Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (40 page)

There’s friendship, there’s gratitude and respect; and then there’s money. Bob didn’t object to Gordie turning his rejected story into a saleable book—that was a stroke of genius. Bob objected to the $5000, and not because Gordie had gotten it—that was good fortune of the first water—but because ACE, having decided that a
Thieves’ World
banner was worth $5000, was neither asking permission to use it nor sharing the wealth.

“By the author of _______” has been appearing on book covers since Gutenberg’s day and by 1982
Star Wars
and
Star Trek
had progressed from one-shot movie novelizations to steady streams of licensed original novels. But the idea that something one author had created could be worth $5000 to another author and his publisher . . . well, that struck a new and somewhat sour note.

Bob and his agent, who was also Gordie’s agent, squared off with ACE. The
Thieves’World
association was pulled, but Gordie got to keep the extra $5000. And while that was happening, I asked a lawyer friend to come up with a paragraph or two we could add to our short-story contract that would clarify the conditions under which characters could be shared. Said lawyer pointed out that changing our contract wouldn’t resolve the problem, because Bob had rejected Gordie’s story. He said we’d need something different, something bound into the invitation to write for
TW
.

A formal invitation that spelled out the ground rules—I thought that sounded good. We were heading into our fifth volume by then and planning to send out a handful of new invitations. We could clarify the whole copyright situation—What copyright situation? my friend the lawyer asked. It was really very simple, I replied: the authors made free use of each other’s characters, settings, etc., but
Thieves’ World
wasn’t work-for-hire and we’d been copyrighting the stories in their authors’ names.

Most jaw-dropping moments are metaphors; not that one. My friend sat across the table, struck mute and frozen. When he finally did move, it was to toss his pencil at the ceiling. Apparently what I’d so glibly described had more legal implications than could be covered in a one-paragraph addition to the standard short-story contract. He suggested a weekend retreat, possibly two.

As an author, one would like to be remembered for one’s stories; I fear that Bob and I are going to be remembered for a contract: the
Thieves’World
Master Agreement, the legalese novelette that unleashed the concept of “Shared Worlds” on a unsuspecting and not altogether welcoming industry. In effect, the Master Agreement solved the problem that had earned me a lecture in 1978. We’d turned the world of science fiction into marketable properties and preserved the intellectual property rights of both the creators and the participants.

Suddenly, Hollywood wasn’t the only franchiser in town. Anyone who’d ever built a world could change the proper nouns in the Master Agreement and go into the exploitation business. And a good many did. The
Thieves’ World
authors were among the first to exploit their worlds.

C. J. Cherryh wrote
The Angel with a Sword
. There were spaceships and aliens in the backstory, but the novel itself was pre-steampunk set in a city that reminded me of Venice . . . and Sanctuary. I mentioned the similarities to her after reading the proofs. Sure enough, a shared world called Merovingen Nights was in the works. In addition to creating characters, Merovingen’s authors would lay claim to their very own island. Did we want to play? Of course. After five years of editing
Thieves’World
, Bob and I were more than willing to be the pain in another editor’s neck.

C.J. adopted the Master Agreement lock, stock, and pussycat. Janet Morris knew all about the hassles Bob and I endured and opted for something simpler: Hell. After all, you couldn’t get more public domain than Hell. Her notion was that we’d write stories about the people who wound up there. Because our characters were to be based on real people, there wouldn’t be a copyright problem; and because they were dead, Janet didn’t think there’d be libel problems, either. Did we want to play? Bob said yes; I waffled until she suggested that I write a story about Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov sharing a cold-water flat in the part of Hell that was indistinguishable from Siberia. How could I resist?

David Drake, who’d written for both
TW
and
Heroes in Hell
, and Bill Fawcett, came up with
The Fleet
in an attempt to inject some honest science fiction into what was becoming a fantasy-dominated sub-genre. They took the Master Agreement into intergalactic space where the writers sent their characters into a nasty, desperate war against an implacable enemy. They asked us to play, but by then we were learning how to say No.

Wendy and Richard Pini weren’t part of the
Thieves’ World
crew, but we’d been friends for years. They had a world, Elfquest, a sui generis tale of wolf-riding elves that Wendy told in a graphic novel format. They had a problem, too: A backstory that spanned ten generations of said elves. Even if she gave up sleeping and eating, Wendy couldn’t draw it all. We gave Richard a copy of the Master Agreement, and the next thing we knew, he’d not only dreamed up
The Blood of Ten Chiefs
project, he’d convinced us to sign on as coeditors until he got up to speed as a prose, rather than graphic, editor.

There were others. Beth Meacham (who’d really gotten the ball rolling when she told me about
Jamie the Red
) shepherded Emma Bull and Will Shetterley’s
Liavek
series into existence. George R.R. Martin questioned me about the Master Agreement when he was putting
Wild Cards
together. I waited and hoped for a call from Spider Robinson. Even more than the
Vulgar Unicorn
, Callahan’s
Crosstime Saloon
seemed a natural shared-world setting, but Spider, wise man that he is, proved immune to our infection.

Throughout the eighties, we described
Thieves’ World
as the “
Hill Street Blues
of sword-and-sorcery” or “
Dungeons and Dragons
for authors.” It was the decade of using one brand name to describe another, the era of subrights and exploitation. ACE published their final
TW
anthology in 1989, after which it was time for the eighties and all they had spawned to fade into history. For better or worse, we’d made our mark: we don’t just write books anymore, we create properties, and if we’re careful, we’re the ones who control and profit from them.

I
’ll get back to the subject in a minute, but first let’s talk about fangs. You’ve seen these vampire movies? With the vampires dislocating their jaws to show their pointy canines? I think the great American public would like vampires to have fangs like rattlesnakes, except equipped for suction instead of injection. But what humans have to work with are these little dull canine teeth way out toward the sides of our mouths.

Even if they were bigger and sharper they’d be more like railroad spikes than a rattlesnake’s hypodermics. Look at a dog’s canines. They’re for hanging on to a struggling victim and doing as much damage as possible, not sliding in and out and leaving a cute little hole. But people are hung up on the fang idea. It’s the word
fang
, I think. Sounds all sinister and thrilling.

So you see these movie vampires with their artificially lengthened and sharpened canines, twisting their heads around and trying to make cute little holes in somebody’s neck. It’s not easy; no matter how long and pointy you make them, they’re still in the wrong place for that kind of bite—too far back in the mouth and too far apart.

Okay, we’re supposed to be talking legal business. But imagine if you decided to lean over your desk right now and bite my neck. You can’t drop your lower jaw out of the way like a rattlesnake, and you can’t just go
whack
with your upper jaw and there’s a hole wherever a tooth hits. No, you’d have to get a piece of me between your uppers and lowers and chew.

And how about these stories where a pair of vampires simultaneously chomp each other’s neck? Picture the contortions required, and ask yourself if it wouldn’t be easier to get at a wrist. The main reason fictional vampires have this throat fetish is the public thinks it’s sexy.

Which is another thing. Something snuffling and masticating and slurping under your chin is
not
necessarily sexy. And except for mosquitoes, sucking is a separate operation from biting, so the process can get messy. Yes, I did say “something,” not “somebody.” A vampire is not a person, and it’s not male or female. It’s a monster. You can say getting sucked by a vampire is a sensual experience, but so is being swallowed by an anaconda. A vampire is an animated corpse, and what animates it isn’t something you’d invite for dinner. It’s an infection, a parasite, and it’s about as romantic as diarrhea.

Personally, I think this sexy-vampire stuff is a legacy of good old American puritanism. We’ve been so uptight about sex and how ooh yikes
physical
it is, a couple of generations have grown up convinced that anything physical has got to be, really, deep down, sexy.

Let me tell you, I’m tired of this sinister-but-thrilling bullshit. Getting vampirized isn’t a sinister but thrilling step to immortality. It’s a dreary, yucky death, a lot like AIDS, only faster. And what stands up out of that grave isn’t you. There may be some traces of your personality left—the thing’s using your body, and a lot of personality is physical. But it doesn’t have your memories. The brain is the first thing to go. After that, the digestive system gets reorganized.

Talking about graves reminds me of another thing. Yes, the will, we’ll get back to that, but first, coffins. Vampires are supposed to sleep in their coffins, or the soil they were buried in, or maybe both, and if they don’t they go all to pieces. Not what you’d call a mobile lifestyle. Think about taking your own bed with you every time you make an overnight trip.

Only it doesn’t work that way. Real vampires are drifters. They can’t afford to stay put. Look at it ecologically. The more they eat, the more competitors they create, not to mention the chances of a vampire scare in the neighborhood. It makes sense just to browse a little and move on. And they don’t need any special box or dirt to get a good day’s sleep.

They’re very physical beings, vampires. They don’t have a religion, no more than a tapeworm does, and they don’t give a damn about yours. So all the crosses and crucifixes and communion wafers in Christendom don’t bother them as much as one good whiff of garlic. Garlic and sunlight are unhealthy for vampires, that much is true. But it’s like wood alcohol and radioactivity are unhealthy for humans. A big enough dose can be fatal, but a little isn’t going to knock you off your chair.

Vampires are like fish; they’re not immortal, they just don’t die until something kills them. You might think modern embalming techniques would be as good as a stake through the heart, but think again. The crap the funeral home puts into you isn’t toxic enough to disinfect against vampirism, and what they take out isn’t all that essential. The ancient Egyptians did it better. The only vampires in ancient Egypt were the poor working stiffs who couldn’t afford to get mummified.

I’ve done a lot of research on this, you see. Figured some of it out on my own, learned some of it from books. Not the bestsellers, you can bet on that! The rest of it you might say I got from the horse’s mouth.

And speaking of animals reminds me of the bat business. That’s one of the silliest pieces in the whole package. You know how big a bat is? About one ounce and five inches, that’s how big. Can you figure any way to condense a human body into that size? We’re not talking fantasy here, we’re talking vampires. Sometimes the stories try to get around that with
giant
bats. But think about the wingspan on a two-hundred-pound vampire. Or even a hundred pounds; you do tend to lose a lot of weight. Anyway, it’s a lot less conspicuous to buy a ticket and take the plane.

You want to know why I’m telling you all this? Okay, let’s get to it. I’ve already said embalming isn’t good enough. There’s a way, though, and it’s legal, and perfectly sane people do it. Cremation. You burn a body, you kill whatever’s in it. Killed. Dead. Finished. Now you understand why I wanted to make a new will?

Get this: I’m dying. Dying a dreary, yucky death, and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop it, though the transfusions slow it down. Most of my friends and ex-friends think I’ve got AIDS. That’s what you thought yourself, wasn’t it? My doctor doesn’t know what the hell to make of it. I’m past the stage where garlic could have helped. I’m infected. I’m digesting myself, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Only what I’m turning into won’t be pretty. No, more like a caterpillar one of those parasitic wasps has laid eggs in—something eating me from inside, turning me into it. Using my blood is the least of it. I can feel the brain going. Part of my doctor’s final diagnosis is going to be Alzheimer’s.