Blue Champagne

by John Varley

  Ed Zzzzzzzzzzayniewski. That'd be nice, he decides.

  Then one day seventeen thermonuclear bombs exploded in the air over Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island, too. They had a yield of between five and twenty megatons each. This was more than enough to kill everyone in this story. Most of them died instantly. A few lingered for minutes or hours, but they all died, just like that. I died. So did you.

  I was lucky. In less time than it takes for one neuron to nudge another I was turned into radioactive atoms, and so was the building I was in, and the ground beneath me to a depth of three hundred meters. In a millisecond it was all as sterile as Edward Teller's soul.

  You had a tougher time of it. You were in a store, standing near a window. The huge pressure wave turned the glass into ten thousand slivers of pain, one thousand of which tore the flesh from your body. One sliver went into your left eye. You were hurled to the back of the store, breaking a lot of bones and suffering internal injuries, but you still lived. There was a big piece of plate glass driven through your body. The bloody point emerged from your back. You touched it carefully, trying to pull it out, but it hurt too much.

  On the piece of glass was a rectangular decal and the message "Mastercard Gladly Accepted."

  The store caught fire around you, and you started to cook slowly. You had time to think "Is this what I pay taxes for?" and then you died.

  This story is brought to you courtesy of The Phone Company. Copies of this story can be found near every telephone in Manhattan, and thousands of stories just like it have been compiled for every community in the United States. They make interesting reading. I urge you to read a few pages every night. Don't forget that many wives are listed only under their husband's name. And there are the children to consider: very few have their own phone. Many people—such as single women—pay extra for an unlisted number. And there are the very poor, the transients, the street people, and folks who were unable to pay the last bill. Don't forget any of them as you read the story. Read as much or as little as you can stand, and ask yourself if this is what you want to pay your taxes for. Maybe you'll stop.

  Aw, c'mon, I hear you protest. Somebody will survive.

  Perhaps. Possibly. Probably.

  But that's not the point. We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. Sure, it's horrible, sure we weep for all those dead people. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive, to start all over.

  Secretly, we know we'll survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.

  All those after-the-bomb stories are lies. Lies, lies, lies.

  This is the only true after-the-bomb story you will ever read.

  Everybody dies. Your father and mother are decapitated and crushed by a falling building. Rats eat their severed heads. Your husband is disemboweled. Your wife is blinded, flash-burned, and gropes along a street of cinders until fear-crazed dogs eat her alive. Your brother and sister are incinerated in their homes, their bodies turned into fine powdery ash by firestorms. Your children... ah, I'm sorry, I hate to tell you this, but your children live a long time. Three eternal days. They spend those days puking their guts out, watching the flesh fall from their bodies, smelling the gangrene in their lacerated feet, and asking you why it happened. But you aren't there to tell them. I already told you how you died.

  It's what you pay your taxes for.

  The Unprocessed Word

  John Varley

  555 Mozart Place Eugene, Oregon 97444

  Susan Allison Editor, Berkley Books The Berkley Building

  1 Madison Avenue New York, New York 10010

  Dear Susan, You and I have talked before about word processors, and how I'm one of the last science fiction writers who doesn't use one. Now I feel it is time to take aggressive action against the blight of computers.

  What I want you to do is run the following notice right before the title page of the new book, and in all books after this, and in any re-print editions of previous books written by me. Though this kind of self-promotion is personally repugnant to me, I feel it is time to speak out before it is Too Late.

  Also, it might help to sell books to people who feel the same way I do.

  You may be wondering just what VarleyYarns® is. Well, I've re-organized, partly for tax purposes, partly for other reasons. I've formed a corporation called VarleyYarns, Inc., to market and promote my books. It's a step that's been long overdue. From now on, you can make out all my royalty checks to VarleyYarns.

  Best, John THE UNPROCESSED WORD

  seal INTRODUCING VARLEYYARNS®

  This symbol is your assurance that the following yarn was composed entirely without the assistance of a word processor.

  Each VarleyYarn® is created using only natural ingredients: The purest paper, carbon typewriter ribbons, pencils, ballpoint pens, thought, and creativity. Manuscript corrections are done entirely by hand. Final drafts are lovingly re-typed, word by word, in the finest typefaces available—no dotmatrix printers allowed!

  The manuscript of each VarleyYarn® is then carried by the United States Postal Service—First Class!—to the good offices of the Berkley/Putnam Publishing Group in Manhattan, New York City, New York. Not a word is ever phoned in via modem.

  Not One Word!

  Here the VarleyYarn® is given to skilled artisans, men and woman who learned their craft from their parents, and from their parents before them... many of them using the tools and even the same offices their grandparents used. Crack teams of proofreaders pore over the manuscript, penciling corrections into the wide margins left for that purpose. Messengers hand-carry the VarleyYarn®

  from floor to floor of the vast Berkley Building, delivering it to deft Editors, clever Art Directors, and lofty Vice-Presidents.

  When all is in readiness, the VarleyYarn® is rushed to the typesetter, who once again re-types the manuscript—word by word!—on the typesetting machine. Then the bulky lead plates are trucked to New Jersey and given to the printer, who uses technologies essentially unchanged from the days of Gutenberg.

  And the end result? The book you now hold in your hands, as fine a book as the economic climate will allow.

  So look for the sign of the twin typewriter keys—your symbol of quality in:

  100% guaranteed non-processed fiction!

  John Varley

  555 Mozart Place Eugene, Oregon 97444

  Dear John, You asked to hear from me as soon as we had some concrete sales figures on the new book. As you know, we ran your ''promotional'' notice as you instructed, just after the title page. The book has been out for a month now, and I'm sorry to say there's no measurable impact. It's selling about as well as the previous collection.

  We have received some rather strange mail, though, which I am forwarding to you under a separate cover.

  John, I'm not completely sure the public cares whether fiction was written on a typewriter, a word processor, or with a quill pen and ink. I know this is an important issue with you and I was happy to help you try and get your message across, but maybe it's best for now if we just forget it.

  Unless I hear back from you soon, I'm going ahead with the twenty-eighth printing of WIZARD without the VarleyYarn seal of approval in front.

  Yours, Susan Allison Susan Allison Berkley Dear Susan, Of course they care. You can't tell me people can't tell the difference when it is so obvious to any literate person. They just haven't been given the choice in recent years... and more importantly, they haven't heard the message. I'm afraid putting it in just my books was a mistake, as that is simply preaching to the converted. What I want you to do now is use the advertising budget for the new book and, instead of running the standard promo, use the following material instead. I'd like to see it in all the trade publications and a
s many national magazines as we can afford. And, far from letting you remove the original message from the new printing of WIZARD, I want to keep it, and run this new one on stiff paper—like you used to use for cigarette ads—somewhere in the middle of the book. Full color won't be necessary; just print the underlined parts in red caps.

  John seal WHY VARLEYYARNS®?

  Perhaps you asked yourself: "Why should I buy and read Berkley's VarleyYarns® when cheaper, more plentiful 'processed' fiction puts me to sleep just as quickly?"

  Here are some things we at VarleyYarns® think you should know: Processed fiction can contain harmful additives.

  When fiction is produced on a Word Processor each keystroke is first converted to a series of "on" and "off" signals in the microprocessor unit. Some of these signals go to the video screen and are displayed. The rest are "tagged" by various electronic additives and stored in the "memory" for later retrieval. Inevitably, these tags cling to the words themselves, and no amount of further processing can wash them away. Even worse, while in the memory these words are subject to outside interference such as power surges, changes in the Earth's magnetic field, sun spots, lightning discharges, and the passage of Halley's Comet—due back in 1986... and every 76 years thereafter!

  VarleyYarns® are guaranteed to contain no sorting codes, assemblers, inelegant "languages" like FORTRAN or C.O.B.O.L., and to be free of the fuzzy edges caused by too much handling (more commonly known as "hacker's marks").

  Floppy disks lack sincerity.

  Think about it. When the "word processor" turns off his or her machine... the words all go away!

  The screen goes blank. The words no longer exist except as encoded messages on a piece of plastic known as a floppy disk. These words cannot be retrieved except by whirling the disk at great speed—a process that can itself damage the words. Words on a floppy disk are un-loved words, living a forlorn half-life in the memory until they are suddenly spewed forth at great and debilitating speed by a dot-matrix printer that actually burns them into the page!

  VarleyYarn® words go directly from the writer's mind onto the printed page, with no harmful intermediate steps. At night, when the typewriter is turned off, they repose peacefully in cozy stacks of paper on the writer's desk, secure in the knowledge they are cherished as words.

  Microprocessors are Un-American.

  That's right, we said Un-American. At the heart of every word processor is something called a microchip. Due to cheap labor costs, these chips are made in places like Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Now, we at VarleyYarns® have nothing against the Japanese (though Pearl Harbor was a pretty cowardly attack, don't you think?), but ask yourself this: Do you want to entrust your precious fiction to a machine that doesn't even speak English?

  So ask your grocer, druggist, airport manager, and bookseller to stock up on Berkley's VarleyYarns® today. And next time someone offers to let you read processed fiction, you can say:

  "No thanks! I'd rather read a VarleyYarn®!"

  John Varley

  555 Mozart Place Eugene, Oregon 97444

  Dear John, As you must have seen by now, I did as you asked.

  But let me tell you, it was a struggle. I fought pretty hard for that ad budget, such as it was, and it was quite a trick to turn around and tell everyone you now want this other material to run in place of the ads we'd prepared.

  A word to the wise, my friend. You're not the only author on the Berkley list. I called in a lot of favors on this one. And I'm sorry to tell you it doesn't seem to have worked. All of them—The Times, Rolling Stone, Publishers Weekly, Variety, USA Today, Locus—report negative responses to the ad as run. Maybe this will convince you that people really aren't concerned—as I know you are—about the spread of word processors.

  One more thing you might not have considered. All the other Berkley authors use word processors.

  More than a few of them have called or written about your ad. So far the tone has been more puzzled than anything else, but I'm afraid that if we went on with this it could only get worse. See, they're beginning to think you're saying something negative about their fiction.

  For this reason, if for no other, I'm pulling your ad from all the printed media, and canceling the upcoming radio and television campaign. The fortythird printing of TITAN goes to the presses next week, and it will do so without either the VarleyYarns ''symbol of quality'' or the two-color slick paper insert.

  Yours truly, Susan Dear Susan, You can't do this to me! You're simply not giving this a chance to work. Naturally there's going to be some initial resistance. It's a new idea to most people out there that word additives can be harmful to one's fiction. Remember how people fought the idea of ecology in the late 60's? Remember how the AEC used to tell us that radiation was good for you? This is just like that. The word has to get out now, before it's too late.

  So here's what I want you to do. Forget all the book advertising. I want to go right on to direct mail.

  See if you can obtain the lists of everyone who ever voted for Eugene McCarthy, and send them all a copy of the enclosed expose. It's time their eyes were really opened.

  I have gone to a great deal of trouble obtaining these testimonials. I expect you to do your part. And, oh, sure, I know the lawyers on your end are going to give you a hard time about some of this, but you'll notice I've concealed the names of the people involved.

  Here's to an unprocessed future...

  John The Shame of MacWrite Brought To You By seal VarleyYarns®

  Home Of The Unprocessed Word Almost without our realizing it, a generation has grown up in America that has never read an unprocessed word, never heard an unprocessed line of dialogue. This is tragic enough... but have you ever considered the effect of the Word Processor upon today's writers? Many of them have never seen a typewriter. Their familiarity with pen and ink extends only to the writing of checks to pay for a new addition to their computer systems.

  And now, slowly, insidiously, hidden from public view, the results of their new toys are beginning to be felt.

  We at VarleyYarns® feel it is time for someone to speak out, to rip away the veil of secrecy that has, until now, prevented these writers from coming forward to speak of their shame, their anguish, their heartbreak. You probably don't know any writers personally. Most people don't. Here are some facts you should know: Fact #1: Writers can't handle money, and are suckers for shiny new toys.

  Writers are a simple folk, by and large. Awkward in social situations, easily deceived, childishly eager to please, the typical writer never had the advantages of a normal childhood. He was the dreamy one, the friendless one, object of scorn and ridicule to his classmates. Living in his own fantasy world, writing his "fiction," he is ill-equipped for the pitfalls of money or technology.

  Fact #2: Writers come in two types—compulsives, and procrastinators.

  The Type A writer will labor endlessly without food, water, or sleep. His output of fiction is prodigious. Many claim they would write fiction even if they were not being paid for it—a sure danger signal.

  Type B writers live to sharpen pencils, straighten their desks, create elaborate filing systems, and answer the telephone and the doorbell. A productive day for the Type B writer consists of half a paragraph—which may end up in the wastepaper basket at the end of the day. This writer will work only under deadline pressure. Any excuse to leave the typewriter is welcomed.

  Conclusion: The Word Processor is precisely the wrong tool to put into a writer's hands!!

  If you don't believe it, listen to these unsolicited testimonials from some of the most pitiful cases of computaholism:

  "SK," Jerusalem's Lot, Maine I was one of the first writers to get a word processor. My God, if only I had known... if only... I was always prolific. I write every day but Guy Fawkes Day, Bastille Day, and the anniversary of the St.

  Valentine's Day Massacre. When I got my computer my output increased dramatically. My family didn't see me for days at a time... t
hen weeks at a time! I was sending in novels at the rate of three a month... and in addition, was writing and selling dozens of short stories every day. Thinking of pseudonyms became a major task in itself, a task I faced with a deepening sense of horror. Have you ever heard of John Jakes? That's really me! And what about Arthur Hailey, I'll bet you've heard of him. That's me, too! And Colleen McCullough, and William Goldman, and Richard Bachman... John D. MacDonald really died in 1976... but nobody knows it, because I took over his name! Soon I was writing movie scripts. (Have you heard of Steven Spielberg? That's me, too.) In 1980 I began writing the entire line of Harlequin Romances. I was making money faster than General Dynamics... but my kids didn't know me. As I sat at my Word Processor, a strange change would come over me. I would become these other people. Friends would mistake me for Truman Capote, or J. D. Salinger. But I could have lived with that... if not for the children. I can hear them now, crying in the kitchen.

  "Mommy, mommy," they weep. "Who is daddy today?" If only I could save another writer from this nightmare... if only... if only...

  "SR," Halifax, Nova Scotia I used to write with a pencil and paper—I never even used a typewriter for my first drafts... until the day someone convinced me to buy a Macintosh Computer, known in the industry as a Fat Mac. I loved it! In only three or four months I taught myself to type and wrote seventy or eighty letters. I purchased a MacPaint program, and soon was turning out wonderful dot-matrix artwork to amuse my friends. Then I brought a MacAlien program and had hours of fun every day eluding the space monsters that tried to eat me alive. (The MacWrite program still had a few glitches, but I knew I'd work them out... one of these days... when I got around to it... manana... what's the rush?) In the meantime, I was having too much fun...