Again, Dangerous Visions Part 79

"Dr. Grishkin, we..."

Grishkin raises an admonitory finger. He sips tea. He points to his surgical window. Birkin Grif watches it, fascinated.

"The ash-flats," intones Dr. Grishkin: and, having dropped his conversational bomb, sits back to watch its effect.

Horror. Silence. Tension drips viscous from the Californium ceiling. Far off, the crowd whispers. Nothing so dramatic has happened in Californium for a decade.

"I am to take you to the ash-flats of Wisdom."

Skinless Lamia shudders ever so slightly. Into the silence fall three perfect silver notes. Jiro-San has taken up his lute.

"I think I have changed my mind," she whispers.

"It is too late, all is arranged," says Dr. Grishkin. "You must come, now it is inevitable that you come." There is the slightest edge of annoyance to his voice. This annoyance is persuasive. One feels that Dr. Grishkin had gone to much trouble to...bring things about. He does not wish to be disappointed.

"But will He be there?" asks Birkin Grif, anxiously. "There is little sense in risking so much if He is not there."

Comes the answer: "There is little sense in anything, Mr. Grif. But He will be there. He has sent me." He sips tea. It is so simple, the way he puts it, it seems already an accomplished fact: but then, his oily job is to simplify, to smooth the way. Lamia leans forward, speaks from the corner of her mouth, the perfect conspirator. Dr. Grishkin finds her skinned proximity delightfully disturbing, her aorta distinctly beautiful.

"The Image-Police, Dr. Grishkin: what of them?"

"Pure paranoia, dear lady. There is nothing very very illegal about a little trip to the edge of Wisdom. Just to the illegal about a little trip to the edge of Wisdom. Just to the edge edge, you understand, merely a sightseeing trip: a little pleasant tourism..." He leers. "Shall we go?"

They leave. The fat man waddles. Birkin limps. The skinless lady is sinuous. As they pa.s.s Jiro-San's table, he gazes wistfully. He finds Birkin very handsome.

TRACK THREE: THE ASH-FLATS OF WISDOM.

Wisdom is a wilderness. Long ago, there was a war here; or perhaps it was a peace. Most of the time there is but small difference between the two; love and hate lean so heavily upon one another, and both are possessed of a monstrous ennui ennui. Certainly, something destroyed whatever Wisdom was: so well that no one has known its former nature for two centuries. From its border one can see little but sense much.

Birkin Grif and the skinless woman stand s.h.i.+vering there in a cold wind, peering through the mesh fence that separates city-ground and forbidden ash. Their cloaks-black for him, gray for her-flutter nervously. Soft flakes of ash fill the air about them with dark snow. Grishkin is huge in voluminous purple, talking animatedly to a grayface guard outside his olive-drab sentry box. Meanwhile, the desolation seems to whisper, You have no business here, everything here is dead You have no business here, everything here is dead.

There is a bleak sadness to this waste, a bereavement: it mourns. Eidetic images of ghosts flit on this wind: women weeping weave shrouds at ebbtide; famine-children wail to old men at twilight. Here there are two kinds of chill, and cloaks will not keep out both.

Abruptly, Grishkin takes out a small silver mechanism, and points it at he guard. There is an incredible blue flash. The body of the guard drops, improbably headless, jetting dark blood from the venturi of its neck. Dr. Grishkin vomits apologetically: a sick valediction. He returns, wiping his mouth on a canary-yellow handkerchief.

"You see? There is no problem, as I have said." He retches, his fat face white. "Oh dear. Excuse me, do excuse me. I grow old, I grow old I grow old, I grow old you know. Poor boy. He has a mother in Australia. He was exported." you know. Poor boy. He has a mother in Australia. He was exported."

"How sad," says Lamia. She is gazing at Dr. Grishkin's heaving stomach through the surgical window. She feels quite sympathetic. "Sympathy is so quaint," she tinkles. "Poor Dr. Grishkin."

Poor Dr. Grishkin, his spasm over, takes out his little glittering mechanism again, and aims it at the fence round Wisdom. The incredible-blue-flash performance is repeated, whereupon the mesh curls and congeals like burning hair.

"Pretty," observes the skinless woman.

"Impressive," admits Birkin Grif. In the charred sentry-box bells begin to ring.

"Now we must hurry," intimates Dr. Grishkin, and his voice is more than faintly urgent. "Leg it!" He begins to waddle hurriedly toward a charcoal dune. They follow him through the broken mesh. The wind rises, whipping up small, stinging cinders. Cloaks fluttering, they top the rise and drop flat, facing the way they have come. A great turmoil of ash-flakes hides the sentry-box.

"The wind will have erased our tracks," says Birkin Grif.

"Correct as ever, mon frere mon frere," returns fat Dr. Grishkin. "Officially, we have just died, n.o.body will bother us now." He leers. "I have been dead these ten years." He laughs mordantly. His stomach trembles behind its window. Birkin Grif and his skinless mistress are unamused.

"Why does the ash never blow into the city?" asks Lamia.

"Come," orders Grishkin, eyeing the weather with distaste.

PAUSE THE SECOND. FOR NARRATIVE PURPOSES THE ASH STORM ABATES.

Led by the seraphic murderer Grishkin, they flit like majestic moths-purple, gray, black-over the long low swells of ash.

This land is empty, composed visually of utterly balanced sweeps of gray, shading from the dead cream to the mystic charcoal. Slow watercourses cut the ubiquitous ash, silting swiftly, meandering, beds infinitely variable. Wind and water make Wisdom unchartable: age and the wind make it cripplingly lonely. Time is overthrown in Wisdom: its very mutability is immutable.

Thinks Birkin Grif: This land is the ultimate vision of the Ab-real Eternity. Across it, we scuttle like three symbolic beetles without legs This land is the ultimate vision of the Ab-real Eternity. Across it, we scuttle like three symbolic beetles without legs.

TRACK FOUR: I REMEMBER CORINTH.

Flitting minutiae on the broad back of the waste, they finally achieve their Heroic goal.

Dr. Grishkin stops.

He and Birkin Grif and the skinless woman stand-at the end of an erratic line of footprints-at the apparent center of an immense, featureless plain: the hub of a ma.s.sive stasis, a vast silence. The horizon has vanished, there is no obvious convergence of ash and sky: both are flat, monochrome gray. Because of this, environment is shapeless; dimensions are unclear; the three suddenly exist without proper frame of reference, with the sole and inadequate orientation of their own bodies. The effect confuses; they become dream figures on a back-cloth of ab-s.p.a.ce: unattached, divested of every vestige of their accepted and appropriate reality.

"It is here we must wait," says Dr. Grishkin, his fat voice devoid of expression, drained of expression by the single-tone emptiness.

"But He is not here..." begins Birkin Grif, fighting to prevent the visual null from sucking up his very thoughts, speaking precisely only through mammoth effort.

"We must wait," repeats Grishkin.

"Will He come, though?" demands Grif, thickly, struggling with the silence. "If this is a fool's errand..." His implied threat falls flat, negated by the vacuum.

"You have lived a fool's errand for a millennium: why quibble now? Here we wait." Slow steel in Grishkin's voice; again he will not be denied. They wait. At this point of minimal orientation, without movement or sound, it seems that eons pa.s.s. They wait. Nothing happens for a million years. Finally, Grif speaks, his words harsh and congested with a sudden aged, neurotic ferocity. "I think I may kill you, Dr. Grishkin. He is not coming. All the way to nowhere, and He is not coming. I think I will kill you..." His face is distorted; his good eye winks, manic; this is a senile fury.

"Shut up." Grishkin is smiling his rosebud parody. "Shut up and look!"

"...I think I will kill kill you..." hisses Grif, like a machine running down fixedly through a series of programmed spasms. But he looks. you..." hisses Grif, like a machine running down fixedly through a series of programmed spasms. But he looks.

Skinless Lamia is dancing on the ash, magnificently naked once more. Her feet make no sound. She moves to a muted hum of her own making; an insistent, droning raga. She dances possessed, smiling in introspective wonder at her own movement, ant.i.thesis of the greater stillness. Her dance is a final destruction of orientation: almost, she floats.

And she is changing changing.

"Is this not the ultimate in body-schema illusions?" breathes Grishkin. "See: she is living living her hallucination!" He is quite overtly touched by the poetry of it all. her hallucination!" He is quite overtly touched by the poetry of it all.

Her body elongates...contracts...flows...diminishes. A tail appears, flips archly, disappears. A jeweled dolphin exists whole for an instant, dissolves. The modal hum rises and falls. A golden salamander weaves, sloughs off its skin...becomes a bright proud bird, falters, s.h.i.+mmering at its edges...disembodies reluctantly...

By turns the plastic Lamia is fish, fowl and beast, myth and dream. Then one shape steadies- And Lamia is no more.

Dr. Grishkin releases his breath in one long sigh of artistic pleasure. Birkin Grif screams.

For on the ash-cinders and dust adhering to its wet membrane-there lies a live human fetus.

It kicks a little, stretching the membrane...

Birkin Grif retches and moans: "O my G.o.d...what...?"

Dr. Grishkin is apologetic but unhelpful. "Don't ask me, Grif mon vieux mon vieux. I expected a snake. But O what poetry; such a metamorphosis...!" The fetus jerks. Grif whirls on Dr. Grishkin, hysterical, whining like a child.

"Cheat! Liar! This is not what we came here for, this is not it at all, you have cheated...it isn't fair!"

Coldly, Grishkin, galactic pimp extraordinary, appraises him. His pleasure is quite gone away. His eyes impale the blubbering Grif.

"Fair? You You have yet to learn the rules of the game! Fair?" Grif is pinned to the inert landscape by those bleak, oblique eyes. "There is no fairness to inevitability. This was inevitable, Mr. Birkin Grif; inevitable because it has happened. Accept it because of that. Do not look to me for have yet to learn the rules of the game! Fair?" Grif is pinned to the inert landscape by those bleak, oblique eyes. "There is no fairness to inevitability. This was inevitable, Mr. Birkin Grif; inevitable because it has happened. Accept it because of that. Do not look to me for fairness fairness." He finds the word distasteful. He pauses to gaze speculatively at the drying fetus.

Then: "You expect too much, my friend. You desire: and expect the universe to provide. But that is not the way of things. No indeed." He appears pleased with this summary. Then he frowns suddenly, as if rediscovering an unpleasant reality. "It is a pity you have learned so late. Too late, in point of fact."

And his glittering, malevolent little device is out in a micro-second, a Birkin Grif throws himself frantically forward, horrid realization contorting his features. Thus dies Grif, last of the archetypal sybarites, while the fetus of his skinless lover lies twitching on the ground. He scarcely has time for a second scream.

His enigmatic slayer shrugs and turns to the feebly struggling fetus Gazing, he shakes his hairless head. Such poetry. Reluctantly, he steps on it. For all his sensibility, he has a tidy mind. Casting a last glance at the smoking Birkin Grif-t.i.tanium thigh his sole remnant of personality-Dr. Grishkin, the Bringer with the Window, pulls his purple cloak around him and waddles off.

Soon, only his footprints are left on the ash-flats of Wisdom.

Afterword.

I wrote this story in March, 1967. At that time, it was all happening for me emotionally, which probably accounts for the exuberance of the piece. It was sparked by a thing called Go For Baroque Go For Baroque by Jody Scott (I think it was Jody Scott...); but I don't believe Scott's story influenced it-merely provided the literary flashpoint. There are echoes of Beckett there, and some quite deliberate references to the work of John Keats. On a secondary level, the Keats thing is rather important. "Lamia Mutable" stands on its own; but if you are familiar with Keats' long narrative poem by Jody Scott (I think it was Jody Scott...); but I don't believe Scott's story influenced it-merely provided the literary flashpoint. There are echoes of Beckett there, and some quite deliberate references to the work of John Keats. On a secondary level, the Keats thing is rather important. "Lamia Mutable" stands on its own; but if you are familiar with Keats' long narrative poem Lamia Lamia, you may get a good deal more out of the section subt.i.tled I REMEMBER CORINTH.

I wrote the story as an allegorical ill.u.s.tration of a philosophy (a few tenets of which are contained in Grishkin's last speech); as a piece of grotesque comedy relevant to certain 20th Century obsessions-black humor, if you like; and as a snide parody of London intellectual life. You can find a Bistro Californium on every street corner in swinging Chelsea or with-it Hampstead: and each one is crowded with aging ravers like Birkin Grif who spend their somewhat pointless lives trying to convince themselves that they have artistic natures and colorful personalities.

My intention was to pose as many unanswered questions as possible, to imply rather than to make statements: thus, conceptually, it is a sprawling and multivalent story, full of blind windows and paranoiac alleys. But its underlying structure is nice and tight, and the thing has-within its own lunatic context-a satisfying rationality. "Lamia Mutable" is tentatively dedicated to Jerry Cornelius.

Introduction to LAST TRAIN TO KANKAKEE.

Ultimately, when the history of these last ten tumultuous years of sf is chronicled, Robin Scott Wilson's name will be listed alongside those of John W. Campbell, Jr., Horace L. Gold, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas as one of the men most responsible for helping to create new writers in speculative fiction. The former gentlemen were all writers and editors, and in their capacities as a.s.semblers of many issues of their respective magazines, they molded, as a matter of daily course, talents without number. Campbell, of course, was the master: from the Thirties well on into the Fifties he gathered around him, and around Astounding/a.n.a.log Astounding/a.n.a.log, most of those we call Greats today: Asimov, Kuttner, Heinlein, Hubbard, De Camp, del Rey, Sturgeon, Blish, etc. Gold developed yet another kind of writer, and from Galaxy Galaxy we read Sheckley, Tenn, Budrys, Simak, Wyman Guin, Kornbluth, Bester, Knight and a host of others. Tony Boucher and Mick McComas brought the literary values of sf into sharper focus and developed Avram Davidson, J. T. McIntosh, Leiber, Idris Seabright, Matheson, Chad Oliver, Poul Anderson, Zenna Henderson and others; though many had written for other magazines, they became what we now behold in we read Sheckley, Tenn, Budrys, Simak, Wyman Guin, Kornbluth, Bester, Knight and a host of others. Tony Boucher and Mick McComas brought the literary values of sf into sharper focus and developed Avram Davidson, J. T. McIntosh, Leiber, Idris Seabright, Matheson, Chad Oliver, Poul Anderson, Zenna Henderson and others; though many had written for other magazines, they became what we now behold in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Robin Scott Wilson, though a writer of considerable talent, as you will discover (if you haven't met him elsewhere already), is only by default an editor. (His anthology of the best stories from the Clarion Workshops, Clarion Clarion [Signet, 1971], has already become a critically-acclaimed necessity for every other sf workshop in the country.) No, by rigorous judgment, Robin is not an editor, and so it is remarkable that his name should be found with those of the acknowledged "forces" in the genre. [Signet, 1971], has already become a critically-acclaimed necessity for every other sf workshop in the country.) No, by rigorous judgment, Robin is not an editor, and so it is remarkable that his name should be found with those of the acknowledged "forces" in the genre.

The reason for comrades.h.i.+p with the aforementioned germinal influences is all in a name, already dropped: Clarion.

In 1967, Robin Scott Wilson showed up at Damon Knight's workshop conference for sf professionals in Milford, Pennsylvania. He was a pleasant man, good-looking but essentially bland, the way a good CIA agent should be. (We learned later he had worked for that skulking organization. It explained the crepe-soled shoes and the suspicious bulges in his clothes, bulges we had attributed to malformations of the body about which gentlefolk do not speak, bulges that later turned out to be service automatics, tape recorders, a plenitude of eavesdropping bugs, a two-way radio, harness rigs of explosives and other items of doom, and a very thick, buckram-bound collection of Snoops: The CIA House Organ Snoops: The CIA House Organ, 195066 much marginally-annotated in a childlike scrawl.) He nosed about, speaking to Damon, to Kate Wilhelm, to Fritz Leiber, to me and to others. For a while there, we were pricing cabins in Cuba. Finally, however, he took us into his confidence and admitted the paraphernalia was just a matter of habit. CIA men are apparently like old fire-horses. They never get over the thrill of playing G-Man. (Which probably explains J. Edgar Hoover, but that's a horrid of another choler.) (Sorry about that.) He further confessed, under threat of having to a.n.a.lyze a Tom Disch story, that he was in the English department of a small liberal arts college, Clarion College in Clarion, Pennsylvania-and he wanted to start a sf workshop for unknown writers. He left, as did we all, when Milford ended two weeks later, and he promised to get in touch with some of us who might care to come in as "visiting faculty." Till that time, there had only been sporadic, usually ineptly-staffed sf cla.s.ses in a very very few colleges and universities. We didn't hold out much hope, but it had been a pleasant encounter. few colleges and universities. We didn't hold out much hope, but it had been a pleasant encounter.

Even the retina-printing didn't bother us.

The next summer, five of us were drawn to the midland of Pennsylvania where we took part in one of the most exciting experiments ever attempted in the field of sf. Students of all ages were gathered together for the first concerted attempt to "teach" the writing of sf and fantasy. (I put those " "s there, because as we all know, writing cannot be taught. If there is a talent, it can be shown the tools of imaginative writing, and the uses to which they may be put.) The success of the Clarion experiment is now history. G.o.d knows I've crowed about it enough in these pages. But only comparison with other, more prestigious, longer-established workshops shows precisely how how successful Clarion has been. As I've said elsewhere in A,DV, if a workshop of fifty or a hundred conferees produces two or three writers who go on to make either a living or a joyful hobby of what they write, it is considered a bonanza. Clarion, in its first three years alone, set forth on a sf world hungry for new voices, at least fifty of its seventy students, and some who have become full-time freelancers, doing quite well, thank you. So Robin Scott Wilson's credits have to include names like Ed Bryant, Joan Bernott, George Alec Effinger, Neil Shapiro, C. Davis Belcher, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Estelle Butler, Steve Herbst, Robert Thurston and others whose names appear in this volume, in successful Clarion has been. As I've said elsewhere in A,DV, if a workshop of fifty or a hundred conferees produces two or three writers who go on to make either a living or a joyful hobby of what they write, it is considered a bonanza. Clarion, in its first three years alone, set forth on a sf world hungry for new voices, at least fifty of its seventy students, and some who have become full-time freelancers, doing quite well, thank you. So Robin Scott Wilson's credits have to include names like Ed Bryant, Joan Bernott, George Alec Effinger, Neil Shapiro, C. Davis Belcher, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Estelle Butler, Steve Herbst, Robert Thurston and others whose names appear in this volume, in Quark Quark, in Orbit Orbit, and in the forthcoming The Last Dangerous Visions The Last Dangerous Visions.

I've taught at a number of workshops, some sf, some general fiction, but even though Robin has moved to Evanston, Illinois and had to pa.s.s along the Workshop to James Sallis at Tulane (now making it the Tulane Workshop in SF & Fantasy, Continuing Clarion, a somewhat unwieldy t.i.tle), I have never encountered a conference as smoothly-run, as productive, as enriching for faculty as for students, as the one that will always be remembered as Robin's gift to the sf world. If Campbell and Gold and Boucher/McComas were the spiritual fathers of the generations of sf writers who brought the form to its present state of respectability and excellence, then surely Robin Wilson will forevermore be known as the driving force who gave first break to the new generation.

All of this quite aside, and forgetting for the moment that there will be a second Clarion/Tulane anthology edited by Robin, it certainly seems unlikely that a pure academic type could have instilled the faith and drive in a project like Clarion: the students demand their faculty be working writers. And on that basis, Robin is included here.

"Last Train to Kankakee" is a strange and artful piece of work, deserving of merit purely as story.

It is doubly a pleasure to present it, however, from a man who has paid his dues to sf in a way most of us never will.

How odd that such a complex human being has so little to say about himself:

"Born 1928 in Columbus, Ohio. Grew up in a house under the cellar steps of which were stacked great mouldering piles of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Amazing Thrilling Wonder Stories, Amazing, and Astounding Astounding. Spent substantial portion of childhood under those stairs along with a considerable pride of silverfish consuming science fiction. Majored in physics at Ohio State but switched to English and girls in my senior year because I couldn't understand mathematics beyond the calculus. Found I could understand English. Took an M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, specializing in 18th century literature and the works of Henry Fielding.

"At various times have been a seaman, college professor, short-order cook, electrician, Navy Lieutenant, fish-cutter, CIA officer, farmer, and writer. Have found all these occupations interesting, none of them lucrative. Am conventional in my behavior, but think lots of dark and unsavory thoughts. When this story was written, I was living in a grey house on a hill overlooking the strip mines of Clarion, Pennsylvania, with two hamsters, a bird, four kids, a poodle, a wife, and some tropical fish. By the time it'll be published I'll have been living for some time just outside Chicago. This may not be an improvement. There are still silverfish in my cellar."

LAST TRAIN TO KANKAKEE.

Robin Scott Sidney Becket began to run a very real risk of eternal d.a.m.nation when he was quite young. When, by the time he was fourteen, he had robbed three candy stores, raped a twelve-year-old girl, and shot his father with his old man's war-surplus '03 Springfield, his d.a.m.nation was pretty well a.s.sured. But Sidney never gave it a thought; he was too busy learning.

And what he learned on the south side of Chicago, he applied with admirable diligence the rest of his life: ...click of cue-ball...fat moneyman in the shadowy corner...groove in the slate into side pocket...dollar bills on green felt like spring leaves in Grant Park after a hailstorm...

In the army, in 1945, it had paid him well: ..."Hab'n Sie den Pennicilium mitgebracht?" "Jawohl. I got it. 500 million units. 500 bucks."...and the dollar bills like green roof-s.h.i.+ngles, stacked and interleaved with German efficiency... I got it. 500 million units. 500 bucks."...and the dollar bills like green roof-s.h.i.+ngles, stacked and interleaved with German efficiency...

After the war, with his army stake, it had been hot cars: ...engine block s.h.i.+vering under the air-hammer...sweet stink of acetone-base lacquer...young men, tough and swaggering, who on a good night could deliver three or four cars apiece to the abandoned bakery on Cicero Avenue...and the C-notes layered and bundled like the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune on street corners before Sunday dawns... on street corners before Sunday dawns...

And then it had been hijacking television sets, and then it had been a string of cribs in Calumet City, and then it had been running uncut heroin up from Matamoros and then it had been Leavenworth, Kansas, and one-to-five. And because Sidney got busted again at Leavenworth, it had been five more. (One of the kids he had dragooned into the back room of the supply shed had objected to the use the older convicts were putting him to, and he had bled a good deal and died from a sacking needle in the eye.) ...O you girls of Calumet City...O you hot and dusty reaches of King Ranch...O you gray walls and jolly fellows and jute-torn hands ... ...and the bills fluttered and skimmed across lonely truck-stops and hot summer night streets and mesquite and through the bars...

And then it had been bunco in L.A. and a pyramid club in Frisco and an acid cult in Berkeley and Mary Louise Allenby. ("I will save you, Sidney. Believe, Sidney, and I will save you.") And he pretended to believe and married Mary Louise Allenby and jacked the dues up to fifty dollars a quarter and upped the price to five dollars a cube and when Mary Louise fell for the cryogenic preservation bit and invested all her money in a deepfreeze plant, Sidney sold lockers and perpetual care for twenty grand a throw and my G.o.d how the money rolled in and even Mary Louise was getting tolerable as long as he could get off to Vegas or down to Tijuana every couple of weeks, and the lessons of South Chicago were really paying off and everything was paradise, or as close to paradise as a man like Sidney Becket could reasonably expect to get, when one night about three in the morning, while he was in bed with a Mexican girl, her lithe young pimp, and a middle-aged couple from Ligonier, Pennsylvania, a small piece of vascular tissue, worn and swollen, broke loose in Sidney's vena cava, sailed gracefully along for a distance of twenty-seven millimeters before nosing a h.o.r.n.y edge into its channel, and blocked the flow of blood to Sidney's right auricle.

...O deep and mysterious briny...O windless sail...O diastolic dance...O caved auricle...

Sidney's last words, as he lay flopping and wheezing at the foot of the bed, were: "Bury me inna ground! Don't let Mary Louise stick me in one of them G.o.ddam lockers!"