Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle

by George R. R. Martin

  She woke to the sound of the door closing. It was only a small click, a latch sliding into place, but it was enough. Her eyes opened, and she pulled herself up. It was so hard to move. She felt heavy, tired. Outside they were laughing. They were laughing at her. It was dim and far-off, that laughter, but she knew it was meant for her.

  Her hand was resting on her thigh. She stared at it and blinked. She wiggled her fingers, and they moved like five fat maggots. She had something soft and yellow under her nails and deep, dirty yellow stains up near her fingertips.

  She closed her eyes, ran her hand over her body, the soft heavy curves, the thicknesses, the strange hills and valleys. She pushed, and the flesh gave and gave and gave. She stood up weakly. There were her clothes, scattered on the floor. Piece by piece she pulled them on, and then she moved across the room. Her briefcase was down beside the door; she gathered it up, tucked it under her arm, she might need something, yes, it was good to have the briefcase. She pushed open the door and emerged into the warm night. She heard the voices above her: “… were right all along,” a woman was saying, “I couldn’t believe I’d been so silly. There’s nothing sinister about him, really, he’s just pathetic. Donald, I don’t know how to thank you.”

  She came out from under the stoop and stood there. Her feet hurt so. She shifted her weight from one to the other and back again. They had stopped talking, and they were staring at her, Angela and Donald and a slender, pretty woman in blue jeans and work shirt. “Come back,” she said, and her voice was thin and high. “Give them back. You took them, you took my things. You have to give them back.”

  The woman’s laugh was like ice cubes tinkling in a glass of Coke.

  “I think you’ve bothered Jessie quite enough,” Donald said.

  “She has my things,” she said. “Please.”

  “I saw her come out, and she didn’t have anything of yours,” Donald said.

  “She took all my things,” she said.

  Donald frowned. The woman with the sandy hair and the green eyes laughed again and put a hand on his arm. “Don’t look so serious, Don. He’s not all there.”

  They were all against her, she knew, looking at their faces. She clutched her briefcase to his chest. They’d taken her things, he couldn’t remember exactly what, but they wouldn’t get her case, he had stuff in there and they wouldn’t get it. She turned away from them. He was hungry, she realized. She wanted something to eat. He had half a bag of Cheez Doodles left, she remembered. Downstairs. Down under the stoop.

  As she descended, the Pear-shaped Man heard them talking about her. He opened the door and went inside to stay. The room smelled like home. He sat down, laid his case across his knees, and began to eat. He stuffed the cheese curls into his mouth in big handfuls and washed them down with sips from a glass of warm Coke straight from the bottle he’d opened that morning, or maybe yesterday. It was good. Nobody knew how good it was. They laughed at him, but they didn’t know, they didn’t know about all the nice things he had. No one knew. No one. Only someday he’d see somebody different, somebody to give his things to, somebody who would give him all their things. Yes. He’d like that. He’d know her when he saw her.

  He’d know just what to say.

  DREAMSONGS: VOLUME II

  A Bantam Spectra Book / December 2007

  Originally published in one volume as GRRM: A RRetrospective by Subterranean Press in 2003

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2003 by George R. R. Martin

  Please see Story Copyrights for additional copyright information.

  Illustrations by Michael Wm. Kaluta

  Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Martin, George R. R.

  Dreamsongs / George R. R. Martin.

  p. cm.

  Originally published in one volume as: GRRM. Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2003.

  2007017681

  www.bantamdell.com

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90434-5

  Cover design: Dreu Pennington-McNeil

  Cover illustration: © Dominic Harmon

  v3.1

  STORY COPYRIGHTS

  “A Beast for Norn” copyright © 1976 by Futura Publications, Ltd. From Andromeda (Orbit, UK, 1976). A longer and substantially revised version of this story later appeared in Tuf Voyaging (Baen, 1986), copyright © 1986 by George R. R. Martin.

  “Guardians” copyright © 1981 by Davis Publications, Inc. From Analog, October 12, 1981.

  “The Road Less Traveled” copyright © 1986 by CBS, Inc.

  “Doorways” copyright © 1993 by CPT Holdings, Inc.

  “Shell Games” copyright © 1986 by George R. R. Martin. From Wild Cards (Bantam, 1986).

  “From the Journal of Xavier Desmond” copyright © 1988 by George R. R. Martin. From Wild Cards IV: Aces Abroad (Bantam, 1988).

  “Under Siege” copyright © 1985 by Omni International, Ltd. From Omni, October 1985.

  “The Skin Trade” copyright © 1988 by George R. R. Martin. From Night Visions 5 (Dark Harvest, 1988).

  “Unsound Variations” copyright © 1981 by Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc. From Amazing Stories, January 1982.

  “The Glass Flower” copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc. From Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1986.

  “The Hedge Knight” copyright © 1998 by George R. R. Martin. From Legends (Tor, 1998).

  “Portraits of His Children” copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications, Inc. From Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1985.

  Bibliography copyright © 2003, 2007 by Leslie Kay Swigart.

  All other material copyright © 2003 by George R. R. Martin.

  CONTENTS

  Master - Table of Contents

  Dreamsongs: Volume II

  Title Page

  Copyright

  STORY COPYRIGHTS

  SIX

  A TASTE OF TUF

  A BEAST FOR NORN

  GUARDIANS

  SEVEN

  THE SIREN SONG OF HOLLYWOOD

  THE TWILIGHT ZONE: “THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED”

  DOORWAYS

  EIGHT

  DOING THE WILD CARD SHUFFLE

  SHELL GAMES

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF XAVIER DESMOND

  NINE

  THE HEART IN CONFLICT

  UNDER SIEGE

  THE SKIN TRADE

  UNSOUND VARIATIONS

  THE GLASS FLOWER

  THE HEDGE KNIGHT

  PORTRAITS OF HIS CHILDREN

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: A RETROSPECTIVE FICTION CHECKLIST BY LESLIE KAY SWIGART

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  SIX

  A TASTE OF TUF

  My career is littered with the corpses of dead series.

  I launched my star ring series with “The Second Kind of Loneliness” and “Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring,” then lost interest and never did a third story.

  “A Peripheral Affair” was meant to be followed by the further adventures of the starship Mjolnir and the Good Ship Lollipop. None ever appeared, for the simple reason that none was ever written.

  My corpse handler series went all the way to three: “Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg” began it, “Override” followed, and “Meathouse Man” brought it to … well, a finish, if not an end. A fourth story exists as a four-page fragment, and there are ideas in my files for a dozen more. I once intended to write them all, publish them in
the magazines, then collect them all together in a book I’d call Songs the Dead Men Sing. But that fourth story never got finished, and the others never got started. When I did finally use the title Songs the Dead Men Sing for a collection (from Dark Harvest, in 1983), “Meathouse Man” was the only corpse story to make the cut.

  I fared somewhat better with the Windhaven series, perhaps because Lisa Tuttle and I were collaborating on that one, so I had someone to give me a swift kick whenever my creative juices dried up (Lisa also added some swell creative juices of her own). We started out trying to write a short story, which turned into the novella “The Storms of Windhaven” (a Hugo and Nebula loser) at the prompting of Analog editor Ben Bova. “One-Wing” and “The Fall” followed, two more novellas. Then Lisa and I put the three of them together, added a prologue and epilogue, and published Windhaven, a classic example of the “fix-up” novel; a novel made by cobbling together a series of previously published short stories or novellas.

  Windhaven wasn’t supposed to be the end of Windhaven, however. Lisa and I meant to continue the tale through two more books and two more generations, showing how the changes Maris started in “The Storms of Windhaven” continued to transform her world. The second book was to be entitled Painted Wings. The protagonist would be the little girl we’d introduced in “The Fall,” all grown up.

  We never wrote it. We talked about writing it for years, but the timing never worked out. When I was free, Lisa was in the throes of a novel. When she was free, I was out in Hollywood, or doing Wild Cards, or a novel of my own. We were a thousand miles apart even when we were closest; then I went west (to Santa Fe and Los Angeles) and she went east (to England and Scotland), and we saw each other less and less often. Also, as we grew older, our voices and styles and ways of looking at the world became more and more distinct, which would have made collaborating far more challenging. Literary collaboration is a game for young writers, I think … or for old, cynical ones trying to cash in on their names. So our Painted Wings never took flight.

  My other series all proved to be even shorter, as I’ve mentioned here and there throughout these commentaries. There was the Steel Angel series (one story). The Sharra series (one story). The Gray Alys series (one story). The Wo & Shade series (one story). The Skin Trade series (one story). It’s enough to make one suspect a terminal case of creatus interruptus.

  Ah, but then comes Tuf.

  Haviland Tuf, ecological engineer, master of the Ark, and the protagonist of Tuf Voyaging, which is either a collection of short stories or a fix-up novel, depending on whether you’re a critic or a publisher. ’Twas Tuf who broke my series bugaboo for good and all, and opened up the gates for Wild Cards and A Song of Ice and Fire.

  As a reader, I had my own favorite series characters. In fantasy, I was drawn to Moorcock’s Elric and Howard’s Solomon Kane, and I loved Fritz Leiber’s dashing rogues, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. In SF, I was fond of Retief, of Dominic Flandry, of Lije Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw. But my favorites had to be Jack Vance’s galactic effectuator Magnus Ridolph and Poul Anderson’s fat, scheming merchant prince of the spaceways, Nicholas van Rijn.

  As a writer, I still had dreams of establishing a popular, long-running series of my own. I had an idea that I was certain could sustain one as well. It was 1975, and “ecology” was a word on everyone’s lips. It seemed to me that a series about some sort of biogenetic engineer, who moves from world to world solving (or in some cases, creating) ecological problems, would offer no end of story possibilities. The subject matter would allow me to explore all sorts of juicy issues … and best of all, no one else had done anything remotely like it, so far as I knew.

  But who was this fellow? It seemed to me I had a terrific concept, but to sustain a series I needed a terrific character as well, someone the readers would enjoy following story after story. With that in mind, I went back and looked at some of the characters that I loved as a reader. Nicholas van Rijn. Conan. Sherlock Holmes. Mowgli. Travis McGee. Horatio Hornblower. Elric of Melnibone. Batman. Northwest Smith. Flashman. Fafhrd and the Mouser. Retief. Susan Calvin. Magnus Ridolph. A diverse bunch, certainly. I wanted to see if they shared any traits in common.

  They did.

  Two things leapt out at me. One, they all had great names, names that fit them perfectly. Memorable names. Singular names. You were not likely to meet two Horatio Hornblowers. Melnibone’s phone book would not list four Elrics. Northwest Smith was not required to use his middle initials to distinguish himself from all the other Northwest Smiths.

  Secondly, every one of them was larger than life. No average joes in this bunch. No danger of any of them vanishing into the wallpaper. Many of them are supreme in their own spheres, be that naval warfare (Hornblower), deduction (Holmes), hand-to-hand combat (Conan), or cowardice and lechery (Flashman). Most of them are severely idiosyncratic, to say the least. There is surely a place in fiction for small, commonplace, realistic characters, subtly rendered … but not as the star of an ongoing series.

  Okay, I thought to myself, I can do that.

  Thus was born Haviland Tuf, merchant, cat lover, vegetarian, big and bald, drinking mushroom wine and playing god, a fussy man and formal, who has long since veered past idiosyncrasy into out-and-out eccentricity. There’s some of Holmes and Ridolph in him, a pinch of Nicholas van Rijn, a little Hercule Poirot and a lot of Alfred Hitchcock … but not much me at all. Of all my protagonists, Tuf is the least like myself (although I did own a cat named Dax, though he was not telepathic).

  The name? Well, “Haviland” was a surname I noticed on the wall charts at a chess tournament I was directing. I’m not at all certain where the “Tuf” came from. When I put the two of them together, though, that was him, and never a doubt.

  Back in the ’70s, I was still trying to place my stories in as wide a variety of markets as possible. I wanted to prove that I could sell to anybody, not just the same few editors. Also, I figured that every time I had a story in a new market I would reach new readers, who might then go on to look for my stuff elsewhere.

  Working on that theory, I sold the first Haviland Tuf story to a British hardcover anthology called Andromeda, edited by Peter Weston. Perhaps “A Beast for Norn” did indeed win me legions of new British readers, I couldn’t say; unfortunately, very few of my old American readers ever found the story until St. Martin’s printed an American edition of Andromeda three years later. By that time, I had already published the second Tuf story, “Call Him Moses.” I’d sold that one to Ben Bova. Thereafter Tuf became a familiar figure in the pages of Analog. Ben and his successor Stanley Schmidt got first look at each new Tuf story, and bought them all.

  Not that there were a great many. Tuf was fun, but he was by no means the only fish in my frypan. In the late ’70s I was still teaching at Clarke College, so my writing time was limited, and I had other stories I wanted to tell. And when I moved to Santa Fe at the end of 1979, to try and make a go of it as a full-time writer, my attention shifted to novels. Fevre Dream occupied most of my writing time in 1981, The Armageddon Rag in 1982, Black and White and Red All Over in 1984. (We won’t talk about 1983, my Lost Year.) The Tuf series might well have petered out at three or four stories, but for Betsy Mitchell.

  Betsy had been the assistant editor at Analog under Stan Schmidt, but in 1984 she left the magazine to become an editor at Baen Books. Not long after joining Baen she phoned to ask if I had ever considered doing a collection of Haviland Tuf’s adventures. I had, of course … but that was for “eventually,” some future time when I had accumulated enough Tuf stories to make a book.

  In 1984 I had maybe half a book at best. Still, Betsy’s offer was not one I could refuse. My career was in serious trouble just then. The readers had ignored The Armageddon Rag in droves, and as a result no editor would touch Black and White and Red All Over. This was a chance to get back into the game. I could write some more Tuf tales, sell first serial rights to Stan Schmidt at Analog, put them all together for Betsy, and
make enough money to pay my mortgage for a little while longer.

  So I wrote “The Plague Star,” the tale of how Tuf came to be the master of the Ark, followed by the S’uthlam triptych, which gave the book a spine. Baen published Tuf Voyaging in February, 1986, as a novel. My fifth novel, some say … though I’ve always counted Tuf Voyaging as a short story collection. (In my own mind, Black and White and Red All Over will forever be my fifth novel, broken and unfinished though it is.)

  No sampling of my checkered career could possibly be complete without a taste of Tuf, so I’ve included two stories here. The rest can be found in Tuf Voyaging, for those who want more.

  “A Beast for Norn” was the earliest Tuf story, written in 1975 and published in 1976. When it came time for me to assemble Tuf Voyaging for Betsy in 1985, a decade had passed, and Haviland Tuf had changed somewhat, coming more into focus, as it were. The Tuf of “A Beast for Norn” no longer quite fit, so I decided to revise and expand the story, to bring the proto-Tuf more in line with the character as he’d evolved in the later stories. It is the revised version of “A Beast for Norn” that appears in Tuf Voyaging. For this retrospective, however, I thought it might be interesting to go back to my first take on Tuf. So what follows is the original version of “A Beast for Norn,” as it appeared in Andromeda in 1976.