FSF, January-February 2010 Page 9

  Everyone at dinner seemed to be in a good mood, maybe because Esner and Gale were now getting along. It was like we'd all forgotten the kind of things she'd said during the week, or the rest of us didn't add it up until we read the story itself.

  Alice lives on Haynlayn back during the time of the Thousand Worlds, and she's lost a father, an aunt, two cousins, and a brother to the war against the Minds. The brother she'd despised until he was declared dead, and now she can only think about how much she misses him. On her worlds tour, she purposely goes to the worlds that have some contact with Minds. Because she's from Haynlayn, the source of conflict with the Minds, she normally would be forbidden entry on certain worlds. But she has a set of forged documents: She has a different last name and a different DNA profile, one more likely to match the gene pools found on Confluence, a Mind-friendly world.

  She makes her way around, finds groups of students her age, and on one Mind-friendly world, she ends up joining a group that explores the mystical side of life. They contact the remembered dead who live in Mindspace. One member of the group claims to have communicated with something or someone that claimed to be one of the Minds. Finally Alice makes contact with the Last Ones.

  I've sat in library reading chairs. You sometimes watch the other readers. You lose focus when someone laughs out loud or when someone says, Oh, my. However, each person is reading something different: You can only see their external reaction to an internal event unfolding within their skulls. But here, there was a sudden silence; you suddenly knew that everyone had stopped breathing. A chair creaked. Someone had sat up, and I listened to the shifting of the chair and of fabric as they removed the headsets.

  “Listen,” Esner said. “You are writers. Not priests. Keep reading.”

  A set of footsteps receded; a door closed. Some people have to dramatize the level to which they've been offended.

  The rest of us stayed with Alice, who was as shocked as we. No one ever talked about the Last Ones, the humans who didn't fight, who didn't flee, but who allowed their minds to be recorded before their actual space was turned into Mindspace. Alice befriends one. He, perhaps she, calls themself Junior. At times Junior takes human form, changing sex and clothes, and sometimes Junior is a pyramid or a sphere; one time he's a dragon.

  Alice arranges a private conversation with Junior so no other Last Ones or Minds can eavesdrop. “Help us,” she says. “You can help cause damage. You can help us bring down the Minds.”

  “Why?” Junior asks.

  “Isn't it obvious? The human race is in trouble. They've taken everything. We have no extra resources. No place to grow. They kill us.”

  “Then don't attack. If you don't attack, they won't kill.”

  “What's the difference? With nowhere to go, we'll eventually die out.”

  “You should all come here,” he says. “No one ever need die again.”

  Despondent, feeling almost lifeless, Alice returns to Haynlayn knowing the coordinates of where the Last Ones live. She passes on the necessary numbers to the authorities. A month later, after the next attack, after the Last Ones have been wiped out, she discovers that she misses Junior.

  When we talked about the piece, Amar wanted to talk about the irony of the ending and Sonisa wanted to know if Alice was working as a spy for Haynlayn, but the guy from Angkor and the old guy and the woman with furrowed hair were adamant. Did Gale really think the Minds were all that Evil? Did she really think the Last Ones all deserved to die like that? Wasn't that genocide?

  Gale had told me this was a pastiche of Esner's writing, and during the whole reading I had wondered: Where are the thrills, the chases, the ticking clocks? Most readers, when they decide to read everything Esner's written, start with his second book, Battle Plan. Only his true fans read his first novel. “It's like All the Deaths of Love,” I said out loud. Tristam travels from world to world to track down the next of kin of two friends...they died in the war against the Minds. Alice is kind of like that. She's trying to find someone who'll help her fight against the Minds, someone who can really do something.”

  Did my comment save the day? If nothing else, it got them to look at Esner, to gauge his response. “I think,” he said, “this story felt like a dead end to the writer. I think that's why she's thinking of these new stories, stories that look to the future.”

  Gale said nothing. Her body was just as rigid as it had been this afternoon when she came back from the library. Her eyes were dark, a darkness I hadn't seen since the night my mother stormed out of the kitchen and out the door. As discussion wound down into awkward conversation, as Tensi offered us something to drink before bed, I tried to smile at Gale, but she only glared. Everyone looked one way or another, but it was as if she'd become invisible.

  Somehow I imagined I'd say the right words. I once had thought I could talk my mother into staying. It was a strange desire because Gale's story had put me off. While the rest of us were drinking wine or beer or water, Gale rose and walked off into our room. Esner started to follow, but stopped. I saw Tensi give him a hard look. I wasn't sure if she was saying, Give her space (or) Don't you dare.

  When I went into the room, Gale was packing.

  “What's wrong?” I asked.

  “I can't stay.”

  I wanted to say, If you have that thin a skin, you better cancel the other workshops.

  She started to tell me what had happened this afternoon, how she'd seen Esner, then gone to the library. “I checked. All the stories he wanted to show me. None of them are in any human library.”

  “Then where did he get them?”

  She looked at me as if I were stupid, but she didn't bother to explain. “He's an utter hypocrite,” she said. “Writes about the so-called glorious days when we fought the Minds. And then goes and talks to them. I did a long trace. That's how he does his research. That's why his details are so good. That's why he understands so well the strategy of the Minds.”

  “It's not like your story is anti-Minds. Alice is left with nothing.”

  “I don't write propaganda,” she said to me. “But I won't make my living by being in contact with the Minds.”

  I was looking for something to say. I think I tried to tell her what a wonderful writer she was.

  “You're not so bad yourself,” I remember her saying. She looked at me for a moment, and I thought this would seal our mutual understanding. I wanted to pull her to me in a long embrace, but by the time the thought was done, she had turned and walked out the door, walking straight ahead. Several approached her. “If you have any questions,” she said, jerking her head in my direction, “ask him.”

  They came to me, Esner glaring. In the end, they didn't want to believe that Gale had left for the reasons she'd stated. They were all certain I'd made a sexual advance. I spent the rest of the week wishing I'd packed with her, had been quick enough to turn myself into her travel companion. I don't like to think back on the rest of the week, of how often I sat alone even when there were people sitting on either side of me.

  * * * *

  II. The End of the Tour

  After I left Santa Fe, I attended other workshops, and I learned to dislike writer after writer. I kept hoping that I'd run into Gale. You always hear stories about how people on their worlds tours keep meeting up. Once or twice, I saw her from a distance, but when I ran up to her, it turned out to be a woman vaguely shaped like Gale.

  On Bombay I meet Dosamai, whose mother had died while the ephemeral patterns of her brain were being recorded to be stored in the Minds. Dosamai's mother had grown up on an anti-Mind world, and she had felt ambivalent about the Minds. But there was family pressure. “Don't do this, dearheart, to your children. Please think of your grandchildren. They will want to talk to you. How can you leave them all alone? How can you be so selfish?” Dosamai's mother acquiesced and allowed her brain to be scanned.

  And something went wrong and there was no Dosamai's mother, no grandmother for future generations, not in the flesh, n
ot in Mindspace, and Dosamai was certain the Minds had done this because of her mother's attitude toward them. At this point, Dosamai was emotionally ready to leave Bombay, and falling in love provided a socially acceptable motive. And who better to take her away than someone who rejected the Minds? I liked her. I liked her toughness. I admired her willingness to deal with all the assimilation programs my world demands of all future residents. I wasn't old enough to know that a woman who falls in love with her rescuer will, in the end, always be disappointed by him. I was wise enough to know that I would think of Gale more often than she thought of me and that I would never see her again.

  * * * *

  III. Open Universes

  Ten years later, there was great controversy over a novel by Ana Calamar. For years she'd been writing closed narratives. If you wanted to read an open version, one that would respond to your reading, Ana Calamar had two assistants who handled that; you were instructed to read about their personalities and literary views before choosing which version of an open book you would read. The novel that drew all that attention was called Our Future.

  In it, a group of anti-Mind rebels kill everyone on a world in close contact with the Minds. The strategic leader has spent her youth in contact with the Minds, and that is how she developed the necessary knowledge to plan a successful operation. Her team convert the emptied world into a starship and fly off to restart humanity in another solar system. The plot concerns all the efforts to put a stop to the plan, so as a reader, you're forced to sympathize with the underdogs, the killers of 9,587 people. Between chapters, Ana Calamar provides brief profiles of some of the people who died in the takeover, some people terrible, some wonderful, some a mixture of both. But by the end you have a sneaking suspicion that Ana Calamar believes that the trip to a new world, whether it exists or not, is worth these deaths.

  If you're eight or older, you know all about the controversy, you probably had a strong opinion one way or another. Twenty worlds barred Ana Calamar from entry. Several notables from Haynlayn and my world argued that Ana Calamar had a point—to allow entropy to continue, to be unwilling to do something drastic, even if it failed to start a new life away from the Hundred Worlds, was a mistake—and for a while twelve Mind-centric worlds barred anyone from Haynlayn or Varle; even ships bearing passengers from those two worlds were not allowed within a thousand kilometers.

  I read other novels by Ana Calamar, and they all featured great transformations. Those who loved her writing loved those transformations; those who didn't always said they were immoral. We live a balanced life in the Hundred Worlds; balance is the key to survival. Great transformations, at least of the kind Ana Calamar writes about, are a threat to stability, a threat to the future of the human race.

  Somewhere along the way, in one reference or another, or maybe it was in an interview, I discovered that Ana Calamar was a pseudonym for Gale Brisa. It turned out she did the occasional workshop, and a year later, someone on her staff read my sample, and I was accepted.

  Ana had relocated to Santa Fe, and as I traveled there, I realized for the first time how her narrative technique owed itself to Magnus Esner, the way she led the reader to make the choices her characters made. Because her writing competed with open narratives, she must work harder to make the reader feel like there was only one clear option with each decision, but she had to do it with finesse. Her writing, at least to me, felt politically manipulative, but each time she made a point, there was some character who chose a path that made you feel like there were other solutions, not to the story, but to the political problem presented by the story.

  Ana looked more than twenty years old, but it was a common look for anyone who did a lot of traveling between worlds, soaking in radiation, going through one regimen or another to correct the destruction done the body. She greeted each of us as we arrived, but she didn't seem to recognize me or my name. I wanted to say, Don't you remember? but the answer would only make us awkward. What was there to remember of that week together?

  Ana's quarters were normal sized. The living area was slightly larger than usual because she'd had one of the walls of one of the bedrooms removed. Ana didn't want her writers to stay in a guesthouse, so there in the living area was one double bunk and one triple. There were also five writing chairs, four of them clearly having lasted years, if not decades, without any kind of refurbishing.

  “My home is now your home,” she said at dinner, “for the next week. You've come here to break free. Whatever world you come from, you've had to learn to be in balance. This has made you a good person; it's made you a lousy writer. Here, there will be two rules. No modesty and no screwing. You change in front of each other like in any pilots’ locker room. No turning away—” for a moment I was certain she was looking at me “—and no ogling, either. This is going to be intense, and I want the intensity in your writing. If you need to screw...when you thumbed in and picked up all the house info, you also received contact info for three men, three women, and one unreformed hermaphrodite. They're good, they're discreet, and they give me ten percent. I would like to refurbish these writing chairs. However, I'd prefer you save the energy for your own work.

  “Now, if you need solitude, take a walk. During the day, my bedroom door is opened. If you just want to be alone, go in, close the door, and no one will talk to you until you decide to come out. You have to come out, however, when I want to sleep.

  “You look like you have something to say.”

  She was looking at me, and even if I had something to say, I knew better than to say it. I marveled at the transformation. This was the same woman who ten years ago kept it to herself that she'd been accepted to workshops by some of the most prestigious writers, this was the same woman who had gone to hide in her room rather than argue with Magnus Esner.

  The next day, she had us talking about the nicest thing we ever did, the meanest thing we ever did, and if it didn't sound mean enough, she said, “Come on. You're not that nice.” Then she wanted to know the most selfish thing we'd ever wished for. I made up something I've now forgotten; at that point, my most selfish wish was to share her bedroom. A week before my most selfish desire had been to come to this workshop to be with her.

  From there we moved to things we wished were different about the worlds we lived on, things we wished were different about the Hundred Worlds, things we wished different about our contact or lack of it with the Minds. From there, she had us making up stories, thinking out plots. She was merciless, not at all like Magnus Esner. She kept harping, “How are you going to convince the reader to go along? You have your character do what? Tell me, what do you really know about human nature?”

  One young man, a ten-year-old on his worlds tour, broke down and dashed out to the street. A sixteen-year-old woman, the mother of two, glared at Ana and followed him out.

  “Let's break,” Ana said. “Everyone take a walk. We'll meet for evening wine.”

  I had experienced some tension with one of the other guys, who was twenty, like me, and clearly entering his own era of recriminations, so when the thirty-two-year-old woman took hold of her cane and walked out with him it was clear that I wasn't welcome.

  Alone for the first time with Ana, I had nothing to say.

  “So,” she said, “from what you say, it sounds like you still haven't been in contact with the Minds.”

  I thought she was deriding me. All I knew of the Minds was gathered from readings, from testimonies of others, but never once had I put on a skullcap to communicate with humans who now lived in Mindspace. Then I realized there was something nostalgic in her voice.

  “I made first contact just to read the stories Esner had told us about.” She poured me a glass of wine, then sat down on the floor. “These stories were very hard to read. You had to know something of the time they were writing about to imagine the other worlds they were imagining. There was this one story. It was like the story Alone, but it was so different. It was about these people who'd been traveling for a
long time. They could walk the entire universe. Then someone figured out that the Universe was bigger. They were just on a very big spaceship that took a long time to get anywhere. And I thought: This is about us. We've let our universe become too small. We can expand it in one direction, and that's by going to the Minds. But for flesh and blood humans, this is it. There are no more stories about the future. I wanted to change that. Even if the futures I write are just made up. Even if they can't come true. Even if it would be a bad thing if they came true.”

  At first, I wanted to place my arm around her shoulders. It sounded like she sought comfort. But soon her voice found a rhythm and anger. She spoke as if I were going to argue the contrary.

  “I like your writing,” I said. It's a shame that my closest avowal of love sounded like a jokey whine. But it did serve to break the tension.

  “You liked Esner's writing, too,” she said.

  “Not after I met him.”

  “So, now that you've met me, what do you think of my writing?” She smiled. I liked the flirtatious sound to her voice.

  We talked for a while, and I felt a growing intimacy, even though we never talked about intimate things. I don't know if she ever married, if she ever had children, if she had a lover. We talked about novels. She talked about books she read that only the Minds have stored away. I wanted to have access to those stories, but I hesitated.

  “How did it happen?” I asked. “When we met, you wouldn't even put on a prayer cap.”

  “I thought I told you. It was to read.”

  “No. You were so adamant. What changed your mind?”

  “I think everyone comes to a point where they wonder why they hold true to their younger selves. Sometimes it's an act of annihilation to believe in something different. It's a terrible moment if you don't like the outcome.”