In the Deadlands Read online

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  In the Deadlands

  Stories

  David Gerrold

  BenBella Books, Inc.

  Dallas, Texas

  Copyright © 2014 by David Gerrold

  “Foreword: The Inevitability of Envy” copyright © by Adam-Troy Castro

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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  Send feedback to [email protected]

  First e-book edition: January 2014

  ISBN 978-1-939529-5-03

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

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  Copyright Acknowledgments

  These stories, some in slightly or substantially different versions, have appeared in the following publications:

  “With a Finger in My I” was previously published in Again, Dangerous Vision, copyright © 1972 by Harlan Ellison; With a Finger in My I, copyright © 1972 by David Gerrold

  “All of Them Were Empty—” was previously published in With a Finger in My I, copyright © 1972 by David Gerrold

  “Oracle for a White Rabbit” was previously published in Galaxy Magazine, copyright © 1969 Universal Publishing & Distributing Corporation; With a Finger in My I, copyright © 1972 by David Gerrold.

  “Love Story in Three Acts” was previously published in Nova 1, copyright © 1970 by Harry Harrison; With a Finger in My I, copyright © 1972 by David Gerrold

  “Yarst!” was previously published in With a Finger in My I, copyright © 1972 by David Gerrold

  “Afternoon with a Dead Bus” was previously published in Protostars, copyright © 1971 by David Gerrold

  “An Infinity of Loving” was previously published in Ten Tomorrows, copyright © 1973 by Roger Elwood

  “Skinflowers” was previously published in The Berserkers, copyright © 1974 by David Gerrold

  “Battle Hum and the Boje” was previously published in With a Finger in My I, copyright © 1972 by David Gerrold.

  “How We Saved the Human Race” was previously published in With a Finger in My I, copyright © 1972 by David Gerrold.

  “This Crystal Castle” was previously published in With a Finger in My I, copyright © 1972 by David Gerrold.

  “In the Deadlands” was previously published in With a Finger in My I, copyright © 1972 by David Gerrold

  For Harlan and Susan Ellison,

  with love.

  Contents

  Foreword: The Inevitability of Envy

  Introduction

  With a Finger in My I

  All of Them Were Empty—

  Oracle for a White Rabbit

  Love Story in Three Acts

  Yarst!

  The Cure

  Afternoon with a Dead Bus

  An Infinity of Loving

  Skinflowers

  Battle Hum and the Boje

  How We Saved the Human Race

  This Crystal Castle

  In the Deadlands

  Foreword: The Inevitability of Envy

  There’s nothing I can tell you about how great David Gerrold is that he isn’t perfectly prepared to tell you himself.

  Wait.

  That came out wrong.

  That makes him sound like a conceited ass.

  It’s not what I meant.

  To be sure, anybody who knows David understands that this healthy self-confidence comes from a few decades of excelling at his craft, and over the years I have heard this fan or that fan— all belonging to that subset of the audience that enjoys creators being put on pedestals because it’s easier to fling mud at such a target—complain that the man thinks his shit doesn’t stink.

  This is a nonsensical charge in that he is perfectly aware that his waste products are equipped with an unpleasant odor; a primal bit of self-awareness that keeps him respectable on social occasions.

  David is fully aware that he is a good writer. He has to be. It is impossible for anybody in this profession get up in the morning and stare at a blank page, ready to create something from nothing, without a core of belief that once the task is done something will have been summoned that has never before in the history of humanity ever existed in this world. It is further an act of incredible self-confidence to embark upon this endeavor thinking it will be something worthy of occupying the imaginations of others. What those grousing fans really mean, in their bitching and moaning, is that David has the colossal bad taste to not cloak what he has in false modesty.

  Actual modesty, that he has. Get him started for thirty seconds and he will deny any characterization of himself as a great writer. (He is occasionally wrong about this, but we’re talking about his attitude, not any attempt to rack up literature points like the score of some video game.) He will bend your ear with a list of writers he will not grudgingly concede, but broadly proclaim, as his superiors.

  Case in point: I once exposed David to a particularly noxious fan who, sans any evidence but his own withered imagination, accused him of being jealous of another writer’s commercial success. David snapped back, direct quote: ”I am jealous of great writing. I am jealous of Ellison’s passion and eloquence. I am jealous of Spinrad’s passion and eloquence. I am jealous of Sturgeon’s way of making paragraphs sing. I am jealous of Pohl’s ability to write about almost anything. I am jealous of Clarke’s deceptively simple way of evoking the awe and wonder of the solar system. I am jealous of Heinlein’s easyreadability and the believability of his worlds. I am jealous of George R.R. Martin’s astonishingly large canvas, his skill with details, the vividness of his characterizations, and the way he continues to surprise. I’m jealous of John Varley’s amazing worldbuilding. I’m jealous of David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson and Harry Turtledove and Connie Willis and Ursula K. LeGuin. I’m jealous of Spider Robinson’s beautiful storytelling and the way he continually recognizes and acknowledges the better impulses in all of us. I’m jealous of Neil Gaiman’s skill with legends and comics. And I’m jealous of just about everything Terry Pratchett does. And more, so many more.Too many to list. I read their books and I’m inspired to reach for those same heights. So I’m glad I’m jealous of those authors. They make me
want to be a better writer so I can stand unashamedly in their ranks.”

  This is the way any writer not a total asshole thinks . . . because if a writer is any good, the stories that come from that talent’s head are manifestations of whatever makes that writer an individual human being. A self-aware writer, even one with a healthy ego like David’s, will read any terrific work by another and know, with a deep yawning sense of personal limit, “This could not have come out of me, not in a million years; I may be good, but I’m not the talent I’m looking at, not today; that’s the product of a completely different set of neurons entirely.”

  All of which I present to you at somewhat excessive length, because it’s the on-ramp to this epiphany:

  I envy David Gerrold’s talent with an intensity that makes my molars ache.

  This will no doubt make him feel older than Methuselah, because I’ve entered my late years myself, but those back teeth have been aching since Captain Kirk opened the wrong storage cabinet, since Harlie dabbled in poetry, since a guy folded himself, since Purple flew, since worms shouted Chtorr, and since the first novelette version of the Martian Child. I have envied his passion, his compassion, his skill with character, and his lack of tolerance for bullshit. If you promise not to tell him, I’ll even admit I envy some of his puns.

  This goes on with the contents of the collection before you today, only some of which were previously familiar to me.

  I envy the throwaway line in his introduction, “the kind of people whose faces were hurting from the inside.” Dang, I think. I know exactly what kind of expression he’s talking about; the ones who lips are not just pursed, but threatening to become an event horizon. I grin in total understanding, and move on.

  I envy him the early stories he’s not entirely proud of. For instance, I understand why he’s moved to apologize for the final line of ”Yarst!”, because it’s too easy to take as a cheap joke instead of the sneaky thesis he intended. And yet, it is still relevant, still a punch to the groin, even as the world still somehow manages to turn. There are a couple of other tales I won’t name here— you need not worry about identifying them, because he will— that show the excessive earnestness of a young writer trying too hard to achieve given effects, because the very worst I can possibly say about them is that they aim high, and, even amid the clunkiest moments, feature phrases and passages and entire movements of sheer, heart-stopping beauty. This is even true of the one story where I happen to agree with David’s negative appraisal of it; even that one contains jewels. (The temptation in saying so is, of course, to dissect them before your eyes, pointing out those highlights for you so they’re properly ruined by the time you encounter them yourselves, and if there is a Heaven I hereby earn at least an afternoon there by not indulging myself.)

  I envy the hell out of “Love Story in Three Acts,” a primal scene of a relationship gone stale that completely captures the phenomenon of passion turned cold, conversations gone forced, barbs flung more out of misguided self-protection than genuine malice.

  I envy the living bejeesus out of “Afternoon With A Dead Bus,” which takes the slightest of all possible jokes and maintains it for many pages of divine visual wit. (And, David, you are wrong: you don’t have to live in LA to get it.)

  I envy the Minneapolis out of “Skinflowers.” (Sorry. I had no further metaphors.)

  And then there’s “In the Deadlands.”

  Oh, boy.

  “In the Deadlands.”

  Wow.

  Breathless pause.

  All these years later, I owe David a sincere apology for that one.

  He will explain the precise circumstances in his introduction and afterward, but that particular tale was subjected to some priceless verbal abuse by an editor very talented at that art, who back then made sure we all knew what a turd David had managed to stuff into a manila envelope.

  It was hilarious. It really was. I laughed out loud when I first encountered those few paragraphs of eloquent contempt, and have vividly remembered them all these years, treasuring them the same way I treasure Mark Twain’s classic evisceration of Fenimore Cooper. They did not mar my appreciation of David’s work, but I always took the thrust of those grafs—that he’d dropped a big fat smelly one—for granted. (After all, as all writers can tell you: no matter how good we are . . . we all still occasionally do that.)

  I honestly did not know, until today, that “In the Deadlands” did eventually see print, that it was nominated for a major award, and that the mocking editor later repented his negative judgment.

  It’s a little masterpiece, that one: half-poem, half-story, all nightmare, unrelenting in its language and its imagery, refusing all explanation in its evocation of an apocalypse that defies rational explanation. Money quote: It’s Lovecraft if Lovecraft had written Haiku. It’ll never be dislodged from this head.

  Shit, do I envy that. And boy, do I envy you if you’re about to read it for the first time.

  One final, personal note.

  I have known David slightly for many years. We were friendly nodding acquaintances. I had the great pleasure of watching him float on air the night he won the Nebula for the novelette version of “The Martian Child,” and had the great pleasure of correcting him as he tried to talk himself back down to Earth afterward, by saying things like, “It’s only an award; it doesn’t mean anything.” (I am proud to say that I quietly told him, “Bullshit.”)

  Only recently in the scale of things have we, with the mysterious alchemy that occurs between human beings, moved on to a somewhat deeper friendship, and have I come to know him for his gentle humor, his commitment to the advancement of human rights, his ability to bury know-nothings in tidal waves of fact, his generosity, and his ferocious—I use the word quite precisely—ferocious love of his adopted son, Sean.

  I find that all of this is tinged with significant envy, as well.

  But, having said all that? Knowing David?

  I also envy me.

  —Adam-Troy Castro

  Introduction

  Picasso had his blue period; I had my bleak period.

  It was the late sixties and science fiction was having an identity crisis.

  Over here in this corner, we had the survivors of The Golden Age—hardy, grizzled, experienced, and legendary. In the opposite corner, the scrawny young challengers of The New Wave—nasty, ferocious, and capable of dazzling footwork. And in this corner … The Trekkies, having staggered into the ring, dazed and confused but wildly enthusiastic. Next corner over, The Feminists, determined to challenge the entrenched patriarchal consciousness of the genre. Also in the ring, The Hard Scientists, The Speculative Fictioneers, The Poetics, The Academics, The Literati, The Illiterati, The Writing Workshop Graduates, The Fabulists, The Wannabees, The Self-Appointed Gods Of Fandom, and The Upcoming Generation Of Authors Who Were Too Busy Writing To Worry About Their Identity Crisis.

  Which group was I in?

  All of them.

  I had grown up in The Golden Age, but I aspired to be as literate as the practitioners of The New Wave; I admired the social consciousness of The Feminists; I’d already proven myself a Trekkie; I was committed to the accuracy of Hard Science; I wanted to be Poetic and Literate and Fabulous; I wanted to survive the rigorous scrutiny of The Self-Appointed Gods. I wanted to write stories that recognized and included the best of all these subgenres, I wanted to achieve accuracy and literacy and insight and passion. I wanted character and style and vision—

  —but mostly I just wanted to write books and stories that would sell so I wouldn’t need a day job.

  For the record, the only groups I wasn’t in (and didn’t want to be in) were The Academics and The Writing Workshop Graduates, probably because of some inner conviction that science fiction did not belong in the classroom, but out in the streets, seducing innocent children into a lifetime of unconventional dreaming beyond the leftover boundaries of an obsolete era.

  There’s this about school—I discovered this the hard
way—it’s not about liberating you from your chains so you can fly; it’s about designing chains so comfortable you’ll never notice you’re wearing them.

  The period after you escape—and it took me six years to escape—is when you realize what pompous windbags some of your instructors were, not all of them, but even one is more than enough. It seems to be an academic hazard that your most critical class will be taught by a professor who bullies students, trampling enthusiasm and flattening dreams like an enraged rhinoceros in a candy store. You know the one, you had his class—he used his position of academic authority to beat you down instead of lifting you up.

  I had two of those instructors. That I succeeded in selling a script to a TV series even before graduation must have surprised them almost as much as it surprised me.

  The good news was that the script sale, and several subsequent sales to the same market, established me as a professional author.

  The bad news was that I still didn’t know diddly-squat how to write a saleable story. I had never cracked the market of the magazines. Not Galaxy, not The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—those were my two favorites—nor any of the others that established credibility in the genre. And I really wanted to earn the approval of Frederik Pohl and Ed Ferman. I felt only that would qualify me as a real science fiction writer.

  But let me backtrack a step.

  Here’s the other thing about school. If you want to have fun, study computer science, physics, engineering, animation, video, biology—anything, just so long as you stay away from the English department.

  If you want to immerse yourself in death and despair, unrequited love, painful odysseys of vengeance and doom, then study English literature. If you want to wrap yourself in anguish and ennui, desperation and self-doubt, be a Creative Writing major.

  If you want to spend long hours staring into a glaring white screen, bleeding from your eyes, trying to shit linguistic bricks onto the page, fighting to make every rebellious word behave itself, hoping to reach a genuine conclusion, or at least the end of the sentence—if you have submerged yourself into the delusionary belief that there exists some pinnacle of brilliance and insight that will ultimately transform the soul of humanity—but knowing the whole time that you will never even equal Ray Bradbury’s grocery list, let alone reach the end of the page—then be a writer.