"Now that I have your attention," he said with forced sternness, "please take your places."
The Council members laughed good-naturedly and complied.
"I’ve never seen or heard of a more vigorous, more vital, more rowdy bunch of representatives in my life!" Petrical whispered, his face flushed with excitement.
Dalt nodded and inwardly told Pard, I feel pretty vigorous myself.
("About time,") came the sardonic reply. ("It’s been a couple of centuries since you’ve shown much life.")
The president pro tem was speaking. "We have before us a motion to install The Healer as chief executive of the Federation by acclaim. Now what I propose to do is…” Even with amplification at maximum, his voice was lost in the joyous chaos that was unleashed by the announcement.
Shrugging, the old man stepped back from the podium and decided to let the demonstration run its course. The pandemonium gradually took the form of a chant.
“…HEALER! HEALER! HEALER!…”
Pard became a demon voice in Dalt’s mind. ("They’re in the palm of your hand. Take command and you can direct the course of human history from now on.")
And be another Kali?
("Your influence wouldn’t have to be malevolent. Look at them! Tarks, Lentemians, Humans! Think of all the great things you could lead them to!")
Dalt considered this as he watched the crowd and drank in its intoxicating chant:
“…HEALER! HEALER! HEALER!…
Thoughts of Tolive suddenly flashed before him. You know my answer!
("You’re not even tempted?")
Not in the least. I can’t remember when I last felt so alive, and I find there are many things I still want to do, many goals I still want to achieve. Power isn’t one of them.
Pard’s silence indicated approval. ("What will you tell them?") he asked finally.
Don’t know, exactly. Something about holding to the LaNague charter, about letting the Federation be the focus of their goals but never allowing those goals to originate here. Peace, freedom, love, friendship, happiness, prosperity, and other sundry political catchwords. But the big message will be a firm "No thanks!"
("You’re sure?") Pard taunted. ("You don’t want to be acclaimed leader of the entire human race and a few others as well?")
I’ve got better things to do.
EPILOGUE
KOLKO LOUNGED BY THE FIRE and eyed the wagon that sat in darkness on the far side of the flames. His troupe of Thespelian gypsies had turned in early tonight in preparation for their arrival in Lanthus tomorrow. Kolko was hurt and angry – but only a little. Thalana had taken up with the new mentalist and wanted no part of him.
He was tempted to enter the darkened wagon and confront the two of them but had decided against it for a number of reasons. First off, he had no real emotional attachment to Thalana, nor she to him. His pride was in pain, not his heart. Secondly, a row over a love triangle would only cause needless dissension in the peaceful little company. And finally, it would mean facing up to the new mentalist, a thought he did not relish.
An imposing figure, this newest member of the troupe, with all of his skin dyed gold and his hair dyed silver… a melding of precious metals. And quite a talent. Kolko had seen mentalists come and go but could not figure out how this one pulled off his stunts.
A likable fellow, but distant. Hiding from his past, no doubt, but that hardly made him unique among the gypsies of Thespel. He would laugh with the group around the fire and could drink an incredible amount of wine without ever opening up. Always one step removed. And he had an odd habit of muttering to himself now and again, but nobody ever mentioned it to him… there was an air about the man that brooked no meddling with his personal affairs or habits.
So let him have Thalana. There would be other dancers joining the troupe along the way, probably better-looking than Thalana and better in the bedroll… .although that would take some doing.
Let ’em be. Life was too good these days. Good wine, good company, good weather, good crowds of free-spending people in the towns.
He picked up an arthritic tree limb and stirred the coals, watching the sparks swirl gently upward to mingle with the pinpoint stars overhead.
Let ’em be.
www.repairmanjack.com
Story Notes
HEALER
First novels are unpredictable.
Sometimes it’s the best thing a writer will do in his career, something into which he empties so much of his heart and talent and experience that he’s left with too little fuel to light much of a fire under future work.
For another it sets the course for an entire career: he’s found the key in which his voice is most comfortable and he sticks to it.
For some writers that first novel gives no hint as to what is to come, the restless been-there-done-that school where every new work is a departure from the last.
And then there’s that first novel, not terribly uncommon in the science fiction field during the seventies, in which the writer is learning his craft in public.
Healer is one of those.
I wrote it in 1975, using "Pard," an Analog novelette, as a springboard. All of my published science fiction to that time had been set in a future I was slowly piecing together. And piecing together was precisely the process. I hadn’t sat down and worked out a time line for this future; I didn’t know how it had begun or where it was going, all I knew was that somewhere along the way the freedom movement had won and something called the LaNague Federation (LaNague – rhymes with the Hague – was chosen for no reason other than I liked the way it rolls off the tongue) was overseeing the far-flung colonized worlds in a very laissez-faire fashion. Only coercion was illegal. Beyond that, do what thy wilt was the whole of the law.
At that point the historical underpinnings of my future didn’t matter to me; the issues were the burning concern, and the issues were timeless ones, all boiling down to the endless struggle between the individual and the collective. The good guys had won, but the bad guys – the never-ending stream of men and women with the monstrous self-assurance that they know best how other people should live and work and play – hadn’t gone away. Fueled by either religion or long-discredited philosophies of social engineering, they were there as always, chipping away at our hard-won freedoms.
I’d written and sold "Pard" in medical school – at a nickel a word it paid a fair number of bills – and had always intended to continue the story of Steven Dalt, a man who shares his brain with an alien; the alien, Pard, was conscious down to the cellular level, making Dalt potentially immortal. However, I had no room in my life for writing during my fourth year of med school and my rotating internship. But after joining a family practice group in 1974 I found I again had time to scratch the writing itch.
Starting with "Pard" as the opening section, I picked up Dalt’s story a few decades after the end of the novelette and tracked him through the centuries as he becomes a mythical figure known as "The Healer." But I needed a publisher. Naïve as can be, I decided to start at the top and work my way down. Agentless, I sent off the novelette plus an outline of the rest of the book to Doubleday, the folks who published Isaac Asimov. A couple of months later I heard back from Sharon Jarvis, Doubleday’s SF editor at that time, with a whopping $2,000 contract offer for world rights.
Wow. My first book proposal, accepted by the first publisher I’d sent it to. As the saying goes: How long has this been going on and why didn’t anybody tell me about it? Looking back later I realized that Healer had a significant advantage in that the anchoring novelette originally had been purchased and published by John W. Campbell, Jr., the Zeus of modern science fiction. That pedigree gave it a definite leg up over the average over-the-transom proposal in Sharon’s office.
Published in June of 1976, Healer garnered decent reviews, with paperback rights picked up almost immediately by Jim Frenkel at Dell. But I wasn’t satisfied. Month after month I scanned the New York Times Book Review, waiting
for the full-page ad that would announce to the world the existence of this epochal novel, checked the Bestseller List every Sunday for the magic word Healer (told you I was naïve). I haunted the science fiction sections of bookstores but only rarely was I rewarded with the sight of Healer in the "W" section. Finally I gathered the courage to ask the manager of a Doubleday Bookstore – owned by Doubleday, my publisher! – why he of all people wasn’t carrying my book. He looked up Healer and informed me that it was out of print.
Out of print? It was published in June and this was only November! There had to be some mistake!
I staggered home and called Sharon Jarvis who patiently explained that as soon as the libraries have their copies and paperback rights have been sold, Doubleday remainders most of its science fiction books. I’d be getting a letter soon allowing me to buy leftover copies for pennies on the dollar.
Welcome to the wonderful world of big-time publishing.
I’m older and somewhat wiser now, but I’ve always known that Healer is not really a novel. Oh, the dust jacket labeled it a "novel" and reviews called it "a picaresque novel" or "an episodic novel," but in my heart I knew it wasn’t. Not really. Because I wasn’t a novelist then. I was a short-form writer, completely daunted by the task of sustaining a novel-length narrative. So I’d copped out by putting together a novel-length collection of interconnected short stories and novelettes following one character through twelve-hundred years of future history.
I've broken up Healer into its chronological components for this omnibus edition.
WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS
Wheels Within Wheels is listed as my second novel. And it almost is. (A novel, that is.)
It’s rooted in the high point of my writing career to that time: When the original “Wheels Within Wheels” novelette snagged the cover of the September 1971 Analog with a fabulous (not a word I use very often) cover by John Schoenherr that perfectly captured the menacing elements of the story. Talk about a thrill. To a newbie SF writer in those days it was equivalent to a garage band making the cover of Rolling Stone. I didn’t have it made, but I felt I had made it.
After Healer, Doubleday wanted another novel. I decided to follow the same process that had sparked that book: Take one of my Analog stories and use it as a springboard. “Wheels Within Wheels” begged for expansion, and so it got the nod.
Doubleday offered a fifty-percent increase in my advance (up to a whopping $3000), and Jim Frenkel took paperback rights for his SF line at Dell.
I was cruising.
WWW the novel is less episodic than Healer, and certainly hangs together better, but it still strikes me as not quite as cohesive as a novel should be.
Perhaps I’m being too tough on it. The important thing now is that after twenty-eight years – I wrote it in 1977 – it still works on many levels. But not all.
Its main failings are those suffered by any science fiction written in the seventies, in the Dark Ages before…
…the microchip revolution: Computers you can hold in your palm? Get out.
…the communications revolution: World Wide Web – are we talking giant spiders? Email – what’s that? Wireless telephones the size of a cigarette pack – crazy.
…the nascent genetics revolution: Whatever I say here won’t come even close to the imminent reality, so why set myself up for a fall?
Please keep all these in mind while you’re reading.
That aside, I think the plot is still strong and engaging, and the mysteries fairly presented.
As for style, well, I keep running into spots where I step in and out of point of view, a carelessness that I now find infuriating. And exclamation points – sheesh. I use more in WWW than in all my novels since 1990. Same for adverbs.
The good news (for me at least) is that all this tells me I’ve learned a lot about writing through the intervening years.
I’ve made some changes here – mostly cleaning up – but I don’t see the point in doing a top-to-bottom rewrite. A lot of people love these novels as is, and major changes would be unfair to folks who want a uniform set of the originals.
But wait – there’s more…
WWW became a milestone in my career when the Libertarian Futurist Society selected it for the first Prometheus Award. I had never heard of LFS and was delighted to learn I was a winner, but bowled over when they told me the award consisted of a certificate (no surprise there) and 7.5 ounces of gold in bullion coin. (Yes!) Gold at that time was running around $200 per ounce, so the award’s value equaled half the novel’s advance from Doubleday. At the current price of over $1,100 per ounce, it is multiples of the advance.
I was now an award-winning author. Cool. I still have the coins… somewhere.
I’ve never liked being pigeonholed, but in this business a reputation for anything (other than lousy writing) is good. Wheels within Wheels and the Prometheus Award started people referring to me as “that libertarian sci-fi writer.”
Read on and see why.
AN ENEMY OF THE STATE
The year was 1979. I had written and sold Healer and Wheels Within Wheels, both patchwork novels extrapolated and expanded from shorter works previously published in Analog. Now I was ready to write a novel from scratch. I decided to stick with the LaNague Federation future history, but this time I'd write about the roots of the Federation, about its founder, the reluctant revolutionary Peter LaNague.
I saw LaNague as a non-violent man trying to bring down a repressive government without bloodshed – or at least with very little. But how to go about that?
At the time I was pursuing a personal radicalism based on the anarchocapitalist writings of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard and others. They contend that the soul of a free society is a free economy: if individuals are not allowed to deal freely with each other, then they are not free. I became fascinated with the Weimar hyperinflation during the early 1920s (a well into which I'd dip again decades later for Aryans and Absinthe, the novella I wrote for the anthology Revelations, edited by Douglas E. Winter, 1997). I began to wonder: if a government can manipulate the economy to further its own ends, why couldn't a clever revolutionary do the same to bring down a government?
And when I realized that Peter LaNague's target and weapon could be one and the same, the story clattered into place.
All this dovetailed perfectly with my long-term disdain for that hoary SF cliché, the galactic empire. Really, even with a faster-than-light drive, the idea of an ironfisted centralized power micromanaging a collection of worlds spanning dozens of light years is absurd. My concept was a little more practical: a loose confederation of colonized worlds left pretty much to their own devices with a centralized Big Stick hanging over them to dampen any aggressive or acquisitive tendencies. In other words: Hands Off. Laissez Faire.
What a concept. It's now called libertarianism. Today there's a libertarian movement and a Libertarian Party, but back in the late sixties when I first arrived at my – for want of a better word – Weltanshauung, it didn't have a name. I spent the years 1964–68 at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. I made the marches, mixing with the gathering hordes around the Lincoln Memorial and trooping en masse across the Potomac toward the Pentagon. It was a happening, a huge party, and sure I wanted the war ended, but I was alone in that crowd, a political and philosophical orphan.
My problem was an inability to perceive much functional difference between state socialism/communism and fascism. The rhetoric was certainly different, but the result either way was central control of business, industry, media, and education, all at the expense of the individual. It didn't matter to me whether the state or the collective slipped the cuffs around my wrists, either way I was shackled.
So I struck out in a different direction, away from the Left-Right axis, and let me tell you, it was lonely out there. I turned off the Lefties with my espousal of a free-market economy (one woman at an anti-war rally cried, “You've must have been frozen for a hundred years!”) and Young Republica
n types all but held up crosses when I suggested legalizing drugs and prostitution.
From the outset I wanted my science fiction to incorporate this odd but fundamentally consistent view of the world. It felt right. Lots of SF concerns aliens, and this nameless philosophy seemed pretty damn alien to just about everyone I knew.
When I finally got around to writing An Enemy of the State, I decided to make it a manifesto of sorts. But I didn't want it to be too deadly serious, so I had some fun with the quotes that opened the chapters, using a wide array of sources ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Roger Ramjet. And when I couldn't and something that suited the mood, I fabricated a quote and attributed it to The Second Book of Kyfho (Revised Eastern Sect Edition).
Kyfho is my word (an anagram that's explained in the novel) but it seems to have taken on a life of its own. A moment ago I did a Google search for the word and got 187 hits. I've seen a Kyfho license plate; newsgroup participants have incorporated quotes from The Second Book of Kyfho into their signature files; I've had readers contact me asking me where they can buy a copy of the book (sorry, you can't); someone wrote and suggested that I should write the book and sell it, and if I didn't have time, he'd do it for me (sorry, you can't).
A number of people wrote to tell me that An Enemy of the State changed their lives. Now that's scary. If you change someone's life, aren't you responsible for what they do with it?
An even more unsettling result of the success of An Enemy of the State was that I began to hear myself referred to as “that libertarian sci-fi writer.” Not wanting to be stuck in that or any other pigeonhole, I decided to take a vacation from SF. My next novel was The Keep, but that's a whole other story.
"Ratman"
My first professional sale (to John W. Campbell for Analog) and the very first LaNague Federation story (so please excuse the humongous pre-microchip computers).