Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction
Dan Simmons
Other Books by Dan Simmons
Song of Kali
Phases of Gravity
Carrion Comfort
Hyperion
The Fall of Hyperion
Prayers to Broken Stones
Summer of Night
The Hollow Man
Children of the Night
Summer Sketches
Lovedeath
Fires of Eden
Endymion
The Rise of Endymion
The Crook Factory
Darwin’s Blade
A Winter Haunting
Hardcase
Hard Freeze
A Grazing Encounter Between Two Spiral Galaxies
“Looking for Kelly Dahl,” © 1995 by Dan Simmons, first appeared in High Fantastic, ed. by Steve Rasnic Tern, Ocean View Books. “Orphans of the Helix,” © 1999 by Dan Simmons, first appeared in Far Horizons, ed. by Robert Silverberg, Avon Eos. “The Ninth of Av,” © 2000, by Dan Simmons, first appeared as “Le 9 av” in Destination 3001, ed. by Jacques Chambon and Robert Silverberg, Imagine/Flammarion (Paris). “On K2 with Kanakaredes,” © 2001 by Dan Simmons, first appeared in Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, ed. by Al Sarrantonio, Roc (New American Library). “The End of Gravity,” © 2002 by Dan Simmons.
Frontispiece copyright NASA and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)
This is a collection of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2002 by Dan Simmons
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simmons, Dan.
Worlds enough & time: Five tales of speculative fiction / Dan Simmons.
p.cm.
Contents: Looking for Kelly Dahl—Orphans of the Helix—The Ninth of Av—On K2 with Kanakaredes—The End of Gravity.
ISBN 0-06-050604-0
1. Science fiction, American. I. Title: Worlds enough & time. II. Title.
PS3569.I47292 W67 2002
813'.54-dc21 2002069224
First Eos trade paperback printing: December 2002
Eos Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries,
Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S.A.
HarperCollins® is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Printed in the U.S.A.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
CONTENTS
Introduction
Introduction to “Looking for Kelly Dahl”
Looking for Kelly Dahl
Introduction to “Orphans of the Helix”
Orphans of the Helix
Introduction to “The Ninth of Av”
The Ninth of Av
Introduction to “On K2 with Kanakaredes”
On K2 with Kanakaredes
Introduction to “The End of Gravity”
The End of Gravity
Introduction
...............................
“Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.” This line begins and ends one of my favorite novels, John Fowles’s Daniel Martin, and it took me four or five readings of the book to understand the full impact of the phrase—not just in relation to that novel, but as a cri de coeur from the very heart of the heart of art and as an imperative for all novelists, all writers, all artists. In the penultimate scene of Daniel Martin, the eponymous character encounters this command in the gaze of the elderly Rembrandt, the arc of uncompromised energy leaping from the aged eyes in one of the Master’s final self-portraits. I’ve also received that sledgehammer blow of encounter with one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, and I agree with this translation as both ultimate question and ultimate answer to the creative artist’s queries.
I’ve never really trusted introductions to stories as a means to gain a clearer view of the fiction itself. As a reader, I tend to enjoy introductions, but I’m wary of them; too many seem to have what John Keats called (in reference to bad poetry)—“…a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.” As a writer, I believe that fiction—like art—should stand alone and be judged alone, and not be camouflaged or apologized for in a barrage of verbiage.
And yet…
As both a reader and writer, I enjoy seeing the stories of some of my favorite writers set in context by introductions. My friend Harlan Ellison said in a recent Locus interview, “Everybody says, ‘You should write your autobiography.’ I say, ‘I’ve been writing it in bits and pieces in the introductions, in every story I write.’” While I have no urge to write an autobiography, I confess that I enjoy Harlan’s passionate and revelatory introductions and admit to remembering some of those intros even after I’ve forgotten the details in the particular stories they were introducing.
Unlike gifted performance artists who find an audience everywhere—passengers in an elevator, say, or fellow diners in a restaurant—I am a private person and fully intend to stay that way. At times, my passion for privacy in an age that seems to hold no interest in privacy and every interest in total revelation makes me seem stuffy. No, it makes me stuffy. “Don’t tell and I won’t ask” could be my policy toward much of the too-confiding world.
But as a novelist and occasional writer of short fiction, I’ve already voluntarily breached that wall of privacy. “Writers are exorcists of their own demons,” said Mario Vargas Llosa, and the corollary to the maxim is Henry James’s observation that the writer is present in “…every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.”
So perhaps context, not clarification, is the saving grace of introductions such as those scattered through this collection. Or perhaps these intros are a simple form of good manners, such as saying “Hi” to other hikers encountered on a trail here in the Rockies where I live. Done right, it does not intrude on the scenery and solitude that are the real reasons for hiking there, or for reading these stories.
THE five long tales collected here were written over the past few years that saw dramatic but not necessarily visible changes in this particular writer. As Dante begins his Inferno (Mandelbaum translation)—
“When I had journeyed half our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:
so bitter—death is hardly more severe!
But to retell the good discovered there,
I’ll also tell the other things I saw.”
This sounds a bit too melodramatic; it would seem that not many of us get a guided tour to and through the Ninth Circle of Hell—but, of course, most of us do sooner or later. And many of us—but not all—are lucky enough to crawl down (or up, since he’s buried upside down in the icy Ninth Circle) the hairy shins of Satan and get out again, if not upward through the Purgatorio to Paradiso, at least back into the light of a regular wor
kday.
I do have a recommendation here. If and when any of you suddenly find yourself in such a dark wood, at such a place where the simplest things begin to ravel (which means the same as “unravel,” delightfully enough), I recommend that you scrape together enough money for a few months of therapy and then skip the therapy, but fly, instead, to the island of Maui, and then drive to the all-but-uninhabited northeast side, perhaps renting a small hale near the village of Hana (population 800) and, once there, eat mostly rice and vegetables, go to sleep to the sound of the surf, awake to the predawn “white rain of Hana” on the metal roof, hike much, draw some, write a little (if you can), and listen to some music if your mood allows. Near Hana, Waianapanapa State Park and its black sand beach are a great jumping off point for coastal hikes—either south toward Hana Town or, more interestingly, north several miles toward the little Hana airport. If you walk away from Hana, be careful, for the ancient Hawaiian “paved trail” that runs along the bare, volcanic shore cliffs is neither paved nor much of a trail and is sometimes treacherous, requiring the hiker to jump over blowholes and to find one’s way along high bluffs falling away to rocks and crashing surf. Even if there’s a mild siren’s song there, the walk is wonderful—far too perfect with its mild rains and following rainbows arching above the great green shoulder of Haleakala for you to be distracted for long.
Five days there should suffice. A week would be better.
THE long stories collected here in WORLDS ENOUGH & TIME—I suspect they’re mostly novellas, or perhaps novelettes, but I always forget the word-length distinction, so I’ll just call them “long stories”—have no overriding architecture, but they probably do resonate to some common themes.
When writers get into discussing themes, they tend to sound pretentious, so I’ll apologize in advance if the following comments come across that way. But sooner or later, everyone has to talk about his or her craft—in terms, at least, of ambition, if not necessarily of accomplishment.
Ideally, these stories (and my longer fiction) would embody the concept of niwa, which, in turn, would include the elements of fukinsei, kanso, koko, datsuzoku, seijaku, and shibui, with all of these attributes being enhanced by the resonance of wabi and sabi. This doesn’t happen to be the case, but more and more it appears to be my goal.
About ten years ago, I traveled with a friend to Japan and other parts of Asia, ostensibly to research a novel (although the research decided that the novel should not be written) but actually to visit Zen gardens.
The Japanese word for garden is niwa, but it also means “a pure place.” As with appreciating any fine art, a certain amount of education is required before reviewing Zen gardens or moss gardens or any of a variety of Japanese gardens. As with fiction or visual art, a simple thing can mean much more than first encounter suggests: raked gravel for the sea, a rock for islands holding millions of souls, a simple shrub for all the forests.
In such gardens—and increasingly, I think, in my fiction—a controlling element is fukinsei—the precept that the principle controlling the balance of composition should always be asymmetrical. A little-known fact of aesthetics is that all human beings seem to be wired to prefer—whether they know it or not—in flower arrangements, the composition of smooth stones interior design, architecture, art, fiction—either symmetry or asymmetry. Most people in Western cultures gravitate to symmetry, sometimes rigid symmetry. The elements of a Japanese garden, as in so much of that aesthetic, celebrate asymmetry. Life, I think, is not so symmetrical as our local sensibilities would have it be.
The themes of my work, I’ve noticed after almost two decades of professional striving, seem to circle back to certain explorations of love and loss, while my craft increasingly becomes a search for kanso (simplicity) and its sibling but not-twin, koko, a quest for austerity and maturity, a return to the bare essentials and an honoring of the venerable. For style, as much as I love reading Oondatje or Nabokov-type lyrical prose, I would, as the gardener in Nara would, choose shizen, a naturalness, a deliberate absence of pretense. Sometimes such simplicity is obtained through finding seijaku—a choice of silence rather than noise, of calm rather than excitation.
Sometimes not.
Shibui, wabi, and sabi are complex ideas and while I have not obtained them as goals in life or fiction, neither can I escape them as recurring obsessions in my work. Wabi includes the underlying Zen-essence of understanding that in the bloom of time comes the first embrace of oblivion. The Zen-garden of Ryoanzi Garden is raked thrice daily, clearing the gravel of the fallen petals from the overhanging tree, but the perfection of the gravel and stone garden is found in precisely those aberrant petals—precisely in that random but inevitable encounter with the dying beauty that is being raked away, reminding us that even as we celebrate life and beauty, we’re being deprived of something irreplaceable. Sabi, the discovery of such beauty in the patina of time, in the lichen on the stone and the weathered fallen tree, tends to remind us that time is generous to things but brutal as hell to us human beings. Perhaps we have worlds enough in our three-score-and-ten, but time denies us room to celebrate those worlds; time is the only gift that takes away everything and everyone we love if we get enough of it. The acknowledgment and perhaps celebration of sabi—that first embrace of oblivion even as we hold tight those people and things we love—is the touchstone for several of the stories in this collection.
Quite a few of us have encountered the word shibui, that all-but-untranslatable word that signifies good taste but which means, literally, the puckery, stringent quality found when biting into a green persimmon. This has been my life experience with nature—a celebration of its beauty and complexity while always resisting the urge to sentimentalize it. We are, I think, in an age not only of sentimentality, but of regressive immaturity, where we find it all but impossible to see that there is something not sweet or benevolent in nature, a restraint, an essential sour tang that makes the central purity all the sweeter in the tasting. My strange girl-prophet, Kelly Dahl, tries to teach this persimmon tartness reality of life to her former teacher, and perhaps this is part of the undelivered message carried to Earth by Kanakaredes and his crèche brothers. I know that it was the central message of Aenea, the reluctant messiah who shaped the human universe in “Orphans of the Helix.”
Yugen requires a subtlety profound, demands suggestion rather than revelation. Combine that with the principle of datsuzoku—an unworldliness having nothing to do with eccentricity, a transcendence of the conventional in ways never imagined by conforming rebel types—and fiction achieves that element of strangeness which the critic Harold Bloom points out is the common element of enduring literature, whether encountered in Shakespeare or Jane Austen or John Fowles.
COME with me, then, into a Zen-garden. There will be fire in the form of a stone or iron lantern. There will be earth in the form of a stone. There will be water, air, plants, and animals in their true forms. There will always be water, even if just by suggestion or by the elegant parade of raindrops down a waterfall chain.
The garden path, the roji, is more philosophy than stone. Every step is designed to bring the visitor and viewer further from the mirror of the passing world and into its opposite. The stepstones of the roji are deliberately placed in irregular cadence (in obedience to the principles of fukinsei) so as to make the watcher look down, to take nothing for granted, to watch his step, and to notice the vistas and views. There are larger standing-on stones for those vistas and views, and also to create pauses for mediation on what has been seen or missed.
To see a Zen-garden fully, we will need the subtle vision of yugen—the Zen-gardener’s mastery of partly hidden views, of deliberately indistinct areas made relative to shadows, as well as an eye for the completeness glimpsed in partial reflections in water, and a full sense of the beauty of darkly revealed forms and layers of meaning. Such joy is found in moon shadows in pond reflections, in stone, in sand textures, in symbols, and in subtle shadows of bamboo on bambo
o in moonlight.
Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.
Introduction to “Looking for Kelly Dahl”
...............................
This is a story about love, loss, betrayal, obsession, and middle-aged angst—in other words, your basic light romantic comedy.
“Kelly Dahl” appeared on OMNI-online and was printed in High Fantastic, a hardcover anthology edited by Steve Rasnic Tem and featuring all Colorado authors of fantastic fiction, but the story was written for none of these markets. It was just written.
One reaction I’ve received repeatedly to the story is odd. People ask, “Is there a real Kelly Dahl?”
Well, there is, actually. Kelly Dahl is the name of a Colorado campground set along the Peak to Peak Highway south of Nederland but north of the old mining towns (now gambling towns) of Blackhawk and Central City.
I got lost in a darkling wood near Kelly Dahl some years ago. I’m fairly certain it’s the only time I’ve ever been lost in the woods or mountains, and it was silly since I’d just gone a quarter of a mile or so from the national forest campground (I usually camp far from such places, backpacking away from people) to watch a sunset from a high ridge. Then, in taking a shortcut back to the campsite, I ended up wandering for a couple of hours through a pitch-black forest of lodgepole pine. I hate lodgepole pine woods. The trees are scruffy, pruning their branches lower down so that only the tops of the trees have living needles to catch the sunlight—which results in a forest of telephone poles growing so close together it’s hard to squeeze through them while the canopy above blots out the sky. Even someone with a reliable built-in sense of direction such as me can get lost while wiggling and waggling his way through hillsides of lodgepole pine.
Or so I reassure myself.
At any rate, I found a road after ninety minutes or so of pushing through undergrowth and lodgepole pine, but it wasn’t the Peak to Peak Highway, the only road running north and south along the Continental Divide there. It was dark. It was very dark, and although I wasn’t really lost any longer since following that access road uphill would, theoretically, get me back to the Peak to Peak, I decided to stop at a farmhouse—the only home along this road—to ask if Kelly Dahl Campground lay north or south of the theoretical intersection with the highway.
