Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Arturo Kollberg was hung out to dry by the Studio; the official line was that this had all been his own rogue operation. Down-casted to Labor, he was moved to a Temp block not far from where Hari grew up.

  Hari had won; Caine had won.

  They’d killed him, but it didn’t matter; he’d beaten them all.

  Then, one day, Shanna came back.

  “CONGRATULATIONS, ADMINISTRATOR MICHAELSON,” was the first thing she said. “I hear your upcaste came through.”

  Hari shrugged. “Hello to you, too. Yeah, the Studio got behind me, and they pretty much get what they want.”

  “The Studio?” she said, looking puzzled. “Why would they want you upcasted?”

  “Because they offered me Kollberg’s job.”

  She went absolutely blank. “I don’t believe it.”

  “I didn’t either, but when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. I’m the most famous man on the planet, right now. Even though I’m—I was—only a Professional, I could cause the Studio a shitload of trouble. I’m virtually untouchable, and I could tell some stories. I could deliver the knockout to follow up the black eye they got from the Kollberg business. So they want to keep me in the system.”

  “They really think you could do them that much damage?”

  He spread his hands. “Hey, I’ve toppled one government already this month.”

  “You don’t seriously think—”

  “Well, maybe not. All I can say is, they better not piss me off.”

  Her face had become more full, and the shadows had disappeared from under her eyes. She suddenly seemed vastly uncomfortable; she made tentative I think I’d better leave movements.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Hari, I . . . I don’t know. That’s great, your news, your upcasteing, all that, but I . . . Maybe I’d better just let this go.”

  “What? Let what go?”

  “I don’t want you to think this has anything to do with your upcaste—”

  His heart leaped into his throat, and blood sang in his ears. “This what? Come on, you’re killing me: Talk.”

  She hand-combed her hair away from her eyes and turned to gaze into the misty distance outside the window; she spoke hesitantly, with obvious difficulty.

  “There at the last, I was a god,” she began, and sighed as though she didn’t know how to continue.

  “I remember . . .” Hari said softly.

  “And, you know, it wasn’t really me—I mean, it was me, I was me, but I was also him, it, Chambaraya. I was only a little part of the god, but at the same time I was all of it, and I know this isn’t making very much sense . . . Words are kind of inadequate, I guess; the only way you could really understand is if it had happened to you.”

  “You miss it, don’t you,” Hari said. This wasn’t a question; the truth of it was all too clear, and it stabbed him inside. She’s leaving me again, he thought. Leaving me for the love of the river.

  “Yes. Of course I do. But I’m here now, and this is where I need to be. I need to be where I am, and whatever I’m doing, that’s what I need to do. Do you understand?”

  “Not really . . .”

  “You saw the power,” she said, “but power has nothing to do with being a god. They, the gods, they look at things differently. To join with Chambaraya, all I had to do was see the world the way it does. And when the world looks different, it’s because you’ve become different—you’re not the same person that saw it in the old ways.”

  She spread her hands, shaking her head with a weak smile of surrender. “I can’t seem to get close to the point.”

  She rose and paced about the room; Hari’s gaze followed her helplessly.

  “You know, the gods don’t understand us, either,” she said. “Mortal folk are as much a mystery to them as they are to us. And what they understand least, what they just can’t figure out, is why we choose to be miserable. It seems to them that we insist on being unhappy . . . When I was with Chambaraya, it seemed that way to me, too, and I couldn’t understand it any more than the river could.”

  She straightened. Hari could see the faintest tremor in the hand that smoothed the seam of her tunic. She breathed deep, as though drawing in courage from the air.

  “I’ve been giving this a great deal of thought, looking it over from every side I can find,” she said hesitantly.

  Hari squeezed his eyes shut. I don’t need to hear this.

  “You’re going to be going home soon.”

  “Yeah . . . ?” was the best he could force through his closing throat.

  “I’d like to . . . I’d like to be there, when you do. And after.”

  He couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even blink.

  She sat down and once again turned away. “Businessman Vilo, he’s got this simichair . . . He and Leisurema’am Dole, are, well, y’know, and so I’ve . . . Over the past week, I’ve been, sort of, first-handing your Adventure.”

  “Shanna . . .”

  “I understand so many things, now. And, and Hari? Through it all, through everything, the separation, everything, I never doubted that you loved me. I guess I just thought you had to love me my way—or something equally petty and stupid. I don’t know. I guess it’s not important, now.”

  “I, I . . .”

  “I don’t know if we can make anything work between us, Hari. I really don’t know. I’m not the same woman you married—different things are important to me, now. And you’re not the same man, either. Maybe, maybe we could . . . get to know each other again. You think? Because I love you, and I want to try to be together, again. I want us both to try to be happy.”

  “Shanna, my god, Shanna . . .”

  And as he reached out to take her hand, a team of doctors with a crashcart burst through the door of his room; his telemetry had set off six different alarms.

  DAYS LATER, WHEN the doctors had been satisfied and he was loaded into the levichair that would be his mobile home for the next few months, he held her hand and gazed into her eyes and thought, Well, shit, this is all right: in the end, I even get the girl.

  She walked beside his humming chair as they left the hospital and entered the open air.

  The sky arched high overhead, and the shining golden spark of an approaching cab arced down toward them.

  He looked up at her. “You really think we can make this work?”

  “I hope so,” she said. “After all, I promised I’d never leave you. And promises are important.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, they are . . . Y’know, you just reminded me of another promise I made.”

  When the cab landed, she helped negotiate the loading of his chair inside. He leaned forward, tapped the CANCEL RUN key, and told the driver to enter a course for the Buchanan Social Camp.

  “The Buchanan?” Shanna asked. “Why are we going to the Buchanan?”

  Hari smiled, just a little; his heart was too full for anything bigger. The greatest joys are expressed in the stillest, smallest, quietest ways.

  “There’s someone that I want you to meet.”

  A Conversation with Matthew Woodring Stover

  Matthew Woodring Stover lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as a bartender at a private club in the United Center, home of the Bulls and the Blackhawks. In previous incarnations he’s been an actor, a theatrical producer, a playwright, a waiter, a barista (okay, what the heck is a barista?), a short-order cook, a telemarketer of fine wines, and a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. With his partner, noted painter and up-and-coming fantasy author Robyn Fielder, he was cofounder and codirector of the Iff Theater. In addition to being a recreational marathon runner and amateur kickboxer, Stover has studied a variety of martial arts, including the Degerberg Blend, tae kwon do, aikido, English boxing, English quarterstaff, the Filipino sword arts (kali/escrima/arnis), savate, and muay thai (reviewers, take note!). Somehow amid all this exhausting activity he finds time to write fantasy novels—three to date—with more o
n the way.

  Q: Tell us a little about how you became a writer . . . and why an SF writer.

  A: Two words: Robert Heinlein. I read Have Space Suit—Will Travel when I was about twelve, then got ahold of Glory Road, and my fate was sealed. From Heinlein to early Zelazny to Fritz Leiber to Evangeline Walton; they got me started, and I’ve never stopped. Much of my life has been an obsessive inquiry into philosophy, mythology, magic, religion, and the concept of the Hero (in the Joseph Campbell sense). SF—fantasy—is the only branch of literature that lets you look at all of those at once. As to “how I became a writer,” I did it on the Ray Bradbury plan: a thousand words a day, six days a week, rain or shine, even if you have to throw it out because it’s so bad that burning it would violate the Clean Air Act. He claims that by the time you’ve written a million words, you start to have some idea what you’re doing. He’s right.

  Q: Your first novel, Iron Dawn, was published in 1997. Its sequel, Jericho Moon, in 1998—which is also when Heroes Die was published. Three novels in two years—all of exceptional quality. Are you an incredibly quick and prolific writer? Do you work on different projects simultaneously, or do you have a lot of material stockpiled from over the years? In other words, should I just slit my wrists now?

  A: Save your wrists: it was pure stockpile. May the gods witness my wish that I really could write that fast. I wrote Iron Dawn in 1993 and early ’94. I sent it off unsolicited and unagented, straight to the slush pile. While I was waiting for a response, I wrote Heroes Die (which is actually a massive revision of an earlier, vastly longer, completely unpublishable book). In late ’95—through the kind intervention of a perceptive editor—I finally got a great agent, and he had Iron Dawn sold at auction within about a month. By that time, Heroes Die was finished—but my editor at Roc Books offered a contract for a sequel, at which I promptly jumped; Jericho Moon was a story I’d been wanting to write for a long time. So Heroes Die had to wait for Jericho Moon, which I finished in early ’97 . . . and then there was a long round of revision on Heroes Die. So, actually, these three books took me five years to write—eight years, if you count the three I spent working on the early version of Heroes Die. The “three books in two years” is entirely an optical illusion.

  Q: Whew! It just wouldn’t be fair for you to be so good and so fast! Your answer will be of special interest to aspiring writers, I think, because (if I’ve understood correctly) Iron Dawn was discovered in the slush pile by an editor who then pointed you toward an agent. What advice would you give to writers looking to break into the field in terms of agents, editors, and submissions?

  A: I think the ideal way to get an agent is exactly the way I did it: a recommendation from an editor who’d like to buy your script. Agents tend to be vastly interested in projects where a sale is more-or-less guaranteed. In my case, the wise and perceptive editor provided me with a list of agents she knew represented my kind of fiction. The best advice I can offer to aspiring fiction writers in any field is to read two books: Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury, and Writing to Sell, by Scott Meredith. Between the two, they’ll tell you just about everything you need to know. As far as advice specific to the fantasy field goes, well, that’s obvious: the easiest way to break into fantasy fiction is to write a novel about an Innocent Adolescent Who Suddenly Develops Powers and Now Is Destined to Defeat the Dark Lord, Save the World, Cure Dandruff, and Wipe Out the Scourge of Acne.

  Q: Iron Dawn received an unusually strong response for a first novel. What sets that book and its sequel apart?

  A: I can’t really say what sets those books apart. All I can tell you is what I like about them—and that would begin with the characters. That’s how I start a book: I get interested in a character, and I try to pull together a story that will show that character to his/her advantage. In the case of Iron Dawn, I became fascinated with a character that my partner, Robyn Fielder, had developed, this female Pictish mercenary named Barra. I had been developing an idea for a historical fantasy based on the premise that Homer’s Iliad was history, rather than fiction, and when Robyn started telling me about Barra, I just fell in love. She became the axis of the book. All three of the heroes are outsiders, expatriates in a foreign culture, and Barra is the most alien—a female warrior from the far side of the world, a land so distant that most people think it mythical—but she is also the most at home. She’s the inside-outsider, the link between the various cultures that interpenetrate the story. She speaks the language, she knows the city, she has an adoptive family that lives there; it’s her fierce passion to defend her adopted city that drives the plot. I’m really only interested in people who have that kind of passion, that fierceness; there are plenty of others who write about pure-hearted knights and Innocent Adolescents Who Are Destined, et cetera. Which brings me to the other thing that I like about my first two books: they’re not about the conflict of Light Against Darkness, or Good versus Evil. They’re about people trying to protect their homes, their families—and they’re about Barra, who has an unfortunate tendency to get emotionally involved in the jobs she takes on. The whole concept of Good and Evil as an abstract moral dichotomy doesn’t appear in historical thought until Zoroaster, five or six hundred years after these books are set. Barra herself puts it this way: “One of the things I’ve learned in all these years is that just because someone’s your enemy, he’s not automatically a bad man.”

  Q: That was one of the things I liked most about Heroes Die: your focus on characters and situations of a certain, shall we say, moral complexity all too rare in fantasy. Is this your strength as a writer?

  A: I don’t really know what my strengths as a writer might be; judging from my mail and the reviews I get, the things I think I’m good at are often not what people like in my work. So let’s just say this: I’m thorough, I love my characters, and for me, evil is entirely a matter of perspective. Everyone’s a good guy, in his or her own mind; even serial killers, Nazi concentration camp commanders, and “ethnic cleansers” the world over don’t think of themselves as evil.

  Q: Well, unless of course they get a big kick out of defining themselves that way! Hitler never thought of himself as evil for a second; on the contrary. But there are men and women, I believe, who consciously set out to embrace and embody an idea of evil: ‘It’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,’ as someone once said . . .

  A: But now you’re shifting into aberrant psychology, as opposed to metaphysics. You quote from Paradise Lost—in that work, Lucifer is a tragic hero, a magnificently flawed character. And what’s his flaw? Basically, he refuses to Do What He’s Told—which, to a more modern sensibility than Milton’s, is hardly a flaw at all. In fact, given the history of the twentieth century (i.e., the Nuremberg trials: “I was only following orders”), it’s a positive virtue. What I’m trying to get at with that element of my work is this: reality has no moral dimension.

  Morality is an arbitrary human creation that supports culture-specific social orders. Not to say it’s not useful, even necessary, but to pretend that it derives from supernatural authority is childish: “This is wrong because Daddy (God, Jesus, Mohammed, pick one or make up your own) says it is.” Similarly, to pretend that behavior we don’t like in others (or desires and drives we’ve been taught are bad in ourselves) is the result of some supernatural force of evil is just a way to shift the blame: “The Devil made me do it.”

  Outside of the wackos who use evil as an excuse to justify their actions, those embracing “evil” are usually defining evil as opposition to a specific social code; it’s an act of rebellion—and they’re actually rebelling not against God, or Truth, or Justice, or whatever but against society’s restrictive view of what these things have to be. Chat with a Satanist sometime; most of them are really nice folks.

  Q: What writers have influenced you most? You’ve already mentioned Heinlein and Leiber; Heroes Die put me in mind of Michael Moorcock as well. Not just the sword and sorcery aspect of it, but the science ficti
onal idea—well, more science factional now thanks to quantum theory—of a multitude of realities harmonically related to varying degrees.

  A: Michael Moorcock is one of my heroes, naturally; the decadence and moral ambiguity that runs through the Elric stories . . . Kierendal (and her brothel) in Heroes Die is pretty much a direct nod to Moorcock. Fritz Leiber—it’s no coincidence that my first novel, Iron Dawn, is set in Tyre, which was the setting of “Adept’s Gambit,” the only Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story (as far as I remember) to be set on Earth rather than Nehwon. Roger Zelazny—the original version of Heroes Die, all those years ago, was inspired by Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead. . . and, of course, Nine Princes in Amber. Stephen Donaldson’s Covenant books were a powerful influence; I read them back in college, and they were my first look at the possibilities of really adult fantasy. He showed me how a fantasy hero can be a long way from conventionally heroic but still capture the imagination and emotion, so long as he or she cares. Outside the genre, I guess my greatest influence would be Joseph Conrad. He convinced me that you don’t really find out what you’re made of until you discover that there are no rules; my characters usually find themselves, at one point or another, in situations where the boundaries they’ve set for themselves break down. They have to act—and usually, act fast—without recourse to the structure of behavior that they have relied upon to carry them through their lives. The characters who win are the ones who are flexible enough thinkers to find right action in a moral vacuum.

  As far as the quantum mechanical part of it goes, well . . . let me put it this way: a few years ago, when I was first reading Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace, I looked up at Robyn and said, “Holy crap! You won’t believe this: Overworld is theoretically possible!”