Tomorrow Sucks Part 28

There are four 'bots and an Over.

"It is time you left this place," I say. "Shortly it will be night and the werebot will walk. Leave, or he will end you."

"You stopped him!" says the Over. "You are the werebot!"

I bunch all the flowers against my chest with one arm and turn to face them. The Over, a large special-order 'bot, moves toward me. Others are approaching from all directions. He had sent out a call.

"You are a strange and terrible thing," he is saying, "and you must be junked, for the sake of the community."

He seizes me and I drop Kennington's flowers.

I cannot drain him. My coils are already loaded near their capacity, and he is specially insulated.

There are dozens around me now, fearing and hating. They will junk me and I will lie beside Kennington.

"Rust in peace," they will say... I am sorry that I cannot keep my promise toFritz.

"Release him!"

No!

It is shrouded and moldering Fritz in the doorway of the mausoleum, swaying, clutching at the stone. He always knows...

"Release him! I, a human, order it."

He is ashen and gasping, and the sunlight is doing awful things to him.

-The ancient circuits click and suddenly I am free.

"Yes, master," says the Over. "We did not know..."

"Seize that robot!"

He points a shaking emaciated finger at him.

"'He is the werebot," he gasps. "Destroy him! The one gathering flowers was obeying my orders. Leave him here with me."

He falls to his knees and the final darts of day pierce his flesh.

"And go! All the rest of you! Quickly! It is my order that no robot ever enter another graveyard again!"

He collapses within and I know that now there are only bones and bits of rotted shroud on the doorstep of our home.

Fritz has had his final joke-a human masquerade.

I take the roses to Kennington, as the silent 'bots file out through the gate forever, bearing the unprotesting Overbot with them. I place the roses at the foot of the monument-Kennington's and Fritz's-the monument of the last, strange, truly living ones.

Now only I remain unjunked.

In the final light of the sun I see them drive a stake through the Over's vite-box and bury him at the crossroads.

Then they hurry back toward their towers of steel, of plastic.

I gather up what remains of Fritz and carry him down to his box. The bones are brittle and silent.

... It is a very proud and very lonely thing to be a stainless steel leech.

An Anthropological Approach to Vampirism.

T. K. F. Weisskopf.

Among the Lalakai of New Britain in the midst of the Pacific they are called vis, spirits who fly at night and scratch the living's eyes out with their long nails. Crossing the oceans to Ireland in the Atlantic, you will find stories told of the leanhaun sidhe, a female fairy who lives off the life spirit of the men she seduces. And in the rest of Europe we find the vampire. From the dim mists of the pre-Biblical Middle East and cults of blood sacrifice, through the rise of Christianity and reports of spirits of the excommunicated rising from the dead, through the age of great plagues and Vlad the Impaler, and on into the Age of Rationalism and Romantic literature, the myth and metaphor of the vampire has been refined-and grown in its power to move people.

This volume has tried to ill.u.s.trate how the symbol of the vampire, present in almost every culture in the world, still is pertinent to us living in a modern, global community, in an age of technical miracles. This collection is not simply a compilation of supernatural stories. Although all these stories concern a supposedly mythic construct, they are also true science fiction, SF performing the function of SF: interpreting the world in a rational manner.

It has been said that SF is the modern equivalent of ancient myth-making. As a literary genre it helps us interpret our universe, and to make it comprehensible.

Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov and many other students of the field have also called SF a literature of change, irresistible change being the central fact of modem life.

Science fiction in general accustoms the reader not to any specific future or technology that may be coming out way, but to the mere fact that chance is inevitable.

But even in the midst of constant change there is some continuity in our culture.

Besides creating new icons and symbols to help us interpret the universe and accustom us to this unstoppable change (not necessarily progress, mind you), science fiction has also commandeered icons and symbols from all preceding ages of which we have record and reinterpreted them.

For the most part, the vampires of early legend and primitive myth are female bloodsuckers or leechers of life, while the modern European vampire is male: Dracula, not Carmilla, reigns in the popular imagination as the ideal vampire. But in this volume "Shambleau" & "Fleas" follow the model. In Ireland the female leanhaun sidhe act the part of muses (according to Yeats), and the victim, if ambivalent, is at least in part willing to exchange his life's blood for inspiration. So, too, in "Shambleau," the man goes semi-willingly to his doom. The fascination of the vampire is not just that it is horrific, but also that it is seductive. To quote C. L.

Moore: "Dimly he knew it, even as his body answered to the root-deep ecstasy, a foul and dreadful wooing from which his very soul shuddered away-and yet in the innermost depths of that soul some grinning traitor s.h.i.+vered with delight." Part of the human is evil and welcomes the darkness-the apotheosis of the forward-looking, problem-solving, ragged individual that is the quintessential science fictional hero.

We see the dark side of the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p.

In Moore's story, and even in Zelazny's humorous contribution, "The Stainless Steel Leech," the mythic nightmare has been reinterpreted to reflect the specific fearsof our modern culture-the end of civilization, the extinction of humanity, the horrors to be found on the new frontier. Of course, by the mere naming of fears you have started on the road to taming them. Which is one of the functions of science fiction. In several other stories included here, the author goes farther, and seeks to explain the nightmare-it's a perfectly straightforward alien, a disease, a mutation, and so forth-and thereby demystify it. And to my mind, the stories that seek to explain the nightmare, solve the mystery of the myth, do more than just qualify as SF, they perform its primary function: to help us understand and thereby shape our environment and our destiny.

(That, after all, is what the human animal does: the thing that separates us from the rest of Earth's biota is not morphology, but what we've done with our upright stance and larger brains and opposable thumbs. We are the animals who drastically chance the environment to suit ourselves-we are the animals with culture.) SF as a whole has of course not only altered older symbols but introduced new ones into the culture. The robot, the artificial intelligence, the cute little alien, and so on, are part of a modern human's psyche as much as-more than-fairies, witches and G.o.ds. The best science fiction shows that a combination of symbol plus metaphor is one of the most effective linguistic tools humans have for interpreting reality. And this volume has tried to ill.u.s.trate how this treatment of the vampire can be persuasive.

But I wonder, what will the next symbol be for humankind's struggle for control over fate and itself?