Writing Science Fiction
The novel Bloodsport probably traces gestation to 1957, the year the first Soviet Sputnik flew, and to the first friend I made when my family moved to Florida in 1954. By 1957, he’d begun having these dark moods I didn’t understand, going far inside his head. Though he carried on a conversation, he wasn’t really there anymore.
We were both interested in science-fiction. So when the Commies announced they’d beaten us into space with the first satellite, we gravitated to the night seawall to see if we could see this moving manmade star against the firmament. We were on the seawall when one of his moods took him. He muttered something about the messiness of human emotions and opined a brain like his would relish encapsulation in a Sputnik, insulated from such unpleasantness.
He envisioned an eternal orbit far from human interaction, an artificially-sustained brain free to read and study history, science — and human society — from afar. A kind of orbital ivory tower.
I never knew what personal pain triggered his imagining, but did not forget the image. Eleven years later I had an idea for a science-fiction novel about a far-future writer and his Boswell, a cyborg called Ball. But I wasn’t writing creatively anymore. Marriage and making a living had intervened.
Life is so unpredictable. In my day job I was editing a weekly newspaper for the U.S. Navy at a Florida home base for carrier air wings during the Vietnam business. We published news releases from squadrons deployed on Yankee Station. I’d do a headline and subhead, and let the stories run.
I screwed up a subhead about Navy jets attacking North Vietnamese supply lines running through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos into the South, known collectively as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I had in mind the thousands of Vietnamese using and repairing the trails under bombardment. The subhead read something like: Cecil Field Pilots Bomb Ho’s Hoards.
And an angry giant exploded into my newspaper office, thundering bitter sarcasm to the effect the Navy was not piratical, not interested in Ho’s treasures. The correct spelling was horde, for God’s sake!
He wasn’t really eight feet tall but he loomed like he was. His voice rattled window panes, though every word was perfectly pronounced. My Navy photographer, a flinty Vermonter with a granite jaw and aversion to rudeness rose to protect his editor from this apparition.
But the giant was right. I said so. My admission calmed him. I calmed my Vermont battler. Fisticuffs were avoided. I got the giant — only six foot six and about 260 pounds, after all — seated with coffee and we talked. He was a crew member from one of the flight lines, a college graduate serving out a term of service after not completing officer training. As was my cranky Vermonter. (The Navy had not learned that with some college men of high IQ, the old bullying bullshit similar to drill-sergeant harassment is a non-starter. The Richard Gere character in An Officer and a Gentleman was a loser who evidently needed the hazing to shine.)
The large human before me was a Shakespearean actor, explaining the voice projection and round diction. He’d chosen the Navy to duck the draft, as my own brother had. My brother wanted to be a poet. The large human drinking my Navy coffee wanted to write science-fiction. He embarrassed me by belatedly recognizing me as author of a 1964 SF novel and asking eagerly about my “other” books.
There were no other books. I was beginning to think there wouldn’t be. But this large human was having none of that. He elected himself cheerleader on the spot and kept probing until I mentioned Ramsey and Ball, and a half-formed notion I called “Hemingway in Space.”
One thing led to another. Over succeeding weeks we ended up brainstorming the idea of a far-world ultimate predator that was more than it seemed. A pimple-faced Lieutenant JG, back from a year on the Vietnamese river boats that earned him a valor medal, was a biologist in real life. With growing exasperation he enumerated all the natural reasons no such critter could exist. His name was Greer.
So we called our far-planet wolverine clone the Greer.
My new large friend was so enthusiastic I thought my own enthusiasm might catch fire again. He fleshed out the rituals of the Greer and taught them to sing. He became my model for Python, a name he chose. We hit on the scheme of me writing Ramsey and Ball and him writing the Greer in alternate chapters.
We were making progress when his orders came through for the Philippines. Before the age of computers, mailed exchanges slowed the rhythm. A job that had him flying all over the Far East distracted him. The narrative got disjointed. While he was over there I moved to the Bahamas, and put away the story after he wrote to say he had given up, it was all mine. I stopped trying to write science-fiction altogether.
There the matter rested for thirty years, until I was fired five years short of retirement. A really miserable time for many reasons. As a form of therapy I resurrected the faded pages from my files and began entering chapters on my first personal computer. And editing, and reorganizing the flow, eliminating some of his more amateurish flights of fancy while trying to keep his freshness of Greer concept.
Forty years after the Sputnik flew, and my high-school friend wanted to be a Sputnik, a publisher friend of mine from Florida and Bahamas days took the Ball and Ramsey novel to Manhattan, and it sold. HarperCollins even wanted a sequel, a second outing for the pair.
But that’s another story. Here’s a bit of Bloodsport:
Ball and Ramsey Meet Python in Hunting Camp
It was good to get away from the city. The small hunting car dived smoothly into the evening sky and settled onto a course the dash compass called north. Cold night air breathed into the cockpit from pressure-vents.
“Mind?” the pilot asked.
“No,” I said, and the Pondoro air flowed more freely.
The raw chill, after weeks of the spacer’s rigidly controlled environment, was good on my skin. We were low enough for it to have a fresh dirt smell to it, and then the pungent odor of a salt sea, and that was good too.
“Ramsey?” Ball loomed, incongruous, in the rear passenger seating.
“What?” I didn’t want conversation now. Not with Ball, not with anybody.
The rejoinder was suspiciously gentle. “The empathometer is reading well into the creative zone. Do you wish to vocalize?”
For a moment I had forgotten what century we were in. Isaac Walton and Hemingway and all those back then were lucky; they never had their quill and inkwell fitted out with Ball’s technology. They could loaf when they wanted to, without having to justify it to their writing machinery.
“No,” I said. “Let it build. It’s been a long time gone.”
“Not in fact,” said Ball. “Simply out of use. According to the readout…”
“Let it rest, Ball.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m very sure.”
And they didn’t get pep talks from their writing equipment, either. I was beginning to realize why Intergalactic Cybernetics had scrapped the design. There are certain points beyond which humans still won’t be pushed. The meter must have wavered, because Ball shut up. The pilot concentrated on his driving. No automatics. I liked that, too.
I lay back in the right-hand seat and let the feel of the dark bulk of the world beneath us come up. The odors. Now I could distinguish faint, indefinable alienness. At first, it had smelled like home. Like Acme. Like Old Earth, for that matter. Funny how you immediately catalog the familiar before you start on the strange. The world below was hospitable to terrestrials, so it was home immediately by contrast to the spaceship. Not for the first time I wondered what makes spacemen tick. But I really wasn’t interested, no more than I was interested in what makes big city cab drivers tick.
The guide was named Nail. Just that. Small, quick-moving man with lots of sun and weather on his face and arms, eyes that looked nervous until you saw they were looking at everything instead of away from anything. Hunter’s eyes. And a bit of hunted, too. Enough hunted to increase my respect for the greer, sight unseen.
“Where we headed?” I asked.
“Straight to camp. Unless you’d rather stop at the lodge…” a sideward dip of his head indicated my shipboard informals.
“No. The camp it is. I’ll change right there. I did want to sight my gun for Pondoro atmosphere, though. Will we be too close to the game?”
“LaChoy has some hushers. You got a beam gun or what?”
“I’ve got a rifle. I don’t believe in beamers.”
He looked at me full face for the first time since we had left the spaceport. “Greers are tough critters.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“They are,” said Nail. “They are tough, and they kill people who didn’t think it would happen.”
“I’m sure they do,” I said. “So do germs and viruses and spaceships that phase into the lost dimension. So does old age, for all those billions who can’t afford restoratives.”
He nodded. “Like that, huh?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“I think you’ll like it here, Mr. Ramsey.”
He turned back to the controls, laid the car over and pointed it at a warm yellow-red eye that centered in the forward windscreen and swelled rapidly. He pulled out of the swoop with a touch of his stick and planted us like a dropped feather in the peripheral glow of what turned out to be a big campfire.
“Atmosphere,” I remarked.
“We do it straight here, Mr. Ramsey,” Nail said. “Go on over to the fire, I’ll unload you. You don’t want to miss the snake.”
“The snake?”
“More of our atmosphere, I guess you writers call it,” he said. “Pondoro’s only eight-foot-tall storyteller in residence.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Who would want to miss a yarning boa constrictor?”
“Python,” said Nail.
“What?”
“He calls himself Python.”
“Okay, Python.” I headed for the fire, with Ball drifting silently behind me.
Python. Twenty paces from the fire I saw it was apt. Of the maybe half-dozen figures around the blaze, there was no question who held center stage, reclined on one elbow at full length along the ground. His mellow baritone was almost tangible in the fireglow. The audience would be captive sparrows, I thought, and that voice would be the weaving of the neck — or was that the method of the cobra? I am weak on Terran histecology; never mind: Ball could fill in the blanks.
“Ramsey…?” Ball murmured.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, record it.”
There were empty camp chairs. I dropped into one to listen. Ball eased up beside me.
“You hunters,” the long man tolled in his bell of a voice. “You hunters of greer around your fires from night. Will you be brave when the toril spits you out into the sunlight to face the death you came to find?”
“Death!” The voice belled it sweetly. And again, “Death!”
Python’s hooded gaze swept the assemblage, ignoring Ball. The eyes were deep-set, introspective. I met the gaze, and it moved on.
“Ball?” I asked softly.
“Toril?”
“Yes.”
Python was speaking again.
“…plastic worlds in plastic orbit, on a plastic plane, and all the sharp ground down and coated plastic. Unprecedented lifespan, all the microscopic legions worse than tigers held at bay, wondrous argosies to ply the void in as peaceful commerce as homo sapience will ever know — what is there then to stir the blood and excite our glands awake to our after-all mortality?”
Dramatic pause.
“Why, here on poor Pondoro there is the greer, so here to poor Pondoro come captains of the universe to make their sport — or be made sport of, which? To seek a death, though not too close, lest the palate be glutted of plastic life and yearn too strongly for the one flesh finality, which the greer supplies full gladly.”
“Ramsey,” Ball said.
“What?”
“A toril is the gate through which fighting bulls enter the arena to confront their antagonist.”
“That only?”
“The term is archaic. Very old. Used only on worlds where the mortal combat of man and bull is viewed as sport.”
Python’s voice tolled on.
“…do the captains care that the greer have other reasons to exist than for a kind of death dance they build themselves? Not one particle of matter, or of energy, or of time, is what the captains care, so long as the sport be hot and deadly, and their aim be true.
“But if the greer, who hunted these reaches undisputed for ages, should weary of the sport, what then, Oh hunters brave by firelight, what then? For the greer is a mighty breed — how mighty, no one dead remembers, no one living knows…”
“Are you for real?” said a voice. Ball’s.
The mood snapped, and shadows moved restively around the fireglow.
“Who’s that?” one of the men said. Lean, big mustached, leaving no question he considered an answer his due. That would be LaChoy, my principal outhunter.
“Ramsey,” I said.
“And what is that?” He nodded chill disapproval at Ball.
“My fortune, what’s left of it,” I said.
Ball loomed forward into the firelight, the reflected glow flaming along his side.
“What’s it to you, Hairlip?”
“Watch it, Ball.”
“Ramsey, this has gone far enough,” the man with the mustache said. “Your reputation has preceded you, but you left it at the spaceport, grab?”
“Don’t be tough,” I said. “I can’t control him. I spent enough on Ball to buy your goddamn contract with change for enough goons to make you eat it, and I can’t do a thing with him.”
“I won’t have it interrupting.”
“Interrupting lies,” Ball said coldly. The fire crawled and fluttered on his great impassive hide as he circled the storyteller. “Lies told as stories is storytelling but lies told as phony mysticism is nothing but lies.”
“That’s you doing that,” LaChoy said. “Quit it, Ramsey — that sounds just like you.”
I shrugged. “Thanks for reading my stuff, but you’re wrong.”
“Customs wouldn’t let an uncontrollable machine on this planet!”
Ball sniggered. Sure, they recorded it for him somewhere. Some black mass, maybe, or some vampire revel. But it sounded as if it gave him the most fiendish pleasure to introduce that sound into the growing tension.
“Customs will allow all kinds of unimagined things on this world,” Ball said. “Especially in the way of machines.”
I didn’t get it, but LaChoy did; his face went stiff and his eyes got very, very watchful. He was looking at the cyborg in a way I did not like at all. This was getting serious fast. Except to Ball.
“Lies,” Ball said contemptuously.
He circled the supine storyteller with a kind of wavering hop that was slow and hypnotic — and wholly a part of whatever Ball was up to, because Ball’s usual method of locomotion is a dead steady drift, like a satellite in eternal orbit.
“Unreasonable lies at that. Baseless imaginings, told as precognition. The great galactic mousetrap, about to spring on mankind’s neck right here on poor Pondoro; and well-deserved at that, humans being what they are.”
Python rose without using his arms. His legs tucked themselves with a swift economy of motion I should have recognized then. His arms drifted out in front of him, moving like twin magnets tracking Ball, and the hands began to flex slowly with what seemed enormous power.
“Where’s the foundation for it?” Ball said. “The planet talks to you, and whispers greers are more than men. Tell the planet for me that it is full of crap.”
Someone was breathing like a sump pump on an Acme barge. Python. The arc of his arms gradually widened. The hand-flex continued. Ball continued his insolent promenade.
“Why don’t you tell a true tale, storyteller born of woman and therefore man. You were born of woman?”
Ball always came back to that, even with bottle birthing common as the womb between the stars. His harping on it was always tinged with that deep rancor of the formless cyborg encased in artifice, a womb’s miscarriage, a bottle’s spillage, cursed to live.
Python said nothing, but Ball had scored. Ball usually scores. He was birthed, if that’s the word, maybe spawned is better, by a society where this kind of conversational savagery — all others being prohibited — is the planetary sport. The storyteller continued in his trance.
“Well?” Ball said. “Will you tell a true story to this gathering, you pathetic creature — or shall I?”
There was a slow movement in the outer darkness. Nail, gliding in a hunter’s crouch, a short spring gun in his hand. Python’s gyrations had fined and strengthened until it was incredible bone and sinew could bear those tensions. Nail raised the gun and I saw it jerk. When the hyposliver bit, Python went straight up as if catapulted, arms flashing like scimitars. There was a sodden thud, and a nasty wet snapping sound, loud against the inhuman silence of that lunge.
In the middle of his gigantic leap, he buckled. Completely. With his feet high as my head, and the rest of him a whole lot higher, he just sagged in the middle and seemed to come all apart.
Ball hovered over the fallen storyteller. He made a small cryptic sound I have come to call his real laughter. I hoped nobody else caught on just then.
“You have a Medfac?” Ball’s voice was neutral, but there was no question he was speaking to LaChoy.
“Yes.”
“You might use it. He fractured his right forearm, cracked two fingers and jammed his entire right hand trying to skewer me. With accompanying flesh, circulatory and nervous system damage, of course.”
LaChoy was very quiet. “Of course. Do you know what he could have done if Nail hadn’t — ?”
If Ball could have shrugged, that would have been the place for it.
“Destroyed himself trying to use me for a volleyball. They made me to last longer than he was made to last. Any reasonable creature could tell that without coming to harm. Well? The Medfac?”
“I’ll help carry him,” I said.
“Not necessary,” LaChoy said shortly. He spoke loudly then. “S-M!”
“Sah!”
A figure materialized at his elbow. It had been there all the time, just far enough away to be invisible except to Ball, because now his crack about illegal machines here made sense. The S-M was a Rongor battle robot, absolutely outlaw stuff.
“Take Python to the med-tent and plug him into the Medfac,” LaChoy said to the Rongor. “Dial up whatever’s needed to fix the damage, will you?”
“Sah!”
The gunport where a human face would be snick-snacked a salute. I couldn’t see if the armament was in place. The robot glided smoothly around Ball, lifted the limp form of the storyteller and was swallowed in the darkness.
LaChoy walked over and studied the dark smear where Python had lain. “I think this needs sleeping on. Your machine shouldn’t have started it, Ramsey.”
“Agreed.”
“Cyborg,” Ball said, and made the laughing sound.
“Ball!” I said.
He made the sound again.
“Ball, quit!”
His sphere actually seemed to contract and sulk, but he quit.
“Agreed,” I said again. “You thinking about civil charges?”
LaChoy waved a hand. “Forget it. Python was actual aggressor. Counter charges?”
“Skip it. On both counts: Host and antagonist.”
“Done and recorded.”
“This was a bad way to start.”
“I agree to that!”
“We’ll pull out tonight.”
“We’ll kick it around tomorrow. Now, me for bed. Your tent is ready.”
The others — I figured them for a client, another full-time guide, a campy and what would be two mechanics an outfit this size would carry — had stayed out of it, and now they rose and faded, making no move to introduce themselves.
Nail came up. “Your tent is this way.”
“Sorry we ruined the act,” I said.
“It’s done. LaChoy will speak on it in the morning.”
“Runs a tight camp, does he?”
“Tight. Good night, Mr. Ramsey.”
“Good night,” I said, but I didn’t believe it.
