A Thousand Deaths (52 page)

"Not until you carve out a new place for yourself," said Eldrēs. "Or renovate your old place. But set all that aside for a minute. Just for argument's sake, I'll grant your objection. Why else would you want to take my suggestion? What about self-respect? You know what's going to happen to you not long from now; I'd think you'd want to take this last chance. It's a crucial moment that only one person out of a billion gets to experience. Nevertheless, you'd be surprised how many ditch the chance. I don't know why. Maybe eternal glory doesn't have as much allure as it used to, or else your fellows are immune to enticements. If that's the real reason, their resistance has rendered their entire lives pointless. Their careers and their body of work are now—that is,
will
be—even more obscure and disregarded than ever."

Courane stared up at the discolored ceiling tiles. "Tell me about the science fiction writers who went along with your other salvage operators. That's what they call you, isn't it? The writers weren't all trapped on charity wards like me. What did you do to persuade them?"

Eldrēs gave him a wan smile. "Oh," she said, "this and that. There's always a plan tailored to each primitive—I'm sorry about that, but the twentieth century is to us as the middle Middle Ages are to you."

"What about Hladky?"

She rubbed her forehead. "I think they got his favorite television program renewed for another season. It was really a terrible situation comedy, but it just goes to show you how versatile and powerful we are."

"Does he accept?"

"I don't remember. You were my project, and I didn't pay very much attention to anything else that was happening in this time line. We're wasting time now. I don't mean to come across as impatient, but—"

Courane interrupted her. "I've changed my mind," he said, "and it has nothing to do with your high-sounding talk about writing my own epitaph. It comes down to extortion. When I'm putting pages in the notebook, I feel better. It's as simple as that."

Eldrēs nodded. "Your ultimate motivation isn't important, as long as you complete the novel itself." She stood up and smoothed the covers on Courane's bed. "I'm going to leave now. I can stand to be in this century for only half an hour at a time. I'll look in on you later tonight, after twelve o'clock. You ought to be snoring away. If you're not, I'll make sure you fall into unbroken sleep with pleasant dreams."

"Thank you, Eldrēs," said Courane.

"You're welcome. I'll see you tomorrow." She went through the curtain, then came back almost immediately. "By the way," she said, "take a look at this." She handed him an old, dog-eared notebook.

He glanced through it. "Whose is this?" he asked.

"It's yours," she said. "It's very old."

"It's so old I don't remember it at all. When did I write the entries in here?"

"According to my research, when you were between ten and twelve years old."
 

"So?"

"So when you finish
Time Spy,
you might want to start working on some of the ideas you'll find in this notebook. They're lumpish and rough, but of course you made the entries before you had any true sense of literary style. You've come a great distance since then."

Courane shook his head. "Why in hell would I even think about working on these? I have no intention of spending my last days reshaping these god-awful things."

Eldrēs gave him her brightest smile. "I'll tell you why," she said. "Because as long as you're scribbling, you're living. And you're not hurting."

"You mean you can postpone my death?"

"That's right."

"For how long?" asked Courane.

She shrugged. "Indefinitely."

"Why?"

"It's very simple. If I can get a lot of new material from you, and if I can increase your reputation a hundredfold, it will increase my own reputation to the same degree."

"Ah," said Courane. "So much for the humanitarian kindness of our distant descendants."

"Live on, and free of pain," said Eldrēs.

Courane grimaced. "As long as I torment myself trying to make decent stories out of these horrible literary shards."

Eldrēs pointed directly at Courane's forehead. "But isn't that what you've always done for a living?"

"Not under this kind of pressure," he said.

"Write and live," said Eldrēs. "Your stories or your life."

Courane didn't say anything for a long while, until Eldrēs looked at him impatiently. "I'm thinking," he said mournfully. "I'm thinking."

 

 

 

Afterword

 

 

Despite popular perception, the field of science
fiction is not especially rich in accurate prognostication. Oh, Jules Verne pulled off some early successes with technological prediction, nailing the nuclear submarine more than sixty years before the launching of the USS
Nautilus.
Since Verne's day, the most impressive feat of SF prognostication belongs to Arthur C. Clarke, who accurately foresaw the launching of communications satellites into Earth orbit. Colonization of the moon? Our trips there have been brief rock-collecting expeditions, abandoned after just five years. Human journeys to other planets? Nope; not with this budget deficit. Time travel?
Fuggedaboudit.
Flying cars, robot nannies, invitations to join the Galactic Federation? Don't hold your breath.

As a science fiction writer, George Alec Effinger had other goals in mind than being a modern-day Nostradamus. However, with his novel
The Wolves of Memory,
George pulled off a truly eerie feat of prognostication. In 1981, he accurately predicted the bleakness, frustration, and futility of the final decade of his life, the accelerating loss of his capacity to work, his friends, and his ability to remain true to the best parts of himself. And he also predicted, following this series of disasters culminating in a lonely death, a posthumous triumph. George's posthumous victory over the forces of decay, forgetfulness, and oblivion, I am delighted to announce, gathers momentum even as I write this afterword.
 

Sandor Courane was the first of George's recurring characters who served as a rough alter-ego, another being Martd Audran, protagonist of George's popular Budayeen novels and stories. Before George died in the spring of 2002, I hadn't encountered Sandor much, having read only a couple of stories that featured the hapless, always doomed SF writer/editor. George had mentioned that the book which had introduced Sandor,
The Wolves of Memory
, was his personal favorite of all his novels. In 2004, I honored him in a small way by naming one of the characters in my second published book,
Bride of the Fat White Vampire
, Courane L'Enfant. But I didn't get my hands on a copy of
Wolves,
by then more than twenty years out of print, until a year after that. Reading the story of Sandor Courane's plight and progressive debilitation, I found myself stunned by a sense of recognition. In his early thirties, George had written a luminous and haunting metaphor of his own fate as a middle-aged man.

By the time I met George in the fall of 1994, taking his course on Science Fiction and Fantasy World Building at the University of New Orleans, and then joining the monthly writing workshop he'd founded six years earlier, the best days of his career were already behind him. The last major book he would publish in his lifetime, the novel
The Exile Kiss,
had come out in 1991. When I first got to know him, he was enjoying a period of relatively good health, and hopefulness that his situation would improve. His hairline had receded since he'd had his book jacket photos taken, and he had bad skin and a multitude of more minor ailments, but he also had an infectious smile, a wonderful, rich laugh, and eyes that literally sparkled with mischievous humor. George was the most naturally witty man I've ever met, and I'm certainly not alone in thinking so. And it's a darn good thing he was blessed with such a robust sense of humor, because he was also one of the most unfortunate people, healthwise, I've ever come across. From the time he was a young man, he suffered almost without respite from a series of stomach and intestinal tumors. George loved to eat, and New Orleans is one of the world's foremost restaurant towns, but his condition frequently made eating too painful to bear. Later in life, he also came to suffer from partial deafness, rotting teeth, hepatitis C, and drug and alcohol dependencies, these last brought on and intensified by his chronic pain. He began working full-time as a freelance writer not long after college and never had the opportunity to buy affordable health insurance. By the time he desperately needed insurance, both his long list of pre-existing conditions and his shaky financial status made it impossible for him to acquire it.

Living in New Orleans, poor but not poor enough to be eligible for Medicaid, George, like a hundred thousand of his neighbors in this impoverished city, found himself dependent on the tender mercies of Charity Hospital. This downtown Art Deco monolith, built during the populist administration of Governor Huey P. Long, flooded badly following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. In all likelihood, this enormous structure, standing some twenty stories tall and taking up an entire city block, will be imploded and may never be replaced with anything comparable. George, I am sure, would have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, he, more than most, recognized the need for such a facility. On the other hand, he hated the place with real passion and was terrified of the possibility that he would ever receive another operation there. Go back and read "Posterity" again. Disregard the time traveling antagonist, and what remains is a harrowing (and pretty accurate) depiction of an inpatient stay at Charity Hospital.

I'm sure that George's terror of Charity Hospital played a large part in his decision in the early 1990s to have a stomach operation at Tulane University Hospital, a private facility (or it's quite possible that this just happened to be the hospital where the ambulance dropped him off, and George was in no shape to tell them that he didn't have insurance—if they had known, the Tulane administrators would've had George speedily transferred across the street to Charity). However his admission at Tulane came to pass, he was discharged with a gargantuan medical bill that he was in no position to pay. The hospital sued. Had they understood the chronic penury of the typical freelance science fiction writer, the lawyers wouldn't have bothered, but possibly they bought into the commonly held myth that published novelists all splurge on three-hour lunches in renowned restaurants and spend their winters on exclusive Mediterranean islands. Discovering their error, the hospital's lawyers then sought to lay claim to the only possession of George's that could conceivably have any real value on the open market—his intellectual property.

This legal maneuver put George in a bind not unlike that within which TECT ensnares our friend Sandor Courane. His most successful books to that point were the three Budayeen novels, which had inspired a pioneering computer-based role-playing game that George had helped to design. In the mid-1990s, his best opportunity to make some decent money, and thus be able to afford to pay at least part of his hospital bill, would have been to write and sell the fourth Budayeen novel,
Word of Night,
and sell option rights to turn
When Gravity Fails
into a movie. Yet by attempting to lay claim to his intellectual property, the hospital's lawyers closed the door on George embarking on any new projects featuring his already established characters, because George could be reasonably certain that he wouldn't see a dime from such work.

For much of the rest of the decade, the status of George's intellectual property hung in limbo while the case dragged on. He wrote no more novels featuring the denizens of the Budayeen, and no more stories featuring Sandor Courane. He eked out a limited income writing work-for-hire projects and creating stories for theme anthologies. Finally, late in the decade, the Sword of Damocles, which had so long been hanging over his head, vanished in a puff of smoke when the hospital's legal team failed to show up at a hearing, and the judge dismissed the case. But the damage had already been done; precious time had been wasted. George didn't have many years left to him to try to resurrect his career, and the tribulations of those years would ensure they weren't productive ones.

In 1998, it appeared that things would turn around for George. His romance with fellow writer Barbara Hambly blossomed, and he announced to our workshop group that he and Barbara were getting married. He went to join Barbara in Los Angeles, moving away from New Orleans for the first time in twenty-five years. We heard that he enjoyed being a part of the large community of science fiction people in California, that he was writing for animated TV shows, and that he had picked up a regular gig composing the website for his favorite daytime soap, As
the World Turns.
We heard he was happy. Sandor, too, finds brief happiness during his first few months of exile on Planet D, relishing his short-lived, doomed romance with Lani.

George's happiness didn't last. Whatever demons had burrowed beneath his skin in New Orleans went with him to Los Angeles, along with his always fragile health. He moved back to New Orleans for the final time in the summer of 2000, less than two years after he'd left. The man who moved into a small courtyard apartment in the French Quarter wasn't much like the brilliantly witty, life-of- the-party GAE we remembered. The failure of his third marriage had crumpled him up like an aluminum can tossed out onto a busy highway. He would carry the burden of his dead marriage with him for the twenty-two months he had left, dragging it in his emaciated arms like Sandor carrying Rachel's corpse through the seemingly endless deserts of Home.

Things eventually came to a head, and George ended up spending about six months in a fee-free rehabilitation center near downtown New Orleans called Bridge House, one of only three residential facilities in town that would accept patients without insurance. George got off to a promising start, quickly becoming the leader of one of the weekend twelve-step discussion sessions. The other residents, many of them convicted criminals who had opted for drug treatment over incarceration, expressed admiration when they learned he was an award-winning author. The Bridge House administrators were impressed with his clerical and composition skills and gave him more and more responsibilities. He must've felt a little like Sandor Courane on Planet D, elected by his fellow inmates to bargain with TECT and search for a solution to their shared dilemma.