Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle

by George R. R. Martin

  But when Haviland Tuf fell silent at last, no one spoke for quite a long time. The Lords Guardian were all ashen and numb. One by one they looked away from Tuf’s impassive features, to the muddy shell on the table.

  Finally Kefira Qay found her voice. “What do they want?” she asked nervously.

  “Chiefly,” said Haviland Tuf, “they want you to stop eating them. This strikes me as an eminently sensible proposal. What is your reply?”

  “Two million standards is insufficient,” Haviland Tuf said some time later, sitting in the communications room of the Ark. Dax rested calmly in his lap, having little of the frenetic energy of the other kittens. Elsewhere in the room Suspicion and Hostility were chasing each other hither and yon.

  Up on the telescreen, Kefira Qay’s features broke into a suspicious scowl. “What do you mean? This was the price we agreed upon, Tuf. If you are trying to cheat us …”

  “Cheat?” Tuf sighed. “Did you hear her, Dax? After all we have done, such grim accusations are still flung at us willy-nilly. Yes. Willy-nilly indeed. An odd phrase, when one stops to mull on it.” He looked back at the telescreen. “Guardian Qay, I am fully aware of the agreed-on price. For two million standards, I solved your difficulties. I analyzed and pondered and provided the insight and the translator you so sorely needed. I have even left you with twenty-five telepathic cats, each linked to one of your Lords Guardian, to facilitate further communications after my departure. That too is included within the terms of our initial agreement, since it was necessary to the solution of your problem. And, being at heart more a philanthropist than a businessman, and deeply sentimental as well, I have even allowed you to retain Foolishness, who took a liking to you for some reason that I am entirely unable to fathom. For that, too, there is no charge.”

  “Then why are you demanding an additional three million standards?” demanded Kefira Qay.

  “For unnecessary work which I was cruelly compelled to do,” Tuf replied. “Would you care for an itemized accounting?”

  “Yes, I would,” she said.

  “Very well. For sharks. For barracuda. For giant squid. For orcas. For gray kraken. For blue kraken. For bloodlace. For water jellies. Twenty thousand standards per item. For fortress-fish, fifty thousand standards. For the-weed-that-weeps-and-whispers, eight …” He went on for a long, long time.

  When he was done, Kefira Qay set her lips sternly. “I will submit your bill to the Council of Guardians,” she said. “But I will tell you straight out that your demands are unfair and exorbitant, and our balance of trade is not sufficient to allow for such an outflow of hard standards. You can wait in orbit for a hundred years, Tuf, but you won’t get any five million standards.”

  Haviland Tuf raised his hands in surrender. “Ah,” he said. “So, because of my trusting nature, I must take a loss. I will not be paid, then?”

  “Two million standards,” said the Guardian. “As we agreed.”

  “I suppose I might accept this cruel and unethical decision, and take it as one of life’s hard lessons. Very well then. So be it.” He stroked Dax. “It has been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I can only blame myself for this wretched turn of events. Why, it was only a few scant months past that I chanced to view a historical drama on this very sort of situation. It was about a seedship such as my own that rid one small world of an annoying pest, only to have the ungrateful planetary government refuse payment. Had I been wiser, that would have taught me to demand my payment in advance.” He sighed. “But I was not wise, and now I must suffer.” Tuf stroked Dax again, and paused. “Perhaps your Council of Guardians might be interested in viewing this particular tape, purely for recreational purposes. It is holographic, fully dramatized, and well-acted, and moreover, it gives a fascinating insight into the workings and capabilities of a ship such as this one. Highly educational. The title is Seedship of Hamelin.”

  They paid him, of course.

  SEVEN

  THE SIREN SONG OF HOLLYWOOD

  When I was in seventh grade The Twilight Zone was my favorite television show. I never dreamed that one day I’d be writing it.

  Now, let us make it clear that we’re talking about two different shows here. I must look one hell of a lot older than I think, because sometimes when I mention that I worked on The Twilight Zone, I get the response, “Oh, I loved that show. What was it like to work with Rod Sterling?” (The clueless inevitably drop a “t” into Rod Serling’s name.)

  I loved that show too, but sad to say I never worked with Rod Sterling, or even Rod Serling. I did, however, work with Phil DeGuere, Jim Crocker, Alan Brennert, Rockne S. O’Bannon, and Michael Cassutt, as well as a host of terrific actors and directors, on the short-lived and much-lamented Twilight Zone revival of 1985–87. Call it TZ-2. (There have been two more incarnations since, TZ-3 and TZ-4, but we prefer not to talk about them in polite company.)

  It was The Armageddon Rag that sent me off to The Twilight Zone. Published by Poseidon Press in 1983, the Rag was supposed to be the breakout novel that would transform me into a bestselling author. I was proud of the book, and my agent and my editor were high on it as well. Poseidon paid me a whopping big advance for the rights, and I went right out and bought a larger house.

  The Rag received some wonderful reviews. It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, losing out to John M. Ford’s superb The Dragon Waiting. And it died the death. It had all the hallmarks of a big bestseller save one. No one bought it. Far from building on the success of Fevre Dream, it sold badly in hardcover and miserably in paperback. The full extent of the disaster was not brought home to me until 1985, when Kirby tried to sell my unfinished fifth novel, Black and White and Red All Over, and found that neither Poseidon nor any other publisher was willing to make an offer.

  Yet even as The Armageddon Rag slammed one door shut behind me, it was opening another. Dismal though its sales had been, the Rag did have its ardent fans. One was Phil DeGuere, the creator and executive producer of the hit television series Simon & Simon. DeGuere was a huge fan of rock music, especially the Grateful Dead. When our mutual agent Marvin Moss showed him my book, Phil saw a feature film in it, and optioned the movie rights. He intended to write and direct the film himself, and to shoot the huge concert sequences at Grateful Dead shows.

  I’d sold other film options previously. My usual involvement was limited to signing the contract and cashing the check. Phil DeGuere was different. The ink was hardly dry on the deal before he flew me out to L.A. and put me up at a hotel for several days, so we could talk about the book and how best to adapt it. Phil went on to write several drafts of the screenplay, but was never able to get a studio to bite for the financing. No movie was made. During the course of this, however, he and I got to know each other a bit … enough so that, when he decided to revive The Twilight Zone for CBS in 1985, Phil phoned to ask me if I would like to try a script.

  Surprisingly, I did not immediately leap at the chance. I had been weaned on television, sure, but I’d never written for it, had never wanted to write for it, knew nothing about scriptwriting, had never even seen a screenplay or a teleplay. Besides, all you ever heard about writing for Hollywood was the horror stories. I’d read Harlan Ellison’s Glass Teat, after all. I’d even read The Other Glass Teat. I knew how crazy it was out there.

  On the other hand, I liked Phil and respected him, and he had Alan Brennert on his staff, another writer whose work I had admired. DeGuere had brought Harlan Ellison aboard as well, as a writer and consultant. Maybe this new Twilight Zone would be different. And if truth be told, I needed the money. At the time I was madly writing Haviland Tuf stories to fill out Tuf Voyaging and keep my mortgage paid, but Black and White and Red All Over still had not sold, and my career as a novelist lay in ruins. I was still hesitating when Phil cinched the deal by promising my lady Parris backstage passes to all the Grateful Dead shows we cared to see. You couldn’t say no to that.

  He mailed me the show’s b
ible and a stack of sample scripts, and I sent him a stack of tearsheets and xerox copies of stories I thought might make good Twilight Zone episodes. Since I had never done a teleplay before, I wanted to make things easier for myself by doing an adaptation rather than an original story. That way, I could concentrate on mastering the form, rather than having to come up with the plot and characters and dialogue as well. Adaptations did not pay as well as originals, but I was more concerned with not making an utter fool of myself than I was with making money.

  DeGuere liked a number of the stories I sent them, and half a dozen would end up becoming episodes of TZ-2, some adapted by me, some by other hands. For my first outing, however, the tale that was chosen was “Nackles,” a Christmas horror fable by a writer named Curt Clark. I’d found it in an obscure Terry Carr anthology.

  “Nackles” was the sort of idea that makes you slap your head and cry, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Every god must have his devil. Nackles was the Anti-Santa. On Christmas Eve, while Santa Claus is flying around the world in his sled, sliding down chimneys to leave presents for good boys and girls, Nackles is moving through pitch-dark tunnels beneath the earth in a railroad car pulled by a team of blind white goats, and crawling up through the furnace grate to stuff bad boys and girls in his big black sack.

  I was delighted by Phil’s choice. “Nackles” seemed to me to be a perfect Twilight Zone, given a faithful adaptation. I also took a little pleasure imagining the thrill the sale would give Curt Clark, this obscure, forgotten little writer, who I pictured teaching English composition at some community college in Nowhere, North Dakota or Godforsaken, Georgia.

  It turned out that “Curt Clark” was a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake, the bestselling author of the wonderful Dortmunder series and a hundred other mysteries and crime novels, half of which had been turned into feature films. It also turned out, once rights had been secured and I had signed my contract, that the guys at Twilight Zone did not want a faithful adaptation of Westlake’s story. They liked the notion of the Anti-Santa, but not the rest of it: the abusive former football star who invents Nackles to terrorize his children, his wife and kids, the brother-in-law who narrates the story. All of that had to go, I was told. Before I could start my script, I would need to come up with a whole new story for Nackles and present it in a treatment.

  (So much for adaptations being easier.)

  I came up with half a dozen ways to handle “Nackles.” The first one or two I wrote up as formal treatments, the later ones I pitched to Harlan over the phone. He didn’t like any of them. After a month of this, I hit a wall. I had no more fresh ideas for “Nackles,” and remained convinced that the best way to handle the material was the way Westlake handled it in his story. Harlan was growing as frustrated as I was, and I got the impression that Phil DeGuere was ready to pull the plug.

  At that point Harlan came up with an idea. Another episode had also been giving trouble, an original called “The Once and Future King,” about an Elvis impersonator who travels back in time and finds himself face-to-face with Elvis. A freelancer named Bryce Maritano had done several drafts of the script, but DeGuere and his team still felt it needed work. I was no stranger to rock ’n’ roll, as The Armageddon Rag bore witness. Harlan suggested a switch. He would take over “Nackles” himself, and I would move to the Maritano script. Phil thought that was worth a try, and the swap was made … with fateful consequences for all concerned.

  The subsequent tale of “Nackles” is as horrifying as Nackles himself. Harlan Ellison’s approach to the story met with more approval than mine had, and his script was duly written and given the green light. Ed Asner was cast in the lead role, and Harlan himself was set to direct. He had added a new twist to the Westlake story, however, one that drew the ire of the network censors. In the midst of preproduction, “Nackles” was brought to a screeching halt by Standards and Practices. For those who are curious, all the grisly details of what followed can be found in Harlan’s collection Slippage (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), along with Westlake’s original story and Harlan’s teleplay. Despite good faith efforts by Phil and Harlan to address the network’s concerns, the CBS censors proved unrelenting. “Nackles” was scrapped, and Harlan left the show.

  Meanwhile, I was still at home in Santa Fe, a thousand miles away from the storms, reading up about the King. Elvis had shouldered Nackles aside. I wrote my treatment of “The Once and Future King,” and when that was approved, I launched into the script. It was the first teleplay I had ever attempted, so it took me longer than it should have. I shot it off to The Twilight Zone with considerable trepidation. If Phil did not like what I’d done, I figured, my first teleplay would also be my last.

  He did like it. Not well enough to shoot my first draft, mind you (I soon learned that in Hollywood no one ever likes a script that much) … but well enough to offer me a staff job after “Nackles” blew up and Harlan’s departure left the Zone shorthanded. Suddenly I was off to a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas, somewhere between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge: Studio City, California.

  I joined the series near the end of its first season, as a lowly Staff Writer (you know the position is lowly if the title includes the word “writer”). My first contract was for six weeks, and even that seemed optimistic. After a strong start, the ratings for TZ-2 had slumped off steadily, and no one knew whether CBS would renew the series for a second season. I began my stint by doing several more drafts of “The Once and Future King,” then moved on to new scripts, adaptations of Roger Zelazny’s “The Last Defender of Camelot” and Phyllis Eisenstein’s “Lost and Found.” Six weeks of talking story with DeGuere, Crocker, Brennert, and O’Bannon, reading scripts, giving and taking notes, sitting in on pitch meetings, and watching the show being filmed taught me more than I could have learned in six years back in Santa Fe. None of my own scripts went before the cameras until the very end, when “The Last Defender of Camelot” was finally sent into production.

  Casting, budgets, preproduction meetings, working with a director; all of it was new to me. My script was too long and too expensive. That would prove to be a hallmark of my career in film and television. All my scripts would be too long and too expensive. I tried to keep Roger Zelazny informed of all the changes we had to make, so he would not be too taken aback when he saw his story on the air. At one point, our line producer Harvey Frand came to me with a worried look on his face. “You can have horses,” he told me, “or you can have Stonehenge. But you can’t have horses and Stonehenge.” That was a hard call, so I put the question to Roger. “Stonehenge,” he said at once, and Stonehenge it was.

  They built it on the sound stage behind my office, with wood and plaster and painted canvas. If there had been horses on the stage, Stonehenge would have trembled like a leaf every time one pounded by, but without horses, the fake rocks worked fine. Not so the stuntwork, alas. The director wanted to see Sir Lancelot’s face during the climactic swordfight, which entailed removing the visor from Richard Kiley’s helm … and that of his stunt double as well. All went well until someone zigged instead of zagging during the swordplay, and the stunt man’s nose was cut off. “Not the whole nose,” Harvey Frand explained to me, “just the end bit.”

  “The Last Defender of Camelot” was broadcast on April 11, 1986, as part of TZ-2’s first season closer. After we wrapped I went home to Santa Fe, not knowing if there would be a second season. For all I knew, my brief stint in television was done.

  But when the networks announced their fall schedules in May, it turned out that CBS had renewed The Twilight Zone after all. I was promoted from Staff Writer to Story Editor, and headed back to Studio City. Several new writers and producers joined us for that abbreviated second season, most notably Michael Cassutt, who took my place at the bottom of the food chain as the lowly Staff Writer. Cassutt had the office next to mine. Short, cynical, talented, funny, and wise in all the ways of Hollyweird, he showed me how to get a better
office (come to work early and move in), and joined me in trying to teach Phil DeGuere’s cockatoo to say, “Stupid idea,” which we thought would enliven pitch meetings no end.

  The second season of TZ-2 got off to a great start for me. Both of my leftover season one scripts, “Lost and Found” and “The Once and Future King,” were put into production; the latter became our second-season opener. As Story Editor, I did more duties, more rewrites, and had a bigger role in pitch meetings. I wrote two new teleplays as well. “The Toys of Caliban” was another adaptation, this time of a story by Terry Matz. “The Road Less Traveled,” which you’ll find presented here, was my first (and last) original for the Zone. The idea was one that I’d come up with a few years earlier for an anthology about the War in Vietnam, but had never gotten around to writing.