Hope of Earth (80 page)

Flo looked at Minne. “What happened?”

“We can go home now. We can use brands from the fire to see our way.”

“But the men—the snipers—”

“Tell them what you saw, when you return to Dreams.”

“But I didn’t see anything! The men were there, then they weren’t.”

“Yes.”

“But what am I to make of that? They wouldn’t just go away on their own.” But she already had a notion. She had chosen a bright spot to sit, so that anyone firing a rifle would be able to see exactly who the four of them were, and where. So as not to shoot them by accident. She had been caught by surprise by the deadly silence of it.

Minne looked at her. The girl’s eyes reflected the fire eerily. “Remember the plague?”

“Yes, but—”

“It’s payback time,” Tourette said.

That was confirmation. It did make sense. The pacifists of Dreams had done the folk of Bones a significant favor, when a problem had come that the survivalists couldn’t handle. Dreams had not accepted payment. But there had been a debt. Now that debt had, been paid, in a way the pacifists could never acknowledge. Maybe they would elect simply not to question where the raiders had gone.

The two girls from Bones had distracted the raiders, including any nearby snipers, so that they would not be alert for the developing siege. So that they would not realize that the hunters had become the hunted. Until too late. They had deliberately risked getting raped, showing the kind of discipline for which they had been trained.

Probably the bodies would never be found. Trust the survivalists to know their business. If they could take out armed raiders one by one without a sound, they could surely handle the rest of it. And with luck, no other raiders would come, for they would have warning that this region was dangerous. Because of the surprising symbiosis of communities with fundamentally opposing philosophies.

“Apparently they just went away,” Flo said as they all picked brands from the fire. “That is all we need to know.”

Minne nodded. That was the proper answer.

T
HEORETICALLY, THE
A
UTHOR IS
G
OD
of his creation, having everything in his story exactly the way he wants it. But in practice it often works out otherwise. It wasn’t just complications of scheduling, which caused the writing of this novel to stretch out a year beyond my original completion date. It wasn’t the fact that I started it on the Sprint word processor in DOS, and finished it on Microsoft Word 7 in Windows 95, with aspects of my formatting changing accordingly. The material itself developed its own will. This volume has a number of examples. Like the preceding two volumes,
Isle of Woman
and
Shame of Man,
this one samples the whole of human history and geography, from
Australopithecus
of five million years ago to Modern mankind of the recent future. As with the prior volumes, I had a number of definite notions to explore. As before, much of the work of research was done by my researcher Alan Riggs, whose own first story was published in the interim in
Tales from the Great Turtle,
and with the help of the library of the University of South Florida, which freely lent us arcane references. But several of my favorites turned out quite differently than anticipated.

I worked out special character traits for each major character, especially their curses: Sam was afraid he would marry an ugly woman, Flo would lose what was most precious to her, Ned was doomed to be betrayed, Jes would be unmasked, Bry would have misfortune, and Lin would be disfigured. But it was hard to follow though; the story line preferred to follow its own complications. Oh, those curses did manifest, but after a time they faded out or were resolved. After that I focused more on the story lines rather than trying to hold my characters to particular molds. So you might say I stopped trying to be God, and yielded to the imperatives of the novel.

The names were a separate challenge. I needed to keep the names the same or very similar throughout the novel, so that readers would know the basic identities, but names that will do for a cave man andáis mate, such as Ugh and Oola, don’t work as well for contemporary times. In the first novel, I gave my main characters descriptive names, like Blaze and Ember, and stayed with them throughout. In the second novel, I started with simple sounds, like Hu and An, and embellished them as human society became more sophisticated. This time I used simple modern names, ignoring seeming anachronism. Of the three approaches, I think the first works best, so for the next novel I may try descriptive names again. I learn from each novel. The time passing for the main characters varies too. The first novel covered three generations, the second one generation, and this novel covered about half a generation. I think the second approach works best: one year between chapters. It gets complicated when several years pass in a single chapter, as is the case in
Chapters 10
and
15
, but I still had the other characters age only six months per chapter, overall. This is apart from the way the characters are illustrating global history spanning millions of years, and a simple fixed personal rate per chapter seems best.

Normally I try to space out the regions and times of the settings, so that the story Une constantly traverses the globe and doesn’t stay long in any particular time or place. But early man was mostly in Africa, so the first settings cluster there. This time the middle settings tended to cluster around Europe, and sometimes it was not possible to space them out without losing the variety of experience I was also trying for. For example,
Chapters 14
and
15
were both in western Asia, set only forty years apart. One related to the terrible bubonic plague, and the other to a special event in Mongol history; who would have thought they overlapped in space/time? But they did, so I played it through as it was.
Chapters 17
and
18
both occur in France, though almost 300 years apart; I wanted the minuet and the Maginot Line, and could not escape France, though I tried.

I was going to show how ancient the making of cloth must be. But there is no record of truly primitive cloth; I believe it existed, but without proof, my case is weak. So I had to hedge. However, after I completed the novel, evidence of 27,000 year old weaving at a site in the Czech Republic was published in
Discover
magazine, and its evident sophistication suggested that it had developed a long time before that. So I think my thesis is on the way to being documented. I was going to show my character Sam always doing construction, on roads, walls, buildings, fortifications, and the like, but so much of the novel is before any real building was done that I had to find other employments for him. By the time there was real building, the complications of scheduling other characters prevented me from having Sam as the protagonist. So while things did not fall apart, they did get somewhat muddled in terms of my original notions. I could manipulate history only so far, to fit the needs of my characters.

More and more evidence has been appearing to indicate that mankind came to the western hemisphere long before the traditional date of 12,000 years ago. In the prior novels, I deemed the evidence insufficient, but this time I scheduled a major chapter showing how it could have been. But after I wrote that chapter, more evidence appeared on the other side, invalidating some of my basis. The early stone arrow and spear points—that it was thought only man’s hand could have chipped—turn out to have been chipped by falling off a cliff onto a particular surface. The chipping may indeed date from 35,000 years ago, but required no hand of man. So were there really people in the Americas 33,000 years ago? There could have been, but I fear there were not.

For
Chapter 8
I had something really special in mind: the Sphinx. I got a video that indicated that the Sphinx in Egypt was actually far older than the pyramids. The reasoning was that the Sphinx showed patterns of weathering that had to have been caused by water erosion. How could that be, in the dry desert? Well, 10,000 years ago the Sahara was a good deal wetter than it is today; in fact there were several major rivers through it. So the Sphinx must have been made back then. The video was persuasive, so I had my researcher, Alan, view it. But he was a real spoilsport, unconvinced. He pointed out reasons that it wasn’t so. The problem with Alan is that he’s usually right; he has messed up any number of my bright notions, so that I have had to stick with reality. Since this series is history, not fantasy, regardless what the publisher may put on the cover, that’s just as well. So my setting of the carving of the Sphinx 10,000 years ago, with all that implied for the true nature of early Egyptian history, had to be ditched. Ned was going to be a designer, getting that great figure right. Wona was going to be attracted to him because of that importance. What was there left to write about, in that region then, with the Sphinx gone? Well, as it turned out, there were artistic works of mankind dating from the Sahara region at that time. So it was a much less dramatic setting, but historical, as it seems the early Sphinx was not.

Next the Ice Man, in
Chapter 9
. Ah, the Ice Man! I tracked him from his discovery in the mountain glacier, knowing I would write about him, waiting eagerly for the book about him to be published, reading articles about him. And he came through nicely. He was named Otzi in Europe, so I went along with that. Ongoing research required me to substantially revise the chapter, after the first draft; I was unable to have the story line I first tried, because it wouldn’t have made sense in terms of what was known of the times. Again, history was pushing me around. After I finished the revised story, more was discovered and published, starting to invalidate some of the bases of my setting. Too bad; I can’t endlessly rewrite as interpretations change. I worked from the best available evidence and theory at the time. Later indications suggest that he was not a mere shepherd, perhaps instead being a metal-smith, but the final verdict is not yet in. So did he have a nice daughter named Snow? Who can say? He was surely a family man of some kind, and could have been as I portray him. I couldn’t spare him his fate, but at least I could save his daughter.

In each of the GEODYSSEY novels I have tried to have significant chapters at the one-quarter, one-half, and three-quarter marks, with the major one in the center. Thus Catal Huyuk in the first one, one of the world’s earliest cities, likely origin of the later Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia. Thus the Philistines from the Greek culture in the second one, giving the primitive wandering Hebrews a hand up toward civilization and receiving no gratitude in return. And the Greeks themselves in this volume. I resisted getting into the standard classical cultures, because of my aversion to the ignorant standard view of civilization, wherein it starts with Egypt, flowers in Greece, and was spread by Rome and then lost before being revived by modern western Europe. What of Asia, Africa, early America? There was a hell of a lot more going on in the world than the standard texts knew of, and I have tried to show it in these volumes. But though classical history was by no means all there was, neither was it insignificant. So, reluctantly, I have come to it in this volume, and discovered lo! it is interesting too. But what dragged me into it was not my sense of fairness, but rather my fascination with the trireme or trieres, the triple-decker rowing ships. When I was in school, they didn’t know how these were managed. Now they have figured it out, though no actual vessel has been recovered. There were even four-and five-decker ships. So could a tomboy girl have found work on a trieres? Who can say she did not, in that position of pipeman, that required a sense of beat and music rather than heavy muscle? Especially when the ship is captained by Ittai, a good seafarer from the prior volume, and guarded by Kettle, a simple but honest former slave from the first volume? And so, from my childhood curiosity about a three-tiered ship came the longest story of the first three volumes, a 48,000 word short novel in itself, featuring travel, battle, conscience, work, plague, challenge, and love. I made my fortune on funny fantasy, but this historical adventure is closer to my heart. Even so, there was more to be known than I could compass. Everything from the nature of threshing grain to weaving tapestry. So I slid by some things without going into much detail, keeping the story moving. It is too easy to get lost in the marvelous detail, and lose the living animation of the cultures which is my main purpose. And naturally, after I had carefully structured and written the chapter, my researcher discovered that I had an error in the sequencing; the Spartan siege and the onset of the plague came not in the fall, as I originally had it, but in the spring. So I had to make significant adjustments, hoping that my narrative still made sense.

Chapter 11
, with Petra, I wanted to show in the prior volume. But I already had too many settings around the Mediterranean Sea, so substituted a Japanese setting. So Petra is in this volume—which is even more concentrated on the Eurasian theater. I had to juggle chapters to make it fit, even so, which made my ongoing family relations tricky. But what a grand vision Petra turned out to be, with its temples carved into the faces of cliffs. I couldn’t show all of them, because some had not yet been constructed at the time of this setting, but it was still impressive. I had expected it to follow the British Boudica, but the dates didn’t quite mesh. I had no idea that it would overlap the Biblical King Herod, or how intriguing that intrigue would be. The fact is, anywhere in history is fascinating; it has just to be sampled, and the glory and skullduggery appear. What a louse Herod is! He gets into the sack with his niece, and decides to kill his wife, not to mention that business with the plattered head of a critic named John, and execution by torture of a mystic named Jesus.