Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  After a moment, the card vanished, disappearing with a smug little pop.

  Everything was quiet. Everything was still.

  Judy held her breath for a few moments, then slowly let it out. She wiped her brow. Slowly, she began to smile.

  She had had her tubes tied two years ago because it was the cheapest and surest form of birth control. It was a good thing that the Wee Folk didn’t really keep up with the times . . .

  Whistling cheerfully, she strolled into the kitchen and finished making breakfast.

  A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

  Introduction to A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

  Gardner Dozois, like any decent writer, is at least half a dozen people. In Gardner’s case his personality encompasses not only the writer but the serious and informed scholar of science fiction, the wit, the critic, the gourmet, the anthologist, the bon viveur, and the finest magazine editor of his generation. In addition to all this, Gardner Dozois’ psyche blessedly contains the most outrageous literary personality since Alexander Woollcott (who wasn’t nearly as funny, it should be pointed out).

  There is also Gardner Dozois, Man of Ideas, evident in “A Night of Ghosts and Shadows.” It is often claimed that science fiction is a literature of ideas, which I wish were true more often than in fact it is, but “Ghosts and Shadows” is genuinely about a clash of ideas, and pretty fundamental ideas, too, having to do with life and death, with humanity’s place and purpose in the universe, with a person’s right to maintain his individuality in the face of historic and technological change.

  With a lesser writer, these ideas would be set forth in talking-heads scenes, in which people threw ideas back and forth like a ball at a tennis match. But in Gardner’s story the ideas aren’t introduced right away—at the start we have the elderly protagonist alone in a room with his memories and a spectral group of time travelers who are, most likely, a product of his lonely fantasies, but who are emblematic of the story’s concern with time, with memory, and with the consequences of the decisions the protagonist has made in the past and will make now, decisions that will resonate into the distant future.

  In a literature that celebrates change, Gardner has chosen to write about someone who refuses to change.

  The story opens beautifully, with a description of the old man and his environment. We see his bedroom, the plaster on the ceiling, the significantly empty space on his shelf. We sense the man’s burden of memories, his once-great ambition, his loneliness. And then the story moves out of the man’s apartment and into his city, and we see the strangeness and the familiarity of the world in which the man lives, all described with care and detail and attention. The prose is in no hurry to get anywhere, but it’s so wonderfully evoked that we’re not impatient with it.

  So when the talking-heads scene finally comes (and yes, there is one), the ideas at issue are so anchored in the reality of the story, in the specific personality of the protagonist, and in the solidly-visualized futurist speculation on which the story depends, that we don’t see it as a superficial literary tennis game, but as something fundamental to the story and its themes.

  It’s a lovely story, and was nominated for a Nebula Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America in the novelette category. Of which more anon.

  For the moment though, I’d like to set the record straight on a matter of vital historical importance. Not because I want to emphasize certain aspects of Gardner’s character—which doubtless will shine forth from other introductions in this volume—but because I was there when it occurred. I was a witness, and I can set the facts straight on what has become a legend within the science fiction community.

  Yes. It really happened. The True and Terrible Tale of Gardner’s Knob.

  It began, dear reader, on an autumn night in the year 199–, at the World Fantasy Convention in New Orleans. The four of us, Gardner and Sue and Rebecca Cartwright and I, had decided to go to dinner. I remember someone saying, “Let’s have a quiet dinner.” But such was the magnetism of Gardner’s personality that, during the course merely of crossing the hotel lobby on our way to the door, our party of four became a party of fourteen. The group by now included Roger Zelazny, Jane Lindskold, Wanda June Alexander, Sage Walker, Claire Eddy, and several others.

  The staff at Tujague’s restaurant were, on the whole, fairly tolerant of a hilarious party of fourteen descending on them all at once and without reservations, but they did put us in our very own room, upstairs, where we wouldn’t disturb the regular customers.

  A prescient move.

  We had just settled in when another party arrived, this one consisting of author and screenwriter Melinda Snodgrass, her husband Carl Keim, the writer George R.R. Martin and his companion Parris, photographer and attorney Christine Valada, her husband the comics and screenwriter Len Wein, and writers/editors Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.

  This second party was put in a separate room, perhaps on the (again prescient) theory that adding the newcomers to our group might provoke some kind of critical mass, like putting two chunks of plutonium too closely together.

  Unfortunately, if Tujague’s was operating on this theory, they failed to provide enough shielding. There was a door between our two rooms, which allowed the two groups to communicate. Gardner and George Martin, seated near the door on either side, took particular advantage of this, opening the door to offer insulting comments to the other party, then shutting the door shut before anyone on the other side could reply.

  This was an old, old door, and had only one doorknob, the mate of which had been lost in distant times past. The knob was loose, and you could pull it out of its socket and reinsert it in the socket on the opposite side of the door. It became clear that whoever possessed the doorknob could open the door, hurl whatever comments occurred to his fertile imagination, and then shut the door, leaving the other side with no knob and no way of opening the door to respond.

  George R.R. Martin, gloating like one of the villains in his fantasy novels, took the knob from our side of the door and shut the door in our faces, leaving us without a knob to stand on.

  Obviously this was an insult not to be borne. Wanda June and Claire went to the other room—walking the long way, out into the corridor and back—where one of them distracted the enemy long enough for the other to pilfer the knob. This knob was ceremonially returned to Gardner, who used it to open the communicating door, abuse George vilely and deservedly, then shut the door before George could respond.

  Baffled in this contest of wit and ingenuity, the other side resorted to violence. Carl Keim arrived carrying a carving knife. (I don’t know where he got it. Probably he carries it all the time.) At knife-point he demanded the return of the knob.

  Let it not be said that Gardner Dozois responds well to threats. He took the knob, dropped it magnificently down the front of his trousers, and told Carl, “Come and get it, big boy!”

  Carl, baffled and by now bright scarlet, retreated in consternation.

  Enough time passed so that our guard was down when the raiding party arrived. Chris Valada and Kris Rusch each pinned one of Gardner’s arms to the chair, and Melinda Snodgrass ran up and jammed her hand down the front of Gardner’s pants.

  I will not venture to guess what she encountered there, but it wasn’t a doorknob. The knob had been removed from Gardner’s boxers and handed to me for safekeeping.

  The look of horror on Melinda’s face was highly entertaining. So were the colors that passed in swift succession across her face. (I remember they began with white, and ended with scarlet.)

  Thus was the other side routed. Thus was the legend born.

  (Honesty compels me to record that, to my chagrin, by this time nobody gave a damn whether I had a doorknob in my drawers or not. Thus do ordinary mortals fade in the presence of greatness.)

  Which brings us to another dinner party, this one in Beverly Hills in that most anticipated of science-fictional years, 2001. It was the Nebula Award dinner, where G
ardner, whose “A Night of Ghosts and Shadows” had been nominated against my “Daddy’s World,” was host to a table of nominees and writers. Gardner was his usual splendid self, keeping the table in mirth with a wicked series of one-liners that effectively punctured the pieties and pretensions of the speakers.

  And by and by, the winner of the novelette category was announced. Who proved not to be Gardner but myself.

  I am immodest enough to record that a cheer went up. But what particularly gratified me was that the cheer was led by Gardner, whose story had just been deprived of an award. Gardner was genuinely pleased that I’d won.

  Which is by way of pointing out that, whatever stories may be told about knobs and other items of hardware in these introductions, Gardner Dozois is a class act. A true gentleman (albeit more in the Restoration than the Victorian sense of the word). And a good friend.

  Here’s “A Night of Ghosts and Shadows.” Enjoy.

  Walter Jon Williams

  A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

  Sometimes the old man was visited by time-travelers.

  He would be alone in the house, perhaps sitting at his massive old wooden desk with a book or some of the notes he endlessly shuffled through, the shadows of the room cavernous around him. It would be the very bottom of the evening, that flat timeless moment between the guttering of one day and the quickening of the next when the sky is neither black nor gray, nothing moves, and the night beyond the window glass is as cold and bitter and dead as the dregs of yesterday’s coffee. At such a time, if he would pause in his work to listen, he would become intensely aware of the ancient brownstone building around him, smelling of plaster and wood and wax and old dust, imbued with the kind of dense humming silence that is made of many small sounds not quite heard. He would listen to the silence until his nerves were stretched through the building like miles of fine silver wire, and then, as the shadows closed in like iron and the light itself would seem to grow smoky and dim, the time-travelers would arrive.

  He couldn’t see them or hear them, but in they would come, the time-travelers, filing into the house, filling up the shadows, spreading through the room like smoke. He would feel them around him as he worked, crowding close to the desk, looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t afraid of them. There was no menace in them, no chill of evil or the uncanny—only the feeling that they were there with him, watching him patiently, interestedly, without malice. He fancied them as groups of ghostly tourists from the far future, here we see a twenty-first-century man in his natural habitat, notice the details of gross corporeality, please do not interphase anything, clicking some future equivalent of cameras at him, how quaint, murmuring appreciatively to each other in almost-audible mothwing voices, discorporate Gray Line tours from a millennium hence slumming in the darker centuries.

  Sometimes he would nod affably to them as they came in, neighbor to neighbor across the vast gulfs of time, and then he would smile at himself, and mutter “Senile dementia!” They would stay with him for the rest of the night, looking on while he worked, following him into the bathroom—see, see!—and trailing around the house after him wherever he went. They were as much company as a cat—he’d always had cats, but now he was too old, too near the end of his life; a sin to leave a pet behind, deserted, when he died—and he didn’t even have to feed them. He resisted the temptation to talk aloud to them, afraid that they might talk back, and then he would either have to take them seriously as an actual phenomenon or admit that they were just a symptom of his mind going at last, another milestone on his long, slow fall into death. Occasionally, if he was feeling particularly fey, he would allow himself the luxury of turning in the door on his way in to bed and wishing the following shadows a hearty goodnight. They never answered.

  Then the house would be still, heavy with silence and sleep, and they would watch on through the dark.

  That night there had been more time-travelers than usual, it seemed, a jostling crowd of ghosts and shadows, and now, this morning, August the fifth, the old man slept fitfully.

  He rolled and muttered in his sleep, at the bottom of a pool of shadow, and the labored sound of his breathing echoed from the bare walls. The first cold light of dawn was just spreading across the ceiling, raw and blue, like a fresh coat of paint covering the midden layers of the past, twenty or thirty coats since the room was new, white, brown, tan, showing through here and there in spots and tatters. The rest of the room was deep in shadow, with only the tallest pieces of furniture—the tops of the dresser and the bureau, and the upper half of the bed’s headboard—rising up from the gloom like mountain peaks that catch the first light from the edge of the world. Touched by that light, the ceiling was hard-edged and sharp-lined and clear, ruled by the uncompromising reality of day; down below, in the shadows where the old man slept, everything was still dissolved in the sly, indiscriminate, and ambivalent ocean of the night, where things melt and intermingle, change their shapes and their natures, flow outside the bounds. Sunk in the gray half-light, the man on the bed was only a doughy manikin shape, a preliminary charcoal sketch of a man, all chiaroscuro and planes and pools of shadow, and the motion of his head as it turned fretfully on the pillow was no more than a stirring of murky darkness, like mud roiling in water. Above, the light spread and deepened, turning into gold. Now night was going out like the tide, flowing away under the door and puddling under furniture and in far corners, leaving more and more of the room beached hard-edged and dry above its high-water line. Gold changed to brilliant white. The receding darkness uncovered the old man’s face, and light fell across it.

  The old man’s name was Charles Czudak, and he had once been an important man, or at least a famous one.

  He was eighty years old today.

  His eyes opened.

  The first thing that Charles Czudak saw that morning was the clear white light that shook and shimmered on the ceiling, and for a moment he thought that he was back in that horrible night when they nuked Brooklyn. He cried out and flinched away, throwing up an arm to shield his eyes, and then, as he came fully awake, he realized when he was, and that the light gleaming above signified nothing more than that he’d somehow lived to see the start of another day. He relaxed slowly, feeling his heart race.

  Stupid old man, dreaming stupid old man’s dreams!

  That was the way it had been, though, that night. He’d been living in a rundown Trinity house across Philadelphia at 20th and Walnut then, rather than in this more luxurious old brownstone on Spruce Street near Washington Square, and he’d finished making love to Ellen barely ten minutes before (what a ghastly irony it would have been, he’d often thought since, if the Big Bang had actually come while they were fucking! What a moment of dislocation and confusion that would have produced!), and they were lying in each other’s sweat and the coppery smell of sex in the rumpled bed, listening to a car radio playing outside somewhere, a baby crying somewhere else, the buzz of flies and mosquitoes at the screens, a mellow night breeze moving across their drying skins, and then the sudden searing glare had leaped across the ceiling, turning everything white. A moment of intense, almost supernatural silence had followed, as through the universe had taken a very deep breath and held it. Incongruously, through that moment of silence, they could hear the toilet flushing in the apartment upstairs, and water pipes knocking and rattling all the way down the length of the building. Then the universe let out that deep breath, and the windows exploded inward in geysers of shattered glass, and the building groaned and staggered and bucked, and heat lashed them like a whip of gold. His heart hammering at the base of his throat like a fist from inside, and Ellen crying in his arms, them clinging to each other in the midst of the roaring nightmare chaos, clinging to each other as though they would be swirled away and drowned if they did not.

  That had been almost sixty years ago, that terrible night, and if the Brooklyn bomb that had slipped through the particle-beam defenses had been any more potent than a small clean tac, or had come down closer
than Prospect Park, he wouldn’t be alive today. It was strange to have lived through the nuclear war that so many people had feared for so long, right through the last half of the twentieth century and into the opening years of the twenty-first—but it was stranger still to have lived through it and kept on going, while the war slipped away behind into history, to become something that happened a very long time ago, a detail to be read about by bored schoolchildren who would not even have been born until Armageddon was already safely fifty years in the past.

  In fact, he had outlived most of his world. The society into which he’d been born no longer existed; it was as dead as the Victorian age, relegated to antique shops and dusty photo albums and dustier memories, the source of quaint old photos and quainter old videos (you could get a laugh today just by saying “MTV”), and here he still was somehow, almost everyone he’d ever known either dead or gone, alone in THE FUTURE. Ah, Brave New World, that has such creatures in it! How many times had he dreamed of being here, as a young child sunk in the doldrums of the ‘80s, at the frayed, tattered end of a worn-out century? Really, he deserved it; it served him right that his wish had come true, and that he had lived to see the marvels of THE FUTURE with his own eyes. Of course, nothing had turned out to be much like he’d thought it would be, even World War III—but then, he had come to realize that nothing ever did.

  The sunlight was growing hot on his face, it was certainly time to get up, but there was something he should remember, something about today. He couldn’t bring it to mind, and instead found himself staring at the ceiling, tracing the tiny cracks in plaster that seemed like dry riverbeds stitching across a fossil world—arid Mars upside-down up there, complete with tiny pockmark craters and paintblob mountains and wide dead leakstain seas, and he hanging above it all like a dying gray god, ancient and corroded and vast.