Skeleton Key

by Piers Anthony

  “Something like that,” Squid said. “Only with the details included.”

  “Now I understand. I wish we could include the details.”

  She laughed. “Ask me again in five or six years when I’m of age.”

  “I will.”

  “Not if the universe is gone. But stay tuned.”

  He did not pursue the matter further. “What’s next?” he asked.

  Suddenly she got an idea. The bulb flashed over her head so brightly it illuminated the castle walls that had returned. “I question you.”

  “What a flash! I will answer.”

  “What is the earliest thing you remember?”

  “Dimension. The one you call Demon Saturn. He brought dimension into existence, so that the universe had space and time instead of being a formless void. I hated him from that moment.”

  “Nothing before that?”

  “Nothing mattered before that. The universe was in total entropy, its ideal state. It was pristine.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Complete randomness. No organization at all. Until the Demons came to mess it up with their foul organization. Mass. Energy. The Strong Force. The Weak Force. Gravity. What horror!”

  “And eventually Life.”

  “Worst of all. An infection.”

  She did not pursue it further. She had her answer, maybe. It was time to apply her insight.

  “Now, I will make you a picture,” she said. “I need thin black cardboard, a ruler, a piece of chalk, and a pair of scissors.”

  “Here.” Suddenly there was a sheet of it before her, with the ruler, scissors, and chalk.

  “Thank you.” She got busy with her simple tools. First she drew a triangle on the cardboard, using the ruler for a straight edge and the chalk to mark the outlines. It was not perfect, but did not need to be. Then she cut the triangle out. She used it as a model to trace four other triangles, and cut them out too. Now she had a pile of five.

  “I am wondering what you are doing,” Chaos said. “I sense great purpose in it, but frankly, I’d rather be flirting. You showed me a kind of feeling I have not experienced before.”

  “Flirting? So would I.” She loved being able to be so candid. “But I have a job to do.” She set the triangles down on the floor, arranging them so that their outer edges touched, forming a rough circle, and their inner points projected toward the center. The result was a light central space in the form of a five pointed star. “Do you see that star?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Now suppose we remove a triangle.” She did so, leaving a sadly distorted central shape. “And another.” She took away an opposite triangle. Now the star had pretty much disappeared. “And the others.” She picked them up. “What picture is left?”

  “No picture. You have removed its outline.”

  “But all I did was subtract the black background. Why isn’t the star still there?”

  Chaos shrugged. “It was never there. It was an artifact of illusion, defined by the absence of cardboard.”

  “Yes. Now do you remember how you answered my question about your first memory?”

  “It was of the Demon of Dimension interfering with perfection.”

  “And before that there was really nothing.”

  “Nothing but pure chaos, yes.”

  “So you really came into existence as a conscious entity only when the other Demons appeared on the scene.”

  “My consciousness was not necessary before that occasion.”

  She took a breath. “I have a theory that may interest you.”

  “What you have to say does interest me.”

  “It is that your very existence, as you know it now, came into being at the point that Saturn, the Demon of Dimension, did. Because that’s when you needed awareness, to defend your demesne.”

  “I suppose that is true. Does it matter?”

  “It may. Consider my picture of the star on the floor. It exists only because of the surrounding triangles. Without them, it’s gone.”

  “Agreed. It is another emergent phenomenon.”

  “Without the other Demons and their demesnes, you have no existence. You are defined by them. You are the absence of them.”

  “Oh, I am there, just not conveniently defined.”

  “As the star is there on the bare floor. No one knows or cares about it, unless the triangles define it. Without the triangles it might as well not exist.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Without the other Demons to define you by their absence from the floor of the universe, you might as well not exist. You need them and the universe to define yourself. Without them, you and I could not be having this dialogue.”

  Chaos nodded. “We could not,” he agreed. “I will be sorry to lose your presence.”

  “And I will be sorry to lose yours, though if I don’t exist it won’t matter much to me.”

  “The Demons are like triangles,” he said thoughtfully. “I am like the space between them.”

  Squid tried to fight back a tear, but it flowed anyway. “Oh, Chaos, I don’t want to lose that space! I think I love you!”

  He gazed at her. Then the scene faded.

  “Squid!” Win cried, hugging her. “You did it!” Then, to the others: “She’s awake, after three days.”

  For half a moment, she was confused. “Did what?”

  “You convinced the Demon Chaos to let the universe exist! Don’t you remember?”

  “I was just talking with him. Nothing was decided.”

  “Yes it was,” Nia said, taking her turn to hug. “Three days ago you satisfied him that he preferred the presence of the universe to its absence, and I think it was at least in part because he liked you.”

  “Well, I liked him. But what has that got to do with the price of beans?”

  They all laughed, which was when Squid realized that they all were there, the children and the adults and the castle. And the universe.

  “You never did really appreciate your importance,” Laurelai said, looking radiant. “You didn’t give up when you lost the second round. You saved the universe, and us with it. What a scene when you flirted up that storm!”

  So they had indeed been watching. Well, so be it. Chaos had asked her to teach him love, and she had tried. It wasn’t real, any more than the Simulation they had all done with the Villagers. She really didn’t regret it.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Laurelai said.

  “A walk?”

  “As far as our cabin will do. Someone wants to talk with you.”

  What now? “Who?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Squid realized that she had not been sleeping in her cabin, but in the infirmary. She had truly been unconscious. She went with Laurelai to their room, perplexed.

  “We’ve all been working it out,” Laurelai said. “We want you to know that this is fine with us and with Fornax. We’re all in it together.”

  What was fine? But surely they were about to tell her.

  “He gets Larry by day,” Laurelai continued. “Dawn to dusk. I take over by night. You can change gender then if you want to. We can be girls together, or boy and girl, maybe increasingly as the years pass and we mature.”

  “Uh, okay,” Squid said, hardly following the relevance.

  “And we’ve made a deal with the skeletons, Piton and Data’s relatives, to have a regular square on Skeleton Key where Caprice Castle and Fibot can have a home port. Things got complicated with Skeleton Key, and now they’ll be simplified. The castle and boat will each have a built in pass so they can leave and return to the Key at any time. In return we’ll take the skeletons anywhere they want to go, when they want to visit Xanth Proper. Piton and Data can stay with the siblings and still have skeleton friends. It seems ideal.”

 
“Okay,” Squid agreed. It was amazing what the others had worked out while Squid was tuned out.

  “We’re forming the Skeleton Key Dance Ensemble. Thirteen children and three peripheral adults. Enough to form two Squares, to start with. It’s really a planned community, accessible only by invitation, but we’ll tour Xanth and meet many others as we do our demonstration dances.”

  “Okay,” Squid said again, beginning to get a picture of the whole. It looked like a very nice future.

  Then Laurelai transformed into Larry. “Now for the piece of resistance,” she said, deliberately mispronouncing it as she faded out.

  Squid smiled as she looked at Larry. “You’ll never believe who you remind me of.”

  “I believe,” he said, his voice carrying evocative timbre.

  “Chaos!” Squid cried gladly. “I thought you’d gone.”

  “Not far from you,” he said. “Without you I am just a space. With you I am learning love. I can hardly wait until we both mature.”

  “We have some serious flirting to do,” she said, hardly caring about the rest of his nature.

  Then they were kissing, and she knew this was just the beginning.

  Author’s Note

  This is the 44th Xanth novel, and it could be the last. Not because I’m tired of it; but because I am old, 83 at this writing, and my life is getting complicated. Let me explain. I eat right and exercise, staying reasonably fit, but my wife of 61 years, Carol, is fading, and in the past decade I have taken over making the meals, washing the dishes, and spot chores where standing is required, as she can’t stay long on her feet. I go shopping with her, and we take along the wheelchair so that it can be used at need, as increasingly it is. For decades, she ran the household, but advancing age required compromises, and now it is my turn.

  So my writing schedule works around the needs of our family. I don’t expect to write as much in a typical day as I did when we were younger. I don’t actually have to write at all to maintain our lifestyle, as we are financially comfortable. I write because it is my reason for being, but I no longer have to make deadlines. I also read the books that interest me, and buy and watch the DVD and Blu-Ray videos that are on sale and intrigue me. For example I saw the entire Star Trek series, the original and the followups, on sale at a bargain price, so bought them. But then came the question: when would I watch them? Trying to assimilate hundreds of hours in one long binge would be wearing and unfair to the material. My wife suggested an answer: watch one episode a day while I wrote my novel. When I’m in a novel I tend to get absorbed in it and everything else suffers: I’m a workaholic, or more properly a write-a-holic. I have to schedule other things to be sure I get to them at all, when I’m writing. You know, like eating and sleeping and answering fan mail. So this might enable me to watch the episodes in a paced manner without sacrificing my novel. Would it work? This was the test.

  I started writing this Jamboree 2, 2018. (I use the Ogre Months, which are more expressive than the Mundane ones.) I played half an hour of Mahjongg tiles, watched one episode of Star Trek, then wrote the novel. It went well, and by the end of the month I had written over half the novel, 52,600 words. Then in FeBlueberry, I got the flu, with a fever of 101 degrees Fahrenheit, and lost any writing initiative. When I lose interest in writing, you know I’m sick, because writing is my life. I resumed in a few days, but then Carol got the flu.

  It put her in the hospital for nine days. Sometimes when I visited she never woke up: the drugs they had her on kept her knocked out. Once she phoned me: they had moved her from the Inverness, Florida hospital to Tampa. What? It turned out that it was a confusion: she was still at the local one. But you can see this was not an easy time, and when she returned home she was on oxygen and had to use a walker and have physical therapy. She could no longer mount the stairs to our bedroom, so I unfolded the sofa/bed in the living room and joined her there each night. Fortunately our daughter Cheryl was there to help us, or we would not have been able to cope. She is now taking over some of the things like shopping and laundry.

  Then during one of my exercise runs—we live on our little tree farm, and our drive is three quarters of a mile long, so I alternate days running out for the newspapers or using the adult trike—I tried to kick a fallen pine cone clear, missed it, stubbed my foot into the drive, and fell, landing on my face, getting scrapes, a black eye, and bruised ribs that wiped out my exercises for about three weeks, and made coughing, sleeping, and sometimes just standing up painful.

  We put a picture on my HiPiers.com web site, and fans agreed that I looked awful. I think they were referring to my blood-masked face on that day, rather than my normal appearance. At my age a fall is no minor matter. So my writing schedule suffered further, and I wrote only half as much in that month. I finally finished the novel in Marsh. I was also in the third season of Star Trek The Next Generation, and enjoying it, an episode a day. So my experiment was working despite other problems.

  Then there was the Xanth movie option. They were considering doing both a movie and a TV series, and it hung like fire for almost three years as the option got extended, and extended again. But alas, at the end, the studio had a new boss, and the new one axed the project of the old one, like a new alpha male killing the offspring of the old alpha male, saying Xanth was sexist. Xanth mirrors and parodies the attitudes of Mundania, so there is sexism there, but hardly approval of it. Folk see what they choose to see. Some say that because in A Spell for Chameleon, she varies with the time of the month, that’s sexist. Ugliness, like beauty, is largely in the eye of the beholder. Now I am left with three novels to market, as I held up #42 Fire Sail and #43 Jest Right pending the verdict on the movie option, because a movie could make a phenomenal difference to their salability.

  And my dentures. My original teeth have been mostly trouble throughout my life; I remember when my wisdom teeth came in, they arrived complete with cavities. It’s not a matter of hygiene: I take care of my teeth. But cavities came in from below, with no connection to the surface; can’t brush that away. So now it was the time for my lower denture, as I got the upper one a year or so back. A months-long hassle, and I lost weight because I couldn’t properly chew. As I type this, I still have pain chewing, but things are slowly improving. Teeth, like old age, are a lady dog.

  And I am breaking in a new computer, and this is my first novel on it. The problem is that it doesn’t have my variant of the Dvorak keyboard, so my touch typing reflexes make myriad errors, such as ; for ‘, so the word “doesn’t” comes out “doesn;t.” Yes, a geek checked it; it’s a Known Problem that they may or may not eventually get around to fixing. My annoyance doesn’t count; I’m only a user.

  So my life as I wrote this novel was hardly sanguine. And you wonder why at times I feel more at home in a fantasy realm, where problems are more straightforward, like Demons, nickelpedes and fire-breathing dragons? Now you know.

  At any rate, I do plan to write another Xanth novel next year, though I don’t yet know its title or its nature. Probably it will have new characters and settings, as the ones in this novel have been around for about three novels. We now have a fair idea whom the sibling children will marry when they grow up and turn traitors to children everywhere by joining the dread Adult Conspiracy.

  There may be some readers who don’t like the fact that both gay and transgender characters are in this novel. They were suggested by readers, and I prefer Xanth to be inclusive rather than exclusive. Some may take exception to the awareness of sex by children. This echoes Mundania, where the very subject of sex is considered taboo for children. They don’t practice it, but they know it exists. This is reality, and even fantasy can acknowledge it. Some may object to the idea of an eleven-year-old girl getting seriously romantic. Well, children do get crushes, and I am not at all sure there is much of a difference between a young crush and mature love. When I was eleven I had a crush on a girl that was unmatched emotionally b
y anything other than my later marriage, and I suspect that even today, over seventy years later, aspects of that girl define my interest in romance, despite the fact that my interest was not returned. I never disparage young love. So, bluntly, if you don’t like this kind of realism, read something else.

  Now my credits to those who suggested ideas and puns. I don’t use all the puns sent by all the readers: some send hundreds, and I prefer to give newcomers a chance before filling up the volume with repeaters. Some just didn’t quit fit in this story. Some were too complicated for my narrative. They remain in my suggestion file, and may be used in a future novel.

  First, a credit to a book, The Amazing Book of Mazes, by Adrian Fisher, which I used for inspiration in my chapter on the Puzzle Planet. It truly is amazing what can be done with hedges and walkways, though you won’t find sexy corn maidens as prizes here in Drear Mundania.

  Title Skeleton Key; Ion and Hilda, reversed; you know, men are supposed to have sons and women have daughters, as signaled by the first letters of their names, so Ion is the son of Princess Ida, and Hilda the daughter of Prince Hilarion; auricle hears the future: person with synesthesia—Misty Zaebst

  Marceen—Tina Barker

  Plantain growing tains—Heather Harris

  Angel Trumpet—Jema Schunke

  Panty Thief; Gentleman’s Club, Gentlewoman’s Club—Alexander Sellers

  Laurelai—Laurelai Bailey. I am not now, and have never been transgender, so my presentation of this condition may be clumsy. But this is fantasy, and the rules differ. Gender portals do not exist in Mundania, unfortunately.

  Dancing Shoes—Emilio Ross

  Abombinabowl—Mitch the Mad Hatter

  School of Hard Knocks—William Adams

  Zuzana, Philip, Tomas, Edvard, with their special talents—Tomas Lauman

  Strip mine, Hard Drive, N-gram, N-points, keyboard to hold keys, Roaming numerals—Clifton R Liles

  Cake Walk, pun titles Duck of the Draw, Knot Gneiss Monster, Knight Bear, Bear Apparent, Demon NA, Robot NA—Tim Bruening