Tabora jeered at such terms. Gora dictating to Tabora! The ropt dictating to the sef (the Abruian lion). However, Tabora was wary enough to say she would consider the terms, and would give her answer two days hence!

  Richard Dorr was with Kirada Yal. Everything was in readiness. He understood Tabora’s strategy. He knew that Tabora would agree to no terms with Kirada Yal.

  For months he had been quietly working for such an end. In Gora he had found the necessary ingredients for gunpowder—saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur. Small hand grenades and bombs and shells had been manufactured, crude but efficient enough for their work. Men had been drilled in the practice of throwing them, and of shooting the tiny cannon that could be carried by planes. And these cannon were now distributed among the thousands of Taboran planes now in possession of the slaves. Then after these planes had been painted in the solution that Dorr had manufactured from a formula stolen from Carajama, they were sent throughout Gora to pick up the tribesmen who had already been trained to do their part.

  The solution used was the only thing that could render man immune to the power of the disintegrating ray of Tabora. Once Doata had warred upon her sister nations, and because all three nations had possessed the same solution, the war had proved futile. Peace had come to Tabora, a peace that lasted many years until it was forgotten that the formula lay in the vaults of Carajama.

  Now every piece of metal, every prop, every piece of fabric, every man was daubed with the solution, so that the entire fleet should be immune to the ray.

  With every fleet of a hundred planes, an airship filled with the officers whom Richard Dorr had created and trained for the work was ready to lead them to battle. Under orders, a hundred of these fleets proceeded to the frontiers of Gora and lay in waiting for the command to descend upon Tabora from every direction. Every plane was provided with one of the new radios, and Dorr had evolved a system of signals by which orders could be dispatched without Tabora understanding.

  By his side was Dana Gleason, still in her golden disguise, and with her was Dure. Dana was not happy over the thought of this war, but she was beside her lover, and that was all she asked for.

  Two days later Tabora radioed her refusal of Kirada Yal’s terms, which was the signal for the fleets of Richard Dorr to set out for Tabora. With Kirada Yal, Richard Dorr, Dana Gleason, and a great number of high-ranking officers and statesmen of Gora, in the largest airship that had been captured, set out for Carajama.

  THE STRANGE WAR

  There is no need to tell what took place on that fateful day. The battle lasted only a day and part of a night before Tabora knew she was beaten. Not an enemy plane fell to the power of the Ureim, while at a signal from the flagship thousands of missiles fell upon the unprotected cities and their environs. Parties landed from the planes, and the Taboran citizens tried to do battle with the Gorans, only to find that they were armed with small metal balls that exploded and caused havoc among the citizenry.

  Still no very great damage was done, outside of the killing of thousands of Taborans. A few private dwellings fell, but they could easily be rebuilt. The farmlands were left unscathed. Bombs continued to fall, but they were dropped with no precision and without doing much harm.

  At midnight of the same day, the Taborans cried for peace. At Ora, the three Kiradas gathered and Kirada Yal and Richard Dorr descended there. Only by his power over his armies had Richard Dorr held the Gorans from completely demolishing all the cities of Tabora, and it was because of his counsel that Gora did not claim all the rich lands of the planet.

  He drew up the terms of the treaty, which gave to Gora her old country, to Moata half of what she had once possessed, and to Tabora the remaining section sandwiched in between her erstwhile enemies and her erstwhile slaves. Had Dorr been another type of man, he might not have succeeded in gaining his point; but he had made warriors of the Gorans, and now he made civilized men of them. Ora approved all that he demanded.

  Tabora was given time to evacuate her lands and move into the space allotted her. New cities had to be built to contain her people. Her three Kiradas were forced to divide the lands between them, and over them was placed a regent from Ora. It will take her wounds long to heal.

  Moata elected a Kirada for herself, and old national lines were reestablished. The golden people are still wildly exuberant over their emancipation, and Gora is overjoyed in the new wealth that has come to her.

  Dorr and Dana Gleason stayed at Ora, planning to seek some out-of-the-way plantation where they would henceforth dwell in peace; but Gora and Moata would not hear of it. With one accord they elected Richard Dorr as their Ur-Kirada to see that justice was carried on.

  It will take many years, no doubt, to force the three races to live on friendly terms. It will take years for the raw sores to heal; but with a man like Richard Dorr at the head, peace and understanding will grow and mature in the hearts of the people.

  And so our host wearily finished his tale. In his eyes we saw a great depth of feeling.

  “But what became of Moura?” we all demanded.

  He apologized for his omission. “With the defeat of Tabora, Moura disappeared. The Taborans sang a song of hate for him. They forgot what good works he had done and remembered only that he had failed. They remembered him for the ambitious, arrogant man he was. They searched for him, but he was not to be found.

  “Only Ubca-tor knew where he had gone to hide with his single faithful servant. In his name Ubca sought out Richard Dorr, and asked for mercy for the man whom his people were seeking in revenge. For Ubca-tor still loved Moura, although he had deliberately set out to save Dana Gleason from the man.

  “Dorr sought Moura out, and promised him his aid.”

  So the story ended. We were all surprised to discover how stiff and cramped we had become, and arose to our feet to stretch. The golden man appeared again with trays of food and drink, of which we partook with enjoyment. We were all silent as each reviewed in his mind the tale he had just heard. I could not but wonder what had happened to Moura-Ur-tor. Looking up, I saw the eyes of our host upon me.

  The Professor broke the tension of the moment. “I wonder,” said he softly, “if you would mind telling us your name, sir. Strange that last night none of us thought of introductions,” and he smiled blandly upon us all. True none of us had been formally introduced. I did not even know my host’s name after traveling half across the world with him. I knew him only as Sa Dak (good master), and his companion as Tor, which I knew meant prince. It occurred to me that the Taboran had deliberately avoided an introduction and an exchange of names. I saw his eyes travel to his companion as if seeking aid there; then he turned to Rollins. “I swore long ago, sir, that nothing that Professor Rollins should demand of me would I neglect to fulfill. And yet most of all I dread to disclose my name. But you ask it.

  “The man who faces you, sir, is none other than one who has since learned that too much ambition is as bad for the soul as too little ambition. Ambition overshadows one’s vision, so that he sees nothing but his aim before him and is willing to sacrifice his fellow man to forward that ambition. I, sir, am Moura-weit.”

  Somehow, I failed to be shocked at the disclosure, but Professor Rollins dropped the plate he was still holding. Elsie Rollins’s eyes widened, and I cannot find words to describe the expression that crept into her face, an expression that was a combination of surprise, distrust, disbelief, disappointment, together with anger and something akin to pity. I could only feel pity.

  “Yes,” went on Moura-weit, “I am the man who did all in his power to break the will of Dana Gleason and to do away with Richard Dorr. I did not recognize the fact that I loved Dana Gleason. Can you forgive me?”

  Professor Rollins slowly answered: “It is not for me to forgive you, for I had almost succeeded in murdering those two. I have lived in sorrow for the deed, but now that you have told me that all is well, I know I can die happy. Wherefore should I judge you? No; rather I am glad you have escaped the wrath of your people and can spend the remainder of your life happy in the thought that you did not accomplish your purpose.”

  Silently the two clasped hands.

  Again a deep silence enveloped us, but I was still anxious for facts. “How did you manage to construct this machine and escape, since men were seeking for you?” I asked.

  Moura-weit turned his strange eyes upon me. “That I owe to three people: Richard Dorr, Dana Gleason, and—Ubca-tor,” and he held out his hand to his companion in exile. “I have spoken of the machine which the Roata (the Earth Club) commenced to build, hoping to gain favor in Dana Gleason’s eyes. It was abandoned at Ora when half-completed. Dorr gave me help to complete it. Then Ubca-tor and my faithful servant Urto elected to accompany me. Richard Dorr and Dana Gleason saw us depart and wished us Godspeed. On leaving, Dana Gleason, whom you would now call Mrs. Richard Dorr, presented me with the manuscript I brought to the Professor, and she also gave me the little diary as a memento; for she said she no longer needed it, since the past was past, and she thought it would aid me in convincing the Professor that she had truly sent me to him!”

  There was much more said, but that is irrelevant to this story. Moura-weit conveyed me back to the spot where he had first captured me, but the Rollinses went back with Moura-weit, for the Professor was anxious to see the Void.

  Professor Rollins died aboard the Yodverl, but what Elsie Rollins experienced aboard the interplanetary vehicle is another story. She returned only to straighten out the effects of the late Professor Ezra Rollins. She came to New York and stayed long enough to help me compile the above story, which will not be published until I am dead. Perhaps after I die, Moura-weit may return to Earth and so corroborate this exceptional history.

  Doctors have examined my collarbone, but can find no proof that it was ever fractured. My wife refuses to believe a word of what I told her, declaring I must have hidden away a cache of whiskey in my fishing hut, and drunk too deeply. I have only the ruby that Moura-weit left in payment for my old suit. Gem experts declare it to be as perfect a ruby as ever was found and insist it is of terrestrial origin. I know differently. But—I cannot prove it.

  LILITH LORRAINE (1894–1967) was the pen name used by the Texas-born author, editor, and publisher Mary Maude Wright (née Dunn). A self-styled Leonarda educated in “science, dancing, swimming, wild horses, psychology, philosophy and boy friends,” Lorraine attended college in Arizona and California before taking on work as an educator, administrator, crime reporter, radio announcer, public lecturer, estate manager, poultry farmer, and housewife to support her literary endeavors (Lorraine, “Story” 2). Although her writing appeared in a variety of newspapers, literary journals, and genre magazines, SF was always her first love.

  Throughout the 1930s Lorraine’s short stories appeared frequently in Amazing Stories and other Gernsback publications, and she was described by fans as “one of sf’s [top] three women writers” (qtd. in Sneyd, “Empress” 210). In the 1940s she built upon her already well-established reputation as an SF pro by branching out into poetry and editing as well (see the biographical entries on Lorraine in chapter 2, “Poets,” and chapter 4, “Editors,” of this anthology). Fans and fellow writers recall her as something of a character: she was a Christian socialist feminist partial to silk robes and turbans in bright colors who liked to use her double thumb as a test of people’s character. Lorraine took the name Lilith because she saw herself as a troublemaker, and indeed, she seems to have lived up to that description—as the SF poet and historian Steve Sneyd notes, Lorraine’s political convictions led the U.S. government to watch her closely, and to this day she is perhaps the only person whose FBI file includes speculative poetry as proof that she was an “advanced radical” (Sneyd, “Lilith Lorraine” 197).

  While her career spanned decades and areas of SF production, Lorraine entered the genre community as a fiction writer. Her first sale was the 1929 novella “The Brain of the Planet,” which appeared as issue 5 of Hugo Gernsback’s Science Fiction Series. She sold four more stories to various Gernsback publications over the next six years. By the mid-1930s, Lorraine—like a number of other women writers who began publishing SF in the 1920s—found herself alienated from what she perceived to be the increasingly “stereotyped and standardized” state of commercial SF (“Cracks” n.p.). Accordingly, she turned her attention to the production of amateur and semi-pro magazines, including Challenge, the first magazine dedicated to SF poetry, and Different, which brought together mainstream and SF artists and provided Lorraine with a forum in which to write fiction that reflected her political and aesthetic convictions.

  “Into the 28th Century” was Lorraine’s second SF sale, appearing in the Winter 1930 issue of Science Wonder Quarterly. It was one of several stories with “feminist-socialist utopian” elements that the managing editor, David Lasser, solicited for that magazine, along with tales by Leslie F. Stone and Margaret F. Rupert (Davin, Pioneers 189). Significantly, the headnote to Lorraine’s story does not address its potentially radical political elements. Instead, it emphasizes the universal appeal of SF to all thinking writers, enthusiastically noting that “it speaks well of the times in which we are living, when women authors such as Lilith Lorraine have the vision to take science fiction seriously enough to make extended studies of it” (Gernsback, “Headnote to ‘Into the 28th Century’” 251). And, indeed, telling as it does the tale of an early-twentieth-century man who travels to a future Earth where mechanical technologies have been replaced by their telepathically driven counterparts and where carefully planned interracial marriages have engendered a nearly immortal “super-race” of humans, Lorraine’s novella is very much in line with the action-packed, scientifically inspired and inspiring SF that Gernsback claimed was the best the genre had to offer (258).

  Of course, Lorraine’s story does rework at least two other popular modes of women’s fiction to make strategic feminist points about the future of science and society. Like other turn-of-the-century feminist utopias such as Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1880) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), “Into the 28th Century” imagines a future where “women’s domestic duties … [including] cooking, canning, preserving, cleaning up, and managing servants” have been reduced or eliminated by the strategic application of new sciences and technologies, thereby liberating women to pursue higher education and participate in statecraft (Donawerth, “Science” 139). Lorraine’s work also echoes that of her predecessors by attributing the creation of utopia to the work of women themselves. However, while Lane and Gilman suggest that utopia can emerge only when women act collectively to eliminate men from society, Lorraine more diplomatically proposes that women might build utopia by withholding sex until their male counterparts are willing to reform themselves and the world.

  Lorraine also updates the conventions of nineteenth-century domestic fiction to demonstrate what the reformed man might look like. As literary scholar Nina Baym explains, the heroine of the domestic novel who ventures out into the world to make a living and build a new life for herself is typically rewarded with the love of a sensible, well-educated man who stands somewhat apart from the daily operations of patriarchal capitalism and “who likes the heroine as much [as] or more than he lusts for her” (41). While the traditional domestic hero is often a man of the cloth, Lorraine suggests that his modern counterpart might just as well be a man of either the sword or science. Accordingly, she casts her narrator Anthony as a well-educated, scientifically inclined, and gentlemanly former soldier who longs for a world better than that of the early twentieth century into which he is born. Anthony finds that world in twenty-eighth century Corpus Christi, where he falls in love with a woman whose ability to quote Shakespeare is every bit as desirable as her bright green hair. In this way, Lorraine synthesizes the emergent conventions of SF with the established ones of the feminist utopia and the domestic novel to create a future where economic and racial inequality have been obliterated and men and women of the new super-race live completely fulfilling lives.

  “Into the 28th Century”

  Science Wonder Quarterly, Winter 1930

  CHAPTER 1

  At the expiration of my four years’ service in the navy in the early summer of 1932, I was convinced that I had had my fill of the sea. I soon discovered that I had merely had my fill of the navy. After all, a ship is no place for a young man with traditions and a fair education but with neither money nor influence. Minus the first two factors I might have been content with such fair advancement as can be wrested from life by unaided effort. These two factors become hindrances when an individual endowed with the culture of a fading aristocracy finds himself in a position where minds of coarser sensibilities can lord it over him. Eventually he has to choose between solitude and such companionship as can be found among those of his own rank. This is neither a plea for the vanishing aristocracy of the South that distilled its fragrance from the rank, black soil of slavery, nor is it a justification of my own attitude. It’s only a statement of that attitude, of a state of mind inherited and hence unchangeable. It’s only a passing regret that something of the graciousness which constitutes the soul of aristocracy cannot be woven into the fabric of democracy that all may share alike.

  That the siren that sings in the winds and waves still sought to lure me over perilous seas was evident enough when, some three weeks after my discharge, I spent the bulk of my savings for an antiquated motorboat. I had gone to visit my grandfather at my childhood home in Corpus Christi, now a newly opened deep-water port on the coast of Texas. My father was long since dead, and my grandfather’s only surviving child, my aunt, was somewhere in the Orient. She had always been a wanderer, writing when the mood swayed her. There was always a sort of unspoken understanding between us, and because of this, I have chosen her to give my story to the world. When it reaches her I shall be—elsewhere.