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The Best Of
JOE HALDEMAN
Ed. by Jonathan Strahan
and Gary K. Wolfe
No copyright 2013 by MadMaxAU eBooks
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Hero
Anniversary Project
Tricentennial
Blood Sisters
Lindsay and the Red City Blues
Manifest Destiny
More Than the Sum of His Parts
Seasons
The Monster
The Hemingway Hoax
Graves
None So Blind
For White Hill
Civil Disobedience
Four Short Novels
Angel of Light
The Mars Girl
Sleeping Dogs
Complete Sentence
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INTRODUCTION
I
t was an entertaining exercise in nostalgia to put together this collection, spanning as it does over forty years of writing. The importance of short stories to my daily life and my writing career has waxed and waned over those years, but writing them is always interesting. They pack surprises in a way that novels do not.
That career didn’t begin until the late 1960s, so it barely brushed the “Golden Age” of magazine science fiction, when an energetic writer could make a living pounding out stories for the pulp magazines, for pennies a word, or less. In the sixties there were still as many as a dozen science fiction magazines on the newsstands—paper was still cheap, and magazines didn’t have to compete with the barrage of media that now tries to grab the reader’s attention and wallet. (Even then, though, oldsters were bemoaning the loss of the “real” pulps, the large-format ‘zines with ragged edges that carried science fiction from the ‘twenties through my childhood ‘fifties.)
I wrote my first two short stories in a writing class, the last semester before finishing my bachelor’s degree. Then I was drafted, and for a couple of years my only literary activity, except for a little poetry, was writing home.
When I returned from Vietnam I spent thirty days as a temporary civilian. During that time I rewrote those two undergraduate stories (both science fiction) and sent them out to magazines, and they both sold before I got out of the army, a few months later.
I knew from reading writers’ magazines that this kind of success was unusual. I’d planned to go back to college when I was out of the army, to study for a Ph.D. in computer science, and so I sort of did that— I registered for half-time and took two required math courses while I wrote “on the side.” But after a couple of weeks I sold my first novel.
I dropped out of graduate school quickly enough to get half of my tuition back. Bought a fresh typewriter ribbon and sailed off into a new life.
My wife Gay and I were living in the Washington suburbs then, going to the University of Maryland—but if I was going to be a writer, we could live anywhere, so we packed everything into an ancient Ford van and fled the Washington traffic and noise and snow for sunny Florida.
We went down to Brooksville, where fellow SF writer Keith Laumer lived—he’d said you could practically live for free there, picking oranges off the trees and catching fish for protein. It wasn’t quite that easy, but it was doable. Our rent on a three-bedroom cottage was $100 a month, which came to about 2500 words at my average rate, four cents. I could do that in two good days—make it three—and then start paying for the groceries, to supplement those free oranges and fishes, which anyhow had lost their charm.
My first novel, War Year, came out, and was a critical success, although it never made much money. But Gay had a job, teaching Spanish at the local high school, and along with my regular-if-sporadic writing income, we were doing pretty well.
The science fiction novels I was working on were both episodic; I could sell their chapters to the magazines as stand-alone novellas. One was The Forever War, which I was calling Hero, and the other became All My Sins Remembered (its working title was “the spy story”).
The conventional wisdom at the time was that there was no real money in magazine fiction, and no future; you had to write novels if you were going to write full time. But the magazines paid our rent and took us to Europe on a shoestring. They also gave me exposure for stories that ran the gamut from New Age surrealism to Analog-style hard science fiction.
In retrospect I can see that they gave the writing life a kind of continuity and rhythm. I’ve never been a prolific writer, by science fiction standards, but writing and selling a couple of short stories a month made me feel like a pro. I might not have known it then, but I’m certain of it now: a beginning writer needs confidence and validation. You can get it from your pals and relatives and teachers telling you how good you are, but trust me: all that is vapor compared to the reality of a check with an editor’s signature. Somebody you don’t know actually parted with his money for a chunk of your imagination.
That can become routine, but the first time makes you giddy with possibilities. (Giddy enough to rent a van and flee for the Sunshine State.)
The writing itself never does become routine, because you don’t know where it comes from, and you can’t know how long it will last. Forever, you hope, whatever finite number of years that turns out to be. Meanwhile, you hope to keep surprising yourself and pleasing others.
I’ve often wished it were still possible to make a living writing just short stories. I came close to doing it for a year or two, around 1970 and 1971, when there were markets galore and short work paid more per word, and per day, than novels were bringing in. I tried to write a thousand words a day (which became 500 words of final copy), and I kept track on a clipboard beside my typewriter. There was a special charm to that kind of writing. I’d always have several stories in some stage of incompletion; while I showered in the morning I’d either come up with a new idea or decide which in-progress story I’d work on. Then get the coffee percolating and sit down with a fresh stack of paper, and have at it.
One thing that a novelist misses, that a short story writer has all the time, is the satisfaction of being near completion. And though finishing a novel that you’ve spent a year or more on is a special satisfaction, well, you do only get it once a year or so.
I don’t know much about Charles Dickens, but they say that when he was writing short stories and came to the end of one, he inscribed a little flourish of a curlicue, and set down his pen. I do know how that feels, even though now it physically may be pulling a piece of paper out of the machine, or just hitting Command-S and sitting back. A job well done, or at least done as well as you can.
Here are some I’m still satisfied with.
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INTRODUCTION TO “HERO”
I remember the day I started “Hero”—probably the most important day in my writing life, since that turned out to be the beginning of The Forever War. At the time, though, I was just idly typing.
My wife and I had driven down to Florida, to visit fellow writer Keith Laumer and escape the snows of Washington, D.C. The second day we were at his place—a modernist mansion on a wild island in the middle of nowhere—she and Keith drove into town for groceries, and I sat down at the dining room table with my manual typewriter and absolutely no idea of what to write.
I had been out of the Army for a year and a half, and had a vague ambition to write a science-fiction war story. So I remembered an absurd day in Basic Training, slogging through midnight snow supposedly training for jungle warfare, when they herded us into a frigid Quonset Hut where a young lieutenant stepped up onto a podium and intone
d “Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.”
None of the methods articulated in the speech was particularly useful, as it turned out. But a couple of years later, I started a career with it.
HERO
I
T
onight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.
I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.
The projector woke me up and I sat through a short tape showing the “eight silent ways.” Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.
After the tape a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.
“Sir”—we had to call sergeants “sir” until graduation—”Most of those methods, really, they looked...kind of silly.”
“For instance?”
“Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actually have only an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?”
“He might have a helmet on,” he said reasonably.
“Besides, Taurans probably don’t even have kidneys!”
He shrugged. “Probably they don’t.” This was 1997, and nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome. “But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.
“That’s the important thing.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “Those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit because you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or an emery board.”
She sat back down, not looking too convinced.
“Any more questions?” Nobody raised a hand.
“Okay Tench-hut!” We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.
“Fuck you, sir,” came the familiar tired chorus.
“Louder!”
“FUCK YOU, SIR!” One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.
“That’s better. Don’t forget, pre-dawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 owes one stripe. Dismissed.”
I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I’d always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago. They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but it’ll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.
Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole company’d been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week lunar training. I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Goddammit, right under the heater.
I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up the person next to me. Couldn’t see who it was, but I couldn’t have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.
“You’re late, Mandella,” a voice yawned. It was Rogers.
“Sorry I woke you up,” I whispered.
“‘Sallright.” She snuggled over and clasped me spoon-fashion. She was warm and reasonably soft.
I patted her hip in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. “Night, Rogers.”
“G’night, Stallion.” She returned the gesture more pointedly.
Why do you always get the tired ones when you’re ready and the randy ones when you’re tired? I bowed to the inevitable.
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II
“Awright, let’s get some goddamn back inta that! Stringer team! Move it up—move your ass up!”
A warm front had come in about midnight and the snow had turned to sleet. The permaplast stringer weighed five hundred pounds and was a bitch to handle, even when it wasn’t covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers was my partner.
“Steel!” the guy behind me yelled, meaning that he was losing his hold. It wasn’t steel, but it was heavy enough to break your foot. Everybody let go and hopped away. It splashed slush and mud all over us.
“Goddammit, Petrov,” Rogers said, “why didn’t you go out for the Red Cross or something? This fucken thing’s not that fucken heavy.” Most of the girls were a little more circumspect in their speech. Rogers was a little butch.
“Awright, get a fucken move on, stringers—epoxy team! Dog ‘em! Dog ‘em!”
Our two epoxy people ran up, swinging their buckets. “Let’s go, Mandella. I’m freezin’ my balls off.”
“Me, too,” the girl said with more feeling than logic.
“One—two—heave!” We got the thing up again and staggered toward the bridge. It was about three-quarters completed. Looked as if the second platoon was going to beat us. I wouldn’t give a damn, but the platoon that got their bridge built first got to fly home. Four miles of muck for the rest of us, and no rest before chop.
We got the stringer in place, dropped it with a clank, and fitted the static clamps that held it to the rise-beam. The female half of the epoxy team started slopping glue on it before we even had it secured. Her partner was waiting for the stringer on the other side. The floor team was waiting at the foot of the bridge, each one holding a piece of the light, stressed permaplast over his head like an umbrella. They were dry and clean. I wondered aloud what they had done to deserve it, and Rogers suggested a couple of colorful, but unlikely, possibilities.
We were going back to stand by the next stringer when the field first (name of Dougelstein, but we called him “Awright”) blew a whistle and bellowed, “Awright, soldier boys and girls, ten minutes. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.” He reached into his pocket and turned on the control that heated our coveralls.
Rogers and I sat down on our end of the stringer and I took out my weed box. I had lots of joints, but we were ordered not to smoke them until after night-chop. The only tobacco I had was a cigarro butt about three inches long. I lit it on the side of the box; it wasn’t too bad after the first couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff, just to be sociable, but made a face and gave it back.
“Were you in school when you got drafted?” she asked.
“Yeah. Just got a degree in physics. Was going after a teacher’s certificate.”
She nodded soberly. “I was in biology...”
“Figures.” I ducked a handful of slush. “How far?”
“Six years, bachelor’s and technical.” She slid her boot along the ground, turning up a ridge of mud and slush the consistency of freezing ice milk. “Why the fuck did this have to happen?”
I shrugged. It didn’t call for an answer, least of all the answer that the UNEF kept giving us. Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tauran menace. Soyashit. It was all just a big experiment. See whether we could goad the Taurans into ground action.
Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer. It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactiv
e on principle.
There really wasn’t any sense in having us train in the cold. Typical army half-logic. Sure, it was going to be cold where we were going, but not ice-cold or snow-cold. Almost by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the time—since collapsars don’t shine—and the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man.
Twelve years before, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and out it pops in some other part of the galaxy. It didn’t take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels along the same “line” (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar hadn’t been in the way—until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars...exactly zero.
The Best of Joe Haldeman Page 1
