Dan Simmons - Remembering Siri

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Remembering Siri

by Dan Simmons

Introduction

I'm interested in how few writers cross the osmotic boundaries between science

fiction and horror, between genre and what those in genre call mainstream. Or,

rather, I should say that I'm fascinated with how many cross and do not return.

Part of it, I think, is the vast difference in states of mind between dreaming the dark

dreams of horror and con-structing the rational structures of SF, or between tripping

the literary light fantastic and being shackled by the grav-ity of "serious" fiction. It is

hard to do both—painful to the psyche to allow one hemisphere to become

dominant while bludgeoning the other into submission. Perhaps that's why

readership of SF and horror, genre and New Yorker fiction overlap less than one

would think.

Whatever the reason, it's a pity that more writers feel constrained—sometimes by

limitations of talent or interest but more frequently by market considerations and the

sim-ple fact that they find success in one field—to stay in one genre.

Of course, the exceptions are always interesting. George R.R. Martin moves easily

between genres and ex-pectations, rarely repeating, always surprising. Dean Koontz

left SF just as he was becoming a star there—possibly because he sensed his destiny

lay in becoming a supernova elsewhere. Edward Bryant took a "sabbatical" from SF

a few years ago and has been producing world-class horror ever since. Kurt

Vonnegut and Ursula K. LeGuin "graduated" from SF to mainstream acceptance.

(To Vonnegut's credit for honesty if nothing else, he allows as to how he gets

nostalgic every once in a while, opens the lowest desk drawer where he keeps his old

pulp SF ef-forts, and then urinates into it.) Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and

others write their most memorable fiction in SF, but they deny any association with

the field. Neither lady mentions urinating into desk drawers, but one sus-pects that

they would feel a certain pressure on their re-spective bladders if forced to accept a

Hugo or Nebula.

Harlan Ellison simply refused ever to be nailed down to a genre—even while he

revolutionized them. We all have heard the stories where Ellison suffers the

ten-millionth reporter or critic or TV personality who is de-manding to know what

descriptive word comes before "writer" in this case. Sci-fi? Fantasy? Horror?

"What's wrong with just ... writer?" Ellison says softly in his most cordial cobra

hiss.

Well, what's wrong with it is that the semi-literate have feeble but tidy little minds

filled with tidy little boxes, and no matter how much one struggles, the newspaper

article (or review, or radio intro, or TV superimposed title) will read something akin

to—"sci-fi guy says his sci-fi stuff not sci-fi."

And the next step is for someone to stand up at a con-vention (sorry, a Con), grab

the microphone, and shout—"How come you're always saying in interviews and

stuff that you're not just a science fiction writer? I'm proud to be associated with

science fiction!" (Or horror. Or fantasy. Or ... fill in the blank.)

The crowd roars, righteousness fills the air, hostility lies just under the surface as if

you're a black at a Huey Newton rally who's been caught "passing"—revealed as an

oreo, or a Jew in the Warsaw ghetto who's been caught helping the Nazis with the

railroad timetables, or—worse yet, a Dead Head at a Grateful D. concert who's been

found listening to Mozart on his Walkman.

I mean, you are at this guy's convention. (Sorry, "Con.")

How do you explain to the guy gripping the mike that there are a thousand pressures

forcing a writer down narrower and narrower alleys—agents trying to make you

marketable and pulling their hair out because you insist on staying a jump ahead of a

readership, publishers trying to shape you into a commodity, editors trying to get

you to Chrissakes be consistent for once, booksellers com-plaining because your

new SF novel just came out and it looks silly racked with your World Fantasy

Award winning novel (which is really about Calcutta and has no fantasy in it), which,

in turn, is next to your Sci-Fi opus and your fat horror novel (it is horror, isn't it?

There wasn't any blood or holograms or demon-eyed kids on the cover...) and now

... now! ... this new book has come out ... this thing ... and it looks, oh sweet

Christ, it looks ... main-stream!

How do you explain that every modifier before writer becomes another nail in the

coffin of your hopes of writ-ing what you want? What you care about?

So you look at the guy with the mike and you stare down the irate booksellers and

you put your editor on hold, and you think—I can explain. I can tell them that the

one wonderful thing about being a writer is the free-dom to explore all venues, the

luxury ... no, the respon-sibility ... to work with the dreams the Muse sends you, to

shape them to the best of your ability and to send them along whether a

guaranteed readership is waiting or not; I can explain the compulsion to write a

good book whether the cover artist knows what to do with it or not, explain the

honor involved in trying new things despite the fact that the manager at the local

B. Dalton's has racked your most recent novel in occult non-fiction and asked ...

no, ordered the distributor not to send any more books written by this obvious

schizophrenic. I can explain all that. I can take every single reader, every defensive

SF chauvinist and horror fan and snooty New York reviewer and sparrowfart

reader of "serious fiction," and show them what being a writer means!

And then you look out at the guy with the mike, and you think—Nahhh. And you

say, "My next book'll be SF."

The next story is SF. I loved writing it. I loved returning to this universe when I

finally used "Remembering Siri" as a starting point to write the 1,500 or so pages of

HYPERION and THE FALL OF HYPERION.

Oh, and the seed crystal for this tale was the thought one night, while dozing off,

What if Romeo and Juliet had lived?

You know—Romeo and Juliet? By that sci-fi/fantasy/horror hack who wrote

sit-coms and historical soap op-eras in his spare time?

Watch for the allusions. And the illusions.

* * *

I climb the steep hill to Siri's tomb on the day the is-lands return to the shallow seas

of the Equatorial Archipel-ago. The day is perfect and I hate it for being so. The sky

is as tranquil as tales of Old Earth's seas, the shallows are dappled with ultramarine

tints, and a warm breeze blows in from the sea to ripple the russet willowgrass on the

hill-side near me.

Better low clouds and gray gloom on such a day. Bet-ter mist or a shrouding fog

which sets the masts in Firstsite Harbor dripping and raises the lighthouse horn from

its slumbers. Better one of the great sea-simoons blowing up out of the cold belly of

the south, lashing be-fore it the motile isles and their dolphin herders until they seek

refuge in lee of our atolls and stony peaks.

Anything would be better than this warm spring day when the sun moves through a

vault of sky so blue that it makes me want to run, to jump in great loping arcs, and to

roll in the soft grass as Siri and I have done at just this spot.

Just this spot. I pause to look around me. The willowgrass bends and ripples like the

fur of some great beast as the salt-tinged breeze gusts up out of the south. I shield

my eyes and search the horizon but nothing moves there. Out beyond the lava reef,

the sea begins to chop and lift itself in nervous strokes.

"Siri," I whisper. I say her name without meaning to do so. A hundred meters down

the slope, the crowd pauses to watch me and to catch its collective breath. The

proces-sion of mourners and celebrants stretches for more than a kilometer to where

the white buildings of the city begin. I can make out the gray and balding head of my

younger son in the vanguard. He is wearing the blue and gold robes of the

Hegemony. I know that I should wait for him, walk with him, but he and the other

aging council members can not keep up with my young, shiptrained muscles and

steady stride. Decorum dictates that I should walk with him and my granddaughter

Lira and the other ladies of the society.

To hell with it. And to hell with them.

I turn and jog up the steep hillside. Sweat begins to soak my loose cotton shirt

before I reach the curving sum-mit of the ridge and catch sight of the tomb.

Siri's tomb.

I stop. The wind chills me although the sunlight is warm enough as it glints off the

flawless white stone of the silent mausoleum. The grass is high near the sealed

en-trance to the crypt. Rows of faded festival pennants on eb-ony staffs line the

narrow gravel path.

Hesitating, I circle the tomb and approach the steep cliff edge a few meters beyond.

The willowgrass is bent and trampled here where irreverent picnickers have laid their

blankets. There are several fire rings formed from the perfectly round, perfectly

white stones purloined from the border of the gravel path.

I cannot stop a smile. I know the view from here; the great curve of the outer harbor

with its natural seawall, the low, white buildings of Firstsite, and the colorful hulls

and masts of the catamarans bobbing at anchorage. Near the pebble beach beyond

Common Hall, a young woman in a white skirt moves toward the water. For a

second I think that it is Siri and my heart pounds. I half prepare to throw up my arms

in response to her wave but she does not wave. I watch in silence as the distant

figure turns away and is lost in the shadows of the old boat building.

Above me, far out from the cliff, a wide-winged Thomas Hawk circles above the

lagoon on rising thermals and scans the shifting bluekelp beds with its infrared

vi-sion, seeking out harpseals or torpids. Nature is stupid, I think and sit in the soft

grass. Nature sets the stage all wrong for such a day and then it is insensitive enough

to throw in a bird searching for prey which have long since fled the polluted waters

near the growing city.

I remember another Thomas Hawk on that first night when Siri and I came to this

hilltop. I remember the moon-light on its wings and the strange, haunting cry which

echoed off the cliff and seemed to pierce the dark air above the gaslights of the

village below.

Siri was sixteen ... no, not quite sixteen ... and the moonlight that touched the hawk's

wings above us also painted her bare skin with milky light and cast shadows beneath

the soft circles of her breasts. We looked up guilt-ily when the bird's cry cut the

night and Siri said, "It was the nightingale and not the lark/That pierc'd the fearful

hollow of thine ear."

"Huh?" I said. Siri was almost sixteen. I was nineteen. But Siri knew the slow pace

of books and the cadences of theater under the stars. I knew only the stars.

"Relax, young Shipman," she whispered and pulled me down beside her then. "It's

only an old Tom's Hawk hunt-ing. Stupid bird. Come back, Shipman. Come back,

Merin."

The Los Angeles had chosen that moment to rise above the horizon and to float like

a wind-blown ember west across the strange constellations of Maui-Covenant, Siri's

world. I lay next to her and described the workings of the great C-plus spinship

which was catching the high sunlight against the drop of night above us, and all the

while my hand was sliding lower along her smooth side, her skin seemed all velvet

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Dan Simmons - Remembering Siri

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