by Allen Steele
This place is a cathedral of literature, and he is its most precious icon. On the other side of the table, hundreds of men and women patiently wait their turn to meet him; the line they’ve formed stretches as far as the eye can see. The gentlemen are handsome, the ladies achingly beautiful. Of high social stature and impeccable taste, they’ve dressed for the occasion, in dinner jackets and silk evening gowns, and each carries a copy of his latest novel as if it’s their precious possession.
The chair in which he sits is a throne, high-backed and upholstered in red velvet. The table is made of ancient oak, fine-grained and hundreds of years old, its surface so polished it practically gleams with a light of its own. A champagne stem rests upon it, just in case he needs a little light refreshment. Next to his right hand is an onyx fountain pen, its tip and band fashioned from white gold. He picks it up, then raises his eyes to the next person in line.
The woman is spectacular. Raven haired, her figure svelte and sensuous, she could easily be a lingerie model, an actress of stage and screen, perhaps the consort of a European prince. Her dark eyes express longing as she shyly steps forward. There is no doubt that he is her favorite author, and that she would gladly indulge his fantasies if the opportunity became available. Perhaps a quiet dinner for two, once the signing is over? For now, though, all she desires is his inscription, if he would be so kind.
Of course. Anything for one of his fans. She gently places the book upon the table, and then he looks down at it.
A paperback, its pages dog-eared, its spine broken. The cover art, rendered in bright primary colors, features a buxom, red-haired woman in a skin-tight spacesuit, her enormous breasts protruding against its silver fabric. Her face is contorted in an expression of homicidal rage, and she has a laser rifle in her left hand and a glowing energy sword in her right; she stands on top of a pile of corpses, blasting and slicing away at the horde of bug-eyed monsters swarming toward her. Behind her, a squad of space marines fires in all directions at once; in the background, a starship that seems to be concocted from pieces of old Star Wars model kits.
The book’s title is nearly an inch tall, raised in gold foil: Guts and Glory: A Glory Gaddington™ Novel. Turning the book over, he skims the rear dustjacket copy. Glory Gaddington, captain of the starship Invincible and rightful heiress to the throne of the deposed Lord Montebaum, continues her heroic quest to regain control of the Bagel System from Count Drok and the evil Rigelian Empire. The latest volume of a series; the last installment, Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, earned high praise from Locus: “…Interesting…”
He lays the book down, looks up at the woman waiting for him to sign it. I’m sorry, he says, but I didn’t write this.
She smiles, and favors him with a knowing wink. Does it matter? she replies.
“What the hell is this?”
“Uhh…well, we’re not sure…”
“You’re not sure? I’ve checked his bibliography, and there’s nothing in there about…what’s her name, Chastity Cummingsoon…?”
“Glory Gaddington. A popular character of early 21st century space opera, featured in a series of novels by…”
“But he didn’t write them, did he? So what’s she doing in his simulacrum? And come to think of it, what were you trying to accomplish by this, anyway?”
“According to Research, although he achieved a certain level of success, like most science fiction writers he was relatively obscure in his day. His books sold just well enough for his publishers to earn a modest profit, but outside the genre he was virtually unknown. So we thought that, if we placed him in an environment in which he perceived himself as being a bestselling author respected at the highest levels of levels of literary society, that might prompt him to produce something that would match up to those expectations.”
“So where did Patience Paddingwell come from?”
“Well, those books were bestsellers, after all, so perhaps his subconscious mind told him that was what he would’ve had to have written in order to get that sort of notoriety. At least that’s our theory.”
“Some theory. All he’s done since then is sit in his office, staring at his computer and mumbling to himself…”
“Not true. We did get three pages of Glory having sex with Count Drok…”
“Yeah, right. That’s going to play in New Kansas. All he did was throw back the very thing that he thought would’ve made him a bestselling writer in his own time.”
“Maybe it was.”
“If we wanted that, we’d just reprint Faith Frothinghard novels…”
“You couldn’t even if you wanted to. During the Collapse, many science fiction fans were forced to burn parts of their collections. Glory Gaddington books were usually the first to go. They were rather thick, after all, so they provided a lot of heat…”
“Fascinating. Look, point is, appealing to his vanity isn’t going to work. If we’re going to get anything from him, we’ve got to work on his creative instincts. Don’t put him in a bookstore. Furnish an environment that inspires him.”
“Umm…sure, all right. Any suggestions?”
“How should I know? This is your department, not mine. But whatever you do, make it snappy. Entertainment needs something they can take to Marketing, and I’m getting swamped with memos. Call me when you have material.”
“Of course. Where will you be?”
“In my office, reading Shakespeare. Anything to get Virtue Violencenuff out of my system.”
He sits at his desk, writing a story.
The doorbell rings, a shrill buzz that breaks his train of thought. Muttering beneath his breath, he pushes back his chair and goes downstairs. He’s expecting the neighbor kid, selling candy for school, or at worst a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but instead two men waiting for him at the front door.
One is dressed in a dark gray business suit, the other the blue uniform of an Air Force colonel. Both wear sunglasses. Behind them, a black sedan with government plates is parked in the driveway. The man in the suit flashes an I.D., then tells him that there’s been an emergency. A strange object has crashed only a few miles from his house. They show him photos of something that looks like two huge pie-pans stuck together, half-buried in a hillside. The military believes that it may be an alien spacecraft. Since he’s a science fiction writer, he’s the closest available person who may be able to make sense of this phenomenon.
He agrees to help them, so he shuts the door behind then, then follows them out to the car. He climbs into the back seat…
There’s no discernable passage of time or distance. One instant, he’s still at his house. The next, the car has arrived at the crash site. He recognizes this place at once: a nature preserve where he sometimes takes the dogs for a run. Tanks and field guns have surrounded the hillside, and soldiers are setting up machine guns behind sandbag emplacements. Helicopters carry in more troops while fighter jets scream overhead.
The Air Force colonel escorts him to a forward command post. Within the dugout, a young dude is seated at a folding table; a half-dozen laptop computers have been set up around him, and he seems to be working at them all at once. The kid’s head is shaved; he wears a black leather jacket, ripped jeans, and Doc Martens, and there’s wires leading from one of the computers to a socket imbedded in the base of his skull. His name is Spike, and he’s trying to download a virus into the alien ship’s computer. He’s not having much success, though, because the extraterrestrial AI is protected by a cyberspace infrastructure of ultradense black ice that has erected a self-evolving synergistic firewall around…
A high-pitched scream. A soldier runs away from the crash site, his uniform in flames. Behind him, a snake-like appendage has risen into from the alien craft; white-hot beams of energy lance from it, torching everything in sight.
He flees from the dugout just before the colonel and the hacker are disintegrated by the death-beam. Making good his escape by taking cover in the surrounding forest, he stops to look back. The infantry has opened f
ire upon the spaceship, but their weapons are useless against the invisible energy barrier that surrounds the strange vessel.
Then the spacecraft’s hatch opens, and half-naked warriors riding winged dragons ascend into the sky. Close behind them are a battalion of space barbarians, a gang of post-apocalypse bikers on chopped-up Harleys, a squad of multiple-limbed androids, a pride of Amazonian she-devils in chain-mail, a horror of flesh-eating zombies, a blitzkrieg of giant Nazi robots, a mob of scabrous mutants, a herd of cloned dinosaurs, and some guy in a black outfit who has the worst case of emphysema he has ever heard. All of them wielding death, doom, and destruction on an unimaginable scale.
All at once, something closes in his mind. It feels like a door slamming shut, with a sudden and irrevocable surety. In no hurry at all, ignoring the sounds of warfare behind him, he picks his way through the forest until he reaches the road that he knows will lead him back home.
Along the way, he encounters a plucky girl reporter from a major metropolitan newspaper. Her car has broken down, so he stops to help her change the flat tire, but when she tells him in breathless tones that she has fallen in love with him, he leaves her behind. Not long after that, he meets a courageous lady scientist from CalTech; her car has broken down, too, and she insists that she alone holds the key to defeating the aliens. She doesn’t fall in love with him, but she gives him every indication that she’s good for a one-night stand. He gives her his email address, and keeps walking. He’s almost within sight of his house when he finds a woman in a tattered white dress sitting on his neighbor’s stone fence, hugging her knees and weeping with inconsolable grief. She tells him that she’s lost her world, her people, her entire future; all she can see is bleakness, cold and dreary, with no hope for anyone. He politely asks if she’d like to come back to his place and have lunch, but all she wants do is wallow in her misery, And besides, she’s a hermaphrodite with three transsexual partners; sharing a meal with him would violate the social mores of her clan. She wants to explain it all to him, but he’s getting hungry, so he leaves her as well and continues walking down the road.
At long last, he finds his way back home. He makes a tuna sandwich and pours a glass of milk, and has lunch at the kitchen table while a Martian tripod stomps through his backyard. After skimming the funny pages of the local newspaper, he climbs the stairs to his office. Sitting down in front of his computer, he reads what he’d been writing being before he was so rudely interrupted.
The story he’d been working on, though, has lost its appeal. He gazes out the window for awhile, idly watching the alien armada as it slowly descends from the sky. After awhile, he closes the file and slides it across the computer screen to the trash can.
Then he creates a new document, and begins to write something new.
“What the hell is this?”
“Why do all of our conversations begin the same way?”
“Don’t get wise with me. You saw what he wrote.”
“Uh-huh…and it’s brilliant. Great story. Terrific characters. Superb setting. A surprise plot twist about halfway through…I didn’t see that coming, did you?…and a killer ending. Kept me going all the way through.”
“But…dammit, it’s not science fiction!”
“So?”
“It’s a western!”
“I’m not sure I’d call it that. It’s set in Colorado in 1870, sure, but it’s more like a mystery that just happens to take place in…”
“It’s got horses, okay? Horses and a sheriff, and a female protagonist who works on a cattle ranch…”
“Wasn’t she great? And when it turns out that she’s actually his step-daughter…”
“That’s not the point. He’s a science fiction writer. Where’s the aliens? Where’s the spaceships? Where’s the…”
“Y’know, I’ve been thinking the much same thing. It occurs to me that we’ve been going about this all wrong. I mean, we keep thinking he’s a science fiction writer…but maybe he’s really a writer who just happens to write science fiction.”
“What are you…?”
“Listen, okay? That last simulacrum…everything we could think of, we threw at him. Crashed spaceship, alien invasion, military forces, creatures of every shape and size, a choice of female characters…the works. We made it as weird as weird can be, and put him right in the thick of it, with no time for him to think of anything else. So what happens? He rejects it all, and writes something completely different.”
“Then program another simulacrum. Make it even more weird than before. Look, I got an idea. Let’s say an asteroid is about to collide with Earth, and…”
“You don’t get it. It’s not the idea that matters the most…it’s what you do with it.”
“Come again?”
“Look…when everything is weird, then nothing is weird at all. We could have cartoon characters crawl out of his ass and it’s not going to make any difference. It’d just be one more strange thing…and this guy made friends with strangeness long before we were born. Maybe he just wants to tell a story, and not have anyone tell him what it’s supposed to be.”
“But he’s supposed to write a science fiction story!”
“And he gave you a western. Or rather, a mystery novel set in the Old West. Big deal. Entertainment and Marketing want him for his imagination, right? So cut him loose. Let him imagine what he will, and stop trying to force him to do something what you think will sell big. I guarantee that, if you take this story to your people, they’re going to love it no matter what it is.”
“Well…um, yeah, it is pretty good, I guess. Can I get back to you on this?”
“Gee, I dunno. I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes. Send me a memo, okay?”
He sits at his desk, writing a story.
Outside the window, the first snow of winter is falling, a gentle white haze that masks bare tree limbs and mutes the sullen growl of his neighbor’s snowblower. Every now and then he lifts his eyes from the computer screen to savor the view. Autumn is gone and the days have become short, but he relishes the change of season. A subtle reminder that time is passing swift, and there’s many more stories to be told before he can take his rest.
Returning his attention to the keyboard, he continues to polish the last few lines of the story he’s been writing. It won’t be long before his wife comes home from work; he needs to go downstairs and start making dinner. Behind him, one of his dogs rises from the carpet; he arches his back, makes a canine yawn, then wanders off to another part of the house. Everyone is hungry. Time to wrap things up for the day.
At last, he reaches the end of the last paragraph. He sits back in his chair, contemplates what he has done. An interesting little fable, really. Probably won’t win any awards, and he doubts that the critics will be very kind, but nonetheless he thinks it raises a question or two about the substance of reality, the nature of the human imagination. What if…?
Never mind. He saves the file and closes it, then stands up from his chair. Feeling as if he’s just woken from a dream, he walks away into reality.
