And what about old farts like me, who are so tied to science fiction we can’t get even our best work published in other genres? We duck. We fake. We write sideways into other genres. In my case, I write contemporary mainstream stories but with a fantasy element, so it is perceived by publishers as being “sort of” speculative fiction even as I begin to build some kind of audience for those books. And, slowly, it’s working. I hear from more and more readers now who tell me that their first exposure to my work was my mainstreamish novel Lost Boys.

  And the other strategy? We go to Hollywood.

  Well, I’m doing that, too, but it’s no cure for genre woes. For one thing, nobody wants to hear a pitch from me that isn’t sci-fi. (Though if my TV series The Gate actually makes it onto the schedule at the WB, I will suddenly be perceived as a writer of teenager television, another box that I’ll have to break out of.) And in Hollywood it doesn’t matter much how successful you’ve been as a novelist. Everything is considered on a project-by-project basis. And it’s a different art. What works as a novel rarely works, unchanged, as a film.

  In short, these genre boundaries are hard to break.

  And yet…that’s not entirely bad. Because the existence of those boundaries is also the reason why science fiction has been able to develop into such a vibrant literary community, with highly developed structures of criticism and many subgenres, so that speculative fiction is larger inside than the rest of contemporary literature is outside. Without our own space on the shelves in the bookstores, without our ability to develop tropes and themes of our own that grow from book to book, story to story, author to author, decade to decade, it is doubtful that we would have achieved any of our finest work. Lacking such a category in Britain, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and C. S. Lewis did not advance “scientific romance” writing, per se, one iota beyond what H. G. Wells had done before them. There was no envelope to push, just a device to use.

  Our lurid magazine covers in America may have brought us contempt, but they also brought us freedom, some room to learn and grow. We may live within literary ghetto walls, but, if we’re determined enough, we can break out, to some degree, and hawk our wares on other streets.

  Whatever Lewis Shiner is doing these days—and I’m not tracking science fiction well enough to know—he had more influence over me than he knows. He reminded me, a dozen years ago, that I don’t have to write one kind of thing just because that’s what people are determined to pay me for. And so I kept looking for and seizing upon chances to write non-genre material. Some of my books exist in part because of that conversation with Lew; maybe my musical comedy that ran this summer in Utah owes a little to Lewis Shiner’s ambition to write what he wants without regard to genre walls.

  I know a lot of writers who never want to write anything but science fiction. That is the sum of their ambition. They are inside and content to remain so. That’s fine with me; I don’t understand them, but I don’t disdain them, either; some of them are among our best. But for those of us who have a lot of different stories to tell, for whom the boundaries are claustrophobic, I can only hope that we have enough success that the powers that be begin to realize that those walls don’t have to be so high or the doorways always locked.

  CABRACAN

  Lewis Shiner

  When Eddie got to the godhouse he still had to wait outside for the old man to notice him. Chan Ma’ax sat and mashed yellow pine gum into pom for the incense pots and pretended he hadn’t seen. Eddie was sweating and his nerves were bad, but the old man demanded patience.

  In their time the Mayans had worked out the cycles of the planets and built stone temples so graceful they made Eddie’s eyes burn. And all that survived was a dozen wood poles and a thatched roof, and a wrinkled old man sitting crosslegged on a mat.

  A tractor coughed in the distance, then crashed screaming into the underbrush. Behind the godhouse the logging road split the dense green of the jungle, its orange ruts filmed over with standing water. To either side the pale ovals of mahogany stumps stared back like frightened eyes.

  The air was thick and smelled of cookfires and diesel. It congealed on Eddie’s face and neck; if he tried to rub his hands together they would stick, just from the humidity.

  “Oken,” the old man said at last. “Come in, Eddie.”

  Eddie hiked up his tunic and sat on a low mahogany stool. After a couple of minutes the old man said, “Ma’ax Garcia spent two days in the forest, looking for copal to burn in the godpots. Nothing.” He spread his hands, palm down, then turned them over and pretended to search them for copal. He spoke in Maya, but slowly, so Eddie could follow. Eddie smiled and nodded to show he understood.

  The Ma’ax Garcia he was talking about was Eddie’s age, mid-thirties. He was Chan Ma’ax’s oldest son by his second wife. He loved the old man and wore himself out trying to help him.

  “They took all the mahogany,” Chan Ma’ax said. “So now we can’t even make new canoes. I guess now we have to take that one and start using it on the lake.” He pointed to the ceremonial canoe full of sugar cane pulp, white bark, and water. It had been fermenting under a covering of palm leaves since the day before. “So what then? No more balché? Then it will truly be the end of the world. My sons will all turn into evangelistas, no?”

  He laughed, showing brown stubs of teeth. His name meant “little monkey” after his clan, and over the years he’d started to look like one: flat nose, hunched back, matted hair. The first time Eddie had been introduced to him as the t’o’ohil, the “great one,” he’d assumed it was just another joke.

  In his more lucid moments Eddie saw himself as a victim of a fashionable malaise, the leading edge of a fin-de-millennium craziness that would peak in another fifteen years. The rest of the time it seemed like some kind of short circuit in his talent that had made him walk out on a career that was just getting started. But it had gotten to the point where everything sounded stale, where he’d go blank on stage and play obvious shit with no energy or heart. And then late at night he’d hear things in his head that were more feeling than music, things he could never find on the neck of a guitar.

  He’d bummed around Europe, but the massive, colorless buildings all seemed to crawl on top of him. He’d tried to work up the nerve for Asia or North Africa but when the time came he’d gotten on a plane for Mexico City. And it was there, pissing away the last of his money, that he’d read a book about the Lacondones and gotten on a bus the next day.

  He came the last leg in an oil company pickup. The oilmen were lining up right behind the loggers to take their turn in the gang rape of the Mexican rain forest, and Eddie saw he’d made it just in time.

  That had been three years ago. He hadn’t expected the Lacondones to make him a better guitarist. All he knew was acid and yoga and macrobiotics hadn’t done it for him and he was running out of things to try.

  And the Lacondones had opened up to let him in and then quietly closed up behind him. They helped him build a hut and gave him black beans and balché and their sour hand-rolled cigars and otherwise left him alone. He felt like somebody’s retarded brother that they’d agreed to put up with.

  In three years he’d lived a couple months with Nuk, one of Chan Ma’ax’s daughters, who’d gotten more and more distant every day; he’d had a week or so with an evangelista girl from the Christian side of the lake who was having a crisis of faith and had put deep scratches in his back; and in the last year or so he’d had a kind of clinical sex with the English doctor who passed through every couple of months, who’d lived her whole life in Mexico and never listened to rock and roll.

  And beyond the sudden widening of the doctor’s eyes when she came, the quick “oh” of her indrawn breath, he’d had no effect on any of them.

  “Listen,” Eddie said to Chan Ma’ax in halting Maya. “Something’s up. Not just the balché. Something’s going on.”

  The smile died on the old man’s face and his eyes went distant and glassy.

  Shit, Eddie thought. He’s not going to talk about it.

  They were like the Japanese. They had a mental curtain they dropped over themselves that cut them off from somebody who offended them. Eddie knew it was no use to go on but couldn’t help himself. “Those bags over there are full of clay. That’s why you’re keeping them wet. They’re for new god pots, aren’t they? You’re going to break the old pots, aren’t you? What’s happening?”

  Chan Ma’ax looked down at the pine sap. Eddie wasn’t there anymore.

  He’d been through this before. Once, pretty badly smashed on aguardiente he’d brought back from San Cristobal, a kid named Chan Zapata had said something about Chan Ma’ax and the Haawo’, the Raccoon Clan. Eddie had read about them in Mexico City. They were supposed to be the last ones with a working knowledge of the Mayan calendar and ceremonies, could even, some said, talk to the gods.

  As soon as the word was out Chan Zapata had shut up, too embarrassed even to change the subject. After that Eddie had gone to Chan Ma’ax and then to the rest of the village, but even a mention of the Haawo’ turned him invisible on the spot.

  Finally young Ma’ax Garcia had taken him aside and said, “It’s bad luck to talk about…you know. The thing you were asking about. Okay? It’s bad luck even to say the name. I’ll probably get bit by a nauyaca for even talking to you about it, but I like you. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

  Eddie could take a hint.

  He stood up and said, “Okay, Max. I’m sorry. No estoy aqui por pendejo. I’ll shut up.”

  He was walking away when Chan Ma’ax said, “Eddie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You will be back for the balché later, no?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Groovy,” Chan Ma’ax said. It was his favorite English word. It meant Eddie’s wrist had been slapped and it was over and now they were friends again. In Maya he said, “Bring your guitar. You can sing for us.”

  For a second Eddie wanted to tell the old man who he was, that he wasn’t just some clown who happened to know a lot of songs on the guitar. But the old man wouldn’t care. It had no bearing on whether or not Eddie was a hack winik, a real person.

  He walked out into the center of the clearing and let the heat wash over him. He shut his eyes and concentrated on the pores of his skin and felt his sweat break all at once, on the backs of his knees and between his shoulders. It made him feel cleaner, less poisonous.

  When he opened his eyes the mountains were in front of him, pristine, sharp-edged, nearly the same color as the pale sky behind them. A few thin clouds floated over them, motionless.

  Fuck it, he thought. Time to move on.

  Everything snapped into focus. He tasted the dust in the air, smelled the jungle broiling in the sunlight, heard the high pitched drone of the cicadas like dueling synthesizers and, over them, the faint voices of women on the far side of the clearing.

  Nepal, maybe. Why not? He thought about ragged, ice-covered mountains, impossibly green terraces set into the sides of valleys, whitewashed monasteries growing out of cliffs. For a second he saw them superimposed on the drab browns and tans of the village

  It would be complicated. He didn’t know the politics anymore, didn’t know if he could even get into Nepal. He would have to spend a while in the real world, long enough to get his bearings and put some money together

  He went on to his hut feeling lightheaded, precarious. The hut was the same general shape as the godhouse, longer than it was wide, rounded on the ends and thatched with sweet palm leaves. Unlike the godhouse it had walls of a sort, vertical strips of yellow bamboo, braided with string and baling wire.

  He opened the door and a woman’s voice from inside said, “Tal in wilech.” I have come to see you.

  “Nuk?”

  “Yes,” she said, switching to Spanish. “I need to talk to you.”

  He made her out in the dimness. She was barrel chested and thick waisted, not even as tall as Eddie’s shoulders, but she was a beauty by local standards. His eyes found the red of the tattered plastic anthurium she always wore in her hair.

  Eddie shut the door and sat in the hammock. He smelled the dry spicy odor of her skin and thought about the nights they’d spent together. “Como no?” he said.

  “It’s about my father.”

  “I just saw him. He’s getting ready to drink balché.”

  “Yes,” she said. “They will drink balché and in the morning they will go on a pilgrimage to Na Chan.”

  “Pilgrimage,” Eddie said, stunned. Na Chan was where Chan Ma’ax’s gods lived. It was one of maybe hundreds of Classical Maya ceremonial centers still covered by jungle, never excavated, never even seriously looted because no one had enough time or money for it. Chan Ma’ax would never talk about what went on there. It was hach winik stuff, for real people only.

  “He must not go. He’s old, almost eighty. The government has told him to stay away from there. If he goes I don’t think he’ll come back. You have to talk to him.”

  “I don’t know why you’re asking me,” Eddie said. He didn’t want it to sound bitter, but it came out that way just the same.

  “He trusts you. He thinks you are a good man. He listens to you.”

  “He’d listen better to Ma’ax Garcia.”

  “Ma’ax Garcia is too much a part of the old ways. He doesn’t care about the danger.”

  The old ways. Nuk was awed by cars and planes and portable stereos. She still talked about the TV she’d seen in San Cristobal five years ago. That’s what I am to her, Eddie thought. Just one more new thing.

  “If he talks to me,” Eddie said. “I’ll do what I can. I’ll tell him I think it’s dangerous. Okay?”

  “Thank you, Eddie.” She leaned over him, kissed him quickly and ran out the door. Her lips were soft and he felt the kiss a long time after she was gone.

  Finally he got up and stood in front of his shaving mirror. He didn’t like the way he looked. It made him nervous, impatient. He got out his straight razor and cut his shoulder length hair to within an inch or so of his skull. He had to do the back by feel. When he was finished he washed himself with cool water from the clay jug in the corner and the last of his hard pink shaving soap.

  There was a bamboo shelf in one corner and he reached to the back of it and took down his shoulder bag. The zipper was stiff from disuse. He got out a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and put them on. The jeans were loose, but he punched a new hole in the belt.

  The longest journey begins with a single step, he thought. Already he felt different, cut off from the heartbeat of the village, his genitals armored in heavy denim.

  He rolled the mirror and razor up in the blue and orange strings of the hammock and put them in the bag. There wasn’t anything else to pack.

  He left the bag sitting in the dust of the floor and picked up his guitar. It was a gut string acoustic he’d bought for twenty dollars in the mercado in Mexico City. The action was brutal and the octaves were about a quarter tone off, but he’d been trying to wean himself from material objects and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. He carried it back to the godhouse where Chan Ma’ax was waiting.

  Everybody else was back from the milpa, the corn field on the far side of the lake. Maybe fifteen men sat or squatted in a loose hierarchy on the floor of the godhouse. Eddie nodded to them and sat next to Ma’ax Garcia. Nobody said anything about his clothes. Ma’ax Garcia handed him a bowl of the deep brown balché and Eddie took it in both hands. It tasted a little like weak stout, a little like strong pulque. Eddie drank it off and Ma’ax Garcia passed it forward to be filled again. When the bowl came back Eddie set it at his feet and wrapped both hands around the neck of his guitar.

  Chan Zapata served the balché from a big clay pot at the front of the godhouse. He was only in his twenties but they all knew he would take Chan Ma’ax’s place when the time came. He had clean features and penetrating eyes and he worked hard for Chan Ma’ax when he wasn’t on a binge in San Cristobal. He made souvenir bows and arrows that he traded for aguardiente and whores, and every time he came home his wife had moved out. She would stay gone a week or so and then he’d convince her he’d never do it again.

  He would be going to Na Chan if anyone did.

  The others sat in twos and threes, drinking, complaining about the Christian converts on the north end of the lake who’d sold off the mahogany and kept all the money for themselves. One old man asked Chan Zapata if he’d saved up enough “arrows” for a trip to San Cristobal and everybody laughed.

  If I painted myself purple, Eddie thought, would anybody say anything?

  Chan Zapata took the pot back out to the canoe to refill it. The full pot had to weigh close to a hundred pounds and he staggered back with his knees bent and his arms all the way around it. His face was agonized. If he dropped it the gods would never forgive him. Just past the edge of the roof Eddie could see towering black clouds blowing in from the Gulf, erasing Chan Zapata’s shadow and turning the jungle behind him into a wall of foggy green.

  The rain started just as suddenly, falling in handfuls that cratered the dust outside and filled the air with the rusty smell of ozone. The sky cracked into a web of white lines and the thunder came after it fast and loud enough to make one of the old men jump.

  “It’s only lightning,” Chan Ma’ax said. His monkey face wrinkled with silent laughter. “Nuxi’ is afraid Cabracan is waking up.” The others laughed and Chan Ma’ax said to Eddie, “Cabracan is what they call in Spanish the temblór.”

  “Earthquake,” Eddie said in English. The old man’s smile terrified him. There had been another quake in Vera Cruz just last week, the third in Central America in the last nine months, each one worse than the one before.