The Warden turns to look at me, as hard as my Uncle. "You've become deranged, trying to maintain two lobes," he says. "You cannot reconstitute or recreate a Terran by our methods, and you must know it."
"Over the edge, over the edge," my Uncle says, now a blonde, six-foot, hearty male Terran, often at the Laugh Tree with one of the joy babies. He enjoys life, his own or someone else's. I have, too, I suppose. Am I fading? I am, really, just one of Arnie's projections, a form on a screen in his mind. I am not, really, Martha. Though I tried.
"We can't have him here," the Warden says. "You better get him out of here. You couldn't explain a corpse like that to the colonists, if they come looking for him. They'll think we did something to him. It's nearly time for my next conjunction, do you want your nephew to arrive in disgrace? The Uncles will drain his bank."
The Warden gets up and comes over to me. He takes hold of my dark curls and pulls me to my feet. It hurts my physical me, which is Martha. God knows Arnie, I'm Martha, it seems to me. "Take him back to his quarters," the Warden says to me. "And come back here immediately. I'll try to see you back to your own pattern, but it may be too late. In part, I blame myself. If you must know. So I will try."
Yes, yes, I want to say to him; as I was, dedicated, free; turn me back into myself. I never wanted to be anyone else, and now I don't know if I am anyone at all. The light's gone from his eyes and he doesn't see me, or see anything, does he?
I pick him up and breathe the door out, and go back through the night to his quarters, where the lamp still burns. I'm going to leave him here, where he belongs. Before I go, I pick up the small carving of the murger bird, and take it with me, home to my glass bridge where at the edge of the mirrors the decimals are still clicking perfectly, clicking out known facts; an octagon can be reduced, the planet turns at such a degree on its axis, to see the truth you must have light of some sort, but to see the light you must have darkness of some sort. I can no longer float on the horizon between the two because that horizon has disappeared. I've learned to descend, and to rise, and descend again.
I'm able to revert without help to my own free form, to re-absorb the extra brain tissue. The sun comes up and it's bright. The night comes down and it's dark. I'm becoming somber, and a brilliant student. Even my Uncle says I'll be a good Warden when the time comes.
The Warden goes to conjunction; from the cell banks a nephew is lifted out. The koota lies dreaming of races she has run in the wind. It is our life, and it goes on, like the life of other creatures.
There is no cohesive or directional 'movement' in American s-f comparable to the British happening. The 'category' field is bigger, more lucrative, and more prestigious than anyone could have imagined a decade ago, but the bolder young writers are little drawn to it; and there is a growing Inner Establishment which clearly feels, 'What was new enough for Daddy is new enough for you.'
Some fine work has appeared in American magazines and 'category' s-f books recently under unfamiliar by-lines: but the best of it is usually from practiced hands drifting in from other fields (Harvey Jacobs,Gilbert Thomas, Virginia Kidd, etc.) or from the new British names (not represented here: David Redd, Keith Roberts, Josephine Saxton). And even this work tends to be strongly traditional in flavor, and conventional in subject matter and technique.
It is too easy to lay the blame at the door of editorial stodginess, or mass-market commercialism. Harlan Ellison, self-appointed prophet of the 'New Thing' in American s-f, spent two years energetically soliciting material for a much-publicised 'no-taboo' anthology of original stories (Dangerous Visions, Daubleday, 1967), and wound up with 33 fair-to-first-rate selections — of which half a dozen might have had some difficulty selling to the American s-f magazines.
The last notable influx of radical new talent, between 1960 and 1963, included Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, Piers Anthony, Jonathan Brand and David Bunch, as well as Lafferty, Delany, Dorman, and Disch. I think it is significant, and probably a Good Thing, that very few of these new people (or the even newer ones, like John Sladek, Joanna Russ, James Sallis) limit themselves, as an earlier generation largely did, to one area of expression: they are painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, actors, poets, playwrights, critics, scenarists, as well as fiction writers — mirroring the painters, poets, musicians, etc., on the 'outside' who are adopting so much of the idiom of science fiction.
Both Sonya Dorman and Tom Disch, as it happens, started out with an interest in the dance, then turned to poetry, and then to s-f. Mrs. Dorman is still better known for her poetry than for her rare (and I use the word with care) fiction. Disch's poetry has just begun to be noticed by his first novel, The Genocides (1965), stirred up a storm of controversy, and his next (Camp Concentration, serialised in New Worlds and forthcoming from Doubleday) is likely to renew it, violently, (Doubleday is also publishing a 'black humour' novel by Disch and Sladek: Black Alice.)
A Vacation on Earth
Thomas M. Disch
Take a word. Take lots. Call them words. Call them a medium.
Everybody uses them. In our culture, almost everybody reads and writes them. All rational thought, almost all consciousness (of even 'purely sensory' experience), is locked firmly into a linguistic framework. Only the mathematicians and the widely multilingual have even comparative freedom from the limitations on logic inherent in the cultural happenstance of native language. In music and mystical/religious experience, sometimes in dance or athletic or sexual activity, occasionally through the graphic arts, we have brief moments of truly nonverbal perception. It is possible that as little as one more decade of electronic-media 'participation involvement' and 'psychedelic' (with or without drugs) transcendentalism and biochemical advance in molecular learning theory, may produce the first generation of a truly revolutionary civilisation, a sophistication not chained to verbal symbols. Today we are all, still, far more enslaved by synaptic/semantic matrices of language than we are influenced — for good or ill — by any other medium of communication.
The word-craftsman, the writer, is both the sorcerer and spellbound victim of word enchantment. Every serious writer I have ever known is a word-gamer/tamer. It may not be visible in the published work: some of the best prose is apparently artless. But its author is probably a secret crossword-puzzler or cryptographer — or it might be Scrabble or Anagrams, formal verse (if only for the desk drawer), foreign languages, Finnegan's Wake explications, or simple refreshing plunges into atlas or dictionary reading.