Psychoshop

Psychoshop Alfred Bester & Roger Zelazny

PSYCHOSHOP: SF JAZZ, B TO Z By Greg Bear

Without Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny, we would not today have William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, perhaps not even Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.

Bester and Zelazny were among the SF jazz greats of their time. Each whirled in like golden dust-devils and disrupted the science fiction landscape, blowing new tunes in new styles and tempos, leaving glitter-speckled, disheveled admirers and a great many imitators in their wake. Other writers puzzled out some of their riffs, and improvised a few new ones of their own; but the surprise and originality of B and Z could not be duplicated.

Alfred Bester began writing in the forties, but it was in the fifties that he made his mark, just as science fiction novels were being published with fair regularity in hardcover, and at the beginning of the golden age of the SF paperback. His SF appeared sporadically through the sixties and seventies: then he seemed to fade. At the time he was declared a Grandmaster by the Science Fiction Writers of America, he was practically broke, dying, almost forgotten by the mainstream SF reader. Even with the highlights, his was not a career to be fervently desired—but it was very like the career of many musical jazz masters.

To list all the jazz masters of SF is difficult, and I'm certain to leave out many worthies. Stanley G. Weinbaum belongs, I think; Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Theodore Sturgeon, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Edgar Pangborn, Robert Sheckley. Ray Bradbury has been accused of being pure Sousa, but I think he's a jazz master as well.

Roger Zelazny, along with Samuel R. Delany and the quizzical Philip K. Dick, dominated the jazz style of the sixties, then settled in through the next two and a half decades to a solid, productive career with frequent, often short, award-winning masterworks. His career was long (though not long enough), disciplined, remunerative, and full of improvisations, collaborations, surprises: a career to be admired. He did not live long enough to be declared a Grandmaster, but no matter; that's a sometimes haphazard glory.

After B ester's death, Zelazny was offered an interesting opportunity. Bester had left behind an unfinished SF novel; would Zelazny finish it? He took up the challenge, and the result is unique—Psychoshop, a posthumous duet between two masters of SF jazz, a rollicking, sometimes cold, sometimes hot torrent of riffs that splatters in style and flavor across the decades.

Like cool modern jazz, the tone is skewed, even perverse. The characters are breezy and practically affect-free, the epitome of pulp heroes, fifties style; they sometimes tell us what they feel, but we don't ourselves feel it. The mood is wry, fast, exhilarating, but ultimately downbeat. The book is meant to make you grin, but with a shake of your head; laughter with an edge. Bester laid down this tempo, but it was not at all difficult for Zelazny to pick it up and draw it out. Zelazny, after all, was one of Bester's literary children; what Bester pioneered, Zelazny made his own country. The match is almost (though not always) seamless.

Looking over a copy of the original manuscript is fascinating, and it's too bad it can't be reproduced in facsimile, with commentary. The typewriters change here and there, there are many handwritten corrections (but in whose hand? Bester's, perhaps; Zelazny's mostly, or an editor's?) and there are the trademark Bester sketches and typographic flourishes. Students of both writers should secure a bootleg copy (not from me!) and analyze the process in more detail.

Writers like Bester and Zelazny enrich a field and provide the intellectual nutrients for intense growth, for all kinds of writers. My own style might more aptly be described as classical, with dips into avant-garde, but I love the jazz greats of SF. Their writing is a tart sorbet between heavy courses. It dissolves greasy, maudlin pretense and cleanses the palate.

Psychoshop: a dark acid curio, brisk, fast, memorable, a rare improvisational duet from two of our best.

ONE · THE PSYCHBROKER

I was looking around desperately when my boss, Jerry Egan, poked his head into my office and in his soft Virginia voice asked, "May I come in, Alf?"

"Sure. Sure." I went on searching.

He hoisted himself on a corner of my big table (I hate desks) and watched. Then, "What have you lost?"

"I can't find my goddamn passport."

"Tried pockets, raincoat, travel bag?"

"Three goddamn times."

He started sorting through the mess on my table, stopped abruptly, and loafed to the low bookshelves under the window. He picked up my British motoring cap and there it was.

"How in the name of heaven could you go right to it?"

"My father was a dowser."

"Bless your father! Bless you!"

"I'd like to spring another foreign assignment on you, Alf. In Rome, but it's tricky. Ask around about the Black Place of the Soul-Changer."

"Sounds wild. What is it?"

"No one really knows. Girl of mine was there but she wouldn't talk about it. Sort of ashamed."

"Any suggestions?"

"You know how to dig. If it's just saloon-hype to pull the jet set trade, forget it. If it's a place that's doing the impossible, like inventing new sins, give it the full."

"Any leads from that ginzo girl of yours?"

"She did drop one name, Adam Maser. That's all."

"Isn't a maser some kind of microwave gadget?"

"You tell me, Alf. You're the Yankee genius. I'm only the Dixie chaser."

The world is divided into 99% civilians and 1% elite. The civilians are all running scared, afraid of nonconforming. The elites are on easy terms with themselves and the world, don't give a damn for, and can't be spooked by, anything. So when word got around that I was in Rome doing features for the chic Rigadoon magazine, I was accepted by the jet set and aimed in the right direction.

So there I was on a stool alongside this Adam Maser in La Corruttela having drinks and bar-chatting. I'd been told that he was the mysterious Soul-Changer and naturally anticipated meeting a Frankenstein or Count Dracula or even the Phantom of the Opera wearing a mask. I couldn't have been more wrong.

He was tawny red, almost the color of a leopard, the hair darker red than his skin, which simply looked sun-and-windburned. His slitty eyes were jet black. His fingernails were pointed and ivory-colored, but his teeth were brilliant white. Altogether an overpowering figure.

When we first sat down with each other, he had taken his time sizing me up, then introduced himself, and I did likewise. He said he'd heard about me. I said I'd heard about him.

His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society. He laughed a lot and his chuckle was almost a purr. He had an easy voice but was slightly hesitant in speech as though continually searching for the right word. Wonderfully pleasant and wide open like all the other one-percenters who don't give a damn. I figured him for a delightful interview provided his Black Place made it worthwhile.

"Adam Maser's an odd name," I said.

He nodded. "It's a compromise name."

"Between what and what?"

"We're late twentieth century, right?"

"And that's an odd question."

"I've got to be careful, speechwise. You know all about passing through time zones when you travel; jet lag and all that?"

"Uh-huh."

"Well, I also travel through people and culture zones, so

I've got to be sure I'm talking the right language. Can't speak Aztec to a Druid. Tell you about it some time if you're interested."

"Tell me about the compromise."

"Well the name should really be Magfaser."

"You're putting me on."

"No, Magfaser's an acronym."

"Of what?"

"Maser Generated Fetal Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation."

"Jeez."

"Yeah. Only close friends call me that.

"And Adam because I'm the first turkey— Do we say turkey in the late twentieth?"

"Not anymore."

"The first to be amplified during the embryo caper. Caper's right, isn't it? I'm having a little trouble getting with late twentieth. Just come from a session with Leeuwenhoek and a long seventeenth-century Dutch discussion about microscopes."

"You need warming up." I called the bartender. "Double shot for me, please, and anything my good buddy Maser Generated Fetal Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation wants to order."

That broke him up. "You're a right rigadoon, Alf."

"You're fairly OK yourself, Adam. What were these friends unknown amplifying you to do?"

"Damned if I know. I don't think the lab mavens know either. They're still trying to find out, which is why they've got me under observation, like in a terrarium. ..."

I shook my head. He was sounding flakier by the minute.

"They thought they were doing a linear magnification, sort of putting me through a magnifying glass."

"Size wise?"

"Brainwise, but what they did was multiply me by myself into a quadratic."

"Inside your mother?"

"Hell no! I was a test tube clone floating in a maser

womb."

"So where is this terrarium where the good doctors have you under observation?"

He purred a chuckle. "My place. If you want to come, I'll show you."

"Love to. The Luogo Nero? The Black Place?"

"That's what the locals call it. It's really Buoco Nero, the Black Hole."

"Like the Black Hole of Calcutta?"

"No. Black Hole as in astronomy. Corpse of a dead star, but also channel between this universe and its next-door neighbor."

"Here? In Rome?"

"Sure. They drift around in space until they run out of gas and come to a stop. This number happened to park here."

"How long ago?"

"No one knows," he said. "It was there six centuries before Christ, when the Etruscans took over a small town called Roma and began turning it into the capital of the world. If you were looking for the Luogo Nero, where the sinister Soul-Changer did business, you were told it was just opposite Queen Tanaquila's palace. Usually your informant would then spit three times to ward off evil."

I smiled. "When did you get put into it, the black hole?"

I asked.

"About a thousand years from now, your time. For me,

ten rotas back."

There has to be a limit. "Adam," I said, "one of us is crazy."

"And you think it's me." He laughed. "That's why I'm safe when I tell it like it is. No one ever believes me."

"I've been assigned to do a story on you."

"Sure. I guessed. I'll cooperate; give you the full; but Rigadoon will never print it. They'll never believe you. You'll be wasting your time, Alf, but you'll have some wild stories to tell. So come on, already."

Outside, the redhead flagged a cab and told the driver, "II Foro etrusco." As we got in he said, "That's what they call the ruin of Tanaquila's palace, the Etruscan forum. I'm just opposite. If I gave a driver my address he'd swear he never heard of it and tell us to get lost."

The Etruscan forum looked like any ordinary Roman ruin, a few acres of fenced rubble covered with the usual graffiti: