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 towards 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 down the first two chapters and an outline of Sidewise to a Chrestian World.
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 harbour 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.” 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 willpower on my part. “Rachel,” I said, “I should be hearing from my editor any time 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 her 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’ Olympiad. The censors won’t stop it now, you know. In fact, all I want you to do now is make the Olympians 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 highspeed flight to London takes nine hours, but I was grinning all the way.
CHAPTER 5
The Way It Is When You’ve Got It Made
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, unlikeable 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 highspeed aircraft to Alexandria and my bride.