Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (347 page)

Miellyn screamed hoarsely. “Run. Run, hurry!”

I didn’t understand, but I ran. I ran, my sides aching, blood streaming from the forgotten flesh-wound in my side. Miellyn raced beside me and Rakhal stumbled along, carrying Rindy.

Then the shock of a great explosion rocked the ground, hurling me down full length, Miellyn falling on top of me. Rakhal went down on his knees. Rindy was crying loudly. When I could see straight again, I looked down at the hillside.

There was nothing left of Evarin’s hideaway or the Mastershrine of Nebran except a great, gaping hole, still oozing smoke and thick black dust. Miellyn said aloud, dazed, “So
that’s
what he was going to do!”

It fitted the peculiar nonhuman logic of the Toymaker. He’d covered the traces.

“Destroyed!” Rakhal raged. “All destroyed! The workrooms, the science of the Toys, the matter transmitter—the minute we find it, it’s destroyed!” He beat his fists furiously. “Our one chance to learn—”

“We were lucky to get out alive,” said Miellyn quietly. “Where on the planet are we, I wonder?”

I looked down the hillside, and stared in amazement. Spread out on the hillside below us lay the Kharsa, topped by the white skyscraper of the HQ.

“I’ll be damned,” I said, “right here. We’re home. Rakhal, you can go down and make your peace with the Terrans, and Juli. And you, Miellyn—” Before the others, I could not say what I was thinking, but I put my hand on her shoulder and kept it there. She smiled, shakily, with a hint of her old mischief. “I can’t go into the Terran Zone looking like this, can I? Give me that comb again. Rakhal, give me your shirtcloak, my robes are torn.”

“You vain, stupid female, worrying about a thing like that at a time like this!” Rakhal’s look was like murder. I put my comb in her hand, then suddenly saw something in the symbols across her breasts. Before this I had seen only the conventionalized and intricate glyph of the Toad God. But now—

I reached out and ripped the cloth away.

“Cargill!” she protested angrily, crimsoning, covering her bare breasts with both hands. “Is this the place? And before a child, too!”

I hardly heard. “Look!” I exclaimed. “Rakhal, look at the symbols embroidered into the glyph of the God! You can read the old nonhuman glyphs. You did it in the city of The Lisse. Miellyn said they were the key to the transmitters! I’ll bet the formula is written out there for anyone to read!

“Anyone, that is, who
can
read it! I can’t, but I’ll bet the formula equations for the transmitters are carved on every Toad God glyph on Wolf. Rakhal, it makes sense. There are two ways of hiding something. Either keep it locked away, or hide it right out in plain sight. Whoever bothers even to look at a conventionalized Toad God? There are so many billions of them.…”

He bent his head over the embroideries, and when he looked up his face was flushed. “I believe—by the chains of Sharra, I believe you have it, Race! It may take years to work out the glyphs, but I’ll do it, or die trying!” His scarred and hideous face looked almost handsome in exultation, and I grinned at him.

“If Juli leaves enough of you, once she finds out how you maneuvered her. Look, Rindy’s fallen asleep on the grass there. Poor kid, we’d better get her down to her mother.”

“Right.” Rakhal thrust the precious embroidery into his shirtcloak, then cradled his sleeping daughter in his arms. I watched him with a curious emotion I could not identify. It seemed to pinpoint some great change, either in Rakhal or myself. It’s not difficult to visualize one’s sister with children, but there was something, some strange incongruity in the sight of Rakhal carrying the little girl, carefully tucking her up in a fold of his cloak to keep the sharp breeze off her face.

Miellyn was limping in her thin sandals, and she shivered. I asked, “Cold?”

“No, but—I don’t believe Evarin is dead, I’m afraid he got away.”

For a minute the thought dimmed the luster of the morning. Then I shrugged. “He’s probably buried in that big hole up there.” But I knew I would never be sure.

We walked abreast, my arm around the weary, stumbling woman, and Rakhal said softly at last, “Like old times.”

It wasn’t old times, I knew. He would know it too, once his exultation sobered. I had outgrown my love for intrigue, and I had the feeling this was Rakhal’s last adventure. It was going to take him, as he said, years to work out the equations for the transmitter. And I had a feeling my own solid, ordinary desk was going to look good to me in the morning.

But I knew now that I’d never run away from Wolf again. It was my own beloved sun that was rising. My sister was waiting for me down below, and I was bringing back her child. My best friend was walking at my side. What more could a man want?

If the memory of dark, poison-berry eyes was to haunt me in nightmares, they did not come into the waking world. I looked at Miellyn, took her slender unmanacled hand in mine, and smiled as we walked through the gates of the city. Now, after all my years on Wolf, I understood the desire to keep their women under lock and key that was its ancient custom. I vowed to myself as we went that I should waste no time finding a fetter shop and having forged therein the perfect steel chains that should bind my love’s wrists to my key forever.

* * * *

Copyright © 1961 by Ace Books, Inc.

My father was an extreme man: extremely intelligent, extremely well read, and with extreme opinions that he voiced in extremely direct and sometimes brutal ways. He was also moody—in turn philosophical, light-hearted and funny, buoyed by childlike enthusiasm, then darkly depressed, bitter, and angry. He was an extreme man, but never a boring one. It is my belief that the extremes of his personality, combined with his visionary intellect were the keys to his extraordinary achievements in the publishing industry and specifically, in the science fiction and fantasy field.

When I was very young, Don was a wonderful father to me. He read to me for an hour every night as I sat in his lap in the large padded rocker in the library of our home in Queens. He read me the complete works of L. Frank Baum, the poems of A.A. Milne, Andrew Lang’s Colored Fairy Books, and many more wondrous old volumes that he allowed me to choose from the gargoyle-covered Victorian glass-front bookcases in our basement. But though I was a child, he didn’t always read me children’s books. Sometimes he read poetry. Vachel Lindsay was one of his favorites because of the cadences and rhythms. He taught me to love the sound of words—even the sound of words I didn’t understand—words that his beautifully deep and sonorous reading voice made sound like music.

Don could be difficult, but he was my dad, and I understood him in a way that was more intuitive than logical. The closeness I felt for him as a child bolstered me in later years, during times when our relationship was stormy.

* * * *

Don took me to my first science fiction convention when I was six. Perhaps it was there that I began to notice how people responded to him. Later, as a preteen, I saw that certain people were completely
simpatico
and easygoing with Don, others seemed intimidated by him, yet others seemed merely awkward in his presence, and still others were plainly in awe and even seemed to idolize him.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, who first worked with Don at Ace Books in 1958, seemed completely oblivious to the character traits that inspired fear in others. She used to come into his office at DAW, pull a chair up to the opposite side of his desk, put her elbows down, and they would talk for hours. I remember her saying to him: “I want to write a circus book.” He responded: “Bad idea! Bad idea!” Many authors would have given up at that point, but not Marion: She banged her fist on Don’s desk and said “But I WANT to!” And as a result, he reneged: “Well, okay then!”

When Marion was writing
The Mists of Avalon
for Lester Del Rey, she would often come to my father’s office directly from Lester’s and throw herself across Don’s desk shaking with sobs. “He keeps telling me to make it deeper—
how many times can I make it deeper?” But both Marion and Don knew that Lester was right. Marion had always been a first draft author, but this magnum opus required more. So Don offered Marion comfort while she wrote her greatest work for one of his competitors.

But no author bonded with my father as closely as C.J. Cherryh. For nearly ten years, she was like a second daughter, and whenever she was in town, she stayed at our home in Queens, and they were inseparable. It was common to see them leaning across the kitchen table, heads together, engrossed in intense discussion. Despite a Masters from Johns Hopkins, a history of world travel, and being a multi-lingual classics teacher, Carolyn seemed almost pathologically shy to me in the early days. There were times I spent with her when she could be silent for hours on end. But with my dad, she became an animated conversationalist, another person completely.

Don had a talent for making people angry, but many of them were too intimidated to confront him directly. Sometimes I became the target instead, which wasn’t exactly appropriate (especially since some of these attacks occurred when I was just a teenager) but was nonetheless indicative of the dysfunctional familial nature of the science fiction field. Certain professionals in the industry attacked me for wrongs perceived by them to have been perpetrated by my dad. Most of these “wrongs” had occurred long before I became a professional myself, and I knew nothing about them. Other times, I could deduce what had occurred, and sometimes I thought Don was right and sometimes I thought he was wrong, but either way I felt honor bound to defend the father I loved and admired.

I was used numerous times by a prominent west coast author with a penchant for grandstanding as a vehicle to attack my parents publicly at science fiction conventions. This man liked to silence crowded rooms by loudly pointing me out and exclaiming over how amazing it was that I had survived and flourished in the home of my parents, despite being raised by “that horrible
alta kocker
, her father.” He would then go on to flamboyantly insult one or both of my parents on personal, professional or ethical grounds. My father, when he heard of one of these incidents, just laughed and said: “It is one of the great mysteries of the science fiction world how [that author] can depict such sensitive characters while being such a boor himself.” My father was not the least bit upset. I’m not entirely sure why this author, who did not seem easily intimidated, attacked my parents through their adolescent daughter so many times. Perhaps he had tried attacking my father directly and not gotten the reaction he was hoping for. Or perhaps he
was
intimidated after all.

When I was attacked on his behalf, it was always when Don wasn’t there to defend himself or his point of view. I was hearing only the complainant’s side of the story, usually delivered quite aggressively. Ironic, since these individuals chose not to confront Don himself. I was once harangued by an artist when my father was in the same room, though out of hearing. “Your father had no right!” he shouted repeatedly. Though I pointed out that perhaps he should take his complaints to my dad, and that he was “standing right over there,” he ignored my suggestion and continued to yell at me.

That so many people went out of their way to avoid a confrontation with my father speaks resoundingly of the power of words to hurt, and also of my father’s unwillingness to compromise or soften his opinion for any reason whatsoever. My dad sold his first short story,
The Man From Ariel
, in 1934, to Wonder Stories, when he was just nineteen. When the ten dollars he was promised for the story never came, my dad got together with several other authors and successfully sued the publisher—Hugo Gernsback—settling for the hefty sum of $75. Despite having made his point and received the money he was owed, he then submitted a story to Gernsback under a pseudonym, and once again, didn’t get paid. (He was expelled from Gernsback’s New York Science Fiction League as “a disruptive influence” but was later reinstated.) It was a pretty ballsy act for a young author to sue the man who first put him into print. But that’s how my dad was.

He had a proclivity for inflammatory language and loved single syllable words like “crap,” “trash,” and “junk.” These words can be very wounding, especially when wielded authoritatively by a man of letters. Such words don’t even criticize; they judge and then discount completely. Highly litigious, prone to feuding, and always up for a fight, my dad was as unlike Mahatma Gandhi as a man could be, yet he believed Gandhi’s statement that, “A ‘No’ uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.”

In a letter to my mother dated January 28, 1942 (the year before they were married) Don describes his moodiness:

I am subject to waves of moods.…There are times, you surely must have noted, when I am happy and full of wit and laughter. And other times when I am sober and depressed. You have seen me coldly impersonally analytical, cynical, aloof. And you have recently seen me in an emotional storm. There are times when I am quite alone in the world and everything else is stomach-wrenching rot. And times when I feel as one with a universal wave of humanity.…

He knew who he was, and the way he describes himself in his late twenties is a valid description of how he was his entire life.

When he died, I read through article after article written about my dad, and I was surprised by how few people mentioned his personality. I believe it was partly because of his personality that he was able to achieve as much as he did. He was completely self motivated. He could be hurt emotionally and professionally by people’s negative opinions, yet these opinions would never sway his actions. He did what he believed was right, and damn the torpedoes. He was an uncompromising idealist who believed in meritocracy. He felt he should get recognition for his achievements, not for his popularity or lack thereof. His personality did not lend itself to acts of social lubrication. He was not a schmoozer, and although indisputably one of the greatest editors in the history of science fiction publishing—some say the greatest—he was never awarded a Best Editor Hugo. He was deeply hurt by that.

There were some people, however, who saw through his brittle exterior to the person he was inside. Robert Silverberg, in his essay on my father in
Reflections and Refractions: Thoughts on Science Fiction, Science and Other Matters,
(Underwood Books, 1997) said:

In person he could be difficult: abrasive and passionately opinionated, a fierce ideological combatant, a vehement holder of grudges. Behind the abrasiveness, though, he was actually a shy and likable man, as his long-time friends can attest; but that wasn’t always readily apparent to outsiders.

He was a visionary, a person who could see things that had not yet come to pass and imagine what they could be in the future, and he was never loathe to take a controversial stance. Because of these qualities he was often at the forefront of emerging trends, in and around publishing.

He founded and edited one of the earliest fanzines, The Phantograph, and in 1935, at the age of twenty-one, engaged in an avid correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft. I still have eight letters and two postcards from Lovecraft to my father. Lovecraft’s tiny, cramped cursive is barely legible. In one letter dated July 6, 1936, the great master tells my father that he has verified the suicide of Robert E. Howard, the author of the Conan novels, and says, “The loss to weird fiction is staggering.” Included in this letter is Lovecraft’s handwritten obituary for publication in The Phantagraph.

With this same strength of vision, Don edited two of the earliest science fiction pulp magazines,
Cosmic
Stories
, and
Stirring Science Stories
with no pay and no budget—stories were willingly contributed by friends. He also organized the first science fiction convention in October, 1936 (today’s Philcon claims descent from this very first convention), formed one of the earliest SF clubs, The Futurians, in 1938, and in 1943, edited the first paperback science fiction anthology,
The
Pocket Book of Science Fiction
. He told me of a young SF writer who would occasionally hang out with the Futurian crowd in Brooklyn and “brag that he was going to invent a new religion based on science and make a million dollars.” That writer, who was L. Ron Hubbard, vastly underestimated his future financial outlook.

One of the pioneer paperback editors at Avon Books from 1947–1951—for two of those years, the
only
paperback editor—Don not only worked on novels, but also on the Avon Fantasy Reader. At Avon he introduced the works of A. Merritt, the science fiction of C. S. Lewis, the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, the novels of Robert E. Howard, and countless others, to a wider readership, and in the Avon Fantasy Reader, published stories by many newcomers, including Ray Bradbury. In 1949, Don edited the very first all-original science fiction anthology, The Girl With the Hungry Eyes.

In 1952, when he left Avon to become the startup editor of a new paperback list for the Ace Magazine Company, he really hit his stride. He brought the double novel—two short novels, bound back to back in the same volume with two front covers—into the sphere of paperback books. In this modest Ace Double format Don was able to introduce many great new writers by pairing them with more established names. These new writers included Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and Brian W. Aldiss. Although Don’s great love was science fiction, at Ace Books he edited multiple genres, and introduced great works beyond the SF world. It was in the pages of an Ace Double that William S. Burroughs (under the pseudonym “William Lee”) first published
Junkie
, bound with an anti-drug pamphlet. I’ve heard that Burroughs’ original title was “Junk,” but my father argued that it would be mistaken for a book about trash and suggested its final title.

While at Ace, Don published Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Roger Zelazny, Poul Anderson, R. A. Lafferty, Gordon R. Dickson, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, A.E. van Vogt, and many others. He also reprinted many great works in paperback, including Asimov’s Foundation series, Frank Herbert’s Dune (which he was afraid would be mistaken for a Western because of its title), the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and others too numerous to list. He pursued his love of short fiction by initiating the very first best-of-the-year anthologies: World’s Best Science Fiction, in 1965, with co-editor Terry Carr. Perhaps his greatest achievement at Ace, however, was also considered by many to be his most notorious: the unauthorized paperback reprinting of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. This brazen act, which was undoubtedly the “big bang” that gave birth to the entire modern fantasy genre, spawned years of dark clouds over the dinner table, due to vilification of my father by the newly risen hordes of Tolkien worshippers who the Oxford don himself referred to as “despicable cultists.”