The Monadic Universe Read online

  The Isolation Station and Preserve on Antares IV had only one prisoner, a three-foot-tall gnome-like biped with skin like creased leather and eyes like great glass globes. His hair was silky white and reached down to his shoulders, and he usually went about the great natural park naked.

  The gnome was very old, but no one had yet determined quite how old. And there seemed no way to find out. The gnome had never volunteered any information about his past. In the one hundred years of his imprisonment he had never asked the caretaker for anything.

  The small staff of Earthmen and humanoids generally avoided him. Sometimes they would watch his small figure standing looking up at the giant disk of Antares hanging blood red on the horizon, and they would wonder what he was thinking.

  The most important fact about the alien was that sometime in the remote past he had been responsible for the construction of the solar system and the emergence of intelligent life on earth.

  —From Heathen God, only one of the fascinating stories in this outstanding collection

  With an Introduction by Thomas N. Scortia, author of THE PROMETHEUS CRISIS

  THE

  MONADIC

  UNIVERSE

  by

  GEORGE ZEBROWSKI

  A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

  A GROSSET & DUNLAP COMPANY

  1120 Avenue of the Americas New York,

  New York 10036

  THE MONADIC UNIVERSE

  Copyright © 1977 by George Zebrowski

  All rights reserved.

  All characters in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living

  or dead, is purely coincidental.

  An ACE Book

  First ACE Printing: March 1977

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This Is: An Introduction by Thomas N. Scortia Copyright © 1977 by Interlit Ltd., British Virgin Islands.

  First Love. First Fear Copyright © 1972 by Random House, Inc., From STRANGE BEDFELLOWS edited by Thomas N. Scortia. Copyright reassigned to the author in 1977.

  Starcrossed Copyright © 1973 by Joseph Elder. From EROS IN ORBIT, Trident Press, N.Y. Copyright reassigned to the author in 1976. Assassins of Air Copyright © 1973 by Roger Elwood. From FUTURE CITY, Trident Press, N.E. Copyright reassigned to the author in 1977.

  Parks of Rest and Culture Copyright © 1973 by Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd. From SAVING WORLDS, Doubleday, N.Y. Copyright reassigned to the author in 1977.

  The Water Sculptor Copyright © 1970 by Lancer Books, Inc., From INFINITY ONE edited by Robert Hoskins. Copyright reassigned to the author in 1972.

  Rope of Glass Copyright © 1973 by Thomas N. Scortia and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. From TWO VIEWS OF WONDER, Ballantine, N.Y. Copyright reassigned to the author in 1976.

  Heathen God Copyright © 1970 by Mercury Press, Inc., From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan. 1971. Copyright reassigned to the author in 1976.

  Interpose Copyright © 1973 by George Zebrowski. From INFINITY FIVE edited by Robert Hoskins, Lancer Books, N.Y.

  The History Machine Copyright © 1971 by George Zebrowski. From NEW WORLDS QUARTERLY 3 edited by Michael Moorcock, Sphere Books, Ltd., London. Berkley Books, N.Y. edition Copyright © 1972 by Michael Moorcock. Copyright reassigned to the author in 1977.

  The Cliometricon Copyright © 1975 by Ultimate Publishing Co. Inc. From Amazing, May 1975. Copyright reassigned to the author in 1975.

  Stance of Splendor Copyright © 1973 by Michael Moorcock. From NEW WORLDS 5 edited by Michael Moorcock and Charles Platt; also published as NEW WORLDS QUARTERLY 6, Sphere Books Ltd., London. Copyright reassigned to the author in 1977.

  The Monadic Universe Copyright © 1972 by Lancer Books, Inc. From INFINITY THREE edited by Robert Hoskins. Copyright reassigned to George Zebrowski in 1972.

  The above stories appeared in slightly altered form and are reprinted here in revised form by permission of the author and his agent. JOSEPH ELDER AGENCY. 150 West 87th Street, 6-D, New York, N.Y. 10024.

  Also by the Author:

  Novels

  THE OMEGA POINT WAR STARS*

  DARK MIRROR*

  THE STAR WEB MACROLIFE*

  FREE SPACE*

  Anthologies

  FASTER THAN LIGHT (co-edited with Jack Dann)

  HUMAN-MACHINES (co-edited with Thomas N. Scortia)

  TOMORROW TODAY BIOGENESIS*

  * forthcoming

  To all the Editors who encouraged and first published these stories.

  Contents:-

  THIS IS: AN INTRODUCTION by Thomas N. Scortia

  FIRST LOVE, FIRST FEAR

  STARCROSSED

  ASSASSINS OF AIR

  PARKS OF REST AND CULTURE

  THE WATER SCULPTOR

  ROPE OF GLASS

  HEATHEN GOD

  INTERPOSE

  THE HISTORY MACHINE

  THE CLIOMETRICON

  STANCE OF SPLENDOR

  THE MONADIC UNIVERSE

  THIS IS: AN INTRODUCTION

  by Thomas N. Scortia

  One of the most difficult tasks a writer faces is that of writing an introduction to the collected works of a friend whom he admires, both personally and artistically. You are tempted to share a great many anecdotes with the reader, hoping somehow to give that special insight into the writer’s personality that will illuminate the unique creative approach that created the stories in the collection. Discarding this approach, you are tempted to discuss his technique, and the writing tricks with which he achieves his effects. Neither approach is completely satisfying to the writer of the introduction or to the audience.

  In the end the only valid stance is that the body of work of the writer must speak for itself. You may perhaps convey some of your enthusiasm for the writer and point out some of the insights that he has given you, but it is the body of the work upon which any final judgement must rest. I have watched George Zebrowski’s body of work grow for five years with a mixture of joy and envy, remembering my own faltering beginnings two decades ago. The distance he has traveled in half a decade is impressive. The rate at which his talent is growing makes me impatient to see the product of his talent twenty years from now.

  Zebrowski, a man of strong intellectual interests, is above all a complete human being of striking warmth. Unlike many of the theatrically neurotic writers of my acquaintance, he is a sane and concerned human being. I have always found his relationships with his friends remarkable. Unlike most Americans of my generation, he does not hide behind a wall of cynicism; he is not afraid to touch. More than this, he is not embarrassed to say, “I love.” This is not a pose with him; he forms strong friendships filled with emotion and concern. Zebrowski comes from a strong European nuclear family, the sort that molds children into poised adults with a carefully balanced mixture of discipline and overt love. This may well be the key to his character; he is the product of love … always a clearly visible, often demonstrated love.

  Zebrowski’s intellectual interests cover a wide range. He reads incessantly in a variety of scientific and philosophical disciplines and hardly a week goes by that he is not on the phone, excited about some new discovery or some innovative way of looking at old knowledge. He has translated Polish science fiction and was one of the first American authors to introduce U.S. writers to Stanislaw Lem (in F & SF, July 1974), the Polish science fiction writer and polymath whose novel-turned-movie SOLARIS is presently making such an impact on American film audiences. Zebrowski’s interest in science fiction film has generated an insightful essay, ”Science Fiction and the Visual Media”, in Bretnor’s SCIENCE FICTION: TODAY AND TOMORROW (Harper and Row, 1974) that I recommend unreservedly. This and a later essay are now a part of a larger project, r />
  THE FEUD OF EYE AND INTELLECT: SCIENCE FICTION ON THE LARGE SCREEN, that presents a discussion of the strengths and limitations of science fiction film written with the tightly reasoned precision of an Enrico Fermi Physical Review paper.

  In the years that I have watched Zebrowski grow artistically to become one of the leaders of the new generation of science fiction writers, I have been struck again and again by his devotion to the field as both an entertainment and as an intellectual form. He is completely committed to his art and his craft. I purposely use both words, “art” and “craft”, because he is constantly striving to improve his storytelling technique while always working to extend the depth of meaning in his work. Although he is well aware of his function as an entertainer, he is no casual spinner of midnight amusements. He is a del-ver into the mysteries and significances of life and the universe, a ceaseless questioner of these mysteries against the larger pattern of man’s intellectual life amid the social and cultural artifacts of the twentieth century. In all of his stories he asks: “Where are we going?” but more importantly he asks: “Where have we been?” and “Where and what are we now … and why?”

  Like Joseph Conrad, that remarkable stylist of half a century ago, George Zebrowski’s natal language is Polish. Yet, he has achieved a remarkable command of his adopted language with a facile knowledge not only of its formal structure, but of its idioms and patois. He has mastered the subtle complexities of the tongue, writing phrases honed precisely to carve out the exact meaning he intends and to shape the emotional nuances that evoke the reader empathy so necessary to effective fiction.

  His phrasing resembles Conrad’s in many ways, a reflection perhaps of the semantic biases of his original tongue. His prose, like Conrad’s, is alternately complex and leanly descriptive. His themes frequently reflect the intellectual heritage of Middle Europe. It is this particular devotion to the critically intellectual viewpoint that often characterizes his enthusiasms and frequently conditions his choice of story material and writing approach.

  Lest these remarks about his fondness for the intellectual make Zebrowski seem formidable and unapproachable except with a liberal dollop of scholarly awe, let me quickly say that he views himself first as a story-teller and in the process of this story-telling, he is clearly entertaining himself. He finds ideas and their interplay fascinating. Yet he is a man of intense humanity and that humanity is reflected herein in some of the most thoughtful and tender stories you are likely to read in science fiction.

  A case in point is “First Love, First Fear”, a story for which I have a special fondness because it first appeared in Random House’s STRANGE BEDFELLOWS, an anthology that I edited in 1972. The specific virtue of the story lies not so much in what is said as in what is carefully not said. When you consider how clumsily this simple theme might have been handled by a lesser writer, what maudlin bathos might have drenched the pages of a story from the typewriter of a less able man, you are grateful for Zebrowski’s discipline in polishing this precious gem of understatement. He gives us a view of an alien nature and, by implication, of terrestrial nature that is both tender and frightening.

  We have entered a period of ecological concern and, although this is painful to say, many ecology defenders have in their zeal shown themselves to be mystically inclined bleeding hearts. By this I mean that in their uncritical enthusiasms, they have forgotten that nature cannot be loved without at times being hated and challenged, that nature can provide us with a beauty and security on one hand while betraying our finest expectations a moment later in the cruelest fashion. It is this sense of beauty coupled with logic and cruelty of nature that I find so moving in “First Love, First Fear.’’ The brutality of the alien mating is delicately counterbalanced by the sweet-sad emotional involvement of the boy with the unhuman female such that his quixotic resolve to return in Spring to protect her mindless offspring becomes a deeper statement of human concern. The futility of the boy’s future gesture makes all the more poignant the impossibility of pursuing the transient rapport he has found with the alien creature.

  The idea wedded to human concern, this is what pervades all of the stories that follow. Consider “Heathen God” in which Zebrowski examines the problem of a hierarchy of creation. In it we meet a god who has created man and who in turn is rejected and then destroyed by man, simply because his existence challenges the deepest egocentricity of humankind: that the creator must be immeasurably greater than the being created. This is the damning flaw of the Heathen God, that he is all too vulnerable and understandable by his creations. We have only to examine the expanding state of today’s biological sciences to wonder how far in our future a like confrontation may occur … with our playing the unhappy role of the heathen god.

  In the same story Zebrowski explores a second level of the contradiction, the anguish of the priest facing the agency of his creation while knowing that the Heathen God must himself be the creation of a still Higher Being. Yet, the priest has only his faith to assure him of the existence of this Higher Being while confronted with the real ity of a lesser creator, a lesser god who does not even consider the possibility of a Higher Being bringing him into existence. The pathos of the lesser god, rejected by his own creations, may well anticipate that final confrontation of the priest and his kind with that more ancient absolute and historically vindictive God who brought priest and Heathen God alike into existence.

  It is this continued exploration of the persistent and disturbing tradition of the “hanged god” that Zebrowski extends further in “Interpose”. Here the Christ figure is driven by the compulsive need of the God Incarnate to fulfill his destiny by dying. This is the Christ, charged with the mission of interposing himself between mankind and God but denied that consummation by cynical creatures from another time and space. Zebrowski’s suggestion of their place in the God-man-devil hierarchy is all the more chilling for its lack of explicitness.

  In “The Water Sculptor” we meet that most illusive of all men, the dedicated artist who has seen a truth beyond the relevancies of his day, a truth whose invented vocabulary has an intense meaning only to the artist himself. There are truths too intuitive to be clothed in the clumsy fabric of words, truths that amount to a voiceless prescience. Zebrowski’s water sculptor sees clearly through an art that has no terrestrial equivalent that man’s home is not the earth, but a larger challenging range of which earth is only the smallest part. How can he convey this grand vision to a world concerned only with the plodding day to day expansion of its boundaries, how show the narrow vision that fixes those boundaries? He cannot, of course, but he can touch perhaps one human psyche with his insight even if only by the trivial manner of his death, the end of a life as evanescent as his art.

  In “Parks of Rest and Culture” Zebrowski’s protagonist dreams of the day when Earth will return to beauty and tranquility, healed of the scarring diseases that technological man has brought to her body. It is here that Zebrowski’s faith in the renascence of human culture through the agency of space travel makes its first statement, a statement amplified to a crescendo in his upcoming novel MACROLIFE, of which more later.

  In “Assassins of Air” he pays a wistful farewell to the metal god of the twentieth century, direct father of the world of “Parks of Rest and Culture”; but with the passing of the automobile, he sees the return of the old injustices, the old class conflicts returning to the form from which long ago the ubiquitous machine liberated them. It is a pessimistic view, quite the opposite of the previous story.

  In four separate stories Zebrowski explores the meaning of reality and the impossibility of separating objective and subjective reality. In “The Monadic Universe” he explores the classical dilemma of the solipsist and goes a step further in posing the problem of communication among alternating solipsistic realities. “The History Machine”, “The Cliometricon” and “Stance of Splendor” all consider other aspects of this same problem: “What is real?” and “How do I perceive reality and pro
ve that my perception is valid?” It is a problem that four thousand years of human thought has not resolved.

  This same theme, the ultimate meaning of reality, is stated to a lesser degree in “Starcrossed”. The story is primarily concerned with the uniqueness and compulsion of sexuality in the multiple brain of a cyborg spaceship. Still the compulsiveness of that drive distorts reality for the ship-brain to the point that death itself becomes trivial.

  I think that the present collection is long overdue. It displays George Zebrowski’s talents as an experimentalist who learns and grows from each success or failure. It is a fitting showcase, one that finds even more dramatic display in his upcoming Harper & Row novel MACROLIFE. This novel represents to me the most thoroughly considered view of the technical, social, and human problems of space colonies that are almost a super entity to themselves. The novel proposes a creative view of human life in such colonies without ever abandoning the humanistic bases of western technology. It marks a radical departure within the body of hard-core science fiction. It and the present collection will, I believe, assure Zebrowski a major place within the New Science Fiction.