by Joe Haldeman
O’HARA
Whom are you going to kill?
GEORGE
I…can’t…say.
O’HARA
More…
Click and HOLD SUBLIMINAL and ADD SUBLIMINAL: Extreme pressure on testicles. SOMATIC: Female sexual tension 0.75.
MEDIUM TWO SHOT of GEORGE and O’HARA. GEORGE has head thrown back, features contorted, screaming; O’HARA leaning over him, hands on his forearms, shouting into his face:
O’HARA
AT THE TOP OF HER LUNGS
Whom are you going to kill whom are you going to kill whom are you going to kill?
HAZLIK (OFF)
WHISPERS
God.
FRIEDMAN
CALMLY, ACADEMICALLY
This level of pain is greater than that experienced by one who burns to death.
JOHNS
SLIGHTLY BOTHERED
You might as well try something else. This isn’t going to work.
FRIEDMAN
You’re probably right.
GEORGE’S screams stop abruptly. SUBLIMINALS OUT.
O’HARA
Whom are you going to kill whom are you going to kill whom are you?
O’HARA slips lithely off him and holds hand out to FRIEDMAN.
O’HARA
Quickly.
FRIEDMAN HANDS her a small ampoule. She grabs GEORGE by the hair—his head is lolling and he’s whimpering like a child—and holds his head up while she crushes ampoule under his nose. Immediate SOMATIC: Male sexual tension 0.70, SMELL: Full-strength Stiffner ©.
O’HARA
TEASING GROTESQUELY
I’ve got something you wa-ant.
GEORGE looks at her sickly and takes in ragged breath. SOMATIC: Male sexual tension 0.75.
GEORGE
HOARSELY
Come here.
O’HARA
Not until you tell me. Whom did Fredrika order you to kill?
FULL-BODY SHOT of O’HARA past GEORGE. O’HARA pulls shift over her head and, underneath, is wearing only a little wisp of bright material which clings wetly to her. She has a ripe young figure, shiny with perspiration. SOMATIC: Male sexual tension 0.85, painful erection.
O’HARA
Who-o-o?
GEORGE shakes his head violently, incapable of speech or not trusting himself. A little salvia has trickled out of the corner of his mouth. O’HARA approaches him and kneels, begins caressing the back of his hand with her breast. FEEL: Featherlight touch of breast on back of hand which is struggling to clutch but unable to turn over. SOMATIC: Male sexual tension 0.93. SMELL: Female, male musk.
O’HARA
Just one little name, and I’ll take care of you.
O’HARA stands and turns her back to GEORGE; slowly slides final garment down. SOMATIC: Male sexual tension 0.95.
O’HARA (FACING AWAY)
Just tell me, George.
GEORGE groans something intelligible. O’HARA turns and, in a quick smooth motion, mounts his hand and begins rubbing back and forth. FEEL: Slippery labia, unnaturally hot and wet. SMELL: Female musk UP. SOMATIC: Male sexual tension 0.99; unbearable, gut-wrenching frustration.
O’HARA
HUSKILY
If you want…
GEORGE
SCREAMS
Haz-lik! Hazlik!
FEEL, SMELL, SOMATIC all OUT. O’HARA slides off GEORGE and slips back into clothes. FEEL: Wetness on back of hand turning cold and sticky as HAZLIK crosses in blind fury. ADRENALINE: 0.75.
HAZLIK
BARELY CONTROLLED
You are going to die…
TIGHT TWO SHOT: HAZLIK and GEORGE. HAZLIK has produced a shooter and is holding it at GEORGE’S head. He lowers aim, pointing it at his groin.
…and it’s up to you whether you die quickly or in great agony.
GEORGE
Don’t…don’t kill…
HAZLIK
Who ordered the contract? Who wants me dead?
GEORGE
I don’t know, she never tells me, please, please don’t kill…
MORENO (OFF)
He’s probably telling the truth, Hazlik.
HAZLIK thumbs safety on shooter; it begins to hum. ADRENALINE: Down to 0.50.
HAZLIK
You’re right.
HAZLIK turns to face MORENO and drops shooter in tunic pocket. ADRENALINE: 0.35.
HAZLIK
Let’s go talk to Fredrika.
JOHNS
Shall we kill him?
HAZLIK
Eventually.
TO O’HARA, LEERING
You may practice on him first. Don’t worry about marks.
CUT TO: Main room again. Party going full swing, people laughing and chattering. FREDRIKA is seated near the bar, looking deadly. DOLLY in for TIGHT GROUP SHOT as HAZLIK and MORENO approach.
SOUND UNDER and HOLD ADRENALINE.
FREDRIKA
COLDLY, TO HAZLIK
Where is my husband?
HAZLIK
He’s enjoying his own private party right now.
MORENO
And being positively garrulous.
FREDRIKA
Oh? I’m glad to hear that. I was afraid he wasn’t having a very good time.
MORENO
HISSES
He still—
HAZLIK
INTERRUPTING
He talked, Fredrika. I know he came here to kill me.
You came here to kill me.
FREDRIKA
WHISPERS
You fool. Both of you, fools.
MORENO
No, dear, for a change you play the fool. This time you went too far.
FREDRIKA
VENOMOUS
If you kill me, an army will be at your door by dawn.
HAZLIK
By dawn, I will have an army here to meet them.
MORENO
Two armies.
HAZLIK
Perhaps, though, if you will tell me who contracted for my death…
FREDRIKA
You know I can’t do that.
HAZLIK
This one time; this last time, you had better.
FREDRIKA
LOOKING AT MORENO
Alone.
HAZLIK
All right. (TO MORENO) You will excuse us?
MORENO makes exaggerated bow. FREDRIKA and HAZLIK leave wordlessly. MORENO watches them go and speaks softly into his bracelet.
CUT TO: TIGHT TWO SHOT of FREDRIKA and HAZLIK alone in a corridor. HAZLIK opens an ornate, old-fashioned manual door.
HAZLIK
WRYLY
My chambers.
LONG SHOT past HAZLIK and FREDRIKA to opulent bedroom; a fantasy of glass and velvet and silk. SUBLIMINAL: Feel of velvet and silk, sound of fine glass tinkling. Slight SMELL: Dope. SOMATIC: Dope 0.08. A tall, beautiful girl sits naked on the couch by the bed, smoking dope and reading. Unruffled, she puts down the viewer and slips a housecoat over her shoulders; crosses to exit between HAZLIK and FREDRIKA.
HAZLIK
I’ll call for you later. (MOTIONS TO FREDRIKA)
Have a seat, dear.
HAZLIK crosses to a large bar and selects a fine decanter.
HAZLIK
Brandy?
FREDRIKA
Just a taste.
HAZLIK pours two small glasses of brandy, his back to FREDRIKA, watching her in a mirror. She doesn’t move. He reaches in tunic pocket and takes out his shooter. SOUND: Soft hum; still activated. He crosses to FREDRIKA with shooter in right hand and drink in left.
HAZLIK
Distilled from the finest Antarean vintage.
FREDRIKA accepts, not looking at shooter, and takes a small sip.
FREDRIKA
It travels well.
HAZLIK returns to the bar and gets his glass, then sits on bed about two meters from FREDRIKA. He empties the glass in one swallow. TASTE and SMELL: Fine brandy; SOMATIC: Liquor burning on its way down.
Well?
FREDRIKA
The man who contracted for your death is one of my oldest and most valued customers.
HAZLIK
Was. As our friend pointed out, you are no longer in the business. (PAUSES) You may yet live, though.
FREDRIKA
LAUGHS SOFTLY
You can’t allow me to live.
TAKES LONG SLOW SIP OF BRANDY
Neither can Moreno.
FREDRIKA reaches up and takes a long pin out of her hair. The hair falls in a soft white cascade around her shoulders. She was very beautiful once.
HAZLIK
RAISING SHOOTER
That pin is a weapon.
FREDRIKA
With proper knowledge, anything is a weapon. (PAUSES) Don’t worry. I won’t throw it at you.
HAZLIK
More of your nerve poison?
FREDRIKA
Oh, you found out George’s little secret? How many men did it take?
HAZLIK
Two. We have atropine now, though. (TAKES AMPOULE OUT OF HIS POCKET AND SHOWS IT TO HER) You might as well tell me who your customer was. If nothing else, I can promise you a pleasant death.
FREDRIKA
Having made a lifelong study of the subject, I can assure you that there is no such thing as a pleasant death. Not even painless death is pleasant, not even for an eighty-year-old woman.
FREDRIKA stands and begins walking. For once, she looks as old as she is. CAMERA FOLLOWS as she talks, fiddling with the pin.
FREDRIKA
You don’t recall the last time you contracted for my services.
HAZLIK (OFF)
Of course not.
FREDRIKA
It was a most unusual request. Also very difficult. But I accepted the challenge.
HAZLIK (OFF)
So? You were paid well, no—
FREDRIKA
I wouldn’t have risked it if it hadn’t meant so much to you. I’ve always respected you, Theo; loved you in my own way.
ADRENALINE: 0.20. SUBLIMINAL: Rattlesnake coiling.
FREDRIKA
You were very disturbed, agitated. You had tried a multitude of other possible solutions before coming to me. None of them was satisfactory.
ADRENALINE: 0.40. SUBLIMINAL: Guillotine rising, rusty squeak.
HAZLIK (OFF)
What has this to do—
FREDRIKA
Patience. Old people do rattle on.
FREDRIKA stops walking a little more than an arm’s length from HAZLIK. ADRENALINE: 0.50, SUBLIMINAL: Losing balance on edge of cliff.
FREDRIKA
You were afraid that your empire was going to crumble because of the weakness of one man.
FREDRIKA points pin at HAZLIK, as if for emphasis. ADRENALINE: 0.60. SUBLIMINAL: Tied to stake and flames licking at feet.
FREDRIKA
You arranged for that man to be killed. One month ago this night, you arranged it. Because he had just turned fifty and was sad and afraid and knew that his empire soon would be down around his ears, and was not strong enough to commit suicide, he—you, Theo—you hired me to be your instrument of suicide.
FREDRIKA rests point of pin lightly on HAZLIK’S chest. ADRENALINE: 0.70, SUBLIMINAL: Falling in darkness.
HAZLIK
You’re insane.
FREDRIKA
No, Theo. Your subconscious knows. Put down the shooter.
HAZLIK puts muzzle of shooter against FREDRIKA’S abdomen. ADRENALINE: 0.85, HOLD SUBLIMINAL.
FREDRIKA No difference.
FREDRIKA leans on the needle and, at the same instant, HAZLIK fires. FREDRIKA explodes, cut in two.
TOTAL SENSORY NULL as HAZLIK stares at pin, a couple of centimeters sticking into his chest. He drops the shooter into the confusion of gore all over the rug and takes the atropine ampoule out of his pocket.
Then HAZLIK throws the ampoule away and shoves the pin the rest of the way into his chest.
ADRENALINE: 1.0.
SOMATIC: Male orgasm 1.0.
SMELL, TASTE, FEEL, HEAR, SIGHT all UP with white noise TO: FULL SENSORY OVERLOAD.
FADE TO BLACK.
CREDITS.
COMMERICAL.
(1972)
Notes on the Stories
The title story of this collection ran a winding path from conception to delivery. Like one of the others here, it started with a letter from my old friend Robert Silverberg, inviting me to write a story for an anthology. This was Far Horizons, with the daunting subtitle “All New Tales from the Greatest Worlds of Science Fiction.” He was asking writers who had created classics in the genre to revisit their worlds and write novellas set in them.
In my case it was The Forever War, and it was a wonderful opportunity. Editors and others had been after me for twenty years to write a sequel to the novel, and my response had always been no, the novel’s complete as it stands. But I always wanted to write a novella about what happens after the novel ends, and here was Silverberg offering me the chance, and for more money than the novel’s original advance.
I got twenty or thirty pages into it, though, a novella I was calling “Forever Free,” when I realized that it begged to be expanded into a novel, an actual sequel. I wrote Silverberg and asked how soon the material could be reused, and he said three years. That was too long; it was time for me to send out the next book proposal.
So I turned “Forever Free” into the book proposal, same title, and looked for another angle on the novella. It was immediately apparent. In the last part of the book, the main characters Marygay and William are separated, and we follow William’s story. What happened to Marygay?
It was fun to write her story, both as a bridge to the sequel and as an oblique commentary on The Forever War, twenty years later.
I don’t often write fantasy (except insofar as science fiction is a subset of fantasy), but every now and then a fantasy idea tickles my fancy. I got a request from Jean Rabe to write a story for Renaissance Faire, a book of stories set in those odd modern worlds of make-believe.
I’m not a big fan of the anachronistic gatherings, but my wife loves them, and I let her drag me along, and do enjoy myself once I get there, the mead and junk food and interesting costumes and old music. The music gave me an entrée into a story.
For years I’ve had in my “crazy ideas” file a clipping from Acoustic Guitar magazine, about the lives and times of those odd performers who hire out as “sidemen”—mostly unsung heroes of live music and records, who sit in to fill lacunae in visiting bands or to beef up the background for a recording session. It’s a precarious life, but full of variety, and as a freelance writer, I feel a kind of bond with people who wind up there.
I’ve also been an amateur musician since grade school, and in a couple of insane periods in my youth considered doing it for a living. Fortunately, no amount of yearning can make up for a lack of talent, so I was never given an opportunity to ruin my life in that particular way. One of the pleasures of writing stories, though, is the license to put on a manic disposition and imagine who you might have become if things had worked out differently. “Diminished Chord” let me venture out into that territory.
“Giza” is one of two stories that appear here courtesy of my classes at MIT. I start out the semester with an assignment that seems arbitrary, even cruel: I give each student a theme chosen at random from the table of contents of Peter Nichols’s excellent The Science in Science Fiction, and make them write the opening couple of pages of a story based on that. If you don’t know anything about antimatter or generation ships or werewolves, hey, look it up. You didn’t get to MIT from a coupon on a cereal box.
As partial compensation, during the break in the middle of the three-hour meeting, I have them get together and agree on whatever topic seems to be the worst, and give it to me to write. This particular year, the students were especially cruel, and made one up: asteroid psychology. I said sure, and then wandered off to wond
er what I had gotten into. The psychology of a rock?
The book Writing the Natural Way, by Gabriele Rico, has some interesting tips, and one I pass on to my students is the idea of trying to visualize a story by making a graphic map of its characters, ideas, settings, whatever—a way to get your brain out of thinking of a story as a sentence-by-sentence structure, and seeing it as a broader gestalt. I did that, writing ASTEROID inside a circle on the left and PSYCHOLOGY inside a circle on the right, and then free-associated on the two words, trying to find a commonality.
I doubt that I spent fifteen minutes on it before the idea for the story crystallized, almost entire: an asteroid can’t have a psychology, but the people trapped inside one could, and it would be toxic.
The time of writing is relevant. It was the week after 11 September 2001.
“Foreclosure” was another story from the random-topic assignment, but this past year the students were more kind and merely gave me a topic that was so overworked it seemed impossible to come up with anything new: terraforming, changing inhospitable planets into Earth-like ones.
Sometimes this writer/teacher’s life isn’t too rough. The day after that class, my wife and I got on a plane to Barcelona, where I was to give a speech and then take it easy for a while. Two old friends, Joan Manel and Mercé, had traded their flat in the city for a beach house in Cubelles, the resort town to the north, and they invited us to kick back and relax for a week.