“Suicide?”
“They saw the very end we contemplate now. They decided that if our kind of life had no hope of escaping the Proof—the Proof these teachers helped fix in all our thoughts—than it was best not to send a part of ourselves into the next universe. We are what’s left of those who disagreed …”
“My tributary did not tell me this.”
“Hiding the truth from yourself even now.”
I hold my hands out to her, hoping for pity, but this Elisaveta has long since abandoned pity. I desperately need to activate some fragment of love within her. “I am so lost …”
“We are all lost, Vasily. There is only one hope.”
She turns and opens a broad door on one side of my cubicle, where I originally placed the window to the outside. “If we succeed at this,” she says, “then we are better than those great souls. If we fail, they were right … Better that nothing from our reality crosses the Between.”
I admire her for her knowledge, then, for being kept so well informed. But I resent that she has advanced beyond me, has no need for me.
The tributaries watch with interest, like voyeurs.
(“Perhaps there is a chance.” My descendant self speaks in a private sending.)
“I see why you divorced me,” I say sullenly.
“You were a tyrant and a bully. When you were stored—before your heart replacement, I remember now … When you were stored, you and I had not yet grown so far apart. We would. It was inevitable.”
“The Proof is very convincing,” I tell Elisaveta. “Perhaps this is futile.”
“You simply have no say, Vasily. The effort is being made.”
I have touched her, but it is not pity I arouse, and certainly not love.
It is disgust.
Through the window, Elisaveta and I see a portion of the plain. On it, the experiments have congealed into a hundred, a thousand, smooth, slowly pulsing shapes. Above them all looms the shadow of the Coordinator. I feel a bridge being made, links being established. I sense panic in my descendant self, who works without the knowledge of the other tributaries.
Then I am asked: “Will you become part of the experiment?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are the judgment engine.”
“Now I must go,” Elisaveta says. “We will all die soon. Neither you nor I are in the final self. No part of the teachers, or the Coordinator, will cross the Between.”
“All futile, then,” I say.
“Why so, Vasily? When I was young, you told me that change was an evil force, and that you longed for an eternal college, where all learning could be examined at leisure, without pressure. You’ve found that. Your tributary self has had billions of years to study the unchanging truths. And to infuse them into new tributaries. You’ve had your heaven, and I’ve had mine. Away from you, among those who nurture and respect.”
I am left with nothing to say. Then, unexpectedly, the figure of Elisaveta reaches out with a nonexistent hand and touches my unreal cheek. For a moment, between us, there is something like the contact of flesh to flesh. I feel her fingers. She feels my cheek. Despite her words, the love has not died completely.
She fades from the cubicle. I rush to the window, to see if I can make out the Coordinator, but the shadow, the mercury–liquid cloud, has already vanished.
“They will fail,” the We–ness says. It surrounds me with its mind, its persuasion, greater in scale than a human of my time to an ant. “This shows the origin of their folly. We have justified our existence.”
(You can still cross. There is still a connection between you. You can judge the experiment, go with the Endtime Work Coordinator.)
I watch the plain, the joined shapes, extraordinarily beautiful, like condensed cities or civilizations or entire histories.
The sunlight dims, light rays jerk in our sight, in our fading scales of time.
(Will you go?)
“She doesn’t need me …” I want to go with Elisaveta. I want to reach out to her and shout, “I see! I understand!” But there is still sadness and self–pity. I am, after all, too small for her.
(You may go. Persuade. Carry us with you.)
And billions of years too late—
Shards of Seconds
We know now that the error lies in the distant past, a tendency of the Coordinator, who has gathered tributaries of like character. As did the teachers. The past still dominates, and there is satisfaction in knowing We, at least, have not committed any errors, have not fallen into folly.
We observe the end with interest. Soon, there will be no change. In that, there is some cause for exultation. Truly, We are tired.
On the bubbling remains of the School World, the students in their Berkus continue to the last instant with the experiment, and We watch from the cracked and cooling hill.
Something huge and blue and with many strange calm aspects rises from the field of experiments. It does not remind us of anything We have seen before.
It is new.
The Coordinator returns, embraces it, draws it away.
(“She does not tell the truth. Parts of the Endtime Coordinator must cross with the final self. This is your last chance. Go to her and reconcile. Carry our thoughts with you.”)
I feel a love for her greater than anything I could have felt before. I hate my descendant self, I hate the teachers and their gray spirits, depth upon depth of ashes out of the past. They want to use me to perpetuate all that matters to them.
I ache to reclaim what has been lost, to try to make up for the past.
The Coordinator withdraws from School World, taking with it the results of the student experiment. Do they have what they want—something worthy of being passed on? It would be wonderful to know … I could die contented, knowing the Proof has been shattered. I could cross over, ask…
But I will not pollute her with me any more.
“No.”
The last thousandths of the last second fall like broken crystals.
(The connection is broken. You have failed.)
My tributary self, disappointed, quietly suggests I might be happier if I am deactivated.
Curiously, to the last, he clings to his imagined cubicle window. He cries his last words where there is no voice, no sound, no one to listen but us:
“Elisaveta! YES! YES!”
The last of the ancient self is packed, mercifully, into oblivion. We will not subject him to the Endtime. We have pity.
We are left to our thoughts. The force that replaces gravity now spasms. The metric is very noisy. Length and duration become so grainy that thinking is difficult.
One tributary works to solve an ancient and obscure problem. Another studies the Proof one last time, savoring its formal beauty. Another considers ancient relations.
Our end, our own oblivion, the Between, will not be so horrible. There are worse things. Much
Appendix: Earlier Prefaces
From the 1983 Arkham House edition of
The Wind from a Burning Woman, my first collection.
PREFACE
I have had a passion for science fiction and fantasy ever since I can remember. Science fiction has been a wonderful mother for my mind, showing me that the world is far bigger and stranger than it seems within my province. And in the past few years—after many more years of apprenticeship--it has become a fine, broad landscape on which to test my imagination.
Occasionally I’ve felt the pressure of limited editors and markets, but I have yet to run up against an artistic boundary. If a thought is expressible in human language, a science fiction story can be written about it. The same cannot be said of any other genre.
Through reading science fiction, I became interested in other forms of literature, in astronomy and the sciences, in history and philosophy. Specifi
cally, discovering James Blish’s Case of Conscience when I was sixteen led me to read James Joyce; L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Poul Anderson, and others have given me solid reasons to explore history. Arthur C. Clarke--and through Clarke, Olaf Stapledon—sent me on a wild search through philosophy, looking for similar insights and experiences. (I’ve usually been disappointed; Stapledon is unique.) In short, my intellect has been nurtured and guided by science fiction.
Some people, reading the above, will sneer the ineradicable sneer. The hell with them. C. P. Snow pinned their little gray moth in The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution; they are ignorant or afraid of science. They reject the universe in favor of a small human circle, limited in time and place to their own lifetimes. You are not one of them if you have read this far. You are one of the brave ones.
So I will open my heart to you a little bit and talk about the stories that follow.
I have friends who believe the world will come to an end in twenty or thirty years. They foresee complete collapse, perhaps nuclear war. They look on the prospect with either stunned indifference or some relish. Serve everybody right, they seem to say.
What they are actually saying is that within the next few decades—certainly within the next sixty or seventy years—they will come to an end. Their world will darken. And, solipsists that many of us are, it seems perfectly logical to take everybody and everything with us. The future does not really exist, certainly not the far and unknowable future. Why talk about it?
They are still my friends, but they are as wrong as wrong can be. The future will come, and it will be different, unimaginably so. Then why do I bother to try imagining it?
I could sing you a long number on how science fiction is seldom intended to be prophetic. But I’m willing to bet, in our deepest hearts, that we all hope one of our more optimistic imagined futures, or some aspect of a literary time to come, will closely parallel reality. Then we will be admired for our perspicacity. People in the future, if they still read, might come across an even more fantastic concept and say, “Hey, that crazy Greg Bear stuff!”
Perhaps. But it will be accident, not prophecy.
Like my pessimistic friends, I’m not going to live forever. I may see the first starships; I may not.
But when I write, I not only live to see one future, I experience dozens. I chart their courses, lay out histories, try to create new cultures and extend the range of discovery. When I write—
When I write, I’m immortal.
Sometimes I enter into a kind of trance state and engage so many thoughts and ideas and abilities that I seem to rise onto another plane. And though I seldom think about it while I’m on that plane, I seem to become everyone who has ever thought about the future. I join the greats, past and present, at least for a moment.
I’ve been writing since I was eight or nine years old. In 1966, when I was fifteen, through something of a fluke I sold my first professional short story. Five years passed before I sold another. The apprenticeship is still not over, and may never be. None of those earlier efforts are represented in this collection; the earliest piece here, “Mandala,” was written in 1975 and first appeared in 1978. It also comprises the first third of my novel, Strength of Stones, published in 1981.
There isn’t much remarkable to record about the writing of these stories. Writing is usually quite dull to an outside observer. It consists of long periods of apparent loafing around, punctuated by hours at a typewriter, highlighted by moments of desk-pounding and fingerchewing puzzlement. (All this, to contrast with the above-mentioned trance state.)
“Mandala” and “Hardfought” were about equally difficult to write, for different reasons. “The White Horse Child” was one of the easiest; like “Scattershot,” it emerged while I sat at the typewriter, consciously unaware of what was going to pour out. “Petra” went through several stages, becoming progressively stranger and stranger. (One of the great difficulties with creativity is trying to impose order on the results.)
“The Wind from a Burning Woman” also began as an exercise in sitting blankly at the typewriter. As in most instances where such stories turn out well, there was a strong emotion lurking behind the apparent blankness-that of repugnance to terrorism. Do the weak have the right to force the strong to do their bidding by terrorist action? To handle the issue honestly, I had to make the “Burning Woman” fight for a cause that I, myself, would cherish. One editor, reading the story for an anthology on space colonies, rejected it because it didn’t overtly support the cause. It would have been dishonest to force the story into such a mold; however pleasant or unpleasant the result, my stories must work themselves out within their own framework, not according to some market principle or philosophical bias.
It may be remarkable that, with such views, I’ve come as far as I have in publishing, where large conglomerates seem to dictate overall marketing of science fiction as if it were some piecework commodity. (“Take dragon/unicorn/spaceship, add vaguely medieval/ magical setting, mix well with wise old wizard/cute sidekick …”) Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed stories with all those elements, but enough is enough. Science fiction is much too restless to accept the same kind of genre regimentation displayed by, for example, Westerns or hard-boiled detective novels, where one Western Town or corrupt Big City can serve as stage settings for an infinity of retold tales.
But enough authorial interference. I will tell you no more about these stories until we meet in person; perhaps not even then, for I’m not certain my interpretations are always correct. “Mandala,” for example, has defied my analysis for seven years, and yet I knew what I wanted to say when I wrote it.
That’s when I’m happiest with my own work—when the stories say so many things that they become playgrounds for the mind. I hope you feel the same way.
Spring Valley, California
On Losing the Taint of Being a Cannibal
From Bear’s Fantasies, Wildside Press, 1993
I’m reminded of the line delivered by Joseph Bologna in the motion picture comedy, The Big Bus. His character, Dan Torrance, once drove a bus through Donner Pass, and of course got snowed in. Desperation quickly set in among the passengers, and some odd recipes were resorted to. Torrance pleads that he did not know what was in the soup, adding, “One lousy foot, and they call you a cannibal for the rest of your life!”
Writing science fiction is one of those odd activities, like being a cannibal, that marks you permanently, even should you later become a vegan.
The odd relationship most people have with science—awed fascination, not infrequently dismay and distrust, and guilty dependence—guarantees a mixed reaction among the reading public: “You actually enjoy science? Writing about it, making it up? How interesting.”
Their tone of voice tells you that you are now marked forever in their minds.
Science fiction explores the outer limits of the current Western paradigm, science; its playground is all that we know about the universe, and what we imagine we might eventually know.
Many of us, at one time or another, enjoy playing with previous paradigms—mind over matter, magic, dream logic, and so on. Literature does not play favorites; excellent stories have been written in all these areas.
A science fiction writer who writes fantasy, however, is regarded by some as an odd bird indeed. Write science fiction, become well known for it, and—well, your fantasy stories become almost invisible. All those times when you weren’t a cannibal—simply forgotten.
Yet most of the great science fiction writers have written a great deal of fantasy, and I have, as well. But prejudices and snobbery on both sides of the fence have grown in the past ten or fifteen years.
I’ve never thought of my fantasy stories as dabbling or slumming. They represent an important part of my writing. Some of my very finest work is fantasy. The first novel I ever finished—an early
version of what would later be published as The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage—was fantasy. My second published novel, Psychlone, is a ghost story, heavily influenced by Stephen King. In real life I’ve even gone hunting ghosts in a world-famous hotel, just like Carnacki, though without his spectacular success.
I love fantasy.
Perhaps by gathering some of my fantasy in one volume, I can convince the world that I’ve had at least a few moments when I was not a cannibal.
But I won’t bet on it.
Being a writer of science fiction is just so odd.
Thank goodness.
Characters Great and Small in SF:
“Sisters” by Greg Bear
Commentary on the story “Sisters” published in Paragons
edited by Reg Bretnor
In “Sisters,” the viewpoint character, Letitia Blakely, is familiar enough—an adolescent girl, struggling with painful problems. In outline, “Sisters” reads much like a contemporary story of growing up—with a few words and some set dressing changed to indicate the near future. Yet my intent in this story—as in many of my stories—is to deal with characters within larger characters, to explore how individuals react to change within a larger setting.
If anything has become more and more clear in the past five hundred years, it is that men and women are not the measure of all things, but the measurers. A richer, more powerful literature must take into account the nature of larger entities than human individuals.
There’s nothing that stops science fiction—often dismissed as merely a literature of ideas—from also being a literature of character, so long as readers understand a larger definition of character. Character is not limited to the nature and actions of a single individual, or even a group of individuals. Character may also describe a nation, a culture, a species, a world—or a universe.
For me, the story of character is not limited to the Jamesian small group of individuals in an unchanging social setting, with all change arising from individually willed action. Yet since James this has been touted as the datum of literature—and not without reason.