The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

by Gardner Dozois

  “Wait a minute.” Darcy frowned. “I can sort of understand how money can go back and forth, but how do these alternate worlds or whatever get copies of our books?”

  “You’ve got a modem, right? You’re involved in that online workshop and bitch session or whatever the hell it is, aren’t you? Mary’s client has a theory that the texts must be leaking into these parallel worlds that way.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” Darcy said.

  “As for your Terror Is My Middle Name proposal, we could try Diadem Books. They’re starting a new horror line.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Darcy said. “Alternate rights. Well, if I’m getting forty grand, Desirée Thorne ought to be worth a fortune in alternate rights.”

  “Probably,” Leonard said cheerfully. “I expect to get an offer for her novels before long.”

  As it happened, Darcy’s agent was wrong about that.

  * * * *

  “You’ll never believe it,” Jane Rubell said over the phone. “Sixty thousand smackers for Plumbing the Depths. And my agent thinks he’ll get an offer for Flushing Out Death, too.”

  “I can believe it,” Darcy said. Jane Rubell, another freelance writer who lived in an adjoining town, was her closest friend. They often drove into New York together to see editors, pooling their meager resources by sharing a room in a rundown hotel and splitting other expenses. At other times, they got together with their colleague Arlen Williams to complain and exchange horror stories about publishers. Jane had written a series of paperback mysteries featuring a plumber who was also a sleuth, but her books had not done well, either because most plumbers didn’t read or because most mystery readers weren’t enthralled by plumbing. Darcy was a trifle annoyed that Jane had landed a larger advance for hardcover alternate rights to her first mystery than Darcy had for The Silent Shriek, but was still happy for her friend.

  “I was talking to Arlen the other day,” Jane went on, “and he told me he got fifty grand for a hardcover of Warlords of Mimistapol.”

  Fifty thousand for a book Arlen called one of his worst? Darcy could believe even that. She had been reading Publishers Weekly before Jane called, where a new article about alternate rights had appeared. Generous sums for insignificant books by unknown writers—that seemed to be the pattern. According to this article, Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, and John Grisham had not yet received offers for alternate rights to their novels.

  Perhaps that was why the trade publications weren’t devoting as much space to alternate rights deals as Darcy had expected. Newspapers and television, after saturating front pages and newscasts with stories about this new development, now mentioned the subject only in passing. As Carl Sagan had so tellingly put it on Nightline, these other continua were really only one world with variants, one world in different states. In which case, Ted Koppel had added, it made sense to accept that fact and then go about one’s business. Stranger things had happened; people had seen the Berlin Wall come down, the Soviet Union collapse, the resorts of Yugoslavia become killing grounds, and the leaders of Israel and the PLO shake hands. “Absorb the impossible and move on,” Koppel’s colleague Jeff Greenfield had blurted out then. “It’s what we always do.”

  In addition to that, most Americans didn’t much care if a writer was wildly successful in another country in this world, let alone in another universe, if he didn’t make a big noise in the U.S. of A. A story about editors buying rights to obscure books wasn’t the kind of news to dominate the media for long, even if the editors buying the books were in other continua. The only publishing stories that really counted to the public at large were tales of mega-advances, surprise bestsellers by former nonentities, book deals involving celebrities, accounts of lurid crimes scheduled to appear in book form before becoming television docudramas, and news of movie rights being sold to Steven Spielberg.

  In spite of that, Darcy was convinced that someone like Dean Koontz would eventually nail down an alternate rights deal that would dwarf any past deal in any universe. Then CNN might again devote more than fifteen seconds to the story. In the meantime, she and Jane might as well enjoy their good fortune.

  “What’s the number for your rights?” Darcy asked.

  “My agent’s statement says ‘Alt. Rights6’,” Jane replied. “Obviously a publisher in a different continuum is buying rights to my stuff.”

  “That seems to be the pattern,” Darcy said. “PW claims that about fifty different universes are involved so far, and there’s no overlap—they all seem to be buying different authors. Must be a pain for all our agents to keep things straight.”

  “Where lots of money is concerned, they always manage. Hey, I think we should celebrate. How about—”

  The phone was clicking in Darcy’s ear. “Hold on a second. Another call’s coming in.” She put Jane on hold and heard her agent shout a greeting.

  “Yo, Leonard,” Darcy replied.

  “Ready for some more good news?” he said jovially.

  “Sure.”

  “I heard from Elysium House today.” It took a few moments for Darcy to recognize the name of her publisher in Parallel World 3. “I hope you’re sitting down,” Leonard went on. “They sold paperback rights to The Silent Shriek. Four hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Four hundred thousand dollars?” Darcy squeaked.

  “And that isn’t all. They want rights to In Terms of Terror. They’re offering us two hundred thousand for that.”

  Darcy sucked in her breath.

  “But I think I can get them up to three hundred.”

  * * * *

  “I promised myself I’d take a long cruise,” Jane said, “if I ever made major money. Now I’m worth over a million, and I’m afraid to go out the door. I mean, a meteor might fall on me or something. That’s about on the same order of probability as my becoming a millionaire.”

  “I know what you mean,” Arlen Williams muttered. “I’ve got all this money coming in, and all I’ve done so far is tell my son he can go to Harvard and take his junior year abroad besides. Thing is, I never expected to have much dough, so I don’t know what to do with it all.”

  “You’re afraid the money’ll dry up,” Darcy said. “We’re all just too damned used to being poor.”

  “That’s part of it,” Arlen said as he dipped a small silver spoon into the caviar. “Kind of ridiculous, actually. All I need is some good financial advice, to set things up so I can be secure for a while. Trouble is, I don’t know anything about handling finances. I don’t even know who to get advice from.”

  Darcy had the same problem. Her past fiscal affairs had been operated on one basic principle: Make sure you can always borrow enough to pay off what you’ve already borrowed, and sooner or later things will either sort themselves out or you’ll be dead before you have to settle. She had no debts now, having paid all her creditors, and no idea of how to handle her assets.

  Jane sipped some more champagne, then leaned forward. “I heard,” she said softly, “that Desirée Thorne still hasn’t sold any alternate rights. Has your agent said anything to you about that?”

  “Leonard doesn’t discuss clients with other clients,” Darcy said, but she wondered about that herself. Leonard had to be disappointed. Still, even Stephen King had not managed to sell any alternate rights. A theory about the reason for that was forming in her mind. Maybe Stephen King wasn’t getting any offers for alternate rights because, in every possible universe, there already was a Stephen King, a literary juggernaut so overwhelming that no continuum could possibly be without one of him. There were probably also countless versions of Michael Crichton, Jean M. Auel, Anne Rice, Tom Clancy, and other mainstays of the bestseller list in other parallel worlds; their editors there would have no need to buy the work of their counterparts in this universe. It was only insignificant writers such as Darcy that they would buy, writers so unimportant that they probably existed in only one continuum.

  These speculations were making her feel depressed, and there w
as no excuse for depression now. She was falling into old habits acquired when she was poor and struggling. Leonard would tell her, as he had after selling Melanesian rights to her novel Terror Takes No Time Out, that even such a limited edition might increase her readership. He would tell her to be glad that she was such a big deal in at least one continuum.

  And she was a big deal in Parallel Universe 3. Elysium Books was now selling foreign rights in that world to The Silent Shriek and In Terms of Terror, and their version of the Book-of-the-Month Club had bought both novels. Surely that proved that she had underestimated herself and her work, and had too readily assumed that her writing was unexceptional because publishers treated it so indifferently. She had accepted and even internalized their valuation of her work. The treatment her books were getting in another continuum only proved that her publishers in this world were wrong.

  The same was true of her friends and their writing. It wasn’t Jane’s fault that the ingenuity and wit of her mysteries were wasted on an audience unable to appreciate the details of the plumbing trade. Arlen might have committed Warlords of Mimistapol to paper, but he had also won a Golden Tome Award for his ornate and sensual Prince of Ithlakkan trilogy.

  After all, hadn’t she always told herself that it was the writing itself that counted, and not what others thought of it? Her good fortune proved that she had been right to persevere.

  * * * *

  It was almost midnight when Darcy pulled up in front of her house; it had taken her a while to sober up after overindulging at Jane’s. She locked her Mercedes, wondering if she should arrange for a chauffeur and limo the next time she visited her friend; that way, it wouldn’t matter how much she drank.

  Of course, it wouldn’t be wise to let such vices get the better of her, now that she had so much to live for. Perhaps she should contact the Lucky Scribes, an informal network several newly affluent writers had formed to exchange ideas on how to handle the sudden wealth parallel worlds were showering upon them. The Lucky Scribes, from what she had heard, spent most of their time complaining about writer’s block, which was apparently proliferating among them now that they could afford more leisure and self-indulgence, but some of them might be able to advise her on other matters.

  Darcy climbed the stairs to her second-floor apartment and unlocked her door. Her lease would be up soon. She would have to decide whether to move into a luxury apartment downtown or buy a house in the country. Even if she wanted to stay here, her landlord was likely to raise her rent as much as possible to take advantage of her recent prosperity, while the jokes her neighbors made about hitting her up for loans were beginning to sound both more insistent and more resentful.

  The light on her phone’s answering machine was blinking. Darcy hit the message button and sat down to listen.

  “Darcy, this is Leonard,” the machine said. “It’s about four o’clock. I just got off the phone with Gertrude Banner, your Elysium House editor. Yeah, you heard that right. She called me up, I actually heard her voice. Looks like communications from other universes are leaking into the phone lines now. Anyway, she wants to talk to you. Call me tomorrow, soon as you can.”

  * * * *

  “She wants to talk to me?” Darcy said to her agent the next morning. “About what?”

  “About your next book. I managed to drop a few hints about your Terror Is My Middle Name proposal, and she thinks it sounds great, but she wants to talk to you. She’s really insistent—called back just a few minutes ago to ask if I’d heard from you yet.”

  Leonard had talked to her Elysium House editor twice! Amazing, Darcy thought. If telephone conversations were possible now, what next? Faxes from other worlds? Maybe a book tour, if someone could figure out how to move bodies, and not just information, from one continuum to another. Anything might be possible. She might actually decide to settle down in Parallel World 3 permanently; writers, after all, had often been expatriates.

  “I guess I should talk to her,” Darcy murmured. “How did she sound?”

  “Like she grew up in Brooklyn and didn’t quite manage to get rid of her accent. Anyway, I was sure you’d appreciate a chance to schmooze, so I told her you’d be looking forward to her call. She said she’d call sometime this afternoon, probably around three.”

  “My God.”

  “And she was making a few noises about doing a short story collection of yours.”

  A short story collection! Would wonders never cease? At this rate, Gertrude Banner would soon be expressing interest in her memoirs. Darcy had begun an autobiography some months back, abandoning the project after realizing that people uninterested in her fiction probably wouldn’t be any more interested in her life.

  “Anyway, let me know how it goes,” Leonard continued. “Frankly, I think the sky’s the limit at this point.”

  * * * *

  Toward three, Darcy was growing increasingly more agitated. She had spoken to plenty of editors in her life, but they had usually been people who regarded her novels largely as a relatively inexpensive way to fill slots on their lists. The only times they called were to ask her when her next novel would be finished. “You have to keep up your shelf presence! Don’t leave me with empty rack space to fill!” She had always sensed such unspoken thoughts behind any offhand praise the editors might offer for her books. She had never spoken to anyone who wanted to invest big bucks in her work, or who treated her as much more than a temp who would eventually be replaced, or as a migrant worker who could be run off the farm.

  Maybe, she thought as she fluttered around the phone, Gertrude Banner wouldn’t call today. Darcy had known more than a few editors who seemed to assume that two months was an appropriate waiting period before returning one of her calls.

  But the phone rang promptly at three. Editors in alternate worlds apparently called when they said they would.

  “Hello?” Darcy said, realizing too late that her nervousness made her sound like Rocky the Squirrel.

  “Darcy Langton?” a woman’s voice with a touch of Brooklyn said. That had to be Gertrude Banner, and she did sound a little like the female New Yorker Mike Myers played in drag in his “Coffee Talk” routine on Saturday Night Live.

  “Speaking,” Darcy said, dropping her voice into the Mary Tyler Moore range.

  “I’m delighted to hear you at last,” the woman said enthusiastically. “This is Gertrude Banner, your editor at Elysium House. I just finished reading your wonderful Terror Takes No Time Out—I simply can’t remember when I’ve had such a good time. What a terrific read—I couldn’t put it down.” Darcy did not have the heart to interrupt as Gertrude went on about how suspenseful and brilliantly written her novel was. “I want to buy it, of course,” Gertrude finished.

  “Uh, you’ll have to talk to my agent about the contract.”

  “Well, of course. But the main reason I called is that I hear you’re working on a new book. I think Leonard mentioned the title—”

  “Terror Is My Middle Name,” Darcy said.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Leonard can E-mail the proposal to you,” Darcy said. “That’s probably the easiest…”

  “Oh, Darcy. I don’t need to see a proposal from you. Just tell me you’ll do Terror Is My Middle Name for me, and I’ll start discussing the advance and contract with your agent right away.”

  Darcy could not bring herself to speak. “Um,” she said at last.

  “I’m so pleased. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to working with you on that. This is really going to be exciting. I know you’ll need more for this one than we gave you for In Terms of Terror, but I just know Leonard and I can come to an agreement that will make us all happy.”

  “Um,” Darcy said again.

  “Wonderful! I’m just so excited!” Gertrude went on to mention another pending book club deal and the prospect of interviews now that The Silent Shriek looked like a sure bet for the bestseller lists. It was a pity Darcy couldn’t be there in person, but at least
now she could be interviewed over the phone. Too bad also that there was no way to send author’s copies from one continuum to another. But Gertrude could download some material from a CD-ROM that would give Darcy an idea of how the book would look, and she could rest assured that one of the best designers in the business had done her dust jacket.

  “And I insisted on full cloth for the book,” Gertrude went on, “a nice red shade, with Gothic gold lettering on the spine—and acid-free paper, of course. But we’ll also be doing a special collectors’ edition of one thousand copies in leather.”

  “Um,” Darcy said. There wasn’t much more to say. All in all, even though the conversation was basically one-sided, it was by far the best discussion with an editor she had ever experienced.

  * * * *

  “I ran into Edwina Maris this morning,” Jane murmured to Darcy as she sat down. They were sitting in Phil Donahue’s green room, waiting to go on his show. Three other writers were already out in the studio fielding questions from the audience about their alternate rights deals, but Darcy had been told she and Jane would be going on after the break.

  “What about Edwina?” Darcy asked.

  “Oh, she was being really bitchy. I think her new book just got remaindered.”

  “But it only came out five months ago.”

  “Well, you know how it is,” Jane said. “Anyway, that’s not the point. She just saw a really shitty review of The Wrench Tightens in Kirkus, and made a point of telling me all about it. She looked absolutely delighted.”

  “What do you care?” Darcy said. “You only got about a million dollars so far for The Wrench Tightens in Alternate World 6.”

  “Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t care, but I do. I’m stuck in this universe, Darcy, and here I’m just a midlist paperback mystery writer. Maybe I’m even flattering myself by saying I’m midlist. I mean, I have to live here. I’m only on the bestseller lists in a world I can’t even get to.”