“How’d you get out? Foot on your chest?” Harry asked.
The driver looked sheepish.
“Thought so,” Harry said. “Look, give us a chance. The military wants to question that thing. We’ll go in after it.” He pointed to the willow trees a hundred yards from the highway. “Over there, right?”
“Over there and go to hell,” someone yelled.
“Let’s go,” Harry said. He gestured to Carlotta. She climbed on behind. “In there.”
“There” was a dirt path leading to the clump of willow trees. As Harry started the motorcycle, he heard one of the truck drivers. “We can blow it away when he gets out.”
There were mutters of approval.
When he stopped at the swamp’s edge, he could hear something big in the creek.
For Harpanet, things had become very odd. He had gone through terror and out the other side. He was bemused. Perhaps he was mad. Without his herd about him for comparison, how was a fi’ to tell?
Try to surrender: fling the gun to the dirt, roll over, belly in the air. The man gapes, turns and lurches away. Chase him down: he screams and gathers speed, falls and runs again, toward lights. Harpanet will seem to be attacking. Cease! Hide and wait.
A human climbs from the cab of a vehicle. Try again? The man scampers into the cab, emerges with something that flames and roars. Harpanet rolls in time to take the cloud of tiny projectiles in his flank instead of his belly. The man fires again.
He has refused surrender. Harpanet trumpets: rage, woe, betrayal. He sweeps up his own weapon and fires back. The enemy’s forelimbs and head explode outward from a mist of blood.
In Harpanet’s mind his past fades, his future is unreal. His digits stroke his side, feeling for the deathwound.
No deathwound; no hole big enough for a digit to find. What did the human intend? Torture? Harpanet’s whole right side is a burning itch covered with a sheen of blood. An eight to the eighth of black dots form a buzzing storm around him. He lurches through the infinite land, away from roads, downhill where he can, within the buzzing storm and the maddening itch. The jaws of his mind close fast on a memory, vivid in all his senses, more real than his surroundings, He moves through an infinite fantasy of planet, seeking the mudroom aboard Message Bearer.
Green…tall green plants with leaves like knife blades, but they brush away the hungry swarming dots…water? Mud!
He rolls through mud and greenery, over and over, freezing from time to time to look, smell, listen.
Harpanet’s past fades against the strange and terrible reality. If he has a future, it is beyond imagining, a mist-gray wall. There is only now, a moment of alien plants and fiery itch and cool mud, and here, mudroom and garden mushed together, nightmarishly changed. He rolls to wash the wounds; he plucks gobs of mud to spread across his tattered flank.
Afraid to leave, afraid to stay. What might taste his blood in the water, and seek its source? The predators of the Homeworld were pictures on a thuktun, ghosts on an old recording tape, but fearsome enough for, all their distance. What lurks in these alien waters? But he hears the distant sound of machines passing, and knows that they are not fithp machines.
A machine comes near, louder, louder. Harpanet’s ears and eyes project above the water.
The machine balances crazily on two wheels, like men. It slows, wobbles, stops.
Humans approach on foot.
Harpanet’s muscles know what to do when he is hurt, exhausted, friendless, desperate, alone. Harpanet’s mind finds no other answer. But he sees no future—
He lurches from the water. Alien weapons come to bear. He casts his gun into the weeds. He rolls on his back and splays his limbs and waits.
The man comes at a toppling run. No adult fi’ would try to balance so. The man sets a hind foot on Harpanet’s chest, with such force that Harpanet can feel it. He swallows the urge to laugh, but such a weight could hardly bend a rib. Nonetheless he lies with limbs splayed, giving his surrender. The man looks down at his captive, breathing as if he has won a race…
“We got him!” Harry shouted, “Now what?” He waved uphill, where a score of armed men, hidden, waited with weapons ready.
“I can talk to them—” Carlotta sounded doubtful.
“They won’t listen.” And dammit, this is my snout, they can’t kill it now. Harry thought furiously. A guilty grin came, and he lifted the seat of the motorcycle, where he kept his essential tools.
“You’ve thought of something?”
“Maybe.” He dug into the tool roll and found a hank of parachute cord. It was thin, strong enough to hold a man but not much use against one of those. He gestured to the captive, using both hands to make “get up” motions.
The alien stood. It looked at them passively.
“Gives me the creeps,” Harry said. He clutched his rifle. One 30-06 in the eye, and we don’t have a problem. “See if it’ll carry you,” Harry said.
“Carry me?”
“Sheena. Queen of the Jungle. I know they’re strong enough.”
A dozen truckers and farmers stood with ready weapons.
Harry walked ahead of the invader, leading it on a length of cord. Carlotta rode its back, sidesaddle. She beamed at them. “Hi!” she called.
None of the watchers spoke. Perhaps they were afraid of saying something foolish.
“It surrendered,” Carlotta shouted. “We’ll take it to the government.”
There was a loud click as a safety was taken off.
Harry whistled: Wheep, wheep, wheep! “Here, Shep! Hey, it’s all right, guys. Shep big gray peanut-loving doggie!”
There were sounds of disgust.
• • •
Hell, if they’d just sing it straight through and get it over with…The red-bearded man seemed intent on his lesson. Roger decided to wait him out. He took out his notebook and idly flipped through the pages. There was a column due at the end of the week. Somewhere in here is the story I need…
COLORADO SPRINGS: Military intelligence outfit. Interviewing National Guardsmen from the Jayhawk War area. (Goddam, those Kansans think they’re tougher than Texans!) Two turned loose two days before. Didn’t want to talk to me. Security? Probably. That bottle of I.W. Harper Rosalee found took care of that…
RAFAEL ARMANZETTI. Didn’t look like a Kansan, “I was aiming for the head, of course. It was standing broadside to me, and it shot at something and the recoil jerked it back and I thought I’d missed. It whipped around and I was looking right into that huge barrel while it pulled the trigger a dozen times in two seconds. I must have shot out the firing mechanism.
“It must have known I was going to shoot it.” Armanzetti had laughed. “It did the damnedest thing. It fell over and rolled. Just like I’d already shot it. Belly up, legs in the air just like a dog that’s been trained to play dead.”
“You shot it?”
“Sure. But, my God! How stupid do they think we are?”
JACK CODY. “When that beam started spiraling in on us, Greg Bannerman just pulled the chopper hard left and started us dropping. ‘Jump out,’ he said. No special emphasis, but loud. Me, I jumped. I hit water and there was bubbles all around me. Then the lake lit up with this weird blue-green color. I could see the whole lake even through the bubbles. Fish. Weeds. A car on its back. Bubbles like sapphires.
“Something big splashed in, and then stuff started pattering down, metal, globs of melted helicopter—I’ve got one here, I caught it while it was sinking.
“The light went out and I came up for air—there was a layer of hot water—and then I looked for the big chunk, and it was Chuck, waving his arms, drowning. I pulled him out. When I saw his back I thought he was a deader. Charred from his heels to his head. I started pushing on his back and he coughed out a lot of water and started breathing. I wasn’t sure I’d done right. But the char was just his clothes. It peeled off him and left him, like, naked and sunburned, except his hands. Black. Crisp. He must have put his hands over his neck.
r />
“But we’d be dead like the rest if we didn’t just damn well trust Greg Bannerman. Here’s to Greg.”
LAS ANIMAS, COLORADO: Prosperous man, middle-aged, in good shape. Gymnasium-and-massage look. Good shoes, good clothes, all worn out.
He needed a lift. I didn’t want to stop, but Rosalee made me do it. Said he looked like somebody I ought to know. Damn, that woman has a good head for a story. Good head—
HARLEY JACKSON GORDON. “I kept passing dead cars. Then burning cars. I tried to pick up some of the people on foot, but they just shook their heads. It was spooky. Finally I just got out and left my Mercedes sitting in the road. I walked away, and then I went back and put my keys in it. Maybe someone can use it, after this is all over, and I couldn’t stand the thought of that Mercedes just rusting in the road. But it felt like bad luck. So I walked. And yes, the snouts came, and yes, I rolled over on my back, but I don’t much like talking about that part, if you don’t mind.”
COLORADO SPRINGS: GENEVIEVE MARSH: Tall, slender, not skinny. Handsome. Solid bones. No money. Nervous. Sick of talking with military people. Wanted a change. Dinner and candles—
Rosalee left me the money to buy her dinner and bugged out. Goddam. She’d make a hell of a reporter if she could write.
“They had us for two days. We thought they were getting ready to leave, and I guess they were, and they were going to take us with them. We all felt it. But on the last day some of them brought in a steer and some chickens and a duck, or maybe it was a goose. The aliens took us out of the pen, and they looked us over. Then they pulled me out, and I was hanging on to Gwen and Beatrice so tight I’m afraid I hurt them. And that crazy man from Menninger’s who spent all his time curled up with his head in his arms, they pulled on one arm and he had to follow. He never stopped swearing. No sense in it, just a stream of dirty words. They aimed us at the road and one of them s-swatted me on the ass with its—trunk? and I started walking, pulling Gwen along, Beatrice in my arms, and then we ran. Beatrice was like lead. We didn’t wait for the crazy man. When the spaceship took off we were far enough away that we only got a hot wind, and that glare. But they took the rest with them, and the animals took our place.” (Laughter). “Maybe they think the steer will breed!”
NEAR LOGAN. Whole bunch, all types, digging around in a wrecked Howard Johnson’s.
Nobody’s too proud to root for garbage now. Shit.
GINO PIETSCH: “I knew there’d be a tornado shelter. Every building in Kansas has something, even if it’s a brick closet in a motel room. I broke in, and I found the tornado closet, and I hid. The snouts never even came looking. I guess they didn’t care much, if you were the type to hide. Every so often I came out just long enough to get water. And I was in the closet when the bombs came, and getting pretty hungry, but not hungry enough to come out. How much radiation did I get? Am I going to die?”
LAUREN, KANSAS:
That page was nearly blank. Roger stared at it. I have to write it down some day. Damn. Damnation.
Not just yet…
ROGER BROOKS, NATHANIEL REYNOLDS, ROSALEE PINELLI, CAROL NORTH. The snouts were all over the city. George Bergson came up with the notion of using Molotov cocktails to wreck a snout tank…
When you think you’re through, you’re not.
Lester Del Rey argued against killing the President. He made it very plain that he did not insist, but he felt very strongly about it. We found that we agreed with him, and we made it work.
We’d been keeping a Cast of Characters throughout. It still needed to be whipped into shape. It covered four pages! We planned to print it on the inside covers, so that the crowd of names wouldn’t scare readers off. Ultimately it wound up inside too. The best laid plans…
The Herdmaster wasn’t Herdmaster by the time that last sentence was written. Yet the phrasing was so nice! We sweated it through during a long dinner break, and finally decided…on the Herdmaster’s Advisor’s chest.
At four dollars a word, the publisher is entitled to see that every word is perfect.
• • •
• • •
WORKS IN PROGRESS
It takes me two years to write a book, working alone. Collaborations vary. INFERNO took four months, once Jerry and I started serious writing. Some have taken much longer.
As of October 24, 1990, I’m in the middle of three collaboration novels, and postponing two contracted novels of my own. Older obligations keep popping up: old stories resold for comic books, mail, movie subsidiary rights, read proofs of a collection from an old friend, a novel by a stranger, proofread a finished novella, rewrite biographical material for PLAYGROUNDS OF THE MIND because the facts have changed…
Chances are that none of these projects will reach the bookstores ahead of PLAYGROUNDS. So you can’t read them yet, but they’re all in the chute.
From THE MOAT AROUND MURCHESON’S EYE
A sequel to THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE was always possible. The blockade established at the Murcheson’s Eye Jump Point could not hold forever, and I was working out ways to trash it before the book hit print. But Jerry and I don’t write sequels just because they’re easy.
Then again, there was an option clause.
We thought we’d fulfilled it, twice. I’ll never know what really went on during the negotiations between Kirby MacCauley and Ron Busch. Leave it at this: ten years ago Jerry and I were persuaded to sign a contract for THE MOAT AROUND MURCHESON’S EYE.
But nobody at Simon & Schuster/Pocket seemed interested in MOAT. The contract blocked us from collaborating on anything until we’d finished MOAT; but not triple collaborations.
So we wrote THE LEGACY OF HEOROT with Steven Barnes. We planned, then dropped a computer game. With Wendy All we wrote a version of A LABOR OF MOLES: returned as too short. We hit a brick wall on FALLEN ANGELS.
Then there was another musical chairs dance at S&S/Pocket. The new guy in charge, Jack Romanos, did his best to get us going again.
So we were at work on MOAT when Jerry dropped out.
Part One went easily. I’d written the first scenes of “The Gripping Hand” years ago. You’ll love the “crottled greeps” scene; we based it on a local Indian restaurant.
Part Two was set on Sparta, the seat of government of Jerry’s thousand-year-old interstellar empire. He’s written several books set in that history—without ever designing a planet Sparta. We did that in his office in a few hours of intensive work.
Then…what was happening was this: I’d drive to Jerry’s house. We’d spend the whole day gearing up to write. Then he wouldn’t have time for a couple of weeks…postponed to three…then I’d drive to Jerry’s house and we’d spend the whole day gearing up to write. It was like being in the government.
It was driving me nuts. I’d pushed the book as far as I could without a collaborator. If I could write the damn thing alone, I’d be doing that. So I waited for Jerry to produce good new text. And I waited three years.
To me it felt like he was in a coma.
He wasn’t. Mostly he was working with computers, writing the Users Column for Byte magazine [now called Chaos Manor], making speeches and so forth. When the Pournelles were imported to the USSR, they learned that Jerry is regarded there as a heavy-duty philosopher. He speaks of computers in language that can be understood and translated across the civilized world and the USSR too.
And he could generate stories by taking a collaborator for a brisk walk on the hill that faces his house. That’s how he and Steve Stirling wrote their delightful tales of kzinti and thrintun family life for the second and third MAN-KZIN WARS.
[Just kidding. Only a deeply disturbed mind would have used the word delightful.]
He just wasn’t able to write text.
…And then he was.
As I write this, THE MOAT AROUND MURCHESON’S EYE is more than half written [and I’ll give up the punning title as soon as I’m offered a better one].
“The Gripping Hand” would make a wonderful graphic
novel. You won’t see it in print otherwise. Jack Romanos of S&S/Pocket is understandably reluctant to allow that, after waiting so many years for the full novel.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
TOURISTS
The bus was supposed to land on the hotel roof at 0830. Kevin and Ruth got there five minutes early. A dozen others waited for the tour to start.
The rooftop was still shadowed by the mountains to the east, but south and west the harbor was in bright sunshine. Even this early the vast harbor bay was lined with the wakes of both big ships and sailing craft. A warren of small boats, power and sail, many of them multi-hulled, jammed much of the docking area nearest the hotel. Most appeared to be yachts, but there were also square-hulled junks covered with laundry and children.
The tops of the mountains to the east and north were hidden in clouds.
Renner pointed. Far to the south they could see where the continent ended in steep mountains. “Blaine Institute is down there. According to the maps it’s over a hundred kilometers to the ocean.”
“One benefit of Empire,” Ruth said. Renner raised an eyebrow. “Clear air. Out in the new provinces they’re still burning coal.”
“True enough. Bury makes a fortune bringing in fusion plants and power satellites. It helps if your customers have to buy—”
“They don’t have to buy from Bury. And even if they did, hey, it’s worth it!”
Renner took a deep breath. “Sure.”
The bus landed on the hotel roof at exactly 0830. When Kevin and Ruth got on, a small man with a round face and red-veined nose looked at them quizzically. “Sir Kevin Renner?”
“That’s me.”
“Durk Riley. I’m your guide, sir. And you must be Commander Cohen.”
“Did we order a guide?” Ruth asked.
“Nabil,” Renner said. “I’m Renner.”