Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 Read online

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SIZE MATTERS

  A DOZEN TOUGH JOBS

  AFTERWORD

  FIN DE CYCLÉ

  AFTERWORD

  YOU COULD GO HOME AGAIN

  AFTERWORD

  FLATFEET!

  AFTERWORD

  MAJOR SPACER IN THE 21st CENTURY!

  AFTERWORD

  THE OTHER REAL WORLD

  AFTERWORD

  A BETTER WORLD’S IN BIRTH!

  AFTERWORD

  Howard Waldrop titles available from Small Beer Press

  OTHER WORLDS, BETTER LIVES

  A HOWARD WALDROP READER

  Selected Long Fiction

  1989-2003

  Small Beer Press

  Easthampton, MA

  OTHER WORLDS, BETTER LIVES: A HOWARD WALDROP READER

  Copyright © 2008 Howard Waldrop. All Rights Reserved.

  Cover Art: “Different Worlds” Copyright © Mondolithic Studios. All Rights Reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written consent from both the authors and copyright holder, except by a reviewer who may want to quote brief passages in review.

  Ebook edition published by Small Beer Press

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  Print edition published by Old Earth Books

  PO Box 19951

  Baltimore, Maryland 21211

  www.oldearthbooks.com

  Print Edition Design by Robert T. Garcia / Garcia Publishing Services

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  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61873-080-0

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-882968-37-4

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-882968-38-1

  A companion volume, Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005 is also available:

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61873-079-4

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-882968-35-0

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-882968-36-7

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “Size Matters” by Howard Waldrop, Copyright © 2008 by Howard Waldrop.

  A Dozen Tough Jobs by Howard Waldrop, Copyright © 1989 by Howard Waldrop. First published by Mark Ziesing, 1989.

  “Fin de Cyclé” by Howard Waldrop, Copyright © 1991 by Howard Waldrop, From Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, Mid-December 1991.

  “You Could Go Home Again” by Howard Waldrop, Copyright © 1993 by Howard Waldrop. First published by Cheap Street Press, 1993.

  “Flatfeet!” by Howard Waldrop, Copyright © 1996 by Howard Waldrop, From Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, February 1996.

  “Major Spacer in the 21st Century!” by Howard Waldrop. Copyright © 2001 by Howard Waldrop, First published in Dream-Factories and Radio-Pictures as an e-book by Electricstory.com, 2001 and as a book by Wheatland Press, 2003.

  “The Other Real World” by Howard Waldrop. Copyright © 2001 by Howard Waldrop. From Sci-fiction.com, posted July 18, 2001.

  A Better World’s in Birth! by Howard Waldrop, Copyright © 2003 by Howard Waldrop. First published by Golden Gryphon Press, 2003.

  All afterwords by Howard Waldrop, Copyright © 2008 by Howard Waldrop.

  To Oso, Washington, bastard-child of the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River.

  SIZE MATTERS

  “Hi-ho, everybody!” as the late Rudy Vallee used to say.

  Welcome to the second volume of my Selected Fiction, culled (if that’s the word) from my shattered and fragmented attempt at a career.

  These are the longer pieces, including two published as books, what they used to call “separate publication” in the bibliographic biz.

  There’s a simple reason for the length of these stories—they came to me in a longer form. The standard rule is, if a piece of fiction is straightforward, it’s a short story; if other things are going on besides the main narrative, it’s a novelette or novella.

  Boy, is there lots going on in these stories. (I’ll get to them in the brand-new afterwords to each story.)

  People used to argue that the ideal form for SF and fantasy was the novella and novelette—the story has room to grow; you can fill in the background at more length, bring in plot complications, etc. etc.

  That’s not the way I do it, of course. (Booklist just referred to me as a “beloved genre wildman”—I don’t know what that means, but I like it.) Anyway, I’ll tell you why I wrote most of these.

  As I said, the ideas came to me in longer forms—I can usually tell within 500 words or so how long something has to be when the idea comes to me. (I’m sometimes, but rarely, surprised.) Since I was so busy with short stories (including those in Things Will Never Be The Same— vol. 1 of this set.), I made up file folders for the longer stories, with whatever notes I could make without doing lots of research (which is what I do right before I’m ready to write a story).

  Along about 1988 I looked through my story log (yes, Mr. Genre Wildman has 4 books of those—when the story idea came, when the first and final drafts were written, who it went to, where and when it sold [if ever] what I was supposed to be paid and when; when it was supposed to be published, etc. You know, some of the donkey-work you have to do as a freelance writer.) Anyway, I was looking at my story logs, and I noted for some reason the last four stories I’d written had come out at almost exactly 5600 words, typical short story length.

  “I was in a rut without noticing it.” I said to myself, “Time for some longer stuff.”

  If you read the first volume of this Selected Fiction, you know that one of my goals is to never write the same story twice (which is why I’ll never be rich.) I’ve stuck to that goal since I started in this pretty thankless business in the late 1960s. If you do it right, it’s much harder to repeat yourself at longer lengths than if you’re doing short stuff all the time.

  In the next few months, after cranking myself in a new direction, I did three of these, including the 35,000 worder. I was mighty pleased with myself. I’d broken out of my same-length rut (to my way of thinking) and was stretching the old writing muscles.

  Best of all, the more I wrote at longer length, the more ideas for longer stories came to me (two ideas, for “You Could Go Home Again” and the forthcoming The Moone World [Wheatland Small Beer Press] came to me within five minutes of each other one hot sweaty day in 1989, when I was trying to nap on a couch in an unairconditioned South Austin house). You tell kids that stuff nowadays, they don’t believe you.

  And between shorter stuff, I’d dip into the long-story notes I’d made for years, seeing if I could crank up some fresh enthusiasm for any of them. And of course the new ideas kept scratching at my brain.

  Part of my enthusiasm for longer stuff was because of the rise of small-press publishers who were looking for a) short story collections and b) novellas to be published as separate editions. (In other words, the stuff big publishers didn’t want to go near with a 3.183-meter pole.) The pay usually wasn’t great (but if I
were totally in it for the money, I wouldn’t be writing short science fiction, would I?) but it was pay of some kind, and what you usually ended up with was some great-looking, beautifully illustrated (and in some cases) handcrafted book in a slipcase that’ll still be around a hundred years from now.

  To quote a famous moron: Bring it on.

  My career at that point, and the startups (and continuations) of some swell small-press publishers coincided. They usually only wanted edition rights, or some month’s exclusivity, and I could sometimes sell them to the magazines later.

  Also, as you’ll see in the story afterwords, Ellen Datlow bought some for Omni Online.com and its adjuncts, successors and bastard children (Event Horizon.com, Sci-fi.com)—earlier when Omni had been a magazine, she could only publish one, or at most two, pieces of fiction a month, usually short stories. If you’re just burning photons, there’s no limit on length (except reader fatigue).

  Anyway, you’ll get more than you want to know in the story afterwords—here they are, all the longer stuff (that fits). There are more that aren’t here for various reasons—they’ve just been reprinted in fairly permanent form by someone else somewhere else; none of the longer collaborations are here—those are in Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations from Golden Gryphon Press, which I see by my latest royalty statement sold a big 28 copies in the last 6 months. (I’ll be laughing my ass off in five years when people are paying $150 for third-hand ex-libris copies off e-Bay, though neither me, my buddies, nor Golden Gryphon will get any of that. Golden Gryphon has vowed to keep the book in print as long as they’re able, but eventually they’ll all be gone, and people who want one will be in the tender care of sharks and wolves . . .)

  I’m proud to have done each and every one of these. For some reason, 2007 is turning out to be the Year of Long Waldrop, with the printing of these, and The Search for Tom Purdue (Subterranean Press, forthcoming) and The Moone World (Wheatland Small Beer Press, ditto).

  Next year, maybe, back to the good old short stuff.

  Howard Waldrop

  Friday, July 15, 2007

  A DOZEN TOUGH JOBS

  I

  It was so early in the morning that the birds wasn’t even up yet, to my way of thinking,and here I was down to the gate of the Old Egypt Cemetery tryin’ to decide whether to tell a white woman a lie or not.

  Miz Eustis had sent me down to see whether the old church cemetery needed the fall cleaning yet—she was of course a Baptist but some of the earliest town settlers was buried out here and the hoity-toity white folks always turned up two Saturdays a year, whenever Miz Luvsey told them to, and worked themselves up almost to a sweat and then had a stand-up ice cream social afterwards.

  I was standing in front of Old Man Chop’s tomb. It was big and pointy-looking, about twenty feet on every side. His brothers Myron and Keiffer’s tombs was about the same (though Mr. Myron’s looked taller because it was on a little rise). They was this big stone lion out front of the three tombs that they’d brought all the way down from Cairo, Illinois, to put in front of the vaults long before the war. Somebody was gonna have to decide what to do about Mr. Keiffer’s tomb—it looked terrible. It had once been covered with imported limestone, but in the middle of the Civil War they came out and found somebody had busted chunks off it to make whitewash with, and what with rain and all there was only about a third of it left now, since they’d started at the bottom it looked all jaggeldy up at the top.

  Miz Eustis thought it should stay like it was to remind people of the sacrifices of the war. So had her mother-in-law and her mother, so it had just gone to hell for sixty-some years.

  Well, the cemetery didn’t look too bad to me, but I’m not an expert, and I don’t like being around them even in daylight. But now that the cotton’s all picked and white kids is back in school, and nobody pays attention to anything because football’s already started at Ole Miss and MSC, it’d probably do the white people some good to work this Saturday.

  So I went back east, crossed over Niles Creek, and went back to the big house to tell Miss Luvsey Eustis that the Old Egypt Cemetery was in sorry shape, but when I got back, Uncle Romulus told me I’d dawdled so long that Miz Eustis had gone into town already to see to the shopping and that I was supposed to go find where she was and wait outside the store for her, and tell her the condition of, as Romulus said she put it, “the former necropolis.” And that should be P.D.Q.

  Mr. Eustis—Boss Eustis—had left earlier that morning to go over to Anatolia County to see Boss Primagenus about some Democrat Party business, so Uncle Romulus was on a tear, being absolute monarch in the absence of both owners of the house.

  “Get moving, I.O.,” he said, “or I’ll be telling Miz Eustis you’re being obstreperous again.”

  “I ain’t. I’m tired.”

  “Don’t be thinking you’ll get the use of a horse, either.” He looked at the big Regulator clock in the kitchen. “It’s seven thirty-two. I want to hear from Miz Eustis that you found her before 8 a.m. by the courthouse clock, else I’ll be serving you up a extra big helping of that Whipme-Whopme pudding I keep behind the smokehouse.”

  I took off at a trot, cutting through the low pasture, taking the short-cut over the two ditches and headed fast as I could down the old bridle-path toward downtown Anomie, Mississippi, U.S.A.

  * * *

  I got to the eastern edge of town—Darky Town they of course call it, and turned up King Bull Street, which was the widest thing in that part of town. Old Man Asher, who’d tried making a go with a line of cattle called King Bulls, had put up lamp posts on every corner decorated with cement cows, and being a thinking man had made them so they had an easy time making them over for electric lights. ’Course, when he’d done that, white folks lived on this side of town; first thing you know there was some Cajuns from Louisiana, then some Mexicans—the ones with money the white folks called ‘Spaniards’—and the next thing you know, ain’t nobody here but us dark people. ’Course, moving the Interurban line back before the Great War had more to do with it than anything. Then King Bull Street was on the wrong side of the tracks. It’s still the only street over here with lights on the corners at all, and the bulbs slowly burn out during the year, or kids slingshot ’em, and every year, just before Christmas, Prometheus Gundlefinger brings his power company truck and a ladder, and puts new bulbs up. It’s about all the Christmas some folks get around here. But the cows all look nice and bright while the bulbs are still new.

  There wasn’t too many people on the streets. I could see all the way to town, the hub of commerce, and there wasn’t much there either.

  Then I saw someone standing on the front gallery of his house, not moving. He had a guitar under his arm. He was an old, old man and he wore a pair of dark round glasses. I slowed down, trying to walk real quiet. I was on the other side of the street. The old man’s head turned toward me. I took a few steps and his head turned with me. I stopped.

  “What you stoppin’ for, I.O.?”

  “Damn if I know, Blind Bill,” I said.

  “Mister Blind Bill to you, young pissant,” he said. “You see that no-good white paperboy?”

  Just as he said that a kid came zooming around the corner of Delphi Street leaning over on the sidewalls of his bike tires. His paperbag buckles was sending up sparks and he had one foot out like a motorcycle state trooper, and his taps were sparking, too. He had a mean look and his cap was down at a chilling angle.

  “He don’t much like being in this part of town,”said Blind Bill.

  The paperboy only had four subscribers in Darky Town, and didn’t care either way about the dime a month he made or not, they were so far apart. For some reason Blind Bill Orff was one of them—folks said it was something that happened between him and the newspaper editor years ago.

  “On the sidewalk!” yelled Blind Bill. Th
e paperboy was oblivious—it didn’t even look like he would throw a paper. He came by a blur, and a paper was flying through the air, twenty feet up, bounced off the tin roof on Bill’s house and end-walked back down the rock path to a stop a couple of inches from Blind Bill’s feet.

  The kid was already out of sight before the paper stopped moving.

  “Hee-hee-hee,” said Blind Bill. “Can’t wait to hear my Thursday paper. Come on and set down and read it to me, I.O.”

  “I can’t Bi—Mr. Blind Bill. I got to go find Miz Eustis down to the mercantile and do some bowin’ and scrapin’.”

  “What you mean? How the hell am I gonna be well informed somebody don’t read the weekly paper to me?”

  “Well, where’s your nephew?”

  “That no-good sumbitch was out tom-cattin’ around and ain’t come back yet. I hope he gets the goddam clap and that’s the truth.” He picked up the paper. “Come on in and read to me.”

  “I ain’t got the time, Mr. Blind Bill, I really ain’t.”

  “Damn, does everybody in your generation got no respect for they elders?”

  “We’re a lost generation, Mr. Blind Bill.”

  “What the fuck you talkin’ bout? You ain’t lost, you right here!”