An Ornament to His Profession

by Charles L. Harness

Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

This collection contains stories covering Harness' repertoire from alternate history, SF about the legal profession, and lyrical and witty stories of science and the arts.

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

“Throw-away ideas” …

Both David Hartwell and George Zebrowski use this term in their analyses of Charles Harness’ work. They’re absolutely right, of course. Harness uses ideas as ornaments and he is extravagant—almost wasteful—with them. His stories are veritable jungles of intriguing ideas, rich and tangled. Compared to this opulence, the works of many other writers seem but arid wastelands.

Read just a few of the stories included in this collection and enjoy the visit! While you explore these luxuriant environments, discover some of his repeating motifs: spiders and their related symbolism (reputedly due to early experiences with tarantulas); a penchant for poetry (notably Coleridge and Poe), music, and other expressions of the arts; chess; law (particularly patent); and history.

And this book is just a small selection of his fifty years of writing science fiction.

Fifty years—pretty neat!

And that’s fifty years of a most unusual writer, indeed. Does Charles Harness write like a romantic version of A. E. van Vogt? A proto-cyberpunk cross between Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny? Part of the old Analog crew? His writing is difficult to characterize. His plots are generally baroque and convoluted. The reader is frequently thrown immediately into an active, sometimes confusing, and always complicated situation, and finds out what is happening (or has happened) as the work progresses. There are few totally happy endings, and nightmarish, dreamlike scenes abound. Additionally, while some of Harness’ material may seem to be merely escapist super-science idea stories, recurrent serious (and often mystical and/or metaphysical) interrelated themes are apparent:

Transformation, change, transcendence, evolution

Love and redemption

Destruction and rebirth, death and transfiguration, grand beginnings and epic endings

“Art versus science” (and their interdependence)

Overall, Harness writes about the hard stuff. He writes about creative people making a difference in a complicated universe. About humanity and hope.

It’s pretty powerful stuff, and it’s first rate SF as well—and people just don’t seem to know this! Many of my proofreaders, all NESFA members (a very well-read group), were unfamiliar with this material. One told me, “Hey, these are really really good!” Another confided that some stories made her cry. “Did you really hate them that much?” I asked, shocked. “No,” she said. “They were wonderful.”

And they are both wonderful and wonder-filled.

I hope you think so too.

Priscilla Olson, Editor

I have been a fan of Charles Harness since I first read Flight Into Yesterday in the Ace Double edition, and read Damon Knight’s insightful review. I was aware at that time that he sometimes published short fiction, but it wasn’t until more than ten years later, in the mid-60s, that I came across The Rose, a Berkley paperback reprint of a British hardcover containing the title novella and two other stories, “The New Reality” and “The Chessplayers.”

“Wow,” I said to myself, and was a convert. I didn’t find The Ring of Ritornel until years later, but by the mid-70s I was an editor and could buy new Harness fiction to publish. I did Wolfhead (1978) at Berkley and The Catalyst (1980) and Firebird (1981) at Pocket Books. I wanted to do a short story collection at that time, but could not. It’s a long boring business story. Harness retired from his day job in the ’80s, and has actually published more since that time than before. He is still active and writing, with recent stories published in the magazines, a new one in this book, and perhaps more to come.

Charles Harness entered the field in the late 1940s and is one of the impressive talents in SF who wrote too little in any one decade to bring him to the forefront of the field. Even worse, his masterpieces, The Rose and Flight Into Yesterday, were published in such a way as to deemphasize their achievements, at least for a time, and marginalize their contributions. The first was published only in Authentic, an English SF magazine, that had no circulation in the USA, and was generally unknown for more than ten years. The second was published first in Startling Stories in 1949 and then in 1953 by a marginal hardcover publisher, and so received little review attention, and then sold off to the Ace Doubles, where it became a minor treasure to readers under the title The Paradox Men. Lots of people were eager to see Harness’s next novel, but it didn’t appear, nor did any new stories for years, and he began to be forgotten, just as the SF of John D. MacDonald and Alfred Coppel began to be forgotten when they moved on out of SF.

The resuscitation of The Rose as a lost classic, with a fine, articulate introduction by Michael Moorcock, made Harness in effect one of the precursors of the New Wave generation, along with Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Philip K. Dick. Many readers discovered Harness for the first time in the paperback collection, and also read his new novel, The Ring of Ritornel (1968)—but The Paradox Men was long out of print in the US, though not in the UK, so his reputation was not fully restored. And although he published a few stories, in the mid-60s, he again disappeared for a decade. His next novel, Wolfhead, appeared in 1978.

He’s been active in six decades of SF now, but never a central figure. Long ago he chose to make his career as a patent attorney for W. R. Grace the center of his professional life, and writing a sideline, just as Wallace Stevens, for instance, had a full career as an insurance executive while writing poetry. Or Cordwainer Smith, who kept his personal and professional life completely separate from his occasional SF, and who did not become recognized as an important writer until after his death. I am not going to try to prove that Harness is as important as Cordwainer Smith, but Harness certainly deserves a higher ranking than he has at present, somewhere below Zenna Henderson and only perhaps slightly above Mack Reynolds.

It seems to me Charles Harness, in stories such as “Time Trap,” “Stalemate in Time,” “The New Reality,” and “Child by Chronos” started his career on the same track as Alfred Bester and Philip K. Dick, as a writer adapting the paradoxes and complexities of A. E. van Vogt to a new kind of story, that plays games with time and the nature of reality. One might with some justice see these stories as a bridge between van Vogt’s work and the new Bester and Dick stories of the early fifties. Time dilation, time paradoxes, colorful and dramatic surprises abound, and more sentiment than usual in such stories at the time. And then there is Flight Into Yesterday and The Rose.

Damon Knight, in his review of Flight Into Yesterday reprinted in In Search of Wonder, said “Harness told me in 1950 that he had spent two years writing the story, and had put into it every fictional idea that occurred to him during the time. He must have studied his model [van Vogt] with painstaking care.” Knight’s point is that Harness surpasses van Vogt in SF: “all this, packed even more tightly than the original, symmetrically arranged, the loose ends tucked in, and every outrageous twist of the plot fully justified both in science and in logic.” Brian W. Aldiss is also a partisan of it: “This novel may be considered as the climax to the billion year spree … I call it Wide Screen Baroque … Harness’s novel has a zing of its own, like whiskey and champagne, the drink of the Nepalese sultans.” Michael Moorcock, though, in an essay about The Rose, calls that work Harness’s “greatest novel,” and says “although most of Harness’s work is written in the magazine style of the time and at first glance appears to have only the appeal of colorful escapism, reminiscent of A. E. van Vogt or James Blish of the same period, it contains nuances and ‘throw away’ ideas that show a serious (never earnest) mind operating at a much deeper and broader level than its contemporaries.”

Moorcock goes on to say, “The Rose [is] crammed with delightful notions—what some SF readers call ‘ideas’—but these are essentially icing on the cake of Harness’s fiction. [His] stories are what too little science fiction is—true stories of ideas, coming to grips with the big abstract problems of human existence and attempting to throw fresh, philosophical light on them.”

I see these works, like the central works of Jack Vance, and Alfred Bester, and Cordwainer Smith, as Space/Time Grand Opera. He approached this level of intensity in some of his later novels, but never equaled these two again. His best mature novel, The Catalyst, is in a different mode altogether, clean and slick.

Harness is a writer who returns to certain themes and ideas: he likes to play with time paradoxes, with chess, with logic, with science (as opposed to technology), with history, with the law (especially patent law—he wrote a series of patent law stories in collaboration with Theodore L. Thomas published in Astounding in the ’50s). His characters are most often motivated by love, or ideas, or ideals, or all three. He writes SF for grown-ups who like to play with speculative ideas. He is willing, like Bester and Dick, to be a bit clunky or gorgeously absurd sometimes, if it keeps the game alive. I think “The Chessplayers” is a good example, and “George Washington Slept Here.”

What Harness is a science fiction storyteller of impressive talents. “George Washington Slept Here,” for instance, reminds me of the stories of James Tiptree, Jr., or Hilbert Schenck, and is quite different from his early stories. As is “The Tetrahedron.” One would expect a good writer to grow and change in interesting ways. “The Araqnid Window,” on the other hand, reminds me of the hybrid SF stories in 1920s adventure pulps, for instance the work of Francis Stevens. It is full of surprises, coincidences, drama, a lost city, and has a volcano erupt just in time. “Summer Solstice” is his best alternate history SF story, a thread you can see in Harness’s work growing from the ’60s onward, in such stories as “Probable Cause” and “Quarks at Appomattox.”

I mentioned The Catalyst earlier. That mode of realistic, character-driven SF about patent law and big corporations and cutting edge technology shows up in the major stories of the ’60s, most especially in “An Ornament to His Profession” and “The Alchemist,” both fantasy stories (one is about a deal with the devil, the other is a clever psi-powers story about industrial chemistry) that appeared in the 1960s in John W. Campbell’s Analog (!); but is also evident in “The Million Year Patent” and “Probable Cause” (a story that combines a Supreme Court drama involving time paradoxes, with historical references to the JFK and Lincoln assassinations).

Over fifty years of publishing SF in six different decades and it seems as if Harness started out as Bester and Dick, and ended up as Tiptree or Hilbert Schenck, erring on the side of sentiment—spending some time as Algis Budrys, alternating with Roger Zelazny in the middle, ca ’66–’86 (the Zelazny stream in his fiction is much more evident in his novels, but begins in The Rose and continues through Wolfhead and Firebird and perhaps The Venetian Court and Lurid Dreams, and is mythic, heroic, and romantic, as in the early Zelazny). In any of the various periods of his writing, he is always just a bit over the top into outrageousness, that van Vogtian goshwow firecracker effect that makes one go “oooh” and “aaah.” For all the intelligence and cleverness and rationality, finally the appeal is emotional.

So here is Charles Harness back in his place in the living history of contemporary SF. There is a new story here too, but I won’t spoil any surprises.

David G. HartwellPleasantville, NY

 

The Rose is about my brother Billy—Blandford Bryan Harness. Billy was nine years older than I, and the age gap precluded the comradely rapport of brothers born closer together. No matter. Maybe he knew me only as a noisy kid, often in his way. But I knew him, as the acolyte knows the demi-god. He was a fine artist; he studied art at TCU, then at the Chicago Art Institute. He wrote short stories but never submitted any for publication. Much much later, I used the plots of several of those stories in my own work. He was a fair mechanic; he kept our ancient Hudson tuned and running. He was many things. No palette of adjectives really illustrates him. He was mocking, wry, sardonic, frequently scornful.

He was killed by two brain tumors. Inoperable, the surgeons said, though God knows they tried. He died at home, in his bed. Mother sat there and held his hand. We all heard his last gasp. He was 26.

I began work on The Rose almost twenty years later. It had been a rough season for me. In the lab where I worked then, a dear friend, a world-class chemist, had been passed over for promotion, and we knew he would now resign. He had been like an older brother to me, a tremendous help when I was just getting started in the patent department. In fact, looking back, he very nearly filled the vacancy left by Billy. His departure was prolonged and painful. Writing The Rose helped me deal with it, like some sort of catharsis. So I finished it and it went out to market.

Every SF market in the U.S. turned it down. John Campbell: “I know only one tune, ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’” Forrest Ackerman finally sold it in England to Authentic Science Fiction magazine. After that everybody wanted it, and it’s been printed in the U.S. and in six or seven foreign languages.

The tale (as indeed the story itself says) is plotted around a short story, “The Nightingale and the Rose,” by Oscar Wilde. This was in a little fabrikoid-bound volume I found among Billy’s books after he died. I was so impressed, I actually memorized the story—2,500 words.

The picture of Billy I love best: He and I are trying to play checkers on the breakfast-room table. Little Brother Pat keeps interfering. Billy in calm silence unlatches the window screen. picks a puzzled Pat up carefully, lowers him out the window, relatches the screen, returns to the game. It was all so smooth, so ceremonial, so right, that I think little Pat took it as a rare honor.

Wherever a mind could go, Billy had been. He could answer Goethe’s question in Mignon: Yes, he knew the land where the lemon trees grow. And the other things. He had sailed to Byzantium. He had heard the mermaids sing. And the very best of all, he had loved, and been loved.

The perfect Ruy Jacques.

Her ballet slippers made a soft slapping sound, moody, mournful, as Anna van Tuyl stepped into the annex of her psychiatrical consulting room and walked toward the tall mirror.

Within seconds she would know whether she was ugly.

As she had done half a thousand times in the past two years, the young woman faced the great glass squarely, brought her arms up gracefully and rose upon her tip-toes. And there resemblance to past hours ceased. She did not proceed to an uneasy study of her face and figure. She could not. For her eyes, as though acting with a wisdom and volition of their own, had closed tightly.

Anna van Tuyl was too much the professional psychiatrist not to recognize that her subconscious mind had shrieked its warning. Eyes still shut, and breathing in great gasps, she dropped from her toes as if to turn and leap away. Then gradually she straightened. She must force herself to go through with it. She might not be able to bring herself here, in this mood of candid receptiveness, twice in one lifetime. It must be now.

She trembled in brief, silent premonition, then quietly raised her eyelids.

Somber eyes looked out at her, a little darker than yesterday: pools plowed around by furrows that today gouged a little deeper—the result of months of squinting up from the position into which her spinal deformity had thrust her neck and shoulders. The pale lips were pressed together just a little tighter in their defense against unpredictable pain. The cheeks seemed bloodless, having been bleached finally and completely by the Unfinished Dream that haunted her sleep, wherein a nightingale fluttered about a white rose.

As if in brooding confirmation, she brought up simultaneously the pearl-translucent fingers of both hands to the upper borders of her forehead, and there pushed back the incongruous masses of newly-gray hair from two tumorous bulges—like incipient horns. As she did this she made a quarter turn, exposing to the mirror the humped grotesquerie of her back.

Then, by degrees, like some netherworld Narcissus, she began to sink under the bizarre enchantment of that misshapen image. She could retain no real awareness that this creature was she. That profile, as if seen through witch-opened eyes, might have been that of some enormous toad, and this flickering metaphor paralyzed her first and only forlorn attempt at identification.

In a vague way, she realized that she had discovered what she had set out to discover. She was ugly. She was even very ugly.

The change must have been gradual, too slow to say of any one day: Yesterday I was not ugly. But even eyes that hungered for deception could no longer deny the cumulative evidence.

So slow—and yet so fast. It seemed only yesterday that had found her face down on Matthew Bell’s examination table, biting savagely at a little pillow as his gnarled fingertips probed grimly at her upper thoracic vertebrae.

Well, then, she was ugly. But she’d not give in to self-pity. To hell with what she looked like! To hell with mirrors!

On sudden impulse she seized her balancing tripod with both hands, closed her eyes, and swung.

The tinkling of falling mirror glass had hardly ceased when a harsh and gravelly voice hailed her from her office. “Bravo!”

She dropped the practice tripod and whirled, aghast. “Matt!”

“Just thought it was time to come in. But if you want to bawl a little, I’ll go back out and wait. No?” Without looking directly at her face or pausing for a reply, he tossed a packet on the table. “There it is. Honey, if I could write a ballet score like your Nightingale and the Rose, I wouldn’t care if my spine was knotted in a figure eight.”

“You’re crazy,” she muttered stonily, unwilling to admit that she was both pleased and curious. “You don’t know what it means to have once been able to pirouette, to balance en arabesque. And anyway”—she looked at him from the corner of her eyes—“how could anyone tell whether the score’s good? There’s no Finale as yet. It isn’t finished.”

“Neither is the Mona Lisa, ‘Kubla Khan,’ or a certain symphony by Schubert.”

“But this is different. A plotted ballet requires an integrated sequence of events leading up to a climax—to a Finale. I haven’t figured out the ending. Did you notice I left a thirty-eight-beat hiatus just before the Nightingale dies? I still need a death song for her. She’s entitled to die with a flourish.” She couldn’t tell him about The Dream—that she always awoke just before that death song began.

“No matter. You’ll get it eventually. The story’s straight out of Oscar Wilde, isn’t it? As I recall, the student needs a red rose as admission to the dance, but his garden contains only white roses. A foolish, if sympathetic, nightingale thrusts her heart against a thorn on a white rose stem, and the resultant ill-advised transfusion produces a red rose … and a dead nightingale. Isn’t that about all there is to it?”

“Almost. But I still need the nightingale’s death song. That’s the whole point of the ballet. In a plotted ballet, every chord has to be fitted to the immediate action, blended with it, so that it supplements it, explains it, unifies it, and carries the action toward the climax. That death song will make the difference between a good score and a superior one. Don’t smile. I think some of my individual scores are rather good, though of course I’ve never heard them except on my own piano. But without a proper climax, they’ll remain unintegrated. They’re all variants of some elusive dominating leitmotiv—some really marvelous theme I haven’t the greatness of soul to grasp. I know it’s something profound and poignant, like the Liebestod theme in Tristan. It probably states a fundamental musical truth, but I don’t think I’ll ever find it. The nightingale dies with her secret.”

She paused, opened her lips as though to continue, and then fell moodily silent again. She wanted to go on talking, to lose herself in volubility. But now the reaction of her struggle with the mirror was setting in, and she was suddenly very tired. Had she ever wanted to cry? Now she thought only of sleep. But a furtive glance at her wristwatch told her it was barely ten o’clock.

The man’s craggy eyebrows dropped in an imperceptible frown, faint, yet craftily alert. “Anna, the man who read your Rose score wants to talk to you about staging it for the Rose Festival—you know, the annual affair in the Via Rosa.”

“I—an unknown—write a Festival ballet?” She added with dry incredulity: “The Ballet Committee is in complete agreement with your friend, of course?”

“He is the Committee.”

“What did you say his name was?”

“I didn’t.”

She peered up at him suspiciously. “I can play games, too. If he’s so anxious to use my music, why doesn’t he come to see me?”

“He isn’t that anxious.”

“Oh, a big shot, eh?”

“Not exactly. It’s just that he’s fundamentally indifferent toward the things that fundamentally interest him. Anyway, he’s got a complex about the Via Rosa—loves the district and hates to leave it, even for a few hours.”

She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Will you believe it, I’ve never been there. That’s the rose-walled district where the ars-gratia-artis professionals live, isn’t it? Sort of a plutocratic Rive Gauche?”

The man exhaled in expansive affection. “That’s the Via, all right. A six-hundred-pound chunk of Carrara marble in every garret, resting most likely on the grand piano. Poppa chips furiously away with an occasional glance at his model, who is momma, posed au naturel.”

Anna watched his eyes grow dreamy as he continued. “Momma is a little restless, having suddenly recalled that the baby’s bottle and that can of caviar should have come out of the atomic warmer at some nebulous period in the past. Daughter sits before the piano keyboard, surreptitiously switching from Czerny to a torrid little number she’s going to try on the trap-drummer in Dorran’s Via orchestra. Beneath the piano are the baby and mongrel pup. Despite their tender age, this thing is already in their blood. Or at least, their stomachs, for they have just finished an hors d’oeuvre of marble chips and now amiably share the pièce de résistance, a battered but rewarding tube of Van Dyke brown.”

Anna listened to this with widening eyes. Finally she gave a short amazed laugh. “Matt Bell, you really love that life, don’t you?”

He smiled. “In some ways the creative life is pretty carefree. I’m just a psychiatrist specializing in psychogenetics. I don’t know an arpeggio from a dry point etching, but I like to be around people that do.” He bent forward earnestly. “These artists—these golden people—they’re the coming force in society. And you’re one of them, Anna, whether you know it or like it. You and your kind are going to inherit the earth—only you’d better hurry if you don’t want Martha Jacques and her National Security scientists to get it first. So the battle lines converge in Renaissance II. Art versus Science. Who dies? Who lives?” He looked thoughtful, lonely. He might have been pursuing an introspective monologue in the solitude of his own chambers.

“This Mrs. Jacques,” said Anna. “What’s she like? You asked me to see her tomorrow about her husband, you know.”

“Darn good-looking woman. The most valuable mind in history, some say. And if she really works out something concrete from her Sciomnia equation, I guess there won’t be any doubt about it. And that’s what makes her potentially the most dangerous human being alive: National Security is fully aware of her value, and they’ll coddle her tiniest whim—at least until she pulls something tangible out of Sciomnia. Her main whim for the past few years has been her errant husband, Mr. Ruy Jacques.”

“Do you think she really loves him?”

“Just between me and you, she hates his guts. So naturally she doesn’t want any other woman to get him. She has him watched, of course. The Security Bureau co-operates with alacrity, because they don’t want foreign agents to approach her through him. There have been ugly rumors of assassinated models … But I’m digressing.” He cocked a quizzical eye at her. “Permit me to repeat the invitation of your unknown admirer. Like you, he’s another true child of the new Renaissance. The two of you should find much in common—more than you can now guess. I’m very serious about this, Anna. Seek him out immediately—tonight—now. There aren’t any mirrors in the Via.”

“Please, Matt.”

“Honey,” he growled, “to a man my age you aren’t ugly. And this man’s the same. If a woman is pretty, he paints her and forgets her. But if she’s some kind of an artist, he talks to her, and he can get rather endless sometimes. If it’s any help to your self-assurance, he’s about the homeliest creature on the face of the earth. You’ll look like de Milo alongside him.”

The woman laughed shortly. “I can’t get mad at you, can I? Is he married?”

“Sort of.” His eyes twinkled. “But don’t let that concern you. He’s a perfect scoundrel.”

“Suppose I decide to look him up. Do I simply run up and down the Via paging all homely friends of Dr. Matthew Bell?”

“Not quite. If I were you I’d start at the entrance—where they have all those queer side-shows and one-man exhibitions. Go on past the vendress of love philters and work down the street until you find a man in a white suit with polka dots.”

“How perfectly odd! And then what? How can I introduce myself to a man whose name I don’t know? Oh, Matt, this is so silly, so childish …”

He shook his head in slow denial. “You aren’t going to think about names when you see him. And your name won’t mean a thing to him, anyway. You’ll be lucky if you aren’t ‘hey you’ by midnight. But it isn’t going to matter.”

“It isn’t too clear why you don’t offer to escort me.” She studied him calculatingly. “And I think you’re withholding his name because you know I wouldn’t go if you revealed it.”

He merely chuckled.

She lashed out: “Damn you, get me a cab.”

“I’ve had one waiting half an hour.”

“Tell ya what the professor’s gonna do, ladies and gentlemen. He’s gonna defend not just one paradox. Not just two. Not just a dozen. No, ladies and gentlemen, the professor’s gonna defend seventeen, and all in the space of one short hour, without repeating himself, and including a brand-new one he has just thought up today: ‘Music owes its meaning to its ambiguity.’ Remember, folks, an axiom is just a paradox the professor’s already got hold of. The cost of this dazzling display … don’t crowd there, mister …”

Anna felt a relaxing warmth flowing over her mind, washing at the encrusted strain of the past hour. She smiled and elbowed her way through the throng and on down the street, where a garishly lighted sign, bat-wing doors, and a forlorn cluster of waiting women announced the next attraction:

“FOR MEN ONLY. Daring blindfold exhibitions and variety entertainments continuously.”

Inside, a loudspeaker was blaring: “Thus we have seen how to compose the ideal end-game problem in chess. And now, gentlemen, for the small consideration of an additional quarter …”

But Anna’s attention was now occupied by a harsh cawing from across the street.

“Love philters! Works on male or female! Any age! Never fails!”

She laughed aloud. Good old Matt! He had foreseen what these glaring multifaceted nonsensical stimuli would do for her. Love philters! Just what she needed!

The vendress of love philters was of ancient vintage, perhaps seventy-five years old. Above cheeks of wrinkled leather her eyes glittered speculatively. And how weirdly she was clothed! Her bedraggled dress was a shrieking purple. And under that dress was another of the same hue, though perhaps a little faded. And under that, still another.

“That’s why they call me Violet,” cackled the old woman, catching Anna’s stare. “Better come over and let me mix you one.”

But Anna shook her head and passed on, eyes shining. Fifteen minutes later, as she neared the central Via area, her receptive reverie was interrupted by the outburst of music ahead.

Good! Watching the street dancers for half an hour would provide a highly pleasant climax to her escapade. Apparently there wasn’t going to be any man in a polka-dot suit. Matt was going to be disappointed, but it certainly wasn’t her fault she hadn’t found him.

There was something oddly familiar about that music.

She quickened her pace, and then, as recognition came, she began to run as fast as her crouching back would permit. This was her music—the prelude to Act III of her ballet!

She burst through the mass of spectators lining the dance square. The music stopped. She stared out into the scattered dancers, and what she saw staggered the twisted fram