Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  But it was too late. Lambclear didn’t even have a family to whom I could send my sympathies; he had remained a solitary bachelor until his last day. There was no one to whom I could properly express my appreciation for his work and my sorrow for his passing.

  No one except . . .

  I moused over the "Send me email" link and watched it blink back and forth between white and red. Finally, I clicked on it, bringing up my email program with the "To:" field already addressed to Lambclear’s America Online account (again, does anyone still remember them?). For a brief moment, I felt silly–but only for a moment. I stared at the screen, looked out my window at the autumn leaves just beginning to turn on the trees, and then I composed this message:

  Subject: Hello

  Dear Mr. Lambclear,

  I’m sorry I never got in touch with you before. I’m a big fan of your works, from the Ethereal Web stories to the Five Universes novels. I even have a copy of your first short story collection, The Universe Off to the Side, which my father gave to me as a birthday present when it first came out.

  I doubt you’ve ever heard of me, though, and I hope you won’t think it forward of me to write. (Your webpage did seem to invite email.) I’ve been trying to write science fiction myself, with no real success. I have to admit that I’ve been emulating you, with the hope that one day you might read my stuff and realize that we were kindred spirits–at least, as far as our tastes in writing.

  I’m sorry that will never happen now. I do wish I had written to you sooner. Although I knew you were something of a recluse, the afterword in Writing Short Science Fiction seemed to indicate that you were willing to hear from your fans. But I just never had the inclination to write to you. In the back of my mind, I think I was waiting until I had published enough stories myself so I could approach you as a colleague. But I guess, as I said, that can never happen now.

  I hope you can forgive me for waiting. Thank you for all your stories. You will be missed.

  I clicked the SEND button on my computer screen, and the email went off to its destination. I felt better. Even though I knew that Lambclear could never know of my appreciation of him and his work, at least I knew about it, and that made a difference.

  I went to bed that night feeling a little less sad about his passing.

  A reader of this file, if anyone finds it, could probably guess what happened next. But as I write this, I still choose to approach the event slowly, like I did that long-ago morning.

  My alarm clock went off at 7 a.m., blaring its grating tone as usual. I could have slept later, I know, but my parents had instilled in me a fear of sleeping away the days of my life. I pulled myself out of bed, walked to the kitchen, and brewed a cup of fresh-ground Colombian coffee to help me wake up. Still in my blue chamois pajamas, I sipped from my father’s old porcelain mug, sat down at my computer, and downloaded my email.

  And among the voluminous spam and occasional email from friends, I found a reply from the account of Carl Lambclear.

  At first I was confused, and I almost choked on my hot beverage. Lambclear was dead; how could he have replied to my note? Perhaps a friend was cleaning out his mailbox. Or maybe Lambclear had set his computer to send out automatic replies, acknowledging receipt of email. Whatever the reason, I knew an obvious way to find out. Just open the email and read it.

  I hesitated, as unwilling to resolve my situation as the familiar quantum cat. So long as I left the email closed, I could imagine that Lambclear lived; but the moment I opened it, I would come face to face again with the bald fact of his death.

  I shook my head, sighed at my own silliness, opened the email, and read it. And when I came to the end of the email, I leaned forward and read it again and again.

  Subject: Re: Hello

  Dear fellow traveler,

  It was an absolute delight to receive your missive from yesterday. As a matter of fact, I have heard of you. I keep up with all the magazines, even the semipro ones, and I fondly recall one of your stories. If my memory does not fail me, yours is the story about the young girl who runs off to join an interstellar circus. Good stuff, even if the writing is a bit awkward in places, and the plot a little thin. But writing weakly is a phase we all must pass through, and within your story I do espy the seeds of better work.

  However, the point of my reply is not to criticize your work, as I would hesitate to do so without a formal invitation. Rather, I am writing to tell you of my gratitude in knowing how much my work has meant to you. It may surprise you to hear this, but in point of fact I do not hear from many of my fans, even those who would aspire to join me in my calling. I presume most people are put off by my reputation of reclusiveness, and are therefore hesitant to intrude upon my privacy, no matter how delicately they might.

  But I must admit, now being in the autumn of my life, I find myself more willing to be an active participant in the world than I have been before. And since your letter arrived at this propitious moment, I feel that perhaps I owe you a little bit of the assistance that was offered to me at the beginning of my career. I would like to offer you the same help, giving you advice on your own stories in the hopes that you will grow to be the best writer that you possibly can.

  In other words, if you are willing, I would be more than happy to begin a correspondence.

  Sincerely yours,

  Carl Lambclear

  After reading the message three times, I leaned back slightly in my chair, sipped my coffee some more, and pondered. The email was impossible. Lambclear was dead; notices of his death had appeared on all the usual places, including the Locus and SFWA webpages. Lambclear could not have replied to me; therefore, by simple logic, someone else must have done so, pretending to be Lambclear.

  But who would have done that? For a moment, I had the fleeting thought that perhaps Lambclear actually did have a family. Was there a secret wife who replied to my message? Or maybe a secret child? But I dismissed that notion as quickly as I came up with it. It simply didn’t make any sense, given the tenor of the reply.

  Still, someone must have been reading his email, and whoever it was seemed intent on playing a joke on me. Rather than fall into the trap, and be made a laughingstock, I carefully composed my next email to dissuade the prankster. It went like this:

  Subject: Re: Hello

  Dear "Mr. Lambclear":

  Whoever you are, this joke is in poor taste. Both you and I know that there is no way in the world Carl Lambclear could have responded to me. All I meant to do was express my appreciation of his work, and you poked fun at me for doing so.

  Leave me alone.

  * * *

  I sent it out within the hour, and then spent the rest of my day writing. I managed to get my thousand words done, not bad for the day’s work. And, as was my habit, I refused to check my email while working. I knew too many aspiring writers who had fallen into that trap and never written a word.

  Furthermore, that night I had no time to read my email after I finished my thousand words, as I went out on an unsuccessful blind date. The date was disastrous enough that I still recall it today; still, the less said about it, the better. So the next morning, when I once again was drinking coffee in front of my computer, I found another ostensible reply from the account of Carl Lambclear.

  I sighed, thinking that this was absolutely ridiculous. I had already told off the anonymous person who had emailed me the first time; I didn’t really want to have to go through this again. I highlighted the email and prepared to delete it. And then a random piece of advice flitted into my head and stayed my hand. Some writer once said that any experience, no matter how bad, was fodder for the typewriter. Perhaps this message might lead to a story idea. At any rate, it couldn’t really harm me just to read it.

  So I clicked on the email, opening it. And read the following:

  Subject: Re: Hello

  Dear fellow traveler,

  I must admit being somewhat perplexed as to both the tone and the content of your last message
. Here I am offering you a chance for personal feedback from me, and you react with hostility. From what you said in your first note, I was under the impression that you found my work enjoyable. Was I mistaken? Should I have not written back with the gratitude that I did?

  Please rest assured that it was indeed I who responded to you, that no one was poking fun at you, and that I am in fact Carl Lambclear.

  However, if I do not hear from you again, I will assume that you wish me to leave you alone, as you so explicitly indicated in your last sentence.

  Sincerely yours,

  Carl Lambclear

  It was only after I read the email that I noticed the attachment accompanying the message. Normally, I would approach an attachment from a strange email address with wariness, but curiosity took over. Besides, people never usually wrote computer viruses for Macintosh computers, so I figured the file would yield no problem.

  I opened the file and began reading it. After a moment, I choked. Lambclear, if it really was he, had written a critique of "Alien Circus," my story about the young girl who runs off to join an interstellar circus.

  At first, I felt insulted. How dare this person, pretending to be Lambclear, take it upon himself to criticize my work without invitation?

  Then I began to read the critique.

  The writer, whoever he was, had made some very cogent points about the flaws in my story. As I continued reading, I felt my anger melt away. The writer’s gentle phrasing and spot-on analysis rendered me more grateful than upset. Lambclear clearly knew what he was talking about–he showed great insight in his comments–

  I shook my head. When had I decided to think of this person as Lambclear?

  I reached the middle of the document and stopped reading in order to ponder its existence. If I had written to Lambclear but a year or two ago, and gotten this email in reply, I wouldn’t have questioned its veracity in the slightest.

  And yet, how could Lambclear have sent me this email today, given the incontrovertible fact that he had died? Could he possibly still be alive? He wouldn’t perpetrate a death hoax, would he?

  A thought occurred to me, prompting me to open the first message I had sent Lambclear. I noticed something interesting; I had never mentioned in my note that Lambclear was dead. It didn’t seem important at the time, but now I wondered. Could whoever it was have taken my email as an invitation to give me the mentoring I so desperately wanted?

  And the funny thing, the two emails did sound like him. I went back to his book on writing and some of his essays, and the style felt very similar. I considered hiring someone to do a textual analysis of the two emails and the critique to prove that Lambclear was really composing them, but it didn’t seem worth it. Kind of like killing a fly with an atomic bomb.

  Still pondering and puzzled, I returned to the critique to see what else he had said about my story. My thoughts flipped back and forth over the question of whether or not Lambclear himself could have written this document.

  And then, when I finished his critique of my story, I saw something that clinched my belief that my correspondent might in fact be Lambclear. I pulled Writing Short Science Fiction off my shelf again, and riffled through the pages, until I came to the page I remembered.

  In this book on writing, Lambclear had given the subconscious mind a name. He called it "George," and frequently noted that George would tell him to do this, or George would tell him to do that. Well, in the critique of my story, he ended with this piece of advice: "I suggest you get in touch with your inner George." Now, the possibility existed that some other close fan of Lambclear’s work had written that final sentence. But it seemed unlikely, especially when taken together with all the other evidence I had that Lambclear himself had written back to me.

  And yet . . . rationality said otherwise. How could I reconcile the fact that Lambclear was dead with the fact that he was writing to me? I had grown up a rationalist, an agnostic, a skeptic in the face of superstition. How could I believe that I was now corresponding with the dead?

  I wrestled with what to do for few hours, finding myself too distracted to write fiction. Finally, I wrote another email:

  Subject: Truth

  Dear Mr. Lambclear (?),

  Thank you very much for your critique of "Alien Circus," and for your willingness to reply. I only wish I had had the opportunity to run the story by you before it saw publication! Still, some of your comments suggest to me the possibility of a sequel, which I feel would have a higher quality than the original story. And so it goes, I guess.

  You must have noticed that although I removed the quotation marks from around your name, I’ve added a question mark in parentheses afterwards. Please do not take that as an insult, only as a representation of my confused state. You see, after reading your critique, I am convinced of a few things. I am convinced that you understand the art of writing very well, and that you also have great skill as a teacher. I am also convinced that you have a deep understanding of the field of science fiction, and what makes a story evoke that sense of wonder we all strive for.

  And yet, for reasons I do not want to mention explicitly, I find it extremely difficult to believe that you really are Carl Lambclear. Not to be insulting, but there are compelling reasons for me to believe otherwise. I hope you will understand what I mean, and still be willing to continue this correspondence that I may have inadvertently started. But I further hope that perhaps you can tell me something to clear up my confusion.

  The email sent into the ether, I returned to my daily quota of words. I recall how sometimes the critiques I received in writing workshops would make me freeze up for days on end, unable to write anything. It pleased me to discover that Lambclear’s critique had the opposite effect. I zipped through my thousand-word quota, and even doubled it before I declared my working day over.

  And the next morning, when I checked my email, I found another message from "Carl Lambclear."

  I noticed he had changed the subject line.

  Subject: What is truth?

  Dear fellow traveler,

  I am delighted to see that you have come around somewhat, and are willing to accept the fact that I am who I say I am. (I remind you once again that you were the one who initiated our correspondence, not I.)

  I must admit, I haven’t received too many emails recently; or at least, not emails of any major interest. I suspect that most people doubt I would bother replying, for those same "compelling reasons" to which you obliquely referred. But you, my young friend, chose to write to me anyway, and for that, I hope to repay you.

  Essentially, I plan to share with you seeds of story ideas that might blossom under your tutelage. My wish is that you grow enough in your talent to be able to take these story ideas and make them uniquely yours. But let me begin with an idea that is uniquely mine, and which is also one that might make you feel better about corresponding with me.

  Let us posit the following scenario.

  Suppose a writer knew he was dying. An older writer, but not one who has yet reached what most would consider the twilight of one’s life, but rather just the autumn. Such a writer might feel many things: desperation, anger, and fear are the obvious ones, although one cannot omit the possibility of feeling peace or a sense of completion. A psychologist could discount that, however, and suggest that the writer might even go through the five stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

  But the writer might do something else instead. Suppose that writer was also a Ph.D. physicist and an expert computer programmer, and he wanted to make sure that he would be remembered. What might he do? How does a person with a technical background and a ceaseless imagination deal with the inevitable conclusion of his existence?

  I know that such a scenario must be light-years away from your own mind, but that makes this all the more interesting a challenge. If you can figure out my idea, you might have the makings of an excellent spinner of tales of science fiction.

  Sincerely yours
,

  Carl Lambclear

  I didn’t know it then, but this was only the beginning of the meat of my emails with Lambclear. Lambclear called it "Campbelling" a story, named after the most influential editor in the field of science fiction. John Campbell would give story ideas to his writers, and ask them to write the stories. They would take his ideas and run with them; for example, Isaac Asimov’s "Nightfall," which was once voted the best science fiction story ever written, was based on an idea given to him by John Campbell. Lambclear loved to throw ideas in my direction, and over the years, many of my most well-regarded stories had their roots in Lambclear’s suggestions. I suppose I could come clean now, and point out which stories of mine came from Lambclear’s suggestions and which didn’t, but I think it is best if I do not. I have to leave something for the scholars to argue about, after all. (Ah, a writer’s ego rears its ugly head once again; why should I assume that future scholars will have any interest in my scribblings?)

  But I’m getting ahead of myself, because on that long-ago night when Lambclear first sent me a story idea, I had no idea where this would all lead. Picture me as a young, confused writer, who still had no idea what Lambclear was getting at. I suppose I could have terminated our correspondence right there and then, or just emailed him back innocuously. But the idea had created some deep feelings within me, and I decided to make my distress evident.

  Subject: Re: What is truth?

  Dear Mr. Lambclear,

  I’m afraid I’m totally at a loss as to how to develop that idea you’re suggesting. In fact, I’m not quite sure why you’re even suggesting it to me in the first place. After all, if it’s just a story idea, why not write the story yourself? And if it’s more than a story idea, why hint at it in such an odd way?

  I actually have more experience with death than you may expect or realize. You see, although I’m just out of college, both of my parents have passed on. I was there for each of them, and I helped my mother and my father go through their struggles before dying.