The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “Take it easy, Cathay,” Trilby soothed, hugging him close to her. “Take it easy.”

  He was immediately contrite, and began to cry quietly. He said how sorry he was, over and over, and he was sincere. He said, he hadn’t meant it, it just came out, it was cruel.

  And so forth.

  I was cold all over.

  We put him to bed in the shack, then started down the road.

  “We’ll have to watch him the next few days,” Trilby said. “He’ll get over this, but it’ll be rough.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I took a look at the shack before we went around the false bend in the road. For one moment I saw Beatnik Bayou as a perfect illusion, a window through time. Then we went around the tree and it all fell apart. It had never mattered before.

  But it was such a sloppy place. I’d never realized how ugly the Sugar Shack was.

  I never saw it again. Cathay came to live with us for a few months, tried his hand at art. Darcy told me privately that he was hopeless. He moved out, and I saw him frequently after that, always saying hello.

  But he was depressing to be around, and he knew it. Besides, he admitted that I represented things he was trying to forget. So we never really talked much.

  Sometimes I play golf in the old bayou. It’s only two holes, but there’s talk of expanding it.

  They did a good job on the renovation.

  INTRODUCTION TO “Air Raid”

  What can I say about the next story? Well, actually, I could say so much that I’d be in danger of having the introduction run longer than the story itself.

  It all began one rather warm afternoon in Damon and Kate’s living room, at the Milford Conference, as I tried not to doze off while somebody’s story was being efficiently deconstructed. It might even have been one of my stories. Suddenly this idea appeared in my head, full-blown. Five minutes later it was more or less completely written, all I had to do was go home and sit at the typewriter for a while. I did it that night, finishing just as the sun was coming up.

  Ten years later I found myself standing with Kris Kristofferson on a steep hillside on the outskirts of Toronto at 3 A.M., so cold I couldn’t feel my feet. The hillside was smoking, there were small fires everywhere, and the twisted wreckage of an old 707 which had been trucked in from an airliner graveyard in Mexico was artfully scattered over several blackened acres, along with thousands of crushed suitcases, carefully scorched clothing, and all manner of other junk. There was a line of big trucks along the dirt road behind me: gaffers’ and grips’ vans, craft services dispensing sandwiches and bottles of Evian water to the five hundred people standing around, honey-wagons, Winnebagos, mobile makeup and hairdressers’ studios. There were thirty cars made up to look like police cruisers from various jurisdictions in Minnesota, right down to fake license plates. There were a dozen real fire trucks ready to spray water over the scene. There were four large camera booms, miles and miles of cables, hundreds of massive lights, and three camera helicopters zooming overhead. The scene was so convincing that two real airline pilots on approach to the Toronto airport a few miles away called the tower to report that a big jet had gone down.

  Kris swept his arm to indicate the scene and grinned at me. “John, you wrote all this,” he said. A few minutes later somebody shouted “Action!”

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. . . .

  I sold the story, “Air Raid,” to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, a new publication which had first been announced while I was attending Milford. It was to appear in the very first issue, but I had already sold them another story. The editor, George Scithers, suggested I might want to use a pseudonym. Back in the forties there were guys who wrote entire issues of SF magazines, under eight different names. Asimov said he thought it was a silly custom, but I was tickled by the idea, and used the name “Herb Boehm.” Herbert is my middle name and the one I used until I decided to become a writer (John Varley just looked better to me), and Boehm (pronounced “Beam”) is my mother’s maiden name. It is the only time I’ve ever used a pseudonym.

  The story was collected in several anthologies. One of them was read by Dennis Lasker, an assistant to John Foreman, a man who had produced many of Paul Newman’s films, most notably Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. “Air Raid” is about people from the future who are taking people off airplanes that are about to crash. They aren’t gentle about it. It is without a doubt the most action-packed story I’ve ever done. Dennis was on a plane when he read it, and later told me he kept looking over his shoulder, worried about being kidnapped.

  Soon I was on an airplane myself, winging down to Los Angeles. I was taken to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel for a lunch meeting. Dustin Hoffman was sitting at the next table. At my table were John Foreman; Douglas Trumbull, the special effects wizard behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, who would be directing the proposed movie; Freddie Fields, who used to be Judy Garland’s agent; and David Begelman. Begelman’s name was familiar. That very morning in the hotel his name had been in the headline of the Los Angeles Times, plea bargaining his way into “community service” because he forged Cliff Robertson’s name on $80,000 worth of checks to cover gambling debts. Many years later, David killed himself in a five-star hotel in Beverly Hills. I don’t think it had anything to do with the movie we discussed that day, which would come to be called Millennium, but I wouldn’t swear to it. It almost drove me to suicide.

  If any movie ever had a checkered history, it was Millennium.

  I was hired to write a forty-page treatment turning what could have been a very exciting episode of The Twilight Zone into a feature-length movie. I was also hired to write a novelization, which struck me as putting the cart before the horse, but since I was assured I’d have a totally free hand and wouldn’t have to adhere slavishly to whatever script was eventually turned in, I accepted the assignment. A good thing, too. The man they hired to write the script eventually produced something that bore only a passing relationship to “Air Raid.” I hated it. Luckily, so did everybody else. I showed John the script I had written in four feverish days adapted from my story “The Phantom of Kansas.” He liked it. I allowed as how I’d like a shot at Millennium. Amazingly, he thought that was a good idea. Even more amazingly, so did Doug, David, and Freddie. I was in the screenwriting business.

  We discussed the project with Paul Newman. John suggested Jane Fonda for the female lead. Pretty heady stuff. I turned in the first draft, which was read and endlessly rehashed, as is standard practice in Hollywood. I began on the second draft. Then one night Natalie Wood went swimming, drowned, and Millennium was dead. In hindsight, I know it probably should have stayed dead, but it soon became The Development Project That Wouldn’t Die! Good science fiction title, that.

  Why did Natalie Wood’s death drive the first stake into the undying heart of Millennium? Simple. Doug Trumbull was directing Brainstorm at the time, and Natalie Wood was starring in it. MGM took a look at the insurance on the project and found, to the surprise and delight of the studio bean counters, that they could make a tidy profit by just closing the picture down. Doug Trumbull thought he could finish it, shoot around her few remaining scenes, and if necessary perform some of his special effects hoodoo and morph Wood’s face onto a double. Create a Natalie golem, sort of like Gollum. MGM thought this was in bad taste, and besides, “We’ve got a guaranteed profit!” Doug thought it would be a good memorial to Natalie, and besides, he wanted to finish the picture. He took them to court. Within a week Doug was about as welcome on the MGM lot as Michael Cimino after Heaven’s Gate.

  Okay, so it wasn’t so simple. But there it was.

  Nobody blamed any of this on me, so while John Foreman looked around for ways to get his picture going again, other producers came calling. Over the next ten years I worked on several projects. I was offered Star Trek III, but turned it down because I knew nothing about Star Trek, and don’t even like it. And I wrote three screenplays that I still think would ma
ke good movies, including an adaptation of Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Nothing happened with them. This is not at all unusual in that business. Everybody in Hollywood has good, unproduced scripts lying around in studio vaults.

  During those ten years, between bouts of rewriting Millennium, I lived in Eugene but spent a lot of time in Hollywood. I stayed at great hotels: the Beverly Wilshire, the Chateau Marmont, the Westwood Marquis, Le Mondrian. I was treated to lunch and dinner at all the fanciest restaurants. I visited or worked at all the major studios except Universal: Fox, Warner Brothers, Columbia, Disney. None of them looked like they do in the movies, with hundreds of extras milling about the streets in exotic costumes, big stars in limos, stagehands shifting props and scenery and lights. In fact, most of them looked like they ought to have tumbleweeds bouncing down the streets. In appearance, they varied from a bit frayed around the edges to downright decrepit, except Disney, which was neat and clean and looked pretty much like my old high school. I strolled down Goofy Drive, expecting to hear the class bell ringing. At the Burbank Studios I hung around at the Waltons’ West Virginia home, which was a hollow shell. I saw appalling indifference to cinema history, from gigantic model warships used in In Harm’s Way left out in the weather to fall apart, to old storage sheds with film canisters spilling out onto the ground and unreeling. Who knows what was on those old reels? Lost, all lost.

  At one point I had an office right at the MGM gate. You can see my window in any number of studio documentaries. I could sit there, not working very hard, and watch Erik Estrada arriving to work on CHiPs, which was about the only thing filming there at the time. I could amble down the avenue with the bungalows that used to belong to Metro’s biggest stars—and there were none bigger—and now all housed production companies. I saw Esther Williams’ giant swimming pool, now dry. The lot has been renamed Sony Pictures Studios, which I’m sure makes Louis B. Mayer spin rapidly in his grave.

  During that time I worked on a development project with Jeffrey Katzenberg, later the K of SKG. S for Spielberg, G for Geffen. I met Charlton Heston, Art Linkletter, Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, Joanne Woodward, Peter O’Toole, Sigourney Weaver, Gary Busey, and Kirk Douglas, among others. All of them were shorter than I had imagined, except Sigourney. None of this has anything to do with Millennium, but it’s so much fun to drop names and I figured this was the best place to do it.

  A while later Richard Rush, who made the wonderful The Stunt Man, was signed to direct the project, and we started a rewrite to bring the script more in line with his personal vision. I soon learned that all directors want to do that. It was fun working with Richard, but I soon began to think he was going to turn my story into The Stunt Man II. Our most memorable meeting was when he flew us to Catalina Island in his plane for buffalo burgers at the airport restaurant. The airport on Catalina is on the highest point, so I’m probably one of the few people to visit there who’s never been to the only town on the island, Avalon.

  That fell apart because of personality clashes between John Foreman and Richard Rush. We went to Canada some years later and hired Alvin Rakoff. That fell apart: some financing deal in the Netherlands. We hired Phillip Borsos. That fell apart. I have no idea why.

  Finally everything was in place, just about nine years after I wrote the first screenplay, and I was invited to Toronto to work with Michael Anderson. He directed The Dam Busters, which George Lucas stole from when filming the climactic battle in Star Wars. He also directed the Best Picture of 1958, Around the World in 80 Days, and had a lot of great stories to tell about Mike Todd, the insane producer of that spectacle. Michael was no stranger to salvaging pictures that were in trouble. He said that on the first day of shooting Orca, the expensive mechanical killer whale that was supposed to be the star of the show caught fire, burned, and sank, never to be seen again. They had to shoot without it. Maybe that should have warned me.

  We rented a gigantic empty factory building that had formerly made massive transformers, and started building what was at the time the largest indoor set ever constructed in Canada. And I got to do something that screenwriters seldom do, which was spend six months in Toronto doing continuous rewrites and watching the movie being made, from early drawings to the first nail being driven into the first board, to the last day of principle photography.

  I have to say that moviemaking is quite the most exciting pursuit I’ve ever been involved in. There is an air of urgency, and most of the things you do are far from everyday reality. The people involved are creating illusions very carefully and it is fascinating. I must also report that it is the dullest work imaginable. You’ve heard the expression “boring as watching paint dry.” It’s that dull. In fact, a lot of the movie business is watching paint dry. It can take many hours to set up one shot that lasts five seconds, then many hours to set up the next shot. Only the grips and the director are busy most of the time. A writer is usually the least busy of all . . . until suddenly an actor doesn’t like the way a line plays, and then you are very busy indeed.

  I had a ball. And at the end we got to blow everything up. Big explosions!

  And in the end, we made a rotten movie. There are lots of people I could blame for that, but I’ll let the blame rest squarely on the one most responsible for it: myself. It’s my name on it, and it’s my baby.

  What happened, in hindsight, is that I lost the vision. I should have bailed out on the third or fourth director. But the project had acquired a life of its own, it wouldn’t die, and I didn’t want to abandon it. I kept thinking I could eventually steer it back on course, but by the end the script was covered with so many fingerprints it would have baffled a forensic scientist. When rewrites are added to a script in production they are printed on paper of a different color and tipped in to the original. By the last day of shooting I don’t think there were any two pages of the same color.

  So that’s how it happened. I console myself by remembering that Harlan Ellison, one of the best writers working in SF movies and television, wrote a rotten script. William Goldman, maybe the best screenwriter ever, wrote a rotten script. So it can happen to any of us. I learned a lot, mostly what not to do, and when to stand firm or get out. I love the movies, I see one almost every day. I’ll get another shot, maybe at my most recent novel, Red Thunder, and I know I’ll do better.

  Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this unassuming little story that was the basis of all the racket.

  AIR RAID

  I WAS JERKED awake by the silent alarm vibrating my skull. It won’t shut down until you sit up, so I did. All around me in the darkened bunkroom the Snatch Team members were sleeping singly and in pairs. I yawned, scratched my ribs, and patted Gene’s hairy flank. He turned over. So much for a romantic send-off.

  Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I reached to the floor for my leg, strapped it on, and plugged it in. Then I was running down the rows of bunks toward Ops.

  The situation board glowed in the gloom. Sun-Belt Airlines Flight 128, Miami to New York, September 15, 1979. We’d been looking for that one for three years. I should have been happy, but who can afford it when you wake up?

  Liza Boston muttered past me on the way to Prep. I muttered back and followed. The lights came on around the mirrors, and I groped my way to one of them. Behind us, three more people staggered in. I sat down, plugged in, and at last I could lean back and close my eyes.

  They didn’t stay closed for long. Rush! I sat up straight as the sludge I use for blood was replaced with super-charged go-juice. I looked around me and got a series of idiot grins. There was Liza, and Pinky and Dave. Against the far wall Cristabel was already turning slowly in front of the airbrush, getting a Caucasian paint job. It looked like a good team.

  I opened the drawer and started preliminary work on my face. It’s a bigger job every time. Transfusion or no, I looked like death. The right ear was completely gone now. I could no longer close my lips; the gums were permanently bared. A week earlier, a finger had fallen off in my sleep. And what’s it to y
ou, bugger?

  While I worked, one of the screens around the mirror glowed. A smiling young woman, blonde, high brow, round face. Close enough. The crawl line read Mary Katrina Sondergard, born Trenton, New Jersey, age in 1979: 25. Baby, this is your lucky day.

  The computer melted the skin away from her face to show me the bone structure, rotated it, gave me cross sections. I studied the similarities with my own skull, noted the differences. Not bad, and better than some I’d been given.

  I assembled a set of dentures that included the slight gap in the upper incisors. Putty filled out my cheeks. Contact lenses fell from the dispenser and I popped them in. Nose plugs widened my nostrils. No need for ears; they’d be covered by the wig. I pulled a blank plastiflesh mask over my face and had to pause while it melted in. It took only a minute to mold it to perfection. I smiled at myself. How nice to have lips.

  The delivery slot clunked and dropped a blonde wig and a pink outfit into my lap. The wig was hot from the styler. I put it on, then the pantyhose.

  “Mandy? Did you get the profile on Sondergard?” I didn’t look up; I recognized the voice.

  “Roger.”

  “We’ve located her near the airport. We can slip you in before take-off, so you’ll be the joker.”

  I groaned and looked up at the face on the screen. Elfreda Baltimore-Louisville, Director of Operational Teams: lifeless face and tiny slits for eyes. What can you do when all the muscles are dead?

  “Okay.” You take what you get.

  She switched off, and I spent the next two minutes trying to get dressed while keeping my eyes on the screens. I memorized names and faces of crew members plus the few facts known about them. Then I hurried out and caught up with the others. Elapsed time from first alarm: twelve minutes and seven seconds. We’d better get moving.