The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 6: Multiples: 1983-87 Read online

  Multiples © 2011 by Agberg, Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Interior design © 2011 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  First Edition

  978-1-59606-402-7

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Tourist Trade” first appeared in Playboy, December 1984.

  “Multiples” first appeared in Omni, October 1983.

  “Against Babylon” first appeared in Omni, May 1986.

  “Symbiont” first appeared in Playboy, June 1985.

  “Sailing to Byzantium” first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1985.

  “Sunrise on Pluto” first appeared in The Planets, December 1985, edited by Byron Preiss.

  “Hardware” first appeared in Omni, October 1987.

  “Hannibal’s Elephants” first appeared in Omni, October 1988.

  “Blindsight” first appeared in Playboy, December 1986.

  “Gilgamesh in the Outback” first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1986.

  “The Pardoner’s Tale” first appeared in Playboy, June 1987.

  “The Iron Star” first appeared in The Universe, November 1987, edited by Byron Preiss.

  “The Secret Sharer” first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1987.

  “House of Bones” first appeared in Terry’s Universe, June 1988, edited by Beth Meacham.

  Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988 by Agberg, Ltd.

  Introduction Copyright © Agberg, Ltd., 2011

  Illustrations are reproduced from source text of first publication or as from indicated above.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Tourist Trade

  Multiples

  Against Babylon

  Symbiont

  Sailing to Byzantium

  Sunrise on Pluto

  Hardware

  Hannibal’s Elephants

  Blindsight

  Gilgamesh in the Outback

  The Pardoner’s Tale

  The Iron Star

  The Secret Sharer

  House of Bones

  For Alice K. Turner

  Ellen Datlow

  Shawna McCarthy

  Byron Preiss

  Gardner Dozois

  Beth Meacham

  INTRODUCTION

  The stories in this sixth volume find me at a relatively stable point in my long career. They were written between 1983 and 1987, from the end of my third decade as a full-time professional writer to the early years of my fourth. With a career that I had been able to sustain over such a long span, I was about as established a writer as one can be in our field. (Consider that such great and well established s-f writers of my youth as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and Fritz Leiber had been writing professionally only about a decade when I began reading them in the late 1940’s, and only Heinlein of that entire exalted quartet had been able to earn a steady living from writing alone in the first decade of his career. It had been my good fortune to be able to support myself entirely by free-lance work right from the start, and here in the 1980’s, thirty-odd years from that starting point, I was still doing so.)

  By the time this present group of stories was written I had passed through the cultural turbulence that engulfed nearly everyone’s life in the wild, stormy period we know as “the Sixties,” which for me had actually lasted from 1968 to 1974 or 1975. I had come through my own angry four-year-long retirement from writing in the middle 1970’s, and was working again at a steady pace, though not with the frenetic prolificacy of the pre-retirement years. At the beginning of this period my personal life was still pretty chaotic, a carryover from all that Sixties madness, and plenty of new chaos was going to descend on me while some of these stories were written, but I was tiptoeing toward an escape from the various messes that were complicating my life, and by the time the last five stories of this volume were being written I was heading into the stability of my second marriage.

  There had been big changes in the market for science-fiction stories during the decades of my writing career. At the outset I had dealt with magazines of relatively small circulation—Galaxy, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Astounding Science Fiction, Fantastic Universe, Future Science Fiction, etc.—that were the successors to the pulp magazines of the generation just preceding my own era. Except for Astounding, which was the ancestor of today’s Analog Science Fiction, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, these magazines endured precarious existences, paid just a couple of a cents a word for the stories they bought, and perished in droves during the magazine-distribution upheavals of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

  For the science-fiction writer the short-story market now shifted, after a troubled period of transition, to the original-anthology field that had sprung up in those years: Orbit, Universe, Nova, Infinity, and my own New Dimensions, all of which were essentially magazines in book form, and a host of thematic one-shot volumes—Wandering Stars, Future City, Eros in Orbit, and dozens more of that ilk. The original-anthology fad was just about played out by 1975, just as I was launching upon the four-year sabbatical from writing that I regarded at the time as a permanent retirement; and by the time I returned to my keyboard a few years later, a startlingly lucrative new market for short stories was beckoning to me in the slick-magazine field.

  There had always been a small slick-magazine market for science fiction. Playboy had been running s-f stories fairly frequently from its inception in 1953, publishing work by Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke, and other top-rank writers of the day, but somehow I had never submitted anything there. Rogue, Penthouse, and a few other Playboy imitators also ran the occasional s-f story. But at the beginning of the 1980’s the new Playboy fiction editor, Alice K. Turner, let it be known that the magazine was going to be publishing far more science fiction than it had in the past, and about the same time came the inception of a new slick magazine, Omni, which would pay Playboy-sized rates and publish two or three s-f stories a month. When I say Playboy-sized rates, I mean rates that made the fee scale for the science fiction magazines seem insignificant. A 5000-word story sold to one of the top science-fiction magazines of the 1970’s was likely to bring its author $250 at best. Playboy and Omni were offering ten times as much, along with the greater increment of prestige that came from being published in magazines whose circulation figures were numbered in the millions rather than in the low six figures.

  I saw the golden gates swinging open before me, and I marched right through. The previous volume of this series, covering the 1980-82 period, includes, among its twenty-two stories, four from Playboy, six from Omni, one from Penthouse, and four from various other high-paying slick magazines. The theme continues here: fourteen stories, numbering four more from Playboy and another four from Omni, along with a few from invitational original-fiction anthologies and a couple from one of the conventional s-f magazines. Writing for the slicks not only fattened my bank account, a very desirable thing for me during a decade that had been complicated by an expensive divorce, but gave me the luxury of polishing and repolishing each story until it gleamed. When you read the tale of my writing “Tourist Trade” for Playboy, writing it over and over again until first I and then the very demanding Alice Turner were both satisfied with it, you’ll understand that it would not have been a practical matter to de
vote so many weeks of effort to a story for which Fantasy & Science Fiction or Asimov’s might have paid me a few hundred dollars. Collecting all those four-digit slick-magazine checks also gave me a chance to write some ambitious longer stories for Asimov’s—notably “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Secret Sharer”—for which I was paid less than a short story for Playboy or Omni would yield, but which most people considered to be among the best work I had ever done.

  So, then: fourteen more stories, five years’ work, not the most prolific period of my writing career but one of the most satisfying.

  —Robert Silverberg

  TOURIST TRADE

  We were nearly done with 1982. I had just learned how to use a computer, which I had employed for my far-future novella, “Homefaring.” Now the giant lobsters of that story were behind me, and I was getting ready for that winter’s major enterprise, Valentine Pontifex, the closing volume of the first Majipoor trilogy. But I still didn’t feel entirely comfortable writing with a computer—I never fully believed that what I had written on Monday would still be on the computer when I got back to my desk on Tuesday—and it seemed like a good idea to tackle one more short story before plunging into the novel. So I decided to try another short story for Playboy’s redoubtable fiction editor, Alice K. Turner.

  My conversion from typewriter to computer couldn’t have come at a more timely moment. “Tourist Trade,” which as I look at it now seems to move seamlessly from first sentence to last, called forth at least half a dozen drafts from me, maybe even more. If I had had to type those thirty-odd pages out every time from beginning to end, I’d probably have hurled the typewriter through the window long before I came up with anything that Alice Turner would find acceptable. What should have been a relatively simple 7,500-word project turned into an interminable and agonizing ordeal. Only my new computerized ability to tinker with a sentence here or a paragraph there without having to type out a complete new manuscript saved the story—and my sanity.

  When you use a computer to write, most of the false starts, fatuous passages, and other miscalculations that any writer will commit along the way don’t survive for the amusement of scholars studying your manuscripts in years to come. You simply back up the cursor and erase the faulty stuff, send them into the black hole of computer limbo, and no one’s ever the wiser. But from time to time a writer does need hard copy of a work in progress, especially if the work in progress is turning into a messy, complicated, recalcitrant job, and so a lot of botched drafts still do get put down on paper even in the computer age. I save mine, though I know not why I do. In the case of “Tourist Trade” the file got to be a stack about five inches thick.

  For those of you who think that story-writing gets easier as a writer’s career goes along, that five-inch stack of paper should be a useful corrective, and the whole “Tourist Trade” saga—dating from my thirtieth year as a professional writer—ought to be highly instructive.

  It begins with a one-page draft in first-person narration of something I entitled “A World of Strangers”:

  [In Morocco all the human tourists head straight for Marrakesh, as people have been doing ever since tourism began. But the extraterrestrials prefer to go to Fez, for some reason, and so I went to Fez also.

  [I don’t know why it should be that way, except that they’re extraterrestrials, and maybe that’s enough of an explanation. Of course, Fez is a great city in its own right, and an enormously interesting place, and no traveler needs any excuse to go there. But Marrakesh is the classic tourist-trap town of Morocco, with its palaces, its tombs, its tower, its crazy grand plaza full of acrobats and jugglers and snake-charmers, and that’s where the hordes invariably have gone. The human hordes. E-Ts, being E-Ts, have different value systems. They]

  And there my gorge rose. It seemed to me that I was blathering on and on impossibly instead of getting my story started. So I stopped and began again:

  [When I arrived in Fez, early on a warm April morning, I checked in at the big old Palais Jamai at the edge of the old city. In Morocco all the human tourists head straight for Marrakesh, as tourists have been doing ever since tourism began. But the extraterrestrials prefer to go to Fez, for some reason. And so I went to Fez also.]

  Not bad, especially when compared with the first version. This time I lasted nearly six pages. I got my alien onto the scene on second page and the exotic green-eyed woman appeared on page three. They moved out on the dance floor together and the narrator’s skin began to tingle and suddenly I felt the upchuck reflex again. What I was writing was slick, yes, but also it was hopelessly mechanical, a computer-constructed men’s-magazine story, lifeless and formulaic. The problem, I thought, was the use of first-person narration. It’s all too easy, writing first person, to slip into a garrulous ingratiating here’s-what-I-did tone that dawdles on and on and on as the narrator murmurs in your ear.

  The third draft started the same way as the second, with the protagonist checking in at his hotel in Fez. But now it was a third-person story. And this time I didn’t abandon it after just a few pages. I pushed on all the way to the end, or what I thought was the end. This is how it opened now:

  [Eitel picked up his merchandise in Paris and caught the Air France night bird to Casablanca, where he connected with a Royal Air Maroc flight for the short hop to Fez. It was the middle of April, when Europe was still bleak and winter-dead, and Morocco was halfway to summer.]

  Very efficient. Protagonist introduced and in motion; exotic background established; and the mysterious “merchandise” provides the hook. A nice lead paragraph. I nodded and went on for thirty-seven more pages, throwing in a lot of juicy Moroccan background information (I had been there in 1975) before bringing my aliens on stage on page five and the gorgeous woman on page seven. Eitel finally gets out on the dance floor with her on page fifteen, and then the trouble starts. And eventually gets resolved.

  All right. I had a story. But it took too long to get down to its central events, and generally seemed to me to be inflated and undramatic. It was now Christmas week of 1982, and an old friend from New York was visiting me—Jerrold Mundis, a wise man and fine writer who doesn’t happen to write (or read, or like, I suspect) science fiction. I gave him the story, telling him that I thought something was wrong with it, and asked him for a blunt critique, no punches pulled. He was blunt, all right. As I already suspected, I had opened the story in the wrong place. All that stuff in the beginning about Fez and Marrakesh might be fascinating to me, and might even make a nice National Geographic article, but it stopped things dead before they had a chance to begin. The endless speculations about the psychology of aliens that occupied pages six through fourteen weren’t very gripping either. Start the story on page five, he suggested, and cut a lot of what follows, and maybe it would work.

  Jerry usually knows whereof he speaks, in matters of writing and in other things. So I took his advice. This was the opening of the fourth draft:

  [Even before Eitel’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness and the glare of the clashing crisscrossing spotlights, his nose began letting him know what sort of bizarre zoo he had walked into. The nightclub was full of aliens, at least seven or eight species. He picked up the whole astonishing olfactory blast at once, a weird hodgepodge of extraterrestrial body odors, offworld pheromones, transgalactic cosmetics, the ozone radiation of personal protection screens, minute quantities of unearthly atmospheres leaking out of breathing devices. He was smelling things that as recently as the year 1987 no human being had ever smelled. Rigelians, he thought, Centaureans, Antareans, Arcturans. Maybe Steropids and Capellans too. The world has turned into a goddamned sci-flick, Eitel thought.]

  At last: some inventiveness, some narrative vigor, some characteristic Silverbergian tone. I cut here, expanded there, and in a few days had a thirty-eight-page story very different from its limp predecessors. On 21 January, 1983, “A World of Strangers” went off to Alice Turner at Playboy’s New York office; I put it out of my mind with deep relief a
nd started writing Valentine Pontifex a few days later.

  But Alice didn’t like what I had sent her.

  On 1 February she told me, “I love the Star Wars bar in the beginning of this story, but, all in all, I’m dubious about the story. First, there’s too much exposition in the beginning…Frankly, I think the flashback could go, the taxi driver too. And the ending doesn’t seem a bit integral to the story. If, for instance…”

  And so on. A lot of problems. “But I know that you probably like the story as is,” she added, “and thus, with complete respect and many thanks, I will pass. If I am wrong, and you feel that, on second thought, you will change the ending and do some cutting early on, let me now. We could talk.”

  Imagine my delight. After four full drafts before submitting the story, I had a reject on my hands. I suppose I could have saved us both a lot of trouble by sending the story, as it was, to some other magazine and collecting my (rather smaller) check for it and putting the whole mess behind me. But I took Alice’s letter as a challenge, instead. I covered it with notes. “Might work!” I wrote, next to the paragraph where she suggested a different ending. “Make it shadier…Story too simple. Make David a real person—a partner? Eitel uptight, David a crook. Eitel has vestiges of ethics.” And a lot more. I phoned Alice and said I was going to rewrite the story. She seemed surprised and pleased. On 16 February I sent it to her again, down to thirty-four pages, with a note that said, “Herewith the promised new version of the art-dealer story. I think I would not have had the heart to attempt it but for the word processor, which allowed me to rewrite big sections and graft salvageable old sections right in…I hope this does it. God only knows how many versions of this one I’ve written—even if you buy it at a fat price I’ll end up making about $3 an hour for it. But that isn’t the point; something must have happened last fall that caused me to lose my touch, to make my stuff top-heavy with exposition, and I’m groping my way back towards the way I’m supposed to write. This revision has been a great help in telling me I’m getting back there.”