Incarnations of Immortality

by Anthony, Piers

  The first letter was to my agent, the man who sells my novels in New York. Beginning writers always want to know how to get a top agent and become an instant best-selling author. Forget it; an agent doesn't make you famous, he just gets better terms for you when you are famous. You have to get there on your own power. I sold eight novels before I took an agent; then my income commenced rising. This particular letter turned out to involve complex matters with four different publishers, plus a reorganization of the agency itself. One publisher had sent a statement of account that was so far off base that my wife and I were flabbergasted. It wasn't just that they were in error, to the author's disfavor by a healthy amount (it's always to the author's disfavor, for some obscure reason)—it was the way they had managed the error. Figuring it all out was like researching relativity, and I had to explain it to my agent in such a way that he could make it clear to the publisher, who naturally would not be eager to understand. That communication to my agent, with its multiple attachments, took me four hours to complete, and my afternoon was shot.

  Okay, I'd do the other letters the next morning, April 18, starting promptly at 9 A.M. But at 8:30 A.M. the phone rang; it was our building contractor. Oh, didn't I mention that? What with the table tennis and the boys my daughters fetched in to play Dungeons and Dragons and computer games, my wife decided we needed to expand our recreation space by enlarging and enclosing our porch, converting it to a heatable, coolable, silenceable playroom area. We had gotten an estimate—phew! who says inflation has been licked?!—and knew that work was to start in due course, after the property was surveyed (a red-tape requirement; of course it had been surveyed before, but now they wanted every cabin, pump, pole, and whatnot pinpointed, too). But this was so soon that we had not even signed the contract. Nevertheless, the crew was on its way to tear down our old porch, and we had to scramble to clear it: fifty-pound cans of horsefeed, chickenfeed, dogfood, an old trunk holding phonograph records dating from my college days, boxes of bric-a-brac, table tennis table, a heavy tool bench overloaded with ghod knows what, a refrigerator, and unclassified junk. I had to find a new shady location for my outdoor thermometer and humidity dial, used to keep track of daily highs and lows and conditions for my runs—I have run my three miles at temperatures as high as 102°F and as low as 39°F, and such extremes do affect my performance—and nowhere else was as good as the porch. These things could not be done carelessly, and we were still at it when the wrecking crew arrived. So while we were inside, signing the contract and forking over the $$$, they were bashing down the porch.

  But that porch abutted our tightly fenced back yard, wherein lurked three of our dogs, Lucky, Tipsy, and Bubbles. Tipsy and Bubbles, spayed females, we had adopted from our neighbor's mongrel litter, which was about to be shipped off to a puppy mill; Bubbles was supposed to belong to the neighbor's boy, so he named her. We had brought her in with her sibling so the two would have warmth and comfort, as we could not bring them inside, where the indoor dogs would kill them, literally; though we were ready to return Bubbles when she was older, the boy had lost interest and she became ours. Tipsy was for Cheryl, and she may be an unusual dog. You know the rule about white on dogs? It's always on the tip of a dog's tail, even if nowhere else. Well, Tipsy has white on the tipsies of her pawsies, but none on the tipsy of her tailsy. Maybe she's unique in caninedom; I don't know. But mainly, that yard contained an earlier adoption, the male, Lucky. He had been a ten-pound waif, the prettiest and weakest of the litter of nine, so that he kept winding up (down?) on the bottom of the pile and yipping piteously. Pups play rough, especially when fed from one dish, and we were honestly afraid he wouldn't survive. He had taken to sleeping alone, under our car, to avoid getting chomped by the others. I was that way myself at that age in human terms; I have empathy. So we took him in, fed him, gave him good vet treatment—and soon he became a seventy-five-pound bundle of muscle who took no guff from strangers or his former littermates. I understand that, too. According to Carl Sagan on the Cosmos TV series, time and death are the secrets of evolution, and I'm sure it is so; I am quite interested in these concepts and have even been known to write novels about them. Sagan is a good man; he's my age. But the secrets of good living are not tune and death, but care and love, even for the aggressive canine—or writer. Now we had to move our fence back before the porch came down, lest Lucky get at the workmen and take bites from unmentionable anatomy. So I got out with the post-hole digger and a roll of welded-wire fencing, working desperately. Just as the workmen reached the final wall, I completed the new fence. Robert Frost, in "Mending Wall," discourses on whether good fences make good neighbors; in this particular case they do. But my writing day was gone.

  Next morning the surveyors were at work; I put Lucky on the leash and took him for a walk in the pasture, and my wife did the same with Tipsy and Bubbles so the surveyors could enter the yard. I was a survey instructor in the Army, though probably in the intervening quarter century I have forgotten more than I ever knew about the subject. But I did understand why they had to run a traverse through the yard, though I could have done it by triangulation. Then we had to rush off, for I had to address the local Friends of the Library group, who were meeting in the City Hall. I don't charge for such things; I regard it as a public service. Libraries are well worth supporting, even though they aren't much on contemporary popular paperback fantasy. A local reporter was there, so he took notes, and next day he phoned me for an hour for an article. Finally, in the afternoon, I caught up on five more letters.

  On the following day the man with the tractor arrived, and a huge truckload of fill-sand to buttress the new construction. I saw that truck and had a notion. We had this huge mudhole where the school bus turns around, just off the county-maintained road. That hole interferes with my three-mile run; I hate having to maneuver around that mire when my stopwatch is going, and sometimes get my foot gunked with mud. I doubt the cars enjoy it much, either. Could we subcontract for a load of lime rock? Yes, we could. So we paid for a twenty-ton load of it dumped in the puddle, and the tractor dozed it smooth. Beautiful! We had just done the neighborhood a service, and maybe now the school bus wouldn't lose an axle in it. Three days later we had a five-and-a-half-inch drenchpour, and some unprintable drove his truck through while the lime rock was squishy, converting our delight to horrendous ruts that promptly solidified in place. We'll need another storm to soften them so we can undo the damage—and now we are in a drought. Such is fickle fate. Meanwhile, yet another writing day was gone, and the sand was trickling ominously through the Hourglass. I was getting nowhere! Writer's Block, where was now thy sting?

  Naturally, once our old porch was gone, it took two weeks for the construction crew to begin work, while the refrigerator remained jammed next to the stove and the table tennis table next to the TV set, waiting for space to move back out, and the cans of animal feeds were squeezed in with our furniture storage. We tripped over boxes trying to get around one another and stubbed our toes on solidities that didn't used to be there. Such is the nature of progress.

  But when I finally had time to write, I moved it right along, doing three and four thousand words a day. Then I typed it at six thousand words a day and got the novel finished by the end of April. Truly did T. S. Eliot say, in The Waste Land: "April is the cruellest month." But I had survived it.

  On May first I started the submission typing—and got hit by another bundle of twenty letters, and appearances at a bookstore for autographing copies—hardly anyone showed up—and at a role-playing convention at the University of South Florida. I'm not much into role playing, but a number of my fans are, so I felt it behooved me to learn something about it. It was interesting; they gave me a beautiful stained-glass picture of Neysa the Unicorn and set up what I suspect is an unusual kind of panel. There were fifteen to twenty knowledgeable role players on the panel, and an audience of one: me. I got to ask anything I wanted to about the subject. It turns out that there are many types of such games, of wh
ich Dungeons and Dragons is one, with many shades of difficulty and experience. Some people like direct personal experience, such as racing in cars, while others prefer vicarious experience, such as reading fantasy novels; role playing falls in between, providing a more active experience than reading without the risks of real auto-racing, warfare, or whatever. I discovered that these were my type of folk, with independent attitudes and wide-ranging interests, intelligent and motivated. I conclude that I'm more into role playing, in my writing, than I knew. But this, too, takes time. It didn't help that in May I also had to proofread the galleys for my novels On a Pale Horse and Dragon on a Pedestal; I'm a slow reader, proofreading is exacting, and my blood pressure rises as I encounter editorial changes in my prose. But I managed to complete everything in time.

  I had one other interruption during this effort. My wife and I had to go for our six-month dental hygiene appointments. We take care of ourselves; I do eat carefully, exercise seriously, and keep up with the doctor, dentist, and oculist. But these things, too, take tune, and it comes out of my working day. In this instance I took along a book to read and pencil and paper, so as to be able to use any slack time available. Sure enough, the hygienist was running half an hour late, so I read a little of Asimov's Foundation's Edge, then used it as backing for my penciled notes. I noticed that others in the waiting room simply sat, some not even reading, merely waiting, as it were, in stasis. It is evident that others don't take time as seriously as I do; it doesn't really bother them to waste it. I am keenly aware that my duration in life is limited; am I unique in this? Even when I'm not writing, I am driven to make my time count. Call me a workaholic if you will, but to me, the indifference to the passage of time that most people evince seems like folly. To me, a life that is slack is a life being lived inefficiently. I don't like inefficiency.

  I looked around the waiting room, listening to the interminable, innocuous sound piped in to soothe the animals. I noted the pictures on the walls and the Bibles placed there by the Gideons, right under the Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon mural. I am agnostic, not espousing any religion or pretending to know the actual will of God, but certainly there is much of value in the Bible, and I would read it rather than sit like a zombie doing nothing. I would read the Koran, too, or the Bhagavad Gita, or Tao Te Ching, the Chinese Way of Life. It is no bad thing to heed the significant thought of other ages and cultures, and to profit from their lessons. But no one was reading any of these here.

  In my Note for On a Pale Horse, I concluded that we should live our lives in such a manner that we would not at the end be ashamed. Accepting this, should we not also live our lives as efficiently as we can? Life is the greatest gift we know; what point is there in wasting any part of it? If we should not measure out our lives with coffee spoons, as in T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—when I was in the Army, we spoke of "Private Prufrock"—we should also not similarly tune out in the lacunae of waiting rooms. This is our life; they are not making any more of it. And with this thought, written in a waiting room, I conclude.

  Copyright © 1984 by Piers Anthony Jacob

  ISBN: 0-345-31315-1

  Fate - With A Tangled Skien (1985)

  Chapter 1 - THE BONNIE BOY

  Niobe was the most beautiful young woman of her generation, with hair like buckwheat honey and eyes like the sky on a misty summer morning and a figure that was better imagined than described. But she had her trifling faults, such as an imperious nature fostered by the ability to use her beauty to get her own way, and she was of only average intellect. Also, though she did not know it, she had been marked for a more difficult destiny than she had any right to dream of.

  "But, Father!" Niobe protested prettily. "Cedric Kaftan is but sixteen years old, while I am twenty-one! I couldn't possibly marry him!"

  Old Sean raised a pacifying hand. "Some rivers are harder to cross than others, and some boats smaller. These are not easy times, my daughter, for Ireland or the world. He belongs to an excellent family, farmers and scholars, and they take care of their own. His age is immaterial."

  "Immaterial!" she snorted. "He is but a child! Father, you do me wrong to marry me to one who is so young!"

  The man's jaw tightened. He had the power of the patriarch, but he preferred to have harmony. "Daughter, I did not do you wrong. It is true he is young, but he's growing. He will be a match for you when I am dead and gone."

  "Let him be a match for some little snippet his own age! I absolutely refuse to put up with this indignity!" Her eyes seemed to brighten with her anger, becoming as intense as the midday welkin.

  Sean shook his head ruefully, not immune to the luster of his child. "Niobe, you are the bonniest lass in the county, and nicely talented on the loom, but perhaps the most headstrong, too! Twice you have balked at excellent matches, and I was weak enough to let you. Now you are becoming embarrassingly old for a maiden."

  That shook her, but she fought back. "Oh, pooh! A fat old moneybags and an ugly aristocrat! You call those matches?"

  "Wealth is not to be sneered at, and neither is aristocracy. You could have had a very easy life, or a very noble one. Such marriages are not easy to come by."

  "Why can't I have a handsome, virile man of twentyfive or so?" Niobe demanded. "Why burden me with a child who probably doesn't know his nose from his—"

  Her father's glance stopped her before she went too far. She could only balk him to a certain extent, however softly he might speak. "Because the war has drawn away such men, so that none remain here who are worthy of you. I will not give you to a peasant! You will not marry beneath your station. Cedric is qualified and financially comfortable, thanks to an inheritance, and—"

  "And he's growing," Niobe finished with disgust. "And I'm growing—sick of the very notion! I won't marry such a child, and that's all there is to it."

  But that wasn't all there was to it. This time Sean's foot was firm. Niobe raged and pleaded and cried, to no avail. She was very good at crying, for her name meant "tears," but her father was impervious. He was determined that this match be consummated.

  And so it was. The banns were duly published, and the wedding was held in early summer, when the groom got out of school. Everything was accomplished according to form, but Niobe hardly noticed; she was too chagrined at being married to such a youth. She wouldn't even look directly at him. As the ceremony concluded, he at least had the wit not to try to kiss her.

  Thus they found themselves alone in a cottage, which was his inheritance. It was in a glade near a swamp— pleasant enough by day for those who liked that sort of thing, but sinister by night. That was perhaps part of the idea: a couple was supposed to be bolted inside during darkness, huddled together for warmth and comfort. There were great romantic possibilities; the locale was conducive.

  Niobe had no trouble resisting conduction. She wrapped her lovely self up in a voluminous quilt—a wedding gift—and slept on the bed. Young Cedric lay beside the hearth, where there was dwindling radiation from the embers. As the quiet chill of the night intensified, neither stirred.

  So they spent their nuptial night, the woman and the boy, in silent isolation. In the morning Cedric got up, stoked the ashes in the fireplace, and went out to relieve himself and fetch more wood. Niobe woke to the sound of an axe splitting billets of wood. It was a good sound, for the morning air was chill indeed; soon there would be physical warmth.

  Or would there? She remembered that a fireplace was an ineffective way to heat a house. A good stove put six times as much heat into the surrounding air for the same amount of wood burned. There was a stove here; she would see to it. She might not be a genius, but she was practical when it suited her purpose. For one thing, she needed warm hands to operate her loom properly.

  She wrapped her coat about her nightrobe and went out to use the outhouse. There was an old catalog beside the wooden seat, half-used, and a bucket of ashes. It was an efficient system, she reflected, for this was the classic place for reflection; one could read
each page of the catalog before using it, or simply stare at the pictures. The mind was edified while the body was cleaned. The ashes were to sprinkle over the refuse, cutting down on the smell, and of course there was a ready supply of them at the house. The refuse was periodically toted to the garden for compost. It was an old-fashioned system, but a good one; nothing, really, was wasted. Still, she would have preferred a modern city toilet.

  She emerged in due course, shivering in the cold, but she paused to watch Cedric at work. He was not cold at all; the effort of splitting heated him. She had to admit he was good at it; he set each billet of wood on the chopping block and halved it cleanly with a single blow of the axe, so that the pieces toppled to either side. He was a boy— but a big boy, with a fine ripple of muscle as he swung the axe. His blond hair jumped as the axe struck, and a muscle in his cheek tightened momentarily. A bonnie boy, indeed!

  He saw her and paused. "You're cold. Miss Niobe," he said with a rich backwoods accent that, like Niobe's form, is better imagined than rendered. "Here, take my jacket till I get the wood in. I'm too hot anyway."

  "Don't call me miss," she protested. "I am, after all, your wife." It grieved her to say it, but it was a truth she could not deny, and honesty required that she not attempt to. A marriage, however ill-conceived, was a marriage.

  He paused, half-startled. "Uh, sure, I guess so. But you know, ma'am, it was none o' my notion to get married like this; I'm not even through school."

  She might have guessed! "It wasn't my idea either," she said. "At least not—"

  "Not to an ignorant kid!" he finished with a rueful grin, "Come on, now, take the jacket before you freeze your toes off, miss—uh, ma'am." He approached her, jacket extended.