A Thousand Deaths Read online

  A Thousand Deaths

  George Alec Effinger

  In memory of

  George Alec Effinger

  1947-2002

  Editor's Notes and Acknowledgments

  The idea for a collection of Sandor Courane stories was originally conceived more than a handful of years ago by Mike Resnick, along with indie publisher Gordie Meyer. Gordie then floated the idea past George Alec Effinger, and he wholeheartedly approved.

  Unfortunately, the exigencies of everyday life tend to interfere with the best laid plans, and, four years later, A Thousand Deaths had yet to be published. (Gordie later informed me that both he and George came up with the book title independently of one another—"cue Twilight Zone theme..." Gordie had written in his email.) In mid-December 2002, while doing some web searching, I came upon Gordie Meyer's Wunzenzierohs Publishing Company web site. The home page contained a statement that the planned George Alec Effinger collection, A Thousand Deaths, was currently in limbo due to George's passing. I immediately contacted Gordie regarding the collection. At the time, I had just delivered Budayeen Nights, my first George Alec Effinger short fiction collection, to Golden Gryphon Press publisher Gary Turner, and I was working on plans for a second Effinger collection, which became George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth. I felt that a collection of Sandor Courane stories would fit perfectly with my future editing plans, and continue to fulfill my earlier promise to George to help bring his fiction back into print. That is, if Gordie was willing to relinquish responsibility for the book, which he did, most graciously.So that's a very condensed version of how A Thousand Deaths came to be. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Gordie Meyer—and Barbara Hambly, executrix for the Effinger estate—for allowing me, and Golden Gryphon Press, to publish a collection of Sandor Courane stories.

  In exercising my editorial prerogative, this "collection" has turned out a bit different from how it was originally conceived. Though George's first novel of the Budayeen, When Gravity Fails, may be his most popular and well-known work, the Sandor Courane novel The Wolves of Memory was always his personal favorite and, he felt, quite possibly his best work. So from the very beginning I intended to include Wolves as the major focus of this third volume, with the short stories as an added bonus.

  Sandor Courane is, of course, one of George Alec Effinger's many alter egos—a somewhat autobiographical character. Yet, contrary to the title A Thousand Deaths, there are only a dozen or so Sandor Courane short stories, and of these, Courane only dies, or faces death, in probably half of them. It is these stories that are included herein. Of those stories not included in this volume, three in particular deserve special recognition: "The Pinch Hitters," the story of five writers who, while attending a science fiction convention, find themselves transported into the bodies of major league baseball players (George was a diehard fan of the Cleveland Indians; and in addition to himself, as Sandor Courane, of course, the other four "characters" are based on the real-life SF writers Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois, Jay Haldeman, and Joe Haldeman); and "Strange Ragged Saintliness," a story narrated by Courane, in which he tells of the trials and tribulations of his childhood friend and roommate, Robert W. Hanson (another recurring Effinger character), who tried to help "plugging"-addicted street people kick their habit before it killed them (given George's own history of drug addiction brought on by chronic pain, this story is indeed very personal). A third story, "The City on the Sand," greatly expanded from its original appearance in the Magazine of Fantasy d1 Science Fiction, is included in the earlier Budayeen Nights collection. Here Courane, though a minor character, is a successful poet and cafe owner who joins the desert city's new regime as a colonel, essentially responsible for propaganda—and serves as a thorn in the craw of the story's protagonist, an alcoholic and failed poet, envious of Courane's popularity and success.

  Lastly, I would like to acknowledge those who helped me track down copies of all of the uncollected Sandor Courane stories: Richard Bleiler, Paul Di Filippo, Curt Phillips, and George Zebrowski. Thank you all once again.

  —Marty Halpern

  Introduction

  There is a wonderful exchange in one of my favorite films, They Might Be Giants, between George C. Scott, who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes, and a Mr. Bagg, whom Scott has just met:

  MR. BAGG: I thought you were dead.

  "HOLMES": The Falls at Reichenbach. I know. I came back in the sequel.

  We used to talk about character actors coming back in the sequels—they'd die in one B movie and there they'd be, back again, two months later—but the above scene was the first time anyone ever actually gave voice to the notion for public consumption.

  And then came Sandor Courane.

  Actually, the title of this book—A Thousand Deaths—is a wild exaggeration. I doubt that Courane has died much more than eight or nine times. Surely less than a dozen.

  But they weren't phony deaths. When I was a kid and we had the first television set on our block, back in the late 1940s, my friends and I used to gather around the tube after school and watch the endless Tom Mix serials. At the end of one episode we'd see him and Tony (his horse, for the uninitiated) fall over the side of a mountain and plunge to their deaths, or get run over by a train. Then we'd wait breathlessly for a few days until the next episode, which always started a minute before the last one ended, and we would see that our eyes had betrayed us, that we only thought we'd seen Tom and Tony fall to their doom, that Tom had somehow dived to safety in the last nanosecond.

  There's none of that sleight of hand for Sandor Courane, no sir. When he dies, he dies, and there's no two ways about it. He stops functioning. He stops breathing. He enters what you might call a long-term open-ended state of non-life.

  But he still comes back in the sequel.

  Most people don't have any trouble coping with reality. Every now and then you get someone like Philip K. Dick, who questions it just about every time out of the box. But no one ever played as many tongue-in-cheek games with it as George Alec Effinger, the sly wit who took such pleasure in constantly killing Courane and bringing him back.

  Take, for example, The Wolves of Memory and "Fatal Disk Error." In the former, TECT runs the universe and eventually kills Courane. But in the sequel, "Fatal Disk Error," Courane kills TECT, and then we find out that it was really George Alec Effinger who created (and destroyed) them both. And since George was never content merely to put in one or two unique twists when he could come up with more, we also learn that the story was rejected by an editor who was a little too based in reality, so George resurrects TECT just to kill it again.

  Or consider "In the Wings." Doubtless at one time or another you've seen or read Luigi Pirandello's classic play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. This story might just as easily be titled: "Effinger's Stock Characters in Search of a Plot." The entire story takes place in the wings (or perhaps the locker room) of Effinger's mind, where Courane and other regular Effinger characters are waiting impatiently for George's oversexed muse to get him to write Chapter 1 so they can go to work. And, of course, Courane is killed again. At least once. (Not to worry. It is impossible to let the cat out of the bag when discussing an Effinger story. If you like the image of cats, it's a hell of a lot more like herding them. Trust me on this.)

  Okay (I hear you say), now I know what a Sandor Courane story is: things happen and he dies.

  Okay, I answer. Go read "The Wicked Old Witch" and then tell me what a Sandor Courane story is about. This one may be one of the least likely love stories you'll ever read. (Or it may not be a love story at all. George was like that.)There's one here that I commissioned some years ago, when Disney's Aladdin movie was coming out and I edited an anthology of stories about
genies and magic teapots and the like, and I invited George to write a story for it. What I got was "Mango Red Goes to War." It's a Courane story, of course, or it wouldn't be here—but it's a lot more than that. For one thing, it's George explaining to me exactly how he's constructing the story, not by phone or e-mail but as part of the story itself. And with all the three-wish stories that filled the book, George's was the most original. (George was like that, too.)

  Poor Courane has reality yanked from under him yet again in "From the Desk of," in which he's a science fiction writer. (George loved to write about science fiction writers. Nothing ever went smoothly for them.) He's a science fiction editor in "The Thing from the Slush," a story I am convinced George wrote after reading one too many Adam-and-Eve endings in some magazine's slush pile.

  I won't tell you a thing about "Posterity," except that it ends with a question no one else had ever thought of asking, but a legitimate, even an important, question nonetheless, one that most writers I know would have a difficult time answering. (George could be so amusing that sometimes people didn't recognize the fact that he asked important questions. Lots of'em.)

  In the course of his career, which ended all too soon with his death in 2002, George created three ongoing characters.

  Marîd Audran was the star of the Budayeen books and stories—When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, The Exile Kiss, and Budayeen Nights—and that is clearly the most important work he ever did.

  Maureen Birnbaum was the ongoing star in a new genre of humor that George created, which I call Preppie Science Fiction. She was the funniest of all his creations.

  His third character, of course, was Sandor Courane. Not as important as Marîd, not as funny as Maureen Birnbaum. But I'll tell you something: the Courane stories are far and away the most creative, the most off-the-wall stories that George or just about anyone else ever put to paper.

  Enough introduction. Sit down and read them, and I'll bet Courane's life you agree with me. (After all, what have I—or he—got to lose?)

  Mike Resnick

  Cincinnati, Ohio

  May 2006

  The Wolves of Memory

  The vilest deeds like poison weeds

  Bloom well in prison-air:

  It is only what is good in Man

  That wastes and withers there...

  — Oscar Wilde,

  "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"

  "I have come to die for your sins," Jesus told a stooped figure passing him on the road.

  "Then what am I to die for?" the old man asked.

  Jesus took a small notebook from his pocket and copied the question. "If I may have your name and address," he said, "an answer will be sent to you."

  — A. J. Langguth, Jesus Christs

  One

  When his arms began to get weary, Courane put the corpse down on the sandy soil, sat with his back against a rough warm boulder, and tried to remember. He closed his eyes for a long time, listening to the faint whisper of the wind blowing the topmost layer of sand toward the western horizon. Courane's breathing was slow and easy, and he was as comfortable as a napping baby. He breathed deeply, enjoying the hot freshness of the afternoon. A buzzing insect disturbed him, lighting on his ear, and he made a rather indolent swipe to chase it away. He opened his eyes again and saw the young woman's body.

  He tried, but he couldn't remember who she was. Or who she had been. He couldn't remember why he was sitting in the hot sun with her. He examined her as well as he could without getting up and taking a closer look. She had been pretty. He couldn't tell how long she had been dead, but the irreversible effects of death had begun to distort her face and form. Yet, even through the grotesque deformity of her life's end, she touched him. Courane wondered if he had known her while she was alive.

  There was a tiny movement near his left foot, and it attracted Courane's attention. Two tiny glass eyes peered at him from a pocket in the sand, a concavity the size of his thumb. A tan snout twitched and disappeared. Courane laughed. He loved animals. Hestretched out on the ground and rolled over on his stomach. He rested there while quick-moving shadows of clouds skimmed over the empty landscape, covering him briefly like a dream of death. He closed his eyes again and slept.

  The sun was setting when he awoke. He was startled and a little afraid. He didn't know where he was, and when he stood up and looked around he learned nothing. As far as he could see in every direction there was only flat waste, dotted frequently with broken boulders. There were no trees to break the lonely mood, nor even clumps of dry dead grass. Only a few feet from where he stood there was the body of a dead woman, a young woman with long dark hair and skin the bloodless pallor of the grave. Courane thought that there must be some reason they were together. There must be something in the past that connected them, man and woman, living and dead. He could not remember. He wanted to go on, but he didn't know where he was going. He was afraid to start walking until he did recall, and he didn't dare leave until he knew for certain if he should leave the girl's body or carry it with him. He wished that he could remember how he had gotten to this silent dead place.

  Long after night fell, he realized that he was intensely uncomfortable. He sat shivering in the desert coldness, trying to identify the immediate source of his suffering. There was no way to measure time, and he didn't particularly care to know how many hours had passed, but after a few minutes he knew that he was painfully thirsty, and that earlier he hadn't been. Either that, or he had been but hadn't realized it. He patted his shirt absently, in a thoughtless searching gesture. He had nothing to eat or drink with him, but he looked anyway. He found a torn piece of paper in a pocket, with a message on it. It said:

  Her name is Alohilani. You and she were very much in love. You must take her back to the house. Keep walking east until you get to the river. Follow the river downstream to the house. East is the direction of the rising sun. They will help you when you get there.

  Courane read the note twice, not comprehending it at all even though it was in his own handwriting. The wind was cold and cut him like knives. The sand stung his face and brought tears to his eyes. He stared at the words and his vision blurred. He knew that it was a terrible thing to forget the woman he loved. He wondered how that could happen. He hadn't been lonely before, but now he felt a deep aching. He put the paper back in his pocket and sat down beside the young woman's corpse. He wanted to hurry to the house, but he had to wait until the sun came up. He wanted to get the help of whoever was there but until morning he was helpless.

  Courane tried to sleep but the fierce coldness and his thirst deprived him of rest. He sat by the boulder and thought. Her name was Alohilani. It was a pretty name, but it meant nothing to him. It occurred to him that he knew her name now but not his own. That didn't seem important for some reason. He yawned and looked up at the stars. The stars were home. That strange thought formed in Courane's mind, like the first bubble in a pan of boiling water. Like a bubble, it burst and disappeared and was forgotten. Courane shivered and clutched himself and hunched against the sharp attack of the wind. Sometime before dawn he drifted into placid, dreamless sleep.

  The warm wind, blowing from the opposite direction, throwing veils of sand into his face, woke him. The sun was well over the horizon. Courane stood and stretched and rubbed his face. He was surprised to find the body of a young woman beside him on the ground. He couldn't recall who she was or where he was, and he didn't know what he ought to do. He felt small and forlorn and, as the minutes passed and he stared at the swollen, lifeless woman, Courane heard himself whimper. He was hungry, but there was nothing at all nearby that might provide him with even a meager breakfast. He took a deep breath and resigned himself. There was neither road nor sign of human settlement in sight, and he didn't have the least idea how he ought to proceed. He sat down again and waited. The breeze blew almost steadily and the sun felt good on his shoulders, but he guessed that by midday the heat would become intolerable, and that at night all the warmth would blee
d away and he would suffer with the cold.

  An hour after awakening he found the piece of paper in his pocket. He was filled with joy. He read the directions several times and, though he didn't understand what they meant, he was given a new energy to obey his own instructions. He narrowed his eyes and looked to the horizon below the morning sun; he chose a landmark to walk toward. Then he bent and picked up the body and slung it clumsily over one shoulder. He leaned forward under the burden and trudged toward the eastern horizon. The sandy soil made walking difficult and Courane was soon out of breath, but he didn't stop. He had to get the woman back to the house before it got dark. After the sun set, he wouldn't know in which direction to walk. He worried about that for a little while, and then he forgot all about the problem. He muttered to himself as he went, and he was as unaware of the passage of time as he was of his own pain.

  Courane took a rest in the middle of the afternoon. The place he chose for his break was identical to the place he had spent the previous night. The sand and the rocks were the same. As he sat in the sparse shade of a tall weathered rock, he watched a fly crawling along one of the woman's arms. He had dropped her roughly to the ground, and one stiff arm stuck out as though she were indicating something to the southwest that intrigued her. The fly walked along the fine sun-paled hair of her arm. Her name was—

  —Alohilani! He remembered. He smiled at the achievement, but then his face contorted with grief. He wept loudly and helplessly as his thoughts battered him cruelly.

  His memories were fugitive visions, and he clutched at them greedily on the occasions when they presented themselves. He studied them all to the smallest detail, disregarding the pain they threatened. He didn't care about pain any longer. He needed to know the truth. He needed to know who he was, where he came from. He needed to know where he was going, what he was doing. He needed to know why Alohilani was dead, and why his mind functioned only at widely separated moments, with bewildering gaps in continuity and understanding.