by Allen Steele
“That was rather forgiving of her,” Kate said.
“Judie was a saint. I was at the party where she and Nat met, and … look, it’s a long story, but what it boils down to is that I was trying to figure out how to break up with him without hurting him too badly when they met. Nat liked me well enough, but with her, it was love at first sight. All I had to do was step aside and let nature take its course.”
“So the three of you stayed friends.”
“That’s right. And that made it easy for the three of us to sit down and work things out.”
“So my grandparents—Grandpapa and Judith, I mean—”
Maggie smiled. “If you still want to call Judie your grandmother, you can. I understand.”
“So they decided to adopt my mother once she was born.”
“That’s correct.” Resting her elbows on the table, Maggie clasped her hands together. “I took a leave of absence from Street & Smith—I hadn’t yet begun to show, so they accepted my story that I was having a ‘case of nerves’ and needed a sabbatical—and moved up to New Hampshire, where my family had a summer cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee. My parents were sympathetic to my situation, and my mother came up to take care of me. In the meantime, Nat and Judie tied the knot and then moved up to Boston where Nat had a teaching position waiting for him at Boston College. Judie bought some maternity clothes and started wearing pillows beneath them, and because she wouldn’t let anyone touch her belly and stayed home as often as she could, everyone accepted their story that she was pregnant. When the time came, they took a weekend trip up to New Hampshire, where she allegedly gave birth to her child.”
“In a vacation cabin on the lake, with a country midwife who happened to live nearby doing the delivery.” Kate slowly nodded. “That’s what I was told, growing up. And it was all a lie.”
Maggie shrugged. “I prefer to think of it as a plausible fabrication.”
“And no one else knew?”
“The only two other people who knew were Harry and George, and they promised to keep it to themselves.” She raised a hand before Kate could ask the obvious question. “Because they belong to the Legion of Tomorrow, and we’ve never kept secrets from each other … well, almost never.”
“So Grandpapa adopted Mama, and Grandma raised her as her own child. And you—”
“Maintained a discreet distance.” Maggie gazed out the window. “It was actually a fairly pleasant arrangement. Once I became an agent and took on Nat as my first client, I was able to watch Sylvia grow up. She always thought of me as the lady who took care of her father’s business, and I was even her babysitter a couple of times.” Her face darkened. “But Nat never really warmed to her. Because of the circumstances in which she was born, I think he had trouble accepting her as his legitimate child, and after he quit teaching to become a full-time writer, he paid more attention to his work than he did to her. That hurt their relationship even more. And when Judie told her the truth just before she passed away—”
“I think I understand everything now.”
“No, you don’t.” Maggie shook her head. “Only part of it, the part where you know why Nat, Harry, and I share a bond that goes back many years and how the Legion of Tomorrow has become the basis for the Arkwright Foundation.”
“How, sure, but not why.” Despite everything Maggie had just told her, Kate found herself thinking like a reporter again. Of the “five Ws” that had been drilled into her back in journalism school—who, what, when, where, and why—she’d learned the first four; the all-important fifth one was still missing.
“You’re right. You should know this too.” The waiter came by, and Maggie motioned for him to take away the plates. “I guess it really started just a few blocks up the street, during the 1989 World Science Fiction Convention.” She paused, and a bleak smile crossed her face. “Come to think of it, that was almost exactly fifty years after Nat, Harry, George, and I first met.”
13
It should have been a good weekend for Nat. In the end, though, Maggie realized that bringing him there had been a mistake.
The line for his autograph session began forming an hour before he actually showed up. By the time Maggie escorted him up the escalator to the promenade of the Hynes Convention Center where author signings were taking place, nearly four hundred people were waiting for him. Nathan Arkwright stared at the line snaking down the broad upstairs mezzanine, and for a moment, Maggie thought he was going to turn and beat a hasty retreat to the curb where his housekeeper, Mr. Sterling, had dropped them off just a few moments earlier.
“My god, Maggie,” he muttered. “Who are all these people here for?”
“You, my love,” she whispered, and then she took him by the arm and led him to the table.
This was the first science fiction convention Nathan had attended in years. Indeed, if it hadn’t been in his own state, he probably wouldn’t have shown up at all. But the mass-market paperback of Through the Event Horizon had just come out, and since the book was a New York Times hardcover bestseller last year, his publisher was putting a major push behind it, and they wanted Nat to make at least a couple of public appearances to promote the book. Showing up for one day of this year’s Worldcon shouldn’t have been much of a burden, but even so, Maggie had had to practically drag Nat out of his house. He’d become a recluse since Judith’s death, and invitations to attend SF conventions had been routinely ignored.
Once Nat sat down at the table—by himself, thankfully, with no authors he didn’t know sitting beside him—things got better. One by one, fans stepped before him, each bearing copies of his books to be signed, mainly Beyond the Event Horizon, but some also brought old and valuable editions of his earlier books, including one collector with a mint-condition copy of the May 1940 issue of Startling where he’d made his debut. Nat was standoffish at first, saying little if anything to the people who approached him, but he gradually warmed up to the task. He began talking to the fans, chatting with them as he signed his name with the onyx Montblanc fountain pen that Maggie had given him when he’d signed his first million-dollar contract, even talking a little bit about the Galaxy Patrol books although this was a subject he was usually reluctant to discuss with anyone who wasn’t professionally involved with their production.
As she quietly sat beside him, Maggie saw a glimmer of the Nat she used to know. Deep down inside the lonely old man still mourning the death of his wife was the young writer she’d met at the first Worldcon a half century earlier. It was a pleasure to see him return, if only for a few minutes.
The signing went well, and when it was done, she escorted him up another level to the greenroom so he could get out of the public eye for a little while before his next program event. But even there he was the center of attention. Once they heard that he was in the building, longtime friends who hadn’t seen him in many years—Hal Clement, Robert Silverberg, Kelly Freas—made a point of coming by, while younger writers for whom he was only a legend either shyly came up to shake his hand or stood off to the side, pretending to play it cool but actually delighted to be in the company of one of the Big Four. Nat sat on a couch, sipping a Diet Coke as writers, artists, and editors gathered around him, and for a little while, it seemed to Maggie that the Nat she knew and loved was coming back.
It didn’t last. A couple of hours later, Nat made the second of three appearances the convention had scheduled for him that day, a panel discussion with the vague title “The Future of the Future.” Again, Nat was among friends: Bob Silverberg and Fred Pohl, along with the moderator, Stanley Schmidt, the Analog editor for whom Nat had written a rare Galaxy Patrol short story a couple of years earlier. The panel was held in the main ballroom, and it was filled to capacity; every seat was taken, and fans stood along the walls and sat in the aisle. So things should have gone well.
Yet they didn’t. Once again, Nat was the center of attention, but what had been a novelty earlier in the day was now an unwanted task. From the first row, Maggie wa
tched as Nat seemed to fade before her very eyes. As the hour went by, he slumped lower and lower in his chair, and he seemed incapable of engaging the other panelists in conversation but instead spoke past them, veering off topic to talk about things that had little to do with the subject at hand. When Fred spoke about emerging awareness of an electronic dominion called cyberspace, for instance, Nat responded with a rambling complaint about how hard it was to find someone in the Berkshires to repair his daisy wheel printer when it broke down. But it wasn’t until the hour was nearly over that matters went from bad to worse.
A bearded fan with Brillo Pad hair and wearing a black T-shirt and baggy jeans—seeing him, Maggie mourned the bygone era when no self-respecting young man would go out in public without a haircut and a tie—had stood up to ask why anyone even bothered to write about space anymore. “It’s all about computers, y’know,” he said. “The Challenger disaster just shows how dangerous space is. Can’t we do the same thing with robots and not make astronauts risk their lives going up there?” A shrug and a know-it-all smile. “Space travel … y’know, that might have been great for the ’40s or ’50s, but now it’s the ’90s, and it’s a whole new world.”
Bob Silverberg leaned forward to speak, but Nat cut him off before he could utter a word. “That is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said with a slow, disgusted sigh.
A collective gasp went up from the audience. A few scattered laughs, a boo from way in the back, but mainly a shocked, shared ohhh. Fred’s eyebrows raised, and Bob gave him a sharp look. Stan was stunned, as well, but before he could gain control of the mike, Nat hunched forward to stare the astonished youngster straight in the eye.
“No, really,” he went on, “that’s amazingly imbecilic. I have a computer too, but do I really think that it could anything I can do? Hell, no. It can’t even make coffee. So this idea that computers are going to be the end-all and be-all of everything is just moronic.” He shook his head.
“Nat,” Bob began.
“No, let me finish.” Nat turned his back to him and Fred. “As for the rest, do you seriously believe the astronauts are marched out to the launchpad at gunpoint?” He made a pistol out of his fingers and jabbed it at the audience. “G’wan … get in that shuttle, or I’ll kill you!” A few people chuckled, and Nat went on, “It is an incredibly brave thing that they do and couldn’t possibly be replicated by any computer or robot, no matter how sophisticated they may be. And even if people could be left on the ground, why would we want them to be? The future is a frontier that’s not going to be explored by sitting in front of a computer screen, eating potato chips. It’s life, and life requires an effort. The astronauts know this, and that’s why they’re willing to accept the danger. And maybe if you got off your butt, you’d understand these things!”
By then, the ballroom had gone quiet. The laughter had stopped, and everyone was staring at Nathan as if he was a beloved grandfather who’d suddenly scolded his family for no apparent reason. The fan who’d asked the question was pale; not knowing whether to sit down or remain standing, he nervously shifted back and forth on his feet.
“You want to see the future?” Nathan demanded, still glaring at him. “You want to know what things are going to be like in the next century? Then turn off your TV, put down your computer games, drop the Star Trek book you’re reading, and go out there and create it yourself! Science fiction is just that—it’s fiction! Made-up stories! You’ve got to … got to…”
Nathan blinked and stammered as if he’d suddenly lost his train of thought. As abruptly as it had begun, the storm passed. Stanley Schmidt took over the mike and tactfully changed the subject, and Nat said nothing more for the rest of the hour. When the panel was over, Maggie hurried to the stage. She took Nat by the arm and ushered him out a side door before anyone could corner him. Mr. Sterling had been given the afternoon off and wasn’t supposed to pick them until that evening, so she flagged down a cab on Boylston Street and pushed Nathan into the back of it.
Maggie asked the driver to take them to a small neighborhood bar she knew about in the Back Bay area, one where they were unlikely to encounter any fans or other writers. Once they were settled into a booth, she pulled out her portable phone—an expensive toy that she’d fortunately thought to put in her shoulder bag before coming up to Boston, just in case a client or an editor needed to reach her—and used it to call the convention’s guest liaison. The young lady with whom Maggie spoke was sympathetic when she was told that Nathan Arkwright was canceling his reading later that afternoon; apparently, she’d already learned about Nat’s panel blowup. Maggie simply told her that Nat wasn’t feeling well; she apologized for the inconvenience and then disconnected and hailed a waiter.
Through all of it, Nat was silent. Stunned by his own behavior, he’d allowed Maggie to spirit him out of the convention and into the dark anonymity of the bar, where he could become just another old guy having a drink. There was a ball game on TV, but the Red Sox weren’t playing, so the few other people in the place weren’t paying much attention. Maggie waited until their drinks came, and then she reached across the table to take Nathan’s hand.
“Okay, you,” she said. “What happened back there?”
“I don’t know.” Nat picked up his whiskey and soda, took a sip, and put it down again. “I was doing okay, I think … well, maybe I wasn’t … but then that brat starts in with … I don’t remember, but it was something stupid, and it just set me off.” A wry grin. “Scared the hell out of him, didn’t I?”
“You scared the hell out of me.”
Nat started to laugh, but then he saw the expression on her face, and the grin disappeared. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to do that to you.” He looked down at his drink and shook his head. “No, I don’t know what got into me. Maybe I’m just frustrated about a lot of things, and I took it out on the first guy who rubbed me wrong. Coming here might not have been such a good idea, after all.”
“Yes, well, I think that goes without saying.” Then she shook her head. “No, no, that’s not true. You were doing fine during the signing and had a great time in the greenroom. In fact, it’s the happiest I’ve seen you in years. But then you got up in front of all those people and … oh, for god’s sake, Nat! What were you thinking?”
Nat looked away. His gaze turned toward the TV, and for a minute or so, he watched the baseball game with detached curiosity, perhaps not really seeing it at all.
“This isn’t my scene anymore, Maggie,” he said at last. “Science fiction, I mean. I come to this convention, and it’s filled with strangers. Sure, I still know a few people, but the rest … they’re just children, kids who aren’t interested anymore in anything I’ve got to say.”
“That’s not true. Your books sell better than they ever have. You have the fans to owe for that.”
He gave her a sidelong look. “C’mon, you know better. Fans aren’t most of my readers. They’re not even the core. They’re a subset, a little circle off to the side of a big Venn diagram. So maybe I ought not care what they think, but…” Again, he shook his head. “I do because, in a way, the kid may be right.”
“How’s that?”
“No one cares about space anymore. The fans are now into … what did Fred call it, cyberspace?… and if it isn’t that, then it’s dragons and elves. If the Galaxy Patrol stories are still selling well, it’s because I’ve been writing them for almost fifty years and have the TV show and the movies too. But I’m bored with them. I really am.” He paused to pick up his glass. “This book is the last one, Maggie. I’m done with the series.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Sorry, old girl, but you’ll have to find a new meal ticket. I’m done with the Patrol books. Sharecrop ’em if you want—I’m sure you’d have no trouble finding writers who’d beg to do them—but I’m sick of the whole thing.” He took a drink, hissed between his teeth. “In fact, I’m sick of writing, period. Half of a century is long enough.”
M
aggie wished Harry or George were there. She could have used help from the rest of the Legion just then. But Harry was ailing, and George was busy at the Institute for Advanced Study, so she had to handle Nat by herself. “So what are you going to do? Sit around the house and do nothing all day?”
“No, not at all. I want to continue pursuing my interests, just in a different way, that’s all.” Nathan put down the empty glass, pushed it away. “I’m thinking about putting all that money I’ve made to good use and underwrite the things I believe in. Projects that will get people into space—private companies, university research, stuff like that.”
“You’ll have a lot of people knocking at your door.”
“Not if I do so anonymously. I might even set up a nonprofit foundation and fund it with profits from investments in space business.” He shrugged. “I’m still working it out in my mind. But the point is, I’ve finished writing. I’m retiring.”
“Writers don’t retire, Nat. They just quit for a while.” Maggie picked up her drink. “You’ll be working on another book before long.”
“Only if it’s my memoirs, sweetheart.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea. Fred and Isaac have written their autobiographies. Why can’t I?”
She’d just taken a sip of her vodka and tonic when he said this; it took a lot to keep from sputtering. “Please don’t,” she said, wiping her mouth with a napkin from the table. “If you tell the truth, no one will ever forgive you.”
“The truth? About what?” And then he caught the look in her eye and understood. “Oh, yeah, that. Well, one day, she’ll be old enough to understand.”