The Inheritance and Other Stories

by Robin Hobb

  THE INHERITANCE

  And Other Stories

  Megan Lindholm

  Robin Hobb

  Dedication

  For Fred, in our fortyish year

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  Megan Lindholm

  A Touch of Lavender

  Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man

  Cut

  The Fifth Squashed Cat

  Strays

  Finis

  Drum Machine

  Robin Hobb

  Homecoming

  The Inheritance

  Cat’s Meat

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  Behind every story a writer writes, there is the story of how the writer came to the tale. In the introduction to each story in this collection, I hope to share a bit of what went on in my mind and in my life that prompted each story.

  It is also true that behind every book, there is a story. This one is no exception.

  I began my writing career when I was eighteen years old, as an aspiring children’s author. I was newly married and living in a small village called Chiniak on Kodiak Island. The population was small, the local business was a combination gas station and convenience store that kept fitful hours, and initially there was little for me to do other than keep my small house trailer tidy and take long walks on the beach with my dog, Stupid. I had long known that I wanted to be a writer, so I borrowed a small portable electric typewriter from my sister-in-law, bought a ream of paper and some carbon papers, large brown envelopes for my SASEs (self-addressed stamped envelopes for rejection slips!), and a copy of Writer’s Market. I was soon submitting short works to various children’s magazines such as Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, and Highlights for Children, in addition to many tiny magazines with very small circulations. In the beginning, rejection slips far outnumbered sales, but with each contact with the editorial world, I was learning.

  By the time ten years had passed, I had realized that writing for children was hard work, much harder than simple words and linear plots had seemed at first glance. Trial and error had taught me that there was a corollary to the famous “Write what you know” advice. That was, “Write what you love reading.” I had long been passionate about fantasy and science fiction, but equally daunted at the prospect of trying to compare my work with the tales from the writers I lionized. But by my midtwenties, I was venturing out with submissions to “fanzines,” the small-press homemade magazines of the genre. Some were little more than mimeographed or Xeroxed pamphlets while others had ventured into glossy pages and illustrations. They were my proving ground as a writer, and I will forever owe a debt to magazines such as Space and Time, and editors such as Gordon Linzner.

  When I began writing SF and fantasy for adults, I initially wrote as M. Lindholm. I was very happy with that sole initial in front of my surname. In 1978, I submitted a story to Jessica Amanda Salmonson that I hoped she would consider for her small-press magazine Fantasy and Terror. To my shocked delight, she wrote back saying that she would like to use it for her forthcoming feminist fantasy anthology, to be entitled Amazons! But she felt strongly that women writers needed to declare themselves as female. She urged me to put a name rather than an initial in my byline. I wrote back to her that I’d never been fond of my given name, Margaret, and that the nicknames such as Maggie, Peggy, Marge, and so on had never really felt like my own, either. I added, almost as an afterthought, that Megan was not so bad.

  Months later, when the book came out, I was a bit astounded to see that I had a new byline. Megan Lindholm it was. I confess to having mixed feelings about it, then and still. A year or two later, when the first Ki and Vandien book, Harpy’s Flight, sold to Ace Books, I realized that without my intending to I’d made an important decision. Since the story in Harpy’s Flight featured the same characters as “Bones for Duluth,” the story in Amazons!, I would have to use the same byline. Without giving it much thought, I’d become Megan Lindholm.

  And Megan Lindholm I would remain for many years.

  Leap forward in time yet another decade and a bit more. It was a time of change in my life. I had recently switched to a new US publisher, my career-shifting agent Patrick Delahunt had passed me on to a new agent, Ralph Vicinanza, and I was writing a story of a type I’d never attempted before. This was to be a big fantasy, on an epic scale, and written from the first-person point of view of a young man. I was writing in a style that I felt was completely different from any I’d ever used before. Perhaps it was a time to make a complete break with the past. The idea of changing my pseudonym greatly appealed to me. Although I remained very fond and proud of my works as Megan Lindholm, the drama of adopting a “secret identity” was irresistible. I jumped at the chance to become Robin Hobb.

  My editors, my agent, and I all agreed that the change presented an opportunity for me to break out of my “Megan Lindholm” voice and tell a big compelling story in a very lively way, one that I hoped would reach new readers. I hadn’t realized that I had begun to feel bound by what readers might expect of a Megan Lindholm book until I stepped away from that name. I wrote with a depth of feeling that I didn’t usually indulge. When Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb was first published, I spent weeks with my nerves in a knot, wondering how this new series by a “new author” would be received.

  The results were beyond my wildest hopes. I will never know how much the name change had to do with the success of Assassin’s Apprentice and the other Hobb books that followed it. I don’t think there’s a way to quantify that. But it felt absolutely wonderful to have reached a wider readership. And for several years, I played my cards very close to my chest, concealing that Megan Lindholm and Robin Hobb were one and the same. I attended conventions as Megan Lindholm, and while I was there, I did not speak about my work as Hobb. I did not do any readings or signings for the initial Farseer books.

  Beyond my agent and publishers, only two people knew the secret. One was Steven Brust, my collaborator on The Gypsy. I think Steve enjoyed keeping the secret, and he did it very well, for which I will always be grateful. The other person was Duane Wilkins of University Book Store, Seattle. I’d known Duane for years at that point. He’d been instrumental in helping my career as Megan Lindholm, supporting me with signings and readings as he did many, many fledgling SF and fantasy writers in the Seattle area. One night I received a call from him. He mentioned he hadn’t seen me in a while, and we talked about various forthcoming books and what he thought of them. Then he brought up Assassin’s Apprentice. It was very gratifying to hear him say nice things about the book I couldn’t openly acknowledge as mine. But then he proceeded to say that he could tell it wasn’t a first effort by any writer. And that he had noticed some stylistic resemblances. I kept my mouth shut. But then he asked me, directly, and there is no lying to old friends.

  And Duane, too, kept the secret intact for me.

  Of course, the information eventually leaked out, in drips and drops, and finally I did a Locus interview with Charles Brown in which I admitted that yes, Robin Hobb and Megan Lindholm were both my pseudonyms.

  But to this day, they remain separate writers in my mind. They may use the same battered keyboard, the one with the letters worn off the buttons. They share office supplies and an assistant, and even do very similar online updates. But they are not the same author, but rather two writers with different styles, issues, and choices of tale. I think each writer continues to attract a different readership, though some read
ers tell me they enjoy stories by both writers. Even today, when I get a story idea, I immediately know if it belongs to Lindholm or Hobb, and the story is written accordingly. Robin tends to hog the word processor with her big books, but Megan has continued to write and publish shorter works.

  This is the first time that a selection of stories by both pseudonyms has appeared in one volume. The Lindholm stories are, if you will, the inheritance that Hobb built upon. The styles and the subject matter differ from name to name, but if you check the DNA, you will find the shared genetics and the common fascinations.

  There are old stories here, written when Megan Lindholm was first establishing herself, as well as new tales by both authors. Robin still tends to sprawl in her storytelling, so while she takes up as many pages, there are fewer stories by her in these pages.

  To those readers who are encountering one (or both) of my bylines for the first time, welcome! And thank you for taking a chance on a “new” writer. And for those readers of Lindholm or Hobb who are taking the opportunity to acquire some of these stories in a more durable form, thank you, I hope you will not be disappointed.

  PART I

  Megan Lindholm

  A Touch of Lavender

  The old question “Where do you get your story ideas from?” still has the power to stump me. The easy, and truthful, answer is “Everywhere.” Any writer will tell you that. An overheard conversation on the bus, a newspaper headline read the wrong way, a simple “what if” question—any of those things can be the germ that grows into a story.

  But for me, at least, there is one other odd source. A stray first line. I may be driving or mowing the lawn or trying to fall asleep at night, and some odd sentence will suddenly intrude. I always recognize these sentences for what they are: the first line of a story that I don’t yet know.

  In the days before computers figured into writing, I would jot those butterfly lines down on a piece of scrap paper and keep them in my desk drawer, with other stray ideas. I knew they had to be captured immediately or they would flutter off forever. The line “We grew up like mice in a rotting sofa, my sister and I” came to me at a time when I had just moved into a house that possessed just such an item of furniture. It was a smelly old sofa, damp and featuring a green brocade sort of upholstery. It came with the used-to-be-a-chicken-house house that my husband and I purchased with my very first book advance from Ace Books. My advance was $3,500 and the run-down house, on almost four acres of choice swampland (oh, wait, we call those “wetlands” nowadays and preserve them!) cost us the whopping sum of $32,500. The payment of $325 a month represented a $50 saving over what we had been paying in monthly rent! And we could keep chickens for eggs. Such a deal!

  From the attic, I could look up and see sky between the cedar shingles that were the roof. A brooder full of chickens was parked in the bathroom. (Buff Orpingtons for you chicken connoisseurs.) We regarded those twenty-five half-fledged layers as a value-added feature of the house, much better than a spare room. A spare room can’t lay eggs! There were no interior doors in the house, and some of the windows didn’t close all the way. We tore up the rotted carpet and lived with bare ship-lap floors. There were no shelves in the noisy old refrigerator; we cut plywood to fit and inserted it. The only heat came from a woodstove. It was thus a mixed blessing that the yard was dominated by an immense fallen cedar tree. My ax and I rendered it into heat for the house for that first winter, one chop at a time.

  A week after we bought it, at the end of March, Fred said good-bye and went off to fish the Bering Sea, leaving me there with my faithful portable Smith-Coronamatic, three children under ten years old, an overweight pit bull, and a tough old cat. I would not see my husband again until October. We were impossibly broke when he left, and I knew that somehow I had to hold it together until after the end of herring season when he would finally get paid. We borrowed money from his sister to buy a can of paint because my daughter could not stand the lavender walls left her by the previous tenant of her bedroom. The bathroom chickens got older and began to lay eggs. It was mend-and-make-do time. Smelly and mice infested or not, the couch and other abandoned furnishings were what we had. I felt a bit bad for the mice when I evicted them. They’d been cozy and safe there, despite the run-down surroundings. Vacuumed, cleaned by hand, and with an old bedspread tossed over it, the rotting sofa became the main seating in the living room.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I suppose it occurred to me that my children were now much like those mice had been. Tough as things were, we now had a place to call our own. And, I hoped, my kids had good folks who would see them through.

  Did the lavender walls have anything to do with the story that would be written, years later, and feature that opening line? Who knows?

  It’s all grist for the writing mill.

  We grew up like mice nesting in a rotting sofa, my sister and I. Even when I was only nine and she was an infant, I thought of us that way. At night, when she’d be asleep in the curl of my belly and I’d be half falling off the old sofa we used as a bed, I’d hear the mice nibbling and moving inside the upholstery beneath us, and sometimes the tiny squeakings of the newborn ones when the mother came to nurse them. I’d curl tighter around Lisa and pretend she was a little pink baby mouse instead of a little pink baby girl, and that I was the father mouse, curled around her to protect her. Sometimes it made the nights less chill.

  I’d lived in the same basement apartment all my life. It was always chill, even in summer. It was an awful place, dank and ratty, but the upstairs apartments were worse, rank with urine and rot. The building was an old town house, long ago converted to four apartments upstairs and one in the basement. None of them were great, but ours was the cheapest, because we had the furnace and the water heater right next to us. When I was real small, three or so, a water main beside the building broke, and water came rising up in our apartment, maybe a foot deep. I woke up to my stuff floating beside me, and the old couch sucking up water like a sponge. I yelled for Mom. I heard the splash as she rolled out of bed in the only bedroom and then her cussing as she waded through the water to pick me up. Her current musician took the whole thing as a big joke, until he saw his sax case floating. Then he grabbed up his stuff and was out of there. I don’t remember seeing him after that.

  My mom and I spent that day sitting on the steps down to our apartment, waiting for the city maintenance crew to fix the pipe, waiting for the water to go down, and then waiting for our landlord.

  He finally came and looked the place over and nodded, and said, hell, it was probably for the best, he’d been meaning to put down new tiles and spraysulate the walls anyway. “You go ahead and tear out the old stuff,” he told my mom. “Stack it behind the house, and I’ll have it hauled away. Let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll send in a crew to fix the place up. Now about your rent . . .”

  “I told you, I already mailed it,” Mom said coldly, looking past his ear, and the landlord sighed and drove off.

  So Mom and her friends peeled up the cracking linoleum and tore the Sheetrock off the walls, leaving the bare concrete floor with stripes of mastic showing and the two-by-four wall studs standing bare against the gray block walls. That was as far as the remodeling ever got. The landlord never hauled the stuff away, or sent in a crew. He never spraysulated the walls, either. Even in the summer the walls were cool and misty, and in winter it was like the inside of a refrigerator.

  My mom wasn’t so regular about paying the rent that she could raise a fuss. Most of the folks in our building were like that: pay when you can, and don’t stay home when you can’t, so the landlord can’t nag at you. The apartments were lousy, but complaining could get you kicked out. All the tenants knew that if the landlord had wanted to, he could have gotten a government grant to convert the place into Skoag units and really made a bundle. We were right on the edge of a Skoag sector and demand for Skoag units was increasing.

  That was back when the Skoags were first arriving and the
re wasn’t much housing for them. It all had to be agency approved, too, to prevent any “interplanetary incidents.” Can’t have aliens falling down the steps and breaking a flipper, even if they are pariahs. These outcasts were the only link we had to their planet and culture, and especially to their technology for space travel that the whole world was so anxious to have. No one knew where they came from or how they got to Earth. They just started wading out of the seas one day, not all that different from a washed-up Cuban. Just more wetback aliens, as the joke went. They were very open about being exiles with no means of returning home. They arrived gradually, in groups of three and four, but of the ships that brought them there was never any sign, and the Skoags weren’t saying anything. That didn’t stop any of the big government people from hoping, though. Hoping that if we were real nice to them, they might drop a hint or two about interstellar drives or something. So the Skoags got the government-subsidized housing with showers that worked and heat lamps and carpeted floors and spraysulated walls. The Federal Budget Control Bill said that funds could be reapportioned, but the budget could not be increased, so folks like my mom and I took a giant step downward in the housing arena. But as a little kid, all I understood was that our place was cold most of the time, and everyone in the neighborhood hated Skoags.

  I don’t think it really bothered Mom. She wasn’t home that much anyway. She’d bitch about it sometimes when she brought a bunch of her friends home, to jam and smoke and eat. It was always the same scene, party time, she’d come in with a bunch of them, hyped on the music like she always was, stoned maybe, too. They’d be carrying instruments and six-packs of beer, sometimes a brown bag of cheap groceries, salami and cheese and crackers or yogurt and rice cakes and tofu. They’d set the groceries and beer out on the table and start doodling around with their instruments while my mom would say stuff like, “Damn, look at this dump. That damn landlord, he still hasn’t been around. Billy, didn’t the landlord come by today? No? Shit, man, that jerk’s been promising to fix this place for a year now. Damn.”