Onward, Drake! - eARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  This gave us the central tension of the series: Raj loses by winning. Of course, if he loses, he certainly loses, and almost certainly dies. Heads I win . . .

  In the case of Bellevue, more is at stake than pleasing the Governor or restoring the Gubernio Civil to a dominant position. This is science fiction, after all! Because under the Governor’s Palace in East Residence are immense catacombs dating back to before the fall of the interstellar Federation, and among the ruins is a perfectly functional computer—a Sector Command model, waiting for the time and the man to restore civilization on Bellevue. Raj is the man . . . and to complicate matters, the Gubernio Civil has a religion which worships the memory of computers. This is known in the trade as a “Crystal Dragon Jesus” religion.

  I won’t go into the details of Raj’s adventures—those who wish to find out can go read the series, now available in omnibus format and ebook. What may be interesting is the general method we used to write the series.

  Writers differ in their methods. I generally don’t do detailed outlines; in fact, unless an editor (or collaborator) requires one, I generally don’t write outlines at all. This might be called the waaaaaah-splooosh! school. You have a general idea of where you want to go, and then jump in and swim.

  The upside of this is that it’s less work. The downside is waste effort—writing yourself into corners, ending up with meanders that have to be cut, and so forth.

  Dave is a much more tightly organized writer than I am. He does detailed outlines. The books in the General series averaged about 150,000 to 200,000 words. Dave, as the senior author, did outlines that ran to 40,000 words each.

  A forty-thousand-word outline is itself the length of a novella or short novel. Dave’s outline covered every scene in the books. By way of comparison, back when I did a lot of collaborations, I sometimes received outlines of paragraph length for whole books. But not from Dave!

  You might think that this was cramping or confining. On the contrary! I found it oddly liberating. The structure of the book, the bones, was right there. I could concentrate on the fun parts: thinking up cool features, and doing the little bits of business that flesh out characters and the incidents that make a scene vivid.

  For example, the military technology of the more advanced parts of Bellevue is roughly equivalent to our 1870s or 1880s. The Civil Government’s troops use a single-shot breechloader, and the Colony a repeating carbine with a tube magazine. Dave told me later that he had the trap-door Springfield and the Henry rifle in mind. Having grown up on tales of British derring-do (three of my four grandparents were English, and my father Canadian) I used the Martini-Henry rifle that Kipling immortalized instead:

  “When she kicks like a mule and throws wide in the ditch;

  Don’t call your Martini a cross-eyed old bitch.

  Remember she’s a lady, and treat her as sich

  And she’ll fight for the young British soldier!”

  With the Winchester of Western fame for the Colonial weapon.

  This is more than a technical detail for military-history nerds; it determines a lot of the action. Both weapons fire at about the same rate in the long run, but as the man put it in the long run we’re all dead. The Martini fires a heavy, powerful bullet to a considerable range, at a steady rate of bang . . . bang . . . bang . . . as the lever is worked to eject a round and another is thumbed into the breech. The Winchester, the classic cowboy-frontiersman weapon of the post-Civil War era, has a magazine—but every round has to be thumbed into it. Hence it can fire rapidly for a few moments: bang-bang-bang . . . and then load-load-load. By happy non-coincidence this corresponds roughly to an important difference between the Byzantine and Persian/Sassanid cavalry of Belisarius’ time—the Byzantines used heavier bows and often shot while their horses were standing, while the Persians used lighter bows and galloped more.

  Of course, there are distinctions—on Bellevue the soldiers don’t ride horses, which had never been numerous in a star-faring, fusion-powered civilization, and which failed to survive the collapse of civilization. Instead they ride giant dogs, originally produced by genetic manipulation before the Fall as amusements and toys. Descott hillmen ride hounds. The pampered chocolate-box soldiers of the Capital garrison, of course, use poodles. There’s a good argument that dogs, if big and sturdy enough, would make much better mounts for soldiers than horses. Horses are densely stupid, but not stupid enough to run onto a line of points. Dogs, like human beings, are social predators and creatures of the pack. They will do that.

  Dave had determined that Raj Whitehall would be advised by Center, an ancient computer still operating in the catacombs under East Residence. I decided that Center would have a dry, pedantic personality and enjoy—or at least do a lot of—lecturing, with a slight tinge of having been driven to distraction by aeons in the cellars chewing over old data. And that Raj’s initial awe of this divine being would eventually settle down to a wry resignation and even friendship of a sort. Dave had decided that Bellevue’s native fauna were roughly similar to dinosaurs—and I had the fun of reliving my childhood fascination with the creatures by doing a lot of research and coming up with the most colorful types to pop up at inconvenient moments, all birdlike quickness and size and really, really big teeth. The nomad Skinners (more or less stand-ins for the Hun raiders and mercenaries of the 6th century) were in the outline; I decided that they’d be descendants of French Canadian settlers isolated in the outback by the Fall. Just because I could.

  And so it went for four long books, war, love, companionship, tragedy, and history . . . and great fun it was to write. Dave was kind enough to say that the result was the book he’d have written if he’d had my knowledge base tacked on to his, and I’ve seldom had a finer compliment as a writer.

  * * *

  S.M. Stirling was born in France in 1953, to Canadian parents—although his mother was born in England and grew up in Peru. After that he lived in Europe, Canada, Africa, and the U.S. and visited several other continents. He graduated from law school in Canada but had his dorsal fin surgically removed, and published his first novel (Snowbrother) in 1984, going full-time as a writer in 1988, the year of his marriage to Janet Moore of Milford, Massachusetts, whom he met, wooed, and proposed to at successive World Fantasy Conventions. In 1995 he suddenly realized that he could live anywhere and they decamped from Toronto, that large, cold, gray city on Lake Ontario, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He became an American citizen in 2004. His latest book is The Golden Princess (September 2014); upcoming titles are The Change (a shared world anthology) in June of 2015 and The Desert and the Blade (September 2015), all from Roc/Penguin. His hobbies mostly involve reading—history, anthropology, archaeology, and travel, besides fiction—but he also cooks and bakes for fun and food. For twenty years he also pursued the martial arts, until hyperextension injuries convinced him he was in danger of becoming the most deadly cripple in human history. Currently he lives with Janet and the compulsory authorial cats.

  Hell Hounds

  Tony Daniel

  I found Mom in one of the dog pens, partially eaten by the three pit bulls inside.

  My first thought? That figures.

  The pen gate was closed and latched behind her so that the dogs couldn’t get out. These were troubled dogs—Mom didn’t have any other kind—but not trip-hammer vicious, at least not to her.

  Mom had names for her dogs, but I never learned more than a couple. After a while they become one horrible, unfriendly, barking, slathering mutt to me.

  Each of the twenty-five dog pens in the barn contained two or three rescued dogs—sometimes more, since for more than twenty years Mom had continued to take in abandoned and mistreated dogs, and she had run out of places to put them.

  How many were adopted out? None. Not one. In fact, every one of them was impossible to adopt. Most had been abused, neglected, and/or mistreated in some way by former owners—or, for the feral ones, other dogs. None of them were trustworthy. Not one.

 
; Do I sound bitter? Hell, yes, I am!

  Over the twenty years she’d had the barn, Mom had spent every scrap of money she possessed on feeding, medicating, and sheltering those dogs. I never expected to inherit anything from her—we were on the lower end of middle-class while I was growing up—but lately I’d been sending her chunks of my savings, and I knew every penny of it went for dog upkeep. I’d sworn never to do this, and I’d broken my promise. My only hope was that she spent some of the money for her own food, if only to ensure she could keep taking care of her dogs.

  I figured Mom had been lying dead in the pen for about a week. From the looks of things, the pit-bull brothers in there had waited until their food ran out before starting in on her body. They weren’t thirsty. Water came from a system of self-refilling troughs my father had constructed—so they didn’t run low on that. But it was obvious from the general lethargy of all the dogs in the barn that none of those yammering mutts had been fed for days.

  It was mostly the meat of Mom’s arms and legs that the pit bulls had chewed off, although there was at least one bite taken out of her neck.

  That was what I gleaned by observing from outside the pen. Now I had to get in, which I knew from experience was no easy task.

  My father, who had constructed the whole barn complex single-handedly, and then promptly died of a stroke, had made the pens five feet across and fourteen feet deep, so the dogs actually had a fairly spacious living area. My mother fixed the pens up with doghouses (although the barn roof guarded against the weather) and she tossed in a layer of straw in winter. Every day for hours and hours, she fed them, medicated them—and shoveled mounds of dog shit from each pen while the pen inhabitants were exercising in the big fenced-in yard outside the barn.

  And she refused most help. Plus, of course, she could never stop. One couldn’t. It was a twenty-four-seven job, and this year she had turned seventy-five.

  So frustrating. Always so damn frustrating, even to the last. Hell, I couldn’t begin to grieve because I had to work through the physical problem of how to get past the goddamn pit bulls to get to Mom’s body.

  I’d already waded through her carpet of cats.

  Oh yeah. There were cats, too.

  The cats lived outside the barn. When you drove up, you encountered a mass of them in the parking area. They only reluctantly parted before you, like some feline Red Sea. There must have been a hundred cats or more out there. Mom fed them by emptying out a weekly fifty-pound bag of cat food on a couple of pieces of plywood elevated on saw horses.

  The cats kept down the rodent problem around the barn, of course, but there were several hawks and vultures that had moved into the neighborhood. These would occasionally swoop down to catch a kitten or sickly cat, and carry it off to be eaten. Thus the number of cats did not grow exponentially—yet apparently there weren’t enough birds of prey in Alabama to keep the lot of them from steadily increasing.

  But now, how to get past three snarling dogs?

  I knew a little of their history. These were sibling pit bulls Mom had taken in after they’d been dumped, probably by dog fighters, down in the Talladega River bottoms near the Highway 431 bridge. The only human beings who frequented the area were meth addicts, drug dealers, and my mother to feed the abandoned dogs that collected under the bridge.

  The pups, which were about a year old at the time, had not only been beaten, scarred, and abused, but were skin-and-bones by the time Mom found them. They had grown up to be a trio of most unpleasant animals. I hadn’t exchanged a word with them since they’d promised to rip out my throat on a previous trip to the barn.

  I can talk to dogs. I can talk to cats, too, but I don’t. Wild animals—okay, those I like. They don’t tend to demand my mother’s love and undivided attention.

  I’m not as good as Mom was with animal languages. My strongest craft is water-witching, which is one reason I became a geologist. But I figured I’d have to give talking a try before I resorted to shooting the dogs in order to get to the body.

  I knew Mom would hate it that I was even thinking of shooting them.

  Then realization set in.

  I don’t have to worry about what Mom wants for her dogs ever again, I told myself. So fuck them.

  Yeah, right. I wasn’t going to shoot them.

  I would protect myself, however. I looked around for a stick and found a section of two-by-four about a yard long Mom had used to prop pen doors open. This would have to do. While I was searching for the wood, I let my spirit loosen up and spread out—at least, that’s how I’ve always pictured it—until I could hear the pit bulls. They were arguing among themselves. Big surprise.

  He’ll take her away.

  She’s ours.

  Smell him. He’s her git. The son. He has claim.

  Means nothing. We were sons, too.

  He sees. He can look back into the before like she could.

  He sees it was us that ate her.

  He’ll beat us.

  I grasped my stick, turned to the pen.

  “Did you kill her?” I asked them.

  The dogs started as if stung. They hadn’t realized I’d been listening.

  No! We didn’t!

  We didn’t kill her!

  We just ate her!

  “Then it is all right,” I said. “I don’t blame you.”

  We ate of her. This time it came across as more of a snivel.

  Maybe there was the tiniest degree of self-realization there. Sadness.

  Not going there, I thought. Mercy, yes, but not pity. Not for these dysfunctional pit bulls.

  That way lay madness. My mother’s madness.

  “I won’t hurt you because you chewed on her.”

  We tried not to.

  “It’s really okay.”

  But hungry.

  Like before at the mud-water when we were dying.

  She came.

  We were so hungry.

  I felt a wave of dog-shame roll over me. Shame in dogs usually led straight to aggression. Maybe it was because of their insecurity at no longer being wolves? Who the hell knew.

  Don’t talk to him! He has a stick.

  We ate her legs.

  He sees! He knows!

  We ate her.

  Get him!

  Bite him!

  I opened the pen’s gate, stood there a moment, then showed them the board. After a moment, I dropped it to the pen floor.

  “I’m not going to hit you,” I said. “But I do need you to get out of there.”

  The pit bulls and I faced off for a few seconds. One was mottled brown. The other two were white. All three had skin lesions here and there from scratching. All three were heavily muscled. My mother dosed them daily with anti-itch steroids—which also served to pump them up. They looked like three doggy weightlifters.

  If I had made another move, they probably would have attacked. I was ready for that. My hand was on the thirty-eight holstered in my rear waistband. I hadn’t spent years wandering lonely oilfields without learning to carry protection.

  Then the pit bulls appeared to arrive at a collective decision and bounded around me, out the pen door, down the center of the barn, and into the exercise yard. I followed them out and shut the yard gate, locking them outside.

  Meanwhile, the commotion had set every dog in the barn to barking and howling. I kid you not, it always sounded like the dog apocalypse, complete with wailing and gnashing of teeth, when all seventy-seven of them got going together.

  Pandemonium.

  Apocalypse for the ears.

  It had mercifully died down to a mild yip and bark chorus by the time I returned to the pen, knelt beside Mom’s body, and examined it.

  Not much to see. The pit bulls had left her face intact, but she’d settled partially facedown in the muck of the floor, and the skin there had turned black and moldy.

  If it hadn’t been a particularly cold November, there’d likely have been a cloud of flies. As it was, there were only a few maggot
s emerging from their burrows under her skin. The smell of death was intense, but not overwhelming to the point where I had to vomit. But I did need to stand up, lean on the pen fencing, and catch my breath.

  Did I finally cry?

  I should not have. I have no gift for divination, but it didn’t take a portent-reader to see where her obsession with saving and hoarding animals was likely headed.

  I’d expected something like this for a long time.

  Yes, I cried.

  Or rather, I let out a low whimper. This set the dogs to howling again. I gazed through the chain-link pen fencing.

  I hate you, each and every one, I thought.

  But I didn’t give voice to the sentiment. Of course, it wasn’t their fault. She’d worked and worried herself to death.

  It was telling that the person who had called me, worried about Mom, was Hailey Teague, the manager of the Tractor Supply where my mother bought her dog and cat food. No one else had missed her. I tried to visit once a month, but I’d skipped November because my work had piled up. Only once in a blue moon did she call me, my brother, or my sister. We had to call her. And any phone call was likely to be interrupted by one dog emergency or another.

  “I’ll call you back.” This was Mom’s refrain.

  But she never did.

  Anyway, my mother had missed two days of her usual dog food buys, and Hailey “just had a premonition” something was not right.

  Hailey could have contacted Gretchen or Tom, my sister and brother. They lived closer. But Hailey and I had been in high school together. She was a year younger and even then was on her way to transforming into the maternal, checklist-obsessed adult she’d become. She’d known me best of Mom’s children, so she’d called me.

  I caught my breath and knelt again beside Mom’s body. What was I going to do? If I called the sheriff or the county coroner, they’d see the dogs and haul them all away to the county gas chamber. My mother hated kill-shelters. I could imagine the sight of the barn dogs being snared about the neck by dogcatchers, and carted away, yelping and terrified, to their doom. If there was an afterlife, my mother would surely smite me from there, if it came to that.