The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  A star-ship. It sounded ridiculous when you said it. But we had seen the members of the crew. It is generally acknowledged by nearly everybody now that there is no intelligent life of any terrestrial sort on the other planets of our own system. So they had to come from farther out.

  Why? That was a tougher one to solve. We could only guess at it.

  “There must be a hell of a big civilization out there,” said Ed, “to build the ships and travel in them. They obviously know we’re here.”

  Uneasy thought.

  “Why haven’t they spoken to us?” he wondered. “Let us in on it too.”

  “I suppose,” I said, “they’re waiting for us to develop space-flight on our own. Maybe it’s a kind of test you have to pass to get in on their civilization. Or maybe they figure we’re so backward they don’t want to have anything to do with us, all our wars and all. Or both. Pick your own reason.”

  “Okay,” said Ed. “But why dump their people on us like that? And how come Marlin, one of our own people, was in on it?”

  “There are Earthmen who’ll do anything for money,” I said. “Like Marlin. It’d not be too hard to contact men like him, use them as local agents.”

  “As for why they dump their people on us,” I went on, “it probably isn’t legal, where they came from. Remember what Marlin said about Vadi? How long will she keep her mouth shut at your end? My guess is her brother was a failure at home and got into a dirty racket, and she was trying to get him out of it. There must be other worlds like Earth, too, or the racket wouldn’t be financially sound. Not enough volume.”

  “But the wetbacks,” Ed said. “Were they failures, too? People who couldn’t compete in the kind of a society they must have? And how the hell many do you suppose they’ve run in on us already?”

  I’ve wondered about that myself. How many aliens have Marlin, and probably others like him, taken off the star-boats and dressed and instructed and furnished with false papers, in return doubtless for all the valuables the poor devils had? How many of the people you see around you every day, the anonymous people that just look a little odd somehow, the people about whom you think briefly that they don’t even look human—the queer ones you notice and then forget—how many of them aren’t human at all in the sense that we understand that word?

  Like the boy.

  Sally Tate’s family obviously didn’t want him back. So I had myself appointed his legal guardian, and we get on fine together. He’s a bright kid. His father may have been a failure in his own world, but on ours the half-bred child has an I.Q. that would frighten you. He’s also a good youngster. I think he takes after his aunt.

  I’ve thought of getting married since then, just to make a better home for the boy, and to fill up a void in my own life I’m beginning to feel. But I haven’t quite done it yet. I keep thinking maybe Vadi will come back some day, walking with swift grace down the side of Buckhorn Mountain. I do not think it is likely, but I can’t quite put it out of my mind. I remember the cold revulsion that there was between us, and then I wonder if that feeling would go on, or whether you couldn’t get used to that idea of differentness in time.

  The trouble is, I guess, that Vadi kind of spoiled me for the general run of women.

  I wonder what her life is like in Hrylliannu, and where it is. Sometimes on the bitter frosty nights when the sky is diamond-clear and the Milky Way glitters like the mouth of hell across it, I look up at the stars and wonder which one is hers. And old Buckhorn sits black and silent in the north, and the deep wounds on his shoulder are healing into grassy scars. He says nothing. Even the thunder now has a hollow sound. It is merely thunder.

  But, as Arnek said, there are plenty of mountains.

  Afterword

  Two writers living and working together, even if they do not collaborate, will inevitably influence each other’s work, in one way or another. Writing is a uniquely personal and solitary endeavor; you do it the only way you know how. But when you’re being constantly exposed to another way of doing it, a bit of that will rub off.

  Ed always knew the last line of a story before he wrote the first one, and every line he wrote aimed straight at that target. I used the opposite method—write an opening and let it grow. Outlining a plot seemed to kill it for me. Ed says that this method seemed to work fine for me, and so it did—when everything went well and the story wrote itself. When it did not, I found myself in a box canyon with no way up the walls, and another beautiful idea went into the files to gather dust.

  I began to realize that this method was not in any sense an artistic virtue; all it meant was that I didn’t know how to construct a story. A lot of this was sheer impatience. I was in such a hurry to get to the wonderful adventures thronging in my mind that I couldn’t be bothered with the bones of the thing. Like trying to take a trip with no map. After we were married, with both of us working like demons, after a certain length of time I began to understand how Ed put a story together, and found myself doing the same thing. So if he learned a little bit about style from me, I learned a whole lot about structure from him.

  When I think about it, it’s an odd thing, I never had any trouble at all constructing or plotting mystery stories. But that’s more like working out an equation; given a certain event, other events will inevitably follow, and variables are limited by the space-time framework in which these events occur. In science fiction, the space-time framework has to be invented and the variables are what you make them. Which is of course why it’s more fun to write science fiction, though the discipline of the murder mystery has its own special joys.

  Ed’s mention of our “Benedict-Arnold-Slept-Here” adventures in rehabilitating our ancient wreck in the woods brings back many memories. Like the day on which the house became officially “Ours.” We were looking around it with fond and foolish pride, and Ed said, “That old paper on the ceiling will have to come off.” He reached up to tear away a strip, and the whole ceiling fell on his head. I think my own low point was reached one miserable November day, with a mean wind blowing and a nasty little spit of snow, when I was trying to gather up some of the more unsightly debris left by the carpenters, who had simply pitched everything out the windows. There had been a thaw and then a freeze, and every rotten little stick and board-end was permanently imbedded in the icy mud. I remember wishing the entire assembly were in a warmer place!

  That scythe, now…I have a great admiration for those old-timers who could scythe a lawn as smooth as velvet. The stuff always looked as if the moths had been at it when I got through. Swinging a bushhook, on the other hand, now, I rather enjoyed. But don’t talk to me about the evils of technology! When we were able to afford a powerful little garden tractor with a sickle-bar and a mower, life became a whole lot easier and the efficiency of the work done took a quantum jump.

  Nowadays, when people admire our house, our old orchard—we set out the tiny whips ourselves—and our several acres of smooth meadow, we always feel like telling them that they should have seen it when…when two families of skunks had to be evicted from the house before we could move in ourselves; when our carpenter quit for the day after a five-foot blacksnake who was living in the rafters bespoke him in a friendly fashion, tapping the back of his neck; when Hamilton and Brackett might have been seen almost any day doing battle with burdocks the size of oaks (we felt we were surrounded by Triffids) or ripping four by eight sheets of 3/4 inch ply the long way with a handsaw, and hammering far into the night. It only took us twenty-six years to get where we are!

  Actually, we owe the basic reconstruction of the house to two wonderful old men, one well up in his seventies, the other past eighty, who still understood the quirks of braced-frame houses and how to deal with them. They’re worth a book in themselves.

  Regarding that Sako .222—Old Shatterhand wasn’t all that much hell on woodchucks himself. Watching a litter of them romping like kittens on a sunny bank, all I heard from him was, “Aw-w…aren’t they cute!”

  The o
ne thing I’ve missed here in this green and fertile Midwest, which has many things we lack in California—spring blossoms, autumn leaves, and water, to name a few—is the sea. It was the dominant factor in my environment for so many years when I was growing up. And the beach where we lived was a wonderful place to grow up in. Not so now; the sand is about to sink under the weight of wall-to-wall apartment houses, and I never go there any more. But in those days there was a handful of little houses, an overarching sky, wind and sun and seagulls, and I loved it. There were winter gales that never seem to blow any more, and beautiful fogs so thick you could bite them and taste the salt. It was a place where I could be alone. I used to walk out to the end of a long jetty and sit on the stringer with my feet in the ocean, feeling it breathe, looking out to where the Pacific ran over the edge of the world and dreaming great dreams…but most of all I was learning what it felt like to be me. I have never understood people who cry that they don’t know who they are. Maybe they just never sat down with themselves long enough to find out.

  My long in-and-out affair with Hollywood is perhaps rather an odd one. I don’t know. When the job on The Big Sleep fell into my lap, out of the blue, and I was signed to a seven-year contract, everybody told me I had it made. I guess because I’m half Scots and inclined to ca’ canny, I kept looking at the option clauses as much as I looked at the salary hikes that would have made me a junior-grade Croesus at the end of seven years. After two-and-a-half years the independent company which had signed me was dissolved for tax purposes, and I was dissolved with it, still somewhat short of my first million. My next job was on the B-lot at Columbia, where I did two scripts. The first one was a success, the second they washed out, and again, me with it. I don’t think it was a bad script. But it was an off-beat story, and off-beat stories they did not want. So I had to go back to work, as it were. I hoped for another film job, but when it reached the point where the Guild was pleading with its members to write something, anything, even greeting-card verse, because there were no jobs to be had, I simply forgot about it. Since 1957 I’ve worked quite a lot in films and television, but I’ve never forgotten that early lesson: don’t count on it. The bad thing about film or TV work is that you have to wait for someone to ask you to do it, whereas you can sit down and write a novel when and as you wish, and if you have a reasonable degree of competence you can be fairly sure of selling it somewhere. For that reason I have never felt like giving up my freedom of choice and relying entirely on Hollywood. Fairy gold is lovely when it comes, but if it doesn’t, I’ve got my workroom here in Kinsman, and no mortgages.

  Besides, I like writing science fiction.

  Aside from the pleasure of congenial work and the making of a living, science fiction has given me much that is beyond price: lifelong friends, a worldwide family, and a marriage that has lasted almost thirty years to date.

  Even fairy gold won’t buy all that!

  * * *

  Leigh Brackett

  Kinsman, Ohio

  July 8, 1976

  Addendum

  About the maps of Mars.

  A couple of years ago, I began to correspond with a lady in Minneapolis who had liked my stories about Mars and who refused to be satisfied with my explanations about why editors do not want any more of them. (The planet, they believe, has become too harsh a reality for my brand of legend.)

  The lady’s name was Margaret Howes, and later on I had the pleasure of meeting her at the Minneapolis convention. She told me that making maps of imaginary worlds was one of her favorite hobbies, and would I mind if she did some maps of Mars, based on my stories?

  Far from minding, I was delighted. And in due course, the maps arrived, a pure labor of love, together with keys and several closely-reasoned pages concerning the reasons for placement of the cities, canals, etc. She knows my stories, and the geography (or, as she says, Areography) implied therein, much better than I do.

  I thought the maps were beautiful. So did my editors, who decided to include them in this collection. And here you may find Jekkara and the Low-Canals (I think the first mention of these was in “The Veil of Astellar”), and Valkis, and Barrakesh where John Ross met the man from Shandakor, and Shandakor itself, and that other lost city of Sinharat, beautiful derelicts in those haunted seas of drifting sand, of which Viking Lander is presently taking such incredible photographs.

  The cities and canals, of course, are fantasy. But the maps themselves…not so. Listen to the Cartographer.

  “No doubt you have the new probe map of Mars, and you will note that I took as much advantage of real natural features as I could. Syrtis Major and Sabaeus Sinus are obvious, of course, as the Eastern Drylands (I imagine this to have been a very deep section of ocean). Edom and Crater 2, in Syrtis, make good oasis spots, as does Solis Lacus for an oasis on the ocean bottom. Aurorae Sinus and Margaritifer Sinus have to be mostly desert, because all the stories speak of crossing only desert to get to Valkis or Jekkara. Shandakor is up there in Boreo Syrtis; Mare Acidalium becomes the hills of Outer Kesh; Oxia Palus is perfect for the location of the Wells of Karthedon; and no doubt you’ll recognize the Nix Olympica area, not far from Kahora.

  “The other hemisphere doesn’t give so much in the way of definite features to make use of, except that I do have Narrissan at the top of Nodus Laocontis; but I do hope that from a distance you will get some approximation of what the astronomers used to see through the telescope.”

  She adds, “What made the Mars maps exceptionally fun to do was the challenge of trying to fit the stories into the actual geography (or Areography, rather) of the real Mars. Also, I’m still hoping to see more stories of Low-Canal Mars.”

  Where else but in the wonderful world of science fiction would you meet wonderful people like Margaret Howes?

  * * *

  LB

  August 21, 1976

  MARS

  By the Survey Commission Office, Kahora, Mars

  CENTRAL TERRAN ADMINISTRATION

  Note: major canals and gross topography are accurately reproduced from high-level aerial surveys. Details of surface areography are still largely unknown, because of difficult conditions and local hostility to both ground expeditions and/or low-level surveys. Many sites are reported but not confirmed, as will be seen in the key.

  Earthmen are warned to obtain permission from the Survey Office and to secure warranted guides through the Office, before traveling beyond the immediate vicinity of Kahora. The Administration assumes no responsibility for persons engaging in unauthorized travel.

  The sea level indicated on these maps, including that defined by the dashed and dotted line, indicates the extent of the ancient Martian ocean basins, excluding the continental shelves. It appears that the waters retreated rather gradually down the shelves, which remained fertile, and that it was at this time that Jekkara and other sea-port cities were built, at the very edge of the abyssal basins. Scholars believe that the sea levels then remained fairly stable for some period ranging anywhere from several centuries to several millennia; there is much dispute on this point.

  However, there is general agreement that when the last dry-up began, it progressed continuously and rather rapidly to its final end. Again, there is much dispute as to how long this process took. Efforts have been made to work out a chronology by studying the degree of erosion that has taken place on even the largest, main canals, once laid out in perfect arcs or straight lines, and now much eroded and irregular (as will be seen from the map) or even wholly overwhelmed by sand. So far these studies have produced no definite conclusions.

  * * *

  Margaret M. Howes, Secretary

  Areographical Division Survey Commission Office

  Kahora, Mars

 

 

 
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