Damon Knight - Orbit 20

The race began. I worked methodically, meaning that I used my own method. During the first two weeks I wrote nothing. I saw a lot of Rome. A wisp of an idea was forming in my mind, but I wasn’t ready to work on it.

Jules was slaving away. He would creep along slowly and finish a draft, then take a week off during which he would feel guilty about not working. He had to rewrite a lot. “Otherwise,” he had told me, “I’d be incomprehensible.”

During the second month, I met Jan Wolowski while taking a walk. He was too intense for my taste. He was always serious, even at parties, and he had no tolerance for the foibles of writers. He was also dogmatic and snobbish. But he was competition.

I said hello and we continued walking together. “How you doing?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

“Still taking notes and working out my plot.”

“I hate making notes. I like to write it as it comes. But I don’t have a chance anyway.” That last line was part of my selfdepreciation routine, but on some level I believed it. If I really thought I was good, some part of me was sure, I would lose.

“I wrote a good paragraph this morning,” he said. “I have my notebook with me. Want to hear it?”

“No.” Wolowski liked to read to other competitors. It would bore, exasperate, or demoralize them. He read me his paragraph anyway. Unfortunately, it was good.

We passed Dankmeyer’s house. He was holding court at a picnic table with his admirers, some fettucini, and plenty of wine. Dankmeyer could turn out a novella in a week, so he was able to spend most of his time garnering publicity.

“Did you ever meet Lee Huong?” Wolowski asked as I waved to Dankmeyer, hating his courtier’s guts.

“No.”

“You should. She may be the best writer here.”

“I never heard of her. What’s she won?”

“Nothing, except a bronze in the Sino-Soviet Games years ago. She’s close to forty.”

“Then she can’t be that great. At that age, she ought to quit.” We passed Ansoni’s house. All the shutters were closed. I had heard he slept during the day and worked at night.

“I mean,” Wolowski continued, “that she’s the best writer. If people still read, they’d read her. I’ve read her best stuff and it wasn’t what she wrote in contests.”

We stopped by a café and sat down at a roadside table. I signaled to a servo for a beer. The man was trying to disorient me. I knew these tricks. “Better than Ansoni?” I asked.

“Better than him.”

“Bullshit. I don’t believe it.” I looked around and saw some spectators. They grinned and waved. A boy shouted, “Go get it, Dorenmatté!” It was nice to have admirers.

I spoke to Lee Huong only once, two months before the end of our race, at a party for the short-story medalists.

The party was held in an old villa. The dining room was filled with long tables covered with platters of caviar, various fruits, suckling pigs, standing rib roasts, and bowls of pasta. I settled on a couch and dug in. Across from me, Jules was flirting with the silver medalist in short stories, a buxom red-haired woman.

Benjamin MacStiofain sat next to me and grimly devoured a pear. “These Olympics are disgusting,” he muttered. “What’s the use? We come here, we agonize, we break our hearts, then someone wins and everybody forgets about it. I hate it all. This is my last competition.” MacStiofain always said every meet was his last.

“I heard Dankmeyer finished his novella already.”

MacStiofain’s mustache twitched. “Did you have to tell me that?” He got up and wandered away morosely.

Then I saw Lee Huong. She drifted past, dressed in what appeared to be white pajamas. Her small light-brown face was composed; her almond eyes surveyed the room benevolently. It was eerie. This late in the race a writer might be depressed, anxious, fatalistic, or hysterical, but not calm. It had to be a tactic.

She nodded to me, then sat down on the couch. I nodded back. “Is this your first Olympic contest?” she asked.

I said it was.

“It means little.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I replied. “It means nothing ... if you’re a loser.” I was being crude. But Lee Huong only smiled as she got up and walked away. Maybe she knew something I didn’t know.

I remembered what Wolowski had said. What if he was right about Huong? If she was the best, it meant that inferior writers defeated her regularly. And if that was true, it might mean that inferior writers beat better ones in all contests. MacStiofain, I recalled uncomfortably, believed that apollo picked the winners at random, although the human judges might give you an edge. The Olympic committee had denied this, but we all knew that MacStiofain’s sister had taken a gold in cybernetics. She might have told him something.

I had lost my appetite during these ruminations, so I got up and made a show of leaving, waving to Jules and telling him that I was heading back to work. This obvious maneuver almost always succeeded in making the writers who remained feel guilty. Karath’s classic move, bringing his typewriter to parties and working in the midst of them, was one I greatly admired but could never emulate with conviction.

On my way back, I saw Effie Mae Hublinger sitting on a stone wall with a few spectators. Her game was beingjust folks, nothin’ special ’bout me, jes’ throwin’ the ol’ words around, but at heart Ah’m jes’ a li’l ol’ socializer. Anyone who believed that about a writer deserved to be fooled, or worse yet, put in a story as a character.

The last month was pressurized. Anyone who could spare the time was playing dirty tricks. Wolowski, who admittedly was erudite, lectured to anyone he saw on the subject of our ignorance and lack of real ability. This upset a few writers, but only encouraged Jules, for some strange reason.

MacStiofain finally cracked. In a show of poor sportsmanship, he duked it out with a novelist. The day after that brawl, he was disqualified for taking unauthorized drugs.

They had to drag him away. The robopols put him in a straitjacket while he screamed that someone had planted the drugs, but we knew that wasn’t true. At any rate, we all calmed down a bit, since a formidable contender was now out of the race.

Lee Huong kept her equilibrium. That drove Effie Mae Hublinger crazy. With a few of her friends, she camped out on Huong’s front step for three days, creating a ruckus. This infantile tactic only lost Hublinger time she could have spent on her own novella.

Someone visited Jules and managed to swipe his medicines, unnoticed by the monitors. Even Jules, angry as he was, had to admire such skill and daring. But it was Dankmeyer who created a classic new ploy. Two weeks before the end of competition he handed in his novella.

Jules, hysterical by then, relayed this news to me. He was having trouble with his ending. He stomped around my workroom, talked himself into utter panic, talked himself out of it, then went back to his house. Even Ansoni had been thrown off balance by that trick. Everyone had always waited for the deadline, revising and polishing. Dankmeyer would be famous. He topped off his stunt with a nervous collapse, which would help with the judges.

The day before the deadline, Rigel Jehan left without finishing his novella and was disqualified. Poor Rigel, I thought, glad he was gone. He could never finish anything during the big contests.

And then the deadline arrived. We handed in our manuscripts and carefully avoided each other while awaiting judgment. I went on a drunk in Rome. I came to in an alley with a large bump on my head, no money, and a hangover. I suppose it’s all grist for the mill.

The closing ceremonies were held two years after the start of the Games. It took that long for some of the races to be completed. The economists, in gold lamé, sashayed around the arena, drawing a few cheers. The anthropologists topped them, weaving in and out, then dancing a nifty two-step in their robes and feathers. I wore my bronze medal proudly as I strutted with the others, our quill pens held high. There was, after all, no shame in being defeated by Ansoni, although it irked me that Dankmeyer had taken the silver. He had recovered nicely from his nervous breakdown and was casting friendly glances at me with his sensitive brown eyes. I ignored him.