By Any Other Name
Page 1
GET YOU READY
My eyes looked past all the conventional hardware to a curious device beyond them, directly in front of Butler Library and nearly hidden by overgrown hedges. I couldn’t have named it—it looked like an octopus making love to a console stereo—but it obviously didn’t come with the landscaping. Carlson was using Butler for his base of operations. God knew what the device was for, but a man without his adenoids in a city full of Muskies and hungry German shepherds would not have built it further from home than could be helped. This was the place.
I drew in a great chest- and belly-full of air, and my grin hurt my cheeks. I held up my rifle and watched my hands. Rock steady.
Carlson, you murdering bastard, I thought, this is it. The human race has found you, and its Hand is near. A few more breaths and you die violently, old man, like a harmless cat in a smokeshop window, like an eight-year-old boy on a Harlem sidewalk, like a planetwide civilization you thought you could improve on. Get you ready.
I moved forward.
—From “By Any Other Name”
BAEN BOOKS by Spider Robinson
By Any Other Name
The Star Dancers (with Jeanne Robinson)
Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson) (forthcoming)
Deathkiller
Lifehouse
User Friendly
Telempath (forthcoming)
BY ANY OTHER NAME
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by Spider Robinson
All stories copyright by Spider Robinson: Melancholy Elephants © 1984, Half An Oaf © 1976, Antinomy © 1980, Satan’s Children © 1979, Apogee © 1980, No Renewal © 1980, Tin Ear © 1980, In the Olden Days © 1984, Silly Weapons © 1980, Nobody Likes to Be Lonely © 1980, “If This Goes On—” © 1991, True Minds © 1984, Common Sense © 1985, Chronic Offender © 1984, High Infidelity © 1984, Rubber Soul © 1984, The Crazy Years was originally published in parts in the Toronto Globe and Mail © 1996-2000, By Any Other Name © 1976.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
http://www.baen.com
ISBN: 0-671-31974-4
Cover art by Richard Martin
Interior art by Rocky Coffin
First printing, February 2001
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Produced by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Foreword
Melancholy Elephants
Half an Oaf
Antinomy
Satan’s Children
Apogee
No Renewal
Tin Ear
In the Olden Days
Silly Weapons
Nobody Likes to Be Lonely
“If this goes on—”
True Minds
Common Sense
Chronic Offender
High Infidelity
Rubber Soul
The Crazy Years
By Any Other Name
For my friends Ted and Diana Powell
—and for Ben Bova,
without whom all this would not have
been necessary…
FOREWORD
Perhaps a story collection should be allowed to speak for itself.
That was my original intention; I submitted this book to Toni Weisskopf without a foreword. The basic plan was simple: to gather all the short stories I’ve written that aren’t already collected in User Friendly (Baen 1998), with a little bit of nonfiction for lagniappe. So the assembly process was not onerous. Basically I pulled manuscripts from the trunk, glanced at their titles, nodded nostalgically, and added them to the pile. Deciding their order was a no-brainer: begin and end with a Hugo-winner, and in between those, alternate humorous and serious stories. Writing a foreword seemed superfluous.
Then a few days ago the galley proofs arrived, and I sat down and read them through, and here I am writing a foreword after all.
I have not written short fiction for some time now. Novels pay so much better that, without consciously planning to, I just stopped getting short story ideas a few years back. So I hadn’t read any of those stories particularly recently. Some I had not read in twenty years or more. As I rediscovered them now, unexpected patterns emerged.
I’d begun the galleys firmly resolved to do nothing but correct typos. I was determined to make no retroactive improvements to these stories—to let them stand as they first came into the world, flaws and all. But I found I kept wanting to push dates forward. I was rather startled to realize how many of these stories are now chronologically outdated. Written, in some cases, in the early 1970s, they tended to be set in the “distant future” of twenty or thirty years later. I’m most comfortable in that range: the further ahead into the future I speculate, the less confident I am about my own guesses—and if I’m dubious, how am I to convince a reader? But history has begun to overtake me.
I was not dismayed—or even surprised—at how often my guesses about the future had turned out to be dead wrong. I’ve never claimed or wished to be a prophet; I write about possible futures, and strive for plausible ones.
But I was somewhat surprised at just how my speculations were wrong: over and over, it seems, I was too optimistic. I don’t mean that all the stories you’re about to read are upbeat, by any means. But most of the futures I imagined were, in retrospect, at least a little better than the one we actually got. At least more technologically advanced.
I find I’m proud of that.
I only pray I can manage to sustain that attitude of positive expectation, that tendency toward benign delusion, through the next quarter-century of tumult and shenanigans. And infect as many other people with it as possible.
Because unconscious expectations are so important. We need all the Placebo we can get. It’s been shown again and again: if you introduce a new teacher to a perfectly average class of kids, and tell him they’re the Advanced group, by the end of the year they will be. This real year 2000 may not be quite as advanced as some of the ones I envisioned for entertainment purposes…but it is, I think, a far nicer one than most average citizens living in the 1970s or 1980s would have believed possible. (Just for a start: no Cold War.) Optimistic science fiction may just have had something to do with that. As my friend Stephen Gaskin once said, “What you put your attention on prospers.”
Case in point: the title story of this book.
It was, if memory serves, the third story I ever tried to write for money. I’d sent my first one to the most popular magazine in the field, Analog—talk about irrational optimism—and miraculously, it sold. But the second, set in the same tavern, had not sold there…or anywhere else. Then from somewhere came “By Any Other Name,” and I just knew this one was going to sell. Perhaps it’s weird to call it an optimistic story, since it posits the total collapse of technological civilization—but it also suggests that humanity will ultimately survive just about any collapse. In any event, it was a much more complex and ambitious story than anything I’d ever tried before, and I certainly sent it off with high hopes.
It was bounced by every market in science fiction.
More than a dozen rejections, beginning with Analog and ending underneath the bottom of the barrel. The last editor on the list lost the damn thing for several months…then rejected it…then lost it again. (I was so green,
the only other copy in existence was the handwritten first draft.)
By the time I finally got it back, I had written several other stories, and not one of them had sold, either. I suspect the only reason I even took the manuscript out of the envelope was so it would burn better in the fireplace. But my own opening sentence caught me. I ended up reading the damn thing all the way through one more time—
—and by God, I still liked it. All thirteen of those editors, I decided on the spot, were wrong.
So I rejected the rejections. I mailed the story, unchanged, to Ben Bova at Analog a second time. It was a perfect act of irrational optimism, of benign delusion.
You guessed it: he bought it this time.
But it wasn’t just a sale. “By Any Other Name” was my first Analog cover story. (Jack Gaughan’s splendid painting for that cover hangs in my home today; God rest his generous soul.) It won my first AnLab, the monthly Analog reader’s poll. A year later it won me my first Hugo Award from readers worldwide. It was a career-maker. It became the nucleus of my first novel, Telempath. Most important of all, it was one of a pair of stories which persuaded a young woman named Jeanne, in spite of her better judgment, to let me court her…
So maybe that’s one reason why I’m optimistic by policy. It seems to be working for me.
(Epilogue I can’t resist: over a decade later, I got up the nerve to ask Ben if he realized he’d rejected a Hugo-winning story the first time he saw it. Oh sure, he said, I had to—no choice. How come? I asked.
(He gave me a pitying look. “Spider, that was an election year—remember? And then you expect me to buy a story where the alien villains are basically giant killer farts, named ‘Musky’?” He shook his head emphatically. “Nixon that.”)
In that spirit of reckless optimism, I’ve adulterated this collection of short fiction with a pinch of non-fiction.
One evening in 1996 Jeanne and I were strolling through town with our friend Shannon Rupp, then the dance critic for Vancouver’s alternative weekly The Georgia Straight, and as is my custom, I was shooting my mouth off. An airliner had just fallen into the sea, and all the media believed it had either been terrorist sabotage, or just possibly a covered-up accidental missile launch from a U.S. Navy destroyer. I was pontificating on why both theories had to be hogwash…and Shannon interrupted. “Write that all down,” she said. And do what with it, I asked. “Send it to The Globe and Mail,” she said. “I’ll bet they buy it.”
Well, that was just silly. The Globe and Mail was Canada’s national newspaper, its journal of record, the Grey Lady of the North. What would they want with the unsolicited opinions of an American-born science fiction writer who lived about as far from Toronto as a Canadian resident can get, and whose most recent journalistic credentials—lame ones—were almost thirty years old?
But Shannon finally bullied me into trying it. And Warren Clements bought the piece, and asked for more, and that’s how I became an Op-Ed columnist—like nearly everything else I’ve accomplished in my life so far: by accident.
I’ve provided herein some samples of the column that ran in The Globe and Mail every three weeks from 1996-99 under the running title, “The Crazy Years.” If you don’t care for fact—or at least, for opinions about facts—with your fiction, by all means skip over them. If they do catch your interest, as of this writing I’m still producing a column a month for The Globe and Mail, and two columns a month for David Gerrold and Ben Bova’s new cybersite Galaxy Online (www.galaxyonline.com).
And now on to the fiction. After all this talk of optimism, naturally the first story in line, which won the 1983 Hugo for Short Story, is one of the gloomier prognostications I’ve ever made. Oh well. The year “Melancholy Elephants” is set in has not arrived yet—maybe this time the real future will turn out brighter than the one I dreamed.
One can hope…
—British Columbia
18 September, 2000
MELANCHOLY
ELEPHANTS
This story is dedicated to
Virginia Heinlein
She sat zazen, concentrating on not concentrating, until it was time to prepare for the appointment. Sitting seemed to produce the usual serenity, put everything in perspective. Her hand did not tremble as she applied her make-up; tranquil features looked back at her from the mirror. She was mildly surprised, in fact, at just how calm she was, until she got out of the hotel elevator at the garage level and the mugger made his play. She killed him instead of disabling him. Which was obviously not a measured, balanced action—the official fuss and paperwork could make her late. Annoyed at herself, she stuffed the corpse under a shiny new Westinghouse roadable whose owner she knew to be in Luna, and continued on to her own car. This would have to be squared later, and it would cost. No help for it—she fought to regain at least the semblance of tranquility as her car emerged from the garage and turned north.
Nothing must interfere with this meeting, or with her role in it.
Dozens of man-years and God knows how many dollars, she thought, funneling down to perhaps a half hour of conversation. All the effort, all the hope. Insignificant on the scale of the Great Wheel, of course…but when you balance it all on a half hour of talk, it’s like balancing a stereo cartridge on a needlepoint: It only takes a gram or so of weight to wear out a piece of diamond. I must be harder than diamond.
Rather than clear a window and watch Washington, D.C. roll by beneath her car, she turned on the television. She absorbed and integrated the news, on the chance that there might be some late-breaking item she could turn to her advantage in the conversation to come; none developed. Shortly the car addressed her: “Grounding, ma’am. I.D. eyeball request.” When the car landed she cleared and then opened her window, presented her pass and I.D. to a Marine in dress blues, and was cleared at once. At the Marine’s direction she re-opaqued the window and surrendered control of her car to the house computer, and when the car parked itself and powered down she got out without haste. A man she knew was waiting to meet her, smiling.
“Dorothy, it’s good to see you again.”
“Hello, Phillip. Good of you to meet me.”
“You look lovely this evening.”
“You’re too kind.”
She did not chafe at the meaningless pleasantries. She needed Phil’s support, or she might. But she did reflect on how many, many sentences have been worn smooth with use, rendered meaningless by centuries of repetition. It was by no means a new thought.
“If you’ll come with me, he’ll see you at once.”
“Thank you, Phillip.” She wanted to ask what the old man’s mood was, but knew it would put Phil in an impossible position.
“I rather think your luck is good; the old man seems to be in excellent spirits tonight.”
She smiled her thanks, and decided that if and when Phil got around to making his pass she would accept him.
The corridors through which he led her then were broad and high and long; the building dated back to a time of cheap power. Even in Washington, few others would have dared to live in such an energy-wasteful environment. The extremely spare decor reinforced the impression created by the place’s dimensions: bare space from carpet to ceiling, broken approximately every forty meters by some exquisitely simple object d’art of at least a megabuck’s value, appropriately displayed. An unadorned, perfect, white porcelain bowl, over a thousand years old, on a rough cherrywood pedestal. An arresting color photograph of a snow-covered country road, silk-screened onto stretched silver foil; the time of day changed as one walked past it. A crystal globe, a meter in diameter, within which danced a hologram of the immortal Shara Drummond; since she had ceased performing before the advent of holo technology, this had to be an expensive computer reconstruction. A small sealed glassite chamber containing the first vacuum-sculpture ever made, Nakagawa’s legendary Starstone. A visitor in no hurry could study an object at leisure, then walk quite a distance in undistracted contemplation before encountering another. A visito
r in a hurry, like Dorothy, would not quite encounter peripherally astonishing stimuli often enough to get the trick of filtering them out. Each tugged at her attention, intruded on her thoughts; they were distracting both intrinsically and as a reminder of the measure of their owner’s wealth. To approach this man in his own home, whether at leisure or in haste, was to be humbled. She knew the effect was intentional, and could not transcend it; this irritated her, which irritated her. She struggled for detachment.
At the end of the seemingly endless corridors was an elevator. Phillip handed her into it, punched a floor button, without giving her a chance to see which one, and stepped back into the doorway. “Good luck, Dorothy.”
“Thank you, Phillip. Any topics to be sure and avoid?”
“Well…don’t bring up hemorrhoids.”
“I didn’t know one could.”
He smiled. “Are we still on for lunch Thursday?”
“Unless you’d rather make it dinner.”
One eyebrow lifted. “And breakfast?”
She appeared to consider it. “Brunch,” she decided. He half-bowed and stepped back.
The elevator door closed and she forgot Phillip’s existence.
Sentient beings are innumerable; I vow to save them all. The deluding passions are limitless; I vow to extinguish them all. The truth is limitless; I—
The elevator door opened again, truncating the Vow of the Bodhisattva. She had not felt the elevator stop—yet she knew that she must have descended at least a hundred meters. She left the elevator.
The room was larger than she had expected; nonetheless the big powered chair dominated it easily. The chair also seemed to dominate—at least visually—its occupant. A misleading impression, as he dominated all this massive home, everything in it and, to a great degree, the country in which it stood. But he did not look like much.
A scent symphony was in progress, the cinnamon passage of Bulachevski’s “Childhood.” It happened to be one of her personal favorites, and this encouraged her.