Gap [1] The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict (14 page)

And Morn would go free, of course. Straight to Nick Succorso.

The trap was perfect and horrible. Stark panic rushed through Angus: every instinct he had gibbered for action. Without pausing to think—without really realizing what he did—he strapped himself into his g-seat and began to warm up
Bright Beauty’s
engines.

Get away: escape: run. He was a coward; his instincts were compulsory. Undock and get out of here before Security had time to make a formal arrest. They were going to kill him,
kill
him. Get away
now.

But he’d been forbidden to leave. If he tried to pull away without permission, Com-Mine would fire on him. With a holed thruster tube, he would never be able to evade the station’s guns.

Bright Beauty
would be destroyed.

Morn would be killed.

Get away!
You fool, you shithead,
go
, GO!

Morn would be killed.

Dismay twisted a cry out of him. He was willing to risk
Bright Beauty.
He’d done it before, when he had to. But Morn—

The last time he hit her, blood welled in her cheek; blood trickled from the cuts of her teeth inside her mouth. Her beauty was marked red. Thinking about her made his guts heave with terror and desire. She was his, his, his, and if he tried to save himself, she would die.

So what? he demanded of his lonely, forsaken life. She’s a bitch, and she did this to me so she can go whore with Nick Succorso. Butcher her now, while she’s asleep. She deserves it.

That was what he wanted. Every instinct in him wailed for it. Kill her and
go!
Better to get blasted fighting for your life than sit here and let them give you the death penalty while Nick motherfucking Succorso watches and laughs!

Unfortunately, his body refused to do it.

Shaking wildly, scarcely controllable, his hands discontinued the warm-up, shut
Bright Beauty
down again. For a long time he sat where he was with his palms clamped over his eyes while instinct and terror fired back and forth inside his head like meteors across the dark.

Then, still shaking, he reached out and erased the parallel zone-implant control from his command computer.

He verified that his sickbay log contained nothing incriminating.

He made a few slight adjustments to his datacore, elisions which were theoretically impossible as well as actively illegal, but which he was able to accomplish because his techniques were so subtle.

After that, he woke up Morn Hyland.

She didn’t meet his eyes. That wasn’t unusual, not in itself; but this time he knew what it meant, oh, he knew what it meant. Briefly she struggled to shake off the effects of sleep.

However, she didn’t get out of bed.

With an effort, her mouth produced a crooked smile. If she noticed his stretched and haggard expression, she gave no sign. Instead, she extended her arms toward him as if she’d been dreaming about him.

As if she wanted, actually wanted, to make love to him, despite his power over her; despite the things he’d done to her.

Involuntarily he recoiled. Behind her smile, her face was studiously empty; blank and beautiful; determined to give nothing away. She couldn’t know what was going on, of course; not for sure: she could only guess. She had little to pin her hopes on except one short note and the few sentences he and Nick had exchanged in the doorway of Mallorys. And yet she fought for those hopes.

She was trying to distract him, in case he hadn’t yet realized what she’d done.

When he saw that, something inside him broke.

For a moment, he hated her. Somewhere, she’d found the one thing he’d always lacked, the courage to meet her doom head-on, to do what she could to control it. And it was Nick she wanted, Nick she did it for; not Angus. Now, however, it made no difference whether he hated her or not; whether he feared her or loved her. He was no longer in command of his own actions. What he said and did came to him like impulses from outside, abject and unpremeditated.

If he tried to get away, he would be killed.

If he didn’t try to get away, he would be killed.

“Get up,” he rasped without anger or conviction. “We’re going to Mallorys.”

Somehow she managed to keep her features expressionless; she accepted his rejection and rose from the bed without so much as a flicker of surprise or fright. Watching her, he felt unexpectedly outclassed, as if the things he had done to her had made her greater than he was.

It might be too late. Station Security might already be on the way to arrest him. The control to her zone implant felt like a grenade in his pocket, primed to destroy him. Nevertheless he went ahead without hurrying.

After she’d used the head, they left
Bright Beauty
for the last time and went to DelSec.

CHAPTER

17

M
allorys was crowded. The time was Station evening; rats and cynics of every description had come out of the bulkheads to cadge drinks or sell secrets, share loneliness or court oblivion. Nevertheless Angus Thermopyle didn’t have any trouble finding a table. His reputation was bad enough already: nobody wanted to be near him, not while he was suspected of looting a supply ship. If any shooting started, Mallorys’ patrons didn’t want to get caught in the cross fire.

Most of the crowd probably desired nothing more complex than companionship or peace; or maybe satisfaction for their guesses about what was going on. That night was a bad one for quiet, however.

Angus and Morn looked much the same as usual, as unsuited to each other as ever. Still they emitted an expectant tension which affected everyone around them, making calm men uneasy and uneasy men nervous. Angus glowered violence at anybody who crossed his gaze; blood from his swollen lip marked his chin. Pale, blank, and unsure, Morn held herself like a coiled spring, restrained only by willpower and circumstance from doing something wild.

The mood in Mallorys thickened steadily around them.

Then Nick Succorso and some of his people came in.

He was in a cheerful humor, laughing and joking, but no one was reassured. The way he ignored Angus and Morn didn’t make anybody relax: the scars under his eyes were too dark. Something was going to happen.

The people who didn’t wish to know what that was left as inconspicuously as possible. Everyone else got ready for sudden movements.

When Security broke into the bar, some of the observers were surprised. The ones who’d probed a bit below the surface and thought they knew what was going on weren’t.

Tables and chairs clattered back hastily: people milled around, jeering, cheering, trying to clear the way: a squad of guards drove into the confusion as fast as they could, determined to get their hands on Angus before he escaped.

So quickly that most people didn’t see her do it, Morn Hyland left him and started through the crowd in Nick’s direction.

But Angus was braced for her flight. He had good reflexes, and fear made him fast. This was the reason he’d brought her to Mallorys, the moment on which his life depended. He was a coward; and like a coward, he wanted to go on living even though his heart was broken. He hardly saw Security: he took note of the confusion around him only as a screen for his own actions.

Quick as a snake, he caught Morn by the wrist.

She struggled as well as she could. He was too strong. While she thrashed against his grip, she looked at him: the loathing and fright in her face were as loud as screams. Or maybe what she felt was incomprehension; maybe she thought he’d decided on a particularly brutal form of suicide. She’d been hoping, pleading, aching for an escape with every gram of her spirit—and now he’d caught her.

If he didn’t release her—

He wanted to say something, but there were no words for it. And no time. His doom gathered against him. Security charged in from the door: Nick and his crew thrust forward from the other side, wedging a path for Morn through the crowd.

Holding her by the wrist, he slipped the control to her zone implant into her hand.

“I accept. The deal you offered. I’ll cover you.

“Remember,” he hissed as if he were pleading with her,
begging
her, “I could have killed you. I could have killed you anytime.”

Then he let her go.

For a second, her eyes flared, and she stared at him.

During that moment, she seemed to understand him. Recognition passed between them. He had brought her here for this. To let her go. To give her what she wanted. And to ask her to spare his life.

Inside himself, he was stark naked with terror.

She had only a second to make her choice. Then Nick’s people reached her, snatched her away.

But by that time she’d already shoved the zone-implant control like a small piece of immortality into one of her pockets, where no one could see it and take it to use against Angus Thermopyle.

Or against Morn herself.

After that, she was gone.

CHAPTER

18

S
o the fair maiden was rescued. The swashbuckling pirate bore her away with all her beauty, and her tormentor was left to pay the price of his crimes.

Angus was convicted of nothing more than stealing Station supplies. The evidence of
Bright Beauty’s
datacore was curiously imprecise. And the techs who examined
Starmaster
couldn’t find any indication that the UMCP ship did anything except blow herself up; whether by sabotage or self-destruct was unclear. Without Morn’s testimony, nothing else could be proved against Angus Thermopyle. Nevertheless that was enough to put him in lockup for the rest of his life.

Morn must have had an easier time with Nick than with Angus. Almost certainly he would have treated her better than Angus did—especially if he knew nothing, or could never be sure, about the zone implant. With the control in her own hands, she was effectively as free as if the implant had been removed. A timer and a little common sense made it possible for her to take care of her own gap-sickness.

The fact that he’d rescued her so cleverly only enhanced Nick Succorso’s reputation. The way he’d framed Angus was too perfect to be criticized. After all, the Station recovered its supplies. And the arrival of the real supply ship on schedule revealed just how clever Nick had been.

The real story however, was that Angus never complained he’d been framed. He never mentioned there was a traitor in Security; he made no effort to defend himself. For the most part, he betrayed no reaction at all to his doom. When he heard
Bright Beauty
was going to be dismantled, he howled as if he were in agony; but he let Morn and Nick go. He had that much courage, anyway.

Despite his horror of imprisonment, he was condemned to stay in lockup until he rotted.

This is the end of
The Real Story.
The story continues in
The Gap into Vision:
Forbidden Knowledge.

AFTERWORD

Most writers hate the question, “Where do you get your ideas?”

This is because the answer tends to be at once ineffably mysterious and excruciatingly mundane. We are all in love with the magic of the imagination—otherwise we wouldn’t be able to survive as creative artists—but none of us can explain how it works. In a sense, writers don’t get ideas: ideas get writers. They happen to us. If we don’t submit to their power, we lose them; so by trying to control or censor them we can make the negative choice of encouraging them to leave us alone. But we can never
force
ourselves to be truly creative. The best we can do is to teach ourselves receptiveness—and trust that ideas will come.

However, once the magic of the imagination has been accepted as given, any specific answer to the question often becomes almost violently anti-creative: for instance, “Well, I got that particular idea off a can of Lysol disinfectant in the men’s room at Circle K.” (I’m not making this up. One of the strongest scenes in
The Power that Preserves
was triggered in my head by a can of Lysol disinfectant in a men’s room.) Such an answer may be perfectly accurate, but who wants to say it out loud? In these cases, the concrete source of the idea seems to demean its underlying imaginative magic. Hence the apparently arrogant or dismissive answers which writers have been giving ever since readers began asking the question.

But occasionally one or another of us is able to offer a practical answer without experiencing too much dissonance between what we say and how we feel about what we’re saying. This
Afterword
is a case in point. I can discuss the sources and development for the sequence of four novels which follows directly after
The Real Story
while suffering no more severe distress than a blind astonishment that my mind works so
slowly.

For some reason, a fair number of my best stories arise, not from one idea, but from two. In these cases, one idea comes first; it excites me enough to stay with me; yet despite its apparent (to me) potential, it stubbornly refuses to grow. Rather than expanding to take on character, event, and context, it simply sits in my head—often for many years—saying over and over again,
“Look
at me, you idiot. If you just
looked
at me, you would know what to do with me.” Well, I
do
look; but I can’t see what I need—until the first idea is intersected by the second. And then: Step back, boys and girls. She’s a gusher.

I’ve heard Brian Aldiss talk about the same phenomenon. For him, a novel often requires two ideas. He describes them as a combination of “the familiar” and “the exotic.” He begins with “the familiar”—usually something germane to his personal life, either thematically or experientially—but he can’t write about it until “the familiar”
is
impacted by “the exotic.” In his case, “the exotic” is usually a science fictional setting in which “the familiar” can play itself out: “the exotic” provides him with a stage on which he can dramatize “the familiar.” Rather like a binary poison—or a magic potion—two inert elements combine to produce something of frightening potency.

The same dynamic works in reverse for me. I start with “the exotic” (remember that these are Aldiss’s terms, not mine), but that idea declines to turn into a story until it is catalysed by “the familiar.”

For example:
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
is squarely—and solely—founded on two ideas: unbelief and leprosy. The notion of writing a fantasy about an “unbeliever,” a man who rejects the whole concept of fantasy, first came to me near the end of 1969. But the germ was dormant: no matter how I labored over it, I couldn’t make it grow. Until I realized, in May of 1972, that my “unbeliever” should be a leper. As soon as those two ideas came together, my brain took fire. I spent the next three months feverishly taking notes, drawing maps, envisioning characters; studying the implications of unbelief and leprosy. Then I began writing.

This dynamic reverses Aldiss’s because leprosy represented “the familiar” rather than “the exotic.” I’d never written fantasy before: The whole concept of writing a fantasy about an “unbeliever” was exotic. However, thanks to the fact that my father was an orthopedic surgeon in India for twenty-one years, I was accustomed to leprosy on a variety of levels.

In the case of the four novels which ensue from
The Real Story
, the two ideas might be labelled “Angus Thermopyle” and “Richard Wagner.”

Contrary to what one might expect, Angus represents “the familiar.”

I wrote the first draft of
The Real Story
in the summer of 1985. At the time, I thought I was simply writing a novella: The idea came to me, so I worked on it at my earliest opportunity.

(Where did
that
idea come from? Well, this is a little embarrassing. It grew entirely out of the names of the characters. Driving through Albuquerque one day, I suddenly found myself chanting like a mantra, “Angus Thermopyle. Angus Thermopyle.” I couldn’t begin to guess why that name had appeared; but I could feel its importance, so I kept on chanting it. For weeks. And then, as if accidentally, another name manifested itself: Morn Hyland. So I chanted, “Angus Thermopyle,” and, “Morn Hyland”—until they were joined by Nick Succorso. By this time, I liked the names so much that I began consciously trying to pull together a story good enough for them.)

My original intentions were explicitly archetypal. What I had in mind was an aesthetically perfect variation on
the
basic three-sided story: the story in which a Victim (Morn), a Villain (Angus), and a Rescuer (Nick) all change roles. (This, incidentally, is the essential difference between melodrama and drama. Melodrama presents a Victim, a Villain, and a Rescuer. Drama offers the same characters and then studies the process by which they change roles.) Victimized by Angus, Morn is rescued by Nick—but that, of course, is not the
real
story. The
real
story has to do with the way in which Nick becomes Angus’s victimizer and Morn becomes Angus’s rescuer.

When I’d finished the first draft of the novella, however, I found myself in a state of acute distress, for at least three reasons—only two of which were conscious. First, I realized immediately that what I’d written was by no means “aesthetically perfect.” My work had fallen below my original intentions rather farther than usual. I’d planned a balanced triangle, with equal attention paid to each character and equal emphasis placed on each shifting role. But in practice I was unable to produce that balance.

Put simply, the problem was that Angus had taken over the story. Vital and malign, he dominated the narrative, reducing Morn to a shadow—and Nick to a cypher. In some ways, this made sense: as long as the action was viewed from Angus’s point of view, Morn’s motivations were unknowable, and Nick’s were unimportant. But the result was that I’d written an intensive study of Angus’s movement from Villain to Victim; but I’d only sketched in Morn’s shift from Victim to Rescuer; and I hadn’t paid any attention at all to Nick’s change from Rescuer to Villain.

(If I weren’t so damn
slow
, this would have given me a powerful clue to the third, unconscious reason for my distress.)

I was quite disappointed in myself.

Yet I was also aware of another reason for my distress. Unlike any other character I’d ever created, Angus made me feel
exposed.
It was as if in imagining him I’d tapped directly into the dark side of my own nature; as if I’d found him inside myself instead of inventing him. (In Aldiss’s terms, he was “the familiar.”) And that in turn shamed me. I felt irrationally sure that anyone who read
The Real Story
would see the “real” me, recognize the truth, and be disgusted.

Because I was ashamed of the novella, both artistically and personally, I decided not to publish it. At the time, I believed that I would never publish it.

Well, time works wonders. Among other things, it gives us the chance to think. And after I’d thought for a while, I began trying to do something about my shame.

There was nothing to be done about my personal shame, of course. I could only dismiss it. Time and thought brought me to the realization that I had no reason to feel ashamed. Suppose for a moment that my worst fears were realistic: that I am in fact an Angus Thermopyle thinly disgused by niceness; that this fact is transparent in
The Real Story;
and that all right-thinking readers will be disgusted by the results. So what? None of that impinges on the integrity of
The Real Story
itself. If I drew on some buried part of myself to create Angus, so much the better: at least I’m writing what I know. In any case, the crucial question for any artist is not: What are people going to think of me? It is: Have I given my best to my work? Nothing else matters.

Where
The Real Story
was concerned, I had to answer, “Yes and no.” Yes, I was doing exactly what I’m supposed to do when I wrote the novella: I accepted the idea of “Angus” for the simple and sufficient reason that it came to me; I followed the idea where it chose to lead me, rather than trying to make it serve my own purposes. And no, I hadn’t given my best to the work: I hadn’t done everything in my power to raise the aesthetic level of the novella as high as possible.

So I spent the next two years, off and on, rewriting
The Real Story.
Indeed, I put it through my word processor at least six different times, developing and focusing Morn, enhancing Nick. And eventually I came to the conclusion that I was never going to be able to make it “aesthetically perfect.” Judged by the standard of my original intentions, this book would always be a failure. For me as a writer, the effort of dealing with Angus was so urgent and compulsory that I couldn’t treat Morn and Nick as his equals. What we might call the spatial constraints of the narrative didn’t leave enough room for them.

(There it was again: a clue to the third, unconscious reason for my distress. But I still didn’t recognize the truth.)

Fortunately, I was saved from the belief that
The Real Story
was doomed to artistic failure by what Dr. Who refers to as “lateral thinking.” If you have an unscalable cliff in front of you and an unbeatable monster behind you, go sideways. Obedient to that dictum, I began to ask myself, not, “How did I go wrong within the novella?” but, “Where did I go wrong in my original intentions?”

Where, indeed? Well, where else?
The Real Story
was based on only one idea—and a
fair number of my best stories arise, not from one idea, but from two.
My problems with the book resulted from the need for a second idea.

However, I’ve told
this
story backward.
The Real
Story
was actually the second idea, not the first. When I combined it with another idea which had already been in my head—alive, exciting, and totally static—for twenty years, I had a gusher.

The real story, however, was that Angus never complained he’d been framed. He never mentioned there was a traitor in Security; he made no effort to defend himself. For the most part, he betrayed no reaction at all to his doom. When he heard
Bright Beauty
was going to be dismantled, he howled as if he were in agony; but he let Morn and Nick go. He had that much courage, anyway.

Despite his horror of imprisonment, he was condemned to stay in lockup until he rotted.

So ends
The Real Story.
There’s no indication here, certainly, that events will take four more books to run their course—or that the course they run will be epic in the Wagnerian sense; as large-scaled, intense, and ambitious as anything in
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
That’s because the original source for this sequence of novels was a recording of Richard Wagner’s
Götterdammerung (The Twilight of the Gods);
the true genesis began in the fall of 1966.

That recording, which I purchased in September of 1966, wasn’t my first experience with Wagner; but it was my first taste of Wagner’s four-part opera cycle,
Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)
, and it inspired me to purchase as quickly as my finances permitted (I spent three years saving pennies) recordings of the other three parts of
The Ring: Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie)
, and
Siegfried
(no translation necessary). In a relatively short time, I knew that I’d discovered my musical alter-ego—a kind of transcendental
Doppelgänger.
Wagner’s music inspired me. (Indeed, some of the literary techniques of
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
were extrapolated from the way Wagner used musical ideas.) And the story of
The Ring
—especially in the twin climaxes of
The Valkyrie
and
The Twilight of the Gods
—moved me as deeply as any story I’ve ever encountered.

Soon after I fell in love with
The Ring
, I conceived the ambition of writing a sequence of novels based on Wagner’s epic.