Or What You Will

by Jo Walton

  “I love Cicero too,” Tish says, surprised into truth. “I don’t see how anyone could help it. He’s such a mix of vanity and real abilities. Reading his letters, when I was younger, once I wrote back to him.”

  “Did you? So did I. And so did Petrarch,” Dolly says, smiling enthusiastically. “He only had a part of Cicero, to begin with. He rediscovered the letters himself, after centuries when they stood on a shelf in a monastery and nobody read them. And reading them, Petrarch was sick at heart. Before, he imagined from the Tusculan Disputations that Cicero had retired to break his staff and drown his book and console himself with Stoic philosophy. So to see him sink so insupportably beneath a sea of troubles naturally distressed him.”

  “Oh! Yes. When Cicero wrote about his exile that nothing worse had ever happened to anyone in the history of the world. I couldn’t help thinking that he himself must have known female slaves,” Tish says. There are still slaves in America in 1847, besides whose fates Vinnie’s seems heaven itself.

  Dolly nods. “Cicero did not bear his troubles well. But Petrarch loved him despite his weaknesses, as we do. Petrarch is a poet famous for love. Well, he fell in love with the whole ancient world, and he thought his own day would be better if they could get it back. So he began humanism to achieve that.”

  “Oh. And that was the beginning of rediscovering the ancient world, of course.”

  “He began that whole project,” Dolly says. “And that’s why he’s important. That’s what began the Renaissance, not his love for Laura and his Italian poetry, but his love for Cicero and his championing of Latin. I could lend you his letters, if you’d like.”

  “Oh yes, I’d love that,” she says. “Are they in Latin? My Latin is much better than my Italian.”

  “Yes, they are in Latin. But your Italian is very good, except your intonation,” he says. “Have you seen The Tempest performed?” he asks.

  “Why, yes,” she says, bemused at what seems to be a sudden change of subject. “In London.”

  “You have to say Milan as if you had never heard Italian. It has to be Millan, to scan. Millan, to rhyme with villain. I couldn’t bring myself to it.”

  “And I speak Italian like that?”

  “Well, yes, but it doesn’t matter.” Dolly grins, and puts his hand to his ridiculous hat, pushing his curls under the brim. “This is fancy dress, but it is also a sincere aspiration. A student, my father said I was, introducing us all, but I am a particular kind of student, a scholar. I am done with Oxford and ready to study my own land. What do you think Prospero did, once he got back to Milano, Millan?”

  “Regretted his magic forever,” Tish says, decisively.

  “Oh yes, I think so too.” Dolly has no agenda here. He is just making conversation with a girl on a wall. I, on the other hand, within him, have an underlying agenda, a very powerful one, and I am bending him towards it. I want my world, and I want to lure her into it. Lure her into building it for me, that is, or rather extending it for me, for it was built already long ago. And then I have to lure or persuade or coax her into entering it herself. It’s there, still, only a breath away now. Brunelleschi’s painting is gone, but there are still ways into it and this is one of them. “I played Prospero in Oxford, you know, wincing every time I said Millan.”

  “That must have been such fun,” Tish says, wistfully. “We sometimes read Shakespeare as a family, but that’s the closest I have come to acting.”

  “The cloud” capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea all which it inherit—” Dolly says, I say, as they come to a tumbledown tower beside a still solid gateway. Tish stumbles suddenly, on a snag, a snatch, a sill, and Dolly leaps forward gallantly and catches her before she can fall, so that for a moment they are almost embraced upon a portal, a passage, they are teetering upon a peak in Darien, and after that there can be no turning back.

  When he helps her straighten up, both of them apologizing, they are standing in a different place entirely.

  What country, friends, is this?

  7

  WHAT IS SHE?

  She is nothing like so easy to entice into another world as Tish. She is too solidly embedded in her own world, the real world, the world where she is undeniably Sylvia Katherine Harrison, born in 1944 in Montreal, author of Castaway in Illyria (1977), the World Fantasy Award winning Dragon College (1999), Once a Wonder (2015), and all the books in between. Thirty books, she’s written, in forty years: three series, nine stand-alones, and four collections of poetry, two slim and two fat. Fifteen of her books are for children, and the rest for “adults, young adults, or children as you please” as it says on her website. She often says her readers grew up and kept reading her. She often says that people enjoy reading coming-of-age stories, whichever side of that divide they happen to be on right now. She has to keep repeating these things because she keeps being asked these questions in interviews. Most interviews bore her, but her publishers’ publicity people insist she does them. Then sometimes there will be an interview that isn’t boring, by somebody truly excited about her work, one that will ask different questions, and she will come alive in it. She tells more or less of the truth in interviews depending on how much she enjoys the questions. I’ve seen her be cagey about things that are so public as to be on her Wikipedia page, and forthcoming about very personal things. She once almost mentioned me in an interview with a New Zealand newspaper, and I had to remind her why that would be a terrible idea.

  Physically, she isn’t tall, a little under average height for a woman, but not so short that she has trouble buying clothes, which is good, as she finds buying clothes tedious and likes to get it over with as fast as possible. She used to go to Hudson’s Bay and buy multiple identical copies of the same thing: four suits, eight bras, twelve blouses, twenty-four pairs of underpants, twenty-four pairs of socks. When they started to look shabby, or at worst, when they developed holes, she forced herself to go through the process again. More recently she has been buying everything online, because of the tedium of trying things on and standing in line in the big Hudson’s Bay store downtown near McGill metro, with its staff who seem to get more lethargic and less helpful every year. She gets most of her clothes from Etsy now, handmade in little workshops in Lithuania, Cincinnati, or Kazakhstan, and her underwear from Amazon. She has her boots handmade in Hong Kong, from a form they made of her feet thirty years ago when she was there with Idris and the girls. She orders a new pair whenever she needs one, and the boots show up promptly, still sized to her foot, still with the two buttons on the inside that she likes. She has the same boots, with neat dark stitching, in light brown, mid brown, dark brown, black, and grey, and for winter in grey, black, and dark brown, with stronger soles and warm white fleecy linings. She has silver hair twisted up into a neat bun and held with a Japanese comb, and she never walks when she can run. She eats lots of fruit, and frequently acts out scenes in her books dramatically, playing all the parts, before she writes them down. Therefore, she disapproves of the modern habit of writing in coffee shops, and always writes at home with the doors locked and the curtains drawn, often up in her workroom in the turret.

  She is solid, established, respected, real. She is seventy-three, and lives alone in her red-and-white Victorian house in Westmount, a little city surrounded by the big city of Montreal.

  That’s expanded a bit from her author bio, but it’s not going to do, is it?

  In 1978, when she was thirty-four, she married Idris Nasir, a civil engineer from Alberta. She lost her husband five years ago. She hates that slippery term, “lost,” as if he was neglected and forgotten about, slipped down the back of the sofa, like the Far Side cartoon. (Or worse, dissolved into the mist inside her head.) She didn’t lose Idris, his warmth and strength and booming laugh, his beard that tickled, his impatience with fools and politics that could turn into vast patience with small children and animals. He was snatched away from her by fate and biology. He was not lost. He died.
Idris built bridges and hydroelectric dams and wore on his smooth brown hands an iron ring that symbolized his devotion to his profession and a gold ring that symbolized his devotion to Sylvia. She misses him every day, and although their work kept them often apart, she has not been comfortable at home since his death. She travels more these days, accepts more invitations to conventions and festivals, chooses to do more travel for research, to work abroad. Sylvia flies or takes the train to visit her daughters and their families regularly, but not frequently. They miss their father, and with the girls now she feels herself an inadequate substitute for Idris.

  It was a sudden massive heart attack that killed him, on a Friday morning in his office in the old port in Montreal. A co-worker in the outer office heard something, or felt something, she could never remember afterwards exactly what. She became aware of something that made her wonder if Idris wanted her, and went in to find him on the floor, his hand clutching at the air. Sylvia worries sometimes in the middle of the night about whether Idris cried out or not, and how long he lay there before the young assistant went in, whether he could have been saved if the ambulance had been called sooner. She knows these thoughts are a useless and unproductive Ixion wheel of pointless anxiety, and berates herself for it, which also doesn’t help, as I have told her, as she tells herself. She repeatedly tells herself to be sensible, that it is now in any case too late, much much too late, and “what ifs” and “might-have-beens” and “if onlies” can only be undone in fiction. But fiction is her realm too. There are worlds out there where Idris could be alive.

  “No,” she snaps at me. “You can’t be Idris. Don’t try.”

  I don’t try! I know I can’t. I don’t want to be. It never occurred to me. I have never been jealous of Idris or wanted to be him. He was his own self, and good for her. I am closer to her and I have known her longer. I am more like her. I am indeed, a part of her … the snarky fast-talking male part of her that doesn’t want to die. But I’m also not a part of her. I am myself, independent of her even when trapped here in her head. In my own way, I loved Idris too (I am not, I never have been, as heterosexual as she is. I have embraced both men and women), and I was certainly glad she had him, that warm still certainty that centered her, that helped to heal her and make her whole. But still, there are worlds where she has that power. If she can bring people to life, people who never existed until she thought of them, until she made them up and drew them out of the mist, then surely she could bring back Idris on the page, when she knew him so well? With just a few words she could evoke his noisy yawn, his warm touch, his tidy desktop, so different from her cluttered one. She cried at the return of his briefcase from the office, with papers shoved into it just anyhow, as he would never have shoved them. She set them straight as she never would her own papers, although he would never know or care.

  I could tell you “she is a widow.” I could say “she misses her husband.” That would be the shallow surface of grief, a dark river that runs deep.

  In this world she did not feel any mystic knowledge at the moment of his death. She found out he was in the hospital from a phone call from her daughter Meg, which came as a complete surprise. She had to fly back from a convention she was attending in Atlanta, gripping the armrests all the way, unable to concentrate on reading, trying to picture the hospital room and beam good thoughts ahead of her. He was dead already, before she landed. She did not get to say good-bye, which sometimes feels like an aching hole that can never be filled, and at other times like a triviality in the face of his palpable everyday absence. Nothing could have given her “closure” after thirty-one years of the teamwork, companionship, harmony, that makes up a marriage. They were not always in accord, but over time they developed such good communication that even their most bitter disagreements became part of their axiomatic assumption of mutual long-term ongoing love and life together.

  There was no medical warning of his heart attack. He had been in his usual good health, swimming regularly and walking for miles every day. He always walked to and from work, except in the worst weather. He was only sixty-two. The same could happen to her any day, but no, at seventy-three she is dying more slowly, and she knows it. She would like to escape death, but sees no present possibility of it. She would like best to escape it by modern technological means—a telomere hack, a longevity drug, an unexpected scientific breakthrough that reverses aging. For somebody who has made a career writing fantasy, she has a surprising amount of faith in science-fictional solutions.

  Of course, Idris would have approved of that. He preferred science fiction to fantasy, the future to the past. His favourite authors were Ursula K. Le Guin, Karl Schroeder, Lois McMaster Bujold, Kim Stanley Robinson. But the last book he read before he died was fantasy: Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria. She had been sent it to blurb, and loved it, and passed it on to him. She had been looking forward to his perspective on it, the wonderful complex world, the characters poised between cultures. “She’s Somali-American and my parents came from Pakistan and Iran to Alberta,” he said, dubious, peering at the cover. “I don’t know what congruence you think I’ll find.” But her last message from Idris was a text saying he couldn’t wait to talk to her about it. She kept the text uppermost on her phone for a year after his death, so that she saw it whenever the phone screen turned on. She couldn’t reply immediately because she was on a panel talking about coming-of-age in fantasy. Then she couldn’t reply because he wasn’t there to receive it. A year after his death, on the anniversary, she finally archived the text message.

  “I’ve finished Olondria. Can’t wait to talk to you about it!”

  The idea of that conversation that will never take place, of the thoughts he never shared, is like a thorn in her shoe. She says that’s why she can’t put him on the page. She can’t make up what he would say, he constantly surprised her, and her imagination of him would be a thin shadow ghost and hurt more than it helps. She hasn’t read The Winged Histories or New York 2140 because he’s never going to be able to read them and they’ll never be able to discuss them. She has them, she bought each of them as soon as it came out, but she keeps skipping past them and reading something else.

  When she confided in her friend Ruth about archiving the text message, Ruth asked whether she was ready to think about dating again. Sylvia laughed incredulously. Dating has never been part of her life, that whole game of negotiation and strategising, not when she was young, and certainly not now. She met Idris in 1977 at a party given by a mutual friend. He was in Montreal as part of a project to build a hydroelectric dam; she was still working as a secretary, though her first book had been published and was starting to bring in a little money. They started talking about books, and left together in the middle of a conversation about the ethnicity and skin colour of Genly Ai, the only human character in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Their friends were less surprised than they were when their friendship evolved into a marriage. She’s never had time or inclination for dating. Her first marriage—she prefers not to think about her first marriage, so we won’t, not yet. The plumbers have finished and left, in a miasma of explanations in Italian, which she reads well but speaks badly. The shower is again emitting your choice of a trickle of burning water or a deluge of icy water, which is better than emitting nothing but groans and hisses. But her tolerance for indulging me in this might be running out.

  She has two children, daughters, only eighteen months between them, with names of the era when they were born Lucy (1980) (after Lucy in Lewis’s Narnia books) and Meg (1982) (after Meg in L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time). Lucy’s middle name is Mevish, after Idris’s mother, and Meg’s is Jedirah, after his mother’s mother. Idris didn’t want the girls to have Muslim names as their first names. “I’m secular and our children are going to be even more secular,” he said during Sylvia’s first pregnancy. “They’ll experience prejudice even without that. Let’s not make it harder for them.”

  “Even here?” she said, sadly, beca
use before she knew Idris she believed that Montreal, torn between French and English, was prejudiced only on language, and had left other prejudices behind.

  “Even here,” Idris replied. “It’s still there, even if it’s not as bad as most other places. And anyway, they won’t stay only here. We don’t want to confine them to this island!” He was thinking already, when Lucy was no more than a curve in Sylvia’s belly, of them as grown up and independent, with lives and choices of their own, and the planet wide open before them, whereas her imagination then stretched no farther than their first breath. But his decision on names was made in 1980; he might have made a different decision later, as the world changed. Sylvia especially loves the name Jedirah, and used it, without the h, for a protagonist, later. She thinks of Jedira in The Magic Oasis, strong and independent, a lance-wielding horse-warrior who learns magic from snakes in the desert and falls in love with a laughing dark-eyed poet-prince (me) as what Idris’s grandmother might have been if she’d fastened her headscarf tightly about her head, packed up her cookpots, and ridden off to have adventures. She makes Jedirah’s recipes for fassoulia and imam bayildi for her grandchildren when they visit, and thinks that this too is a form of immortality.

  Both girls have their father’s surname, and height, and similar skin tones. Lucy has his eyes, too, but Meg has her mother’s sea-gray eyes that look blue or violet in some lights. Lucy lives in Halifax and is a successful designer. She is divorced with one son, Jason (after the argonaut), who is in college. Meg is a banker and lives in Vancouver with her husband, also a banker (perhaps less boring and more evil as a choice of profession now than in 1847?), and two children, Penny and Louis, both still in school. Sylvia knows Meg didn’t deliberately name her kids after coins, and probably doesn’t even know the Louis d’Or was France’s gold coin, but she can’t help thinking of it every time she uses their names. They are well-behaved, polite, unimaginative children. Penny plays the viola, very correctly. Sylvia sometimes goes to her recitals when she visits them. They seem to have hobbies but no passions. Lucy’s Jason was wilder, prone to tantrums as a child, but more appreciative of his grandmother’s books. The last she heard from him was an email saying he had switched his major from classics to astrophysics. Meg gets tears in her eyes when she talks about Idris now, but Sylvia believes Lucy also really misses her father. He shared himself between them equally and did not have a favourite, but he was unquestionably their favourite parent. He could, from the first, love them without constraint.