A Separate War and Other Stories (34 page)

FREDRIKA points pin at HAZLIK, as if for emphasis. ADRENALINE: 0.60. SUBLIMINAL: Tied to stake and flames licking at feet.

FREDRIKA

FREDRIKA rests point of pin lightly on HAZLIK'S chest. ADRENALINE: 0.70, SUBLIMINAL: Falling in darkness.

HAZLIK

FREDRIKA

HAZLIK puts muzzle of shooter against FREDRIKA'S abdomen. ADRENALINE: 0.85, HOLD SUBLIMINAL.

FREDRIKA No difference.

FREDRIKA leans on the needle and, at the same instant, HAZLIK fires. FREDRIKA explodes, cut in two.

TOTAL SENSORY NULL as HAZLIK stares at pin, a couple of centimeters sticking into his chest. He drops the shooter into the confusion of gore all over the rug and takes the atropine ampoule out of his pocket.

Then HAZLIK throws the ampoule away and shoves the pin the rest of the way into his chest.

ADRENALINE: 1.0.

SOMATIC: Male orgasm 1.0.

SMELL, TASTE, FEEL, HEAR, SIGHT all UP with white noise TO: FULL SENSORY OVERLOAD.

FADE TO BLACK.

CREDITS.

COMMERICAL.

(1972)

The title story of this collection ran a winding path from conception to delivery. Like one of the others here, it started with a letter from my old friend Robert Silverberg, inviting me to write a story for an anthology. This was
Far Horizons
, with the daunting subtitle “All New Tales from the Greatest Worlds of Science Fiction.” He was asking writers who had created classics in the genre to revisit their worlds and write novellas set in them.

In my case it was
The Forever War
, and it was a wonderful opportunity. Editors and others had been after me for twenty years to write a sequel to the novel, and my response had always been no, the novel's complete as it stands. But I always wanted to write a novella about what happens after the novel ends, and here was Silverberg offering me the chance, and for more money than the novel's original advance.

I got twenty or thirty pages into it, though, a novella I was calling “Forever Free,” when I realized that it begged to be expanded into a novel, an actual sequel. I wrote Silverberg and asked how soon the material could be reused, and he said three years. That was too long; it was time for me to send out the next book proposal.

So I turned “Forever Free” into the book proposal, same title, and looked for another angle on the novella. It was immediately apparent. In the last part of the book, the main characters Marygay and William are separated, and we follow William's story. What happened to Marygay?

It was fun to write her story, both as a bridge to the sequel and as an oblique commentary on
The Forever War,
twenty years later.

 

I don't often write fantasy (except insofar as science fiction is a subset of fantasy), but every now and then a fantasy idea tickles my fancy. I got a request from Jean Rabe to write a story for
Renaissance Faire
, a book of stories set in those odd modern worlds of make-believe.

I'm not a big fan of the anachronistic gatherings, but my wife loves them, and I let her drag me along, and do enjoy myself once I get there, the mead and junk food and interesting costumes and old music. The music gave me an entrée into a story.

For years I've had in my “crazy ideas” file a clipping from
Acoustic Guitar
magazine, about the lives and times of those odd performers who hire out as “sidemen”—mostly unsung heroes of live music and records, who sit in to fill lacunae in visiting bands or to beef up the background for a recording session. It's a precarious life, but full of variety, and as a freelance writer, I feel a kind of bond with people who wind up there.

I've also been an amateur musician since grade school, and in a couple of insane periods in my youth considered doing it for a living. Fortunately, no amount of yearning can make up for a lack of talent, so I was never given an opportunity to ruin my life in that particular way. One of the pleasures of writing stories, though, is the license to put on a manic disposition and imagine who you might have become if things had worked out differently. “Diminished Chord” let me venture out into that territory.

 

“Giza” is one of two stories that appear here courtesy of my classes at MIT. I start out the semester with an assignment that seems arbitrary, even cruel: I give each student a theme chosen at random from the table of contents of Peter Nichols's excellent
The Science in Science Fiction
, and make them write the opening couple of pages of a story based on that. If you don't know anything about antimatter or generation ships or werewolves, hey, look it up. You didn't get to MIT from a coupon on a cereal box.

As partial compensation, during the break in the middle of the three-hour meeting, I have them get together and agree on whatever topic seems to be the worst, and give it to me to write. This particular year, the students were especially cruel, and made one up: asteroid psychology. I said sure, and then wandered off to wonder what I had gotten into. The psychology of a rock?

The book
Writing the Natural Way
, by Gabriele Rico, has some interesting tips, and one I pass on to my students is the idea of trying to visualize a story by making a graphic map of its characters, ideas, settings, whatever—a way to get your brain out of thinking of a story as a sentence-by-sentence structure, and seeing it as a broader gestalt. I did that, writing ASTEROID inside a circle on the left and PSYCHOLOGY inside a circle on the right, and then free-associated on the two words, trying to find a commonality.

I doubt that I spent fifteen minutes on it before the idea for the story crystallized, almost entire: an asteroid can't have a psychology, but the people trapped inside one could, and it would be toxic.

The time of writing is relevant. It was the week after 11 September 2001.

 

“Foreclosure” was another story from the random-topic assignment, but this past year the students were more kind and merely gave me a topic that was so overworked it seemed impossible to come up with anything new: terraforming, changing inhospitable planets into Earth-like ones.

 

Sometimes this writer/teacher's life isn't too rough. The day after that class, my wife and I got on a plane to Barcelona, where I was to give a speech and then take it easy for a while. Two old friends, Joan Manel and Mercé, had traded their flat in the city for a beach house in Cubelles, the resort town to the north, and they invited us to kick back and relax for a week.

So there I was, sitting on a blanket on this gorgeous topless beach, not a cloud in the sky or a care in the world, and of course my thoughts turned to terraforming, because deep inside this jet-setting sybarite is an American Puritan workaholic. I took out my Moleskine notebook—that I should even have it on the beach condemns me as hopeless—and decided to make a list of every terraforming theme I could remember, and see whether that would generate an idea for a new one. It worked. The list, which didn't take a half an hour of Spanish sun, is kind of interesting:

 

Playing God

The ultimate in pollution

Unwitting horror

Greed

Insane colonialism

Need to abandon Earth

Geometric increase (von Neumann machines)

Earth as a result of terraforming

Accidental terraforming (garbage taking over)

Terraforming as trivial hobby

Aliens xenoforming Earth

Doing Mars, Venus, Luna for mining, etc.

Moon partially terraformed

Earth retroterraformed after disaster

Very slow terraforming

 

—which led to the story. I wrote down “Maybe nobody has done this one—terraforming on such a slow scale that it looks like planetary evolution. The aliens come back to claim Earth, now that it's “done,” and their claim is legal; humans are an accidental by-product and are screwing up the process. They have to be educated so they know why they're being destroyed. “Foreclosure”—people have a thousand years to leave the Earth.

I chose as a viewpoint character my late mother-in-law, a wonderful woman who left a bad marriage and reinvented herself as a hotshot real estate agent.

 

“Four Short Novels” was another story generated by a Robert Silverberg request. The French publisher Flammarion wanted an anthology of stories that take place a thousand years from 2001, called
Destination 3001.
Unspecific enough that I could say yes and table it until an idea occurred to me.

This is unusual: I don't have the faintest idea where the story came from, but I know the exact instant when it occurred to me.

I'm a fairly serious bicyclist, and one chore bicyclists do is “interval training,” which is a fancy way of saying “go up hills.” I was laboring up one beautiful hill here in Gainesville, Florida, trying to keep my cadence up without descending into granny gears, when the structure of the whole story came to me in a hyperoxygenated flash. By the time I finished with the hills, I knew what the first and last sections of it would be, and wrote a paragraph describing them as soon as I got home.

I wasn't able to write it right away, though, because I was racing a deadline on the novel
The Coming
. I got that put away and we hopped on a plane to Australia, for the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne. After that convention, we were invited up to Airley Beach, a lovely resort town just off the Great Barrier Reef, which we'd visited back in the eighties with Australian fan and critic Eric Lindsay. Eric had had the good sense to move there, and he invited a small mob of us up to continue the party that had started in Melbourne a week before.

I suppose the old Puritan gland, again awakened by cloudless skies and topless women, drove me once more to my notebook, and I wrote the story in three or four easy mornings. Perhaps I ought to move to a topless beach and start making a living as a short-story writer.

 

“For White Hill” is probably the most complex story in this book, and is my personal favorite, for various reasons. Greg Benford wrote to five “hard” science-fiction writers—as a short definition, you can say that hard SF uses real science—and asked us to write novellas for an anthology called
Far Futures
, stories set at least a thousand years from now.

Looking back at the notes for this story, I see that initially I had suggested a much different one, concerning time travel. Here's a letter to Greg, who is a professional physicist:

That turned out to be the novel I'm writing now, twelve years later:
The Accidental Time Machine
. I'd forgotten that Greg was in on its inception.

I drifted over into another direction, though. I'd been thinking about writing a novella about the future of art, anyhow, so why not do it for Greg? The structure of it, I stole from the best of sources.

When I was in the middle of the book
Forever Peace
, I was slowly reading
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets
, by Helen Vendler. I had real issues, as they say, with her approach to the text, but it was a good read and a good way to start writing in the morning: I would copy out a sonnet by hand, and then read her analysis while the tea was brewing, and then turn to my own book with the same pen. (Some of us hard-science guys slightly believe in magic.)

In the course of that exercise, I noticed that some of the sonnets had a compelling narrative thrust; in particular Number 18, possibly the best-known poem in the language: “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” I decided I would write a novella in fourteen sections, each one based on a line of that poem.

I wanted to make it just possible for a careful reader to figure out the source. Numbering the sections 1 through 14 would make it too easy, so I invented a base-14 number system to be decoded. The title “For White Hill” is another clue; Shakespeare dedicated the 1609 printing of the sonnets to W.H., their “onlie begetter.” Finally, the short last section is a pretty direction evocation of the final line—“So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

(There's also a writing pun in the names of the main characters—Waterman and Montblanc [roughly “white hill”] were the brands of fountain pens used to write the story. I know, that's beyond the pale.)

For anybody with a morbid interest in the calculations and logic that go into a story like this, I put eight pages of notes at http:home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/forwhitehillnotes.htm. I trust the story can be enjoyed without all that stuff, though.

 

The plot for “Finding My Shadow” also came from verse, but this time a popular song. Along with a number of other science-fiction writers, I met singer/ songwriter Janis Ian at a World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal—she had been in correspondence with Mike Resnick over one of his stories, and he talked her into coming.