Letters to Jenny

by Piers Anthony

  This summer they will have a solar car race starting in Florida. It will pass near here. Each car is worth half a million dollars. When they get the price down, we’ll be interested. I’d love to see the world get off fossil fuels, because—oh, that’s right, you know why.

  Elsie the Bored Cow showed up again. At least it may be her; all we saw was her manure in our road. The sheriff never caught the one cow left over. So we called him, and today heard sirens all over, and a helicopter circled overhead. No, I suppose it’s possible it wasn’t searching for the cow, now that you mention it.

  So how has life been with you, Jenny? That ordinary? Well, maybe it will perk up when you go home. Then you can snooze, buried in cats.

  I’m enclosing more comics. As I said, I have this nagging suspicion that they aren’t taking proper care of you, so that you miss some of these comics, so I’m enclosing the best ones. There was a block of four good ones associated with Curtis, Sunday, so I’m sending the block. Plus some daily ones. Marvin’s mother is named Jenny; I figure she represents what your life could be like when you grow up, etc. Cartoon of a writer’s life; they could have based it on mine. Picture of girl with horse, sort of like Colene and Seqiro, the telepathic horse in Virtual Mode. And a golden one hundred dollar bill I pasted together from an investment ad, with pictures of sailing ships on it; I thought maybe you’d like this kind of money.

  Now, about that next book report I was going to do— what do you mean, there’s no room left for that? I might almost get the impression you weren’t interested, and I know that’s not true. Is it? Uh, Jenny, did you hear the question? Sigh. Well, then, maybe next week.

  Say hello to the other Jenny for me, if she’s still there.

  Jamboree 19, 1990

  Dear Jenny,

  Hey, it’s Friday again (Wednesday for you; you run half a week behind me), and time for the JenLet. I hope things have been less hectic for you than they have been for us. I’ve been writing Virtual Mode, the novel featuring the suicidal fourteen year old girl. All I get are twenty working days a month; the rest goes to correspondence and such. So I try to write 3000 words of text a day in whatever novel I’m in, and in the first month of Mode, Dismember 16—Jamboree 15, I succeeded, completing over 60,000 words. Then things started going wrong. Yesterday I only got 800 words done; the rest of the day went to accounting, business letters and I can’t remember what else, just that it wasn’t my novel. Oh, now I remember: my laser printer went on the blink on Monday. It flashed the smug message 27 OPC-1 and refused to print. Aggravating time with the manual, whose perfectly clear instructions nevertheless manage to be perfectly unclear, indicated that the something-or-other magazine needed replacement. No, it didn’t want ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE replaced with PEOPLE; this was a complicated dingus deep in the works. So we ordered one and replaced it—and the error message was unchanged. We called in the guy who handles the computers, and it mooned him with the same message. So we called the repair service. That’s in Tampa. It turns out that a repair man costs $115 an hour whether he’s driving here or working on the printer, and it’s a four hour round trip drive in addition to the time he’s here. Plus 31 a mile, and parts. So it will be a $600 repair bill for a balky printer, and the amount of paying work I haven’t gotten done in this period is a good deal more expensive than that. In short, it isn’t only your mother who gets aggravated about things. Especially about balky printers. Growr!

  Remember last week I told you how we reported some cow manure on our driveway, and next day a helicopter was circling our tree farm? Well, it was the sheriff! He drove by a few days later to let us know, with his horse in a van behind. No, he didn’t find that cow. Man is supposed to be a smart species, but he’s not as smart as a cow in the wilderness.

  Meanwhile my wife asked me whether I’d refilled the pasture water. Ouch! I’d forgotten it for over a month. That’s not the only water the horses have; I fill the tub at the barn every day, and they can drink from the lake if they want. But I like to keep the pasture water full too, to encourage them to be out there. I went out, and sure enough, that old bathtub was down to about one inch deep. So I dumped it out, because the bottom was solid with leaves and sludge, rinsed it, and then pumped it up again. Took 450 strokes with the red handpump. Ever thus, with mundane life. But if we ever have a weeklong power failure, we’ll still be able to pump water with that handpump, so it’s worth maintaining.

  Plans proceed with Richard Pini and the graphic edition of Isle of View. The three parts of the adaptation are to be titled Return to Centaur or “What Kind of Foal Am I?” and Nada Worry in the World or “A Serpent Teen Exposition” and Morning Becalms Electra or “All the Snooze Befits the Prince.” You see, Che is the lost five year old winged centaur foal at the beginning, and in the middle we have the problem with Nada Naga, the princess who can become a serpent, betrothed to Prince Dolph, and at the end we have the problem with Electra, who must marry Dolph before she turns eighteen or she will die. But Dolph is smitten with Nada, not Electra, and the judgment of a teenage boy is— well, would you trust that? Anyway, publication of the first part is scheduled for JeJune, which means it won’t be all that long before you get to see Jenny Elf in person, as it were.

  Which reminds me: you will be getting fan mail, Jenny. A reader has already asked for your address, so I gave him the box number your mother gave me, c/o Jenny Elf. By this time maybe he has written to you, and you’ve heard the letter. There will be more when the novel is published in OctOgre. Just don’t get a helled swead about it.

  60 Minutes on TV had a feature about a girl with muscular dystrophy, the wasting away of her muscles. She’s your age, and uses a powered wheelchair to get around. I thought of you when I saw that. There was also an item on the news: they have discovered something that encourages nerve regrowth. Tell your mother to run that down, if she hasn’t already, because the only thing between you and the use of your body, Jenny, is some nerves that could use some regrowth. It could make a significant difference.

  Meanwhile I received an envelope from Sierra. Well, I’m an environmentalist, so that wasn’t surprising. But this turned out to be Sierra Games, a different outfit. There was a letter thanking me for my suggestions, but saying they wouldn’t be using them. Interesting for two reasons: First, I never wrote to them; I didn’t even know they existed. Second, I had just heard about a computer game called Hero’s Quest, with good graphics. I’m considering making a Xanth computer game with some special features, and have been pondering whether to allocate time to it. So I want to look at that Sierra game, and several others they have, to see how they are; then I’ll make a better one. What was that sound? Were you sniggering? You doubt that I, with no prior experience, can improve what others have spent a lifetime doing? Oh, you don’t doubt? Okay. So this was a very timely arrival. Who sent in my name I don’t know, but—hey! I heard it again! You definitely made a sound! I caught you this time. Oh—you want to know whether Jenny Elf will be in my game. Well, do you want her to be?

  Okay, I can put her in. And you want to know what’s different and superior about my game? Well, as I see it, most role-playing games get all complicated with things like hit points and closely defined levels of proficiency on a number of levels and they lack any genuine human interaction. Computer role playing games seem to share such problems, as well as requiring endless lists of supplies and things, and if you forget one, boom, you’re dead. This is not appealing to any but a game freak. I want to pull in ordinary folk like you, who don’t want to have to memorize a manual to play, but also don’t want something stupidly simplistic. So I plan on having Companions, and—what’s that? You mean I’ve already told you about that? More than once? Why didn’t you stop me, then?! Anyway, I have now discussed this with the experts—that is, my daughters and their friends—and I conclude that what I want to do is technically feasible. Whether I will do it I don’t know; probably I’ll get some of those games and see how they are, and then decide. Once you
get home, Jenny, you should be able to start playing computer games, maybe some of the high-graphic action ones, and if they’re as interesting as they are supposed to be, you’ll have a lot of entertainment there. Tell your folks that it’s good digital therapy.

  Meanwhile I have been exploring FM radio stations. The newspaper lists some, but some of the best it doesn’t list, which annoys me, so I finally wasted some time charting them myself. There are about fifty I can get well, and some seem promising. For example there’s one that plays nothing but mellow vocal oldies. Once I know where all the stations are, I’ll be able to listen to what I want continuously while I work, changing stations whenever commercials hit. I heard an ad for a dance on one, and at the end it said “Improper dress required.” Hm.

  Meanwhile I still ride my bicycle out each morning to fetch the newspapers, and it’s always interesting in its fashion. The architecture of dawn moves me. The clouds form such spectacular and always different formations, with orange or red as the sun arrives, and the low clouds form thin sheets about ten feet above the ground. The bunnies run off the road. No, they don’t seem to hop much. The men are working on our front gate again; it’s been out of commission ever since the bad lightning strike some months back. Now they have set up two tall towers to transmit signals between house and gate, so maybe we can open and close the gate from the house, as was always intended. I want to be able to shut out those hordes of fans, in case I ever get famous. They got the signal working from the house, but not from the gate. But it’s getting close. Maybe.

  I suffered a minor revelation this morning: accounts are like sex. Don’t laugh; I mean it. You see, I added up my earnings for last year, using my account book, and my wife added them up using her accounts. They didn’t match. That’s par for the course. She had more money than I did. So I gave her my calculator tape, and she found half a dozen errors. So I corrected those—and now I had more money than she did. So she corrected hers, and now we agree to within two dollars, which is pretty good. So how does this relate to sex? No, we didn’t decide that sex was more fun than accounting, and quit accounting. It is more fun, but that’s another story. But I realized that though each of our lists of figures had errors, those errors didn’t match, so we were able to cancel out all the errors by cross-matching. Well, that’s what sex does. If living creatures reproduced parthenogenically (that is, without sex), any errors in the genetic blueprint would continue. But with sex, there are two blueprints, and the errors in them cancel out. So it’s a good system. If those who hate sex were able to abolish it, they would soon enough breed themselves into extinction, because there would be no good way to correct for deleterious mutations. Serves them right.

  And tomorrow we must get up at 5 A.M., so we can drive to Ocala and meet my mother on the train. Then two days later we’ll take her back to the same train, same hour. I don’t see my parents often, because they live in Pennsylvania.

  Okay, I still have a book report in mind—what, you say we’re out of time? Just what do you have against book reports? Oh, well, maybe next week. Just let me know when you get home. Actually I may know it anyway, when you stop answering my letters.

  Jamboree 26, 1990

  Dear Jenny,

  All right. Your mother phoned Sunday and said you had been home almost a week! I hope your dad didn’t take my last letter out to the hospital on Wednesday, only to discover that you weren’t there.

  So let’s discuss important things, like comics. I’ve been enclosing some because I’ve had a suspicion that you weren’t getting to see enough of them. But now you’re home, so you probably see them all. So maybe I’d better cut down on those, except for the Sunday Curtis, which your mother forgot to make the local newspaper run. So I’ll enclose what I have this time, and then cut down. This week’s Curtis features Gunk, and the only problem is that Gunk wouldn’t have picked up a sausage pizza; he’s a vegetarian. As it was, he was right to step on it.

  I’m also enclosing a big fake $20 bill which you can use to pay off your mother next time she reads you the comics, and a clipping of a poem about a cow.

  Now about last Sunday. Did your mother tell you about that? My mother was visiting us, for the first time since 1988; she was here for two days. We picked her up at the train station at 6:30 Saturday morning in Ocala, which is about an hour’s drive from here, and put her back on it Monday morning. So I put my mother on the phone with your mother so they could analyze their children. It seemed to work out okay.

  One thing I learned in the course of this visit. My mother had hair so long she could sit on it—but she cut it short when she was twelve years old. She says there is a picture of her mother in tears, with all this beautiful hair from her daughter on the floor. It seems my mother looked just like the picture of Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party or whatever—they drink tea in England, you know—but she didn’t like it. There seems to be something about age twelve that’s bad for long hair. Do you think some evil creature put a curse on long-haired twelve year old girls? Then again, my daughter Penny never cut her hair; I was there to protect her from that, and it’s still beautiful today, now that she’s 22. Well, keep growing yours back, Jenny; you know what a difference hair makes. I may have details slightly garbled, but it seems to me that you lost all your strength about the time they cut your hair, and are gaining it back only at the rate your hair grows back. Remember Samson in the Bible.

  I hope your mother is able to get help for you and her. Maybe the folk at Cumbersome Hospital figured she could take over and do everything that the 24 hour shifts of assorted personnel did, in addition to earning her living. I may be wrong, but I’m not quite sure that’s the case. If the right person could come in and help, it could be very good. I remember how good the Nanny was in England, when I was young; if I had had a choice, I would have stayed with her and not bothered with my family. Of course they don’t have such folk in America; closest we come here is the movie with Mary Poppins. Ah, well.

  Meanwhile I had a letter from the Bird Maiden. Did I tell you about her? Yes, my Computer Find says I did, a couple of letters ago. Well, she sent a whole package of Christmas cards and letters to her mother in America, for remailing at local rates—25¢ instead of 90¢ overseas from Germany—and they ran it through one of their Patented Post Orifice Cruncher machines and burst it apart and most of the letters were lost. But I got mine, with 90¢ postage-due from Germany, and then another letter from her explaining what had happened, thinking her letter had not arrived. Mundane mails are like that; they have no respect even for bird maidens. (Come to think of it, the way you use that finger, I should call you the Bird Maiden!) Anyway, she told me how her cute 18 month old daughter Alessandra did a Cute Thing: locking her mother outside the glass door on the upper-story balcony in Dismember while she was washing it. It was an automatic latching door, sort of. So there was mother outside in temperature in the 30° range in her housecoat, and there was cute daughter inside alone, with the apartment locked. The neighbors below had to toss up an overcoat and shoes, and Bird Maiden had to keep Daughter entertained and occupied for an hour so she wouldn’t do something like turning on the oven and climbing in for a snooze. So they played pantomime games through the glass, while the locksmiths came and drilled out the lock and opened the door so they could rescue Bird Maiden before she froze. And you thought that only your mother had adventures like that!

  And how is my dull life doing, you inquire? Well, after a year and a half they finally got our gate buzzer done. Sort of. Had to build a tower to get the radio signal over the trees, and at this point it has cost us over $3,500—just to be able to open our front gate from the house. Yes, yes, I know—your mother encounters such problems on an hourly basis. But she’s used to it. So we tested it, and it worked. And next day it didn’t. So my wife and I took the gate buzzer and she drove out to the gate—it’s three quarters of a mile by the road, remember—and signaled me to buzz it open, and I tried it in all different parts of the house.

&
nbsp; The buzzer buzzes the radio unit in the attic, which in turn buzzes the gate to open. But the hand buzzer turned out to work only in the parts of the house closest to the attic unit. Sigh. So we finally mounted buzzers on the walls, upstairs and downstairs, where we know they work, and we run to buzz them when someone pushes the button at the gate. It worked when the lady editors from Putnam and Berkley came to see me yesterday, anyway.

  Oh, what were they here for? Just visiting. They were at a sales meeting in Orlando, and they’re reading Tatham Mound, and Unicorn Point is on the New York Times best-seller list, so they came over. We went to eat at a restaurant where they have a fine what-do-you-call-it, where you take plates and serve yourself to whatever you want in the way of anything, all you can eat. There was even an ice cream vending machine, which the ladies delighted in using, then pouring on chocolate syrup and nuts and all. I stuffed myself with onions and mashed potato and three kinds of pudding. You’d have loved it. No, you would not have to take onions! I still feel stuffed, a day later.

  So keep struggling through, Jenny. People do care about you. You should already be receiving fan mail; two readers asked for your address. So if you get letters “care of Jenny Elf” you’ll know.

  February 1990

  * * *

  A symmetry is achieved. A story continues.

  * * *

  FeBlueberry 1, 1990

  Dear Jenny,

  I’m starting this letter a day early. It is my 30th letter of the month, after 160 last month. What happened was that yesterday 39 letters arrived in the mail, 31 of them in a package from DEL REY BOOKS, about a dozen of them dating back to Apull 1989. Right, not long after I started writing to you. Someone must have cleaned out the cobwebby recesses of his desk. If your mother had sent her letter through that publisher, and it had taken nine months for it to be forwarded—well, if I said what needs to be said about those bloatbottomed noodlebrained functionaries at publishing houses, my mouth would catch fire. You see enough of that with your mother already. I think her teeth had nuclear meltdowns. So anyway, I have now answered all those letters, doing them at the rate of up to seven letters per hour cold—that is, from first reading to proofreading—starting last night, and as long as I’m doing letters, it’s your turn. So if this arrives a day early, don’t worry; it won’t happen again. The Post Orifice would never allow it.