The Magic (October 1961–October 1967). Roger Zelazny

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СКАЧАТЬ Frost begins to perceive what is left of the world as a factory for making humans, even though he does not quite understand what human beings are supposed to be. The working out of this process gives us the remainder of the story. By the same token, we realize Frost was destined to replace Man the moment he began obsessively studying Man in detail and taking Man as a “hobby,” because the jobs he was supposed to be doing simply did not utilize his capacities anywhere near to the full.

      III

      “Not El Greco; nor Blake, no: Bosch. Without any question, Bosch—with his nightmare vision of the streets of hell. He would be the one to do justice to this moment of the storm.”

      This is the story of “Godfrey Justin Holmes—‘God’ for short,” and whose nickname is “Juss . . . ” who has come to a watery world, and its single continent, “Terra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan—delightful name.

      “Delightful place, too, for a while . . . ”

      Juss is a Hell Cop, a lookout with a hoard of 135 remote control eyes, which look over what at first seems to be a peaceful land, but as a great storm—far greater than any known on earth—raises up about the landscape a hoard of monsters in the streets. (“They say the job title comes from the name of an antique flying vehicle—a hellcopper, I think.”) In this story, Zelazny’s first person narrator returns to a cryogenic technique we last saw in “The Graveyard Heart,” only here strung out to become the way to accomplish interstellar travel at slower than light speeds.

      People smoke regularly—risking cancer. (It is what killed Zelazny in 1995 at the age of 58.) In the same story at one point sickness is said to come from “dampness” and “from cold,” which is tantamount to earmarking the story as originating from before the increased awareness, which arrived with the age of AIDS, that sicknesses come from viruses and bacteria and that dampness, cold, and malnutrition can only lower one resistance to disease. Even dirt does not spread disease itself, if the proper pathogens are not present. The bag of hydrochloric that hangs at the bottom of the esophagus, commonly known as the belly, is not only an early step in the digestion process, it is also an early step in the immune system’s fight against the pretty much ninety-five percent of all viruses and bacteria that might harm the human machine itself.

      “Where are the rains of yesteryear?” Zelazny riffs on the line by Villon, “Ou sont les nieges . . . ”

      And another one of his Immortals moved off onto an uncertain future threaded across the stars: “Years have passed. I am not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don’t know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?

      “In the invisible city?

      Inside me . . . ?”

      And in two more necessary sentences the story is done.

      *

      I seem to remember an editorial blurb at the beginning of Zelazny’s story “This Mortal Mountain” that first appeared in the March 1967 edition of Worlds of If that said, in effect, that, as Dante knew, at the end of everything, there are stars. (John Ciardi’s very serviceable translations of all three parts each ends with the word “stars.”) This is a story about climbing the mount of Purgatory, and ironically, it begins with the protagonist, Jack Summers, looking down on that seven-tiered mountain from a space ship:

      “A forty-mile-high mountain,” I finally said, “is not a mountain. It is a world all by itself which some dumb deity forgot to bring into orbit.”

      The prospect of an ascent up the highest mountain in the explored section of the galaxy inspires Jack Summer to summon his posse from among the stars: Doc and Kelly and Stan and Mallardi and Vincent.

      The discovery is that, at the top, is a woman who has been put into a sort of suspended animation who suffers from something called Dawson’s Plague, by her husband (whose name was Carl, which is incidentally the name of the protagonist of “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”), before he died. Illusions begin to confront them announcing that they should go back, in between other communications.

      As Zelazny remarks, Dante had located the Earthly Paradise—Eden—on the top of Mount Purgatory (on the top level devoted to the Lustful). To go on beyond that point requires a miracle.

      As they get closer and closer to the top, the mountain begins to look more and more like a Nordic version of a Night on Bald Mountain, with a three-headed dragon encircling its highest peak.

      The seven chapters of the novelette correspond to the seven terraces that circle Dante’s Mount of Purgatory, with the seven deadly sins that become more and more forgivable: pride, envy, ire, sloth, greed, gluttony, and finally lust or eros:

      The first chapter of the story establishes Jack Summer (Whitey) as the man who has climbed all the other great mountains in this universe, including Mt. Kasla on Litan, at 89,941 feet. As well, we learn that world, wherever it is, has a thin atmosphere, because the ceiling on a jet is 30-thousand feet, and the mountain is higher than that. And the beginning of the second chapter he sends out his call for his crew to join him: “If you want in on the biggest climb of all, come to Diesel. The Gray Sister eats Kasla for Breakfast.

      The gravity of the planet is a little weaker. (“On Diesel, the pack and I together probably weighed about the same as me alone on Earth—for which I was grateful.”) And as he does his early exploring of the mountain from the north face, now and again he hears the voice in his mind that says, “Go back.” If there is envy, it would seem to be of the solidity of the mountain itself. In three days, we are told (in the way only science fiction can do), he has gotten higher than Everest—and that, indeed, on other islands nearby there are 12 and 15 mile high mountains, but nothing like the Gray Sister (a.k.a. The Lady).

      Chapter III (which we might expect to be devoted to Ire) turns out to be the section that contains what first appears to be a burst of lyric madness; when his friends come and Whitey/Summer meets with them by themselves, he offers the proof that makes the story actually science fiction—a charred back pack he turns out to have brought back with him from his preliminary climb on the mountain while he was waiting for his crew to assemble. “Ire” is replaced by “Intelligence.”

      (It recalls a moment from Disch’s Camp Concentration when the imprisoned poet Louis Sachetti recalls how his priest in his childhood would warn him to be beware of “Intellectual Pride,” which Sacchetti finally decided was just a warning to deride intellect.)

      Chapter IV finds the crew planning, mapping, charting, and studying photos—the only nod to “sloth” is that “Henry was on his way to fat,” and that Doc and Stan, while in good condition, had not climbed in a while.

      In the course of this section, Summer meets with an embodied hallucination from the mountain—a woman—and the section ends with talk of tiredness and exhaustion.

      Greed, Gluttony, and Lust lie ahead; and chapter V begins with two days of steady progress. (“We made slightly under ten thousand feet,” pp 490.) They have made their way to the western side, where they break ninety thousand feet and stop “to congratulate ourselves that we had surpassed the Kalsa climb and to remind ourselves that we had still not hit the halfway mark.” That takes them another two-and-a-half days.

      A new hallucination materializes, then, which they all see: “the creature with the СКАЧАТЬ