Virtual Mode

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Now don’t get mad at me. This is the first novel of the Mode series, and there’s no concealing the fact that there is a whole lot more to go. This is a complete episode, introducing the concept of the Virtual Mode and the major characters. The next novel, Fractal Mode, will follow in about a year, featuring Colene, Darius, Provos, Seqiro, and Nona in a setting that is not exactly our own. Let’s face it: Colene and Darius hardly know each other, and it would be unrealistic to think that they could just get together and live happily forever after. There are real problems for them to work out, and their love is really infatuation. She has a score to settle with him about his sexual attitude, and he has one to settle with her about her lack of integrity. Promising relationships have been known to founder on just such issues. This process will not be simplified by the presence of another attractive young woman as an anchor figure. And what of those who made the Chips, and isolated the DoOon? With each novel, an anchor figure will be lost, and a new one gained, with the new Virtual Mode. If you object to this sort of complication, don’t buy the sequels; the series will languish without your support, and shut down in due course. Oh, it hurts to lose your favor!

I had three fantasy series going, and a collaborative fantasy series. Two are being shut down now, and a third in another year. Only Xanth will continue, and Mode will join it, inheriting aspects of the Adept and Incarnations series. It’s not that I don’t like fantasy, but that each series has its natural cycle, and the cycles of some are longer than others. You may wonder about my reference to fantasy, as there was little fantasy in Virtual Mode. Well, this is to be an anything-goes project, and Fractal Mode will have a good deal more magic. It all depends on the Mode, you see. So this may be referred to as a fantasy series, though that pinches its definition. It’s an imaginative series which does not shy away from realism, as you may have noticed.

It is also an Author’s Note series; readers of my Incarnations series will have a notion what to expect: that slice of my life occurring during the writing of this novel, complete with discussions of social issues and unfinished thoughts. Reaction to such Notes has been fairly neatly polarized, with the critics ranging from grudging acceptance to deep disgust, and the readers ranging from interested to enthusiastic. The most common comment is that the Notes make the author real for the reader. As one reader put it, approximately: I make my characters live; the Notes make me live.

So what happened in the three months of this writing? A slew of things, professional, personal, and in between. I started in mid-Dismember and finished in Marsh—and in this period I learned that the 1990 Xanth Calendar from which these months are borrowed sold well enough to leave me with a probable fifty per cent loss of the money I invested in it. Apparently the publisher underprinted, so that many stores never got it, and many sold out and could not get new stock. I even received a letter from a reader with a wonderful idea: why didn’t I do a Xanth Calendar? So much for getting the news spread! I did the Calendar for love rather than money, and feel the artists did a fine job, and there will be similar calendars following, but an ongoing losing proposition can not endure indefinitely. Sigh.

We had an extremely mild winter—possibly the warmest Jamboree and FeBlueberry since American records began, which is a bad sign considering the question of the global warming trend. But just before Christmas Florida was hit by one of its worst cold waves. We live in the middle of a tree farm on a peninsula in Lake Tsoda Popka, and our climate is moderate compared to that of the region, which is mild enough. But our thermometer dropped to 16°F, and we had a light snow flurry—the first I’ve seen personally in thirty years in the state—and most of our decorative plants died. We had been given a set of poinsettias by this publisher the year before, and we planted them and they grew very nicely and were just starting to turn their top leaves from green to red in the style of that plant, when the freeze destroyed them. Sigh.

And the mail. I answered 166 letters in Dismember, 160 in Jamboree, and 205 in FeBlueberry. I had tried using a secretary for a year and a half, but discovered that I wasn’t cut out for dictating letters; I’m a lot less intelligent and literate when I speak than I am when I write, perhaps because I can revise what I write when I see it on the screen. I hated seeing the stupid words I spoke go out. So finally I returned to typing them myself, and my wife did the filing. I found that I could take two days off a week and do up to 50 letters that way, and that sufficed. The other five days I had to write my novels, trying for 3,000 words of novel text a day, in addition to perhaps 2,000 words of related and unrelated notes. I use my “Bracket” system, you see: whenever the going gets difficult in the novel, which may be every few minutes, I go to my notes file and enter a dialogue with myself, exploring the problem and possible solutions, until I work it out. Many a week I didn’t make my target, because there is more to a writer’s life than text and correspondence—phone calls to/from agents, business associates, relatives, and fans also take time—and sometimes I try to sneak in a little leisure with my family. I feel properly guilty when I do that, but it happens. In this period I received a package of letters from one publisher dating back as far as nine months. I answered them immediately, but some did come back for want of a current address. I hate that.

I see a parallel between Darius’ situation as Cyng of Hlahtar and my own with respect to my readers: publishing my books multiplies the joy I bring to others, but fan mail depletes my resources. I can not keep answering indefinitely. One fan pointed out that I won’t be able to cut down on letters as long as I keep writing Author’s Notes, because the Notes make me seem like a person and a person can be written to.

But somehow I don’t want to feel less like a person. So I struggle along, my responses getting later and briefer, knowing that this, like the Xanth Calendar, is probably doomed to extinction in due course.

There are limits, however. On FeBlueberry 26 I received three separate solicitations for fund-raising auctions. Each wanted me to contribute an autographed book of mine, or some other item they might sell to raise money for their worthy purposes. Now at first glance this seems reasonable, but I have been on the receiving end of so many such solicitations that my perception has shifted. My objection is based on two main factors. First, the cost to me, considering the value of my time expended in preparing, packaging, and mailing an item, is probably substantially more than it will sell for at the other end. Thus it is a losing game, overall; if I wanted to contribute, it would be cheaper for me to send a check. Second, while stocking libraries and such is good, I feel the cost ought to be borne by the community that library serves, rather than folk like me, who will never see it. Such solicitations in their essence boil down to transferring the cost to strangers. I once received a letter from a young man who had decided to become a millionaire by soliciting money from every address he could get; the principle is the same. So a library is a more worthy cause than a greedy person; that simply suggests that the end justifies the means. I feel the means is unjustified, and I oppose it on principle. At first I did contribute to such efforts, until I had a request for copies of every one of my titles, plus manuscripts and magazines, to be shipped overseas at my expense. Thereafter I wrote letters explaining why I did not. This day I decided to stop responding to them at all. Call me ungenerous if you will. The line has to be drawn somewhere.

What kind of fan mail do I get? Mostly compliments on my novels (thanks), requests for pictures (I ran out long ago), and suggestions for future writing (but I have plenty of my own ideas). But some are different. One letter in Dismember was from a woman who had not read my books, but she informed me that I was ignorant and sarcastic. Why? Because her friend had asked me how I really felt about fan mail, and I replied that I’d rather be writing my novel. I responded to her politely, inquiring how she would feel if she had to answer up to 160 letters a month which squeezed out all her free time and some of her working time at her own expense, and someone asked how she felt about it, and she said candidly that she’d rather have more time to herself, and that person then called her ignorant and sarcastic. I received no response. Well, that’s one way to cut down on mail. God preserve us from the self-righteous.

Another was from a woman who had read the rape scene in Unicorn Point and declared herself an ex-Anthony reader. I replied that I was sorry to lose her, but that when a person does something another person deems unconscionable, the latter has little choice but to withdraw support. I mentioned that I had just done something similar myself. Oh, you want to hear about that? Well, hang on; this is a major discussion.

More than a year back I heard from a prisoner who had murdered his girlfriend. It was a brutal and to my mind pointless crime for which he was condemned to death. He was politically conservative and believed in the death penalty. His quarrel with the system was that his lawyer kept making appeals on his behalf which he didn’t want. He had committed the crime and deserved to die for it, and he was frustrated by the continual delays.

Now, I am politically liberal, and I don’t like the death penalty. That does not mean I like murder. I don’t like killing, whether it is done by private enterprise or the state. I don’t like killing animals either, which is why I am a vegetarian. No need to belabor my philosophy here; you are welcome to read all about me in my autobiography, Bio of an Ogre, and if your local bookstore doesn’t carry it, don’t kill the proprietor, just reason sweetly with him. As Ferrovius reasoned all night with a pagan, in G. B. Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, and in the morning not only was the man a Christian, his hair was as white as snow. The pacifistic approach can work wonders when practiced by ogres. I’m sure your store will agree to stock the book. But I try to answer my mail without regard to the nature of the letter writer (well, junk mail gets checked and thrown away), and so I answered the murderer’s letters. I made no bones about my sympathy for the victim of his crime, and agreed that he had a right to insist that he pay the penalty in his fashion. You see, I believe in the right to life, and also in the right to death, so I support legislation to allow patients to say no to heroic measures used to prolong their lives in the face of terminal maladies. Note that I do not say that all killing is wrong, just that I don’t like it. Absolutes are hard to come by, for those of liberal persuasion, and truth does generally seem to be a shade of gray.

Well, the murderer wrote again, and I answered, and it continued. Sometimes I will cut off a too-persistent correspondent, because I really do have other things to do than to engage in frivolous dialogue, but this person’s letters were serious and well thought out. It turned out that I was the only one who did keep up with him; his friends and family did not. He assumed it was because I cared for him. No, I was simply being true to my standard. But as long as the correspondence continued, I thought I might as well learn something useful, such as why would a man murder a woman who by his own account was true to him and wanted nothing but good for him? Men murder women every day; is it just their way of proving how macho they are, or do they do it to prevent the women from moving on to other men? If we could only fathom a common underlying motive, and discover how to abate the situation before an innocent person gets killed, we might spare the world much grief. In this case there turned out to be no simple answer.

The murderer expressed interest in science fiction and supernatural phenomena, such as flying saucers. That sparked a notion. I suggested that he write to a fanzine: that is, one of the amateur magazines of the genre where pros and fans exchange remarks in the letter columns. I gave him information on the best one I knew, considering its frequency of publication, the variety of interests of its contributors, and its open-forum philosophy. I had been writing to it for years, taking on its hard-core conservatives. I had addressed the feminists: “I am a man. I like looking at women. That does not make me a sexist.” Indeed, I support much of the feminist agenda, and I value the company and input of women. I suspect I receive more fan letters from women than most writers of this genre, and I often have female protagonists who are sympathetically portrayed, as you may have seen in this novel. I also took on reviewers: I believe that a reviewer should indicate how well a book relates to the needs or desires of its readers, rather than pushing a private agenda. Gun control—I favor it, though the case is not clear-cut. Minimum wage—I favor raising it to keep pace with inflation. Affirmative action—I favor it, not as ideal, but the only practical way to redress a long-standing wrong. In fact, if you run your finger down the classic liberal agenda—or, if you are conservative, poke your finger up at it—you will find me there most of the time. One major exception is abortion; I don’t like it because of my objection to killing. But I don’t like the anti-abortionists either, because they seem to have little regard for the welfare of mother or baby and generally don’t seem to support the obvious method of not having babies: contraception. I took on all comers in this fanzine, being one of two blatantly liberal writers to do so, and as I see it, we showed up the conservatives as ignorant and mean-spirited clods. But fairness requires that I admit that the conservatives didn’t necessarily see it that way. One had a sense of humor about it: when I chided him for making sense on one issue, when I depended on him to be always wrong, he replied that it wasn’t his intent to make sense. It is possible for folk to disagree and still respect each other. So I thought it would be interesting if the murderer stated his case here, and let the cynics and conservatives argue his case with him. Is the death penalty a deterrent to crime, when a murderer wants to be executed and the system won’t oblige? Just why does a person commit murder? Maybe such a discussion would elicit truths which would enable society to deal more realistically with crime. Such a dialogue would also give the murderer some social interaction in a limited environment, which could be a positive thing. I’m generally interested in beating swords into plowshares, philosophically.

He was hesitant, but he did write to the fanzine. The fanzine editors were hesitant, but did publish his letter. The dialogue began. He made it a point to respond to all challenges or questions directed at him, and he made no apologies for his crime; he wanted truth, not sympathy. But once he had honestly addressed the matter, he wanted to get into other subjects of mutual interest. He wrote a positive letter—and the editors refused to run it.

They explained that they had gone to a convention, and several unnamed parties had approached them and expressed dismay at the murderer’s presence in the fanzine. So they cut him out, not for anything he said, but because of essentially anonymous objections to his presence. They said they did this to be fair to those hidden folk, and that they had a right to choose who would appear in their fanzine.

Well, they did have that right. But I also had the right to withdraw my support from what I deemed to be invidious editing. I sent one letter putting my position on the line, and when they did not change their policy, I did not write again. Naturally that left me open to charges that I was a bad sport, and there were a number of insults directed at me. Another pro writer wrote in my defense, protesting the “pre-emptive smear” and upholding the principle of free speech. In fact, the “make no sense” conservative also wrote a stirring objection to their censorship. I could almost get to like conservatives like that. But the editors were adamant about their policy and about my supposed bad nature, accusing me of attacking another contributor and of calling names. Their basis for this was my suggestion that needless cruelty to animals is an early sign of sociopathic behavior, in response to the other’s seeming pride in squishing spiders. Readers may remember Jumper, the spider character in Castle Rooqna. You don’t see the Disney folk sit on their hands when someone disparages the Mouse; well…

I can’t say I was happy to go. I had enjoyed slugging it out with those of differing opinion, and the interactions had been by no means predominantly negative. I had trouble sleeping several nights, upset about the business. But the principle of freedom of expression is fundamental, and I simply could not allow so egregious a violation to pass. It is in the extremes that our philosophies are tested, and those of us who are serious do not set aside our ethics merely because in some cases they become inconvenient or distasteful. Does a murderer have rights too? Yes, even the worst among us must be granted their right to speak. Imagine applying the editors’ logic to other cases: anonymous folk approach a city councilman, saying they don’t like the presence of blacks in their neighborhood, so in fairness to them he sets up apartheid. Anonymous businessmen approach a congressman, saying they don’t like foreign competition, so in fairness to them he introduces a bill to ban all imports. Anonymous fundamentalists dislike certain elements of the Catholic Church, so they have the government ban Catholicism in the name of fairness. Does that seem farfetched? There are regions where exactly such things have happened. But in America most of us disapprove of them. We believe in freedom of expression, even for those we don’t like. It is part of our Constitution.

How did the murderer react to this exclusion? He apologized for causing the magazine this trouble and asked that his subscription money be used to purchase some tapes he liked, and the balance donated for useful purposes. To my mind he acquitted himself in a more honorable manner than those editors did. I continued the correspondence with him. I believe I did come to understand the rationale for what he did, though I disagree with it. Because he spoke in confidence, I shall not describe it here, except to say that I believe it vindicates the liberal case for socially responsible activity as a preventive for disaster.

So yes, I do understand the principle of withdrawing support from an endeavor one has previously valued. Since I am as adamant about maintaining my freedom to incorporate any elements I choose in my fiction as those editors were about their prerogatives, I can only tell readers who object to such elements to go their own ways. The woman who objected to the rape scene was not abusive or anonymous; she stated her case politely and gave her address. So she received a polite response. I do not vilify those who stand on principle, and I tend to value those who do stand on an opposing principle more than those who agree with me while lacking principle. But lest there be any question: I do not approve of rape. I merely defend my right to show rape onstage, as one of the evils of society.

So I departed that fanzine, disliking the smell. The editors are probably still wondering why professionals are so touchy. I had supported the publication with money, letters, and recommendations. I gave it one last item: my report on the convention where I had met Jenny, the girl paralyzed by a drunk driver, and that was it. I left not only because of what had been done, but because the editors were unwilling or unable to grasp why they were wrong. It marked the probable end of my active participation in fanzine fandom, because this had been one of the best fanzines. What are the worst like? Don’t ask!

Ah yes, that brings up Jenny. She has been discussed more fully in the Xanth series, where she has become a character, and you may have met her as Jenny Elf in the graphic edition of Isle of View. For those who haven’t, a compressed recap: in FeBlueberry of 1989 I received a letter telling me how a twelve-year-old girl had been struck by a drunk driver and almost killed, and had remained almost three months in a coma. I wrote to her, and my first letter did bring her out of the coma. I continued to write, though she remained paralyzed and mute and could not respond. Later I attended a convention in her area, so I could meet her. She was treated well there, and I believe she enjoyed herself, though she remained so weak that most of her time was spent lying on her back. That was the report I sent to the fanzine. The significance for this novel is that during this period we passed the anniversary of my first letter to her: one year. I have an artificial rose from her corsage beside my computer screen as I type this, a memento. It resembles the roses on the clifflike structure as the novel ends; there will be more on them in the next novel. In this period Jenny resumed going to school, but not the one she had attended before; this one is for folk like her, whose needs are special. She seems to like it.

And on to Ligeia. Ligeia is the name I gave to the first of a number of suicidal teenage girls I have heard from. All have the same name, to preserve their anonymity, because often their nature is a secret from their parents and I don’t feel I have the right to betray their confidence. What have I to do with girls forty years my junior? The same as with prisoners: I answer my mail. But though I will not name them individually, I will do so collectively. This novel has considerable input from them, as you may have guessed. Colene represents a composite of these bright and tormented creatures. If you know a girl exactly like Colene, she is not any of my sources, because none is that close to her overall.

I am no expert on the subject of suicide, and I can’t say I ever properly understood even my daughters when they were teenagers. In this day of the revelation of fathers who abuse their daughters, I have been hyperconscious of the proprieties. When does a father stop playing with his little girl? Some it seems don’t stop; they proceed into sexual molestation. But the other direction is not ideal either: isolation from one’s children. We have been a close family, but I stopped physically touching my daughters early, and felt the gradual alienation. Would one of them tell me if she had a serious problem or felt suicidal? Maybe, and maybe not. I have always been there, and ready to help if asked, but they tend not to ask. I suffer the perhaps universal inadequacy of fathers. So I have had the nagging suspicion that the feelings expressed by the Ligeias, which they don’t tell their parents, could also be felt by my daughters, and they wouldn’t tell me. But mine have not been abused or neglected, and have suffered neither poverty nor family breakup. I hope that’s enough. They are now going to college, and thence into the larger world. As has been said: a child is someone who passes through your life and disappears into an adult. Am I sublimating the distancing I regret in my own daughters by being more sensitive to these Ligeia girls? I don’t know, but it is possible. I prefer to think that I am simply trying to do what is right, whatever the context.

The first Ligeia was deeply disturbed. She believed that there had never been love in her home, and she was isolated and hurting. Cautious, I put in an indirect query via the school system, to see whether she could be helped by private counseling there. The school counselor went straight to her parents, putting her into deeper trouble. So much for the sensitivity of the system; no wonder girls prefer to keep the secret. “No one can be trusted,” a later Ligeia told me, and I had to agree. You see that attitude in Colene. First Ligeia One wrote to me; then she phoned me. She declared that she loved me, and was upset when I demurred. She wanted to talk for an hour or more at a time, and on subjects I balked at, such as sex. Call me conservative if you will, but I feel it is not the proper business of a man who is not a doctor or counselor to talk to a girl just about young enough to be his granddaughter about the specifics of sex. There is too much potential for abuse. When she started calling on consecutive days, I had to put the brakes on, because she was sticking her family with horrendous phone bills and I was losing time from my work that was worth even more. In addition, my daughters were bothered. “She’s trying to take more of your attention than we are!” one protested with some accuracy. I set a limit: one hour cumulative per month; I would hang up on her if she overreached it. This was no easy thing, because this girl wasn’t kidding about suicide; once she was cutting her wrists as she talked to me. There was more, but let me digest it down to this: in due course her folks seem to have put her in some kind of institution, and her outside contacts were abruptly cut off. I do not know whether she is alive today. In fact, I do not know whether any of them are alive, other than those now in contact with me, and I hesitate to inquire.

Perhaps my favorite was the first Ligeia Two, who was artistic and sensitive to her individuality. I think she could have made it professionally as an artist, and she wanted to pursue this career, but her folks had other plans for her. Later I saw the movie Dead Poets Society, which hit home to me on several levels. I attended such a school, and later I taught English at such a school. But in this case I’m thinking of the young man portrayed there who wanted to be an actor, and could have made it, but his father refused, and he committed suicide. Parents can do terrible harm to their talented children that way. I tried to help her by putting her in touch with another person—and this went wrong, and she overdosed on pills. They caught her in time and I heard from her in the hospital, and not thereafter. I could have killed her, just by trying to help her. It is foolish to speak of such emotion in such a connection, but there was that in me that could have loved her. She was a sweet and sensitive girl. Had she been my daughter, her art would have been allowed to flourish.

Others wrote once or twice, and not thereafter. “Why is life so unfair?” one asked. In that case I had confirmation from a relative of a deeply disturbed girl. But what I said to her was limited; I had become too conscious of the danger of doing harm myself, without meaning to. I stopped trying to keep track of them; I don’t know how many there have been. Some women have written, and only later revealed their suicidal tendencies. Others have only skirted the notion, for reason: they had been abused, or raped, or otherwise devastated. There is a lot of grief out there, and only a fraction of it ever goes on record. A number told how they made it through to successful marriage and family. As a general rule, based on my observation, if they make it through their teens, they are probably all right. But it is never certain.

You may wonder whether some are just making it up, to get my attention. I don’t think so. Some send me pieces they have written, or sketches they have made, and I think I am experienced enough as a writer and as an adult depressive to have a notion whether they are faking it. Some of this material horrifies me. Some is presented as fiction, but I know that a person that young would not write that kind of fiction or poetry if she didn’t have a basis. The details are too real, the material rings true. They are not fooling about death. They are obsessed with it. I believe, I believe.

Why does it seem to be exclusively female? This is a matter of natural selection. There are suicidal boys, but a boy is likely to try to kill himself with a gun, while a girl is more apt to try it with pills or wrist slashing. The gun is more effective. I understand that twice as many girls try suicide as do boys, but that twice as many boys succeed as do girls. So the main reason I heard from relatively few suicidal boys may be that those who might have written were already dead. At least my own depression is mild. One might expect the author of funny fantasy to be light-hearted, but professional comics may be quite otherwise privately, and my affinity may be closer to Colene and Ligeia than to the happy folk.

Now I have some credits for elements of this novel. All of them relate to the characterization of Colene, but to protect privacy I will not identify the actual items here. Some of the contributors may have felt suicidal at some time; some have not. Some are young; some are not. What they have in common is that they happened to mention things in letters which I asked to use. They can not in any other way be classified. I list them in alphabetical order by first name:

Amanda Wagner

Frances Wagner

Kimberly Adams

Ligeias—anonymous group

Margaret McGinnis

Yvonne Johnston

And a sketch titled “Someday” sent by Oria Tripp: a young woman walking through shallow water toward distant mountains, her hair and dress blown out by the wind. She reminds me of Colene, and of the one to come in the next novel, Nona: girls with more hope than prospects. Then there’s Emily Ivie, with a literary project: “It is a waste of paper to speak of it.” Colene would have said that too.

But not all the women I hear from are related to such things. Let me tell you about another kind.

Some years back I had one or two fan letters from a young woman in America, unremarkable. Then she sent me a newspaper clipping describing her work with raptors, which are birds of prey. She would take care of injured ones and nurse them back to health and set them free. Folk would bring them to her. She did not get paid for this; she just did it to help the birds. Suddenly this young woman came alive for me, and I dubbed her the Bird Maiden. I mentioned her in the Author’s Note in the reprint of my Arabian Nights fantasy tale adaptation, Hasan. In that novel, the Bird Maiden had a feather suit which she could put on so that she could fly; Hasan captured her by hiding her feather suit. He married her and took her home. But later she recovered the suit and flew away, with her two children. After a fabulous adventure, Hasan won her back. So there’s really not much connection between that Bird Maiden and the one who cared for raptors, but I was satisfied with the designation and so was she. Indeed, she flew overseas (today it is done by airplane) and was captured by a modern-day Hasan in Germany, fulfilling the romance.

So did she live happily ever after? Well, it’s too soon to tell, but she had a scary moment in this period of my writing this novel. At this time the Bird Maiden has a daughter, Alessandra, eighteen months old, cute as only that age can be. After the Christmas holiday, with her husband back at work, Maiden decided to catch up on some postponed housework. She got a bucket of water, a sponge, and a squeegee and started cleaning the windows of their upstairs apartment. She squeezed out past the heavy glass door, onto the balcony, into the just-above-freezing outer air and started scrubbing from outside while Alessandra watched from the warm inside. Maiden pretended to scrub the little girl’s face through the glass: fun.

Then Maiden heard a familiar thud. Alessandra was clasping her hands with pride at her accomplishment. She had managed to operate the lever that effectively sealed the door back in place from inside. She was too small to work the lever the other way. Maiden was locked out on the balcony with the temperature in the thirties with no shoes, just a sweater and sweatpants. She had not expected to stay out long. The apartment’s front door was locked from the inside with the key still in the lock; no one could enter that way. What was she to do?

She watched the street below, and hailed a little old lady on her bicycle. The lady tried not to laugh as she went to ring the bell of the folk in the apartment immediately below. The downstairs lady came out and threw Maiden a coat and pair of shoes, which she donned. Alessandra noted that, so she dashed to the coatrack and brought her own jacket and boots. Maiden tried to keep her occupied, but the little girl tired of that and ran to the kitchen, out of sight. What was she getting into?

The locksmith arrived and drilled out the lock. Alessandra reappeared and put her fingers into the new giant-sized keyhole. The locksmith had to coax her to the side so he could finish. The door opened, and Maiden was rescued. Oh, sweet warmth; she had been sooo cold! She hugged Alessandra—and the little girl was disappointed. She knew that the excitement was over. But what a grand adventure it had been!

The Bird Maiden wondered how many more days like this there would be before her marvelous little girl turned eighteen. “So, how was your Christmas?!” she inquired.

Meanwhile, the world continued. Panama was invaded, and the Communist Empire crumbled. The United States population reached 250 million. Robert Adams, author of the Horse-clans series and a Florida resident, died. He was just under a year older than I. TV personality Andy Rooney was suspended because someone else claimed he had made a racist remark, though he denied it and has no record of racism. Apparently the TV executives have minds like fanzine editors. Then the program he was on dropped twenty per cent in the ratings, and suddenly the execs had a change of heart and brought him back. I think those execs should have been suspended, not Rooney.

There is worse. At this time the child of Dr. Elizabeth Morgan was discovered with grandparents in New Zealand.

Dr. Morgan had ascertained to her satisfaction that her daughter was being sexually molested by the father, but the court had decreed that unsupervised visits be allowed. Maybe I’m no expert, but too many correspondents have told me how they were molested as children; a man who does this takes any opportunity he can get, and an unsupervised visit is folly. I feel that Dr. Morgan’s caution was reasonable. So she hid her child rather than accede to this—and spent two years in jail for defying the will of the court. It took, literally, an act of Congress to get her out. So much for trying to protect a child: the innocent get punished instead of the guilty.

What happens when the mother does not try to protect her child? The book Dark Obsession, published at this time, showed how Bobby Sessions admitted in court to having sex five hundred times with his teenage stepdaughter. She finally blew the whistle on him, and he spent six months in a luxury hospital and was released. She was shipped to a fundamentalist home for troubled children where girls were regularly beaten. But sometimes the worm does turn: she sued her stepfather and won $10 million.

Let’s return to more positive business. I had mixed news on my ongoing projects. My erotic novel Pornucopia, published in America only in expensive hardcover and forbidden to readers under age twenty-one, was selling well, and there was a flurry of interest by foreign publishers. I don’t object to sex, you see, just to sexual abuse. My collaboration with a teenage boy who was killed by a reckless driver before completing his novel, Through the Ice, was published at the same time, and reports indicate it is also doing well. My 200,000-word historical novel about the American Indians who encountered Hernando de Soto, Tatham Mound, was taken by Morrow/Avon. The collaboration with Robert Margroff, Orc’s Opal, was taken by Tor. I took time off Virtual Mode to do a chapter in my collaborative novel with Philip Jose Farmer, not yet titled, and a segment of 49,000 words was put on the market. The main female character there is Tappy, a blind thirteen-year-old girl, a bit like Colene in her isolation and the drama of her changing situation. I had started it as a story in 1963; a complicated situation and a quarter century had brought it to this point. The galleys for my provocative mainstream novel Firefly arrived, and I broke to proofread them. In that novel I show voluntary underage sex, the girl being five years old. More of this happens than we care to advertise.

I placed two of the last three novels which remained unsold from the days of my blacklisting in the 1970s, and set up to rework the third with a publisher interested. I had built up a total of eight unsold novels while weathering the blacklist—you can read about that too in my autobiography, but the essence is that I got in trouble for being right, somewhat in the manner of a whistle-blower—and it was good to eliminate the last tangible vestige of it. This campaign of mine to get all my novels into print is one reason I may seem more prolific than I am; I’ve been writing novels steadily for twenty-five years, and by the end of 1990 the number of books I have had published may come to eighty-two. That’s about three and a quarter a year, average.

I read the finalists for a story contest and decided on the winner. I reviewed revisions for the novel Total Recall, necessary to bring the paperback edition into conformance with late changes in the motion picture.

The ladies of Putnam/Berkley visited and brought me a print of the cover for Phaze Doubt: the editors had finally taken one of my suggestions, and got a beautiful cover painting of a little girl playing hopscotch with a BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster). At last we would see whether the author’s notion of a good cover works to sell copies. You see, at this writing I have made the New York Times best-seller list with eighteen different titles, which may be the record for this genre, but all have been in paperback, none in hardcover. Other fantasy writers make the list in hardcover; why can’t I? Grumble. But in this period I did crack the Publishers Weekly hardcover list with the final Incarnations novel, And Eternity. Barely. I always was a slow starter.

I wrote a letter to a parole officer on behalf of a prisoner with AIDS, urging compassionate release, as he will otherwise be dead before he gets to see his folks outside. I had corresponded with him for two years, finding him to be a pleasant and principled person; I doubt he would be a menace to society.

My laser printer broke down shortly after the warranty expired: a counter which could not be reset, evidently defective when delivered. Twenty-dollar part, $560 repair bill. Par for that course. Which brings me to my present computer setup, for those who are interested: Acer 900 AT-clone, 73M hard disk, 5.25- and 3.5-inch drives, VGA monitor, laser printer; Fansi-Console for my Dvorak keyboard, Sprint for word processing, XTreeGold for file handling. I got that last program in this period, and had a time-wasting ball playing with its nice features, such as the ability to set up parallel windows, with different directories in each, or to show and work with the files of several drives simultaneously. I had changed from Dec Rainbow with reluctance, but it was the readiest way to get Sprint, which looked like the ultimate word processor for me, and now I am quite satisfied with it. I set up the Piers Anthony Interface, which is in effect my own word processor, following my rules, like no others.

I started exploring the literature on computer games, playing with the notion of Grafting a Xanth game that would be superior to what else exists. I know nothing about such games; naturally I figure I can do a better job than the experts, just as ignorant reviewers figure they could be better writers than I am. We shall see.

A reader advised me that the main thing at issue in her divorce settlement was custody of the collection of Anthony novels. Well, that seems reasonable to me.

And my daughter’s horse, Blue: at this writing she is thirty-two years old, and still spry though her head is turning gray. When Blue came into our lives, horses galloped into my fiction, as you may have noticed. Unlike Seqiro, Blue can not read minds—I think.

I had a sore tongue during this novel. Finally, on the last day of editing, I figured it out: there was a roughness on a tooth, and my tongue was rubbing against it as I read my text to myself—I do that to hear it as well as see it, because I relate to it with more than one sense. That chafing was awful. So my wife hauled me in to see the dentist the same day. Sure enough: a gold onlay (not inlay) had worn through, and there was an edge. Maybe now my tongue will heal.

Meanwhile the problems of the world accelerate and population runs out of control and the environment degrades apace. We are headed pell-mell for end-of-the-world disaster. About the only saving grace I see is the dawning awareness of increasing numbers of people that this has to stop. My daughter Penny brought home a book titled How to Make the World a Better Place—A Guide for Doing Good, which tackles questions of the environment, hunger, socially responsible investment and consumerism in a realistic manner. Many other good books are appearing, and I am getting them as I do preliminary research for a major novel relating to this subject. I feel obliged to turn my resources increasingly to the service of the universe rather than merely to my own well-being, and the talent I have for writing is my chief instrument. I try not to proselytize unduly in my fiction, but this is the Author’s Note where I do speak my mind.

But let me finish on more personal notes, because these Notes as I see them relate not to lectures but to feeling. I’m sure my readers differ from me on many things, but I hope that we share the essence of wonder and longing for what we may never quite understand.

I have pictures in my study of my wife at age one and a half or two, phenomenally cute, with her father. I had been looking at them, and then the song “Scarlet Ribbons” came on and I suffered a certain siege of nostalgia for a situation I had never really known, for my wife was somewhat older when I met her. Our own daughters were like that, and they too have grown up. How precious children are! It is foolish to wish that time could stand still, yet tempting.

There was another episode in this period that touched my heart for inconsequential reasons. My mother visited for two days. She is in the neighborhood of eighty and travels by train, and naturally the hours are inconvenient. We had to get up early to get her to the station on time. We used the house speaker system to wake us: at 5 A.M. the local radio station blared on throughout the house. As I was blindly scrambling into clothing, a popular song played. It was a pretty one, with touching words, in contrast to my bleary mood. It suggested that he close his eyes and let her take his hand so that he could feel the beating of her heart. I have a mental picture of bittersweet young Colene taking Darius’ hand and holding it to her bosom, longing for love. Isn’t that the way we all are, in the hell of our anonymity?

Marsh 8, 1990: Harpy Reading!

P.S. Since writing this novel, I have addressed some of the problems discussed in this Note. Now you can get a sample copy of my Newsletter and catalogue. Call my “troll-free” number 1-800-HI PIERS. (e-book note: this phone number is no longer valid. For similar information try the official web site at http://www.hipiers.com instead.)

Copyright © 1991 by Piers Anthony

Cover art by Daniel R. Horne

ISBN: 0-441-86503-8