FSF, January-February 2010 (12 page)

If you're eight or older, you know all about the controversy, you probably had a strong opinion one way or another. Twenty worlds barred Ana Calamar from entry. Several notables from Haynlayn and my world argued that Ana Calamar had a point—to allow entropy to continue, to be unwilling to do something drastic, even if it failed to start a new life away from the Hundred Worlds, was a mistake—and for a while twelve Mind-centric worlds barred anyone from Haynlayn or Varle; even ships bearing passengers from those two worlds were not allowed within a thousand kilometers.

I read other novels by Ana Calamar, and they all featured great transformations. Those who loved her writing loved those transformations; those who didn't always said they were immoral. We live a balanced life in the Hundred Worlds; balance is the key to survival. Great transformations, at least of the kind Ana Calamar writes about, are a threat to stability, a threat to the future of the human race.

Somewhere along the way, in one reference or another, or maybe it was in an interview, I discovered that Ana Calamar was a pseudonym for Gale Brisa. It turned out she did the occasional workshop, and a year later, someone on her staff read my sample, and I was accepted.

Ana had relocated to Santa Fe, and as I traveled there, I realized for the first time how her narrative technique owed itself to Magnus Esner, the way she led the reader to make the choices her characters made. Because her writing competed with open narratives, she must work harder to make the reader feel like there was only one clear option with each decision, but she had to do it with finesse. Her writing, at least to me, felt politically manipulative, but each time she made a point, there was some character who chose a path that made you feel like there were other solutions, not to the story, but to the political problem presented by the story.

Ana looked more than twenty years old, but it was a common look for anyone who did a lot of traveling between worlds, soaking in radiation, going through one regimen or another to correct the destruction done the body. She greeted each of us as we arrived, but she didn't seem to recognize me or my name. I wanted to say, Don't you remember? but the answer would only make us awkward. What was there to remember of that week together?

Ana's quarters were normal sized. The living area was slightly larger than usual because she'd had one of the walls of one of the bedrooms removed. Ana didn't want her writers to stay in a guesthouse, so there in the living area was one double bunk and one triple. There were also five writing chairs, four of them clearly having lasted years, if not decades, without any kind of refurbishing.

"My home is now your home,” she said at dinner, “for the next week. You've come here to break free. Whatever world you come from, you've had to learn to be in balance. This has made you a good person; it's made you a lousy writer. Here, there will be two rules. No modesty and no screwing. You change in front of each other like in any pilots’ locker room. No turning away—” for a moment I was certain she was looking at me “—and no ogling, either. This is going to be intense, and I want the intensity in your writing. If you need to screw...when you thumbed in and picked up all the house info, you also received contact info for three men, three women, and one unreformed hermaphrodite. They're good, they're discreet, and they give me ten percent. I would like to refurbish these writing chairs. However, I'd prefer you save the energy for your own work.

"Now, if you need solitude, take a walk. During the day, my bedroom door is opened. If you just want to be alone, go in, close the door, and no one will talk to you until you decide to come out. You have to come out, however, when I want to sleep.

"You look like you have something to say."

She was looking at me, and even if I had something to say, I knew better than to say it. I marveled at the transformation. This was the same woman who ten years ago kept it to herself that she'd been accepted to workshops by some of the most prestigious writers, this was the same woman who had gone to hide in her room rather than argue with Magnus Esner.

The next day, she had us talking about the nicest thing we ever did, the meanest thing we ever did, and if it didn't sound mean enough, she said, “Come on. You're not
that
nice.” Then she wanted to know the most selfish thing we'd ever wished for. I made up something I've now forgotten; at that point, my most selfish wish was to share her bedroom. A week before my most selfish desire had been to come to this workshop to be with her.

From there we moved to things we wished were different about the worlds we lived on, things we wished were different about the Hundred Worlds, things we wished different about our contact or lack of it with the Minds. From there, she had us making up stories, thinking out plots. She was merciless, not at all like Magnus Esner. She kept harping, “How are you going to convince the reader to go along? You have your character do what? Tell me, what do you really know about human nature?"

One young man, a ten-year-old on his worlds tour, broke down and dashed out to the street. A sixteen-year-old woman, the mother of two, glared at Ana and followed him out.

"Let's break,” Ana said. “Everyone take a walk. We'll meet for evening wine."

I had experienced some tension with one of the other guys, who was twenty, like me, and clearly entering his own era of recriminations, so when the thirty-two-year-old woman took hold of her cane and walked out with him it was clear that I wasn't welcome.

Alone for the first time with Ana, I had nothing to say.

"So,” she said, “from what you say, it sounds like you still haven't been in contact with the Minds."

I thought she was deriding me. All I knew of the Minds was gathered from readings, from testimonies of others, but never once had I put on a skullcap to communicate with humans who now lived in Mindspace. Then I realized there was something nostalgic in her voice.

"I made first contact just to read the stories Esner had told us about.” She poured me a glass of wine, then sat down on the floor. “These stories were very hard to read. You had to know something of the time they were writing about to imagine the other worlds they were imagining. There was this one story. It was like the story
Alone
, but it was so different. It was about these people who'd been traveling for a long time. They could walk the entire universe. Then someone figured out that the Universe was bigger. They were just on a very big spaceship that took a long time to get anywhere. And I thought: This is about us. We've let our universe become too small. We can expand it in one direction, and that's by going to the Minds. But for flesh and blood humans, this is it. There are no more stories about the future. I wanted to change that. Even if the futures I write are just made up. Even if they can't come true. Even if it would be a bad thing if they came true."

At first, I wanted to place my arm around her shoulders. It sounded like she sought comfort. But soon her voice found a rhythm and anger. She spoke as if I were going to argue the contrary.

"I like your writing,” I said. It's a shame that my closest avowal of love sounded like a jokey whine. But it did serve to break the tension.

"You liked Esner's writing, too,” she said.

"Not after I met him."

"So, now that you've met me, what do you think of my writing?” She smiled. I liked the flirtatious sound to her voice.

We talked for a while, and I felt a growing intimacy, even though we never talked about intimate things. I don't know if she ever married, if she ever had children, if she had a lover. We talked about novels. She talked about books she read that only the Minds have stored away. I wanted to have access to those stories, but I hesitated.

"How did it happen?” I asked. “When we met, you wouldn't even put on a prayer cap."

"I thought I told you. It was to read."

"No. You were so adamant. What changed your mind?"

"I think everyone comes to a point where they wonder why they hold true to their younger selves. Sometimes it's an act of annihilation to believe in something different. It's a terrible moment if you don't like the outcome."

I could have asked if she liked the outcome. I could have told her that I liked the outcome.

"My feeling is this,” she said. “It's a cliché. The Minds didn't get it. When they stored away everything, they didn't feel like they were wiping away humanity. Their utter refusal to understand how we feel, as flesh and blood, is their moral failure. I decided I don't want to believe anything so powerfully that I can't take in another way of seeing things."

What she said was so commonplace that I was disappointed. Like many writers, she was smarter in her fiction. I asked, “Will you download your mind?"

She shifted on the floor and looked straight at me. “Why?"

"Well, I don't know.” For the first time, I pictured us, sitting, our two selves in Mindspace, talking for eternity.

"If I download my mind, it will go on forever. That mind will think she's continuous from me. But the mind in this body, by which I mean my heart—” At this point, she took my hand, placed it against her head, then right against her heart, and she talked about how the mind in her body would end, it would still die, it would still struggle at the end knowing that for this mind, this mind in her body, it
was
the end. I heard the sense of the words, but I was more aware of the warmth of her breasts pressing against my thumb and pinky. Her eyes shone because they were moist. The intensity of her feeling could be felt more intensely than anything that might have passed between us ten years ago, when we were starting our adult lives. I wanted to kiss her. But she took my hand from her heart, kissed it lightly, and said she had to start making dinner.

When I returned home to Varle, I discovered my son sleeping on the couch. My daughter, who was nine, a year away from her own worlds tour, was sleeping in their room with her lover. It seems odd to go through the routine of making sure her seven-year-old brother has what he needs from the room, never knowing for sure if Paul will stay the night or not. Dosamai and I are in bed early on these nights. I was never graced with the opportunity to sleep in someone else's home in the arms of their daughter. Dosamai and I are only comfortable making love when our daughter doesn't have a guest over.

One night, after making love, during that restfulness in which our relationship is truly at peace, Dosamai says, “In a year she'll be gone. It makes me yearn for a third child.” She shifted in bed to get a closer look at my face. “That's a selfish thought, isn't it?"

"No. It's a very human thought."

"Murder's a human thought. But it's not a good one to have.” She wasn't arguing. She was thinking out loud, her voice wandering into sleep.

I thought about the idea. What if a group of couples all decided they'd have a third child? Sure, it would upset the balance, but it would force the world they lived in to find some way to grow, to expand. It would be a story to fight against entropy, to fight against our end. It was most likely another story I would never finish, but that night, I couldn't sleep the idea seemed so wonderful.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Gorlen Vizenfirthe, the Bard with the Gargoyle Hand, last appeared in our magazine in the March 2009 issue. Here we have a new tale in this series, but this one concerns the gargoyle whose hand Gorlen owns. It also concerns something that utterly baffles gargoyles: human behavior
Marc Laidlaw reports that he recently enticed another
F&SF
contributor, Ted Kosmatka, to work with him in his day job as a game designer for Valve Software.

Ocean passage was never easy for a gargoyle. Most were content to pack themselves away in a carton, but Spar had developed an unusual (for a goyle) appetite for the ever-varying spectacle of clouds in slow parade against blue depths or starry night skies. Besides, packing arrangements took several days—even weeks, depending on the port and its stringencies—and on this occasion he had not even several hours to spare. If he failed to leave tonight, then morning might find nothing left of him except some black gravel fit only to be swept into the harbor. Complicating matters, the port was unfamiliar and all the ships looked equally sea-unworthy in the dark. He compared them to the crumpled list of vessels leaving that night, scribbled out by the terrified quartermaster at his request. Three smeared names matched up to three creaking candidates that chafed against the dock as if restless, like himself, to be away. But how was he to choose among them?

As he cast about for some differentiating factor, he noticed a pale face nodding down at him from the nearest of the ships. A feminine creature, friendly and alert—and definitely, alluringly, beckoning him aboard.

Spar bowed back, a gesture he had learned from humans, unsure if she were signaling to him. In response she dipped her head closer, affirming his silent question with her entire being.

This was the portent he sought, and more than he needed—especially now that he heard voices raised in the night, footsteps turning from the wharf and rumbling down the dock. He sprang into some dangling lines that spilled from the deck and pulled himself aboard, finding the planks reverberant beneath his heavy feet.

Before long, his pursuers rushed out along the dock. Spar hunched low, peering over the side through the mounded net. A party of torch-bearing men paused at each ship, demanding of whatever watch was on duty the right to board. In some cases the requests were met with indifference and the ships were boarded, in others with defiant bellows and the men moved on. But the ship Spar had selected was quiet and dark, its occupants no doubt off carousing, and it seemed likely the searchers would board without opposition. He leapt lightly to the mast and climbed to its peak, clinging there like a sky-barnacle watching them come and go below. He much preferred the stability of a traditional spire or roof peak; but he enjoyed the advantage of watching their every move from above. They swept their torches into the corners where he had first hid, making him glad he had ascended to the height. And just as they began to argue about who should climb into the riggings, Spar heard even angrier voices rising from the wharf. A sizable flood of men were streaming from the tavern district.