“Studying us,” Taki said. “Let them,” but he rolled away and released her. They were alone in the room. He would have seen the mene easily in the dark. “Hesper,” he said. “There’s no one here.”

  She lay rigid on her side of their bed. He saw the stitching of her backbone disappearing into her neck and had a sudden feeling that he could see everything about her, how she was made, how she was held together. It made him no less angry.

  “I’m sorry,” Hesper told him, but he didn’t believe her. Even so, he was asleep before she was. He made his own breakfast the next morning without leaving anything out for her. He was gone before she had gotten out of bed.

  The mene were gathering food, dried husks thick enough to protect the liquid fruit during the two-star dry season. They punctured the husks with their needle-thin teeth. Several crowded about him, greeting him with their fingers, checking his pockets, removing his recorder and passing it about until one of them dropped it in the dust. When they returned to work, Taki retrieved it, wiped it as clean as he could. He sat down to watch them, logged everything he observed. He noted in particular how often they touched each other and wondered what each touch meant. Affection? Communication? Some sort of chain of command?

  Later he went underground again, choosing another tunnel, looking for one which wouldn’t narrow so as to exclude him, but finding himself beside the same lake with the same narrow access ahead. He went deeper this time until it gradually became too close for his shoulders. Before him he could see a luminescence; he smelled the dusty odor of the mene and could just make out a sound, too, a sort of movement, a grass-rubbing-together sound. He stooped and strained his eyes to see something in the faint light. It was like looking into the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. The tunnel narrowed and narrowed. Beyond it must be the mene homes and he could never get into them. He contrasted this with the easy access they had to his home. At the end of his vision he thought he could just see something move, but he wasn’t sure. A light touch on the back of his neck and another behind his knee startled him. He twisted around to see a group of the mene crowded into the tunnel behind him. It gave him a feeling of being trapped and he had to force himself to be very gentle as he pushed his way back and let the mene go through. The dark pattern of their wings stood in high relief against the luminescent bodies. The human faces grew smaller and smaller until they disappeared.

  “Leave me alone,” Hesper told him. It took Taki completely by surprise. He had done nothing but enter the bedroom; he had not even spoken yet. “Just leave me alone.”

  Taki saw no signs that Hesper had ever gotten up. She lay against the pillow and her cheek was still creased from the wrinkles in the sheets. She had not been crying. There was something worse in her face, something which alarmed Taki.

  “Hesper?” he asked. “Hesper? Did you eat anything? Let me get you something to eat.”

  It took Hesper a moment to answer. When she did, she looked ordinary again. “Thank you,” she said. “I am hungry.” She joined him in the outer room, wrapped in their blanket, her hair tangled around her face. She got a drink for herself, dropping the empty glass once, stooping to retrieve it. Taki had the strange impression that the glass fell slowly. When they had first arrived, the gravitational pull had been light, just perceptibly lighter than Earth’s. Without quite noticing, this had registered on him in a sort of lightheartedness. But Hesper had complained of feelings of dislocation, disconnection. Taki put together a cold breakfast, which Hesper ate slowly, watching her own hands as if they fascinated her. Taki looked away. “Fork,” she said. He looked back. She was smiling at him.

  “What?”

  “Fork.”

  He understood. “Not art.”

  “Four tines?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Roses carved on the handle.”

  “Well then, art. Because of the handle. Not because of the tines.” He was greatly reassured.

  The mene came while he was telling her about the tunnel. They put their dusty fingers in her food, pulled it apart. Hesper set her fork down and pushed the plate away. When they reached for her she pushed them away, too. They came back. Hesper shoved harder.

  “Hesper,” said Taki

  “I just want to be left alone. They never leave me alone.” Hesper stood up, towering above the mene. The blanket fell to the floor. “We flew here,” Hesper said to the mene. “Did you see the ship? Didn’t you see the pod? Doesn’t that interest you? Flying?” She laughed and flapped her arms until they froze, horizontal at her sides. The mene reached for her again and she brought her arms in to protect her breasts, pushing the mene away repeatedly, harder and harder, until they tired of approaching her and went into the bedroom, reappearing with her poems in their hands. The door sealed behind them.

  “I’ll get them back for you,” Taki promised, but Hesper told him not to bother.

  “I haven’t written in weeks,” she said. “In case you hadn’t noticed. I haven’t finished a poem since I came here. I’ve lost that. Along with everything else.” She brushed at her hair rather frantically with one hand. “It doesn’t matter,” she added. “My poems? Not art.”

  “Are you the best person to judge that?” Taki asked.

  “Don’t patronize me.” Hesper returned to the table, looked again at the plate which held her unfinished breakfast, dusty from handling. “My critical faculties are still intact. It’s just the poetry that’s gone.” She took the dish to clean it, scraped the food away. “I was never any good,” she said. “Why do you think I came here? I had no poetry of my own so I thought I’d write the mene’s. I came to a world without words. I hoped it would be clarifying. I knew there was a risk.” Her hands moved very fast. “I want you to know I don’t blame you.”

  “Come and sit down a moment, Hesper,” Taki said, but she shook her head. She looked down at her body and moved her hands over it.

  “They feel sorry for us. Did you know that? They feel sorry about our bodies.”

  “How do you know that?” Taki asked.

  “Logic. We have these completely functional bodies. No useless wings. Not art.” Hesper picked up the blanket and headed for the bedroom. At the cloth curtain she paused a moment. “They love our loneliness, though. They’ve taken all mine. They never leave me alone now.” She thrust her right arm suddenly out into the air. It made the curtain ripple. “Go away,” she said, ducking behind the sheet.

  Taki followed her. He was very frightened. “No one is here but us, Hesper,” he told her. He tried to put his arms around her but she pushed him back and began to dress.

  “Don’t touch me all the time,” she said. He sank onto the bed and watched her. She sat on the floor to fasten her boots.

  “Are you going out, Hesper?” he asked and she laughed.

  “Hesper is out,” she said. “Hesper is out of place, out of time, out of luck, and out of her mind. Hesper has vanished completely. Hesper was broken into and taken.”

  Taki fastened his hands tightly together. “Please don’t do this to me, Hesper,” he pleaded. “It’s really so unfair. When did I ask so much of you? I took what you offered me; I never took anything else. Please don’t do this.”

  Hesper had found the brush and was pulling it roughly through her hair. He rose and went to her, grabbing her by the arms, trying to turn her to face him. “Please, Hesper!”

  She shook loose from him without really appearing to notice his hands, continued to work through the worst of her tangles. When she did turn around, her face was familiar, but somehow not Hesper’s face. It was a face which startled him.

  “Hesper is gone,” it said. “We have her. You’ve lost her. We are ready to talk to you. Even though you will never, never, never understand.” She reached out to touch him, laying her open palm against his cheek and leaving it there.

  Introduction to “Cabracan”

  by Lewis Shiner

  Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling are friends and, through playing ideas off each other, have come to have some opinions in common. Shiner also seemed to enjoy the early notoriety of the movement that later became “cyberpunk,” but wore his mirrorshades as a joke, really. For at the same time that cyberpunk was first penetrating the consciousness of a certain segment of the American culture, Shiner was talking with real excitement about mainstream authors that he admired, and how he wanted to write something other than science fiction. Or perhaps I should say “in addition to” science fiction, for with Shiner there was no ringing declaration that he was not a sci-fi writer.

  Which just goes to show you Shiner’s class. He didn’t have to reject one community in order to embrace another.

  There are various reasons why some writers make vehement denials that what they write is science fiction, even though it is obvious that they have and they do. Sometimes it is snobbery—one thinks at once of Margaret Atwood, who, had she not been too arrogant to read science fiction in order to learn from it, might not have done such a clumsy job of handling exposition in The Handmaid’s Tale. But so grimly determined is she not to confess to having perpetrated that loathsome thing, sci-fi, that she can’t even manage ordinary civility when sharing a public platform with a known science fiction writer.

  Other writers, though, become quite frustrated at the science fiction label, because it limits what they can write and publish. Those limits are real. For instance, I have a story called “Feed the Baby of Love” that cries out to be a short novel. But it hasn’t found a publisher because no one wants to take a chance on a completely mainstream smalltown love story by a “science fiction writer.” Thus my relative success in science fiction has put serious roadblocks in my way as a writer of other kinds of fiction. This is especially frustrating because at no point in my career has even half my writing been genuine science fiction and fantasy. But the public perception—or rather, the bookstore buyers’ and publishers’ and marketers’ perception—means that I cannot write out of category, at least not under my own name.

  That kind of narrow categorizing functions even within the genre of speculative fiction. A science fiction writer I very much admire has recently had to make the painful decision to publish his latest book, the start of a fantasy trilogy, under another name, for apparently fantasy readers won’t embrace a writer perceived as a sci-fi guy. Or at least not in sufficient numbers.

  Thus I understand perfectly why Harlan Ellison and Kurt Vonnegut both made ringing declarations of the non-science-fictional nature of their fiction—this despite the obvious fact that both of them had written within the genre and showed intense awareness of how it is properly done. Ellison has won about as many Hugos as you can win and not get lynched by the other writers. Vonnegut has always written science fiction as an insider, and his work has strayed less from the genre’s boundaries than the work of, say, Ray Bradbury, who has never denied his science fiction roots.

  But that’s not a fair comparison, because Ray Bradbury, like Ursula K. Le Guin, was embraced by the academic-literary community without having to deny his previous work. This luxurious gift is bestowed only by whim, however, and is not to be had for the asking. Even those writers who most slavishly imitate the manners and methods of li-fi in their sci-fi are contemptuously ignored by the literati, for begging to be admitted to the “cool” group is the surest way to be despised by them—a lesson we all learned in middle school, I thought.

  Harlan Ellison and Kurt Vonnegut were not begging for academic-literary respectability, however; to one degree or another, both of them already had it. What they wanted was to be published out of category. They wanted not to be shelved with the science fiction in some back corner of the bookstore. They felt that their audience was much wider than the dedicated aficionados of the genre, and correctly so. They wanted not to be limited in the way their books were presented to the public, in the kind of reader who would be permitted to find their work.

  Lew Shiner, at that point in his career, was not yet well enough known as a science fiction writer to be confined within boundaries. He still had the freedom to choose what kind of writing he would do. So no public declaration was required, no furious negotiations with publishers to insist that certain labels not be placed on his books.

  What Shiner was bound to run into was another wall: Science fiction is easier to break into than mainstream fiction.

  Why is that? Because it’s so easy to write?

  Not at all. In fact, if it were easy to write science fiction, it would be one of the hardest fields to break into, because so many people want to write it that there would be far more competition for each slot in the magazines or in publishers’ schedules. The reason science fiction is relatively easier to break into is partly because it’s so hard to write that there is less competition for each slot—fewer competently written manuscripts vying for the editors’ attention.

  Another reason that science fiction is easier to break into is that we still have a short-story market—the magazines and anthologies—that functions as a kind of “farm club” for the big leagues of books. (This reflects the reality of publishing, not the relative artistic merit of novels and short stories—by aesthetic standards, the various lengths are similar in their capacity to embrace great art.) The sf magazines don’t pay much, but they pay something, and they are read and taken seriously by readers, critics, and editors within the field. And the short-story market is constantly reopening because the writers who break in that way quickly find that writing novels pays so much better and reaches so much wider an audience that it makes more sense to develop ideas that can become novels than those that could only be short stories.

  But even this does not explain entirely why sci-fi is an easier genre to enter. Another contributing factor is the contempt of American English departments for science fiction and fantasy.

  Young people who love to read and want to write fiction are invariably steered by high school English teachers toward “creative writing,” which puts the young writers under the thumbs of teachers who, with few exceptions, sneer at science fiction as being less than literature. Some, of course, being stubborn souls, know that science fiction is a viable and potentially powerful literary medium and so pay no attention to the disdain of their teachers. But that’s a tough position to maintain, especially if every story you write that is not sci-fi gets lavishly praised, while your ventures into science fiction are ignored or criticized.

  Thus a significant number of the talented young writers who, by taste and inclination, ought to be contributing to the science fiction community are drawn away into writing fiction that, ironically enough, usually reaches a much smaller audience than science fiction (i.e., academic-literary writing) and leads to book publication for a relatively smaller proportion of those who attempt it. This is why, when I visit college campuses, an astonishing number of English professors and graduate students confess to me that they’d really like to write science fiction, that they love reading in the genre (though they confess it to few of their colleagues), and that they want very much to publish a manuscript. Sadly, however, those few who actually write science fiction have become so imbued with the tenets of academic-literary writing while never having practiced or fully analyzed how science fiction is written, that they generally produce manuscripts that simply cannot be published within the sf community. Often their stories are marvelous, and if clearly told and reasonably paced they would do well. But, still true believers in the dogmas of the academic-literary establishment—or perhaps determined to show their colleagues that they haven’t sold out completely by writing sci-fi—they make it a point to include a lot of purely literary elements in their novel or story.

  It is rather as if a talented composer of operas, unable to get one of the few opera houses in the world to debut his atonal “experimental” (don’t get me started) operas, finally realizes he should never have allowed his teachers in college to steer him away from his first love—Broadway-style musical comedy. That’s what he grew up with; the names that make his heart pound are Richard Rodgers and either Hart or Hammerstein (take your pick), Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Lerner and Loewe, Jones and Schmidt. He knows that music. He can write it! So he works and works to produce his first Broadway score and script—but he has written it atonally! There is no chance that anyone will invest fourteen cents in producing a twelve-tone musical on Broadway—songs have to be memorable and singable! But this composer, frustrated as he is, can’t let go of the very tenets of “serious” music that have made the general public turn away in disgust. He loves Broadway and knows that the “serious musician’s” rejection of that kind of music is stupid; but he has been made just a little stupid, too, through long association, and carries the stupidity with him.

  It breaks my heart to see how close some of these writers come—but then they refuse to let go of their handhold in academia, and so they never give themselves a fair trial. And, sadly enough, they take consolation by telling themselves (and their colleagues), “I guess I was just too literary for a commercial genre like that.” Well, yes, I guess you were. But while you’re congratulating/consoling yourself, remember that people read that “commercial” stuff out of love, while precious few of the “literary” works that are written are ever read at all—and even fewer are beloved.

  And that’s why science fiction is easier to break into—somebody has been poisoning half of the most talented competitors, taking them out of the competition.

  So what happens to someone like Lewis Shiner, who can write science fiction—good science fiction—but wants to speak to other audiences as well? Well, he starts over, that’s what. He plunges as a nonswimmer into a different pool, and finds that there are a lot more people here…and a lot more sharks. If he’s tough enough and smart enough, he learns what he has to learn and sticks it out. And maybe—if we’re lucky—now and then he’ll continue to write science fiction for us.