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Six years ago, a slim volume called New Maps of Hell put science fiction on the literary map. The author, a gifted comic novelist taking a fling at literary criticism, was a staunch supporter of the Virile Virgin, or “Look, Ma, no hands,” social-mural school of s-f. The genre, he contended, was suited only to abstract, or wide-screen, ideas. For instance: “The role of sex in science fiction seems bound to remain secondary.” And: “What will certainly not do ... is any notion of turning out a science fiction love story.”
Nor was Mr. Amis alone in his views; most editors in the field agreed with him at the time.
“Coming-of-Age Day”—particularly since it found print as a first story by an unknown—is evidence enough of what has happened in the few years since. (It is true that the British magazines—like British radio—have abandoned Puritan restraints more eagerly than the American; but for exhibit B, try William Tenn’s “The Masculinist Revolt,” or Willard Marsh’s “The Sin of Edna Schuster,” both from F&SF.) As for the science-fiction love story, there never was any question about it—not since del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” (1938); nor, for a moment, while Sturgeon was writing; and not with stories like Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” (9th Annual), or Leo P. Kelley’s “O’Grady’s Girl,” in F&SF last year.
I don’t think there is any serious doubt now about the tolerance of the field for the whole range of human interests and human behavior. What is at issue in the new work is not topic, but treatment. Today it is symbolism and surrealism the Old Guard is fighting.
Josephine Saxton here gives us a love story in the new vein— and another “First.”
THE WALL
JOSEPHINE SAXTON
It was as if the landscape was divided into two halves, split across by some change in the light, in the atmosphere, in the colors of the air and the earth. It was a great flat valley that rose so shallowly to the summits of the surrounding escarpments that the change in height was scarcely noticeable, but indeed the difference in height between the floor and the horizon was some five hundred feet. A great curving saucer. But the saucer was cracked across from east to west by a difference. The horizon on the north and the horizon on the south when looked at from west or east looked scarcely different from one another when seen in turn, but to bring the eyes forward would have shown how great indeed the difference between these two halves was, and the eyes looking thus would discern a definite line across this area of the world, coming closer, winding upward, until it was close enough to be seen as a wall.
It was a very high wall, thirty feet in height, and it was very ancient in its stone, dark blue, hard, impenetrable, but rough and worn. Crystalline almost, its surfaces sprang this way and that, revealing whole lumps of glittering faceted hardness, with smooth places where mosses and orange lichens had got hold; and at its foot many creeping plants; tough twisted vines bearing clusters of ungathered raisins, convolvulus white and pink, and ivy in many colors, thick, glossy and spidery. Here and there stones had fallen from its old structure, two and three feet thick, and in one place, almost halfway across the floor of the valley, there was a hole through the wall, only six inches across its greatest measurement, and three feet from the floor, which was moist red clay on the north side, and dry white sand on the south side. The top of the wall was sealed to all climbers by rows of dreadful spikes which curved in every direction, cruel, needle-sharp, glassy metal rapiers set into green bronze. They were impenetrable in every way, these swords, and stood endless guard between north and south.
The valley was the home of rats and snakes of many kinds, and thousands of spiders ran in the dust at the foot of the leafy creepers, and rabbits burrowed in the clay on the north side, and lizards scuttled in the sand on the south side. There were two sources of water: one a spring which flooded a puddle in the clay—the water here was cold and green and clear—and the other a limpid pool in the sand under a rock, the water therein being warm and slimy and gray. There were no trees to be seen anywhere, only the earth with the sparse grasses; no habitation save the rabbit warrens.
At either side of the hole in the wall lived a man and a woman. The man lived on the north side where it was usually cold and damp, and the woman lived on the south side where it was usually warm and dry. These two were tall and thin and beautiful, strong and lean, but something was to be seen in their way of moving that spoke of inner suffering, some twisted thing which showed on the outside, almost imperceptible, something from the heart. He was fair in color, with yellow-gray hair to his shoulders and a beard of great length which tangled in great curls, with blackberry thorns and stains of purple juice in his beard from the raisins he had eaten over the years. His feet and hands were horny with callouses from running and scrabbling for wild rabbits, but his fingernails were specklessly white, for, in his idle hours, of which there were many, he sat and cleaned them with a little stick of thorn wood and rubbed them down to a neat shape on a stone in the wall. He wore a threadbare suit of lovat green thorn-proof worsted suiting, a dark-green silk shirt which was of the finest quality, with gilt cufflinks which had only enough cuff just to stay hanging in the threads, and a tie which could not be seen for the wild beard.
The woman was dark and brown like a nut that has been polished. Her hair was dark, so dark it was not black but something beyond black, and her lashes and brows matched it in depth and thickness, and the hair fell straight and heavy to her thighs in great thick locks with not a wave or curl. Her hands and feet also were immaculately clean, but she had callouses on her knees from kneeling in the sand at the side of her pool of water, washing her hair until it shone. Her breasts were still full and young, bearing the marks of suckling an infant, but that was in another life. She was dressed in a dark blue dress of courtelle jersey with brass buttons long ago turned mouldy green. The dress fitted her figure and had a pleat in the back of the skirt, and she showed a little bit of nylon lace, sometimes when she walked, peeping out from under the dress, a very dusty white. She always carried a handbag with her. It was a large white plastic beach bag with bamboo handles, and in it were all manner of bottles containing sun oil, hand lotion, face cream and skin food—none of which she ever used— handkerchiefs, hairpins, dried-up cigarettes, old bills, papers and letters and a paper bag with a clean sanitary pad and two little safety pins wrapped up tight. There was also in the bag a brush and comb, a necklace of heavy beads, several photographs, some dried flowers and several recipes for the making of home-made wines, Irish soda bread and potted meat.
These two people were lovers. For most of the day, in their separate climates, they would sit by the hole in the wall exchanging conversation, peeping at glimpses of one another, able to see only half a face, or a hand, or a length of hair through the fissure, making up poetry for one another which only had meaning for themselves alone; and sometimes they would hold hands through the rock, although they were only able to do this for very short periods of time because of the awkward height of the hole, and the extreme pain caused by being half bent and by the cold sharp rock rubbing on their arms. They would exchange bits of food—blackberries and raw rabbit meat, ripe grapes, and mushrooms—and they would pass bunches of grasses or flowers from around the base of the wall to each other with passionate love messages whispered from the heart and from their deepest feelings. Although they had never seen one another, or touched one another farther than their wrists, they felt deeply for one another in the tenderest way, and were swept by full passions that could never be consummated because of the wall. At times like these—especially was it hard when the moon was full—they would sit close to the hole and weep and moan in longing for each other, longing for something the other could give were it not for the cruel wall that parted their starving bodies. Many long tortured hours they passed in this way wishing the wall would melt. But it never melted, it stayed there hard and enduring, as if it had always been there and always would be so. They had no ideas on the subject of how to relieve themselves of this terrible situation, for it had been like this so long they could hardly remember when it was, the day they had found themselves, each at a side of the wall. Their love had begun on that very day, even before the sound of their singing voices, and with the rapturous discovery of the hole and the first blissful touches of the hands, and with the dreadful realization that they could never come closer together than this. All through the years they had yearned but never thought it could ever be any different. They knew, as if with an inborn knowledge, that the wall was too deeply set to be tunneled under, too long to be walked around, if indeed it had an end anywhere, and much too hideously guarded at its crest.