Analog SFF, May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Carlson had been warned against dealing with the Tchi, who seemed poised to reward their advance reputation as a bunch of aggravating snots, but the art of the novel had just been declared dead for the ten thousandth time in about as many years, and like any scrivener not one of the current best-seller list's anointed five he had leaped at the first subsidy offered him. How hard could it be, to write on an alien world for one local year? To scratch his beard thoughtfully, while those aliens asked a hundred variations of “where do you get your ideas?” and each time parrot back some version of the classic reply “Schenectady?” To offer himself as an accomplished eminence, attending parties, radiating knowledge and saying witty things while going home to work on the perennial One That Was Going To Change Everything For Him?

  Not hard at all, he'd imagined. Especially considering just how much the Tchi were willing to pay: an order of magnitude beyond any speaking fee he'd ever received.

  But judging on the intimations of doom expelled by the odious Finn, he'd overlooked something. He said, “I must have misunderstood the nature of the curriculum. I thought I was to be the only Author in Residence.”

  “No such luck,” Finn said. “You're one of forty. Everybody's signed up for a year or more, and scheduled to arrive at staggered intervals of one every few weeks or so. That way there's always some new preening egotist primed for a rude awakening, and some empty shell counting the last days before his or her ride home. Generally speaking, you can tell those who've been here for a while by how gut-punched they look; I have most of the year still left to go and I look like I have gremlins eating my spleen.”

  “Just what do they do that's so bad?”

  “Nothing that isn't in your contract. You write your standard daily output on any project of your own personal preference. You make it available to the faculty. You show up once a week or so to read aloud and answer questions before an audience. If you produce nothing—and I assure you, some of us have tried that; there are Authors in Residence here who swear they'll never write anything again—they ask about your past work instead. Repeat as necessary until your time in hell is over.”

  Carlson frowned. “All of that sounds pretty standard.”

  “Oh, it's standard all right,” Finn said, with bleak finality. “The Tchi have it down to a science.”

  “And this defeats people, how?”

  “It defeats them by driving a stake through every creative impulse they ever had. Look. Remember Sandra Jaagin?”

  Of course Carlson did. He'd shared a teaching fellowship—and for a while, an apartment—with her at the University of New Kansas. It was there, in fact, that she'd sold her first novel: also there that Carlson, whose own career had not been going well at the time, had burst into a jealous tantrum that turned everything sour for the few weeks their relationship still had to live. He had always wanted to run into her again, so he could apologize. “The Tchi made her stop writing?”

  “She's well and truly blocked. These days she goes on a lot of long walks. And then there's Vera Lugoff.”

  Carlson remembered Vera from several previous writing conferences. She was an odd twig of a woman, poorly socialized even by the sometimes generous standards afforded fiction writers, and she specialized in the production of epic doorstops about virginal frontier women and the shaggy-maned, bare-chested louts who loved them. The supreme sexual act for the couples inhabiting any Vera Lugoff novel seemed to be standing atop one windswept crag or another, and proclaiming their love in three-page sentences crammed with enough metaphors to make her pages sticky. Vera spoke much the same way, and always radiated scorn when her five-hundred declarations of nothing in particular failed to produce sustained replies in the same prose style. Carlson had never known another writer so much in love with her own work, or any other whose ego had seemed more impervious to criticism. He squeaked: “She's here?”

  “She's here, nested flashbacks and all. The Tchi flew her in three months ago. And she was game all right: she flounced in, and read her first excerpt in a fit of high eloquence capable of flattening even the most demanding human audience in either satisfaction or sheer dumbfounded amazement. And guess what?”

  “What?”

  “It took less than a dozen sessions with the Tchi to break her. She's stopped writing. She just stays inside her bungalow and weeps, saying that she'll never write a word again.”

  “Vera said that? Vera?"

  “Vera,” Finn confirmed. “We've had suicide attempts, outbreaks of alcoholism, buzzpop abuse and other arcane addictions, perfectly good manuscripts fed to deletion programs, one nervous breakdown that left its victim declaring himself a mushroom, and at least a dozen talented writers who have found themselves unable to add a single word to their online files in weeks or months. Lord alone knows how many of them will produce again. I'm stronger than most, and my muse may have fallen down the well for good.”

  Carlson was horrified, intrigued, terrified, and defiant, all at once. The main reason he wasn't actually forewarned is that he was also a professional writer, which is to say he'd spent much of his life listening to all the learned voices, ranging from his parents to his ex-wives to the gray-bearded eminences who had plowed this ground before him, who had advised him of doom if he allowed his life to take this course. So instead of asking Finn for further details, he just ventured, “That won't happen to me.”

  And Finn exploded. Almost literally: a few additional grams per square millimeter pressure against the inside of his skull and he might have left most of his cerebrum plastered against the skimmer walls. As it is, his head bulged. “Oh, so you think you're better than us.”

  “Oh, come on, I never said that, it's just that you've always been hypersensitive to criticism—”

  “Oh, that's it,” Finn laughed. “And you're not? Forgive me for thinking otherwise! I know you're better than us! You can't be broken by the same forces breaking the rest of us mere mortals! I'll just cease doubting you and permit you to enter the lair of beasts without further warning!”

  The goggling Carlson said, “I never—”

  “No, to hell with you. I'll just let you get up before all those Tchi and learn for yourself. It's just about the only form of entertainment us poor scribes have around here!”

  * * * *

  At first, the press conference didn't seem any more, or any less, grim than most other public appearances of Carlson's experience.

  There were the Tchi, of course: disconcerting enough when encountered in human space, where most people operating outside diplomatic circles rarely encountered more than one or two at a time. As on the transport, there was something about the way they raised their eyebrows or curled their lips at even the slightest human utterance that had always made Carlson wonder if his deodorant had failed, and when they performed their silent derision act in public, it was a little like having his fragile sense of self-worth pelted with invisible foam-rubber mallets. But Carlson had spoken at many other colleges in his career, including many that catered exclusively to the children of the entitled and privileged: he was well acquainted with the hostile blank stares of those who had never heard of him, those who had never had any interest in hearing of him, and those who resented him for their university's insistence in believing that they might want to hear of him. He found nothing in the many rows filled with Tchi grimaces he could not connect to those prior experiences.

  Too, there was the comfort to be found in the presence of his colleagues: not just Finn, who stood in the back of the chamber, grinning nastily as he waited for the carnage to follow, and Vera Lugoff, who had affected an ancient widow's veil out of mourning for whatever she thought the Tchi had done to her, but also a number of individuals Carlson actually liked and respected. He was particularly pleased to see Sandra Jaagin: she was many years older, like himself, but showed the signs of regular rejuvenation treatments, and seemed kilometers removed from the broken woman Finn had described: she even smiled at him from her spot at the back of the room. Only
the sudden urgency that flared in her eyes, when the Tchi moderator Dr. Flei Garkh stepped up to the podium to introduce him, gave Carlson another frisson of fear.

  Garkh licked his minuscule lips with the distaste of a creature that had just found something moving on them, and said, “Today we are pleased to have with us the eminent Hom sap author, Brian Carlson, a man who exemplifies the state of the art insofar as it applies to his species. He is, in fact, a multiple award winner, demonstrating that his race judges him as near or at the top of their version of the quality scale. Carlson has joined our acclaimed Author in Residence program, where his regular contributions will provide us with vivid and repeated demonstrations of Hom sap preferences in story construction. He has agreed, in fact, to open today's conference with a reading from a representative sample of his work. Mr. Carlson?”

  Defiant applause from every human being except Everett Finn, who kept his arms folded in angry challenge.

  Well, to hell with him.

  Carlson made the usual opening remarks about the great honor of being permitted to represent his species, and the tremendous importance of cross-cultural exchange, and the great hope that this might support even better relations between their two great species in the future, give me a break, blah, blah, blah.

  Then he activated his hytex link and began to read.

  Carlson had built his reputation on two mutually exclusive genres: interspecies thrillers, in which he concocted clockwork interstellar conspiracies involving intricate alliances between alien races both actual and invented, which if left unchecked by his valiant heroes and heroines threatened to wreak horrific carnage of world-destroying proportions; and heartwarming bucolic adventures about a bookish young boy coming of age in the watery pastures of the ocean world Greeve. Both stretched the bounds of reader credulity, in the first case because his elephantine conspiracies never imploded out of poor management or internal rot, like most conspiracies on that scale, and in the second case because the young hero of his Greeve series, widely recognized to be a version of Carlson himself, hadn't aged a day despite more than thirty volumes detailing events that ate up an average of one year apiece.

  Carlson's latest opus, of which he was inordinately fond, belonged to neither fictive universe: it was a truth-based love story involving a Cylinked boy and girl, who having rewired themselves into a new gestalt personality, now find a shared yen for each others’ exes. It was an excerpt from this newest work that he read to the assembled Tchi, utilizing the expert command of accent and idiom that had once led him to consider a secondary career as a supporting actor in neurec drama.

  Carlson projected. He drank in the silence of his audience and read it as appreciation. He lost himself in the story he had written, saw his audience in there with him, and for a few fleeting moments was not a fictioneer of undeniable but sadly limited gifts but a god glorying in the richness of the universe he had created.

  He finished to polite hissing.

  This he'd been warned about: it was the Tchi equivalent of applause. He took it as intended, and responded in the preferred manner, by pressing his palm against his forehead and rocking his head to and fro, all the while thinking, I don't know what Finn's talking about, this isn't that bad.

  Then came the questions.

  “Mr. Carlson: the sun in your heroine's sky—what was its distance?”

  Carlson blinked. “I don't know. It's a warm world, though. The habitable regions are high tropical, by human standards. I describe the weather there in detail—”

  “Mr. Carlson: Would you know its high altitude weather systems?”

  “No. But neither would she. The schools—”

  “Mr. Carlson: she eats with a utensil you call a fork. Four curved tines at the end of a handle. Would you happen to know why four tines became the standard, and not six?”

  “That's deep background,” Carlson said. “I suppose I—”

  “Mr. Carlson: the female you write of. You say she has freckles. These are local variations in skin pigmentation, aggravated by ultra-violet radiation. You say that they fan out across both cheeks. What side had more? The left or the right?”

  Carlson was just beginning to realize he'd entered hell. “Both cheeks were equally freckled.”

  “Mr. Carlson: would a medical examination confirm the accuracy of this count?”

  “Human beings don't count their freckles,” he said.

  “As the author, Mr. Carlson, it was up to you to design her facial features. Announcing that she was freckled without offering a precise count amounts to abdicating your responsibility toward your readers. You must have a precise count.”

  “I don't.”

  “And yet you know for a fact that she had an equal number of freckles on both cheeks?”

  “More or less!”

  “More or less is not equal, Mr. Carlson. So you contradict yourself.”

  “I haven't—”

  “We have noted similar inadequacies in the imagination of your fellow humans, Mr. Finn: their fictive creations deflate like empty vessels upon any rigorous examination. This is even true of your so-called classics. Are you familiar with the works of your famed earther, Victor Hugo?”

  Hugo had been one of Carlson's earliest influences; he had written several papers on the man's work, had indeed spent a couple of semesters teaching it to bored university students who had needed two months of special orientation before they could appreciate the conventions and mores of an earthbound, pre-diaspora economy. He didn't have to hear the snotty intonation in the Tchi's voice to know that the bastard knew it. “Yes?”

  “On the day Jean Valjean is released from prison, what is the humidity?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Exactly how many insects infest his clothing?”

  “I don't know.”

  “What is the state of his periodontal health?”

  “I don't know!” he shouted. “It's irrelevant!”

  “Irrelevant,” the Tchi said. “Irrelevant.”

  “Yes, dammit! You don't need to know everything that's happening on every single centimeter of his body to get swept up in the story or to understand its underlying theme of social injustice!”

  There was a pause. The Tchi sat silent, the collective force of their disapproval washing over him like a tidal surge. They didn't have to say anything; anything they put into actual words would have been superfluous.

  Predictably, inevitably, without any gesture toward mercy, the words arrived, planting themselves one after another, with the pitiless finality of gravestones.

  “So you admit,” the Tchi said, “that human authors are inadequate?”

  The Earth cooled. The continents formed. Life rose from the deep, was wiped out by the asteroid strike, and continued in bold new forms. The Renaissance came and went. The stars went black and died. Hell filled with souls and put out a NO VACANCY sign. Time stopped as all creation contracted to the size of a dot.

  The Q & A seemed to last one full hour after that.

  * * * *

  For Carlson, light returned to the universe later that evening, and to the wine, cheese and condolence party the various human writers trapped in the hell of Tchi academia threw in their compound, to welcome the latest inmate of their shared hell.

  It was not a bad place, as torture chambers go. In its own way, it was quite beautiful. The Tchi had built a circle of cottages around a glen wooded with popular species from human worlds and landscaped to provide walking paths and shade and plenty of sunlight for humans who liked that sort of thing. Maybe they did want to be good hosts. Or maybe they were sadists who realized gardens and sunlight could be torment to people already driven into despair.

  The welcome party was held in the clearing. Carlson had already endured the sympathy of several mystery novelists, a memoirist, a satirist, and a writer of epistolary fiction once notorious for couching the letters his characters had written to one another in untranslated binary code.

  Carlson had been told not
to worry overmuch about a bunch of Tchi assholes; as long as his colleagues knew he was a good writer, and he knew himself to be a good writer, and he would one day be free to return to human space where at least one person in a couple of hundred thousand still had some use for good writers, he should not allow the Tchi mission to destroy him any more impact than a light spring rain.

  Of course, he would have to endure a questioning just as brutal one week from now. And one week after that.

  And just about everybody who offered him sympathy averted their eyes when he countered by asking them how their own writing was going. Their respective muses were all, if not shackled, then bruised to the point where putting pen to paper (or keystrokes to electron template, or neurally transmitted impulses to hytexual database, or whatever) was too painful to bear.

  The evening did not seem about to substantially improve when he recognized the next sympathetic face in line. He completely forgot the acrimonious nature of their parting and leaped up to say hello. “Sandra!”

  She shared his embrace. “Brian. I'm so sorry. I would have warned you if I could.”

  “That's all right,” he said, grinning with genuine happiness for the first time since the press conference. “How the hell are you doing?”

  “Could be worse,” she said. “I haven't been able to finish anything for months, but at least I have a sense of humor about it. You're looking good. Fatter, but still good.”

  “You too. Except for the fatter part.” Back when Brian had first known and loved her, Sandra had been a slender, elfin thing with close-cropped black hair and the terrible habit some women have of punctuating every statement with a self-deprecating giggle, as if the mere act of speaking her mind deserved apology. Back then she'd defied her natural shyness with outrageous fashions, including those with animated holographic patterns and at least one that sounded a buzzer and turned transparent at randomly-generated intervals. She'd lost some of the slenderness, but the added weight balanced her face and made her more a woman than a waif; the sunny yellow tunic she wore now enhanced her features rather than distracting from them, like some of the things she'd worn in the old days.