The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

THREE PROLOGUES AND AN EPILOGUE by John Dos Passos

A shift in viewpoint, lighting, or perspective may serve to study the background as well as the figure. Most of the selections so far have been concerned with individual insights; in the group that follows the focus shifts to the outlook for society.

Jules Feiffer’s cartoon made graphic use of a device for this purpose that was also effectively employed, recently, in Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet: the detached observer’s viewpoint (from space or time). George Elliott used, instead, the reflection of a single individual in the mirrors of two cultures, to shed light on both. Ward Moore (who follows this selection) makes use of retroflection — a sort of hindsight-in-advance gained by viewing through sympathetic and familiar eyes a society that could result from ours.

John Dos Passos is probably the outstanding contemporary practitioner of a less common and non-science-fiction technique for the same purpose. In his “mural novels,” he interweaves and counterposes strands of fact and story lines in such a way as to compel the mental eye to follow a pattern which composes a sort of aerial view of society. This can, sometimes, constitute Einstein’s famous “pause to wonder” in its most immediate form — as in these excerpts from Midcentury.

I should like to express my gratitude to the editors of Audit (published at the University of Buffalo), where I first saw this printed as a unified whole.

Walking the earth under the stars,

musing midnight in midcentury,

a man treads the road with his dog;

the dog, less timebound in her universe of stench and

shrill, trots eager ahead.

The man too senses smells:

the frosted pasture and the cold loblollies,

he warmsweet of cows, and perhaps a hint of the passing of a skunk; hears

the hoot, hoot, hoot-hoot of the horned owl,

as full of faraway foreboding as the hoot of a

woodbuming locomotive heard across the plains as a child long ago; sees

Orion overhead sport glistening Rigel

and Betelgeuse, and the three belt buttons

that point out Sirius, and Belletrix that indicates

smoldering Aldebaran.

Eyes sweep

the bluedomed planetarium pivoting on the

polestar which the meditative Greeks and the Bedouin dreamed

engraved with the quaint creatures of the

zodiac; the spheres spun to music

and cherubim, benign to man,

with halcyon voices chanted

glory to God.

The dog stops short, paw poised, sniffs deep

and takes off yelping after some scuttle in the underbrush.

The man walks on alone.

Thoughts swarm; braincells, as multitudinous as the wan

starpoints that merge into the Milky Way overhead, trigger notions; tonight,

in the century’s decline,

new fantasies prevail. Photoelectric calculators

giddy the mind with number mechanically multiplying immensities by

billions of lightyears.

A million hostile chinamen a month; a hundred and thirty thousand

miscellaneous manmouths a day added to the population of the planet Earth.

But rockets successfully soar and satellites trundle on their punctual trails

above the stratosphere. Sam the Rhesus returns in his space capsule, his little face as inscrutable as when he went up. An aeronaut from a twelvemilehigh balloon spies moisture in the Venusian atmosphere. Norbert Weiner says his calculators are hep; watch out if they get a will of their own. A certain Dr. Otto Struve has predicted the possibility of ten million lifebreeding planets among the island galaxies, and, at Green Bank, West Virginia.

(far from the sins of the world)

they are building a radio telescope the size of a

baseballfield, tipped sixty stories up in the air, where the

physicists of project Osma plan to listen for messages

emitted with intelligent intent

from tau Ceti or epsilon Eridani.

A million men on a million nights, heirs of a

million generations, ponder the proliferation of their millions to the

millionth power till

multitude bursts into nothingness,

and numbers fail.

I feel the gravel underfoot, the starlit night about me. The nose smells, the

ears hear, the eyes see. “Willfully living?” “Why not?” Having survived up to now at least the death-dealing hail of cosmic particles, the interpreting mind says “I am here.”

In the underbrush under the pines my dog yelps in hot chase. Furry bodies

jostle in the dark among the broken twigs. Fangs snap, claws tear; barks, growls, snarls, panting breath as jaws close on the soft hairs under the throat. A shriek, not animal not human, a shriek of unembodied agony rips the night.

In the silence my dog panting drags a thick carcass through the brambles out

on the road

and places at her master’s feet

in the starlight

a beautiful raccoon

that was alive and is dead.

This much is true.

Man is a creature that builds

institutions

out of abnegation of lives linked for a purpose

the way the flowerlike polyps, the coralmakers of the warm salt seas

build

from incrusted layers of discarded careers:

niggerheads, atolls, great barrier reefs

and coquina benches forming the limestone basements of peninsulas where

civilizations flourish and flower and fall frazzled to seed.

Man’s institutions fashion his destiny,

as the hive, the nest, the hill, the sixsided cellular comb of the honeybee,

serried, tiered,

grouped according to impulses

inherent in the genes,

fashion the social insect, his castes and functional diversities:

the winged males and females, the blind workers, the soldiers, the nasuti,

the alternates of the “fourth caste”

of the pale termites,

dwellers in dark,

whose complex society has so astonished the naturalists.

Institutions, so the sociologists tell us,

shape man’s course.

as the comings and goings of the hardshelled ants — their diligence since the

dawn of philosophy has delighted the makers of fables and the pointers of morals — are

predetermined by instinct.

Institutional man,

like the termites and the social insects among the hymenoptera, must, we

are told, sacrifice individual diversity for diversity of caste. (Already in his bureaucratic form, with a diligence which would astonish any uncommitted naturalist, institutional man accumulates

in vaults and cabinets and files,—

paper,

the same paper the polistes wasp builds his

house of

and the termites of the tropical uplands

their towering castles.)

Lecturing on “Social Insects” the late Professor Wheeler of Harvard used to point out with some malice to his students

that the ants,

too,

in spite of the predestined perfection

of their institutions,

suffered what he called “perversions

of appetite.”

Their underground galleries and storied

domes

are infested by an array of lethal creatures, thieves and predators, scavenger

crickets, greedy roaches and rove beetles, and one particular peculiarly plumed little bug

which secretes in its hairs an elixir so

delectable to antkind

that the ants lose all sense of self- or

species-preservation

and seek death in its embrace.

What man can contemplate the aardvark without astonishment?

Who, should he be happy enough to have the zoo attendant hand him the

little creature, can feel in his hands the odd ambiguous body,

between fur and feathers,

of the duckbilled platypus

without a catch of the breath and awful wonder (suppose you were me and I

were you): what impulses,

wakened by the intake of the soft fluvial eyes,

trigger the cells of that small brain.

Or the spiny anteater?

what dreams, when he curls in the dark of his box, luminesce inside the

wedgeshaped skull? The variousness of life

as if in whimsy

constantly cracks the dogmatic mold

which man the classifier laboriously constructs to ease the pain of sorting

out diversities.

In man himself there are more variants

than in the animal kingdom or the vegetable

or the crystalline realm of minerals; sometimes, when

man the classifier slackens under the endless drudgery of arguing away

complexities; man, the curious viewer; the other man, the naive,

the astonished child

looks at himself in a mirror or lets his fingers explore the dissymmetries of

his uneven carcass or maybe, taking a peep through a fiuoroscope,

discovers enough aberrant factors to outdo the bestiaries from aardvark to

zebra.

“Did you know,”

asked Dr. Roger J. Williams the biochemist from Texas, of a tableful of

punditry at a symposium at the Princeton Inn,

“that the size of the human stomach has a sixfold variation

or that the small intestines of men and women have measured out

anywhere between eleven feet and twenty-five feet nine?”

Eleven different patterns have been plotted for the muscle that controls the

index finger. The blood’s path through vessels and arteries flows in courses as various as the earth’s

great river systems. Cell chemistries and the matching

electrical impulses vary from individual to individual. We none of us smell

alike. (That’s how the bloodhound earns his kennel ration; the bloodhound can tell.)

And when you try to chart the convolutions of the brain, each one’s a

universe where the layered cells multiply a trillion interactions into infinity.

“Can it be?”

Egghead inquires of Doubledome,

“that variety instead of uniformity

is nature’s law?”

SENDOFF

Musing midnight and the century’s decline

man walks with dog,

shuffling the roadside gravel where sometimes we used to find among the

quartzy riverpebbles,

spent arrowheads of the Powhatans.

Overcast blots the stars. Not even a glimpse of impudent Echo, America’s toy

balloon the radio man said go out and see. The fall’s too late for lightningbugs, only a chill hint here and there of a glowworm in the wet grass.

The dog trots eager, sniffing the night, proud of her man’s steps behind. The

man,

shamed drags beaten strides, drained of every thought but hatred

of the tinpot pharaohs whose coarse imprecations the impartial transistors

have been dinning in his ears. Evil is indivisible. By hate they rose to flashbulb glory and the roar of cowed multitudes, police sirens shrieking how great the leader, how little the led: the abject mike ever waiting to receive

the foul discharge of their power to kill. The lie squared, the lie cubed, the lie

to the power of x deals death like a tornado. By hate they live. By hate we’ll see them die. We’ve seen them die before. The hate remains

to choke out good, to strangle the still small private voice that is God’s spark,

in man. Man drowns in his own scum.

These nights are dark.

In the light of the carriagelamps on the brick steps of the sleeping house

back home the man pauses for a last breath of the outdoor air; the dog’s nose nuzzles his hand. She bows, wriggles, cavorts, goes belly up, eyes rolling in frantic appreciation:

walker on hindlegs, hurler of sticks, foodgiver, builder of shelter, toolmaker,

creation’s lord, initiator, master of Yes and No;

wagging dog-Shakespeare her tail declaims:

Oh paragon of animals.