It will take a little while.  This is how it opens:

The White Lady of Christmas

It was snowing – thick, white, fluffy flakes – when I came across the beauty with empty eyes.

This was rare, because it didn’t normally snow in LA.  In fact the last large snow storm worthy of the name had been in 1949, almost a hundred years ago.

But then again, we were in the vicinity of the spaceport, and once the space magicians had started doing their thing in this neighborhood, the weather – and just about everything else – had gone to hell.  It was about as normal to wake up to a hundred degrees as to freezing weather on Christmas morning.  Or midsummer.

On the other hand, it made the neighborhood really cheap for a barely-surviving PI like me.  Lately frankly more attuned to the barely than the surviving.  The rent was late again, I hadn’t had a decent meal in three days, and the holes in my soles which I’d plugged up with cardboard were letting snow in to freeze and wet my shoes.  And there would be no jobs till after Christmas.

For some reason, cheating spouses, crooked business partners and evil warlocks might not take a break at Christmas, but those who wish to catch them seem to.  It’s as though for the duration of the season, people want to believe the best of everyone around them.  Which meant that people like me, who made a living off the worst in humanity starved.  I’d be going to the soup kitchen for Christmas dinner at this rate.

My mind was on my problems, my heart in the vicinity of the holes in my shoes, when I saw her.  She was tall and beautiful, like the lost dreams of youth, with pale blond hair, big blue eyes, and the kind of lips that made you think of frozen raspberries.

I thought I was hallucinating her, and stood, my eyes wide open, staring, as a man does who walked into a dream.  In this weather, she was wearing a form-fitting white dress of sparkling  white silk.  Snow flakes clustered in her pale hair.  Her eyes were thoroughly empty.

She stared at me without blinking, and then the frozen raspberry lips formed two words: help me!

I tried to say “with what?” but my throat was dry, and I couldn’t summon words.

She put her hand out and touched mine.  Her hand was ice cold. And then she was gone, walking very fast, past me, her heels clicking rhythmically on the pavement, somehow not at all muffled by the snow.

I’d seen those empty eyes before.  A PI comes across all sorts of things, but eventually we always come across necromancers.  My first case had been a necromancer who used the residents of entire cemeteries as workers in his factories.

For just a moment, under the unnatural snow, I considered running to St. Joe’s down the street.  I wasn’t very prone to religion, but there are things in this business that make even an atheist want to cross himself and bathe in holy water.

Worse, after the shock wore off, I realized that not only did I know what those empty eyes meant, I knew who that woman was.  Myrene Myrreile had smiled at me from a hundred movie screens, her expressive face reflecting whatever the movie plot called for.

The hair rose at the back of my head.  Someone in Hollywood was playing with necromancy.

 

I case you thought the post yesterday was somewhat scattered, that’s true.  I was starting to feel very weird, and I thought maybe I was tired.

Apparently my body decided this is a wonderful time to have the flu.  I’ve been up half an hour and had breakfast and I’m exhausted, so I’ll be going to bed again.

Hopefully I can get over it (relatively) quickly

Sorry.

So I’m reading a pretty good book about making covers.  His “how to pick an image for your cover” and “how to see what’s a good cover for your genre” are spot on.

A lot of his other advice on how to actually DO it seems to lead to the kind of bland, nothing-burger covers that sell pretty well for a certain type of thriller and contemporary mystery, but tend to not sell for beans in say science fiction or fantasy.  And, frankly, suck for romance.

On the whole, though, I think the book is valuable and I wish everyone who asks me to design a cover for them would read it, because honestly, first and foremost your cover needs to signal genre.  It’s even excusable for it to look cheesy or bland, but it has to be the right genre.  A cover that has a spaceship will always sell science fiction over a cover that has something gorgeous and unidentifiable.

Most of all, always, you must signal genre.

There are other interesting tidbits he gives, like the traditional publishers use the proportions of a 6×9 book not the Amazon-requested ones, and that gives a subconscious signal.  I haven’t tested if they’ll let me upload that (they might not) but I’m gonna try.

However halfway through he talked about how bad cultural stereotypes were on covers, like for instance, for Africa all we see is a red sunset and a bare tree, and how Africa has big cities and is as civilized as anywhere else.

Um…. yes.  Kind of.  Any continent where the main form of success is working for an NGO which pays way more than skilled technical professions is not a continent like anywhere else.  Civilized, of course.  In fact, dying of civilization and a peculiar idea of the world that they should help the continent to death.

And see, just above I made a generalization, as when you talk about an entire continent, you can’t concentrate on the little things.

In defense of the author of the book about cover design, he’s not stupid.  He also immediately said that the reason that the covers show a sunset and an acacia tree is because in the collective subconscious that signals “Africa” to people and that a book cover is not a place to educate people.

Of course he also thinks people can or SHOULD be educated about the nature of stereotypes, and the non-stereotypical stuff that lies behind it.

Sigh.  (Does sinal salute.)

Stereotypes are part of the human brain, and frankly one of the parts that saw us become masters of the globe, living in all kinds of environments.  You see, we are monkeys with an overgrown brain, but still monkeys.  Oh, pardon me, great apes (who declared us great, anyway?) have the capacity to notice a lot of things but only remember a limited number of them.

By and large what we remember are patterns.  And they probably allowed our ancestors to survive long enough to become human, and then to become successful human tribes.  Because a lot of the patterns will be things like “trying to hunt tiger ow ow crunch hurts, like Ogg.”  Or “Behind that bush hide “aaaaah! Hyenas!”  Or “If get away from band, lion crunch crunch maul and then Ogg only one leg which makes hunting hard.”

Remembering that type of pattern, particularly when it happens to other people, can save your life.  Of course it’s a stereotype.  Perhaps a tiger is hurt and old, and you could have killed him and have a nifty tunic.  Or perhaps tiger is friendly and you could have joined forces and been super-hunters.  but that’s not the way to bet.  The way to bet is crunch crunch, ouch, ouch, deathy death.

Stereotypes are the product of the same mechanism.  None of us has the time, the patience or the brain space to remember everything about everywhere in the globe, much less give it due consideration and note all the exceptions to the “run of the mill” thing.

Now, stereotypes are often insanely outdated, particularly when it comes to other countries from the US.  They are mostly acquired from movies, and Hollywood’s researchers are non-existent.  Nine times out of ten they have a vague idea that some country is “quaint” or “old fashioned.”  In the US they’re also often acquired from the last known relative or relative of a friend that emigrated from that place.  And this is how my host family ended up teaching me how to flush a toilet, because the grandmother who’d come from Portugal hadn’t ever seen a flush mechanism.

People don’t stop and think “Wait, that was a 100 years ago!” No, they file that under “this is how it is in distant place. And honestly, it doesn’t hurt anyone. I mean, I already knew how to flush a toilet, but it cost us all perhaps a minute of our time.  I wasn’t offended, because I knew where this was coming from.  No sane person should be offended of this sort of thing.

And besides, sometimes stereotypes are true.  At least the ones where you encounter the real thing on a regular basis have to be true, or you’d revise them.

My own stereotype of Africa had come from reading a lot of African exploration books.  Which meant I thought of Africa as huts and tribes.  And I wasn’t far off.  When I visited South Africa I passed a lot of tribal hut villages.  Of course, this was the eighties and they had satellite dishes, but they were still huts.

And while I’m quiet, non-demonstrative and honestly an introvert for the country I come from (the region I come from is more undemonstrative anyway, being English influenced, but I’m an introvert even for there) people who meet me still think I fit the stereotype of Latin female.

That’s fine.  If it becomes necessary for them to know me as an individual, they’ll learn differently.  But while dealing with me as part of a group, that’s enough for them to know, particularly if I’m in one of my occasional snits.

I mean, you could roam the globe “educating” everyone in the ways every stereotype is wrong, and itemizing all the little ways things are different from the picture in their heads.

In the end, all it would do is make people confused, tired of you, and annoyed.

In general, I have better things to spend time on than “educating” people.

In fact if you talk of “educating” other people, perhaps you should already educate yourself on how you’re not superior and we don’t want to hear it.

And if you persist, we’ll show you our middle fingers.  We have a full set.

 

 

 

HRC: Those Damn Emails by Amanda S. Green

Well, you knew it had to happen. Sooner or later in our conversation of HRC’s book,  What Happened, we would finally see what she really thought about the email controversy. By now, I doubt few expect an open and honest discussion of the email controversy. Trust me, if you were one of the cynics, you won’t be disappointed.

The entire chapter could be summed up this way: I didn’t do anything wrong. Others had used their personal devices before me. It’s Comey’s fault. It’s Bill’s fault for having his personal server and letting me use it. Trump’s evil. I didn’t know and no one would believe me. Sniffle.

But that would make for a terribly short blog post. So let’s dig a little deeper. Oh, look, HRC sets the tone of the chapter from the very first sentence or two:

Imagine you’re a kid sitting in history class thirty years from now learning about the 2016 presidential election, which brought to power the least experienced, least knowledgeable, least competent President our country has ever had. (pg 289)

My first thought reading this was why she specified history and not government class. But then her intent became very clear. She was priming the pump for the chapter, trying to show that no matter how bad her judgment might have been, no matter how badly she failed to understand what’s important to the American voters, Trump has to be worse. Note how she already claims, less than a year into his presidency, that Trump is the least competent president we’ve ever had. Of course, she doesn’t present any evidence to support her claim. She never does.

Something must have gone horribly wrong, you think. Then you hear that one issue dominated press coverage and public debate in that race more than any other. “Climate change?” you ask. “Health care?” “No,” your teacher responds. “Emails” . . . In fact, if you had turned on a network newscast in 2016, you were three times more likely to hear about those emails than about all the real issues combined. (pg 289)

A couple of observations here. She says that we were more likely to hear about the emails than the so-called “real” issues but notice she doesn’t say in what way we were hearing about them. She doesn’t discuss how MSM tried to bury the issue under the rug. But, more telling, is her complete lack of understanding about how important the issue was to the American people. It went beyond the fact she was foolish enough to use her personal email for official purposes. It went beyond the fact she tried for so long to sidestep the issue. It became a matter of trust, especially after she deleted thousands of emails before turning them over to the investigators.

As painful as it is to return to this maddening saga, it’s now more important than ever to try to understand how this issue ballooned into an election-tipping controversy. (pg. 291)

Uh, what? If that isn’t a loaded comment, I don’t know what is. Why is it “more important than ever” to figure out what happened? My stomach did a slow roll and I think I threw up in my mouth a little when the most obvious answer came to me. HRC still has plans for political office or appointment. Nope and nope and nope again.

Right off the bat, let me say again that, yes, the decision to use personal email instead of an official government account was mine and mine alone. I own that. I never meant to mislead anyone, never kept my email use a secret, and always took classified information seriously. (pf 291)

Wow, how magnanimous of her. And how much that one statement shows she doesn’t get why so many people looked hard at her email use. It wasn’t that she used her personal email – that was bad enough – but it was what she did later, when she was asked to turn over all her emails, that caused raised eyebrows and questions about what she might be trying to hide.

Now we get to the excuses – err, explanations. You knew they had to come. Be honest. You just knew it.

A lot of young people today are used to carrying around multiple devices and having both a personal phone and one provided by their work. But I’m not a digital native. . . I didn’t send a single email while I was in the White House as First Lady or during most of my first term in the U.S. Senate. I’ve never used a computer at home or at work. It wasn’t until about 2006 that I began sending and receiving emails on a BlackBerry phone (pg 292-293)

I had to finish laughing after reading that before I could make a few notes. Of course, she hadn’t sent emails as First Lady. She had a staff to do so for her. All she had to do was snap her fingers and say “do this!” and it got done. It also makes me pity whoever had to listen to her dictation and then type all of her books, not just this one. Either that or they had to decipher her handwriting. Oooh, I know, maybe HRC sat with her old Remington typewriter and typed away on it.

Of course, then the cynic in me shook loose and started asking questions like: why didn’t she use a computer at all? Was she trying to avoid leaving a digital trail for investigators to follow?

The excuses continued. She knew former Secretary of State Colin Powel had used his personal email while in office. So that meant it had to be all right, didn’t it? “I also knew that email wasn’t where the bulk of a Secretary’s work was done.” (pg 293)

Here’s one of the kickers, however. After several pages of seeing the sort of “unimportant” emails she sent, we get this from HRC:

As for record keeping, because the overwhelming number of people with whom I was exchanging work-related emails were government personnel with their “.gov” email addresses, I had every reason to think the messages I sent should have been captured by the government’s servers, archived, and made available for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. (pg 296)

Now it’s the government’s fault for not capturing her emails when she sent them to someone else. Of course, her own explanation shows the fallacy with her argument. She admits that not all of her emails went to people with a .gov address. So, how was she going to insure those emails were archived and made available for FOIA purposes? I know. She wasn’t. Not that it should surprise any of us. HRC is nothing if not the master of passing the blame to someone else.

She then goes on to bring Benghazi into the mix. I kid you not. The bitch dares use what happened to our people on HER watch to show how evil the rest of us, especially the Republicans on the Hill, were to keep pressing her for her emails. “Republicans turned the deaths of four brave Americans into a partisan farce.” (pp 297-298) Read that again and think about it. This is from the woman touting herself as the best person, most qualified person in the country to be president. Nope, nope and HELL NO.

She notes that when the Benghazi Committee sent a “blizzard of requests for documents” (pg 299), there were approximately 8 emails to or from her that were included in those turned over. “At the time, nobody raised any questions to me about why I was using a non-state.gov account.” (pg 299)

Duh. They weren’t worried about that at the time, Hills. They were worried about how our four brave men met their deaths and what role you and your office played in them. It’s called priorities, babe.

When State decided to “complete its record keeping” in 2014 and asked HRC, as well as the three previous Secretaries of State for any emails they might have kept that had to do with their job as Secretary, she then ran to her attorneys. What did she have to turn over and what could she delete? “So we checked to make sure we were following the rules, providing every relevant email I had, and deleted the personal ones.” (pg 300) Except she made the decision about what was relevant and what was personal. She didn’t consult with State. She didn’t consult with anyone else, except for her team. She made the decision and she still doesn’t understand why people have problems with that.

As an attorney, you’d think she’d understand. By making that determination herself, it was like telling a defendant in a fraud case to go through his records and delete anything that wasn’t related to the crimes with which he was charged. Even if the defendant only deleted personal emails, the shade of doubt has been planted. It’s the same with HRC, not that she will ever admit it or understand it.

There’s more, as you can imagine. Again, she throws the media under the bus for being more negative toward her than they were toward Trump. (pg 318) She really throws Comey under the bus for going public with his concerns about her and her emails. How dare he do so publicly?

In typical HRC fashion, she blames the emails – and Comey, and the media, and anyone else she can think of – for her loss. Not once does she show any sort of understanding about why the American voting public had concerns about her emails and the use of her personal email account. She thinks a simple, “I’m not a native technology user” should be enough to excuse her. Sorry, Hills, but nope. You had a responsibility to keep your emails secure, to make sure they were stored in such a way they could be preserved for FOIA purposes as well as for historical purposes. You had a responsibility of making sure your servers were secure. Most of all, you did not have the right to determine which of your emails to hand over when asked. There are ways to get clarification and you subverted each and every one of them.

Once again, we see HRC in full denial. More importantly, we get hints that she isn’t done yet. If that isn’t enough to keep you awake at night, I don’t know what is.

Next up is the Russia question. There will be one more post after that. Here’s your chance. What book would you like me to dissect next?

(You can find the other installments in this series at the following links: What Happened or How I Suffered for this Blog and had to Share, Grit and Gratitude, HRC Gets Caught Trying, A New Deal, A Square Deal or How She Wanted to be the Next Roosevelt, It’s All His Fault, Turning Mourning into a Movement, HRC: Idealism and Realism and HRC: Making History.)

[I know this is hard to watch, imagine what it must be like to read the book.  If you want to help finance Amanda’s liquor bill, use this address  Send the woman a drink-SAH]

 

 

I’ve always wondered about characters who readily take the call to adventure.  Why?  Because frankly, if you think you’re getting a call to destiny, you should slam the phone down.

The problem is that I come from a culture that absolutely believes in “destiny” and “fate.”  You’re born to be great, or born to be of no account, and not everything you do, not everything you try can avail you.

I think those who are told they have a great destiny — by reason of family, brains, or some early quality — are far more likely to be hurt by it.  Those of us of whom not that much was expected — we were expected to do well, but we had no great destiny — sometimes achieve something nonetheless.  But the ones who are told they’ll set the world on its ear have trouble with giving up early (and often.)

Then there is the whole matter of vocations.  I don’t want to believe in vocations.  I don’t want to believe you’re born to do something.  What it implies about the state of the world, how its run, and the state of free will itself scares me just a little.

And yet, I was born to write, and all the times I tried to walk away from it were attempts at self harm.  I hated myself because I couldn’t be perfect at it, and what’s the good of a vocation if you have to work to be good at it.

And yet it is.  It is what it is.  Maybe I’m just broken in the peculiar way that makes a writer.

I don’t know what to say about this, except that it ties in with my post at Mad Genius Club.

Contrary to fiction and legends, just because you fail, it doesn’t mean you can’t succeed in the end.  Just because you struggle, it doesn’t mean it’s not what you’re supposed to do, and just because you hit bottom, doesn’t mean you can’t rise.

And yes, I’m saying this to myself as well as to you guys.

In 2003 when I hit rock bottom on my career I was saved by that quote I put in the image above.  It was found, of all places, at a Jane Austen fan group.  And it gave me the impetus to work and get back in the game.

Do you have a great destiny?  I have no idea.  I’m not sure I believe in destiny.

Do you have a vocation?  Well, either you do or you don’t, but if you keep coming to the same thing and trying to make it work, either it’s your vocation or you’re nuts.  I’m okay with being nuts.  Quite likely, really.

You buy everything in this world, and the most important things aren’t bought with money.  They’re bought with persistence, courage, work, and sometimes something else, something that just refuses to give up.

There is a passage in Don Camillo that goes something like “Smilzo made a final effort, spit out a piece of his lung, but he did make the goal.”

Sometimes that’s what it feels like.  You’re shedding bits of yourself and hurting like hell, but you push through, and you can even get there.

Oh maybe not where you intended to, but to a place you can live with.

Everyone is going to meet contretemps, set backs and, in my case, the constant sabotage of my goals by my own body.  But you keep going — not in the Hillary “do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result” way — but in a sane, reevaluate, recast, reaim and try again way.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well.  Or at least managing to do well, eventually.

And sometimes hitting the bottom is just the preparation to rise.

*I recently came across this, and it’s amazing how prescient it was, all those years ago.-SAH*

What is Mine I Keep – A Blast from the Past from May 2, 2012

In Terry Pratchett’s books, Lady Sybil Ramkin Vimes’ family motto is “What is ours, we keep.”

I’m sure it started out the way most things in Pratchett’s books started out.  The Ramkins are an old family, who intimidated their way everywhere and who conquered a lot of places and took a lot of wealth.  At least that has been the view of them throughout most of the books.  Sybil herself is a good egg, devoted to saving dragons, but the Ramkins are, by and large, one of the rapacious noble clans.

And then in the last book, something happened.  The “What is mine I keep” was turned on its head, in a way, which brought me to the realization that property, hereditary or not, is a double edged sword.  As is ownership: of things, of self, of talents, of career, of EVERYTHING.

Two things.  This is not a political article – mostly – but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that yesterday was Victims of Communism Day.  Or that if you haven’t read The Black Book of Communism, you should.

The second thing I’d like to mention that I sort of already knew all this, instinctively and through my toenails, as I seem to know most of this stuff.  I just didn’t put it together in moral terms, till recently.

I grew up in the seventies and eighties with the communists and assorted stripes of collectivist taking the moral high ground.  After all, the rest of us were for things being unfair.  We wanted some people to have more stuff than others.  And even if people got there naturally, well, it was wrong, because not everyone has the same capabilities.  Even if you got what you have by chiseling stuff off the rock, with your bare hands, well, not everyone has the same tough hands you have, you know, and why aren’t you more compassionate?

Even people who were strong anti-communists – and paid for it in career – seemed to bow to the communists and take a sort of moral back seat to them, and say “I know they mean well, it just doesn’t work.”  This still goes on.  In a lecture, yesterday, my kid was shown anti-communist films from the seventies, and his classmates laughed, because, you know, communists aren’t evil.  They’re well intentioned, after all.  (Read the Black Book Of Communism.  DO.)

I said this is not a political column.  It’s not.  At the same time this stuff is so ingrained and has become such part of our society that it’s hard to get at the basis of morality and – eventuality – the basis of managing a writing career, without going through it.

For instance, the idea of “equality” we have is mostly Marxist.  The equality before US law is not an equality of results.  But we assume that equality of results is desired.  We assume that if someone has more than others, this was somehow acquired by immoral means.  We talk about “Giving more to the community” and “Having more than our fair share.”  All of it is nonsense in real world terms.  It can only be talked about in terms that concede that Marxism is moral.

Part of this is because Marxism slots, perhaps fatally, with a part of the monkey brain.  In a small hominid band, if someone is taking more food than the others, he IS hogging it; he is greedy; and he is stealing from others.

In our society in which “resources” are what you make of them… not so much.  In our society where what you create is what matters for life, not so much.  In the chaotic system of a global economy, not so much.

And we come back to “what is mine, I keep.”

Look, I know some people are born with more than others.  They’re born with more talent, more intelligence, more ability, more tenacity.  Some are born with more things, too, but that’s nowhere as important in the long run.  However, some people are born with more than others.  Most of us realize that round about kindergarten.  It is immediately followed by ourselves or others realizing “it isn’t fair.”

“Fair” works in kindergarten, which is much like a small hominid band.  (Or a band of small hominids.  Eh.)  There are limited resources, and if you take too many graham crackers you are being greedy and your crackers will be redistributed.  This works, because the teacher, who is in charge of the class, makes you do it.

There is no teacher in charge of life.  I know, I know, but it’s true.  NO TEACHER.  This being the case, there is no “fairness” in life.  There is no “honor” in life.  There is no “equality” in life.

Heinlein and Shakespeare have both been there before me, but the truth is you could take all of reality and distill it down to the last atom.  And you’d not find an ounce of fairness.  Not an atom of justice.  Not a hint of equality.

These qualities exist only in the mind of man.

Does that mean then that there is no morality?  That the life of man devolves to nature, red in tooth and claw?  How can I claim that’s good?

I don’t.  There is morality.  Morality starts with the individual.  Over time we’ve found that the only thing that distinguishes us from animals is to devise ways of getting along – ways of jostling together – and we’ve discovered – sometimes against our best instincts – that some ways of living together are better than the others.  Those societies where it doesn’t start with the individual always end the same way, whether you call them absolute monarchy, communism or enlightened oligopoly.  Always.  It’s always the mass graves and the small group of rulers, who preside over an increasingly more impoverished society.  It’s always the famines and the purges.  And I’ll explain why, in a moment.

So we start with the individual and with “What is mine, I keep.”  This means each individual has a right to self defense, to begin with.  And if you say no one is disputing anyone’s right to self defense, you are wrong.  It starts in kindergarten, where these days “fighting” is punished equally, whether you are the aggressor, or not, because “violence never solved anything.”  (All of these teachers are hanging hopefully on the line, to confirm that with the City Fathers of Carthage.)  It goes on to people being charged with using “excessive force” to defend themselves from attack or home invasion.

Not being allowed to defend yourself, means you can’t KEEP what is yours.  Keep both in the sense of own and control.  Which immediately makes you a possession of those in authority to defend you.  And on the other side of that – and not as far as you’d expect – there’s the mass graves.  Because, well, if they can choose to defend you or not, then they can also remove you if you become inconvenient to the “common good” which always has to be judged by someone, after all (remember, life has no teacher overseeing it) and is always judged by those with the capacity to exert force.

Once you grant an individual the right to self-ownership, you can’t go about saying he has to give back to the community, though, or that what he’s doing isn’t fair.  Unless he’s actually actively impairing others’ rights to self-ownership and exertion of their talents (the reason government is a necessary evil) he should be allowed to own himself to the final extent of the law.

What is mine, I keep.  That means I use or not, protect or not, increase or waste.  It is mine.  My body, my talents, my effort, my responsibility, my stuff, and the more tenuous web of feelings granted to me by others and by me to them: my friends, my kids, my husband.  And then the stuff that falls under honor-and-credit.  What others know about me, based on accumulated behavior: my career.  My reputation.  My trustworthiness.  They’re all mine.

What is mine, I keep.  This is what is known as being a free man.

It is also a crushing responsibility.  You have the right to squander everything that is yours, to the last penny, the last ounce of strength.  It’s your choice.  You use your mind to do it.

What does society owe you then?  Nothing.  Am I saying you should be cast out into outer darkness, where there’s crying and gnashing of teeth?  No.  I’m saying that if you husbanded what is yours, even if you’re broke – I’ve been dead broke three times in my life.  I mean DEAD broke, considering soup kitchen as only way to a meal that day broke – and even if in ultimate analysis it’s not really your fault, you will have an immaterial safety net.  Honor and credit.  Friends.  A community that will come through for you.

But that would be shameful, you say.  Society shouldn’t make you feel ashamed.

Why not?  What business is it of society whether you came to this legitimately or not?  Whose job is it to judge? Who is supposed to make it “fair”?  Do you know every one from whom money will be taken by force (taxes are always enforced by physical force) to help you?  Do you know they’re not as needy as you are?  Or that this taking won’t make them spiral into a situation like yours?  HOW do you know?  WHO are you making into your judge, your “teacher”?  And if you don’t know them personally, if they’re not part of “what is yours” why would you do that?  You’re making yourself property, a chattel.  Even if you think you’ll gain by it, you’re surrendering the right of self-ownership.  And that, in my view, should make you feel more ashamed.

It’s very scary to keep what’s yours. You could lose it all.  It’s also very freeing.  You don’t grant anyone the right to take it from you – or to take you from you.

For years now, writers have been living in a kindergarten class.  Teacher decided on the value of our work.  Teacher decided what was right and what was wrong, what was “worthy of being read” and pushed and promoted, and what was “hack work, not to be published, or to be buried deep in the never-upturned midlist.”

Turns out teacher was wrong, and has squandered most of their credit, their honor, and their money too.  And the new kid in town – ebooks, though mostly Amazon just now – has taken their power and their control, not yet to the same extent, but close to the way they took writers.

And now they’re crying, and it’s not fair, and they want teacher to make it fair.  They’re playing with fire.  A government that can favor them can also shut them up.  But they don’t care.  They want it “fair.”  And they want to make sure only the “worthy” books get read.

Any author who isn’t at least experimenting with indie is a born slave.  I love my one remaining traditional publishing house and have (I think.  I don’t know if she’d agree, but I hope so) a good relationship with the publisher.  BUT it still behooves me to have alternate career paths, to have other ways of getting my words before the public and – bluntly – other ways of making money.

Why?  Because what is mine, I keep.  My talent, my ability, my work, my CONTROL.  What is mine, I keep.  I can destroy it or increase it.  It’s my right.  I’m a free woman.  I grant no one the right to control me, or keep me, or impair me.

(Holds up both middle fingers to every one who thinks that publishing “needs” those who know better to look after it.)  There is no such thing with fairness.  There’s only this:

What is mine, I keep.

Someone once said that we could sweep away all the self help groups: Adult children of alcoholics; adult children of drug abusers; adult children of mentally ill parents, etc, and replace them with a single term “Adult children.”

He was wrong.  Growing up (or living) in an abusive environment does many things, but none of them is make you an adult.  At least not a “fully functional/operational adult.”

It can give you the marks of adulthood.  Most children who grew up in abusive situations, ranging from casual abuse in that you and your needs weren’t important to your parents, to actual physical abuse aren’t adults.  Sometimes they aren’t adults as adults.  This is because they have trouble individuating and separating themselves from how others perceive them.  When it’s a matter of survival being aware of your parents’ moods, you’re likely to always want to be in the “right” with people around you, in your group, in your work place, in your church, in your family.  You live in function of how others are going to react.

You can appear very mature from the outside, because the spontaneity of childhood is mostly gone.  You’re always calculating for effect.  And in a family where everyone is slightly (or very) off kilter, this can give the impression you’re “the adult.”

You also acquire habits of always blaming yourself when everything goes wrong, of trying to take care of everyone around you, and blaming yourself when something goes wrong with them, of accepting abuse (of the same type you endured, for which case it is worse to be used to getting “hind teat” and “blamed for everything” than to be sexually abused. Though one wonders how many of the Hollywood victims of Weinstein were used to sexual abuse growing up) from your employers and colleagues.

This is not true confessions, and my own personal childhood has bloody nothing to do with it, except to say my relationship with my mother is peculiar.  Yes, I’m sure she loves me — though I only realized it at 16 when I fell in the bathroom and lost consciousness, and woke up to her crying and begging me not to die — more so now, as an adult.  But the fact that I didn’t realize it and the fact that she still (guys, I’m 55) thinks I can’t possibly be able to look after a family/etc. is indicative of some of our problems.

Having seen this from the other side, and not going into other issues, I think part of the problem is that mom’s childhood truly stank on ice, particularly in terms of family relationships, and therefore she tried to “protect me”.  Some of the “protecting” though took the form of — since I had it so much better than her — making sure I was “motivated.”  This meant in practice that I could never do anything right.  EVER.  (The fact I was competing with a brother who was ten years older and had an eidetic memory didn’t help in this.)

The other part of our relationship is that I was severely premature and very sickly.  I once read an article (pre-internet, so I can’t find it) that explained that mothers of premature babies often have lousy relationships with their kids, more so if the kid is the second or third, and the first one or two (or more) were normal.

Subconsciously (these things never rise to the conscious level, and I wonder if it’s part of the same reaction that makes cats kill or abandon kittens who are defective or ill) you are disappointed in your baby.  They can do less, they are weaker, as they grow up they’ll have coordination issues (in spades in my case) and are generally odd and stick out.

The fact the doctor with, I’m sure, best intentions in the world, told my parents, hours after I was born, that I’d probably be mentally slow/damaged because of being so premature didn’t help.  Also, I don’t know if it’s true.  I know that until I got accepted into college, my parents’ explanation for my academic achievements was that “Someone made a mistake.”  (Note here that I also get this having seen it from the other side.  If younger son hadn’t been tested and if they didn’t tell us he has the highest IQ in the family, things he does with … oh, laundry…. would lead me to believe he’s not very bright.)

In fact a lot of us “Odds” get this reaction and have weird relationships with our parents.  Particularly if the parents aren’t odds themselves, or if the parents have suppressed their Odd side so far back they don’t remember. We just don’t do what they expect, aren’t what they expect, and they don’t know how to love us.

I think there is a good dose of that in my relationship with my mom because of two things: first, her battle cry when my brother and I were discussing a book or movie, or having a multi-quote “conversation” or taking prizes in things she didn’t get was “I wish I had normal children.”  She once came home from shopping, and she’d met an elementary school friend whose kids, our ages, were a mechanic and a seamstress.  My brother was at the time working as an engineer, and I was in college — rare and something to aspire to in Portugal those days, as college was strictly on grades and there were no private colleges — and she looked at both of us and informed us she wanted “normal children” and “children whose goals I can understand.”  (Note that she herself pushed us to achieve and get into college.  These things aren’t always straight forward.)
Second, I once heard her complain to a friend that I had such crazy notions of the world, and she didn’t know how I would survive.
Note she was right.  I did have crazy notions of the world, including for a while that we could abolish money.  But none of it had anything to do with how I actually lived in the day to day, and none of it was UNUSUAL for an Odd child my age.

Note I’m not complaining about my upbringing.  Mom did the best she could with what she had to hand, and it’s not for me to stand judgement over her.  I wasn’t a wanted child (I think I’ve mentioned that before) and I am proof that unwanted children can grow up to be happy and for that matter to be loved by the parent who initially didn’t want them.  She certainly spent years of her life trying to push and pull me through severe illness, when just a bit of neglect would have had me die.

Anyway, that’s enough about me, because this is not the point of this. The point of this is that I could have been defined as and often functioned as an “adult child” managing mom’s moods and her reactions to me to the best of my ability — hell, for years after I’d moved away and was a married woman.  I think it took me ten years to stop taking mom’s opinion into account when I dressed myself in the morning, and being afraid she’d have disapproved.

The funny thing is that in the family, they often told me I was emotionally immature.  They were right, of course, but probably not the way they meant.  In public, however, I was considered way too mature for my age, and told things like “you’re an old soul”.  Also that I overthought things, but never mind.

The point is that I’m 55 and I’ve only recently come across the scars and become aware of them.

Because psychological scars aren’t the same as physical scars, and you don’t necessarily know they’re there.  And people who see you might THINK there’s something odd, but not what it is, necessarily.

I’ve come to notice my scars by seeing them in other people in whom they’re way more obvious and who sometimes engage in outright suicidal behaviors because of them.

EVERYONE is scarred by their upbringing.  This is part of being human.  It’s the size of the scars and how non-functional the behaviors are that make a difference.

And you might not even notice them, because in the space behind your eyes that’s “normal life.”

That whole failing to separate thing?

Dan and I take in strays.  We’ll probably always take in strays.  BUT the hyper-responsible causes us to continue feeling responsible/trying to help long after it’s started to hurt us physically/emotionally/financially and long after it’s become obvious that we’re not doing good and are on the contrary creating learned helplessness.

And I realized recently my entire relationship with publishers/employers mimics my relationship with my mom.  Hell, for a long time, until Dan so did my romantic relationships.

At some level, I was aware that I was sickly and a lot of trouble, and that she had better things to do, so I tried to keep quiet, not obtrude.  Yeah, I’m sure I was still tons of trouble, because sickly, but the thing is that I somehow internalized that I didn’t have a right to be sick or take up her time.  Which is part of the reason I tend to ignore it when I’m sick until I land in emergency, and why I try not to bother employers or publishers.

In this if nothing else, I’m not just the prototypical female employee, but female employee with an additional jet pack for extra timidity and helplessness.

This feeling of “And I’m lucky to get hind teat” means I’ll get sick with stress but not demand clarification or payment or–  Because I’m afraid it will be worse for me if I do.  They’ll notice how much trouble I am and just drop me, say.

This has been, possibly, the worst thing for my career.  In any artistic field, if you act like a field mouse, they’ll assume you’re not very good.  You have to sell yourself to publishers, before you sell to the public.  I tended to count only on my skills, and when those didn’t get appreciated, I tried not to make noise.

To make things worse, when my stress ratchets up, the autoimmune kicks in.  And since keeping quiet while I feel ignored/undervalued is inherently stressful, I get sick… a lot.  Or I enter six-month long depressions

Yeah, I only realized that in a sense I look for/mold the relationships into this, because that’s what’s familiar and comfortable.  Oh, not comfortable, but known.

In the grocery store, they have a product called Scar Fade for physical scars.

I’m trying my darndest to do that with psychological scars. But it’s not easy.  Most of the time, as I said, you don’t see them.

So am I going to strut out and be super aggressive and self selling?  Ah!  I still feel guilty when I say things like “self care” because it seems to selfish.

But if you find you’re seeing some scars in yourself, I found this helps, a little:

1- Remember you’re not perfect.  No one expects you to be perfect and you can’t be perfect.  Even your parents/whoever didn’t expect you to be perfect.  You just got this idea because you were young and didn’t understand what was going on.

2- When you fail/do something wrong, from the big to small, forgive yourself.  Don’t dwell on it, just try again.

3- You’re not responsible for the actions of others.  No, not even if they tell you that you are.  Even if you enabled someone’s learned helplessness, if that person is/was an adult, they made the decision to let you do that.  Not your fault.  “Look what you made me do” is not a defense.  And it’s not your fault.  Others have agency.  Let them have it.  Let it go.

4- Identify your bad patterns, such as drifting to abusive relationships/work situations and consciously try to avoid them. This sometimes means doing the opposite of what you “feel” you should.  That’s fine. Weird and scary as h*ll but fine.

5- Value and take care of yourself.  No, I don’t mean become a self-centered *ss, but be aware of when what you’re giving is so far that it’s damaging you.  Stop it.  Moderate it.  Find another way.

6- Complain.  Yes, it’s entirely possible your employer values you so little, particularly because of the image you’ve projected, and particularly if you’re a writer in the current stressful environment for publishing, that they just let you go. So? Find another way.  You don’t deserve hind teat.  No one does.

There are other things, I’m sure, things I’ll need to learn.

What seems normal to you in the space behind the eyes isn’t.  What you do for the best is sometimes the worst thing you can do.  This is true for others too.  Understand them, forgive them and move on.

In this space between ape and angel, sometimes all you can do is try.

Blog Theme explanation:

Yesterday I tried a new theme on the blog.  It probably won’t stay, simply because it hides a ton of things, including the other pages and stuff like the donate button and the zazzle store.  So, yeah, no.
I’ll reinstall the former one today while the search continues.
I’d like something that makes it easier to display my books, etc, but this is not it.  Sorry.  OTOH in case you missed it, for about an hour, yesterday, I had carrots as a header.

Sunday Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: aftermath

*Yes, some of you have read this in War and Other Punchlines.  It’s also in a collection.  However, I thought the rest of you might enjoy it.  Yes, Dark Fate should be done, but I have a million business things to catch up on and my brain is trying to engage with fiction and failing.  I’m sorry.  I’ll try to be better.  For now, free short story.  And yes, it’s crazy, but well… never mind.*

Who Goes Boing?

 

It was raining and the LT was grumbling.  As the seven of us moved around, setting up the tents and securing the perimeter with breach detectors, he set his back pack down and looked around at the desolate area of peaks and rock spheres as far as the eye could see and muttered a long complaint from which the words “nerd army” and “I must have been crazy” emerged.

I traded a look with Sargent Miller as he came over to help me affix the breach detector to a rock spire nearby. Sarge’s eyes wrinkled a bit at the corner, but he didn’t say anything, but “Having trouble with that, Bronk?”

I nodded.  Technically my name and designation is Specialist First Class (Xenobiology) Bronkowsky of the Earth Exploration Corps.  But just about everyone called me Bronk, and from the Sarge that was almost a compliment.

He was a hard-worn man of about fifty and he’d done countless drops.  The people he’d lead on their first exploration-drop now occupied positions everywhere, at every level, from Cabinet positions in several worlds, down to big names in research and science.  But he’d chosen to stay out here, leading parties through space gates onto newly discovered planets.  For the fun of it, I suspected.  Though of course the bounty for clearing a new planet was fabulous and he was probably by now a many times multi-billionaire.

You wouldn’t know it, as he fumbled at the sensor with clumsy-looking fingers, until he got the nanites embedded at the back of it to do whatever they needed to do to stick to the rock spire.  “Well, you know,” he said, speaking in a very low voice, and with every appearance of giving me some instruction about the apparatus supposed to detect any sort of intrusion – electromagnetic, infrared or biological – into our perimeter.  “The LT transferred from what it pleases him to call the real army.  He might be consorting with us, but he will always think he’s better than us.  He doesn’t even think our ranks are real.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.  “But the thing is, that I don’t know why he transferred, if he thinks we’re all so weird.”

“Yeah, but the real army, as he calls it, the people who come after us to make sure the world is safe for colonists, don’t get paid a tenth of what we do.”

I nodded, and moved off to set up another perimeter sensor.  I knew that.  We all knew that.  I’d always assumed it was because the EEC, or as they called us, the Nerd army required a heck of a lot more of education.  All of us had at least graduate-level training in our disciplines by the time we joined, and to that more was added during EEC induction.  There were few people out in the civilian population as trained as we were.

Had to be.  We were the first people through to a new location.  All that had been in this planet, once we’d first been able to open a  gateway to it were automated probes.  And automated probes didn’t get everything.  Or even most of it.  There had been that sentient planet, in the Hesperides which had not reacted at all to the probes, but had killed every man jack of the first three landing parties, before someone figured out what was wrong and closed that gateway for good.

And then there were the risks which awaited parties landing on planets with species that might be sentient, but which had no concept of machines, and thereby had left the first probes alone.

When I’d been a kid, back in Arrois, my dad said that even in our planet, so seemingly peaceful as it was, the first five exploration groups had been killed because of a microbe that could infect humans – a rare occurrence – and which drove them mad.

This is why before the EEC was the Nerd Corps, the popular name for us had been the half hour men.  Because that’s how long you could expect to live in any given planet.

The instruments had gotten better, though, and we’d gotten better as well.  Our training now allowed many of us to survive to ripe old age.  The others–  Well, colonists would find it odd if they came through a newly opened planet and didn’t find half a dozen of graves marked with name, rank and the symbol of the EEC.  There was a reason we carried markers in our basic kit.

When I finished setting the perimeter and came back, the LT seemed to be in a better mood.  Or at least Sarge was telling him “Yes, sir” a lot which usually put him in a better mood.

On my way to help the other four members of the party — Jackel, specialist in geology; Tadd, engineering; Gack in electromagnetics; and Lablue in Atmospheric science – prepare dinner, I heard the LT say something about not being a scientist and not knowing what to do with a passel of geniuses.

These were complaints I knew from our former two drops, and I suspected they were bad as all get out for morale, except that they weren’t because none of us paid him much attention.  We went around and did out thing and reported to Sarge, and he made it all palatable for the LT, which is what I suspect made the LT crazy.  Crazier.  Whatever.

The guys and I had been working together since basic orientation, and we started warming up the food packs, in silence, and with no more than the occasional glance around.  In no time at all we were settled down and eating from our ration bowls, when there was—

I can’t describe it, but it was a sound sort of behind and above me.  Only it wasn’t a sound, so much.  It was like the sensation you’d expect the sound “boing” to cause if it were a feeling up the back of your neck.

At the same time, Gack tried to jump up and backwards, only he forgot to get up first and got soup all over his pants.  And he didn’t even look at his pants, nor around him, but stood there, frowning behind me.

I turned around but could see nothing where he was looking, save a barren expanse of rock and spires between sheets of falling rain.

“Gack?” Sarge said.  “What happened?”

Gack was one of those enormous men that people tend to think grow in high grav environments.  This isn’t true.  He was actually from the same region I came from, an agricultural planet in Andromeda.  But he was square built and square-jawed, six feet seven with a growth of beard that resisted his twice-a-day shaving.  It went oddly with his wide-open eyes, and the hand he lifted to cover his mouth.  “I—“  He said.  Then stopped.  He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, as though he were trying to gain time.  Then he took a deep breath.  “I saw a rabbit.”

Sarge looked at me.  I was the xenobiology expert, which in practical fact meant that I was the expert in anything biological, from the life forms on this planet to medic duties to my own unit.  I had studied the reports sent by all the probes that had examined this world for years before we were allowed through.  “There aren’t any life forms we’d classify as animals,” I said, slowly.  “Or at least none our probes reported.  The most advanced life form is a kind of mold spore.  Of course—” I paused.  “That is also the technical classification of the sheep in Proxima Centauri, the ones popularly known as Vegetable Lamb.”

Sarge shrugged.  “So, that means it could be a small pseudo-animal that looks like an Earth Rabbit, I supp—”

“No,” Gack said.  “No, Sarge, you don’t understand.  This wasn’t a normal rabbit.  It was… It went on two feet, and it had… it looked humanoid, but with really long ears, and huge eyes.  It was odd.”

“Um…” the LT said.  “You saw an awful lot in that glimpse.”

“I—It was just an impression,” he said.

“It could be an hallucination, caused by some undetected compound in the air,” I said.  And I dove into the tent for the medical kit.  But the med tech we had didn’t show Gack as suffering from any poisoning or any other undue influence.

We went to bed that night feeling restless and, in my case, worried.  I’d known Gack a long time.  It just wasn’t like him to freak out at some nonsensical glimpse of an impossible creature.  And what he’d seen was impossible.

I woke up in the middle of the night with another impression of having heard a sound.  The sound was “paff” as best I can transcribe it.  And there was an idea that there had been a scream of some sort just after it.

There is no duty to get up and check on things in the middle of the night, unless one of the perimeter alarms has gone or the officers give orders.  But in the Nerd Corps, you don’t wait for those.  Not if you want to live.

I got up. There was no sound around me, except the pattering of the steady, whispering rain on the tent roof.  I couldn’t even hear any noise from my squad mates.  Which was fine, since we had individual tents, and they weren’t that close.

My exercise fatigues, which I wore as pajamas on these missions, were not water proof, so I pulled on the regulation rain poncho before stepping out to check the perimeter units.

While I was looking at the last one – showing nothing had breached our perimeter line – I heard steps behind me, and turned to see Gack, also awake, and also wearing a rain poncho.  He was walking with a sort of exaggerated, comedic stealth, which surprised me, because Gack was known for many things, but none of them was physical comedy.

I said, “You heard it too?”

“What?” he asked, stopping.

“You heard the sound of something falling?” I asked.  “And the scream?”

His eyes shot out.  What I mean by this is that his eyes came out of his head, straight at me, then sagged onto his face, suspended from springs.  He put them back in, matter of fact, and said, “Uh, no.”

I was trying to tell myself I hadn’t seen what I’d thought I’d seen.  But there are things that you can’t deny.  And if I’d gone around the bend, it still wouldn’t run to seeing people’s eyes pop out on springs.  I kept my face as absolutely neutral as I could, and nodded, “Okay,” I said, but walked sideways towards Gack’s tent, and drummed my fingers on the outside of it.  When no one answered, I stooped momentarily to unfasten the magnetic closure in the front.

The tent was… covered in blood.  And in the middle of it all was an anvil, huge and improbable.  An antique anvil, of the sort that people had used to beat metal on.  The kind of thing you only saw in museums.

I jumped sideways at a whistle above me, and jumped out of the way, just as a big square thing fell where I’d been seconds before.  I turned around to see Gack – or whatever it was that looked like Gack – hop towards me at crazed speed.

I did what any man would do.  I screamed and ran.  Right into the LT who had got out of his tent.  I have no idea what I told him, but it probably didn’t matter, as he took a look at Gack, then jumped out of the way in his turn, pulling me along as yet another square thing fell where we’d been.

By now the camp was bedlam, with everyone running around in a state of undress, and pseudo-Gack hopping around and, somehow, perhaps causing heavy objects to appear.

LaBlue, finally, had the presence of mind to shoot at pseudo-Gack.  There was a sound like “phlui” as the energy weapon hit Gack, and there was a feeling like an implosion, as Gack disappeared and air rushed in to fill the place he’d been.

It was a while before anyone spoke, and then it was Sarge, who said, “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “But it wasn’t Gack.  Gack is dead.  In his tent.”

The funny thing is that the anvil I’d seen in the tent was no longer there, only Gack pate all over the inside surfaces.  The other things that had fallen, mostly square boxes, were also not there anymore.  The LT said they were safes, things used to keep documentation and valuables in the pre-space days.  But none of us had any idea why the pseudo-Gack had dropped them everywhere, or even if he had or if they were just an associated phenomenon to whatever had killed Gack and taken his form.

Still, in moments like this, it was good to have protocol to fall back upon.  Gack had to be buried on this planet, and his grave appropriately marked. We decided to strike the tent and bury the whole thing, and did just that, digging a deep grave in an area just at the edge of the camp.  Everyone had gone around and checked the perimeter and verified that neither biological nor electromagnetic violation had occurred, so we were all jumpy and looking at each other.  And I, particularly, was alert to the sound of something that wasn’t quite heard with the ears.  Something like boing or paff felt at the back of the neck.

For a moment, as we were digging soggy reddish dirt back in atop the tent that contained the mortal remains of Gack, I thought I heard-felt that boing, but nothing strange happened.

Until we were setting the marker to show Gack’s universal birth and death date, that is.  That was when the LT gave Sarge a cigar.  This in itself was weird enough, because smoking was not just a rare enough thing, but a very expensive habit.  There were some planets where it might be more common, like the place in Andromeda where they grew tobacco.  But to carry one to Earth quarters and bring it on an expedition was unlikely, since if you had a cigar you could sell it for a lot of money on Earth.

Sarge seemed to sense the strangeness of it, and stood there, holding the cigar in between his fingers, until the LT snapped, gave an odd little laugh, took the cigar from Sarge’s hand, jammed it in Sarge’s mouth, brought out a little stick, aflame, and set fire to the end of the cigar.  At which point the cigar exploded, blackening Sarge’s face.

It took a moment, and I might have been the first to react.  I ran to where I’d last seen the LT before this, and found him behind a spear of rock.  He had been crushed by what looked like an antique musical instrument, the kind you still see on Earth sometimes, called a Grand Piano.

Four of us shot the LT at the same time.  Or rather we shot the creature who was hoping around our camp, looking but not moving like the LT.  This time it had no effect.  Or rather, for a moment, it created a hole in the middle of its chest, but then it looked at it and said “uh oh” and the hole healed.

LaBlue who was nearer hit the pseudo-LT on the head with his pack, the one he’d carried on his back here, and which contained his folded tent and all his gear.

The pseudo-LT folded down like an accordion, and ran.  He ran right off the perimeter, and disappeared.

Leaving us all breathing hard, scared, and not at all sure what we were facing.  Sarge organized those of us who remained.  He detailed Jackel and Tadd to dig the LT’s grave and move the body – easier since the piano had of course disappeared – and he and I and LaBlue went around the perimeter, checking all the readings.

“How is it possible,” LaBlue said.  “For whatever it is to get past our perimeter without setting off the alarms.”

I was biting the inside of my lip to keep from screaming in frustration at the events, but I’d been thinking about it since Gack had bought it.  “All the life forms we’ve found have been either energy or flesh,” I said.  “Well, except those bio forms that are plants, including ambulatory ones, but for the purpose of this discussion, we’ll call them flesh.  But that doesn’t preclude life forms made of something else.”

“What else could it be?” LaBlue asked.  “What other than energy or biological beings.”

“Minerals, I suppose?” Sarge asked.

LaBlue shook his head.  “Nah, the alarms would detect different substances from the ones previously identified for this site,” he said.  “It would detect movement too.”

“Are we dealing with another sentient planet?” I asked.

LaBlue shrugged.  “Even if it were, certainly we’d have detected movement.  And besides, why would aliens pelt us with Earth antiques?”

I had no answer to it, partly because at that moment I heard-felt “boing” and jumped aside just in time to avoid a black, globular object which fell where we’d been, and which said ACME on the side and had a sort of rope on top.  The end of the rope was burning.

I recognized it then, and it all fell in a pattern in my mind.  I screamed, “Take cover.” Then jumped behind a rock spear.

There was an explosion, and a flash of fire.

When we emerged, three of us were fine, but LaBlue had been too close to the explosion and was dead, a startled look on his face.

Sarge sighed, and Jackel and Tadd looked too stunned to even mention digging another grave, but I said, “Wait, I think I know what’s happening?”

“Oh?” Sarge said.

“Yes, Sarge.  You know how we got to some worlds and found that they were capturing our entertainment transmissions and knew about us from them?”

“Not very well,” Sarge said.  “I mean, they didn’t know about us very well.  The older transmissions, which would have reached the more distant stars are also more substantially degraded by the time they get there.  Some races managed to reconstruct all of a movie or a series of transmissions, which is why that place in Proxima is the ILoveLucy planet, but—”

“Cartoons,” I said.

“Beg your pardon?” LaBlue said, so surprised that he spoke before Sarge reacted.

“Cartoons were drawn adventures from the time before computers were significant in entertainment,” I said.  “Middle twentieth century.  Drawn adventures that were animated by drawing a lot of similar freeze frames, then making them move very fast to give the impression of movement, on movie.”

“Sounds inefficient,” Sarge said.

“It was, but it was also very imaginative.  The cartoonists, as they were called, created a whole universe of creatures, like… animated anthropomorphic rabbits, a world without death, where characters pulled themselves from under heavy weights, or recovered easily from explosions.  The projectiles were often safes, pianos or anvils.”

“How do you know this, Bronk?” Sarge asked.

“I grew up in a backward planet, sir.  Until we got more advanced technology when I was fifteen, we had locally built televisions and we watched a lot of antique entertainment on them.”

“I see. So you think the beings on this planet, whatever they are reconstituted those signals—”

“Possibly from one of the colony planets closer than Earth,” I said.  “Yes, sir.”

“And that they think this is what human beings on Earth are actually like?”

“It’s possible, sir.  It seems like few species have the imagination humans have, and those cartoons… well, if you didn’t know the time and place they came from, you too might not believe someone just made them up out of whole cloth.  Heck, even knowing the time and the place.”

“But what are they?” LaBue said.  “What are these creatures?  What makes them?”

I shrugged.  “We know there are energies in the universe we can’t measure or get a full fix on.  Take the singing ghosts of Antares 5.  Some people think they are powered by thought.”

“That is—” the Sargent said, and then used a word that was also archaic and referred to the excreta of an Earth bovine.

“Yes, sir,” I said.  “Or as we like to put it not scientifically proven.  But we still can’t explain the ghosts, sir.  Or it could be anything else.  There are those who posit time as a form of energy, and if that’s so, then these things could be time itself.  That’s not important,” I said.  “The important thing is this: how do we survive their attacks, their ability to mimic those of us they kill and replace, and how do we get back to Earth in one piece?”

The Sargent said a word that rhymed with ducked, followed by, “if I know.  The gate won’t open again for another six hours.”  He looked around at the shambles of the camp.  “The question is whether any of us will be alive and sane enough to report.”

Which is when Jackel and Tadd started chasing each other with the shovels.  Which by itself was not as bad as the fact that when one hit the other with a shovel, the other would walk around for a while looking like he’d been compressed, then would pop back to normal size with a sound like “boing.”

Sarge and I fell back, retreating behind a spear of stone. Behind us was the edge of a cliff.  We stared at the camp where Jackel and Tadd hit each other amiably and ran around in the deranged motions of cartoon characters.

If I squinted, I could see two immobile forms, out by the graves.  Three, if I focused really hard, though the third was a little far off and indistinct.  Three.

I turned around to look at Sarge, who looked back at me.

I heard “boing” and felt it at the back of my neck, and rolled out of the way, and shot at Sarge, even as an anvil fell between us.

Sarge got a hole in his chest, said “uh, oh” and ran.

He ran right off the edge of the cliff in a straight line, until he looked down and realized there was nothing under him.  And then he fell.

I went to the edge of the cliff and looked down, to see his – its? – crumpled body far below.

Well, that was that.  I was the only human being still left.  I’d have to last long enough, until the gate to Earth opened again.

Back in the camp, the pseudo-Jackel and pseudo-Tadd were dropping pianos on each other and crawling out from under them to fight another day.

I couldn’t understand the purpose of it, and it made my eyes pop out.  I had to keep pushing them in when they dangled in springs against my face.  It got old fast.

Clutching my gun tightly, I prepared to keep the strange creatures at bay.

I couldn’t wait will the gate to Earth opened again.

 

Sorry, guys, I’m going to blame it on the holidays and various doctors’ appointments.  I have a million things to do and no time to torture Grant (Dark Fate) though I’ll try to do it sometime this weekend.

There will also be other free fiction these next two weeks, but not today.

The story below was a dream so vivid, I had to get up and pound it out in about three hours.  Most of you will be familiar with it.  To those who aren’t, enjoy:

It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

The pounding on the doors, the words, “Open up in the name of the law.”

Juan Johnson who had been lying in the dark, in his little bed at the back of the house, half asleep, retained only a sense of explosions, a smell of something burning, papa up front saying he didn’t know anything of these Usaians and besides, he was a honest carpenter and what could they—

And mama! Mama, who had never left dad alone in any difficulty, Mama who rarely left the house without him and never at night, had gotten Juan and Angelita out of their beds, in the dark, wrapping the baby and putting her in a sling, and dressing Juan, fast, so fast that she’d put a sock of each different color on his feet.

This still bothered him, as they ran down the alley in the night, and then up another alley, all staying away from the police.

Juan could hear other pounding and “Open up—”

And fragments of other sentences, too, “Forbidden,” and “Dangerous elements” and “Seditious ideology.”

Juan knew what “dangerous elements” were. He was only ten, but Mama and Papa had taught him at home and he’d been allowed to read a lot of dad’s old books, the sort of thing they no longer taught in the school. Dangerous elements were things like Uranium and other things that gave off radiation that could kill you. Why the police would be looking for it, he didn’t know.

He did not however have any idea what Seditious ideology meant.

He repeated the words to himself as mama stopped in a dark alley, by a flyer. It wasn’t their flyer, but then Mama rarely drove their flyer, and she certainly never burned its genlock clean off, reaching in before it could do more than emit a bzzzt and burning something else, murmuring to herself as though to remember a list, “Alarm off,” Then went in, leaving Juan alone at the entrance for a moment. She came back and threw something to the floor. Juan didn’t know what it was – pieces of something electronic. “Tracker,” Mama said.

She pulled Juan in with one hand, and closed the door, then sat him in a seat, and – strangely – put the sling with Angelita around him. The baby was only three months old, but Juan was a slim boy and the sling – and the baby – very big and very heavy. He thought of protesting, but Mama looked as though she would start to cry, so he said nothing. He let Mama put the harness over both of them, and saw her consult a paper in Papa’s handwriting as she set the coordinates.

Moments later they were in the air, and Juan might have dozed, but he woke with the flare of explosions, and the shaking as Mama sent the flyer careening side to side.

“Mama!” he said.

“Say it, Juan, say it, my little Juanito.”

“I pledge allegian—”

Mama made a sound. It wasn’t quite laugh and not quite a cry. “Not that one. The other one. The human events one.”

Juan blinked. He’d learned all these from as soon as he could speak. The only time dad was really strict was in making sure he remembered everything, every single word. And the meaning. All the meaning. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God—”

An explosion came very close, making them shake and showing Mama’s face, very pale and marked with trails as if she’d cried a lot. He hadn’t heard her cry. How could she cry so silently.

“Nature’s God?” Mama prompted.

“Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—”

Mama sobbed then, but didn’t say anything but “Go on,” so Juan did, as explosions rocked the small flyer, and Mama, finally, just took them really low, and did something, and pulled Juan out after her, but never took the baby sling of him, and she pushed him against a wall and put her hand over his mouth, while the flyer lifted off again and flew a programmed course.

“It was only a second,” Mama said. “Only a second. Maybe they won’t notice.”

But then she was pulling Juan, and running down an alley, and then another.

Juan heard heavy boots after them, and was surprised when Mama pulled out a burner and shot a man down. Juan didn’t have a very clear idea of what happened then, save the man fell, and mama pulled Juan after her again.

Up, up and up, they were climbing narrow stairs in the dark. Mama was talking to herself in Spanish, something she only did when she was really worried. Juan didn’t know Spanish, but he knew a few of the words. He knew “must do something” because mama used to say it at Papa when she was really mad or worried.

“Mama,” Juan said. “My legs hurt. And Angelita is heavy.”

“Yes,” Mama said, which seemed not to be an answer at all. From somewhere to their right came an explosion and then someone screamed, and screamed and screamed, the voice getting weaker as it went. Mama, who normally went to help all the neighbors, didn’t even slow down.

“Juan, you know what we’ve taught you? Papa and I?”

They’d taught him so many things. To read and to write, and to brush his teeth, and– “To mind and be a good boy?”

Again, Mama made that sound that wasn’t quite laughter or a sob, and her hand came down and touched his hair briefly. “That too, my love, but not that. About the Usa. About how it existed and was blessed by God as long as it kept to the precepts of liberty and equality before the law. And how it fell and gave its power to supposedly enlightened rulers and then—”

“It was reduced in size,” Juan said, puffing a little as it was hard to keep up with Mama as she ran down one alley, then another. “And punished.”

“Not reduced in size,” she said. “What remains calls itself United States, but it’s not.”

“But you said, if it returned to faithfulness and the…” He struggled for the words Papa had said so many times, “the inspired vision of the founders it would be forgiven and be great again.”

Sob-laugh and mama said, “It’s not the same place. It can’t return. We’ll have to remember and make it true again. Those of us who keep the faith.”

“Daddy said,” and now he was having true trouble catching his breath. “Daddy said that as long as the belief in the principles of the declaration of independence and the constitution-” deep breath. “As long as those remained in one human heart, the Usa wouldn’t be dead.”

“And so it won’t.” Mama stopped abruptly. Juan could hear the noise of people running after them, voices saying “They went this way. The Flyer was a ruse.”

There were flyers above too, with low-pointing floodlights. As one passed overhead, Mama pressed Juan against the wall. She spoke quickly, in a low voice, “That’s why they made us illegal. That’s why they’re trying to exterminate us. As long as liberty remains in one human heart, the bio-lords won’t have full sway. And they want full sway. They want to dictate our every thought. Listen, Juan, my son. Do you know where the Peace Tower is? From here?”

Juan thought. He wasn’t sure where he was, but he knew the neighborhood, and they hadn’t gone very far. Their flight had been too short. The Peace Tower, built to commemorate peace in the Americas, even if Papa said it wasn’t peace at all, just surrender, was big and lit up and right in the center of the city.

He shook his head a little, because if the peace tower were anywhere nearby, he would see its light. They lit it up in white and green every night.

“If you take that alley to the left, and keep going, mind, Juan, as fast as you can, you will come to the plaza where it is. Don’t go to the plaza. I don’t know if your description is out, but it might be. Instead, the alley that leads to the peace tower plaza, just before you leave it, it has a branch that turns left. Take that. It runs behind a lot of restaurants. Keep on that until you come to the back of a restaurant called Silver Palate – remember that. The name is on big red dumpsters in the back. Turn right there. Follow that alley till it ends, and climb over the wall to the right. It will be difficult, but mind, Juanito, keep Angelita from falling as you climb.

“You’ll be in the backyard of an apartment house. It’s what used to be a large house, long ago, but it’s now apartments. Go in through the back door, run up the stairs to the left, all the way to the top. There’s a door there, marked 4 B. Knock on it. Say Paul sent you. Say treason. They’ll know what to do. The man in the house, his name is James Remy. Do what he tells you. Can you remember?”

He nodded. One of the great advantages of the long stretches of memorizing Papa had made him do was that he could remember things much more easily than any other kid his age in school. But a worry remained, “Why Mama?”

“Never mind that. Just remember, you must do that, or thousands of people will die.” The light had passed overhead. It was dark in the alley, but the sounds of steps and the voices drew closer.

She reached in her pocket and pulled out something. It was a burner. Not a burner like they showed on tv, all glossy and pretty, but a short, battered thing, with a rounded butt, that looked as if it had been assembled together from spare parts. “Papa showed you how to fire these, right? You remember?”

Juan remembered. It was hard to forget as it had been only this week. Papa had taken him to the basement, set a burner on lowest, and had him fire at figures painted on the wall.

Mama said, “If someone tries to stop you, shoot them. Don’t stop to see if you hurt them or killed them. Burn center mass, and run on.”

“Papa said never to point it at a person.”

“No, dear,” she spoke very fast. “Never to point it at a person you don’t mean to kill. But everyone is allowed to kill, if the other person would kill them.”

“How do I know—”

“Trust me, Juan. If they try to stop you, if they catch you, they’ll kill you and Angelita. Or worse.” She pushed something into his pocket. He didn’t know what it was, but she said, “There are two scraps of flag there, Papa’s and mine. Papa’s is the one with the stain on the corner. Keep it when you grow up. Give mine to Angelita, when you’re sure she understands. Now go.”

“What about you?”

“Never mind me.” Mama leaned over and kissed him, a brief touch of lips on his hair, and then she pushed him, hard, down the alley.

He ran to keep from falling, and then he kept running, down the alley, at full speed. He was aware of burners firing and of cries. Was Mama shooting people or had she—

He couldn’t imagine Mama hurt, Mama dead, anymore than he could imagine the end of the world. And that’s what it would be if Mama died.

Instead, he held on to the idea that she would escape, she would join him.

He ran as fast as he could, the route she said.

He met no opposition, until, running so fast he almost couldn’t see, and sweat trickling into his eyes, making them sting, he almost ran into the Plaza of Peace. There a uniformed soldier turned around and said “You, Kid!”

Juan didn’t think this counted as trying to stop him, and he didn’t want to shoot the man, who was young and looked a lot like the brother of his friend Klaus, back at school. So instead he ignored him, and turned left, into the alley with the dumpsters. Mama hadn’t said it would be this long.

He ran down it as fast as he could, but it wasn’t very hard, because his legs felt as though they were made of water, and his breath was coming in short puffs. He felt like he would collapse, but he remembered what mama said. Could he live with knowing he’d caused the death of thousands of people? Or failed to save them? He tried to picture thousands of people, but he couldn’t. That would be like everyone he knew.

“Hey, Kid, stop,” came from behind him. And as he ignored it, another voice told the first, “It’s just a kid, why are we chasing him.”

“It’s not just a kid. His description and that he’s carrying a baby is on the bulletins. He’s going to alert the other rebels. Those damned Usaians.”

Juan didn’t want to turn. Juan didn’t want to shoot these young men. But Mama’s words rang in his mind, and he could not doubt these people wanted to stop him. And they’d said damned Usaians. These men wanted to kill them. People like him and Mama. Mama had said–

He pulled the safety on the burner, as dad had taught him to do it, by touch. And he set it on high. Papa said it was just like the games, point and click.

Juan wanted to close his eyes, but he knew that if he did he’d miss, so he turned and fired, center mass, only he kept the beam on and cut straight across. He had the impression of cutting two bodies in half, but he didn’t stop to look.

Angelita had started crying and squirming. Papa used to joke she slept through everything, but judging by the smell, she must be dirt. He murmured soothing words he knew wouldn’t help, as he ran and hoped no one looked out the windows to see where the crying baby was.

He came to the dumpster and turned, in the almost blind dark, and ran. This alley was shorter, and it ended in a brick wall. There was ivy growing along the wall, and, fortunately, Juan was light. Fortunately, too, he’d always liked climbing.

Even so, Mama was right, and it was difficult. It was very difficult to hold on and not to squish Angelita against the wall. Particularly, since she was crying.

At the top of the wall, he hesitated. There was a man with the dog in the enclosure. He was old, about Papa’s age, and he had a pipe, and a little yellow puppy playing at his feet.

He looked up, as Juan sat there, and Juan didn’t want to kill him, because he didn’t think he was the authorities, but he had to go up and give the message… He had to.

The man blinked at him, in confusion. “Hello, there. What is wrong?”

The last was said in a tone of concern, as he looked from Juan to the baby.

“I must see my uncle,” Juan said. The idea just came to him. Anyway, at the great fall festival, when people gathered in some secret place to eat and trade stories, the kids called every older man uncle and every older woman aunt, so, it must fit. “James Remy.”

The man’s face froze. There was a long silence. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He looked kindly, with pale hair streaked with white, and grey eyes, and he said, “I see, you must be my nephew, Jimmy.”

“No. Juan,” he said. “Juan Johnson.”

“Of course Juan. Sorry, I got confused with your brother. Here, let me help you down from the wall.”

There was a bad moment, as the man reached up and took Jimmy’s hands, and helped him, till he was holding him and Angelita in his arms, together, and Juan thought he would hold him and not let him go, and then Juan would have to kill him. But the man must have sensed Juan’s discomfort, and put him down. “We can’t talk here,” he said. “We’ll go on up to aunt Mary, shall we.” He whistled for the puppy, “Come on Pie.”

“Pie?” Juan asked, as he noted they were going in through the back door and trotting up the stairs Mama had described.

“Pumpkin pie. My daughter Jane named him. She’s very silly.”

The puppy followed at their heels, as they got to the top of the stairs.

The shock when the door opened was almost too much for Juan. He’d been living a bad dream for the last hour? Eternity? But here was normal life, just like it had been at home before that knock on the door. They had a Winter Holidays tree set up, all decorated and lit with lights, and presents under it, and there was a smell of food, and there were two kids, just older than him, and a baby, and a large blond woman, with a kind face, who looked at the man he’d come in with, and then at Juan, with Angelita, and said, “Now, Jim, what?”

But the man was walking past her, and telling the two children, “I think this is bugout. You know what to do. Go.”

The woman said, “Oh, no. Can’t be. They’ve eased the restrictions on religions. We can even have trees if we don’t call them—”

But the man turned to Juan and said, “Son, what is your message?”

“Paul sent me,” Juan said, feeling like he would cry, and he wasn’t sure why, repeating Mama’s words. “Treason.”

The man said a word. One of those words Papa said when he cut himself with one of his tools. And then took a deep breath. “I’ve been wondering. First the Christians, then us. Anything that might stop the state…” He looked at Juan’s uncomprehending face.

“How do we know?” his wife said. “how do we know it’s not a trap so we reveal ourselves?

The man looked at Juan and said, very softly, “In congress, July four, seventeen seventy six—”

Juan nodded and answered with the remembered words, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires—”

“Enough, son. He’s one of ours. Mary, I’ll pack, you change that baby and give this young man something to drink, and maybe something to eat. I think he’s been through hard times, just now.”

The big blond woman took him by the hand. She felt like Mama, even though she couldn’t be because Mama was small and dark. Presently, she was giving Angelita a bottle while Juan ate a bowl of warm oatmeal with cream and brown sugar and told her what had happened. Her eyes got misty when he talked about Mama being left behind.

Juan had been thinking, he said, “She’s dead now, isn’t she, ma’am?” It seemed impossible, and yet he was sure of it, in a way. “Papa said if you died defending the Usa, you’d be born again in a land of freedom, is it true? Do people live more than once?”

The woman’s eyes misted, blue beneath a veil of tears. “Some people think so. Some of our people. But my husband and I we’re Chri– We believe in another religion, too, an older one. We just think there is a better land, and your mama and papa are already there. You should call me mom now. It will make things easier. Your name is Juan? Maybe we should call you John.”

“Juan is the name on my birth certificate,” he said, “But Papa said my real name was John Adams. And Angelita is Martha Washington. Johnson.”

“Let’s forget the Adams and the Washington. We need to be even quieter than we’ve been,” the father of this family said, as he did things around them. Juan wasn’t sure what the things were, but he was bringing small bags from inside, and checking burners, as though to make sure they were okay, then setting them atop the bags. “Your name now is John Remy, can you remember that? And Mary is your mom and I’m your dad. And Angelita is Martha. Just Martha. I think we’ll call her Marty, shall we?”

Juan was too tired to protest. The oatmeal had hit his stomach and somehow made him feel warm and really sleepy.

“You go with your brother Jimmy and mom,” the man he was to call dad said. “You know where to go,” he told his wife. “Take the baby. I’ll take Jane and go the other way after I pass on the alarm. We’re just a normal family, going to visit relatives. If you run into trouble, send me signal. I’ll try to retrieve you. That message – someone gave away our enclaves and we don’t have very long. I’ll pass on the codes, and then I’ll join you.”

“Where are we going, sir—uh—dad?” Juan said.

“Olympus Seacity. We’re not forbidden there.”

“Yet,” his wife said.

“Yet, but we’ll survive this,” her husband said, and kissed her. “You can’t erase the idea of the USa until you kill every one of us. And they can’t. We’ll move on. We’ll be secret. We’ll keep going. And someday, someday, we’ll be free to be and to believe again. The idea of freedom and equality we hold might be small and frail compared to the will to power of the tyrants, and the idea that our betters should always lead. But once it had been kindled in human breasts, it is unquenchable. We’ll go to Olympus. We’ll start again. They always need skilled people. And if we should fail and if we should fall, someone will go on, someone will believe. Maybe one of these children.” He kissed his wife again. “Go on. Jane and I will join you and take Pie with us.. And you too, Johnny, go on. Your Mama and Papa and you saved a lot of people tonight. And you might have saved the hope for a future in freedom.”

Juan didn’t understand it all, but as he went out into the night again, this time held in the arms of his adopted mom, he felt somehow that he’d accomplished something big, something that would be remembered. The young man, Jimmy, was carrying Angelita, who was asleep again.

They walked down the street, in the muted street lights. Above the moon shone with a bright, clear, silvery light.

And it seemed to Juanito that up there, somewhere, Mama was watching and smiling. Perhaps he’d saved many people, but he’d only done what she wanted.

That was enough for him.

She’d believed that the words he’d been taught, the beliefs she held, would one day make the world better.

He didn’t know if she was right, but she was Mama. Dead or alive, he’d follow her beliefs.

“Life, liberty,” he whispered to himself.

“And the pursuit of happiness,” his new mom said. She kissed his forehead. “And we will pursue all three, little one. We will. However long it takes to attain them,There are dreams so big you must keep chasing them, no matter how long it takes.”

Juan only half heard her.  He was falling asleep, slipping into a dream where the great summer high holiday was held in the open, in a park with green grass, and there were red blue and white streamers floating in the wind, and fireworks, like what dad had told him about in the old days.

Mama and papa were there, holding hands and looking up at the fireworks.  And in their faces was the most radiant happiness he’d ever seen.

It was a terrible and beautiful sight,