Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (64 page)

Brodey spun around, as though to stalk back into the house, and then spun violently back. “He should be dead!” Brodey shouted. His fists were clenched now, and the muscles in his neck were corded. “At the very
least,
he should be dead! Billions of lives on that man’s hands!
Billions.
And
you,
you people, you not only let him live, you make excuses for him! For
him!”
He stopped, groping for words to express the enormity of his outrage. “It’s like . . . like making excuses for the Devil himself.”

Mrs. Hamlin stirred and came forward, stepping out of the porch shadows and into the moonlight, drawing her shawl more tightly around her, as though against a chill, although the night was still mild. She stared eye to eye with Brodey for several moments, while the country silence gathered deeply around them, broken only by crickets and the hoarse sound of Brodey’s impassioned breathing. Then she said, “I thought I owed it to you, Mr. Brodey, to try to explain a few things. But I don’t know if I can. Things have changed enough by now, steadied down enough, that maybe you younger people find it hard to understand, but those of us who lived through the War, we all had to do things we didn’t want to do. Right there where you’re standing, Mr. Brodey, right here on this porch, I shot a marauder down, shot him dead with my husband’s old pistol, with Mr. Hamlin himself laying stiff in the parlor not ten feet away, taken by the Lumpy Plague. And I’ve done worse things than that, too, in my time. I reckon we all have, all the survivors. And just maybe it’s no different with that poor old man sitting in there.”

Brodey regained control of himself. His jaw was clenched, and the muscles around his mouth stood out in taut little bands, but his breathing had evened, and his face was tight and cold. He had banked his anger down into a smoldering, manageable flame, and now for the first time he seemed dangerous. Ignoring—or seeming to ignore—Mrs. Hamlin’s speech, he said conversationally, “Do you know that we curse by him down in Mohawk? His name is a curse to us. Can you understand
that?
We burn him in effigy on his birthday, in the town squares, and over the years it’s become quite a little ceremony. He must
atone,
Mrs. Hamlin. He must be made to pay for what he’s done. We don’t suffer monsters to live, down in Mohawk.”

“Ayuh,” Mrs. Hamlin said sourly, “you do a lot of damnfool, jackass things down there, don’t you?” Mrs. Hamlin tossed her head back, silver hair glinting in the silver light, and seemed to grow taller again. There was a hard light in her eyes now, and a hard new edge in her voice. “Atone, is it now, you jackass? As if you’re some big pious kind of churchman, some damn kind of saint, you red-faced, loudmouthed man. You with your damnfool flag and damnfool Mohawk Confederacy. Well, let me tell you, mister, this isn’t any Mohawk Confederacy here, never has been, never will be: this is Northview, sovereign state of Vermont,
United States of America.
Do you hear me, mister? This here is the United States of America, and that poor fool in there—why, he’s the
President
of the United States of America, even if sometimes he can’t cut his meat up proper. Maybe he was a fool, maybe he was wrong long ago, maybe he’s crazy now, but he’s still the
President.”
Eyes snapping, she jabbed a finger, at Brodey. “As long as this town stands, then there’s still an America, and that old man will be President as long as there are still
Americans
alive to serve him. We take care of our own, Mr. Brodey;
we take care of our own.”

A shadow materialized at Brodey’s elbow and spoke with Seth’s voice. “Edna?”

Brodey turned his head to glance at Seth. When he turned back to face Mrs. Hamlin, there was a gun in her hand, a big, old-fashioned revolver that looked too huge for the small, blue-veined hand that held it.

“You can’t be serious,” Brodey whispered.

“You need any help, Edna?” the shadow said. “I brought some of the boys.”

“No, thank you, Seth.” The barrel of the revolver was as unwavering as her gaze. “There’s some things a person’s got to do for herself.”

Then she cocked the hammer back.

The President of the United States didn’t notice the shot. Alone in the small upstairs bathroom, he avoided the eyes of the tarnished reflection in the mirror, and compulsively washed his hands.

Strangers

Introduction to Strangers

The 1970s were, among many other things, the decade of the great original-fiction anthologies in science fiction. Following upon the superb example of Frederik Pohl’s 1950s-era
Star Science Fiction,
Damon Knight launched
Orbit,
Terry Carr started
Universe,
and I, between 1969 and 1979, edited ten issues of
New Dimensions.
Much of the most significant short fiction of the decade appeared in those three publications. This could most quickly be shown by the disproportionate number of Hugo and Nebula winners that came from their pages, but also by the number of major careers that were established in them—those of Gene Wolfe, R.A. Lafferty, Richard M. McKenna, and George Alec Effinger, for example. And that of Gardner Dozois.

I had been editing
New Dimensions
just a couple of months when a manuscript bearing that byline showed up in the summer of 1969. The accompanying letter explained that its author was 22 years old, had sold a story to Fred Pohl’s magazine
If
in 1966 and four more—three of them to Damon Knight’s
Orbit
—after a three-year hiatus. “I’m working out of a cramped garret apartment (yes, a garret; the cliches I live never fail to amaze me),” he told me, in a pre-World War II house in a suburb of Nuremberg, Germany, where he had been working for an Army newspaper.

The story didn’t work for me. My notes say things like “Nice writing, but—story too static. The
situation
is static but that doesn’t mean story has to be . . . Also story insufficiently visionary. Could take place in 1970 . . . What’s new here? What’s going for the story other than its excellent writing? What does it have to offer as sf?”

So I sent it back. A couple of months later Dozois returned to the United States; I met him at a convention in Philadelphia that November—a skinny kid, long straight hair, hippie clothing—and we exchanged a couple of pleasant words. And a few weeks after that he sent me a manuscript, badly typed on cheap paper, that absolutely astounded me. This is what I told him on December 30, 1969: “You may be the lousiest speller this side of the Rockies. But you are one hell of a writer, and you have a sale, man. An exciting hour for me—reading your story tensely, wondering if you were going to sustain the promise of the first few pages or let it all go driveling away into slush, as so many of the other new writers who’ve been sending me stuff have done . . . But no. The thing held up, it grew from page to page in inventiveness, the style remained vivid and supple—go have a swelled head for an evening. You’ve earned it. Now I know what editors talk about when they speak of the thrill of having something come in from an unknown that turns them on. But your spelling sure is awful.”

That story—“A Special Kind of Morning”—became the lead story in the first issue of
New Dimensions,
and it was the lead again, years later, in my anthology
The Best of New Dimensions.
Of it I said, in the latter book, “All by itself, it made having edited
New Dimensions
worthwhile.” You’ll find the story in an earlier collection,
The Visible Man.

I happily bought another from him, “King Harvest,” for
New Dimensions Two,
and another, “The Last Day of July,” for issue number three. And then he told me, in the autumn of 1972, that he was working on a new and extremely ambitious one for me. He warned me, sounding a little worried about it, that it was likely to be pretty lengthy. Go ahead and send it when you’ve finished it, I said. Theoretically I wasn’t buying anything longer than about 15,000 words for
New Dimensions,
but on the strength of “A Special Kind of Morning” I was willing to stretch that limitation a little for Gardner. He let me see the opening section. It was haunting, powerful stuff, a rich evocation of an alien world. Very nice, I replied. Keep going. Then, soon after Christmas he wrote that he now had 50 pages written and was nowhere near completion. Fifty pages, in the typeface he was using then, was well over 15,000 words. Once again Gardner offered to show me the incomplete story, but I, now expecting something running in the 20-25,000-word range, told him to go right on to the end. “The chances that I’ll reject it are very very slim, based on the chunk I’ve already seen, so don’t bother sending me the incomplete portion.”

Silly me. When the complete manuscript reached me at the end of March, 1973, it was immense—three times as long as the longest story I had bought thus far. Gardner had no idea himself how long it was—anywhere from 35,000 to 50,000 words. I reckoned it as 40,000: virtually a book-length novel.

If I bought it, it would crowd everything else in
New Dimensions Four
into one corner. But if I didn’t buy it, I’d be passing up a superb story, complex and moving, one of the finest on the theme of interstellar miscegenation since Philip Jose Farmer’s pioneering “The Lovers” twenty years earlier. I bought it, of course. And I was lucky enough to find half a dozen fine stories of 5000 words or less to pepper my contents page with so that I could make the issue look like a real anthology instead of a showcase for a single extraordinary novella. It is, I think, one of the half dozen most memorable stories I published in my ten years with
New Dimensions.
(Dozois’ “Special Kind of Morning” makes that list too.) Eventually I stopped editing and went back to being just a writer, and Gardner started editing and pretty much gave up writing, doing just occasional and often collaborative stories. As the editor who had found it so exciting to publish Gardner Dozois’ work when he was a brilliant young beginner, and who has continued to find pleasure in it to this day, I feel some regret that this splendid writer has chosen to give us so sparse an output in recent times. On the other hand, the science-fiction world has plenty of splendid writers today, whereas gifted editors are in very short supply, and Gardner (as a long shelf of Hugos testifies) has become the great sf editor of the modern era, a fitting successor to such editorial giants as John Campbell, Anthony Boucher, and Horace Gold. He’s come a long way from his days of bleak poverty in that Nuremberg garret, and it pleases me greatly to have been on hand when his magnificent career was just beginning to unfold.

Robert Silverberg

Strangers

Joseph Farber met Liraun Jé Genawen for the first time during the ceremony of the
Alàntene,
the Mode of the Winter Solstice, the Opening-of-the-Gates-of-Dûn, that was observed annually in the ancient city of Aei, on the North Shore of Shasine, on the world of Lisle. “Lisle” was the Terran name, of course, after Senator Lisle Harris, the first human to visit the planet, and had come into common usage among the expatriate Terran Population of Aei because the Earthmen professed great difficulty in pronouncing the native Weinunnach, “Fertile Home.”

This was about two decades after the Expansion, when a team of Silver Enye had opened Earth up for trade by “inducing” her to join the Commercial Alliance, as cynically, and with as little concern for the inevitable impact on native culture, as Perry had opened Japan.

As a matter of fact, the impact of this on Earth—whose technology had not yet freed man of the solar system when the Enye arrived, whose cities were scarred and half-ruined by a series of major and nearly terminal wars, whose biosphere was scummed and strangled by pollution—was immense. Governments toppled, amalgamations were formed, and the Terran Co-operative was hastily created to go out and get a nice juicy piece of the pie in the sky for impoverished Earth. Earthmen went forth to the stars, first as paying passengers on alien ships, then, later, in human-crewed ships purchased at staggering cost from other worlds. In spite of everything, they took quite a load of arrogance along with them. And as they traveled from world to world, farther and farther from Earth, that arrogance slowly died; some of it was drained away at every planetfall, like an intense electrical charge being grounded, and with it—oh, so gradually and grudgingly!—went the expansionist dreams of Empire, went even the more modest hope of financial dominance, fading from them as it had faded in turn from every star-faring race. Space was too
big.
Everything was too complex, the distances were too vast, the travel times too great, the communications halting at best. Even the Commercial Alliance was the loosest of organizations; some of its members had not had contact for hundreds of years. Establishing dominance—or even too much continuity—across that gaping infinity of night was something that seemed possible only from the provincially narrow viewpoint imposed by looking up from the bottom of a gravity well. The vastness swallowed everything; it was too much for any corporeal creature.

Joseph Farber’s personal state of mind, on the eve of
Alàntene,
reflected the racial experience. He had left Earth, two years ago by his own subjective clock, as a cocksure and confidently ambitious man. Now, as he walked the broad ceramic streets of Aei New City, he was sad, apprehensive and bewildered. Two years of contact with creatures who were not necessarily superior but who
were
alien—inherently different, inherently strange—
alien—
had stripped him of much of his original assurance, and given him no real knowledge or wisdom to replace it. He had been on “Lisle” for about three weeks, and had only been outside the Enclave—the exclusive Terran district, or ghetto, however you wanted to look at it—on rare occasions. Tonight boredom and despondency had combined finally to shake him loose; he’d gone along with a group of expatriates who were walking down to the
Alàntene,
partially because Brody had assured him that “the Cian always put on a good show,” and partially because he was afraid of getting hopelessly lost without guides.

It was a wet, chilly night, just this side of actual rain. Grey mists, up from the river, wound slowly through the high-walled streets, like sluggish snakes, or drifted in glistening, billowing curtains across the wide porcelain squares. The wet air carried the smell of spices, pollen, incense, musk. Sharp, sour, sweet, heavy and rank—the odors slid across the moist night like oil over water, most unidentifiable, all evocative. Occasionally the wind would rise, scooping the mists and cloud-scuts aside like an invisible hand, revealing the million icy stars of Aei’s night sky, dense and blazing against velvet black. None of the moons had yet risen, and the constellation of Winter Man was just thrusting its frosty, nebula-maned head up over the close northern horizon. Old City loomed there, to the north, on top of its three-hundred-foot-tall sheer obsidian cliff, silhouetted against the blaze of Winter Man’s upper body, with His head rearing terribly above its tallest towers. Its lights shone silver and yellow and deep, secret orange, glinting coldly from that cold stone place in the air. To Farber, it was as if Old City was watching him; not necessarily with disapproval, or even with interest, but just watching, staring down inscrutably, as if to drive home again the fact that this was not Earth.

New City was friendlier, with its rounded ceramic homes, its tiles and mosaics, its glazed earthenware and pottery walls. Its lights were soft pastels, blinking and diffusing wetly through the languid mists. But still, the underlying ambiance was unsettling, and strange. They had been walking through New City—a small, nervously giddy group of humans, too loud in the alien hush—for an hour that had seemed like a year, and they had seen no one, no natives, no living thing at all. Farber was just beginning to wonder if the streets were always so empty, echoing and still, and if so, how anyone could ever stand to go abroad in them, when they sighted a group of Cian ahead, walking in the same direction they were. And at the same moment, they heard the first faint and distant mutter of the
Alàntene.
They were near the eastern outskirts of New City now, and the streets began to slant rapidly down toward the River Aome. The natives ahead slowed down—they had fetched up against another group of Cian, and in front of that group was another, and another, and Farber saw why New City was deserted. The whole population of Aei was on the move, down to the banks of the River Aome for the
Alàntene,
and the Earthmen had just caught up with the tail of the immense crowd.

Ahead, as far as the eye could reach, the streets were packed solid with shuffling ranks of Cian. Most were walking, carrying children on their shoulders, holding baskets of fruit, or strangely shaped garlands of flowers, or various implements of polished wood and metal and obsidian whose function the Earthmen were unable to divine. There were numerous other objects, half-seen, that defied definition altogether. Some of the Cian were riding in six-wheeled carts pulled by huge, brindled animals that looked something like enormous boar hogs; their reins were hung with star-shaped black flowers, and with tiny crystal chimes, so that when the boars tossed their heads, the air was filled with tinkling melancholy music, and their spiral tusks flashed white in starlight. A few Cian—and Farber blinked, startled—were riding bareback on big, sinuous things like many-legged snakes, or reptilian centipedes. The crowds seemed to make the things skittish; occasionally they would moo, long and mournfully, and, looking around at the assemblage, blink their sad, intelligent eyes. The Cian themselves—short, slender humanoids, uncannily graceful of movement—were dressed mostly in dark colors, but in rich and fantastical costumes, of the finest fabric and workmanship. Jewelry of silver and amber and obsidian glinted here and there throughout the crowd, and the entire slow-moving procession had about it a curious mood of somber celebration.

It took about another half-hour for the bulk of the remaining crowd to filter down into the place of ceremony. In that time, the sound of the
Alàntene
grew from a murmur, a whisper, to a vast rhythmical sea-surge that filled the night, that filled the blood, and brain, and bowels, until Farber found that he was breathing in time to the huge slow booming of the drums and the deep-throated susurrus of the chant, and he suspected that his heart was also beating in rhythm. Janet LaCorte said it gave her a headache. Sometimes the wind would bring them a snatch of faster music—crystalline, ringing and staccato—that was being played as counterpoint to the giant beating of the World-Heart. There was no other sound, except the whisper and scuff of a million feet over tile, the creak of wagon wheels, and the occasional plaintive lowing of the snake-things. The Cian around them did not speak at all. Brody was off on something—like many of the Earthmen, he was of the opinion that the Modes, the native ceremonies, were more enjoyable if you went to them stoned—and he was giggling constantly now, his eyes rolling from one object to another, never quite focusing on anything. Farber had been quarreling bitterly with Kathy Gibbs for the last fifteen minutes over some trivial matter, their voices growing ever louder and more heated, and as they reached the bottom of the slope, Farber, stung by some final gibe of Kathy’s, broke away and whirled fiercely to face her.

“You fucking bitch,” he said. He had gone pale, and he looked as if he was going to hit her.

Kathy laughed in his face. She was flushed and bright-eyed from the argument, but she seemed in no way perturbed by his rage. “You’re no fun at all tonight, are you?” she said. Some of her hair had become plastered to her forehead with sweat, and Farber could see her breasts clearly through the semitransparent blouse; her nipples were hard against the fabric. A sudden rush of desire mixed with his anger, confusing him. His mouth worked on words, but she laughed at him again, and they died in his throat. She had read him well enough. “See you later, sweetheart,” she said, brushing the hair out of her eyes, giving him a knowing, cutting smile. “Here, about midnight. All right?” He said nothing. She looked at him with hard, taunting eyes, smiled again, and walked quickly away, mingling with the crowd. She vanished from sight within seconds. Farber stared after her, his fists balled impotently, his jaw tight.

Brody giggled. He had listened openly to the whole exchange, without embarrassment, apparently getting a kick out of it. He slapped Farber on the shoulder. “Fuck her,” he said, in a voice that was a dreamy parody of hearty man-to-man comradery. “Fuck ‘em all, I always say. There’re millions of cunts in the world. Always another one along in a minute.”

“Why don’t you mind your own goddam business?” Farber snapped.

“Fuck you too, Jack,” Brody said pleasantly, without any hint of rancor. He was almost jovial about it. He giggled abruptly, seeming to startle himself, as if it had popped out before he was ready for it. He squinted at Farber.
“You’ll
find out,” he said, with listless, languid wisdom. Then he said, “Oh my!” plaintively, and tracked to follow something moving down on the beach. And he smiled and smiled.

The other Earthmen had been hanging back while the fight went on; now they came up, and Fred Lloyd gave Brody a shove to get him walking in the right direction again. Ed Lacey and two friends went by, sniffing narcotic atomizers, followed by Janet LaCorte, who gave Farber a disapproving look as she passed; she was Kathy’s friend. Lloyd was wearing a complex expression of condescending boredom that—it occurred to Farber—must have taken him years of diligent practice to perfect. “You coming?” Lloyd asked. Farber shook his head. Lloyd shrugged, and the Earthmen went on. Farber was glad to see them go. Soured by the futility of the Terran enterprise, they were all self-consciously cynical and bitter, and liked to think that they were projecting an air of
fin de siècle
decadence. Actually, they were boring.

Farber plunged into the thick of the crowd and started worming his way through the dense mass of bodies. He was filled with disgust and self-contempt. Kathy had only been his lover for a little over two weeks, and already she was so sure of him that she could laugh at him and walk away into a festival crowd, sure that he would be waiting for her when she chose to come back to him. And he would be. Once he’d swallowed that, his anger died to a dull resignation. Lightyears from his home and his people, he had to hang on to something—and she was it. Sullenly, he kept walking. He had run out of road. He was on sand now, and it shifted and whispered under his feet. A row of sand dunes rose up in front of him, interlaced and overgrown with tough sea-grass and ironwood shrub.

He came up over a dune, and saw the
Alàntene
spread out below him. He paused, swaying, a little drunk, alone in the alien night. He was a big, slow-moving man, bullet-headed and bull-necked, with dark eyes and a shaggy mane of blond hair. He had a blunt, big-boned face, dominated by thick flat cheeks and a massive, stubborn jaw—square, jutting and truculent. It was an arrogant face, touched permanently now by a shadow of wistful puzzlement. His eyes were incongruously lost and vulnerable, set against those rough-hewn, brutal features—as if there was a frightened child inside, peering out, running the massive body by manipulating pedals and levers. The long, bone-deep soughing of the chant came up and hit him in the face, and the patient elemental thunder of the drums shook the dune under his feet, sending little rivulets of sand whispering down toward the beach. Listening now, as his anger died, he was submerged again by that endless sea-sound, drowned, dissolved, whirled away like a grain of sand in the tide, to be rolled across the secret places of the ocean bottom and then washed back to the shore after a decade or a thousand years. Calmly, he began to descend the dune, digging his heels in. He felt that if he should fall, or jump, the huge noise of the
Alàntene
would puff up to meet him, bearing him up, and he could ride the sound as a gull rides the currents of the air—

Here the River Aome, rolling out of the west, met the sea, Elder Sea, the Great Northern Ocean, the World-Ocean. The Aome was a roaring grey turbulence to the right, a streak of lighter darkness rolling through a dead black night, more sensed and heard than seen. To the left, and at right angles to Farber’s path, the dunes stretched away in an unbroken line to the north; they, and their fringe of beach, extended for more than three hundred miles, ruler-straight: the North Shore of Shasine. South, beyond the Aome and invisible now, were endless leagues of saltwater marsh. Ahead, straight east, the night opened up into a feeling of echoing, infinite space. Ocean was there, behind the mists—the smell of its salt was in the wet wind that slapped Farber’s face, the hissing of its swells and surges could be heard under the derivative sound of the chant, and—beyond the ceremony—its waves gleamed in torchlight as they foamed against the beach.