Dreamsongs. Volume I Read online

  And all the people cheered and cheered.

  A FEW HUNDRED MILES AWAY, MAXIM DE LAURIER SAT IN A HOTEL room and watched, his face a milk-white mask. “No,” he whispered, choking on the words. “Not this. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s wrong, all wrong.”

  And he buried his head in his hands, and sobbed, “My God, my God, what have I done?” And then he was still and silent for a long time. When he rose at last his face was still pale and twisted, but a single dying ember burned still in the ashes of his eyes. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I can still—”

  And he sat down to oil his gun.

  TWO

  THE FILTHY PRO

  YOU NEVER FORGET THE FIRST TIME YOU DO IT FOR MONEY.

  I became a filthy pro in 1970, during the summer between my senior and graduate years at Northwestern University. The story that turned the trick for me was “The Hero,” which I’d originally written for creative writing my junior year, and had been trying to sell ever since. Playboy had seen it first, and returned it with a form rejection slip. Analog sent it back with a pithy letter of rejection from John W. Campbell, Jr., the first, last, and only time I got a personal response from that legendary editor. After that “The Hero” went to Fred Pohl at Galaxy…

  …where it vanished.

  It was a year before I realized that Pohl was no longer the editor at Galaxy, that the magazine had changed both publisher and address. When I did, I retyped the story from my carbon—yes, I had finally started to use the stuff, hurrah—and sent it out to Galaxy’s new editor, Ejler Jakobsson, at Galaxy’s new address…

  …where it vanished again!

  Meanwhile, I had celebrated my graduation from Northwestern, though I still had a year of post-graduate study looming ahead of me. Medill offered a five-year program in journalism; at the end of the fourth year you received a Bachelor’s degree, but you were encouraged to return for the fifth year, which included a quarter’s internship doing political reporting in Washington, D.C. At the end of the fifth year, you received a Master’s.

  After graduation I returned to Bayonne, and my summer job as a sportswriter/public relations man for the Department of Parks and Recreation. The city sponsored several summer baseball leagues, and my job was to write up the games for the local papers, the Bayonne Times and Jersey Journal. There were half a dozen leagues, for different age groups, with several games going on every day at different fields around the city, so there was no way for me to actually cover the action. Instead I spent my days in the office, and after every game the umps would bring me a box score. I’d use those as the basis for my stories. So I spent four summers working as a baseball writer, and never saw a game.

  By that August, “The Hero” had been at Galaxy for a year. I decided, instead of writing a query letter, to phone the magazine’s offices in New York City and inquire about my lost story. The woman who answered was brusque and unfriendly at first, and when I mumbled something about inquiring after a manuscript that had been there for a long time, she told me Galaxy could not possibly keep track of all the stories it rejected. I might have given up right there, but somehow I managed to blurt out the title of the story.

  There was a pregnant pause. “Wait a minute,” the woman said. “We bought that story.” (Years later, I discovered that the woman I was speaking to was Judy-Lynn Benjamin, later Judy-Lynn del Rey, who went on to found the Del Rey imprint for Ballatine Books). The story had been purchased months ago, she told me, but somehow the manuscript and purchase order had fallen behind a filing cabinet, and had only recently turned up again. (In some alternate universe, no one ever looked behind those files, and I’m a journalist today.)

  I hung up the phone with a dazed look on my face, before heading off to my summer job. I must have floated, since I was far too high for my feet to touch the ground. Afterward, when neither contract nor check appeared, I began to wonder if the woman on the phone had misremembered. Perhaps there was some other story called “The Hero.” I developed a paranoid fear that Galaxy might go out of business before publishing my story, a fear that was inflamed when summer ended and I headed back to Chicago, still without a check.

  It turned out that Galaxy had mailed the check and contract to the North Shore Hotel, the dorm I had vacated on graduating Northwestern that June. By the time it was finally forwarded to my summer address, I was back at school, but in a different dorm.

  There was a check, though, and I did get my hands on it at last. It proved to be for $94, not an inconsiderable sum of money in 1970. “The Hero” appeared in the February 1971 issue of Galaxy, in the winter of my graduate year at Medill. Since I did not own a car, I made one of my friends drive me around to half the newsstands on the north shore, so I could buy up all the copies I could find.

  Meanwhile, my college years were winding down. I breezed through the first two quarters of my graduate year in Evanston, then packed my bags for Washington and my internship on Capitol Hill. In a few months my real life would begin. I had been doing interviews and sending out job applications, and was looking forward to sorting through all the offers and deciding which of them I’d take. After all, I had graduated magna cum laude from the finest journalism school in the country, and would soon have a Master’s degree and a prestigious internership under my belt as well. I had lost a lot of weight my graduate year and bought new clothes to suit, so I arrived in D.C. the very picture of a hippie journalist, with my shoulder-length hair, bell bottoms, aviator glasses, and double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket.

  My internship was demanding, but exciting. The nation was in turmoil in the spring of 1971, and I was at the center of it all, walking the corridors of power, reporting on congressmen and senators, sitting in the Senate press gallery with real reporters. The Medill News Service had client newspapers all over the country, so a number of my stories actually saw print. The program was run by Neil McNeil, a hardnosed political reporter of the green-eyeshade school who would sit in his cubicle reading your copy, and roar your name whenever he came on something he didn’t like. My own name was roared frequently. “Too cute,” McNeil would scrawl atop my stories, and I’d have to rewrite them and take out everything but the facts before he’d pass them on. I hated it, but I learned a lot.

  It was also in Washington that I attended my first actual science fiction convention, almost seven years after that first comicon. When I walked into the Sheraton Park Hotel in my burgundy bell bottoms and double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket, the fellow behind the registration table was this bone-thin hippie writer, with a scraggy beard and long orange hair. He recognized my name [no one forgets the R.R.] and told me that he was Galaxy’s slush reader, the very fellow who’d fished “The Hero” out of the slush pile and pushed it on Ejler Jakobsson. So I suppose Gardner Dozois made me a pro and a fan both (though I have since wondered whether he was actually working on registration, or whether he just saw the table unattended and realized that if he sat there people would hand him money. Reading slush for Galaxy didn’t pay much, after all).

  By that time I had a second sale under my belt. Just a few weeks before, Ted White, the new editor at Amazing and Fantastic, had informed me that he was buying “The Exit to San Breta,” a futuristic fantasy that I’d written during the spring break of my senior year of college. (Yes, sad to say, when all my friends were down in Florida drinking beer with bikini-clad coeds on the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale, I was back in Bayonne, writing.) The story of my second sale was eerily similar to that of my first. Relying on the listings in Writer’s Market, I’d sent the story off to Harry Harrison at the address given for Fantastic, never to see it again. Only later did I learn that both the editor and address had changed, requiring me to retype the manuscript all over again and, well…I was starting to wonder if having your story lost in the mail was somehow a necessary prerequisite to selling it.

  Galaxy had paid me my $94 on acceptance for “The Hero,” but Fantastic paid on publication, so I would not a
ctually see the money for “The Exit to San Breta” until October. And when the check did come, it was only for $50. A sale is a sale, however, and your second time is almost as exciting as your first, in writing as in sex. One sale might be a fluke, but two sales to two different editors suggested that maybe I had some talent after all.

  “The Exit to San Breta” was set in the Southwest, where I live at present, but at the time I wrote it I had never been west of Chicago. The story is all about driving and takes place entirely on highways, but at the time I wrote it I had never been behind the wheel of an automobile. (Our family never owned a car.) Despite its futuristic setting, “Exit” is a fantasy, which is why it appeared in Fantastic and not Amazing, and why I had not even bothered to send it to Analog or Galaxy. Inspired by example of Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost,” I wanted to take the ghost out of his mouldering old Victorian mansion and put him where a proper twentieth century ghost belonged…in a car.

  Though the most horrible thing that happens in it is an auto accident, “The Exit to San Breta” might even be classified as a horror story. If so, my first two sales prefigured my entire career to come, by including all three of the genres I would write in.

  Gardner Dozois was not the only writer at that Disclave. I met Joe Haldeman and his brother Jack as well, and George Alec Effinger (still called Piglet at that time), Ted White, Bob Toomey. All of them were talking about stories they were writing, stories they had written, stories that they meant to write. Terry Carr was the Guest of Honor; a fine writer himself, Carr was also the editor of Ace Specials and the original anthology Universe, and went out of his way to be friendly and helpful to all the young writers swarming about him, including me. No convention ever had a warmer or more accessible guest.

  I left Disclave resolved to attend more science fiction conventions…and to sell more stories. Before I could do that, of course, I would need to write more stories. Talking with Gardner and Piglet and the Haldemans had made me realize how little I had actually produced, compared to any of them. If I was serious about wanting to be a writer, I would need to finish more stories.

  Of course, that was the summer when my real life was supposed to begin. I would soon be moving somewhere, working at my first real job, living in an apartment of my own. For months I had been dreaming of paychecks, cars, and girlfriends, and wondering where life would take me. Would I have time to write fiction? That was hard to say.

  Well, life took me back to my old room in Bayonne. Despite all those interviews, letters, and applications, despite my degree and my internship and magna cum laude, I had no job.

  It did look for a while as if I were going to get an offer from a newspaper in Boca Raton, Florida, and another from Women’s Wear Daily, but in the end neither place came through. I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have worn the double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket to that follow-up interview. Even Marvel Comics turned me down, as seemingly unimpressed by my Master’s as they were by my old Alley Award.

  I did get an offer of sorts from my hometown paper, the Bayonne Times, but it was withdrawn when I asked about salary and benefits. “A beginner should get a job and experience,” the editor scolded me. “That should have been your first consideration.” (I got my revenge. The Bayonne Times ceased publishing that very summer, and both the editor and the guy he hired in place of me found themselves out of work. If I had taken the job, my “experience” would have lasted all of two weeks.)

  Far from starting my real life in some exotic new city, with a salary and an apartment of my own, I found myself covering summer baseball for the Bayonne Department of Parks and Recreation once more. As if that were not wound enough, the Department of Parks had some nice salt to rub in. Because of budget cuts, they could only afford to hire me half-time. However, there were just as many games to write up as last summer, so I would be expected to do the same amount of work in half the time for half the pay.

  There were black days that summer when I felt as if my five years of college had been a total waste, that I would be forever trapped in Bayonne and might end up running the Tubs o’ Fun again at Uncle Milty’s down on 1st Street, as I had my first summer out of high school. Vietnam also loomed. My number had come up in the draft lottery, and by losing all that weight over the past year I had also managed to lose my 4-F exemption. I was opposed to the war in Vietnam, and had applied for conscientious objector status with my local draft board, but everyone told me that my chances of receiving it were small to none. More likely, I’d be drafted. I might only have a month or two of civilian life remaining.

  I had that much, however…and since I only had a part-time job, I had half of every day as well. I decided to use that time for writing fiction, as I’d resolved to do at Disclave. To work at it every day, and see how much I could produce before Uncle Sam called me up. My Parks Department job began in the afternoon, so the mornings became my time to write. Every day after breakfast I would drag out my Smith-Corona portable electric, set it up on my mother’s kitchen table, plug it in, flick on the switch that made it hummmmm, and set to writing. Nor would I allow myself to put a story aside until I’d finished it. I wanted finished stories I could sell, not fragments and half-developed notions.

  That summer I finished a story every two weeks, on the average. I wrote “Night Shift” and “Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels.” I wrote “The Last Super Bowl,” though my title was “The Final Touchdown Drive.” I wrote “A Peripheral Affair” and “Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg,” both of them intended as the first story of a series. And I wrote “With Morning Comes Mistfall” and “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” which follow. Seven stories, all in all. Maybe it was the spectre of Vietnam that goaded me, or my accumulated frustration at having neither a job, a girl, nor a life. (“Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg,” though perhaps the weakest story I produced that summer, reflects my state of mind most clearly. For “New Pittsburg,” read “Bayonne.” For “corpse,” read me.)

  Whatever the cause, the words came pouring out of me as they never had before. Ultimately, all seven of the stories that I wrote that summer would go on to sell, though for some it would require four or five years and a score of rejections. Two of the seven, however, proved to be important milestones in my career, and those are the two that I’ve included here.

  They were the two best. I knew that when I wrote them, and said as much in the letters I sent to Howard Waldrop that summer. “With Morning Comes Mistfall” was the finest thing that I had ever written, ever… until I wrote “The Second Kind of Loneliness” a few weeks later. “Mistfall” seemed to me to be the more polished of the two, a wistful mood piece with little in the way of traditional “action,” yet evocative and, I hoped, effective. “Loneliness,” on the other hand, was an open wound of a story, painful to write, painful to read. It represented a real breakthrough for my writing. My earlier stories had come wholly from the head, but this one came from the heart and the balls as well. It was the first story I ever wrote that truly left me feeling vulnerable, the first story that ever made me ask myself, “Do I really want to let people read this?”

  “The Second Kind of Loneliness” and “With Morning Comes Mistfall” were the stories that would make or break my career, I was convinced. For the next half-year, break looked more likely than make. Neither story sold its first time out. Or its second. Or its third. My other “summer stories” were getting bounced around as well, but it was the rejections for “Mistfall” and “Loneliness” that hurt the most. These were strong stories, I was convinced, the best work that I was capable of. If the editors did not want them, maybe I did not understand what makes a good story after all…or maybe my best work was just not good enough. It was a dark day each time one of these two came straggling home, and a dark night of doubt that followed.

  But in the end my faith was vindicated. Both stories sold, and when they did it was to Analog, which boasted the highest circulation and best rates of any magazine in the field. John W. Campbell, Jr., had d
ied that spring, and after a hiatus of several months Ben Bova had been named to take his place as editor of SF’s most respected magazine. Campbell would never have touched either of these stories, I am convinced, but Bova intended to take Analog in new directions. He bought them both, after some minor rewrites.

  “The Second Kind of Loneliness” appeared first, as the cover story of the December 1972 issue. Frank Kelly Freas did the cover, a gorgeous depiction of my protagonist floating above the whorl of the nullspace vortex. (It was my first cover and I wanted to buy the painting. Freas offered it to me for $200…but I had only received $250 for the story, so I flinched, and bought the two-page interior spread and a cover rough instead. They’re both swell, but I wish that I’d gone ahead and bought the painting. The last time I inquired, its current owner was willing to sell for $20,000.)

  “With Morning Comes Mistfall” followed “Loneliness” into print, in the issue for May 1973. Two stories appearing in the field’s top magazine so close together attracted attention, and “Mistfall” was nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, the first of my works to contend for either honor. It lost the Nebula to James Tiptree’s “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death,” and the Hugo to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” but I received a handsome certificate suitable for framing and Gardner Dozois inducted me into the Hugo-and-Nebula Losers Club, chanting “One of us, one of us, one of us.” I can’t complain.

  That summer of 1971 proved to be a turning point in my life. If I had been able to find an entry-level job in journalism, I might very well have taken the road more traveled by, the one that came with a salary and health insurance. I suspect I would have continued to write the occasional short story, but with a full-time job to fill my days they would have been few and far between. Today I might be a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, an entertainment reporter for Variety, a columnist appearing daily in three hundred newspapers coast to coast…or more likely, a sour, disgruntled rewrite man on the Jersey Journal.