Alternate Gerrolds Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  ALSO BY DAVID GERROLD

  Title Page

  Dedication

  10 REASONS WHY I HATE DAVID GERROLD

  SKIP THIS PART

  Bauble

  The Impeachment of Adlai Stevenson

  The Kennedy Enterprise

  The Firebringers

  Franz Kafka, Superhero!

  Rex

  ... And Eight Rabid Pigs

  The Ghost of Christmas Sideways

  A Wish For Smish

  What Goes Around

  The Fan Who Molded Himself

  The Feathered Mastodon

  The Seminar From Hell

  The Spell

  PART ONE:

  PART TWO:

  PART THREE:

  PART FOUR:

  EPILOGUE:

  AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD:

  Digging In Gehenna

  Riding Janis

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR DAVID GERROLD

  “Gerrold has a remarkable gift for storytelling.”

  —LAMBDA BOOK REPORT

  “A first-rate writer”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “David Gerrold is one of the most original thinkers and

  fluent writers in contemporary science fiction.”

  —BEN BOVA

  “Whether you like science fiction or not, you will find his

  keen intelligence, profound empathy and world-class wit

  hard to resist, difficult to put down and impossible to forget.”

  —SPIDER ROBINSON, author of The Crazy Years

  ALSO BY DAVID GERROLD

  The Man Who Folded Himself

  The Martian Child

  The Flying Sorcerers*

  When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One

  Space Skimmer

  Moonstar Odyssey

  Deathbeast

  Chess With A Dragon

  Tales of the Star Wolf Series

  Yesterday’s Children

  The Voyage of the Star Wolf

  The Middle of Nowhere

  Blood and Fire

  The War Against the Chtorr Series

  A Matter For Men

  A Day For Damnation

  A Rage For Revenge

  A Season For Slaughter

  The Dingillad Trilogy

  Jumping Off the Planet

  Bouncing Off the Moon

  Leaping To the Stars

  *with Larry Niven

  for Mike Resnick,

  with gratitude and love

  by Mike Resnick

  10 REASONS WHY I HATE DAVID GERROLD

  1. While still in his early twenties, David wrote “The Trouble with Tribbles,” which was voted the most popular Star Trek script of all time. If it wasn’t for David, there would probably be a million less Trekkies in the world. If there is a better reason to lynch him, I can’t think of it.

  2. It was David who, with Anne McCaffery, cornered me at the 1969 worldcon in St. Louis and wouldn’t let me go until I joined SFWA. There is no question in my mind that I would have won at least a Pulitzer by now, and probably a Nobel, if I hadn’t spent so much time working on SFWA committees. (David himself dropped his membership in SFWA for almost a decade while turning out one bestseller after another, the swine.)

  3. David wrote When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One back in 1971. It really should have won the Hugo, but more to the point, it practically destroyed the field when one inept imitator after another tried to match David’s sure hand dealing with cybernetic self-awareness.

  4. David and I judged the 1978 worldcon masquerade in Phoenix, which that summer resembled the anteroom to hell. The only air-conditioned room in the city was the judges’ deliberation room, and David therefore called for three separate run-throughs and eliminations, just so the judges could keep returning to air-conditioned comfort. Of course, I was the one who was blamed for it.

  5. David wrote The Man Who Folded Himself, a work of sheer brilliance that made all future time paradox novels redundant, just before I sat down to write mine, which would certainly have done the same thing even better.

  6. David got the notion of charging a dollar apiece for his autographs at conventions, when the rest of us were doing it for free. Just about the time I was feeling morally superior to him, it was revealed that all the money he collected for those autographs went to charity. You can’t imagine how much I hate it when someone makes me feel like a moral midget. Especially someone like (ugh) David.

  7. David began writing the War Against The Chtorr series, hitting the bestseller list with each of them. To add insult to injury, he came up with the plan of taking money to put fans into the books and having them die in horrible ways—and, of course, the money went to charity. This made it impossible for entrepreneurs like me to charge fans for killing them in gruesome ways while keeping the money. One more black mark against him.

  8. Because I am nothing if not generous and magnanimous, I decided to invite David to write for one of my anthologies. It was to be a one-time thing, just to prove to the world what I nice guy I am. And that blackguard screwed up the works again, by writing such a brilliant and well-received story that I had no choice but to commission thirteen more for my next thirteen anthologies. You’ve no idea of the psychic pain I endure each time a Gerrold story comes in that is too good to reject.

  9. David is both thinner and hairier than I am. Neither will ever be forgiven.

  10. I am a professional writer. It is the only thing people pay me to do. And yet, just because my anthologies have made David a household name (so is “cockroach,” but let it pass), here I am writing about him for free. The only consolation I take is that he is so universally loathed—except by 20,000 fans and three million Trekkies, all of whom want to have his baby—that no other pro would write about him, even for money. So there.

  Mike Resnick is the Hugo-winning author of Santiago, Ivory, Lucifer Jones, the Kirinyaga stories and about 200 other pieces of fiction that David Gerrold would have given his eyeteeth to have written.

  by David Gerrold

  SKIP THIS PART

  NO, REALLY. I mean it. Skip this part.

  You don’t have to read this page. I have nothing important to say.

  I’m only going to explain how these stories were all commissioned for Mike Resnick’s silly anthologies, and I only wrote them because the anthologies were assigned to Resnick as his work therapy from the outpatient clinic, and a lot of us in the science fiction community generously dashed off little quickie throwaway pieces so Resnick could pretend he was an editor again and start to rebuild his fragile self-esteem. (I won’t go into all the details, but the breakdown was really tragic and unnecessary, especially since all the members of the girl scout troop magnanimously agreed to drop the charges if he’d go into therapy and move out of the state. As he was already out of the state, whereabouts unknown even to the FBI, he was halfway in compliance, and then when the videotapes were all destroyed in a fire of suspicious origin, the Grand Jury refused to return any indictments, so he was free of the criminal complaints as well as the civil ones, but the stress on his family was significant, and well—never mind. I don’t want to violate Resnick’s confidentiality. He used to be almost a nice guy, before the unmentionable situation got out of hand, and for a while there it was really messy, okay? Do you need to know any more? No, of course not. But you keep reading anyway, probably in the morbid hope that I’ll mention something about how he got that unusual scar, and why he was caught climbing the trellis at the Richard Nixon library in San Clemente and who the umbrella man really was, right? Did it ever occur to you that none of that is any of your business? For God’s sake, already, leave the poor guy alone! He’s earned his privacy. Paparazzi and vultures, all of you!)

  The point is, that you really shouldn’t be wasting your time reading any of this. You can turn the page now and go on to the stories, which are far more worthwhile than plowing through another three or four pages of self-serving treacle by an author who doesn’t like writing introductions and forewords, and doesn’t care if you read this one or not. We just need a bunch of words to fill up the page so that it looks like there’s a real foreword in the book. So, you can stop reading, right here. Right now. Stop. (Dave, stop. I can feel it, Dave. Stop.)

  You’re not going to stop, are you?

  Nothing I say here is going to stop you from continuing ruthlessly on to the end of the essay. You like standing around and watching people clean up after automobile accidents too, right? You’re one of those people who slows down on the freeway after an accident to gawk at ambulances and fire engines and smashed fenders. What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen an accident before? Haven’t you ever realized that you’re causing traffic to back up for three miles behind you? All those cars sitting there, idling, their engines burning up irreplaceable megagallons of precious petro-chemicals, pouring hundreds of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere, hastening the ecological death of the planet, all because you cannot control your obsessive-compulsive behavior to know every last detail, every little jot and tittle of disaster that passes helplessly before your attention, even when you are the disaster!

  Well, I for one am not going to be a party to this any longer. I am not going to be an enabler for your bad habits.

  Here’s all I have to say. I wrote these stories. I wrote them (most of them anyway) for some anthologies edited by Mike Resnick. And no, I am not ashamed of it. So there.

  And now, whether you want to or n
ot, you will stop reading this.

  Why?

  Because I say so.

  David Gerrold

  Resnick called. He said he needed a short story. He described it to me and I felt the mood more than the events. I sat, I typed, I discovered what the story was by writing it.

  Bauble

  AT FIRST, I thought her hair was on fire.

  The light danced around her face in orange waves. Red and yellow highlights sparked and flashed. Biogenetic cellular-holography. She was a walking celebration.

  I stopped what I was doing, which was easy, because I wasn’t doing anything. I was sitting and listening to myself die. I opened my mouth, realized I didn’t know what to say, closed it again and waited.

  “May I come in?”

  “You’re already in.”

  The door slid shut behind her.

  She wore an oil-slick daycoat. It parted for an instant and my heart stopped. Naked shimmersilk. Sprayed on. She did it deliberately. I was doomed and we both knew it.

  “May I sit down?”

  There were only two chairs in the room. There was no other furniture. I didn’t need furniture. Furniture is for resisting gravity. I’ve never had a problem with gravity. Levity, maybe. Gravity, never.

  I waved a hand toward the other chair, a barely perceptible gesture. She poured herself into it. I envied the chair.

  I cleared my throat, tried to clear my mind, and asked, “What is it you want?”

  “I was told you might be able to help me.” Her voice had the same smoky rasp as a glass of hundred-year-old bourbon. You could die in it. “I’m looking for a bauble.”

  I coughed mechanically. Another part of me slipped and died. Somehow, I got the words out. “I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed. I deal in trade goods.”

  Translation: when there’s nothing else, I fence.

  I was fencing now. We were both fencing. A different sense of the word. She was winning. I was dying. Faster than ever.

  “It’s very important to me,” she insisted. “It’s worthless to anybody else, but it’s very important to me. It’s a necklace.” The violet huskiness in her voice was so rough you could climb it.

  “I’d like to help you, but—” A lie. I wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Parts of me were trying to respond. No. Not right. Parts of me were demanding that other parts respond. Parts that no longer existed. Or operated. Or cared. “—I’m not what you think I am.”

  “I know what you are,” she said, all honeysuckle and razors. She stopped. She studied me for a moment. Her eyes changed. She knew she didn’t have to pretend with me.

  She pulled a silver cigarette case from her pocket. I watched as she opened it, a graceful unfolding gesture. Her fingers danced a little ballet, selected a cigarette and lifted it to her molten lips. Her nails gleamed like ice.

  She waited. I made no move to light it. She lifted an eyebrow at me.

  “No, I don’t mind if you smoke,” I said, pretending to misunderstand. Discourteous, perhaps, but energy conservation ranks higher than courtesy to a dying thing.

  Over the dancing flame, she said, “I was told that you sometimes manage private investigations. This necklace was taken from me. I need it back. I’ve followed it across five worlds. I’ll do anything to get it back.” The emphasis was heart-stopping. “You understand me, don’t you?”

  She was a fantasy of pink and gold magic, and she had eyes as green as ocean dreams. I understood. But it was empty understanding. Too late.

  Without breaking the connection from her eyes to mine, I shook my head slowly.

  She inhaled, held it, closed her eyes, opened them, exhaled, glanced sideways over at me. “Does the name Kilrenko mean anything to you?”

  I looked at my fingernails. They needed cleaning. I looked at her fingernails. They were made of diamond. They glittered. They were silver knives. I thought of the scratches those nails could leave on a man’s back and decided I was safer thinking about anything else. Almost anything else.

  “Never heard it before,” I said. She didn’t believe me either.

  I knew who she was. I couldn’t not know. There were only a few of them. And they were all famous. She was one of the ones they called the Alluras. They said the Alluras were the most beautiful. I believed it.

  A hundred years ago, I sold off the last part of my humanity. For the first time, I was beginning to regret it. I could almost remember what I lost, what it felt like. I could almost wish for it again.

  “When I was a little boy—” she began. “Yes,” she said, to my look. “They start with boys. There are good reasons for it. And no—” she said, to my unasked question, “I’ve never once stopped to wonder if I’ve missed anything.”

  That was the difference between us. Light years.

  She shrugged out of her coat. I watched in fascination. It slid off her shoulders and carelessly down her sides. She juggled the cigarette from one hand to the other. It was a performance for an audience of one.

  Too bad it was wasted.

  Maybe not.

  She wasn’t stupid. She knew. And she knew that I knew too.

  “When I was a boy,” she began again, comfortable now, “they told me that one of the reasons I was selected was because of my persistence. My refusal to quit. That’s part of the transformation process. So much of it is beyond your imagination.” Another languorous puff on her cigarette. Tongue against teeth. Lips pursing in a seductive promise. The cigarette moaned and died happy. “Yes, I’m completely female now. In fact, I’m more female than if I had been genetically designed and born female. But getting here requires persistence. I have persistence. Do you understand what I’m saying? I want that necklace. Whoever has it. Wherever it is. No questions asked. I’m going to have it back.”

  “What makes it so valuable?” I asked. My throat was dry.

  “That’s not your concern.”

  “It is if you want my help.”

  Silence. She considered my words. “I couldn’t even begin to explain it,” she said.

  “Try me.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “All right. It looks like a simple strand of silver beads. Nothing really extraordinary about it at all. If you didn’t know what it was, you’d assume it was just a trinket. Polished volcanic rock.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She dropped her cigarette to the floor. She placed the toe of one bare foot on it and scuffed it out in one swift, violent movement. She brought her eyes back to mine. They had changed color. They were black, with little glimmers of crimson at the back of them. “It’s me,” she admitted. “It’s the part of me that doesn’t walk around.”

  “Memory beads?” I asked.

  “Of a sort.” She conceded. “Memory, yes. Processing too. And ... more.”

  “It’s an identity platform, right?”

  “You’ve seen it.” A statement, not a question.

  I shrugged. “I might have heard about it. “

  “Without it,” she said, and her voice took on a terrifying quality, “I’m dead. The body walks around, but the soul—the soul is in the necklace.” She looked at me perceptively. She stood up and turned around. Slowly. If the shimmersilk could hug her any closer, it would be behind her.

  “Look at me,” she whispered. “Do you think it’s right that a body like this should be walking around without a soul?”

  Long pause. “You play dirty, lady.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “I’m dying,” I said.

  “I knew that before I walked in.”

  I tapped the chair arm. My fingers clicked like granite. “I began two centuries ago,” I said. “I’m wearing out. I’m running on empty. Do you know that term. It’s an anachronism now. It means there’s nothing left. It means that I’m running on my own momentum.”