The Book of Skulls (22 page)

42. Eli

Summer lies heavy on the land. The sky throbs with stupefying heat. All seems predetermined and properly ordered. Timothy sleeps. Oliver sleeps. Ned and I remain. In these months we have grown quite strong and our skins are dark from the sun. We live in a kind of waking dream, floating placidly through our daily round of chores and rites. We are not quite full-fledged fraters yet, but our time of Trial is nearing its end. Two weeks after that day of gravedigging I mastered the ritual of the three women and since then I have had no difficulties in absorbing any lesson the fraters would teach me.

The days flow together. We stand outside time here. Was it April when we came first to the fraters? Of what year, and what year is this? A waking dream, a waking dream. I feel sometimes that Oliver and Timothy are figures in another dream, one that I had long ago. I have begun to forget the details of their faces. Blond hair, blue eyes, yes, but then what? How were their noses shaped, how prominent were their chins? Their faces fade. Timothy and Oliver are gone, and Ned and I remain. I still remember Timothy’s voice, a warm supple bass, well controlled, beautifully modulated, with faintly nasal aristocratic inflections. And Oliver’s, a strong clear tenor, the tones hard-edged and firm, the accent neutral, the accentless American of the prairies. To them my gratitude. They died for me.

This morning my faith wavered, only for an instant, but it was a frightening instant; an abyss of uncertainty opened beneath me after so many months of wholehearted assurance, and I saw devils with pitchforks and heard the shrill laughter of Satan. I was coming in from the fields, and I happened to look far across the flat scrubby land to the place where Timothy and Oliver lie, and unexpectedly a thin scratchy voice in my head asked me,
Do you think you’ve gained anything here? How can you be sure? How certain are you that it’s possible to have the thing that you seek?
I knew a moment of awful fear, in which I imagined I stared with red-rimmed eyes into an icy future, seeing myself wither and shrivel and turn to dust in an empty, blasted world. The moment of doubt then left me, as suddenly as it had come. Perhaps it was just a vagrant gust of unfocused discontent, blowing idly across the continent toward the Pacific, that had paused briefly to unsettle me. I was shaken by what I had undergone, and I ran to the house, meaning to find Ned and tell him about it, but by the time I neared his room the episode seemed too ridiculous to share with him.
Do you think you’ve gained anything here?
How could I have doubted at all? A strange backsliding, Eli.

His door was open. I looked in and saw him sitting slumped, his head in his hands. Somehow he sensed my presence; he looked up quickly, rearranging his face, replacing a transient look of despair or dejection with a carefully bland expression. But his eyes were bright with strain and I thought I saw the glitter of incipient tears.

“You felt it too, then?” I asked.

“Felt what?” Almost defiantly.

“Nothing. Nothing.” An airy shrug.
How can you be sure?
We were playing games with one another, pretending. But doubt was general that morning. An infection running through both of us.
How certain are you that it’s possible to have the thing that you seek?
I felt a wall rising between him and me, preventing me from telling him of the fears I had felt, or from asking him why he had seemed so distraught. I left him and went to my room to bathe, and afterward to breakfast. Ned and I sat together but said little. Our morning session with Frater Antony was due to follow, but I felt somehow that I should not go, and when I had eaten I returned instead to my room.
Do you think you’ve gained anything here?
In confusion I knelt before the great mosaic-work skull-mask on my wall, staring at it with unblinking eyes, letting myself absorb it, compelling the myriad tiny bits of obsidian and turquoise, of jade and shell, to melt and flow and change, until that skull put on flesh for me and I saw a face over the gaunt bones, another face, another, a whole series of faces, a flickering, ever-shifting array of faces. Now I saw Timothy, and now the mask put on the finer features of Oliver, and now I saw my father, who swiftly was transformed into my mother.
How can you be sure?
Frater Antony looked down from the wall, speaking to me in an unknown tongue, and became Frater Miklos, murmuring of lost continents and forgotten caves.
How certain are you that it’s possible to have the thing that you seek?
Now I saw the slender, timid, big-nosed girl I had loved momentarily in New York, and I had to grope for her name—Mickey? Mickey Bernstein?—and I said, “Hello, I went to Arizona, just as I told you,” but she made no reply; I think she had forgotten who I was. She vanished and in her place came the sullen girl in the Oklahoma motel, and then the heavy-breasted succubus who had floated past me that night in Chicago. I heard the shrill laughter again, rising from the abyss, and wondered if I would have another of those moments of devastating doubt.
Do you think you’ve gained anything here?
Suddenly Dr. Nicolescu peered down at me, gray-faced, sad-eyed, shaking his head, accusing me in his mild self-deprecatory way of having treated him unkindly. I made no denials, but neither did I wince nor look away, for my guilt had been taken from me. I kept my weary eyelids open, staring at him until he was gone.
How certain are you that it’s possible to have the thing that you seek?
Ned’s face came. Timothy’s, again. Oliver’s. And then my own, the face of Eli himself, the prime instigator of the journey, the feckless leader of the Receptacle.
Do you think you’ve gained anything here?
I studied my face, deplored its flaws, seized control of it, retrogressed it to plump pasty-faced boyhood—then brought it forward in time again to the present, to the new and unfamiliar Eli of the House of Skulls, and went beyond that Eli to another I had never seen before, an Eli to come, timeless, stolid, phlegmatic, an Eli-turned-frater, a face of fine leather, a face of stone. As I examined that Eli I heard the Adversary insistently asking His question:
How can you be sure? How can you be sure? How can you be sure?
He asked it over and over, hammering me with it, until all echoes blurred into a single formless rumbling boom, and I was without answer for Him and found myself alone on a dark polar plateau, clawing at a universe whose gods had fled, thinking, I have shed the blood of my friends, and for what? And for what? For
this
? But then strength returned to me, and I shouted my answer into His booming derisions, crying out that I fell back upon my faith, I was sure because I was sure. “I believe! I believe! I deny You Your victory!” And showed myself my own image striding through the shining streets of distant tomorrows, treading the sands of alien worlds, an eternal Eli embracing the torrent of years. And I laughed, and He laughed also, and His laughter drowned mine, but my faith would not waver and at last He fell still, allowing me to laugh last.

Then I found myself sitting, hoarse-throated and trembling, before the familiar mosaic mask. There were no more metamorphoses. The time of visions was over. I gave the mask a wary glance but it remained as it was. Very well. I searched my soul and found no residue of doubt in it; that final conflagration had burned all those late-lingering impurities away. Very well. Rising, I left my room and walked quickly down the hall, into that part of the building where bare beams alone stand forth against the open sky. Looking up, I saw a huge hawk circling far above me, dark against the fierce blank blueness. Hawk, you will die, and I will live. Of this I have no doubt. I turned the corner and came to the room where our meetings with Frater Antony are held. The frater and Ned were already there, but evidently they had waited for me; for the frater’s pendant still hung around his neck. Ned smiled at me and Frater Antony nodded.
I understand,
they appeared to be saying.
I understand. These storms will come.
I knelt beside Ned. Frater Antony removed his pendant and placed the tiny jade skull on the floor before us.
Life eternal we offer thee.
“Let us turn the interior vision upon the symbol we see here,” said Frater Antony gently. Yes. Yes. Joyously, expectantly, undoubtingly, I gave myself anew to the Skull and its Keepers.

Afterword

The early 1970s was a revolutionary period in American society, when old assumptions were being turned upside down and a host of new ways of thinking and behaving were sweeping through the land. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 had set centrifugal forces loose in us; then the strange, grim episode of the Vietnam War, a minor “police action,” which had escalated into a surrealistic and incomprehensible struggle that was consuming all the moral and psychic energy of the country and much of its economic substance as well, touched off a period in which we let our hair grow long, turned away from conventional clothing to don weird new fashions or no clothing at all, experimented with mind-altering drugs and new forms of sexual freedom, adopted a whole new slang vocabulary, and, of course, railed endlessly against the politicians who had led us, seemingly with their eyes closed, into the new chaos that was our daily portion. It was a time of—well, craziness.

Science fiction, which always reflects the culture of its era while ostensibly taking the future as its subject, was, of course, profoundly affected by the cultural revolution that we term “the Sixties,” but which actually spanned the years from 1966 or so through 1973. We science fiction writers had a revolution of our own in those years, a time when the old pulp-magazine narrative modes of SF were cast aside in favor of an attempt to reconcile the visionary, even romantic themes of science fiction with the methods of modern mainstream novelists—a movement that quickly was labeled “the New Wave.”

The critic Judith Merril, one of its most deeply committed exponents, characterized the primary intent of the New Wave writers as “the application of contemporary and sometimes (though mostly not very) experimental literary techniques to the kind of contemporary/experimental speculation which is the essence of science fiction.” But, she said, New Wave content was as important as its style: fiction that took into account such things as “op art, student protest, the new sexual revolution, psychedelics, and a multiplex of other manifestations of the silly-sounding phrase, Flower Power. . . .”

Many of the New Wave writers were British: Brian W. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, D. G. Compton. But in America too, in this time of exuberant ferment, many well-established SF writers who were bored with the constraining nature of the old SF were taking the opportunity to reinvent themselves as well, often without realizing that they were affiliating themselves with something called the New Wave. They simply wanted to try something new. Harlan Ellison, who had written a great deal of undistinguished SF in conventional pulp modes, abruptly broke loose with such startlingly surreal stories as “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World,” which won him an entirely new reputation as a literary innovator. John Brunner, a British writer whose career was largely centered in the United States, turned away from paperback space-opera to write such unusual books as
The Whole Man
and the gigantic, astonishing, Hugo-winning
Stand on Zanzibar.
Fritz Leiber’s fiction, always dark and strange, grew darker and stranger. So did that of Philip K. Dick and Philip Jose Farmer.

Then the frenzy and furore of the Sixties began to die down and most of the former cultural rebels began to seek more orderly and conventional lives. Once again science fiction reflected society’s larger cultural changes by returning to conventional storytelling formulas, and the dark, intense books of the New Wave period were quickly overshadowed by straightforward formula fiction that owed its inspiration to
Star Trek
and
Star Wars
rather than to James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Thomas Mann. Things have pretty well stayed that way ever since.

Does that mean that the New Wave period of 1966–73 was a bizarre and insignificant aberration in the history of science fiction?

No. Bizarre, maybe, but not insignificant. Those years were a time of riotous excess in science fiction, as they were in European and American civilization in general, and, like most literary revolutions, the New Wave produced much abominable nonsense along with a few genuine classics. In their reaction against the staleness of the older fiction modes, the New Wave writers sometimes went much too far over the top into wayward and willful self-indulgence, as even some of them will admit today. But one can hardly say that it was all in vain.

The longterm effect of the dizzying New Wave period was a grudging acceptance of the fact that science fiction could and should be something more than straightforwardly told pulp narrative involving a conflict between generically characterized stereotypical figures that led inevitably to the triumph of good over evil. For the first time it became permissible in science fiction to write complex narratives about complex people who were dealing with complex speculative situations. Fullness of characterization, emotional depth, and richness of prose would no longer be seen as something for a writer to avoid, as generally had been the case in SF in the magazine-dominated era of the first half of the twentieth century.

I was myself caught up in the New Wave excitement, though I never labeled myself as a follower of any particular revolutionary movement. But my career took me on a New Wave trajectory, from my early straightforward magazine fiction to such unusual works of the 1960s as the novels
Thorns
and
Son of Man,
and experimental stories by the double handful.

The Book of Skulls,
which I wrote in late 1970 and early 1971, was a product of the latter half of the New Wave period. It is an indication of my own ambivalent, somewhat conservative place in the science fiction of the times that although I felt no hesitations about writing a book as unusual in form and tone (for science fiction) as
The Book of Skulls
was, I did feel some residual doubt, rooted as I was in the pulp magazine SF of the 1940s and 1950s, about whether the book I was writing was science fiction at all.

Defining science fiction is a tricky business at best. I think I know what it is, but both as an editor and as a writer I have sometimes played fast and loose with my definition of it. It is, as the writer and critic Damon Knight once said, whatever we are pointing to when we point to something and call it “science fiction.” I can define it by specifics: A story with robots in it is science fiction, a story about interplanetary travel is science fiction, a story about a time machine is science fiction, and so on and so on, heaping up a multitude of specific cases in the hope that they will unite into one big generalization. But that’s not a very good way to define anything. (“This oak is a tree. . . . This maple is a tree. . . . But is this big fern a tree? Is this sixty-foot-high cactus a tree?”) Wherein lies the treeness of oaks and maples, and in what way do the tall fern and the huge cactus share that quality, and in what way, if any, do they not?

I can also define science fiction, as has often been done, as fiction about the interaction of human beings and technology. That will cover an awful lot of territory, but it seems to exclude such books as my own
Dying Inside
(which is about telepathy) and Harry Harrison’s
Make Room! Make Room!
(which is about demography). I can, and sometimes do, fall back on the notion that science fiction is defined by a certain kind of
strangeness,
by an element of the unreal, of the fantastic; but you can see what a useless definition that is, since it qualifies
Alice in Wonderland
as science fiction, just as the humans-and-technology definition qualifies
Arrowsmith.
I don’t think
Alice in Wonderland
is science fiction, nor would I willingly admit
Arrowsmith
to the genre. But
The Book of Skulls—

Here we have a novel that takes place in the early 1970s, in the United States—a straight contemporary setting, since that was when I wrote it. The narrators (there are four of them, each speaking in an individual tone of voice, and what a harrowing technical exercise
that
turned out to be!) are American college boys off on an Easter vacation. Nothing at all science-fictional about that; but there is nothing science-fictional about the first hour or so of
King Kong,
either, and certainly
King Kong
turns into science fiction once those dinosaurs are on the screen. Eventually the four boys of
The Book of Skulls
get to Arizona, where they have gone in search of the secret of eternal life; and since the attaining of immortality is one of the classic themes of science fiction, and I have stated right there in the second paragraph of the book that that’s what they’re looking for, perhaps that alone is enough to qualify the book as science fiction. Surely the
quest
for immortality is science-fictional to the core, whether or not the characters actually find it.

And yet, and yet—and I think this is the crux of the matter—the book doesn’t
sound
like science fiction, at least not science fiction of the sort I grew up reading more than fifty years ago. Where is the simple, functional prose of John Campbell’s great old magazine,
Astounding Science Fiction,
in which so many of our SF classics were born? These kids talk of dope and Sergeant Pepper, of Joyce and Kierkegaard, of sex both straight and gay, of WASP country-club folkways and noisy bar mitzvahs, of all sorts of stuff that never got into
Astounding.
Where is lean, gray-eyed Kimball Kinnison, the Second Stage Lensman? Where is Gilbert Gosseyn of the multiple mind? Where’s Captain Kirk? Luke Skywalker? The stuff in the book sounds an awful lot like the material of mainstream fiction, doesn’t it? No spaceships, no robots, no time machines, no galactic empires, none of the familiar SF furniture, no trace of the texture of the stories that filled the beloved gaudy magazines that hooked so many of us on science fiction in the first place so long ago.

And yet—immortality—surely
that’s
a science fiction theme!

Is it real, though, this immortality I write about here? What’s the true story of these monks out there in the Arizona desert? Have they actually survived since the days of the Lascaux caves, since the era of lost Atlantis? If they have, then the book must be science fiction by anybody’s definition, and never mind the furniture or the texture: A novel that has 25,000-year-old men running around in it
has
to be science fiction, right? Unless, of course, those 25,000-year-old men aren’t 25,000 years old at all, just a bunch of cultists pulling some sort of scam, and that possibility definitely exists in the book. So is it science fiction or isn’t it?

I don’t know. It all depends on whether you, like Eli and Ned and Oliver and Tim, can accept the story of the fraters at face value. If you think they’re genuine immortals, the book is genuine science fiction. If you think it’s all some kind of nut-cult hoax, well, the book turns into some sort of dark social satire, I suppose, with science-fictional overtones. I just don’t know. I wasn’t there. Ask Eli. Ask Tim. Or make up your own mind.

The Book of Skulls,
at any rate, was written during a particularly freaky time in American life, and is very much a book rooted in that freakiness. It is also a reasonable representative of the new sort of science fiction that evolved in that time. The novel I wrote just before it,
The Second Trip,
was definitely science fiction, but its tone, hard-edged and profanity-laced, is that of modern non-science-fictional fiction. The novel I wrote just after it,
Dying Inside,
is about a telepath, and therefore qualifies as SF, but its handling makes it a kind of borderline case. All three books have a certain contemporaneity of feel, a certain mainstreamness of approach, which is absent from such other novels of mine of that period, unchallengeably science fiction and not at all marginal, as
Tower of Glass
and
The World Inside.

When
The Book of Skulls
was first published in the summer of 1972—by the respectable old mainstream house of Charles Scribner’s Sons, publishers of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe—it was received with some bafflement by reviewers outside the science fiction field, who thought it was science fiction, and by science fiction reviewers, who thought it was mainstream. Even the SF writer James Blish, one of the most perceptive of critics, was puzzled by it when he reviewed it for one of the science fiction magazines, finally deciding, “arbitrarily,” that it qualified as fantasy because of its immortality-quest theme. He did, at least, like the book. (“Please buy it at once, and read it repeatedly; you’re sure to find it important, rewarding, and quite possibly better integrated than I’m able to see. Of one thing about it I’m quite sure: It’s so unobtrusively, flawlessly written, that even at its most puzzling it comes as perilously close to poetic beauty as any contemporary SF novel I’ve read.”) I was, of course, delighted by such an accolade coming from a writer I respected as much as Blish. More than thirty years later, that’s still one of the reviews I treasure most. But even he had trouble figuring out where to place the book in its genre.

It was, regardless of its ambiguities, nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards that year, along with
Dying Inside,
which ought to settle the question of whether those books are science fiction. (A novel nominated by hundreds of people as best Science Fiction Novel of the Year is, ipso facto, science fiction, right?) In the final voting for the Hugo, which is given by science fiction readers, both
Skulls
and
Dying Inside
finished behind three novels whose value, both as science fiction and as literature, seemed to me very modest; this was to me an educational experience. The nominees for the Nebula, the award given by science fiction writers, included a couple of books of rather higher caliber, but no matter, because the same very ordinary novel by a well-known author carried off both trophies that year, and so much for the democratic process.

Over the years, though,
The Book of Skulls
has maintained a passionate audience, and tattered copies of old editions pass from hand to hand, I understand, with great reverence. It has also been the center of considerable interest in Hollywood since about 1977, with any number of famous directors on the verge of making a movie from it before some Hollywood-style twist of fate intervened. I am delighted that the book will now be made available to today’s readers, who will, I suppose, find some of the 1970s background details and social patterns to be of quaint historical interest, but who nevertheless are likely to find themselves caught up in the mysteries of its plot just as intensely as readers were when the book was first published a generation ago.