Finally, I’d like to thank Mark Van Name for putting together this volume. It was his idea, and his project, and I have to say it’s very nice to do one of these things while the person being honored is still alive to appreciate it—to say nothing of the salubrious effect to the world getting two new Dave Drake stories. Well done, Mark, and thank you, Dave, for having such enterprising friends!
* * *
Toni Weisskopf succeeded Jim Baen as publisher of Baen Books in 2006. With Josepha Sherman she compiled and annotated the definitive volume of subversive children’s folklore, Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts, published by August House. Weisskopf is a graduate of Oberlin College, with a degree in anthropology. She is the mother of a delightful daughter, and lives in a hundred-year-old house in a balanced household of three cats and three dogs. Taking care of those consumes most of her spare time, but she is also interested in space science and is a participant in the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop.
Swimming from Joe
Barry N. Malzberg
For David Drake and Spalding Grey
I
Much later Hammer could still remember the actress, distended, inflated, enormous, drifting above the killing fields like a balloon. In country he had dreamed of her in darkness and light, thinking of that Korean tour fifteen years earlier, Marilyn on that distant stage with five thousand troops screaming at her and he had awakened screaming himself, her image in swirls of paint and fire. This was after the campaign, after all of the fierce but failed conquests, after he had been taken to the rear lines in what he had thought was a body bag. “Joe, you never heard cheering like that in your life.” “Oh yes.
“Oh yes I have.”
Oh yes he had.
II
What did they know of those fields back in the world? Marilyn drifted ever closer to him in the night, her mouth open with need, her thighs soaring before him and sometimes he would reach for her, emerge from that cocoon of space to attempt some kind of contact. It would never happen. Like the enemy itself she was there and she was absent, she was omnipresent and invisible, he could not touch her, she would not touch him, she was as remote as the Slammers, as close as the deadening, cooling fire.
III
He was not sure when he had first seen her. The campaign was arched in its annihilation of time. But years later Hammer had become convinced that he had not only seen but somehow caused her to react: that doomed actress, seven years past her suicide, hanging enormously over the fields, intimately in the tent, her body drifting slowly among the cloudbanks, the spurs of napalm and stink of the ordnance covering but never obliterating her. Oh, she was dead, she had to be dead, Hollywood had killed her as the War had killed the Slammers, dead men in living posture but to Hammer, not sure if he was awake or dreaming no cause, no person meant more to him than simply crawling to the next day. In her assumption of a circumstance larger than death she was somehow keeping him alive. We are born to die, he thought. All except her. She died to live. She was the engineer and circumstance of the helium that kept her high in the air, close in the tent.
IV
The Slammers had overtaken him. They had become the purest instruments of the killing field. Down among the dead men he was as live man now, somehow brought through circumstance to something beyond. In the early films Marilyn had been nothing but fear, fear and nervousness in small roles: stricken models, stricken secretaries, a stricken babysitter . . .she had been driven by fear from the outset and had been taken to places beyond her capacity. She was the perfect handmaiden to the Slammers for that reason: the Slammers could feel nothing, she felt everything. Everything and nothing: that was what In Country had become and Hammer did not know if he was poised beyond mortality or simply draped by it. The Slammers were the dead and the living in simultaneity, they were truly Schrodinger’s Troops. “Oh come to me,” he dreamed that he pleaded. “Show me your fear and I will show you mine and we will find salvation together.”
V
This was before she had taken to suspension in the air, clinging in the tent. This was before the First Sergeant had, broken, dispatched the anonymous kill order. He could theorize that it was in that abyss that Hammer himself might have engaged in stricken dialogues with Marilyn which however imaginary (like the Slammers too might have been) were no less testing or terrible. This war itself was imaginary, he was learning. Like Marilyn it hung suspended or came in sleep. Here it was another contrivance and its possibilities completely inseparable from its events.
VI
So there she was and there she would be, hovering near or far, close perspective and distant. He dreamed her in clouds and in the field latrine, dreamed her in postures grotesque and fanciful. “I never heard cheering like that.” “I never knew anyone like you.” “I never thought I would have but we had. Frightened: I am so frightened.” She would say anything. Whether what she spoke was real or imagined was irrelevant, it was certainly real enough for him.
VII
So real, so evanescent. She had been dead all that time but just as the Slammers had bloomed under their commission, even as the dead men had learned to march, so had Marilyn grown in the squalor of her final posture. If fear had made her ever more sensuous, then death had induced a gravitas to her fear which made it the War itself. I went to sleep and awakened here, she whispered. Who are you? Who are they? Why did all of their cheering fail to save me?
VIII
As with the Slammers, so it was for the Marilyn: the essential story, the central story had been taken. Nothing remained but fragments of that narrative dropped like shrapnel on the killing field, scattered and dispersed through the emptiness.
IX
“And so it was in that moment, in that single flash of cognition refracted from her enormous drifting suspended soul that I came to understand truly and for the first time who Hammer was, from where he had come and for what purpose. And why we had been assembled. And why Marilyn had killed herself.”
* * *
Barry N. Malzberg, Pvt. E-2 USA, long retired, is the author of “Final War” (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1968) and many other works of fiction over the succeeding near half-century. “Final War,” a Nebula finalist in 1969, lost to Richard Wilson’s “Mother To The World,” which was in fact quite a good novelette. Breakfast In The Ruins, a collection of essays on science fiction, won the Locus Award in 2008 for Best Related Nonfiction Book and was a Hugo finalist.
At my request, he provided this afterword.
David spent years in country with the armored cavalry; he lived the ferocity and the fire. I spent six months at Fort Dix beginning in August 1960, eight weeks of them in Basic Training. This was still Eisenhower’s sleepy and quietly resentful peacetime Army, nothing to compare with McNamara’s Band but it was over a hundred degrees on the rifle range and bivouac and the forced marches, six miles with field equipment, left even well conditioned kids gasping and First Sergeant Tommy Atkinson was coughing blood. The experiences were not to be equated and I do not equate them but David and I reached, nonetheless, similar conclusions about the Army and the Hastings of “Final War” would have found nothing unfamiliar about the Slammers. Down among the dead men. The primal, the universal alienation laid out by both writers in the flattest, deadest prose of repressed anger: PTSD prose, the lilies of the valley crushed in the noonday sun. Nothing about the actual experience of war is ideological or principled. Of course the three generations of chicken hawks who ran operations for half a century and are running them now would argue otherwise. Dulce et decorum est.
David wrote the Scott Meredith Agency twenty years ago in search of an ex-client Raymond Banks (“The Short Ones”) to whom he wanted to send a long-contemplated fan letter. His note came to the desk of the only employee of the previous four decades who might have known who Banks was (an obscure author of occasional science fiction and mystery short stories) and I pointed him in the right direction, unfortunately just a few months too late. David and I fell into
correspondence and it has not flagged in two decades. We’ve shared a few panels at a few convention meetings and the correspondence has flourished like the Slammers (although in a different way). He is one of my closest friends. He may be the closest friend I have. That friendship is of course tied to the fields of science fiction and/or that laughable occupation called “professional authorship” but it has actually grown from a commonality of misery and understanding. Hastings is an honorary Slammer; the Slammers as rigid as Bemelmans’ line of Madelines surround Hastings in eternal fire.
The Village of Yesteryear
Sarah Van Name
The North Carolina State Fair is a polarizing event. Some people get really into the whole thing: the food, the rides, the exhibits of farm animals and prize-winning hay. Some people hate it for the same reasons; they roll their eyes and say it’s not worth the money. I’ve always been a part of the former camp. Frankly, I think people would be less dismissive if they knew what happened there when I was eleven. Or maybe it would scare them away. But it doesn’t matter, because no one ever believes me—except Dave, because he was there.
That year, Dave and his wife, Jo, were late meeting my family at the pretzel stand near gate seven. I was licking the butter off my fingers when they showed up.
“You made it!” my dad declared. “Got lost?”
“Yes,” Dave said thoughtfully. “But we saw the exhibit of gourds. They were good this year. I mean really shapely, excellent range of colors. But I apologize for being late. I am ready now.” Jo hoisted her purse onto her shoulder and shot my mom a beleaguered look. Every year, Dave got lost before meeting us and dragged Jo with him. Dave wrapped his thin arm around his wife, the grey strands of her hair catching on his sleeve.
“Well,” my dad said to the group, “shall we?”
He reached out his hand to me. I thought I was old enough to walk without holding anyone’s hand. But I still took it.
Wandering through the fair was, and is, a unique experience. The full tapestry of humanity moves in throngs, people big and small, old and barely born. For me, the best moment is when you turn a corner and the road dips down in front of you, so you can see far ahead, the backs of so many people’s heads moving and swaying. There is no way to be efficient about the fair. You have to amble. And that’s good, because it means you move slow enough to take it all in.
We passed the candy shack, the pig races, and the booth with the mermaid woman. The ostrich-burger stand and one of a thousand soft-serve vendors. A tent selling fried candy bars and donuts. Over the fence to our right, I saw the midway with the rickety rollercoasters and puke-and-twirls.
After the Wisconsin Cheese stand, we turned right and found the carousel. Every year, I thought it was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen. Two stories tall, it was different from everything around it. It had no neon lights or flashing letters. Instead, it was lined with white bulbs like in the dressing rooms of old movie stars. The animals were made of wood and painted in fading colors, and the gold trim was chipping off to reveal bare pine underneath.
On the first story, there were small round booths with circular gold bars in the middle. You could sit in them and spin the bar and the whole booth would turn, creating your own tiny vortex in the middle of the carousel. These were my favorite.
My dad looked down at me. “Sarah, you wanna go on the carousel?”
“Yes yes yes,” I said, bouncing on my heels.
“Scott, how about you?” he asked my brother. Scott shook his head, eyeing the stand that sold cheesecake on a stick.
Dave studied the carousel and announced, “I will go. It looks like a fine ride.”
My mom and dad were happy with this. After I had nauseated them with my super-fast spinning last year, they preferred to stand on the sidelines with a camera, and besides, Scott was now begging for cheesecake. Dave had known me since I was born; his wife had been my nanny. My mom handed me four tickets and told me to wave when we passed by.
We wound our way through the line and stepped onto the first platform.
“I think I will ride on this fish,” Dave said, sizing up a scaled beast as big as any of the horses.
“No, Dave, we gotta go in the spinny thing,” I told him. I tugged him a few more steps forward to lead him toward the booth before another kid claimed it.
“What do you do?” he asked as we climbed in. Beside us, two boys hopped on a goat and a unicorn.
“You go like this,” I told him. I put my hands on the bar and strained, pulling and pushing. Starting up was always the hardest. Slowly, we began to turn.
“Ah! I see. Do you want help?”
“You can if you want, but I don’t need it.”
At that moment, the lights got brighter, the music got louder, and the carousel jolted to life. I started spinning in earnest. Dave and I waved at my family the first time around, but I only took my hands off the bar for an instant. I spun us faster and faster and faster. The force of the motion pressed Dave back against the seat, and I leaned in.
“Good God,” Dave muttered.
“You okay?!” I yelled. He didn’t respond. I spun us until the outside was a neon blur. The only things in the world were that gold bar and my small determined hands spinning, spinning, spinning.
And then, the bump and squeal that meant the carousel’s motor had ground to a halt. The motion slowed, the music quieted, and I took my hands off the bar. I sat back in the booth, breathing hard and gloriously dizzy. When the carousel stopped, Dave stood up unsteadily. I followed suit. It felt like the floor was shifting underneath me. We stumbled off the carousel and onto the dirt, where Dave promptly vomited.
“Ugh, Dave!” I was disgusted. I didn’t even feel sick to my stomach.
“Well, that was a surprise,” he said, wiping the back of his mouth.
“Let’s go see if Scott has any cheesecake left,” I said, looking carefully at the ground to avoid the evidence of Dave’s illness as I stepped forward. “Come on.” I reached my hand out behind me and expected Dave to take it, but he didn’t. “Dave?”
“Huh,” he said.
“Dave, come on.”
“We may be in a bit of a pickle,” he said. I turned and followed his gaze upward, and that’s when I realized we were in quite the pickle indeed.
The world immediately around us was the same: the dirt, the carousel, the velvet ropes blocking off the line. There was the ticket booth and the sign that said “you must be this tall to ride,” which I had passed when I was eight.
But there were no other children. The man collecting tickets was gone, as were all the other parents. As were my parents. The whole area was empty, bound in by some strange fence that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Mom? Dad?” I yelled. The sounds hit the air with zero impact. The hustle and bustle of the fair was still there in the background, but it felt . . .different. I was starting to get frightened. I edged closer to Dave. “What’s going on?” I asked him.
“Well,” Dave said, “either everyone left while we were on the carousel, or something strange is happening.”
I did not like the sound of that.
“Let’s look for your parents first,” he said, and so we did. He took my hand and together we walked the perimeter of the carousel. Not a soul in sight. I started crying as we went, because I was eleven and my parents were gone and I was stuck with their weird friend. You’d probably cry too. The tears blurred my vision, and I followed Dave until he stopped, having completed a full circle.
He squatted down next to me. “It appears that one of two things has happened,” he told me, businesslike. I wiped my eyes and fumbled in my coat pocket for the pack of tissues my mom always put there before we left for the fair. It was there, crumpled and familiar. It smelled like our house. I blew my nose.
“One potential is that we have physically moved location,” he said. “That’s unlikely, I think, since our immediate surroundings are the same as they were before we got onto the ride.
> “Or,” he continued, “we have traveled in time. Given the circumstances, and the state of the world beyond that fence—not to mention the fence itself—I think this is the more likely scenario.”
I looked up. And that’s when it really hit me that we were not in 2002 any more.
I had been blinded by dizziness and tears, so I hadn’t noticed that the fence surrounding us was shimmering. At a glance, it looked like the black metal bars that bound the outer perimeter of the fairground, but it wasn’t metal, nor was it quite black. It glittered transparently and didn’t have all the dimensions of a real object—it looked the same from every angle, didn’t catch the light. Like a hologram. It ran in a circle around the carousel and met in an enormous sign that stretched over an open gate. It was backwards to me, so at first it was hard to read, but I looked letter by letter and made it out: Village of Yesteryear.
“We’re in the Village of Yesteryear,” Dave said, his eyes following the same progression as mine.
“But that’s on the other side of the fair,” I said, confused. My parents loved the Village. Craftspeople gathered there to sell pottery and leather goods and fancy Christmas ornaments. My mom always said it was important to remember the old traditions. I thought it was boring.
Onward, Drake! - eARC Page 18