On the first day of the summer my month wife, Silena Ruiz, filched our district’s master program from the Ganfield Hold computer centre and disappeared with it. A guard at the Hold has confessed that she won admittance by seducing him, then gave him a drug. Some say she is in Conning Town now, others have heard rumors that she has been seen in Morton Court, still others maintain her destination was the Mill. I suppose it does not matter where she has gone. What matters is that we are without our program. We have lived without it for eleven days, and things are starting to break down.
***
Tonight at the capital they are planning next month’s rainfall patterns for districts that the planners have never seen. District food allocations – inadequate, always inadequate – are being devised by men to whom our appetites are purely abstract entities. Do they believe in our existence, at the capital? Do they really think there is such a place as Ganfield? What if we sent them a delegation of notable citizens to ask for help in replacing our lost program? Would they care? Would they even listen? For that matter, is there a capital at all? How can I who have never seen nearby Old Grove accept, on faith alone, the existence of a far-off governing centre, aloof, inaccessible, shrouded in myth? Maybe it is only a construct of some cunning subterranean machine that is our real ruler. That would not surprise me. Nothing surprises me. There is no capital. There are no central planners. Beyond the horizon everything is mist.
***
I knew her only eleven weeks, she was my month-wife only for two; I had not realized she had come to mean so much to me so quickly.
- from “Getting Across”
The notion that I could singlehandedly end the war in Vietnam, or the oppression of the oppressed, by writing a science-fiction story always seemed transcendentally dim-witted to me.
- from the introduction to “Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine”
For instance, does it mean anything to you when I tell you that I have two womb-mothers, one ovarian and one uterine, and that my sperm-father in the somatic line was, strictly speaking, part dolphin and part ocelot? Or that I celebrated my fifth neurongate raising by taking part in an expedition to Proxy Nine, where I learned the eleven soul-diving drills and the seven contrary mantras?
***
If you need gadgetry to get yourself off, you use gadgetry; the superficials simply don’t enter into any real consideration of how you get where you want to be from where you’re at. The aim is to eradicate the well-known evils of our society, and if we have to get there by means of time machines, thought-amplification headbands, anti-uptightness rays, molecular interpenetrator beams, superheterodyning levitator rods, and all the rest of that gaudy comic-book paraphernalia, so be it. It’s the results that count.
- from “Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine”
Oh, Christ, how awful it is to be trapped in an era where everybody goes around like some sort of zombie, cut off from the energies of the spirit, ashamed even to admit there are such energies.
- from “Breckenridge and the Continuum”
What lies beyond the ship is neither a blank wall nor an empty tube; it is a stunning profusion of interlocking energy fields, linking everything to everything; it is music that is also light, it is light that is also music, and those aboard the ship are sentient particles wholly enmeshed in that vast all-engulfing reverberation, that radiant song of gladness that is the universe. The voyagers journey joyously toward the center of all things, giving themselves gladly into the care of cosmic forces far surpassing human control and understanding. He presses his hands against the cool glass. He puts his face close to it. What do I see, what do I feel, what am I experiencing? It is instant revelation, every time. It is almost, almost! – the sought after oneness. Barriers remain, but yet he is aware of an altered sense of space and time, a knowledge of the awesome something that lurks in the vacancies between the spokes of the cosmos, something majestic and powerful; he knows that the something is part of himself, and he is part of it. When he stands at the viewplate he yearns to open the ship’s great hatch and tumble into the eternal. But not yet, not yet. Barriers remain. The voyage has only begun. They grow closer every day to that which they seek, but the voyage has only begun.
- from “Ship-Sister, Star-Sister”
They descended toward the place where the Snow Hunters had made their camp. Breaking a long silence, Shadow said, “There must once have been a time when the world was different, when all people were of the same kind, and everyone lived in peace. A golden age, long gone. How did things change, Leaf? How did we bring this upon ourselves?”
“Nothing has changed,” Leaf said, “except the look of our bodies. Inside we’re the same. There never was any golden age.”
“There were no Teeth, once.”
“There were always Teeth, under one name or another. True peace never lasted long. Greed and hatred always existed.”
“Do you believe that, truly?”
“I do. I believe that mankind is mankind, all of us the same whatever our shape, and such changes as come upon us are trifles, and the best we can ever do is find such happiness for ourselves as we can, however dark the times.”
“These are darker times than most, Leaf.”
“Perhaps.”
“These are evil times. The end of all things approaches.”
Leaf smiled. “Let it come. These are the times we were meant to live in, and no asking why, and no use longing for easier times. Pain ends when acceptance begins. That is what we have now. We make the best of it. This is the road we travel. Day by day we lose what was never ours, day by day we slip closer to the All-Is-One, and nothing matters, Shadow, nothing except learning to accept what comes.”
- from “This is the Road”
Pitkin, who had watched the interchange from the far side of the lounge, came striding fiercely toward him as the Spicans glided off. “What are you up to now?” he demanded.
“How about minding your own business?” Schwartz said amiably.
“You’re trading pills with those snakes, aren’t you?”
“Let’s call it field research.”
“Research? Research? What are you going to do, trip on that orange stuff of theirs?”
“I might,” Schwartz said.
“How do you know what its effects on the human metabolism might be? You could end up blind or paralyzed or crazy or –”
“–or illuminated,” Schwartz said. “Those are the risks one takes in the field. The early anthropologists who unhesitatingly sampled peyote and yage and ololiuqui accepted those risks, and–”
“But those were drugs that humans were using. You have no way of telling how – oh, what’s the use, Schwartz? Research, he calls it. Research.” Pitkin sneered. “Junkie!”
Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!”
- from “Schwartz Between the Galaxies”
Trips is a collection showcasing Silverberg’s preoccupations of the period: senescence, death (The Book of Skulls
and Dying Inside
[the only Silverberg novel I've read aside from his three collabs with Asimov when I was a kid] are also products of ’72) and what he saw as not-all-that-wonderful currents in SF itself. The 14 stories, though occasionally nihilistic, are all solid fun and cast interesting shadows on 2009, and Silverberg’s introductions give a sense of where his head, and the SF field, were at during those strange years.
Rating: 5/5 stars
Trips contains the stories “In the Group” (written for the rad-sounding sex-themed SF anthology Eros in Orbit), “Getting Across” (Silverberg moved from New York City, where he’d lived up to then, to California before writing this tale of a dystopian world-city), “Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine” and “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” (vignettish meta-SF send-ups of SF that’s more polemic than story and SF fandom, respectively), “A Sea of Faces” (therapist uses “consciousness-penetration treatment” on patient), “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV” (from the intro,
Then my good friend Jack Dann asked me to do a story for a book called Wandering Stars, an anthology of what he called “Jewish science fiction.” I thought that was an odd idea for a book, even a wrong-headed one.
but of course he did it anyway and the story’s awesome, kind of a mirror-world take on Bradbury’s “The Fire Balloons”), “Breckenridge and the Continuum” (more sorta nonlinear meta-SF, my least favorite in the book, but still fun), “Capricorn Games” (Comte de Saint-Germain character undecided on unto whom to confer his secret of longevity attends a birthday party, against a backdrop of global cooling), “Ship-Sister, Star-Sister” (set on a starship for which a blind woman’s telepathic bond with her twin is the only communication link to Earth; my favorite of all these stories and the basis for Silverberg’s 1996 novel Starborne
), the novella “This is the Road” (four folks [three of different imaginative mutant races, one old school human] hit the road together after beings called Teeth destroy their homes), the titular “Trips” (guy seeks a version of his wife through a series of alternate Californias), the novella “Born with the Dead” (guy stalks his dead wife [the "rekindled" don't mix with the living] to the amusement and irritation of her dead pals and lover; Nebula and Locus winner), “Schwartz Across the Galaxies” (meta-SF again, anthropologist from homogenized “global village” near-future longs for contact with romanticized alien cultures), and “In the House of Double Minds” (where kids are commissurotomized and trained to be oracles). Most of these stories were originally written for anthologies and have been subsequently reprinted prior to this collection, so the introductions are really the only novelty; but if you haven’t read these stories before, may as well read them here!
I won’t tell you not to click on my Amazon links, but if you’re in Pittsburgh you can definitely get Trips from the Carnegie Library (I just returned a copy) and maybe drop those folks some cash while you’re at it.
Happy reading and cuídate.
