Pohlstars

Frederik Pohl

1984

————

Del Rey; 1st edition

If you find an unexpectedly Oriental flavor to this collection (and to one particular story in it), it is because a couple of months ago, for the first time in my life, I was in China. What brought me there was simple curiosity, and I sated it. I did all the things tourists are supposed to do. I climbed the Great Wall and gaped at the terracotta warriors of Hsian; I cruised on the Whangpoo River and even walked the old Silk Trail at the tag end of the Gobi Desert. But that wasn't all I was curious about, so in between the bouts of tourism, I spent a lot of time with writers. Chinese writers. Chinese
science-fiction
writers in particular.., and I tell you true, if I had read that sentence a few years ago I would have assumed it must be the beginning of a science- fiction story, and not a very plausible one, at that. But it isn't fiction. It's real. Science fiction is being read, written, and published in the People's Republic of China.

The more I talked with the people involved in science fiction there, the more I felt that curious nibble at the fringes of the memory that is called Deja vu. I had been there before! For what the Chinese science-fiction scene reminded me of more than anything else was the way it had been in the United States when, five decades ago, I was beginning to try to be a writer of science fiction. The Chinese science-fiction people I met seemed young, energetic, idealistic, not very sophisticated- very like the young, unsophisticated Isaac Asimov, Donald Wollheim, Cyril Kornbluth, and other teenage members of the 1930s fan group, the Futurians, which launched so many of us into careers as writers and editors. The social standing of science fiction in China is very low. The literary mandarins don't think it's literature at all-any more than America's literary mandarins did in the 1930s. (It didn't become respectable in the United States until some of those bright, unsophisticated kid fans grew up to become college professors and deans.) The economic situation of science fiction in China today maps almost exactly with that of the United States in the 1930s. An average price for a science-fiction story is about a third of a cent a word (in 1939 I was lucky enough to average almost half a cent); a Chinese editor I met confided that his salary was about eleven dollars a week (my first editorial job paid ten). And almost all the science fiction being written by Chinese authors is in the form of short stories; the few novels published are importations from abroad. That, too, was true of America then. Almost the only science-fiction
books
that one could find were written by people on the other side of the ocean, such as S. Fowler Wright, Aldous Huxley, and W. Olaf Stapledon. The book publishers in America disdained science fiction-at least when it was by American writers. It was not until around 1950-and then, again, only because some fans grew up to start or join publishing companies-that American science-fiction writers could have their novels published in hard covers.

To find out that science fiction existed outside the United States was not a surprise to me-after all, I spent a couple of years as president of the international association of science-fiction professionals, World SF, with members in several dozen countries from Singapore to the U.S.S.R. and most nations in between. But it was surely a delight!

Of course, it would take a braver man than I to predict how widespread science fiction will become in China. China is an intensely politicized country. Nearly every aspect of its life has to conform with the decisions of the high Party apparatus-whatever those decisions may be at any particular moment-and so it is impossible to guess what its future will be. China is also a country that for just about a solid century has been wracked by a series of violent convulsions, almost nonstop, revolutions, wars, and internal turmoil. From the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty-through the war with Japan; the battle against Chiang Kai-shek, the "Great Leap Forward, the "Cultural Revolution, the "Rule of the Gang of Four and their overthrow-there has hardly been a period of more than a year without devastating upheaval. The achievements of the current regime are immense in fundamental ways: They manage to feed and educate their billion people, an accomplishment no previous rulers even tried. But they are also, by Western standards, complex, unpredictable, and frequently weird. Walking the streets of Beijing or Shanghai today, it is difficult to believe that this largest nation the world has ever seen was, just a few years ago, tearing itself to shreds in the violence of the Cultural Revolution, with factions shelling each other's campuses and factories at will-and even more difficult to understand how they managed to pull themselves together afterward. So I don't know how things are going to work out for the billion Chinese people, much less for that tiny fraction of them who read and write science fiction ... but I wish them well!

This is almost my first short-story collection in a decade. It isn't that I've given up writing; it's that I've been writing novels rather than short stories most of the time.

I must confess that I find this a little nettling. I don't like to think of myself as a statistic manipulated by large economic forces.., but that's the way it looks, even to me. The field that used to be dominated by the magazines, and thus by short stories, is now overwhelmingly represented by novels and films. I suppose the average readership of the science-fiction magazines of my youth was somewhere around forty thousand copies. Now 40
million
people flock to see a new
Star Wars
movie in the first weekend of its release. As to books, the
New York Times
best-seller list has been heavily populated with science fiction for this whole year: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Joan Vinge, Anne McCaffrey, and a dozen others have reached the heights of bookstore sales previously scaled only rarely by a Frank Herbert or a Robert A. Heinlein. When Cyril Kornbluth and I wrote
The Space Merchants
thirty years ago, we were in science-fiction's transitional period from magazines to books; we expected to earn a couple of thousand dollars from having it run as a serial in
Galaxy
magazine, and it did-but it has earned more than that every year since as a book.

So there is an economic incentive to write longer pieces. But it isn't all economic. It's where the audiences are.., and no writer likes to be talking to himself.

I hope you'll enjoy the stories.., and that it won't be so long before I have another collection of new short stories to offer!

—Frederik Pohl

New York City
November, 1983

At the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in 1982 I was part of a panel discussing the work of the late Cordwainer Smith (pseudonym of the Johns Hopkins political science professor, Paul M. A. Liriebarger). Paul Linebarger was an author whom I published extensively as long as he lived while I was editing
Galaxy
in the 1960s, and one whose work I greatly admire still. He was not merely a contributor but a friend, for which reason he tolerated my practice of changing almost every title of the Cordwainer Smith stories I published. (Other writers were less forgiving.) While talking about this on the panel, it occurred to me that it was a long time since I had made up a Cordwainer Smith story title. So I amused myself (in the boring periods while other people were talking) by inventing titles for stories Paul had never written, but should have. The one I liked best was this one. . . and so, that afternoon, as part of my self-imposed regime of defacing four pages of clean paper with writing every day of my life, I began to write a story to go with the title. I do not think it is a "Cordwainer Smith story' by any means. But I did borrow one of his favorite devices in the writing of it- perhaps some readers will detect which one.

In Twenty and Three, born at sea,
Her daddy endowed her a legacy.
In Twenty and Ten her brother Ben,
Stole the inheritance back again.
She loves but she loses, she weeps as she smiles,
The sweet, sad queen of the grazing isles.

BECAUSE I DID THE OLD COMMODORE A FAVOR, he promised I would always have a job with the Fleet. I always did. I always do still, because even now I have the job. The title and the pay and the working conditions have changed a dozen times, and these times not the best of them. But even Jimmy Rex knows I have that right to a job, and grants it. Meanly.

The favor I did for Commodore Mackenzie was done long before he was a Commodore, and I could have gone to jail for it. Jason, he said, give me a month. I need an extension on my loans, thirty days at most, and if you give it me, you'll never have to worry again as long as you live. I will worry, though, I said-a boy still in his twenties, just a keypuncher in the records section of a bank-I'll worry about the law, at least until the statute of limitations runs out, because buggering the records is a penal offense. Only if they catch you, he said, laughing, and that they can't do. For you'll be at sea, where the land law cannot reach. It was his first oaty-boat that was building at the time, you see, and he had used up all his wife's money and all he could cajole out of his first two financial backers, and the third one, the big one, was trying to make up his mind to plunge.

He was a powerful man even then, James Mackenzie. No older than forty. no gigger than most but the blue eyes flashed and the smile was sure, and he knew how to talk a person toward any place he chose. But what decided me was not Mackenzie. It was his young wife, the lady Ella. She loved him. So I worked overtime one night, and displayed his file, and changed a few dates, sweating with fear. He had his thirty days. And the backer did, at the last minute, come through with the money to finish the boat, and so James William Mackenzie became the Commodore.

He was a son of a bitch, Commodore Mackenzie, but he had style. Fifty shares of stock I got and a title: Executive Assistant to the Fleet Captain. Very grand. Even if the fleet was still only a single vessel. But even one oaty-boat is a huge and costly machine, two hundred thousand metric tons of hull and works, towing twenty kilometers of tubes and pumps, with a deck the size of a township. The Commodore did something you won't believe with that deck, or at least with the part forward of the bridge. He planted it. He pumped aboard half a million cubic meters of San Francisco Bay bottom muck while the boat was still at the builder's dock. The water ran off through the scuppers, and the soil remained. He sailed it up toward Tacoma for the deep-water fitting and steamed slowly around the wettest, stormiest part of the Pacific Coast until the rain had rinsed it clean. Seeds and slips and bulbs and saplings came aboard, and by the time we were on our first cruise there was grass there, and gardens, and the beginnings of a grove. For his dear lady Ella hated the sea. So Owner's Quarters were an apartment below deck and a terrace above, and if you looked only forward you could think you were in some fine manor house with the weather always balmy and the lawn as steady as any on Earth. The weather was always fine because oaty-boats are never in bad weather. That is why they are boats, instead of drilling platforms or moored barges, so that they can seek out the places where sea and air are best to do their work.

And for four years they were happy, and I was happy, and the great boat steamed slowly through the fruitful patches of the southern ocean, sucking up the cold and pitting it against the warm, and, oh, how the money rolled in! And we were happiest of all in the fourth year, when Ella was pregnant. She was a tiny, frail woman, all spirit and no stamina, and there were times when in even the calmest seas she seemed unwell. Yet as a pregnant woman she bloomed, prettier than ever and glowing with the child inside. The baby was born, even prettier than her mother. It was in the month of May, and so they called her May, and then the happiness stopped because Ella died. It was not childbirth alone-she had the best of doctors, flown in from Sydney and San Francisco. It was cancer. She had known she had it, and kept it secret, and wouldn't let them cut it away because it would have cut away the unborn child as well. Childbirth merely finished her off.

It was her wish to be buried on land. The Commodore walked dry-eyed through the crew quarters and crooked a finger at an oiler's mate named Elsie Van Dorn. A large, plain woman, but a kind one. And when he came back from the funeral, he took all the Fleet stock that was in Ella's name and put it into baby May's, and gave me a new job. "Van Dorn will be May's nursemaid, he said, "but you'll be her godfather. That was a joke, I think, because we had been told that money was his god. "You're Managing Director of the May Mackenzie Trust, and if you do anything wrong with it I'll kill you. Even if I die for it. Even if I die first, for I'll leave a little sum of money and some orders, and someone will be watching who has a gun. He still owed me for the favor I had done him, you see, but he remembered what it was.