Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (365 page)

Those in the water could easily be heard; in fact, the calls seemed magnified, as if meant to be heard clearly by everyone who was safe, as a punishment for past sins.

“We’re all deaders,” said a woman standing beside Stephen. “I’m sure no one’s coming to get us before dawn, when they have to pick up survivors.”

“We’ll be the last pickup, that’s for sure, that’s if they intend to pick us up at all.”

“Those in the water have to get their money’s worth.”

“And since we opted for death…”

“I didn’t,” Stephen said, almost to himself.

“Well, you’ve got it anyway.”

* * * *

Stephen was numb, but no longer cold. As if from far away, he heard the splash of someone falling from the boat, which was very slowly sinking as air was lost from under the hull. At times the water was up to Stephen’s knees, yet he wasn’t even shivering. Time distended, or contracted. He measured it by the splashing of his companions as they fell overboard. He heard himself calling Esme, as if to say good-bye, or perhaps to greet her.

By dawn, Stephen was so muddled by the cold that he thought he was on land, for the sea was full of debris: cork, steamer chairs, boxes, pilasters, rugs, carved wood, clothes, and of course the bodies of those unfortunates who could not or would not survive; and the great icebergs and the smaller ones called growlers looked like cliffs and mountainsides. The icebergs were sparkling and many-hued, all brilliant in the light, as if painted by some cheerless Gauguin of the north.

“There,” someone said, a woman’s hoarse voice. “It’s coming down, it’s coming down!” The dirigible, looking like a huge white whale, seemed to be descending through its more natural element, water, rather than the thin, cold air. Its electric engines could not even be heard.

In the distance, Stephen could see the other lifeboats. Soon the airship would begin to rescue those in the boats, which were now tied together in a cluster. As Stephen’s thoughts wandered and his eyes watered from the reflected morning sunlight, he saw a piece of carved wood bobbing up and down near the boat, and noticed a familiar face in the debris that seemed to surround the lifeboat.

There, just below the surface, in his box, the lid open, eyes closed, floated Poppa. Poppa opened his eyes then and looked at Stephen, who screamed, lost his balance on the hull, and plunged headlong into the cold black water.

* * * *

The Laurel Lounge of the dirigible
California
was dark and filled with survivors. Some sat in the flowered, stuffed chairs; others just milled about. But they were all watching the lifelike holographic tapes of the sinking of the Titanic. The images filled the large room with the ghostly past.

Stephen stood in the back of the room, away from the others, who cheered each time there was a close-up of someone jumping overboard or slipping under the water. He pulled the scratchy woolen blanket around him, and shivered. He had been on the dirigible for more than twenty-four hours, and he was still chilled. A crewman had told him it was because of the injections he had received when he boarded the airship.

There was another cheer and, horrified, he saw that they were cheering for
him
. He watched himself being sucked into the ventilator, and then blown upward to the surface. His body ached from being battered. But he had saved himself. He
had
survived, and that had been an actual experience. It was worth it for that, but poor Esme…

“You had one of the
most
exciting experiences,” a woman said to him, as she touched his hand. He recoiled from her, and she shrugged, then moved on.

“I wish to register a complaint,” said a stocky man dressed in period clothing to one of the
Titanic’s
officers, who was standing beside Stephen and sipping a cocktail.

“Yes?” asked the officer.

“I was saved against my wishes. I specifically took this voyage that I might pit myself against the elements.”

“Did you sign one of our protection waivers?” asked the officer.

“I was not aware that we were required to sign any such thing.”

“All such information was provided,” the officer said, looking uninterested. “Those passengers who are truly committed to taking their chances sign, and we leave them to their own devices. Otherwise, we are responsible for every passenger’s life.”

“I might just as well have jumped into the ocean early and gotten pulled out,” the passenger said sarcastically.

The officer smiled. “Most people want to test themselves out as long as they can. Of course, if you want to register a formal complaint, then…”

But the passenger stomped away.

“The man’s trying to save face,” the officer said to Stephen, who had been eavesdropping. “We see quite a bit of that. But
you
seemed to have an interesting ride. You gave us quite a start; we thought you were going to take a lifeboat with the others, but you disappeared belowdecks. It was a bit more difficult to monitor you, but we managed—that’s the fun for
us.
You were never in any danger, of course. Well, maybe a
little.
”

Stephen was shaken. He had felt that his experiences had been authentic, that he had really saved himself. But none of that had been
real.
Only Esme…

And then he saw her step into the room.

“Esme?” He couldn’t believe it. “Esme?”

She walked over to him and smiled, as she had the first time they’d met. She was holding a water-damaged cedar box.

“Hello, Stephen. Wasn’t it exciting?”

Stephen threw his arms around her, but she didn’t respond. She waited a proper time, then disengaged herself.

“And look,” she said, “they’ve even found Poppa.” She opened the box and held it up to him.

Poppa’s eyes fluttered open. For a moment his eyes were vague and unfocused, then they fastened on Esme and sharpened. “Esme…” Poppa said uncertainly, and then he smiled. “Esme, I’ve had the strangest dream.” He laughed. “I dreamed I was a head in a box…”

Esme snapped the box closed. “Isn’t he marvelous,” she said. She patted the box and smiled. “He almost had me talked into going through with it this time.”

* * * *

“Going Under” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 1981 by Omni Publications International Ltd. First published in
Omni
, September 1981. Reprinted by permission of the Author. All rights reserved.

(1942– )

Chip Delany is a big, bearish outspoken figure and a lot of fun to be on panels with (or just to listen to him declaim—Chips knows as much about the field as anyone alive). I remember a Readercon panel on teaching science fiction that we were on together, which Chip led off by explaining, in a deep booming voice, how the problem with SF classes is that the professor invariably starts off the class with the wrong thing. Deadpan, I couldn’t help responding, “But Chip, I start off with
you
.” And it’s true. If you want to show a class how great science fiction doesn’t have to be about battles and robots, or that the alienation in an alien world may be much closer to home than the characters (or readers) realize, Chip is the writer to start with. I talk about language and how we experience it a lot in my classes, and the book that as a teenager made me think about of how language shapes us was Chip’s Nebula and Tiptree Award–winning
Babel-17
(1966).

An African American intellectual and openly bisexual at a time when either could get a person jailed or worse, Chip was both a college dropout and a writing prodigy when his first novel,
Jewels of Aptor
, in 1962 came out when he was just twenty. Between 1962 and 1969 he published eight novels, winning Nebulas for
Babel-17
and
The Einstein Intersection
(1967). By then he’d turned to short fiction, and electrified the field with a series of stunning stories like “Driftglass,” Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967), and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” (1968). He also wrote four volumes’ worth of terrific criticism, some of the best the field had ever seen. But his next novels, the massive Dhalgren (1975) and Triton (1976)—both complicated, ambitious works that polarized critics—would be nearly his last science fiction for the next thirty years.

Chip now heads up the creative writing program at Temple University (my old alma mater, though he wasn’t there at the time). His most recent novel,
Dark Reflections
(2007), is a mainstream novel that won the Stonewall Book Award for 2008. Forthcoming in 2012 is a long novel,
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
, that, after thirty years of writing little or no science fiction at all, has, as Delany says, elements of science fiction to it.

Chip lives in New York with Dennis, his companion of more than twenty years. He was previously married (it was an open marriage) for two decades to Marilyn Hacker; their daughter, Ivy Hacker-Delany, was a theater director before becoming a physician.

The text of “Driftglass” used here includes minor corrections made by the author to the originally published version.

First published in
If
, June 1967

I

Sometimes I go down to the port, splashing sand with my stiff foot at the end of my stiff leg locked in my stiff hip, with the useless arm a-swinging, to get wet all over again, drink in the dives with cronies ashore, feeling old, broken, sorry for myself, laughing louder and louder. The third of my face that was burned away in the accident was patched with skin grafts from my chest, so what’s left of my mouth distorts all loud sounds; sloppy sartorial reconstruction. Also I have a hairy chest. Chest hair does not look like beard hair, and it grows all up under my right eye. And: my beard is red, my chest hair brown, while the thatch curling down over neck and ears is sun-streaked to white here, darkened to bronze there, ’midst general blondness.

By reason of my being a walking (I suppose my gait could be called headlong limping) horror show, plus a general inclination to sulk, I spend most of the time up in the wood and glass and aluminum house on the surf-sloughed point that the Aquatic Corp ceded me along with my pension. Rugs from Turkey there, copper pots, my tenor recorder, which I can no longer play, and my books. But sometimes, when the gold fog blurs the morning, I go down to the beach and tromp barefoot in the wet edging to the sea, searching for driftglass.

* * * *

It was foggy that morning, and the sun across the water moiled the mists like a brass ladle. I lurched to the top of the rocks, looked down through the tall grasses into the frothing inlet where she lay, and blinked.

She sat up, long gills closing down her neck and the secondary slits along her back just visible at their tips because of much hair, wet and curling copper, falling there. She saw me. “What are you doing here, huh?” She narrowed blue eyes.

“Looking for driftglass.”

“What?”

“There’s a piece.” I pointed near her and came down the rocks like a crab with one stiff leg.

“Where?” She turned over, half in, half out of the water, the webs of her fingers cupping nodules of black stone.

While the water made cold overtures between my toes, I picked up the milky fragment by her elbow where she wasn’t looking. She jumped, because she obviously had thought it was somewhere else.

“See?”

“What…what is it?” She raised her cool hand to mine. For a moment the light through the milky gem and the pale film of my own webs pearled the screen of her palms. (Details like that. Yes, they are important things, the points from which we suspend later pain.) A moment later wet fingers closed to the backs of mine.

“Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”

“I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”

“They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”

“Ohhh!
”
she breathed as the beauty of the blunted triangular fragment in my palm assailed her like perfume. Then she looked at my face, blinking the third, aqueous-filled lid that we use as a correction lens for underwater vision.

She watched the ruin calmly.

Then her hand went to my foot where the webs had been torn back in the accident. She began to take in who I was. I looked for horror, but saw only a little sadness.

The insignia on her buckle—her stomach was making little jerks the way you always do during the first few minutes when you go from breathing water to air—told me she was a Biological Technician. (Back up at the house there was a similar uniform of simulated scales folded in the bottom drawer of the dresser and the belt insignia said Depth Gauger.) I was wearing some very frayed jeans and a red cotton shirt with no buttons.

She reached for my neck, pushed my collar back from my shoulders and touched the tender slits of my gills, outlining them with cool fingers. “Who are you?” Finally.

“Cal Svenson.”

She slid back down in the water. “You’re the one who had the terrible…but that was years ago! They still talk about it, down…” She stopped.

As the sea softens the surface of a piece of glass, so it blurs the souls and sensibilities of the people who toil beneath her. And according to the last report of the Marine Reclamation Division there are to date seven hundred and fifty thousand who have been given gills and webs and sent under the foam where there are no storms, up and down the American coast.

“You live on shore? I mean around here? But so long ago…”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“I was two years older than you when the accident happened.”

“You were eighteen?”

“I’m thirty-one now. Which means it happened over a dozen years ago. It
is
a long time.”

“They still talk about it.”

“I’ve almost forgotten,” I said. “I really have. Say, do you play the recorder?”

“I used to.”

“Good! Come up to my place and look at my tenor recorder. And I’ll make some tea. Perhaps you can stay for lunch—”

“I have to report back to Marine Headquarters by three. Tork is going over the briefing to lay the cable for the big dive, with Jonni and the crew.” She paused, smiled. “But I can catch the undertow and be there in half an hour if I leave by two-thirty.”

On the walk up I learned her name was Ariel. She thought the patio was charming, and the mosaic evoked, “Oh, look!” and “Did you do this yourself?” a half-dozen times. (I had done it, in the first lonely years.) She picked out the squid and the whale in battle, the wounded shark and the diver. She told me she didn’t get time to read much, but she was impressed by all the books. She listened to me reminisce. She talked a lot to me about her work, husbanding the deep-down creatures they were scaring up. Then she sat on the kitchen stool, playing a Lukas Foss serenade on my recorder, while I put rock salt in the bottom of the broiler tray for two dozen Oysters Rockefeller, and the tea water whistled. I’m a comparatively lonely guy. I like being followed by beautiful young girls.

II

“Hey, Juao!” I bawled across the jetty.

He nodded to me from the center of his nets, sun glistening on polished shoulders, sun lost in rough hair. I walked across to where he sat, sewing like a spider. He pulled another section up over his horny toes, then grinned at me with his mosaic smile: gold, white, black gap below, crooked yellow; white, gold, white. Shoving my bad leg in front I squatted.

“I fished out over the coral where you told me.” He filled his cheek with his tongue and nodded. “You come up to the house for a drink, eh?”

“Fine.”

“Just…a moment more.”

There’s a certain sort of Brazilian you find along the shore in the fishing villages, old yet ageless. See one of their men and you think he could be fifty, he could be sixty—will probably look the same when he’s eighty-five. Such was Juao. We once figured it out. He’s seven hours older than I am.

We became friends sometime before the accident when I got tangled in his nets working high lines in the Vorea Current. A lot of guys would have taken their knife and hacked their way out of the situation, ruining fifty-five, sixty dollars’ worth of nets. That’s an average fisherman’s monthly income down here. But I surfaced and sat around in his boat while we untied me. Then, like typical coastal kids, we came in and got plastered. Since I cost him a day’s fishing, I’ve been giving him hints on where to fish ever since. He buys me drinks when I come up with something.

This has been going on for fifteen years. During that time my life has been smashed up and land-bound. In the same time Juao has married off his five sisters, got married himself and had two children. (Oh, those
bolitos
and
teneros asados
that Amalia—her braids swung out, her brown breasts shook so when she turned to laugh—would make for Sunday dinner/supper/Monday breakfast.) I rode with them in the ambulance ’copter all the way into Brasilia. In the hospital hall Juao and I stood together, both still barefoot, he tattered with fish scales in his hair, me just tattered, and I held him while he cried and I tried to explain how a world that could take a pubescent child and with a week of operations make an amphibious creature that can exist for a month on either side of the sea’s foam-fraught surface could still be helpless before certain rampant endocrine cancers coupled with massive renal deterioration. Juao and I returned to the village alone, by bus, three days before our birthday—back when I was twenty-three and Juao was twenty-three and seven hours old.

“This morning,” Juao said. (The shuttle danced in the web at the end of the orange line.) “I got a letter for you to read me. It’s about the children. Come on, we go up and drink.” The shuttle paused, backtracked twice, and he yanked the knot tight. We walked along the port toward the square. “Do you think the letter says that the children are accepted?”

“If it’s from the Aquatic Corp. They just send postcards when they reject someone. The question is, how do
you
feel about it?”

“You are a good man. If they grow up like you, then it will be fine.”

“But you’re still worried.” I’d been prodding Juao to get the kids into the International Aquatic Corp nigh on since I became their godfather. It would mean much time away from the village during their training period—and they might eventually be stationed in any ocean in the world. But two motherless children had not been easy on Juao or his sisters. The Corp would mean education, travel, interesting work, the things that make up one kind of good life. They wouldn’t look twice their age when they were thirty; and not too many amphimen look like me.

“Worry is part of life. But the work is dangerous. Did you know there is an amphiman going to try and lay cable down in the Slash?”

I frowned. “Again?”

“Yes. And that is what you tried to do when the sea broke you to pieces and burned the parts, eh?”

“Must you be so damned picturesque?” I asked. “Who’s going to beard the lion this time?”

“A young amphiman named Tork. They speak of him down at the docks as a brave man.”

“Why the hell are they still trying to lay the cable, there? They’ve gotten by this long without a line through the Slash.”

“Because of the fish,” Juao said. “You told me why fifteen years ago—”

“Sixteen,” I said, “actually. We had a birthday three months back, you and me.”

Juao went on as if it made no difference. “The fish are still there, and we fishermen who cannot live below are still here. If the children go for the operations, then there will be less fishermen. But today…” He shrugged. “They must either lay the line across the fish paths or down in the Slash.” Juao shook his head.

Funny things, the great power cables the Aquatic Corp has been strewing across the ocean floor to bring power to their undersea mines and farms, to run their oil wells—and how many flaming wells have I capped down there—for their herds of whale, and chemical distillation plants. They carry two-hundred-sixty-cycle current. Over certain sections of the ocean floor, or in sections of the water with certain mineral contents, this sets up inductance in the water itself which sometimes—and you will probably get a Nobel prize if you can detail exactly why it isn’t always—drives the fish away over areas up to twenty-five and thirty miles, unless the lines are laid in the bottom of those canyons that delve into the ocean floor.

“This Tork thinks of the fishermen. He is a good man too.”

I raised my eyebrows—the one that’s left, anyway—and tried to remember what my little Undine had said about him that morning. And remembered not much.

“I wish him luck,” I said.

“What do you feel about this young man going down into the coral-rimmed jaws to the Slash?”

I thought for a moment. “I think I hate him.”

Juao looked up.

“He is an image in a mirror where I look and am forced to regard what I once was,” I went on. “I envy him the chance to succeed where I failed, and I can come on just as quaint as you can. I hope he makes it.”

Juao twisted his shoulders in a complicated shrug (once I could do that) which is coastal Brazilian for, “I didn’t know things had progressed to that point, but seeing that they have, there is little to be done.”

“The sea is that sort of mirror,” I said.

“Yes.” Juao nodded.

Behind us I heard the slapping of sandals on concrete. I turned in time to catch my goddaughter in my good arm. My godson had grabbed hold of the bad one and was swinging on it.

“Tio Cal—?”

“Hey, Tio Cal, what did you bring us?”

“Clara, you will pull him over,” Juao reprimanded. “Let go, Fernando!”

And, bless them, they ignored their father.

“What did you bring us?”

“What did you bring us, Tio Cal?”

“If you let me, I’ll show you.” So they stepped back, dark-eyed and quivering. I watched Juao watching: brown pupils on ivory balls, and in the left eye a vein had broken in a jagged smear. He was loving his children, who would soon be as alien to him as the fish he netted. He was also looking at the terrible thing that was me and wondering what would come to his own spawn. And he was watching the world turn and grow older, clocked by the waves, reflected in that mirror.

It’s impossible for me to see what the population explosion and the budding colonies on Luna and Mars and the flowering beneath the ocean really look like from the disrupted cultural melange of a coastal fishing town. But I come closer than many others, and I know what I don’t understand.