Being a Green Mother (45 page)

But Edward had some horrendous holes, too. At one point it filled our hard disk with garbage; at other times it blew the memory, which was a frightening experience, rather like a pressure cooker exploding, only the effects were non-physical. We had to figure out exactly where those holes were, because they were like mines waiting for someone to blunder into them. More hours I lost, defusing mines! There were also some formidable problems. Edward couldn’t underline, and I use underlining frequently. The wonderful Edward macros could not be saved for future use: some
glitch in the routine that was supposed to save them. Edward’s printing program was of the “batch” type, which was so completely unsuitable to my need that I never even loaded it into my machine. I discovered by experimentation that PTP would print an Edward file, and that I could use “escape” codes to put in underlining. That saved Edward; I could use it after all. I decided to write a novel with Edward and see how I liked it. Yes,
this
novel.

Thus, on-schedule DisMember 1, I started writing on Edward. I had to use special escape codes to underline, and PTP to print, and to set up my macros each time. But before the month was out, I knew I wanted to stay with Edward. It was those buffers. I had worked things out with PTP to accommodate my [brackets] system of writing; with Edward I didn’t have to do that, because I could set up an entire separate buffer for my ongoing notes. And another for an ongoing Table of Contents. And one for a list of characters, so I didn’t have to search through past text for names I’d forgotten. Plus any temporary notefile for stray notions about other novels that occurred to me while working; I could write them and save them with no fuss. Thus everything changed; my --->arrow<---macros disappeared, and my brackets. I had a better system. Just about the time I worked it out, we got hold of a collection of public-domain programs that do marvelous little things that the regular programs never thought of, such as un-erasing a program you erased by accident that contains irreplaceable material, or scrambling a file so nobody else can read it without the code word—and these, too, had their glitches that could and did blow the memory. After much struggle I figured out how to debug the major glitch and sent a letter to the public domain folk, who evidently hadn’t known; they did not respond. Glitchers never do; that’s human nature.

No need to go into detail about the myriad little refinements I worked out to integrate PTP and SmartKey and Edward; suffice to say that the three programs now seem like one, overlapping marvelously. But the doing took time, much time, and that coupled with other interruptions such as horses and illness and correspondence—I wrote 1206 letters last year, and am doing over a hundred a month so far this year—have run this novel into overtime, putting me behind schedule. Aspects of the novel do reflect the nervousness
and wonder of the computer experience, such as Orb’s first traveling by turning the pages on reality, and the manner that mysterious codes or sequences can do truly remarkable things. Just getting the page number in the right place took us three months to figure out; PTP vindictively shoved the page numbers for Edward text so far to the right they sometimes went off the page. The breakthrough? I now put nonprinting symbols in the heading. The printer just eliminates them and closes up the line, sucking the page numbers in several columns, and PTP never even knows, heh, heh. It can take real cunning to outsmart a stupid machine, but what a satisfaction!

In the middle of it all, our hard disk crashed. The human equivalent would be complete amnesia; all our programs were lost when we replaced the unit. Except that we had been careful throughout to back up almost everything of value. But it was another harsh lesson in the nature of computers, and of course it cost its share of time.

I don’t attend many fan conventions—maybe one a year—and the one for 1985 was Fall-Con (a pun on Falcon, I think) in Gainesville, Florida, in OctOgre. (The Ogre does tend to make public appearances in that month, of course.) These affairs typically have one Guest of Honor, plus appearances by a number of other genre writers, and are good places to meet writers, artists, and fans, and to shop for genre books and art and artifacts. I spent several hours autographing copies of my books and chatting with whoever was interested. I don’t go public much, but when I do, I try to do it properly. Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, I have never actually been an ogre at a convention, as anyone in the know will verify. My memory for names and faces is sievelike, but I do recall some of the other writers there. Martin Caiden, author of the story that became TV’s “Six Million Dollar Man.” Robert Lynn Asprin, of the punnish Myth-Begotten series. (His wife is also Lynn, and I have contributed an Elfquest story to their volume
Blood of Ten Chiefs;
if any trouble occurs, I’m tempted to say “Take two Asprin and call me in the morning.”) David Palmer, author of
Emergence
, a finely crafted post-holocaust novel. There are two Haldemans, and I met one of them, and my daughters met his daughter. Robert Adams, of the Horseclan series. Meredith Ann Pierce, author of the delightful Darkangel trilogy,
who reminds me of Rapunzel because her hair reaches nearly to the floor. The following week, collecting a daughter or two from Tampa’s Necronomicon, I renewed acquantance with Andre Norton, the Grand Dame of the genre, and Roger Zelazny, author of the Amber series, and met Robert Bloch—remember
Psycho?
Florida is not a complete backwoods region for the genre!

Thus went my life during this novel. It’s a pretty mundane life, overall, and I’m a pretty ordinary character. I suffer increasingly from allergies that can turn my nose into a faucet for hours or days at a time, and slobs cut in front of me in lines, and the phone glitches when I try to make a call. I presume these things happen to every nonentity, in this world. That is surely a major reason I seek respite in the realms of fantasy, where I have the illusion of importance. Yet even the mundane life has its minor compensations. When I walk out around the grounds I see the little cedar trees we planted as seedlings; now some of them are my height, and some are taller. I have paths that go to them, for I love paths. I know the little wild flowers that grow nearby; there was a violet beside a cedar tree that came up just for me each year. Then, abruptly, it was gone; evidently a horse had stepped on it. That saddens me every time I pass that spot. Nature can be cruel. There was a little pine tree growing, just rising into adolescence, and then the wind took down a big old dead oak, and that oak caught the pine tree and snapped it off. That, too, I mourn, even years later, though we have thousands of pine trees growing.

In fact we set up a region for Penny with pines, called Penny’s Pines, with one for each year of her life. Then when we fenced it for the horses it was less accessible, so we moved Penny’s Pines to a new spot. Since that time no new pines have appeared at the old site, but a score of new little ones have seeded in the new one; they knew! Penny and I are special; I have short brown hair and she has long blond hair, but one day we discovered that we match exactly at a given length; if I wore mine as long as hers, I’d be blond, too. Which explains why my mother always thought I was blond, and I thought she was color-blind. Our eyes match, also; Penny’s my daughter through and through. We live and learn constantly about nature; even the little things aren’t always what they seem.

When we built the barn and stalls for the horses, two huge spiders moved in, one with about a four and a half inch leg-span, the biggest web spinner ever seen, and the other was larger. Fine; they trapped the flies that bother the horses. Then the larger drove out the other and took over that site. Then one morning that one was hanging from its web, dead; I never found out what happened. Whole life histories are available for our consideration, in Nature, if we but watch.

Death is integral to Nature, of course. It was my preoccupation with death that started this series, and I have had many letters from readers who say they were helped over personal crises of death by that novel. I always read and respond to these with mixed emotions: glad to have been of help, however distantly, but sad that the crisis had to come at all. Meanwhile, the Deathwatch, which I bought at the time of that first novel, I finally retired during this novel; in four years its functions had declined to the point where it simply wasn’t worthwhile to use it. I set it aside with a special sadness. I shouldn’t personalize machines, I know; still …

Death can strike at the least expected times. In this period of
Green Mother
the Tylenol crisis redeveloped, causing the company to discontinue capsules, because some grisly joker was putting cyanide in them. I have little brief for big drug companies, but this one strikes me as a singularly upright one, paying a singularly unjustified penalty for someone else’s misdeeds. We may thus have seen one of the new forms that world terrorism will take, bringing death and ruin to innocent parties.

There was also the case of a most foolish challenge of Nature that resulted in tragedy. A launch of the Challenger shuttle was set, but the night was cold. We live at the same latitude, and our morning low was the coldest of the winter, sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn’t quite as cold on what in my lexicon is called the Isle of Illusion, but there were long icicles on the equipment. Engineers were worried about the ability of the sealing rings to function in cold weather, but the powers that be overruled them and fired off the rocket anyway. Thus seven lives and a billion dollars thrown away needlessly, and the space program severely damaged, because people did not yield to Nature. That horrifies me on several levels.

While delving through my old papers in search of something else, I came across material relating to my researches for
Macroscope
, one of my earlier novels. It was an article in a 1967 issue of
Saturday Review
, by John F. Wharton, and I had highlighted significant passages. Now I find those passages relevant to my present thinking. They describe the nature of man: his enormous capacity for self-delusion, and his propensity to bully others. Thus, in the name of a compassionate faith, fanatics slaughter those who have done them no harm, and we race recklessly toward destruction. Religion doesn’t stop it, it merely finds ways to forgive sin. This explains part of my cynicism about that subject; I prefer prevention to forgiveness.

Which brings me to my conclusion. I make no claim to any special depth in these novels; they are entertainments that merely flirt with the deeper concepts that underlie our superficial reality. Just as the screen of the computer is a window to an aspect of its inner workings, so is the human eye a window to an aspect of mundane reality. Codings and buffers enable the computer to present portions of its content as if they were all of it, and if you don’t know how to use those controls, you will never see the rest. I see this as an analogy to the deeper nature of our existence. We see only the superficial aspects, the skin of a person, the paint on the wall, and extrapolate to perceive the larger situation. But even so, do we grasp it all? Or are there entire worlds that we can not perceive, alternate realities that are present but beyond our ken unless we learn the keys to their revelation? So far, this concept has been evoked mostly in science fiction and fantasy, but now science is approaching it, suspecting that we perceive only a tenth of the mass of the universe. What about the other nine-tenths? What is the key to its perception? Can science devise some magic spell to reveal it? Is the universe, seen and unseen, truly random, or is there some higher organization, some ethic superior to what we practice?

This leads us to considerations of God, which I shall define as the source of that higher organization. Some readers send me letters of proselytization, assuming that I have somehow lived my life without becoming aware of Jesus. I had a report that a fundamentalist school was banning my books on the grounds that I was a Satanist. (I wrote them a stiff letter,
reminding them that Jesus would not have lied like that. I am at this writing approaching my thirtieth anniversary of marriage to a minister’s daughter.) One reader wrote at length arguing that either Jesus was a stark, blithering lunatic who should have been put away, or he was correct when he claimed to be the son of God, with all that implies. No; this is a fallacy of limited thinking. The world is not black/white, it embraces all the shades of gray in between. Jesus did not have to be one or the other; he could have been a man who felt a strong need to reform the evils of the world, and whose parables were misunderstood by those who took them literally instead of grasping their messages. What mischief is wrought by those who take Jesus’ words in vain—without realizing it! Jesus claimed to be the son of God? Of course he was.
We are all children of God
.