Analog SFF, May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Without wanting to, he felt a moment of deep, heartbreaking nostalgia for their times together. “God, but it's good to see you!”

  “Wish I could say the same,” she said, sending his spirits deeper into the basement. They bounced back a little with her next words. “You really do deserve better than this. Have you figured out, or has anybody bothered to explain, just what's going on here?”

  “Ummm. Not really. Finn tried to warn me before the Q & A, but we butted heads and he never got around to finishing.”

  “Then it falls to me,” she said, and grabbed his hand. “Come on, we'll find a quiet corner.”

  Once upon a time, Sandra would have died before presuming to guide anybody but a child by the hand; she hadn't had the self-confidence to presume herself a fit guide to lead anybody anywhere. Now she was like a bulldozer, expertly carving her way past the throng of inebriates in tweed, deflecting the one or two who still hadn't offered Carlson their sympathies. The last one she evaded was Vera, who wore the look of a ghostly bride glimpsed in the upper windows of some Victorian mansion; it was a good thing Sandra was able to spare him the encounter, because the one overriding quality in Vera's eyes was defeat, and Carlson didn't think he was in any state to be doused in any more of it.

  The refuge Sandra found was a stone bench by a narrow brook, the rushing water just loud enough to serve as welcome white noise, obliterating the chatter of the other Authors in Residence. She sat him down, then took her own place beside him, and began, “I'm half-inclined to let you knock your head against the wall until it becomes obvious. You were a real jerk, way back when.”

  “I know,” he said. “I've been meaning to get back in touch with you and tell you that. I'm sorry.”

  She studied his face. “Why didn't you?”

  “I had a good excuse.”

  “Which was?”

  Carlson spread his hands. “Cowardice.”

  She showed no surprise, just nodded, and looked away. “I figured as much. But you had a good heart, and that's rare enough among real people, let alone writers, so I'll spare you some of the confusion you must be feeling right now. Have you ever actually read any Tchi literature?”

  With something like shame, Carlson realized that it had never occurred to him, not even when in the months between the invitation and the embarkation of the Tchi shuttle. “Uh, no.”

  “Then you don't know what they consider a good novel, right?”

  “Well, I assumed...”

  “That's right. You assumed that just because they invited you to be the guest of honor it was because they wanted to honor you.”

  “It usually follows.”

  She sighed. “How long have you been on the lecture circuit, Brian? Haven't you learned yet that sometimes they hire you because they want to do the exact opposite?”

  Carlson remembered a small college he'd visited on the wheelworld New London. There'd been a symposium dedicated to his work. He'd wandered in, expecting kudos, and found that the main subject of discussion had turned out to be the flatness of his characters as shaped by the psychosexual inadequacies of the author. After three hours he'd become more evidence in the popular stereotype of novelists as raving egomaniacs who drink. He had sworn never to accept such an invitation again. But the idea of being honored by an actual alien race had overcome his misgivings, and...

  ...and for the first time in his life, he now actually felt the sensation novelists mean when they reference a sinking feeling. “What are they up to?”

  “Tchi don't like human beings. They consider us violent, uneducated philistines, with a barely evolved sense of aesthetics and a pop culture that debases us and every other alien race that has ever developed an appreciation for any of our work. The curriculum of their Human Studies program is entirely devoted to reinforcing that thesis. When they invite our best writers here—at least, those who aren't warned off—they do so with the specific purpose of humiliating us with the inadequacies of our literary traditions as judged by the specific criteria of their own standards. In short, you're here to be held up as a negative example. To be humiliated. No story you write, no matter how good, can possibly meet with their approval. I mean, no story. They're particularly fond of ripping apart our classics. What they do to Jane Austen alone is enough to make a strong woman cry.”

  He gulped. “Why do we sit still for it?”

  “Because we have no choice. We signed the contracts. We accepted their honoraria. We agreed to come and face their questions. If any of us refuse to cooperate, the penalties are more than any working writer could ever afford to pay; they'd end up owning everything you've ever written and everything you ever would write in perpetuity, giving them the right to drive your reputation even further into the grave publishing annotated editions that exist only to support their perception of you as dishonest, demented, shallow, untalented, and unTchian in every way.” She grimaced. “Do that and you'll be buried. I'd die before I let them do that to Cold Victory.”

  That had been Sandra's first novel, a portrait of a character secretly based on her remote and disapproving father. He remembered her saying that she'd cried herself blind while writing it. He remembered the acclaim it had received on publication, the lump it had raised in his own throat, the very real sense of closure it had given her. And then he realized that the questions the Tchi asked her must have included contemptuous ones about that very book, and how she would have had to sit and take them, on a weekly basis. Anger, the very real anger of a novelist faced with societies of evil critics, overcame him, and he said, “They can't be allowed to get away with this.”

  She snorted. “Oh, Brian. How can you stop them?”

  “I haven't figured that out yet. But I'll defeat them. Don't you worry. I'll shut them down and leave them begging for mercy. This I swear.”

  Sandra just stared at him, blinking, for several seconds, before laughing out loud. “I almost believe you.”

  “You should believe me. I'm serious.”

  She touched a fingertip to his lips. “I know you are. But this is their world, their rules, their aesthetic. You can't write the kind of prose they like, and you can't make them like yours. It's a fool's game.”

  “Then I'm a fool,” he said recklessly. “But I will defeat them. I will.”

  She sighed, looked upon him with a special kind of affection that looked like it did not want to cross the boundaries of pity, and gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek. “If you ever actually manage to do what you just said, you'll be my hero for life.”

  “Really?” he said. “Enough to be given a second chance?”

  She was dubious, but desperate enough to consider it. “Sure. Why not.”

  And this, of course, was a challenge no heterosexual male novelist could have refused.

  * * * *

  The next day, his head pounding from all the drinks pressed into his hands by fellow writers eager to see another get as sloppily drunk as they'd seen themselves get, Carlson left the compound of the humiliated and found his way to the university's main library, where the Tchi on duty took one look at him and inquired, with just the right degree of scorn and condescension, whether he was really in the right building. Didn't the works here have subtexts and subtleties no human being could possibly understand?

  He smiled and handed the withering snot a list of three titles alleged to be the greatest novels in Tchi history. The snot told him they were available via hytex link. Carlson smiled and said, “Aaaah, but the sheer sensory experience of holding the books in my hands, as I soak up the brilliance...!”

  It required an interlibrary transmittal and consultation with the director of the Human Studies program, but by late that afternoon the Tchi authorized the replication of three volumes in approved Mercantile translations, printed and bound in the format Carlson always preferred when he read novels on paper.

  This was a mistake.

  None of the novels were shorter than three thousand pages.

  Grimacing as much from
the weight as the prospect of reading these behemoths, but adopting the fiction of happy anticipation, Carlson lugged them back to his bungalow and spent all of that night beginning the first and by reputation most honored among them.

  After six pages he went back to the beginning, unwilling to believe that the story was unfolding as it seemed to be. Confirming the awful truth, and feeling more and more despair by the time he bulled his way past page one hundred, he rejected the impulse to feed the damned thing to a fire and forced himself onward, ever onward, paragraph by paragraph, tedious line by tedious line.

  Somehow, heroically, he reached page two hundred that night, having already misdiagnosed the pain of getting that far as a dozen separate strokes. Before he collapsed, he flipped the remaining pages all the way to the end, confirming the awful truth.

  In the morning he knocked on Sandra's door. “Want to take a walk?”

  She was frowsy-haired, wearing a cloth robe and drinking something hot from a cup. “Depends. Given up on defeating them yet?”

  “No,” he said. “Actually, I think I might have a handle on the situation.”

  She raised an eyebrow and brushed a sleepy tangle of hair away from her opposite cheek. “I must say. Heroic fantasy's a new genre for you, Bri.”

  “No, I'm serious,” he insisted. “I just need to clarify some things. Come on, take a walk with me.” When she hesitated still further, he added, “Unless you'd rather stay home and try to write...”

  The terrible truth about novelists is that precious few of them, given a choice of activities, would rather stay home and try to write. Faced with a way out, Sandra moved faster than any whirlwind.

  An hour later, the two of them had settled beside the same stream where they'd last spoken two nights before. They'd talked about everything but Carlson's plan for a counter-offensive, but now Sandra had kicked off her shoes so she could dangle her feet in the water, and Carlson, who required all his might to ignore the sight of the sun glinting on her hair, needed to talk business or die. “I started reading A Thousand Futilities last night.”

  She coughed hard. “Oh, Brian. I'm so sorry. How far did you get?”

  “Two hundred pages. Skimmed the rest.”

  “That's further than I got. I think Vera got to fifty. The poor thing's never been the same.”

  “I have two other Tchi classics,” Carlson told her, “but a quick glance at those makes me fear for my sanity if I continue. Still, it remains possible that the equivalent of Dickens or Dumas or Hugo or even Quantum Cloud remains somewhere in the Tchi canon, so it would save me a whole lot of pain if you did me the favor of fact-checking my conclusions.”

  She gave him a thumbs-up, threw her head back so her face could catch the sun, and said, “Shoot.”

  He said, “As near as I can figure from my exposure to the greatest novel in Tchi history and, I must admit, from using the hytex to consult academic papers our own best universities have written about their canon, Tchi fiction has never been about plot or character or even theme. It's about nested parentheses.”

  She swirled the water with her toe. “Interesting way of putting it.”

  “Historically, the typical Tchi novel has always been centered on the elaborations of the most minuscule subject matter they can concoct. Let's say, a vase bearing a single flower. What kind of flower? They describe that. Where was it picked? They describe the region and its entire economic development. What kind of vase? They describe the design, go into several pages about how the school of artists developed it. In further chapters they talk about the clay it was fashioned from and why potters find that clay preferable to that available down the road. Then they talk about the table. Don't get me started on how they go on about tables. Then they go into describing the room and every last detail about every single furnishing, and maybe, if they want to be really daring, an actual person sitting on a chair somewhere in that room. They describe that person and going into every last detail about that person's genealogy. The one thing they won't do, ever, is have that person get up and get himself involved in an actual story, because that's gauche, that's a betrayal of the kind of subtlety they prefer. And besides, if they did that, then they'd be likely to forget some more important details like the precise amount of fraying on the local area rug. It's this layering, this obsessive accumulation of detail, the more mundane the better, that the Tchi intelligentsia consider art. Am I correct so far?”

  Sandra shuddered. “You are. And to think I used to have problems absorbing Joyce and Proust.”

  But Carlson was still warming up. “Tchi novelists seek to provide so much detail of a single static moment that the rest of the world can be inferred, whereas even the most leisurely human novelists move their narratives through time and sketch in only enough detail to enrich the story, an amount that must by necessity assume some details extraneous and therefore safe to omit. A Tchi writer, invited to a symposium like this, would be able to describe the precise contents of a desk drawer in the home of an academic living across the street from a house where his novel takes place. And it's not the kind of thing that can be faked, because if he doesn't put that detail in his book he will be asked that question not once or twice, but every single time his book is discussed in public. That's why their most respected books are all two thousand pages long. That's why they get longer when they're annotated by academics. In short, their platonic ideal as far as fiction is concerned is a bludgeon too heavy to lift and too motionless to endure. Do I have all of this correct?”

  Sandra kicked at the burbling water, creating a silvery arc that achieved beauty of its own before collapsing forever. “Yes, you do. But you can't fight that, Brian. It's their world, their aesthetic standards. If you ever tell them to their faces that you think their literature sucks, they'll just blame it on your coarse human sensibilities and your inability to appreciate their finer subtleties.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Carlson said.

  “And you can't imitate what they do, either. Trust me, several of us have tried. Write ten pages of a novel in the true Tchi tradition, and your eyes will cross. Write fifty and you'll want to kill yourself. Write a hundred and you may never finish anything publishable in human space ever again. Manage to finish one—as one of us did, a couple of years ago—and you'll find yourself unable to defend it to the extent they require; try as you might, they'll find the contradictions, or the holes, and trumpet your failure even louder. You'll have tortured yourself for no reason.”

  “I know that too,” Carlson said. “And I have absolutely no intention of trying.”

  She contemplated his expression for several seconds, frowned as she registered the confidence in his eyes, and splashed the water again. “But you said you can defeat them.”

  He grinned. “I know I can.”

  “In Juje's name, how?”

  He picked up a rock in tossed it into the brook, enjoying the ker-plunk of the splashdown, taking special pleasure in imagining that the running water was the Tchi literary tradition and the stone his own special contribution, still to come. “By using their own nature against them. Come on. I think it's time that we go talk to the others.”

  * * * *

  Two days later, it was Everett Finn's turn in the hot seat. As usual, he'd failed to produce anything new in the interim since his last weekly evisceration, so the Tchi had exercised the contractual clause that prevented the human writers in residence from simply abdicating their responsibilities and programmed a discussion on one of his past works: in this case a very sweet little autobiographical story about the ten-year-old Everett's first space walk. Finn had won a minor literary award for the piece, and still had some affection for it, though he now considered it juvenilia. The Tchi had spent the greater part of three hours demanding a full dissertation on orbital mechanics, down to the precise volume of canned atmosphere that bled into space when the airlock he'd used opened to vacuum. Finn kept to his usual strategy of sullen monosyllabic answers until the Q & A was almost over, at w
hich point, as arranged, he allowed his voice to break and broke down sobbing into cupped hands.

  The gathered Tchi took this with remarkable aplomb; it was, after all, the reaction they demanded. Garkh said, “Are you all right, Mr. Finn?”

  Finn shook his head. “N-no. You're right. My work is sloppy and half-assed. It's not good enough. It'll never be good enough.”

  “Are you then changing your position and conceding the inferiority of the human literary tradition?”

  “Y-yes,” Finn said. “I'm so ashamed.” He wailed and stormed out, covering his eyes as a veritable font of tears gushed down his cheeks.

  The Tchi did not see him slow down as he passed Carlson, fix his long-time rival with a glare of undying hatred, and mutter, “You better be right.”

  Nor did the assorted Tchi academics see the similar eye contact when every other human writer in the program, attending their own Q & A sessions over the course of the next week, succumbed to similar bursts of overwhelming faux despair. It wasn't all anger; some of the hysterical breakdowns the Tchi witnessed and failed to properly recognize were actual hysterical breakdowns of the mirthful variety. No Tchi were present the one fine evening that Vera Lugoff had a little too much to drink and giggled nonstop for close to an hour, wailing, “I'm soashamed,” with a level of delight that rendered her intoxication redundant. There were lots of hangovers, that next week, lots: again, nothing unusual at a novelists conference, but the revels themselves were less the usual pits of auctorial despair than wild celebration at the prospect of striking back at their tormentors.