When the Great Days Come Read online

  WHEN THE GREAT DAYS COME

  Gardner Dozois

  For my mother, who started it all by teaching me how to read

  and

  for my wife, for all our years together.

  Copyright © 2011 by Gardner Dozois

  An extension of this copyright page can be found here.

  Cover art by Donato Giancola.

  Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-306-8 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-230-6 (trade paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-278-8 (hardcover)

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  www.prime-books.com

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  • Contents •

  Introduction by Robert Silverberg

  Counterfactual

  The Hanging Curve

  Recidivist

  When the Great Days Came

  The Peacemaker

  Fairy Tale

  Chains of the Sea

  Solace

  A Cat Horror Story

  Disciples

  Ancestral Voices (with Michael Swanwick)

  Dinner Party

  A Dream at Noonday

  A Special Kind of Morning

  Morning Child

  A Kingdom by the Sea

  Community

  A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

  Copyrights and Original Publication

  About the Author

  • Introduction •

  Robert Silverberg

  If you last long enough in this business, everything comes around again . . . and again and again. Gardner Dozois and I have known each other for forty years, now, and in the course of that time he has turned his hand, not often but steadily, to the writing of dazzling short stories. When he has enough of them put together to add up to a book-sized collection he collects them, and it seems that the karmic necessities of my life dictate that I will be asked to do an introduction for them. This is my third go-round in the Dozois introduction sweepstakes, and if the fates are kind to us both perhaps it is not yet the last. That his work should be collected and published every decade or so over the span of more than thirty years thus far shows that Gardner Dozois’ short stories can stand the test of time. Even so, most of you know him, still, only as an editor. This new volume provides an occasion, once again, to reintroduce him as a writer, one of the best we have.

  My initiation into the ritual of introducing Dozois short-story collections came in 1977—a geological eon ago, as time is reckoned in science-fiction publishing. A quick demonstration of that point: for nearly twenty years, 1986–2005, Gardner was editor of the top magazine in the field, Asimov’s Science Fiction. During his incumbency he won an astonishing fourteen Hugo awards as Best Editor, a record that has never been matched and very likely never will be. But when Gardner’s first story collection, The Visible Man, was published, Asimov’s, which today seems like such a venerable magazine, was barely an issue or two old, and the Dozois editorship was still nearly a decade in the future, though he was on the masthead of the first issue with the title of associate editor.

  The Visible Man was Gardner’s first published book of fiction, containing a dozen stories that had been written over a period of seven years. Four of those twelve stories—“A Dream at Noonday,” “A Special Kind of Morning,” “A Kingdom by the Sea,” and “Chains of the Sea”—are back among us this time around, as strong and impressive as they were when first published all those decades ago. (I can testify to that: I was the editor who originally published two of them.)

  Most of what I said in my introduction to that initial Dozois collection is still appropriate to a consideration of Gardner’s virtues and achievements as a writer, and I will repeat it here, as I did in my second Dozois introduction, since there’s no reason for rephrasing what was perfectly well stated back then. But two of my statements do require significant updating, and it would be best to deal with those first.

  One had to do with Dozois’ physical appearance. In that 1977 introduction I described my first meeting with him, seven years previously, and spoke of the Gardner Dozois of March 1971, perhaps somewhat unkindly, as “a weird-looking apparition.” At that time, I said, he was “a gaunt young man just under six feet tall with a vast cascade of shoulder-length blond hair of an eerie voluminous sort covering most of his face, a strange bushy beard . . . the glint of inquisitive eyes behind big steel-rimmed glasses, and—am I imagining this?—a bulky and grotesquely dilapidated raccoon coat. I mean, weird, man.”

  This description was already somewhat out of date in 1977, for I noted then that “he is no longer gaunt, not even remotely,” nor was his general appearance quite as weird, although he still affected some quaint elements of hippie garb and a penchant for shagginess.

  A further update is needed here. The twenty-first-century version of Gardner not only continues not to be gaunt, but indeed is rather less so than he was even in 1977. Indeed, here in the full maturity of his years—he’s getting to be a senior citizen now, as so many of us who dedicated our youth to science fiction are—he cuts quite a conspicuous figure indeed.

  But hippie garb and shaggy hair are most definitely not his style any more. Perhaps under the influence of Susan Casper, Gardner’s jolly and loving wife of these many years past, he dresses now as modern adults do, even unto a coat and (sometimes) a tie. The effect is magisterial and commanding. Nor is he an uncouth, hairy, hippified being these days. He had his beard and hair trimmed quite neatly and expertly somewhere back in the 1980s, so I believe, has he has had it done again with fair frequency since then. From humble beginnings he has become the very model of sartorial elegance in our field, a man to study and emulate.

  The other aspect of my 1977 introduction that needs emendation now is the statement that because he produces his fiction so painfully and slowly, “he does a little editing on the side” in order to help make ends meet. I observed then that he was “dabbling in anthology-making” and also serving as first reader for the newly established Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  Of course Gardner’s editorial career can no longer be dismissed as a little something that he does on the side. His two decades in charge of Asimov’s established him forever as one of the great magazine editors of science fiction’s history, a major shaper of modern sf fully worthy of being classed with those three titans of earlier years, John Campbell, Horace Gold, and Anthony Boucher. Not content with that task alone, he has produced since 1984 the monumental annual anthology called The Year’s Best Science Fiction, which is in its third decade now and constitutes in its many-volumed totality the definitive archive of the contemporary science-fiction story. And he has done dozens of stand-alone anthologies besides, comprising an awesome list that each year is extended by another impressive volume or three.

  But, as I said in my second Dozois introduction (to the 1992 collection Geodesic Dreams, from which “Dinner Party,” “Disciples,” “Morning Child,” and “The Peacemaker” are carried over), it is Gardner the writer with whom we are concerned here; and if writing has taken second place to editing in his career over the thirty-four years since his first short story collection appeared, that does not mean that writing is in any way a secondary sort of activity for him. Editing a monthly magazine that receives scores of submissions from hopeful writers every week was, of course, a time-consuming job; but I think that even if Dozois had not been for so many years the editor of Asimov’s he would have produced a fictional oeuvre not very much more exten
sive than the one he has given us. He is simply not a prolific writer. His stories are carefully considered and elegantly wrought, sentence by sentence: a thankless job, some might say, in a field where for the most part basic story-telling has always been valued more highly than literary craftsmanship. But he has no choice but to work the way he does, and those of us who are sensitive to the values of Dozois’ fiction are much the richer for it.

  Not that Dozois the writer has gone unrewarded. His first published story, “The Empty Man,” was a nominee in 1966 for the award that science-fiction writers annually give their peers: the Nebula. Nearly every year thereafter, all through the 1970s and early 1980s, his stories were prominent features of the Nebula ballot. “The Visible Man” was a contender in 1975; Strangers, his first and, I think, only science-fiction novel, was nominated in l978; “Disciples” was a nominee in 1981; and so forth. His stories had regularly been reaching the ballot for the Hugo (the award given by readers) also; “A Special Kind of Morning” was a nominee in 1972; “A Kingdom by the Sea” made the ballot in 1973; the novella “Chains of the Sea” was on the ballot in 1974; Strangers in its original shorter form had been a nominee in 1975. By 1982, Dozois had achieved enough nominations (without winning any awards) to place him second in the roster of the “most consistent Hugo and Nebula award losers” in Mike Ashley’s statistical compilation, The Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Lists: Dozois had collected four Hugo nominations and six Nebula nominations, but no trophies.

  Then things changed, though. His story “The Peacemaker” won the Nebula in 1983 as Best Short Story, and the following year Dozois picked up a second Nebula in that category for “Morning Child.” Only the Hugo for fiction has continued to elude him; the preferences of the Hugo voters are weighted, usually, toward basic storytelling qualities, and it is the common fate of s-f writers whose great strength is stylistic to receive frequent nominations but few awards.

  Not that Dozois is merely a stylist. His fiction, as you will see, is passionate, powerfully committed stuff. But he deals in deep and eternal matters of the human heart, and in the complexities and disappointments of life in a human society. You will see that here in the older stories brought forward from those first two collections, and in the more recent ones—“Community,” “When the Great Days Came,” “Fairy Tale,” and the others that have been added to make up this volume.

  This is what I had to say in 1977 about the particular qualities of Dozois’ fiction that I think are most worthy of praise, and which still, I think, provides the best summation of my feelings about it. Let us consider this paragraph from one of his earliest stories, written when he was scarcely old enough to vote:

  “Did y’ever hear the one about the old man and the sea? Halt a minute, lordling; stop and listen. It’s a fine story, full of balance and point and social pith; short and direct. It’s not mine. Mine are long and rambling and parenthetical and they corrode the moral fiber right out of a man. Come to think, I won’t tell you that one after all. A man of my age has a right to prefer his own material, and let the critics be damned. I’ve a prejudice now for webs of my own weaving.”

  Allow me to invite your attention to the rhythms of the prose, the balancing of clauses, the use of alliteration, metaphor, and irony, the tough, elegant sinews of the vocabulary. It is a paragraph of splendid construction, a specimen of prose that shows honorable descent from Chaucer and Shakespeare, Pope and Dryden, Defoe and Dickens, the prose of a man who knows what he wants to say and says it eloquently and effectively. It is the opening paragraph of “A Special Kind of Morning,” which Dozois wrote in 1970 and which I occupied, not by any accident, the lead position and place of honor in the first number of New Dimensions, the anthology series that I was editing in that era. Many science-fiction writers, including a lot of the great ones, are content to be mere storytellers, using whatever assemblages of words may be handy to convey their meanings.

  Dozois is a storyteller too, and no mere one, either—“A Special Kind of Morning” is a vigorous and violent tale of war with a structural underpinning worthy of Sophocles—but he is concerned as much with the way he tells his stories as with the events he is describing.

  Or here, this paragraph from “Chains of the Sea”:

  One day the aliens landed, just as everyone always said they would. They fell out of a guileless blue sky and into the middle of a clear, cold November day, four of them, four alien ships drifting down like the snow that had been threatening to fall all week. America was just shouldering its way into daylight as they made planetfall, so they landed there: one in the Delaware Valley, about fifteen miles north of Philadelphia, one in Ohio, one in a desolate region of Colorado, and one—for whatever reason—in a cane field outside of Caracas, Venezuela. To those who actually saw them come down, the ships seemed to fall rather than to descend under any intelligent control: a black nailhead suddenly tacked to the sky, coming all at once from nowhere, with no transition, like a Fortean rock squeezed from a high appearing-point, hanging way up there and winking intolerably bright in the sunlight; and then gravity takes hold of it, visibly, and it begins to fall, far away and dream-slow at first, swelling larger, growing huge, unbelievably big, a mountain hurled at the earth, falling with terrifying speed, rolling in the air, tumbling end over end, overhead, coming down—and then it is sitting peacefully on the ground; it has not crashed, and although it didn’t slow and it didn’t stop, there it is, and not even a snowflake could have settled onto the frozen mud more lightly.

  Prose, yes. Actual prose. America is “shouldering its way into daylight.” The alien spaceship descends like “a black nailhead suddenly tacked to the sky.” The sense of invasion is conveyed through an accretion of concrete detail, of vivid and immediate simile and metaphor and physical description. Melville understood these things, and Joyce, and Faulkner. So did Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and in our own field Theodore Sturgeon and Cyril Kornbluth and Henry Kuttner. The power of that passage depends on a respect for language and grammar, a sense of the structure of the sentence and the paragraph, and a keen perception of sensory data. Gardner Dozois is as skilled a worker in prose as there is in science fiction. His marvelous ear and eye provide much, though not all, of the explanation of his success as an editor; and these stories collected here will tell you how considerable a writer he has been over the past three and a half decades as well.

  The name, by the way, is pronounced Do-zwah. It’s French-Canadian in origin. Most of the readers of the 1977 collection needed to be told that. Today, I think, the name of this writer is more familiar to us. May his acclaim continue to grow for years to come.

  —Robert Silverberg

  February, 2011

  • Counterfactual •

  “If we reach the Blue Ridge Mountains, we can hold out for twenty years.”

  —General Robert E. Lee

  Cliff’s fountain pen rolled across the pull-out writing shelf again, and he sighed and reached out to grab it before it tumbled to the floor. The small inkbottle kept marching down the shelf too, juddering with each vibration of the car.

  Writing on a train wasn’t easy, especially on a line where the rail-bed had been insufficiently maintained for decades. Even forming legible words was a challenge, with the jarring of the undercarriage or a sudden jerk all too likely to turn a letter into an indecipherable splat or to produce a startled, rising line across the page, as if the ink were trying to escape the mundane limitations of the paper.

  Scenery was a distraction too. Cliff had always loved landscapes, and he had to wage a constant battle against the urge to just sit there and look out the window, where, at the moment, pale armies of fir trees were sliding slowly by, while the sky guttered toward a winter dusk in washes of plum and ash and sullen red. But he’d be sharing this room tonight with three other reporters, which meant lights-out early and a night wasted listening to them fart and snore, so if he was going to get any writing done on the new Counterfactual he was working on fo
r McClure’s, it’d better be now, while his roommates were down in the bar with the rest of the boys.

  Cliff opened his notebook, smoothed it, and bent over the page:

  General Robert E. Lee put his hands on the small of his back and stretched, trying to shake some of the tension out of his aching spine. He had never been so tired, feeling every one of his fifty-eight years sitting on his shoulders like bars of lead.

  For days, days that had stretched into a unending nightmare of pain and fatigue, he had struggled to stay awake, to stay erect in the saddle, as they executed a fighting retreat from the trenches and earthworks of Petersburg westward along the Appomattox River toward Lynchburg, Grant’s Army of the James, which outnumbered his own forces four to one, snapping at their heels every step of the way. Thousands of his men had died along the way, and Lee almost envied the fallen—at least they could stop. But Lee couldn’t stop. He knew that all eyes were on him, that it was up to him to put on a show of being indefatigable and imperturbable, tall in the saddle, regal, calm, and totally in command. His example and the pride it inspired, and the love and respect the men felt for him, was all that was keeping his ragged and starving army going. No matter how exhausted he was, no matter how bleak and defeated were his inner thoughts, no matter how hopeless he knew his position to be, no matter how much his chest ached (as it had been aching increasingly for days), he couldn’t let it show.

  They had stopped for the night in the woods near Appomattox Court House, too tired to even pitch tents. There had been almost nothing to eat, even for the staff officers. Now his staff huddled close to him in the darkness, as if they depended on him for light and warmth as much or more than the low-burning bivouac fire, ragged, worn-out men in tattered uniforms, sprawled on blankets spread on the grass or sitting on saddles thrown over tree-stumps, without even chairs or camp-stools anymore. Lee could see their eyes, gleaming wetly in the firelight, as well as feel them. Every eye was on him still.