Through the Ice (30 page)

In March the manuscript arrived. It was about 21,000 words long, consisting of Chapters 1 to 8, with #5 missing. I read it—and found that it had potential. This put me in another quandary.

What the friends of Robert Kornwise wanted, of course, was publication, as this would be a fitting memorial for their friend. I understand this well; my own claim to immortality consists of the body of my published work, where my thoughts and dreams are displayed. Death may be part of the natural order, but it remains a nasty business. There are things worse than death, and one of them is death out of turn: the death of a child. I had a hint how this felt, too, for my wife and I lost our first three babies: two stillborn, the third living for an hour. At least we never knew them; our suffering was relatively minimal. Even so, it haunts me: what might our son and two daughters have been, had they had their fair chances in life? I take enormous joy in our fourth and fifth children, Penny and Cheryl, but I can never quite forget those others, struck down in their complete innocence without having any chance at life. So Rob's friends were right, and they had come to the right person, for I had no doubt of my ability both to complete the novel and to get it into print. I have two overwhelming advantages that beginners lack: over twenty years' experience as a novelist, and name recognition that makes publishers take me seriously. Oh yes, I could do it, and do it well. But I still was not eager to take on such a project.

Why not? There was a complex of reasons, some legal, some technical, some monetary, some ethical, some emotional. Let me take these in order. Legally I could not simply take Rob's manuscript and make it my own. Original fiction is protected by statute deriving from common law; it has an inherent copyright, and belongs to the author, until a certain number of copies are published. Normally a publisher takes out an official copyright at the time of publication, keeping the literary rights tight. I was not about to pirate Rob's novel.

My technical reasons related to the state of the text: it was incomplete, and would require a good deal of work for completion. It was also amateur, with problems of spelling, syntax, and development. I could correct these, but in the process I would have to change virtually every sentence, in addition to creating new scenes from whole cloth. Thus the original author's words would be lost. In the process of rescuing it, I would be destroying much of its original nature. I remember the ironic joke: the operation was a success, but the patient died. I was loath to do that.

The monetary situation was formidable. I am a highly successful writer who can command six figure advances per novel for my individual work. But not for my collaborative projects, which was what this would have to be: that is, a shared byline. My collaborations range from a quarter to a tenth as much in advances, which is the publisher's guarantee, and a fair guide to how a novel will do commercially. I normally split the money evenly with my collaborator; that seems only fair. That cuts it in half again. No, I do not save half the work; it can take just as much time to do a collaboration as an individual novel, because of the difficulty in agreeing on scenes and meshing styles. In this case, I would have no input from the collaborator. But even if I kept all the money myself, such a project would be at a loss of perhaps 75%, compared to what I could get for a solo Piers Anthony project. I don't want to seem overly mercenary, but that gave me pause for thought.

That leads into the ethical considerations. About the only way I could consider it at all, was to do what I didn't like, and keep all the money. But that is manifestly not fair to the other party. Oh, I know, some amateurs are so eager to get their names into print that they will give up all the money, and indeed, even pay for publication. Vanity publishers thrive on that: for several thousand dollars they will publish a few hundred copies of anyone's book. The writer can then proudly show off his (often abysmal) novel and get his name into one of those paid-listing author's directories, pretending he is an author of note. There are Ph.D. mills that do much the same for those who want phony doctorates. But I won't touch this sort of thing. What, then, was I to do in this case, where Rob's folks had no interest in any money from the project, but only wanted a memorial for their son? Indeed, they had not asked me; this project had been initiated by Rob's friends, to whom I have dedicated it, who wanted to fulfill his dream of publication. Would anyone understand that I was not being greedy, but merely trying to cut my loss so that I could justify taking the time for the project? It wasn't just the money. I have been demurring while publishers have been eager for my material, as the editors at Avon, Berkley and Tor can confirm. Should I delay things yet more?

And the emotional level. I knew that if I did this project, I would have to come to know Robert Kornwise well—knowing that he was dead. I would be confronted again with the desolation I had seen when my cousin died. Death is not some distant specter to me; it is a close companion that I would prefer to see go elsewhere. I have written often of death, and Death is a main character in one of my novels. I did not relish the prospect of another experience like this.

But when push comes to shove, my conscience governs, and I do what I have to do. I agreed to do the novel. I tackled and compromised on the problematical considerations. Sanford Kornwise, the executor of his son's estate, gave me notarized authority to work with the novel. I scheduled a time to work on it, following the novel I was then amidst,
And Eternity,
and made notes for the completion of the manuscript. I concluded that though I would have to change just about every sentence to some degree, and to write new material that was unlikely to be the same as what Rob would have written, or
had
written, in the case of Chapter 5, I would save as much as I could of his text. Thus I modified by addition: virtually everything he wrote is here, and his characters and story line are intact. I deleted almost nothing; instead I amplified and clarified, doing what I believe he would have done, had he lived and grown and reviewed his text himself. I tried to keep the spirit of his story. Often the finished text was quite close to the original.

I did keep the money, but not in an ordinary way. I decided to do this as a low-budget project, so that the money would not be a factor for some time. I wrote to the publisher Underwood-Miller, explaining the situation and asking whether they would be interested in an Anthony/Kornwise fantasy novel. Tim Underwood agreed that they would be interested. I did not ask for a contract, only that willingness to look. The fact is, I could readily sell the project to a more commercial publisher, but Underwood-Miller is a small genre publisher dedicated to really nice hardcover volumes, with acid-free paper and quality bindings, and that was the kind I wanted for this. An edition that the family and friends of Robert Kornwise would be glad to have in their homes. We did not discuss money, but I had sold a novel to U-M before, for an advance of $2,000, and it seemed to me that this would be appropriate for this one. I donated $1,000 to the fund set up in Rob's memory, in effect sharing the advance as in a normal collaboration. Probably U-M's hardcover edition will be licensed for five years; after that I will be free to sell the paperback rights to one of my regular publishers for a much larger sum. (Publisher's note: The license was indeed for five years, but Baen and U-M reached a separate agreement shortcutting U-M's period of exclusivity.) So I started by paying out money, but later I expect to get more back. In this manner I have tried to balance the concern I have for doing right by all parties involved, with what success I may never be sure.

There was no compromise on the emotional aspect. I simply went through the novel, fleshing out Rob's text, trying to know his mind—and it was a good mind, compatible. He had a good feel for the dynamics of story-telling, and he had some serious things to say along the way. That dead deer—that strikes right to the heart of it, his deep respect for life. I hurt with him, and for him, for he was as pointlessly killed himself. The pain was not in having to complete unfinished work, but in trying to feel what he felt, while knowing that he was dead. In knowing that I could not complete his story his way, because I am a different person, with different experience; no matter how hard I might try, it would be to some degree untrue. Even as I edited my text, I saw errors I had made; I think now that he intended Tirsa to be younger than I had her, and I had reversed the two medals the hermit gave Tirsa and Rame: he was supposed to have the truth-showing one. I was also constrained by the need to make the novel commercial: that is, one that many people would enjoy reading. Something always had to be happening. I could only hope that if Rob could see what I did, he would approve. I knew it would be worse when I came to the Author's Note, and it was. Letters from his father, his mother, his sister, his teacher, his friends, telling of him, loving him, and suffering. I drew from them all, trying to make him come alive for the audience for his novel, you who are reading this Note, as he came alive for me. Then I had to tell you that he was dead.

I am not able to describe all of what I learned of Rob, because some of it might embarrass others whom he helped, and because he was modest and would have been embarrassed himself to be praised for his successes or for doing things he felt were only common decency. Yet perhaps I can come at it obliquely, by telling not what he did but what I know he would have done. When my daughter Penny was younger there was an episode involving a group of students her age. She wanted to participate, and this group was open to all; we encouraged her to join. But she was hyperactive and dyslexic, and children can be cruel about any such differences. They so arranged it that Penny was denied without proper reason, apparently because she was different. After trying several times to join, she came home on the bus in tears, rejected. I was outraged by this, but we did not make an issue because it seemed pointless to force her acceptance into a group that evidently didn't want her. So she never joined. Today, as an adult, she works for an agency that helps outcast or runaway children; she understands. But if Robert Kornwise had been a member of that group, he would have stood in protest on the spot, and shamed the others for their attitude, and she would have been accepted. He did not seek quarrels, but there were some things he simply didn't tolerate.

This, then, was the background of this collaboration. It is Rob's novel, even though I made his 21,000 words into over 75,000. The chapters he did are 1 to 4 and 7 to 9; I replaced the lost Chapter 5 with two of my own, and then concluded with three more. Some elements of his chapters I added; some elements of mine were based on his notions, so it should be very hard to tell exactly who wrote which words. But there need be no mystery about it. Here is the opening paragraph of the second chapter, which was quoted in his school yearbook, so that you can see what it was and what I did with it.

Seth was acutely aware of the hot sun beating down on him in his heavy winter clothes. Lifting a hand to his face, he felt a long stinging gash but did not remember being hit. The ice must have cut me when I fell through, Seth thought. Lying on his side he opened his eyes. A pearl white beach stretched out under him, in length, it stretched as far as he could see. The beach led up to a brilliantly blue ocean with small rippling waves. About fifteen feet behind him was a tremendously thick jungle. Although Seth was no botanist, nothing looked remotely like a Michigan landscape. If anything, it was more like a tropical rainforest. The bark on the trees was not brown. A good number of them were blue, green, or white. There was also a peculiar yellow tree which appeared to have no bark at all, and was somewhat disturbing to look at. Most of the leaves were larger than what he was accustomed to seeing. Not quite green, they were almost emerald with veins of incandescent pink and violet. The overall effect was dazzling.

As you can see by looking at my Chapter 2, I did things to it. I broke it up into smaller paragraphs, I modified words, I changed sentences to add drama, I added comments. But it remains his text. This is typical of the way it went. This is Rob's novel, as it might have been had he had opportunity to revise and complete it himself.

There are ironies. The protagonist is evidently Rob, as he expected to be in two years (remember, he was fifteen when he started writing), but he changed the family in the manner that writers do, so as not to embarrass living people. His sister became younger than he, instead of older, and his father died. This should not be taken as any ill will toward his real father, just a divergence from the starting point, perhaps occasioned by his effort to relate to the fact of his father's illness. My novel
Shade of the Tree
similarly excluded my wife; she likes to say that she gave her life for that novel. I made Ferne resemble Rob's sister Jill, as she was when younger. But perhaps some of Jill's spirit came through in Tirsa, too. In the novel, the father is dead; in reality, the father lived—and Rob died. There was an accident in a motor vehicle in the novel, a rear-end collision—and a similar one in life, far more serious. It was as if he foretold his own death, mistaking only the nature of it: a car collision instead of drowning. It reminded me of my own auto accident, at the age of twenty-two, sailing off a six-foot drop-off at 40 miles per hour and rolling over. It might have killed me, but only bashed my shoulder and knocked me out a few seconds, thanks to the luck of the draw. Thus I lived to complete the novel of the one who died. In the novel, Seth died, but lived on in another world. In reality, Rob died—and I hope lives on in a world like the one he made for
Through the Ice.
I wrote the happy ending; I had to do it, for Rob, so as to be able to picture him there. Perhaps the greatest irony is that he never knew that he was to work closely with me, and to become a published author, after his death.

When I queried Tim Underwood about this project, I learned that he too had suffered a death in the family. His brother had been gunned down in the night by an Eskimo while camping near the arctic ocean, a decade before. There didn't seem to be any reason for it; apparently it was just because he and his girlfriend were there. "The living need memorials," Tim wrote, "as valuable symbols, to replace what is missing." So he too understood, because of his own experience. Thus Rob's friends chose to query the right author, and I chose to query the right publisher—none of us knowing the background that made this particular project personal. Rob's friends queried me because I was Rob's favorite author; I queried U-M because I knew them and liked their attitude toward books. Coincidence, perhaps.