Vanishing acts, p.36
Vanishing Acts, page 36
The arm withdrew. The assassin’s face appeared in the window. “Fancy yourself clever, don’t you?” he called out. Then he disappeared.
Stratton relaxed slightly. Had the man given up? A minute passed, and Stratton began to think about his next move. He could wait here until the factory opened; there would be too many people about for the assassin to remain.
Suddenly the man’s arm came through the window again, this time carrying a jar of fluid. He poured it over the automaton’s head, the liquid splattering and dripping down its back. The man’s arm withdrew, and then Stratton heard the sound of a match being struck and then flaring alight. The man’s arm reappeared bearing the match, and touched it to the automaton.
The room was flooded with light as the automaton’s head and upper back burst into flames. The man had doused it with lamp oil. Stratton squinted at the spectacle: light and shadow danced across the floor and walls, transforming the storeroom into the site of some druidic ceremony. The heat caused the automaton to hasten its vague assault on the door, like a salamandrine priest dancing with increasing frenzy, until it abruptly froze: its name had caught fire, and the letters were being consumed.
The flames gradually died out, and to Stratton’s newly light-adapted eyes the room seemed almost completely black. More by sound than by sight, he realized the man was pushing at the door again, this time forcing the automaton back enough for him to gain entrance.
“Enough of that, then.”
Stratton tried to run past him, but the assassin easily grabbed him and knocked him down with a clout to the head.
His senses returned almost immediately, but by then the assassin had him face down on the floor, one knee pressed into his back. The man tore the health amulet from Stratton’s wrist and then tied his hands together behind his back, drawing the rope tightly enough that the hemp fibers scraped the skin of his wrists.
“What kind of man are you, to do things like this?” Stratton gasped, his cheek flattened against the brick floor.
The assassin chuckled. “Men are no different from your automata; slip a bloke a piece of paper with the proper figures on it, and he’ll do your bidding.” The room grew light as the man lit an oil lamp.
“What if I paid you more to leave me alone?”
“Can’t do it. Have to think about my reputation, haven’t I? Now let’s get to business.” He grasped the smallest finger of Stratton’s left hand and abruptly broke it.
The pain was shocking, so intense that for a moment Stratton was insensible to all else. He was distantly aware that he had cried out. Then he heard the man speaking again. “Answer my questions straight now. Do you keep copies of your work at home?”
“Yes.” He could only get a few words out at a time. “At my desk. In the study.”
“No other copies hidden anywhere? Under the floor, perhaps?”
“No.”
“Your friend upstairs didn’t have copies. But perhaps someone else does?”
He couldn’t direct the man to Darrington Hall. “No one.”
The man pulled the notebook out of Stratton’s coat pocket. Stratton could hear him leisurely flipping through the pages. “Didn’t post any letters? Corresponding with colleagues, that sort of thing?”
“Nothing that anyone could use to reconstruct my work.”
“You’re lying to me.” The man grasped Stratton’s ring finger.
“No! It’s the truth!” He couldn’t keep the hysteria from his voice.
Then Stratton heard a sharp thud, and the pressure in his back eased. Cautiously, he raised his head and looked around. His assailant lay unconscious on the floor next to him. Standing next to him was Davies, holding a leather blackjack.
Davies pocketed his weapon and crouched to unknot the rope that bound Stratton. “Are you badly hurt, sir?”
“He’s broken one of my fingers. Davies, how did you—?”
“Lord Fieldhurst sent me the moment he learned whom Willoughby had contacted.”
“Thank God you arrived when you did.” Stratton saw the irony of the situation—his rescue ordered by the very man he was plotting against—but he was too grateful to care.
Davies helped Stratton to his feet and handed him his notebook. Then he used the rope to tie up the assassin. “I went to your office first. Who’s the fellow there?”
“His name is—was Benjamin Roth.” Stratton managed to recount his previous meeting with the kabbalist. “I don’t know what he was doing there.”
“Many religious types have a bit of the fanatic in them,” said Davies, checking the assassin’s bonds. “As you wouldn’t give him your work, he likely felt justified in taking it himself. He came to your office to look for it, and had the bad luck to be there when this fellow arrived.”
Stratton felt a flood of remorse. “I should have given Roth what he asked.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“It’s an outrageous injustice that he was the one to die. He’d nothing to do with this affair.”
“It’s always that way, sir. Come on, let’s tend to that hand of yours.”
Davies bandaged Stratton’s finger to a splint, assuring him that the Royal Society would discreetly handle any consequences of the night’s events. They gathered the oil-stained papers from Stratton’s office into a trunk so that Stratton could sift through them at his leisure, away from the manufactory. By the time they were finished, a carriage had arrived to take Stratton back to Darrington Hall; it had set out at the same time as Davies, who had ridden into London on a racing-engine. Stratton boarded the carriage with the trunk of papers, while Davies stayed behind to deal with the assassin and make arrangements for the kabbalist’s body.
Stratton spent the carriage ride sipping from a flask of brandy, trying to steady his nerves. He felt a sense of relief when he arrived back at Darrington Hall; although it held its own variety of threats, Stratton knew he’d be safe from assassination there. By the time he reached his room, his panic had largely been converted into exhaustion, and he slept deeply.
He felt much more composed the next morning, and ready to begin sorting through his trunkful of papers. As he was arranging them into stacks approximating their original organization, Stratton found a notebook he didn’t recognize. Its pages contained Hebrew letters arranged in the familiar patterns of nominal integration and factorization, but all the notes were in Hebrew as well. With a renewed pang of guilt, he realized it must have belonged to Roth; the assassin must have found it on his person and tossed it in with Stratton’s papers to be burned.
He was about to set it aside, but his curiosity bested him: he’d never seen a kabbalist’s notebook before. Much of the terminology was archaic, but he could understand it well enough; among the incantations and sephirotic diagrams, he found the epithet enabling an automaton to write its own name. As he read, Stratton realized that Roth’s achievement was more elegant than he’d previously thought.
The epithet didn’t describe a specific set of physical actions, but instead the general notion of reflexivity. A name incorporating the epithet became an autonym: a self-designating name. The notes indicated that such a name would express its lexical nature through whatever means the body allowed. The animated body wouldn’t even need hands to write out its name; if the epithet were incorporated properly, a porcelain horse could likely accomplish the task by dragging a hoof in the dirt.
Combined with one of Stratton’s epithets for dexterity, Roth’s epithet would indeed let an automaton do most of what was needed to reproduce. An automaton could cast a body identical to its own, write out its own name, and insert it to animate the body. It couldn’t train the new one in sculpture, though, since automata couldn’t speak. An automaton that could truly reproduce itself without human assistance remained out of reach, but coming this close would undoubtedly have delighted the kabbalists.
It seemed unfair that automata were so much easier to reproduce than humans. It was as if the problem of reproducing automata need be solved only once, while that of reproducing humans was a Sisyphean task, with every additional generation increasing the complexity of the name required.
And abruptly Stratton realized that he didn’t need a name that redoubled physical complexity, but one than enabled lexical duplication.
The solution was to impress the ovum with an autonym, and thus induce a foetus that bore its own name.
The name would have two versions, as originally proposed: one used to induce male foetuses, another for female foetuses. The women conceived this way would be fertile as always. The men conceived this way would also be fertile, but not in the typical manner: their spermatozoa would not contain preformed foetuses, but would instead bear either of two names on their surfaces, the self-expression of the names originally borne by the glass needles. And when such a spermatozoon reached an ovum, the name would induce the creation of a new foetus. The species would be able to reproduce itself without medical intervention, because it would carry the name within itself.
He and Dr. Ashbourne had assumed that creating animals capable of reproducing meant giving them preformed foetuses, because that was the method employed by nature. As a result they had overlooked another possibility: that if a creature could be expressed in a name, reproducing that creature was equivalent to transcribing the name. An organism could contain, instead of a tiny analogue of its body, a lexical representation instead.
Humanity would become a vehicle for the name as well as a product of it. Each generation would be both content and vessel, an echo in a self-sustaining reverberation.
Stratton envisioned a day when the human species could survive as long as its own behavior allowed, when it could stand or fall based purely on its own actions, and not simply vanish once some predetermined life span had elapsed. Other species might bloom and wither like flowers over seasons of geologic time, but humans would endure for as long as they determined.
Nor would any group of people control the fecundity of another; in the procreative domain, at least, liberty would be restored to the individual. This was not the application Roth had intended for his epithet, but Stratton hoped the kabbalist would consider it worthwhile. By the time the autonym’s true power became apparent, an entire generation consisting of millions of people worldwide would have been born of the name, and there would be no way any government could control their reproduction. Lord Fieldhurst—or his successors—would be outraged, and there would eventually be a price to be paid, but Stratton found he could accept that.
He hastened to his desk, where he opened his own notebook and Roth’s side by side. On a blank page, he began writing down ideas on how Roth’s epithet might be incorporated into a human euonym. Already in his mind Stratton was transposing the letters, searching for a permutation that denoted both the human body and itself, an ontogenic encoding for the species.
Ted Chiang’s first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival starring Amy Adams. His second collection Exhalation was chosen by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019.
ENDANGERED SPECIES
JOE HALDEMAN
Men stop war to make gods
sometimes. Peace gods, who would make
Earth a haven. A place for men to
think and love and play. No war
to cloud their minds and hearts. Stop,
somehow, men from being men.
Gods make war to stop men
from becoming gods.
Without the beat of drums to stop
our ears, what heaven we could make
of Earth! The anchor that is war
left behind? Somehow free to
stop war? Gods make men to
be somewhat like them. So men
express their godliness in war.
To take life: this is what gods
do. Not the womanly urge to make
life. Nor the simple sense to stop.
War-men make gods. To stop
those gods from raging, we have to
find the heart and head to make
new gods, who don’t take men
in human sacrifice. New gods,
who find disgust in war.
Gods stop, to make men war
for their amusement. We can stop
their fun. We can make new gods
in human guise. No need to
call to heaven. Just take plain men
and show to them the heaven they could make!
To stop God’s wars! Men make
their own destiny. We don’t need war
to prove to anyone that we are men.
But even that is not enough. To stop
war, we have to become more. To
stop war, we have to become gods.
To stop war, make men gods.
Joe Haldeman is a Grand Master author of Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award–winning science fiction and fantasy. His first story appeared in 1969. His best-known novel is The Forever War and his most recent is Work Done For Hire. He taught writing at MIT for thirty years but is now retired. He paints, bicycles, plays the guitar, and spends as much time as he can out under the stars as an amateur astronomer. He’s been married to Mary Gay Potter Haldeman for fifty-seven years.
“Endangered Species” is the perfect encapsulation of the concerns he’s exhibited throughout his writing career about war and its effect on the human race.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank David Hartwell and Jim Minz for being behind this book.
A BIOGRAPHY OF ELLEN DATLOW
Ellen Datlow is an acclaimed, award-winning science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor.
Born and raised in New York, Datlow aspired to be a veterinarian when she was a child, but changed her plans when she realized how much she preferred reading and writing to math and science. Her first publishing job was in the New York office of Little, Brown & Co. in 1973. During the next eight years she worked at a handful of other publishing companies before finally finding her calling in 1981 as an editor of short fiction at OMNI magazine, where she worked until 1998. She has also worked at the online magazine Event Horizon and at scifi.com, and currently acquires short fiction and novellas for Tor.com
Datlow has edited more than fifty anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year, The Doll Collection, Mad Hatters and March Hares, The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea,Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, the all-original anthology Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles, and reprint anthology Edited By .
She has often collaborated with renowned coeditor Terri Windling, with whom she worked on the adult fairy tales series of six anthologies beginning with Snow White, Blood Red, which has been one of their most successful projects together.
Datlow is the recipient of numerous awards, including multiple Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards; Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor and Best Short Form Editor, and Locus Awards for Best Editor. She also received the Karl Edward Wagner Award given by the British Fantasy Society for “outstanding contribution to the genre.” In 2011, she was the recipient of a Life Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, and in 2014 she was awarded the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Association. Datlow also cohosts a popular reading series, Fantastic Fiction, at the KGB Bar in New York City, where she resides.
Baby Datlow in 1950. The so-called Gerber baby portrait was common at the time.
Datlow’s high school graduation photo, taken in 1967.
Datlow at home, wearing a vintage dress for a science fiction function in 1981. She says that she favors 1940s-era clothing.
Datlow sitting at her desk in the OMNI offices in 1981, roughly a year after she began working there. On her desk is a Kaypro computer and the Selectric typewriter she kept for addressing envelopes. On her bulletin board she pinned, among other things, a photo of King Kong climbing the Empire State Building.
Datlow in 1989, on the roof of the building where John Clute, renowned science fiction and fantasy critic, and his artist wife, Judith, live. The Clutes are based in Camden Town, London, and have graciously hosted many writers and editors over the past few decades. (Datlow usually stays with them on her annual visit to London.) Datlow is on the left, John Clute is in the center, and Datlow’s good friend Pat Cadigan, an award-winning science fiction writer, is on the right.
A manipulated photo of Datlow taken in 1990 by art photographer and illustrator J. K. Potter, giving her cat eyes. It first appeared on the original back flap of Alien Sex.
Datlow in front of an advertisement for OMNI magazine in New York City in 1991. That winter day, Datlow wandered Manhattan with her camera and her friends, the married writers Steven Gould and Laura J. Mixon. They happened upon the advertisement just north of Datlow’s West Village home.
Datlow with fellow editor Terri Windling in 1994. Datlow and Windling have collaborated on anthologies for more than twenty years, yet rarely see each other. This photo is from one of those rare yet cherished meetings.
Datlow modeled for J. K. Potter’s cover of the illustrated edition of The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells, published in 1990. Potter gave Datlow a print of the image, which hangs on her living room wall.
A BIOGRAPHY OF TERRI WINDLING
