At last, when the sharp smells of excitement could get no stronger, when their eyes could grow no wider or wilder, and when their tails were beginning to lash with impatience with a noise like a strong wind slashing through the branches of trees, the full moon rose, immense and pale and round, its pockmarked face pitiless and remote and cold, and that cruel orb was reflected full and bright in all the watching eyes of all the People who waited below.
One of the People stretched and yawned, showing all his teeth. His name was Caesar2, and he was known as a good hunter, and a fierce defender of his territory. In fact, he had a bloody feud of long duration and rich tradition going with Jefferson, whose territory adjoined his own, but Jefferson sat quietly beside him now, and did no more than turn a slightly disdainful glance at Caesar’s display of teeth. This was no time for fighting, or mating, or for territoriality. The Hunter Light, the Death Light, The Night Face, That-Which-Lights-the-Way-to-Kill, was in the sky, and that had always meant the same thing, for uncounted generations back to the beginning of all.
It was time to tell stories, under the cold, watchful gaze of The Night Face.
“This I have seen,” Caesar began. “I was hunting with the tom named Bigfoot, and we came to the place where all the grass stops, and for almost as far as you can see, until the trees start again far away, the ground is flat and hard and smells of Dead Things. I warned Bigfoot that this was Ghostland, the territory of demons3 and monsters, but his hunting blood was up, and the hunting is good under the trees at night, and he would not listen. And so we went out across the hard, bad-smelling stuff. Out into Ghostland.”
Caesar looked away for a moment, out toward the far horizon, then turned his eyes back to the People. “We walked out across Ghostland. The Dead Stuff was cold and hard under our paws, and we could hear our claws skritch on it. The wind carried the voices of ghosts as it whined past us. Suddenly, there was a bright light, far away, but coming closer. Closer! I froze with fear, but, in his eagerness, Bigfoot went on. There was a growling noise, louder and louder, like all the dogs that ever were born, growling at once. And then there was a light, blinding me. The light! So bright, so close, as if The Night Face had fallen from the sky down on top of me! Then a Fast Dead Thing went by with a roar that shook the world and a blast of wind that nearly knocked me over, and with a smell of burning. I heard Bigfoot scream.”
Caesar paused, and the rest of the People crept a step or two closer to hear him. “When the Fast Dead Thing was gone,” he continued, “I went back, step by slow step, to see what had happened to Bigfoot.” Caesar paused again, significantly. “He was dead. The Fast Dead Thing had crushed him. His guts were everywhere, torn from his body, and his blood was all around. The middle of his body was flat, as though it had no bones in it anymore. He was mashed into the dead black ground of Ghostland, in a puddle of his own guts and blood. On his face was a look of fear and horror such as I hope never to see again.”
The People shivered. After a moment, Caesar said, “Then I heard it coming back. The Fast Dead Thing. I saw its light. It was coming back from the way it had gone. Coming back for me. I’m not ashamed to tell you all that I ran like a kitten! And ever since then, when I go near Ghostland, I can hear the Fast Dead Thing hunting for me, roaring back and forth, hunting through the night to find me.”
There was an awed silence, and then a young queen named Katy said, “I hear they can get you anywhere, the Fast Dead Things.” She looked around her nervously. “Even inside the lair. There are some of them who can follow you right in, and get you even when you’re inside. My mother told me that she used to get chased by a little one that roared and whooshed and tried to pull her tail.”
“That was just a Small Roaring Thing,” a tom named Pooter said. “The humans play with them. They’re not really dangerous—though, of course, it’s better to stay away from them, just to be safe. But the Fast Dead Things, now—they can kill you even when they’re asleep!”
“Nothing can kill you while it’s asleep,” Jefferson said.
Pooter bristled, then licked his foot in a slow and insulting way that might have been provocation for a fight on another evening. “Yes? Well, I have seen this. There was one of the People, her name was Lady Jane, and she went near one of the Fast Dead Things at night, while it was sleeping. And she crawled inside the top of the Thing, because the night was cold, and it was warm deep up inside the Thing. And in the morning, as I was watching, a human came and made the Fast Dead Thing swallow it, and then the Thing woke up.” He shuddered. “It growled, and then it roared, and then Lady Jane screamed, and I smelled the hot smell of her blood. The human got out, and made the Thing open up its smaller mouth in the front, and then he lifted Lady Jane out. And she was dead. Dead, and cut into pieces! Her head was cut nearly all the way off, hanging by some fur!”
“Dead!” some of the People moaned. “Dead!”
A scarred old feral tom named Blackie, who had one ear torn nearly to rags, said, “You don’t need Dead Things to kill you, young ones!” He lashed his tail and made the clicking and smacking noise that signified deep contempt among the People. “Humans will do the job readily enough! Yes, your precious humans, the things you all live with, willingly! When I was a kitten, some humans put me in a sack4, and threw me in the river. Ai, the horror of it!” He shivered and shook himself convulsively. “It was dark and hot and smothering, and I couldn’t breathe, and then I was falling, twisting and tumbling and falling, and there was no air to breathe! My claws were sharp in those days, People, lucky for me, and I ripped my way out. But then I was in the water! In the water! I was under the water, with it all around me—over my head! I had to swim, swim for my life, and I nearly died before my head broke the surface and I could take a breath, and then I had to swim for a long time before my feet found the ground again, and all the while the water was pulling at me, sucking at me, trying to pull me down to death!”
A low growl went around the circle of the People. Their eyes gleamed.
“My human goes in the water every day,” a young queen named Spooky said. “On purpose. She lets it go all over her! She doesn’t try to escape at all! Sometimes she sits under the water, with only her head outside it!”
The People moaned in horror. “Ah, they are strange creatures,” Jefferson muttered. “Strange!”
“But those were Rogues, those humans who tried to kill you,” a young tom named Bangers said, somewhat uneasily, as though seeking reassurance. “We’ve all been chased and kicked by Rogues now and again, or had stones or Hard Clattering Things thrown at us. That doesn’t mean that our humans would hurt us. My humans wouldn’t hurt me. They like me! They feed me and pat5 me whenever I want them to!”
“I had humans once, too, later on,” Blackie said bitterly. “They fed me and they patted me—and then they cut my balls off!”
Bangers hissed involuntarily, and many of the People blew their tails out to several times their normal size.
“It could happen to you, too, young one!” Blackie said. “Don’t you think it couldn’t! You think you’re safe with your humans because they feed you and give you a warm place to sleep, but you never know when they’re going to turn on you and torture6 you. You’ll never know why they do it, either, but sooner or later, they will. They all will. None of them are any different!
“They wait until you’re sick,” a burly tom named Hobbes said. “They wait until you’re feeling really bad, and then they take you to the Pain Place, to the Torture Place, and they hurt you more—”
Another tom shuddered. “It’s true! The humans there stick things up your ass! And they stab you, with things that hurt! And they drain your blood out of you!”
“They cut you!” a queen named Jasmine said, her voice thrilling with horror. “They cut you open! My humans took me there, to the Pain Place, with all its bad smells and its sick smells and the sounds of the People screaming in agony while dogs sit around and watch them, and they left me there, locked in a Box-You-Can’t-Get
-Out-Of, and I went to sleep, and when I woke up, my belly had been slashed open! I could feel the cut, deeper than a cut from any fight. It hurt for a long time, even when my humans came and got me and took me back to the lair again. It hurt for a long time!”
They were crouched close together now, almost touching, their heads in a circle.
“They kill People there, too,” Blackie said. “The humans kill them. And not just the humans who live in the Pain Place. Your precious humans. The very same ones who live with you and give you Food. They kill you, themselves!”
There were a few wails of protest, and the People pressed closer together, shuddering.
“I have seen it,” Blackie continued inexorably. “When they cut my balls off, in the Pain Place, before they took me back to the lair and I ran away, they brought my lair-mate in, an old queen named Stuff who had lived with the humans before I joined them. Our humans brought her in, and they held her down while she fought to get away, both of them held her down, and then another human stabbed her with a Pain Stick, and she struggled for a while, and then she died! I could smell that she was dead! They’d killed her! Our humans! They held her down and killed her—and they patted her while they were doing it!”
Someone moaned with dread, and then fell silent.
“And that’s what will happen to all of you! Every one of you! If a dog or a Fast Dead Thing or some other kind of monster or demon doesn’t get you, then, at the end, your own humans will kill you!”
This was almost too much. They pressed close together for comfort, too scared even to wail or moan now.
There was a crazed light in Blackie’s eyes. “I saw Stuff’s ghost last night. I often see it, after dark. Her fur is like ice, like frost on a winter morning, and her dead eyes give back no light . . .”
The moon was high and full above them now, and it seemed to tug on their souls, as if it would suck them out through the tops of their heads and up into the mysterious depths of the night sky, where they would fall forever through the dark.
“Yes!” a tom shrieked. “Yes! I have seen it! Its feet leave no mark on the grass when it walks, and its eyes are like deep pools of black water! And one night, when everyone slept except me, I could hear it outside, scratching on the door, trying to get in—”
A huge Dead Thing went by overhead, roaring, a blazing light flying through the night sky like a terrible gazing eye, seeming to pass almost close enough to touch, and the People crouched low on the hillside until the monster had rumbled away into distance and was gone.
In the sudden shocked silence, Caesar said, almost with satisfaction, “The Ghostway is around us, always.” And the People shivered deliciously, and moved closer in the night, and told their stories until the moon went down, as they have for a million generations, and as they will for a million more, until the Earth goes cold, and even the People are forgotten.
Executive Clemency
Introduction to Executive Clemency
This is what’s known as a writer’s story, and if you want to know what I mean by that, go read the story first so you’ll understand what I say. I’ll wait right here for you.
Back? Okay, here’s how it works. If you’re primarily a reader, you reacted to the smooth and lovely prose, the slowly building mystery, the sudden twists and revelations of the plot. But if you’re a writer, a working writer, then right now you’re shaking your head in envy and admiration and muttering to yourself, “How the hell did he do that?”
It’s that opening, to begin with, that long and beautiful and suspenseful opening in which essentially nothing happens. No, worse than that! Gardner takes an almost static situation and then by degrees drains the heat out of it, slowing it down until, a mere breath away from motionlessness, something snaps and the protagonist falls back into the world of actions and consequences.
You’ve read the story. You know that once you began reading, you had no choice but to follow that compulsive flow of words wherever it went. That something which would sound in synopsis extremely boring, is in practice gripping in the extreme. A receptive reader could no more abandon this story a few sentences in than flap his arms and fly away.
But how the hell did Gardner do that?
Me, I like to begin a story somewhat less subtly, by (say) killing the protagonist in the very first sentence. That’s because the reader is a fickle beast, and can be extremely difficult to win over. To write an opening as aggressively contrarian as this one requires the writer to not only have what my teenage son, Sean, calls “mad skills,” but to know it. When Gardner was writing this story, he was able to follow the logic of the prose where it naturally led, because he knew he had the reader in his control. He knew the writing would pull the reader in after it.
What can it possibly feel to write like that? Incandescent.
As I understand the history of this story, it began with a sizeable fragment submitted at a Guilford writer’s workshop by Jay Haldeman, which Gardner, not realizing it was meant to be a parody of his style, latched onto with enormous excitement. Jay agreed to a collaboration and then (and I apologize to Jay if I’m getting this wrong and underplaying his contribution), Gardner took it home and worked on it, off and on again, for the next seven years. Seven years! I’ve got to tell you that, as a working writer myself, I’m amazed that it was done in so short a time.
Because the beginning is only . . . well, the beginning. To succeed, it has to open naturally into a larger story, one that the reader will feel is worthy of its extraordinary opening. It has to develop easily and by a series of small surprises into something satisfying. Something the reader can’t see coming and yet will accept as inevitable. Something that gives the reader some new insight into the human. And it all has to work together flawlessly, as a single organic mechanism.
You’ve read the story. You’ve seen it done. But how? This is the kind of work that drives other writers nuts. This is the kind of work that fills us with admiration for the guy who wrote it. Enormous skill went into this story, but something more than that happened as well. When a writer of Gardner’s caliber is at his absolute best, when he’s in the mental equivalent of what Castaneda would call his Spot of Power, he creates something that’s not only inimitable but unassailable. So here.
This is what a writer can do, if he’s got the chops.
Michael Swanwick
Executive Clemency
by Gardner Dozois and Jack C. Haldeman II
The President of the United States sat very still in his overstuffed chair on the third floor and watched early-morning sunlight sweep in a slow line across the faded rug.
He couldn’t remember getting out of bed or sitting down in the chair. He could dimly recall that he had been sitting there for a long time, watching the slow advent of dawn, but he was only just beginning to become fully aware of himself and his surroundings.
Only his eyes moved, yellow and wet, as the world seeped in.
This happened to him almost every morning now. Every morning he would return slowly to his body as if from an immense distance, from across appalling gulfs of time and space, to find himself sitting in the chair, or standing next to the window, or, more rarely, propped up in the corner against the wall. Sometimes he’d be in the middle of dressing when awareness returned, and he’d awake to find himself tying a shoelace or buttoning his pants. Sometimes, like this morning, he’d just be sitting and staring. Other times, he would awaken to the sound of his own voice, loud and cold in the bare wooden room, saying some strange and important things that he could never quite catch. If he could only hear the words he said at such times, just once, he knew that it would change everything, that he would understand everything. But he could never hear them.
He didn’t move. When the lines of sunlight reached the chair, it would be time to go downstairs. Not before, no matter how late it sometimes made him as the sunlight changed with the seasons, no matter if he sometimes missed breakfast or, on cloudy winter days, didn’t move at all until Mrs. Hamlin c
ame upstairs to chase him out. It was one of the rituals with which he tried to hold his life together.
The east-facing window was washed over with pale, fragile blue, and the slow-moving patch of direct sunlight was a raw, hot gold. Dust motes danced in the beam. Except for those dust motes, everything was stillness and suspension. Except for his own spidery breathing, everything was profoundly silent. The room smelled of dust and heat and old wood. It was the best part of the day. Naturally it couldn’t last.
Very far away, floating on the edge of hearing, there came the mellow, mossy bronze voice of a bell, ringing in the village of Fairfield behind the ridge, and at that precise moment, as though the faint tintinnabulation were its cue, the house itself began to speak. It was a rambling wooden house, more than a hundred years old, and it talked to itself at dawn and dusk, creaking, groaning, whispering, muttering like a crotchety old eccentric as its wooden bones expanded with the sun or contracted with the frost. This petulant, arthritic monologue ran on for a few minutes, and then the tenants themselves joined in, one by one: Seth in the bathroom early, spluttering as he washed up; Mr. Thompkins, clearing his throat interminably in the room below, coughing and hacking and spitting as though he were drowning in a sea of phlegm; Sadie’s baby, crying in a vain attempt to wake her sluggard mother; Mrs. Hamlin, slamming the kitchen door; Mr. Samuels’ loud nasal voice in the courtyard outside.
Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois Page 56