Onward, Drake! - eARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  I came on fallen plaster and broken wood and shoveled it back behind me with my hands. More carpet. I pulled, tugged. The cloth too thin for carpet, surely. I gripped something under the cloth, yielding, cold, like a sausage, and yanked, and suddenly I knew I had hold of an arm.

  I recoiled almost back entirely into the hole I had left. My hand tingled. I said, “Who’s there?” and gulped. I wondered which of the other men it was, buried there in the dark, crushed in the house.

  Or maybe he was alive. I inched my way back up my little tunnel, until I found the body again, but when I touched the arm it felt like a slab of meat. I knew he was dead.

  Whoever he was. I panted in the dark, breathing the fumes of death. Finally I reached out and lightly, lightly ran my fingertips along the arm until I came to the hand at the end.

  I knew the ring on the little finger. I had won that ring from him at dice, and lost it back again. This was Bardo’s hand.

  The uncontrollable black horror engulfed me again. I could not breathe; the house closed down around me. Not moving, not talking, so dead, by his own definition. Some truth in there somewhere, a mouse in the corn.

  There was no other way to go but forward. Digging steadily on, through powdery plaster and wads of straw and hair, I uncovered Bardo’s chest, and dragged myself across the dead man.

  Pardon me, I imagined myself saying, belly to belly with the corpse. The ceiling pressed down over me, the space narrower with each move, my face down against Bardo’s neck. We were never this close before, were we. I was cold, and tired; I lay still a moment, gathering myself, resting on the body.

  Bardo said, I am so you will be.

  Not yet. Not yet. I moved, my back scraping against the unyielding planks above me. My cheek rasped against Bardo’s. His beard in my teeth. My doublet snagged on the harsh surface against my back and tightened around my neck like a noose. I gasped for air. My face mashed against the side of Bardo’s head. His cold clay chilled me, head to toe. Another sign I was alive: that cold.

  Bardo said, He thinks he is, so he is, he thinks.

  He had never been that clever. Dying had improved his wit.

  I pushed on, my chin against his ear, and then I could move no farther. Wedged between Bardo and the collapsed house I could go neither forward nor back.

  I lay still a while, feeling the cold seep into me, his death invading my body. My heart went thump-thump. One-two. I worked my right arm along beside the dead man, and reached up past my head, under another joist, and groped around. I touched rubble, and then empty space.

  I gasped in relief. I forced all the air out of my lungs, to make myself flatter, and bit-by-bit, I eased my shoulder in under the beam. I turned my head sideways and wiggled it after, the beam grinding against my ear, I felt Bardo pass by along my chest, down my side. Well, I thought, hail and farewell, brother. Something sharp ripped my scalp. My elbow was free. Abruptly I could lift my head.

  My hands flailed out through empty space. I dragged myself forward, over rubble, which slid under me away under me from a sloping wooden floor. Then I felt a breath of air against the back of my head, and I blinked, and I realized I could see.

  I pushed myself up onto my knees. The light was faint, sifting in through a thousand holes in the broken roof above, but I could see before me a stretch of empty room: the attic. On one side there was more light. I crawled forward toward the light. And now even my leg felt better. I staggered upright on the sloping floor, holding onto the roof truss, and looked out through a gap onto the street.

  The light was a hazy twilight: night coming. It had been midafternoon when we came; I had been buried for hours. The collapsed house half-filled the narrow street. By the edge of the rubble three pikemen were standing around talking: standing guard. Afraid to go in, likely, since it had blown up once.

  I called out, and they turned. One ran off a few steps, looking over his shoulder, and the others gawked and pointed. I shouted again. Now they were running and shouting toward me, joyous, as if I were a marvel. As I was. I raised my arms, reborn, as my name meant. I am.

  * * *

  Cecelia Holland lives in California, where she writes, teaches and chases after her 5 grandchildren.

  At my request, she supplied this afterword.

  I wrote “SUM” to honor David Drake, the scholar-soldier, with the not-too-subtle Ovid nod, and also because I know he will get all the jokes.

  David Drake

  Tom Doherty

  I met David Drake almost 40 years ago at a science fiction convention. I don’t remember which one, or quite when, but I do recall we had an interesting conversation which included a discussion of a Hammers story I had read in Galaxy. The year was probably 1976 or 77.

  I had loved science fiction since I was a kid. Growing up in farm country, science fiction books were hard to come by, and I became a regular reader of Astounding, which became Analog, and of Galaxy. As publisher of Ace and Tempo, a young adult line that also published science fiction, I still often read them. When Jim Baen took over at Galaxy, the improvement he brought to the magazine’s editorial content was impressive. We needed a strong editor to head our Ace SF program. I recruited Jim for the position. Shortly after he came aboard, he suggested we do a Hammer’s Slammers collection. We didn’t do short story collections as first books by relatively unknown authors, but by that time I had read two of those stories and thought yes!—strong, different, we should do this.

  We did, and it was a real success. In it, David began the creation of a new form of military science fiction. We bought that collection from David’s agent, Kirby McCauley, sometime in 1978 and published it in 1979, just before I left to start Tor. Jim would come with me. At Tor we would acquire the next book in the Hammerverse, the first Hammers Slammers novel, Cross the Stars.

  Tor would publish Cross the Stars in 1984, shortly after it had spun off Baen Books. There were three partners in Baen: Jim; a venture capitalist, Richard Gallen; and myself. Jim would run Baen. One of my contributions would be the contracts of any Tor author Jim had worked with and who wanted to follow him to the new company. I was delighted when David Drake decided he wanted to write for both of us. By this time, I was not just his publisher, I was his fan.

  David had been there. He brought a realism to military science fiction I hadn’t seen before. I remember, about the time we were publishing Cross the Stars, sitting with him for dinner, and how during that dinner he made it clear to me that he wouldn’t have, couldn’t have written it if he hadn’t been drafted out of Duke Law School and sent to Vietnam. He arrived there just in time for the 1970 invasion of Cambodia and saw his part of the war from the loader’s hatch of a tank. He served with the 11th Armored Cavalry, the Blackhorse. He believed then, and still believed, that the Blackhorse was the best armored regiment in Vietnam, but neither he, nor anybody he knew there, thought they were doing any good, that the war could be won, or that the corrupt, brutal government in Saigon was worth saving, but they did their job, they were the Blackhorse. That experience was, he felt, the strongest influence on that book and, in fact, on all his writing for years to come.

  We’ve known each other for a long time now and somewhere along the way he told me that he had come to believe that he wrote then, and continued to write, as a way to let out his anger in an acceptable fashion, that his writing calms him, probably because it’s the one thing in life he knows he can control. I think it works. He may never be completely free of the anger and depression caused by that horribly useless and destructive war, but at least to me he seems more at peace with himself, less depressed than he was in the first 20 years or 25 years we worked together.

  They have been great years. David is a great storyteller, and he brings to that storytelling not just the so real, so negative experience of a war that should never have been, but his erudition, his deep knowledge of his story and the classics. In Cross the Stars he drew on the Odyssey. In his latest series for us, his Books of the Elements, he shows us what the
culture of first century Rome was like as reflected in the writing of those who lived it, such as Virgil, Ovid and Tacitus. For his longest Tor series, Lord of the Isles, he reread Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and the other Romans of the late Republic but the religion is Sumerian. For both he reread Polybius. You can see his translation of large parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on his web site. I find David’s use of earlier civilizations, so different yet still the base from which our own evolved, as source material fascinating, but mostly I read and publish David Drake for the great stories he tells. I hope to be doing both for many years to come.

  * * *

  Tom Doherty is the President, Publisher, and Founder of Tor Books, LLC. He has been in publishing for 52 years. He started as a salesman for Pocket Books and rose to be Division Sales Manager. From there, he went to Simon and Schuster as National Sales Manager, then became publisher of Tempo Books. He was Publisher and General Manager of the Ace and Tempo divisions of Grossett & Dunlap before founding his own company, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC (publishers of Tor/Forge Books) in 1980.

  Tor became a subsidiary of St. Martin’s Press in 1987; both are now subsidiaries of Holtzbrinck Publishers. Tom Doherty continues as President and Publisher of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, publishing under the Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape and Aerie imprints. Many authors of the Tor and Forge lines have won honors as diverse as the World Fantasy, Hugo, Nebula, Edgar, Spur, Tiptree, Stoker and Western Heritage awards.

  In 1993 Tom Doherty was the recipient of the Skylark, awarded by the New England Science Fiction Association for outstanding contributions to the field of science fiction.

  For the last 27 consecutive years, the Locus poll, the largest reader survey in fantasy and science fiction, has voted Tor “Best Publisher” in these categories. Tom received a “Lifetime Achievement Award” at the 2005 World Fantasy Convention. In 2006, Tom received the Raymond Z. Gallun Award for outstanding contribution to the genre of science fiction. He received the 2007 Silver Bullet Award from the International Thriller Writers. Also in 2007, Tom received the Lauriet Award from the Western Writers of America for contribution to literacy; he was honored with a proclamation from Charles B. Rangel, the Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives of the United States Congress, for outstanding leadership to enhance and provide literacy programs throughout the nation.

  The Crate Warrior, the Doppelgänger, and the Idea Woman

  Mur Lafferty

  Steven had a sick pallor to his face at lunch as he trudged into the small backstage area we called the break room. There was a card table and if the room was full, well tough for you, go find somewhere else to eat your Subway. But if we weren’t filming, Steven and I usually ate early, around 11 a.m., before anyone else could get in there.

  Steven was tall, with super pale skin that spoke of either Norse heritage, computer programming heritage, or windowless soundstage heritage. And we didn’t talk about it much, but I’m pretty sure he was a mixture of one and three. His shock of blond hair was always messy, but not in that adorable, just woken up way, but in a real woken up way, like half of it flat as if he’d slept on it, with the other half sporting a cowlick that spiraled out of his head as if Athena was trying to work her way out with a corkscrew.

  I’d heard the word “lugubrious” used to describe two things before, a blobfish she had seen on a nature program, looking like it was sculpted from Play-Doh by an abandoned child, and a lumpy, sad (and ultimately murderous) man from a science fiction book by Douglas Adams. I loved the word, and it was what I always thought when I saw Steven. He doesn’t know this, of course.

  My sister once asked me, if I saw him in such a poor light, why did I hang out with him? Two reasons: we were both addicted to Red Dragon Skies, the hit online RPG, and he saved my life once. I don’t feel I owe him friendship, but I definitely owe him not being an asshole. And so long as we talk about the game, the conversation can be spirited. Besides, he’s a lot more fun (and outgoing) online.

  His considerable frame collapsed into the folding chair. He looked at me from beneath too-long bangs. “Cassandra.”

  Uh-oh. He almost never called me by my full name. Had I done something to piss him off? I wracked my brain but came up with nothing. “What’s up, Steven? Where’s your lunch?”

  “I didn’t get anything. I just got done stacking the latest prop shipment backstage.” He shocked me by beginning to cry.

  I was at a loss for words. Steven and I weren’t the touchy-feely type of friends, but I awkwardly patted his forearm. “Hey, what’s going on, man?”

  “I’m going to cause a multi-planar war,” he sobbed, covering his face with his hands.

  My spine went cold. “What did you do? Did you offend the director? Did you mispronounce her name?”

  “Worse. So much worse,” he said.

  “Her fiancé arrived today,” he said, sniffling, still covering his face. It sounded as if we had a bad phone connection. “He must have gotten lost, and was wandering around backstage. It was dark, I was stacking boxes, and I didn’t see him. I put down my last box, and—“

  Panic made my head reel. “You killed the guest director’s fiancé. With a box.”

  He wailed into his hands.

  When we learned that fairies do exist, discovered by three scientists and their daughters who were walking through a field one day—I know, sounds like a joke, huh?—The world went crazy with excitement. Theirs did too, as I understand it. In the past six months, we have learned so much about the beings that live, as they call it, “just one plane over.”

  Fairies are a lot like us, only smaller, and with wings. We haven’t seen them fly, but that doesn’t mean they can’t. I think they don’t want us to get jealous. Steven thinks they only fly when they attack. Whatever, Steven.

  Like some of our cultures in this world, fairies often marry for familial linkage, and sometimes to people they don’t know. Which accounts for this poor sap wandering around backstage instead of being with his fiancée.

  Fairies can live for thousands of years, and breed only rarely.

  And fairies, like us, make movies.

  When we discovered this, cultural anthropologists shit themselves, wanting to know how such media technology evolved alongside our own. Film students began studying every piece of fairy film they could get their hands on. And Hollywood, of course, wanted to know how to monetize it. My studio (ok, the studio I work for as a tiny food prop designer) was the first to successfully recruit one of the biggest fairy directors (or at least, as we understand it. They could have sent us the equivalent of a kid with a video camera for all we know) to direct a human film.

  We couldn’t pronounce her name, and she was horribly offended whenever we tried, so we called her “Ma’am” to her face and “HRH” for “Her Royal Highness” behind her back. The timing of everything was awkward, as she was expecting the arrival of her third husband-to-be amid all of the chaos. We were to treat him with the same respect as we treated her.

  Steven apparently didn’t get that memo, and decided to drop a box on the poor bastard.

  I left Steven in the break room and went to where Steven had stacked the new prop shipment. All I saw was a green wing coming from underneath the box. It didn’t quiver. It reminded me of the Wicked Witch of the East, and I shuddered.

  I went back to the break room and closed the door behind me. “Yeah, that’s one dead fairy. How could you not have seen him? They almost never shut up!”

  “I was distracted, OK?” he said, dropping his hands. His pale face had bloomed two bright red blotches on his wet cheeks. “My grandma died last night.” He plucked at his arm, which I just noticed had a black bandana wrapped around it.

  “Is that a mourning armband?” I asked, eyes growing wide. “Is it suddenly 1944? What is wrong with you? People are going to think that’s a tourniquet or something. People are more likely to assume you’re a drug user instead of in mourning.”

  He wiped his nose with the
heel of his hand. I considered yanking his black “armband” off and handing it to him, but then thought that might cross a weird line. I tossed him the napkin from my Subway bag. “We’re getting off topic. I’m sorry, I didn’t know about your grandmother. But yeah, we have to deal with this now.”

  “How?” he asked, staring at the table. “The best case is I’ll get fired. The worst is I’ll get tried for murder in fairyland.”

  “Don’t forget the multi-planar war,” I reminded. I wondered if the government had a plan for attacking fairyland, and then realized they probably had plans for invading Canada somewhere, they certainly figured out a way to fight fairies about ten minutes after the news of the weird little people hit the cable networks.

  I thought hard about what I knew about fairy culture. Murder was serious—there wasn’t the same kind of trial as we have in this world, considering you would have killed someone maybe a thousand years old—

  I groaned as a memory popped into my head. In the excitement, I had forgotten about who exactly this squashed fiancé was. He wasn’t just a young bohunk to add to our director’s stable of fairy man flesh, he was a prominent historian. Like one of the oldest fairies alive. The pairing was a huge political move, the antiquated hermit wedding a prominent mover in media and human diplomacy—he would learn about human history to add to his huge brain, and she could get plot ideas from him for movies. We were even going to film their meeting tonight at dinner.