Casey’s Empire

By Nancy Kress

Writers are often fond of writing stories in which writers are the protagonists—usually sympathetic protagonists. Several recent short stories and at least one major fantasy trilogy come immediately to mind. There is something distinctly self-indulgent about this, but writers fall prey to self-indulgence at least as much as the rest of the population (editors might say, “More.”) CASEY’S EMPIRE, then, is a double self-indulgence: the fortunes of not only a writer, but of a science fiction writer.

The business of writers is to tell lies, and the business of science fiction writers is to tell large lies. Large lies can be seductive. It has always seemed to me that one could easily come to prefer them to the truth.

But it costs. It always costs.

This is the story of Jerry Casey, who lost a galactic empire. Oho, you sneer to yourself—one of those. You know, of course, from your vast reading, what a trivial and hackneyed idea a galactic empire is—even now. You know, of course, from your vast reading, about the convoluted, melodramatic machinations by which a hero loses an empire, and what that feels like. Go suck an egg; you wouldn’t know a galactic empire if you tripped over it, which Casey did. Tripped over it and lost it. You think you know how that feels? You don’t know. Unless it has happened to you, you don’t know. You can’t ever know.

He was born in the 1950’s in Montana, but he didn’t let it bother him. To his child’s eyes, the big, lonely, empty plains were within the sound of the sea, within a hard day’s climb of the Himalayas, within touch of the hibiscus-smelling rain forest. He walked on desert sands or ancient glaciers or the bottom of the Mariana Trench. At night the wide sky was impossibly full of stars, and he named them all and walked on their spangle-colored planets. Part of it, of course, was his reading, which he did so constantly that he failed the fifth grade. But not all of it. There was something else, something extra, something his own. His parents were puzzled but tolerant. They bought a new car every three years, new drapes every five, and saved up for yearly vacations in Las Vegas. Older people—he was a late, only child. Kind, decent, stupid people. Casey loved them.

His high school years were no more hellish than anyone else’s; his college years were an anonymous marathon of beer blasts, rock concerts, and overdue term papers; his decision to enter graduate school was complicated by his advisor’s doubt that any graduate school would enter him. But enrollment was falling, programs were being cut if too few live bodies registered for thesis seminar, and Casey found himself a teaching fellow in a small undistinguished college that was part of a large undistinguished state university system in the Northeast. He also found himself scorned. Politely, judiciously, even indulgently—he was in the Humanities, and indulgence was encouraged—but scorned is scorned.

“What’s your area?” asked Paul Rizzo, the stocky, bearded teaching fellow with whom Casey shared an office. Rizzo was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and Frye boots. All the male teaching fellows, Casey had noticed, wore plaid flannel shirts, jeans, and Frye boots. So did some of the females. Casey wore a sports jacket.

“Area?”

“For your thesis.”

“I’m doing the option—the creative-writing thesis. A novel.”

“A novel?”

“Yeah, you know,” Casey said, “a fiction narrative over 40,000 words. You’ve heard of them.”

Rizzo’s eyes narrowed. “Have you started this, uh, novel?”

“Yes.”

Rizzo seemed surprised. He stopped in the middle of changing his plaid flannel shirt for a football jersey, arms suspended in midair. Twice a week he scrimmaged to keep in shape, playing on a team limited to grad students and captained by a third-year fellow in the biology department who had his own grant from the federal government.

“What’s it about?”

Casey smiled. “In twenty-five words or less?”

“All right, then, what’s it like? Who would you say your writing was closest to, if you had to name an influence, a mentor? Barth? Hemingway? Dickens? Faulkner?”

Casey took a deep bream. “Burroughs.”

“Naked Lunch?”

“No, not William.”

“Then who—”

“Edgar.”

“Edgar Burroughs? You write …”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Rizzo finished sliding into his football jersey and picked up his helmet, rubbing a finger over a jagged nick. Then he smiled. Politely, judiciously.

“Well, chacun à sa gout, right?”

“Son gout,” Casey said.

“My thesis is on Keats. The psycho-sexual relation of the “Hyperion” fragment of his later work. You probably don’t like Keats, though?”

“Why not?”

“If you write that … do you like Keats?”

Casey picked up Rizzo’s football shoe and fingered the cleats. He tried each one in turn, pressing lightly with the end of his index finger. They were all dull. Rizzo waited. Indulgently.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Paul. I really think Keats is some kind of poet. Not too commercial, you know, but a strong sensory receiver, quick on the end line. Some kind of poet. But, overall I guess I have to go with Edgar Guest. Enjambment-wise, that is.”

Rizzo turned maroon. Casey smiled. Politely, judiciously, indulgently.

“Who you got for frosh comp?”

“Some flake in a striped sports jacket. Young. He talked about semicolons.”

“Must be the new guy. Casey.”

Casey, the new guy, ducked behind the gray bulk of the candy-and-pastries vending machine. The styrofoam cup he was carrying sloshed coffee onto his striped sports jacket. The student on the other side of the vendor kicked it.

“Took my quarter again!”

“Here, have half my Babe Ruth.”

“Eff-ing machine. Any frat files on his assignments?”

“Not yet. He’s new”

“Just my luck.”

“It’ll be all right. The new ones don’t like to flunk anybody. Just go to class. The new ones take attendance.”

“He wants us to write a paper for Friday.”

“Get Sue to do it. She’s an English major.”

“Yeah. Jesus—semicolons!”

“Yeah.”

He got used to teaching freshmen. He made truce with Rizzo. What he couldn’t get used to or make truce with, what led him to discover why a university was a bad place to write, was the faculty.

His professors spoke blithely of Shakespeare’s “minor plays,” Shaw’s “failed efforts,” Dickens’ “unsuccessful pieces.” Stories that Casey, stretched out on a flat rock under the blank Montana sky, had thrilled to and wondered at and anguished over, were assigned grades like so many frosh comp papers. B+ to Somerset Maugham and Jane Austen. B-to C.S. Lewis and Timon of Athens. His own half-finished stories, Casey figured, the stories sweated and bled and wept over in the $83-a-month hole above a barber shop, were about a H-. On a good day.

His thesis advisor was a Dreiser man. If you are a Dreiser man, Casey learned, if you champion Dreiser and the American realists for 25 years (including six articles in PMLA), if you dissect and evaluate and explore Dreiser, you can be Dreiser. You know what he wrote in the margins of his books, how he wore his hair and who cut it. You have his/your position in belles-lettres to defend, and you fight for it ferociously. When a prestigious Eastern university has a sudden unfortunate death among its existing faculty and so needs to acquire another American realist, you throw your hat into the academic ring and play politics with dead candidates. You win, and jolly well you should. Dreiser is a definite A. And then so, of course, are you.

Casey walked. He walked on village streets at noon, over snowy athletic fields before dawn, in night woods where one clumsy step could break his unwary neck. While he walked, he agonized. He agonized because he was not Tolstoy or Shakespeare or even Maugham. He agonized because he was honest enough to know that he never would be Tolstoy or Shakespeare or Maugham, complimented himself on being “at least” that honest with himself, and agonized that his self-compliments showed a lack of artistic passion. When he wasn’t walking and agonizing, he wrote. It was all H-. When he wasn’t writing, he read Dreiser. It was a definite A.

“But I had my advisor’s approval for the thesis before I began!” Casey said. He tried to sound indignant rather than desperate, and knew he failed. “Both Dr. Jensen and Dr. Schorer signed the approval form!”

“I know that,” said Dr. Stine, Chairman of the Graduate Committee. He sat behind his book-cluttered desk in his book-lined office and looked distressed. Beyond the open window three students, exhilarated by the spring, were tossing a blue frisbee; occasionally it hit the building with a soft clunk muffled by budding ivy.

“They both knew my novel was going to be s-”

“I know that, too, Mr. Casey.” The chairman’s distress was genuine. Casey didn’t care. “We are not narrow in our academic outlook, Mr. Casey. There is room for many different types of writing in our creative thesis option. The graduate committee is perfectly aware that a lot of exciting research is being carried out right now in your field and that there is much literary merit in selected examples of sci-fi.”

Casey winced. Dr. Stine didn’t notice. The frisbee hit the wall.

“We’re also aware that Ph.D.’s are being granted by very prestigious universities for scholarly work in sci-fi. But both the writing and the research ends that are worthy of serious attention concern the best sci-fi, the work concerned with social insight and human verities. Hawthorne’s ‘truth of the human heart, you know,’” the chairman said, and smiled, obviously pleased with this reference. The frisbee hit the wall.

“Your novel, on the other hand, is just—just adventure. Escapist improbabilities. You must see—’galactic empire’!”

“It’s a realistic interpretation of a possible technological—”

“Precisely. Technological, not humane. You don’t deal with psychological or social themes at all. When your protagonist meets those aliens in the blue UFO—blue—I’m sorry, Mr. Casey. It’s not that your novel is badly written. In fact, it shows some commercial promise; it’s colorful and fast-paced. But it doesn’t measure up to the standards of serious fiction. And serious literature is what a thesis-novel acceptable to the English department, must at least try to be.”

“It could very well happen just the way I—”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Casey. I wish you would believe that.”

Casey did believe it. He uttered a short expletive that he hoped made the chairman even sorrier, and left the book-lined office just as the frisbee missed the wall altogether and sailed through the window, a miniature blue UFO.

He resigned from the university, regretted it as pretentiously self-indulgent, and stayed resigned. To fill his time, he wrote, waited on tables at a local pizzeria, brooded over his rejection slips, and walked. The walking, he figured, was the best thing he did. He could walk for hours, could walk all night. After a while he no longer needed to look down at his own feet in even the darkest, most unfamiliar woods; his feet developed such sure sensing of the dead twigs and leaf-covered rabbit holes that he never stumbled. He could walk looking upward at the stars which, in some way, he couldn’t say just exactly how, had betrayed him. He could walk on desert sands, on ancient glaciers, on the bottom of the Mariana Trench. His walking was a definite A.

“Hey, Casey!”

“Hello, Rizzo. What’ll you have?”

“What do you want, Darlene?”

“Oh, I don’t know—pepperoni, for sure. Mushrooms, green pepper, onions. And anchovies, if they’re fresh. Are the anchovies fresh?”

“Are the anchovies fresh?” Rizzo asked Casey.

“No,” Casey said.

“Well, then, no anchovies. OK, Darl?”

“Are they good frozen anchovies?” Rizzo asked Casey.

“No,” Casey said.

“So what are you doing now?” Rizzo said, and added hastily, without glancing around the pizzeria, “What are you going to do? I mean your, uh, plans?”

“Bring you a pizza without anchovies,” Casey said, saw that he was being a bastard again, and tried harder. “Guess what, Rizzo? I sold one.”

Rizzo wrinkled his beefy forehead. “One what?”

“One story. I sold one.”

“You did? Hey, that’s great! Is it … is it one of those—”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

“Well, that’s still great! Do you mind if I ask you what you got for it? No, never mind. None of my business.”

“It wasn’t much.”

“I hear that market pays less. Comparatively.”

“Generally, yes. There are exceptions.”

“Of course—there always are. Speaking of exceptions, do you mind if I brag a little? I got a job. A real, tenure-track, full-time job. Starting as assistant professor.”

“Congratulations. Where is it?”

“Lunell College. It’s a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts. I really lucked out, you know what the market is, nobody wants humanities people. Only technology-gadget guys, computer specialists and all. But this is a bona fide good deal. Guess what the salary is.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Go ahead, guess.”

“I couldn’t.”

Rizzo told him. Casey smiled and underlined “no anchovies” on his order pad, thick and black. Twice. The pencil broke.

“I really did luck out,” Rizzo said. “They just happened to need a Keats man.”

He had not forgotten his childhood nomenclature for the stars, but now he learned everyone else’s. This was easy because there seemed to be fewer stars than there had been in Montana. He wrote out a list of the more mellifluous ones, set the list to the melody of a sixteenth-century English madrigal, and chanted it while he walked:

Regulus Fomalhaut Betelguese

Ri-i-gel,

Arcturus Polaris Cano-o-pus

AL-TAIR.

The chant stayed in his head while he tried to write about galactic empires and interstellar battles; since he couldn’t get the tune out, he learned to ignore it. After a while he found it rather soothing and came to depend upon it while he sweated and thrashed and fought, motionless at his Salvation Army desk.

The actual presence of real stars was less soothing. Nightly he glared upwards, weather permitting, with real anger, while summer dew soaked his sneakers and a crick developed at the back of his neck. He didn’t try to understand his anger; it was more satisfying to revel in it. They had let him down, Regulus Fomalhaut Betelguese Ri-i-gel. They had all let him down. They had not delivered, somehow, what had been promised, promised to the Montana kids playing on the big flat rock in the middle of prosperous insignificance: Marty Hillek and Carl Nielsen and Billy DeTine and Jerry Casey, playing UFO and Sirian Invaders and Would-You-Go? They had deceived. They were not what he thought them. They had refused to let him go, as they had let Marty Hillek and Carl Nielsen and Billy DeTine go, but they had also refused to satisfy him. They were heartless, they were cold, they were shallow, and he himself was probably crazy to stand here thinking of them as anything but ongoing nuclear fusions. “Many thynges doth infect the ayre, as the influence of sondry sterres,” he quoted aloud, enormously pleased to have remembered the quote from Renaissance Lit. He only quoted aloud when in deserted areas, however; his angry craziness demanded privacy to be fully wallowed in. It was a lover’s quarrel.

“Jerry! Happy birthday, dear!”

“Thanks, mom.”

“So how does it feel to be twenty-six, son?”

“Oh, I don’t know, dad. Not too different from twenty-five.”

“Your presents are in the mail, dear. I’m sorry they didn’t get East by your birthday, but I just couldn’t get to town to the post office; the car was acting up, and your father couldn’t figure out if it was the starter or that little black thing that goes from the—”

“Now, Mary, we don’t need to tell him all that long distance.”

“Guess not. How’s everything going, dear?”

“Fine, just fine.”

“Did you sell any more—”

“No. No, I haven’t. It takes time, you know, mom.”

Fourteen hundred miles away, his father cleared his throat. Jerry held the receiver a little away from his ear and closed his eyes, waiting.

“Speaking of selling, son, I happened to talk to John Nielsen yesterday, and he still needs someone to help him and Carl at the Grain & Feed. Now I’m not pressuring you, you know that. Whatever you want to do is fine with your mother and me. That’s what we’ve always said, and we mean it. But I just promised John I’d pass along the information to you, so I am.”

“Okay,” Casey said. “The information is passed.” He could see his father holding the phone—the upstairs extension, it would be—lightly in his big hand, still wearing his stetson with his boots and plaid flannel shirt.

“Just so’s you know, son.”

“I know,” Casey said. There was a pause.

“Are you still seeing that girl, dear, that you wrote us about? The kindergarten teacher? Kara Phillips?”

“Yes. No. A little.”

“I have an idea! Why don’t you bring her with you when you come home for Christmas? You know, we’d just love to have her!”

“Now, Mary, don’t push,” Casey’s father said.

“I wasn’t pushing, Calvin Casey! All I said was that we’d love to have Jerry’s friend stay with us over Christmas, if he’d like to bring her. She could have the spare room, it was just freshly papered, it’d be no trouble at all.”

“Thanks, mom. Maybe I’ll ask her.”

“Of course, it’s up to you. Write us when your presents arrive, so I know they fit, and tell us if Kara is coming for Christmas.”

“Assistant manager,” his father said. “Did I mention that it’s assistant manager?”

“Well, bye, dear. Happy birthday!”

“Good starting salary, son.”

“Love you,” Casey’s mother said.

“Love you, too,” Casey said, and hung up the receiver carefully, with no sound.

He quit the pizzeria. One night in October he had waited on the Chairman of the Graduate Committee, Dr. Stine. The man had been so tactful, so diplomatic in chatting with Casey without once mentioning Casey’s failed novel-thesis, Casey’s inexpert self-haircut ($4.70 at the barber, and that without sideburns), Casey’s tomato-and-mozzarella smeared apron, that Casey had been unable to stand it. He smiled at the chairman, said yes, fall was beautiful in this part of the country, said yes, it was interesting that the papers always reported an increase in UFO sightings in the fall, said no, he didn’t think there was anything in it. Then he went into the kitchen and stuffed his apron into the pizza oven, where it turned the exact color of flabby frozen anchovies.

He found a job as part-time grounds man for an old, beautiful, tree-shaded cemetery. He wrote all morning and raked leaves all afternoon, avoiding funerals in progress. The metal rake prongs caught repeatedly at the bases of tombstones and then twanged back, a sound as monotonous and hypnotic as a pendulum. Sometimes he returned late at night and walked through the cemetery. The darkness was rich and velvety; it was the quick flashes of headlights beyond the iron gates that seemed like the ghosts. He read the oldest of the tombstones with a penlight, stooping to trace the letters with his finger when age had made them illegible:

ELIZABETH ANN CARMODY

1851-1862

Eleven years old, he thought. At eleven years old he had been playing Would You Go? on the big flat rock on the plains. Eleven years old.

JAMES ALLEN ROBERTS

1789-1812

DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI

Ha, snorted Casey, child of draftcard burnings and ping-pong detente.

CECILIA HARDWICK SMITH

1884-1879

BEYOND THIS NARROW VALE OF EARTH

WHERE BRIGHT CELESTIAL AGES ROLL

THE COUNTLESS STARS OF HEAVEN’S REALM

GUIDE AND LIGHT THE WAND’RING SOUL

Ha again, Casey told the stars, the lover’s quarrel having solidified into the cynical half-banter of an accepted marriage. So go ahead, guide and light. Send down knowledge. Send down enlightenment. Send down a publisher. Go ahead, I’m waiting, I’m a wandering soul, as duly specified, I’m ready. H-has arisen. Go ahead.

Clouds started to roll in from the west.

“And she said to tell you that it would be no trouble at all, you could have the spare bed in the spare room, and they’d love to have you.”

Kara raised herself on one elbow in Casey’s rumpled, un-spare bed. The neon barber pole just outside Casey’s window striped her breasts with revolving red and blue.

“I don’t think it’s fair of you to change the subject in the middle of a discussion just because you’re losing.”

“I was losing?”

“You know you were. And then you just drop in this invitation to your parents’ house for Christmas, and that really puts me at an emotional disadvantage, Jer. It’s not fighting fair.”

“So report me to the Geneva Convention.”

“There you go, getting nasty again, de-railing the argument just because you haven’t got a valid viewpoint that won’t stand up to close scrutiny.”

“I haven’t got a valid viewpoint that will stand up to close scrutiny? And what is it you’ve got, an airtight case?”

“I didn’t say that. I said—”

“More like a braintight case.”

“—that not being able to prove that a thing exists isn’t the same as being able to prove that it doesn’t exist, and—”

“Absolutely impervious to the osmosis of facts.”

“—just because the Navy doesn’t choose to admit that a UFO—”

“Last month it was transactional analysis.”

“That was different! If you’d just have an open mind—”

“With enough holes to fit the airtight case in?”

“That’s enough!” Kara shouted. She bolted upright in bed and clutched Casey’s grubby sheet around her. “You’re so superior, aren’t you, with your clever little wisecracks about my intelligence! Just because you’ve never seen one, they don’t exist, right? If Jerry Casey, great unpublished novelist, hasn’t personally seen and touched and goddamn tasted a UFO, then there’s no such thing. Of course not! No matter that hundreds of sightings have been reported, no matter that a respected witness right here in town saw a ship streaking over the woods, no matter that there doesn’t—if Jerry Casey didn’t see it, it doesn’t exist, because Jerry Casey is the great fictional expert on spaceships and galactic empires! If Jerry Casey, with three unpublished novels and the enormous authority of his sacred pile of rejection sl—”

Casey hit her. It wasn’t a hard slap, he didn’t know he was going to do it until he had, and instantly he regretted it more than he had ever regretted anything else in his life. Kara put her hand to her red cheek and turned away from him, the sheet twisting itself around her small striped breasts. Tears filled her eyes but did not fall. Casey put out one hand to touch her shoulder, but he couldn’t make the hand quite connect and it hung there, suspended between them, useless.

“Kara … oh God, Kara, I’m sorry.”

She didn’t answer. The sheet humped up over her thin legs. Something broke in Casey, something so light and delicate he hadn’t known himself that it was there, or what he would say when it wasn’t.

“Kara, listen, I’m sorry I hit you, so fucking sorry I don’t know how to say it. But, Kara, you don’t know, you can’t know, I’ve wanted there to be something out there since I was a kid, wanted it more desperately than anything else in my whole fucking life. I used to stand out there on the plains and squeeze my eyes shut and will them to be out there, to come down to me, because I was one of them. I knew it, so they had to know it, too. I made up whole stories, epics, about how I got left here by mistake and adopted by my parents, but they’d come back for me eventually. It was so real I could taste it, Kara, could shiver with it down to my bones, my marrow. It was like a religion, or an insanity. And I still would like to believe, would give fucking anything to believe, but I can’t. The evidence against it is just too strong. Do you know what the odds are that intelligent life would behave like…so I started to convince myself that the stories were just made up. I started to make them up, to write them down. Kara, it’s not ‘superiority,’ it’s not wisecracks, it’s … Kara, do you see what I’m talking about? Can you understand what I’m trying to mean? Kara?”

She didn’t answer. After a while he touched her. She put her head on his shoulder. He wiped her tears. She let him. He stroked her hair and apologized all over again. She said it was all right, looking pensive and thoughtful. He pulled the blanket protectively up to her chin. She lay still in his arms. He kissed her. She smiled. A few days later she called and said they should have a long talk. He never saw her again.

Paul Rizzo was getting married, and he wrote to invite Casey to the wedding. His bride was a fellow faculty member at Lunell College—an assistant professor, Rizzo wrote, underlining the words twice. She was also “the only child of a wealthy shoe polish entrepreneur.” Casey tried to figure out how you got really wealthy from shoe polish, couldn’t, and knew that this proved nothing. He wouldn’t have known how to become really wealthy if the process were detailed for him in heroic couplets. For all he knew, shoe polish was a rewarding and fulfilling way to make money enough to freshly wallpaper all the spare rooms in Montana. For all he knew, shoes and the right polish were what his life had been missing all along, the yin and yang of his universe’s deficiencies. For all he knew.

With his letter Rizzo had enclosed a picture of his fiancée, cut from the local newspaper which had announced their engagement. She looked pretty, if a little blurry. The invitation was embossed with blue-and-white doves swooping around a quotation from Keats.

Tramping along over the hard Montana snows on Christmas night, Casey tried to picture the wedding. There would be champagne, and sexy-coy toasts, and good food. There would be women—bridesmaids in silky dresses, Lunell professors with good nun’s college-student relatives giggly and flushed with wine. The wedding was in April, over Easter recess, so the bridesmaids and professors and gigglers would have on spring dresses, light and bare. They would smell of flowery perfumes. They would dance on strappy, high-heeled sandals. They would talk to Casey on the dance floor, at the bar, on the church steps. And they would all ask him, eventually, what it was that he “did.” Or tried to do. Or was supposed to be doing.

Somewhere near the barns a cow lowed. Casey tramped up to his old flat rock, knocked the snow off it, and sat down. Overhead the stars blazed. He willed himself to concentrate on the stars, to forget the depressing mechanics of attending Rizzo’s wedding, the self-kept scoresheets. He just wouldn’t think about it. Above him glittered Thekala, aka Aldebaran, aka The Red Terror. To the south and east shone Rigel, Sirius, Betelguese, Pollux, Procyon. The Orion Nebula, spawn ground of new stars. They used to pretend it was alive, like a queen bee. Only the southwest looked subdued, empty of all but the faint stars of Cetus. The sky there was a soft, even black, lustrous with reflected light, like… .

Like shoe polish.

In January the ground froze so hard that no graves could be dug. People continued to die anyway, and their caskets were stacked, carefully labeled, in a brick vault to await a thaw. Casey was laid off. Nothing else seemed to be opening up in the cemetery line. So he took a job as a part-time janitor in a high school, nightly scrubbing anatomical impossibilities off lavatory walls with industrial-strength cleanser. He wrote.

In February it snowed 52 inches, a century’s record. During the entire month the sky remained cloudy; if the stars had all simultaneously winked out, their light spent like so many weary philanderers, Casey wouldn’t have known it. He caught the flu and spent six days in bed, feverishly watching the barber pole revolve against the gray snow. He wrote.

In March Dr. James Randall Stine, Chairman of the Graduate Committee and a widower for two years, announced his engagement to Miss Kara Phillips, a kindergarten teacher in the local public schools. Casey’s father called to just pass on the information that Marty Hillek’s father was looking around for someone with business sense to help him run the Holiday Inn. He wrote.

In April, a week before Rizzo’s wedding, Casey’s third attempt at a novel sold to a major publisher. It was about a galactic empire.

He leaped through the dark April woods, the letter in his hand, the ground inches below his feet. He was Pan with scriptorial pipes, Orpheus with graphic lyre, Caesar of the literary spaceways. He was the god-child of intergalactic muses. He was the first person in the universe to publish a novel. He was the Pied Piper with hordes at his singing back, Circe with spells to drive men mad. He was drunk, but only partly on California champagne.

Running wildly through springtime smells unseen in the darkness, he held the letter before him and a little to one side, like a spear, brandishing it upward.

“See! See!” he called up between the trees, drunkenly flaunting his own theatricality. “See! See what I did about you! Look! Look!”

The stars glittered.

Casey stopped running and stood panting beneath a sugar maple, holding his side. He was Shakespeare, he was Tolstoy, he was Dreiser, he was a definite A. He could walk on spangle-colored planets forever, just as soon as his stomach lay still.

The stars glittered.

Across the sky the branches of the sugar maple slanted like bars. Gemini sliced in half, Dubhe divided from Merak. Through the bars the Milky Way looked broken, fitful, about to sever and recede even more, and it was already so far away, so high … so high … they were all so high… . For a dizzy second Casey put his hand on the tree trunk, searching for a foothold. But the second passed and he stood on the ground, half-trampled fern shoots under his worn boots.

The stars glittered.

OK, so the universe doesn’t notice, hardly an original observation, Casey ol’ boy, got to do better than that. What’d you expect—a supernova? No romantic despair; cosmic self-pity strictly forbidden in moments of drunken triumph, on pain of triviality. No brooding, no self-indulgent self-incrimination. “A man’s reach should exceed… .” so you’ve got a hell of a reach, kudos to you ol’ Jer, good to have a hell of a reach. Supposed to have a hell of a reach. Reach for a star a star is born born to boogie … oh, hell. I am not Prufrock, nor was meant to be—

Meant to be what?

Abruptly, he saw that he was not alone. Under the sugar maple, at the edge of the wide circle of branches, stood a child. A skinny, grubby boy, ten years old, gazing upward. Casey lurched forward, but the boy ignored him. Motionless except for his eyes, he was conquering distant, spangle-colored planets, and in his shining look, Casey saw, there was no longing; no one longs for what he already possesses. He was still, complete, but as Casey grabbed wildly to throttle the unbearable wholeness in the rapt face that he knew perfectly well was not there, the champagne heaved and he threw up into the trampled fern shoots. When he could finally wipe his mouth on his shirt tail, the boy was gone.

The stars glittered.

Casey stumbled back through the woods. In one small clearing he smelled lilacs, barely budded but sweet in the dark, and he turned his head away. Somewhere he lost the path. Scratched by brambles, scuffing the decay of last year’s leaves, he thrashed forward until the moon rose. It was easier, then, to walk, but the moonlit pattern of dark branches on the white letter made him squeeze his eyes shut, and it was thus that he tripped over the spaceship.

It wasn’t really, of course. The ship itself was a hundred feet away, dully black in the moonlight, circled with birch branches that had been pushed aside by its landing and had snapped back. Casey, sprawled on the ground over a foot-long, log-shaped … whatever it was, could almost feel the crack of those returning birch limbs on his back and shoulders. He reached under himself to feel the Whatever; it was-hard and smooth, faintly vibrating. Unlike the boy, it did not vanish.

Unsuspected additional champagne churned in his stomach.

The ship was small; it could hardly be more than some sort of shuttle. Curved into flowing lines and embraced by budding trees, it looked weirdly beautiful in the night woods, weirdly right. Moonlight slid off the black surface, a deep rich black the color of loam. Leaves and ferns grew right up to where the ship rested on the forest floor. There was no burned patch, no sign that the ship had not always been there, would not always be there, a part of the ferns and birches, surrounded by the usual night rustlings and scamperings. An owl hooted.

Under Casey’s belly, the Whatever began to hum.

He rolled off it and scrambled to his feet. A section of the ship slid upward, sending a shaft of blue light over the ground. Slowly, a ramp descended until it met the dead leaves, which sighed softly.

Casey closed his eyes. He was drunk, he told himself. He was drunk, he was emotionally exhausted, he was hallucinating in some bizarre, wish-fulfillment fantasy. He was insane, he was schizophrenic, he was dead. He was a grown man with a more-or-less job, aging parents, and his own copy of the ten-volume Oxford English Dictionary. He was afraid, but not of the ship.

When he opened his eyes, it was still there. The “door” was still open. Nothing was visible inside except the bright blue light. The log-shaped Whatever rose into the air as high as Casey’s chest and floated towards the ship. Ten feet away it stopped, floated back to Casey’s chest, then again toward the ship. When Casey didn’t follow, it repeated the whole sequence. Casey took one step forward.

He was on the flat rock under the twilight sky. Would You Go? they asked each other, sprawled on concave stomachs. Nan, said Marty Hillek—too dangerous. Chicken! said Carl Nielsen, chicken! I’d go, said Billy DeTine, I wouldn’t care, I’m not afraid, I’d go. Me too, whispered little Jerry Casey, youngest of the lot. Me too. What if you never got back? said Marty Hillek, and no one said anything.

“The probability,” lectured the professor to Astronomy 101, “of intelligent life visiting earth covertly is very small. Even if we generously suppose a 50-50 chance of life developing on any planet within a 25-light-year radius of Earth, the next calculation would—”

“You don’t know,” insisted Kara Stine, née Phillips. “Nobody really knows.”

Casey took another step forward. Wet leaves squished under his boot. The letter rustled in his hand:

Dear Mr. Casey:

We are happy to inform you that our editorial staff is very impressed with your book, and that we are interested in publishing it. First, however, it is necessary… .

The Whatever floated back to Casey a third time. It was humming more loudly now, and in the humming Casey heard a soft urgency.

Moonlight shone on the letter, crumpled where his fist had tightened, fouled at one corner with vomited champagne.

Would You Go? asked Marty Hillek and Carl Nielsen and Billy DeTine. What if you never got back? Nights on the cemetary tombs: Regulus Formalhaut Betelguese Ri-i-gel. Days at his desk, struggling with stars on the head of a pin. “If Jerry Casey, great unpublished novelist, hasn’t personally seen one… .” Me too, whispered little Jerry Casey. We are happy to inform you … “What are you doing now? I mean your, uh, plans?” Me too. Oh, me too. Happy to inform you… “Escapist improbabilities, Mr. Casey. You must see … ‘galactic empire’!” Happy to inform you… .

Casey, battlefield for two warring empires, hiccupped in anguish.

Carefully, as if he might break, he took three steps backward. Then three more.

The Whatever followed him, then reversed direction and floated towards the ship, but only once. It floated inside, and the curved section of hull lowered slowly. The ship started to rise, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment the dark hull stood poised above the birches, blotting out the stars. Then it blurred and was gone. The birch branches snapped back. Something small and fury scuttled away through the leaves, startled by the sudden sharp sobbing that went on and on, the unchecked tearless sobbing of a ten-year-old-boy.

You know the rest. All but Casey’s name, which is not Casey. You can read in any standard reference work about the first official UN contact with the Beta Hydrans, fifteen years ago last May. You can read the pages and pages of testimony from the Des Moines dentist and the Portugese fisherman and the Australian housewife who visited the Beta Hydran spacecraft during their reconnaissance landings. You can read about the shifts of global power and the scientific boons and the interstellar promises of good faith and speedy return by the Beta Hydrans, who were not part of a galactic empire and who seemed bewildered by the entire concept. You can’t not read it; it’s everywhere.

You can look up Casey, too, in the reference works, and read about how he became the most famous “name” in SF before he was forty-five. You can look up his awards, his honorary this-and-thats, his movie credits, the alimony he pays both wives, his bout with alcoholism. If your mind runs that way, you can look up his biographies—written, all, by impoverished Ph.D. ‘s weary of Keats—which will analyze for you all the early environmental influences on Casey’s writing. You can look up the academic critics, also impoverished Ph.D.’s, who have concerned themselves with Casey’s novels. They find in all of them, except the first, a “lost, human yearning, a quality almost mythic in the scope of its cosmic rootlessness” (Glasser, Richard J., “Rockets and Wanderjahr: Another Look at SF.” PMLA, 122 (1992), 48-76). You can look it all up, or could if you knew Casey’s name. You’d recognize it, even if you don’t read “that space stuff.”

But what you don’t know, can’t look up, is the loss of Casey’s galactic empire. What it was, what it meant, how it felt. You don’t know. Unless it has happened to you, you don’t know. You can’t ever know.

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