The Avram Davidson Treasury (79 page)

I have a T-shirt that bears the message
NOT TONIGHT
,
DEAR
, I
HAVE A DEADLINE
.

Funny, till the last deadline comes, as it did for Avram. And then, like West or Tully or F. Van Wyck Mason, you’re no-price. So what was it all about?

The secret is this:
anyone
can become a writer. If you look at the actual work of many of the creatures appearing on the bestseller lists, you know that things that flourish in petri dishes can become writers. The trick, the secret, is to
stay
a writer. To produce a body of work that you hope improves and changes with time and the accumulation of skill. To stay a writer day after year after story, till at last you get smart enough, or work long enough pulling the plow, to write something that gets included in
The Best American Short Stories,
a dream you know (in those cold moments when you can’t lie to yourself) will always elude you, because there is no great bearded sentience in the universe, and “it ain’t fair… I deserve it” doesn’t mean shit, as David Webb Peoples said in his screenplay for
Unforgiven
(which should’ve won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay). There is no god, or even upper-case God, wasting his, her, or its time mucking about in our daily affairs. There is only random chance and the cupidity of the uncaring cosmos.

Which is
exactly
what “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” is about. There is no pattern; no pantheon of busybody entities up there in the clouds ordaining our lives; no Grand Scheme. You can be walking down the street, slip and tear your Achilles tendon, and walk with a limp for the rest of your life, thereby killing your career as a ballet dancer, but forcing you to make a living at brain surgery, during which career you discover the cure for brain cancer.
That’s
what the story is about. Don’t listen to the bonehead deconstructionists when they start all that “basic Apollonian-Dionysian Conflict” hooey. The story is about nothing more difficult or loftier than the admonition that
you
are responsible, that posterity is a snare, that memory is short, and that life is an absolutely unriggable crap shoot, with the stickman a civil servant who works for some department as inept as you are. Some days he does something swell, some days he does something creepy, some days he does something crummy, and some days, well, he don’t do nothin’ at all.

Even if you’re standing all alone in the middle of the Gobi Desert at high noon, and a Mosler safe falls out of the baggage compartment of a Concorde zipping by overhead at thirty-three thousand feet, and the great heavy thing falls right on top of you and squashes you to guava jelly…it was your fault. You’re responsible. It was, after all,
you
who chose to stand in that spot, at that moment.

And it only took me fourteen years, from conception and the writing down of the first few lines of the story, to get smart enough to write the
complete
story, and do it properly. And I cannot tell you how goofily pleased I am to be here. It only took thirty-eight years, and I’m nuts with pleasure. I’m one of the lucky ones. Avram never made it.

Rest in peace, old pal.

1 :
From
Poëmes Philosophiques sur l’Homme
, Paris, 1795, quoted in
The Count of Saint Germain
, by Isabel Cooper-Ashley, Steiner, Blauvelt: New York, 1970.

2 :
From Ronsard,
Poems of Love
, selected and edited by Grahame Castor and Terence Cave, Manchester University Press, 1975.

3 :
Excerpted from the Contributors’ Notes in
The Best American Short Stories 1993,
ed. Louise Endrich pp. 363–65.

These stories are works of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in them are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THE AVRAM DAVIDSON TREASURY

Copyright © 1998 by Grania Davis

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web:
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

Design by Judith Stagnitto Abbate

eISBN 9781429972673

First eBook Edition : April 2011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davidson, Avram.
The Avram Davidson treasury: a tribute collection / edited
by Robert Silverberg & Grania Davis.
—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 0-312-86729-8 (acid-free paper)
1. Science fiction, American. I. Silverberg, Robert. II. Davis, Grania. III. Title.
PS3554.A924A6 1998
813’.54—dc21
98-23556
CIP

First Edition: October 1998