The Nail and the Oracle (41 page)

And all four of us got into the front seat. We went to a place which serves nothing but pancakes—Swedish and German and French and flaming and with sausages and sour cream and six kinds of syrup and lots more. We ate so many pancakes that we came this close to being too fat to get back in the car. And all the while I was chewing on the knobby thought that Harlan had already bought the garbage cans and that settle when he came back to where I was and started lusting after a twelve-foot stepladder
.

“Runesmith”:
by Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison; first published in
F&SF
, May 1970. Harlan Ellison’s introduction to this story, in his 1983 book
Partners in Wonder:

“Sturgeon and I go back many years. No words by me are needed to add to the luster and familiarity of his reputation and his writings. Of his personal warmth and understanding of people I’ve written at length in Dangerous Visions and elsewhere, as I have written of his many kindnesses to me.

Ted came out to the Coast about five years ago and stayed with me for a while, and we got to know each other almost better than we wanted to. (Picture this, if you will: Ted has a penchant for running around in the buff; that’s cool; I do it myself a lot of the time. But I make these tiny concessions to propriety when I know nice people with easily blown minds are coming to the house; I wear a towel. After the first few incidents—a cookie-peddling Brownie ran screaming, an Avon lady had an orgasm on my front stoop, a gentleman of undetermined sexual orientation started
frothing—I suggested to Ted that while he had one of the truly imposing physiques of the Western World, and while we all loved him sufficiently to overlook the vice squad pigs who came to the door at the request of the Brownie’s den momma, that he would make me much happier if he would for Christ’s sake put something on. So he wandered around wearing these outrageous little red bikini underpants.) For his part, Ted had to put up with my quixotic morality, which flails wildly between degenerate and Puritan. I would catch him, from time to time, when I’d done something either terribly one or the other with a look on his face usually reserved for Salvation Army musicians who find their street corner is occupied by a nasty drunk lying in the gutter.

But we managed to be roommates without too much travail, and during that period I suggested to Ted that we do a story that we could dedicate to the memory of Dr. Paul Linebarger, who wrote speculative fiction of the highest order under the name Cordwainer Smith. Ted thought that was a pretty fair idea, so I typed out the title “Runesmith” and sat down—I type titles standing—and did the first section, up to the sentence, Smith, alone. Then!

Then, the dumb motherfucker pulled one of those wretched tricks only a basically evil person can conceive. He decided in between paragraphs that he didn’t care for the way the story was going and he wrote the section beginning with ‘Alone’ and ending—without hope of linking or continuing—at the sentence that begins, ‘The final sound of the fall was soft …’

‘Now what the hell is that supposed to be?’ I demanded, really pissed off. Sturgeon just smiled. ‘How do you expect me to proceed from there, you clown? Everybody knows the plot has to start emerging in the first 1500 words, and you’ve tied me off like a gangrenous leg!’ Sturgeon just smiled. I suppose you think that’s funny, dump the hero into a pit, he can’t get out, the lions are gnawing at his head. You think that’s really funny. Dumb is what it is, Ted, it is dumb!” Sturgeon just smiled.

I threw my hands in the air, dumped the six pages of the story in a file for a week, and didn’t get back to it till I’d calmed down. Then I went on and wrote—struggling to smooth the break between my first and second sections and that gibberish of his—the section running from Smith backed to the wall of the landing to the section where he returns to his former lodgings, where the mistake was first made. (But much of what you now find in that longish section came in rewrite. It was only three pages of typescript originally.)

Then I gave it to Ted. Twenty-six months passed. Finally, I called him—he was long since gone from my house, where it was possible to get an armlock on him—and told him if he wasn’t going to get off his ass and finish the story, to return it to me, so I could lift out that demented section he’d written, and complete it myself. Nine months passed.

So I called him and told him I’d trash his damned house, rape his old lady, murder his kids, loot his exchequer, pillage his pantry, burn his silo, slaughter his oxen, pour salt on his fields and in general carry on cranky. Four months passed.

So I had a lady friend call him and tell him I was dying of the Dutch Elm Blight, lying on my death bed and asking, as a last request, for the story. He went to the mountains with his wife and kids for a holiday.

‘What is all this nonsense about Sturgeon understanding love?’ I screamed, stamping my foot.

Two weeks later Dr. Jekyll waltzed into the house and handed me the completed first draft, smiled, went away. I didn’t waste any time. I rewrote it from stem to stern, cackling fiendishly all the while, sent it off, and kept the money!

Now how about that, Sturgeon!”

“Jorry’s Gap”:
first published in
Adam
, October 1968. This was one of the first of the “Wina stories” (a name given by Sturgeon to a burst of new stories that flowed forth from his pen and typewriter shortly after the arrival in his southern California life of a woman named Wina who would become his fourth long-term committed life partner and the mother of his seventh child, Andros). He recounts Wina’s positive effect on his life and writing in the introduction to his 1971 collection
Sturgeon Is Alive and Well
, which consists almost entirely of “Wina stories.”

These stories were also the product of a special relationship Sturgeon developed with two young editors of “men’s magazines,” Merrill Miller and Jared Rutter, who agreed to purchase and publish any stories Sturgeon sent them, whether science fiction or not.
One can approach the typewriter with a wonderful sense of wingspread with a market like that
, Sturgeon said in his introduction to
Sturgeon Is Alive and Well
. He went on to say:
Nothing will ever stop me from writing science fiction, but there sure is a plot afoot to keep me from writing anything else, and I won’t have it. Perhaps now you can understand why I am so pleased with this collection
In 1968, when this story was written, Ted’s son Robin was 16, and was living in the small town of Woodstock with his mother, two younger teenage sisters, and his little brother.

“Brownshoes”:
first published in
Adam
, May 1969. This story was then reprinted in
F&SF
, October 1969, under the title “The Man Who Learned Loving.” It went on to win the Nebula Award (voted on by members of the Science Fiction Writers of America) for best science fiction short story of the year. It is also an early “Wina story.” The ongoing argument between the hippie chick and her hip guy on whether it is possible to save the world while wearing unhip brown shoes or whether in fact that was necessary as protective coloration is classic, evidence that Sturgeon was writing from his own experience.

“It Was Nothing—Really!”
first published in
Knight
, November 1969, and another early “Wina story.” This is another of a series of Sturgeon stories (including “Brownshoes”) on “how to save the world,” very much an expression of what was on the minds of intelligent, caring people when the story was written.

“Take Care of Joey”:
first published in
Knight
, January 1971. The line near the end, “or the one boy with curly hair” is a reference to himself, Ted Sturgeon, a recollection of what he went through as a young man with curly hair.