Chains of the Sea Read online

  Robert Silverberg (ed) – Chains of the Sea

  CHAINS OF THE SEA

  Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction

  by

  Geo. Alec Effinger

  Gardner R. Dozois

  Gordon Eklund

  Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Silverberg

  THOMAS NELSON INC. Nashville New York

  No character in this book is intended to represent any actual person; all the incidents of the stories are entirely fictional in nature.

  Introduction copyright © 1973 by Thomas Nelson Inc.

  “And Us, Too, I Guess” copyright © 1973 by Geo. Alec Effinger “Chains of the Sea” copyright © 1973 by Gardner R. Dozois “The Shrine of Sebastian” copyright © 1973 by Gordon Eklund

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Conventions. Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson Inc. and simultaneously in Don Mills, Ontario, by Thomas Nelson & Sons (Canada) Limited. Manufactured in the United States of America.

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  Contents

  Robert Silverberg (ed) – Chains of the Sea

  Contents

  Introduction

  And Us, Too, I Guess by GEO. ALEC EFFINGER

  Chains of the Sea by GARDNER R. DOZOIS

  The Shrine of Sebastian by GORDON EKLUND

  Introduction

  Science fiction is a field strangely characterized by periods of sudden creative ferment in which platoons of gifted new authors arrive all at once. One such period came just prior to World War II, when Theodore Sturgeon, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey, and half a dozen other major writers made their debuts within the span of a year or two. About fifteen years later there was a similar upsurge that produced, all at once, such notable contributors to science fiction as Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Algis Budrys, Philip José Farmer, and Walter M. Miller, Jr. A decade after that—in the early 1960’s—a third startling cluster of newcomers appeared simultaneously: Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, R. A. Lafferty, and Thomas Disch, among others. The process seems to be repeating itself in the 1970’s, for, although it is a risky business to project the course of an entire career from the evidence of a few stories, one can already see that such new science-fiction writers as Ed Bryant, Gene Wolfe, Josephine Saxton, David Gerrold, and James Tiptree, Jr., are well on their way toward establishing themselves.

  The present book is intended as a showcase for three of the most highly regarded of the newer writers: Geo. Alec Effinger, Gardner R. Dozois, and Gordon Eklund. All three belong unarguably to the literary generation of the 1970’s. Aside from one story by Dozois that appeared in 1966, none of their work saw print professionally before 1970. They are still young: Eklund, the oldest, is several years short of thirty as I write this late in 1972. Yet they are no novices; as the evidence of this volume shows, their writing is skillful, evocative, thoughtful, occasionally profound. Despite the relative sparseness of their output to date, Effinger, Dozois, and Eklund have all been spoken of as potential winners of science fiction’s highest awards for literary achievement, the Hugo and the Nebula, and no doubt will collect their share of these coveted trophies in the years ahead. The three short novels you are about to read are being published here for the first time anywhere, and represent, I think, a fair sampling of their authors’ talents.

  —ROBERT SILVERBERG

  And Us, Too, I Guess by GEO. ALEC EFFINGER

  Disaster stories have been commonplace in science fiction since the days of H. G. Wells. But usually the fictional catastrophes are spectacular noisy events—the continents are sundered by mighty earthquakes, a second deluge drowns the earth, the sun goes nova. Here Geo. Alec Effinger, one of the most highly regarded of science fiction’s new generation of writers, gives us a quiet catastrophe, one which sneaks up subtly and obliquely on the world, a disaster that begins on a trivial scale and widens until it engulfs all of civilization. Effinger’s first published stories appeared as recently as 1971, and only the following year his short story “All the Last Wars at Once” was a runner-up for the World Science Fiction Convention’s Hugo award. His first novel, What Entropy Means to Me, was published to warm critical acclaim in 1972. He and his wife currently live in Brooklyn.

  It was certainly a quiet cataclysm.

  I remember very well how I reacted in its early days. Of course, it was by no means my first disaster; I had graduated from a good school where I received the best practical training, and afterward I had found a job with a well-known metropolitan research team. In the following months, during which I worked with some of the sharpest minds on the East Coast, I witnessed a small but decisive catastrophe. It ruined at least three lives, in addition to dissolving the research team and forever discouraging financial support in my own chosen field.

  I was not deterred. It was necessary for me at that point to choose another field. No sooner had I reeducated myself and gathered the essential literature and equipment for my first solo experiments than the world at large was struck by a singular and devastating disaster. Again my work had to be postponed. I weathered the disturbance easily, but millions of people in the United States alone were permanently affected. My own assistant, Wagner of the hunched back, disappeared with my only set of keys, and I was forced for the third time to set out afresh.

  I sought counsel from one of my former associates, Dr. Johnson. I felt that it would be foolish to continue entirely on my own, especially now that hardly anyone else could be at all useful. So I moved into Dr. Johnson’s spacious apartments, and together we planned a good scientific project with plenty of chemicals and glassware, leaving the matter of goals and hypotheses for later. This partnership required that I leave my own headquarters in New York and take up residence in Cleveland, a city that I had always thought of as primarily for Ukrainians, hoodlums, and other nontechnical types. After a short time I grew more comfortable there, and our work began to lose the ugly dilettante aspects that new laboratories always seem to harbor.

  Of course, with my luck, that’s precisely when the cataclysm occurred. Or, to be more exact, when we (the scientific community) first began to acknowledge its existence, with whatever private misgivings. Not yet fully recovered from many superior twentieth- century disasters, the world was already beset by another. This one was not man-made; no, the proud scientific community could not take the slightest credit for it. Perhaps, I have come to think, perhaps that is the reason it took us all so many years to accept the truth. If only we had been granted a small part, a tiny creative task in the grand scheme of things, then the world and its inhabitants could have perished overnight without causing us an instant’s regret.

  But it’s no use second-guessing the cosmos. Some ten years after my last meeting with Dr. Johnson I arrived by plane in Cleveland. My first impression of the area was unfavorable. Before I had even reacquired my luggage I had decided that it would be impossible to breathe the Ohio air. The temperature in mid-July was ninety-four degrees, and it was an hour and a half past midnight. The humidity was a Devonian ninety-two percent. I felt as if I had been squeezed from the plane into a huge stewpot at the simmer. My white lab coat seemed too heavy to carry, let alone wear. My legs and arms were unbearably weary, and if I had not seen Dr. Johnson waiting for me at the gate, I might well have climbed back on the plane and gone home.

  “Well, hello there, Dr. Davis,” said Dr. Johnson, shaking my hand firmly.

  “Hello, Dr. Johnson,” I said. “It’s nice of you to meet me.”

  “Not at all. Hot enough for you?”

  I looked closely at my old friend. The Dr. Johnson I had known in my youth would never have permitted himself such a cli
ché. I had an inkling that I’d have to suffer more than merely the climate.

  “Is it like this all the time?” I asked, forcing myself to proceed through the entire weather routine.

  “No,” said Dr. Johnson, pleased at my acquiescence, “sometimes it rains as well!” We both laughed briefly and walked in silence to his car. The parking lots were nearly deserted; the world’s previous disasters could not yet be forgotten, and life continued on a much more distracted plane than I preferred.

  Dr. Johnson had chosen a lovely old home in the Garden District. The former owners, like so many mere landlords, had been “incapacitated” by the catastrophe of the mid-seventies. So many of the old mansions along St. Charles Avenue had been deserted and taken over by the scientific community, alone among the city’s residents still able to appreciate the neighborhood’s charms. The two of us could barely fill a single chamber with our possessions, but we found ourselves masters of two dozen rooms. For the first time in my life I had a dormitory room of my own, plus a reading room, an office, two private baths, a private parlor for whatever visitors I might entertain, and a strange little closet-sized room at the end of a long corridor. There were no windows in this room and but the one door, and there was no clue as to what purpose the previous owners might have put it. Dr. Johnson suggested jokingly that I use it for a chapel, and at the time the idea was exquisitely foolish.

  The entire back of the house, shaded by arching palm trees and great leafy shrubs I could not identify, was given over to our laboratories. The city of Cleveland was ours, as far as acquiring materiel was concerned; our only limits were placed by the other members of the scientific community with whom we competed. But the house was already admirably furnished. What appeared to be an old pantry had been converted into the main lab. Dr. Johnson had set it up along the lines we had learned both in school and during our mutual ill-fated project of a decade before. One wall had been covered with pine-plank shelves, which supported hundreds upon hundreds of little bottles of chemicals, all in alphabetical order. Their tiny red-and-white labels were peculiarly comforting. Along the opposite wall were cages of small animals, whose marble eyes followed us about in our splendid pursuits. Could they know what part they were to play in our work? No, of course not. But as Dr. Johnson could not avoid the effects of the earlier disaster, now speaking in annoyingly trite phrases, so, too, have I felt the most unclean anthropomorphic urges. It was not sympathy I knew for the unlucky beasts we kept, but it was another fell emotion with matching symptoms.

  We worked long hours, feeling certain that someday we would find a method and an object. But none of that was important; it was the joy of pipettes and gram atoms that maintained us. Indeed, we did not recognize the hoped-for stimulus when it came. Surrounded by cataclysm, we labored blithely on.

  One morning I came down from my rooms to find Dr. Johnson hard at work, although it was not yet noon. He had fed the fish in the tanks, had thrown some decomposing material into the terrariums, and was beginning to examine the wood shavings in the rodents’ cages. He turned to me as I entered. His broad smile and the crackling freshness of his lab coat were all the reward I ever needed.

  “Good morning, Dr. Davis,” he said. “Your mollies have all kicked the bucket.”

  Yes, it was the beginning of a pleasantly restrained disaster.

  Paul Moran searched his pockets for the house keys. “Come on, already,” said Linda, his wife. It was very late, well after midnight, and her habitual mistrust of the city overruled any desire to placate Paul. At last he found the key chain and handed it to her; she took it nervously, glancing up and down the street to see if anyone lurked in the shadowed doorways.

  “Go on, you’re safe,” said Paul. Then to himself he murmured, “I can’t see why anybody’d bother, anyway.” For all her insecurity, Linda took foolish chances. She hurried up the tenement steps while Paul unloaded the suitcases from the trunk of the car. He watched her for a few seconds, again thinking that someday a guy was going to be waiting for her inside the foyer. That would teach her, all right. Then maybe she wouldn’t be in such a hurry to leave him with all the luggage. Linda opened the front door and disappeared for a moment while she unlocked the inner door. As Paul slammed the trunk lid closed, he heard her voice.

  “Paul?” she said. He did not answer. “Paul? Are you all right?”

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “The light in here’s burned out. It’s dark inside; I can’t see.”

  Paul swore under his breath. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Wait a minute,” she said, her voice shaking audibly. “I’ll come down and help you.”

  “Hallelujah,” said Paul angrily. He waited on the sidewalk beside the suitcases. Linda stuck her head out of the front door, peering up and down the street once more. “It seems to be okay,” said Paul cynically. “I mean, you only have to come about thirty feet, you know.”

  “I just want to be sure, that’s all,” she said harshly. “One day you’re going to run out of luck, you’re going to walk down some dark street not paying any attention, and you’re going to end up with a Saturday-Night Special stuck in your back. Knowing you, you’d wind up getting your head blown off.”

  Paul didn’t react the way she expected. She forgot that he’d heard all of this several times before. He just bent over and picked up two of the three suitcases. “Don’t be so smug,” he said at last. “I mean, where would that leave you?”

  Linda had never considered that aspect before. She just stared at him. He smiled coldly and shoved the third suitcase toward her with his foot. Then he turned and carried his suitcases up the stairs to the door, never once looking around to see if she followed. Linda stood on the sidewalk for a short time, glaring angrily at his back, ignoring for the moment her nervousness on the night-shaded street. She started to shout something after him but stopped abruptly. Finally she just picked up the heavy bag and hurried up the stairs.

  The Morans’ apartment was on the fourth floor of the building. The light was out in the ground-floor foyer, and the first flight of stairs was hidden in a vague darkness. Paul considered how the city forced an unhealthy fear on its populace; passing beyond the inner door, Paul paused before he began climbing the stairs, suddenly feeling vulnerable and too much like an easy target. He readily granted what that notion implied: someone to take a sight on that target, waiting, quietly hiding in a second-floor ambush. Often the stairwell smelled of urine and vomit. More than once the Morans had returned home at night to find drunks and vagrants passed out on the narrow landings between floors.

  Linda walked up the stairs behind Paul. She hated the building, but Paul insisted that they couldn’t afford to move. As he struggled up the stairs with the luggage, Paul could hear her loud sighs. Tonight, fortunately for their ragged tempers, there were no foul-smelling bodies to block their way. At their door at last, he dropped the suitcases heavily; his deep, rapid breathing was intended to let Linda know that he hadn’t enjoyed carrying the luggage. She was unlocking the door, but turned to look at her husband.

  “All right,” she said, “I’m proud of you for carrying those things up here. If it wasn’t for you, we’d have to leave them out on the sidewalk all night. I think you’re wonderful.” She gave him a spiteful frown and finished opening the door.

  “You know something, Linda?” said Paul, throwing the suitcases over the threshold into the kitchen of their apartment. “You know what? I think you’re crazy. I think you’re about the most frightened person I’ve ever known. It’s almost sick, how scared you are all the time. It’s not normal.”

  “Shut up, Paul,” she said wearily. “It’s time to go to sleep. We’ll talk about my mental illness in the morning.”

  “That’s just it, for God’s sake. You’re even too scared to talk about it. You’re too scared to go on a trip out of the city, because the junkies will rob the apartment while you’re gone. You’re too scared to drive with m
e because I’ll wrap the car around a telephone pole. You’re too scared to stay here alone because some strange person will mug you. You’re too scared to stay here with me because I might mug you.”

  “Have you ever listened to yourself?” asked Linda, already in the bedroom undressing for bed, leaving the suitcases where they had fallen in the other room. “You want to talk about sick, you just listen to the crazy stuff that runs out of your own mouth.”

  “You’re scared that I’m telling the truth, isn’t that right?”

  She peered around the doorway; Paul was lying on the couch, his shoes making grimy trails on the slipcover. “You want to know what I’m really afraid of, Paul?” she said. “I’m terrified that someday you will tell the truth. I mean, I can guess all the shady things you do behind my back. But I’m just scared that the true story will make my imagination look like a Disney movie, rated G. See, honey, I still love you. I give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  Paul didn’t answer. He just sat up, clenching his fists angrily, composing several variations of his natural reply. But he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of making him shout at her. She smiled again, with even less affection, and disappeared into the bedroom. She continued undressing; at last he heard her turn down the bedspread and plump her pillow. Then he heard the creak of the bed’s springs, and the click of the light switch. He sat on the couch for a while. In his furious, illogical mood he didn’t want to follow her too soon. That would be a sign of weakness.

  When he did decide to go to bed, about ten minutes later, he went into the bedroom and turned on the lights. Linda groaned sleepily, and Paul just sighed loudly.

  “You’re getting good at heaving those heavy breaths,” said Linda, propping her head with one hand.

  Paul hung his shirt in the closet. Without turning, he answered her. “My God, look who’s complaining. The original martyr. What’s the matter, does the light bother you? Don’t try to tell me you were asleep already.”