This was one of the story ideas Jack and I talked over during a brainstorming session at my place early in 1981. According to my calendar, I didn’t do much more extensive work on it after that until the week of November 9th of that year—I think Jack had been working on it off and on in the meantime—and it was finished on January 22,1982. It’s my memory that Jack started working on the middle sections of the story—starting with Mr. Meisner’s first talk with Arnold—while I was simultaneously working on the opening section (after first grilling Susan intensively on games young girls play, stealing large portions of her childhood) and later, the long bus ride/seduction scene. Later, Jack and I bounced drafts of the closing scene, the coda, back and forth, and then I did a homogenizing and unifying draft, adding some new material throughout to smooth things out. Later still, at the end of November, we did a rewrite for Shawna McCarthy, working mostly on the coda. (The story as it appears here is somewhat different than the IAsfm version—Shawna let us get away with a fair amount of Smut for a digest magazine . . . but not as much as was in the story in the first place.)
This is usually considered to be a comic story, and there are some pretty good laughs here, but the understory is pretty grim. Marcy perpetuates what has been called the Chain of Blows by taking her revenge on Arnold. What goes around, comes around, as they say—and every parent must come to terms with the instinct to dish out to their own children the mistreatment (in all its forms) that they themselves were given. The story would have been Karmically more wholesome if Marcy had broken the Chain of Blows, set out to heal Arnold rather than warping him as he had warped her—but it would have been less convincing as something the character would really do, and considerably less powerful as a story. Thus the fiction writer’s dilemma. Usually, story values win over Political Correctness, and they did here.
GUILFORD GAFIA REVISITED
JACK C. HALDEMAN II
It was a strange old house, even for Baltimore, which has its fair share of them. It came fully equipped with its own pickled brain in the root cellar. My keen biologist’s training told me it was a shark’s brain floating in a mason jar filled with formaldehyde. I moved it to the fireplace mantel. A third-floor bathroom had been converted into a bedroom by simply pulling out all the fixtures. It had not been painted or papered in fifty years because it was occupied by the Blind Aunt. In the attic I found three packs of WWII cigarettes hidden under a board. Several smoked butts sat in a carefully arranged circle in an old jar lid. I felt a pang of sympathy for the returning serviceman forced to crouch in the attic to smoke, perhaps by the Blind Aunt. The walls of the old coal bin were still standing in the basement, covered with hand-scrawled notations such as two tons #2, December 3, 1932. Clearly this house was destined to be a focal point for writers; stories leaped from every wall.
In the early ‘70s, Gardner and my brother Joe dropped by on their way back from one of Damon Knight’s Milford writer’s conferences. They were all charged up by the experience of workshopping their manuscripts with other writers. The problem was that the Milfords were held only once a year. Since I had just started selling stories, we decided to form our own workshop, mostly with writers in the early stages of their careers. We called it the Guilford Science Fiction Writers Conference after the neighborhood I lived in. The Guilford Gafia was born.
Who to invite? We had lots of bedrooms to fill. Joe had a friend down in Florida named Bill Nabors. There was a fellow named Jack Dann who I’d just met at a convention. He was jumping up and down on a bed at the time, but I understood he could write a good sentence or two. There was a new writer named George Alec Effinger someone had heard of. Ted White lived nearby, as did Tom Monteleone. These eventually formed the nucleus of the Guilford, with occasional appearances by others, including Bob Thurston.
It was a heady time to be writing science fiction. Something called the New Wave was surfacing in England. The drug culture and counter-culture were influencing some literary stylists. Hard science fiction was getting harder. There were lots of SF magazines that needed to be filled every month, and we were the Young Turks who were going to do it while all those old farts out there ground out the same old novels.
The conferences lasted for several days and we held them two or three times a year. We would wander around the sprawling house reading copies of each other’s manuscripts and taking notes. Then we’d spend two days workshopping each manuscript in turn. As in the Milfords, we would sit in a circle and the criticism would start with the person to the left of the author. He would talk as long as he wanted and then the person to his left would comment. The author could not interrupt the criticism except to answer a direct question. He got his say at the end.
The system worked well, primarily because all the participants were published writers. The few times we had unpublished writers there it didn’t do as well. Face-to-face criticism by your peers—in particular by writers you respect—is strong stuff. You may think you’ve got a gem, but if one by one they trash it for the same reasons, perhaps you ought to reconsider. I know, because it happened to me a couple of times. It’s incredibly painful to sit through a session like that.
It was a tremendous learning experience, and compressed about ten years of trial and error into a couple of years for me. There were some marvelous highlights.
I remember reading Effinger’s first story and it just blew me away. I didn’t realize you could do that kind of writing within a science fiction framework. It literally opened doors to a whole new way of writing for me. If The Last Dangerous Visions ever sees print, check the story out. It’s fantastic.
Joe workshopped “Hero,” the novella that became part of The Forever War. I remember sitting on the side porch next to the keg of beer, thinking it was great stuff. History shows us the novel went on to win the Nebula, Hugo, and Ditmar awards. It probably was great stuff.
But it wasn’t all hard work around the beer keg. Down the street from our house was an anarchist bar where we let off steam. The bartender/owner had a habit of cleaning out the till on Friday and going off on a three-day toot, so the hired help never had any change. Sometimes if he was mad enough at the owner, he’d just give the beer away.
Sometimes they’d run out of beer and just collect everybody’s money until they had enough for a six-pack. Then they’d send The Hawk two doors down to the liquor store to buy some. The Hawk lived in the bar and once a week moved a broom around the floor.
They were always losing their liquor license because the owner had a habit of writing bad checks. Until he could clear up the misunderstanding, he developed an interim solution. You brought your own beer and wine, which he would store in his fridge. When you wanted one, you’d buy it from him. It made perfect sense at the time.
One favorite Guilford activity was to play “Name That Song” in the bar. It seems that one day the owner got yet another brainstorm and went out and bought a used jukebox. He then proceeded to move all the records from the leased jukebox into his personal one. He figured that way he got all the money, and he could put the records back before they came to collect. Wrong. One day we went in and all the records were back in the leased jukebox and the fridge had a couple of new bullet holes in it. Then complications arose. He’d put all the records back in random order and none of them matched the labels. So we’d punch a number and yell it out. When it started playing he’d jot it down in a notebook. This logical solution failed miserably in practice, due to the fact that he was almost always too drunk to write anything down. The Guilford Gafia solved this problem for him by removing all the record titles from their holders and making up strange science-fictional names for songs.
The bar was a perfect mirror for the craziness of the conference. Even the non-drinkers among us took to hanging out there. After I moved to Florida and the conferences stopped, it turned into a waterbed store.
But what about “Executive Clemency”? I’m getting there.
The Guilford became inbred, which was both good and bad. We re
inforced the kind of writing we liked, but we all did it differently. With certain exceptions, we started typecasting ourselves.
Joe was considered the hard SF writer of the bunch. George Effinger had a wry humor, with a bent toward the occasional spectacular literary device. (“Too literary by half” became a catch phrase that was aimed at all of us at one time or another. “Turgid prose” and “dense” became others.) Bill Nabors had a vivid imagination and a very distinct style. Jack Dann was sharp and to the point, sometimes creeping toward the New Wave. Ted White’s writing was casual, as he was spending most of his time editing Amazing and Fantastic. (He bought several stories from the conference, often on the spot, and had a special Guilford issue of Fantastic.) Ted also won the Name The Brain contest, but the libel laws keep me from revealing the name in print.
But Gardner? He excelled in his criticism of the manuscripts, going straight to the faults of any flawed story, no matter how complex. It was marvelous to observe (unless it was your story he was dissecting), and I thought at the time he’d make a great editor. Again, I was proven right. His prose style in that period was very descriptive. I loved reading it, being led along as he built image upon image.
Although we preferred completed manuscripts for the workshop, we would accept fragments, and Gardner often brought them along as works-in-progress. Since Gardner’s writing had a leisurely pace, some of them were quite long. We’d kid him about his 50,000-word fragments. Sometimes I’d realize that there had been no action to speak of in the last five pages, but the description was so well done I hadn’t noticed. Even as long as they were, when I tried to find possible places to cut, I was never successful. The words were too good, and too interlocked, to remove.
“Executive Clemency” began as a joke I played on Gardner. I wrote a three-page fragment in which absolutely nothing happened. The entire storyline consisted of an ex-president watching the sun’s shadow creep across the floor. For added excitement, I had him shave and go down to eat. It seemed to be a perfect Gardner Dozois story and I slipped the pastiche in the stack of manuscripts, not figuring it would be workshopped.
He loved it. Of course he did, it sounded just like he’d written it himself. How could he fail to like it? So we decided to collaborate. We worked out the storyline together and I kept it to do the first draft. A week or two later, I sent what I had to Gardner, figuring it was about halfway through. I enclosed notes on the ending and waited to see what happened.
Nothing happened. A few months passed and I asked him about it. He said he was working on it. A year passed, then two. I moved from Baltimore to Florida. Every time I saw Gardner I’d ask him about it and he’d always say he was working on it. Once I dropped by his house in Philadelphia and sure enough, there it was, buried on his table and I could see he had been working on it. Another year passed. A couple more. About seven years after I sent the first draft up to him, he called to say he’d finished it. As an afterthought, he added that he hoped I didn’t mind that he’d sold it to Omni. The highest-paying science fiction market? No, I didn’t mind. But I would like to see it. He mailed me a copy and it was just the way I’d hoped it would be, a finely crafted story.
Since that time, I’ve been involved in several other collaborations, and they all worked out differently. I did a parody of Jack Dann that turned out to be a collaboration called “Limits” (Fantastic). I did the same thing with George Effinger that became the short story “The Terrible Thing They Did to Old McBundy’s Son” (Night Cry). Joe and I wrote the novel Starschool by alternating sections. Bill Nabors and I did three books working together all the time, sharing the same keyboard. Jack and I are working on the novel High Steel both together and apart. The most enjoyable collaboration I’ve done was with my wife Vol. It was an “adult” SF novel (The Ice World Connection by “John Cleve”), and people had to jump into bed every five pages or less. The research was most entertaining. We worked with the typewriter on a Lazy Susan between us and sent the chapters off to Andy Offutt for the final draft as soon as they were finished. My most recent collaboration was with Harry Harrison called Bill the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Slime Zombies. In that novel I did the first draft and sent it off to Harry for final revision.
None of the other collaborations, even the novels, took near the time that “Executive Clemency” took. Before it was published, we’d all moved from the “New Writers” panels to the “Old Fart” panels. But I think it’s a fine story, thanks to Gardner, and well worth the wait.
SNOW JOB
GARDNER DOZOIS & MICHAEL SWANWICK
Have you ever toured the Harding Dam in Boulder, Colorado? Have you ever caught that old Errol Flynn movie about the life of Lord Bolingbroke, the man who restored the Stuarts to the British throne and overran half of France but who “couldn’t conquer the Queen he didn’t dare to love,” a real classic, also starring Basil Rathbone and Olivia de Havilland? Have you?
Of course you haven’t—which shows what a difference a single line of coke can make.
If it weren’t for the coke, the blow-off wouldn’t have come hot, and things would have been very, very different.
Just how different, you don’t realize. You can’t realize, in fact.
But take my word for it, baby—I can.
###
One little mistake . . .
I was running, faster than I had ever run in my life, and as I ran those words kept ringing through my head, louder than the pounding of my heart or the breath rasping in my throat: one little mistake . . . that was what the losers always said, the gonifs stupid enough to get caught; that was what they’d whine as the handcuffs closed over their wrists and the Boys in Blue dragged them away . . . it’s not fair, just one little mistake . . . it’s not fair . . . But I wasn’t a loser, I was tough and smart, I wasn’t like them . . .
One little mistake . . .
I was running through the warehouse district and the cops were right behind me, and not all that far behind me either, in hot pursuit as they say on TV, following the trail of blood I was laying down drop by drop. I could hear their footsteps clattering in staccato non-rhythm back there, harbingers of more hot pursuit to come. And they were going to catch me this time. This time they were going to get me—the certainty of that sat in a cold lump in my stomach, and made my legs feel cold and slow, so slow. I’d made my one little mistake, and now I was going to pay for it; boy, was I going to pay, my whole life was going down the toilet and it wasn’t fair . . .
I choked back a laugh that sounded more like a sob.
Behind me, the footsteps were abruptly halved. Tiny hairs crackled on the nape of my neck. I knew without looking that one of the cops was falling into the regulation crouch while his buddy ran far and to the side. Now he would be holding his gun two-handed and leveling it at me. I tried to zig-zag, do some broken-field running, but let’s face it, fear drives you forward, not to the side. Maybe my path wobbled a bit; you couldn’t really call it evasive action.
I felt the bullet sizzle by, inches from my head, an instantaneous fraction of a second before I heard it. The time lag would have been subliminal to anyone who wasn’t hyper on adrenalin and fear. There was a ping as the bullet ricocheted off a brick wall far down the street, and I went into panic mode, pure scrambling terror. Otherwise, I’d have known better than to duck into a side alley without checking for exits first.
It was a cul-de-sac.
Belgian block paving stone, a few ripe heaps of garbage, a rusted automobile muffler or three. And dead ahead, the blank back wall of a warehouse. No doors, no windows, no exits.
I skidded to a stop, and gaped idiotically.
What now, wiseass?
The cops rounded the corner behind me.
Galvanized, like a corpse jolted into motion by electrodes, I started running again, blindly, straight at the wall.
There was no place to go . . .
###
An hour before, I had been trying to sell four kilos of lactose for a hundred
thousand dollars. Listen—I had a hell of a nut. My overhead included rent and furnishings for the Big Store (actually the second floor of an old warehouse converted into a loft apartment), a thousand each for the shills, ten percent of the take for the manager, and thirty-five percent for the roper. These things add up.
Stringy—the mark—was a joy to burn, though. He was a pimp and I never have liked those suckers. Cheap and lazy grifters, the batch of them.
“It’s been stepped on once,” I said. “Very lightly. And that’s only because I prefer it that way. Know what I mean?”
Stringy nodded sagely. The roper, James Whittcombe Harris—better known in some circles as Jimmy the Wit—grinned a trifle too eagerly. In the background, half a dozen post-hippie types wandered about, putting Grateful Dead albums on the sound system, rolling joints, discussing the Cosmic All, and doing all those beautiful things that made the ‘60s die so hard. “I know what you mean, Brother Man,” Stringy said meaningfully. Jimmy the Wit snickered in anticipation.
“Jerry’s got the best stuff on the Coast,” Jimmy the Wit said. “He smuggles it in himself.”
“That so?”
I smiled modestly. “I had help. But I’ll admit to being pleased with this particular scam. We set up a front office—religious wholesalers—with calling cards, stationery, the whole riff. And we brought the load in inside of a batch of wooden madonnas. You should have seen the things! The absolute, and I mean ne plus ultra worst examples of native folk art these tired old eyes have ever seen. The cheeks were painted orange.” I shuddered theatrically.
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