Empties (27 page)

“It wouldn’t mean much to you either,” she said, “if you could do what I do. You’ll be my helper, remember?”
 

“To terrify people?”
 

“Control them, make them pay money, which will give us influence over the right people, make them do anything we want. And there may be other things I can do, maybe with inanimate objects— but at the very least take three pounds of flesh here and there and make the world dance for us.”
 

“There’s nothing good about you,” he said, and for the first time she felt his disgust.
 

“I’m learning,” she whispered. Fearless, she would win him over.
 

He was silent, but she felt his breathing quicken with her own. “Is it that redhead?” she asked. “You want that bimbo?”
 

He took a deep breath.
 

“She was the last on my list.”
 

“You sick bitch, you’re lying,” he said with a pained laugh.
 

She turned her head, looked into his unblinking eyes, and twisted wildly within herself, but his brains were slow in coming out. His eyes fluttered as he gazed at her, and she knew that in a moment she would have no time or strength left to reach him.
 

She twisted and knotted herself.
 

His brain sliced through the walkway fence and the pieces dropped into the dirty river below. He slumped against her, blood in his ears, eyes rolling back—and his gun fired with a muffled thud, as if two blocks of wood had been struck together somewhere beyond the world.
 

She tensed from the pain and clutched at him, knowing that he had held back until she had lied about Carla.
 

“Bill...” she said, staring into the shadows of his open mouth as the sun hid behind white clouds.
 

She held him.
 

After an age, the sun glared at her. She looked down and saw blood staining her blouse and skirt, and wondered if she could get up and walk home. A couple strolled by, and she held Benek close to hide her wound. A boy and his dog ran past. The dog stopped for a moment and looked back at her, sniffing, then ran after the boy.
 

She looked at her wound again. It was not pumping out blood.
 

She willed her fortress self to stand up. There wasn’t a lot of blood after all.
 

She took a few steps, stopped and looked back at Benek, then went back and pried the gun out of his hand and threw it into the river after his brains. Then she picked up the pharmacy bag and stuffed it into her pocket. Buttoning her jacket tightly, she looked back at him again, struggling against pity. How had he dared turn against her? It had been a delusion for her to believe that he could change, that he could love her and be her partner.
 

But now, finally, no one was left who knew about her, or would ever know about her, she told herself, and realized that this was what she had been working toward—her own survival, and the acceptance of herself.
 

She had made mistakes in discovering herself, but they had not been fatal, and there was still so much to learn and do...
 

She felt a sudden dizziness along with her relief, and realized that her injury might be fatal. She staggered forward and sat down with a jolt on the next bench. The dark crept up through her body, blacking her vision...
 

When light returned, she looked over at Benek. He seemed so small on his bench, and she remembered when she had been a prisoner inside herself, unable to reach out to anyone. Her next helper would be more appreciative, she told herself through her pain. After all, she had a lot to offer, and nothing would keep them apart...
 

Her pain insisted.
 

She stood up and staggered back toward Benek.
 

Her pain went with her.
 

She nearly fell over in the last few steps, but finally sat down next to him. Jaw clenched, he seemed to be gazing intently across the river. The barge had moved on, leaving a clear view of the far shore.
 

Angry at her pain, she worked to purge it from her body; but the harm was stubborn. She let her head down on Benek’s peaceful shoulder, and saw the blackness around her...
 

There will be no you and me, my love, she thought, then sat up, gasping for breath in the bright flickering daylight.
 

No you and me.
 

Her heart skipped a beat.
 

Only me.
 

Fritz Leiber,
 

A Remembrance

Personal histories are lost unless written down; for a time they persist in the living, who may fail to pass them on. Families often do not retain even verbal histories, but sometimes there is one member who speaks out and records them, to the dismay and delight of the living, who tend to judge plausibility by seemings and unlikelihoods without recourse to testimony or evidence.
 

As you can see from my dedication to this novel, which you have either read or just turned to this afterword out of curiosity, I thought highly of Fritz Leiber and felt deeply about his work; I was also persuaded by his methods, as was noted in recent years by Howard Waldrop and others.
 

This was especially brought home to me after I finished
Empties
and reread Leiber’s novel
Conjure Wife
. Long before Stephen King called it his favorite horror novel, I had admired its seamless segues from drama to thoughts about life and living, as one might find much later in the highly praised novels of Robert Stone; but this was in a 1943 novel first published in John W. Campbell’s
Unknown Worlds
, which gave impetus to what we now call modern or urban fantasy. Open the yellowing pages of what was a commercial “pulp” magazine and find serious insights into life and gender conflicts, in a magazine from an editor more noted for so-called hard, realistic science fiction? Yes, and yes. This same editor was also a one man “new wave” of literary SF as the writer Don A. Stuart, where he was an example of the ambitiously written SF that he sought for his magazine,
Astounding Science Fiction
, later
Analog
.
 

Fritz Leiber was my mentor at the first Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop in 1968, held in the misty hills of Pennsylvania, at Clarion State College, a fact I have rarely emphasized because I doubt the consensus fiction tendencies of workshops.
 

But Fritz, a master who taught by example and by encouragement, made you feel more like an apprentice. I asked him during private walks why he so rarely said anything negative about the stories presented in the sessions, and he answered that every writer there had already shown skill and some dedication through the acceptance process and would get enough discouragement later, so why not be encouraging. The basic-training military method was not for him.
 

He shared practical advice. I write novels, he said, by typing out a synopsis that is not very complete, then cutting out each line and pasting it at the top of a page, and that becomes the first page of a chapter. Later he would rewrite it all anyway, but he refused to bore himself with “complete” outlines. The best was to be discovered, but some overview could be helpful. Plan, but not too much, lest you strangle spontaneity and abandon the work. He had described the careful balance between fiction by the numbers and artfulness. He did not say art, but artfulness, which may be found in all kinds of work, even in the maligned pulp magazines of fantasy and science fiction, and today’s commercially aimed fictions. Art, in its true sense of artfulness, draws us with meanings, with elegance, even if they are only the delights of a great adventure plot; add human character and longing, and you are on your way to ambitious work, not through mere intent but by doing what it takes.
 

Fritz took us on walks filled with conversation about science, writing, the ambivalent evidence for the supernatural in human experience; we even hunted a ghost in the college theater, where someone had once hanged himself. A tall, graying man who was a near twin of his father, the actor seen in many films of the 1930s and ’40s,
A Tale of Two Cities
for one, Fritz demonstrated swordsmanship to us in graceful style. He also held private discussions with each student and asked questions about specific works that we had in mind, the ones we wished for, longed to write. I described my first two novels,
The Omega Point
and
Macrolife
, both of which were later published, as he assured me they would be. He couldn’t know, of course, but he knew that self-fulfilling prophecies also needed encouragement. The first was a genre entertainment, owing to the works of Charles Harness and A. E. van Vogt, which became more serious as it became the central part of
The Omega Point Trilogy
; my second novel,
Macrolife
, was entirely serious; both are still in print.
 

We talked about how short stories might well be a writer’s best work, and I have had that possibility brought home to me in the enthusiastic receptions afforded the three hardcover collections of my short fiction published since 2000. Fritz, of course, did it all, and had all the awards of a master of science fiction, fantasy, and horror; he was the finest writer of his generation, equaled perhaps but never surpassed in his versatility in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and in the many award winning short fictions within all these categories. A short list must include
The Wanderer
(1964),
The Big Time
(1961),
The Swords of Lankhmar
(1968),
Our Lady of Darkness
(1977), and the horror stories “A Bit of the Dark World” (1962), “Smoke Ghost” (1941), and “You’re All Alone” (1950). A complete list of stories and novels would be longer than this afterword.
 

Thinking about
Empties
long past its completion, I began to consider the “separateness” between human minds, and how necessary it seems. Yet people, men and women, are more alike than different, so they can guess about each other, and guess rightly, however isolated they are, even as much remains opaque. They not only flow into each other socially, they invade. Tip the balance with wealth and the power it buys, or with the power that appears in my Dierdre of this novel, and the temptations begin to play.
 

Fritz’s
Conjure Wife
tips the balance with the poorly understood phenomenon of “witchcraft,” which the author almost makes into realistic SF (ghosts may be “real phenomena, poorly observed,” as Nigel Kneale’s character observes in the Quatermass series of television serials), and we watch the what-if play out as a drama of warring motives, in the wife who knows what she can do and the husband who denies what is happening, and must inevitably join the conflict on his wife’s side.
 

My
Empties
plays out between two people who can’t truly encompass what is being offered to them, or what to do about it, much in the same way as what is “offered” in human life, wealth, for example, or political power, or a fast car—all of which merely amplify human flaws. There are black comedy features to my story. Many a man’s intelligence sinks before a beautiful woman. Men and women of power excite sexual longings and suppress reasoning ability. The struggle is well expressed in the famous Keats poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” in the countless pitiless women of drama and fiction, although today we know that every story could easily reverse the roles.
 

If only my characters could have turned to the back of the book for the answers, for the “stepback” insights of this very afterword! It’s here, but they could never have read it, postmodernism be damned.
 

What
Conjure Wife
still has to say about our two sexes is that each has power over the other, and that this leverage may be variously, indefinitely enhanced.
Empties
sets the enhancement at the extreme, a nearly valueless, horrifying exertion that still follows familiar parallels. The result, I hope, has been intriguing, and readers will forgive this postmortem, but remembering Fritz led me to ask why I wrote a so-called horror novel—or any of the horror stories in
Black Pockets
(see my ruminations in the “afterbirth” to that 2006 collection).
 

The answers were always there. Fantasy reflects our oldest inner life, while science fiction looks to the high ground of the reasoning cortex, to knowledge. But the old darkness keeps at us, subverting the cortex. The longer I live the less I see of knowledge ruling us and more of humankind living by no rules at all; worse, kicking over the game board whenever it sees a disadvantage to set rules, especially the restraints, some would say weakness, that seems to come with kind behavior. The horror is that it has never been otherwise for very long, and that writers cannot help but reflect their times. Karl Rove’s example of doing the outrageous thing comes to mind even as I hope that a day will arrive when no one reading these notes will know his name and will have to look it up.
 

It is no accident that I wrote this novel about tipping the balance of power between people; no accident that I wrote
Brute Orbits
, a novel about an absurd future penal system, on the eve of tortures at Abu Ghraib and at other “secret locations” which power reserves for itself; or
Cave of Stars
about provoking religious fundamentalism. My world seeped into my fiction as I tried to write without bending the knee to commerce, or, in my science fiction, subservience to a temporal parochialism.