Storeys from the Old Hotel Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  An Introduction

  The Green Rabbit from S’Rian

  Beech Hill

  Sightings at Twin Mounds

  Continuing Westward

  Slaves of Silver

  The Rubber Bend

  Westwind

  Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee

  The Packerhaus Method

  Straw

  The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton

  To the Dark Tower Came

  Parkroads—A Review

  The Flag

  Alphabet

  A Criminal Proceeding

  In Looking- Glass Castle

  Cherry Jubilee

  Redbeard

  A Solar Labyrinth

  Love, Among the Corridors

  Checking Out

  Morning-Glory

  Trip, Trap

  From the Desk of Gilmer C. Merton

  Civis Laputus Sum

  The Recording

  Last Day

  Death of the Island Doctor

  Redwood Coast Roamer - On the Train

  In the Mountains

  At the Volcano’s Lip

  In the Old Hotel

  Choice of the Black Goddess

  Acknowledgments

  By Gene Wolfe from Tom Doherty Associates

  Copyright Page

  An Introduction

  What you are holding is, quite unabashedly, a collection of some of my most obscure work. Jim Goddard and I shook hands on the deal at Conspiracy, the 1987 world science-fiction convention in Brighton. It has taken us over a year to surmount the obstacles and produce this book for you, but here it is at last. I think we both knew from the beginning the sort it was to be.

  Perhaps the best way to explain it is to tell you something about “In the Old Hotel,” a short piece you’ll read not far from the end. At about the time the winter of 1980-81 was fading, my wife Rosemary and I rode a crack train called the Empire Builder from Chicago (where we live) to Seattle and back. Sitting in the observation car with a notebook on my lap, I wrote six very brief stories. When we got home, I typed them up and sent them off to The New Yorker.

  With no great hope. One tends to gamble with short pieces—if they are accepted, their acceptance will bring a noticeable gain in prestige; if they are not, little has been lost. All in all, I suppose I’ve submitted at least twenty stories to The New Yorker.

  This time I got a surprise—one of the six, “On the Train,” had found a home; it’s still the only success I’ve ever had with that notoriously picky publication. Furthermore, the letter of acceptance revealed that the junior editor who had real all six had wanted to accept another, “In the Old Hotel,” but had been overruled. Needless to say, “In the Old Hotel” at once became a great favorite of mine. My agent submitted the remaining five to Amazing, where George Scithers, its editor in those halcyon days, bought four—bought all of them, in fact, except “In the Old Hotel,” which appears in this collection for the first time anywhere.

  The stories you find here are, in short, more or less like that: they’re mostly stories that I feel are good, but that have received little or no praise.

  “The Green Rabbit from S‘Rian” was written for the Liavek series edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull. The idea was to make up a fictional city-state (Liavek) with its surrounding geography, technology, religions, laws of magic, and so on and so forth, and to persuade a variety of authors to submit stories laid there; compilations of this rather freakish kind are called shared-world anthologies. “The Green Rabbit from S’Rian” was my first contribution and appeared in the first book in the series.

  It was not well received. A great part of the fun of these anthologies lies in shared jokes; in this one, for example, a vicious camel was featured in one story, shot in another, cooked and eaten in a third, appeared as a ghost in a fourth, and so on. I was told about this serial camel and urged to include it somehow in my own story, but I couldn’t see how it could be made to fit. I hope that you will enjoy my story anyway—a magical jade rabbit should be fun enough, I think, without a resurrected camel for company.

  “Beech Hill” is a rather early piece, written after I had attended my first Milford Writers’ Conference. (I had no idea when I wrote it that a Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference lurked in the future, life being an imitation of art.) Milford died away as Damon Knight, who had conducted it, grew more and more interested in teaching and less involved in writing; but for ten years or so it was a wonderful sort of fair at which serious SF writers of varying talents mingled with mountebanks frequently more gifted still. From it I conceived the notion of a convention of fictitious persons, of extraordinary poseurs who were themselves their own fiction. After all these years, it is still one of my favorites.

  “Sightings at Twin Mounds” was written last year as a sort of experiment—when you turn from “Beech Hill” to this story you will be passing across ninety-five percent of my career. From time to time, no reading gives me more pleasure than supposedly factual accounts of UFOs, black dogs, vanishing hitchhikers, and similar apparitions, although all such accounts are ultimately unsatisfactory. (I recommend Sasquatch: the Apes Among Us, by John Green, should you ever come upon a copy.) It seems to me that a good, and indeed entirely satisfactory, story could be written in that style. It is a framed story, if you like, in which the frame is the whole story; and if you like it, that makes two of us.

  “Continuing Westward” reflects my first hobby, many years ago buried beneath the press of schoolwork—building models of First World War aircraft. I’ve done another one, “Against the Lafayette Escadrille,” but it’s not in here. Both are rather Kiplingesque, like my earliest published story, “The Dead Man,” which isn’t here either; a few months ago Sandra Miesel asked for some Kipling-influenced pieces for two anthologies she was editing, and I sent her “Continuing Westward” and “Love, Among the Corridors.”

  “Slaves of Silver” is the Sherlock Holmes pastiche all of us seem compelled to do. Its sequel brings in—as a robot—my favorite private eye, Nero Wolfe. At one time I dreamt of a whole series of these; little does the world realize just how narrow its escapes have been.

  “Westwind,” written in 1972 during a time of considerable stress, remains one of my favorites to this day. According to Hollywood legend, a certain poor screenwriter was summoned to the vast estate of the head of one of the great studios of the ’30s. Asked afterwards how he had liked its acres of manicured grounds, the writer said, “Wonderful! It just goes to show what God could have done if He’d had the money.” When I wrote this particular story, I was specualting upon what God might do if only He had the technology. Or at least, that’s what I believe now. Others have found a great many other things in there, and sixteen years is a long time. Anyway, I had a CB radio back when everybody in America had a CB radio, and my handle was Westwind.

  “Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee,” an even older tale, is a magazine story in a special sense. In those days I was crazy about dogs, and I used to subscribe to Dog World, devoted to purebreds. W
hen I had read twenty issues or more, it struck me that models were never employed to sell the dogs advertised in its pages, as they are to peddle cars, perfume, and virtually every other product. Or rather, that the models were the dogs pictured in the ads, the champion fox terriers, rottweilers, or whatever. For a long time I’d realized that the most attractive thing in most ads was the model.

  “The Packerhaus Method” embodies one of the few story ideas (perhaps the sole story idea) I’ve ever generated by one of the standard methods taught in such books as Creating Short Fiction. This is not because those methods don’t work, I hasten to add—they do. One is to choose some branch of science or technology and speculate on the result if it attains perfection. I picked embalming, in which the object is to render the late lamented more lifelike.

  “Straw” is fundamentally a hot-air ballooning story. Every so often I like to think of things that could have been invented a long time before they actually were—or that might easily have been invented but weren’t. For example, for hundreds of years, wars among the Greeks (possibly the most brilliantly creative people in history) were fought by heavy infantrymen armed with long spears and circular shields. Most of them were won by the Spartans, the acknowledged masters of hop-lite warfare. Then, around 379 BC, Thebes produced a general of real genius named Epaminondas. And Epaminondas came up with the simplest great military innovation I know of: he cut a notch out of each round shield. That was all it was. Instead of looking like a whole cracker, the shield looked like a cracker from which a tiny bite had been taken. But that bite permitted the solder to use his left hand to assist his right in managing his long spear, and the Thebans crushed the Spartans at Leuctra.

  The point is that Epaminondas’ notch could have been cut a thousand years sooner—in Homer’s day, for example. In the same way, it seems obvious that the hot-air balloon could have been invented well before the end of the ancient world. You need a little rope (it’s been around for a long time), a lot of silk (which by then was coming steadily along the spice routes), some straw, and an iron basket to burn it in. There are no moving parts, and the design is simplicity itself—a bag held over a fire. But if the hot-air balloon had been invented in 500 AD, what would have been done with it?

  “The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton” turns the idea we’ve just been talking about on its head, asking, “What if an invention that did not in fact survive the fall of civilization (the chess-playing computer, in this case) were believed to have survived?”

  Once in a rare while, I have a dream so vivid and organized that it can be written with a minimum of polishing; these dreams are always nightmares, like “To the Dark Tower Came.” I can’t imagine why anyone would want to psychoanalyze me, but if anybody does, that’s the place to start.

  “Parkroads,” a short story in the form of a movie review, is as good a piece as I’ve ever turned out. After half a dozen rejections, it appeared in Fiction International, a literary magazine published by San Diego State University. I’m happy to say that several people wrote to Larry McCaffery, the editor, asking where they could rent the film.

  In 1982, Ed Bryant, Michael Bishop, and I taught a three-week course in science fiction and fantasy writing at Portland State University’s Haystack Summer Program in the Arts. We had a grand total of four students, but I’m happy to say that one of the four, David Zindell, is rapidly becoming a very well-known author. During my week, I did the exercises I assigned to the doughty four. One was to write a science-fiction story about a blocked writer; “Alphabet” was my own homework.

  “A Criminal Proceeding” is just my impression of real-life courtroom drama as it’s presented in the popular press. When I read one of these things, usually while buttering yet another slice of toast, I never know who anyone is or what the person on trial is supposed to have done. Do you?

  “In Looking-Glass Castle” harks back to one of the earliest science-fiction ideas: the human society modeled on that of bees or ants. It got me an unasked-for grant from the Illinois Arts Council, the only grant I’ve ever received.

  “Cherry Jubilee” is a science-fiction mystery story, among other things. Alex Schomburg gave it a marvelous illustration showing dinner aboard the spacecraft; if you’re going to try to solve the mystery, you’d be wise to draw a picture—or at least a chart—of the same sort.

  “Redbeard” is a horror story based upon a house I used to drive past every so often. It has since burned to the ground, which may be a good thing. Maybe I should write a story about John Gacy, the killer clown; he lived a few miles from here, and my friend Jerry Bauer used to take pictures for him.

  “A Solar Labyrinth” is another favorite. Labyrinths seem to fascinate just about everybody, and for a while I was almost equally interested in what used to be called dialing. I tried to keep the sinister element well in the background, and it seems I kept it so far back that few readers notice it at all; but I like it that way.

  “Love, Among the Corridors” is a homage to Kipling’s lovely “The Children of the Zodiac.” Like “Alphabet,” it originated in a Haystack assignment: write a fantasy in which a woman’s touch brings a statue to life.

  “Checking Out” was written for Pamela Sargent’s Afterlives, an anthology of life-after-death stories. Similarly, “Morning Glory” was written for Anne McCaffrey, who was editing a book of stories with university backgrounds. “Trip, Trap” was the first story I ever sold Damon Knight for his Orbit series; it marks the real beginning of my writing career.

  “From the Desk of Gilmer C. Merton” is the story my agent (Virginia Kidd) dislikes the most; she thinks Georgia Morgan’s modeled on her. Nah. I should point out that Velo’s a village near here. I don’t think there’s really a North Velo City, but in a few years there might be—this is Barrington, and there’s also North Barrington, South Barrington, Lake Barrington Shores, and Barrington Hills. So you see.

  “Civis Laputus Sum” is one of my periodic semiserious hits at academics, who often seem to feel that the only good writer is a dead writer. I do it mostly to show that I’m not good yet, and because it’s such fun to see tenured professors who’ve built whole careers on criticizing some poor bastard who had to hustle to make the rent bluster and huff when they’re criticized a bit themselves.

  “The Recording” drew the comment, “At last! Calling it like it is!” from Isaac Asimov. If that isn’t enough to make you want to read it, what would be?

  The next story, “Last Day,” was written on request for an editor who had asked for a religious science-fiction story. I don’t think it can have been quite what he had in mind, because he rejected it without comment. Since I’ve already talked about writing stories for Pam Sargent and Anne McCaffrey, perhaps I should warn you that editors who ask specifically for stories rarely buy them. What usually happens it that the editor has some earlier piece in mind and rejects what you write for him when it doesn’t resemble that.

  When we were discussing “Civis Laputus Sum,” I implied that I dislike all academics, at least in the humanities. “Death of the Island Doctor” proves I don’t. There are still a few left who got into their fields because they actually love them. Not many, but a few. Needless to say, they are scorned by their colleagues, though frequently worshipped by their students. It seems to me that there used to be a lot more of them than there are now.

  “In the Mountains” and “At the Volcano’s Lip” are two of the stories I wrote on the train; I’ve already told you about “On the Train” itself and “In the Old Hotel,” from which this book takes its name. The closing story, “Choice of the Black Goddess” presents the further adventures of Captain Tev Noen, Ler Oeuni, and their meery crew, whom you will meet first in “The Green Rabbit from S’Rian.”

  And now it’s time to check in. Please don’t forget to sign the register—our porter isn’t available at the moment, but I’ll be happy to carry your bags upstairs myself. I do hope you have a pleasant stay. Perhaps someday you’ll want to return.

&n
bsp; Gene Wolfe

  Barrington

  Illinois

  The Green Rabbit from S’Rian

  CAPTAIN TEV NOEN TOOK OFF HIS GILDED DRESS HELMET and scratched his shaven head—not because he was puzzled by the sight of two of his best hands nailing up a placard at the mouth of Rat’s Alley, but because it had occurred to him that the placards might be ineffective, and he had not yet decided what to do if they were. He had composed them himself that afternoon, and Ler Oeuni, his first mate, had lettered them with sweeping strokes of the brush.

  JOIN THE LEVAR’S NAVY!

  THE GALLEASS WINDSONG

  IS NOW ACCEPTING RECRUITS!

  THREE COPPERS A DAY

  PROMPTLY PAID AT EVERY PORT!

  AMPLE FOOD, DRINK, AND CLOTHING, AND

  GOOD TREATMENT!

  SIGN TONIGHT AT THE BIG TREE!

  FIVE COPPERS WHEN YOU SIGN!!

  PRIZE MONEY COULD MAKE YOU RICH!!!

  It was a simple appeal to self-interest, and Noen wondered whether sounding the trumpets of Liavek and Her Magnificence, as most captains did, would not have been better. He thought not. In his experience, recruits did not care about such things.

  The hands drove home their final nails with resounding whacks and turned to face their captain, touching their foreheads with all fingers. Automatically, Noen replaced his helmet and returned their salutes. “Good work. Now we’ll rejoin Lieutenant Dinnile and see if these have brought anyone yet.” Recklessly he added, “I’ll buy you each a tankard, if there’s a good hand already.”

  The sailors grinned and took their positions like proper bodyguards, the woman ahead of him and the man behind him. Noen tried to recall their names; they pulled the first (that was, the rearmost) starboard oar—Syb and Su, of course. Each wore a sharply curved cutlass in a canvas sheath now, although the hammers they carried would be nearly as effective.