A MAGIC CARPET

  Come along as a stowaway on an incredible journey of strange ideas and alien viewpoints, on a mind-voyage to far places that never were and never can be. Smuggle yourself aboard Terry Carr’s imagination as it races off into the depths of space beyond Darkedge; to the planet Loarr, where the perplexing pure energy lifeforms dance the traditional Dance of the Changer and the Three; to Starmont, where the killer mountain waits to snare the unwary; to the dead Earth of the far future where bizarre scavengers pick over the decaying corpse of 20th Century culture; to a time when the adults wither and die of a terrible plague as the children watch…and read the minds of the dying…waiting for the end; to a Mars no astronaut will ever see, where the uncanny Marshie hoppers haunt a land no Bradbury ever imagined; to a mysterious ju-ju shop where eternal peace and contentment can be bought for only five bucks; to fifteen impossible locales known only to the native guide named Terry Carr. Hold tight! Once torn loose, there is no sure path for return. But what a trip!

  ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST

  The cover of this book was the first paperback art purchased from MIKE PRESLEY. (Mr. Ellison’s well-known tardiness in completing projects has permitted Avon’s Rediscovery Series to release Silverberg’s THE MAN IN THE MAZE and Christopher’s NO BLADE OF GRASS—with Presley covers—first; but Ellison steadfastly claims first kill.)

  A native Texan, Presley is still in his early twenties and has been a commercial illustrator since late 1971 when he joined the studio staff of nationally-known, award-winning artist Don Ivan Punchatz (The Sketch Pad) in Arlington, Texas.

  During this period, Presley’s paintings and drawings appeared in such publications as The National Lampoon, Texas Monthly, Renaissance Pittsburgh, Modem Medicine and Vista. His cover painting for Renaissance Pittsburgh was later reproduced as a poster and was selected as one of the top hundred posters in America in 1974 and was subsequently published in Communications Arts Magazine.

  Though no relation to Elvis of the same last name, but like his namesake, Presley has been a long-time fan of science fiction; it has only been recently that he entered the field of sf illustration.

  He has lived the majority of his life in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, attended public schools in Irving, Texas and later attended the University of Texas at Arlington, where he was a member of the varsity football team. Married, he presently lives in Arlington.

  He is the second “new” artist “discovered” for this series, continuing the editor’s policy of matching new writers with fresh unexposed artists.

  THE LIGHT AT THE END

  OF THE UNIVERSE

  TERRY CARR

  THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

  A PYRAMID BOOK, by arrangement with the Author, the

  Series Editor and the Author’s Agent This is an original collection and has never before been published in any form.

  Copyright © 1976 by Terry Carr.

  Introduction Copyright © 1976 by Harlan Ellison.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the Author or the Author’s Agent, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio or television. For information address Author’s Agent:

  Henry Morrison Literary Agency, Inc.; 58 West 10th Street;

  New York, New York 10011.

  This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended between any character herein and any other person, living or dead; any such resemblance is purely coincidental.

  Pyramid edition published October 1976

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-42123

  Printed in the United States of America

  Pyramid Books are published by Pyramid Publications

  (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.). Its trademarks, consisting of the word “Pyramid” and the portrayal of a pyramid, are registered in the United States Patent Office.

  PYRAMID PUBLICATIONS

  (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.)

  757 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y, 10017

  Cover art by Mike Presley.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE DANCE OF THE CHANGER AND THE THREE: Copyright © 1968 by Joseph Elder. Originally published in The Farthest Reaches.

  THE WINDS AT STARMONT: Copyright © 1973 by Terry

  Carr. Originally published in No Mind of Man. OZYMANDIAS: Copyright © 1972 by Harlan Ellison. Originally published in Again, Dangerous Visions.

  REJOICE, REJOICE, WE HAVE NO CHOICE: Copyright© 1974 by Roger El wood. Originally published in Future Kin.

  HOP-FRIEND: Copyright © 1962 by Mercury Press, Inc. Originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1962.

  TOUCHSTONE: Copyright © 1964 by Mercury Press, Inc. Originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1964. IN HIS IMAGE: Copyright © 1971 by Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc. Originally published in Amazing Stories, November 1971.

  CHANGING OF THE GODS. Copyright © 1973 by Terry Carr. Originally published in Infinity Five.

  STANLEY TOOTHBRUSH: Copyright © 1962 by Mercury Press, Inc. Originally published under the pen-name “Carl Brandon” in Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1962.

  THE COLORS OF FEAR: Copyright © 1974 by Robert Silverberg. Originally published in New Dimensions 4.

  SLEEPING BEAUTY: Copyright © 1967 by Mercury Press, Inc. Originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1967.

  BROWN ROBERT: Copyright © 1962 by Mercury Press, Inc. Originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1962.

  THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS: Copyright © 1963 by Mercury Press, Inc. Originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1963.

  THE ROBOTS ARE HERE: Copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Originally published in If, May 1967.

  THEY LIVE ON LEVELS: Copyright © 1973 by Robert Silverberg. Originally published in New Dimensions 3.

  For Avram Davidson

  Avram Magus

  Contents

  NICE GUYS FINISH SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE an introduction by HARLAN ELLISON

  THE DANCE OF THE CHANGER AND THE THREE

  THE WINDS AT STARMONT

  OZYMANDIAS

  REJOICE, REJOICE,

  WE HAVE NO CHOICE

  HOP-FRIEND

  TOUCHSTONE

  BROWN ROBERT

  CHANGING OF THE GODS

  STANLEY TOOTHBRUSH

  THE COLORS OF FEAR

  SLEEPING BEAUTY

  IN HIS IMAGE

  THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS

  THE ROBOTS ARE HERE

  THEY LIVE ON LEVELS

  NICE GUYS FINISH SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE

  an introduction by HARLAN ELLISON

  Harry Harrison (you all know who Harry Harrison is, right?) speaks of the community of practicing science fiction writers as “The Old Boys’ Network.” Phrase comes from Eton and Rugby alumni, Cambridge ex-classmates, Sandhurst grads who keep in touch, work in the foreign service, hire one another, pass all the vital social gossip, foregather without having to stoop to social congress beneath their station…that sort of thing.

  But what Harry means when he refers to “The Network” is the way we, in the clutches of the demiurge Mythos, support one another intellectually. (At least ‘I think that’s what Harry means; one is never really certain what Harry thinks. But if he’d take that foul cigar out of his face we might better be able to understand him.) Without even the faintest formality, it’s more closely a salon than a network, though I can hear good old Harry spitting acidulously at the plop of the word “salon.” Harry is definitely not a joiner.

  There’s nothing conscious about it, nothing calculated; but it’s true: we who toil in the vales of fantasy pretty well know one another. There are so few of us. As soon as a new one comes along, we all dash to embrace him or her. (Usually, if it’s a her, we all find ourselves waiting in line behind Asimov, the Speedy Gonzales of sf writers.) We’re just a big dumb family. You’ve heard it referred to that way before.

  Ah, my goodness; in this big dumb family we love and hate and toil and suffer with greater angst than anything conceived by Galsworthy, Hawkesworth or even Olive Higgins Prouty. At least Galsworthy. Maybe not as noble as Dostoevsky, but at least easily Galsworthy.

  Ah, my goodness; the gossip I could pass along were it not for having to share evenings with all them clowns at least half a dozen times a year. But, they’re family; so we put up with the thieves and the rakes and the monsters and the frauds. Even as they put up with me.

  And so, inevitably, there is nepotism. This family closely resembles Boss Tweed’s New York pork-barrel system of political favoritism. Harrison edits with Aldiss and (with justification) believes Aldiss to be the finest writer in the genre; and so Aldiss stories keep appearing in the Harrison-Aldiss Best of the Year anthologies. Nothing wrong with that, if the stories are good. But Brian does have a bit of an edge. Gordy Dickson and Ben Bova frequently examine the bottoms of Dom Perignon bottles and so Dickson’s best stories always get offered to Analog before anyone else gets to see them. Nothing wrong with that; Analog pays better than any other magazine in the field. But Ben does have a bit of an edge with Gordo. Damon Knight got lucky and married Kate Wilhelm, so if you want to buy a new Wilhelm story before Damon grabs it for ORBIT, you have to call in the dead
of night and get Damon on the phone when he’s groggy with sleep, and tell him his car is on fire, and when he rushes outdoors to douse the vehicle, you call back, get Kate on the line and quickly extract a promise that she’ll send her next wonderfulness to you instead of Damon the Greedy. Nothing wrong with that; I mean they are married. But Damon does have a bit of an edge.

  Which brings me to Terry Carr.

  Terry is a friend of mine. Not a close friend, he doesn’t like me that much. But a friend nonetheless. He’s got an edge.

  We met in 1954, at a World Science Fiction Convention being held at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco. We met. We’d been in correspondence long before that, of course. In those days when Terry and Bob Silverberg and Lee Hoffman and Ray Nelson and others and I were runny-nosed fans, we all wrote for each other’s fan publications, we all exchanged letters with admirable prolificity, and we all kept much more in touch than we do now that we’ve all become professional writers with lives that touch the others a lot less than we’d like. In those days, before I met him at the Sir Francis Drake, Terry was writing and cartooning; doing his “face critters” sometimes for Peter J. Vorzimer’s fanzine Abstract, and sometimes for other mimeo’d zines now long forgotten.

  I was never able, during that period, to focus on Terry too clearly. He was part of an amorphous clique of West Coast fans and fellow travelers whom we, on the East Coast and in the Midwest (I was living in Cleveland at the time), only knew as fabulous characters immortalized by Terry in his fanzine Vulcan (and later in Innuendo) and in his occasional Boswellian articles or letters chronicling the activities of those bizarre Golden State weirdos.

  And because he wrote about his friends with such skill, they all blended together in my mind as one big person. Terry, and Ron Ellik, and Pete Graham, and Bob Stewart (who signed himself “Boob” Stewart, to differentiate himself from the other Bob Stewarts running loose in fandom in those days), and Dave-Rike, and Don Wegars, and Mike Rossman (who spelled his first name “Mique,” and who subsequently became one of the power forces in the Berkeley radical movement of the sixties): they were all other voices of Terry Carr, and though Ron is dead and Mike has written several books on alternate lifestyles, and the others are who-knows-where, even today in my foggy brain they remain as memorable entities only as they were conjured up by the typewriter of Terry Carr.

  And so we met. The remembrance of that meeting is • almost wholly flensed from my mind, but I do recall the one significant interchange. I smoked a pipe even then, and when Terry met me, he made fun of the one I had sticking out of my face. I said to him, in my very best Bogart manner, “Don’t push it too far, Carr.” Terry backed off, and to this day informs me that he saw in that moment the essence of the don’t-fuck-with-me that forms such an integral part of my gentle pussycat nature.

  When we met again, in 1961, in New York, Terry was living on Jane Street in Greenwich Village—where several of the stories in this book were written and, in fact, take place—and he was married to the amazing Carol.

  I’m tempted to ramble off on a side-trip about Carol Carr, a splendid lady and a writer of no mean talent herself, but I’ve been chided about my rambles previously, so all I’ll drop in here is that if you haven’t read Carol’s stories, “Inside” or “Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles” for example, you are cheating yourself of rare pleasures.

  By 1967, when Terry was already an editor at Ace Books and creator of the Ace “Specials” series (more about that in a moment), we were good friends, and during a very hectic period when I was completing the work on Dangerous Visions I stayed at the Carrs’ apartment in Brooklyn Heights, close by the home of Leo and Diane Dillon, who were doing the illustrations for the anthology and to whose townhouse I journeyed five and six times a day with copy they needed to complete the artwork.

  We became tight friends, Carol and Terry and I, during that week I stayed there. Playing Risk, jabbering till the sun came up, myself waking too early for Carol, who likes to sleep late but usually can’t, sharing the cleanup chores. I had always been very laid back where Terry was concerned because we are so different in style and temperament. I’m volatile and flashy and self-serving; Terry is quiet and steady and incredibly funny in a gentle way that sends one flash of piercing wit whipping at you from*a soft-spoken monologue, like a razor blade in your tapioca pudding. I am a guttersnipe, Terry is a gentleman. He is invariably polite—though sometimes short—with imbeciles who waste his time or ask him stupid questions. I have never seen him treat rudely even the most persistent dingbat. Needless to say, our stories are very different. Nonetheless, we are friends.

  And even though I put my hand through a frozen-shut window in his Brooklyn Heights apartment in the late sixties, in an attempt to open it during a party, Terry has always treated me with kindness and camaraderie, and so . we are friends. So he has an edge.

  I tell you all of this upfront so you will perceive that there are several reasons why I’m delighted to be the editor perspicacious enough to have finally brought Carr’s first short-story collection to the waiting world.

  It is not only that it is an absolutely first rank group of writings. It is not only that I think Terry’s fiction has been so overshadowed by his eminence as an editor that it has been criminally overlooked. It is not only that I feel Terry Carr should be ranked with the best and most influential of the direction-setters in the genre. It is also because we are friends.

  And if you can’t use your high office to benefit your friends, of what possible good is being corrupted by power?

  Here in this big dumb family, as a member of The Old Boys’ Network, it quickly becomes clear that acclaim for talent goes in waves. One season it’s Philip K. Dick, and the next it’s R. A. Lafferty, and the season after it’s James Tiptree, Jr. or Samuel R. Delany or Ursula K. Le Guin. We are a fickle crowd, and in the rush of admiration for someone who has laid an especially original number on our heads, we ignore everyone else working steadily, quietly, with craft and composure.

  And if several seasons 50 by without a writer having made a big kill, we tend to accept him/her as one of the entrenched mob. Oh, we respect the individual hot story, and we once in a while vote it a Nebula award. But when the lists are drawn up of the right king mixers, those steady workers simply are not listed.

  Terry. Carr is one of those writers. He’s been publishing little gems of fiction since 1962, has had a couple of dozen stories logged under his name (and he’d have more if he weren’t (a) so damned lazy and (b) such an in-demand editor), and yet when the roster is assembled with its Malzbergs, Moorcocks, Wilhelms, Silverbergs and Cowpers ranked one after the other in order of importance…Carr is nowhere to be found. The fickle waves have gone by.

  This book is boldly, coldly, openly, even nakedly calculated to rectify that error. Out of respect and admiration for the work, out of friendship and nepotism for the man.

  Now there will be purists who will carp about Terry

  Carr being published in a “discovery” series. Why Carr, they’ll beef, why a guy who’s been published all over the lot? They’ll erroneously decide without benefit of counsel to the contrary that this series is only for new, unpublished writers. Wrong. It’s for “discoveries.” Most of the time that will mean the first novel of some newer writer, even if that writer has had a collection of short stories published. But once in a while it will mean doing a book of short stories by a writer who has had a novel released or a writer who’s been around for some time but has been overlooked. In this case, yes, Terry has had a novel published.