The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales Read online

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  The Best of Both Worlds

  and Other Ambiguous Tales

  By Brian Stableford

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  Borgo Press Books by BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Algebraic Fantasies and Realistic Romances: More Masters of Science Fiction

  Alien Abductions: The Wiltshire Revelations

  The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

  Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica

  Changelings and Other Metamorphic Tales

  A Clash of Symbols: The Triumph of James Blish

  The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

  The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse

  The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future

  Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future

  The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions

  Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence

  Gothic Grotesques: Essays on Fantastic Literature

  The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions

  Heterocosms: Science Fiction in Context and Practice

  In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

  Jaunting on the Scoriac Tempests and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

  The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future

  News of the Black Feast and Other Random Reviews

  An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels

  Opening Minds: Essays on Fantastic Literature

  Outside the Human Aquarium: Masters of Science Fiction, Second Edition

  The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera

  Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

  The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas

  Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

  The Sociology of Science Fiction

  Space, Time, and Infinity: Essays on Fantastic Literature

  The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below

  Yesterday’s Bestsellers: A Voyage Through Literary History

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  The Borgo Press

  An Imprint of Wildside Press LLC

  MMIX

  Copyright © 1966, 1976, 1982, 1991, 1994, 2002, 2008, 2009 by Brian Stableford

  www.wildsidepress.com

  FIRST EDITION

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  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Introduction

  The Best of Both Worlds

  The Highway Code

  Captain Fagan Died Alone

  The Face of an Angel

  Vesterhen

  The Bad Seed

  The Man Who Came Back

  Appearances

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, and The Stones of Camelot. Collections of his short stories include Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution, Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and Sheena and Other Gothic Tales. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950, Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence, and Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical entries to reference books, including both editions of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and several editions of the library guide, Anatomy of Wonder. He has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including several by the feuilletonist Paul Feval and various classics of French scientific romance.

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  INTRODUCTION

  It may seem superfluous to subtitle a collection with the description of “ambiguous tales”, since any tale that was not ambiguous would not be worth telling. If ambiguity did not exist, fiction— from the humblest one-liner to the vastest epic—would not exist either, because we would not only be able to content ourselves with actuality but would have no alternative. One can elaborate this issue in high-flown academic terms by citing such classic works of aesthetic analysis as Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction, the Inklings’ Bible, but there really is no need; it is perfectly obvious that if double meanings did not exist, we would have to invent them. (Put simply, Barfield’s argument is that there never was a time when they didn’t, so we didn’t.)

  There are, however, degrees in ambiguity just as there are in everything else, and there are also different sorts of ambiguity— seven is the most oft-quoted number—ranging from the commonplace and conventional to the abstruse and tortuous, so some tales are more ambiguous than others, and may be ambiguous in more or less commonplace ways. By the same token, there are writers who merely accept ambiguity as a necessity, writers who cultivate it as a staple crop and writers ambitious to become explorers in search of rare and exotic ambiguity. I have always aspired to membership in the last-named category, although I am not entirely confident that my quests have had as much success as I could have hoped. At any rate, in labeling the items in this collection “ambiguous tales” I am aiming for something a little more meaningful than mere tautology, hopeful that the ambiguities they contain might, at the least, be a trifle odd, even within the context of the routine oddities of science fiction and fantasy.

  The great but somewhat under-appreciated science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt learned to write pulp fiction by studying the advice manuals of the great but somewhat under-appreciated advice-manual writer John Gallishaw, whose techniques of scenic analysis and strategic planning he used religiously. Like any inventive writer, however, van Vogt added a wrinkle of his own to his theory and method, which he called the theory of “fictional sentences”. According to this theory, different genres of pulp fiction were distinguished not only by the specifics of their content, but also by their typical narrative style.

  Having started out writing romances and “true confession” stories, van Vogt was of the opinion that such stories worked best if every substantial sentence they contained featured some reference to emotion, and that the key feature of the “fictional sentences” of the romance genre was that emotional reference. When he switched to science fiction writing, he immediately set out to discover what the key feature of the “fictional sentences” of the sf genre ought to be. He came to the conclusion that it was uncertainty—which is to say that every substantial sentence in a science fiction story should contain a reference that was deliberately underspecified, thus creating a superabundance of ambiguity and generating new dimensions of imaginative space for the temptation of the reader’s curiosity.

  The ultimate effect of the assiduous application of this theory, according to some excessively-pedantic readers, was that van Vogt’s work became literally incomprehensible, because it was impossible for the reader to work out what the hell was supposed to be happening, but connoisseurs of rare and exotic ambiguity found the additional wiggle-room both intriguing and exhilarating. I have never been nearly as assiduous in my literary method as A. E. van Vogt, and am quite willing to admit that I have penned the occasional sentenc
e whose meaning is crystal clear, but I have always tried to compensate for that failing as much as is humanly possible by means of a liberal but carefully-applied gloss of sarcasm, which hopefully makes it impossible for readers to figure out whether or not I mean what I am saying. Mostly, admittedly, I don’t—but every now and again I do, and because that possibility, or threat, is always there, so is the edge of potential ambiguity. Not all readers appreciate this as much as I would like them to do, and I suppose that I ought to apologize to the others, but the apology would inevitably be sarcastically ambiguous, so it can be taken as read.

  At any rate, no mater how many failed fictional sentences there are in the stories included here, I have tried to ascertain that their perennial keynote is uncertainty. They feature events of dubious significance, seen from unreliable narrative viewpoints. The stories themselves do make some pretence of instructing the reader as to what to think about the extraordinary hypothetical events described therein, but the postures in question are inherently deceptive. Some readers might think this a lazy way to write, in that it lets me off the hook of having to decide what I think about them myself, but I am only human; if I had already made up my mind what to think about things, I probably wouldn’t be a writer at all. I certainly wouldn’t be a writer of science fiction and fantasy stories, never content to deal with conventional views of what is, but insistent instead on dealing with all kinds of bizarre possibilities that never were and never will be, and are intellectually interesting for exactly that reason.

  My favorite story in the book is “The Highway Code”, because it is the only one that has a central character with whom I can truly sympathize and admire (alert readers will notice that he is loosely based on one of the great heroes of modern mythology, Thomas the Tank Engine), but I could not call the book The Highway Code lest it cause dire confusion to British learner drivers, so I settled for The Best of Both Worlds instead.

  The substance of “The Face of an Angel” was subsequently absorbed into the text of a novel called The Moment of Truth (Borgo Press, 2009), but the transfiguration forced the story to mutate so considerably that the two texts remain quite different in their narrative implications—one of the many fortunate corollaries of calculated ambiguity.

  “The Man Who Came Back” was the first story I published under my own name, its only predecessor being a pseudonymous collaboration, and the contrast it provides with the more recent publications will hopefully illustrate the vast artistic strides I have made in the interim, while never sacrificing my steadfast commitment to uncertainty.

  “Appearances” was written when one of my ex-students from the M.A. in “Writing for Children” at the University of Winchester went to work for a Mexican publisher editing a line of dark fantasy novellas aimed at a teenage audience; unfortunately, the publisher ran into difficulties (as Mexican publishers are wont to do), so the opportunity for her to translate it into Spanish vanished into the misty maze of unrealized possibilities, like so many other fond and fabulous hopes.

  “The Best of Both Worlds” first appeared in Postscripts 15 (Summer 2008). “The Highway Code” first appeared in We Think, Therefore We Are, edited by Peter Crowther and published by DAW Books in 2009. “Captain Fagan Died Alone” first appeared in The DA W Science Fiction Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and published by DAW in 1976. “The Face of an Angel” first appeared in Leviathan 3, edited by Forrest Aguirre and Jeff Vandermeer, published by the Ministry of Whimsy in 2002. “Vesterhen” first appeared in German translation in Pilger Durch Raum und Zeit, edited by Peter Wilfert and published by Goldmann in 1982; the first publication of the English version was in the Kongressbok Confuse 91 in 1991. “The Bad Seed” first appeared in Interzone 82 (April 1994). “The Man Who Came Back” first appeared in Impulse 8 (October 1966). “Appearances” appears here for the first time.

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  THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

  Since Emily had died I had become exceedingly restless, unable to settle to my own work—indeed, I no longer found it possible to think of writing articles for Blackwood’s and the Monthly Review as “work”—and equally unable to take solace in the genius of other men that was stored in my father’s library.

  My father was in London, fully absorbed by the duties of his military career, but I was glad of that, for his innocently cheerful presence would have seemed an insult. Had he not lost the love of his life too, albeit twenty-and-one years before? How could he tolerate his own comfortable contentment, with that kind of void at the core of his existence? How could he bear to look at me, let alone love me, knowing that it was in giving birth to me that his wife had died?

  Emily, dear heart, had not lived long enough to celebrate our wedding, let alone to give birth to my child, but that did not make my pain one whit less intense. I felt that my soul had been ripped apart, and could never be healed

  I had taken to wandering on the moors every day, whatever the weather. At first, I had done so merely in order to walk from our isolated house at Stonecroft to the village churchyard in Haughtonlin, where Emily was buried, but it had become so very difficult to tear myself away from my meditation in order to return to the awful normality of home that I had taken to going further on rather than reversing my direction. Nor did I stick to the path that would around the hillside before crossing the beck at the little wooden bridge and making its way back to the York road. Instead, I plunged into the wilderness of gorse and heather, punctuated by hawthorn spinneys and outcrops of black rock, which dressed the slopes above the bog, forming a basin whose broken granite rim served as a source for rills that combined their trickling waters lower down to form the beck.

  It was desolate land, impossible to cultivate, into which sheep were reluctant to stray, and it suited the temper of my moods very well. The cloud which, by some freak of nature, always dressed the summit of Arnlea Moor came to seem strangely welcoming, although I usually refrained from going so far up the hill as to immerse myself in its mists.

  My father had hoped that I might make a soldier, like him, but I had no appetite at all for the looming conflict in the Crimea. My childhood dreams had been fantasies of exploration, following in the footsteps of James Cook or Mungo Park. Had I not fallen in love with Emily, I might have taken ship for the Pacific isles or the shores of darkest Africa, but she had kept me at home, and kept me still now that she had been laid to rest in the soil of Arnleadale. It was easy enough, however, to imagine myself as an explorer whenever I ventured into the upper reaches of the vale, struggling through what was, in a literal though perhaps rather trivial sense, trackless wilderness. There were foxes and pheasants living wild on the heath, but no hunt or shooting-party ever came this far from either of the manor houses that presided like Medieval forts over the valley’s neck. Stonecroft, which had once belonged to one of Lord Arnlea’s stewards but had been sold off fifty years before, was the limit at which sport stopped and untroubled Nature began.

  My father, a devotee of natural theology, had often said that there was more to be learned about the mysterious mind of God in the bleak and misty head of the valley than there was from its carefully tamed and excessively man-handled mouth. I was not so sure that what was revealed there was the mind of God, but I had thought the judgment likely to be truthful even before I lost my lovely Emily. Afterwards, I became convinced. Even so, I had difficulty following my father’s perennial advice to see the Divine Plan in everything that existed or occurred upon the Earth. What kind of divinity could possibly manifest itself in the premature death of such a charming soul as Emily?

  I was never intimidated in my excursions by the weather, although the moor could become a direly dismal place when the ever-present cloud turned to drizzle, or when a brisk west wind brought darker clouds scurrying from the distant Atlantic Ocean to unleash a deluge on the slopes. There was no man-made shelter in the wilderness, but there were natural coverts formed by overhanging rocks, and clefts that sometimes extended back int
o the hillside to become pot-holes. I knew many of them, though by no means them all, and regarded them as my own.. .until, one day, I raced to the remotest of them all to escape a sudden squall, and found it already occupied, by a young woman dressed in black.

  I had never seen her before, and was quite at a loss to understand how she had got there, since I would surely have caught a glimpse of her had she come by way of Haughtonlin. When I saw her, I hesitated at the mouth of the cave, and was actually about to turn around and go back into the storm when she spoke.

  “There’s no need to get wet on my account,” she said, in a soft and strangely musical voice. “The shelter is narrow, but there’s room enough for two. The shower cannot last long at this level of violence.”

  I hesitated still, studying her carefully. Her coat was long, and bulky enough to conceal the precise contours of her body her walking-boots sturdy. Her bonnet was as black as her coat, and so was the hair tucked up within it. Her complexion was pale—which made her eyebrows stand out remarkably—and her eyes were grey, completing the strange impression that she was a figure drawn in monochrome, a charcoal sketch rather than a portrait in oils.

  Eventually, I bowed, and said: “I’m Edward Grayling of Stonecroft. I apologize for my rudeness, but I was startled to find anyone abroad in this lonely region—especially a woman.”

  “My name is Mary McQueen,” she said, lightly. “I fear that I’m a little lost. I’m staying at Raggandale Hall, and I do not know the county at all.”