She smiles politely. "No, none." Sharp metal teeth; she runs her tongue along behind her teeth but the switches aren"t connected. "It would take as much energy to "fall" into the Sun as it takes to escape from the solar system." Less to skim it, though, fry. "All that gravity. I suppose it might be possible; I"ve never made the calculation."
Characteristic velocity 17.038 emos, exit inclination 0.117 rad, goodbye solar system, goodbye filth.
Blank stare. "Yes . . . oh, Jimmy"s giving me the signal." Right at perihelion, goose it all the way up, emergency override, nineteen gees, crush their dry baked bodies into dust. "I"m afraid we"ve run out of time."
Cargo s.h.i.t baked to sterile dust. "We certainly have enjoyed having you here, Lydia." He holds out his hand and she looks at it.
Bound for the stars, forever young, the dear ship inside of my ecstasy. "Thank you."
That"s one of only two prose stories I"ve written in one sitting. If it happened more often, I"d probably write a lot of them. Instant gratification. Normally, though, my short stories accrete at the same slow rate as the novels, five or six hundred words on a good day.
Like most people who write fiction for a living, I spend most of my time on novels. Not only are they more remunerative than short stories, but they feel more "serious," more worthwhile. That"s a fallacy, of course; one good short story is worth more than a closet full of mediocre novels. But the feeling is real, and the practical side of it can"t be disputed: a person who writes as slowly as I do would have to hit Playboy or The New Yorker every month to make a living from short stories.
(I don"t want to appear to be making a virtue out of slow writing. Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevski, Stevenson, d.i.c.kens-the list goes on and on-were all good careful writers who managed to turn out thousands of words a day, most of them with dip pens. Stendhal even kept a pocket watch on his writing desk, requiring himself to write one page, 250 words, every fifteen minutes. Stevenson famously wrote the 40,000-word Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in one long rather drug-crazed sitting. If these guys had had word processors, a degree in literature would take eight years.) Anyhow, novels are the meat, and the gravy, but short stories are the succulent dessert. Their irresistible attraction is that the end is always in sight. There"s a special satisfaction to finishing something, anything, and we slowpokes have to wait a couple of years to get that satisfaction from a novel.
I think this desire to actually get things finished is the main reason I returned to poetry, after more than a decade of deliberately not writing any. I started out writing only poetry-my first poem was published when I was nine years old-and it must have been good training, since when I did finally sit down to try fiction I sold the first two stories I wrote. But when I decided to become a full-time writer, I made the cold- blooded decision that the poetry had to go. I couldn"t afford to spend time on work that would eventually be paid for with two copies of an obscure journal. (I did allow myself to write a song every now and then, usually as a reward for finishing a book.) I always felt a little churlish about this, as if I had abandoned a dear relative who had helped me get started in the business. But business is business, I told myself, and one thing a freelance writer does not do is ply his lance for free.
My resolve started to weaken a few summers back, when my wife and I were BritRailing around England. Eventually we came to Elsmere, a quaint little tourist town in the Lake District.
Elsmere is where Wordsworth lived his strangely romantic life with Dorothy, his sister, and their cottage there is open to tourists. Wordsworth was one of my favorites when I was young, so I looked forward to seeing where he had lived and worked. But I wasn"t prepared for the intensity of the experience.
I don"t believe in ghosts but I do know that some people leave a "presence" behind in the place where they lived, a palpable stamp that their personality embedded there.
Hemingway"s house in Key West has it, as does the room where Samuel Johnson rode herd over his minions, a.s.sembling the great Dictionary. The mansion where Toulouse-Lautrec"s brooding crippled genius developed; the laboratory where Edison slaved; the small square of stones that"s the remains of the cabin on Walden Pond.
Wordsworth"s cottage had it in every board-and the spirit suffused out to include the hills and heaths, the lakes and streams, where he and Dorothy would stride along on their daily ten- or twenty-mile hikes, stopping every now and then to jot down a few lines or a stanza. (Dorothy was quite a good writer herself, and her brother was not above filching from her. The lines "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky" and "The child is father to the man" evidently originated in her diary.) I knew I would have to come back to Elsmere some day for an extended stay, to write, and not to write prose.
I haven"t made it back yet, but the idea was planted firmly and grew into a mild obsession: What are you missing by not writing poetry? It"s true that the pay is negligible and the audience is small-hut why did you start writing in the first place?
And isn"t your primary audience yourself? So I started spending a couple of days a month writing poetry and verse.
The following three pieces are story poems-two rather serious and one just plain goofy-and their stories are science fiction, so I feel justified in including them here.
THE BIG BANG THEORY EXPLAINED.
(IN LIGHT VERSE).
Premise the First: Immortality-or even greatly prolonged life-would be no blessing. You were born with all the brain cells you"ll ever have, and you lose a certain number of them every year, because of background radiation. Live long enough and you"ll have the intelligence of a bright cabbage.
Premise the Second: If you have enough money it will take care of itself.
"Wake me when the Dow-Jones. .h.i.ts a million," he said, And took a few grams of Sweet Dreams Hydrochloride, Closed his eyes, lay back, rested his head, And while diverted by raunchy fantasy, died.
The friendly machines, they opened his veins: Sucked out the blood from flesh and from bone; Replaced it with stable polymer chains, Then froze his wealthy a.s.s into stone.
He owned a salt mine, miles deep but cool.
His gold coffin rested there, blissly serene, Facing millenniums, immersed in a pool Of nitrogen, tended by friendly machines.
To backtrack: This wasn"t a thing that our hero did lightly, Nor fearing death: he"d died twice before These past two centuries, and found it just slightly Boring, lying in wait for his cash to restore Some old failed organ-beef up his muscles-brighten his blood ...
Come out of his coffin a centuries-old stud.
But there was a limit. Because the brain Cannot be replaced-yet it slowly decays a.s.saulted in silence by treacherous rays Of the alpha, beta, and gamma persuasion, Destroying your brain by ablation.
You can lock yourself up in a box made of lead, And be safe from the fallout and all cosmic ray- But no such protection will save your poor head, For the elements comprising your body betray You with unstable isotopes that leak radiation, Subjecting your neurons to steady predation.
Our hero knew this, and it made him quite mad To know that by quantum-mechanical fiat His ultimate fate was both sordid and sad: The world"s first immortal blithering idiot.
But over the centuries our hero"d evolved A method for dealing with logical goblins: "Deluge it with money until it gets solved!"
It had cracked the world"s most intractable problems.
It worked: they invented a magical box Where he sat all day long, for dozens of years, Cleansing his body of isotope pox By exchanging atoms with poor volunteers.
He finally was clean! No Geiger could count The tiniest click from his corpus pristine.
His eye on the future, he gleefully mount- Ed his coffin-c.u.m-time-s.p.a.ce-and-money machine.
To backtrack again: By creating a fortune so diverse and broad, He"d created something resembling life: It would feed and excrete; be active and nod, And when confronted with problems or strife Could act on its own, without consultation Of the genius financial who"d sparked its creation.
Which suited him fine. He wanted to, know Whether this creature of dollars and francs, Without him, would simply continue to grow Sucking up offices, factories, and banks, Expanding its own ecological niche- Quietly making him rich.
And it did-beyond his most fabulous dreams!
Not being omniscient, though, he couldn"t know He"d own the whole planet with his little scheme And still have a hundred centuries to go.
It followed humanity out into s.p.a.ce; Annexing whole planets, and systems, and more, Till it finally ran into a greedier race And plunged the whole Galaxy into a war.
It won, though it took it some eight thousand years, In which time humanity changed for the worse.
They stopped using money, stopped having careers- They thought owning things was perverse!
The friendly machines that our hero"d entrusted With all of his wealth had long ago rusted.
But their n-times-great-grandchildren covered the planet, Waiting to wake up the man who once ran it.
But they spent a few centuries converting those dollars To things of real worth, according to scholars: A Galaxy"s worth of compa.s.sion and pain; Quintillions of lives to maintain.
And so in a salt mine in Texas, in autumn, They opened his casket, injected, and thawed "im.
He looked in the eyes of metallic envoys And asked, "What the h.e.l.l is that noise?"
Sparrows falling.
What?
They drop like flies. You have to keep track of every one.
Hey. I"m just a banker.
So was I. Now you"ve got one nanosecond to count each hair on everybody"s head.
Everybody?
I didn"t make up the rules.
(sighs) I can count pretty fast, it seems. But they grow faster. It"s your baby now.
What"s going on here? What went wrong?
Nothing. It all went according to plan. I"ve been in charge of this circus for four and a half billion years. It"s all yours now.
What? All mine?
Somebody has to do it.
But I"m just a banker!
Tell it to the Judge. Look. I evolved you from a fish. Gave you opposable thumbs and supply-side economics. Set you up, I admit it. You"ll excuse me? I"m going to get some sleep now.
Hold it! What about these G.o.dd.a.m.ned sparrows?
They do make a racket. Do whatever you want.
What do you mean?
Hey! Come back!
Aw h.e.l.l. Might as well start over.
THE GIFT.
Feel behind the ear, the small hole (left for women, right for men). Now insert the wire until a cold sensation comes beneath the eye. See how twirling the wire makes you smile?
When it feels like sunshine on your face, raise your hand. In a little while a friend will come to calibrate. Solace will be yours another year. Just turn the wire until it feels like sun; that"s good. Another year of trust.
No fear. Loving peace for everyone.
I take the wire and bend it till it breaks!
They can"t do this! Can"t you see it makes us into simple blobs of happy clay?
Most of us can think back to a day when living wasn"t easy. There was pain and trouble in the world-but then again, at least it all was real. What they destroy is not just pain, but love, and awe, and joy.
One unit fails to comprehend this can"t be done unless it"s done for all.
His childish need for pain could end this heaven that we"ve made for you. You called for us in desperate need. You prayed that somehow we could save you from your fate.
An so we came in answer. But we said you"d have to change your nature. It"s too late to turn you into angels. Now the best that we can do is try to make you harmless. Don"t ask how.
Trust in us. We do it for your sake.
So long as one man lives who won"t submit, then all your words and wires won"t work. That"s it.
Right? For all your talk, you just want slaves.
I can"t believe that no one else is brave enough to break the wire and take the world as it was given us-a clashing whirl of good and bad in nearly equal parts.
Not turned to harmless pap by your black arts.
We will not argue. But we care how this experiment turns out. Let"s try a kind of vote. If there is only on in ten who"ll take your side then we will go. And take along these wires and words you think will make you slaves.
Ready? Counting. Sorry. Wrong. We counted every one and found that they"ve decided we were right. You"re wrong.
So you must go. Take your broken wire and twisted heart. Your pagan song: Your empty merely human angry fire.
Done. Now you are at peace. Not slaves.
We ask for nothing. If you just don"t pull the wires, your world"s forever saved.
Forever happy. If a little dull.
SAUL"S DEATH.
I used to be a monk, but gave it over Before books and prayer and studies cooled my blood, And joined with Richard as a mercenary soldier.
(No Richard that you"ve heard of, just A man who"d bought a t.i.tle for his name.) And it was in his service I met Saul.
The first day of my service I liked Saul; His easy humor quickly won me over.
He confided Saul was not his name; He"d taken up another name for blood.
(So had I-my fighting name was just A word we use at home for private soldier.) I felt at home as mercenary soldier I liked the company of men like Saul.