Frankly I Don’t Care

Frankly I Don’t Care

If you’ve never had a nerdy bone in your body, feel free to skip this note. But, if you ever laid on your back under the stars and thought about Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the Space Shuttle, read on and see if you’re as geek-struck as I was researching this. (Unknown observer).

I don’t care what you do as long as it’s something we can be proud of. But why the craze for gadgets? We’ve got all the machines we need. (Arthur C. Clarke, The Lion of Comarre).

Now that all other approaches have failed, the “frankly-I-don’t-care” attitude is the only one left open to me (Megan Jorgensen, Frankly I don’t care)

Fancy an artist saying that anything’s perfect. Father, I’m ashamed of you! ((Arthur C. Clarke, The Lion of Comarre).

Frankly I don't care. Illustration by Elena

It’s not a dark age, because we haven’t forgotten anything. (Arthur C. Clarke, The Lion of Comarre).

I’ve got better things to do with my time. Too much damn gold around, anyhow. I’m after the commercially useful metals – the ones our civilization is going to be desperately short of in another couple of generations. And as a matter of fact, even with my sieve it wouldn’t be worth going after gold. There are only about fifty pound of the stuff in every cubic mile. (Arthur C. Clarke, The Man who Ploughed the Sea).

When are we going to cross interstellar space? – Who wants to go to the stars, anyway? (Arthur C. Clarke, The Lion of Comarre).

Laagi

Laagi

(by Gordon R. Dickson, from The Forever Man)

The human race had been in war with Laagi so long, over five generations, that the contest had become something that was almost as taken for granted as the physical facts of the universe itself. It seemed they had always been at war with the Laagi. They would always be at war with them… these aliens, these people no human had ever seen, whose worlds no human had ever seen; but only the hulls of their heavy-bellied space warships. It was almost as if Mollen had suggested altering all the continents of Earth into unfamiliar shapes.

It was not just what he wanted, of course. It was what everyone wanted. No more of this war which had drained Earth’s resources and brought her nothing in return – unless it was the feeling of being safely entrenched behind a line of fighting spaceships. But with no more Laagi to fight, what was next?

Hopefully, they could then go out to colonize livable worlds, wherever these could be found, which had been what they had been engaged in when they found that there were no ready-to-live-on planets within practical phase-shifting distances, they were the world already occupied by the Laagi or in that area of space to which the Laagi barred the way.

Laagi. Illustration by Elena

No one even knew why the Laagi fought. They had attacked, on contact, the first unarmed human spaceships that had encountered them. Clearly, they would have followed this up by carrying their attacks against Earth, itself, if the aroused world had not hastily combined to arm and man the defensive line in space that was the Frontier. Clarly, the Laagi wanted colonizable planet-space, too: and in spite of the fact no human had ever seen one, Earth must be enough like their world or worlds to be usable.

In the early years after human and Laagi ships had first encountered each other, their ships had come close enough to be observed just outside Earth`s atmosphere. But meanwhile Earth had been frantically building ships fitted for space combat; and by the time the first of these went up in effective numbers, hunting for the Laagi, they had to travel almost as far as the present Frontier before encountering any of them.

But beyond the Frontier all the military strength of Earth had not been able to push, in well over a hundred years. The larger a fleet of fighter ships with which they tried to penetrate, the greater the number of Laagi ships that came to oppose them. Were the Laagi from one world or many? Were they paranoid or reasonable? What were they, physically and mentally?

No Laagi ship ever surrendered. They fought or ran, but once engaged in combat they kept fighting until they were destroyed, or destroyed themselves. Continual efforts to find a way of capturing a Laagi ship had been without success. There seemed to be the equivalent of a dead-man`s switch in each of their ships that triggered its destruction if it became too badly crippled either to run or fight any more.

Did you ever know a spaceship to tell a lie? (Gordon R. Dickson) Illustration : © Megan Jorgensen.

The Forever Man

The Forever Man

By Gordon R. Dickson

There was absolutely no light within the sealed interior of the alien vessel, so Jim did not see in the sense of using his eyes. Rather he felt everything within it so clearly that his mind was able to form a picture of what was there as well as if the interior had been lighted.

It was immediately apparent why the Laagi ships had the pregnant look that was so characteristic of them. The second member of the ship’s crew did not seat behind the first as in the human ships, but directly underneath the first. There was nothing between the two positions, and they were close enough that even human could have reached down, or up, as the case might be, and clasped hands with a shipmate.

But whoever had been the pilot and gunner of this ship – if indeed that was the way the Laagi divided up the duties of the two who operated the vessel – they were now long dead, even though Jim felt that the interior of the ship still held an oxygen-bearing, but unearthlike atmosphere that his body would have tolerated only with difficulty. It was a somewhat sulphurous atmosphere as far as his senses of it could tell him, but what less odorous gases it held beyond that he had no way of telling.

No telling how long the ship has been sitting there (Gordon R. Dickson). Illustration: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The two operating positions in the ship were up front before an open space that was divided into open compartments which could have been bunks or storage spaces. The operating positions consisted essentially of two metallic-looking vertical rings encircling what looked like oversize golf tees. These had their base on flooring behind the rings and angled forward so that the cap of this tee-structure sat in the center of the ring, the cap itself tilted, so it sat horizontally – that is, parallel to the floor below.

The inside of the ring was studded with what were easily recognizable as controls, buttons and small levers. On the cap itself sat something almost indescribable ; what looked like a pile of hooplike rings of bones or cartilage from a quarter to a half-meter in diameter, enclosed with what might have been a dark, thin, leatherlike skin, that was, however, now dried and cracked open under its own weight to show hoopelike bones beneath.  It was hardly possible to relate the remains of skin that rested on and hung down from the two cup-ends with any imaginable shape of living creature.

The instruments and controls also seemed non-functioning. Experimentally, Jim willed some of the buttons and switches into movement, as he was used to doing with those in AndFriend, but nothing happened. The ship was dead – powerless. He was left with the enigma of what he had found, plus something else he could not identify and which he was not entirely sure he would have noticed if he had been there in the flesh.

It was a strangeness – a non-physical feeling that compounded the disgust he might have felt in a charnel house with a sadness of a graveside or a feeling of despair. Now that he had noticed it, it grew on him, mounting steadily from a whisper toward a scream in his mind; and he literally fled, in his point of view, to a position on the outside hull of the alien ship.

Fireflies

Fireflies

(From The Forever Man, by Gordon R. Dickson)

It was unbelievable, not only that, thought Jim, it was just about indescribable.

He and Mary and Squonk were surrounded by what could only be described as a host of innumerable invisible fireflies. Ro call them fireflies and at the same time to say they were invisible was a contradiction in terms, but it was the only way of describing them. They were invisible to any physical sight – even And Friend’s instruments did not register their presence. But his mind saw them very clearly indeed as multitudinous living points of colored lights – lights whose colors changed constantly, so that it was like standing in the midst of a rainbow in the process of sorting itself out from an endless number of tiny component parts.

And they were constantly in motion.

Not only that, but they were not only in the ship but all around it. They were in the interior space of the ship, they were partway through the hull of the ship, they were outside the ship, swarming in space and stretching off into the interstellar distance like the tail of a comet.

They went. It was a magnificent but surprisingly brief trip. Outside the ship as they now were, they were at the head of the comet’s tail of invisible yet rainbow-colored fireflies that were those of 1’s race which had chosen to come along. Illustration : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

– They see us! Like the other one!

– That one doesn’t.

– But these two do. It’s lovely to see and be seen by you.

Their voices rang in Jim’s mind, each one different and memorable. Each one audible separately for a moment before they were drowned by a perfect roar of greetings from what sounded at the very least like hundreds of thousands of such voices, all entirely individual.

Flowers of Edo

Flowers of Edo

By Bruce Sterling

All three men screeched aloud. The armless, legless monster, like a gray cloud on a tether, rolled its glassy eyes at all of them. Its steel teeth gnashed and sparks showed down its throat. It whistled again and made a sudden gnashing lurch at Onogawa.

But Onogawa’s old sword-training had soaked deep into his bones. He leapt aside reflexively, with only a trace of stagger, and gave the thing a smart overhead riposte with his pipe. The demon’s head bonged like an iron kettle. It began chattering angrily and hot steam curled from its nose. Onogawa hit it again. Its head dented. It winced, the glared at the other men.

The townsmen quickly scrambled into line behind their champion. “Get him!” Encho shrieked. Onogawa dodged a hakf0hearted snap of teeth and bashed the monster across the eye. Glass cracked and the bowl flew from Onogawa’s pipe.

But the demon had had enough. With a grumble and crunch like dying gearworks, it retreated back towards its wires, sucking itself back within them, like an octopus into its hole. It vanished, but hissing sparks continued to drip from the wire.

“You humiliated it!” Encho said, his voice filled with awe and admiration. “That was amazing!”

Monster of Edo. Illustration by Elena

“Had enough, eh!” shouted Onogawa furiously, leaning on the sill. “Easy enough mumbling your dirty spells behind our backs! But try an Imperial warrior face to face, and it’s a different story! Hah!”

“What a feat of arms!” said Yoshitoshi, his pudgy face glowing. “I’ll do a picture. Onogawa humiliates a ghoul. Wonderful!

The sparks began to travel down the wire, away from the window. Ìt`s getting away!” Onogawa shouted. “Follow me!”

He shoved himself from the window and ran headlong from the studio. He tripled at the top of the stairs, but did an inspired shoulder-roll and landed on his feet at the door. He yanked it open.

Encho followed him headlong. They had no time to lace on their leather shoes, so they kicked on the wooden clogs of Yoshitoshi and his apprentice and dashed out. Soon they stood under the wires, where the little nest of the sparks still clung. “Come down here, you rascal,” Onogawa demanded. “Show some fighting honor, you skulking wretch!”

(The Year`s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martins`s Press, New York)