Putting It Together; Turning Sow's Ear Drafts into Silk Purse Stories Part 19

"When I conduct members of your race, I choose the name Hermes."

Question: The use of the word conduct makes me think of a guide in a museum ... it makes me wonder if none of these sacred and religious places (like the Spiral Ramp) are used by the Antareans any more, if that is yet another tradition they have been forced (in some way or another) to give up.

Answer: One never sees Africans enjoying their national parks, or Jamaicans day-tripping through their mountains. Once the tourists move in, the locals abandon the pasttime.

In mythology, Hermes is the guide to Hades (i.e., h.e.l.l), and Antares has become h.e.l.l to the narrator's race.

"There is a belief among my people that those who achieve public greatness are doomed to private misery."

Question: Was this comment intentionally spurred by current events (e.g. Lady Di, Clinton)? If so, any ones in particular, or just the faintly noticeable general trend?

Answer: No, it wasn't spurred by current events, but by history. It seems to me that most of those men and women who achieved enormous success in their fields usually paid for it with equally tragic failures in their personal lives.

Just look at this century: Teddy Roosevelt spent years convincing us to enter World War I, then lost his son in it. FDR served as president for 13 years, but he served from a wheelchair. Joe Kennedy, amba.s.sador and multi-millionaire, groomed three sons for the White House; one was killed in World War II, one was killed in office, and one was killed while running for office. You can't count the number of brilliant artists who drank and drugged themselves to death-and half of the exceptional members of the Broadway community have died of AIDS.

And suddenly I am thinking excitedly: You disdain their food when you are hungry, and their money when you are poor. Could you possibly be the One we have awaited for so many millennia, the One who will give us back our former glory and initiate the 44th Dynasty?

Question: Overall I sort of felt there was a slow buildup throughout this story, and that there would be some explosive ending, and then when there wasn't it made me have to think back, what really happened? What did those tourists really learn from this?

Answer: I don't do explosive endings. That's for the sledgehammer boys, and I prefer a scalpel.

What really happened? The same thing that's happened to Hermes a thousand times in the past, and the same thing that will happen to him a thousand times in the future.

What did the tourists really learn from this? Not a d.a.m.ned thing.From: D. A. Hussey Question: Why does Hermes believe they would not understand the Hall of Thinkers?

Answer: Their insensitivity convinces him that thinking is not very high on their list of priorities, and paying homage to thinkers would rank even lower.

Question: Had the Antareans themselves ever been conquerors? We do know from what Hermes said that they have warred against each other.

Answer: Probably. Most cultures that have been around any length of time have been both conquerors and conquered. But an author must pick and choose the facts he presents to the audience. Those facts must serve the story-and suggesting that the Antareans decimated six neighboring planets and exterminated seventeen sentient races definitely does not serve the needs of the story. In fact, it runs counter to them.

Question: What was so valuable about the planet that so many came in to take it over?

Answer: It was there. That may seem facetious-but why have men spent their blood and their resources to conquer Egypt, or Angola, or the Seych.e.l.les Islands, to choose three examples that wouldn't seem to have enough resources or treasure to be worth fighting for?

Question: Does Hermes really have a realistic view of the past?

Answer: Probably not. The past was probably better than the present, and not quite as wonderful as he imagines it. But again, his view must serve the story.

Question: Were the spires built with free or slave labor?? Hermes says they were built by the artisans and craftsmen.

Answer: Since this is an a.n.a.log of Egypt, they were built by free labor. I know Hollywood is fond of showing slaves being whipped as they build the pyramids, but the truth of the matter is that they were built by volunteer labor.

Question: Does Hermes realize that he could refuse the coin, and that if he did sohe could have been the hope?

Answer: Now, that's a fascinating notion. The best answer I can give is that if Hermes had said No to the coin, it would have been a petty act of rebellion, caused by his irritation with the tourists, and the only result would be that his family would go hungry that night. With the skinny, starving child, Hermes sees it as somehow apure act, an unexpected and unusual act of innate character and n.o.bility-until he realizes the child is blind.From: John Teehan The human child looks at his Antarean counterpart. I wonder if he realizes how fortunate he is.

His face gives no reflection of his thoughts; perhaps he has none. Finally he picks his nose and goes back to manipulating his computer.

Question: Picks his nose? The kid seems to at least acknowledge the guide as an intelligent and sentient being, reminding his father the name was Hermes, not Herman. He may not like touching him, but would he pick his nose so publicly? And what is he manipulating? A game? Sports news? Is it sufficiently interesting enough to walk along staring at the little screen and following the voice of his mother asking questions? It seems you're throwing the obnoxious human characters into exaggerated relief, but perhaps the painting of the boy is a littletoo obvious?

Answer: I have seen pro football players pick their noses in front of 80,000 fans while standing on the sidelines. I have seen major league baseball players stand in the batting box and scratch their genitals in front of TV audiences numbering in the tens of millions.

As for the computer game the boy is playing, haven't you seen thousands of kids wearing Walkmans, strolling down the street like zombies, totally oblivious to their surroundings-and these are kids who are justlistening , not.w.a.tching .

The next morning Tcharock regretfully gave the signal to the executioner, and Chaluba was beheaded. Despite this unfortunate beginning, the 30th Dynasty survived for 1,062 Standard years.

Question: I wonder why you chose something so insignificant as brus.h.i.+ng Tcharock. Would it have been more effective if perhaps he tripped and the well-meaning but unlucky Chaluba reached forward to catch him? Or would that have been too cliche and obvious?

Answer: I wanted the action to be something trivial, to show how harsh the Law was-and how far the current Antareans had fallen from primacy. The point was to juxtapose the two events: the insignificant, totally minimal contact on that bygone day with the current situation, which is also shown in two ways, both distasteful-the manmaking contact with the Antarean, and the childrefusing to.

I find that you don't have to climb on a soap box and lecture to a reader to get your point across. Give him two events to compare and contrast-and that's what this story does from start to finish-and he can usually draw the proper conclusion.

Question: Concerning the human rest rooms-why not one for the Antareans or a comment from our narrator? Be interesting if they did not dispose of waste in a manner similar to humans and the further indignation of having to put up with human waste matter, especially to accommodate visits to their holies of holies.

Answer: There are probably all kinds of fascinating things I could have said/created about the Antareans, but every single one of them must serve the needs of the story or be jettisoned. The particular problem you suggest comes too late in the story (and hence would slow it down) and would require a major "info dump" on the physiology of the Antareans.

THE KEMOSABEE.

by Mike Resnick.

So me and the Masked Man, we decide to hook up and bring evildoers to justice, which is a pretty full-time occupation considering just how many of thesemomzers there are wandering the West. Of course, I don't work on Sat.u.r.days, but this is never a problem, since he's usually sleeping off Friday night's binge and isn't ready to get back in the saddle until about half past Monday.

We get along pretty well, though we don't talk much to each other-my English is a little rusty, and his Yiddish is non-existent-but we share our food when times are tough, and we're always saving each other's life, just like it says in the dime novels.

Now, you'd think two guys who spend a whole year riding together wouldn't have any secrets from each other, but actually that's not the case. We respect each other's privacy, and it is almost twelve months to the day after we form a team that we find ourselves answering a call of Nature at the very same time, and I look over at him, and I am so surprised I could justplotz , you know what I mean?

It's then that I start calling him Kemosabee, and finally one day he asks me what it means, and I tell him that it means "uncirc.u.mcised goy", and he kind of frowns and tells me that he doesn't know whateither word means, so I sit him down and explain that Indians are one of the lost Hebrew tribes, only we aren't as lost as we're supposed to be, because Custer and the rest of thosemeshugginah soldiers keeps finding us and blowing us to smithereens. And the Kemosabee, he asks if Hebrew is a suburb of Hebron, and right away I see we've got an enormous cultural gap to overcome.

But what the h.e.l.l, we're pardners, and we're doing a pretty fair job of ridding the West of horse thieves and stage robbers and other varmints, so I say, "Look, Kemosabee, you're amensch and I'm proud to ride with you, and if you wanna get drunk andshtup a bunch ofs.h.i.+kses whenever we go into town, that's your business and who am I to tell you what to do? But Butch Cavendish and his gang are giving me enoughtsouris this month, so if we stop off at any Indian villages, let's let this be our little secret, okay?"

And the Kemosabee, who is frankly a lot quicker with his guns than his brain, just kind of frowns and looks hazy and finally nods his head, though I'm sure he doesn't know what he's nodding about.

Well, we ride on for another day or two, and finally reach his secret silver mine, and he melts some of it down and shoves it into his sh.e.l.ls, and like always I ride off and hunt up Reb Running Bear and have him say Kaddish over the bullets, and when I hunt up the Masked Man again I find he has had thechutzpah to take on the whole Cavendish gang single-handed, and since they know he never shoots to kill and they ain't got any such compunctions, they leave him lying there for dead with a couple of newpupiks in his belly.

So I make a sled and hook it to the back of his horse, which he calls Silver but which he really ought to call White, or at least White With The Ugly Brown Blotch On His Belly, and I hop up my pony, and pretty soon we're in front of Reb Running Bear's tent, and he comes out and looks at the Masked Man lying there with his ten-gallon stetson for a long moment, and then he turns to me and says, "You know, that has got to be the ugliestyarmulkah I've ever seen."

"This is my pardner," I say. "Some goniffs drygulched him. You got to make him well."

Reb Running Bear frowns. "He doesn't look like one of the Chosen People to me. Where was hebar mitzvahed ?"

"He wasn't," I say. "But he's one of the Good Guys. He and I are cleaning up the West."

"Six years in Hebrew school and you settle for being a janitor?" he says.

"Don't give me a hard time," I said. "We got bad guys to shoot and wrongs to right. Just save the Kemosabee's life."

"The Kemosabee?" he repeats. "Would I be very far off the track if I surmised that he doesn't keep kosher?"

"Look," I say, deciding that it's time to play hardball, "I hadn't wanted to bring this up, but I know what you and Mrs. Screaming Hawk were doing last time I visited this place."

"Keep your voice down or thatyenta I married will make my life h.e.l.l!" he whispers, glancing back toward his teepee. Then he grimaces. "Mrs. Screaming Hawk. Serves me right for taking her to Echo Canyon.Feh! "

I stare at him. "Sonu ?"

"All right, all right, Jehovah and I will nurse the Kemosabee back to health."

"Good," I say.

He glares at me. "But just this one time. Then I pa.s.s the word to all the other Rabbis: we don't cure no moregoys . What have they ever done for us?"

Well, I am all prepared to argue the point, because I'm a pretty open-minded kind of guy, but just then the Kemosabee starts moaning and I realize that if I argue for more than a couple of minutes we could all be sittings.h.i.+vah for him before dinnertime, so I wander off and pay a visit to Mrs. Rutting Elk to console her on the sudden pa.s.sing of her husband and see if there is anything I can do to cheer her up, and Reb Running Bear gets to work, and lo and behold, in less than a week the Masked Man is up and around and getting impatient to go out after desperados, so we thank Reb Running Bear for his services, and he loads my pardner down with a few canteens of chicken soup, and we say a fondshalom to the village.

I am hoping we have a few weeks for the Kemosabee to regain his strength, of which I think he is still missing an awful lot, but as Fate would have it, we are riding for less than two hours when we come across the Cavendish gang's trail.

"Aha!" he says, studying the hoofprints. "All thirty of them! This is our chance for revenge!"

My first thought is to say something like, "What do you meanwe , mackerel eater?"-but then I remember that Good Guys never back down from a challenge, so I simply say "Ugh!", which is my opinion of taking on thirty guys at once, but which he insists on interpreting as an affirmative.

We follow the trail all day, and when it's too dark to follow it any longer, we make camp on a small hill.

"We should catch up with them just after sunrise," says the Masked Man, and I can see that his trigger finger is getting itchy.

"Ugh," I say.

"We'll meet them on the open plain, where n.o.body can hide."

"Double ugh with cherries on it," I say.

"You look very grim, old friend," he says.

"Funny you should mention it," I say, but before I can suggest that we just forget the whole thing, he speaks again.

"You can have the other twenty-nine, but Cavendish is mine."

"You're all heart, Kemosabee," I say.

He stands up, stretches, and walks over to his bedroll. "Well, we've got a hard day's bloodletting ahead of us. We'd best get some sleep."

He lays down, and ten seconds later he's snoring like all get-out, and I sit there staring at him, and I just know he's not gonna come through this unscathed, and I remember Reb Running Bear's promise that no medicine man would ever again treat a goy.

And the more I think about it, the more I think that it's up to me, the loyal sidekick, to do something about it. And finally it occurs to me just what I have to do, because if I can't save him from the Cavendish gang, the least I can do is save him from himself.

So I go over to my bedroll, and pull out a bottle of Mogen David, and pour a little on my hunting knife, and try to remember the exact words the medicine man recites during thebris , and I know that someday, when he calms down, he'll thank me for this.

In the meantime, I'm gonna have to find a new nickname for my pardner.

Discussion of "The Kemosabee"

Okay, we've had four serious stories. A Hugo winner, a pair of Hugo nominees, and one that's too recent to have qualified for any awards. (Editor's note: "The Elephants on Neptune" has won the Asimov's Readers Poll and become a Hugo Nominee since this book first came out.) Maybe it's time for a funny one. After all, science fiction is the just about the only remaining market for funny short stories, and humor is an entirely different animal. So I chose one of my favorites and gave it to the List members to pick apart.

From: Adrienne Gormley Question: Why open with such an informal sentence, a sentence beginning with the word "So"?

Answer: It's going to be a funny, informal story, so it's best to immerse the reader instantly in that fact.

How? By starting in the least grammatical yet comprehensible way. It's not just "So" that serves the purpose, but the next 5 words as well: "me and the Masked Man",not "the Masked Man and me" or "the Masked Man and I." 6 words into the story I've broken two grammatical rules, and made it as conversational as I can, so it (hopefully) feels as if Tonto is addressing the reader directly.

And before the sentence is over, I've also introduced a slang Yiddish term, "momzers", which means "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds". Now, I'd like to think most of my audience will know that, but even if they don't, the word alerts them to the fact that this isn't a typical Indian, because that's neither a typical Indian word nor an informal English word such as you find in the rest of the sentence.

And finally, since there's a reference to the West (capitalized, which means the American West), I think most readers-well over 90% of them-will know that the Masked Man is the Lone Ranger, and hence that the narrator is Tonto.

I submit that that's a lot for a single sentence to do-but the opening sentence is often the most important single thing you do in a short story.

Question: Why present tense?

Answer: Listen to any friend's informal recountings of his experiences, and you'll find that four times out of five it's told in the present tense. I think it fits with the opening few words, as described above.

Question: Why did you make the Indians the lost Hebrew tribes?

Answer: I don't think it's a funny story if it doesn't have an off-the-wall concept like that-or at least not as funny. I got the notion quite accidentally when watchingCat Ballou on television; there's a little 30-second bit about how her father thinks the Indians are one of the twelve tribes of Israel, and it struck me as such a ludicrous notion that I thought it would work as a very short story, using our best-known cowboy and Indian icons.

Question: I notice you use Reb instead of Rabbi when addressing the medicine man. What is the reason for this?

Answer: The actual form of addressis "Reb". If the reader didn't know that the Indians were Jews and that Tonto was coming to Running Bear for a blessing, I'd certainly have signposted Running Bear's function in the story by using "Rabbi"...but since the readerdoes know that, this just lends a little verisimilitude to a concept that's so far out in left field that it can use all the verisimilitude it can get.

Question: How did you hit upon Tonto's dialect?

Answer: He's uneducated, as were most people in the mythical Wild West. And since I'm not writing for a Jewish audience, I threw in just enough Yiddish words to remind the readers from time to time that he's Jewish. (And since they're so infrequent, they should jar comically each time they appear.) Other than that, semi-literate sentence construction was the order of the day ... and in this case, since I had a lot of plot to cover in just a handful of pages, I gave him a ton of run-on sentences, just like this one, since an uneducated man wouldn't know where to put his periods and semi-colons.

Question: If you're making fun of Silver's name, why not Scout's?

Answer: It seems to me that everybody knows the Lone Ranger's horse is Silver ... but you had to be a fan of the radio or TV show to know that Tonto's horse is Scout, so I made no mention of it. (By the same token, I never considered using the Lone Ranger's nephew, Dan Reed, andhis horse, Victor, both of whom were limited to radio-which means you'd have to be on the distant side of 50 to remember them.) "What do you meanwe,mackerel eater? "

Question: Is there something special about eating mackerel that you used this term in this pa.s.sage?

Answer: "Mackerel eater" is a dated slang term for Catholic. It's not quite as offensive as "kike" or "n.i.g.g.e.r", and it's pretty much vanished from the lingo since Catholics are no longer restricted to eating fish on Friday. And the humor, of course, comes from the unexpected, in this case "mackerel eater" rather than the by-now-trite "What do you meanwe , white man?" The reader, knowing this is a funny story, expects Tonto to back away from fighting for a non-Indian; theoretically the notion that Tonto would refuse to risk his life for a non-Jew rather than a non-Indian should surprise and delight the h.e.l.l out of him.

In fact, I think a case can be made that humor is primarily composed of the logical or the expected, occurring at an illogical or unexpected point in the story.From: John Teehan Question: I showed an office-mate this story who professesno knowledge of yiddish, even the parts in which it enters the American vernacular (tushandschmuck , for example) and she felt the Yiddish a bit distracting and confusing. She didn't have much knowledge of Judaism so I had to explain the whole foreskin/bris thing and even then the leap from being "snipped" to being able to be treated (and no longer a "goy")-she thought "goy" was another term for "gay"-for the inevitable wounds.

When you use a specialized vocabulary/language (for example, Yiddish, j.a.panese, Spanish) sprinkled in a story, do you limit your readers.h.i.+p and can the story survive a publisher?