by Dan Simmons
I joined religions. Hell, I helped create religions. The Zen Gnostic Church was expanding exponentially and I became a true believer, appearing on HTV talk shows and searching for my Placed of Power with all of the devoutness of a pre-Hegira Muslim pilgrimaging to Mecca. Besides, I loved farcasting. I had earned almost a hundred million marks from royalties for The Dying Earth, and Helenda had invested well, but someone once figured that a farcaster home such as mine cost more than fifty thousand marks a day just to keep in the Web and I did not limit my farcasting to the thirty-six worlds of my home. Transline Publishing had qualified me for a gold universal card and I used it liberally, farcasting to unlikely corners of the Web and then spending weeks staying in luxury accommodations and leasing EMVs to find my Places of Power in remote areas of backwater worlds.
I found none. I renounced Zen Gnosticism about the same time Helenda divorced me. By that time the bills were piling up and I had to liquidate most of the stock and long-term investments remaining to me after Helenda had taken her share. (I was not only naive and in love when she had had her attorneys draw up the marriage contract … I was stupid.)
Eventually, even with such economies as cutting down my farcasting and dismissing the android servants, I was facing financial disaster.
I went to see Tyrena Wingreen-Feif.
“No one wants to read poetry,” she said, leafing through the thin stack of Cantos I had written in the past year and a half.
“What do you mean?” I said. “The Dying Earth was poetry.”
“The Dying Earth was a fluke,” said Tyrena. Her nails were long and green and curved in the latest mandarin fashion; they curled around my manuscript like the claws of some chlorophyll beast. “It sold because the mass subconscious was ready for it.”
“Maybe the mass subconscious is ready for this,” I said. I was beginning to get angry.
Tyrena laughed. It was not an altogether pleasant sound. “Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said. “This is poetry. You’re writing about Heaven’s Gate and the Caribou Herd, but what comes across is loneliness, displacement, angst, and a cynical look at Humanity.”
“So?”
“So no one wants to pay for a look at another person’s angst,” laughed Tyrena.
I turned away from her desk and walked to the far side of the room. Her office took up the entire four hundred and thirty-fifth floor of the Transline Spire in the Babel section of Tau Ceti Center. There were no windows; the circular room was open from floor to ceiling, shielded by a solar-generated containment field which showed no shimmer whatsoever. It was like standing between two gray plates suspended halfway between the sky and earth. I watched crimson clouds move between the lesser spires half a kilometer below and I thought about hubris. Tyrena’s office had no doorways, stairways, elevators, field lifts, or trapdoors: no connection to the other levels at all. One entered Tyrena’s office through the five-faceted farcaster which shimmered in midair like an abstract holosculpture. I found myself thinking about tower fires and power failures as well as hubris. I said, “Are you saying that you won’t publish it?”
“Not at all,” smiled my editor. “You’ve earned Transline several billion marks, Martin. We will publish it. All I am saying is that no one will buy it.”
“You’re wrong!” I shouted. “Not everyone recognizes fine poetry, but there are still enough people who read to make it a bestseller.”
Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. “Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said, “the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments. By the Hegira, ninety-eight percent of the Hegemony’s population had no reason to read anything. So they didn’t bother learning how to. It’s worse today. There are more than a hundred billion human beings in the Worldweb and less than one percent of them bothers to hardfax any printed material, much less read a book.”
“The Dying Earth sold almost three billion copies,” I reminded her.
“Mm-hmm,” said Tyrena. “It was the Pilgrim’s Progress Effect.”
“The what?”
“Pilgrim’s Progress Effect. In the Massachusetts Colony of … what was it!—seventeenth-century Old Earth, every decent family had to have a copy in the household. But, my heavens, no one had to read it. It was the same with Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Stukatsky’s Visions in the Eye of a Decapitated Child”.
“Who was Hitler?” I said.
Tyrena smiled slightly. “An Old Earth politician who did some writing. Mein Kampf is still in print … Transline renews the copyright every hundred and thirty-eight years.”
“Well, look,” I said, “I’m going to take a few weeks to polish up the Cantos and give it my best shot.”
“Fine,” smiled Tyrena.
“I suppose you’ll want to edit it the way you did last time?”
“Not at all,” said Tyrena. “Since there’s no core of nostalgia this time, you might as well write it the way you want.”
I blinked. “You mean I can keep in the blank verse this time?”
“Of course.”
“And the philosophy?”
“Please do.”
“And the experimental sections?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll print it the way I write it?”
“Absolutely.”
“Is there a chance it’ll sell?”
“Not a hope in hell.”
My “few weeks to polish up the Cantos” turned into ten months of obsessive labor. I shut off most of the rooms in the house, keeping only the tower room on Deneb Drei, the exercise room on Lusus, the kitchen, and the bathroom raft on Mare Infinitus. I worked a straight ten hours a day, took a break for some vigorous exercise followed by a meal and a nap, and then returned to my writing table for another eight-hour stint. It was similar to the time five years before when I was recovering from my stroke and it sometimes took an hour or a day for a word to come to me, for a concept to sink its roots into the firm soil of language. Now it was an even slower process as I agonized over the perfect word, the precise rhyme scheme, the most playful image, and the most ineffable analog to the most elusive emotion.
After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely ahandoned.
“What do you think?” I asked Tyrena as she read through the first copy.
Her eyes were blank, bronze disk in that week’s fashion, but this did not hide the fact that there were tears there. She brushed one away. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
“I tried to rediscover the voice of some of the Ancients,” I said, suddenly shy.
“You succeeded brilliantly.”
“The Heaven’s Gate Interlude is still rough,” I said.
“It’s perfect.”
“It’s about loneliness,” I said.
“It is loneliness.”
“Do you think it’s ready?” I asked.
“It’s perfect … a masterpiece.”
“Do you think it’ll sell?” Tasked.
“No fucking way.”
They planned an initial run of seventy million hardfax copies of Cantos. Transline ran ads throughout the datasphere, placed HTV commercials, transmitted software inserts, successfully solicited blurbs from best-selling authors, made sure it was reviewed in the New New York Times Book Section and the TC2 Review, and generally spent a fortune on advertising.
The Cantos sold twenty-three thousand hardfax copies during the first year it was in print. At ten percent royalties of the 12MK cover price, I had earned back 13,800MK of my 2,000,000MK advance from Transline. The second year saw a sale of 638 hardfax copies; there were no datasphere rights sold, no holie options, and no book tours.
What the Cantos lacked in sales it made up for
in negative reviews: “Indecipherable … archaic … irrelevant to all current concerns,” said the Times Book Section. “M. Silenus has committed the ultimate act of noncommunication,” wrote Urban Kapry in the TC2 Review, “by indulging himself in an orgy of pretentious obfuscation.” Marmon Hamlit on “AllNet Now!” issued the final deathblow: “Oh, the poetry thing from Whathisname—couldn’t read it. Didn’t try.”
Tyrena Wingreen-Feif did not seem concerned. Two weeks after the first reviews and hardfax returns came in, a day after my thirteen-day binge ended, I farcast to her office and threw myself into the black flowfoam chair which crouched in the center of the room like a velvet panther. One of Tau Ceti Center’s legendary thunderstorms was going on and Jovian-sized lightning crashes were rending the blood-tinged air just beyond the invisible containment field.
“Don’t sweat it,” said Tyrena. This week’s fashions included a hairdo which sent black spikes thrusting half a meter above her forehead and a body field opaciter which left shifting currents of color concealing—and revealing—the nudity beneath. “The first run only amounted to sixty thousand fax transmits so we’re not out much there.”
“You said seventy million were planned,” I said.
“Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline’s resident AI read it.”
I slumped lower in the flowfoam. “Even the AI hated it?”
“The AI loved it,” said Tyrena. “That’s when we knew for sure that people were going to hate it.”
I sat up. “Couldn’t we have sold copies to the TechnoCore?”
“We did,” said Tyrena. “One. The millions of AIs there probably real-time-shared it the minute it came in over fatline. Interstellar copyright doesn’t mean shit when you’re dealing with silicon.”
“All right,” I said, slumping. “What next?” Outside, lightning bolts the size of Old Earth’s ancient superhighways danced between the corporate spires and cloud towers.
Tyrena rose from her desk and walked to the edge of the carpeted circle. Her body field flickered like electrically charged oil on water. “Next,” she said, “you decide if you want to be a writer or the Worldweb’s biggest jerk-off.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” Tyrena turned and smiled. Her teeth had been capped to gold points. “The contract allows us to recover the advance in any way we have to. Seizing your assets at Interbank, recovering the gold coins you’ve got hidden on Homefree, and selling that gaudy farcaster house would about do it. And then you can go join the other artistic dilettantes and dropouts and mental cases that Sad King Billy collects on whatever Outback world he lives on.”
I stared.
“Then again,” she said and smiled her cannibal smile, “we can just forget this temporary setback and you can get to work on your next book.”
My next book appeared five standard months later. The Dying Earth II picked up where The Dying Earth left off, in plain prose this time, the sentence length and chapter content carefully guided by neuro-bio-monitored responses on a test group of 638 average hardfax readers. The book was in novel form, short enough not to intimidate the potential buyer at Food Mart checkout stands, and the cover was a twenty-second interactive holo wherein the tall, swarthy stranger—Amalfi Schwartz, I suppose, although Amalfi was short and pale and wore corrective lenses—rips the bodice of the struggling female just to the nipple line before the protesting blonde turns toward the viewer and cries for help in a breathless whisper provided by porn holie star Leeda Swann.
Dying Earth II sold nineteen million copies.
“Not bad,” said Tyrena. “It takes awhile to build an audience.”
“The first Dying Earth sold three billion copies,” I said.
“Pilgrim’s Progress,” she said. “Mein Kampf. Once in a century. Maybe less.”
“But it sold three billion …”
“Look,” said Tyrena. “In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”
Dying Earth III introduced the characters of Winona, the escaped slave girl who rose to the ownership of her own fiberplastic plantation (never mind that fiberplastic never grew on Old Earth), Arturo Redgrave, the dashing blockade runner (what blockade?!), and Innocence Sperry, the nine-year-old telepath dying of an unspecified Little Nell disease. Innocence lasted until Dying Earth IX, and on the day Transline allowed me to kill the little shit off, I went out to celebrate with a six-day, twenty-world binge. I awoke in a lungpipe on Heaven’s Gate, covered with vomit and rebreather mold, nursing the Web’s biggest headache and the sure knowledge that I soon would have to start on Volume X of The Chronicles of the Dying Earth.
It isn’t hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth II and Dying Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my characters cardboard, my prose preliterate, and my free time was my own. I traveled. I married twice more; each wife left me with no hard feelings but with a sizable portion of the royalties from my next Dying Earth. I explored religions and serious drinking, finding more hope of lasting solace in the latter.
I kept my home, adding six rooms on five worlds, and filled it with fine art. I entertained. Writers were among my acquaintances but, as in all times, we tended to mistrust and badmouth each other, secretly resenting the others’ successes and finding fault in their work. Each of us knew in his or her heart that he or she was a true artist of the word who merely happened to be commercial; the others were hacks.
Then, on a cool morning with my sleeping room rocking slightly in the upper branches of my tree on the Templar world, I awoke to a gray sky and the realization that my muse had fled.
It had been five years since I had written any poetry. The Cantos lay open in the Deneb Drei tower, only a few pages finished beyond what had been published. I had been using thought processors to write my novels and one of these activated as I entered the study. SHIT, it printed out, WHAT DID I DO WITH MY MUSE?
It says something about the type of writing I had been doing that my muse could flee without my noticing. For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt. When one is writing—really writing—it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods. No true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels when the mind becomes an instrument as surely as does the pen or thought processor, ordering and expressing the revelations flowing in from somewhere else.
My muse had fled. I sought her in the other worlds of my house but only silence echoed back from the art-bedecked walls and empty spaces. I farcast and flew to my favorite places, watching the suns set on the windblown prairies of Grass and the night fogs obscure the ebony crags of Nevermore, but although I emptied my mind of the trash-prose of the endless Dying Earth, there came no whispers from my muse.
I sought her in alcohol and Flashback, returning to the productive days on Heaven’s Gate when her inspiration was a constant buzzing in my ears, interrupting my work, waking me from sleep, but in the relived hours and days her voice was as muted and garbled as a damaged audio disk from some forgotten century.
My muse had fled.
I farcast to Tyrena Wingreen-Feif’s office at the precise moment of my appointment. Tyrena had been promoted from editor-in-chief of the hardfax division to publisher. Her new office occupied the highest level of the Tau Ceti Center Transline Spire and standing there was like perching on the carpeted summit of the galaxy’s tallest, thinnest peak; only the invisible dome of the slightly polarized containment field arched overhead and the edge of the carpet ended in a six-kilometer drop. I wondered if other authors felt the urge to jump.
“The new opus?” said Tyrena. Lusus was dominating the fashion universe this
week and “dominate” was the right word; my editor was dressed in leather and iron, rusted spikes on her wrists and neck and a massive bandolier across her shoulder and left breast. The cartridges looked real.
“Yeah,” I said and tossed the manuscript box on her desk.
“Martin, Martin, Martin,” she sighed, “when are you going to transmit your books rather than going to all of the trouble of printing them out and bringing them here in person?”
“There’s a strange satisfaction in delivering them,” I said. “Especially this one.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why don’t you read some of it?”
Tyrena smiled and clicked black fingernails along the cartridges in her bandolier. “I’m sure it’s up to your usual high standards, Martin,” she said. “I don’t have to look at it.”
“Please do,” I said.
“Really,” said Tyrena, “there’s no reason. It always makes me nervous to read a new work while the author is present.”
“This one won’t,” I said. “Read just the first few pages.”
She must have heard something in my voice because she frowned slightly and opened the box. The frown deepened as she read the first page and flipped through the rest of the manuscript.
Page one had a single sentence: “And then, one fine morning in October, the Dying Earth swallowed its own bowels, spasmed its final spasm and died.” The other two hundred and ninety-nine pages were blank.
“A joke, Martin?”
“Nope.”
“A subtle hint then? You would like to begin a new series?”
“Nope.”