“Or had I not, by purest accident, emptied my Mistress Lightouch’s store of innocent anise. Aye, of those particular spices, we ought to have had ample in the galley to last the entire trip, without recourse to the adulterated stores above.”
“He must have marked the whammied tins somehow,” said Angela, “though they took all the spare spices, to make sure.”
“So that what is in the galley at present must e’en suffice us to Yambouli,” said the highwayman. “And already we lack anise. You see, madame, what hazard ’twould be to your palates, to set me at large once again, to the endangerment of our remaining spices.”
“No more anise,” Corwin remarked, “means no further danger of iguanice soup. Which suits me, for one, admirably.”
Belladonna emerged from the stateroom corridor and came over to their group. “I should be sitting in chains with you, Master Thief.”
“Nay, sweet mistress mine, be of good heart! As matters have fall’n out there is indeed an herriot aboard yon vessel which even now nears the distant horizon.”
“A real Herriot,” Angela reminded Belladonna. “Capitalized.” It was one of the names that, if you were a veterinarian, you had to earn with superior work records before you could register it as your chosen final name—even if it happened to be your middle—your family—name by birth. Almost every workline had its own restricted final names.
“Aye,” said Belladonna. “Jane Lawrijan Herriot, elves bless her work! All the same, if I could have been with you last night, and with my good, lost Widowmaker in hand to stop that bloody-minded goblin from finishing what I—”
“Well, thank goodness you weren’t!” Angela exclaimed. “That is,” she added, as the Dungeon Chessite frowned at her, “if you’d run him through, you’d only have been in more trouble yourself, and—”
The ship’s intercom gave its respectful chime and, after a polite half second to let everyone fall silent, the third officer’s cheerful voice announced: “Well, M.’s, the latest radiophonic bulletin from Second Seal down there, hot from M. Jane Herriot’s shipboard surgery—dog doing A-Okay, total recovery confidently predicted. Roger, over and out.”
“Huzzah!” cried Jemmy. In other parts of the promenade deck, Winterset and Amahl cheered, too. Jove and Juno were much too dignified to do anything more than smile and nod, as if they personally had arranged Valkyrie’s recovery; and the Musician of the Spheres might have been asleep in her patch of sunlight. But Mother Frances and Miz Ming clapped and, after a moment, without opening her eyes, the Firebird clapped too. So did Angela, who would have cheered as well, along with Jemmy, Winterset, and Amahl—but she could see Belladonna’s face too plainly, and it was pressing in on itself, as though the Chessite were close to tears.
The thought fluttered in Angela’s mind: Some people see demons and nightmares even without whammy!
Her husband stood up, catching her eye. “To Valkyrie’s health and perfect recovery!” he cried, as though deliberately joining the cheer a little late. It always seemed odd when he called attention to himself by doing something like that. “Come, Pundita,” he went on in a softer voice, moving round Jemmy’s chair to Angela’s and laying one hand on her shoulder, “let us find our own buttered toast and spare our sorely overworked attendants.”
Jemmy was looking at Belladonna with great sympathy—Corwin might have called it empathy—and the Chessite had already fallen into the vacated lounge chair beside the highwayman’s. In another moment, Angela would have found an excuse to call Corwin away, so she was delighted to go with him now.
At the last window before the stateroom corridor, she paused for one more look at the disappearing Second Seal. She might have preferred talking more with Dr. Junge about her whammy nightmares, but Dr. Junge was on that cargo ship with her dog and her prisoner—officially the prisoner of the Second Seal’s captain—returning to the R.S.A.
Corwin must have been following some of Angela’s thoughts. Watching with her, one arm encircling her, he remarked, “Heaven help whomever Obersturmbannfuehrerin von Cruewell next chooses to be her ‘Gospodin Raven’!”
“Confess, Pundit! You enjoyed playing that role.”
“Well ... if there hadn’t been a real criminal to catch ... it had its moments, I suppose.”
“Come on!” She squeezed his fingers. “Ozzie said he’d be in the library this morning. To give ‘Dr. Poe’ another chance to conquer the Land of Oz.”
NOTES.
Winterset Windsong’s “Deity.” While we would call him a polytheist, Windsong seems to be among those who regard all gods and goddesses as manifestions of a great overall divinity’ individual facets.
* * * *
as soon as possible. The acronym “asap” hadn’t yet gotten into popular awareness—not, at least, into my own popular awareness—even by 1983. I seem to remember a “Remington Steele” TV episode of about that time in which they were working “A.S.A.P.” and other acronyms for comic effect; in that one, they pronounced it “ay-ess-ay-pea.” Anyway, I decided to leave the phrase in full in my own earlier works. Not the only place, by a long shot, where I failed to anticipate future developments.
* * * *
Dr. Ilna Junge. I once saw a small newspaper ad for an X-rated movie about “The She-Wolf of the SS,” which made an impression on me. In the summer of 2013, I found Wikipedia to be actually aware of it (what isn’t Wikipedia aware of?)—I had supposed it extraordinarily obscure. It was a 1975 production, filmed on the set of the defunct TV series “Hogan’s Heroes,” and that She-Wolf’s name was Ilsa. Her motivation, says Wikipedia, was to prove that women could withstand more pain than men and should therefore draw combat duty; and she unwound after a hard day’s work by raping all the male prisoners she could. (Now, why can’t I dream up plots of such subtle psychological sophistication?) The ad was quite sufficient in itself to spark my imagination; I’ve never seen, nor have I any desire ever to see, the actual movie, which by the slim plot synopsis sounds as if it commits the increasingly common mistake of confounding POW camps on the Western front with concentration or “death” camps. I hope my use of the hardly original-sounding sobriquet, with a coincidentally close but variant first name (although I think the tiny ad didn’t give the first name the X-movie heroine-villainess in question, my officer has been “Ilna,” with an “n,” ever since 1983), for a character appearing in one novel only, falls within the legal bounds of copyright.
I remember that already in high school I saw how the vicissitudes of historical study would eventually produce a scholarly opinion that the Nazi death camps hadn’t actually existed. Even that one of these generations Adolf Hitler would be as much romanticized as Alexander the Great, Napoleon, etc. (And my mature mind doesn’t think very much of those conquerors, either.) What I had never in my wildest surmises expected was that I would actually see the phenomenon beginning within the lifetimes of death camp survivors. Let me state here and now at once, for the record, that I do not for a minute believe those death camps to be some sort of exaggerated fiction, nor that the Nazi scourge was anything else than a monstrous evil. What bothers me is the insistence in some quarters on regarding the Jewish people as the unique, rather than the numerically prominent, victims. The Nazis also exterminated Gypsies, Slavs, Catholics and such other religious persuasions as Wiccans and Jehovah’s Witnesses, political liberals, anyone else who opposed Nazi ideas, etc. Given time and their continued power, we would no doubt have seen the list grow even longer. It also bothers me that Nazi hunters have continued to work so long after eyewitness identification—far from the most reliable evidence even when fresh—has become shaky or impossible with the passing years. It is not that the crimes of WWII have somehow become less of a blot on the human record, but that in trying too long and hard to avenge them—and all human “justice” is essentially vengeance, except in so far as it aims to prevent a repetition of the crimes and to provide some mater
ial relief to the immediate victims—we make new victims out of any innocent spouses and families married and begotten by these men while in hiding. And sometimes, I much fear, we create innocent scapegoats, “identifying” them as former Nazis with more attention to revenge than accuracy. The human memory can prove very malleable. But enough.
I like Ilna; and living so far in the future gives her some excuse for crediting certain “historians” more than they deserve. But she is a registered fancier who “lives” at least part-time in a personal perceptional world romanticized far out of keeping with the actual historical record. It is interesting, though, that her dog is the namesake of a famous plot by Hitler’s own officers to assassinate him. (I’m not sure I was consciously aware of this in 1983.)
* * * *
The Madre. In the early 1980s, when this novel was written, women priests still looked like a Roman Catholic possibility in the not too distant future. Now, I have only the alternative timeline excuse to fall back upon, for the original as well as the new version of the R.S.A. In this novel, I very much wanted to do the less expected thing by having a female priest representing the male-dominated religion, a male priest representing the more female-oriented one.
* * * *
Jove and Juno Olympian. They may take a few liberties with mythology, doubtless on their own authority.
* * * *
an NTC. More and more, I see “a SF,” “a NTC,” etc., apparently in stubborn adherence to the rule of “a” before consonants, “an” before vowels. I overwhelmingly prefer going by the sound. N, spoken aloud, begins with a vowel sound: we pronounce the acronym as “en tea see.” Hence, I insist on “an NTC,” etc.
* * * *
“Mister Altocumulus; sir.” “Mister” and “sir” used as address terms appropriate to the officer’s rank, regardless of gender.
* * * *
whammy. There might still be an opinion abroad to the effect that fictioneers should avoid using any kind of poison or hallucinogen or suchlike substance “unknown to science.” I find this principle nonsensical when applied to fanciful or futuristic fiction. New poisons, hallucinogens, etc. are being discovered and/or invented all the time, so any future that continues in a reasonably unbroken line from our own present is going to be awash in such substances, and it would be utterly ridiculous to limit any fiction set in the future to what is known to science at the moment of writing. The “no unknown substances” principle may be legitimate when applied to fiction based strictly in historical times and/or the present day, but I regard myself as at perfect liberty to invent any “unknown to [today’s] science” substance I wish, when it comes to futuristic and/or fanciful fiction, from the dreamberries of Frostflower and Thorn’s Tanglelands to the whammy of the 21st-century R.S.A. world.
* * * *
“One chair here, the next chair there, and when they were finally perfect, all the musicians would come.” I wrote this novel in 1983. “Field of Dreams” came along in 1989. The book on which that “If you build it, they will come” movie is based, Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe appeared in 1982; I’m reasonably confident I didn’t not hear it read on NPR’s “Chapter a Day” until my days of renting workspace, 1984-1989; but if my memory is at fault there, I could have picked up the expression from that novel, to echo it in Amahl Garson’s whammy fantasy. Or it could have gotten in during the various revisions that come along with each auctorial retyping.
* * * *
the codex reader. Hard as it is to believe, e-books didn’t appear on the horizon until some years after I had imagined and described codex readers; and the first time my husband found a description of these new inventions, in Popular Science, we wondered if my prediction was coming true. Now, you’ll just have to accept codex readers as an alternate-timeline development.
* * * *
the S.S.S.R. In 1983, the U.S.S.R. hadn’t yet broken up, nor was I prescient enough to foresee that development. In my original R.S.A. timeline, it had developed into an essentially friendly and benevolent power, and was commonly referred to by a transliteration of its Russian initials, “S.S.S.R.” (Which looks like our “C.C.C.P.”)
* * * *
Angela’s mother. This lady, unfortunately, fell casualty to the revision of 2011—having forgotten their family histories almost entirely (except that Corwin had a sister), I have Angela’s father a widower by the time of All But a Pleasure.
* * * *
done finely and artificially. In Jemmy Tolliver’s point of view, “artificially” has its archaic meaning—”done with artistry”—and is therefore a complimentary modifier. Many things in Jemmy’s point of view which today would count as errors of grammar and spelling are in fact consistent with the usage of Jonathan Swift’s era. I did not, however, attempt to recreate the capitalization principles of Swift’s time, which as nearly as I can figure out substitute in some measure for underlining or italicization. Or perhaps they carry over from German usage.
What to capitalize and what not to capitalize remains an ongoing problem in our own times, and it is very hard to be perfectly consistent even within a single long story. E.g., I have capitalized Obersturmbannfuerherin, used by itself, when writing in Ilna’s point of view, but not when writing from that of any other character.
* * * *
Oziah Prendergast Gillikin III/”No, no, I don’t mind being an Oz villain to while away an idle hour or two.” I no longer remember which came first: the idea of Corwin as an Oz villain, or that of a fancier living in a personal perceptional world based on Baum’s Oz. I suspect that Oziah came to me first, and he may have sparked the dream that touched off the Computer Wizard series. In any case, this chapter heading appears in my copy of Mayday on the Melon of ca. 1987. The original versions of the first few Computer Wizard stories were indeed played on the NTC Cygnus, and involved only Oziah, Corwin, and Angela. In 2011, I saved the Computer Wizard stories for the re-imagined R.S.A. timeline, and even began adding to them, replacing the fantasy-perceivers element with a strong societal emphasis on role gaming, and moving the introduction of Oziah Prendergast to Sam Imani’s Sunday role-game parties. The revisions and newer stories demand, and get, more participants in the games. Several of the original stories have been published in The International Wizard of Oz Club’s annual Oziana. Both the revised older adventures and the newly written ones have been collected in Sundays at Sam’s: The Computer Wizard in Oz Games and The Wishing Horse and the Computer Wizard of Oz, and are planned for inclusion in my Oz Megapack.
Oziah is the only member of the Melon cast besides Corwin, Angela, the ubiquitously offstage Al Everymind, and his similarly offstage and prolific fellow author Atramentacia Scribbler, to have made it into the new version of the R.S.A. I may remark that the Oz canon of the realizers and fanciers’ world is identical with our own, while the Oz canon of the re-imagined R.S.A. is just slightly variant.
—Hoyts’ Hobbitat, May 2016
* * * *
I was thinking of an interconnected dual series of whodunits, one series featuring Rosemary Lestrade, the other Corwin and Angela—whose honeymoon novel had for its working title Murder on the Melon. I may have begun Melon the same way I tackled The Monday after Murder: by working up a situation, a victim, and a cast of suspects, and seeing where the clues led me as I investigated along with my sleuth characters. It came as a great relief to me—because I liked the whole cast—that we didn’t need any murder in the Corwin and Angela novel, after all. Makes a much better honeymoon for them without.
For the record, with The Standard Murder Mystery (as with my other two big whodunits, Idylls of the Queen and Rogue Fuzzy, as also with Frostflower and Windbourne, I knew from the outset whodunit, and why. (Well, in Idylls of the Queen I drew the plot from Malory.) The surprise in Standard was who turned out to be which ones were the most important of my good-guy characters.
AUTUMN LEAF
co-authored with
Melody Grandy Keller
As I remember, the initial inspiration for this one came from Melody, who on reading Mayday on the Melon started imagining an encounter between the Musician of the Spheres and her own beloved Ozian sorcerer Zim Greenleaf. There might be an argument for putting this story in my Oz Megapack instead of here; but in fact it takes place entirely at home in the R.S.A., so I decided it belongs in the Realizers/Fanciers volume. This version is retyped from a draft copy marked in pencil “Original Version,” albeit with the inevitable minor new tinkerings and rewordings here and there. The story has not been previously published.
My walking stick? Yes; and notice how the glow from the fireplace glances and dances over the natural artistry of polished woodgrain up to its golden hand-knob and back again.
I have it on loan from a gentleman whose full oddity—and I use the word in utmost respect ... But perhaps I had best harken back to the outset of my acquaintance with him.
Although it is actually more the tale of his acquaintanceship with another person, one of the most justly renowned individuals of our time, and one whose perceptional world is so distinctive, so well reported, and so inextricably bound into the course of these ensuing events as to render futile any attempt at identity disguise. Therefore, even though the episode in no way discredits this individual, common privacy guidelines forbid us to recount it except to such select auditors as you, upon whose discretion we can rely.
It happened some autumns ago that a telephone call for M. Corwin Poe reached our rooms, Angela’s and mine, at the Brown County Hilmar. I remember that my fantasy perception was in good trim when the call came, so that the room ’phone unit looked like a large raven croaking my name at me; and I confess to feeling some annoyance at this disruption of our holiday. Nevertheless, remembering that we had given clear instructions as to the sort of calls that should be relayed, I accepted it.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 90
