Symbiography (2 page)

Both of the other two short pieces in this collection began as magazine assignments. In the early 1970s,
Playboy
had a plan to replace its “Little Annie Fanny” cartoon parody at the back of the magazine with a more robust science fiction feature. Their idea was to pair a different artist and writer in each issue. The editors contacted me and asked if I’d like to work with French cartoonist Philippe Druillet. As I had been a fan of Druillet’s graphic novel,
Les 6 Voyages des Lone Sloane,
I immediately said yes. The assignment demanded finding a narrative form to dovetail with Druillet’s abstract geometric style and so I deliberately constructed “Homecoming” without either plot or characters. The little story was well received at
Playboy.
Only one problem remained: of the dozen or so writers who had agreed to contribute to the series, I was the only one who actually delivered a finished piece and so the entire notion was abandoned.

“Homecoming” seemed doomed by its abstract nature to that peculiar limbo inhabited by unpublished manuscripts and unproduced screenplays. I thought no one would ever want a story so specifically designed to accompany illustrations that didn’t exist. It turned out I was wrong. When the
Cornell Review,
a high-end literary magazine affiliated with the university, started up in the spring of 1977, I was asked to contribute a story to their first issue. After “Conquistador” had been noted for distinction in
The Best American Short Stories of 1978,
editor Baxter Hathaway requested something new. I sent him “Homecoming.” It appeared in issue number five, and in his introduction Hathaway wrote, “Can the reader tell whether William Hjortsberg has tongue in cheek or not … ?” Sometimes I wonder myself.

“The Clone Who Ran for Congress” owes its life to Patricia Ryan who, in October 1975, was the text department editor at
Sports Illustrated.
Pat rode herd over all the freelancers contributing material to the magazine. I had worked on several oddball sporting articles for her in the past (avalanche control, raft trips, fly-fishing, rodeo schools), and when she wrote to ask if I’d be interested in writing a science fiction piece about the Olympics (“Maybe cloning?”), I jumped at the chance, not often being offered an opportunity to write fiction on assignment.

Other than the Olympics connection (the summer games were coming around again the next year in Montreal),
Sports Illustrated
gave me free rein. I liked Pat’s suggestion about clones as it provided a convenient starting point. A first-person narrative seemed to fit the bill and once I came up with the concept of a disgruntled corporate sports “image modifier” I was off and running. The story took much less time to write than a more conventional piece. Pat liked what she saw and ran it in the magazine almost without alteration, although somewhere along the line the title changed to “Goodby, Goodby, Goodby, Mr. Chips.” (Knowing I had also written a comic bullfight novel called
Toro! Toro! Toro!,
this prompted a friend to suggest a mock title for the detective novel I then had in progress: “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Deadly.”) Curiously,
Sports Illustrated
never used the titles supplied by the actual writers of the articles. It had something to do with layout and the art department but I never understood exactly what. In any case, whatever the title, I truly believe “The Clone Who Ran for Congress” was the only work of science fiction ever published in the magazine.

Life is nothing if not a series of accidents. A blind date in college becomes your first wife. Another chance encounter in a doctor’s office waiting room leads to divorce and remarriage. An old pal loans a copy of one of your novels as bedtime reading to a visiting friend who just happens to be Ridley Scott’s agent and two years later you’re in London working on the tenth draft of an original motion picture. Or, more to the point, while researching a biography of the late poet and novelist Richard Brautigan, I phoned Jack Shoemaker who, in the 1960s, co-owned the Unicorn Book Shop near Santa Barbara where his friend Richard read the entire
Trout Fishing in America
shortly before its first publication. In the course of our interview, Jack happened to ask, “Whatever happened to your book,
Symbiography
?” and the eventual result of that query became this collection.

Having a book go out of print is akin to watching a cherished friend die. Seeing it republished is like participating in a resurrection. Unlike Henry James, who rewrote all his novels when they were reissued, I have for the most part left the work in its original form. Other than proofreading for spelling and grammatical errors that slipped through the first time around, I have largely resisted the temptation to edit myself. I did feel troubled by the repeated use of the word “tape” in both
Gray Matters
and
Symbiography.
Magnetic recording tape is almost obsolete today and surely wouldn’t be in use five hundred years into the future, so I amended the term to avoid any anachronisms. Also, we all now know how long a round-trip to Jupiter takes and it isn’t three hundred years, so I substituted Aldebaran as a destination. Ditto the date of the 1999 Thirty-minute War, since that moment in time has come and gone without an outbreak of worldwide hostilities. In addition, I included epigraphs for both books, which were omitted way back when. In the case of
Gray Matters,
I felt it was too pretentious. For
Symbiography,
I thought I was just being silly. I no longer feel the same in either instance and the epigraphs have been duly restored. The future remains an unwritten book, its cryptic pages blank, and no crystal ball wizard, palm reader or Tarot deck manipulator can accurately provide a sneak preview of what’s coming in the next chapter. It is precisely this unknown anything-can-happen aspect of the time yet to come that makes the possibilities presented by science fiction such fertile ground for the literary imagination. Writers are forever looking for new ways to retell old stories. The freedom provided by speculation about the future allows the artist a means of viewing the present through a fresh pair of eyes. Among the several unfinished projects stacked on a shelf awaiting my further attentions is a novel dealing with time travel (hopefully in a manner fresh enough to make that well-worn path worth yet another visit). Whether I’ll ever get around to telling this particular tale becomes a science fiction story all its own.

There’s no business like show business  …

IRVING BERLIN

P
AR
S
ONDAK’S HOUSE
was set on automatic. Beyond the garden, concealed sensory-indicators probed the waiting night. All rooms but one were disconnected until morning, windows and doors sealed, air-conditioners silent; deep in the sub-basement, the accumulator and power-distributor idled. Only Sondak’s soundproof studio remained active. There, in the padded, ovoid chamber, Par Sondak slept; his swollen, pink body curled, knees drawn almost to his chest, his thumb in his mouth.

Adjoining the egg-shaped studio hummed a unit housing the encephalograph probes, high-density recorders, mode storage banks, duplication and mix-machinery; the tools of the trade. While the Dreamer slept, folded like an embryo, a circuited crown of receptors and transmitters banded his smooth, unwrinkled brow. This equipment captured and preserved the subtle essence of his art.

The dream was standard Sondak escape adventure: swordplay, a cut rose, distant hoofbeats on a moonlit road, the awesome stillness of the scaffold. Attention to detail made all of Sondak’s dreams memorable; his feeling for place and period was unlike any other Dreamer’s. Sondak’s career was in its eighty-fifth year and over three-hundred of his dreams remained in public circulation.

Far at the bottom of the hill, among the disorder and rot hidden from the Dreamer’s machine-tooled house by the opulence of his gardens, a starved mongrel prowled, sniffing the debris left by encamping Nomads. There wasn’t much, for the Nomads were themselves avid scavengers, and the dog found nothing of interest among the charred garbage and broken glass; even discarded bones had been gnawed to splinters by the eager rats.

The dog continued up the hill, favoring an injured forepaw, ignorant of the warning implied by the orderly cultivation and the watching infra-red eyes ahead. A hidden sensor relayed the intruder’s presence back to the house; the computer plotted the exact location; twin antennae revolved on the turreted roof, focusing a disc-mounted sound-intensifier. The dog lifted his head to catch a final scent as the high-frequency beam found its target. In an instant, the animal’s blood temperature rose to the boiling-point and, before he could fall, he erupted from within, consumed by a burst of incandescent flame which left his canine imprint briefly hanging in the evening air, a chalky drift of ashes and smoke like shreds of fog dissolving.

In the morning it was raining. The kitchen switched on at six. Within the hour, the rest of the house came alive and by the time Par Sondak was eased awake electronically, the place was purring like a spaceship.

Smoothly, the sides of the studio slid open and Sondak stepped down, padding across the thermal-turf mat which covered his bedroom floor like a carpet of insulated moss. The mirrored walls reflected the lurching sag of his fatman’s amble; sounds of breaking waves issued from a dozen surrounding speakers. Although his house was located a thousand miles from any sea, Sondak found the rushing murmur of surf soothing in the early morning.

The bath was contoured to the folds of his massive body and while churning, scented water swirled and sensitive vibrators kneaded his mottled flesh, the extended nozzle of an air-compression inoculator blasted painlessly through the tallow of his suet-soft buttock, giving him the minimum-daily-requirement; the complete prescription of vitamins, enzymes, hormones and energizers which kept him plodding through another day.

Par Sondak was one-hundred-and-five years old and in the best of health. Indeed, he had never been sick a day of his life. His outward appearance was that of a chubby, middle-aged infant, due mainly to his total baldness, a condition resulting from nearly a century of wearing the probes to bed each night. “Bald as a Dreamer,” was the standard cliché. Par Sondak punched the code-numbers for breakfast and waited.

“Good morning, sir,” his computer said. “Did you sleep well?”

“I hope so.” Sondak yawned. “What’s the weather been like?”

“There was thunderstorm-level precipitation for two hours earlier this morning, and another light shower is scheduled for sixteen.”

“How long?”

“The gardeners have requested forty-five minutes.”

“No, I want rain all afternoon, clearing at sunset.”

“Very good.” The computer paused. “Sunset will be at 19:49.”

“It doesn’t matter, I’ll be around. Anything special for today?”

“You have a conference with the City at ten. Otherwise, the agenda is open.”

A tray appeared on the conveyor from the kitchen and Sondak carried his breakfast onto the patio, where he sat in the shade of a flowering dogwood. The eggs on his plate were real; Sondak despised synthetics and maintained a poultry yard in his garden. From below came the sounds of the mechanical cultivators at work, weeding and fertilizing. A row of fruit trees screened their synchronized labor. Beyond the gardens stretched the open desert, barren and scorched; hills like slag-heaps, shining, metallic, sparsely fringed with a feeble growth of scrub. The Dreamer gazed out over his breakfast at this wasteland, to a point in the distant, hard-blue sky, where three fly-speck vultures turned in a drifting spiral.

Beneath the circling carrion-eaters, on a bleak basalt outcrop jutting over a dry riverbed, a Nomad burial platform rested in the gnarled and naked limbs of a long-dead jack pine. Most of the clan departed before sunup, but several Nomads, blood-kin to the child lashed in the branches above them, stood silently waiting for the vultures to feed.

The ritual was complete; offerings had been made and the proper spells cast. But the behavior of the birds was important and the old ones watched for sign, measuring their vatic powers against those of the augur, an ancient crone who hunched and mumbled, fingering an amulet from long ago. The vultures settled in the branches around the body, making a show of folding their wings and shifting from foot to foot while they sized up the gathering below. No one moved. Only the wind, rustling the tinder-dry thornbushes, disturbed the quiet. The largest of the lizard-necked birds hopped forward onto the platform, rasping with a satisfied croak, and thrust his beak into an eye-socket. A good omen: a mutter of approval ran through the grouped Nomads.

One member of the clan wasn’t watching: a young man with only a faint mustache and the first downy patches of beard on his cheeks. He stood apart from the others, gripping the long wire-bound barrel of his smooth-bore muzzle-loader, and stared back across the desolate blast-furnace expanse of cinder-pile nothingness to the glowing green oasis, a brief flowering of life in a dead land. It was the first time the young man had ever seen the fabled, forbidden dwelling-place of a Lord Citizen, the Select and All-Powerful Ones.

Of all the rooms in his efficient house, the projection-booth was one Sondak almost never used. He disliked the cramped, windowless chamber; the dull uniformity of its metallic walls, ceiling and floor. Seated in the padded control seat in the center of this tiny room, Sondak felt uncomfortably claustrophobic and he avoided coming here except when called in by conferences.

Sondak wasn’t alone for long. A door appeared to open in the blank, gray wall and the hologram image of a Dream Syndicate hostess stepped into the room. The girl was young and not unattractively dressed in a plum-colored tunic, her nipples tinted pale green to match her lips and hair.

“Prompt as always,” Sondak said.

“That’s how things happen in the City.” The girl smiled. “Promptly. What setting would you like for the conference, sir?”

“Makes no difference to me. Anything but this iron maiden.”

The girl turned for a moment and nodded to the wall behind her. “Well, if it’s all right with you, sir,” she said, “Mr. Tarquille is already adjusted to setting number ZT-90065-N7.”