AMONG THE TCHI

by Adam-Troy Castro

Obviously, this story could only take place on a very alien world….

Brian Carlson emerged from the transport wearing the curdled expression native of any man who had just spent his entire journey enduring the disdain of all forty fellow passengers.

This was not an unusual experience for him. As a professional novelist, he was well used to the disdain of others; it was the medium in which he lived. But four days on a Tchi transport with nobody but grumpy Tchi to talk to was a little too much disdain even for a man who last four novels had “betrayed his minimal but undeniable early promise” (New London Literary Journal, Vol XXXVIIII, ch 3, col. 2). Until realizing that his fellow passengers would have treated any human being no matter how accomplished with the same level of contempt, Carlson had spent most of the journey wondering if he’d spilled something on himself.

He was therefore encouraged to find another human being waiting at the gate, even if that human being happened to be Everett Finn, who had never been one of his favorite ten thousand people.

Finn was not just a novelist, but a critic as well.

Their relationship had never been happy.

For a moment, the two men glared at each other, each struggling to construct a witticism with sufficient pith. This was crucial. Whenever hostile novelists encounter one another in unclaimed territory, the author of the most cutting witticism is awarded dominance. The principle is so dear that some personalities, Dorothy Parker for one, are remembered by subsequent generations more for their barbed tongues than for anything they ever put down on paper. All these centuries later, Carlson knew nothing about Parker except that she drank, that she liked her tables circular, and that by all accounts anybody who wised off to her took his reputation in his hands. He wanted an immortality as lasting as hers and suspected, from his sales and reviews, that his prose would not get him there: the consolation being that, judging from his even poorer sales and reviews, neither would Finn’s.

No witticisms materialized.

The two novelists resorted to locking horns.

“Finn,” Carlson said, with the intonation he would have reserved for a highly suspect brown suspect on the sole of his shoe.

“Carlson,” said Finn, in the manner of an ailing man who had just been told the name of an alien disease that would soon make his arms fall off.

The contest ended in a tie, complicated by the waves of revulsion on the faces of all the surrounding Tchi, who like most Tchi seemed to regard humans the same way they regarded suspect brown substances or arm-dissolving diseases.

Realizing that somebody had to act lest the face-off go on for hours, Carlson took the initiative, as per the one-time review in the Neklortun Review that had praised him for marching where so many lesser literary lights feared to tread. “What are you doing here?”

Finn responded in the bold, incisive manner that had earned his latest novel special kudos in a review printed in the Xanan Journal of Letters. “What are you doing here?”

Carlson made himself taller. “I’m going to be this semester’s Author in Residence at the Tchi University Seminar in the Fiction of Human Beings.”

“Ah,” Finn said, without changing his own height one millimeter. “How honored you must be.”

Carlson’s neck had already achieved full extension, but he managed to elevate his nose another millimeter. “They paid my fare, my expenses, and a healthy honorarium.”

“More than you got for your last two novels combined.”

“Yes,” Carlson said. “How would you know?”

Finn said, “They paid me the same.”

For the first time, Carlson suspected that his new sinecure would not be quite as exclusive as his agent and his ego had led him to believe. “I was told they’d send a driver.”

Finn spread his arms. “I’m the driver.”

Carlson struggled to maintain the illusion of great height, and for a moment or two succeeded in wrenching the space-time continuum beyond its natural parameters by peering down his nose at this upstart who according to all considerations involving sheer physical measurement was actually several centimeters taller than himself. The attempt failed only because he was unable to imagine any plausible series of events that could lead to Everett Finn agreeing to drive him anywhere that didn’t promise explosive decompression at the destination. “Oh? You’re on the support staff?”

“I’m one of the other Authors in Residence, you arrogant twit, and if you want to know why I volunteered to pick you up, it’s because my overweening pride in the human literary tradition as a whole trumps the crashing tidal wave of contempt I feel for you as a particular individual. Period. You need to be warned what to expect before your press conference.”

Carlson’s heart fluttered. “Warned?”

“Yes, warned. We’ll talk about it on the way back to campus. Carry your own bags, will you? I’m a harbinger of doom, not your own personal mule.”

The skimmer bore all the design joys of every other Tchi ground vehicle: unlike its human equivalents, which provided transparent surfaces on all sides to foster the illusion that the pilot bore some measure of control over the direction or speed of its flight, it was completely sealed in, providing only a narrow slit at what the typical Tchi passenger would have considered eye level. The glass there was translucent, not transparent; and tinted a sickly shade of amber that made the world outside look like it had been dipped in pudding.

Tchi architecture tended toward big puffy inflatables bobbing atop obelisks. The pedestrians were, of course, all Tchi; and though there was no way for any of them to have singled out this one unmarked skimmer as the one ferrying the famous Hom saps, the expressions of all the pedestrians within Carlson’s truncated line of sight seemed to glow with a special scorn that couldn’t have been explained away by their disdain for whoever programmed the skimmer with the Tchi rules of the road.

Carlson had been warned against dealing with the Tchi, who seemed poised to reward their advance reputation as a bunch of aggravating snots, but the art of the novel had just been declared dead for the ten thousandth time in about as many years, and like any scrivener not one of the current best-seller list’s anointed five he had leaped at the first subsidy offered him. How hard could it be, to write on an alien world for one local year? To scratch his beard thoughtfully, while those aliens asked a hundred variations of “where do you get your ideas?” and each time parrot back some version of the classic reply “Schenectady?” To offer himself as an accomplished eminence, attending parties, radiating knowledge and saying witty things while going home to work on the perennial One That Was Going To Change Everything For Him?

Not hard at all, he’d imagined. Especially considering just how much the Tchi were willing to pay: an order of magnitude beyond any speaking fee he’d ever received.

But judging on the intimations of doom expelled by the odious Finn, he’d overlooked something. He said, “I must have misunderstood the nature of the curriculum. I thought I was to be the only Author in Residence.”

“No such luck,” Finn said. “You’re one of forty. Everybody’s signed up for a year or more, and scheduled to arrive at staggered intervals of one every few weeks or so. That way there’s always some new preening egotist primed for a rude awakening, and some empty shell counting the last days before his or her ride home. Generally speaking, you can tell those who’ve been here for a while by how gut-punched they look; I have most of the year still left to go and I look like I have gremlins eating my spleen.”

“Just what do they do that’s so bad?”

“Nothing that isn’t in your contract. You write your standard daily output on any project of your own personal preference. You make it available to the faculty. You show up once a week or so to read aloud and answer questions before an audience. If you produce nothing—and I assure you, some of us have tried that; there are Authors in Residence here who swear they’ll never write anything again—they ask about your past work instead. Repeat as necessary until your time in hell is over.”

Carlson frowned. “All of that sounds pretty standard.”

“Oh, it’s standard all right,” Finn said, with bleak finality. “The Tchi have it down to a science.”

“And this defeats people, how?”

“It defeats them by driving a stake through every creative impulse they ever had. Look. Remember Sandra Jaagin?”

Of course Carlson did. He’d shared a teaching fellowship—and for a while, an apartment—with her at the University of New Kansas. It was there, in fact, that she’d sold her first novel: also there that Carlson, whose own career had not been going well at the time, had burst into a jealous tantrum that turned everything sour for the few weeks their relationship still had to live. He had always wanted to run into her again, so he could apologize. “The Tchi made her stop writing?”

“She’s well and truly blocked. These days she goes on a lot of long walks. And then there’s Vera Lugoff.”

Carlson remembered Vera from several previous writing conferences. She was an odd twig of a woman, poorly socialized even by the sometimes generous standards afforded fiction writers, and she specialized in the production of epic doorstops about virginal frontier women and the shaggy-maned, bare-chested louts who loved them. The supreme sexual act for the couples inhabiting any Vera Lugoff novel seemed to be standing atop one windswept crag or another, and proclaiming their love in three-page sentences crammed with enough metaphors to make her pages sticky. Vera spoke much the same way, and always radiated scorn when her five-hundred declarations of nothing in particular failed to produce sustained replies in the same prose style. Carlson had never known another writer so much in love with her own work, or any other whose ego had seemed more impervious to criticism. He squeaked: “She’s here?”

“She’s here, nested flashbacks and all. The Tchi flew her in three months ago. And she was game all right: she flounced in, and read her first excerpt in a fit of high eloquence capable of flattening even the most demanding human audience in either satisfaction or sheer dumbfounded amazement. And guess what?”

“What?”

“It took less than a dozen sessions with the Tchi to break her. She’s stopped writing. She just stays inside her bungalow and weeps, saying that she’ll never write a word again.”

“Vera said that? Vera?”

“Vera,” Finn confirmed. “We’ve had suicide attempts, outbreaks of alcoholism, buzzpop abuse and other arcane addictions, perfectly good manuscripts fed to deletion programs, one nervous breakdown that left its victim declaring himself a mushroom, and at least a dozen talented writers who have found themselves unable to add a single word to their online files in weeks or months. Lord alone knows how many of them will produce again. I’m stronger than most, and my muse may have fallen down the well for good.”

Carlson was horrified, intrigued, terrified, and defiant, all at once. The main reason he wasn’t actually forewarned is that he was also a professional writer, which is to say he’d spent much of his life listening to all the learned voices, ranging from his parents to his ex-wives to the gray-bearded eminences who had plowed this ground before him, who had advised him of doom if he allowed his life to take this course. So instead of asking Finn for further details, he just ventured, “That won’t happen to me.”

And Finn exploded. Almost literally: a few additional grams per square millimeter pressure against the inside of his skull and he might have left most of his cerebrum plastered against the skimmer walls. As it is, his head bulged. “Oh, so you think you’re better than us.”

“Oh, come on, I never said that, it’s just that you’ve always been hypersensitive to criticism—”

“Oh, that’s it,” Finn laughed. “And you’re not? Forgive me for thinking otherwise! I know you’re better than us! You can’t be broken by the same forces breaking the rest of us mere mortals! I’ll just cease doubting you and permit you to enter the lair of beasts without further warning!”

The goggling Carlson said, “I never—”

“No, to hell with you. I’ll just let you get up before all those Tchi and learn for yourself. It’s just about the only form of entertainment us poor scribes have around here!”

At first, the press conference didn’t seem any more, or any less, grim than most other public appearances of Carlson’s experience.

There were the Tchi, of course: disconcerting enough when encountered in human space, where most people operating outside diplomatic circles rarely encountered more than one or two at a time. As on the transport, there was something about the way they raised their eyebrows or curled their lips at even the slightest human utterance that had always made Carlson wonder if his deodorant had failed, and when they performed their silent derision act in public, it was a little like having his fragile sense of self-worth pelted with invisible foam-rubber mallets. But Carlson had spoken at many other colleges in his career, including many that catered exclusively to the children of the entitled and privileged: he was well acquainted with the hostile blank stares of those who had never heard of him, those who had never had any interest in hearing of him, and those who resented him for their university’s insistence in believing that they might want to hear of him. He found nothing in the many rows filled with Tchi grimaces he could not connect to those prior experiences.

Too, there was the comfort to be found in the presence of his colleagues: not just Finn, who stood in the back of the chamber, grinning nastily as he waited for the carnage to follow, and Vera Lugoff, who had affected an ancient widow’s veil out of mourning for whatever she thought the Tchi had done to her, but also a number of individuals Carlson actually liked and respected. He was particularly pleased to see Sandra Jaagin: she was many years older, like himself, but showed the signs of regular rejuvenation treatments, and seemed kilometers removed from the broken woman Finn had described: she even smiled at him from her spot at the back of the room. Only the sudden urgency that flared in her eyes, when the Tchi moderator Dr. Flei Garkh stepped up to the podium to introduce him, gave Carlson another frisson of fear.

Garkh licked his minuscule lips with the distaste of a creature that had just found something moving on them, and said, “Today we are pleased to have with us the eminent Hom sap author, Brian Carlson, a man who exemplifies the state of the art insofar as it applies to his species. He is, in fact, a multiple award winner, demonstrating that his race judges him as near or at the top of their version of the quality scale. Carlson has joined our acclaimed Author in Residence program, where his regular contributions will provide us with vivid and repeated demonstrations of Hom sap preferences in story construction. He has agreed, in fact, to open today’s conference with a reading from a representative sample of his work. Mr. Carlson?”

Defiant applause from every human being except Everett Finn, who kept his arms folded in angry challenge.

Well, to hell with him.

Carlson made the usual opening remarks about the great honor of being permitted to represent his species, and the tremendous importance of cross-cultural exchange, and the great hope that this might support even better relations between their two great species in the future, give me a break, blah, blah, blah.

Then he activated his hytex link and began to read.

Carlson had built his reputation on two mutually exclusive genres: interspecies thrillers, in which he concocted clockwork interstellar conspiracies involving intricate alliances between alien races both actual and invented, which if left unchecked by his valiant heroes and heroines threatened to wreak horrific carnage of world-destroying proportions; and heartwarming bucolic adventures about a bookish young boy coming of age in the watery pastures of the ocean world Greeve. Both stretched the bounds of reader credulity, in the first case because his elephantine conspiracies never imploded out of poor management or internal rot, like most conspiracies on that scale, and in the second case because the young hero of his Greeve series, widely recognized to be a version of Carlson himself, hadn’t aged a day despite more than thirty volumes detailing events that ate up an average of one year apiece.

Carlson’s latest opus, of which he was inordinately fond, belonged to neither fictive universe: it was a truth-based love story involving a Cylinked boy and girl, who having rewired themselves into a new gestalt personality, now find a shared yen for each others’ exes. It was an excerpt from this newest work that he read to the assembled Tchi, utilizing the expert command of accent and idiom that had once led him to consider a secondary career as a supporting actor in neurec drama.

Carlson projected. He drank in the silence of his audience and read it as appreciation. He lost himself in the story he had written, saw his audience in there with him, and for a few fleeting moments was not a fictioneer of undeniable but sadly limited gifts but a god glorying in the richness of the universe he had created.

He finished to polite hissing.

This he’d been warned about: it was the Tchi equivalent of applause. He took it as intended, and responded in the preferred manner, by pressing his palm against his forehead and rocking his head to and fro, all the while thinking, I don’t know what Finn’s talking about, this isn’t that bad.

Then came the questions.

“Mr. Carlson: the sun in your heroine’s sky—what was its distance?”

Carlson blinked. “I don’t know. It’s a warm world, though. The habitable regions are high tropical, by human standards. I describe the weather there in detail—”

“Mr. Carlson: Would you know its high altitude weather systems?”

“No. But neither would she. The schools—”

“Mr. Carlson: she eats with a utensil you call a fork. Four curved tines at the end of a handle. Would you happen to know why four tines became the standard, and not six?”

“That’s deep background,” Carlson said. “I suppose I—”

“Mr. Carlson: the female you write of. You say she has freckles. These are local variations in skin pigmentation, aggravated by ultra-violet radiation. You say that they fan out across both cheeks. What side had more? The left or the right?”

Carlson was just beginning to realize he’d entered hell. “Both cheeks were equally freckled.”

“Mr. Carlson: would a medical examination confirm the accuracy of this count?”

“Human beings don’t count their freckles,” he said.

“As the author, Mr. Carlson, it was up to you to design her facial features. Announcing that she was freckled without offering a precise count amounts to abdicating your responsibility toward your readers. You must have a precise count.”

“I don’t.”

“And yet you know for a fact that she had an equal number of freckles on both cheeks?”

“More or less!”

“More or less is not equal, Mr. Carlson. So you contradict yourself.”

“I haven’t—”

“We have noted similar inadequacies in the imagination of your fellow humans, Mr. Finn: their fictive creations deflate like empty vessels upon any rigorous examination. This is even true of your so-called classics. Are you familiar with the works of your famed earther, Victor Hugo?”

Hugo had been one of Carlson’s earliest influences; he had written several papers on the man’s work, had indeed spent a couple of semesters teaching it to bored university students who had needed two months of special orientation before they could appreciate the conventions and mores of an earthbound, pre-diaspora economy. He didn’t have to hear the snotty intonation in the Tchi’s voice to know that the bastard knew it. “Yes?”

“On the day Jean Valjean is released from prison, what is the humidity?”

“I don’t know.”

“Exactly how many insects infest his clothing?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is the state of his periodontal health?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted. “It’s irrelevant!”

“Irrelevant,” the Tchi said. “Irrelevant.”

“Yes, dammit! You don’t need to know everything that’s happening on every single centimeter of his body to get swept up in the story or to understand its underlying theme of social injustice!”

There was a pause. The Tchi sat silent, the collective force of their disapproval washing over him like a tidal surge. They didn’t have to say anything; anything they put into actual words would have been superfluous.

Predictably, inevitably, without any gesture toward mercy, the words arrived, planting themselves one after another, with the pitiless finality of gravestones.

“So you admit,” the Tchi said, “that human authors are inadequate?”

The Earth cooled. The continents formed. Life rose from the deep, was wiped out by the asteroid strike, and continued in bold new forms. The Renaissance came and went. The stars went black and died. Hell filled with souls and put out a NO VACANCY sign. Time stopped as all creation contracted to the size of a dot.

The Q & A seemed to last one full hour after that.

For Carlson, light returned to the universe later that evening, and to the wine, cheese and condolence party the various human writers trapped in the hell of Tchi academia threw in their compound, to welcome the latest inmate of their shared hell.

It was not a bad place, as torture chambers go. In its own way, it was quite beautiful. The Tchi had built a circle of cottages around a glen wooded with popular species from human worlds and landscaped to provide walking paths and shade and plenty of sunlight for humans who liked that sort of thing. Maybe they did want to be good hosts. Or maybe they were sadists who realized gardens and sunlight could be torment to people already driven into despair.

The welcome party was held in the clearing. Carlson had already endured the sympathy of several mystery novelists, a memoirist, a satirist, and a writer of epistolary fiction once notorious for couching the letters his characters had written to one another in untranslated binary code.

Carlson had been told not to worry overmuch about a bunch of Tchi assholes; as long as his colleagues knew he was a good writer, and he knew himself to be a good writer, and he would one day be free to return to human space where at least one person in a couple of hundred thousand still had some use for good writers, he should not allow the Tchi mission to destroy him any more impact than a light spring rain.

Of course, he would have to endure a questioning just as brutal one week from now. And one week after that.

And just about everybody who offered him sympathy averted their eyes when he countered by asking them how their own writing was going. Their respective muses were all, if not shackled, then bruised to the point where putting pen to paper (or keystrokes to electron template, or neurally transmitted impulses to hytexual database, or whatever) was too painful to bear.

The evening did not seem about to substantially improve when he recognized the next sympathetic face in line. He completely forgot the acrimonious nature of their parting and leaped up to say hello. “Sandra!”

She shared his embrace. “Brian. I’m so sorry. I would have warned you if I could.”

“That’s all right,” he said, grinning with genuine happiness for the first time since the press conference. “How the hell are you doing?”

“Could be worse,” she said. “I haven’t been able to finish anything for months, but at least I have a sense of humor about it. You’re looking good. Fatter, but still good.”

“You too. Except for the fatter part.” Back when Brian had first known and loved her, Sandra had been a slender, elfin thing with close-cropped black hair and the terrible habit some women have of punctuating every statement with a self-deprecating giggle, as if the mere act of speaking her mind deserved apology. Back then she’d defied her natural shyness with outrageous fashions, including those with animated holographic patterns and at least one that sounded a buzzer and turned transparent at randomly-generated intervals. She’d lost some of the slenderness, but the added weight balanced her face and made her more a woman than a waif; the sunny yellow tunic she wore now enhanced her features rather than distracting from them, like some of the things she’d worn in the old days.

Without wanting to, he felt a moment of deep, heartbreaking nostalgia for their times together. “God, but it’s good to see you!”

“Wish I could say the same,” she said, sending his spirits deeper into the basement. They bounced back a little with her next words. “You really do deserve better than this. Have you figured out, or has anybody bothered to explain, just what’s going on here?”

“Ummm. Not really. Finn tried to warn me before the Q & A, but we butted heads and he never got around to finishing.”

“Then it falls to me,” she said, and grabbed his hand. “Come on, we’ll find a quiet corner.”

Once upon a time, Sandra would have died before presuming to guide anybody but a child by the hand; she hadn’t had the self-confidence to presume herself a fit guide to lead anybody anywhere. Now she was like a bulldozer, expertly carving her way past the throng of inebriates in tweed, deflecting the one or two who still hadn’t offered Carlson their sympathies. The last one she evaded was Vera, who wore the look of a ghostly bride glimpsed in the upper windows of some Victorian mansion; it was a good thing Sandra was able to spare him the encounter, because the one overriding quality in Vera’s eyes was defeat, and Carlson didn’t think he was in any state to be doused in any more of it.

The refuge Sandra found was a stone bench by a narrow brook, the rushing water just loud enough to serve as welcome white noise, obliterating the chatter of the other Authors in Residence. She sat him down, then took her own place beside him, and began, “I’m half-inclined to let you knock your head against the wall until it becomes obvious. You were a real jerk, way back when.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to get back in touch with you and tell you that. I’m sorry.”

She studied his face. “Why didn’t you?”

“I had a good excuse.”

“Which was?”

Carlson spread his hands. “Cowardice.”

She showed no surprise, just nodded, and looked away. “I figured as much. But you had a good heart, and that’s rare enough among real people, let alone writers, so I’ll spare you some of the confusion you must be feeling right now. Have you ever actually read any Tchi literature?”

With something like shame, Carlson realized that it had never occurred to him, not even when in the months between the invitation and the embarkation of the Tchi shuttle. “Uh, no.”

“Then you don’t know what they consider a good novel, right?”

“Well, I assumed…”

“That’s right. You assumed that just because they invited you to be the guest of honor it was because they wanted to honor you.”

“It usually follows.”

She sighed. “How long have you been on the lecture circuit, Brian? Haven’t you learned yet that sometimes they hire you because they want to do the exact opposite?”

Carlson remembered a small college he’d visited on the wheelworld New London. There’d been a symposium dedicated to his work. He’d wandered in, expecting kudos, and found that the main subject of discussion had turned out to be the flatness of his characters as shaped by the psychosexual inadequacies of the author. After three hours he’d become more evidence in the popular stereotype of novelists as raving egomaniacs who drink. He had sworn never to accept such an invitation again. But the idea of being honored by an actual alien race had overcome his misgivings, and…

…and for the first time in his life, he now actually felt the sensation novelists mean when they reference a sinking feeling. “What are they up to?”

“Tchi don’t like human beings. They consider us violent, uneducated philistines, with a barely evolved sense of aesthetics and a pop culture that debases us and every other alien race that has ever developed an appreciation for any of our work. The curriculum of their Human Studies program is entirely devoted to reinforcing that thesis. When they invite our best writers here—at least, those who aren’t warned off—they do so with the specific purpose of humiliating us with the inadequacies of our literary traditions as judged by the specific criteria of their own standards. In short, you’re here to be held up as a negative example. To be humiliated. No story you write, no matter how good, can possibly meet with their approval. I mean, no story. They’re particularly fond of ripping apart our classics. What they do to Jane Austen alone is enough to make a strong woman cry.”

He gulped. “Why do we sit still for it?”

“Because we have no choice. We signed the contracts. We accepted their honoraria. We agreed to come and face their questions. If any of us refuse to cooperate, the penalties are more than any working writer could ever afford to pay; they’d end up owning everything you’ve ever written and everything you ever would write in perpetuity, giving them the right to drive your reputation even further into the grave publishing annotated editions that exist only to support their perception of you as dishonest, demented, shallow, untalented, and unTchian in every way.” She grimaced. “Do that and you’ll be buried. I’d die before I let them do that to Cold Victory.”

That had been Sandra’s first novel, a portrait of a character secretly based on her remote and disapproving father. He remembered her saying that she’d cried herself blind while writing it. He remembered the acclaim it had received on publication, the lump it had raised in his own throat, the very real sense of closure it had given her. And then he realized that the questions the Tchi asked her must have included contemptuous ones about that very book, and how she would have had to sit and take them, on a weekly basis. Anger, the very real anger of a novelist faced with societies of evil critics, overcame him, and he said, “They can’t be allowed to get away with this.”

She snorted. “Oh, Brian. How can you stop them?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet. But I’ll defeat them. Don’t you worry. I’ll shut them down and leave them begging for mercy. This I swear.”

Sandra just stared at him, blinking, for several seconds, before laughing out loud. “I almost believe you.”

“You should believe me. I’m serious.”

She touched a fingertip to his lips. “I know you are. But this is their world, their rules, their aesthetic. You can’t write the kind of prose they like, and you can’t make them like yours. It’s a fool’s game.”

“Then I’m a fool,” he said recklessly. “But I will defeat them. I will.”

She sighed, looked upon him with a special kind of affection that looked like it did not want to cross the boundaries of pity, and gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek. “If you ever actually manage to do what you just said, you’ll be my hero for life.”

“Really?” he said. “Enough to be given a second chance?”

She was dubious, but desperate enough to consider it. “Sure. Why not.”

And this, of course, was a challenge no heterosexual male novelist could have refused.

The next day, his head pounding from all the drinks pressed into his hands by fellow writers eager to see another get as sloppily drunk as they’d seen themselves get, Carlson left the compound of the humiliated and found his way to the university’s main library, where the Tchi on duty took one look at him and inquired, with just the right degree of scorn and condescension, whether he was really in the right building. Didn’t the works here have subtexts and subtleties no human being could possibly understand?

He smiled and handed the withering snot a list of three titles alleged to be the greatest novels in Tchi history. The snot told him they were available via hytex link. Carlson smiled and said, “Aaaah, but the sheer sensory experience of holding the books in my hands, as I soak up the brilliance…!”

It required an interlibrary transmittal and consultation with the director of the Human Studies program, but by late that afternoon the Tchi authorized the replication of three volumes in approved Mercantile translations, printed and bound in the format Carlson always preferred when he read novels on paper.

This was a mistake.

None of the novels were shorter than three thousand pages.

Grimacing as much from the weight as the prospect of reading these behemoths, but adopting the fiction of happy anticipation, Carlson lugged them back to his bungalow and spent all of that night beginning the first and by reputation most honored among them.

After six pages he went back to the beginning, unwilling to believe that the story was unfolding as it seemed to be. Confirming the awful truth, and feeling more and more despair by the time he bulled his way past page one hundred, he rejected the impulse to feed the damned thing to a fire and forced himself onward, ever onward, paragraph by paragraph, tedious line by tedious line.

Somehow, heroically, he reached page two hundred that night, having already misdiagnosed the pain of getting that far as a dozen separate strokes. Before he collapsed, he flipped the remaining pages all the way to the end, confirming the awful truth.

In the morning he knocked on Sandra’s door. “Want to take a walk?”

She was frowsy-haired, wearing a cloth robe and drinking something hot from a cup. “Depends. Given up on defeating them yet?”

“No,” he said. “Actually, I think I might have a handle on the situation.”

She raised an eyebrow and brushed a sleepy tangle of hair away from her opposite cheek. “I must say. Heroic fantasy’s a new genre for you, Bri.”

“No, I’m serious,” he insisted. “I just need to clarify some things. Come on, take a walk with me.” When she hesitated still further, he added, “Unless you’d rather stay home and try to write…”

The terrible truth about novelists is that precious few of them, given a choice of activities, would rather stay home and try to write. Faced with a way out, Sandra moved faster than any whirlwind.

An hour later, the two of them had settled beside the same stream where they’d last spoken two nights before. They’d talked about everything but Carlson’s plan for a counter-offensive, but now Sandra had kicked off her shoes so she could dangle her feet in the water, and Carlson, who required all his might to ignore the sight of the sun glinting on her hair, needed to talk business or die. “I started reading A Thousand Futilities last night.”

She coughed hard. “Oh, Brian. I’m so sorry. How far did you get?”

“Two hundred pages. Skimmed the rest.”

“That’s further than I got. I think Vera got to fifty. The poor thing’s never been the same.”

“I have two other Tchi classics,” Carlson told her, “but a quick glance at those makes me fear for my sanity if I continue. Still, it remains possible that the equivalent of Dickens or Dumas or Hugo or even Quantum Cloud remains somewhere in the Tchi canon, so it would save me a whole lot of pain if you did me the favor of fact-checking my conclusions.”

She gave him a thumbs-up, threw her head back so her face could catch the sun, and said, “Shoot.”

He said, “As near as I can figure from my exposure to the greatest novel in Tchi history and, I must admit, from using the hytex to consult academic papers our own best universities have written about their canon, Tchi fiction has never been about plot or character or even theme. It’s about nested parentheses.”

She swirled the water with her toe. “Interesting way of putting it.”

“Historically, the typical Tchi novel has always been centered on the elaborations of the most minuscule subject matter they can concoct. Let’s say, a vase bearing a single flower. What kind of flower? They describe that. Where was it picked? They describe the region and its entire economic development. What kind of vase? They describe the design, go into several pages about how the school of artists developed it. In further chapters they talk about the clay it was fashioned from and why potters find that clay preferable to that available down the road. Then they talk about the table. Don’t get me started on how they go on about tables. Then they go into describing the room and every last detail about every single furnishing, and maybe, if they want to be really daring, an actual person sitting on a chair somewhere in that room. They describe that person and going into every last detail about that person’s genealogy. The one thing they won’t do, ever, is have that person get up and get himself involved in an actual story, because that’s gauche, that’s a betrayal of the kind of subtlety they prefer. And besides, if they did that, then they’d be likely to forget some more important details like the precise amount of fraying on the local area rug. It’s this layering, this obsessive accumulation of detail, the more mundane the better, that the Tchi intelligentsia consider art. Am I correct so far?”

Sandra shuddered. “You are. And to think I used to have problems absorbing Joyce and Proust.”

But Carlson was still warming up. “Tchi novelists seek to provide so much detail of a single static moment that the rest of the world can be inferred, whereas even the most leisurely human novelists move their narratives through time and sketch in only enough detail to enrich the story, an amount that must by necessity assume some details extraneous and therefore safe to omit. A Tchi writer, invited to a symposium like this, would be able to describe the precise contents of a desk drawer in the home of an academic living across the street from a house where his novel takes place. And it’s not the kind of thing that can be faked, because if he doesn’t put that detail in his book he will be asked that question not once or twice, but every single time his book is discussed in public. That’s why their most respected books are all two thousand pages long. That’s why they get longer when they’re annotated by academics. In short, their platonic ideal as far as fiction is concerned is a bludgeon too heavy to lift and too motionless to endure. Do I have all of this correct?”

Sandra kicked at the burbling water, creating a silvery arc that achieved beauty of its own before collapsing forever. “Yes, you do. But you can’t fight that, Brian. It’s their world, their aesthetic standards. If you ever tell them to their faces that you think their literature sucks, they’ll just blame it on your coarse human sensibilities and your inability to appreciate their finer subtleties.”

“Oh, I know that,” Carlson said.

“And you can’t imitate what they do, either. Trust me, several of us have tried. Write ten pages of a novel in the true Tchi tradition, and your eyes will cross. Write fifty and you’ll want to kill yourself. Write a hundred and you may never finish anything publishable in human space ever again. Manage to finish one—as one of us did, a couple of years ago—and you’ll find yourself unable to defend it to the extent they require; try as you might, they’ll find the contradictions, or the holes, and trumpet your failure even louder. You’ll have tortured yourself for no reason.”

“I know that too,” Carlson said. “And I have absolutely no intention of trying.”

She contemplated his expression for several seconds, frowned as she registered the confidence in his eyes, and splashed the water again. “But you said you can defeat them.”

He grinned. “I know I can.”

“In Juje’s name, how?”

He picked up a rock in tossed it into the brook, enjoying the ker-plunk of the splashdown, taking special pleasure in imagining that the running water was the Tchi literary tradition and the stone his own special contribution, still to come. “By using their own nature against them. Come on. I think it’s time that we go talk to the others.”

Two days later, it was Everett Finn’s turn in the hot seat. As usual, he’d failed to produce anything new in the interim since his last weekly evisceration, so the Tchi had exercised the contractual clause that prevented the human writers in residence from simply abdicating their responsibilities and programmed a discussion on one of his past works: in this case a very sweet little autobiographical story about the ten-year-old Everett’s first space walk. Finn had won a minor literary award for the piece, and still had some affection for it, though he now considered it juvenilia. The Tchi had spent the greater part of three hours demanding a full dissertation on orbital mechanics, down to the precise volume of canned atmosphere that bled into space when the airlock he’d used opened to vacuum. Finn kept to his usual strategy of sullen monosyllabic answers until the Q & A was almost over, at which point, as arranged, he allowed his voice to break and broke down sobbing into cupped hands.

The gathered Tchi took this with remarkable aplomb; it was, after all, the reaction they demanded. Garkh said, “Are you all right, Mr. Finn?”

Finn shook his head. “N-no. You’re right. My work is sloppy and half-assed. It’s not good enough. It’ll never be good enough.”

“Are you then changing your position and conceding the inferiority of the human literary tradition?”

“Y-yes,” Finn said. “I’m so ashamed.” He wailed and stormed out, covering his eyes as a veritable font of tears gushed down his cheeks.

The Tchi did not see him slow down as he passed Carlson, fix his long-time rival with a glare of undying hatred, and mutter, “You better be right.”

Nor did the assorted Tchi academics see the similar eye contact when every other human writer in the program, attending their own Q & A sessions over the course of the next week, succumbed to similar bursts of overwhelming faux despair. It wasn’t all anger; some of the hysterical breakdowns the Tchi witnessed and failed to properly recognize were actual hysterical breakdowns of the mirthful variety. No Tchi were present the one fine evening that Vera Lugoff had a little too much to drink and giggled nonstop for close to an hour, wailing, “I’m soashamed,” with a level of delight that rendered her intoxication redundant. There were lots of hangovers, that next week, lots: again, nothing unusual at a novelists conference, but the revels themselves were less the usual pits of auctorial despair than wild celebration at the prospect of striking back at their tormentors.

The Tchi could not be blamed for suspecting that something was up and were even more than typically offensive in their questioning when Carlson’s turn came again.

Following the lead the others had set on his instruction, Carlson failed to produce any new work by the deadline, and therefore had to endure the savaging of a favorite old work of his, which included questions like, “Exactly how many hair follicles did Suzie have?” and, “What was Professor Clump’s blood pressure at this time?”

It took everything Carlson had to sit through the interrogation, but he did, surprising his hosts by not pretending to break down.

Instead, he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You know, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. The human literary tradition is inferior to yours. But it’s not the only one that could stand improvement.”

A murmur rippled through the gathered Tchi literati. “Specify,” Garkh said.

“I’ve been reading some of your great classics, like A Thousand Futilities, and Anarchy, and The Dust in the Purg-Farmer’s Restroom, and while I’m astounded at their brilliance and their wealth of detail, it occurs to me that your canon lacks the fresh, cleansing spirit of innovation necessary to keep any great art form alive. I believe that the addition of allusion and implication, wielded by an expert hand, can drive a volume with as much nested detail as even the greatest Tchi novels of all time, in but a fraction of the space. Indeed, now that my eyes have been opened, I believe that I’m about to produce a work as meritorious as even your immortal Vlurkh-Bom’s Nostril, and that I’m going to fill it with all the verve and emotional truth and compelling relevance that has always been so praised among our own great writers. In short, give me one week and I promise you that I will come up with something capable of doing the great names of the Tchi literary tradition proud.”

The room erupted. There were cries of “impossible!” and “one week?” and “a human?” and so on, not to mention a few scattered boos, but Carlson had expected that, and he continued to stand firm, his head held high, his chin outthrust as far as his rather flabby chin could thrust. In the human gallery at the back of the room, Everett Finn scowled, Vera Lugoff coughed into a handkerchief, and Sandra Jaagin beamed, her faith in the enterprise now so overpowering that it was enough to dispel all the dark clouds of negativity emitted by their combined patrons and tormentors.

Resisting the urge to wink may have been the single most self-sacrificial moment of Carlson’s life.

Eventually, the hubbub died. Garkh emerged from a huddle with some of his colleagues, strode back to the podium, and sneered, “One week. You say that you can best our greatest literary works in one week.”

“Yes,” said Carlson. “I believe I can.”

“We do not believe it, Brian Carlson. No human novelist has the brilliance or the subtlety to pull off such an unprecedented feat. But you have dictated the terms of your own challenge. We will meet back here in one week, where you will either read a composition as remarkable as your claims, or admit the inherent inferiority of not only your own narrative traditions but also the very creative potential of your species.”

“Agreed,” Carlson said, with reckless abandon. “On the condition that you put all responsibility for that question on my shoulders. Whether I succeed or fail, you must pay my colleagues the remainder of their honoraria, release them from the remainder of their contracts, and provide their transportation back to their respective points of origin.”

Another colloquy, and Garkh returned again. “Agreed. With the understanding that by cutting off all further debate you allow the entire literary reputation of your species to rest on your own inadequate shoulders.”

Carlson could barely contain his mirth. “In that case I had better get started. Thank you for your time.” He stepped away from the podium, bowed, and strode down the center aisle, pausing at the exit so the rest of the human writers in attendance could join what had now become a mass exodus.

Everett Finn, who had maneuvered himself close to him, repeated his previous warning. “You had better be right.”

Carlson kept his smile fixed. “Oh, shut up.”

The week that followed was an exercise in inexorably building tension, as the humans awaited the moment of truth and their hosts trumpeted the importance and the finality of the showdown to come.

Carlson didn’t subject himself to much of what the Tchi media had to say about him, but he caught some of it by accident, and the big issue seemed to be just which of the culture’s many superstar academics would eviscerate his work with the cruelest eloquence. The snottiest of the bunch were as famous as sports stars, their visages captured on collectable cards sold in packs along with a mucus-like gel the Tchi prized for its sweetness and chewability. The upcoming destruction of Carlson’s reputation was such an eagerly-awaited occasion that it had even drawn a number of the field’s all-stars out of retirement, prompting much speculation over whether the most incisive condemnations would come from masters like Khludt and Kyael, or such upstarts as Phyeyilii.

Nobody on the Tchi side seemed to think that Carlson’s upcoming opus could possibly be anything but a disaster. Which was pretty much how Carlson wanted it. He didn’t talk about it much with the rest of the human writers, with the exception of one conversation he had with Sandra over waffles.

It was, it followed, the last thing he wanted to talk about, since it had been years since she’d made him waffles.

But she said, “You know they’re lying in wait for you, right? That they’re pulling out every stop to make this humiliating?”

He had been in the act of pouring his maple syrup, a moment that had possessed significant sensual pleasure all by itself, since it had been years since he’d indulged his famous passion for maple syrup and found extreme significance in the very fact that Sandra had managed to obtain some for him, here on the Tchi homeworld. “We’ve talked about this, my love. The more effort they put into destroying, the further I can throw them with my own brilliant rhetorical ju-jitsu.”

“I’m just saying that you don’t have to go through this just to impress me.”

His fork hovered over the treasure on his plate. “Do you really think I’m doing this just to impress you?”

She colored. “Well, aren’t you? At least a little?”

Carlson put down his fork while it still remained unwaffled. “I’m crazy about you, Sandra. I’ll always be crazy about you, and I’ll always count driving you away as the second worst mistake I ever made, directly behind that liability clause in my second novel contract. And it’s a near thing, even there. But if you think I’m doing this for you, you’re wrong. I’m doing this for Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Ibsen, Chekhov, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Rowling, X’uffasch, Dawntreader, and everybody else those people have locked outside the city gates and thrown garbage at. I’m doing this because I want past those gates so the trash starts landing on the right heads for a change and because I happen to be the one who thought of a way to build a big wooden horse in the shape of a manuscript. Impressing you is just a wonderful added benefit.”

Sandra’s lips moved without emitting sound. Then she found her voice and said, “Eat up. Your waffles are getting cold.”

He picked up the fork again, suppressing a helpless grin.

That was about as good as it got, until the day itself.

*

On the day itself, the final confrontation was held, not in the modest seminar room of the earlier Q & A sessions, but in a vast off-campus auditorium, lit by balloons full of tumescent vapor, and filled to the very last seat with Tchi luminaries radiating waves of full-bore disapproval. The stage was furnished not only with the lectern where Carlson was expected to stand, but also two long tables, occupied by several of the venerable names Carlson had learned about from the collectable cards, their expressions already dour and puckered and suggestive of long unpleasant lives spent scraping disagreeable substances from the soles of their shoes.

Garkh absented himself from the carnage being plotted on the dais and strode to the lectern, where he was greeted by polite applause from the two rows of gathered human writers and energetic hissing from the remainder of the great hall’s population. He said, “My fellow sentients, we are gathered here today to judge the work of the human being Brian Carlson, who has claimed himself capable of redeeming the sloppy and barely intelligible prose of his species with a work that incorporates and improves upon the finest accomplishments of our own. He has refused to submit his work for prior review, saying that he can only present it in its entirety this evening. If, like me, you doubt that this can be anything but proof of his self-deluded inadequacy, you will humor his madness in coming here with a reception as warm as the one you have given me. Gentlebeings, the human being Brian Carlson.”

More applause. More hissing. Carlson strode to the podium, waited for the tumult to die down, and scanned the first row for the pair of eyes most important to him.

Sandra gave him a thumbs-up.

So did Everett Finn, who had taken the seat beside her. His poor opinion of Carlson had not changed, but he knew enough to root for his team, and had wished Carlson luck earlier that morning, with a final, begrudged, Gotta hand it to you, Brian. You sure do know how to go out in style.

Carlson smiled at both of them, communicating the absolute confidence he felt at that moment, then adopted his academic face and said, “Good evening, everybody.

“My name is Brian Carlson.

“I’m here, on this occasion, because I believe that I’ve completed a work that combines the vibrant narrative power of the best human fiction with the all-inclusive detail of the best Tchi work: a work that by implication captures every salient feature of an entire imaginary world, from the smallest blade of grass to the jagged peaks of its most majestic, snow-capped mountains. It is a world as richly imagined as the ones described in such pivotal Tchi works as Pebble and Sleeping Fungus and Intestinal Distress, yet as filled with drama and conflict as the greatest works on the Hom sap bookshelf: a book that has been pared down to its most essential facts, that nevertheless contains all the others as subtext and implication. I feel entirely justified in resting the reputation of all my race’s finest accomplishments on this, the most important story I’ve ever written. It’s called The Rock, and it’s my supreme honor to present it to you, my colleagues, for the very first time.”

He took a deep breath, allowed the silence to build build build, and then placed the manuscript on the lectern before him.

“The Rock by Brian T. Carlson.

“The Rock,” he said, again pausing, imparting all the possibilities inherent in that one sad moment of silence, “sat imbedded in mud beneath a gray, twilit sky.”

Pause pause pause.

You could hear a pin drop.

Then Carlson took a deep breath and added, “The end.”

Then he stepped away from the podium and bowed, waiting for the inevitable tidal wave of disbelief and rage.

It didn’t take long. All at once, the audience exploded, humans with awestruck cheers and Tchi with helpless astonishment. One of the learned figures on the dais performed a perfect spit-take. Another reared back so violently he hit the back of his head on the backdrop. Unprepared for the suddenness of their cue, they glared at each other and at him and at the audience before getting it together enough to pelt him with incredulous questions.

“What?”

“Is that it?”

“Is that the whole thing?”

“Is this a joke?”

“Have you taken leave of your senses, man?”

“What kind of world does this take place on?”

“Is it inhabited?”

“Is there a civilization?”

“What’s the average yearly rainfall?”

“Is this a big rock or a small rock?”

“How many grams does it weigh?”

“Is it igneous, sedimentary, or compound?”

“Are there ants on it?”

“How many ants?”

“What’s the precise chemical breakdown of that mud?”

“How deep is it?”

“Is the water potable?”

“You haven’t answered my question about the ants!”

And so on, and so forth, a veritable torrent of angry questions, pelting Carlson’s bowed shoulders with all the force of a light spring rain.

Aware that his enemies thought they already saw their own victory on the horizon, when that prize was his the instant he elected to grasp it, Carlson basked in the moment, reflecting that his colleagues should have been able to do what he was about to do, as soon as they became aware of the trap they’d fallen into; certainly, storytellers had taken the same out since the first caveman told the first mammoth-hunting anecdote around the first fire, and writers had been performing the same trick at academic conferences ever since. For some, it had even been the entire basis of their careers. It should have been just as obvious for those trapped here on the Tchi homeworld. Instead, Sandra and the others had acted like writers confronted by other writers, never once considering that the true solution to their woes had always rested in taking the traditional out so favored by writers confronted by academics and critics.

And yet it was simple. By the end of this day, Garkh and the others would be competing with each other to answer the very same questions they’d just been asking of him.

Content, already victorious in his heart, he waited for the weight of all those unanswerable questions to reach critical mass.

Then he fired his ultimate weapon.

He gave the learned figures on the dais the most incredulous look he could muster and demanded, “You mean to tell me you don’t know?”