IGMS Issue 22 (17 page)

"Yeah, I'm definitely ready for a break. See you later," Joey said.

Peter watched Joey hurry down the aisle. The driver -- they called him The Ogre -- got angry if kids took their time. Peter had been yelled at more than once. But the next stop was his, and in less than five minutes he'd be off the bus and ready to start enjoying the weekend.

The bus jerked to a stop at a red light. Peter's backpack slid off the seat. He reached down to grab it. As he lifted it up, the zipper broke. Books and pencils spilled onto the floor.

"Oh, no." Peter squeezed into the space in front of the seat and started picking everything up. As he shoved the books and papers into another section of the backpack, he felt the bus move, then come to a stop again. He heard the squeak of the door as the Ogre yanked it open.

"Hey, wait!" Peter called.

He grabbed for the rest of his stuff and shoved everything in the backpack. He tried to step into the aisle, but the bus was moving again, and the motion threw Peter onto his seat.

He looked back. His stop was behind him. Peter got ready to walk down the aisle and tell the driver. But he knew The Ogre would shout at him. There was a rule against standing when the bus was moving. It would be easier just to get off at the next stop and walk home. It couldn't be that far.

Peter looked around, checking to see who else might be getting off. But he didn't really know any of the kids who were left on the bus, and he had no idea where any of them lived.

The bus made several turns. Peter realized he'd better keep track of where he was going. There'd been two lefts, then a right. Then they'd gone up the hill.

Come on,
Peter thought,
stop somewhere
.

The bus kept going. Peter felt in his pocket. His Mom had taken his cell phone away last week.

The bus went through a tunnel under a road, then came out in an area that was all woods. After about five minutes, it pulled to the side of the road. Peter looked around. Nobody got up. But he didn't want to risk going even further from home.

He stood and rushed down the aisle.

"NO RUNNING!" The Ogre shouted.

"Sorry," Peter mumbled as he dashed from the bus. He stood and watched as the door closed and the bus started to roll away. Then he took a good look around. There was nothing in sight but trees. "Hey!" he called, running after the bus. "Wait. Come back . . ."

The bus disappeared around a curve.

Peter looked both ways. He realized it would be best to head back the way the bus had come. At least he knew his home was back there somewhere. He started walking down the road.

After a long, hot mile, Peter still hadn't found the tunnel. "It has to be around here," he said as he paused to slide his backpack off his sore shoulders.

He looked over his shoulder. There were no cross streets, no places where he could have gotten onto the wrong road. He looked ahead. There was nothing in front of him but more road and more trees.

He picked up the backpack and started walking again. When something other than trees finally came into sight, Peter sped up. Then he slowed when he realized it wasn't the tunnel. It was a house at the side of the road.

There were people on the porch. An old man and a old woman sat in rocking chairs. "Excuse me," Peter said. "Do you know how far it is to Tuttle Street?"

The man stared at him for a moment, then looked at the woman. The two of them spoke, but Peter couldn't understand the words. It wasn't any language he'd ever heard before.

"Tuttle Street?" Peter asked again.

The man said something and shook his head. Then the man and the woman got up from their chairs and went inside the house.

The door slammed behind them. Peter heard a bolt snap into place. He went back to the road and kept walking.

He saw two children playing in the front yard of the next house he came to. This house was also by itself. "Hi," Peter said.

The younger child, a boy who looked like he might have been two or three, smiled at Peter. The older girl grabbed his hand and dragged him toward the back yard.

Peter sighed and walked on. As he shuffled along the road, he heard the rumble of an engine behind him. He turned and saw the bus. It shot past him, but then stopped. The door opened.

Peter ran up to it and looked inside. The Ogre was there, his hand on the lever that opened and closed the door.

Peter put one foot on the first step. He paused, not sure what to do.

"Come on, get in." the Ogre said. "I'll take you home."

"Thanks." Peter climbed into the bus and took his regular seat. He wanted the rest of the ride to be as normal as possible.

They went through a tunnel and down a hill. The world looked familiar again. The bus made a right and two lefts. The Ogre pulled up across the street from Peter's stop and opened the door.

Peter started to run down the aisle, but he forced himself to walk. "Thanks," he said as he stepped down from the bus.

"There are worse things in life than riding with an Ogre," the driver said. He closed the door.

As the bus drove away, Peter thought he heard laughter.

SCHWEITZER
: Let me start with what is doubtless on your fans' minds these days. Have you really retired from writing fiction? If so, why? Maybe it's because I haven't been at it as long or with such intensity, but I find it hard to understand why someone would stop writing when they still could.

SILVERBERG
: The only thing I've retired from is writing novels. After I wrote
The Longest Way Home
, somewhere around 2002, I said I would not write any more novels, and I haven't, despite several offers from publishers. I just don't want to make the big commitment of time and stamina that a novel would require. But I've continued to do short stories and even the occasional novella, like the recent
Last Song of Orpheus
, and in fact I finished a new short story this very month. And I still do essays for
Asimov's SF
and introductions for other people's books. I won't deny, though, that I'm far less active as a writer than I once was. I'm 76, after all; writing takes time and energy; there are still a lot of things I want to do in the time that is remaining to me, other than writing more science fiction. And it isn't as though my existing bibliography is a skimpy one.

SCHWEITZER
: Is fiction writing for you a job or a compulsion?

SILVERBERG
: Probably both. The fact that I've written so much over the years, even after economic pressures ceased to be a driving factor, very likely indicates that something within me keeps pushing me to move words around on paper. I've been doing it, after all, for seventy years or so, if you count the little stories I was writing in the third grade. And I don't seem to stop.

SCHWEITZER
: Has this changed for you over time?

SILVERBERG
: I write more slowly than I once did, and I spend much less of my time each year doing it. I don't think there's anything unusual about that. Some writers stay prolific to the end, like Frederick Faust (Max Brand), but Faust died when he was in his fifties. I wonder if he'd still have been knocking them out at the old rate if he had lived another twenty years. Another of my prolific heroes, Georges Simenon, was 68 or so when he wrote his last novel. (Though he did go on compulsively writing autobiographical works to the end of his days.)

SCHWEITZER
: Do you find yourself, after all this time, comparing your career with those of other writers? (Here you are citing Frederick Faust and Georges Simenon.) I suppose we must all look with envy on the career of Jack Williamson, or on Gene Wolfe, who seems to be at the top of his game and turning out novels at great speed at80.

SILVERBERG
: Envy is not much of a psychological issue for me, and never has been. I've been able to sell everything I write and have it appear in the places where I want it to appear, and the success of other writers is something I cheer, not bemoan. Sure, I'd like to have Stephen King's income or Neil Gaiman's popularity with huge crowds of readers, but my work is not much like theirs, is not likely to appeal to great multitudes of readers outside the central SF audience, and so be it.

The only writers I ever compared myself with were Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley, back at the beginning of my career nearly sixty years ago. They were quick, clever, prolific writers, and I wanted to have the same sort of careers they had. I kept count of the number of stories they had published, studied their work carefully to see how they did it, watched their progress with immense admiration that I guess could be seen as a kind of envy. In time I became as prolific and widely published as they were, they both became my friends, and I stopped keeping count of their published stories. (And I hardly envied the courses of their lives as they unfolded, with Dick dying young and Sheckley going through all manner of career and financial problems. I could never have imagined, back there in 1952, that they would finish so badly).

Simenon and Faust also were writers I admired rather than envied. I saw them as gifted predecessors whose productivity over an extended period I hoped to emulate. But emulating Jack Williamson would be a fool's game: Jack was a unique figure in our field, endowed with extraordinary longevity and remarkable lucidity of mind right to the end of his long life, and I applaud him without any expectation of doing what he did. Staking any emotional capital on the notion of following his path and winning Hugos and Nebulas in my nineties would be just plain silly. As for Gene Wolfe, yes, he's doing great things at an advanced age, but I regard Gene as a late starter: I began publishing in my teens and have been a full-time writer for nearly six decades, whereas he entered the field ten or twelve years after me and continued to hold down his day job until he was in his fifties or sixties. Writing is something he does for the love of it; to some degree that's true of me, of course, but it has also been my only job for all these years. I've done an enormous amount of hard work over those six decades and it should surprise no one that I want to cut back on my output now.

SCHWEITZER
: In any case, any retirement you declare for yourself now must be on a very different basis than the last time, circa 1977. Then the backlash against the New Wave was in full blast, and the publishing world's idea of SF seemed to be Laser Books or
Star Wars
knockoffs. It must have been a very grim time to be a science fiction writer with any serious ambition. Was it?

SILVERBERG
: It certainly was. A bunch of us tried to remake the field in the 1967-72 period with a burst of original and creative science fiction, and we were greeted with vast indifference and even overt hostility by most of the readers. It became very difficult for the best people of that group -- Joanna Russ, Chip Delany, Tom Disch, Norman Spinrad, John Brunner, Barry Malzberg, to name just some of them -- to earn any kind of livelihood writing SF, and most of them turned to other fields of endeavor. Because I had built up more economic security than most by virtue of my prolificacy, I shrugged an angry shrug and walked away from writing altogether, and stayed away for nearly five years. This time around, as I slide gradually into retirement, I'm still not happy with the course that commercial SF publishing in the States has taken since the collapse of the New Wave a generation ago, but I'm not angry -- just interested in slowing down, relaxing, living the sort of life that most people my age do.

SCHWEITZER
: The story goes that when he was very old, Picasso was asked by a reporter, "What are you doing now?" and he said, "I'm looking for a new style." Are there always, likewise, new horizons for the writer?

SILVERBERG
: I suppose. Not for this one. I've had my turn as a revolutionary. Any writing I do from here on in is going to be very much like the sort of writing I did in the past.

SCHWEITZER
: If you've been writing for seventy years and are now seventy-six, that means you must have started writing when you were six? That does suggest it's inborn, doesn't it? How long before you knew that this was to be your life's work?

SILVERBERG
: My earliest published work was done for my elementary-school newspaper when I was, as I said, in the third grade. I also began writing little stories about the same time. (I continued to do school-newspaper work all the way; I was the editor of my junior-high paper and my high-school paper, and when I was at Columbia I was the drama reviewer for the university paper.) I was fairly late discovering science fiction -- I was about ten -- and didn't write my first SF story until I was nearly thirteen. But I made up for that slow start later on.

Somewhere along the way -- probably in junior high school -- it occurred to me that being a writer was probably what I was going to do when I grew up. By the time I was in my late teens, it was clear to me and everybody around me that a writer was what I was, and I never deviated from that path after that.