“No, stop right there!” she ordered, suddenly indignant. “Are you trying to say that we Judaeans aren’t interested in science? That I’m not? Or my Uncle Sam? And we’re certainly Judaeans.”
“But you’re not
Chrestian
Judaeans, sweet. There’s a big difference. Why? Because I say there is, Rachel, and I’m the one writing the story. So, let’s see—” I paused for thought “—all right, let’s say the Chrestians go through a long period of intellectual stagnation, and then—” I paused, not because I didn’t know what was coming next, but to build the effect. “And then along come the Olympians!”
She gazed at me blankly. “Yes?” she asked, encouraging but vague.
“Don’t you see it? And then this Chrestian-Judaean world, drowsing along in the middle of a pre-scientific dark age, no aircraft, no electronic broadcast, not even a printing press or a hovermachine—and it’s suddenly thrown into contact with a super-technological civilization from outer space!” She was wrinkling her forehead at me, forgetting to eat, trying to understand what I was driving at. “It’s terrible culture shock,” I explained. “And not just for the people on Earth. Maybe the Olympians come to look us over, and they see that we’re technologically backward and divided into warring nations
and all that … and what do they do? Why, they turn right around and leave us! and … and that’s the end of the book!”
She pursed her lips. “But maybe that’s what they’re doing now,” she said cautiously.
“But not for that reason, certainly. See, this isn’t our world I’m talking about. It’s a
what if
world.”
“It sounds a little far-fetched,” she said.
I said happily, “That’s where my skills come in. You don’t understand sci-rom, sweetheart. It’s the sci-rom writer’s job to push an idea as far as it will go—to the absolute limit of credibility—to the point where if he took just one step more the whole thing would collapse into absurdity. Trust me, Rachel. I’ll make them believe it.”
She was still pursing her pretty lips, but this time I didn’t wait for her to speak. I seized the bird of opportunity on the wing. I leaned toward her and kissed those lips, as I had been wanting to do for some time. Then I said, “I’ve got to get to a scribe, I want to get all this down before I forget it. I’ll be back when I can be, and—And until then—well, here.”
And I kissed her again, gently, firmly, and long; and it was quite clear early in the process that she was kissing me back.
Being next to a rental barracks had its advantages. I found a scribe to rent at a decent price, and the rental manager even let me borrow one of their conference rooms that night to dictate in. By daybreak I had the first two chapters and an outline of
Sidewise to a Chrestian World
down.
Once I get that far in a book, the rest is just work. The general idea is set, the characters have announced themselves to me, it’s just a matter of closing my eyes for a moment to see what’s going to be happening and then opening them to dictate to the scribe. In this case, the scribes, plural, because the first one wore out in a few more hours and I had to employ a second, and then a third.
I didn’t sleep at all until it was all down. I think it was fifty-two straight hours, the longest I’d worked in one stretch in years. When it was all done I left it to be fair-copied. The rental agent agreed to get it down to the shipping offices by the harbor and dispatch it by fast air to Marcus in London.
Then at last I stumbled back to Rachel’s house to sleep. I was surprised to find that it was still dark, an hour or more before sunrise.
Basilius let me in, looking startled as he studied my sunken eyes and unshaved face. “Let me sleep until I wake up,” I ordered. There was a journal neatly folded beside my bed, but I didn’t look at it. I lay down, turned over once, and was gone.
When I woke up at least twelve hours had passed. I had Basilius bring me something to eat, and shave me, and when I finally got out to the atrium it was nearly sundown and Rachel was waiting for me. I told her what I’d done, and she told me about the last message from the Olympians. “Last?” I objected. “How can you be sure it’s the last?”
“Because they said so,” she told me sadly. “They said they were breaking off communications.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking about that. “Poor Sam,” I said, thinking about Flavius Samuelus. And she looked so doleful that I couldn’t help myself, I took her in my arms.
Consolation turned to kissing, and when we had done quite a lot of that she leaned back, smiling at me.
I couldn’t help what I said then, either. It startled me to hear the words come out of my mouth as I said, “Rachel, I wish we could get married.”
She pulled back, looking at me with affection and a little surprised amusement. “Are you proposing to me?”
I was careful of my grammar. “That was a subjunctive, sweet. I said I
wished
we could get married.”
“I understood that. What I want to know is whether you’re asking me to grant your wish.”
“No—well, hells, yes! But what I wish first is that I had the right to ask you. Sci-rom writers don’t have the most solid financial situation, you know. The way you live here—”
“The way I live here,” she said, “is paid for by the estate I inherited from my father. Getting married won’t take it away.”
“But that’s your estate, my darling. I’ve been poor, but I’ve never been a parasite.”
“You won’t be a parasite,” she said softly, and I realized that she was being careful about her grammar, too.
Which took a lot of will-power on my part. “Rachel,” I said, “I should be hearing from my editor anytime now. If this new kind of sci-rom catches on—If it’s as popular as it might be—”
“Yes?” she prompted.
“Why,” I said, “then maybe I can actually ask you. But I don’t know that. Marcus probably has it by now, but I don’t know if he’s read it. And then I won’t know his decision till I hear from him. And now, with all the confusion about the Olympians, that might take weeks—”
“Julie,” she said, putting her finger over my lips, “call him up.”
The circuits were all busy, but I finally got through—and, because it was well after lunch, Marcus was in his office. More than that, he was quite sober. “Julie, you bastard,” he cried, sounding really furious, “where the hells have you been hiding? I ought to have you whipped.”
But he hadn’t said anything about getting the aediles after me. “Did you have a chance to read
Sidewise to a
Chrestian World?
” I asked.
“The what? Oh,
that
thing. Nah. I haven’t even looked at it. I’ll buy it, naturally,” he said, “but what I’m talking about is
An Ass’s Olympiad.
The censors won’t stop it now, you know. In fact, all I want you to do now is make the Olympian a little dumber, a little nastier—you’ve got a biggie here, Julie! I think we can get a broadcast out of it, even. So when can you get back here to fix it up?”
“Why—Well, pretty soon, I guess, only I haven’t checked the hover timetable—”
“Hover, hell! You’re coming back by fast plane—we’ll pick up the tab. And, oh, by the way, we’re doubling your advance. The payment will be in your account this afternoon.”
And ten minutes later, when I unsubjunctively proposed to Rachel, she quickly and unsubjunctively accepted; and the high-speed flight to London takes nine hours, but I was grinning all the way.
To be a freelance writer is to live in a certain kind of ease. Not very easeful financially, maybe, but in a lot of other ways. You don’t have to go to an office every day, you get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing your very own words being read on hovers and trains by total strangers. To be a potentially
bestselling
writer is a whole order of magnitude different. Marcus put me up in an inn right next to the publishing company’s offices and stood over me while I turned my poor imaginary Olympian into the most doltish, feckless, unlikable being the universe had ever seen. The more I made the Olympian contemptibly comic, the more Marcus loved it. So did everyone else in the office; so did their affiliates in Kiev and Manahattan and Kalkut and half a dozen other cities all around the world, and he informed me proudly that they were publishing my book simultaneously in all of them. “We’ll be the first ones out, Julie,” he exulted. “It’s going to be a mint! Money? Well, of course you can have more money—you’re in the big time now!” And, yes, the broadcast studios were interested—interested enough to sign a contract even before I’d finished the revisions; and so were the journals, who came for interviews every minute that Marcus would let me off from correcting the proofs and posing for jacket photographs and speaking to their sales staff; and, all in all, I hardly had a chance to breathe until I was back on the high-speed aircraft to Alexandria and my bride.
Sam had agreed to give the bride away, and he met me at the airpad. He looked older and more tired, but resigned. As we drove to Rachel’s house, where the wedding guests were already beginning to gather, I tried to cheer him up. I had plenty of joy myself; I wanted to share it. So I offered, “At least, now you can get back to your real work.”
He looked at me strangely. “Writing sci-roms?” he asked.
“No, of course not! That’s good enough for me, but you’ve still got your extra-solar probe to keep you busy.”
“Julie,” he said sadly, “where have you been lately? Didn’t you see the last Olympian message?”
“Well, sure,” I said, offended. “Everybody did, didn’t they?” And then I thought for a moment, and, actually, it had been Rachel who had told me about it. I’d never actually looked at a journal or a broadcast. “I guess I was pretty busy,” I said lamely.
He looked sadder than ever. “Then maybe you don’t know that they said they weren’t only terminating all their own transmissions to us, they were terminating even our own probes.”
“Oh, no, Sam! I would have heard if they’d stopped transmitting!”
He said patiently, “No, you wouldn’t, because the data they were sending is still on its way to us. We’ve still got a few years coming in. But that’s it. We’re out of interstellar space, Julie. They don’t want us there.”
He broke off, peering out the window. “And that’s the way it is,” he said. “We’re here, though, and you better get inside. Rachel’s going to be tired of sitting under that canopy without you around.”
The greatest thing of all about being a bestselling author, if you like traveling, is that when you fly around the world somebody else pays for the tickets. Marcus’s publicity department
fixed up the whole thing. Personal appearances, bookstore autographings, college lectures, broadcasts, publishers’ meetings, receptions—we were kept busy for a solid month, and it made a hell of a fine honeymoon.
Of course any honeymoon would have been wonderful as long as Rachel was the bride, but without the publishers bankrolling us we might not have visited six of the seven continents on the way. (We didn’t bother with Polaris Australis—nobody there but penguins.) And we took time for ourselves along the way, on beaches in Hindia and the islands of Han, in the wonderful shops of Manahattan and a dozen other cities of the Western Continents—we did it all.
When we got back to Alexandria the contractors had finished the remodeling of Rachel’s villa—which, we had decided, would now be our winter home, though our next priority was going to be to find a place where we could spend the busy part of the year in London. Sam had moved back in and, with Basilius, greeted us formally as we came to the door.
“I thought you’d be in Rome,” I told him, once we were settled and Rachel had gone to inspect what had been done with her baths.
“Not while I’m still trying to understand what went wrong,” he said. “The research is going on right here; this is where we transmitted from.”
I shrugged and took a sip of the Falernian wine Basilius had left for us. I held the goblet up critically: a little cloudy, I thought, and in the vat too long. And then I grinned at myself, because a few weeks earlier I would have been delighted at anything so costly. “But we know what went wrong,” I told him reasonably. “They decided against us.”
“Of course they did,” he said, “but why? I’ve been trying to work out just what messages were being received when they broke off communications.”
“Do you think we said something to offend them?”
He scratched the age spot on his bald head, staring at me, then he sighed. “What would you think, Julius?”
“Well, maybe so,” I admitted. “What messages were they?”
“I’m not sure. It took a lot of digging. The Olympians, you know, acknowledged receipt of each message by repeating the last hundred and forty groups—”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, they did. The last message they acknowledged was a history of Rome. Unfortunately, it was six hundred and fifty thousand words long.”
“So you have to read the whole history?”
“Not just
read
it, Julie; we have to try to figure out what might have been in it that wasn’t in any previous message. We’ve had two or three hundred researchers collating every previous message, and the only thing that was new was some of the social data. We were transmitting census figures—so many of equestrian rank, so many citizens, so many freedmen, so many slaves.” He hesitated, and then said thoughtfully, “Paulus Magnus—I don’t know if you know him, he’s an Algonkan—pointed out that that was the first time we’d ever mentioned slavery.”
I waited for him to go on. “Yes?” I said encouragingly.
He shrugged. “Nothing. Paulus is a slave himself, so naturally he’s got it on his mind a lot.”
“I don’t quite see what that has to do with anything,” I said. “Isn’t there anything else?”
“Oh,” he said, “there are a thousand theories. There was some health data, too, and
some people think the Olympians might have suddenly got worried about some new microorganism killing them off. Or we weren’t polite enough. Or maybe, who knows, there was some sort of power struggle among them, and the side that came out on top just didn’t want any more new races in their community.”
“And we don’t know yet which it was?”
“It’s worse than that, Julie,” he told me somberly. “I don’t think we ever will find out what it was that made them decide they didn’t want to have anything to do with us;” and in that, too, Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus was a very intelligent man. Because we never have.