Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “Sooner or later you’ll find that you have to incorporate with the Confederacy,” Mr. Brodey, the stranger, was saying. The other faces around the big dining room table were cool and reserved. “The kind of inter-village barter economy you’ve got up here just can’t hold up forever, you know, even though it’s really a kind of communal socialism—”

  “Are you sayin’ we’re communists up heah?” Mr. Samuels said, outraged, but before Brodey could reply (if he intended to), Jamie strode to the table, pulled out an empty chair—his own habitual seat—and sat down. All faces turned to him, startled, and conversation stopped.

  Jamie stared back at them. To walk to the table had taken the last of his will; things were closing down on him again, his vision was swimming, and he began to lose touch with his body, as if his mind were floating slowly up and away from it, like a balloon held by the thinnest sort of tether. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and he opened his mouth, panting like a dog. Through a sliding, shifting confusion, he heard Mrs. Hamlin start to say, “Jamie! I thought I told you—” at the same time that Mr. Ashley was saying to Mr. Brodey, “Don’t let him bother you none. He’s just the local half-wit. We’ll send him back to the kitchen,” and Brodey was smiling in tolerant, condescending amusement, and something about Brodey’s thin, contemptuous smile, something about the circle of staring faces, something wrenched words up out of Jamie, sending them suddenly flying out of his mouth. He hurled the familiar words out at the pale staring faces as he had so many times before, rattling their teeth with them, shaking them to their bones. He didn’t know what the words meant anymore, but they were the old strong words, the right words, and he heard his voice fill with iron as he spoke them. He spoke the words until there were no more words to speak, and then he stopped.

  A deathly hush had fallen over the room. Mr. Brodey was staring at him, and Jamie saw his face run through a quick gamut of expressions: from irritation to startled speculation to dawning astonishment. Brodey’s jaw went slack, and he gasped—a little startled grunt, as if he had been punched in the stomach—and the color went swiftly out of his face. “My God!” he said. “Oh, my God!”

  For Jamie, it was as if the world were draining away again, everything pulling back until he could just barely touch reality with his fingertips, and the room shimmered and buzzed as he struggled to hold on to even that much control. All the faces had gone blank, wiped clean of individuality, and he could no longer tell which of the featureless pink ovoids was the sweating, earnest, astounded face of Mr. Brodey. He got clumsily to his feet, driving his leaden body by an act of conscious will, as though it were some ill-made clockwork golem. He flailed his arms for balance, knocked his chair over with a clatter, and stood swaying before them, smelling the sour reek of his own sweat. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hamlin. I didn’t mean to—”

  The silence went on a moment longer, and then, above the mounting waves of buzzing nausea and unreality, he heard Mrs. Hamlin say, “That’s all right, child. We know you didn’t mean any harm. Go on upstairs now, Jamie. Go on.” Her voice sounded dry and flat and tired.

  Blindly, Jamie spun and stumbled for the stairs, all the inchoate demons of memory snapping at his heels like years.

  Downstairs, Mr. Brodey was still saying, “Oh, my God!” He hardly noticed that the dinner party was being dissolved around him or that Mrs. Hamlin was hustling him out onto the porch “for a word in private.” When she finally had him alone out there, the cool evening breeze slapping at his face through the wire mesh of the enclosed porch, he shook himself out of his daze and turned slowly to face her where she stood hunched and patient in the dappled shadows. “It’s him,” he said, still more awe than accusation in his voice. “Son of a bitch. It really is him, isn’t it?”

  “Who, Mr. Brodey?”

  “Don’t play games with me,” Brodey said harshly. “I’ve seen the old pictures. The half-wit, he really was—”

  “Is.”

  “—the President of the United States.” Brodey stared at her. “He may be crazy, but not because he thinks he’s the President—he is the President. James W. McNaughton. He is McNaughton, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God! Think of it. The very last President.”

  “The incumbent President,” Mrs. Hamlin said softly.

  They stared at each other through the soft evening shadows.

  “And it’s not a surprise to you, either, is it?” Anger was beginning to replace disbelief in Brodey’s voice. “You’ve known it all along, haven’t you? All of you have known. You all knew from the start that he was President McNaughton?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God!” Brodey said, giving an entirely new reading to the phrase, disgust and edgy anger instead of awe. He opened his mouth, closed it, and began turning red.

  “He came here almost twenty years ago, Mr. Brodey,” Mrs. Hamlin said, speaking calmly, reminiscently. “Perhaps two months after the War. The Outriders found him collapsed in a field out by the edge of town. He was nearly dead. Don’t ask me how he got there. Maybe there was some sort of hidden bunker way back up there in the hills, maybe his plane crashed nearby, maybe he walked all the way up here from what’s left of Washington—I don’t know. Jamie himself doesn’t know. His memory was almost gone; shock, I guess, and exposure. All he remembered, basically, was that he was the President, and even that was dim and misty, like something you might remember out of a bad dream, the kind that fades away and comes back sometimes, late at night. And life’s been like a half-dream for him ever since, poor soul. He never did get quite right in the head again.”

  “And you gave him shelter?” Brodey said, his voice becoming shrill with indignation. “You took him in? That butcher?”

  “Watch your mouth, son. You’re speaking about the President.”

  “Goddamn it, woman. Don’t you know—he caused the War?”

  After a smothering moment of silence, Mrs. Hamlin said mildly, “That’s your opinion, Mr. Brodey, not mine.”

  “How can you deny it? The ‘One Life’ Ultimatum? The ‘preventative strikes’ on Mexico and Panama? It was within hours of the raid on Monterrey that the bombs started falling.”

  “He didn’t have any other choice! The Indonesians had pushed him—”

  “That’s crap, and you know it!” Brodey was shouting now. “They taught us all about it down in Mohawk; they made damn sure we knew the name of the man who destroyed the world, you can bet on that! Christ, everybody knew then that he was unfit for office, just a bombastic backwoods senator on a hate crusade, a cracker-barrel warmonger. Everybody said that he’d cause the War if he got into the White House—and he did! By God, he did! That pathetic half-wit in there. He did it!”

  Mrs. Hamlin sighed and folded her arms across her middle, hugging herself as if in pain. She seemed to grow smaller and older, more withered and gnarled. “I don’t know, son,” she said wearily, after a heavy pause. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. Maybe he was wrong. I don’t know. All that seemed so important then. Now I can hardly remember what the issues were, what it was all about. It doesn’t seem to matter much anymore, somehow.”

  “How can you say that?” Brodey wiped at his face—he was sweating profusely and looking very earnest now, bewilderment leaching away some of the anger. “How can you let that . . . that man . . . him—how can you let him live here, under your roof? How can you stand to let him live at all, let alone cook for him, do his washing. My God!”

  “His memory was gone, Mr. Brodey. His mind was gone. Can you understand that? Old Doc Norton, rest his soul, spent months just trying to get Jamie to the point where he could walk around by himself without anybody to watch him too close. He had to be taught how to feed himself, how to dress himself, how to go to the bathroom—like a child. At first there was some even right here in Northview that felt the way you do, Mr. Brodey, and there’s still some as can’t be comfortable around Jamie, but one by one they came to under
stand, and they made their peace with him. Whatever he was or wasn’t, he’s just like a little child now—a sick, old, frightened child who doesn’t really understand what’s happening to him, most of the time. Mr. Brodey, you can’t hate a little child for something he can’t even remember he’s done.”

  Brodey spun around, as though to stalk back into the house, and then spun violently back. “He should be dead!” Brodey shouted. His fists were clenched now, and the muscles in his neck were corded. “At the very least, he should be dead! Billions of lives on that man’s hands! Billions. And you, you people, you not only let him live, you make excuses for him! For him!” He stopped, groping for words to express the enormity of his outrage. “It’s like . . . like making excuses for the Devil himself.”

  Mrs. Hamlin stirred and came forward, stepping out of the porch shadows and into the moonlight, drawing her shawl more tightly around her, as though against a chill, although the night was still mild. She stared eye to eye with Brodey for several moments, while the country silence gathered deeply around them, broken only by crickets and the hoarse sound of Brodey’s impassioned breathing. Then she said, “I thought I owed it to you, Mr. Brodey, to try to explain a few things. But I don’t know if I can. Things have changed enough by now, steadied down enough, that maybe you younger people find it hard to understand, but those of us who lived through the War, we all had to do things we didn’t want to do. Right there where you’re standing, Mr. Brodey, right here on this porch, I shot a marauder down, shot him dead with my husband’s old pistol, with Mr. Hamlin himself laying stiff in the parlor not ten feet away, taken by the Lumpy Plague. And I’ve done worse things than that, too, in my time. I reckon we all have, all the survivors. And just maybe it’s no different with that poor old man sitting in there.”

  Brodey regained control of himself. His jaw was clenched, and the muscles around his mouth stood out in taut little bands, but his breathing had evened, and his face was tight and cold. He had banked his anger down into a smoldering, manageable flame, and now for the first time he seemed dangerous. Ignoring—or seeming to ignore—Mrs. Hamlin’s speech, he said conversationally, “Do you know that we curse by him down in Mohawk? His name is a curse to us. Can you understand that? We burn him in effigy on his birthday, in the town squares, and over the years it’s become quite a little ceremony. He must atone, Mrs. Hamlin. He must be made to pay for what he’s done. We don’t suffer monsters to live, down in Mohawk.”

  “Ayuh,” Mrs. Hamlin said sourly, “you do a lot of damnfool, jackass things down there, don’t you?” Mrs. Hamlin tossed her head back, silver hair glinting in the silver light, and seemed to grow taller again. There was a hard light in her eyes now, and a hard new edge in her voice. “Atone, is it now, you jackass? As if you’re some big pious kind of churchman, some damn kind of saint, you red-faced, loudmouthed man. You with your damnfool flag and damnfool Mohawk Confederacy. Well, let me tell you, mister, this isn’t any Mohawk Confederacy here, never has been, never will be: this is Northview, sovereign state of Vermont, United States of America. Do you hear me, mister? This here is the United States of America, and that poor fool in there—why, he’s the President of the United States of America, even if sometimes he can’t cut his meat up proper. Maybe he was a fool, maybe he was wrong long ago, maybe he’s crazy now, but he’s still the President.” Eyes snapping, she jabbed a finger, at Brodey. “As long as this town stands, then there’s still an America, and that old man will be President as long as there are still Americans alive to serve him. We take care of our own, Mr. Brodey; we take care of our own.”

  A shadow materialized at Brodey’s elbow and spoke with Seth’s voice. “Edna?”

  Brodey turned his head to glance at Seth. When he turned back to face Mrs. Hamlin, there was a gun in her hand, a big, old-fashioned revolver that looked too huge for the small, blue-veined hand that held it.

  “You can’t be serious,” Brodey whispered.

  “You need any help, Edna?” the shadow said. “I brought some of the boys.”

  “No, thank you, Seth.” The barrel of the revolver was as unwavering as her gaze. “There’s some things a person’s got to do for herself.”

  Then she cocked the hammer back.

  The President of the United States didn’t notice the shot. Alone in the small upstairs bathroom, he avoided the eyes of the tarnished reflection in the mirror, and compulsively washed his hands.

  Strangers

  Introduction to Strangers

  The 1970s were, among many other things, the decade of the great original-fiction anthologies in science fiction. Following upon the superb example of Frederik Pohl’s 1950s-era Star Science Fiction, Damon Knight launched Orbit, Terry Carr started Universe, and I, between 1969 and 1979, edited ten issues of New Dimensions. Much of the most significant short fiction of the decade appeared in those three publications. This could most quickly be shown by the disproportionate number of Hugo and Nebula winners that came from their pages, but also by the number of major careers that were established in them—those of Gene Wolfe, R.A. Lafferty, Richard M. McKenna, and George Alec Effinger, for example. And that of Gardner Dozois.

  I had been editing New Dimensions just a couple of months when a manuscript bearing that byline showed up in the summer of 1969. The accompanying letter explained that its author was 22 years old, had sold a story to Fred Pohl’s magazine If in 1966 and four more—three of them to Damon Knight’s Orbit—after a three-year hiatus. “I’m working out of a cramped garret apartment (yes, a garret; the cliches I live never fail to amaze me),” he told me, in a pre-World War II house in a suburb of Nuremberg, Germany, where he had been working for an Army newspaper.

  The story didn’t work for me. My notes say things like “Nice writing, but—story too static. The situation is static but that doesn’t mean story has to be . . . Also story insufficiently visionary. Could take place in 1970 . . . What’s new here? What’s going for the story other than its excellent writing? What does it have to offer as sf?”

  So I sent it back. A couple of months later Dozois returned to the United States; I met him at a convention in Philadelphia that November—a skinny kid, long straight hair, hippie clothing—and we exchanged a couple of pleasant words. And a few weeks after that he sent me a manuscript, badly typed on cheap paper, that absolutely astounded me. This is what I told him on December 30, 1969: “You may be the lousiest speller this side of the Rockies. But you are one hell of a writer, and you have a sale, man. An exciting hour for me—reading your story tensely, wondering if you were going to sustain the promise of the first few pages or let it all go driveling away into slush, as so many of the other new writers who’ve been sending me stuff have done . . . But no. The thing held up, it grew from page to page in inventiveness, the style remained vivid and supple—go have a swelled head for an evening. You’ve earned it. Now I know what editors talk about when they speak of the thrill of having something come in from an unknown that turns them on. But your spelling sure is awful.”

  That story—“A Special Kind of Morning”—became the lead story in the first issue of New Dimensions, and it was the lead again, years later, in my anthology The Best of New Dimensions. Of it I said, in the latter book, “All by itself, it made having edited New Dimensions worthwhile.” You’ll find the story in an earlier collection, The Visible Man.

  I happily bought another from him, “King Harvest,” for New Dimensions Two, and another, “The Last Day of July,” for issue number three. And then he told me, in the autumn of 1972, that he was working on a new and extremely ambitious one for me. He warned me, sounding a little worried about it, that it was likely to be pretty lengthy. Go ahead and send it when you’ve finished it, I said. Theoretically I wasn’t buying anything longer than about 15,000 words for New Dimensions, but on the strength of “A Special Kind of Morning” I was willing to stretch that limitation a little for Gardner. He let me see the opening section. It was haunting, powerful stuff, a rich evocation of an alien world
. Very nice, I replied. Keep going. Then, soon after Christmas he wrote that he now had 50 pages written and was nowhere near completion. Fifty pages, in the typeface he was using then, was well over 15,000 words. Once again Gardner offered to show me the incomplete story, but I, now expecting something running in the 20-25,000-word range, told him to go right on to the end. “The chances that I’ll reject it are very very slim, based on the chunk I’ve already seen, so don’t bother sending me the incomplete portion.”

  Silly me. When the complete manuscript reached me at the end of March, 1973, it was immense—three times as long as the longest story I had bought thus far. Gardner had no idea himself how long it was—anywhere from 35,000 to 50,000 words. I reckoned it as 40,000: virtually a book-length novel.

  If I bought it, it would crowd everything else in New Dimensions Four into one corner. But if I didn’t buy it, I’d be passing up a superb story, complex and moving, one of the finest on the theme of interstellar miscegenation since Philip Jose Farmer’s pioneering “The Lovers” twenty years earlier. I bought it, of course. And I was lucky enough to find half a dozen fine stories of 5000 words or less to pepper my contents page with so that I could make the issue look like a real anthology instead of a showcase for a single extraordinary novella. It is, I think, one of the half dozen most memorable stories I published in my ten years with New Dimensions. (Dozois’ “Special Kind of Morning” makes that list too.) Eventually I stopped editing and went back to being just a writer, and Gardner started editing and pretty much gave up writing, doing just occasional and often collaborative stories. As the editor who had found it so exciting to publish Gardner Dozois’ work when he was a brilliant young beginner, and who has continued to find pleasure in it to this day, I feel some regret that this splendid writer has chosen to give us so sparse an output in recent times. On the other hand, the science-fiction world has plenty of splendid writers today, whereas gifted editors are in very short supply, and Gardner (as a long shelf of Hugos testifies) has become the great sf editor of the modern era, a fitting successor to such editorial giants as John Campbell, Anthony Boucher, and Horace Gold. He’s come a long way from his days of bleak poverty in that Nuremberg garret, and it pleases me greatly to have been on hand when his magnificent career was just beginning to unfold.