A Day in the Life Read online

  A DAY IN THE LIFE

  A Science Fiction Anthology

  edited, with introduction & commentary

  by GARDNER R. DOZOIS

  “Slow Tuesday Night,” by R. A. Lafferty. Copyright © 1965 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Virginia Kidd.

  “The Lady Margaret,” by Keith Roberts. Copyright © 1966, 1968 by Keith Roberts.

  “Mary,” by Damon Knight. Copyright © 1964 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  “Driftglass,” by Samuel R. Delany. Copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the author and Henry Morrison, Inc., his agents.

  “A Happy Day in 2381,” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright ® 1970 by Harry Harrison.

  “This Moment of the Storm,” by Roger Zelazny. Copyright © 1966 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and Henry Morrison, Inc., his agents.

  “The Haunted Future,” by Fritz Leiber. Copyright © 1959 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Corporation.

  “On the Storm Planet,” by Cordwainer Smith. Copyright © 1965 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  A hardcover edition of this book is available from Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

  A DAY IN THE LIFE. Copyright © 1972 by Gardner R. Dozois. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., so East 53d Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

  First PERENNIAL LIBRARY edition published 1973.

  STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 06-080307-X

  eISBN: 978-1-61824-920-3

  Digital Edition by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  To:

  Damon, Kate, and Bob Silverberg

  and

  my mother and sister

  and

  The Guilford Gafia

  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  And now the introduction, wherein I’m supposed to tell you how excellent the stories contained in this anthology are, and urge you to go ahead and buy the volume, since you are supposedly holding it in your hands in some dingy and/or floodlit bookstore and riffling through the pages in the venerable act of browsing. If this is true, and you are, then let me discharge my part of the thing right now: (1) the stories in this anthology are all excellent in their various ways or I wouldn’t have bothered to put them together in the first place; and (a) yes, you should buy the book, because I need the money, for one thing, and because you are getting a pretty good hunk of top-quality fiction, for another.

  Now that that’s over, and you, swayed by my rhetoric, have supposedly bought this book and are now supposedly relaxing in whatever equivalent of a comfortable reading room you have (mine has a rickety bookcase, a faded convertible couch long past its prime, a wine bottle with some wild flowers poking out of it and a fire escape looking over one’s shoulder), let me move on to the other—and more interesting—things that should be covered by an introduction to an anthology:

  Why did I do it at all? and

  What did I hope to do with it, besides pay the rent?

  This anthology grew, in part, out of frustration. I have been a professional reader for more than two years now, and that is a killing job, as any number of people would be happy to testify. Being a professional reader means being trapped in the same room with a slush pile for long stretches of time, and worse, being forced not only to coexist with it but also to relate to it. A slush pile is a fabulous monster with guts of steel and the head of an idiot—it is an accumulation of unsolicited manuscripts that have been submitted to a magazine or a publishing house. These manuscripts are as numberless and inexhaustible as the grains of sand in the Sahara: scoop them out from the bottom and they pour in again at the top. Most of these manuscripts are science fiction (or SF, as we initiates like to call it), a lot of them are god-awful, the vast majority of them are both SF and god-awful. You can’t ignore a slush pile—you are being paid specifically to read it, to make it go away. So I would sit and try to cope with it, and day after day I would read stirring sagas of the spaceways; I would read galaxy-shaking, sun-busting adventures; I would watch a hundred different avatars of Captain Wasp of the Terran Space Patrol singlehandedly making the universe safe for humanity; I would watch intrepid scientists constructing Amazing New Devices and Secret Weapons in their basement workshops out of birdhouse scraps and bailing wire; I would watch astronauts spacewalking along the hull in spite of a deadly meteorite shower to fix the damaged hyperwarp engine with a hairpin and a prayer; I would watch Jupiter falling out of its orbit “down on top of” the Earth, to be deflected at the last minute by a cobalt ray whipped up in a basement workshop; I would watch galactic conspiracies on a scale so complicated and paranoid as to make Dostoevsky blanch; I would watch star empires grow and wither in numbers as vast as all the tulips in all the Hollands that have ever been; I would read stories so huge and dynamic in scope that I had to struggle to thrust each glittering, bellowing handful of manuscript back into the return-address envelope.

  They were all lousy.

  And so I would sit at the Formica table every day at lunch, with my submarine sandwich and my cup of coffee, and my eyes dangling limply from their sockets like melted blue crayons, and I would watch the steam from the coffee and think: There must be some way to do all this right.

  There is, of course.

  This anthology contains eight stories that “do it right”—that take the common subject material of SF and handle it with intelligence, with humanity, with a high degree of literacy.

  And they do more than that.

  There has been a great deal of talk in the last few years about the “sense of wonder,” and many wailing lamentations that it is forever gone, that SF is no longer capable of delivering that quasi-religious shiver that goes through you when you come into contact with something bigger than yourself, that intuition into systems different from any you will ever know. This is what the nameless wretches in the slush pile were trying to do: they were trying to communicate the sense of wonder, but the only way they could think of to do it was to make their canvases bigger and bigger, and more and more gory. And those particular grooves on the record have worn pretty thin by now. That just doesn’t work anymore.

  SF has developed an unfortunate evolutionary tendency to depend on melodrama: on world-shaking plots, heroic deeds, cliff-hanger action. And, as a result, on formula writing, cardboard characters, shallow conceptualization, simplex—or nonexistent—cerebration. On cliché that becomes genre under the weight of years. This makes for staleness, conformity, stagnation—the insistence on wide-screen dreams limiting the range of the field, becoming monotonous, finally defeating its own purpose: the instilling of wonder and awe in the reader. The microcosm of pulp stories becomes so widely divorced from what we know of the macrocosm, the quality of existence of the hero’s life becomes so divergent from the experience of our own everyday lives, that we cease to relate to it, it stops having any relevancy to us. It becomes fantasy, as strongly stylized as a No play. We fail to suspend our disbelief, we cease having any empathy with these supermen and their superdeeds. We cease to care—we know that it’s all nonsense anyway, something that would only happen on that little piece of paper. We know it has nothing to do with us.

  And the sense of wonder dies.

  The eight stories here find ways around that syndrome. They are stories that we intuit as life, that somehow fool us into thinking—while we are reading them—that they are something more than words on paper
, that the events in the story are actually occurring in some dimension congruent with our own, viewed through the window of fiction. Most of them do this by keeping the focus tight, intense, personal, by concentrating on the people involved and letting them live the story from the inside out, so that their viewpoints and values become ours, and we care about the solution of their problems because they have become our own. They show us, with conviction, something we would otherwise never know on this earth: what everyday, day-to-day life would be like in a different society, an alien culture, another world. They are stories that are concerned with more or less ordinary people—however strange they seem to us in their own context—leading ordinary lives, struggling the way we do, loving, losing, dying, getting along. Not that the events portrayed here are mundane—there is more than enough action, color, sweep and drama—but that the action is dramatic exposition consistent with life, not melodrama. The action—Zelazny’s great storm, Roberts’ murderous routiers, Delany’s hostile and slaughtering sea, Leiber’s demoniac prankster, Smith’s battles and confrontations—is the type of sudden, violent incursion on normalcy that happens to us: I have been mugged in the streets of Manhattan, beaten, robbed, I have suffered great storms, I have seen people struck dead and down by cars. I can believe the type of action these authors give us, the senseless violence and uncaring cruelty, much more than I can believe the heroic escapades of Captain Wasp.

  These stories translate us into another world in ways we can find believable and consistent, that allow us to share someone/thing else’s skin. And by so doing they engender a far greater sense of wonder than a library full of pulp world-shaking—because we are able to go Out There ourselves, not through a surrogate.

  The stories here are all days in someone’s life, someone real, and that’s why we care. That’s what makes the difference.

  I enjoyed collecting them. I hope you enjoy reading them.

  And keep your cobalt ray dry. We may need it yet.

  G.D.

  SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT

  R. A. Lafferty

  * * *

  “By 1990, we will have television.” SF has always been fond of statements like that. Most of them have been wrong—hardly anyone foresaw the incredible- acceleration of our society, the cultural/technological/psychological explosion that wrenched us from Kitty Hawk to Copernicus in seventy years, that gave us credit cards and pollution and LSD, that shoved us into the mass nervous breakdown of the late sixties. As a result, only those stories that were the most radical and farfetched in their conception of life in 1970 bear even a conservative correlation to reality. Satire ages best—I’m sure to the horror of the satirists, who must watch their created absurdities and distortions creeping into the headlines and becoming mundane. Listen to a TV commercial, watch an X-rated movie, look out the window (remember windows?), step outside and discover that you can’t breathe the air. Notice how much your morning newspaper resembles The Marching Morons? Catch-22 is one of the most realistic war novels ever written. Ask any private who’s ever been caught in the gears.

  One thing we can be fairly sure of: if we don’t blow up the world or strangle in our own excreta, the future will be more complex and strange than we suppose, maybe more strange than we can even imagine. R. A. Lafferty—a man possessed of one of the most daring, flexible and incisive imaginations in the world—here blips us through a slow Tuesday night with the speed of a computer data transfer. Read it and laugh, because it is very funny, and at the moment it is satire. If you’re still around forty years from now, do the existing societal equivalent of reading it again, and you may find yourself laughing out of the other side of your mouth (remember mouths?). It will probably be much too conservative.

  G.D.

  * * *

  A panhandler intercepted the young couple as they strolled down the night street.

  “Preserve us this night,” he said as he touched his hat to them, “and could you good people advance me a thousand dollars to be about the recouping of my fortunes?”

  “I gave you a thousand last Friday,” said the young man.

  “Indeed you did,” the panhandler replied, “and I paid you back tenfold by messenger before midnight.”

  “That’s right, George, he did,” said the young woman. “Give it to him, dear. I believe he’s a good sort.”

  So the young man gave the panhandler a thousand dollars, and the panhandler touched his hat to them in thanks and went on to the recouping of his fortunes.

  As he went into Money Market, the panhandler passed Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city.

  “Will you marry me this night, Ildy?” he asked cheerfully.

  “Oh, I don’t believe so, Basil,” she said. “I marry you pretty often, but tonight I don’t seem to have any plans at all. You may make me a gift on your first or second, however. I always like that.”

  But when they had parted she asked herself: “But whom will I marry tonight?”

  The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker, who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.

  When the Abebaios block had been removed from human minds, people began to make decisions faster, and often better. It had been the mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was removed by simple childhood metasurgery.

  Transportation and manufacturing had then become practically instantaneous. Things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period.

  Freddy Fixico had just invented a manus module. Freddy was a Nyctalops, and the modules were characteristic of these people. The people had then divided themselves—according to their natures and inclinations—into the Auroreans, the Hemerobians, and the Nyctalops—or the Dawners, who had their most active hours from 4 A.M. till noon; the Day Flies, who obtained from noon to 8 P.M.; and the Night Seers, whose civilization thrived from 8 P.M. to 4 A.M. The cultures, inventions, markets and activities of these three folk were a little different. As a Nyctalops, Freddy had just begun his working day at 8 P.M. on a slow Tuesday night.

  Freddy rented an office and had it furnished. This took one minute, negotiation, selection and installation being almost instantaneous. Then he invented the manus module; that took another minute. He then had it manufactured and marketed; in three minutes it was in the hands of key buyers.

  It caught on. It was an attractive module. The flow of orders began within thirty seconds. By ten minutes after eight every important person had one of the new manus modules, and the trend had been set. The module began to sell in the millions. It was one of the most interesting fads of the night, or at least the early part of the night.

  Manus modules had no practical function, no more than had Sameki verses. They were attractive, of a psychologically satisfying size and shape, and could be held in the hands, set on a table, or installed in a module niche of any wall.

  Naturally Freddy became very rich. Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city, was always interested in newly rich men. She came to see Freddy about eight-thirty. People made up their minds fast, and Ildefonsa had hers made up when she came. Freddy made his own up quickly and divorced Judy Fixico in Small Claims Court. Freddy and Ildefonsa went honeymooning to Paraiso Dorado, a resort.

  It was wonderful. All of Ildy’s marriages were. There was the wonderful floodlighted scenery. The recirculated water of the famous falls was tinted gold; the immediate rocks had been done by Rambles; and the hills had been contoured by Spall. The beach was a perfect copy of that at Merevale, and the popular drink that first part of the night was blue absinthe.

  But scenery—whether seen for the first time or revisited after an interval—is striking for the sudden intense view of it. It is not meant to be lingered over. Food, selected and prepared instantly,
is eaten with swift enjoyment; and blue absinthe lasts no longer than its own novelty. Loving, for Ildefonsa and her paramours, was quick and consuming; and repetition would have been pointless to her. Besides, Ildefonsa and Freddy had taken only the one-hour luxury honeymoon.

  Freddy wished to continue the relationship, but Ildefonsa glanced at a trend indicator. The manus module would hold its popularity for only the first third of the night. Already it had been discarded by people who mattered. And Freddy Fixico was not one of the regular successes. He enjoyed a full career only about one night a week.

  They were back in the city and divorced in Small Claims Court by nine thirty-five. The stock of manus modules was remaindered, and the last of it would be disposed of to bargain hunters among the Dawners, who will buy anything.

  “Whom shall I marry next?” Ildefonsa asked herself. “It looks like a slow night.”

  “Bagelbaker is buying,” ran the word through Money Market, but Bagelbaker was selling again before the word had made its rounds. Basil Bagelbaker enjoyed making money, and it was a pleasure to watch him work as he dominated the floor of the Market and assembled runners and a competent staff out of the corner of his mouth. Helpers stripped the panhandler rags off him and wrapped him in a tycoon toga. He sent one runner to pay back twentyfold the young couple who had advanced him a thousand dollars. He sent another with a more substantial gift to Ildefonsa Impala, for Basil cherished their relationship. Basil acquired title to the Trend Indication Complex and had certain falsifications set into it. He caused to collapse certain industrial empires that had grown up within the last two hours, and made a good thing of recombining their wreckage. He had been the richest man in the world for some minutes now. He became so money-heavy that he could not maneuver with the agility he had shown an hour before. He became a great fat buck, and the pack of expert wolves circled him to bring him down.