Vintage Season
by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore

Basic Information:

First published in Astounding Science Fiction, September 1946, starting on page 54

Collected in a number of anthologies, including The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume IIA (one of the novella volumes); The World Treasury of Science Fiction; The Time Travellers; & The Best of C. L. Moore.

Sci-fi theme: Time travel (sub-category: Time travel tourism)

Opening paragraph:

Three people came up the walk to the old mansion just at dawn on a perfect May morning. Oliver Wilson in his pajamas watched them from an upper window through a haze of conflicting emotions, resentment predominant. He didn't want them there.

Thoughts:

As always, please read the story first, as there are many spoilers.

Kuttner and Moore don't really try to hide that these three people are from the future, time-traveling tourists who have very precisely rented Oliver's specific house over an entire specific and perfect May for... some reason. (Because we know we are reading a sci-fi short story, we can immediately narrow it down to two likelihoods: they are either aliens or visitors from the future.) Some mystery resides in the reason these people are here, renting Oliver's house, but that, too, can be broadly guessed by the reader, if one wishes to, without damaging the impact of the story. This is not a story where these mysteries are the point.

While we are likely to figure out these renters are from the future before too long, it takes a while for Oliver to figure that out, however, as he assumes they are just particularly sophisticated foreigners, what with their unusual names and odd-smelling food. The authors' depiction of these people - and of their clothes, their tech, their social lubricating beverage, the way the move, and particularly their "future-art" - is done perfectly. We get it from Oliver's point of view, so it comes to us through the limited filter of the present-day. Oliver's descriptions reflect his confusion, the way things we do not fully understand are hard to remember precisely, or just hard to pin down. While he is a little slow on the uptake, he knows immediately that they are 'other.' Human, but something more, something alien to his experiences. He may be bumbling at times, but he's not stupid.

It is Oliver's encounter with "future-art," about halfway through the story (in a scene with Kleph, the younger of the two woman from the future), that breaks down the very British wall he's put up that there must be a rational explanation. "What he saw there he could not afterward remember except in a blurring as vague as the blurred ideas the music roused in his brain. Half the room had vanished behind a mist, and the mist was a three-dimensional screen upon which were projected - He had no words for them. He was not even sure if the projections were visual. The mist was spinning with motion and sound, but essentially it was neither sound nor motion that Oliver saw.

"This was a work of art. Oliver knew no name for it. It transcended all art-forms he knew, blended them, and out of the blend produced subtleties his mind could not begin to grasp."

By placing the weight of explanation on a character who cannot explain it - and who is the stand-in for us - Moore and Kuttner avoid the exposition trap. We don't get the woman from the future explaining how all the technology works, how the illusions are created, how it was invented and by whom, and whatever else a lessor author would give us in an information dump. Because it's impossible for Oliver to fully describe what he experienced, and because we're not weighed down with a bunch of science gibberish, the "future-art" passage remains effective and believably from the far-future even now, 80-plus years after the story was written.

While deeply affecting him, this future-art is not even necessarily enjoyable for Oliver, who tells us that, "It was outrageous. It violated the innermost privacies of a man's mind, called up secret things long ago walled off behind mental scar tissue."

The future-art (they are called "symphonies," this one by the greatest composer of their day, Cenbe) is the catalyst for Oliver to figure out his guests have spent the previous day in the 14th Century, and from there, to understand that they are time travelers from the future. But these symphonies are not merely a plot device to unlock these facts. They are also a central component of why the future tourists are here in Oliver's house. When the time comes, when the event they have been waiting for arrives, it is followed by the appearance of Cenbe himself, who will create a new symphony out of the tragedy of Oliver's time, staying after the others leave to collect the material for this multimedia "future art."

The story is critical of these "tragedy-tourists" from the future. Their lives in their present seem to be lacking challenges and contain too much leisure time. For all their advances, they are no less petty than any other human, as shown especially through Madame Hollia as she fights for access to Oliver's house. Oliver reflects, at the end, that there is "something wrong about this race from the future." He thinks, "...all of them had been touched with a pettiness... They were all dilettantes... They toured time, but only as onlookers. Were they bored - sated - with their normal existence? Not sated enough to wish change... They dared not change the past - they could not risk flawing their own present... Time traveling purely as an escape mechanism seemed almost blasphemous... how had [Kleph] seen him? Not as a living, breathing man... [they] were spectators."

Fair enough, but we have to ponder if Oliver did no differently, within the limits of the technology of his time, when he studied the long-ago past in college? Are we able to appreciate the people of the past as "living, breathing" humans? I am sure most of us are not. Just as Cenbe was "different from the others," displaying a "avidity... a bright, fascinated probing," there are likely small number of exceptions: historians with an artistic sensibility, or artists who dive deeply into history, perhaps.

There is sadness in this story, flirting around the edges of this most perfect May ever recorded (a beautifully balanced juxtaposition), a sadness that only, at the end, when Cenbe is with Oliver, finds its way fully to the surface, allowing us to look back and see it at the heart of the tale, running through the entire story. Yes, Oliver's time has just experienced a great, terrible, tragic event, but that is not the source of the sadness. It is Oliver seeing himself through the eyes of his guests:

"And suddenly Oliver realized from across what distances Cenbe was watching him. A vast distance, as time is measured... the whole world of now was not quite real to Cenbe, falling short of reality because of that basic variance in time."

Earlier, when Oliver figured out his visitors were time travelers, the clue was a musical work (so yet another composition), this one from Chaucer's time. He found, in his library, a "book... old and battered, interlined with the penciled notes of his college days" (always the past comes into this story), where the unchanging history of the Middle Ages was recorded, which had this tune in it. Now, at the end of the story, he realizes these people from the future see his time in the same way.

This is truly looking into the abyss, and this is the tragedy of the story - of all of our stories. The catastrophe he is living (and dying) through is secondary. To his visitors, all this happened centuries ago, it is historical fact, something that impacted people long dead. Unchanging history. Oliver understands this mindset, because it is how he sees the 14th Century plague described in his battered college history book. It never occurred to him that someone could view his present-day world that way.