Gray Matters (2 page)

Both of the other two short pieces in this collection began as magazine assignments. In the early 1970s,
Playboy
had a plan to replace its “Little Annie Fanny” cartoon parody at the back of the magazine with a more robust science fiction feature. Their idea was to pair a different artist and writer in each issue. The editors contacted me and asked if I’d like to work with French cartoonist Philippe Druillet. As I had been a fan of Druillet’s graphic novel,
Les 6 Voyages des Lone Sloane,
I immediately said yes. The assignment demanded finding a narrative form to dovetail with Druillet’s abstract geometric style and so I deliberately constructed “Homecoming” without either plot or characters. The little story was well received at
Playboy.
Only one problem remained: of the dozen or so writers who had agreed to contribute to the series, I was the only one who actually delivered a finished piece and so the entire notion was abandoned.

“Homecoming” seemed doomed by its abstract nature to that peculiar limbo inhabited by unpublished manuscripts and unproduced screenplays. I thought no one would ever want a story so specifically designed to accompany illustrations that didn’t exist. It turned out I was wrong. When the
Cornell Review,
a high-end literary magazine affiliated with the university, started up in the spring of 1977, I was asked to contribute a story to their first issue. After “Conquistador” had been noted for distinction in
The Best American Short Stories of 1978,
editor Baxter Hathaway requested something new. I sent him “Homecoming.” It appeared in issue number five, and in his introduction Hathaway wrote, “Can the reader tell whether William Hjortsberg has tongue in cheek or not … ?” Sometimes I wonder myself.

“The Clone Who Ran for Congress” owes its life to Patricia Ryan who, in October 1975, was the text department editor at
Sports Illustrated.
Pat rode herd over all the freelancers contributing material to the magazine. I had worked on several oddball sporting articles for her in the past (avalanche control, raft trips, fly-fishing, rodeo schools), and when she wrote to ask if I’d be interested in writing a science fiction piece about the Olympics (“Maybe cloning?”), I jumped at the chance, not often being offered an opportunity to write fiction on assignment.

Other than the Olympics connection (the summer games were coming around again the next year in Montreal),
Sports Illustrated
gave me free rein. I liked Pat’s suggestion about clones as it provided a convenient starting point. A first-person narrative seemed to fit the bill and once I came up with the concept of a disgruntled corporate sports “image modifier” I was off and running. The story took much less time to write than a more conventional piece. Pat liked what she saw and ran it in the magazine almost without alteration, although somewhere along the line the title changed to “Goodby, Goodby, Goodby, Mr. Chips.” (Knowing I had also written a comic bullfight novel called
Toro! Toro! Toro!,
this prompted a friend to suggest a mock title for the detective novel I then had in progress: “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Deadly.”) Curiously,
Sports Illustrated
never used the titles supplied by the actual writers of the articles. It had something to do with layout and the art department but I never understood exactly what. In any case, whatever the title, I truly believe “The Clone Who Ran for Congress” was the only work of science fiction ever published in the magazine.

Life is nothing if not a series of accidents. A blind date in college becomes your first wife. Another chance encounter in a doctor’s office waiting room leads to divorce and remarriage. An old pal loans a copy of one of your novels as bedtime reading to a visiting friend who just happens to be Ridley Scott’s agent and two years later you’re in London working on the tenth draft of an original motion picture. Or, more to the point, while researching a biography of the late poet and novelist Richard Brautigan, I phoned Jack Shoemaker who, in the 1960s, co-owned the Unicorn Book Shop near Santa Barbara where his friend Richard read the entire
Trout Fishing in America
shortly before its first publication. In the course of our interview, Jack happened to ask, “Whatever happened to your book,
Symbiography
?” and the eventual result of that query became this collection.

Having a book go out of print is akin to watching a cherished friend die. Seeing it republished is like participating in a resurrection. Unlike Henry James, who rewrote all his novels when they were reissued, I have for the most part left the work in its original form. Other than proofreading for spelling and grammatical errors that slipped through the first time around, I have largely resisted the temptation to edit myself. I did feel troubled by the repeated use of the word “tape” in both
Gray Matters
and
Symbiography.
Magnetic recording tape is almost obsolete today and surely wouldn’t be in use five hundred years into the future, so I amended the term to avoid any anachronisms. Also, we all now know how long a round-trip to Jupiter takes and it isn’t three hundred years, so I substituted Aldebaran as a destination. Ditto the date of the 1999 Thirty-minute War, since that moment in time has come and gone without an outbreak of worldwide hostilities. In addition, I included epigraphs for both books, which were omitted way back when. In the case of
Gray Matters,
I felt it was too pretentious. For
Symbiography,
I thought I was just being silly. I no longer feel the same in either instance and the epigraphs have been duly restored. The future remains an unwritten book, its cryptic pages blank, and no crystal ball wizard, palm reader or Tarot deck manipulator can accurately provide a sneak preview of what’s coming in the next chapter. It is precisely this unknown anything-can-happen aspect of the time yet to come that makes the possibilities presented by science fiction such fertile ground for the literary imagination. Writers are forever looking for new ways to retell old stories. The freedom provided by speculation about the future allows the artist a means of viewing the present through a fresh pair of eyes. Among the several unfinished projects stacked on a shelf awaiting my further attentions is a novel dealing with time travel (hopefully in a manner fresh enough to make that well-worn path worth yet another visit). Whether I’ll ever get around to telling this particular tale becomes a science fiction story all its own.

The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

F. Nietzsche

The Twilight of the Idols

T
HE SCANNER SEES: UNENDING
gun-metal walls; waxed plastic flooring; three de Hartzman Communicators, multifrequency channel finders attached and blinking; and the forward end of the subdistrict memory-file. A soft flush of lavender suffuses the luminous egg-crate ceiling, the first gentle trace of a dawning day. At the end of the aisle, the Sector’s community power unit hums with life.

Next to the power unit, in the foremost deposit drawer, a solitary cerebromorph has switched off his scanner and floats in voluntary darkness. His number is A-0001-M(637-05-99). His name was Denton “Skeets” Kalbfleischer. Skeets is the oldest resident of the Depository. He is twelve years old and will remain so forever.

Over in Aisle B, an Amco-pak Mark IX maintenance van prowls silently along on pneumatic treads. The Mark IX is a clumsy piece of equipment and inventoriai considerations alone keep it from becoming obsolete. Accordingly, its use is restricted to those Sectors established before the Awakening. Maintenance vans are programmed to perform a wide range of mundane chores: the Mark Is clean and polish the aisles each night, the Mark IIIs tend the power units. Every Amco-pak above Mark V is a mechanic, equipped with telescoping arms and lubricated digits capable of the most intricate and precise manipulations. Mechanically minded Depository residents never tire of watching the vans at work and a special scanner channel has been provided to satisfy these vicarious repairmen.

One Aisle B resident with no interest in the Amco-pak is a former Czechoslovakian motion-picture star housed in deposit drawer number B-0486-F(098-76-04). Classified female (in the advanced Sectors no sex distinctions are made between resident cerebromorphs), Vera Mitlovic spends her time screening old films. Although Center Control considers twentieth-century cinema frivolous, and thus detrimental to spiritual growth, the old movies are recorded in the memory bank and all Vera need do is check her Micro Index and dial the appropriate code key on the telescript console.

Vera is awake this morning before reveille serenade (today the overture to Wagner’s
Der Fliegende Holländer)
and dials her first film the moment the memory bank librarian switches on for the day. (The film is
Bohemian Idyl,
a Czech romantic comedy, starring Vera as a Prague fashion designer who falls in love with a gypsy.) Three Center Control regulations for members of her category are neglected. By not checking her memo for a dream playback, she is unable to file the required auditing report; more importantly, for the third day in a row she misses the morning meditation exercise.

But Vera doesn’t care. With the old film flickering, she is transported beyond the demands of Center Control. Does it matter if the print is in poor condition, the celluloid yellow and scratched? It is like watching her own ghost. The challis skirt lifts and swirls; her long limber legs gleam with firelight; she dances about the caravan encampment, tempting the fiddlers with her buoyant breasts. And where were those lovely legs today, those youthful breasts? Gone to dust with only their image preserved, a shadow etched in silver nitrate. Vera’s joy is tinged with sadness and regret. If only she had eyes she would be weeping.

Two drawers down from where Vera views her melancholy matinee, Obu Itubi, a late twenty-second-century Nigerian sculptor (the most distinguished member of the school now known as the African Renaissance), programs a memory-bank entomology file on the habits of bees. Itubi’s work with plastic and steel represents the final flowering of Western humanism, a last gasp of anthropomorphism before the machines lulled the world into meditation. His file number is B-0489-M(773-22-99).

The Amco-pak in Aisle B has finished its work on the auxiliary power unit. A malfunctioning valve has been located and replaced and the Mark IX sorts and repacks the complex array of tools laid out for the job. A comic business. The Amco-pak is an absent-minded octopus, searching with its many arms for a variety of misplaced gadgets. Scanner viewers are always amused by this clumsy clean-up operation.

The Amco-pak locates the tools and lumbers up the aisle, retractable arms stored, steel digits at rest, mindlessly treading toward its next assignment. Many Depository residents are frankly envious. They feel it a waste to bestow those miraculous fingers on a machine incapable of appreciating their worth.

Skeets Kalbfleischer is sleeping late; the reveille serenade digested into his dream, a stirring soundtrack for the Hollywood sex fantasies which still occupy his adolescent mind even after a four-hundred-year absence from Grade B double features. Skeets is a definite problem for Center Control. Because of his stature as a historic landmark, the very first cerebromorph and cornerstone of the oldest Depository in the System, his complete failure to achieve any measure of spiritual progress in this enlightened age following the awakening is a matter of considerable concern to the Auditing Commission.

The problem isn’t that Skeets is not educated. In the years, decades, and centuries following his operation, Skeets has earned the equivalent of several dozen baccalaureate degrees. He has ten doctorates to his credit. Sealed in his cranial container from the age of twelve, Skeets has been spoon-fed knowledge by whole committees of curious scientists. Skeets is versed in mathematics, languages, the arts; he is an outstanding authority on molecular biology and ninth-century Indian cave painting. Learning, programmed on endless microfiles, has saturated his brain cells and Skeets spouts answers with the speed and accuracy of a computer. Denton Kalbfleischer is a very successful experiment. Only one problem: in this sophisticated age of meditation and spiritual liberation, Skeets still wants to be a cowboy.

“… the superfamily
Apoidea,
consisting of various social and solitary hymenopterous insects. Observe
Apis mellifera,
the common honeybee, both industrious and social. This insect lives in a swarm consisting of three classes. The majority of the swarm are neuters, known commonly as workers; they gather the pollen and build the comb. The female is called the Queen; she is the reproducer, the egg layer, and there is only one per swarm. The male of the species is the drone and his is an idle life. The drone’s only function is to… .” Obu Itubi isn’t listening to the narrator’s voice. He has turned the volume down until the mechanized monotone drawl is a murmur faint as the distant humming of the bees. All the more recent memory-files are narrated by computer and the soundtracks have an assembly-line sameness that makes Obu Itubi’s flesh crawl. An unpleasant sensation, akin to the phantom pain amputees of an earlier age suffered in their missing limbs, for Itubi no longer has flesh.

A bower of evening primroses arches delicately over the lovers’ heads, sweetly scenting the late afternoon. (They were made of paper and dusty from long storage in the property shop.) The slanting rays of an amber sunset gild the features of the handsome young couple. (The lightman was malicious and had trained his thousand-watt instruments directly into Vera’s eyes.) Distant violins blend with the shimmering nocturne of nightingales and crickets. (The musicians were drunk and made rude remarks concerning the leading lady’s private life. The bird calls and insect noises were produced by a fat pockmarked man who whistled into a microphone and rubbed two rosin-covered sticks.) “My beloved … my treasure …” the dark-eyed gypsy croons, while the blushing girl flutters and sighs. (His breath stank of garlic sausage and not even a heavy application of gum arabic kept his toupee from slipping slightly askew.) “Come away with me to the Moravian mountains, my love. I want to take you to the little willage where I was born.” (The leading man, who spoke Czech with a thick Slavic accent, was actually born in Croatia.) Leaning forward, he cups her radiant face in his hands and kisses her lips as the violins burble and the sunset dies like a smear of raspberry jam on the cyclorama.