The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (31 page)

   Tyrena Wingreen-Feif did not seem concerned. Two weeks after the first reviews and hardfax returns came in, a day after my thirteen-day binge ended, I farcast to her office and threw myself into the black flowfoam chair which crouched in the center of the room like a velvet panther. One of Tau Ceti Center’s legendary thunderstorms was going on and Jovian-sized lightning crashes were rending the blood-tinged air just beyond the invisible containment field.

“Don’t sweat it,” said Tyrena. This week’s fashions included a hairdo which sent black spikes thrusting half a meter above her forehead and a body field opaciter which left shifting currents of color concealing—and revealing—the nudity beneath. “The first run only amounted to sixty thousand fax transmits so we’re not out much there.”

“You said seventy million were planned,” I said.

“Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline’s resident AI read it.”

I slumped lower in the flowfoam. “Even the AI hated it?”

“The AI
loved
it,” said Tyrena. “That’s when we knew for sure that
people
were going to hate it.”

I sat up. “Couldn’t we have sold copies to the TechnoCore?”

“We did,” said Tyrena. “One. The millions of AIs there probably real-time-shared it the minute it came in over fatline. Interstellar copyright doesn’t mean shit when you’re dealing with silicon.”

“All right,” I said, slumping. “What next?” Outside, lightning bolts the size of Old Earth’s ancient superhighways danced between the corporate spires and cloud towers.

Tyrena rose from her desk and walked to the edge of the carpeted circle. Her body field flickered like electrically charged oil on water.
“Next,” she said, “you decide if you want to be a writer or the Worldweb’s biggest jerk-off.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Tyrena turned and smiled. Her teeth had been capped to gold points. “The contract allows us to recover the advance in any way we have to. Seizing your assets at Interbank, recovering the gold coins you’ve got hidden on Homefree, and selling that gaudy farcaster house would about do it. And then you can go join the other artistic dilettantes and dropouts and mental cases that Sad King Billy collects on whatever Outback world he lives on.”

I stared.

“Then again,” she said and smiled her cannibal smile, “we can just forget this temporary setback and you can get to work on your next book.”

   My next book appeared five standard months later.
The Dying Earth II
picked up where
The Dying Earth
left off, in plain prose this time, the sentence length and chapter content carefully guided by neuro-bio-monitored responses on a test group of 638 average hardfax readers. The book was in novel form, short enough not to intimidate the potential buyer at Food Mart checkout stands, and the cover was a twenty-second interactive holo wherein the tall, swarthy stranger—Amalfi Schwartz, I suppose, although Amalfi was short and pale and wore corrective lenses—rips the bodice of the struggling female just to the nipple line before the protesting blonde turns toward the viewer and cries for help in a breathless whisper provided by porn holie star Leeda Swann.

Dying Earth II
sold nineteen million copies.

“Not bad,” said Tyrena. “It takes awhile to build an audience.”

“The first
Dying Earth
sold three billion copies,” I said.

“
Pilgrim’s Progress,”
she said.
“Mein Kampf
. Once in a century. Maybe less.”

“But it sold three
billion …
”

“Look,” said Tyrena. “In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens,
wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

   
Dying Earth III
introduced the characters of Winona, the escaped slave girl who rose to the ownership of her own fiberplastic plantation (never mind that fiberplastic never grew on Old Earth), Arturo Redgrave, the dashing blockade runner (what blockade?!), and Innocence Sperry, the nine-year-old telepath dying of an unspecified Little Nell disease. Innocence lasted until
Dying Earth IX
, and on the day Transline allowed me to kill the little shit off, I went out to celebrate with a six-day, twenty-world binge. I awoke in a lungpipe on Heaven’s Gate, covered with vomit and rebreather mold, nursing the Web’s biggest headache and the sure knowledge that I soon would have to start on Volume X of
The Chronicles of the Dying Earth
.

   It isn’t hard being a hack writer. Between
Dying Earth II
and
Dying Earth IX
, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my characters cardboard, my prose preliterate, and my free time was my own. I traveled. I married twice more; each wife left me with no hard feelings but with a sizable portion of the royalties from my next
Dying Earth
. I explored religions and serious drinking, finding more hope of lasting solace in the latter.

I kept my home, adding six rooms on five worlds, and filled it with fine art. I entertained. Writers were among my acquaintances but, as in all times, we tended to mistrust and badmouth each other, secretly resenting the others’ successes and finding fault in their work. Each of us knew in his or her heart that he or she was a true artist of the word who merely happened to be commercial; the others were hacks.

Then, on a cool morning with my sleeping room rocking slightly in the upper branches of my tree on the Templar world, I awoke to a gray sky and the realization that my muse had fled.

It had been five years since I had written any poetry. The
Cantos
lay open in the Deneb Drei tower, only a few pages finished beyond what had been published. I had been using thought processors to write my novels and one of these activated as I entered the study.
SHIT
, it printed out,
WHAT DID I DO WITH MY MUSE
?

It says something about the type of writing I had been doing that my muse could flee without my noticing. For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt. When one is writing—
really
writing—it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods. No true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels when the mind becomes an
instrument
as surely as does the pen or thought processor, ordering and expressing the revelations flowing in
from somewhere else
.

My muse had fled. I sought her in the other worlds of my house but only silence echoed back from the art-bedecked walls and empty spaces. I farcast and flew to my favorite places, watching the suns set on the windblown prairies of Grass and the night fogs obscure the ebony crags of Nevermore, but although I emptied my mind of the trash-prose of the endless
Dying Earth
, there came no whispers from my muse.

I sought her in alcohol and Flashback, returning to the productive days on Heaven’s Gate when her inspiration was a constant buzzing in my ears, interrupting my work, waking me from sleep, but in the relived hours and days her voice was as muted and garbled as a damaged audio disk from some forgotten century.

My muse had fled.

   I farcast to Tyrena Wingreen-Feif’s office at the precise moment of my appointment. Tyrena had been promoted from editor-in-chief of the hardfax division to publisher. Her new office occupied the highest level of the Tau Ceti Center Transline Spire and standing there was like perching on the carpeted summit of the galaxy’s tallest, thinnest peak; only the invisible dome of the slightly polarized containment field arched overhead and the edge of the carpet ended in
a six-kilometer drop. I wondered if other authors felt the urge to jump.

“The new opus?” said Tyrena. Lusus was dominating the fashion universe this week and “dominate” was the right word; my editor was dressed in leather and iron, rusted spikes on her wrists and neck and a massive bandolier across her shoulder and left breast. The cartridges looked real.

“Yeah,” I said and tossed the manuscript box on her desk.

“Martin, Martin, Martin,” she sighed, “when are you going to transmit your books rather than going to all of the trouble of printing them out and bringing them here in person?”

“There’s a strange satisfaction in delivering them,” I said. “Especially this one.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why don’t you read some of it?”

Tyrena smiled and clicked black fingernails along the cartridges in her bandolier. “I’m sure it’s up to your usual high standards, Martin,” she said. “I don’t have to look at it.”

“Please do,” I said.

“Really,” said Tyrena, “there’s no reason. It always makes me nervous to read a new work while the author is present.”

“This one won’t,” I said. “Read just the first few pages.”

She must have heard something in my voice because she frowned slightly and opened the box. The frown deepened as she read the first page and flipped through the rest of the manuscript.

Page one had a single sentence: “And then, one fine morning in October, the Dying Earth swallowed its own bowels, spasmed its final spasm and died.” The other two hundred and ninety-nine pages were blank.

“A joke, Martin?”

“Nope.”

“A subtle hint then? You would like to begin a new series?”

“Nope.”

“It’s not as if we hadn’t expected it, Martin. Our story-liners have come up with several exciting series ideas for you. M. Subwaizee thinks that you would be perfect for the novelizations of the Crimson Avenger holies.”

“You can stick the Crimson Avenger up your corporate ass, Tyrena,” I said cordially. “I’m finished with Transline and this premasticated gruel you call fiction.”

Tyrena’s expression did not flicker. Her teeth were not pointed; today they were rusted iron to match the spikes on her wrists and the collar around her neck. “Martin, Martin, Martin,” she sighed, “you have no idea how finished you will be if you don’t apologize, straighten up, and fly right. But that can wait until tomorrow. Why don’t you step home, sober up, and think about this?”

I laughed. “I’m as sober as I’ve been in eight years, lady. It just took me awhile to realize that it wasn’t just
me
who’s writing crap … there’s not a book published in the Web this year that hasn’t been total garbage. Well, I’m getting off the scow.”

Tyrena rose. For the first time I noticed that on her simulated canvas web belt there hung a FORCE deathwand. I hoped that it was as designer-fake as the rest of her costume.

“Listen, you miserable, no-talent hack,” she hissed. “Transline owns you from the balls up. If you give us any more trouble we’ll have you working in the Gothic Romance factory under the name Rosemary Titmouse. Now go home, sober up, and get to work on
Dying Earth X
.”

I smiled and shook my head.

Tyrena squinted slightly. “You’re still into us for almost a million-mark advance,” she said. “One word to Collections and we’ll seize every room of your house except that goddamn raft you use as an outhouse. You can sit on it until the oceans fill up with crap.”

I laughed a final time. “It’s a self-contained disposal unit,” I said. “Besides, I sold the house yesterday. The check for the balance of the advance should have been transmitted by now.”

Tyrena tapped the plastic grip of her deathwand. “Transline’s copyrighted the Dying Earth concept, you know. We’ll just have someone else write the books.”

I nodded. “They’re welcome to it.”

Something in my ex-editor’s voice changed when she realized that I was serious. Somewhere, I sensed, there was an advantage to her if I stayed. “Listen,” she said, “I’m sure we can work this out, Martin. I was saying to the director the other day that your advances were
too small and that Transline should let you develop a new story line …”

“Tyrena, Tyrena, Tyrena,” I sighed. “Goodbye.”

I farcast to Renaissance Vector and then to Parsimony, where I boarded a spinship for the three-week voyage to Asquith and the crowded kingdom of Sad King Billy.

Notes for a sketch of Sad King Billy:

His Royal Highness King William XXIII, sovereign lord of the Kingdom of Windsor-in-Exile, looks a bit like a wax candle of a man who has been left on a hot stove. His long hair runs in limp rivulets to slumped shoulders while the furrows on his brow trickle downward to the tributaries of wrinkles around the basset-hound eyes, and then run southward again through folds and frown lines to the maze of wattles in neck and jowls. King Billy is said to remind anthropologists of the worry dolls of the Outback Kinshasa, to make Zen Gnostics recall the Pitiful Buddha after the temple fire on Tai Zhin, and to send media historians rushing to their archives to check photos of an ancient flat-film movie actor named Charles Laughton. None of these references mean anything to me; I look at King Billy and think of my long-dead tutor don Balthazar after a week-long binge.

Sad King Billy’s reputation for gloominess is exaggerated. He often laughs; it is merely his misfortune that his peculiar form of laughter makes most people think he is sobbing.

A man cannot help his physiognomy, but in His Highness’s case, the entire persona tends to suggest either “buffoon” or “victim.” He dresses, if that can be the word, in something approaching a constant state of anarchy, defying the taste and color sense of his android servants, so that on some days he clashes with himself and his environment simultaneously. Nor is his appearance limited to sartorial chaos—King William moves in a permanent sphere of dishabille, his fly unsealed, his velvet cape torn and tattered and drawing crumbs magnetically from the floor, his left sleeve ruffle twice as long as the right, which—in turn—looks as if it has been dipped in jam.

You get the idea.

For all this, Sad King Billy has an insightful mind and a passion for the arts and literature which has not been equaled since the true Renaissance days on old Old Earth.