Saying Good-bye to Now
Twenty years in
Stasis. Numerous deaths, many of them self-inflicted, ordered with
the callous detachment of self-appointed gods. They feed into the
unquiet conscience of a man who knows he could have been better,
can still be better—if only he can
untangle the Gordian knot of his destiny after it’s been tied up
and handed to him by people he’s coming to despise.
That’s you in a
nutshell, Pierce.
You’re at a bleak
crossroads, surrounded by lovers and allies and oh, so isolated in
your moment of destiny. Who are you going to be, really? Who do you
want to be?
All the myriad ways
will lie before you, all the roads not taken at your back: who do
you want to be?
You have met your
elder self, the man-machine at the center of an intrigue that might
never exist if Kafka gets his way. And you’ll have mapped out the
scope of the rift with Xiri, itself rooted in her despair at
Stasis. You can examine your life with merciless, refreshing
clarity, and find it wanting if you wish. You can even unmake your
mistakes: let Grandpa flower, prune back your frightened teenage
nightmare of murder. You can step off the murderous infinite
roundabout whenever you please, resign the game or rejoin and play
to win—but the question you’ve only recently begun to ask is, who
writes the rules?
Who do you want to
be?
The snow falls
silently around you as you stand in darkness, knee-deep in the
frosted weeds lining the ditch by the railroad tracks. Alone in the
night, a young man walks between islands of light. A headhunter
stalks him unseen, another young man with a heart full of fears and
ears stuffed with lies. There’s a knife in his sleeve and a
pebble-sized machine in his pocket, and you know what he means to
do, and what will come of it. And you know what you need to do.
And now it’s your
turn to start making history . . .
Afterword—“Palimpsest”“Palimpsest” wanted to be a novel. It really, really wanted to be a novel. Maybe it will be, someday. And maybe I could have gotten away with making it a short novel, just to round out this collection with an example of every format of fiction, if it wasn’t for the imaginary voice of my editor nagging at the back of my head (“Do you know how much it costs to print a hardcover once it goes over five hundred pages?”).Part of the reason novels are the length they are is the cost of printing and binding. Binding a fat book is disproportionately more expensive than binding two thinner ones, and there is a downward pressure on the price of hardbacks, which makes it difficult for publishers to show a profit on a fat volume. No surprise, then, that many recent big fat fantasy novels have shown up split into two or more thinner volumes.Perhaps once publishing moves wholesale onto the Internet, fashions in fiction length and the disappearance of printing and binding costs will lead to more and longer novels: but in the here and now, this short-story collection is pushing the limits of what I can get away with, without any need to add another hundred thousand words!