stars of the
slave giants

calvin aaargh

Crudely rendered artwork
based on a truly magnificent original by

ROSS CHAMBERLAIN

____________________

The Exciting Fourth Part
of
A Four Part Serial

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS

From world to world wanders Floyd Scrilch, intrepid spaceman, veteran of an infinity of death-defying exploits. Neither the cruelties of slavering alien monsters nor the indifference of fair women nor the hardships of extra-terrestrial environments nor the churlishness of barbarian pirates can dismay Scrilch for long, as, meeting challenge upon challenge, he survives a decade and a half of potent metaphorical convulsions and stylistic mutations. At last, cornered by the excessively liberated Trimazon Queen, Melpomene, Scrilch faces his utmost test. Her three heaving breasts have tempted him into an act of mad lust; and, infuriated, she thrusts her trident against his chest, crying, "Prepare to die, loathed male!" She tenses her muscles for the fatal disembowelment. "Prepare to die!"

NOW GO ON WITH THE STORY

1. Around this dichotomy, McLuhan builds
a theory of American culture and, hence, of
modern culture generally. He sees the South
as a direct inheritor of the encyclopedic
Ciceronian tradition ("The Southern Quality,"
Sewanee Review LV, 1947.) By virtue of its
con-connections with the eloquent and
humanistic European ideal represented by
Castiglione, Sidney and Spenser.

2. Brachycephalic. They stopped
beneath the half-painted bowl of
the radio-telescope. As the blunt
metal ear turned on its tracks,
fumbling at the sky, he put his
hands to his skull, feeling the
still-open sutures. Beside him
Quinton, this dapper pomaded
Judas, was waving at the distant
hedges where the three
limousines were waiting. "If
you like we can have a hundred
cars -- a complete motorcade."
Ignoring Quinton, he took a piece
of quartz from his flying jacket
and laid it on the turf. From it
poured the code-music of the quasars.

3. Cunningly, Scrilch avoids the thrust and
seizes the weapon. He moves through dooms
of love to dematerialize its menacing prongs.
The Trimazon Queen pants passionately. In the
suddenly transparent sky the mask of Eshb Hack
looms in unexpected benignity.

4. Decidedly

this evening I shall say

nothing

that is not false.

I mean nothing that is not calculated to leave me in doubt as

to my real

intentions.

For it is evening, even night,

one of the darkest I can remember, I have a short memory. My little finger glides before my pencil across the page and

gives warning, falling over the

edge, that the end

of the line is

near.

5. Every culture, as it enters its decadent period, produces
bizarre and quirky manifestations of impending dissolution.
The forms of art mirror the inner chaos. A time of fragment-
ation and desperate experimentation arrives. The malaise of
the spirit spreads even into the popular arts, which take on an
edgy pretentiousness, a shrill superfluity of ambition, that
destroys their value as mass entertainment while reinforcing
the general sense of cultural collapse.

6. Frantic motions galvanize Scrilch. He spins through hyperspace, looping back again and again on his own time-track. Mushroom clouds belly from the sea. Psychedelic rainbows flitter through his dazzled cerebral valve. Swords descend, sever his body, and melt away, leaving him unharmed. April is the cruelest month, he cries.

7. "God," exclaims novelist
Ronald fair, "it must be
terrible not to be born black
in this day and age." It all
depends, it all depends.

8. He wakes. Beneath him the black earth is cool
and moist. He lies on his back in a field of scarlet
grass; a soft gust of wind comes by, ruffling the
blades, and they melt into a stream of blood. The
sky is iron-blue, an intensely transparent color that briefly sets up a desperate clamor in his skull. He finds the sun: low in the heavens, larger than it ought to be, looking somewhat pale and vulnerable, perhaps flattened at top and bottom. Pearly mists rise from the land and swirl sunward, making cortices of blue and green and red lacings as they climb. A cushion of silence presses against him. He feels lost. He sees no cities, no scars of man's presence anywhere in this meadow, on those hills, beyond that valley. Slowly he lifts himself to his feet and stands facing the sun.

9.
I
think
this
is
one
hell
of
a
weird
way
to
write
a
space
opera
.

10. J. S. Slotkin -- one of the very few white men
ever to have participated in the rites of a Peyotist
congregation -- says of his fellow worshippers that
they are "certainly not stupefied or drunk .... They
never get out of rhythm or fumble their words, as
a drunken or stupefied man would do .... They are
all quiet, courteous, and considerate of one another.
I have never been in any white man's house of
worship where there is so much religious feeling
or decorum."

11. "Katabolism!" Scrilch cries, bewildered.
"Ia! Shub-Niggurath! J. G. Ballard! Help me! Help me!"
But there is no help to be had.
He is trapped.
Time winds on its own bowels and Scrilch topples passively through the unending void.
The space station crashes and its girders twitch nervously in the first few moments of its
death.
The astronaut lies decomposing on the vermilion sands.
Scrilch weeps.
He prays.
He masturbates.
He worries a lot about himself.

12. Look, Simeon Krug wanted to say, a billion years ago there wasn't even any man, there was only a fish. A slippery thing with gills and scales and little round eyes. He lived in the ocean, and the ocean was like a jail, and the air was like a roof on top of the jail. Nobody could go through the roof. You'll die if you go through, everybody said, and there was this fish, he went through, and he died.

13. Metamorphosis, Scrilch mutters, is the key to
eternal harmony. The more things remain
the same, the more they change. Let
us therefore undergo transfor-
mations. Let us become
polymorphous. Let
us make a joyful
noise unto
the Lord.
Scrilch, transfigured,
draws his sword. I am the
resurrection and the life, he cries.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is
coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the
voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.
This is a problem that had been handled satisfactorily before. They seize him. They place him on the Cross. They hammer in the nails. Scrilch sighs. Father, forgive them, he murmurs; for they know not what they do.

TO BE CONCLUDED

* *

DON'T MISS THE SMASHING FIFTH PART OF
THIS EXCITING FOUR - PART SERIAL

-- Bob Silverberg

Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan

Data entry by Judy Bemis

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