The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

by Gardner Dozois

  Jane sounded totally bummed. Darcy hated to admit it even to herself, but she was feeling the same way lately. She had thought it might be her usual depression after finishing a book, but there was more to her low spirits than that. She had completed Terror Is My Middle Name a week ago, in record time, buoyed by Gertrude Banner’s encouragement and praise and Elysium House’s million-dollar advance. Terror Is My Middle Name was her best novel so far, but Leonard had not yet found a publisher for the book here. The Silent Shriek was still number 1 on Alternate World 3’s bestseller lists, but it remained out of print in this world. Darcy might have finally made it to Phil Donahue’s show, but only as part of a program about this alternate rights business. To most people, she and her colleagues were probably even less interesting than a random selection of lottery winners; a glance at the green room’s monitor told her that Phil’s audience was already getting bored. David Letterman had booked a few alternate rights millionaires as guests on his show, but only to poke fun at them. Oprah Winfrey hadn’t invited any such writers at all.

  And now she, her friend Jane, and others like them had to suffer the scorn of writers such as Edwina Maris. Edwina was one of those critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful writers, with a small but vociferous cult following that was waiting for her to “break out.” Along with many such writers, Edwina shared a biting wit, a gift for sarcasm and irony, and scorn for writers who appealed to the lowest common denominator. Once Edwina had directed her barbs at the denizens of bestseller lists. Now, she and her underappreciated colleagues had new targets—the merely adequate wordsmiths who appealed to mass audiences only in other universes.

  Darcy knew how Edwina felt. From Edwina’s point of view, her own failure to sell alternate rights was simply further proof of her work’s worth, since those writers signing such contracts were, to Edwina, only hacks unable to achieve success in their own world. Darcy sighed. In Edwina’s shoes, she might have felt exactly the same way.

  “Better crank up my hair.” Jane poked at her permed, highlighted, and stylishly cut blonde locks with a gold pick. “We have to go on after this ad.”

  * * * *

  After their appearance, Jane went off to comfort herself with some shopping. Darcy took her limo back to the Royalton, where she had promised to meet her agent for drinks. She and Jane hadn’t exactly lighted a fire under Phil Donahue’s audience. Phil himself had grown increasingly manic in his efforts to work the crowd, and had spent the last five minutes of the program delivering a monologue about his own failure to sell alternate rights to his autobiography.

  Leonard was pacing in the hotel lobby. He came toward her as soon as she was through the door. “Come on,” he said, “we’re going to Mary Thalberg’s.”

  “What for?”

  “Don’t ask.” He herded her back outside. “This is disaster. This is absolute, total disaster.”

  “Let me guess,” Darcy said. “Money from Elysium House isn’t legal tender any more. The IRS just reversed its ruling, right? That’s why you’re here. You came to tell me I’m broke. I always knew it was too good to be true.”

  “No, no. You’re still loaded. But there’s some heavy duty shit coming down the pike anyway.” He pushed her toward the limo.

  * * * *

  Leonard was silent all the way to Mary Thalberg’s offices on the East Side. Mary’s partner and assistants had gone home by the time they arrived, but the agent was still in her office. A computer was in one corner; a widescreen TV, complete with speakers and VCR, sat against one wall. Mary’s high heels sank into her pile carpeting as she paced soundlessly and took deep drags on a cigarette.

  “I thought you quit smoking,” Leonard said to the other agent.

  “I relapsed. I should die of lung cancer anyway now that so many of my clients got screwed.” Mary waved Leonard and Darcy to her sofa. “Leonard’s already seen this, but he wanted you to see it, too.”

  “See what?” Darcy asked.

  “Didn’t he tell you? My clients already know, the ones that have alternate rights deals. I informed them all immediately. Actually, they’ve been taking the news very well. Anyway, Leonard asked—”

  “Just show her,” Leonard said glumly.

  “I was on the phone,” Mary said, “talking to an editor in Parallel World 7. Had the TV on to tape Days of Our Lives, so I have something to watch when people put me on hold, you know? While I was talking, I lost the picture, and—well, this is what my VCR taped instead.”

  Mary pointed a remote at the TV. An image came on, slightly blurred and without sound, but Darcy could make out the tiny form of a young man sitting behind a large mahogany desk, apparently talking to someone on the phone. The room dwarfed him; the place was the size of Madison Square Garden, and the walls were lined with paintings that looked to her untrained eye like Botticellis. An older man was walking toward the desk, bearing a china teapot and cups on a silver tray. Darcy couldn’t be certain, but thought she glimpsed a swimming pool through the glass doors behind the young man.

  “That’s the guy I was talking to today,” Mary said. “Lorne Efferman, an editor at Cotter and Crowe—that’s a publisher in Parallel World 7.” She paused. “We were in the middle of our conversation when I saw that on the TV. I immediately guessed it was Lorne, and he reluctantly confirmed it. Seems some signals from other universes are leaking in over the cable.” The image flickered out; Mary turned off the TV. “Let me be more specific. Lorne Efferman is an assistant editor at Cotter and Crowe.”

  “An assistant editor,” Leonard mumbled. “Not an executive editor, or a senior editor, or even just a plain editor. An assistant editor. Makes you wonder what the goddamn publisher’s office looks like—probably Versailles.”

  “My God,” Darcy whispered.

  “I was seeing if Lorne might be interested in some novels by one of my clients,” Mary said. “I’d already sold alternate rights to them in Parallel World 8, but I thought I’d feel Lorne out. We’ve been waiting for alternate publishers to come to us, but I figured it was time to be a little more aggressive.”

  “And?” Darcy asked.

  “Lorne explained—very nicely, not that it helped—that I didn’t have those rights to offer him. ‘Look at your contracts,’ he told me, so I did. I never signed those contracts, I’m positive of that, but my name was on them, and every contract had the same damned clause. I know it wasn’t in any of my alternate rights contracts before—I’d never have approved any of them if it were. But it’s there now, and I have no way to prove that I didn’t let that clause go through!”

  Mary put out her cigarette and lit another. “What clause?” Darcy asked.

  “The clause that says we haven’t been selling to just one universe when we sign those contracts. We’ve been giving one publisher in that particular universe rights to sell any book we give them to every other universe. And we don’t get one extra fucking cent!”

  “Let me put it this way,” Leonard muttered from the other end of the sofa. “Seems the contracts go into uncertainty and then don’t match the worlds they were written in. They drift. You end up with a different contract than the one you started with.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “A lot of you writers would say that’s nothing new.”

  “But I get royalties,” Darcy said, “don’t I?”

  “That’s just on sales in Parallel World 3,” Leonard replied. “I checked your contracts. You get your share of book club money and foreign sales and everything else, but only from sales in that universe. They get to keep everything else. That’s probably how they can pay such nice advances to everybody.” He glared at the blank TV screen. “That’s how some dipshit little assistant editor can have an office big enough to hold the goddamn Frankfurt Book Fair in.”

  “But—” Darcy began.

  “I put in a call to that physicist Sterling Blake,” Mary said. “Our agents’ association put him on retainer a while back. He said something about uncertainty creeping into our continuum, about the wave
functions of perception shifting or whatever. I think it means we’re in a different universe from the one we were in a few days ago.” She let out her breath. “Blake has some new equations to play with now, so of course he’s just thrilled to death.”

  They were all silent for a long time. At last Darcy said, “Does it really matter? Elysium House paid me some serious money. They did beautiful editions, even if I can’t get any author’s copies. I could retire and never have to worry about money again, and you and the other agents are raking in plenty from the deals anyway.”

  “That isn’t the point,” Leonard said.

  Darcy had known that even as she spoke. The agents would never forgive themselves for letting all those alternate rights slip away, however inadvertently. And she, along with her now-wealthy colleagues, would have to live with the knowledge that, even in other continua, publishers could still rip you off and not pay you what your work was really worth.

  Not that this newly acquired wisdom should have come as much of a surprise to any writer.

  * * * *

  Mary and Leonard were feeling a little better by the time Darcy left them to go back to her hotel. The two agents had to be philosophical about matters. Anyway, according to the grapevine, it looked as though this alternate rights business was heading toward a downturn of sorts. Mary hadn’t heard of any new alternate rights contracts being signed for nearly a month, and a couple of agents she knew had reported that their calls were no longer going through to a couple of continua. Time to collect as much as they could for their clients just in case things got even more uncertain and they ended up cut off from other parallel worlds altogether. They probably wouldn’t be able to sue for any uncollected payments later on unless attorneys in this universe got even more ingenious than they already were.

  Darcy was set. She had to look at it that way. If Donahue’s audience had been more interested in whether she knew Stephen King or in how she was going to spend her money than in her books, she could live with that. Edwina Maris might get better reviews, but raves on the front page of the New York Times Book Review hadn’t noticeably fattened Edwina’s bank account. If Elysium House was ripping Darcy off, then at least there would still be all those millions of readers in Gertrude Banner’s world reading In Terms of Terror and Terror Takes No Time Out.

  She had to think of it that way. It was the work that mattered. Her true reward was the writing itself, wasn’t it? No one could deprive her of the vivid moments she spent in worlds of her own creation, or of the sense of accomplishment she felt after finishing a final draft.

  But then the image of a publisher somewhere, sitting in the midst of splendor greater than that of the Hearst estate at San Simeon, came to her. The bastards of this world, and every other world, always won in the end; they didn’t care about the writers they exploited. Darcy ground her teeth. She would have to get hold of the Lucky Scribes and ask them for some advice. She could feel a writer’s block coming on.

  THE EICHMANN VARIATIONS, by George Zebrowski

  The beast must die;

  and the man as well;

  one and the other.

  —Brahms, Songs

  O Germany—

  Hearing the speeches that ring from your house one laughs.

  But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife.

  —Bertolt Brecht

  And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

  —Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

  1.

  I learned the details after the war. Jewish scientists had been gathered in America to create a vengeance weapon against us. It happened very much in the way described in those fantastic American pulp magazines that von Braun was always reading (he kept up his subscription through a neutral country once the war started). A team of physicists got together at a secret desert laboratory and concocted the atomic bomb out of decades-old theories.

  I didn’t believe that Berlin, Munich, and Dresden had disappeared completely until I saw the Life magazine photos published after the formal surrender in 1946. By then I had been for some months in the Argentine, living quietly, hoping to finish out my life in solitude.

  The Japanese had avoided atomic attack by surrendering shortly after their agents reported the magnitude of the blasts in Europe. I don’t blame myself for being skeptical; who would have believed such a story, especially after our bad experience with the V–2 wonder weapons? Always too expensive and impractical, Speer had complained, who knew something of engineering as well as financial planning.

  I watched the Jews build their Israel for twenty years, growing in power and prestige, until it dominated the Middle East. Everybody loved them, but how could it be otherwise? Their first miracle, the Manna Machine, took sand and through certain physico-biological manipulations of basic patterns produced edibles of any kind, as well as any other physical object or resource. Solar power was endless, so the machine ran without stop, giving away as much stomach support as Israel’s neighbors demanded. I read about it in Reader’s Digest.

  The world fell into a stupor of peace as the Semites gifted the planet with their easy solutions. But it was all on the surface; these magicians would just as easily have worked for our Fuehrer if he had courted them, if their very existence had not been such a blinding abomination. We were too zealous in our convictions. Since it is in the nature of the lower orders to go where they are welcome, these sorcerers would have built for us the greatest bakeries in Europe, and our armies would have marched to victory on the bread transubstantiated from the raw material of the underfolk.

  Now, with their stomachs satisfied and their homeland secure, they began to refine their tastes for revenge. I was captured in 1961, as I was strolling by the seashore, and taken to Jerusalem aboard a luxurious submarine. It seems that their Maimonides Mentality, a sophisticated artificial intelligence that also plans economies, had finally been able to predict where I might be found, on the basis of elaborate probabilities and shabby scraps of gossip. It had taken a picture of my footsteps, as well as my bald head, from a satellite.

  A world benefiting so greatly from Israeli science and technology looked the other way when I was kidnapped. Nazis were merely a strange and rare form of humanity collected by their Jewish benefactors, for private reasons.

  2.

  Ten gallows.

  They die by metric count, these scarecrows who wear my face. Each morning I am duplicated ten times and forced to watch the execution.

  The faces seem puzzled as they stare at me. Who am I? they wonder, knowing full well who they are. Why am I not with them on the block? Do they all have my memories? Or are they blank die cuts, wearing my wrinkles? They are innocent, even if they remember what is in my brain.

  What can I care for my doubles?

  I imagine rushing forward to mingle with them, thus denying my captors the satisfaction of seeing the original perish, except as the hidden member of a group. Any one of us will answer to being the original, except that the doppelgängers are innocent!

  Why? How can that be?

  Because they did not exist when my so-called crimes were committed! Only the pattern of specific memories is guilty. I will not rush among my doubles; I do not wish to die anonymously.

  They force me to watch as the bodies are fed into the fusion torch, which consumes utterly, leaving only a gas from which basic elements can be reclaimed. What we could have done with that! The final solution would have been completed by 1941.

  3.

  The point of killing your racial enemies lies in denying them their future, the embodiment of their children. The stream of history is diverted, given a different character than i
t might have had; but now cultures live or die where once individuals of unconscious species clashed for glorious possession of plain, sea, forest, or sky.

  They are manlier, these scientific Jews; they are not fearful of wielding power. Once they were constrained and cowardly; a good number were homosexual. What did they know of true freedom, they who would not dare do what was in their hearts? A true man listens to the abyss, to the inner song that the Fuehrer knew so well. A few years after the war I read that some of the survivors were developing nostalgia for the war, for the death camps, for slavehood.

  4.

  This morning, one year after my imprisonment, I dreamed of a pit. A huge, dark beast came into it on all fours. Its skin was sandpapery, gray-black, covered with sores. It stood up on all fours and spoke to the crowd pressing in around the guard rail.

  “The world is not mine,” it said as the crowd drew back, horrified by its massive body. “This my father taught me, that the world is not mine.” The voice was soft, cultivated, threatening.

  The crowd gasped and whispered, and moved closer to observe the tragic, apelike face.

  “They captured it at the headwaters of the Amazon,” someone said. “It’s descended from giant tree otters.”

  I didn’t want to look into the beast’s eyes. The lights in the arena flickered. It grew dark.

  “You see,” the same voice said, “it’s not really intelligent. A very kind, sensitive man taught it that speech, but it’s nothing but a kind of mimicry…”

  I watched the beast out of the corner of my eye. The creature was watching me; it knew I was there.

  I woke up and yearned to see the sun; there was no time in my cell.

  5.

  Today, one of my brothers visited me.

  “How goes it?” the image asked.

  “And you?”

  He shrugged. “I have your thoughts and memories, innocently. They explained, as if confessing their crime. I feel that what we did, what you and I remember doing, is a bad dream from which I have wakened.”