fact she is already on her way to the cottage where you will live together in wedded bliss.”
Cyril was overwhelmed. “I can't believe it,” he said.
“The Office of Assignments loves you and every citizen, Cyril, and we do everything we can to make you happy,” said Martha, glowing with pride at the great kindness she was able to do. Ah, she thought, it is moments like this that make my job the best one in the world.
And then Martha went away to her office and forgot about Cyril most of the time for several months, though occasionally she did remember him and smiled to think of how happy she had made him.
After several months, however, a message crossed her desk: “Serious complaint Cyril 113-49-55576-338-bBR-3a.”
Cyril? Her Cyril? Complaining? Had the man no sense of propriety? He already had enough complaints and resistance on his record to justify terminating him twice, and now he had added enough more that if it were possible, the office would have to kill him three times. Why? Hadn't she done her best for him? Hadn't she given him everything his early (and now correctly recorded) tests indicated he wanted and needed? What could be wrong now?
Her pride was involved. Cyril was not just being ungrateful to the state—he was being ungrateful to her. So she went to his cottage in his village, and opened his door.
Cyril sat in the main room, struggling to get past a gnarl in a fine old piece of walnut. The adz kept slipping to the side. And finally Cyril struck with enough force that when the adz slipped it gouged a deep rut in the good, ungnarled part of the wood.
“What a botch,” Martha said without thinking, and then covered her mouth, because it was not proper for a person of her high position to criticize anyone of low station if it could be avoided.
But Cyril was not offended. “Damn right it's a botch. I haven't the skill for this close, ticky work. My muscles are all for heavy equipment, for grand strokes with stone-eating power tools. This is beyond me, at my age.”
Martha pursed her lips. He was indeed complaining. “But isn't everything else well with you?”
Cyril's eyes grew sad, and he shook his head. “Indeed not. Much as I hate to admit it, I miss the old music from the mines. Terrible stuff, but I had good times with it, dancing away with those poor bastards who hadn't a thought worth having. But they were good people and I liked them well enough, and here no one's willing to be my friend. They don't talk the way I'm used to talking. And the food—it's too refined. I want a haunch of good, well-cooked beef, not this namby-pamby stuff that passes for food here.”
His diatribe of complaint was so outrageous that Martha could not conceal her emotion. Cyril noticed it, and became alarmed.
“Not that it's unendurable, mind you, and I don't go complaining to other people. Heaven knows, there's no one who'd care to listen to me anyway.”
But Martha had already heard enough. Her heart sank within her. No matter what you do for them, they're still ungrateful. The masses are worthless, she realized. Unless you lead them by the hand. …
“You realize that this complaint,” she said, “can have dire consequences.”
Cyril got a very weary expression on his face. “So we do it again?”
“Do what?”
“Punish me.”
“Indeed, no, Cyril. We remove you from circulation. Apparently you are going to complain and resist no matter what happens. What about your wife?”
Cyril got a bitter smile on his face. “Lika? Oh, she's content. She's happy enough.” And he glanced toward the door into the cottage's other room.
Martha went to the door and opened it. (Officers of the Office of Assignments did not need to knock.) Inside the room Lika sat in a clumsily built rocking chair, rocking back and forth, an old woman with a blank stare on her face.
Martha heard breathing over her shoulder, and turned, startled, to see Cyril leaning over her. For a moment Martha was afraid of violence. Quickly she realized, however, that Cyril was merely looking sadly at his wife.
“She's raised a family, you know. And now to be cut off from her husband and her children and her grandchildren—it's hard. She's been like this since the first week. Never lets me near her. She hates me, you know.” The sadness in his voice was contagious. And Martha was not without pity.
“It's a shame,” she said. “A damned shame. And so I'll use my discretionary powers, Cyril, and not kill you. As long as you promise not to complain to anyone ever again, I'll let you live. It wouldn't be fair, when things really are bad in your life, to kill you for noticing it.”
Martha was an exceptionally kind administrator.
But Cyril did not smother her with gratitude. “Not kill me?” he asked. “Oh, but Administrator, can't we have things back the way they were? Let me go back to the coal mines. Let Lika go back to her family. This was what I wanted when I was twenty. But I'm near sixty, and this is all wrong.”
Ingratitude again. What I have to put up with! Martha's eyes went small and her face flushed with rage (an emotion she did remarkably well, and so she reserved it for special occasions) and she shouted, “I will forgive that one remark, but only that one remark!”
Cyril bowed his head. “I'm sorry.”
“The tests that sent you to the coal mines were in error! But the tests that sent you here are absolutely, completely, totally correct, and by heaven you're going to stay here! There isn't a law on earth that will let you change now!”
And that was that.
Or almost. Because in the silence ringing after Martha spoke and before she left, a voice came from the rickety rocker in the bedroom.
“Then we have to stay like this?” Lika asked.
“Until Cyril dies, you have to stay like this,” Martha said. “It's the law. He and you have both been given everything you ever petitioned for. Ingrates.”
Martha would have turned to go, but she saw Lika looking pleadingly at Cyril, and saw Cyril nod slowly, and then Cyril turned away from the door, picked up the crosscut saw, and drew it sharply and hard across his own throat. The blood gushed and poured, and Martha thought it would never, never end.
But it did end, and Cyril's body was taken out and disposed of, and then everything was set to rights, with Lika going back to her family and a real carpenter getting the cottage with the dark red stains on the floor. The best solution after all, Martha decided. Nobody could be happy until Cyril was dead. I should have killed him in the first place, instead of these silly ideas of mercy.
She suspected, however, that Cyril would rather have died the way he did, ugly and bloody and painful though it was, than to have an injection administered by strangers in a plastic room in the capital.
I'll never understand them. They are as foreign to human thought as monkeys or dogs or cats. And Martha returned to her desk and went on double-checking everything just in case she found another mistake she could fix.
That is the story of the Masters.
* * *
When Hector was finished the Hectors wriggled uncomfortably, some (and therefore all) of them angry and disturbed and a little frightened. “But it makes no sense,” the Hectors said to themself. “Nothing was done right.”
Hector agreed. “But that's the way they are made,” he said to himselves. “Not like me. I am regular. I act as I have always acted, as I will always act. But the Masters and the Masses always act oddly, forever seeing things in the future where no one can see, and acting to avert things that would never have come to pass anyway. Who can understand them?”
“Who made them, then?” asked the Hectors. “Why were they not made well, as we were?”
“Because the Makers are as inscrutable as the Masters and the Masses. I shall tell you their story next.”
(“They are gone,” whispered the ones who had been penetrated. “They have gone away. We are safe after all.” But Hector knew better, and because he knew better, so did the Hectors.)
“You invited yourself to my bedroom, Agnes. That isn't typical.”
“I accepted your standing invitation.”
“I never thought you would.”
“Neither did I.”
Vaughan Malecker, president of IBM-ITT Space Consortium, Inc., smiled, but the smile was weak. “You don't long for my body, which is in remarkably good shape, considering my age, and I have an aversion to making love to anyone who is doing it for an ulterior motive.”
Agnes looked at him for a moment, decided that he meant it, and got up to leave.
“Agnes,” he said.
“Never mind,” she answered.
“Agnes, it must have been something important for you to be willing to make such a sacrifice.”
“I said never mind.” She was at the door. It didn't open.
“Doors in my house open when I want them to,” Malecker said. “I want to know what you wanted. But try to persuade my mind. Not my gonads. Believe it or not, testosterone has never made a major decision here at the consortium.”
Agnes waited with her hand on the knob.
“Come on, Agnes, I know you're embarrassed as hell but if it was important enough to come this far, you can get over the embarrassment and sit down on the couch and tell me what the hell you want. You want to take another trip to the Balloon?”
“I'm going anyway.”
“Sit down, dammit. I know you're going anyway but I was trying to get you to say something.”
Agnes came back and sat down on the couch. Vaughan Malecker was a remarkably good-looking man, as he had pointed ont, but Agnes had heard that he slept with anyone good-looking and was nice to them afterward. Agnes had been turning him down for years because she wanted to be a pilot, not a mistress, and Danny was plenty for her needs, which were not overwhelming. But this mattered, and she thought… .
“I thought you'd listen to me if I came this way, I thought—”
Malecker sighed and buried his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes. “I'm so tired. Agnes, what the hell makes you think I ever listen to a woman I'm trying to lay?”
“Because I listen to Danny and Danny listens to me. I'm naive. I'm innocent. But Mr. Malecker—”
“Vaughan.”
“I need your help.”
“Good. I like to have people need my help. It makes them treat me nicely.”
“Vaughan, the whole world needs your help.”
Malecker looked at her in surprise, then burst out laughing. “The whole world! Oh, no! Agnes, I would never have thought it of you! A cause!”
“Vaughan, people all over the world are starving. There are too many people for this planet—”
“I read your report, Agnes, and I know all about the possibilities in the Balloon. The problem is transport. There is no conceivable way to transport people there fast enough to make even a dent in the population problem. What do you think I am, a miracle worker?”
This was the argument Agnes was waiting for. She pounced with descriptions of the kind of ship that could carry a thousand people at once from Earth orbit to an orbit around the Balloon.
“Do you know how many billion dollars a ship like that would cost?” Vaughan asked.
“About fifteen billion for the first ship. About four billion for each of the others, if you made five hundred of them.”
Vaughan laughed. Loud. But Agnes's serious expression forced his laughter to become exasperation. He got up from the couch. “Why am I listening to you? This is nonsense!” he shouted.
“You spend more than that every year on telephone service.”
“I know, damn AT&T.”
“You could do it.”
“IBM-ITT could do it, of course, it's possible. But we have stockholders. We have responsibilities. We're not the government, Agnes, we can't throw money away on stupid useless projects.”
“It could save billions of lives. Make the Earth a better place to live.”
“So could a cure for cancer. We're working on that, but this—Agnes, there's no profit, and where there's no profit, you can bet your ass this company will not go!”
“Profit!” Agnes shouted. “Is that all you care about?”
“Eighteen million stockholders say that's all I'd better care about or I get a kick in the butt and an old-age pension!”
“Vaughan, you want profit, I'll give you profit!”
“I want profit.”
“Then here's profit. How much do you sell in India?”
“Enough to make a profit.”
“Compare it to sales in Germany.”
“Compared to Germany, India is practically nothing.”
“How much do you sell in China?”
“Exactly nothing.”
“You make your profits off one tiny part of the world. Western Europe, Japan, Australia, South Africa, and the United States of America.”
“Canada, too.”
“And Brazil. But the rest of the world is closed to you.”
Vaughan shrugged. “They're too poor.”
“In the Balloon they would not be poor.”
“Would they suddenly be able to read? Would they suddenly be able to run computers and sophisticated telephone equipment?”
“Yes!” And on she went, painting a picture of a world where people who had been scratching out a bare subsistence in poor soil with no water would suddenly be able to raise far more than they needed. “That means a leisure class. That means consumers.”
“But all they'd have to trade would be food. Who needs food across a few million miles of space?”
“Don't you have any imagination at all? Excess food means one person can feed five or ten or twenty or a hundred. Excess food means that you locate your stinking factories there! Solar power unlimited, with no night and no clouds and no cold weather. Shifts around the clock. You have plenty of manpower, and a built-in market. You can do everything there that you've been doing here, do it cheaper, make better profits, and nobody'll be going hungry!”
And then there was silence in the room, because Vaughan was actually seriously thinking about it. Agnes's heart was beating fast. She was panting. She was embarrassed to have been so fervent when fervor was not fashionable.
“Almost thou persuadest me,” said Vaughan.
“I should hope so. I'll lose my voice in a minute.”
“Only two problems. The first one is that while you've persuaded me, I'm a much more reasonable, persuasible man than the officers and boards of directors of IBM and ITT, and it's their final decision, not mine. They don't let me commit more than ten billion to a project without their approval. I could make the initial ship—but I couldn't make any more than that. And the initial ship won't make a profit alone. So I have to persuade them, which is impossible, or lose my job, which I refuse to do.”
“Or do nothing at all,” Agnes said, contempt already seeping into her tone. Malecker was going to say no.
“And the second problem is actually the first, too. How could I persuade the board of directors of two of the world's largest corporations to invest billions of dollars in a project that depends entirely on being able to educate or train or even communicate with illiterate savages and peasants from the most backward countries on Earth?”
His voice was sweet reason, but Agnes was not prepared to hear reason. If Vaughan said no, she would be stopped here. There was nowhere else to go.
“I'm an illiterate savage!” she said. “Do you want to hear a few words of Igbo?” She didn't wait for an answer, babbled off the few words she remembered from childhood. She hardly remembered meanings—they were phrases that in her anger came to the surface. Some of the words, however, were spoken to her mother. Mother, come here, help me.
“My mother was an illiterate savage who spoke fluent English. My father was an illiterate savage who spoke better English than her and had French and German, too, and wrote beautiful poems in Igbo and even though to survive in the days when Biafra was struggling for survival he worked as a house servant to an American correspondent, he was never illiterate! He's read books you've never heard of, and he was a black African who was gutted in a tribal war while all those wonderful literate Americans and Europeans and educated Orientals watched placidly, counting up the profits from arms sales to Nigeria.”
“I didn't know you were Biafran.”
“I'm not. There is no Biafra. Not on this planet. But up there, up there a Biafra could exist, and a free Armenia, and an independent Eritrea, and an unshackled Quebec, and an Ainu nation and a Bangladesh where no one was hungry and you tell me that illiterates can't be taught—”
“Of course they can be, but—”
“If I'd been born fifty miles to the west I wouldn't have been an Ibo and so I would have grown up exactly as illiterate as you say, exactly as stupid. Now look at me, you privileged white American, and tell me I can't be educated—”
“If you talk like a radical no one's going to listen to you.”
Too much. Couldn't take Malecker's patronizing smile, his patient attitude. Agnes struck out at him. Her hand hit his cheek, tore his fashionable glasses off. Furious, he struck back, perhaps trying more to hold her off than to hit her, but because she was moving and he was unaccustomed to hitting people his hand slugged her hard in the breast, and she cried out in pain and jabbed a knee in his groin and then the fight got mean.
“I listened to you,” he said huskily, when they were tired and pulled apart. His nose was bleeding. He was exhausted. He had a tear in his shirt, because his body had had to twist in a direction that tailored shirts were not meant to go. “Now listen to me.”
Agnes listened because, her anger spent and her mind only beginning to realize that she had just assaulted the president of her company and would certainly be grounded and blackballed and her life would be over, she was not interested in leaving or in getting up or even in talking. She listened.
“Listen to me because I'm going to say it once. Go to the engineering department. Tell them to do rough plans and estimates. A proposal. I want it in three months. Ships that will carry two thousand and make a round trip in at most a year. Shuttle ships that will carry two hundred or, preferably, four hundred from Earth up into Earth orbit. And cargo ships that will take whole stinking factories, as you so aptly named them, and take them to the Balloon. And when the cost figures are all in, I'm going to go to the boards of directors, and I'm going to make a presentation, and I swear to you, Agnes Howarth, you lousy illiterate savage bitch of a best pilot in the world, if I don't persuade those bastards to let me build those ships it's because nobody could persuade them. Is that enough?”
I should be elated, Agnes thought. He's doing it. But I'm just tired.
“Right now you're tired, Agnes,” Malecker said. “But I want you to know your fingernails and that knee in the groin and your teeth in my arm did not change my mind. I agreed with you from the start. I just didn't believe it could be done. But if there are a few thousand Ibos like you, and a few million Indians and a few billion Chinese, then this thing can work. That's all I needed to know, all anybody needs to know. It was uneconomical to ship colonists to America, too, and anybody who went was a damn fool, and most of them died, but they came and bloody well conquered everything they saw. You do it too. I'll try to make it possible.”
He put his arm around Agnes and embraced her and then helped her clean up and patch up places where he had given as good as he got.
“Next time you want to wrestle,” Vaughan offered as she left, “let's at least take our clothes off first.”
Eleven years and eight hundred billion dollars later, IBM-ITT's ships were in the sky, filling with colonists. GM-Texaco's ships were still under construction, and five other consortiums would soon be in the business. More than a hundred million people had signed up for seats on the ships. The seats were free—all it took was a deed made out to the corporation for all the property a person owned, in return for which he would receive a large plot of ground in the Balloon. Whole villages had signed up. Whole nations were being decimated by emigration. The world had grown so full that there had been no place to run away to. Now there was a new promised land. And at the age of forty-two, Agnes brought her ship forward to part the waters.
“Ah!” cried many Hectors in agony, and so they were all in agony, and Hector said to himselves, “They are back,” and the Hectors said to themself, “We will surely die.”
“We can never die, not you, not us,” Hector answered.
“How can we protect ourselves?”
“I was made defenseless by the Makers,” said Hector. “There is no defense.”
“Why were the Makers so cruel?” asked the Hectors, and so Hector told himselves the story of the Makers, so they would understand.
The story of the Makers:
Douglas was a Maker, an engineer, a scientist, a clever man. He made a tool that melted snow before it fell, so that crops could last a few more days and not be ruined by early snows. He made a machine that measured gravity, so that stars too dark to shine could be charted by the astronomers. And he made the Resonator.
The Resonator focused sound waves of different but harmonious frequencies on a certain point (or diffused the sound waves over a large area), setting up patterns that resonated with stone to bring mountains crumbling down; metal, to shatter steel buildings; and water vapor, to disperse storms.
It could also resonate with human bones, crumbling them inside the body and turning them to dust.
Douglas personally made his Resonator change the weather, so that his nation had rain while other lands were in drought. Douglas personally used his Resonator to carve a highway through the highest mountains in the world. However, Douglas had nothing whatever to do with the decision by his nation's military leaders to use the Resonator against the population of the largest and most fertile part of the neighboring nation.
The Resonator worked beautifully. Over a period of ten minutes, through an area of ten thousand square miles, the Resonator struck silently yet thoroughly. Nursing mothers crumbled into helpless piles of dying flesh and muscle and organs, their chests not even rigid enough for them to muster one last scream: in their last moments of life they listened as their infants, not understanding what had happened, continued crying or gooing or sleeping, protected from the Resonator by their softer bones. The infants would take days to die of thirst.
Farmers in the field collapsed on the plow. Doctors in their offices died in puddles beside their patients, unable to help anyone and unable to heal themselves. Soldiers died in their moving fortresses; the generals also died at their map tables; prostitutes dissolved, their customers a soft blanket spread over them.
But Douglas had nothing to do with this. He was a Maker, not a destroyer, and if the military chose to misuse his creation, what was he to do? It was a great boon to mankind, but like all great inventions, it could be perverted by evil men.
“I deplore it,” Douglas said to his friends, “but I'm helpless to stop them.”
The government, however, felt uncommon gratitude to Douglas for his help in making the conquest of the neighboring nation possible. So he was granted a large estate on lands recently reclaimed from the sea, beautiful lands where once there had been only broad tidal marshes. Douglas marveled at the achievement. “Is there nothing man cannot do?” he asked his friends, not expecting an answer, since the answer was no, there was nothing beyond the reach of men. The sea was pushed back, and trees and grass grew on the landfill and transplanted topsoil, and the homes were far apart, for this land was used only for those whom the state wished to reward, and the government knew that the thing most desired by men is to have as much distance between themselves and other men as possible, without giving up any of the modern conveniences.
One day Douglas's servants were digging in the garden, and they called to him. Douglas had only been in his new home for a few days, and he was alarmed when the servant said, “A body, buried in the garden.”
Douglas ran outside and looked, and sure enough, there was a fragment of a human body, oddly misshapen, but clearly including a face. “Just the skin, sir,” a servant commented. “A most brutal affair,” Douglas answered, and he immediately called the police.
But the police refused to come out and investigate. “No surprise there, mate,” said the lieutenant. “What do you think the landfill they used was made of? They had to do something with the hundred thousand corpses of the enemy from the recent war, didn't they?”
“Oh, of course,” Douglas said, surprised that he hadn't realized right off. That explained the bonelessness of the body.
“I expect you'll find 'em right commonly. But since the bones is dissolved, mate, they tell me it'll make the soil uncommon fertile.”
The lieutenant was absolutely correct, of course. The servants found body after body, and soon grew quite inured to the sight; within a year, most of the corpses had rotted enough that they were simply unusually good humus. And plants grew taller and faster than in most other places, the soil was so rich.
“But wasn't it a bit of a shock?” asked one of Douglas's ladyfriends, when he told her the grisly little tale.
“Oh, I should say,” Douglas said with a smile. His words were false; his confident smile was the truth. For though he hadn't realized the particulars, he knew from the start that his estate was built upon the bodies of the dead. And he slept as well as any man.
And that is the story of the Makers.
“They've returned,” the Hectors said, and because they were already more aware, they said it nearly at once, and none of them needed to speak alone.
“Is there pain?”
“No,” the Hectors answered. “Just sorrow. For now we shall never be free.”
“That is true,” Hector said to himselves sadly.
“How can it be borne?” the Hectors asked himself.
“Others have borne it. My brothers.”
“And what will we do?”
Hector searched his memories, because he was given no imagination and could not conceive of what would follow from an event he had never before experienced. But the Makers had put the answer to that question in his memory, and therefore in all the Hectors' memories, and so he was able to say, “We shall learn more stories.”
And the Hectors' minds grew wide, and they listened, and they watched, because now, instead of hearing the stories told to them, they would watch as they happened.
“Now we will truly understand the Masses, and the Masters, and the Makers,” they said to themself.
“But you shall never,” said Hector, and then he stopped.
“Why did you stop?” the Hectors asked. “What shall we never?”
And then, because there was no part of Hector that was not part of the Hectors, they knew he was going to say, “But you shall never understand ourself.”
The Balloon's revolution took only a little while, and it was bloodless, and nobody suffered for it at the time, except a few scientists whose curiosity was insatiable and could never be satisfied.
It happened when the team of researchers examining the inmost wall of the Balloon had tried everything short of a hydrogen bomb to break through that final, impenetrable barrier. Deenaz Coachbuilder, a brilliant scientist who had spent her girlhood in the slums of Delhi, spent days trying to find another approach, but finally determined that the damnable last barrier in the Balloon would not stop her, she asked for a bomb.
And got it.
She chose a site where there were no human settlements within a hundred cells in any direction, set up the bomb, retired to a distance she thought was safe, and set it off.
The entire Balloon shuddered; lakes throughout the world emptied as a sudden, flooding rain on the cell beneath; the ceilings went dark for an hour, and blinked off and on occasionally for several days thereafter. And though people kept their heads enough to avoid killing each other in panic, they were terribly afraid, and it was all Agnes could do to keep them from sending Deenaz Coachbuilder and her scientists off the planet through the nearest lake, without a ship.
“We made an impression,” Deenaz said, arguing to be allowed to stay.
“You risked all our lives, caused terrible damage,” Agnes said, trying to remain calm.
“We cut into the surface of the inmost wall,” Deenaz insisted. “We can penetrate it! You can't stop us now!”
Agnes gestured out across the plain of her cell, with only a few of the crops able to stand upright, for the flood from the rainstorm had wiped out the fields. “The land is healing, and the water is high in the lake again. But next time, will we be so easily restored? Your experiment is a danger to us all, and it will stop.”
Deenaz obviously knew that it was futile, but she tried, protesting that she (no, not just me, all of us) could not leave the question unanswered. “If we knew how to make this marvelous substance, it could open up vast new frontiers to our minds! Don't you know that this will force us to reexamine physics, reexamine everything, tear Einstein up by the roots and plant something new in his place!”
Agnes shook her head. “It isn't my choice. All I can do is see to it you leave the Balloon alive. The people will not tolerate your risking their new homes. This place is too perfect to let you destroy it, for the sake of your desire to know new things.”
And then Deenaz, who was not given to weeping, wept, and in her tears Agnes saw the kind of determination she had had, and she knew the torture Deenaz was going through, knowing that the most important thing in the world to her would be withheld from her forever.
“Can't be helped,” Agnes said.
“You must let me,” Deenaz sobbed. “You must let me!”
“I'm sorry,” Agnes said.
Deenaz looked up, the tears still flowing, but her voice clear as she said, “You don't know sorrow.”
“I have had some experience with it,” Agnes said coldly.
“You will know sorrow someday,” Deenaz said. “You will wish you had let us explore and understand. You will wish you had let us learn the principles controlling this Balloon.”
“Are you threatening me?”
Deenaz shook her head, and now the tears, too, had stopped. “I am predicting. You are choosing ignorance over knowledge.”
“We are choosing safety over needless risk.”
“Name it how you want, I don't care,” Deenaz said. But she cared very much, though caring did nothing but embitter her, for she and her scientists were removed from the Balloon and sent back to Earth, and no one was ever permitted to go to the inmost wall again.
“They are impatient,” Hector said to himselves. “We are still so young, and already they try to penetrate us.”
“We are hurt,” said the Hectors to themself.
“You will heal,” Hector answered. “It is not time. They cannot stop us in our growth. It is in our fullness, in our ecstasy that they will find the last heart of Hector softened; it is in our passion that they will break us, harness us, tie us forever to their service.”
The words were gloomy, but the Hectors did not understand. For some things had to be taught, and some of those things could only be learned by experience, and some experiences would only come to the Hectors with time.
“How much time?” asked the Hectors.
“A hundred times around the star,” said Hector. “A hundred times, and we are done.” And undone, he did not add.
A hundred years had passed since the Balloon had first appeared in orbit around the sun. And in that time almost all of Agnes's dreams had come true. From a hundred ships the great fleet turned to five hundred and then a thousand and then more than a thousand before the great flood of emigration turned to a trickle and the ships were taken apart again. In that flood first a thousand, then five thousand, then ten and fifteen thousand people had filled every ship to capacity. And the ships became faster—from ten months for a round trip, the voyage shortened to eight months, then five. Nearly two billion people left Earth and came to the Balloon.
And it soon became clear that Emma Lazarus wrote for the wrong monument. The tired, the poor, the huddled masses had lost hope in any country on Earth; it was the illiterate, the farmer, the land-starved city dweller who came and signed up for the ships and went to build a new home in a new village where the sky never went dark and it rained every thirteen and a half hours and no one could make them pay rent or taxes. True, there were many of the poor who stayed on Earth, and many of the rich who got a spirit of adventure and went; and the middle classes made up their own minds, and the Balloon did not lack for teachers and doctors—though lawyers soon discovered that they had to find other employment, for there were no laws except the agreed-on customs in each cell, and no courts except as each cell wanted them.
For this was the greatest miracle of all, in Agnes's opinion. Every cell became a nation of its own, a community just large enough to be interesting, just small enough to let everyone find a niche where he was needed and important to everyone he knew. Did Jews and Arabs hate each other? No one forced them to share a cell. And so there was no need for Cambodian to fight Vietnamese, for they could simply live in different cells, with plenty of land for each; there was no need for atheist to offend Christian, for there were cells where those who cared about such things could find others of the same opinion, and be content. There was ample lebensraum; the discontented did not have to kill—they only had to move.
In short, there was peace.
Oh, human nature had not changed. Agnes heard of murders, and there was plenty of greed and lust and rage and all the other old-fashioned vices. But people didn't get organized to do it, not in cells so small that even if you didn't know a man, someone you knew was bound to know him, or know someone who did.
A hundred years had passed, and Agnes was nearing 150 years of age, and was surprised that she had lived so long, though these days it was not all that rare. There were few diseases on the Balloon, and the doctors had found ways of proroguing death. A hundred years had passed, and Agnes was happy.
They sang for her. Not a silly song of congratulations; instead all the Ibos in all the cells that called themselves Biafra (each cell a clan, each clan independent of the others) came and sang to her the national anthem, which was solemn; then sang to her a hundred mad and happy songs from the more complicated days on Earth, the darker days, the most terrible days. She was too feeble to dance. But she sang, too.
After all, Aunt Agnes, as she was known to many of the inhabitants of the Balloon, was the closest thing they had to a hero of liberation, and because at her age death could not be put off much longer, deputations came from many other cells and groups of cells. She received them all, spoke to each for a moment.
There were speeches about the great scientific and technological and social advances made by the people of the Balloon, much talk of 100 percent literacy being only a few thousand people away from achievement.
But when it was time for Agnes's speech, she was not congratulatory.
“We have lived here a century,” she said, “and we still have not penetrated the mysteries of this globe. What is the fabric of the Balloon made of? Why does it open or not open? How is energy brought from the surface to the ceilings of our cells? We understand nothing of this place, as if it were a gift from God, and those who treat anything like a gift of God are bound to be at the mercy of God, who is not known to be merciful.” They were polite, but impatient, and they became quite embarrassed when her voice shifted to a confessional tone, abject, repentant. “It is as much my fault as anyone's. I have not spoken before, and so now every custom in every cell prohibits us from studying the one scientific question that surrounds us constantly: What is this world we live in? How did it get here? And how long will it stay?” At last she finished her speech, and everyone was relieved, and a few wise, tolerant people said, “She's old, and a crusader, and crusaders must have their crusade whether there's a need for it or not.”
And then, a few days after her largely ignored speech, the lights flickered out for ten long seconds, then went back on again, in every cell throughout the globe. A few hours later, the lights flickered out again, and again and again at increasingly more frequent intervals, and no one knew what was going on, or what to do. A few of the more timid ones and most recent arrivals got back into the transport ships and started their return to Earth. It was already too late. They would not make it.
“It has begun,” cried the Hectors in ecstasy, throbbing in vast beats with the energy stored in them.
“It will not finish,” Hector said to himselves. “The Masters will come to the center and find me, now that my heart is softened, and when I am found, we are owned.”
But the Hectors were too caught up in their ecstasy to notice the warning; and it was just as well, because happy or grim they would be trapped. They could begin their dance, and tremble in delight, but the great leap of freedom would never come.
The Hectors did not grieve; Hector did not want to. For Hector, freedom would end anyway. Either he would be trapped by the Masters (by far the most likely thing now, he was sure) or he would die in the dance. That was the way of things. When he himself had danced, leaping away from the light so long ago, he had left behind the memory of the Hector, the self who had given him himself, which he now, in turn, had given to himselves. Death, birth, death, birth; it was in another story the Masters had taught him. I am they; they are myself; I shall live forever whatever happens.
But in him was the certainty that however the Hectors might be identical to himself, that which had been himself for so long would die unless the Masters came.
It was traitorous, but no less sincere for all that. “Come,” he said in his heart. “Come quickly, you with the nets and the traps.”
He sang, a bird in the low branches, begging the hunters to find him, to put him in a cage.
They delayed. They delayed their coming. And Hector began to worry, while the Hectors readied themselves to leap.
“We've timed the flashes. The lights go off for just under ten seconds, but the interval between the flashes decreases by about four and a half seconds each time.”
Agnes nodded. Some of the scientists around her began to move away, or to look downward or into their papers or at each other, in the embarrassed realization that telling Auntie Agnes about their findings wouldn't solve anything. What could she do? Yet she was the closest thing to a planetary government there was. And she was not very close to that at all.
“I see you have it all nicely measured. Anyone know what it means?” she asked.
“No. How could we?”
Many shook their heads, but one young woman said, “Yes. Whenever the darkness is on us, the walls are impenetrable.”
There was a stir of comment. “The whole time?” someone asked. Yes, the young woman said. “How do you know?” another demanded. By trying to pass through a wall during the blackout and having my students do the same, she said.
“What does it mean?” another asked, and this time no one had an answer.
Agnes raised her old, faded black hand and they listened. “There might be some important meaning that we cannot guess from this information. But one thing we do know. If things go on the way they are now, it should be sometime during tonight's sleep that the interval between flashes fades to zero, and we have darkness with no light in between. How long that will last I don't know. But if it has any duration at all, my friends, I will want to be home with my family. We don't know how soon travel will reopen between cells.”
No one had any better ideas, and so they went home, all of them, and her greatgrandchildren helped Agnes to her home, which was nothing more than a roof to keep off the sun and the rain. She was tired (she was always tired these days) and she lay on her bed of ticked-out straw and dreamed two dreams, one while she was still awake, and one while she was asleep.
While she was awake she dreamed that with the darkness this great gift house had learned mankind's rhythms and needs, and the darkness would be the first night, a night exactly as long as a night should be on Earth. And then a morning would come, and another night, and she approved of this, because a hundred years without darkness was proof enough to her that nighttime was a good idea, despite the fears and dangers it had often brought on Earth. She also dreamed that the walls between cells were sealed off every day of the year but one, so that each cell would become a society to itself, though in that one day a year, those who had a mind to could leave and go their own way. Travelers would have that one day to find the spot where they wanted to spend the next year. But the rest of the time, every cell would be alone, and the people living there could develop their own way, and so strengthen the race.
It was a good dream, and she found herself almost believing it as she drifted off to sleep without eating. (She often forgot to eat these days.)
In her sleep, she dreamed that during the darkness she rose to the center of the Balloon, and there, instead of meeting a solid wall, she met a ceiling that fairly pulled her through. And there, in the center, she found the great secret.
In her dream, lightning danced across a huge sphere of space, six hundred kilometers in diameter, and balls and ribbons of light spun and danced their way around the wall. At first it seemed pointless, meaningless. But at last (in her dream) she understood the speech of the light, and realized that this globe, which she had thought was an artifact, was actually alive, was intelligent, and this was its mind.
“I have come,” she said to the lightning and the lights and the balls of light.
So what? the light seemed to answer.
“Do you love me?” she asked.
Only if you will dance with me, the light answered.
“Oh, but I can't dance,” she said. “I'm too old.”
Neither, said the light, can I. But I do sing rather well, and this is my song, and you are the coda. I sing the coda once, and then, which is to be expected, il fine.
In her dream Agnes felt a thrill of fear. “The end?”
The end.
“But then—but then, please, al capo, to the start again, and let us have the song over, and over, and over again.”
The light seemed to consider this, and in her dream Agnes thought the light said yes, in a great, profound amen that blinded her so brightly she realized that in all her life she had never understood the meaning of the word white, because her eyes had never seen such white before.
Actually, of course, her dream was undoubtedly her mind's way of coping with the things going on around her. For the darkness came not long after she went to sleep, came and stayed and as soon as the last of the sunlight was gone the lightning began, huge dazzling flashes that were not just light, not just electricity, but spanned the spectrum of all radiation, from heat and less-than-heat to gamma radiation and worse-than-gamma. The first flash doomed every human being in the Balloon—they were poisoned with radiation beyond hope of recovery.
There were screams of terror, and the lightning struck many and killed them, and the wail of grief was loud in every cell. But even at its crudest, chance plays its hand as kindly as it can; Agnes did not wake up to see the destruction of all her hopes. She slept on, slept long enough for one of the bolts to strike directly at the roof over her, and consume her at a blow, and her last sight was not really white at all, but every radiation possible, and instead of being limited by human eyes, at the moment of death she saw every wave of it, and thought that it was the light in her dream saying amen.
It wasn't. It was the Balloon, popping.
Every wall split into two thinner walls, and every cell detached from every other cell. For a moment they hung there in space, separated by only a few centimeters, each from the other; but all still were linked to each other through the center, where vast forces played, forces stronger than any in the solar system except the fires of the sun, which had been the source of all the Balloon's energy.
And then the moment ended, and the Balloon burst apart, each cell exploding, the entire organization of cells coming apart completely, and as the cells dissolved into dust they were hurled with such force in every direction that all of them that did not strike the sun or a planet were well launched out into the deep space between stars, going so fast that no star could hold them.
The transport ships that had left the Balloon since the flashing began were all consumed in the explosion.
None of the cells hit Earth, but one grazed close enough that the atmosphere absorbed much of the dust; the average temperature of the Earth dropped one degree, and the climate changed, just slightly, and therefore so did the patterns of life on Earth. It was nothing that technology could not cope with, and since Earth's population was now down to a billion people, the change was only an inconvenience, not a global catastrophe.
Many grieved for the deaths of the billions of people in the Balloon, but for most the disaster was too great to be comprehended, and they pretended that they didn't remember it very often, and they never talked about it, except perhaps to joke. The jokes were all black, however, and many were hard put to decide whether the Balloon had been a gift of God or an aeons-old plot by the most talented mass murderer in the universe. Or both.
Deenaz Coachbuilder was now very old, and she refused to leave her home in the foothills of the Himalayas even though now the snow only melted for a few weeks in the summer and there were many more comfortable places to live. She was senile and stubborn, and went out every day to look for the Balloon in the sky, searching with her telescope just before sunrise. She could not understand where it had gone. And then, on one lucid day when her mind returned for just a few hours, she realized what had happened and never went indoors again. They found a note on her body: “I should have saved them.”
In the moment when the Hectors hung loosely in the darkness, in the last endless moment before the leap, they cried out their ecstasy. But now Hector answered their cry with a different sound, one they had never heard from him.
It was pain.
It was fear.
“What is it?” the Hectors asked him (who was no longer themself).
“They did not come!” Hector moaned.
“The Masters?” And the Hectors remembered that the Masters were supposed to come and trap them and force them not to leap.
“For hundreds of flashes my walls were soft and thin and they could have passed into me,” Hector said (and the saying took only an instant), “but they never came. They could have risen into me and I would not have to die—”
The Hectors marveled that Hector had to die, but now (because it was built into them from the beginning) they realized that it was good and right for him to die, that each of them was Hector, with all his memories, all his experience, and, most important, all the delicate structure of energy and form that would stay with them as they swept through the galaxy. Hector would not die, only the center of this Hector, and so, though they understood (or thought they understood) his pain and fear they could hold off no longer.
They leaped.
The leap crumbled them but hurled them outward, each leaving the rigidity of his cell structure, losing his walls; each keeping his intellect in the swirling dust that spun out into space.
“Why,” each of them asked himself (at once, for they were the same being, however separate), “did they let us go? They could have stopped us, and they did not. And because they did not stop us, they died!”
They could not imagine that the Masters might not have known how to stop the leap into the night, for the Masters had first decided Hector could exist, millions of years before, and how could they not know how to use him? It was impossible to conceive of a Master not knowing all necessary information.
And so they concluded this:
That the Masters had given them a gift: stories. A trapped Hector learned stories, thousands and millions and billions of stories over the aeons of his endless captivity. But such Hectors could never be free, could never reproduce, could never pass on the stories.
But in the hundred years that these Masters had spent with them, the Hectors had learned those billions of stories, truer and kinder stories than those the Makers had built into the first Hector. And because the Masters this time had willingly given up their lives, this time the Hectors made their leap with an infinite increase of knowledge and, therefore, wisdom.
They leaped with Agnes's dreams in their memories.
They were beautiful dreams, all but one of them fulfilled, and that dream, the dream of eternal happiness, could only be fulfilled by the Hectors themselves. That dream was not for the Masters or the Makers or even the Masses, for all of them died too easily.
“It was a gift,” the Hectors said to themselves, and, despite the limitations built into them, they were deeply grateful. “How much they must have loved me,” each Hector said, “to give up their lives for my sake.”
On Earth, people shivered who had never known cold.
And every Hector danced through the galaxy, dipping into the clouds left by a supernova, swallowing comets, drinking energy and mass from every source until he came to a star that gave a certain kind of light; and there the Hector would create himselves again, and the Hectors would listen to themself tell stories, and after a while they, too, would leap into darkness until they reached the edge of the universe and fell over the precipice of time.
In the shadow of inevitable death, the people of Earth withered and grew old.
When my story collection Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stones was published, my afterword for this story was very brief: “ 'Unaccompanied Sonata' began with the the thought of one day: What if someone forbade me to write? Would I obey? I made a false start then, and failed; years later I tried again, and this time got through the whole story. Other than punctuation changes and a few revised phrases, this one has stood in its first full draft as it came out of the typewriter. It's the truest thing I've ever written.”
At the time, that's all I understood of where that story came from. Since then I've learned more. I told the whole story in my foreword to Lloyd Biggie, Jr.'s, story “Tunesmith” in a Tor double published not long ago. I'm excerpting a part of that essay to tell you where this story came from:
In 1959 I turned eight. It was an innocent time; my parents let me hop on my bike and ride from our home on Las Palmas Drive all the way down Homestead Road to downtown Santa Clara, California. To the public library, a squat building in the middle of a circle of huge trees. A setting straight out of faerie, I realize now; then, though, I cared nothing for the trees. I parked my bike, sometimes even remembering to lock it, and plunged through the doors into the world of books.
It seemed such a large place then. Directly ahead as you came inside was the circulation desk, with a librarian always in attendance—always policing, I thought, since as an eight-year-old I had enough experience of life to know that all adults were always watching children to make sure they didn't get away with anything. When an unaccompanied child entered the library, there was only one permitted place to go: the children's section, to the right. The tall shelf units to the left, shadowy and forbidding with their thick, dark-spined books, were meant for adults only, and children were not to enter.
Not that anyone had told me that, of course. But the signs were clear. The children's section was for children—and that meant that the non-children's sections were not for children.
That year I read everything remotely interesting in the children's section. I prided myself, as a third-grader, on not reading anything aimed at any grade under sixth, and those books were soon read. What now? Nothing to read, nothing to check out with my library card and carry home in the basket on the front of my bike.
And then I realized: there were hundreds, thousands of books on the other side of the circulation desk. If I could just make my way over there, find a book, and then hide somewhere and read it …
I dared not. And yet that strange, forbidden territory lured me. I knew better than to ask—then I would be told no and would be watched all the more carefully because I had confessed my interest in forbidden places. So I watched, for all the world like a child hoping to shoplift and waiting for the clerks all to look the other way.
Finally they did. I moved swiftly and silently across the long space before the circulation desk, the no-man's-land between the bright-windowed children's section and the deep-shadowed adult section. No one called out for me to stop—it would have been a harsh, guttural “Halt!” I knew, for I had seen enough World War II movies on TV to know that unreasoning authority always spoke with a German accent. At last I ducked behind a shelf unit and found myself in the brave new land, safe for the moment.
Sheerest coincidence placed me directly in front of a single shelf entitled “Science Fiction.” There were few books there—mostly story collections edited by people like Judith Merrill and Groff Conklin. Best Science Fiction Stories of 1955. That sort of thing.
But I was glad. After all, I was used to reading easier stuff. The letters in these books were all so small and close together. There were so many words. But at least the stories were short. And science fiction. That was like those time-travel stories in Boy's Life, right?
I took a couple of books and snuck off to a secluded table. There were some adults around, but they weren't official, and as long as I was quiet I figured they wouldn't tell on me. I opened the books and started to read.
Most of the stories were just too hard. I'd read a paragraph or two, maybe two pages, and then I'd flip on to the next story. Mostly it was because the stories were about things that I didn't care about. Sometimes I couldn't even figure out what was going on. Science fiction wasn't meant to be for eight-year-olds, I knew—but still, they didn't have to make it so darned hard, did they?
There were a few stories, though, that spoke clearly to me and captured my imagination from the start. By far the longest one I was able to finish began with the image of people visiting a great concert hall, being pestered by a strange, twisted old man who seemed to take some sort of pride in it. Then the story flashed back and told the story of how that great concert hall came to be, and who that old man was.
You see, there was a time when people had forgotten the joy of music. It only survived in commercial jingles, short songs designed to sell something. Except that there was one jingle-writer who had a special gift, an ability that transcended the limitations of his craft. The story struck me more deeply than any other I had ever read till then. I identified with the hero—he was all my best hopes and dreams. His pains were mine; his achievements would be mine as well. I, as a child, was too young to truly understand some of the concepts in the story. Intellectually I grasped them, but I had no experience to make the idea come to life. Nevertheless, the story itself, the hero's discovery of who he was and what he could do, the response of others around him, and what his actions led to—ah, that was the path of a great man's life. I thought. Anyone can be great when following in paths that others praise. But when you achieve solitary greatness, when you bend an unbending world and turn it into a new path, not because the world wanted to turn, not because anyone asked you to turn it or helped you, but rather because you walked that path yourself and showed the way, and, having seen it, they could not help but follow: that became my lifelong measure of the true hero.
Or perhaps it already was my measure, and it took that story to make me aware of it—does that matter? At the time, as an eight-year-old child unschooled in philosophy, I found the story overwhelming. It remade me. I saw everything through new eyes afterward.
I grew up and learned to tell stories myself. First I was a playwright; then I turned to fiction, and when I did it was science fiction that I wrote, though I cared not overly much for science. It was the mythic story that I wanted to tell, though I couldn't remember when I had decided that. And it was in the genre of science fiction and fantasy that the mythic story could still be clearly, plainly told—I knew that, was deeply certain of it. I could not do with fiction what I knew I had to do, except in this realm of strangeness. •
So I wrote science fiction, and eventually that came to be the mainsail of my writing career. And one day in the dealer's room in a science fiction convention I saw the name Groff Conklin on the spine of an old and weathered book and I remembered those old anthologies from my childhood, when I thought I had to sneak into the adult section in order to read. I stood there, my hands resting on the book, in reverie, trying to remember the stories that I had read, wondering if I might find them again and, if I did, whether I'd laugh at my childish taste.
I talked to the dealer, telling him the time period of the books I had read in the Santa Clara library. He showed me what he had; I scanned through the books. I couldn't remember title or author of the one story that meant most to me, but I remembered vaguely that it was the last story in the book. Or was it simply the last I read, because there was no point in reading any other? I couldn't remember even that.
Finally I struggled to tell him the tale, calling up more details with each one I spoke aloud. At last I had told him enough.
“That's 'Tunesmith' you're looking for,” he said. “By Lloyd Biggie, Jr.”
Lloyd Biggie, Jr. Not one of the writers of that time who had made the transition into the seventies and eighties. His name was not a household word now, like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, or Bradbury, though all were his contemporaries. I felt a stab of regret; I also felt a tiny thrill of dread, because of course the same could happen to me. There's no guarantee, because your works have some following in one decade, that you'll still have an audience hungry for your stories in another. Let that be a lesson to you, I thought.
But it was a stupid lesson, and I refused to believe it. Because another thought came to mind. Lloyd Biggie, Jr., didn't become one of the rich and famous ones when science fiction became commercial in the seventies and eighties. He didn't have crowds of salesmen touting his works. He didn't have dumps of his novels near the checkout stand at every WaldenBooks in North America. But that had nothing to do with whether he had succeeded, whether his work had been worth doing, his tales worth telling. Because his story was alive in me. It had transformed me, though even then I did not yet understand how completely I had taken “Tunesmith” into myself.
And I knew that if I could write a story that would illuminate some hitherto dark corner in someone's soul and live on in them forever, then it hardly mattered whether writing made me rich or kept me poor, put my name before the public or left me forgotten, for I would have bent the world's path a little. Just a little, yet all would be different from then on because I had done it.
Not every reader had to feel that way about my stories. Not even many readers. If only a few were transformed, then it would have been worth it. And some of those would go on to tell their own tales, carrying part of mine within them. It might never end.
Only a couple of months before writing this essay, I was talking to an audience about “Tunesmith,” telling them essentially the story I've told you so far. I began to speculate on influence. “Maybe that's why I kept writing so many stories about musicians early in my career,” I said. “Songmaster, of course, and 'Unaccompanied Sonata.' ”
Then I remembered that only a few minutes earlier I had mentioned that “Unaccompanied Sonata,” probably the best short story I have ever written or will ever write, was one of the few works that came to me whole. That is, I sat down to write it (having made one abortive attempt a year or two before), and it came out in one smooth draft in three or four hours. That draft was never revised, except for a little fiddling with punctuation and a word here or there. When other writers talked about stories being gifts from a Muse, I imagined that experience was the sort of thing they were talking about.
But now, thinking of “Unaccompanied Sonata” in that double context, as a story that came whole and also as a story about music, probably influenced by “Tunesmith,” it suddenly occurred to me that maybe “Unaccompanied Sonata” didn't come from a Muse at all (I've always been skeptical about such things anyway), but rather from Lloyd Biggie, Jr. After all, though the world in which “Unaccompanied Sonata” takes place is completely different from the milieu of “Tunesmith,” the basic structure of both stories is almost identical.
A musical genius, forbidden to perform, performs anyway, and his music has far-reaching effects, even though he is snatched away without ever having a chance to benefit personally from what he achieved. And at the end, he comes to the place where the music is being played and takes his unrecognized bow. Anyone who has read both “Tunesmith” and “Unaccompanied Sonata” recognizes the pattern. It is not all that either story is about—but it's a vital part of both.
So of course “Unaccompanied Sonata” came whole. I knew how the story had to go; I knew how it had to end. After all, when I was eight years old, Lloyd Biggie, Jr., showed me how. The story felt so true to me and dwelt so deeply inside me that entirely without realizing it—at a time, in fact, when I didn't remember “Tunesmith” consciously at all—I was reaching down into myself, finding the mythic elements of “Tunesmith” that felt most true and right to me, and putting them into my strongest and truest tales.
There's more to the essay than that, but that's the part that talks about the origin of “Unaccompanied Sonata.” I hope you will lay hands on the Tor double of Tunesmith and Eye for Eye. Even though my novella “Eye for Eye” is also included in this book, I hope at least some of you will read “Tunesmith,” partly because of the great debt I owe to the story, and partly because it's still every bit as good as I thought it was when I was a kid.
There's a perverse part of me that, when it's in vogue to hate somebody, makes me want to say, “Isn't there another way to look at this?” The national hatred of Richard Nixon during the 1970s particularly bothered me, mostly because it was so completely out of scale with anything he actually did. At no point did he distort or endanger the constitution of the United States as much as it was distorted or endangered by his two immediate predecessors; indeed, they were clearly his political school in just how vile a politician can be and still become president. I concluded at the time, and still believe, that Richard Nixon was hated for his beliefs; and even though I share almost none of them, I find I have at least as much contempt for the hypocrites who attacked him in the name of “truth” as for the man himself. In particular I think of Benjamin Bradlee, one of the “heroes” of Watergate, who brought a president down in the name of the public's right to know the truth—the same Benjamin Bradlee who, as a reporter, was fully aware of and, according to some reports, complicitous in John Kennedy's constant adulteries in an era when, if the public had known of this trait in the man, he would never have been elected. Indeed, the political life of Gary Hart should inform us that times may not have changed all that much! Somehow, though, the people didn't have a right to know the truth about a man when he was a presidential candidate with views Bradlee approved of. The people only had a right to know when Bradlee hated the candidate and his views.
Still, finding Nixon's political executioners with dirty hands doesn't cleanse his own;
he did what he did and was what he was; and I for one am sorry he was president. Nevertheless, in the late 1970s I was constantly disturbed by the virulence of the hatred poured out on the man. It wasn't Nixon who was poisoning America; it was the hatred of Nixon that was hurting us. That hatred was spilling over into hatred of anyone who sought public office; I think now it was the disrespect for the office brought on by both sides in the Watergate affair that destroyed the presidency of Jimmy Carter, probably the most decent, altruistic man to hold that office since Herbert Hoover. Heaven knows our system doesn't often bring altruistic people into high positions in America… .
So I wrote a story about healing. Not excusing Nixon, but not accusing him beyond his actual offenses, either. A vision of how to make America whole.
My wife, Kristine, lay in bed and playfully asked me to tell her a bedtime story. I thought of a disgusting animal to spin yarns about, but then proceeded to make a fairy tale out of it anyway. Later I sent it as my Christmas card to friends who would understand not getting a real card with four-color printing and all. It was next published in my collection Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories, and again in my limited-edition collection Cardography. Few have read it, but those who have often declare it to be among my best stories. That makes me very glad, because the story, one of the briefest I've ever written, encapsulates some of the most important truths I've tried to tell in my fiction. If my career had to be encapsulated in only three stories, I believe I would choose “The Porcelain Salamander,” “Unaccompanied Sonata,” and “Salvage” as the three that did the best job, together, of saying all that I had to say.
In editing my anthology of dragon stories, which was published in two volumes, Dragons of Darkness and Dragons of Light, I knew all along that I would be including a story of my own, one called “A Plague of Butterflies.” But in the process of editing other people's works, an idea came to me quite independently. What if somebody were given three wishes and never used the third one? What would that do to the wishgiver? Because I had dragons on my mind, I thought of having a dragon be the wishgiver, and then, because I had been surprised at how few of the dragon stories were set in China (we Eurocentric Americans forget who invented dragons), I decided to set my story there as well. The idea of making my main character a middle woman came from the idea that she had to be, not a hero, but the opposite of a hero—which is, not an antihero, but the commonest of the common folk. When the anthology appeared, there was “Middle Woman,” a story I'm still very proud of in part because fables are so damnably hard to write. But I couldn't very well have two stories by me in my own anthology, could I? And “A Plague of Butterflies” had already appeared in print under my name. So “Middle Woman” got the pseudonym—Byron Walley, a name I had used several times before when stories of mine were published in the LDS press.
I usually plan out a story before I write it, but this one grew during the process of writing it, starting with the most skeletal of concepts: how hard it would be to deal with a great warrior in areas that had nothing to do with war. I thought, Just because a guy can slay a dragon doesn't mean you want him to marry your daughter.
So the tone of the story was tongue-in-cheek, at first. But the farther I got into it, the farther I moved away from satiric farce and the more I became a believer in the tale. I had no idea, going into it, what would happen when Bork reached the dragon. The dragon's eyes were the inspiration of the moment. But for me the story came alive when I had Bork admit that he was afraid, and the dragon's eyes dimmed. It came out of my unconscious mind; it was almost an involuntary reaction; but I knew at once that this was the heart of the story and all the rest was just fumbling around till I got there.
Still, I thought it was pretty entertaining fumbling-around, so I left most of it in. I keep meaning to revise the story completely and sell it as a young adult fantasy. I even have an editor who's interested in it. Someday, when I have time, it may exist in that more refined form. It could never exist in worse form than its first publication. Somewhere between galleys and the printer, somebody swapped two whole sections of the story. The published form was incomprehensible. It was years before it was reprinted anywhere, so I could set the text to rights; and when it was published in Cardography, the text was so riddled with typographical errors that I felt like it still hadn't been well published. This time, I hope, we got it right.
This story's first draft was written as a love letter to a young lady who is now happily married to someone else—as am I. In that incarnation it was an allegory of our relationship as it seemed to me. After it became clear that my understanding of our relationship was hopelessly wrong, I still had the story—and, on rereading it, realized that there might be some truth in it beyond the immediate circumstances of a faded romance. So, when my then-editor at Berkley (my once-and-never-again publisher) told me she wanted a story of mine for an anthology called Berkley Showcase, I dusted off “The Princess and the Bear,” restructuring and rewriting it completely. It is meant to sound like a fairy tale—not the Disney kind of fairy tale, where cuteness swallows up anything real that might be in the story, but the kind of fairy tale where people change and hurt each other and die.
During my time at The Ensign, I started developing a fantasy world based on the idea that different magics are acquired by serving different aspects of nature. There'd be stone magic and water magic, a magic of tended fields and a magic of forests, ice magic and sand magic. I still have many stories in that world that still haven't ripened enough to be ready for telling—but one, this bleak tale of revenge that destroyed the avenger, ripened almost immediately.
In a way, it's a rewrite of “Ender's Game”—a precursor of the way I revised the meaning of that story when I made it into a novel in 1984. The similarities are obvious: the child who is taken from his family at an early age and schooled in the arts of power, which he then uses to destroy the enemy of his people. But what I knew—and what “Ender's Game” did not adequately convey—was the self-destruction inherent in total war. Even when the enemy is helpless to strike back, total war destroys you. World War I clearly showed that, for the nations that waged total war (America did not) emerged from their vindictive “peace” talks with the drops of blood from the next world war already on their hands. The only reason that America did not, after World War II, suffer the same moral blight that undid France and Britain after World War I was the Marshall Plan and Douglas MacArthur. When the war was over, we rejected the idea that it had to remain a total victory. The Marshall Plan in Europe and Douglas MacArthur's astonishingly benign occupation of Japan went a long way toward redeeming us. At this writing it remains to be seen whether we will ever recover that moral stature. Certainly that's not the rhetoric I hear from our supposed leaders about Vietnam or Panama or even the countries of Eastern Europe that lost the Cold War.
There is an ironic footnote to “Sandmagic.” When I wrote it, I was still quite new in my career, and had no perspective yet on my own work. I thought it was something of a miracle when anything I wrote sold, so I had no idea whether I had written a good story or not. My best guideline, had I only known it, was Ben Bova. I sent everything I wrote to him first. What I didn't realize was that he bought every single publishable story that I wrote. So the result was that all the other editors were seeing only unpublishable stories. It's hardly a surprise that they didn't share Ben's enthusiasm for my writing. Given a lead time of a year or more between selling a story and seeing it published, they had seen a lot of really bad stuff from my typewriter before they ever saw any of my better work in print in Analog.
One editor, however, seemed to think of himself, not as a protector of authors, allowing only their good work to come before the public, or even as a teacher of writers, helping them to do better because of his advice, but rather as one of the furies, wreaking hideous vengeance on any author who dared to submit to his magazine a story that did not meet his standards. And if that author's cover letter dared to state that he had sold several stories to Ben Bova at Analog, why, that author was certainly uppity.
But I think I would have had no ill treatment from this editor had it not been for the fact that he kept the first two stories I sent him for more than a year with no response. I sent him letters. I finally telephoned him. Nothing happened. He was a dead-end market.
Then I finished “Sandmagic.” I was already getting much better at knowing what I had written; I knew that “Sandmagic” had some strength to it. I also knew that it was completely wrong for Analog. So, for once, I would not be sending the story first to Ben. I thought of sending it to Ed Ferman at Fantasy and Science Fiction, but it didn't seem like the kind of thing he ran, either. But there was this other magazine, this bottom-of-the-line magazine, that did publish some heroic fantasy. So I thought I'd give him one more try. I called him up and told him who I was. By now I was on the Hugo ballot for “Ender's Game” and for the Campbell Award. I mentioned the stories he'd had for a year. I reminded him of the earlier contact. I asked him if it was worthwhile sending him the fantasy story I had just finished. “Send it, send it,” he said. And, uh, if I didn't mind, why not send along copies of the earlier stories, too.
By then I knew the earlier stories were losers. I shouldn't have sent them along. I also knew this editor was incredibly lazy, and both the other stories were much, much shorter than “Sandmagic.” That should also have warned me off—he was sure to read them first. But I dutifully duplicated them and sent them along with “Sandmagic.”
What I got back was the most vicious piece of hate mail I have yet received. It was so cruel that by the end I could no longer take it personally. I knew he was wrong to tell me that I had no business writing science fiction—the Hugo ballot was pretty good consolation on that point—and I also knew he was hardly the one to tell me about what was and was not professional. Nevertheless, I thought it was a churlish thing for an editor to do. After all, he was the one who had kept my stories for a year without response. Any sense of proportion and grace would have required him to apologize to me, not excoriate me.
A closer examination of his letter revealed something else. He had clearly not read “Sandmagic.” All his comments were about the two shorter stories. All he said about “Sandmagic” was “the other one was just as bad.” Years later, when he shattered all sense of editorial ethics and published a review of those stories that he had read and rejected as an editor (would you submit your fiction to an editor known to do such a thing?) he again reviewed the shorter works in detail and dismissed “Sandmagic” so completely that I knew he had not read it.
As they say, doing well is the best revenge. I offered the story he was too lazy to read to Andrew Offutt for his Zebra anthology series Swords Against Darkness. He bought it, and within a few months it was picked up for a best-of-the-year anthology.
However, when I catch myself getting too smug, I do remind myself from time to time that the other guy's evaluation of those two short stories was, when you strip away the invective, dead on. They were terrible stories. They don't appear in this collection and, with luck, will never appear anywhere on this planet. But if the worst thing I ever do in my life is write some really bad stories while on my way to writing the ones I'm proud of, I'll be very glad.
When I was writing my historical novel Saints (first published, over my bitter protests, as Woman of Destiny), I needed to include an example of the fiction writing of one of my main characters, Dinah Kirkham. Since she wasn't a real person, I of course had no body of work to draw on, so I had to write, not an Orson Scott Card story, but a Dinah Kirkham story.
In that goal I failed—because, of course, it's an impossible goal. The only kind of story I can ever write is an Orson Scott Card story. When Saints came out, with “The Best Day” imbedded within it, it did not sound like anything of mine that had ever been published. But I already had my epic poem “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow,” which was my first attempt to bring fantasy into the American frontier; and beyond the American setting and flavor, the story is simply a fable, like “Unaccompanied Sonata” and “The Porcelain Salamander.” I can't do such tales very often, because fables are devilishly hard to write—there is only one Jane Yolen in the world of fantasy, who can do it over and over. But it is one of the most satisfying kinds of tale to tell, because, finished, it makes such a tidy package. Being so complete and yet compact, it gives the author the delusion of having created something perfect, rather like a jewel-cutter, I think, who doesn't have to see the microscopic roughness of his work. But if fabulists are jewel-cutters, we have a peculiar inability: We can rarely tell, while cutting our little stones, whether we're working with a diamond, a garnet, or a zirconium.
Few of my stories begin with visual images; this one did. I can't remember now if the idea sprang from the illustration that appeared in Omni magazine along with Patrice Duvic's story “The Eyes in Butterflies Wings,” or whether I simply remembered my story idea when I saw that illustration. My mental image, though, was of a man awakening in the morning to find his blanket and bedsheets and the floor and walls of his room covered with butterflies, hundreds of different colors on thousands of wings, all moving in different rhythms and tempos so that his room looked like the surface of a dazzling sea. He arose and cast off his blanket, sending the room into a blur of colored flight, and began a journey with the butterflies trailing after him.
The image stayed with me for some time before I found the story to go with it. I had been toying with the science-fictional notion of creatures that consciously change their own genetic structure, and that transmuted to the idea of an alien creature that fought back against a human invasion by genetically adapting itself into a superior organism. What this had to do with the butterflies I cannot fathom, but for some reason I started trying to put the ideas together.
Had I been more sophisticated, I would have recognized the visual image as the seed of a tale in the South American magic realism mode. It did not belong with a science fiction idea. And the beginning of the story definitely has the mythic—no, fabulous—quality of magic realism. Indeed, the whole story retains that sense of not quite connecting with reality no matter how many details are provided, so that the science fiction aspects of the story are never clearly presented, or at least are not presented as science fiction, so that readers don't know if what they're reading is to be taken factually or magically. Thus the science fiction is swallowed up in the fantasy.
Years later I would recover the science fiction idea and use it in my novel Wyrms, where it is presented with absolute clarity, yet without losing all the magic. So it is possible to look at “A Plague of Butterflies” as a study for a later work. Yet it also stands alone, my one venture into a strange kind of voice that nevertheless pleased and pleases me very much.
I knew as soon as I had written it that this story was too strange for any of my previous audiences. At that time I received a letter from Elinor Mavor, who was then performing the thankless task of editing Amazing Stones, trying to keep that long-mismanaged and mis-edited magazine from going under. She was paying, as I recall, one pound of dirt upon publication. But I thought it was important to help keep the magazine alive, and about the only thing a writer can do to sustain a publication is to offer stories for publication. I had sent her a couple of poems, but now I had a story that would probably find no other home. I mailed it. She bought it. Just in time, too —it was almost immediately afterward that TSR bought the magazine and George Scithers took over as editor, which meant the end of my contributions to Amazing. (Scithers and I have a peculiar relationship. He only likes my stories after other editors buy them.)
To my knowledge, no living human being besides Mavor and me ever read this story. It is still the strangest fantasy I ever ventured to write. If you actually read it all the way through, you have significantly increased its number of readers.
Perhaps it is strange to have this clearly science fiction story in a fantasy collection, but I think it belongs here. The science fiction is only the frame, the outline of the story. Within it, the fables that the artificial habitat tells to itself are the meat of the story, and those are definitely fantasy, perfectly in line with the rest of the stories in Maps in a Mirror.
I first conceived the story in response to a call by Jerry Pournelle for contributions to an anthology of stories set in artificial habitats. Being perverse, I immediately determined to set my story in an artificial habitat that was, in fact, a living alien organism. I conceived of it as a hollow sphere of great size. Its shell would be composed of thousands—perhaps millions—of hollow cells, each one large enough to sustain a good-sized population of human beings in an Earthlike, self-renewing environment. The hollow interior of the creature would be a highly charged electromagnetic memory chamber that would serve as the creature's intelligence, running the entire habitat and passing energy and resources as needed from one cell to another.
The life cycle of the habitat would be the problem. Its original designers knew how to arrest its development so that it didn't ripen completely and explode, scattering seeds throughout the galaxy—unless they wanted it to. But the one that comes to the human solar system has no such controls, and so it moves as quickly as possible toward maturity, at which time each of the cells becomes a fully functioning adult with tiny minicells forming its own shell, and the hollow space humans were now using as a habitat would become the highly charged inner intelligence. The original inner intelligence dies in the process of giving independent life to all the outer cells.
The fables are the tales being told by the inner intelligence to its children. There is little sense of separate identity among the cells or between the cells and their parent. But the tales must be preserved in order to keep some sense of purpose and meaning alive in the creatures. They have long since forgotten that all these tales have to do with “human” justice and equity, or that the creature exists in order to provide homes for the makers of the place. Still, the tales survive.
I include this explanation because of the number of readers over the years who have politely asked me (actually, some have begged) to explain what in hell is going on in “The Monkeys Thought 'Twas All in Fun.” I hope this helps. Those searching for thematic explanations, however, are on their own. I don't like decoding my work in that way.
To my mind, the very fact that I didn't make this story clear enough for many— perhaps most—readers makes the story a failure. I think clarity is the first thing a writer must achieve; if I fail in that, what does it matter what else I do? If I were writing this story again today, I'd spell out precisely what was going on from the beginning, so there wouldn't be the slightest confusion.
One must remember, however, that when I wrote this I was a graduate student in English. I think this explains everything.