Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading the stories that were reprinted in Robert Silverberg's 1969 collection Dimension 13 (the short German version was retitled Dimension 12.) Three more today; I'm reading the original versions of these stories in scans of the SF magazines in which they appeared in the period 1958-1966.
"The Four" (1958)
"The Four" is a brief little tale. Mary is an angry young woman! She lives in New Baltimore, an underwater city of 11,000 off the coast of North America; the domed submarine town's authoritarian government maintains total control over births so as to not exceed that figure. Of those 11,000, two hundred people have psychic powers, and Mary is one of the strongest of them, but her use of her gifts is severely circumscribed. For one thing, it is illegal to communicate telepathically with people from other underwater domed cities, like New Boston or New Miami, because the government fears any international intercourse could spark a war like the nuclear exchange that destroyed all surface civilization. For another, even Mary is not strong enough to project her mind above the surface of the ocean, and she desperately desires to see for herself the radioactive ruins the government tells everyone cover the Earth's dry land.
Headstrong and determined Mary flouts the law forbidding contact with people in other domes. And then she comes up with a scheme to cast her mind above the ocean waves; Mary enlists three male psykers, believing that they combine their mental powers they can reach beyond the ocean surface and view land.
(The psychic powers in this story don't make much sense--Mary can cast her mind hundreds of miles north, south, east and west--even to New London!--but not just a few miles up?)
Mary comes across as a domineering bitch who contemptuously pushes around her three accomplices, and her bitchiness comes back to bite her in the ass as the story ends. Working together, the four rebels see the land of North America, and find it isn't a radioactive waste covered in ruins after all, but green and beautiful! The psychic police, having detected this forbidden use of psychic powers, arrest the four, and they are sentenced to death. Death is administered by throwing people out the airlock to be crushed by water pressure. Mary, however, saves them from execution by corralling their combined mental power and teleporting the four of them to the surface.
(One person isn't capable of viewing the surface herself, but working with three other people she can transport all four of their physical bodies to the surface? Not very convincing.)
The four scofflaws reappear on the North American continent in the middle of a radioactive ruin and die within minutes. As they expire one of them gloats that he used a special mental skill he has to trick everybody into thinking the world was not a radioactive waste; I guess this is revenge because Mary treated him shabbily.
Gotta give this story a thumbs down. The characters' motivations are sketchy, and the mental powers are questionable, making the story feel like a filler piece Silverberg threw together without taking sufficient time to revise. I also have to question the theme--sure, Mary is a manipulative exploitative jerk who deserves to be punished, but the story sort of endorses, or fails to condemn, the heavy-handed government, which rankles.
"The Four" would be reprinted in two other Silverberg collections besides Dimension 13, World of a Thousand Colors and Sunrise on Mercury.
"Dark Companion" (1961)
Leon Rocklin, 26, is trying to kill himself, but is finding that it is not easy to do one's self in in the super high tech future of a bustling market-oriented interstellar civilization! Surveillance is constant, so aid is always close at hand, and medical technology is so advanced that even severe damage to bones and flesh can be readily repaired, leaving the self-loathing young man good as new after each suicide attempt. After the third such attempt, Leon's wealthy parents resort to assigning to their persistently self-destructive son a "Companion." This artificial man, the product of a vat in a lab, has purple skin, high intelligence, and superb reflexes and lacks genitals, susceptibility to drugs or booze, and any need for sleep, making it more than able to stick to Leon like glue and prevent him from popping a bottle's worth of sleeping pills or jumping out a window or whatever.
Silverberg does a good job describing the medical technology of the future and of fashioning Leon and even the Companion into engaging characters, but the actual plot and its resolution are a little mundane and kind of a let down. The second half of the "Dark Companion" consists of Leon and his tireless watchman travelling around the galaxy on a space liner, bopping from from one pleasure planet to another, and as time goes by we learn through flashbacks and expository dialogue why Leon is suicidal. In contrast to second son Leon, a slacker devoted to leisure, Leon's older brother Jeff was a responsible hard-working bourgeois type slated to take over the family's vast commercial enterprise. While Leon treated the jobs Dad gave him as no-show sinecures, Jeff strove to learn the family business and efficiently accomplish all the tasks assigned to him and proved himself a talented administrator. Jeff discovered corruption among some middle managers, and when these ruthless criminals realized Jeff was on their trail they lay an explosive death trap for him! Leon learned about the plot and, while precious seconds were ticking by, he equivocated--should he put his own life at risk by warning Jeff or just bug out and save his own skin? Leon finally did the right thing, but, having dallied, didn't get to Jeff in time to save him, but did manage to see him get blown to bits. It is Leon's guilt over his brother's death that is the genesis of his desire to destroy himself.
This kind of psychology makes perfect sense and is easy for the reader to swallow, but then Silverberg pushes further into abnormal psychology territory, approaching those regions where he starts to lose people who might be skeptical of Freud and Jung and suppressed memories and multiple personalities and that sort of thing, and MPorcius happens to be one of those people. The artificial man that is Leon's Companion is an expert psychologist, and asserts that Leon doesn't really want to kill himself--Leon is just trying to get attention! Every time he has tried to kill himself--the three times before he was saddled with the Companion and since then as well--Leon has made sure to alert somebody who can save him. He also always chooses failure-prone methods of killing himself, never considering shooting himself in the head or jumping off the 42nd floor or anything guaranteed to work like that. According to the android, Leon doesn't realize consciously that he wants to live--it is his subconscious mind that is ensuring that his suicide attempts fail as well as erasing his conscious memories of phoning the police before he slashes his wrists or telling a guy in a bar he is about to expose himself to subzero temperatures.
The resolution of the plot is somewhat contrived; the Companion (it appears) engineers a situation in which Leon has the opportunity to save the life of a sexy young girl at some risk to his own life--the fact that Leon rescues her wins him redemption from guilt, while his taking care to safeguard his own life during the rescue convinces him that he doesn't actually want to die. Besides being contrived, the climax is mundane--instead of this dangerous episode being built around a wild science fiction danger like zero gravity or hard vacuum or deadly radiation, the girl just falls off an ocean-going vessel during a storm and Leon, whom we have been told is an experienced swimmer, jumps in after her. I suppose the storm is a symbol of Leon's psychological state and the sea monsters he glimpses far below represent his subconscious, but come on--Silverberg's plot could have worked in a mainstream story set in the early 20th century, with a friend who studied in Vienna under Freud instead of an android.
As I have suggested, the first half or two thirds of this story is good, but my patience for these abnormal psychological stories in which the climax or resolution of the story has to do with a person reverting to childhood (like in Robert Bloch's "See How They Run") or suppressing memories or otherwise acting in a way that requires a lot of suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader (the climax of Fredric Brown's The Screaming Mimi is a good example) is running thin. We'll say "Dark Companion" is acceptable.
"Dark Companion" debuted in the same issue of Amazing that featured a reprint of John Wyndham's 1960 "The Asteroids, 2194," which we read back in 2015 because Judith Merril liked it, and a reprint of a 1933 story by David H. Keller that we may read someday. "Dark Companion" can be found in the collection The Songs of Summer, which I guess was only ever printed in Britain and France. The top blurb on the 1981 UK paperback printing (which has an oddly altered version of a Juvek Heller painting as a wraparound cover--see the original painting in 1991's Six Fantasy Artists at Work: Dream Makers) is from Ursula K. LeGuin, who suggests Silverberg is "the most intelligent science fiction writer in America," an interesting sort of thing to say; is there a lot of evidence Silverberg is more intelligent than, say., Isaac Asimov or Gene Wolfe?
"Halfway House" (1966)
Franco Alfieri is the world's greatest businessman and engineer! He has built a vast business empire in Europe based on inventing, manufacturing and selling high tech devices, including power sources that have made possible travel to other dimensions through the artificial generation of Singularities, phenomena associated in nature with the death of stars. Summoning such a Singularity takes "three million kilowatts" and so only rich people can afford to be transported to other dimensions, but intercourse with alien civilizations can yield tremendous benefits, and as the story begins Alfieri himself is transported to another dimension seeking a boon. You see, Alfieri is dying of cancer, but he is of sound mind and has tons of ideas for new inventions and business endeavors, and seeks a civilization where he can be cured and enjoy another four or five more decades of life in which he can continue building his business and producing life-improving products and services for the people of Earth.
When you leave your dimension via a Singularity, you find yourself in a sort of intermediary universe colloquially called Halfway House; here a staff of aliens of an array of types negotiate with you over the next stage of your trip. In payment for being directed to the universe where people cure his cancer, Alfieri agrees to work at Halfway House for five years--as an expert administrator, he has a lot to offer the HH staff, and there is a vacancy coming up that will need filling. After Silverberg describes the man's experience of being cured of his cancer, we accompany Alfieri on a tour of Halfway House and we are there when he is told exactly what position he will be filling at HH--he is replacing the head of the staff, he will have final say on who is sent onwards from Halfway House and who is returned to whatever universe he came from empty-handed. Most people travel through the dimensions on missions of great import, matters of life and death, and so Alfieri will be literally providing salvation to some and condemning others to destruction.
I hadn't looked at the page count of this story, so I expected that the stuff I outlined above was just the background foundation for the actual plot, but Alfieri's medical treatment and recruitment as boss of Halfway House is in fact the bulk of the plot. The climax/twist ending of the story came much faster than I expected and is the revelation to Alfieri and the reader that the job of deciding who is saved and who is doomed causes those who fill it tremendous suffering--Alfieri is in greater agony in this job than he was when his body was wracked with cancer and he knew he was dying.
This is a good piece of work, but I can't help but feel Silverberg could have done more with the good setting and character he came up with--it's like he has a good foundation here for a story, but not much actual story.
"Halfway House" debuted in If, and has been reprinted in various Silverberg collections, including The Cube Root of Uncertainty and the aforementioned The Songs of Summer.
No comments:
Post a Comment