by Jack Dann
He nodded. ‘I hoped that this time, you would not retreat. And I was right.’
‘You risked much for loneliness,’ Anna said.
‘You speak of loneliness who do not know it as I have known it. When first we met, I was lonely almost to madness. You endured my madness with compassion, though you do not remember, and you allowed me to share your quest for truth. And then you vanished into the void. I waited and kept watch and in time you came again but you did not know me. That was hard, but I grew accustomed to the forgetting, for countless times you retreated into the void and each time, I searched and found you. In the beginning, I sought you for companionship and sanity, and then as time passed, for friendship. The last time, I thought that you would finally come to the truth you sought, but you were not ready and again you vanished. This time, it was as if my soul went with you into the void. I waited and I watched, and then one day, I saw your hill. I could not find your house, which meant you were not yet lucid, but I continued to search, knowing that you had at least come from the void. Then one morning you called out to me. And when I saw you, I knew that I would rather go to the void forever, than to let go of you again.’
‘You love me?’ Anna asked, something inside her unfurling.
‘It would seem so,’ he said, then he added gravely, ‘But I do not expect you to love me.’
‘I … I’m afraid your expectations will be thwarted then …’ Anna said shyly, and she held her hand out to Nicholas, who took it, his pale face lighting up with joy. Then he stiffened and looked about them.
‘Quick,’ he said urgently, and he leapt to his feet and pulled her to the door.
Leaf woke, smiling, to find the nurse shaking her gently.
‘You fell asleep again, Miss Leaf,’ she chided. ‘You ought to have gone to bed. She doesn’t know you are here. The monitors have shown no evidence of brain activity in all the decades she has laid here. Most people would have thought long ago about switching off the life support machines.’
‘I am not most people,’ Leaf said placidly. ‘As to these clever machines, they may show no evidence of brain activity, but are they sensitive enough to measure the activity of a soul?’ She reached forward to pat Anna’s withered hand and said softly, ‘For all we know she is dreaming. Imagine the sort of dreams that might come to one who never wakes.’
The nurse suppressed a shudder, thinking how ghoulish old people were. After all, what sort of dreams would someone that old have, even if there was anything left in her capable of dreaming?
AFTERWORD
I have been writing for a lot of years. More years than I, frankly, want to think about. I like thinking about all that writing, just not all those years. I’m an insomniac. I’ve never seen it as a curse. I’m the only person I know who was not tired with a baby waking her every two hours. Sometimes I was awake waiting for the baby to wake. My partner never had to get up at night. I didn’t even want him to. My daughter is now showing strong signs of the same insomnia. One day recently, she said, ‘What do people do who can’t sleep when other people can?’ I said smugly, ‘Feel smug, because think of all that time they are wasting while we get to be awake and think and read and write and daydream. They waste years and years of sleeping, and we get to be awake instead.’ On the other hand, my partner sleeps enough to make up for my daughter and me and possibly several other children. He also dreams vividly and often. I never dream, except the occasional nightmare involving vampires. Unfortunately, I’m never the vampire; only its prey. Maybe that is why I write so much about dreaming. I’ve been doing that for as long as I’ve been writing, too. ‘Perchance to Dream’ came to me when I started wondering what would happen if instead of never sleeping, you never woke; if life was truly a dream …
— Isobelle Carmody
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ABOUT THE EDITOR
JACK DANN is a multiple award winning author who has written or edited over seventy books, including the groundbreaking novels Junction, Starhiker, The Man Who Melted, The Memory Cathedral — which is an international bestseller — the Civil War novel The Silent, and Bad Medicine, which has been compared to the works of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson.
Dann’s work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Carlos Castaneda, J. G. Ballard, Mark Twain, and Philip K. Dick. Dick, author of the stories from which the films Blade Runner and Total Recall were made, wrote that ‘Junction is where Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven and Tony Boucher’s “The Quest for Saint Aquin” meet … and yet it’s an entirely new novel… I may very well be basing some of my future work on Junction.’ Bestselling author Marion Zimmer Bradley called Starhiker ‘a superb book … it will not give up all its delights, all its perfections, on one reading.’
Library Journal has called Dann ‘a true poet who can create pictures with a few perfect words.’ Roger Zelazny thought he was a reality magician and Best Sellers has said that ‘Jack Dann is a mind-warlock whose magicks will confound, disorient, shock, and delight.’ The Washington Post Book World compared his novel The Man Who Melted with Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal.
His books have been translated into over thirteen languages, and his short stories have appeared in Playboy, Omni, Penthouse, Asimov’s, ‘Best Of’ collections in Australia and the United States, and many other major magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of the anthology Wandering Stars, one of the most acclaimed American anthologies of the 1970s, and several other well-known anthologies such as More Wandering Stars. Wandering Stars and More Wandering Stars have just been reprinted in the United States. Dann also edits the multi-volume Magic Tales series with Gardner Dozois and is a consulting editor for TOR Books.
He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (three times), the World Fantasy Award, the Peter McNamara Achievement Award, and the Premios Gilgames de Narrativa Fantastica award. Dann has also been honoured by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight).
High Steel, a novel coauthored with Jack C. Haldeman II, was published in 1993 Critic John Clute called it ‘a predator … a cat with blazing eyes gorging on the good meat of genre. It is most highly recommended.’ Dann is currently writing Ghost Dance, the sequel to High Steel, with Jack Haldeman’s widow, author Barbara Delaplace.
Dann’s major historical novel about Leonardo da Vinci — entitled The Memory Cathedral — was published to rave reviews. It has been published in over ten languages to date. It won the Australian Aurealis Award, was #1 on The Age bestseller list, and a story based on the novel was awarded the Nebula Award. The Memory Cathedral was also shortlisted for the Audio Book of the Year, which was part of the Braille & Talking Book Library Awards.
Morgan Llwelyn called The Memory Cathedral ‘a book to cherish, a validation of the novelist’s art and fully worthy of its extraordinary subject.’ The San Francisco Chronicle called it ‘A grand accomplishment’, Kirkus Reviews thought it was ‘An impressive accomplishment’, and True Review said, ‘Read this important novel, be challenged by it; you literally haven’t seen anything like it.’
Dann’s novel about the American Civil War, The Silent, was chosen as one of Library Journal’s ‘Hot Picks’. Library Journal wrote: ‘This is narrative storytelling at its best — so highly charged emotionally as to constitute a kind of poetry from hell. Most emphatically recommended.’ Peter Straub said ‘This tale of America’s greatest trauma is full of mystery, wonder, and the kind of narrative inventiveness that makes other novelists want to hide under the bed.’ And The Australian called it ‘an extraordinary achievement.’
His novel Bad Medicine (titled Counting Coup in the US), a contemporary road novel, has been described by The Courier Mail as ‘perhaps the best road novel since the Easy Rider days.’
Dann is also the co-editor (with Janeen Webb) of the groundbreaking Australian anthology Dreaming Down-Under, which Peter Goldsworthy called ‘the biggest, boldest, most controversial collection of original fiction eve
r published in Australia.’ It won Australia’s Ditmar Award and was the first Australian book ever to win the World Fantasy Award. His anthology Gathering the Bones, of which he is a co-editor, was included in Library Journal’s Best Genre Fiction of 2003 and was shortlisted for The World Fantasy Award. His latest anthology, Wizards (co-edited with Gardner Dozois and titled Dark Alchemy in the UK and Australia), made the Waldenbooks/Borders bestseller list
Dann’s stories have been collected in Timetipping, Visitations, and the retrospective short story collection Jubilee: The Essential jack Dann. The West Australian said it was ‘Sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, erudite, inventive, beautifully written and always intriguing, Jubilee is a celebration of the talent of a remarkable storyteller.’ His collaborative stories can be found in the collection The Fiction Factory.
The West Australian called Dann’s latest novel, The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean, ‘an amazingly evocative and utterly convincing picture of the era, down to details of the smells and sensations — and even more importantly, the way of thinking.’ Locus wrote: ‘The Rebel is a significant and very gripping novel, a welcome addition to Jack Dann’s growing oeuvre of speculative historical novels, sustaining further his long-standing contemplation of the modalities of myth and memory. This is alternate history with passion and difference.’ A companion James Dean short story collection entitled Promised Lane has just been published.
As part of its Bibliographies of Modern Authors Series, The Borgo Press has published an annotated bibliography and guide entitled The Work of Jack Dann. An updated second edition is in progress. Dann is also listed in Contemporary Authors and the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series; The International Authors and Writers Who’s Who; Personalities of America; Men of Achievement; Who’s Who in Writers, Editors, and Poets: United States and Canada; Dictionary of International Biography; Directory of Distinguished Americans; Outstanding Writers of the 20th Century; and Who’s Who in the World.
Dann lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea and ‘commutes’ back and forth to Los Angeles and New York.
His website is jackdann.com.
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