Hanson laughed. “That a’n’t half bad!” He thought about it and slapped his knee. “Not half bad at all! Let the young people sort it out for themselves. Maybe they’ll make a hash of it, maybe not. Either way, it’ll be their decision to make—not mine.” He paused, made up his mind, and said, “So that’s my answer to your question as well.”
“How do you mean?”
“Nobody ever thought I could sit here forever, lording over who gets Utopian technology and who doesn’t. I sure as hell didn’t! But I figured if I could just slow down the way it oozed out, share it out equally, make sure that nobody got the upper hand over anybody else for long enough, there’d come a day when I wasn’t needed anymore. Maybe that day’s today.”
All in a flash, Dr. Tyler was up on her feet, then down on her knees before Hanson. She seized his hands and would have kissed them if, embarrassed, he hadn’t snatched them away from her. Reddening, he said, “You got your answer. Tell the boys below that from now on, as many scientists who want to come to the City, they can. So long as they don’t take out anything more’n they can carry in their heads and notebooks. I’ll write to Becky tomorrow, and if she agrees, as I s’pect she will, it’ll be official.”
The doctor, given more than she could possibly have expected, was grinning ecstatically, almost glowing with joy. So, before she could say anything more to embarrass him, Hanson said, “It’s time for you to go now.”
Dr. Tyler nodded wordlessly and turned away. Three steps down the hill, she spun about and said, “I want you to know how romantic it is, you and the Reverend Mother, working together but never meeting. Like Abelard and Heloise.”
“I don’t know who those are,” Hanson said. Then, when Dr. Tyler had told him the entire story, “Well, I’ve grown as plump and harmless as a capon, so maybe that fits. Only, Becky was a’ways the smarter one of us two, so that don’t. Also, she really a’n’t Becky, you know. She does such of good job of being Becky that people forget that. But I can’t.” He lurched to his feet. “But right now, Doctor, I’m going to shoo you away. I’ve got a lot of serious drinking to do. Plus, I’ve got to warn you that when I’ve poured enough alky into me, I start to singing, which by itself I reckon is a’right, my singing voice is good enough. But then I strip out of my robe and start to dance.
“And nobody wants to see an old fat man like me, dancing and singing naked in the moonlight.”
Two Pilgrims on the Road to the City of God
Long, long ago, when the world was young and dinosaurs still fell from the sky, I met Gardner Dozois. That was in 1974. I was long-haired, beardless, countercultural, and years away from publishing my first story. He was ex-army, bohemian, and the most celebrated writer known only to the cognoscenti in all of science fiction. I instantly became friends with his wife-to-be—after what she later and with characteristic wit called a “whirlwind seventeen-year courtship”—Susan Casper. Gardner was a little suspicious of me, afraid I would try to get him to read my undoubtedly terrible fiction.
There was little chance of that happening because, although I wrote persistently, madly, every day, I never managed to finish a story. I had no idea how to do that. But Susan and I palled around a lot, smoked dope, played pinball, argued the finer points of rock musicians, electronica, and Mummers clubs. On Thursday nights I hosted hearts games at my apartment on Twenty-Third Street for a louche circle of acquaintances. Susan and I were both sharkish competitors, while Gardner and a young woman named Marianne Porter—remember that name—sat in the shadows talking.
Less than a year into our friendship, Susan entered the hospital for what she reassured everyone was “a silly little operation.” The operation, of course, was neither silly nor little, and when she was wheeled off to the OR, she later said, she looked back at Gardner and saw from his face that he never expected to see her again. But shortly before, at one of the first science fiction conventions I ever attended, I had noted which people she talked to as friends and secretly got dozens of them to sign an outsized get-well card for her. So when, against all his fears, Susan emerged from surgery alive, Gardner decided that I was okay. Though he still worried I would inflict my admittedly terrible fiction upon him.
Back then, Gardner could be spotted from blocks away. He had long, straight blond hair that fell halfway down his back and a jaunty little beard and dressed in blue jeans, a black Stetson, and a black T-shirt with white block letters reading PROPHET OF DOOM. He and Susan were poor as church mice and had a child to provide for. Gardner’s wonderful stories came slowly and with great effort and didn’t bring in much money. So Susan held down a low-paying buzzkill of a job in Welfare while Gardner supplemented their income by assembling anthologies and landing the occasional editorial gig. Once, his jeans split down the back, which was a major crisis because he didn’t have a second pair or the cash on hand to buy one. He was a natural short fiction writer, but because novels paid better than short fiction, he made several abortive attempts at the form.
Among the projects begun and never finished was something called “the Digger Novel.” Those in Gardner’s literary cohort who had read that fragment spoke of it with awe. It began, they said, with a long, slow, mesmerizing description of a man shoveling coal into a hole, during which the reader got to see his life and soul destroyed—and then things got worse. It was, by repute, the best stick of prose Gardner had ever written. But he had snagged on a key plot point and the novel went unwritten, waiting for a burst of inspiration that, so far, had not come. Gardner was a private soul. I knew better than to ask if I could read it.
I also knew that I could never aspire to the first rank of Gardner’s friends, people like Joe Haldeman and George R. R. Martin and Ed Bryant and George Alec Effinger and Jack Dann, writers who had begun their careers at roughly the same time, fought in the metaphoric trenches together, and written their best work hoping for each other’s approval. This did not bother me. There are no chums like those of our youth. Also, they were like gods to me. Gardner was one of the pantheon of writers I revered and much older than me when we met. He had been published for years. He had the gravitas of age.
I was twenty-three years old and he was twenty-six.
Years passed. One day I was visiting Gardner and Susan in their tiny, cat-infested, three - rooms - and - a - bath apartment on Quince Street in Center City, Philadelphia. It was raining. Susan’s son Christopher, who was angelically beautiful and engagingly mischievous, was running around underfoot. Susan had smoked the last of her Salem Light menthols and sent Gardner to the corner to buy another pack. (Sending each other on minor errands, like arguing frequently, was one way they expressed their love.) He shambled into the hallway, rooted around in the closet, and emerged with a raincoat and a cardboard box. Dumping the box in my lap, he said, “Here, Michael. This is the Digger Novel. You can read it while I’m out.”
I was stunned. I had, without realizing it, passed some sort of threshold in our relationship and was now deemed worthy of the legendary text. I opened the box, lifted out the typescript, and began to read.
A few minutes later, Gardner came back with the cigarettes and returned the box to the closet. I forget how many pages I’d finished. Four, maybe, or five. It wasn’t many.