Half the audience was gone. As he watched, the twenty people furthest from the stage snapped out of existence. Then another twenty. And another.
The crowd noise continued undiminished, the clapping and whooping and whistling, but the audience was gone now—except for Blemings, who sat alone in the exact center of the empty theater. He was smiling faintly at them, a smile that could have meant anything and, as Holly watched, he began softly, politely, to applaud.
Holly retreated backstage, pale, still playing automatically. Only Janis was singing now.
Not fade away
Holly glanced back at the musicians, saw first one, then another, cease to exist. Unreality was closing in on them. He stared into Elvis’s face, and for an instant saw mirrored there the fear he felt.
Then Elvis threw back his head and laughed, and was singing into his mike again. Holly gawked at him in disbelief.
But the music was right, and the music was good, and while all the rest—audience, applause, someplace to go when the show was over—was nice, it wasn’t necessary. Holly glanced both ways, and saw that he was not the only one to understand this. He rejoined the chorus.
###
Janis was squeezing the microphone tight, singing, when the last sideman blinked out. The only backup now came from Holly’s guitar—Elvis had discarded his. She knew it was only a matter of minutes before the nothingness reached them, but it didn’t really matter. The music’s all that matters, she thought. It’s all that made any of it tolerable, anyway. She sang.
Not fade away
Elvis snapped out. She and Holly kept on singing.
If anyone out there is listening, she thought. If you can read my mind, or some futuristic bullshit like that—I just want you to know that I’d do this again anytime. You want me, you got me.
Holly disappeared. Janis realized that she had only seconds to go herself, and she put everything she had into the last repetition of the line. She wailed out her soul, and a little bit more. Let it echo after I’m gone, she thought. Let it hang on thin air. And as the last fractional breath of music left her mouth, she felt something seize her, prepare to turn her off. Not fade away
It had been a good session.
AFTERWORD TO TOURING
This was the first of the collaborations, and, as I’ve mentioned, an important story for me, since it was the first story I’d worked on in a couple of years.
I wasn’t keeping up my work calendar at that point, so the exact date of this story’s origin is lost in the mists of time. My own guess is that we started work on it one weekend in the spring or summer of 1979 when Jack was down for a visit. I know that a complete draft of it was finished in time for it to be submitted for scrutiny at the first formal workshop we held—a full-dress affair, with several other writers in attendance, as opposed to our regular sessions, which consisted of Jack and Michael and me sitting around somewhere with a bottle of wine—the first Philford Workshop, held over the weekend of April 11-13,1980, at Michael and Marianne’s house. (A few years later, the weekend of May 16-18,1986, we held the second Philford Workshop at my new apartment on Spruce Street; so far no third.) And I know that I read the final draft of the story to a convention crowd in Austin, Texas, on October 4,1980, when I was down there doing a Guest of Honor stint at Armadillocon, but whether the story had been initially completed in late 1979 or early 1980, I can no longer recall.
Michael’s recollection is that Jack and I had come up with the idea for this story on our own the night before, and that when Michael came over to my place for a visit the next day, we cut him in on the story because we knew that he’d just written a story featuring Janis Joplin and another featuring Buddy Holly, and we were too lazy to duplicate his research. My own recollection is that Michael had actually been there the night before, when Jack and I came up with the idea for this story during a brainstorming session, and that we cut him in on the spot, because we were too lazy to duplicate his research, and so on. (Actually—he says piously—I did end up duplicating much of Michael’s research anyway in the course of writing the story, and even ended up correcting him on a point of Buddy Holly Trivia. For Elvis Trivia we depended on Jack, who is a much bigger Elvis fan than either Michael or myself.)
I’m pretty sure that it was Jack who first said that it would have been neat if Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, and Elvis had ever gotten a chance to perform together. As soon as he said this, the basic plot of the story blossomed in my mind in an instant, and a few moments later we were hammering out details of the storyline. I conceived of it from the start as a Twilight Zone episode—I still think that it would have made a good one—and that’s the way we wrote it; if you like, you can visualize the ghost of Rod Serling looming up solemnly at the end to wrap things up before the commercial.
Our original plan, I think, was that each of us would take one character and write about that character throughout—I was assigned to do Buddy Holly, Michael got Janis Joplin, and Jack, of course, got Elvis—but this quickly proved to be unworkable, and we all ended up writing scenes for each other’s characters: Michael, for instance, writing the very funny scene where Elvis coerces Buddy Holly into praying to Momma with him, and I contributing a long scene where Janis raps semi-hysterically about just what might be happening to them all. After we gave up on the initial plan, my memory is that Michael wrote the first complete draft of the story, incorporating most of the pages we’d produced under the abortive one-character-per-writer plan, Jack then did another draft, and I then did a final unifying draft, adding several new scenes and interjecting new material throughout. I think that the first scene I worked on was the scene where Buddy Holly goes to the laundromat—I have a clear memory of sitting on the white marble steps of an old brown-stone building at 40th and Walnut, writing furiously in longhand in a three-ring notebook, while Jack and Michael and Susan were in the Fun Arcade next door playing pinball; perhaps this was the same weekend.
“Touring” sold to Penthouse. Kathy Green squashed our original plan to publish the story under the collective pseudonym of “Phil Ford”—get it? hyuck hyuck—and insisted that we use our real names on it instead, although beforehand everyone had assured us that no magazine would be willing to list three authors for one story, and that we would have no choice but to use a collective pseudonym.
This turned out not to be true—in fact, nobody ever gave us the slightest bit of trouble about listing three authors for one story, and so “Phil Ford” went early and unmourned to an unmarked grave. This was one of the most popular of the collaborations, and, I think, one of the best. It has been reprinted a number of times, including an appearance in Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories, where one critic later judged it to have been the single best story ever published in the series. Not too shabby.
THE GODS OF MARS
GARDNER DOZOIS, JACK DANN, & MICHAEL SWANWICK
They were outside, unlashing the Mars lander, when the storm blew up.
With Johnboy and Woody crowded against his shoulders, Thomas snipped the last lashing. In careful cadence, the others straightened, lifting the ends free of the lander. At Thomas’s command, they let go. The metal lashing soared away, flashing in the harsh sunlight, twisting like a wounded snake, dwindling as it fell below and behind their orbit. The lander floated free, tied to the Plowshare by a single, slim umbilicus. Johnboy wrapped a spanner around a hex-bolt over the top strut of a landing leg and gave it a spin. Like a slow, graceful spider leg, it unfolded away from the lander’s body. He slapped his spanner down on the next bolt and yanked. But he hadn’t braced himself properly, and his feet went out from under him in a slow somersault. He spun away, laughing, to the end of his umbilicus. The spanner went skimming back toward the Plowshare, struck its metal skin, and sailed off into space.
“You meatballs!” Thomas shouted over the open intercom. The radio was sharp and peppery with sun static, but he could hear Woody and Johnboy laughing. “Cut it out! No skylarking! Let’s get this d
one.”
“Everything okay out there?” asked Commander Redenbaugh, from inside the Plowshare. The commander’s voice had a slight edge to it, and Thomas grimaced. The last time the three of them had gone out on EVA, practicing this very maneuver, Johnboy had started to horse around and had accidentally sent a dropped lugnut smashing through the source-crystal housing, destroying the laser link to Earth. And hadn’t the commander gotten on their asses about that; NASA had been really pissed, too—with the laser link gone, they would have to depend solely on the radio, which was vulnerable to static in an active sun year like this.
It was hard to blame the others too much for cutting up a little on EVA, after long, claustrophobic months of being jammed together in the Plowshare, but the responsibility for things going smoothly was his. Out here, he was supposed to be in command. That made him feel lonely and isolated, but after all, it was what he had sweated and strived for since the earliest days of flight training. The landing party was his command, his chance for glory, and he wasn’t going to let anybody or anything ruin it.
“Everything’s okay, Commander,” Thomas said. “We’ve got the lander unshipped, and we’re almost ready to go. I estimate about twenty minutes to separation.” He spoke in the calm, matter-of-fact voice that tradition demanded, but inside he felt the excitement building again and hoped his pulse rate wasn’t climbing too noticeably on the readouts. In only a few minutes, they were going to be making the first manned landing on Mars! Within the hour, he’d be down there, where he’d dreamed of being ever since he was a boy. On Mars.
And he would be in command. How about that, Pop, Thomas thought, with a flash of irony. That good enough for you? Finally?
Johnboy had pulled himself back to the Plowshare. “Okay, then,” Thomas said dryly. “If you’re ready, let’s get back to work. You and Woody get that junk out of the lander. I’ll stay out here and mind the store.”
“Yes, sir, sir,” Johnboy said with amiable irony, and Thomas sighed. Johnboy was okay but a bit of a flake—you had to sit on him a little from time to time. Woody and Johnboy began pulling boxes out of the lander; it had been used as storage space for supplies they’d need on the return voyage, to save room in Plowshare. There were jokes cracked about how they ought to let some of the crates of flash-frozen glop that NASA straightfacedly called food escape into space, but at last, burdened with boxes, the two space-suited figures lumbered to the air lock and disappeared inside.
Thomas was alone, floating in space.
You really were alone out here, too, with nothing but the gaping immensity of the universe surrounding you on all sides. It was a little scary, but at the same time something to savor after long months of being packed into the Plowshare with three other men. There was precious little privacy aboard ship—out here, alone, there was nothing but privacy. Just you, the stars, the void . . . and, of course, Mars.
Thomas relaxed at the end of his tether, floating comfortably, and watched as Mars, immense and ruddy, turned below him like some huge, slow-spinning, rusty-red top. Mars! Lazily, he let his eyes trace the familiar landmarks. The ancient dead-river valley of Kasei Vallis, impact craters puckering its floor . . . the reddish brown and gray of haze and frost in Noctis Labyrinthus, the Labyrinth of Night . . . the immense scar of the Vallis Marineris, greatest of canyons, stretching two-thirds of the way around the equator . . . the great volcanic constructs in Tharsis . . . and there, the Chryse Basin, where soon they would be walking.
Mars was as familiar to him as the streets of his hometown—more so, since his family had spent so much time moving from place to place when he was a kid. Mars had stayed a constant, though. Throughout his boyhood, he had been obsessed with space and with Mars in particular . . . as if he’d somehow always known that one day he’d be here, hanging disembodied like some ancient god over the slowly spinning red planet below. In high school he had done a paper on Martian plate tectonics. When he was only a gangly grade-school kid, ten or eleven, maybe, he had memorized every available map of Mars, learned every crater and valley and mountain range.
Drowsily, his thoughts drifted even further back, to that day in the attic of the old house in Wrightstown, near McGuire Air Force Base—the sound of jets taking off mingling with the lazy Saturday afternoon sounds of kids playing baseball and yelling, dogs barking, lawn mowers whirring, the rusty smell of pollen coming in the window on the mild, spring air—when he’d discovered an old, dog-eared copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars.
He’d stayed up there for hours reading it while the day passed unnoticed around him, until the light got so bad that he couldn’t see the type anymore. And that night he’d surreptitiously read it in bed, under the covers with a pencil flashlight, until he’d finally fallen asleep, his dreams reeling with giant, four-armed green men, thoats, zitidars, long-sword-swinging heroes, and beautiful princesses . . . the Twin Cities of Helium . . . the dead sea bottoms lit by the opalescent light of the two hurtling moons . . . the nomad caverns of the Tharks, the barbaric riders draped with glittering jewels and rich riding silks. For an instant, staring down at Mars, he felt a childish disappointment that all of that really wasn’t waiting down there for him after all, and then he smiled wryly at himself. Never doubt that those childhood dreams had power—after all, one way or another, they’d gotten him here, hadn’t they?
Right at that moment the sandstorm began to blow up.
It blew up from the hard-pan deserts and plains and as Thomas watched in dismay, began to creep slowly across the planet like a tarp being pulled over a work site. Down there, winds moving at hundreds of kilometers per hour were racing across the Martian surface, filling the sky with churning, yellow-white clouds of sand. A curtain storm.
“You see that, Thomas?” the commander’s voice asked in Thomas’s ears.
“Yeah,” Thomas said glumly. “I see it.”
“Looks like a bad one.”
Even as they watched, the storm slowly and relentlessly blotted out the entire visible surface of the planet. The lesser features went first, the scarps and rills and stone fields, then the greater ones. The polar caps went. Finally even the top of Olympus Mons—the tallest mountain in the solar system—disappeared.
“Well, that’s it,” the commander said sadly. “Socked in. No landing today.”
“Son of a bitch!” Thomas exploded, feeling his stomach twist with disappointment and sudden rage. He’d been so close . . .
“Watch your language, Thomas,” the commander warned. “This is an open channel.” Meaning that we mustn’t shock the Vast Listening Audience Back Home. Oh, horrors, certainly not.
“If it’d just waited a couple more hours, we would have been able to get down there—”
“You ought to be glad it didn’t,” the commander said mildly. “Then you’d have been sitting on your hands down there with all that sand piling up around your ears. The wind can hit one hundred forty miles an hour during one of those storms. I’d hate to have to try to sit one out on the ground. Relax, Thomas. We’ve got plenty of time. As soon as the weather clears, you’ll go down. It can’t last forever.”
Five weeks later, the storm finally died.
Those were hard weeks for Thomas, who was as full of useless energy as a caged tiger. He had become over-aware of his surroundings; of the pervasive, sour human smell; of the faintly metallic taste of the air. It was like living in a jungle-gym factory, all twisting pipes and narrow, cluttered passages, enclosed by metal walls that were never out of sight. For the first time during the long months of the mission, he began to feel seriously claustrophobic.
But the real enemy was time. Thomas was acutely aware that the inexorable clock of celestial mechanics was ticking relentlessly away . . . that soon the optimal launch window for the return journey to Earth would open and that they must shape for Earth then or never get home at all. Whether the storm had lifted yet or not, whether they had landed on Mars or not, whether Thomas had finally gotten a chance to show off his
own particular righteous stuff or not, when the launch window opened, they had to go.
They had less than a week left in Mars orbit now, and still the sandstorm raged.
The waiting got on everyone’s nerves. Thomas found Johnboy’s manic energy particularly hard to take. Increasingly, he found himself snapping at Johnboy during meals and “happy hour,” until eventually the commander had to take him aside and tell him to loosen up. Thomas muttered something apologetic, and the commander studied him shrewdly and said, “Plenty of time left, old buddy. Don’t worry. We’ll get you down there yet!” The two men found themselves grinning at each other. Commander Redenbaugh was a good officer; a quiet, pragmatic New Englander who seemed to become ever more phlegmatic and unflappable as the tension mounted and everyone else’s nerves frayed. Johnboy habitually called him Captain Ahab. The commander seemed rather to enjoy the nickname, which was one of the few things that suggested that there might actually be a sense of humor lurking somewhere behind his deadpan façade.
The commander gave Thomas’s arm an encouraging squeeze, then launched himself toward the communications console. Thomas watched him go, biting back a sudden bitter surge of words that he knew he’d never say . . . not up here, anyway, where the walls literally had ears. Ever since Skylab, astronauts had flown with the tacit knowledge that everything they said in the ship was being eavesdropped on and evaluated by NASA. Probably before the day was out somebody back in Houston would be making a black mark next to his name in a psychological-fitness dossier, just because he’d let the waiting get on his nerves to the point where the commander had had to speak to him about it. But damn it, it was easier for the rest—they didn’t have the responsibility of being NASA’s token Nigger in the Sky, with all the white folks back home waiting and watching to see how you were going to fuck up. He’d felt like a third wheel on the way out here—Woody and the commander could easily fly the ship themselves and even take care of most of the routine schedule of experiments—but the landing party was supposed to be his command, his chance to finally do something other than be the obligatory black face in the NASA photos of Our Brave Astronauts. He remembered his demanding, domineering, hard-driving father saying to him hundreds of times in his adolescent years, “It’s a white man’s world out there. If you’re going to make it, you got to show that you’re better than any of them. You got to force yourself down their throats, make them need you. You got to be twice as good as any of them . . ” Yeah, Pop, Thomas thought, you bet, Pop . . . thinking, as he always did, of the one and only time he’d ever seen his father stinking, slobbering, falling-down drunk, the night the old man had been passed over for promotion to brigadier general for the third time, forcing him into mandatory retirement. First they got to give you the chance, Pop, he thought, remembering, again as he always did, a cartoon by Ron Cobb that he had seen when he was a kid and that had haunted him ever since: a cartoon showing black men in space suits on the moon—sweeping up around the Apollo 58 campsite.
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