A, B, C: Three Short Novels Page 2

  It was a lot of work—I’ve written about it several times. The middle volume was more work than I’d ever imagined it might be. Often, I was afraid the work would defeat me. There are places where I believe it did. But I also knew, by now, that if I didn’t do it, not only couldn’t I sell it, but I couldn’t live with myself either. By now I was afraid to avoid the work or to try for shortcuts.

  The three books of The Fall of the Towers are not here. But they are still in print.

  It’s worth repeating: the rejection of Çiron gave me the chance to compare two things I had written, not in terms of the differences between the surfaces of the texts, but rather the differences between the mental work I had done writing the accepted text and the mental work I had shirked writing the rejected one.

  The writing of The Ballad of Beta-2 came along to interrupt the trilogy, during the time I’d thought, for a while, the second volume would stop me. I began it in the middle of that stalled second book. I wanted to write a short novel unconnected to the War of Toromon, so that I could give myself the feeling of starting and completing something. Soon I realized I had to stop (or more accurately realized I had already stopped) thinking about selling in order to attain and sustain the level I was reaching for—and always missing and going back in hope of pulling myself closer. Today I suspect even that conflict muddled the causes of the problems I was having.

  The Ballad of Beta-2 itself was interrupted when I managed to get back my wind on the trilogy’s recalcitrant book two. After the third volume appeared, I finished Beta-2. (Yes, I managed to complete the trio; after volume two, work on the third was as surprisingly easy as, for the second book, it had been unexpectedly hard. That meant—to me—it was time to go on to projects which would be harder.) Beta-2 appeared as the shorter half of another Ace Double at the start of 1965 and then in an Ace volume containing The Ballad of Beta-2 and another of my short science-fiction novels, Empire Star. In 1982 Beta-2 was again released by Ace, this time in a stand-alone paperback that remained in print till 1987. Altogether the book had a run of twenty-two years in print, as did The Jewels of Aptor.

  Although They Fly at Çiron was, in fact, the third of the three here to be published (which is how it earns its “C”), while I think of it as my second novel, actually it was my nineteenth published. The reason I published it at all is because in 1991, in Amherst, Massachusetts, I took it out and reworked it end to end.

  In 1993 They Fly at Çiron had two separate hardcover printings, a trade hardcover and a special edition, both from Ron Drummond’s incomparable small press, Incunabula. Two years later, a hardcover and a mass-market paperback followed from Tor Books.

  The above is all to say, whether the effort was wasted, invisible, or has somehow left its signs either in pleasing or in awkward ways, by the time these three were actual books, I’d worked on them as hard as I could—as did the publishers to see that they were successful in the marketplace—and I hope it says it in a way that conveys three further facts (the second of which I’ll return to in my “Afterword”):

  First, with each book, moments arrived in the creation process when the text felt as if it required more work than I could possibly do. I gave up. I despaired. Then I came back and tried to do it anyway. In short, it was a process like any other human task. What made it different, however, was that it was primarily internal: the “shape” of its internality made it wholly of itself and only indirectly and incompletely communicable in any rigorous way.

  Second, over a very, very long time—tens of thousands to multiple millions and even billions of years, rather than over decades or centuries—a congruence arises between creatures and the conditions that are the landscapes in which they and we dwell.*2 Along with that congruence arises the illusion of a guiding intelligence. (There may be a truth behind the illusion. There may not be. But that is metaphysics, however, and not our concern here. The similarly structured illusion of direct animal and human communication through the senses, by the same process imposes the effect/illusion of a metaphysics we arrogantly presume must exist behind our necessarily mediated perceptions to form a reality resonant with our aesthetic wonders and distress, our appetitive pleasures and pain, our political urgencies, disasters, and satisfactions, and their largely unseen structuring forces: another illusion, another effect. The same indirect process that feels so direct to us (and probably to all the animals who utilize it) is what allows wolves to bay out to warn their pack of danger or approaching prey—and humans to tell stories, gossip, and write novels, as well as create cultures: the cultures we form are the only realities we have, however, or can have any access to, and our ignorance of which, when we are aware of it, all too infrequently we take as a mandate for both honesty and humility (the engine of ethics at its best), even as these realities of which we are a part create the curiosities, the yearnings, the passions to know so often perceived to be that arrogance itself. That these multiple realities are parsimoniously plural, however (without having been directly caused by evolution; only the ability to construct them and respond to them is evolutionary, not what is constructed), is the first, but by no means the strongest, evidence for their complex relations,*3 however functional or problematic their multiplicity.

  Third, the work of art—a sculpture we carve or a novel we write—can be and can exhibit a complex structure that appears to mimic some of the world (some of one reality or another; or even some of one that does not exist) because it evolves from the world; it mimics it in much the way certain insects camouflage themselves as the bark or the leaves of the trees they sometimes rest on, in the same way that intelligence can sometimes mimic something greater than itself, both spatially and temporally, even while simpler in its details and less protracted in operation; thus we can camouflage what we have to say as a series of happenings from life. And sometimes something that is not mind but that here and there entails one or millions of minds, at different levels and at different tasks—mind that is as likely to be on the way out (like gigantism in dinosaurs) as it is to be developing into something more useful, the results of which we will not live to see because it (they) will not manifest in any way we might notice or even it itself might notice or comprehend—if ever—for another handful of millions of years or more, is only another wrinkle in the bark or the leaf—another fold in the monad, as Leibniz would have it.

  The possibility that from time to time such aesthetic work as I have so inadequately described can create anything of interest is another effect: direct causality between work and result is as much an effect here as is any other sort of communication. But because that interest is communicated and therefore indirect, incomplete, constituted of its own inaccuracy and slippage, already there in whatever education from which we can construct our experience of utterances (including what can be spoken about), or of texts (including what can be written about; and they are not necessarily the same). From time to time, locally or briefly, however, something of interest occurs. We suspect it does mostly because, however briefly and locally, we are interested.

  April 17, 2014

  Philadelphia

  * * *

  *1 Like thousands on thousands of young writers before and since, I figured the easy way to write a novel was to write a series of interconnected short stories. I’d even thought of it as an experiment—and I still think it could have been an interesting one. But it was an experimental idea that I’d used in place of doing the necessary imaginative work, rather than a formal idea I had brought to life through the work and the thinking that would have opened up and multiplied its resonances and meanings. It was an idea I had thrown away rather than utilized, because I’d hoped it would be interesting in itself, whatever its content. Forty years later I tried it again, with more success—I hope—in a novel called Dark Reflections. (It won the Stonewall Book Award in 2008.) But this reflects on something I find myself writing about even today: though the genre can suggest what you might need, it can never do the work for you—whether you are thi
nking of the text as science fiction, as literary, or as experimental; though, from time to time, all of us (writers and critics both) hope that it will.

  *2 Sometimes the uses of evolutionary developments seem obvious. Far more often, though, they are invisible and their uses not necessarily comprehended by the creatures—including humans—who possess them. (This is why the notion that sex is only for reproduction is, itself, an antievolutionary notion.) What are earlobes for? Well, they are blood collectors that help supply the ear with blood and keep the inner ear warm in very cold weather. That’s probably why they developed first in northern climates and why smaller earlobes developed nearer the equator. Well, then why don’t all northerners have large earlobes and all equatorial people have small ones? Because, over the last four hundred years, quite enough intermixing has occurred in both the north and south to rearrange the genetic distribution, which rearrangements can be considered a natural response to the interbreeding of peoples and the movement that goes along with it and is also a long-ago established evolutionary advantage of genetic reproduction itself, which allows such rearrangements in diploid genetic species for blending-inheritance aspects. (Haploid species—some stages of amoeba and paramecia—can mix genes through a process called syzygy, but that’s much rarer and takes even more time to develop anything evolutionary—although it does, some. A science-fiction writer who was most fascinated by that process—and one of the great short fiction writers of the middle of the last century—is Theodore Sturgeon. Read him. He’s wonderful.) Two evolutionary ideas to keep in mind: first, by the time anything develops evolutionarily, it always has many uses; and that includes earlobes, large and small. No matter how scientists talk about them, anyone who believes that any evolutionary development has only one use basically misunderstands how evolution works: because the development is slow and gradual, at each stage the development must be useful enough to give a large-scale statistical survival advantage to a group. Those uses change as the aspect develops but the older uses they met don’t necessarily go away. (Humans’ external ears are highly erogenous—whether individuals use that aspect or not.) If it isn’t useful at all, it breeds out eventually. Carrying around excess still isn’t an advantage—though sometimes it only looks excessive to us. Second, any aspect of us that is widespread and has been around for a long time almost certainly has some functional use(s), even if we have never stopped to consider what it might be. Humans had developed a circulatory system with veins, arteries, valves, and a complex heart multiple millions of years before the Egyptians in the sixteenth century BCE and with observations by Romans and Arabs over three thousand years contributed to William Harvey’s assembling a viable model of the whole human circulatory system (as well as discussing a few of its uses, but by no means all) in his 1628 publication, De Motu Cordis. And we are still discovering aspects of the circulatory system that have been in place since before we branched off the general evolutionary line along with the other great apes, many of which are common to all mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish. In many of their variant forms they do lots of things very well, and a staggering percentage of the greater “us” (almost all of us who aren’t plants or worms—and worms are the major planetary population, remember; though we share still other things with them, such as muscles and an alimentary canal) utilize them to interact with the cities, the caves, the rural areas in which they live or have lived, the prairies, the grasses and brambles and ferns, the seas, the seabeds and trenches and shallow reefs, the deserts, the hills, the tundra, the mountains, the jungles, and forests.

  *3 That multiplicity, thanks to evolution, is always both plural and limited (parsimonious). Their pluralities are the political urgencies, disasters, and satisfactions mentioned above, as they are inchoate to the wonders and distresses, the pains and pleasures, and the symbolic forces that exist only through intellect, from the workings of discourse to the square root of minus one, to the existence of stars, quarks, photons, quasars and pulsars, dark matter, dark energy, galaxies, gravity, and the multiverse they constitute.

  the jewels of aptor

  The waves flung up against the purple glow

  of double sleeplessness. Along the piers

  the ships return; but sailing I would go

  through double rings of fire, double fears.

  So therefore let your bright vaults heave the night

  about with ropes of wind and points of light

  and say, as all the rolling stars go, “I

  have stood my feet on rock and seen the sky.”

  THE OPENING LINES OF THE EPIC

  OF THE CONFLICTS BETWEEN LEPTAR AND APTOR,

  BY THE ONE-ARMED POET GEO

  Afterwards, she was taken down to the sea.

  She didn’t feel too well, so she sat on a rock and scrunched her toes in the wet sand. She looked across the water, hunched her shoulders a little. “I think it was pretty awful. I think it was terrible. Why did you show it to me? He was only a boy. What reason could they possibly have had for doing that to him?”

  “It was just a film. We showed it to you so that you would learn.”

  “But it was a film of something that really happened!”

  “It happened several years ago, several hundred miles away.”

  “But it did happen; you used a tight beam to spy on them, and when the image came in on the vision screen, you made a film of it, and—Why did you show it to me?”

  “What have we been teaching you?”

  But she couldn’t think: only the picture in her mind, vivid movements, scarlets, bright agony. “He was just a child,” she said. “He couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve.”

  “You are a child. You aren’t sixteen yet.”

  “What was I supposed to learn?”

  “Look around. You should see something.”

  But it was still too vivid, too red, too bright….

  “You should be able to learn it right here on this beach, in the trees back there, in the rocks down here, in the shells around your feet. You do see it; you don’t recognize it.” His voice brightened. “Actually you’re a very fine student. You learn quickly. Do you remember anything from your study of telepathy a month ago?”

  “ ‘By a method similar to radio broadcast and reception,’ ” she recited, “ ‘the synapse patterns of conscious thought are read from one cranial cortex and duplicated in another, resulting in a duplication of sensory impressions experienced—’ But I can’t do it, so it doesn’t help me!”

  “What about history, then? You did extremely well in the examination. Does knowing about all the happenings in the world before and after the Great Fire help you?”

  “Well. It’s…it’s interesting.”

  “The film you saw was, in a way, history. That is, it happened in the past.”

  “But it was so…”—her eyes beat before the flashing waves—“horrible!”

  “Does history fascinate you only because it’s interesting? Don’t you ever want to know the reason behind some of the things those people do in your books?”

  “Yes, I want to know the reasons! I want to know the reason they nailed that man to the oaken cross. I want to know why they did that to him.”

  “A good question…Which reminds me: at about the same time they were nailing him to that cross, it was decided in China that the forces of the Universe were to be represented by a circle, half black, half white. To remind themselves, however, that there is no pure force, no single and unique reason, they put a spot of white paint in the black half and a spot of black paint in the white. Interesting?”

  She frowned, wondering at the transition. But he was going on:

  “And do you remember the goldsmith, the lover, how he recorded in his autobiography that at age four, he and his father saw the Fabulous Salamander on their hearth by the fire; and his father smacked the boy across the room into a rack of kettles, saying something to the effect that little Cellini was too young to remember the incident unless it was
accompanied by pain.”

  “I remember the story,” she said. “And I remember Cellini said he wasn’t sure if the smack was the reason he remembered the Salamander—or the Salamander the reason he remembered the smack!”

  “Yes, yes!” he cried. “That’s it. The reason, the reasons…” In his excitement, his hood fell back and she saw his face in the late afternoon’s copper light. “Don’t you see the pattern?”

  Scored forehead, the webbing at his eyes: she traced the pattern of age there, and let her eyes drop. “Only I don’t know what a Salamander is.”

  “It’s like the blue lizards that sing outside your window,” he explained. “Only it isn’t blue and it doesn’t sing.”

  “Then why should anyone want to remember it?” She grinned. But he was not looking at her.

  “And the painter,” he was saying, “you remember, in Florence. He was painting a picture of La Gioconda. As a matter of fact, he had to take time from the already crumbling picture of the Last Supper of the man who was nailed to the cross of oak to paint her. And he put a smile on her face of which men asked for centuries, ‘What is the reason she smiles so strangely?’ Yes, the reason, don’t you see? Just look around!”

  “What about the Great Fire?” she asked. “When they dropped flames from the skies and the harbors boiled; that was reasonless. That was like what they did to that boy.”

  “Oh, no,” he said to her. “Not reasonless. True, when the Great Fire came, people all over the earth screamed, ‘Why? Why? How can man do this to man? What is the reason?’ But just look around you, right here! On the beach!”

  “I guess I can’t see it yet,” she said. “I can just see what they did to him; and it was awful.”

  “Well.” He pulled together his robe. “Perhaps when you stop seeing what they did so vividly, you will start seeing why they did it. I think it’s time for us to go back now.”