is Zelazny trying (and succeeding) to write a Cordwainer Smith story—about Sandor Sandor, Benedict Benedict, and Lynx Links—in their pursuit of Corgo. They succeed, and indeed it is an extremely good Cordwainer Smith story—done in brief mosaic sections and as memorable as any of Smith’s stories of C’Mell, the cat girl, or D’Joan, the dog woman. But it is perhaps not the most interesting Zelazny story, which is perhaps the best analysis I can give of it here.
While he seemed to enjoy the attention lavished upon him in those years, the slim, dark man of Polish American extraction never did anything to seek it out, except write: the same humorous irony with which he confronted the most intense excitement about his work (from 1963 till approximately 1968), he would use to confront those people who, a few years later, were to declare his newer work was not as strong as his earlier productions. Zelazny went on to write more award-winning novels and stories, including Lord of Light and Home is the Hangman. His Amber novels, which began appearing in ’70, were unremittingly popular, as the individual novels came out over the next twenty years, but the excitement within the SF community still centered on the ten long stories we have cited, coupled with a handful of those early novels: This Immortal, The Dream Master (an expansion of “He Who Shapes”), Bridge of Ashes, Doorways in the Sand (the last coming to be considered the best, with This Immortal close behind), while others would argue as intelligently and as passionately for Isle of the Dead and Lord of light, producing the conflict that is what must rumble about in the socio-aesthetic landscape for a century or so after the death of the author before any reputation can begin to settle.
“For a Breath I Tarry” (1966), and “The Keys to December” (1966), both first appeared in the English magazine, New Worlds, before its transition from digest size to tabloid size, but still locking Zelazny’s reputation with that of the New Wave.
The first of them, Zelazny claims was his favorite novelette. (The second was developed for a film, at least as far as a completed script, but as is often the case on such projects, nothing materialized.) The title comes from A. E. Housman.
It is a retelling of the story of Job with all the characters taken by great artificial intelligences and their robots, long after humanity has vanished from the Solar System—Divcom, that burns like a blue star in the sky, and the Alternate, which is buried deep underground, in radio contact with each other and with a hoard of robots around a world, where only robots move and do destroy each other . . . each trying to undo what the other creates.
Man had ceased to exist long before Frost had been created.
Almost no trace of Man remained upon the Earth.
Frost sought after all those traces which still existed.
He employed constant visual monitoring through his machines, especially the diggers.
After a decade, he had accumulated portions of several bathtubs, a broken statue, and a collection of children’s stories on a solid state record.
After a century, he had acquired a jewelry collection, eating utensils, several whole bathtubs, part of a symphony, seventeen buttons, three belt buckles, half a toilet seat, nine old coins, and the top part of an obelisk.
In this post-human world inhabited by only robots and A.I.s, the story of Frost is both the story of Job and the story of Faust, with Frost as the main character of both. Solcom and Divcom and the Alternate (as well as the Beta Machine and Mordel), are all god-like intelligences who seem to have no sense either of pain or their own eventual extinctions or even the meaning of the senses or the feelings that made them meaningful. (“The senses do not make a Man,” said Mordel. “There have been many creatures possessing his sensory equivalence, but they were not Men.”) They can measure the temperature, but have no awareness of what cold or warm means. They can perceive sunrises or sunsets and even artworks, but have no sense of what beauty is that distinguishes one from another.
Scattered throughout the story are bits of diction that recall passages from the Bible or poetry. (“Divcom created a crew of robots immune to the orders of Solcom and designed to go to and fro in the Earth and up and down in it . . . . For six days he worked at its shaping, and on the seventh he regarded it.”) Divcom inhabits the air along with Solcom, which is sometimes perceived as “a blue star.” The Alternate lives deep underground. Their conversations with each other seem to embody hostilities, and their first one in the fourth scene of the story ends with a line by Divcom that recalls another scriptural moment: “Do you know my servant Frost . . . ?”
In the course of the story, Frost, whose hobby has become the study of Man, is presented by Mordel three books, as the first of many others: Human Physiology, An Outline of History (by H. G. Wells), and A Shropshire Lad (by A. E. Housman, in particular the XXXIInd poem “From far, from eve and morning”). The point of all of this is that without knowing the experiences that make the human physiology meaningful (hunger, thirst, desire, fear, pleasure . . . ), true understanding of the others is finally impossible, even as what is called the Library of Man—the considerable number of books that remain in the world, though this is only a fraction of what once was there—is exposed to Frost’s text scanners:
Load by load the surviving Library of Man passed beneath Frost’s scanner. Frost was eager to have them all, and he complained because Divcom would not transmit their contents directly to him. Mordel explained it was because Divcom decided to do it that way. Frost decided it was so that he could not obtain a precise fix on Divcom’s location.
Still, at the rate of one-hundred to one-hundred-fifty volumes a week, it took Frost only a little over a century to exhaust Divcom’s supply of books.
At the end of the half-century, he laid himself open to monitoring, and there was no conclusion of failure.
During this time, Solcom made no comment upon the course of affairs. Frost decided this was not a matter of unawareness, but one of waiting. For what? He was not certain . . . “So few?” asked Frost. “Many of them contained bibliographies of books I have not yet scanned.”
“Then those books no longer exist,” said Mordel. “It is only by accident that my master succeeded in preserving as many as there are.”
“Then there is nothing more to be learned from Man from his books. What else have you?”
“There were some films and tapes,” said Mordel, “which my master transferred to solid state records. I could bring you those for viewing.”
“Bring them,” said Frost.
Mordel departed and returned with the Complete Drama Critics Living Library. This could not be speeded up beyond twice natural time, so it took Frost a little over six months to view it in its entirety.
Then, “What else have you?” he asked.
“Some artifacts,” said Mordel.
“Bring them.”
He returned with pots and pans, game boards, and hand tools. He brought hairbrushes, combs, eyeglasses, human clothing. He showed Frost facsimiles of blueprints, paintings, newspapers, magazines, letters, and the scores of several pieces of music. He displayed a football, a baseball, a browning automatic rifle, a doorknob, a chain of keys, the tops to several mason jars, a model beehive. He played him the recorded music.
Then he returned with nothing. (pp 370)
Frost begins the processing of the material evaluation of what he has looked over, however poorly he does or does not understand it, and at least once, we
