Spider Robinson - By Any Other Name

327 Pages·2016·0.94 MB·English

by  Robinson Spider

By Any Other Name

Spider Robinson Fout! Onbekende schakeloptie-instructie.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by Spider Robinson
All stories copyright by Spider Robinson: Melancholy Elephants © 1984, Half
An Oaf © 1976, Antinomy © 1980, Satan’s Children © 1979, Apogee © 1980,
No Renewal © 1980, Tin Ear ©, 1980, In the Olden Days © 1984, Silly
Weapons © 1980, Nobody Likes to Be Lonely © 1980, “If This Goes On—” ©
1991, True Minds © 1984, Common Sense © 1985, Chronic Offender © 1984,
High Infidelity © 1984, Rubber Soul © 1984, The Crazy Years was originally
published in parts in the Toronto Globe and Mail © 1996–2000, By Any Other
Name © 1976.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof
in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 0-671-31974-4
Cover art by Richard Martin Interior art by Rocky Coffin
First printing, February 2001

Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY
10020
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH Printed in the United States of
America
For my friends Ted and Diana Powell
—and for Ben Bova, without whom all this would not have been necessary …

BAEN BOOKS by Spider Robinson

By Any Other Name
The Star Dancers (with Jeanne Robinson)
Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson) (forthcoming)
Deathkiller
Lifehouse
User Friendly
Telempath (forthcoming)
FOREWORD

Perhaps a story collection should be allowed to speak for itself.
That was my original intention; I submitted this book to Toni Weisskopf
without a foreword. The basic plan was simple: to gather all the short stories I’ve
written that aren’t already collected in User Friendly (Baen 1998), with a little
bit of nonfiction for lagniappe. So the assembly process was not onerous.
Basically I pulled manuscripts from the trunk, glanced at their titles, nodded
nostalgically, and added them to the pile. Deciding their order was a no-brainer:
begin and end with a Hugo-winner, and in between those, alternate humorous
and serious stories. Writing a foreword seemed superfluous.
Then a few days ago the galley proofs arrived, and I sat down and read them
through, and here I am writing a foreword after all.
I have not written short fiction for some time now. Novels pay so much better
that, without consciously planning to, I just stopped getting short story ideas a
few years back. So I hadn’t read any of those stories particularly recently. Some
I had not read in twenty years or more. As I rediscovered them now, unexpected
patterns emerged.
I’d begun the galleys firmly resolved to do nothing but correct typos. I was
determined to make no retroactive improvements to these stories—to let them
stand as they first came into the world, flaws and all. But I found I kept wanting
to push dates forward. I was rather startled to realize how many of these stories
are now chronologically outdated. Written, in some cases, in the early 1970s,
they tended to be set in the “distant future” of twenty or thirty years later. I’m
most comfortable in that range: the further ahead into the future I speculate, the
less confident I am about my own guesses—and if I’m dubious, how am I to
convince a reader? But history has begun to overtake me.
I was not dismayed—or even surprised—at how often my guesses about the
future had turned out to be dead wrong. I’ve never claimed or wished to be a
prophet; I write about possible futures, and strive for plausible ones.
But I was somewhat surprised at just how my speculations were wrong: over
and over, it seems, I was too optimistic. I don’t mean that all the stories you’re
about to read are upbeat, by any means. But most of the futures I imagined were,
in retrospect, at least a little better than the one we actually got. At least more
technologically advanced.
I find I’m proud of that.
I only pray I can manage to sustain that attitude of positive expectation, that
tendency toward benign delusion, through the next quarter-century of tumult and
shenanigans. And infect as many other people with it as possible.
Because unconscious expectations are so important. We need all the Placebo
we can get. It’s been shown again and again: if you introduce a new teacher to a
perfectly average class of kids, and tell him they’re the Advanced group, by the
end of the year they will be. This real year 2000 may not be quite as advanced as
some of the ones I envisioned for entertainment purposes … but it is, I think, a
far nicer one than most average citizens living in the 1970s or 1980s would have
believed possible. (Just for a start: no Cold War.) Optimistic science fiction may
just have had something to do with that. As my friend Stephen Gaskin once said,
“What you put your attention on prospers.”
Case in point: the title story of this book.
It was, if memory serves, the third story I ever tried to write for money. I’d
sent my first one to the most popular magazine in the field, Analog—talk about
irrational optimism—and miraculously, it sold. But the second, set in the same
tavern, had not sold there … or anywhere else. Then from somewhere came “By
Any Other Name,” and I just knew this one was going to sell. Perhaps it’s weird
to call it an optimistic story, since it posits the total collapse of technological
civilization—but it also suggests that humanity will ultimately survive just about
any collapse. In any event, it was a much more complex and ambitious story
than anything I’d ever tried before, and I certainly sent it off with high hopes.
It was bounced by every market in science fiction.
More than a dozen rejections, beginning with Analog and ending underneath
the bottom of the barrel. The last editor on the list lost the damn thing for several
months … then rejected it … then lost it again. (I was so green, the only other
copy in existence was the handwritten first draft.)
By the time I finally got it back, I had written several other stories, and not
one of them had sold, either. I suspect the only reason I even took the manuscript
out of the envelope was so it would burn better in the fireplace. But my own
opening sentence caught me. I ended up reading the damn thing all the way
through one more time—
—and by God, I still liked it. All thirteen of those editors, I decided on the
spot, were wrong.
So I rejected the rejections. I mailed the story, unchanged, to Ben Bova at
Analog a second time. It was a perfect act of irrational optimism, of benign
delusion.
You guessed it: he bought it this time.
But it wasn’t just a sale. “By Any Other Name” was my first Analog cover
story. (Jack Gaughan’s splendid painting for that cover hangs in my home today;
God rest his generous soul.) It won my first AnLab, the monthly Analog reader’s
poll. A year later it won me my first Hugo Award from readers worldwide. It
was a career-maker. It became the nucleus of my first novel, Telempath. Most
important of all, it was one of a pair of stories which persuaded a young woman
named Jeanne, in spite of her better judgment, to let me court her …
So maybe that’s one reason why I’m optimistic by policy. It seems to be
working for me.
(Epilogue I can’t resist: over a decade later, I got up the nerve to ask Ben if he
realized he’d rejected a Hugo-winning story the first time he saw it. Oh sure, he
said, I had to—no choice. How come? I asked.
(He gave me a pitying look. “Spider, that was an election year—remember?
And then you expect me to buy a story where the alien villains are basically
giant killer farts, named ‘Musky’?” He shook his head emphatically. “Nixon
that.”)

In that spirit of reckless optimism, I’ve adulterated this collection of short
fiction with a pinch of nonfiction.
One evening in 1996 Jeanne and I were strolling through town with our friend
Shannon Rupp, then the dance critic for Vancouver’s alternative weekly The
Georgia Straight, and as is my custom, I was shooting my mouth off. An airliner
had just fallen into the sea, and all the media believed it had either been terrorist
sabotage, or just possibly a covered-up accidental missile launch from a U.S.
Navy destroyer. I was pontificating on why both theories had to be hogwash …
and Shannon interrupted. “Write that all down,” she said. And do what with it, I
asked. “Send it to The Globe and Mail,” she said. “I’ll bet they buy it.”
Well, that was just silly. The Globe and Mail was Canada’s national
newspaper, its journal of record, the Grey Lady of the North. What would they
want with the unsolicited opinions of an American-born science fiction writer
who lived about as far from Toronto as a Canadian resident can get, and whose
most recent journalistic credentials— lame ones—were almost thirty years old?
But Shannon finally bullied me into trying it. And Warren Clements bought
the piece, and asked for more, and that’s how I became an Op-Ed columnist—
like nearly everything else I’ve accomplished in my life so far: by accident.
I’ve provided herein some samples of the column that ran in The Globe and
Mail every three weeks from 1996– 99 under the running title, “The Crazy
Years.” If you don’t care for fact—or at least, for opinions about facts—with
your fiction, by all means skip over them. If they do catch your interest, as of
this writing I’m still producing a column a month for The Globe and Mail, and
two columns a month for David Gerrold and Ben Bova’s new cybersite Galaxy
Online (www.galaxyonline.com).

And now on to the fiction. After all this talk of optimism, naturally the first
story in line, which won the 1983 Hugo for Short Story, is one of the gloomier
prognostications I’ve ever made. Oh well. The year “Melancholy
Elephants” is set in has not arrived yet—maybe this time the real future will turn
out brighter than the one I dreamed.
One can hope …
—British Columbia
18 September, 2000
Melancholy
Elephants

This story is dedicated to
Virginia Heinlein

She sat zazen, concentrating on not concentrating, until it was time to prepare
for the appointment. Sitting seemed to produce the usual serenity, put everything
in perspective. Her hand did not tremble as she applied her make-up; tranquil
features looked back at her from the mirror. She was mildly surprised, in fact, at
just how calm she was, until she got out of the hotel elevator at the garage level
and the mugger made his play. She killed him instead of disabling him. Which
was obviously not a measured, balanced action—the official fuss and paperwork
could make her late. Annoyed at herself, she stuffed the corpse under a shiny
new Westinghouse roadable whose owner she knew to be in Luna, and
continued on to her own car. This would have to be squared later, and it would
cost. No help for it—she fought to regain at least the semblance of tranquility as
her car emerged from the garage and turned north.
Nothing must interfere with this meeting, or with her role in it.
Dozens of man-years and God knows how many dollars, she thought,
funnelling down to perhaps a half hour of conversation. All the effort, all the
hope. Insignificant on the scale of the Great Wheel, of course … but when you
balance it all on a half hour of talk, it’s like balancing a stereo cartridge on a
needlepoint: It only takes a gram or so of weight to wear out a piece of diamond.
I must be harder than diamond.
Rather than clear a window and watch Washington, D.C. roll by beneath her
car, she turned on the television. She absorbed and integrated the news, on the
chance that there might be some late-breaking item she could turn to her
advantage in the conversation to come; none developed. Shortly the car
addressed her: “Grounding, ma’am. I.D. eyeball request.” When the car landed
she cleared and then opened her window, presented her pass and I.D. to a Marine
in dress blues, and was cleared at once. At the Marine’s direction she re-opaqued
the window and surrendered control of her car to the house computer, and when
the car parked itself and powered down she got out without haste. A man she
knew was waiting to meet her, smiling.
“Dorothy, it’s good to see you again.”
“Hello, Phillip. Good of you to meet me.”
“You look lovely this evening.”
“You’re too kind.”
She did not chafe at the meaningless pleasantries. She needed Phil’s support,
or she might. But she did reflect on how many, many sentences have been worn
smooth with use, rendered meaningless by centuries of repetition. It was by no
means a new thought.
“If you’ll come with me, he’ll see you at once.”
“Thank you, Phillip.” She wanted to ask what the old man’s mood was, but
knew it would put Phil in an impossible position.
“I rather think your luck is good; the old man seems to be in excellent spirits
tonight.”
She smiled her thanks, and decided that if and when Phil got around to
making his pass she would accept him.
The corridors through which he led her then were broad and high and long;
the building dated back to a time of cheap power. Even in Washington, few
others would have dared to live in such an energy-wasteful environment. The
extremely spare decor reinforced the impression created by the place’s
dimensions: bare space from carpet to ceiling, broken approximately every forty
meters by some exquisitely simple object d’art of at least a megabuck’s value,
appropriately displayed. An unadorned, perfect, white porcelain bowl, over a
thousand years old, on a rough cherrywood pedestal. An arresting color
photograph of a snow-covered country road, silk-screened onto stretched silver
foil; the time of day changed as one walked past it. A crystal globe, a meter in
diameter, within which danced a hologram of the immortal Shara Drummond;
since she had ceased performing before the advent of holo technology, this had
to be an expensive computer reconstruction. A small sealed glassite chamber
containing the first vacuum— sculpture ever made, Nakagawa’s legendary
Starstone. A visitor in no hurry could study an object at leisure, then walk quite a
distance in undistracted contemplation before encountering another. A visitor in
a hurry, like Dorothy, would not quite encounter peripherally astonishing stimuli
often enough to get the trick of filtering them out. Each tugged at her attention,
intruded on her thoughts; they were distracting both intrinsically and as a
reminder of the measure of their owner’s wealth. To approach this man in his
own home, whether at leisure or in haste, was to be humbled. She knew the
effect was intentional, and could not transcend it; this irritated her, which
irritated her. She struggled for detachment.
At the end of the seemingly endless corridors was an elevator. Phillip handed
her into it, punched a floor button, without giving her a chance to see which one,
and stepped back into the doorway. “Good luck, Dorothy.”
“Thank you, Phillip. Any topics to be sure and avoid?”
“Well … don’t bring up hemorrhoids.”
“I didn’t know one could.”
He smiled. “Are we still on for lunch Thursday?”
“Unless you’d rather make it dinner.”
One eyebrow lifted. “And breakfast?”
She appeared to consider it. “Brunch,” she decided. He half-bowed and
stepped back.
The elevator door closed and she forgot Phillip’s existence.
Sentient beings are innumerable; I vow to save them all. The deluding
passions are limitless; I vow to extinguish them all. The truth is limitless; I—
The elevator door opened again, truncating the Vow of the Bodhisattva. She
had not felt the elevator stop—yet she knew that she must have descended at
least a hundred meters. She left the elevator.
The room was larger than she had expected; nonetheless the big powered chair
dominated it easily. The chair also seemed to dominate—at least visually—its
occupant. A misleading impression, as he dominated all this massive home,
everything in it and, to a great degree, the country in which it stood. But he did
not look like much.
A scent symphony was in progress, the cinnamon passage of Bulachevski’s
“Childhood.” It happened to be one of her personal favorites, and this
encouraged her.
“Hello, Senator.”
“Hello, Mrs. Martin. Welcome to my home. Forgive me for not rising.”
“Of course. It was most gracious of you to receive me.”
“It is my pleasure and privilege. A man my age appreciates a chance to spend
time with a woman as beautiful and intelligent as yourself.”
“Senator, how soon do we start talking to each other?”
He raised that part of his face which had once held an eyebrow.
“We haven’t said anything yet that is true. You do not stand because you
cannot. Your gracious reception cost me three carefully hoarded favors and a
good deal of folding cash. More than the going rate; you are seeing me
reluctantly. You have at least eight mistresses that I know of, each of whom
makes me look like a dull matron. I concealed a warm corpse on the way here
because I dared not be late; my time is short and my business urgent. Can we
begin?”
She held her breath and prayed silently. Everything she had been able to learn
about the Senator told her that this was the correct way to approach him. But was
it?
The mummy-like face fissured in a broad grin. “Right away. Mrs. Martin, I