[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.He opened his beer.He looked out the window again.Lines of turtles were moving toward the city.Rumborough looked at the turd he held in his hand, put it down, and picked up the picturephone, while adjusting the small screen.He dialed the operator, but got no sound.“Operator,” he said into the dead phone, “I’ve got to get through to Edie Kudatsky, I want to.” Rumborough stopped, and grinned to himself.“Kudatsky, that’s it,” he said softly.“She lived in Queens.” The phone felt soft and he dropped it, and picked up his bottle of beer.He got up from the soft brown chair, walked across the red carpet, thought he saw turds on the floor.He went into the hallway, opened the front door, and watched the creatures crawling over the landscape.He took a swig from his beer bottle, then spit the beer out violently.“Christ, this beer tastes terrible,” he said softly.He walked back to the living room and looked at the brown rug and walls.As he looked, the house seemed to flow, feeling like toothpaste.He squished toward the window and saw a flat brown plain; it was bubbling in some places.There seemed to be thousands of the turtles around.Rumborough climbed out the window and fell on his stomach.He watched his house sink quickly, turning brown.“What do you know,” Rumborough said.When the house was gone, he lay spreadeagled on the soft muddy stuff.Then he tried to crawl, and started to sink.His feet went first, then he grasped at the air with his hands, but there was nothing to grab.A large turtle was coming closer, and he could see his eyestalks looking at him curiously, but there was no time.At last he screamed, and went under.His mind, still conscious, fought the sensations, the mass of stuff around him felt thicker, then thinner.Rumborough moved his arms as if swimming——and struggled onto the brown surface.He crawled a few inches forward on his four feet, shaking his body slightly in order to remove some debris from his shell.He looked around with his four eyestalks, noticed a girl with large breasts, flat on her back, sinking into the brown stuff.He looked at her curiously.“Help,” called the girl.Rumborough drew his feet into his shell and relaxed, admiring the, brown landscape.He felt fine.Oscar, Rumborough thought, while luxuriating in the muck, you sure knew what you were doing.All over the earth’s brown surface, the hard-shelled quadrupeds moved slowly.* * * ** * * *I wrote in UNIVERSE 1 about the Clarion SF Writers’ Workshop and the new writers it’s produced.Since then science fiction writing courses have multiplied both on the campuses and sometimes in private classes; Avram Davidson taught one such course in the San Francisco area last year, and the story and author below developed there.It’s the first published story for Grania Davis, but her ability to bring places and people vividly to life will surely put her byline on more stories in the future.Asked about the background of the story, Mrs.Davis replied that it “is indeed based on a genuine, Garden-of-Edenish spot (and thus a spot which is impossible for a 20th Century American to enjoy for any length of time without becoming bored to tears).The protagonists and ‘natives’ and myths are also genuine, as is Brother Jo—who sadly is suffering from the final and unbeatable obstacle which the shaman or witch doctor must face; in Castanada’s DON JUAN, these are fear, power and old age.All his stories and magic will die with him, since the people there have discovered land rovers and transistor radios and regard him as a quaint relic.Sigh.”MY HEAD’S IN A DIFFERENT PLACE, NOWby Grania DavisLiving on welfare is one of the biggest bummers in the whole world.To apply, you stand for hours in some huge, long line, your kid in your arms, all fussy and wet.When you finally get seen, some bitchy clerk tells you that you filled out line 67 in the forms wrong, and you have to redo the whole thing and go back to the end of the line.If you’re sick, you crawl on the bus to this clinic, and hope there’ll be a seat left for you in the hot airless waiting room, cause you know it’ll be maybe three, four hours.They tell everyone to get there at eight, and send you home if you’re late, but the doctors don’t show up till maybe 9:30, and by the time it’s your turn it’s maybe eleven or (twelve is lunch for the doctors) one o’clock.and your lad is in your lap, screaming and drooling.(No bread for baby-sitters, man.)And if you’re too sick to make it to the bus, but not sick enough for an ambulance, like maybe you sprained your ankle and can’t walk to the bus stop, well then, tuff titty, sister, you don’t see any doctor at all, and you end up with a bum ankle for the rest of your life.And you can’t get into a decent apartment, cause even if you could afford the rent, they won’t rent to welfare-freaks, so you end up in some raunchy flop-house, overlooking an airshaft, where the roaches are running across your kid’s face at night and eating holes in your dirty clothes to get out the little bits of food.The fascist papers make it sound like welfare’s some kind of groovy trip and like everyone is lying and cheating to rip-off the taxpayers’ bread.but, like, what the hell would you do if you had this two-year-old kid, and the day-care centers had a waiting list two miles long.and if you had no high-school diploma or job-training of any kind? You can get a job sometimes scrubbing floors, but nothing that’d support both you and your lad, and a full-time baby-sitter.I was kinda thinking to put my kid in Head-Start when she’s a little older.and maybe take a class in something so I could get a part-time job.somewhere.if I could find one.My old man’s on welfare, too.He keeps psyching out.He’s into a big intellectual and revolutionary bag, an anarchist, but figures he might as well make use of the government until it can be destroyed.He’s a Leo, with Taurus rising.People are always saying to him, “Wow, the freedom part sounds really fine, but wouldn’t people get on a heavy violence trip and start runnin’ around, doing each other in?”His eyes get all big, and his red-bearded face starts to twitch with excitement as he explains, “People are already running around, doin’ each other in.Haven’t you heard of ‘crime in the streets’? And the government, with all its wars, has done in more people than 10,000 Jack-the-Rippers ever could.The government doesn’t give a damn about protecting you and me, it only protects the rich and the powerful, because that’s all it cares about, power, power over us with the pigs, power over other governments with missiles and bombs.power for the rich to get richer, power for the oil companies to pollute our water, power for the automakers to make uselessly huge, fast cars that run around, doin’ people in.But if people had a sense of individual freedom and dignity, and could do their own thing, then a lot of hate and anger would disappear.”It’s a heavy trip, being an anarchist, and every now and then it just gets too heavy for him and he, like, just.freaks out.and has to take a little trip to the loony bin.They dope him up, and calm him down, and then he’s all right, for a while.It’s kinda hard, never being sure if his head’s gonna be together from one day to the next, but we really have a lot of telepathy, both in and out of bed.and he hasn’t been bugging out, too much.lately
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]