Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, page 456
“Oh, come on! I know what you’re implying, and I’ve never believed in any of that Heaven and Hell nonsense!”
The room was growing darker. The blue gleam along the edge of the reaper’s scythe was becoming more obvious.
Astonishing, said Death. Really astonishing. Let me put forward another suggestion: That you are nothing more than a lucky species of ape that is trying to understand the complexities of creation via a language that evolved in order to tell one another where the ripe fruit was?
Fighting for breath, the philosopher managed to say: “Don’t be silly.”
The remark was not intended as derogatory, said Death. Under the circumstances, you have achieved a great deal.
“We’ve certainly escaped from outmoded superstitions!”
Well done, said Death. That’s the spirit. I just wanted to check.
He leaned forward.
And are you aware of the theory that the state of some tiny particles is indeterminate until the moment they are observed? A cat in a box is often mentioned.
“Oh, yes,” said the philosopher.
Good, said Death. He got to his feet as the last of the light died, and smiled.
I see you…
* * * *
Copyright © 2002 by Terry Pratchett.
CRAIG RAINE
(1944– )
Because he’s such an established literary figure now, as a poet, academic, editor, critic, and media personality, it’s easy to forget how much of a splash Craig Raine made early in his career, with collections like The Onion, Memory (1978) and A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979). Fellow poet James Fenton joked about “The Martian School” of poetry, because of the influence Raine’s deeply visual images that rendered familiar objects strange had on other writers. Retired from a post at Oxford, Raine now devotes much of his time to Areté, a literary magazine he founded in 1999.
A MARTIAN SENDS A POSTCARD HOME, by Craig Raine
First published in A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, 1979
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings—
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.
Model T is a room with the lock inside—
a key is turned to free the world
for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.
But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises
alone. No one is exempt
and everyone’s pain has a different smell.
At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves—
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
* * * *
Copyright © 1979 by Craig Raine.
MIKE RESNICK
(1942– )
Considering SF is his second (or possibly third) career, it’s fairly astonishing what Mike Resnick has accomplished. Actually, it would be pretty astonishing if it was his only career. Despite a late start he’s written more than 60 novels and 250 stories, and edited another 40 or so anthologies. Even more impressive, he’s been nominated a record 35 times for Hugo Awards (and won five of them, plus a Nebula and many other awards). Mike is also incredibly helpful; he came up through fandom and is very conscious of the history of the field. When I sold this book to Wildside Press, Mike was one of the first peopl I approached to talk about how to structure contributor contracts. He immediately lent his support to the project, and was the first person I actually bought a story from (and a beautifully haunting story, at that).
Although Mike sold his first story in 1959, while he was at the University of Chicago, he wasn’t actually a genre fan until several years later. His first SF story was the Burroughs pastiche, “The Forgotten Sea of Mars” (1965). He sold three more SF novels in the 1960s, to no great acclaim, and then left the genre for the more lucrative field of writng soft-core pornography (he sold an impressive 2,500 stories, articles, and books from 1964–1976) along with editing various tabloids and men’s magazines. At the same time, Mike and Carol Resnick and his wife were avid collie breeders and exhibitors, among the nation’s best. In 1976, they bought the Briarwood Pet Motel in Cincinnati, the country’s “second largest boarding and grooming establishment.” Working the motel full time for a few years made them financially stable enough for Resnick to return to SF and begin writing full time in 1980.
Mike and Carol travel widely, especially in Africa; African themes often infuse his work, either literally or allegorically. He has incredible range as a writer; his stories range from the sprawling space opera of Santiago (1986, the first book I read by Mike and still a favorite) to the sentimentality of “Travels with My Cats” (a Hugo winner in 2005) to the transplanted African vistas of the Kirinyaga stories. He’s also active in helping protect writers from exploitation, and has written quite a bit of nonfiction geared to writers, most recently in the Hugo-nominated The Business of Science Fiction: Two Insiders Discuss Writing and Publishing (2011)
Mike and Carol have been married for nearly fifty years. Their daughter, Laura, is also an award-winning SF writer.
FOR I HAVE TOUCHED THE SKY, by Mike Resnick
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1989
There was a time when men had wings.
Ngai, who sits alone on His throne atop Kirinyaga, which is now called Mount Kenya, gave men the gift of flight, so that they might reach the succulent fruits on the highest branches of the trees. But one man, a son of Gikuyu, who was himself the first man, saw the eagle and the vulture riding high upon the winds, and spreading his wings, he joined them. He circled higher and higher, and soon he soared far above all other flying things.
Then, suddenly, the hand of Ngai reached out and grabbed the son of Gikuyu.
“What have I done that you should grab me thus?” asked the son of Gikuyu.
“I live atop Kirinyaga because it is the top of the world,” answered Ngai, “and no one’s head may be higher than my own.”
And so saying, Ngai plucked the wings from the son of Gikuyu, and then took the wings away from all men, so that no man could ever again rise higher than His head.
And that is why all of Gikuyu’s descendants look at the birds with a sense of loss and envy, and why they no longer eat the succulent fruits from the highest branches of the trees.
* * * *
We have many birds on the world of Kirinyaga, which was named for the holy mountain where Ngai dwells. We brought them along with our other animals when we received our charter from the Eutopian Council and departed from a Kenya that no longer had any meaning for true members of the Kikuyu tribe. Our new world is home to the maribou and the vulture, the ostrich and the fish eagle, the weaver and the heron, and many other species. Even I, Koriba, who am the mundumugu—the witch doctor—delight in their many colors, and find solace in their music. I have spent many afternoons seated in front of my boma, my back propped up against an ancient acacia tree, watching the profusion of colors and listening to the melodic songs as the birds come to slake their thirst in the river that winds through our village.
It was on one such afternoon that Kamari, a young girl who was not yet of circumcision age, walked up the long, winding path that separates my boma from the village, holding something small and gray in her hands.
“Jambo, Koriba,” she greeted me.
“Jambo, Kamari,” I answered her. “What have you brought to me, child?”
“This,” she said, holding out a young pygmy falcon that struggled weakly to escape her grasp. “I found him in my family’s shamba. He cannot fly.”
“He looks fully-fledged,” I noted, getting to my feet. Then I saw that one of his wings was held at an awkward angle. “Ah!” I said. “He has broken his wing.”
“Can you make him well, mundumugu?” asked Kamari.
I examined the wing briefly, while she held the young falcon’s head away from me. Then I stepped back.
“I can make him well, Kamari,” I said. “But I cannot make him fly. The wing will heal, but it will never be strong enough to bear his weight again. I think we will destroy him.”
“No!” she exclaimed, pulling the falcon back. “You will make him live, and I will care for him!”
I stared at the bird for a moment, then shook my head. “He will not wish to live,” I said at last.
“Why not?”
“Because he has ridden high upon the warm winds.”
“I do not understand,” said Kamiri, frowning.
“Once a bird has touched the sky,” I explained, “he can never be content to spend his days on the ground.”
“I will make him content,” she said with determination. “You will heal him and I will care for him, and he will live.”
“I will heal him and you will care for him,” I said. “But,” I added, “he will not live.”
“What is your fee, Koriba?” she asked, suddenly businesslike.
“I do not charge children,” I answered. “I will visit your father tomorrow, and he will pay me.”
She shook her head adamantly. “This is my bird. I will pay the fee.”
“Very well,” I said, admiring her spirit, for most children—and all adults—are terrified of their mundumugu, and would never openly contradict or disagree with him. “For one month you will clean my boma every morning and every afternoon. You will lay out my sleeping blankets, and keep my water gourd filled, and you will see that I have kindling for my fire.”
“That is fair,” she said after a moment’s consideration. Then she added: “What if the bird dies before the month is over?”
“Then you will learn that a mundumugu knows more than a little Kikuyu girl,” I said.
She set her jaw. “He will not die.” She paused. “Will you fix his wing now?”
“Yes.”
“I will help.”
I shook my head. “You will build a cage in which to confine him, for if he tries to move his wing too soon, he will break it again and then I will surely have to destroy him.”
She handed the bird to me. “I will be back soon,” she promised, racing off toward her shamba.
I took the falcon into my hut. He was too weak to struggle very much, and he allowed me to tie his beak shut. Then I began the slow task of splinting his broken wing and binding it against his body to keep it motionless. He shrieked in pain as I manipulated the bones together, but otherwise he simply stared unblinking at me, and within ten minutes the job was finished.
Kamari returned an hour later, holding a small wooden cage in her hands.
“Is this large enough, Koriba?” she asked.
I held it up and examined it.
“It is almost too large,” I replied. “He must not be able to move his wing until it has healed.”
“He won’t,” she promised. “I will watch him all day long, every day.”
“You will watch him all day long, every day?” I repeated, amused.
“Yes.”
“Then who will clean my hut and my boma, and who will fill my gourd with water?”
“I will carry his cage with me when I come,” she replied.
“The cage will be much heavier when the bird is in it,” I pointed out.
“When I am a woman, I will carry far heavier loads on my back, for I shall have to till the fields and gather the firewood for my husband’s boma,” she said. “This will be good practice.” She paused. “Why do you smile at me, Koriba?”
“I am not used to being lectured to by uncircumcised children,” I replied with a smile.
“I was not lecturing,” she answered with dignity. “I was explaining.”
I held a hand up to shade my eyes from the afternoon sun.
“Are you not afraid of me, little Kamari?” I asked.
“Why should I be?”
“Because I am the mundumugu.”
“That just means you are smarter than the others,” she said with a shrug. She threw a stone at a chicken that was approaching her cage, and it raced away, squawking its annoyance. “Someday I shall be as smart as you are.”
“Oh?”
She nodded confidently. “Already I can count higher than my father, and I can remember many things.”
“What kind of things?” I asked, turning slightly as a hot breeze blew a swirl of dust about us.
“Do you remember the story of the honey bird that you told to the children of the village before the long rains?”
I nodded.
“I can repeat it,” she said.
“You mean you can remember it.”
She shook her head vigorously. “I can repeat every word that you said.”
I sat down and crossed my legs. “Let me hear,” I said, staring off into the distance and idly watching a pair of young men tending their cattle.
She hunched her shoulders, so that she would appear as bent with age as I myself am, and then, in a voice that sounded like a youthful replica of my own, she began to speak, mimicking my gestures.
“There is a little brown honey bird,” she began. “He is very much like a sparrow, and as friendly. He will come to your boma and call to you, and as you approach him he will fly up and lead you to a hive, and then wait while you gather grass and set fire to it and smoke out the bees. But you must always”—she emphasized the word, just as I had done—”leave some honey for him, for if you take it all, the next time he will lead you into the jaws of fisi, the hyena, or perhaps into the desert where there is no water and you will die of thirst.” Her story finished, she stood upright and smiled at me. “You see?” she said proudly.
“I see,” I said, brushing away a large fly that had lit on my cheek.
“Did I do it right?” she asked.
“You did it right.”
She stared at me thoughtfully. “Perhaps when you die, I will become the mundumugu.”
“Do I seem that close to death?” I asked.
“Well,” she answered, “you are very old and bent and wrinkled, and you sleep too much. But I will be just as happy if you do not die right away.”
“I shall try to make you just as happy,” I said ironically. “Now take your falcon home.”
I was about to instruct her concerning his needs, but she spoke first.
“He will not want to eat today. But starting tomorrow, I will give him large insects, and at least one lizard every day. And he must always have water.”
“You are very observant, Kamari.”
She smiled at me again, and then ran off toward her boma.
* * * *
She was back at dawn the next morning, carrying the cage with her. She placed it in the shade, then filled a small container with water from one of my gourds and set it inside the cage.
“How is your bird this morning?” I asked, sitting close to my fire, for even though the planetary engineers of the Eutopian Council had given Kirinyaga a climate identical to Kenya’s, the sun had not yet warmed the morning air.
Kamari frowned. “He has not eaten yet.”
“He will, when he gets hungry enough,” I said, pulling my blanket more tightly around my shoulders. “He is used to swooping down on his prey from the sky.”
“He drinks his water, though,” she noted.
“That is a good sign.”
“Can you not cast a spell that will heal him all at once?”
“The price would be too high,” I said, for I had foreseen her question. “This way is better.”
“How high?”
“Too high,” I repeated, closing the subject. “Now, do you not have work to do?”
“Yes, Koriba.”
She spent the next few minutes gathering kindling for my fire and filling my gourd from the river. Then she went into my hut to clean it and straighten my sleeping blankets. She emerged a moment later with a book in her hand.
“What is this, Koriba?” she asked.
“Who told you that you could touch your mundumugu’s possessions?” I asked sternly.
“How can I clean them without touching them?” she replied with no show of fear. “What is it?”
