The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  Opening the mailer, I slipped out the contents—a brand new, fat, hardcover book. A thrill ran through me when I saw that it was a copy of The Butcher of Malfeasance. Of course, I dropped the mailer and paged frantically to the end of the novel, to the part I had been responsible for. Five pages from the end, I picked up the narrative where Glandar faces off against the monster by the edge of the cliff. Reading it was an experience I will never forget, for Ashmolean had used my exact words. I ran my fingers over the print on the page and when it didn’t brush away, I thought to myself, I created this.

  I saw the battle take place before my eyes just as I had seen it in Ashmolean’s office the day I dictated it to him. The oaths and all were there, perfectly rendered. But when I read to where the ocean washed the fallen bodies out to sea, there was another whole page of writing.

  Puzzled, I continued to find that Glandar returns that night to Kreegenvale. Soaking wet, with urchins in his hair and seaweed wrapped around his neck, he steps into a room of mourners. They rejoice, the flagons are passed, and he tells how the elastic body of the Malfeasance saved him from the fall. Although he almost drowned, he managed to fight the current and come ashore three miles down the coast. Then the novel ends on a high note, promising more drinking, wenching, and wielding to come.

  “What the hell is this?” I said aloud. A few minutes later, after reinspecting the mailer, I found my answer. In my rush to see my words in print, I had missed the letter from Ashmolean that was addressed to me:

  Dear Mary:

  I’m sorry, but I had to change your ending a little. Think of all the future royalties I would have lost had I let Glandar die. I’m not ready to kill him off just yet—everyone needs a fantasy. He sends his best and apologizes for his part in the fiction I created for you. I knew from the day I met you that you were smart, that you loved books and ideas. I would have realized that even if I hadn’t made a phone call to your school before you even came to the interview. They told me about your place on the edge of the field. I know that place. There are other places you need to go as well. Sometimes an act of destruction can be an act of creation. I felt you needed that to begin your journey. I believe that as your obsessed, blinded, fantasy writer, I was the best character I ever created. What good is the illusion of fiction if it cannot show us a way to become the people we need to be? Glandar says, “Be courageous, squeeze every ounce out of life, and live with honor.” Simple but still not a bad message to sometimes remember in this complex world. I did this because I knew someday you might become a writer, but that you needed a little help. Glad to be of assistance.

  Ashmolean

  At first I was confused, but I read the letter again and laughed like a believer. I never took my test on Swift that day, but instead went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. Then, I returned to my room and over the course of two days, my mother and father calling to me from the other side of the locked door, I wrote this story.

  This was the first story I published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—the realization of a life-long dream. “The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant” was nominated for a Nebula Award and is probably my best known story. Gordon Van Gelder, in his concise editorial style, made two pinpoint suggestions that cut directly to the heart of the matter. Incorporating them made all the difference.

  The story is about Fantasy and genre and literature and writing, but for me it is most importantly about two individuals and their relationship, how they help each other. Both the characters of Ashmolean and the narrator, Mary, are in some ways autobiographical and in more ways not. Why is it written in the voice of a young woman? I don’t know, it’s just the way I saw it, as Ashmolean might say. I think it is important to keep in mind that at the end, Mary does not adopt the older writer’s style, but writes her own story in her own way.

  Glandar’s phrase, “One must retain a zest for the battle,” comes directly from my father and is part of his personal philosophy of life.

  This story has always been for Bill Watkins, author of “The Beggar in the Livingroom,” Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer, Cosmic Thunder, Going to See the End of the Sky, and The Last Deathship Off Antares, who gave me great encouragement and insight into the writing of Speculative Fiction.

  The Far Oasis

  In their exquisite self-centeredness our ancestors believed that they were alone in the universe. At the same time, they had convinced themselves that Earth was the blue apple of God’s eye and the sole reason for all of creation. This two-headed fallacy caused humanity both delusions of grandeur and a paranoiac sense of loneliness. Although we eventually achieved the ability of space travel at speeds exceeding that of light and discovered a proliferation of planets along with the near-infinite diversification of species inhabiting them, we could never flee far enough to escape those ingrained disabilities of ego and the angst of isolation but carried them with us like ghostly stowaways to the most remote corners of the universe. The drama caused by the tension between these two psychological conditions born of the same impulse played itself out on a million far-flung stages. As a historian, I can tell you that in studying the history of mankind, this is, though it dons a multitude of disguises, the sole phenomenon one studies. At least a thousand instances come readily to mind, but allow me to apprise you of a single case, and it will be for you like a mirror. One glance and you will be assured that you are not alone in your willful loneliness.

  The celestial city of Aldebaran had pirouetted through the limitless vacuum for centuries, and its population, whose original purpose was to find a habitable world to colonize, had grown so at home in the star-studded blackness of space that the group mind could not conceive of leaving its clear-domed vessel for the natural atmosphere and sunlight of any planet no matter how blue. The citizens of Aldebaran had done well, not only in maintaining their systems, both mechanical and organic, but also in maintaining their society. To their credit they remembered the concept of love and kept it alive all the long years they aimlessly drifted.

  In order to ensure survival it was absolutely necessary that their laws be strict. Those of the original population, who had written the precepts for the city, knew the dangers of allowing chaos to get a foothold in a closed system. Justice on Aldebaran was humane, but it was also swift and given a place of utmost importance. When a citizen too egregiously violated the code, he or she was viewed as a plague virus and banished, with the greatest expediency, to the surface of the closest habitable planet. The citizens viewed this punishment in the same manner that their ancient Earth ancestors did the consignment to Hell.

  Somewhere in the fifth century of the history of Aldebaran, a little less than halfway to its annihilation in the maw of a black hole, there lived within the city a man named Honis Sikes. He was just one of a hundred other agricultural workers who tilled the soil that lay between the boundary of the dome and the structural complex that was the city at its center. He was a hard worker, and although he was by nature shy, he was well known for his expertise at a popular strategy game played with corn kernels on a board that carried a labyrinthine design. The name of this entertainment was Maize. In his time away from the fields, he designed boards for this game and recorded some of the more interesting points of strategy from famous games he remembered having played or seen. There were very few players who had ever beaten him, and the lucky ones who did never repeated the feat. In this fact, he enjoyed a modest notoriety all throughout Aldebaran.

  Once when he was playing in the city park, a large group of onlookers present, he called for his next opponent and a young woman stepped up to the table. She was carrying a board of her own making, and when she placed it down on the table for all to see, the crowd gasped at the complexity of the design. Sikes smiled at her, for the only thing he wanted more than to be admired for his play at Maize was a real challenge. The game began and right from the very start, the young woman took the lead. Play was heated and corn kernels came and went from the labyrinth so fast that many of the onlook
ers couldn’t follow what was happening. Near the end, when it looked like Sikes was about to lose, he put into effect a secret strategy that rapidly depleted the woman’s store and closed down the labyrinth around her. He had trapped her only remaining viable pieces, causing them to (in the parlance of the game) rot.

  Sikes knew that he had met a formidable opponent, but it was not until after he was finished playing the game that he noticed how beautiful she was. Her hair was long and light, the color of the beams from the artificial growth lamps that were positioned throughout the fields. Her face was unusual in that it was not as pale as that of the predominance of citizens but still held the tone of some ancient Earth ethnicity. The eyes also were startling in their exotic almond shape and deep green like the fabled wandering star, Karjeet. He quickly packed up his board and pieces and followed her out of the park. On the street that ran past the entrance to the underground generators and gravity replicators, he caught up to her.

  “Hello,” he called.

  She turned, her hair whipping in a bright wave over her left shoulder, and he knew he would never forget the sight of it. As he approached, he felt weak, but held himself together and inquired as to her name.

  “Methina,” she said.

  They exchanged some comments about the game. He told her about his job in the fields, and she said to him that everyone who played Maize knew about him. She volunteered that she was a laborer in the fission plant.

  “And can you tell me that strategy you used at the end of the game?” she asked, smiling.

  “That is my secret,” he said. “It must be initiated in the second move of the game or it will not work. I call it the Winner’s Conceit.”

  They walked on for a time down the street together, conversing, and when they came to the place where their intended paths diverged, Sikes, who had always been very shy with women, very much a loner, set his courage and asked if she would join him on the upcoming holiday when the city governors allowed the gravity replicators to be turned way down and everyone gained, for an hour’s time, something akin to the power of flight. To this she agreed, told him where and when to meet her and then turned away, leaving him standing on the corner. It took a few moments for her acceptance to sink in, and when it did, he dropped his board and box of pieces, his kernels scattering everywhere.

  On the day of the holiday, they met as agreed upon at the outdoor café in the center of town. Methina wore a long, white dress that billowed around her, and when she leaped and swept through the skies above the city she embodied for Sikes the ancient concept of an angel. It was a custom of good luck that one must jump upward from the smaller buildings to the tallest, Shiva Tower, and from there kick off and ascend to touch the inner apex of the dome. This they each did, encouraged and applauded by the other. Methina and Sikes held hands and performed midair somersaults together. They flew, laughing, arms flapping, like Earth birds above the fields.

  After the gravity replicators had been restored to their standard settings and the city lights had been turned down to the merest glow, the two found themselves alone in a clearing of a small thicket of woods, an island of green out in the golden wheat field. They lay on the ground while above, way out past the clear boundary of the dome, a spiraled galaxy turned slowly like a milky pin-wheel in a cosmic breeze. Pieces of space debris occasionally collided with the invisible force field surrounding Aldebaran and these shards of creation disintegrated in showers of orange sparks.

  The two Maize players had long since lost interest in using their tongues for speech and were now twining them heatedly; their bodies locked in a tight embrace. Off came their clothes. But just at the moment of fruition, Sikes panting like a robot worker suffering a power surge, Methina put her palms against his chest and held him back.

  “First, you must give me the secret of the Winner’s Conceit,” she whispered.

  Sikes, who had imagined himself taking the technique smugly to the grave, who had long daydreamed of future generations puzzling over the riddle of the move, spewed forth the strategy with its placement of kernels, its series of moves and when to perform them with each of the basic types of labyrinths. “You must distract the opponent,” he grunted, “by letting her take the lead, clouding her mind with the winner’s conceit.”

  “All right,” she said and removed her palms, but it was too late. Sikes lurched inelegantly forward once with bad aim, his kernels scattering everywhere.

  She dressed quickly and left him there on the ground weeping, for now it had become clear to him that he had squandered the treasure of his secret and never so much as entered the labyrinth.

  In the days that followed, Sikes could not return to Maize. The game was finished for him. When he would try to force himself to contemplate strategies he had been assiduously building in his mind for months, they were crowded out by the image of Methina’s beauty and the somatic memory of her naked body. He did not know where she lived, but she had told him that she worked at the fission plant. One afternoon he left the fields early without telling his superiors and went to wait for her outside the plant’s entrance.

  He watched the workers exit, filled with the excitement that he would again see her. But she never materialized. Going down into the plant, he found the office and gave her name, inquiring as to what shift she worked. Since the secretary was a devotee of Maize and was impressed to be speaking with Sikes, she told him that there was no one with that name among the workers. Methina had lied to him. For a moment he felt lost, but then reassured himself with the thought that Aldebaran was an island from which there was no escape.

  He began looking for her everywhere in the city, at the café, in the museums, along the shore of the lake. He had forsaken his job in the fields, dodging calls from his superiors. With each passing day, he succumbed more and more to a growing sense of melancholy. He began to believe that she had been merely a figment of his imagination generated by his own loneliness until, one day on the observation deck of Shiva Tower, he ran into Porleman, another aficionado of the game.

  “Where have you been, Sikes?” asked the thin, horse-faced man.

  “I’m out of the Maize,” he said.

  “Just in time,” said Porleman. “There is a new champion, a woman, who is hacking through the ranks of players with what appears to me to be that famous tactic of yours.”

  “You’ve seen her?” asked Sikes.

  “She crushed me the other day over at the Provident Club. She’s taking on all opponents. No one has been able to stand up to her.”

  Sikes stood, hidden down an alley, across the street from the Provident Club. He waited patiently for hours until the city lights had been dimmed and the players and fans began to file out and head home to their apartments. Finally, he saw Methina, if indeed that was her real name, exit the club and head down the street. She walked alone through the shadows cast by the buildings. The governors had opted for a windy night and the breeze machines had been set at three-quarter speed. With a stealth born of his desire, he snuck quietly up behind her and grabbed her by the shoulder. She gave a sharp cry and turned quickly, her hair whipping over her left shoulder as it had the day he had met her.

  “Sikes,” she said, and seemed relieved it was not someone more threatening. “Good to see you again.”

  “You tricked me,” he said. “You stole my move.”

  She shook her head and laughed softly. “I had my own strategy,” she said, “and beat you with it. You were too foolish to see that the game extends beyond the boundaries of the board. I broke no rules.”

  “I don’t care,” said Sikes, “have the strategy. What I want is to see you again. I haven’t been able to think of anything but you,” he said.

  “Feel free to think of me,” she said, “but I have as little interest in you as I might a single kernel on the twenty-ninth space of a spiral labyrinth riddled with rot.”

  “What about the holiday?” he asked. “The clearing in the trees?”

  “You, Sikes, were a victi
m of the winner’s conceit,” she said. “Goodnight.” She turned to leave.

  He could not let her go and so employed a new intuitive strategy, one devoid of intellect and logic. His only goal was to touch her again. He put his hands around the soft flesh of her throat and held on with all his strength until her arms stopped flailing and she slumped, lifeless, against him. When the city lights were brought up again hours later, the citizens on their way to work found him in the same spot, clutching her to him in a vicelike embrace. The security officers were called out, and the game closed down around him.

  Honis Sikes was found guilty and sentenced to banishment. On the day of his sentencing, he begged the magistrate that he simply be executed on Aldebaran and not be sent out into space to some nameless planet. The good man on the bench felt the horror of Sikes’s situation and, never having had to banish someone from the city before, had a difficult time refusing him. But in the end, after consulting with the other magistrates, they all concluded that his crime was too heinous and if their ancestors insisted on one thing that would ensure the perpetuation of the celestial city, it was the upholding of the law as it was written.

  The probe that was to be Sikes’s new island in the void for what would end up being the next four hundred years was not much larger than he was. Inside was a suspended animation chamber called a cocoon, for the process that was used to preserve human life on long space flights was one borrowed from the chrysalis stage of Earth caterpillars. Those insects wrapped themselves in a cocoon and then through their own organic chemistry changed into a liquid state only to be reformed from that mucous later into the guise of a butterfly. Through the use of technology and inorganic chemistry, so too was the case with the body of the traveler in this device. Sikes’s bone and muscle, flesh and blood, would again cohere out of the liquid sleep, the only difference being he would not come forth a resplendent winged creature but merely the same old Sikes.