Being a Green Mother (44 page)

The choir flickered into nonexistence; all the available demons had been upgraded to the status of damned souls. For the final stanza, Satan sang alone. He turned again to Orb, and the glow about him intensified. He had become godlike in the nobility of his countenance. He met her gaze and sang with an earnestness that transfixed her.

The light about him became so bright that it resembled flame. Orb’s eyes were smarting from the effort of looking at him. What was happening to him?

As Satan concluded the hymn, the light turned blinding. Orb squinted, then blinked—and he was gone!

She lurched to her feet. “Satan, my love!” she cried. “Where are you?”

Mym stood. “He is gone, Gaea,” he said.

“But—”

“He was doomed the moment he took up his cross. He knew it, but he had to do it. He has left you at the altar and given you back the world.”

“What cross?” she asked, horrified.

Niobe stood and walked toward Orb. “The cross of his true love for you,” she explained.

“Then he wasn’t lying,” Orb said. “He really did—”

“He really did, dear. He knew he could never truly marry you, but he had to come as close as it was possible to do. To love you, to have your love in return, and to complete the vows of marriage. But you are now a widow.”

“The glow—” Orb said, numbed.

“It was the brightness of the redeemed souls being released from Hell. He could no longer hold them, once he invoked the forbidden song. He truly loved you, as he had never loved before, and he gave up everything for you.”

Orb looked at the empty chair that had been reserved for God. Had God really elected not to attend? Surely He had known …

Then the magnitude of her own loss struck Orb. She fell into her mother’s arms and sobbed with her private heartbreak.

“Not too much, dear,” Niobe murmured. “When you cry, Gaea, the world cries with you.”

Indeed, it was raining throughout the world. But no damage was being done, and in time the sunshine would return. Now it was time for her to learn the office she had assumed and so far neglected—to concentrate on being a Green Mother.

As I wrote each of the prior novels of this series, their themes tended to impinge on my own life. Thus Death became prominent during
Pale Horse
and Time during
Hourglass
and Fate during
Tangled Skein
and War during
Red Sword
. Perhaps it is a matter of interpretation as much as of reality; you can be the judge.
Green Mother
concerns Nature, and I was indeed aware of the things of Nature.

To begin with, as I completed the prior novel in this series, my shoulder began to hurt. It worsened over the months, and finally the pain cut off all my exercises except running. I had been doing about thirty chins on my study rafter, and 75 Japanese push-ups in under four minutes, but the pain took no note of physical condition. When it began to manifest as I reached for my keyboard, I saw the doctor; I can live without the exercises, but this affected my livelihood.

It turned out to be tenonitis. Not “tendonitis”; there is no such word, contrary to public belief. It is an inflammation of the tendon that manifested, in my case, when I tried to stretch out my arm. When I was bitten by a deerfly and swatted it, the pain of the effort was so sudden and intense it had me reeling. I could not reach my back pocket or lift my hand above my head. I learned how to be left-handed in
most respects; fortunately I am already left-handed in a number of ways, such as eating. Sleeping was a problem because there was no position in which my right arm remained comfortable; I had to undertake contortions to avoid being awakened by a jolt of pain. Sometimes by day I would simply pick up my right arm with my left hand and put it where it needed to be. I’d rather not discuss the effect this ailment had on my love life.

Pills had no effect. Finally the doctor gave me a shot in the tendon, and that turned the corner. The inflammation gave ground as slowly as it had advanced; six months later it hardly bothers me, and in a few more months it should be gone entirely. I don’t know whether I’ll resume my arm exercises then; after about a year’s layoff, I have lost what it took me ten years to develop, and I suspect I’ll call it a day. The truth is, those exercises were pretty grueling, and I feel more relaxed in their absence. Thus I learn about my own nature; now that I am on the downhill side of 50, I’m more inclined to relax a bit.

In this period I also learned more about equine nature. We moved to the forest when my daughter Penny reached horse-craze age, and each daughter got a horse. I liked Penny’s horse Sky-Blue from the start; she was a registered Hackney, a former racer, then twenty years old, which would be something like sixty in a person. Blue had raised her former owner from age ten to fifteen, and had raised Penny through the same range. The former owner is now married, and Penny is in college, so you can see how well Blue did her job.

Cheryl’s horse Misty was another matter. She was arrogant, not acceding readily to the directives of her rider, and taking any feed she could get at. We had to fence Blue off during feeding time so that she could eat in peace; otherwise Misty would take it all. That is why Blue became the model for two of my creatures in other series, while Misty was unrepresented. I knew which kind of horse was better.

But in this period Misty developed severe foot problems. She saw the vet more times than I saw the doctor. The essence is that the bones in her front feet warped, so that she could no longer stand normally; she had to bend her legs just above the hooves back at a thirty degree angle when she stood, and was in obvious discomfort. She lay down for most of the day. This is the stage at which horses are shot, but
we are not a horse-shooting family. We accommodated her as well as we could, bringing her food and water to her.

Blue, however, had a different notion. Realizing that the mighty had fallen, she took to stealing Misty’s food. Now I had to fence Blue off to protect Misty. At one point I brought some hay to Misty that Blue hadn’t deigned to touch, and opened the gate, figuring Blue wouldn’t try to steal that. I was wrong; Blue charged in so determinedly that Misty lurched to her feet to avoid her. Blue bit at her anyway and stood outraged guard over that hay until Misty had hobbled far away and lain down again, hungry. Then Blue left the hay—still untouched. She had never wanted it; she wanted only to establish her dominance. We had wondered why Misty was losing weight, while Blue got fat; now we knew. My illness was reversible; Misty’s will be terminal.

Thereafter I fenced them apart for the full day, opening the gate only at night. I had seen to my regret that horses are no better than people; when the underdog finally gets power, he can be just as mean as the overdog was. Might makes right. Human beings, at least, can sometimes rise above their instincts and act in a more generous manner—but I think not often enough. This is the nature of creatures of whatever kind.

Another aspect of nature is the weather. Here around Florida the summers get hot and humid—On occasion our high temperature for a day has been two degrees above the high for the nation for that day—and those who have read this novel know how that can lead to trouble. There has been tremendous overbuilding along the shoreline by those who apparently assume that hurricanes are a myth. It was time for a warning blow. It came in the form of storm #4 for the season, at the end of AwGhost—Hurricane Elena. She was just passing by, heading for Alabama or Louisiana; when she was safely by our latitude, I relaxed and turned in for the night.

I should not have. Elena took that opportunity to make a right-angle turn and headed straight for us. Now hurricanes are allowed to go ashore where they choose, but not right where
I
live! I worked up some magic and straight-armed that storm, pushing her off. But it takes an awful lot of magic to stop a hurricane in full advance, and I had been caught off guard. Elena slowed, but wouldn’t turn away. For two
days she hovered there, building up strength; she had been a minimal blow of about 90-mile-per-hour winds, but she swelled to a hundred, then to a hundred ten, and finally became a major hurricane of a hundred twenty-five, still determined to land on our house. The entire Florida shoreline in this region was taking a beating. Then, finally, the magic prevailed and shoved her back on course toward Alabama. What a struggle! But of course I should have known better than to relax before the storm had actually landed elsewhere.

The season kept throwing storms at us, but none of the others got that close. One was called Juan (pronounced Wan), that wandered all over. I could have told them that would happen; it was predicted in the operetta
The Pirates of Penzance
, in the song “Poor Wandering Juan.” The path of storms can be predicted; you merely have to know the proper key.

But these were just warm-ups for the coming novel. Once I got into the actual writing, things intensified. Not all can be lightly dismissed. For example, the person who arranged to buy this novel, Judy-Lynn del Rey, Publisher of DEL REY BOOKS, was on the phone in SapTimber, spending an hour talking with me in an effort to straighten out a problem that had come up between the publisher and me about this series. In OctOgre Judy-Lynn had a stroke that put her in a coma. In FeBlueberry she died. She and her husband Lester had put me on the map as a bestseller in fantasy, along with Steven Donaldson and David Eddings and Terry Brooks; they had done more to make fantasy a big-time operation than anyone else I know of. I fear that thus suddenly a golden age is waning. There were other deaths in this period: Theodore Sturgeon, perhaps the best writer the genre has seen; Frank Herbert, author of one of the most successful science-fiction novels ever,
Dune;
L. Ron Hubbard, who left the genre for thirty years to found Dianetics and then Scientology, then returned; I have no brief for Scientology, but Hubbard was certainly a figure to be reckoned with.

Let’s move on to a gentler aspect of nature: the nature of women. This novel was delayed because I came down with a flu-like illness, running a fever of a couple of degrees for a couple of days. Then it dropped to normal, the same day, FeBlueberry 4, that Blue drove Misty from the hay. I relaxed and turned in with a book; I always read myself to sleep. I
was out of paperbacks at the moment, so I was in a hardcover:
The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
by Suzette Hayden Elgin, who is also a genre writer. The essence of the book is that you can defend yourself from verbal abuse if you are alert. The first thing is to recognize when you are under such attack; it is obvious if someone calls you a @#$%&*!! of a Censored/Blank, but not if the person says “I don’t understand why you don’t try to be fair.” Beware of words like “even” and “really,” as for example “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t be such a jerk.” Recognizing the state of siege, you may then respond in a guarded or diversionary manner, so that you don’t wind up feeling like a C/Blank. I found it interesting; I took judo classes for three years and learned that you can’t throw a person who retains his balance; similarly, Suzette shows, you can’t verbally damage a person who retains verbal balance. I had a coughing fit that delayed my sleep for an hour or so; then when I finally nodded off, the book fell from my hand and smote me on the mouth, cornerwise.

Now this did not seem quite fair of Ms. Elgin, considering the doctrine she was preaching. I would have continued reading her book on the morrow, after all. Wide awake again, I resumed reading, and in another hour I nodded off a second time. Whap! Suzette smacked me again. What a temper! It took me yet another hour to nod off, this time with the book propped so it couldn’t hit me, making four hours in all. Next day my fever shot up to new heights, peaking at 102.5°. My mouth felt like bruised cheese rind. Thus it was two more days before I could resume paying work, and yes, I did finish reading the book. Suzette, dearest, if you really loved me, you wouldn’t even
want
to publish in hardcover.…

The nature of computers and their programs also figured heavily in my life at this time. Those readers who object to this sort of discussion are encouraged to skim on down the page until I return to something interesting, if ever. The fact is, though I resisted getting computerized for a long time, just as I resisted getting involved with girls throughout high school, when I finally did get into it, I fell in a big way. For me, being on the computer is like starting a fine automobile or mounting a dynamic horse: it seems alive and exciting, with limitless potential. But it can also be ornery, and the
challenge, frustration, and joy of it was never more evident than when I wrote this novel.

You see, I got a new program in No-Remember. I like PTP, the text processor I was using, but it had two weaknesses: it could use only half my computer’s memory, so that I had to keep chopping chapters in half because they wouldn’t fit, and it had no windows, so I could look at only one file at a time. My wife spied this ad for a text processor named Edward that solved both these problems, so we sent for it, just in case. And Edward changed my life. It addressed all my computer’s memory, so I no longer had to divide files, and it had fourteen buffers, or places where files could be called up, as it were, in parallel. I could call up Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, etc. without exiting Chapter 4, and flick back and forth between the buffers to compare, or I could move material from one file to the other, or make a change in one and save it and close down the buffer. I spent a week getting into it, not because it was that complicated, but because it opened up such new horizons for me and made me appreciate new qualities about the programs I already had. For example, Edward had a squintillion places to put macros, those keys that do simple or complicated chores with single keystrokes, such as typing out my entire address-block. I rechecked SmartKey, which is a macro program, and discovered it would put macros in those new places, too; I never realized! Thus I could set fifty macros if I wanted, instead of the twenty-two I had before. I could embed macros within macros, putting a SmartKey macro in an Edward macro. And Edward allowed me to move its functions about, putting them on any keys I want. That meant I could place them to match the equivalent functions on PTP and not have to retrain my reflexes. What fun!