Who Goes There?

Walter Jon Williams made his debut at the start of the ’80s, and unlike most writers he began as a novelist before moving into short stories. He was already in his thirties when he sold his first short story, but the good news is that he was so adept at it from the outset that by the end of the ’80s he had emerged as one of the field’s major talents at short lengths. I especially recommend his 1987 story “Dinosaurs,” which is not about dinosaurs at all, but rather a far-future humanity that’s become so alien from us that they may as well be a different race. His affiliation with the cyberpunk movement (which coincided with his own emergence) gives one the impression he couldn’t have come about earlier than the ’80s, although Williams is not purely a cyberpunk writer. Williams’s writing is elegant and yet moody enough that it makes sense he would’ve written a distant sequel to a Roger Zelazny story, Williams’s “Elegy for Angels and Dogs” being a sequel to Zelazny’s classic “The Graveyard Heart.” “Surfacing” is itself a moody and rather dense novella, about alien contact, language, mental illness, and a future humanity that seems on its way to conquering the stars. It also has whales, and who can say no to that?

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), The Mammoth Book of Modern Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1980s (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), The Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Short Science Fiction Novels (ed. Gardner Dozois), and The Best of Walter Jon Williams.

Enhancing Image

Anthony is a 26-year-old scientist on some far-off planet, although he’s not along, for he’s brought humpback whales as translators of a sort—or as middle men. These whales, one of whom is named Two Notches (actually his name is longer than that, but let’s keep it simple), were imported to this planet, but have adapted to it splendidly. Anthony has very few in the way of humanoid friends, but he gets along with the humpbacks, even having a translation system via computer that allows him to talk to them; turns out the whales have a name for Anthony as well, “He Who Has Brought Us to the Sea of Rich Strangeness.” The real reason Anthony is here, though, is to study the Deep Dwellers, and possibly even to see one in its entirety. The Dwellers are like the giant squid on Earth: a truly massive marine animal that was once thought to be merely legend, but whose existence has been scientifically proven as of late. The problem is that nobody is totally sure what a Dweller looks like, only having parts of dead Dwellers to go on. The Dweller, so it’s suspected, is whale-like, but also with tentacles—and larger than even the blue whale. Thus the humpbacks are the closest the Dwellers would have to relatives (however distant) that can also communicate with humans. Anthony doesn’t mind the solitude of being on a boat by himself all day, not being much of a fan of other people.

Can you tell this was written in the years following the sudden popularity of whales? Incidentally the Roger Payne album Songs of the Humpback Whale (sold over a hundred thousand copies despite literally being whale noises) coincided with the hippie movement right before it went into decline, with “Save the Whales” becoming one of the big movements of the ’70s. Read some disco-era SF and notice how suddenly people give a fuck about whales. It’s a bit weird, with hindsight. Otherwise this story doesn’t show its age at all, and even then, why complain about a planetary SF adventure where whales are on the side of the good guys? Anthony himself is less appealing. On the one hand it makes sense someone who spends hours of his day, every day, with animals would be a bit misanthropic. (Meet any veterinarian and there’s a good chance they’re pessimistic enough about the human condition to make Mark Twain blush.) I can also see how Gardner Dozois, the editor of Asimov’s at the time, would’ve latched onto “Surfacing” enough to reprint it twice, as Anthony is a very Dozois-like protagonist. I do think that because Anthony is such a downer, a moodiness that infects the rest of the story, the downbeat nature of the story now reads as a bit been-there-done-that. I don’t think we, in [CURRENT YEAR], have yet properly reckoned with the fact that Dozois is the most influential SF editor of the past forty years, and that the reason why so much short SF is downbeat (to the point of tedium) is like that is at least partly because of his influence. My point is that I can tell you I would’ve liked “Surfacing” more in 1988.

At the beginning of the story we get a newsfeed of a famous Kyklops, named Telamon, making a tour of the planet. The Kyklops are basically a race of energy beings, like of many such races found in the Star Trek universe; they lack solid bodies of their own, instead using the bodies of others like puppets, including humans. This is important to keep in mind for later, although given how quickly this little scene comes and goes it’s easy to forget about its importance. Maybe this was by design, but I do wish the Kyklops were set up better so that them becoming relevant to the plot much later feels less random, since the first time we see them it comes off as insignificant and the reader is likely to forget.

While Anthony is easily the main character, and the setting rather desolate, this is not a one-man show—more like a two-people show. Anthony meets Philana, who despite being only 21 (this is especially conspicuous in a world where, for reasons I don’t recall being given, humans can now live centuries at a time) has own her yacht, which she uses to talk to the whales as well—particularly the females, which it turns out is a special skill. Anthony can talk to males and Philana the females. Each has what the other lacks. By the way, I said that aside from the timely fixation on whales this story doesn’t show its age, but that’s not entirely true.

Get a load of this:

It was harder to talk with the females; although they were curious and playful, they weren’t vocal like the bulls; their language was deeper, briefer, more personal. They made no songs. It was almost as if, solely in the realm of speech, the cows were autistic. Their psychology was different and complicated, and Anthony had had little success in establishing any lasting communication. The cows, he had realized, were speaking a second tongue: the humpbacks were essentially bilingual, and Anthony had only learned one of their languages.

No comment needed.

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack with that one passage, but let’s not.

I said before that Williams’s writing can at times come off as Zelazny-esque, and “Surfacing” has a relatively subtle example of this with the budding relationship between Anthony and Philana, the brooding young man with the spritely young woman, with allusions to mythology (locals call the Dwellers Leviathans) that you’d expect from Zelazny; yet there’s something to be said for how capable Philana is, despite her age. Of course, it turns out that Philana’s skills and her apparent wealth have a catch, or rather came at a hefty price. More on that later. “Surfacing” is at one point a love story, and also about trying to make contact with an alien species—possibly even more than one. Anthony has a direct line to the humpbacks but unfortunately the same can’t be said for the Dwellers, whose language is much trickier. A neat thing Williams does here is he shows us lines from the Dwellers that are basically dialogue trees, with branching paths and ambiguities with what words could mean. The Dwellers also have an issue with pronouns, not because of gender but because they have this problem with subjectivity. It would’ve been a pain in the ass to print, not to mention these dialogue trees take up a lot of space on the page, so I can see why Williams only does them a handful of times. Still, it’s neat. It helps that we get to know little about the Dwellers until the very end.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

There Be Spoilers Here

Philana is a puppet for Telamon, that Kyklops mentioned earlier, which comes to Anthony as a real shock considering the first time he sees Telamon take over Philana’s body the two are having sex, and Anthony isn’t sure why Philana starts acting very strangely—and violently. Telamon is “a decadent,” as Philana puts it, which is to say he’s a bit of a sadist and pervert. He does things often out of boredom. Telamon becomes the closest the story has to a villain, although he doesn’t really enter the plot until the back half. The thing about the Kyklops is that they’re energy beings, but they’re also basically immortal, and unspeakably old. Telamon (or Jockstrap as Anthony takes to calling him) is so much older than his human host that the gap is all but unfathomable. So you have a dirty old man who can’t be killed through conventional means and who can also teleport matter at will, sending the pesky Anthony anywhere he likes—indeed he can kill Anthony with a mere thought. Obviously this is a losing battle; aside from dishing out some snark there’s very little Anthony can do. To make matters worse, Telamon can take over Philana’s body whenever he likes, and the best Anthony can hope for is to look for the signs. There are at least a couple ways of looking at Philana and Telamon’s relationship. We can understand Philana as, metaphorically anyway, someone living with mental illness, more specifically a personality disorder that gives her blackouts when Telamon’s in control; for better or worse she doesn’t remember these episodes. Telamon can also be thought of as like Philana’s abusive sugar daddy, since he does provide for her, at what many would consider too hefty a price.

So Anthony can’t beat Telamon directly, fine; but he can outmatch his rival in a way that has to do with what he loves doing most. I was rather confused at first by this story’s open-ended climax, since it’s not clear what we’re meant to take away from Anthony contacting the Dweller he’s been studying and coaxing it into rising to the surface—a maneuver that may or may not kill the damn thing, never mind Anthony and Philana. We already figured Dwellers were massive, but this turned out to be something else, with the Dweller being host to a variety of deep-sea organisms. “The Dweller was so big, Anthony saw, it constituted an entire ecosystem.” As frightened as they are astounded, Our Heroes™ make contact with a creature whose entirety no one had ever seen before. What happens after this point is totally unclear. Maybe Telamon will give up Philana, on account of Anthony proving himself an exceptional scientist, doing something Telamon himself never could. The plotline with Anthony studying the Dwellers gets resolved satisfactorily, but the same can’t be said for the “love triangle” (if you really wanna call it that), which perhaps deliberately is left hanging.

A Step Farther Out

Occasionally you’ll get an SF story about the ocean, but Williams is one of the few writers I’ve seen to tackle the inherent alienness of the high seas. There’s a dash of Moby-Dick in there (as there should be with any oceanic narrative written after 1920), but Williams combines a high-seas adventure (with WHAAAAALES) with psychology such that ultimately this is not a story that would be possible without a few SFnal elements. I’ve had a few days to think about it, and I’d say it’s worth a look if you’re up for summerly reading—while we still have a month of summer left.

See you next time.