Orbit 16 - [Anthology] Read online

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  Orbit 16

  Ed by Damon Knight

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  THEY SAY

  MOTHER AND CHILD

  Joan D. Vinge

  THE SKINNY PEOPLE OF LEPTOPHLEBO STREET

  R. A. Lafferty

  A BRILLIANT CURIOSITY

  Doris Piserchia

  PHOENIX HOUSE

  Jesse Miller

  JACK AND BETTY

  Robert Thurston

  PRISON OF CLAY, PRISON OF STEEL

  Henry-Luc Planchat

  HEARTLAND

  Gustav Hasford

  SANDIAL

  Moshe Feder

  THE MEMORY MACHINE

  IN DONOVAN’S TIME

  C. L. Grant

  AMBIENCE

  Dave Skal

  BINARY JUSTICE

  Richard Bireley

  THE HOUSE BY THE SEA

  Eleanor Arnason

  EUCLID ALONE

  William F. Orr

  * * * *

  They Say

  At that point, my theoretical work complete, I began to look around for those new forms that my theorizing had led me to demand. And I found them everywhere, hiding under a classification which seems designed to guarantee that they are not “serious literature.” The classification, as you are all aware, is “science fiction,” and it conceals a body of work that is truly astonishing, not just in its “amazing” content but in its range and variety of expression, its present quality and future potential.

  —”Stillborn Literature,”

  by Robert Scholes, Bulletin

  of the Midwest Modern Language

  Association, Spring 1974

  “Science fiction” is a publisher’s marketing category like “westerns” or “gothics” or “nurse novels”—a packaging definition. When you walk through a supermarket, you can tell the breakfast cereals from the detergents at a glance, even though they come in boxes of roughly the same size and shape. . . . Science fiction writers have complained that serious literary critics automatically ignore their work, no matter what its merits, and sometimes have spun elaborate theories about the snobbishness of the “literary establishment.” But after all, how can a serious, conscientious literary critic sort through the year’s mountain-high pile of tacky-looking science fiction paperbacks to find a few real jewels buried in this heap of literary mediocrity? He knows what a potentially important book looks like as an artifact, as a physical package, because publishers have consistently packaged most of these books in an identifiable style. He may even realize that one soap box out of twenty contains breakfast cereal, but is he going to chomp through nineteen boxes of soap to find it?

  —Norman Spinrad, Modern

  Science Fiction (Anchor, 1974)

  Mr. Bryan: . . . During the nerva experience, I first came into contact with aec and the methodology they were using. Obviously, since we were developing a nuclear plant that was going to fly over people’s heads, we had some of the same problems— in some cases even more severe, since we were moving the plant rather than having a stationary source. We spent a considerable amount of money on research into improved reliability techniques when we entered the nerva program. This was primarily because you could not build a lot of these and test them like we could in the Apollo program to find out where the problems were. During this experience, we would occasionally be analyzing a potential accident or problem and we’d see the similarity between that and what a power plant would have, so we would go to the aec or to the industry and try to find out what was going on in analyzing this particular sub-problem.

  We were very surprised to find a lack of overall knowledge of aerospace techniques within the afx, and pretty much a lack of interest in developing them. They were having a lot of problems at that time just with normal Qc-type functions—quality control; they were just implementing that as a program, which, of course, had been in aerospace for many years and in industry many years before that. But they were having problems implementing that type of program—which, incidentally, is an inspection-after-the-fact type of program whereas reliability is trying to analyze it before the fact. So we didn’t find a lot of help from anything that was going on within the aec or within the industry. . . .

  Since we had spent considerable millions in research to develop some new techniques in the nerva program for reliability and safety analysis, we were urged by our aec funding sponsors to contact other aec people to see what could be salvaged from this program and transferred over to the aec to use in nuclear power plant analyses. So we made many presentations to aec personnel on just what we had gone through—what we had learned and the techniques we had developed. We were very disappointed that they elected not to take advantage of this experience—not even to consider, for instance, taking our final documents and reports into a library function to hold until they got to the point in their learning curve where they could use them. What we found was a major concern with their own problems and a very typical resistance to change. ... I personally concluded, from these many contacts and from discussions with people since those contacts, that in general, the aec is up to ten years behind the times as far as implementing aerospace reliability and safety techniques is concerned, and as a substitute for good analysis, is pushing phony reliability and safety numbers to assure us of just the opposite. . . .

  Chairman Warren: Can you explain fault tree analysis?

  Mr. Bryan: Yes. A fault tree analysis is where you start with some problem that can occur, some system malfunction, then you start tiering your analysis much like an organizational chart. You start with a box at the top that says you’re going to have a loss-of-coolant accident. You then tier it down to the six or so things that can cause a loss-of-coolant accident, and then for each one of those six things, you analyze the things that could cause each of those six, and you just keep tiering down until you’re down to the nuts and bolts of the system.

  The problem in building a fault tree and getting a number out of the fault tree analysis is obvious. You have this huge tree of possible failure mechanisms that all inter-react and all lead into other events for which you have no quantifiable data. The only possible way to quantify each one of these boxes is to have a failure rate for each one. You’d have to have a failure rate for the bolt. You have to have a failure rate for the inter-reactive effect between two adjoining parts. You have to have a failure rate for the seal leaking between two parts. You just have to have failure rates for every point in the analysis, and there just does not exist that type of information. So you end up doing the same thing we’ve always done. Where you can get failure rates, you use them. Where there are industrial failure rates, use them. For instance, maybe you can’t find anything on the particular burst failure mechanics of a high pressure line that you have, so you go to the oil industry and see what they’ve got. Obviously, a pipe used in the oil industry is going to fail much differently from one in a nuclear application, but this is the best you have got so this is what you use.

  In other cases, where there is no industrial failure rate, you go back to some qualitative method or some guessing game.

  If you’re consistent in the use of these numbers in the fault tree, when you get done you certainly can compare one design against another and say this design is better than the other, if you used a common data base.

  Chairman Warren: But only for comparison?

  Mr. Bryan: Only for comparison. The absolute value of the number is totally meaningless. There is just no way that number can mean anything in terms of the real-world probability of failure.

  —William Bryan of the National

  Institute for Applied Research,<
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  testifying before the Subcommittee

  on State Energy Policy of the California

  State Assembly, Charles Warren,

  Chairman, February 1, 1974 (excerpted

  in Not Man Apart, Mid-May 1974,

  under the title “Nothing Can

  Possibly Go Wrong, Go Wrong, Go Wrong”)

  By 1919 the German bourgeoisie must have felt any means to be justified in the defense of its power. As of this time, myths and magic moved out of the drawing-rooms and coffee-houses to light against reason and revolution. The flood of pseudo-scientific pamphlets and treatises became overwhelming, sf, read by the social classes that were not reached by pseudo-scientific and philosophic pamphlets, also succumbed to such irrationality. The idea that the time was ripe for a “spiritual re-orientation” in literature too was ceaselessly suggested by such authors. They called for sensations and imaginative fantasies that would help to conquer gross “materialism” and its literary counterpart, realism. One seemingly non-political articulation of these tendencies went as follows:

  There are many indications that mechanistic materialism—derived from the exact sciences—which has impressed its stamp on the last decade, is at last dying out, due to the recent spiritual revolution. Obviously, the transcendental longings of the majority of humanity cannot be suppressed in the long run. . . . To begin with, we have again arrived at the point of view of “wonder”—i.e., we no longer dismiss as nonsense all things that are not explicable in terms of the known laws of physics. Mysterious connections between human beings, independent of spatial and temporal separation, spooks, the appearance of ghosts, all are again in the realm of the possible.

  This quotation comes from the magazine Der Orchideengarten, which was devoted to publishing only fantastic fiction and drawings—analogous to American “weird” and “fantasy” sf magazines. Max Valier, the later rocket pioneer and chairman of the “Society for Space-Flight,” who toured the country lecturing about the end of the world, about Atlantis and Lemuria, about Glacial Cosmogony and the breakthrough into Space, and in 1929 made an unsuccessful attempt to interest Hitler in the military potential of rockets, was even more explicit—

  Our present time, more than any other, requires a truly cosmic source and center for spiritual orientation. We need a tremendous, even super-Terran shock, in order to regain a sense of our identity which we have lost in the whirlpool of everyday selfishness. . . . On the basis of a new theory of cognition we will seek a more profound knowledge; and for our emotions, we will seek sensations of truly primeval shock, so that even the end of the world and of this Karth shall be a constructive experience.

  —”sf, Occult Sciences, and Nazi

  Myths,” by Manfred Nagel, Science-Fiction

  Studies, Spring 1974 (excerpted and

  translated from Nagel’s Science Fiction

  in Deutschland (Tübinger Vereinigung

  fur Volkskunde, Tubingen, 1972)

  <>

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  MOTHER AND CHILD

  Joan D. Vinge

  The king, the smith and the alien all loved her:

  and she? She loved all three.

  Part i: The Smith

  All day I have lain below the cliff. I can’t move, except to turn my head or twitch two fingers; I think my back is broken. I feel as if my body is already dead, but my head aches, and grief and shame are all the pain I can bear. Remembering Etaa . . .

  Perhaps the elders are almost right when they say death is the return to the Mother’s womb, and in dying we go back along our lives to be reborn. Between wakings I dream, not of my whole life, but sweet dreams of the time when I had Etaa, my beloved. As though it still happened I see our first summer together herding shenn, warm days in fragrant up­land meadows. We didn’t love each other then; she was still a child, I was hardly more, and for our different reasons we kept ourselves separated from the world.

  My reason was bitterness, for I was neaa, motherless. The winter before, I had lost my parents to a pack of kharks as they hunted. My mother’s sister’s family took me in, as was the custom, but I still ached with my own wounds of loss, and was always an outsider, as much from my own sullenness as from any fault of my kin. I questioned every belief, and could find no comfort. Sometimes, alone with just the grazing shenn, I sat and wept.

  Until one day I looked up from my weeping to see a girl, with eyes the color of new-turned earth and short curly hair as dark as my own. She stood watching me somberly as I wiped at my eyes, ashamed and angry.

  —What do you want? I signed, looking fierce and hoping she would run away.

  —I felt you crying. Are you lonely?

  —No. Go away. She didn’t. I frowned. —Where did you come from, anyway? Why are you spying on me?

  —I wasn’t spying. I was across the stream, with my shenn. I am Etaa. She looked as if that explained everything.

  And it did; I recognized her then. She belonged to another clan, but everyone talked about her: Etaa, her name-sign, meant “blessed by the Mother,” and she had the keenest eyesight in the village. She could see a bird on a branch across a field, and thread the finest needle; but more than that, she had been born with the second sight, she felt the Mother’s presence in all natural things. She could know the feeling and touch the souls of every living creature, some­times even predict when rain would fall. Others in the village had the second sight, but not as clearly as she did, and most people thought she would be the next priestess when she came of age. But now she was still a child, minding the flocks, and I wished she would leave me alone. —Your shenn will stray, O blessed one.

  Old hurt pinched her sun-browned face, and then she was running back toward the stream.

  —Wait! I stood up, startled, but she didn’t see my sign. I threw a stone; it skimmed past her through the grass. She stopped and turned. I waved her back, guilty that my grief had made me hurt somebody else.

  She came back, her face too full of mixed feeling to read.

  —I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you unhappy too. I’m Hywel. I sat down, gesturing.

  Her smile was as sudden and bright as her disappointment, and passed as quickly. She dropped down beside me like a hound, smoothing her striped kilt. —I wasn’t showing off ... I don’t mean to. ... Her shoulders drooped; I had never thought before that blessedness could be a burden like any­thing else. —I just wanted to— Her fingers hesitated in mid-sign. —To know if you were all right. She looked up at me through her long lashes, with a kind of yearning.

  I glanced away uncomfortably across the pasture. —Can you watch your shenn from here? They were only a gray-white shifting blot to me, even when my eyes were clear, and now my eyes were blurred again.

  She nodded.

  —You have perfect vision, don’t you? My hands jerked with pent-up frustration. —I wish I did!

  She blinked. —Why? Do you want to be a warrior, like in the old tales? Some of our people want to take the heads of the Neaane beyond the hills for what they do to us. I think in the south some of them have. Her eyes widened.

  The thought of the Neaane, the Motherless ones, made me flinch; we called them Neaane because they didn’t believe in the Mother Earth as we did, but in gods they claimed had come down from the sky. We are the Kotaane, the Mother’s children, and to be neaa was to be both pitiful and accursed, whether you were one boy or a whole people. —I don’t want to kill people. I want to be farsighted so I can be a hunter and kill kharks, like they killed my parents!

  —Oh. She brushed my cheek with her fingers, to show her sorrow. —When did it happen?

  —At the end of winter, while they were hunting.

  She leaned back on her elbows and glanced up into the dull blue sky, where the Sun, the Mother’s consort, was strug­gling to free his shining robes once more from the Cyclops. The Cyclops’ rolling bloodshot Eye looked down on us ma­levolently, out of the wide greenness of her face. —If was the doing of the Cyclops, probably.
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  Etaa sighed. —Her strength is always greatest at the Dark Noons, big Uglyface; she always brings pain with the cold! But the Mother sees all—

  —The Mother didn’t see the kharks. She didn’t save my parents; She could have. She gives us pain too, the Great Bitch!

  Etaa’s hands covered her eyes; then slowly they slid down again. —Hywel, that’s blasphemy! Don’t say that or She will punish you. If She let your parents die, they must have offended Her, She lifted her head with childish self-righteous­ness.

  —My parents never did anything wrong! Never! My mind saw them as they always were, bickering constantly…They stayed together because they had managed to have one child, and though they’d lost two others, they were fertile together and might someday have had a fourth. But they didn’t like each other anyway, and maybe their resentment was an offense. I hit Etaa hard on the arm and leaped up. —The Mother is a bitch and you are a brat! May you be sterile!

  She gasped and made the warding sign. Then she stood up and kicked me in the shins with her rough sandals, her face flushed with anger, before she ran off again across the pasture.