“I am compulsed to write”, said Hector Kavos XIV.

“You mean ‘compelled’, I think”, offered Dink.

Hector stood with his back straight as a flagpole, his hands loosely clasped behind his back. He stared boredly out the 25-meter windows of his penthouse office, sur­vey­ing the planet-covering city that flowed away from the building.

“Perhaps”, Hector admitted to the floating computerized personal assistant, which he had named “Dink” after misunderstanding the factory foreman from which he’d appropriated the robot (the man had said “it can think”). “Though being corrected mid-thought somewhat lessens the impact of my statement. My point is that I don’t write for fun, or in order to receive accolades. I write because I simply must. When I don’t, the ideas stay in my head forever.”

Dink didn’t nod, because Dink was a sphere. About 30 centimeters in diameter, it floated beside Hector. It said: “Your remarkable output numbers are evidence of that.”

“Yes, yes”, Hector said, bowing his head and stepping lankily away from the win­dows toward where a desk would be if the office had a desk. Instead there was a stadium-sized, highly-polished dark wood floor (constructed entirely from extinct species of tree) devoid of any furniture whatsoever. He paced the opulently empty room. “One hundred forty-two novels written, six published”, he replied.

Had Dink been human, it would have cleared its throat at this point. “Technically, seven novels written and zero published”, it corrected him. “One hundred thirty-five were never finished. And the six that were approved for publication were never actually published. For the record.”

“Of course”, Hector admitted easily. “It shouldn’t count against me that my father bought the publishing houses before my books hit the presses. That he in fact bought them because he wanted my books canceled.”

Dink didn’t respond to this.

Hector Kavos XIV was the thirteenth son of Hector Kavos I, who had named all of his sons “Hector Kavos” plus a successive number.

“Dad is a prime example of the problem with longevity treatments”, Hector com­plained. “He’s from several generations ago and doesn’t understand how the world works today. He still thinks writing is for weak-willed, effeminate men. Heck, he still thinks ‘effeminate’ is an insult!”

Dink had heard these complaints multiple times. Again, it didn’t respond.

“So”, Hector went on, “what I’m saying is that it just isn’t fair that I can’t get a single thing published, when I am so compulsed to write.”

“Compelled”, Dink corrected again. If Dink was going to be Hector’s personal assist­ant instead of supervising lesser robots on a factory floor, then Dink was damn well going to correct Hector occasionally.

“Yes, it’s almost like someone is pulling my strings”, Hector went on, ignoring the correction. “As if I am simply a character in a script, forced to have this desire.” He suddenly yelled up at the ceiling, which was too far away to hear him: “What if I don’t want to write?” He turned to Dink. “What if I want to — I don’t know — be a painter?” he asked of Dink.

“Most painters are robots”, Dink said knowledgeably. “In fact, very few products are painted at all these days. You should see the factory where I—”

“I meant a person who makes paintings”, Hector interrupted irritably. “Aren’t they still called ‘painters’?”

“Ah.”

“What if I wanted to do that?”

“You are the fourteenth-wealthiest person in the Universe”, Dink pointed out. “As your personal assistant, I would easily obtain paints and canvases for you. I can have them here by...” There was an unusual pause. “Tomorrow. I apologize; it took some time to locate actual canvases in the commercial database — apparently they aren’t as easily obtained as they once were.”

Hector waved his hands. “No, you’re not understanding me, Dink. I don’t want to paint. But what if I did?”

Dink didn’t shrug, for obvious reasons. But it considered that the ability to shrug could come in handy around Hector. “Then you could paint”, Dink said.

“No! I couldn’t!” Hector’s pace of pacing increased. Dink floated easily nearby. “Because I must write. There is no question. It drives me, haunts me, laughs at me — this desire to write. My point is that even if I wanted to be a painter, or a... say, a hikist... I couldn’t, because of this compulsion to always write!”

“Hiker?” Dink suggested. “I am not aware of any hikers who do so as an oc­cu­pa­tion. It is typically a hobby.”

“No matter”, Hector said. “All of this gives me an idea for a story. Prepare for dic­tation. To give you an idea of what this story is about, you must remember all that I’ve said this evening. Speaking of evening, where is my food?”

“Your meal arrived 43 minutes ago”, Dink replied. “You ignored it, as you were think­ing at the time.”

“Well, I’m hungry now”, Hector insisted. Dink immediately messaged the kitchen supervisor; food would arrive within a few minutes. “But back to this story. It will be about a writer who feels this compulsion but tries to deny it. Think of Joshua and the porpoise—”

“Jonah and the fish?” Dink offered.

“Irrelevant”, Hector insisted. “In the story, Joshua has his life planned by a higher power, but he tries to do other things. I can’t remember exactly what he tries to do, but that isn’t the point. The point is that everything is about to get destroyed if he doesn’t obey his compulsion. He can’t escape his destiny.”

“This is a good idea”, Dink said. “Trying to escape one’s destiny only to be forced into it is a common theme of literature — and also of early 21st Century cinema. Human consumers tend to like this sort of repeated trope. It also reassures them about their own boring and pointless paths in life.”

Hector glanced at Dink in surprise.

“Yes, but this is a different kind of story”, Hector said, rubbing his hands together, as if trying to warm them on a cold night — despite the temperature in the room being permanently ideal. “In this story, the writer tries all sorts of other oc­cu­pa­tions — you will research a variety of them for me, of course — but things like a paintist or hikerette — whatever non-wealthy humans do for money, but none of it works out. Writing is the only thing this person is able to do with any degree of success.”

“Okay”, Dink said. It swiveled in mid-air as a kitchen robot floated through the door with a tray of food. “Please eat, Hector”, it said. “You are startlingly un­der­weight, even for someone compelled to write.”

The kitchen robot held the tray near Hector as he continued pacing — he had only just now finally reached the other side of the cavernous room — and Hector absentmindedly grasped morsels and consumed them.

“But that’s just the introduction”, Hector said, growing more excited now. “The whole idea is that he or she really is forced to write... And here’s the kicker — because I am forcing the character to write. See, I am the author; the character really doesn’t have any say in the matter.”

Dink didn’t blink due to a lack of eyelids. But it swiveled downward slightly, as if to view Hector from underneath a heavily compressed brow. It also lacked a brow, so this impression was lost on Hector.

“I see”, Dink finally said. “Because characters in other books can do whatever they want; it’s just this character who is forced to obey the will of the author?”

“You’re being sarcastic again”, Hector pointed out. “I like that about you. No, you see, this character gets the same idea that I just had — that he or she might be controlled by an outside author, that his or her compulsion is being written onto him or her.”

“You will save a lot of time if you decide right now whether it’s going to be a him or her”, Dink pointed out.

Hector nodded. “Her. Okay? So listen up. She gets the same idea I just got, and decides her next story will be about an author who can’t help but write. And then she will write that story.”

Dink turned in mid-air to look pointedly at the kitchen robot. The kitchen robot silently returned Dink’s glance. Electronically, they exchanged quick messages. They decided Hector actually had not lost his mind; this is just the way humans behave sometimes. Especially writers.

“But it will actually be you who writes this second story, correct?” Dink asked. “Because the woman in your story is just a character; she can’t actually write anything.”

“Yes, yes, of course”, Hector sighed, chewing on an extraterrestrial fruit he couldn’t remember the name of. “Obviously, I’m writing the story, so I will also have to write her story, but if you keep interrupting, I’ll never get to the point.”

“You should practice getting to the point more quickly”, Dink said. “This is something an accomplished author should have mastered by now.”

Hector stopped chewing and stared at Dink.

“I am your personal assistant. I’m assisting you”, Dink insisted.

More slowly now, Hector resumed his pacing and eating. “The point is that she’ll write a story about an author, maybe some kid who stows away on commercial passenger liners with a notebook (but this might change because it’s her story; not mine) because he can’t help writing. Despite a lifetime of poverty and hardship, he writes and writes. He has no choice — because the author — the woman, remember — is forcing him to. When he realizes this, he gets the same idea that I first had and that this woman then had too.”

“The woman character, who only got the idea because you wrote it?”

“Yes, exactly. But the kid gets the idea because she wrote it, see? So he begins this same kind of story. Maybe it’s about a... Well, you’re going to get me a list of occupations, so...”

Dink projected a solid-appearing hologram in front of Hector as he walked; it listed a multitude of human occupations.

“Ah, yes! An ornithologist! What’s that?” he asked Dink.

“It’s someone who studies birds”, Dink explained. “It’s a very common field for humans on Ornicopia, the planet where all multicellular life is either bird-like or insect-like.”

“Who would want to study birds?” Hector asked, confused. “They just fly around pooping on hats and windshields.”

“Maybe they can’t help being ornithologists”, Dink offered. “Because the author wrote them that way.”

“Ah! So you do get the point of the story”, Hector laughed. “You are one smart cookie!” While Dink researched the turn of phrase to be sure of its meaning, Hector took a cookie from the food tray and waved away the kitchen robot. A cleaning robot followed him now, slurping up the discarded husks, bones, shells, and crumbs with a tiny artifical gravity broom.

“Yes, this ornithologist studies birds because the author has written it that way. But he or she feels compulsed to write—”

“Compelled”, Dink interrupted again.

“Really? Are you certain that compulsed isn’t a word? If it isn’t, then where do we get compulsory, compulsive, and so on?”

Dink answered quickly: “It was a word. It’s obsolete now. It meant ‘compel’.”

Hector looked confused. “Obsolete means ‘no longer used’. I’m clearly using ‘compulse’, so by definition it can’t be obsolete.”

“You got me there”, Dink admitted. It wished it was back in the factory, watching other robots pour construction glue into giant mixing vats. “Go on.”

Satisfied, Hector went on. “Anyway, maybe it won’t be an ornithologist. That’s really up to the author whose story it is. The idea is to write several stories within stories like this, just introducing each character long enough to get the gist and then moving on to the story that the character writes. The trick is at the end. The last one, whoever it might end up being, will write about a man named Hector Kavos XIV.”

“That’s your name”, Dink pointed out helpfully. “Won’t that be confusing to the reader, having both an author and a character with the same name?”

Hector shrugged. “It’s the only way to get my point through, I think. It will show — as the last author character writes about me — that I too am without any free will, beholden to the whims of the author who created my character. It is that author who decided I must be compulsed — or compelled, if you insist — to write. Be­sides, authors have done this before. Jesus had himself as a character in that book he wrote.”

Dink really wanted to have eyebrows to raise. “I think you mean Moses. Moses was long claimed to be the author of part of a book in which he is a character. Later scholarship debunked this notion.”

“And Robert Heinlein, right? He was a character in one of his own books?”

Dink searched quickly. “One downside of your father owning the most popular search engines is that quality has declined steeply in recent years. However, I found several authors who use their own names as names of characters in fictional books.”

Hector shrugged. “Mine will be different of course, to show how I am constrained — indeed how we all are constrained in our thoughts, desires, and life paths — by the authors who wrote us.”

“In this case, you mean you”, Dink clarified.

“Obviously, I’m writing this one”, Hector said. “But the character in the book who writes me is a stand-in for whatever other—” he looked up toward the ceiling again “—real author is writing my life into existence.”

Dink hummed audibly. “Do you really believe you’re not real?” it asked.

“Maybe”, Hector shrugged. He had reached the 25-meter windows again and was once again gazing out over the city, his back straight as if drawn with a ruler. “For example, why would a real person stand this way?” he asked. “Look at me. I look like a caricature. My nose is small and narrow like a cartoon; my hair is slicked back and dark in color like villain in old movies. I am curiously neither the palest nor darkest example of humanity — probably reflecting the author’s views on interracial marriage. I have larger-than-average, questioning eyes. I clearly have begun growing a beard but haven’t fully committed to it. These giant windows? What real person would have these?” He sighed. “The person writing the novel of my life is probably in a tiny-windowed suburban home somewhere, dictating all this into a cheaper version of yourself, and can’t even afford the longevity treatments.”

“But you are real, Hector”, Dink assured him. “As you know I have no imagination. I can only sense what is in front of me, and I can sense you. Your heat signature, your body mass — even the tiny gravitational waves you exude. Only a real, existing person would produce any of this for me to sense. I was designed to detect real things, not imaginary ones.”

Hector laughed, not quite maniacally. “But don’t you get it, Dink? If I’m a char­acter in a story, then so are you! You’re not detecting anything. Some nightgown-wearing housewife is scratching this out on her touchscreen, or maybe a sentient lifeform I haven’t even thought of is writing this on some prism-shaped planet in an inside-out universe.”

“I see”, Dink said, not quite getting it. “And are you now ready to dictate your story?”

“Yes”, Hector sighed.

 

**********

 

(Dictacted by Hector Kavos XIV, edited by Dink:)

 

“Get out of the way, slowpoke!” yelled Gwendolyn Stone, digging her fingers into the gritty outcropping just above her head and hoping her wet boots didn’t slip from the foothold below.

“Waiting on the slowpoke above me”, calmly replied Sam Mathers. Rain dripped from his widebrim hat, adding to the rest of the rain that was cascading down onto Gwendolyn.

She looked up again and saw that Sam had begun to move. She couldn’t see past him to the men above. The five city slickers weren’t so self-assured now. Gwendolyn tilted her view downward to keep the rain from her eyes. Carefully but quickly, she moved a foot upward to a new hold, then a hand. Then the second foot, then the second hand. Three-point contact at all times. Then the first foot again, and so on. Until she felt Sam’s boot again.

“Omigod" she growled.

This was turning into the worst tour ever.

Then she allowed herself a self-deprecating laugh. It had been the worst tour ever from the very beginning. When she glanced out the window of her office three days ago and saw the gaggle of suit-and-tophat-wearing, pocket-watch checking, chortling businessmen from back East, she had immediately begun mentally composing her next journal entry.

“When’s the tour guide get here?” the youngest one had demanded as soon as the five of them opened her door and saw her sitting there. “And rustle us up five coffees while we wait”, he ordered, not even looking at her. And he giggled.

She sighed and tapped the nameplate in front of her desk: “Tour Guide : Gwendolyn Stone”. She knew they were going to be a handful if they were new enough to the West to giggle at words like “rustle”. Probably fresh off the train. Just had their fancy trunks hauled up to fancy hotel rooms by low-wage townboys, she figured. Well, what passed for fancy hotel rooms in this dusty mountain town — which she often referred to in her journals as Dustville, Rockville, and/or Poortown.

Eyebrows shot up all around, but the oldest and slowest-moving of the men calmed the others. “Oh, don’t act so surprised, fellows”, he told them. “On my last sabbatical in Africa, our guide was a woman and she was quite knowledgeable. Women are fantastical creatures when you give them a chance.”

The other four nodded slowly but skeptically at this revelation.

“What’ll ya have, gentlemen?” she queried, pointing at the three posters on the wall behind her, advertising her three specialty tours. “Coal and silver mines and back before dark, or burro ride into the mystical Indian Canyon?” Those were the two quickest, cheapest tours.

“What about that third one?” asked the most attractive of the five men, later identified as Sam Mathers. Something in his manner told her he’d been out West before. “I promised my associates a truly authentic Western experience.”

“That’s the one you want, then”, Gwendolyn sighed. “We visit a working silver mine on the way out of town, then ride burros down the mystical Indian Canyon, go over Cactus Ridge on the other side, and then camp authentically on an authentic Western mountainside, with true cowboy gear. Ride back the next day.”

“Sign us up then”, Mathers insisted.

“It’s too late to start today”, she said, checking the angle of the shadows on the bank’s facade across the dusty street. “Get everyone here at 8 o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. There’s an hour-long orientation.”

Sam Mathers’ eyebrows shot up. “An hour?”

The oldest gentleman chortled. “Oh, my dear, we’re all experienced travelers. Why, I’ve been to Africa three times and to the Far East twice. Despite what I said earlier, you can be sure we don’t need a lesson from a girl.”

“Woman”, she pointed out. “Let me ask you something, mister...?”

“Theodore Huntington III, at your service, madam”, the man said, bowing ever so slightly.

“Mr. Huntington the third, when you were on these other journeys, were there porters carrying your gear?” Seeing the interested nods, she went on, “And did these porters erect your sleeping quarters while you sat at a portable table sipping tea? See, we don’t have porters here. Every able-bodied male of age is working in the mines. And every one not of age is lugging luggage at the station or the hotels. Most of the women are broodmares, pardon my American. The rest are serving whiskey at the hotel or saloon. Our town marshal is nearly 80 years old and is too weak to lift his shotgun without someone pouring a gallon of coffee into him, which we had to do last year during the stagecoach robbery. I don’t think he’s left his desk in two weeks.” She looked troubled. “Someone should probably check on him. Regardless, you’re going to hafta lug your own gear and get on your own burros and set up your own tents. And they aren’t going to be room-sized tents with iron stoves in the middle like ye had in Ole Africa. Got it? Your young friend here said you wanted authentic, and that’s what you’re going to get. So arrive at eight o’clock sharp on the morrow and listen to the one-hour orientation or I refund your money and bid you good day.”

The youngest man and two of the older ones were mouth-agape at this. Sam Mathers was smiling curiously. Huntington didn’t make any expression during her speech.

When she was finished, Huntington nodded. “Very well, young lady. I admire your spirit and I can tell you have us well in hand.” He turned to the others. “Gentle­men? What say we order several glasses of whiskey from the aforementioned bar maids and discuss our coming excursion?”

Now here she was climbing rain-battered rocks beneath five men because it was her agreed-upon duty to get these city slickers back to Dustville before one of them expired due to an Act of God. Not that being last in line would help anything if Huntington slipped and came crashing down. But she had ordered them up ahead of her anyway, the youngest one first — because he was most likely to reach the top before the river rose and swallowed them. Then Huntington and the other two aged men. She’d told Mathers to go last of the men — “in case something happens”, was how she’d explained it. What she really meant was: “If I feel the rising river on my feet, I’m grabbing your feet, Sam, and you’re going to use your considerable man-bulk to pull me up. And then I’m going to grasp onto you like a frightened and helpless dame, just because it might be fun.” But she hadn’t said all that. In fact, she wondered why in the world she would even think something like that. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing she would think.

She looked down. The river was indeed rising in the narrow canyon. The path they’d been following was underwater already. Who the hell knew where the burros had got off to? Most of their gear — her gear — was long gone. The young one, Billy, had his pack with him. Gwendolyn and Sam each carried a pack. That was it.

There was a shout from far above. “Grab my hand, sir!” It was Billy, helping Huntington over the last bit. She hoped. Sam moved above her again and she followed instantly. The river below was roaring and the rain was pouring. Lightning blasted through the peaks above them and thunder, expectedly, resulted.

“Almost there!” Sam shouted down at her.

Minutes later, she joined the five men atop the canyon’s edge. Huntington was red-faced and wheezing as if he was about to give birth to a long-overdue Christ child and his two oldster friends were in varying degrees of shock. Billy looked haggard — as would anyone who had recently lifted Huntington over a canyon’s edge. Sam seemed okay; he was a healthy sort. But his clothes weren’t in great shape. No one’s were.

“This is what we’re going to do!” she shouted over the wind and torrents at the five men sitting in the mud. “We’re going to help Mr. Huntington walk 50 yards that way—” she pointed “—where there is an overhang just around the bend. Got it?”

“And then?” Billy shouted back.

“And then I’ll tell you what’s next”, she said, hoping she could think of what was next by the time they got to the rock overhang.

Sam and Billy made quick work of helping up the heaving and gulping old man and Gwendolyn trotted off with the two other oldsters doing their best to not fall back down the cliff. Inside two minutes, they were all sitting on dry rocks under the overhang. She sighed with relief; she hadn’t been 100 percent certain about the rock overhang, but here they were.

The five men looked to her for her promised “what’s next” speech and she had never felt so fudging upset about men looking to her for answers. Why couldn’t they respect her in the office? Or on a train? Or... well, anywhere really, she thought. But now that we’re all suddenly contemplating death they’re going to depend on me?

“I was supposed to be a writer!” she blurted out and sat down red-faced, both from exertion and embarrassment.

While the other men remained quiet and still, Sam managed to find a dry cigarette in his drenched pack. He lit it then passed it to her.

“I don’t smoke”, she mumbled, taking the cigarette and jamming one end her mouth. She inhaled deeply, nearly gagged, and then let out a cloud of smoke. “I mean I didn’t smoke”, she said.

Gwendolyn sighed. “Let’s rest here a minute; we could all use that.”

“What’s that bit about being a writer?” Sam asked. His dark eyes told her several stories all at once, and at least one of them she wanted to hear the ending of. He lit another cigarette for Billy, and then one for himself. The older men were still breathing heavily.

“I’m a writer”, Gwendolyn answered. “It’s all I was ever good at. The only thing life ever pushed me toward. I just don’t like it.”

“Have you actually written anything?” he asked. It wasn’t a taunt. It was pure curiosity.

“Yes.” She told him of the women’s magazine in St. Louis and then the newspaper in Chicago. Piles of journals and poems. A handful of novels she’d never shown anyone.

“But I don’t like writing. Don’t like the publishing business, don’t like how they treat women, and don’t like the editing process. Also, I’ve never been convinced anyone else wants to read what I write.”

“Go on.”

“So I quit writing. I packed up all my journals and rough drafts and shipped them to my Aunt Jolene in Nashville. I moved from town to town, taking up whatever jobs were offered, hoping I could find a calling that isn’t writing.”

“You’re a hell of a tour guide”, Sam offered. “Current circumstances not­with­stand­ing.” He winked. Then he suddenly realized he was bone-chillingly cold and began digging in his pack for a dry shirt.

Gwendolyn fished out blankets to cover the older men. When she draped one that wasn’t too damp over Huntington, he grunted. “I’ve never been so glad I took advice from a lady”, he said. When she waited for the rest of the story, he added, “Everything I brought with me is down that river somewhere. I didn’t believe you when you said to leave behind as many personal belongings as possible at the hotel.”

She smiled. Then nearly sobbed as she pulled her flask out of a belt pouch and saw that it had been punctured and was full of river water. Huntington quickly handed her his own flask. It was ornate and probably cost more than all the money she’d ever made in her life.

“You say you don’t want to write, lady, but if you write anything like you rescue old capitalists from a flash flood, then I’ve got a deal I want you to consider.” He made what probably passed for a kind smile in the high society circles he ran in.

“I might take you up on it”, she said, then swigged back some of his — ooh, that was nice! Whatever expensive liquor he’d stocked in his flask hadn’t been bought in this town. “I actually have an idea for a story that’s been kicking around in my head for a year. Once an idea gets stuck up there, the only way to move my brain on to something else is to actually write it.”

“Pitch me”, the old man said as the others listened, all of them eyeing the rain suspiciously. It was now flying sideways in the whistling wind, almost like it was looking for them. They couldn’t see more than fifty feet beyond the ledge.

“Okay, it starts with someone like me, a writer who doesn’t really want to write, but feels as if he must”, Gwendolyn said, sitting between Billy and Huntington. From here, she could make eye contact with Sam more naturally and without turning her head. “He gets the crazy idea that God or some other puppet master is forcing him into it for unknown reasons.” She held up her hands toward the rock overhead. “For all I know, that’s all I am, some puppet. Some sadist has written me as a writer, and so I am bound to do it despite my misgivings and frustrations. Okay, so this writer character in my story has the same idea that I’ve got, and he starts writing a story about it. And his character does the same thing. At some point, it will circle back to me, though I don’t know in how many stages. I’d be the last character in the book, written by the previous writer who — because he is the author — controls my every word and deed.”

Huntington stared at her for a moment, then reached for his flask. After sniffing it cautiously, he sipped genteelly. “Lady, that is some far-fetched thinking going on in your noggin.”

Everyone laughed at his poor imitation of a rural accent.

“I don’t think it’ll sell more than a few dozen copies — and all of those in Paris coffee houses — but I feel like I owe you the chance after this. One of the companies my family owns is a small publishing house in Norfolk, and if I say to them ‘publish this’, then they publish it. You will get that story out of your head, and I will see to it that you are housed and fed during your efforts. No more risking your life with strange men from the East Coast.”

Then he shuddered. “I suppose you’re going to tell us to wait out this storm?”

“Yes.”

At noon the next day, the six bedraggled travelers stamped into town without the assistance of burros, all of them with stories to tell for years. Townsfolk gasped and covered their mouths.

A woman’s voice cried out: “Oh, I knew surely they’d all been called up to Heaven! It’s a miracle! The Lord saved them!”

“I’ll bet it was Gwenny Stone who saved them”, a different voice responded.

Two months later as the moist Atlantic Coast winter began, Gwendolyn Stone was scribbling furiously on stacks of paper in a small boarding house in New Jersey paid for by Theodore Huntington III. She had no deadline — only a promise to be published not long after she finished.

 

**********

 

(By Gwendolyn Stone, published under the pseudonym “Samuel Matherton”:)

 

Jake Tibble blinked away thick snowflakes as he shivered in his thin coat, clutching his satchel and waiting in line. Far ahead at the front of the queue, the sign read:

MAKE YOUR FORTUNE IN THE SKY!
Apply for Skyship labor here

Tibble noted the distinct lack of fortune-having people in the line. Hundreds of gray- and brown-coated men stood mostly silent, unmoving, awaiting the chance to get paid for adventures. If his fingers weren’t so cold, Tibble would be writing his thoughts on the matter.

Little Jake Tibble had been writing as far back as he could remember, ever since he learned his letters. He didn’t think much of it; he just wrote whatever came into his head. Sometimes it was observations on whatever he saw and sometimes he wrote of imaginary events.

The day he’d turned 15, the world’s first airship reached the edges of the ether and men began talk of sailing to the Moon. A German scientist built the first Ether Wings and a team of Japanese engineers developed a transparent bubble canopy to ride atop the Skyships — to trap breathing air and keep the ether at bay while passengers rode to Moon Cities. Businessmen up and down the East Coast and in Europe formed conglomerates to fund the ventures, promising each other abundant profits once they claimed the Moon for their countries and established trade with Moon Men. Others, more farseeing, fantasized about Mars and Jupiter. “Maybe men will build resorts on the rings of Saturn!” exclaimed an excited editorial.

When Little Jake Tibble was 21, and no longer very little, he worked like most men at any job he could find: street sweeper, doorman, carriage-cleaner, and finally as a hammer-banger in a box factory. What little pay he received for his weekly articles in local magazines and newspapers was barely enough to buy coal for heat or mush for eating. By then, the first Skyships had been to the Moon, finding no Men already there, and the American and European conglomerates began setting up mines and villages on the dusty dry surface there — everyone in the Moon wearing scientific masks because the air on the Moon is so dusty.

On his 25th birthday, Little Jake Tibble said to his wife — just a year after the first men arrived at the canals of Mars — he said, “Darling, you know I write all the time, but it’s only because I can’t figure out how to stop. Nowhere on this Earth have I found respite from the ideas that clang around in my head. My thumbs are raw from hammering wooden boxes, but always the stories were in my skull.”

Mrs. Jake Tibble, now the mother of Jake Jr. and a daughter of no consequence, answered him by saying: “Little Jake Tibble, who ain’t so little no more, a man ought to be able to write if that’s what’s in his head. It saddens me to no end that you hammer tiny nails into wooden boxes every day in order to pay for this 10-foot-square apartment and I take in laundry so we can purchase victuals, when it is so evident that the Good Lord meant for you to write.”

Little Jake Tibble took a deep breath and told her his plan: “My darling wife, I have thought of a fine way to solve both our lack of money and my ever-present need to write. I will gain employment on a Skyship, where the pay is good and the room and board is provided. They say no jobs are better than Sky jobs. And, as for the words I write, all those words are Earth words, darling. All those thoughts are Earth thoughts. They say men think differently in the Moon or Mars. Once a man sees the whole Earth from up in the heavens his brain and soul are changed and he becomes a new man. We have seen the Skynauts riding in their tickertape parades and we have seen on their faces that they are different now. Whatever thoughts those men had before they flew, now they have different ones. And I think that will work for me.”

“Oh Jake”, his wife sighed. “If the Good Lord wanted mankind to float around in the sky He would have built us out of dandelion seeds so we could float of our own accord. It just ain’t natural to wander in the sky on a wooden contraption with bubbles on top. If you’ve got it in your head to fly into the Moon with its ungodly dust, then you go right ahead but I won’t promise to wait around. I will take Jake Jr. and our sickly girl-child to my mother’s house for safekeeping. We will pray for your soul.”

“It will only be for a little while”, Little Jake Tibble told her.

But while he stood in the snowy line the first day, Mrs. Jake Tibble took Jake Jr. as promised, and the other child, and rode a train away from the city. He came home that night to an empty box of an apartment; even the silverware had been sold, a neighbor told him. So each night he slept on bare planks of wood floor and each day he waited in line sniffling and shaking with the other men who wanted to go to the Moon.

After a week of no progress — for the number of men wanting to work in the Sky was greater than the conglomerates wanted to hire — he was struck by a sight he saw in the distance. In the train yards where men and supplies were hauled toward the Skynaut Fields, he watched scraggly and dirty men hopping onto the train with nary a ticket. Tibble thought to himself: “If those no-ticket-having men can hop up onto a railroad car, then maybe I can thusly sneak into the Skynaut Fields, and whilst no one has eyes toward me I can alight myself into a Skyship without being noticed.”

And he did just that. After walking through the frozen fields at night and lying in a ditch until dawn, he was outside Skynaut Fields where the great Skyships were tethered between voyages. As the sky grew light with a pinkish glow, he arose from his slumber. Grasping his satchel, Little Jake Tibble ran through the dawn, hiding behind the massive anchor joints that held the Skyships from floating aloft.

Once in the deep shadow of the floating craft’s underside, and after ascertaining that no one had noticed his presence, he surveyed the keel of the boat, looking for something to grasp onto. After some minutes, he noticed portholes in the belly of the ship, which seems odd at first until one realizes that Skyships do not rest on the dark Sea but on the Skies of Earth. Passengers and workmen can look down for a last glance at Earth before departing into the Sky and riding to the cities in the Moon.

With a powerful leap, he grasped onto the riveted ledge of the porthole, his satchel strapped around his neck and shoulders. Spying a latch in the edge of the porthole, he twisted it and the heavy window swung downward. Though it was dark and forbidding inside, Little Jake Tibble performed a quick chin-up and then scrambled into the Skyship. With great effort, he pulled up the heavy window behind him and once again affixed the latch.

The author assumes that all readers are well-informed about the interiors of Skyships so the details shall not be repeated here. In short, Little Jake Tibble located many worthwhile places to hide amongst the great and powerful machinery that powered the flapping Ether Wings and the air-pumping fans. In a pile of items for discard, he found dirty blankets and shawls, which he wrapped about himself to ward off the powerful cold that accompanies all voyages through the Ether. And with careful attention to his whereabouts he avoided detection for all the days required to sail to the Moon.

Once the great Ship was anchored to its station at the Moon, Tibble awaited until passengers and cargo were removed and workmen were dozing, then he found his porthole once more and dropped away down onto the dusty gray soil of the Moon.

There at the general store for tourists, he purloined a breathing mask, and down the dusty street he spent the last of all his box-factory earnings to get a room in a hotel. It was clean inside for a great number of workers were employed to daily sweep out piles of Moon Dust.

Seeing no lines of men waiting for work, Tibble inquired (pretending to be a curious tourist) and learned that the only people on the Moon were either tourists from Earth or workers hired on Earth, and that no tourist had ever asked about a job while at the Moon. Telegrams were sent and answers received, and he was hired on the spot to be a dust-sweeper in the morning and a Skyship caulker by evening — for the great ships must be recaulked after each voyage. For food, he only had to present his worker certificate at any worker’s food line.

Day after day, Little Jake Tibble wandered through Moon City, through all its sights and resorts and saloons and even houses of ill repute, awaiting the change of thinking that would accompany him. But that change never came. He always felt the need to write all his thoughts. Any old thought that happened into his head was always accompanied with another thought: “Write this down.” And he wrote until his notebooks were filled, and he bought some more.

After some time, Little Jake Tibble boarded another Skyship just as he had the first — without a ticket and without anyone noticing — and he rode this one to the dusty red ranches of Mars, where three-horned bison drank from the canals and Mars Cowboys kept watch on them. He got a job with the Mars Canal Company for a month and then rode one of the first Skyships to Jupiter’s Moons.

All through this, he wrote. Little stories, funny stories, one full novel, and one entirely true book about his travels. He noticed other men were hopping aboard Skyships now, having gotten the same idea he once had. They met each other in the shadows and exchanged stories or useful information — like how to obtain food, which passages to avoid at certain times, and so on.

One of these fellow “hopalongs” — as they came to call themselves — was named Art and he introduced himself to Little Jake Tibble. After hearing the latter’s name, he laughed heartily. “I shall refer to you as ‘Big Jake Tibble’, for you are tall and strong as a tree.” Big Jake accepted the name change and the two became fast friends.

They ventured from one Sky City to the next, eventually having ridden every Skyship in the light of our Sun. One day, Art discovered that Big Jake spent his time writing, and he asked “What for?”

And Big Jake told him. “If I don’t write it down, the thought will keep circulating, like a floating digestive mass — if you never pass that mass, it just stays in you until you’re all blocked up. If I wait until many of these thoughts are located in my brain passages, eventually I fear my brain will become useless and I will be unable even to say words or remember my name.”

Art nodded at this. “That is a fine explanation, Big Jake, and I pity you your problem. I once read a lengthy article about a psycho-ologist who thinks everything about our thoughts and brains are a result of something that happened in childhood. Can you think of something that made you this way?”

“No”, Big Jake responded sullenly. “I think it must be due to some greater force outside our universe. The religious people — you’re not religious are you, Art? Oh good — call it ‘God’ but it could be anything. A Great Spirit like the Noble Indians believe, or something out of Mystical Eastern religions of the Orient. But sometimes I suspect something far keener.”

“How so, old boy?” Art asked.

“You will think me touched”, Big Jake warned, “and I don’t want to lose a friend as good as you.”

“Not on my life”, Art responded. “I know you to be a full-well individual man, Big Jake, with all the smarts of a scientist or engineer. I would never guess you to be insane.”

So Big Jake expressed his idea: “What if I am some sort of character, written by an author none of us can see? What if all of us are such? I mean to say, what if everything you and I see and experience isn’t really true and actual?”

“I’m real enough”, Art said, pinching himself with a small laugh. But he meant no ill-will toward Big Jake by this activity. “You don’t feel the same way?”

Big Jake grinned. “But why pinch yourself? Did the author write that down? Maybe it’s some cosmic Shakespeare or Jules Verne thinking up our every word and action, and we are only puppets doing his bidding.”

Art shook his head ruefully. “Darned if I know, Big Jake”, he said. “I’m heading up to the kitchen bin. Do you want some stale bread?”

Big Jake nodded, and then affected the poise of a wealthy estate owner speaking to a servant: “Two stale loaves please”, he said. They shared a laugh over this pretense as Art scurried away through the belly of the Skyship.

By the time Art returned, Big Jake was still thinking. “Why did you come to the Sky, Art?” he asked.

“Because the Earth is overgrown with rich men getting richer while paying us nothing to work in their factories and stand in their bread lines”, he responded quickly. “There ain’t no way for a poor man to get rich without robbing a rich man, and I ain’t the kind of poor man to rob nobody. I thought to myself, ‘Maybe out in the Sky or in the Moon there will be a way to make a healthy living.’ That’s what I thought.”

“But how did you come about that thought?” Big Jake asked. “That’s what I am trying to ascertain in my thinking. Did you have that thought only because the Author came upon it and wrote that thought into your life? Like this Skyship we are in. When you and I were both born, no one had built a Skyship or an Ether Wing or a Breathing Bubble and we all just lived on Earth. Who thought up these things? I don’t think a man on our Earth thought up these things. I think someone is writing all this. Only an author bent on evoking sorrow or horror would create a world with such inequalities between men. Think of it, Art! Think of the men who work as hard as we do but get paid half because of a skin color. Think of the women, who are in my opinion human like us, but are never afforded what we have. These are unnatural states, Art, and this also leads me to believe in the Author.”

When he saw the expression on Art’s face, he hurried to add, “Oh, I don’t mean I’m convinced of it, Art. Just that I wonder about it sometimes.”

“Well then”, Art mumbled, handing over the loaves. “I can’t say as you’ve convinced me. But it does strike me as odder than a hare’s nest that I sometimes talk cowboy talk though I ain’t never been a cowboy, not even in Mars ranches.”

“See, that’s just the kind of thing I mean”, Big Jake insisted. “Some things happen in our world that don’t seem to make a lot of sense. It would make a whole lot of more sense if we found out someone was just imagining all this and you and I weren’t even real people. Just words on a page.”

Both men ate in silence for some time.

Then Art piped up, “Big Jake, I have an idea for you. I know you write due to all the blocked up brain thoughts running around in there, so I’ll put one more in there and you write this, okay? If you don’t, that’s your business, because I’ve already forgot about it once I’ve said it. Here it is, Big Jake: Write about someone that has the same worry as yourself. You said it already, once you write it down, it’s gone. That true? Then do it. Make it fiction so no one who reads it will think it’s really your thoughts, so you don’t end up in an asylum. I heard they’re building an asylum on Saturn’s rings, by the way, due to the fact that half the miners out there go crazy in the first year. But as to my suggestion, just write that there story and get it out of your head forever.”

“Art, you have solved this once and for all”, Big Jake said, smiling bigger than he had smiled since the birth of Jake Jr. Now he recalled waving good-bye to Jake Jr., his darling wife, and his other child — he had been sad to see them go and mostly sad ever since. But now he was starting to smile.

“I will write that story. And I will have the character in my story wonder about these same things, about the way life doesn’t always add up like arithmetic and how it would make more sense if they were simply being written by someone. And I won’t feel bad at all about writing that character, because I’ll know they’re just made up — because I made them up. And I won’t do to them what my Author did to me; I won’t have them live in winter and poverty continuously and eating stale loaves in greasy crevices in the bellies of Skyships. No, I will put them in a clean home, in a just world, with enough to eat most of the time — where people are treated without contempt.” He smiled again. “This bread isn’t very stale. It’s actually very good. Thanks, Art.”

Later that night, in the glowing light of the furnace that powered the Ether Wings, Jake began to write his story.

 

**********

 

(excerpts from Jake Tibble’s notebooks, found in the wreckage after the crash of the Skyship Huntington:)

 

“So how long will you continue this cycle?” asked Zoe Baldwin. She sat in a comfortable chair in a clean living room in a tidy small house in a sparkly clean neighborhood.

Her lifelong friend Marjorie Washburne sat happily nearby. “I haven’t thought it through yet, dear, but maybe four or five. That seems like enough. Because if it goes on too long — with one writer after another concocting stories about the next writer who feels the same way — then the reader will get bored.”

“Unless each story is interesting enough in itself”, Zoe mused. She was a voracious reader with a well-stocked library, but had never felt the need to write anything beyond reports for work.

“Yes, there’s that. But if each cycle in the writer-to-writer story is too interesting, then it will distract from the primary point of the entire exercise”, Marjorie argued sweetly. She clinked her wine glass lightly against Zoe’s and they each sipped.

Many of Marjorie’s stories had begun this way, as she voiced her ideas randomly in the evening while Zoe talked her through them. It was nice to have a reader for a best friend, she thought to herself. And it was even nicer that both of them had this kind of time — Zoe worked no more than five days each week and Marjorie stayed home to keep house and write. It was what they both had always wanted out of life, though neither had grown up this way.

Zoe and Marjorie were born into vastly different neighborhoods, though only the railroad track had separated their houses. They had played together and become fast friends as children while their parents worked in factories and sewing shops, but while Marjorie was sent to a mediocre public school Zoe had gone to one with almost no funding whatsoever, from which most students dropped out before graduation. Their lives, they came to realize, were on paths that would take them to vastly different places.

Both had been part of overlapping nationwide movements to change everything, and they had met again while working for separate groups petitioning Congress for equality. In years of debate and protest, no one ever devised a defensible answer for why a few people got to be born into opulence while the great mass of humanity labored beneath them for pennies. And no one could think of a logical reason for why different colors or sexes should be arbitrarily divided into groups with different rights and opportunities. Oh, the old people had argued “the law of nature” and “anyone can succeed if they work hard” and a dozen other things that once made sense to them, but when faced with all that humanity lining the street outside — none of whom would go back to work unless things changed, it quickly became clear that the old answers rested on foundations of sand and were no longer acceptable.

“The trick”, Marjorie continued, “will be to write each section just interesting enough to give the reader a picture of that writer’s life and see views into their diverse worlds, but not interesting enough to distract from the central theme — which is that none of these writers are truly in control of themselves because each was created by the writer before her.”

“Or him”, Zoe suggested with a wink.

“Oh yes”, Marjorie agreed. “I should switch sex or gender with each story, shouldn’t I? That way, if the writer is a man he will be writing of a woman, and if the writer is a woman then she will write of a man. Yet another hidden gem within this masterpiece of mine.”

“So, why not just have two writers?” Zoe asked. She checked the clock; Marjorie could stay up all night chatting like this, but Zoe did eventually have to sleep before work tomorrow. She did love her job, with its clean offices and friendly co-workers. All of them could remember the days when they lived in veritable shacks and had only two changes of clothes and no running water.

“If you only write two, then the story is much shorter and easier to do. Start with the main one you want, who feels he’s being ordered around by the Author above him, then the writer he writes about, who would in turn write about the first person. Then it ends, and the point is made.”

Marjorie considered this, also glancing at the clock.

“If we stop talking now, then we have time for a stroll through the Park”, she suggested. “It’s always nice to walk at dusk and wave to the neighbors. Our city is so peaceful and clean now.”

Zoe nodded. Indeed, she had enough energy remaining for a short stroll. “Just think of it”, she insisted. “Two is all you need.”

Marjorie shook her head. “I think it’s too short that way. The first author controls the second, who controls the first? Two people isn’t a circle; it’s a line. No, I think four authors is better. Plus it gives me a chance to include a few more ideas.” She ticked off her plan: “Two women and two men. Four different time periods. One very wealthy and one very poor. Some who work and some who don’t. Some will have children and some won’t; married or not. The only thread tying them all together is that they feel the need to write, begin to wonder if they are being controlled by an Author beyond them — if they might be the figment of someone else’s imagination.”

Zoe shrugged. “You’re the writer. I’m sure you’ll do well. And, of course, I figure there is no way to prove that we’re not simply the figments of someone else’s imagination.”

Then they set down their wine glasses and went for that stroll. A little later, both tidied up for a few minutes, then bathed in clean running water, and then went to sleep in comfortable beds in a safe and comfortable house.

The next morning, after Zoe set out for work, Marjorie cleaned up the breakfast table and set herself down to write. She decided that the first character would be a man, since she was a woman. And the first one would be wealthy beyond imagining, because that might be a shock to readers in her day who were no longer accustomed to excessive wealth. Maybe it would return in the future. She took a moment to imagine what a future world might look and feel like. The man should be slightly not smart, she thought, because a life of ease brought about by immense inherited wealth would not require any great degree of critical thinking.

And she took a moment to wonder about whether her entire life had simply been concocted by some other writer in this great chain of...

 

**********

 

(By Marjorie Washburne:)

 

Hector Kavos XIV stood straight as a flagpole, surveying the world his father owned by gazing out of windows as tall as a skyscraper. He itched with a thought that wouldn’t go away.

“I am compulsed to write”, he said.

“You mean ‘compelled’, I think”, offered Dink, his automaton personal assistant. “The word ‘compulsed’ is considered obsolete.”

“That is why I have a personal assistant robot, I suppose”, Hector said, nodding. “However, what I am trying to explain to you is that I sometimes believe I am not in control of my impulses.”

“You aren’t”, the robot agreed. “Medical science has recently uncovered that most of your impulses and desires are coded into your genetical material or generated by the microbes in your gut.”

Hector drew his fine, dark eyebrows together at that statement. “Then, Dink, to say it another way, I sometimes feel that all of this—” he gestured emphatically at his grandiose surroundings “—is merely the construct of some author’s imagination.”

“Do you mean this is all created by a god?”, Dink asked for clarification.

“Oh no, not a god”, Hector corrected. “An actual author. Someone who writes. A person.”

“You mean a human like yourself?”

“I suppose”, Hector said, turning away from the window. He picked at a platter of tasty food samples that floated in the air nearby by means of a gravity-repulsing device manufactured by one of his father’s many companies. “But it doesn’t have to be a human. It could be a sentient warthog or a dust-person from another planet. Whoever this author is, and whatever he or she is like, he or she is imagining a person like me—” he pointed to himself “—and having some of the thoughts I’ve been having about not being entirely an actual person. This author then set about to write a story to explain his or her thoughts and came up with me as one of his or her characters.”

“Do you feel underdeveloped as a character?” Dink asked him.

“I didn’t know mechanical men could be so witty”, Hector replied dryly. “And yes, of course I do. Think about this whole world, all the people in it, and all of its history. How much of that information do you know?”

“All of it”, Dink replied. “I am not merely a facsimile of intelligence — via precisely controlled radio waves I can communicate with all the information centers of the planet and pull up the entire history at any time. Would you like to hear it?”

“No”, Hector said. “Because it still wouldn’t convince me it’s not some author thinking up that history as we go along, typing the words I’m saying just this minute, or the ‘facts’ that you will present to me.”

Suddenly, Hector jerked and looked around with paranoia. “Who are you?” he shouted. He looked at the faraway ceiling, then peered cautiously out of the overbearing windows. “Why have you written me this way, as the last son of a too-wealthy man so that I never have to accomplish anything in life for myself? Why couldn’t I have been an ordinary worker who lives and works with friends and neighbors and never has to write?”

No one answered. Of course they didn’t. Authors don’t respond to their characters. They just write them. As they must.