Folk of the Fringe

by Orson Scott Card

  "He is as beautiful," she said. "But not as pure."

  Then they embraced each other and wept. Only for a moment. Then her men lifted her back into her litter, and Sam returned with Carpenter to the helicopter. They never met again.

  In retirement, I came to visit Sam, full of questions lingering from his meeting with Virgem America. "You knew each other," I insisted. "You had met before." He told me all this story then.

  That was thirty years ago. She is dead now, he is dead, and I am old, my fingers slapping these keys with all the grace of wooden blocks. But I write this sitting in the shade of a tree on the brow of a hill, looking out across woodlands and orchards, fields and rivers and roads, where once the land was rock and grit and sagebrush. This is what America wanted, what it bent our lives to accomplish. Even if we took twisted roads and got lost or injured on the way, even if we came limping to this place, it is a good place, it is worth the journey, it is the promised, the promising land.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  On Sycamore Hill

  I never consciously made a decision to stop writing short fiction. I didn't even notice I had stopped until someone I pointed it out. But then I wondered why.

  It wasn't just because I was writing novels—I wrote some of my best short stuff after finishing my first three books.

  Maybe I stopped because I actually learned how to write novels. By the time I was through with Hart's Hope, The Worthing Chronicle, and all 1,000 manuscript pages of Saints, long treatments felt natural. I got used to having room to flesh things out. To linger a little. To build through lots of different scenes.

  Even the few short stories I actually wrote in the last few years were really novel-length ideas struggling to get out. "The Changed Man and the King of Words," my last short story to see print, cost me tremendous effort just to cut it down to size. I left out a lot. And the story suffered from it. There were two stories before that, which were every bit as bad as the ones Ben Bova didn't buy when I was starting out. The story I wrote in the fall of 1983 was the first chapter of a novel. The editors noticed that fact and didn't buy the story.

  You think I didn't worry? I'm the guy who had forty-plus stories published from 1977 to 1981. Four Hugo nominations, two Nebula nominations, an absurdly high paperback advance for my second novel. You know me—the one Ted White accused of indecent exposure.

  And now I couldn't write short stories anymore.

  I couldn't even think of short stories.

  Now, that may not seem like much of a worry. As long as I'm selling novels for a fair price, it's not as if my kids will starve because I got nothing to send Ed Ferman.

  I wasn't even reading short fiction; ever since I burned out doing my Science Fiction Review short fiction review column, I hadn't opened a magazine more than a couple of times, just to read a story by a close friend. And I don't think I had read more than three sf novels I didn't write myself since 1982.

  So when Mark Van Name and John Kessel invited me to the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop near Raleigh, North Carolina, I wasn't sure. A workshop sounded good to me—I liked teaching at Clarion, and really enjoyed teaching science fiction writing at the University of Utah. Those were both workshops, and they were great. I said yes, definitely, count me in.

  And then I realized that there was a key difference between those other workshops and Sycamore Hill. At Sycamore Hill, I was going to have to put my own stories at risk.

  What stories?

  I sent in my thirty-five bucks. I marked the days on the calendar. Then I buried myself in writing Speaker for the Dead and the script of Space Pioneers for the Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City. Halfway through Speaker I realized I had to throw away that draft—a minor character had taken over and it wasn't the book I wanted to write. That was November. I started doing a long overdue story for George Martin's Campbell Award Winners anthology. This will be the story I take to Sycamore Hill, I thought.

  But it wasn't a short story. A third of the way through, I knew it wasn't even a novella. If I told the whole story the way it needed to be told, it was a novel. I was doing it again. I still couldn't tell a short story if it killed me.

  I left out chapters and kept it down to some 42,000 words and sent Unwyrm off to George. He told me he could tell where the chapters were missing and asked for changes. I made the changes, sent the new version, and then realized that I had half a novel sitting there and I knew what the other half was. Why not finish it? So I spent November and December turning Unwyrm into a novel, Wyrms. I finished it right after Christmas. Then I had to write a new version of the planetarium script and do my computer game programming column for Ahoy! magazine in a panic and here it was New Year's Day and I hadn't written anything short. I was committed to going to Sycamore Hill and I didn't have a story.

  But all during the month of December, I had been thinking now and then about some stories I knew I wanted to write. They were set in Utah, the place I know best in all the world, in a future after a limited nuclear exchange and heavy biological warfare—enough to decimate the population, cool the climate, but leave plenty of hope for the future. The Great Salt Lake was filling up, covering the most heavily populated parts of Utah.

  My stories focused around people surviving. Not just any people, my people. Mormons, and the non-Mormons who live among them and must adapt to this curiously secular religion. I had first worked on this milieu back in 1980, when I outlined a play about a small family of actors who traveled from town to town, putting on pageants on the back of their flatbed truck in exchange for gasoline and food and spare parts for the truck.

  That story would be a novel, though, if I wrote it in prose, so I couldn't use it for the workshop. However, I had two more stories in that milieu vaguely plotted out. One was about a group of people who go to the half-submerged Salt Lake Temple to try to salvage some fabled gold that the Mormons were supposed to have hidden there. The other, set in a desert-edge community, was about a schoolteacher with cerebral palsy who uses a computer to synthesize his voice.

  The only trouble was, it was already Wednesday afternoon. When Gregg Keizer got off work that day at Compute! Books, I would pick him up and drive us to Mark Van Name's house for the workshop. There was no time to write the story. There was barely time to finish up a couple of other things that absolutely had to be done so my family could eat while I was gone.

  I was going to Sycamore Hill with nothing written, nothing at all. Oh, I could give them a fragment of Wyrms, but what a cheat that would be. I knew it was a good novel, of the kind I write, anyway, and what could they tell from a fragment? There was no way they'd want to read 300 pages, and no time to make eight copies even if they did.

  So I packed up the PCjr—not the computer I usually work on, but the only one I owned that was small enough to carry and big enough to run a real word-processing program. Whatever I wrote at the workshop I could print out on Mark Van Name's PC, so I wouldn't have to worry about taking a printer with me. I loaded everything into the rust-corroded '76 Datsun B-210 so my wife could have the Renault, and drove up the road to get Gregg.

  It was cold and rainy. Not surprising, for January in North Carolina. But we'd been spoiled lately, three weeks of summery weather—I'd taken walks in my shirt sleeves. I didn't even bring a heavy coat or a sweater, but I began to realize right away that this did nothing to prove my intelligence.

  Gregg brought his Osborne and a suitcase; we stopped for gas and I bought six liters of Diet Coke. I had visions of maybe not eating anything but the Coke, to shed some of the forty-five pounds I'd picked up working at a desk the last two years. We drove I-85 and US 70 and then I managed to forget the name of the road we were supposed to turn on after that. We ended up driving right on into Raleigh, which I knew was wrong; we found a payphone, called, found out we were closer than I thought. Rain and darkness made it hard to find your way to a house you've only visited in daylight. But I also knew my mind wasn't working altogether right.

  I was too nervou
s to see straight. I had to write a couple of stories in the next few days, and then listen to a bunch of writers tell me that I obviously must have had a ghostwriter on "Unaccompanied Sonata"; these little drecklings couldn't possibly have come from the same mind. Not just writers, published writers, and the ones I knew, I had great respect for. John Kessel had pulled off the miracle and got a Nebula, Greg Frost had a novel that had actually earned out its royalties, Gregg Keizer and Mark Van Name had given me plenty of opportunities to know they were gifted writers and perceptive critics, and above all, every single person at the workshop had sold at least two short stories since I had last sold one.

  It was dark and wet and the coldest night of the year. Everybody had already eaten spaghetti when we got there. There was some left, but true to my resolution to starve myself, I drank half a liter of Coke and dragged my stuff down into the basement. The temperature of the basement made me wonder if maybe it was heated with geothermal energy and the earth was cooling faster than anybody thought. I went back upstairs.

  There were a bunch of people sitting around the table laughing and enjoying themselves. Gregg Keizer, as usual, immediately fit in and was part of the conversation as if he'd been drinking beer with these guys every days for years. I, as usual, hadn't the faintest idea how to get into anything. I've long envied that quality in Gregg—without calling attention to himself, he can slide into any situation and within minutes it's as if he belonged there all his life. The only time I'm instantly comfortable is when I'm expected to perform. Give me an audience of ten or ten thousand, and I know I can hold them as long as I want; I've never had stage fright in my life. I enjoy even more the kind of conversation where the idea is what matters and the level of thought is very high. But when I'm with ten people, many of them strangers, who are in party mode—banter, with no serious topic of conversation to attack—I don't belong. I've got no small talk. I always sound stupid to myself and the glazed look on other people's faces tells me they usually agree. So I did what I always do; I retreated, avoided the group at the table, busied myself with setting up the computer, putting my Cokes in the fridge, talking to Mark's wife Rana.

  Finally things got structured for a minute and I could fit in. We all met together long enough to decide whose stories would be done which days. This was Wednesday night. Tomorrow we'd do only two stories, one from Jim Kelly and one from Greg Frost. We set up four a day for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Since I hadn't written a story yet—the only one who had come unprepared—they scheduled my first one for Saturday. I couldn't even tell them a title. Everyone was very polite about it. But I was sure that behind their smiles they were all calculating exactly how many pounds I was overweight. "Enough extra flesh on this boy to create four small dogs, or perhaps a third-grader. And he has the gall not to bring a story."

  You're paranoid, I told myself. Get a grip on yourself, I said. Get me the hell out of here, I answered, get me back to where my wife and children cooperate to sustain the illusion that I'm a competent human being.

  I took the stories for tomorrow—and the next day—and escaped into the basement.

  As I lay there, my body providing the major source of heat for the room, it began to dawn on me that something was rotten in the atmosphere. Dear Teela Brown, the Van Names' most socially aloof cat, had a look of innocence and complacency that was not to be believed. Was it so? Yes, indeed, a little pile of kitty poo in my boudoir. It was going to be a long night.

  Houses in North Carolina are designed for summer. Lots of air circulating through the walls, that sort of thing. This is not as comfortable during a real cold snap. By morning I felt like I had spent a night in the Gulag, stiff and cold. Ten people showering doesn't leave a lot of hot water, either, and I had stayed up so late reading stories that I was not exactly the first to shower.

  So I was not feeling at my best when we gathered around a group of tables in the dining room at ten o'clock. John Kessel read a formal statement but couldn't keep a straight face through the whole thing. We had some pretty simple rules. Everybody got a turn to talk about the story except the author, who kept his mouth shut until it was all over. After everybody had spoken, the author could then answer, if he was capable of speech.

  And I mean he. About as many women as men had been invited, but, each for her own reason, the female writers had all declined. So it was just us guys. The old locker room. I've never been half as comfortable with men as with women. Locker rooms always smelled like sweat and old spattered urine to me.

  To my relief, this was no football team. Greg Frost, for instance, will be unable to keep a straight face in his coffin. Allen Wold has a pony tail down to here. Scott Sanders looks like a college professor among a bunch of freshmen who surprise him by being so young. Jim Kelly has a beatific grace and looks as sensitive as the young Peter O'Toole. Steve Carper looks like he's doing complex logarithms in his head, just for fun, and when he runs across an especially good one it's all he can do to keep from laughing. Not what you expect to find in the average locker room—nobody was taped up and slobbering; nobody was mumbling, "Kill. Kill."

  The most forbidding-looking guys at the table I already felt pretty comfortable with: John Kessel, spectral and intense, with more than a hint of maniacal intelligence. Mark Van Name, the only person there who I knew felt as vulnerable as me, but who always seems confident enough to perform brain surgery with blinders. And Gregg Keizer, whom I had met in my writing class at the U of U (not that I had anything to teach him); even then, whenever I looked at him I had the vague feeling that I had just said something stupid but out of kindness he wasn't going to tell anybody. It took years, but I finally realized that this impression was absolutely right.

  One thing I've always hated in bad workshop situations is when the critics vie with each other for the cleverest evisceration of the victim. The criticism of the first story made it clear that this group was not going to do that. Oh, there was some humor, but there was never any cruelty. I saw no evidence that anyone ever spoke without considering the feelings of the writer hearing the criticism.

  And yet no one was ever sparing, either. If we hated a story, we said so. We also said why. And best of all, the comments were intelligent. When somebody pointed out something that I hadn't noticed, I always felt a little embarrassed that I hadn't noticed it. These guys knew how to read.

  And I was going to give them a story?

  There was only one bit of tension at the first criticism session. One of the writers did start making some comments that were on the level of, "You said here, 'Her eyes fell on the paper he held,' and I thought, There they go, plop-plop." I really hate that sort of criticism. In the first place, the metaphorical use of eyes for gaze is perfectly legitimate. In the second place, nobody ever notices those things if they're involved in the story; they are a symptom of a failure to engage the attention and belief of the reader, not a problem per se. So I broke in and said so. I thought I was saying it politely. Afterward I realized that I had been brusque and had, in effect, put down one of the most perceptive and experienced critics at the table. I had visions of being put out of the workshop with bell, book, and candle. Instead, because he was a perfect gentleman, he withered me with a forgiving look and went on. But the point was taken: never again in the workshop did anybody make that kind of criticism of the language of a story.

  After the first story, everybody else attacked an incredible pile of cold cuts; I, still determined to be ascetic, retreated to the basement. It was too cold to type, but I did it anyway, every now and then pleading with Mr. Scrooge to buy more coal. Actually, the PCjr put off enough heat to stave off frostbite.

  A funny thing happened as I was writing the story. I had just finished listening to a bunch of highly intelligent and talented men criticize a story. It was exciting, it made me feel alert, awake to the possibility of the story. And as I wrote, I began to feel at ease in the story as I hadn't with a short story for years. It came fast.

  By the time two o'
clock rolled around, I had the story about a third done. I had worked out a heavily expository opening in such a way that the reader only realizes the teacher is speaking through a computer and has cerebral palsy in a few gradual steps. I was worried, though—to get some of the history and some of the social milieu across, I had included the teacher's lecture. Broken up with some tension between him and a student, but a lecture's a lecture no matter how you juice it up, and I was afraid it would be boring. Still, I couldn't see any other way. So I left it in.

  We came back and did another story. This was a fairly artsy and ambitious one, interspersing lectures on Stonehenge with a cloning/incest/decadent-drug-society story. Just the kind of thing that makes me want to abolish the teaching of contemporary literature classes in universities. I mean, the writing was excellent, but the story took forever just to get from A to B. Like New Yorker stuff. But I couldn't help suspecting that part of the reason it put me off was because I have zero sympathy whatsoever with people who take drugs. I'm as compulsive as the next guy—you don't get overweight by ignoring candy bars and driving past Wendy's without stopping—but people who deliberately wipe out their brains get no tears of sympathy from me when they wake up and discover they've got no mind. That's part of why I hated Neuromancer. (I also loved Neuromancer, but ambivalence has always been my strong suit as a critic.)

  Then, as the others commented on the story, I began to see virtues in it that I had been blind to, before. I also began to realize that they also saw the flaws I saw. That was when I really began to trust them to be good critics—they saw what wasn't working in the story, and yet they also saw the power in it that made the writer want to tell the story in the first place. That was both comforting and frightening. When I finished my story, I wouldn't be casting it among fools; but if they hated it, I'd be compelled to believe them.

  They all went out to dinner that night. I had deliberately brought only about ten bucks with me, to avoid the temptation to do exactly that. I never did go out to dinner with them on the nights they went. And it wasn't just because I had to finish a story, or because I didn't have much money, or because I wanted to lose weight. It was because I still was afraid of situations where there was no subject matter to discuss.