Perhaps today is as good a day as any to talk about blood and blood guilt.

Pratchett was right that once you get really far deep into any religion, any myth, any legend, any story that MATTERS, it’s always about the guilt and the blood.

The genius of the averted sacrifice of Isaac is that – and those who aren’t believers will forgive me, okay? Just assume there is some genius in the story, even if you don’t believe it happened. – humans learn only by example.  Saying “don’t sacrifice your kids, then m’kay” doesn’t work.   Even the Greeks, when the going got really tough reverted to human form, which is grab the nearest defenseless human being and sacrifice him/her so the angry/hungry gods, spirits, ghosts, creatures of the night will be happy and leave us alone.

No, I actually have no idea why that is built into our psyche.  I mean, as Ori mentioned in the comments, the paleolithic “envy is good” thing actually made sense in a very small group of humans or hominines or whatever they’re calling it these days.  If one of you gets all the food, someone is starving.  (Though even in that situation there are reasons someone should/would eat more.  But never mind.)

Where the “things have gone pear shaped, let’s kill someone to stop it” makes less sense.  Unless, of course, the someone you are killing is responsible for the tensions in some way, or you can convince yourself he or she is.

Which bring us to blood guilt and World War One, because Christmas Eve or not, I’m not going to get in religious arguments in the comments.  (You’ve been warned.)

So we’re going to talk about World War One, which in a way is TOTALLY traditional, because for your information it was traditional to tell ghost stories on Christmas Eve.  (And all through winter I tend to bop around the house listening to my audible editions of Agatha Christie’s Mr. Quin tales – ghost stories – while waging merciless war on the dust bunnies and chasing the cats with the vaccum. [Well, THAT’s what they think I’m doing.])

If you prefer I start again (Should I come in again?) it could go this way:

There is a ghost haunting western civilization.  It is the youth of the early twentieth century, the fine flowering of the early industrial age.  I am told in certain fields in France, you can put in the plow and turn up human bones, and uniform buttons.

The enormity of it can’t be perceived by anyone of my generation, and probably – maybe – not even anyone of my parents’ generation, born during World War II.  Possibly, it can’t be understood by anyone who either wasn’t there, or didn’t read extensively about it.  (Which I have done.  And yes, I AM quite aware what I “know” is not a patch on the people who served.  OTOH what I know is quite enough to dip me head first in unimaginable horror.)

Let’s back up, shall we?  Let’s take the very long view (though the person who suggested fifty thousand years is unduly optimistic about our species’ survival, at least unless we find a better way, and more importantly our chances of understanding something that far off.)

Let’s take the view of backing up and up, away from our present troubles, and then look way back from– say —  two thousand years in the future.  Our present civilization, which is well nigh worldwide, comes from the fact that we’re descended from the BEST sorts of sons of b*tches.  Specifically, the Indo-European culture seems to have won out big time.  And part of this is because other people adopted their culture a lot, (we now believe that a lot of the people who became “Indo-Europeans” were not related by blood, they were just imitating) but this wasn’t done out of fluffy goodwill.  It was done because frankly not only could the Indo Europeans kick the butt of all their neighbors, (Chieftains were buried with maces as a symbol of their power.  Their power was, of course, the ability to crush people’s skulls.) no – they seem to have come up with a new idea.  They glorified the ass kicking in long spoken poem sagas.  The Iliad is a good example.  A more advanced form, mind, as the death, mayhem and glory seeking is less.. in your face than in the fragments surviving of the older examples.

Perhaps it is my professional deformation.  When all you have is a keyboard, everything looks like a story, or something.  Or perhaps it is the truth.  In one of those ridiculous “reading cravings” I get into every so often, I spent a good part of the last year reading what we know and conjecture about Indo-Europeans and their sweep through Europe.  No, I have no idea why.  Yes, there are things I would rather/should rather read, that are still sitting in a pile.  Sue me.  It’s the way my brain works, you know, like sometimes you simply MUST have that roast pineapple or something.  Sometimes I have to have books on something.  And sometimes I figure out why years later.  And sometimes… I don’t.

Anyway, perhaps it is my professional perspective leaking, but I think the extraordinary success of our culture was in telling stories to fit us.  To fit our expansion, to fit our conquering.  The saga-poems made other tribes want to join in.  They too wanted their share of righteous ass-kicking glorified.  (How much ass kicking?  Well, it always amuses me to go to New Age Stores and find Celtic this and Celtic that.  As far as we can tell, the Celts were as much cattle thieves as the Maasai (well, like the Maasai they seemed to believe all cattle belonged to them) but they also believed there was an inherent good to raiding/war/headhunting.  The niches in Celtic homes are believed to have been put there for displaying human skulls.  “You should see that one.  I caught it when…”  And when they weren’t at war with anyone else, they would go to war among themselves, because that would allow them to attain manliness and glory.))

So…  Manliness and power depended on spilling blood.  Sometimes a lot of blood.

But things changed.  We… tamed ourselves.  And the stories were part of it.  (And Christianity with its own set of admirable virtues was a great part of this.  Though the Romans and Greeks had made SOME steps in the direction of what we consider virtues.  Filial piety, as opposed to killing the old man and taking over was an ideal, for instance, even if more honored in the default, I think.  And before you attempt to throw things at me, I’m AWARE Greek and Roman Values weren’t exactly our own.  As older son put it after visiting an exhibit of Roman artifacts and every-day life-objects “Rome is like us and not like us in startling ways.  It’s like P.J. O’Rourke said about the Phillipines, more shocking that some utterly alien culture.  It’s like thinking that this person is your mother, and everything is fine, till you find mommy in the kitchen, in the middle of the night, eating live snakes.)

It took time.  This sort of thing takes a lot of time.  One of my favorite things about nominally Christian rulers in the Middle Ages is the way they’d put off being baptized until they were on their death beds, because then all their sins would be washed away.

The ideals changed humans and humans changed the ideals, until by slow progression we had the industrial revolution, with its printing press, its trains, its glorification of another type of – no less – manly virtues: protecting, taking care of women and children, creating wealth.

If “rulers” – leaders – in the nineteenth century had been buried with symbols of their power, it might have been a fountain pen and a watch.  Or rather, a lot of them were buried beneath symbols of their power – beneath statues of weeping women and children.  The feminists, who are almost as bad as communists at getting symbols, (they’re like the man who is afraid of dogs and who sees a dog in every ink blot) would  say that those women and children were the man’s possessions, symbolically buried with him, but truly, they have a tin ear for meaning.  The woman/women and children were the outward projection of his power  “Look, I can protect/look after this many.”

Helped, in large part, by the printing press, by the ability to disseminate stories far and wide and to everyone in society, the story of the vast Indo-European civilization, by then spread over much of the globe, even if in the position of conquerors, changed.  All of a sudden, the glorification wasn’t of our power to kick ass.  That had been demonstrated well enough, but now the story was about looking after other people.  Even when we invaded, we invaded for other people’s OWN GOOD.  (And btw some of it is still arguably so.  I mean, look, no, all cultures aren’t created equal, and some cultures would be better off eradicated.  No.  Really. YOU whistle past the graveyard if you wish, but any culture that enslaves women, kills people because of their sexual orientation, and which keeps their people mired in Medieval-levels of poverty does not deserve to survive.  Yes, they might make beautiful buildings.  And?)

So that was the logic of empire, and how Europe justified the righteous ass-kicking it was still inflicting around the globe.  “We’re bad asses with a purpose.”  “Yes, Indian culture is older than ours, but WE stopped suttee.” “Yeah, okay, we are getting this and that, but—”

The expansion and conquest had a price in blood and sometimes a high price on both sides, BUT it was against those people, over there, who needed to be saved from themselves.

Then came World War One.  To some extent, what made it horrible was that it was the result of an archaic survival, of doctrines and facts not quite meshing – trench warfare, who the h*ll came up with that.  To another extent it was, as RES has pointed out a family quarrel.  It was all about what Wilhelm said about our king.  To another extent, it was the result of the competition for markets, the change in value, the shift in power.  It was, in fact, a violent, convulsive, change in material culture, in how things are done.  (Which btw, scares the living daylights out of me, considering how fast we’re changing those now.)

Up until that moment, one power structure of the Indo Europeans remained in place.  The reason the leaders were leaders might have changed, but we were still led by the “wise old men.”  (Who, for the feminists benefit, were sometimes women.  Yes, even in pre-historic times, sometimes it was women buried as men and with the mace of power.  Yes, yes, sometimes the best man for the job is a woman and not being gender doctrinaires the ancients could see that.  Look you to the mote in your own eye.)

The stories were still about the wise old leaders.  If you read stuff from the nineteenth century you get the whiff of respect for years, for position, for learning.  It wasn’t so much our ersatz belief in the experts in whatever field but the “people in position to know.”)  (The final flowering of this was eugenics, and let’s not go there, shall we?  Yeah, there was a patriarchal structure, in the new patriarchy, where men not only ruled, but defended and protected.

And then…  And then the story failed.  Those we trusted, those in a position to know, sent waves of young men to be slaughtered for not much purpose at all.  They sent them to stack ten deep in death and to stink the air so badly with their rotting that everyone in the vicinity took up smoking to dull the sense of smell.  Worse, this was reported in papers all over Europe.  Worse, people could go to the front and back in almost no time.  Worse, yet, was the reports of German atrocities, a lot of it, at that time, made up to incite people to hatred and war.  (There weren’t as many nuns in Belgium as, reportedly, were raped by the German Army.)  It was all too big and too glaringly obvious.  After all, it’s not unusual (though it tends to surprise Americans) for Europeans to have relatives all over Europe, relatives who are nominally foreigners.  This was especially true in England with Germany.

It wasn’t the same thing as going and conquering them-over-there no matter how much for their own good.  These were people we knew.  This was, beneath the superficial differences, our own people.

The narrative collapsed.  It broke and shattered.  The veterans coming back from WWI and those who heard their stories didn’t believe the elders of the tribe knew better and there was an inclination to reverse it all.

The worm of Rosseaunism that had been biting at the edges for a while, the whole idea of the noble savage, took deep, deep hold after WWI.  “Let’s upend everything” became a “sane” cry.

Only it wasn’t.  Oh, yeah, patriarchal power can be thrown over.  We’re safer now than in the Neolithic.  We don’t need the big silver-back up front.  But… but we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water.  We’ve thrown out the idea of honor, even when honor means “looking after yourself and those who depend on you.”  We’ve thrown out the confidence in our own culture.  We went looking for some mythical noble savage who was never there.  Back there, in that unthinking age, when reason is not applied, there’s only our cattle-thieving ancestors and their polished skulls of enemies, or cousins, or brothers if there’s no one else on whom to prove one’s manliness.  There’s only the ululating darkness where tribalism reigns and everyone’s hand is against everyone else.  And we’ve gone an awful long way towards that.

However, we’re still humans, still social animals, still designed for hierarchy.  So we’ve fallen into the rabbit hole of this sort of anti-hierarchy hierarchy, where greater power is given to those who claim (even while making d*mn sure no one unseats them) to want to “smash the establishment” and where greatest honor is given to those who hate their own culture and who glorify some mythical “other” who will never come close to their imagined greatness.  Power is attained by claiming a wish to commit cultural suicide.  And the sad thing is that some of these people actually mean it.

The story has come unmoored and is flapping in the wind, like a shroud.  The specter of WWI is haunting western civilization.  It’s time to lay the ghost to rest.

Western civilization was never a thing of tribe. From the beginning we’ve absorbed people of different genetics who wanted to adopt our customs.

We’re all of us humans descended from murderers, rapists and sons of b*tches.  EVERY ONE OF US.  But we, in the West, are descended from the sons of b*tches who told stories.  We’re descended from those who gradually convinced themselves it is not always right and just to smash the weak.  We’re descended from those who told themselves we should help the helpless.  We’re descended from those who believed in doing the right thing even when it hurt.

We’ve sold our birth right for a mess of modernism and post-modernism.

Metaphorically speaking, we’re the little kid screaming in the dark because he/she can’t face the blood guilt.

Let’s let go of it.  Let’s make stories about it.  Let’s make the horrible and largely senseless sacrifice of WWI the place to begin.  They died, yes, but let’s not build chaos on their graves.

In the blood soaked soil of Europe, and in the US to which Europe has offloaded a great part of their blood guilt (no?  Well, that’s another post) let a new idea flourish: the state, the state that considers the individual as nothing but a cog in a machine is wrong.  Let the individual count.  Let the individual come forth as the harbinger of the new age.  The new tech is suited to it.

Let’s start from the individual.  Let’s employ reason.  Let’s stop dreaming of the noble savage, the noble animal.  Let’s start as humans, flawed, wounded.  Let’s build from the flawed individual human, accepting we’re flawed.

Let’s build neither utopian schemes nor great individual-mauling bureaucratic apparatus.

The long night is gone.  The blood has been paid.  Let’s not go back there, to that yawning maw of irrationality.

The old is not necessarily worse.  The new is not necessarily better.  No one’s skin color/gender/age is proof of good (or evil.)  On the other end, some cultures are better than others: those that provide better living conditions, more wealth, better ability for individuals to survive.  We need to start making those distinctions again.  Those distinctions did not lead to WWI.  No, the old thirst for power, the old family arguments on who gets to be the leader of the clan did.  It was an old, old evil.  And not the same at all as the spirit of the age in which it occurred.

Which is why it fractured us.  And it’s time we understand that.

Let WWI rest in peace.  And come out of the dark.

Clifford Simak’s City contains a device built into a kaleidoscope – you shake it, and look through it, and it alters your mind and your perceptions.

This is not a post about Simak, or City or Classical Science Fiction, but I’ll say in passing that the device – perfectly sensible way for a writer to dramatize the changing of minds necessary to take everyone out of Earth and into space – both fascinated me and made me uneasy.  The uneasy is because I don’t approve of any kind of mind-control.  Heinlein’s mind-engineering does the same to me: that creepy feeling at the back of the skull. It fascinated me because I had never seen a kaleidoscope and well… I like shiny things.  (In fact I just realized I don’t own one, which is a little odd.)  The other observation in passing is that Simak throws out more ideas under the guise of McGuffin or plot device that could be used for short stories or novels and that I mean to – supposing I get the time – mine a lot of them.  I mean, a pattern of shiny lights that can change minds?  That is an entire story – an entire novel.  That would turn society upside down (and not in a good way, probably.)

So, this brings us to…

A kaleidoscope.  You shake it and suddenly you see things in a completely different way.  That is how I woke up this morning, and it is an inconvenient feeling, uncomfortable and prickly, like clothes that don’t fit quite right or scratch the skin.

We’ve been talking about the death of Western Civ.  I still think there is a wound in our consciousness, something that is slowly destroying our spirit.

But back up.  No, back up further.  Take the long view.  The longer view.  See it from very far away.  This is what we do as science fiction writers.  Okay, fine, this is what science fiction writers are supposed to do.  In the last thirty years or so, they’ve mostly obsessed over the trendy cause of the moment: pesticides! Global cooling! Global Warming! Women’s equality! Squirrel!

What we’re supposed to do, however, if truth be told is take the long view, look at history, visualize things as they could go/would go/would be.  In a way if Science Fiction is anything more than fantasy with machines and engineers it is the ability to shake the Kaleidoscope and see things as if we weren’t ourselves and gain a new perspective on how things move and what is really going on, even when it presents in a way that seems totally different.

So imagine you’re a thousand years in the future, and you are learning about European history.  This is important.  European.  Remember that.

The first glimmer of an European identity was Rome.  Rome was the first European entity to look beyond tribalism – yes, yes, barbarians, but all the same, they considered these people, at least after a while, as potential Roman citizens.  That was a huge step, and why every large polity in Europe since harks to Rome and tries to imitate or revive Rome, consciously or not.

We fall victims to this too.  We think of ourselves in terms of the Roman empire.  I wonder how much of this is the Soviet Union’s doing.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, the one thing they’re really, really, really good at is propaganda and the rewriting of history, partly through commanding pet intellectuals.

They loved comparing us to the decadence of Rome.  Partly because it made their people feel better about living in caves and eating acorns – sorry, that was how the Romans of the republic seemed to view virtue.  Yeah, I know, the Soviet Union was somewhat better.  Maybe.  Most of the time.

The funny thing is that we are in no way in the mold of Rome.  The Soviet Union was closer.  (Which again, from the distant future would make perfect sense.  The communists were the Red Tzars – tzar being a corruption of Cesar.  These things aren’t hard to seek.)  Like Rome it was an empire which relied on loot to make the life of its citizens back home better (it wasn’t as successful as Rome.)  Like Rome it had a populace on bread and circus (though again, at least if history is semi-accurate, not nearly as successfully) while the people who ran the society lived lives of unimaginable luxury.  (Unfortunately still rather lower than the lifestyle of our middle classes, except for power over other human beings.)

The rest of Europe is not that much different – no, please, listen, I’m not doing Europe down.  We come from them, and to an extent they were the best example of human civilization until we came along.

But all amity between colony and mother country(ies) aside, let’s keep in mind who and what we are.  We are the dregs, the rebels, the rejects of Europe.

The people who stayed behind are those who fit into Europe’s pattern, which again, comes from Rome.  Yes, yes, Rome fell.  Yes, yes, we lost technology.  But the Roman pattern was preserved, brought back.  And to an extent that was good because the Roman pattern transcended tribalism which makes Europe different from the rest of the world.  In Rome you could be a citizen no matter who your brothers, your cousins, your parents were.  This is not true anywhere else.

Europe, to an extent, ported the same pattern of citizenship, of a state that is larger than the tribe.  Of a civilization that is larger than tribes, than blood, than that kind of loyalty.

Now, view it as a journey.  Europe conquered Africa and the Americas not because it is uniquely colonialist or imperialist but because it had transcended tribalism.  Look, when conquered the “new worlds” we were slightly more advanced in weaponry than the natives, but not by that much and not by that far.  But the furniture in our heads was different.

Time and again, I read stories of colonization where the natives acted in the way that had always worked in tribal warfare: they killed everyone in the colony in a horrible way.  If they were facing a tribe the size of normal tribes, this would make colonizing their land too expensive.  It would stop colonization cold.

Only they weren’t facing a tribe.  Reports of the atrocity in European Newspapers brought the wrath of all Europeans on them.  The end was always the same.

(We’ll pretend here that I explained that Christianity hooked on top of Roman citizenship to eliminate tribalism, and that also European colonization was aided by germs and blah blah, blah.  Not germane.  We’re a thousand years in the future, the details have softened.)

Now look at the last century.  The two world wars, not as world wars, but as the wars of European Unification.  The decision of who gets to run western civ.  Then expansion, always expansion because the old European model is the old Roman model.  You go abroad and you get good things to bring home.

Only they’ve lost the plot a little (because of the horrific long civil war of the twentieth century) and they forgot that model implies conquest and despoiling.

On the other hand, the European model is going everywhere: India, China.  Yes, yes, it is our tech they use, but it is the European model of civilization.  They’re still expanding.

And that brings us to where we are.  The war with Islam is just the front in the current European Expansion.  Europe is, of course, expanding its form of government, its mental furniture, to the lands of Islam, and Islam resents it.  They are the ultimate tribalist society.

Then there’s us.  We are the other front in that war.

You see, we are part of Western civilization, but not part of European civilization.  Even our parent, Great Britain, is only half digested into Europe.  We are the castoffs, the redheaded step child.  Part of them, but not.

Part of their resentment of us over intervention in the two world wars is the resentment of parents whose kid intervenes in an argument – particularly if the kid was right.  If you view the long war of the twentieth century as a civil war, they resent we came in and settled it.

And they’ve done a lot of projecting – aided by Soviet propaganda – they call us imperialist and war mongers, because they can’t bear that in themselves.

And also they have no clue what makes us work, not really.  They don’t know why we innovate more than they do.  They don’t know why our consumer society is what is softening their politics advancement into the rest of the world.  They know it, but they resent it.

We are of them, but we are also the others.  And being the others, we must be absorbed, and we must be brought in line.  There can be no competing mental furniture, as Europe takes over the rest of the world.

Which brings us to where we are.  Since the early twentieth century, they’ve been conquering our intellectuals, our universities, convincing them the European way is better.  (And look, they’ve changed from monarchy to “democracies” of various kinds, but the same people are in charge.  The bureaucrats that have the real power are the same people – often from the same families.)  They’ve been telling them about the soft power of redistribution, of socialism, of an entrenched bureaucracy, set to encompass the world.

Intellectuals – and bureaucrats – like that.  It’s the sort of power they understand and the sort of power they crave.

And now intellectuals and bureaucrats are in power.  Europe is trying to swallow us.

It won’t work.  Of course it won’t. They don’t understand the reason the soft imperialism has worked is because we remain free to create wealth that can redound back on them in more ways than one.  (Not just aid, but us being the main consumer of the world’s goods – the engine of the world’s commerce.)  They don’t understand that, because all they understand is the old model: wealth comes from elsewhere and makes the people at home prosperous.

They don’t understand that without America it will have to be back to Roman-style (or Soviet Style) rapine and everyone will be a little poorer.  All they understand is that we make their model look bad and we must – must – be brought into line.

So – that’s where we stand.  Islam is a front in European expansion (and they’re completely dysfunctional and have nothing to oppose it, so they turn on… us – because it’s our gadgets and our wealth that are dismantling their poverty and ignorance from within.)  Curiously, we have to fight them too.

But we’re the other front.  We’re under assault by Europhiles who think that if they just bring us under control, they’ll be in charge of the world.  A sort of empire of the paper-pushers.

Even if they succeed — and they’re well on the way there — all they’ll manage is a brief period of time of increasing misery and then (and in this the Roman analogy is somewhat apt) an age of darkness.  (No, don’t want to hear it.  Yes, yes, the middle ages were not as dark as painted.  And yet, for the average peasant, they were.  No, life might not have been as blood-soaked as some parts of Roman history could be, but it was still brutal and nasty and short.  Yes, I know the works to the contrary.  This seems to be part of the European project.  As in the Soviet Union, it’s the past that keeps changing.) And then probably a repetition of the pattern all over again.

If they eliminate us, as the new model, their model will still be the best thing in human civilization.  And when civilization comes back again, it will be in their model.

I have only one question for you guys – are you going to let them get away with it?

UPDATE: Welcome instapundit readers, and thank you, Glenn, for the link!

And if ya’ll are so inclined, go and vote for me on the Gay Patriot Conservative Diva Bloggress Poll. (Or for one of the others, if you think you should.  The competition is formidable.)  Remember, you can vote once a day.

I’m truly, truly, truly not blowing off anyone who invited me to guest blog.  It’s just the dread flu/cold/ancillary infections slowing me down and then catching up with everything that was left undone.

Today I FINALLY did a blog for one of the very first places to invite me: Otherwhere Gazette.

Are you tired of the same old grey goo you’ve been getting in your SF for years?  Are you hankering for some red meat, served fresh and hot?  Do you want stories you can sink your teeth into, that leave you satisfied when you’re finished instead of wondering why you even bothered consuming them?  Then brother, then sister, you want to try some Human Wave Fiction.

Human Wave Fiction comes in both SF and Fantasy as well as other genres and combinations. It is guaranteed to satisfy, with a rich flavourful taste and real substance in every bite.  Eschew boiled oatmeal plots, spit out cardboard characters, Human Wave Fiction gives you main characters who just won’t quit and are good to the last bite.  When Human Wave characters whines about how rough their life is, that’s when they’re getting ready to take on the world and deliver a mouthful of kick.

Friends, you won’t find yourself looking around for the Tobasco when you put Human Wave on your menu, it needs no special sauces to let you know there’s something on your plate.  Human Wave takes the cooking secrets of old masters, guys and gals who really knew how to cook up a tale, and serves it up with modern style and contemporary flavours.

Human Wave gives you plenty of zest and plenty of substance, leaving you fit to take on the world.  Human Wave takes techniques from Asimov to Zelazny, takes the best of Heinlein, Sturgeon, Tolkein, Simak, , Bradbury, Piper and Laumer, among others, and serves them up with a side of Campbell and a shot of undiluted Boucher, Human Wave Fiction will put hair on your chest (except for the ladies, who are guaranteed to look like they’ve added a full cup size) and fire in your belly.

Human Wave combines the best of the old ingredients with the latest cooking techniques, giving you the best, most satisfying, most nutritious stories you could want.  They have the satisfyingly full flavours you’ve been missing and the substance you need.  Human Wave will remind you of the comfort food you read as a kid, the kind of stories that left you feeling satisfied at story’s end yet still hungry for more.  You get undiluted plots and characters who know what they want and why they want it.  Human Wave is the good old stuff reborn for modern tastes, with all the goodness still intact.  Human Wave contains no filler, no pablum, no political correctness, nor any grey goo.

*              *              *

It has been months since the discussion of Human Wave SF began, and it seems a good time to revisit some of the ideas underlying that movement.

For quite some time a persisting theme in SF has been “Humans/Men/European Culture is harmful.”  Almost as soon as you open a book you can tell who will be the “hero”, who the “villain” and what sins will be perpetrated, and just about as easily as watching an old movie Western and noting whose hats are black, whose are white.

Such tales are predictable, therefore boring.  Even when they don’t bore, the reader has to make an effort to overlook his brain being run through the rinse cycle by such manipulation.

Of course, in that bad old world a reader’s choices were limited to what publishers thought was good for him.  A few writers seemed to think that technological man wasn’t entirely bad, but that was mostly because he accepted the burden of the sins committed against the planet, against the universe, against “others” by his species.

Any publisher who didn’t advance these enlightened views was sneered at by other publishers, no matter (in fact, inversely proportional) to the popularity of their wares.  Authors who failed to toe the line were routinely tasked to rewrite their work, eliminating offensive elements in order to produce a publishable tale or, if they slipped through the filters and became best sellers they were disdained as populist, as pandering to the masses.  Their books could count on being slammed on Amazon as racist, sexist, reactionary and an affront to the noble trees whose lives had been sacrificed in order to publish such hate-mongery.  Sometimes there even existed the possibility that the reviewer had actually read the book before damning it.

Readers who craved good books, tales of humans surmounting barriers and overcoming challenges through grit, determination, pluck and seizing opportunities found themselves mostly reading (and rereading) older books, “Golden Age” SF.  Often they found themselves simply not reading SF at all.

A lot of readers (and authors, too – and even a few editors) longed for books where the race/gender/sexual orientation of a character was not relevant to the actions they took, the role they played in the drama.  Most of us know people of all races/genders/sexual orientation who not only encompass the full range of human behaviour but whose “identity” did not seem to predetermine their integrity, their nobility, their bravery nor the challenges they faced as they traversed this Earthly vale.

A lot of readers (and authors, too – and even a few editors) longed for books where the heroes were heroic, too.  We longed for books whose characters we identified with, in a positive way.  We longed for books whose characters we identified with because they emulated character traits we admired and desired to emulate in our own lives.

We also longed for books where “good guys” would win, or at the very least would go down fighting.  We desired books with characters who would inspire us to dream impossible dreams, not books which lampooned their characters dreams, pegged the dreamers as suckers.  We tired of books which portraying success as a matter of luck or connections rather than effort and skill and determination.

We longed for books in which even flawed people pursuing a flawed dream could achieve something great, books which inspire us rather than leaving us depressed.

We longed for books which said that the individual counted for something, that a person is more than a component of a group identity, more than the “hat” they wear.  We don’t care what identity group a main character belongs to, we see complexity in all individuals whatever their race, creed, sex or who they long to kiss.  We are indifferent to those aspects of the characters, that is not why we read, that is not why we buy a book.  That is not why we thrust a book into the hands of friends, relatives, strangers in line at the grocery store.

What we want are tales about people, people who act to improve their worlds, who assert human dignity as an individual quality, who defend their beliefs and who are unashamed to be human.  We don’t need our heroes to be perfect, but we want them to strive to be better, to improve themselves and their lot in life.  We aren’t interested in them bending the knee, accepting their limitations and knowing their place in the world.

We want tales that challenge our ways of thinking, our ways of doing things, not by shaming us, by telling us we have been bad, greedy, wasteful intolerant.  We want tales that inspire us, encourage us, show us there are different ways of thinking about the Universe and what we can achieve in it.  We want books that, once we put them down we are eager to pick them up again and read more.  And when we have finished them we want to be full of energy, ready to address our own lives reinvigorated.

We are entering a world wherein publishers and booksellers no longer dictate what our book choices are.  Writers no longer need to sublimate their ideas, their craft, their art to what some editor is willing to buy.  Gatekeepers may still man the gates of the publishing industry, but their walls are a tumbling down, and more choices are available in the marketplace of ideas.  Readers are free to exercise their low, plebian, uneducated tastes – we can read what we like and like what we read.

Tell us stories about adventures, great and small.  Tell us stories about dreams and what people will do to achieve them.  Write about wishes come true – and the regrets they cause.  Give us heroes willing to stand upon principle, no matter the cost – and be honest about those costs.  Examine the costs of being human and show us the nobility of accepting those costs.

Write about the great complexity of human existence without submitting to the vision of existential meaninglessness.  Give us a vision of the world as it is, warts and all, but give us a true vision.  Above all, give us tales about those who can see a world better than the one they are in, about people who force change upon their world, even about those who force their worlds to crush them but who, in being crushed, remain defiant.

Readers need to support stories of grandeur, of inspiration.  We need to express our appreciation, enthusiasm and support for these types of tales in the only manners which matter: our buying and recommending habits.  We must not accept stories which depress us, which bury us in the grey goo of existential ennui.  Do not accept boredom as a badge of literary merit; do not accept clever phrase making in exchange for plots that make sense.

Above all, pick tales that stand for something admirable, that espouse virtues rather than values.  Our heroes can be flawed because we know humans are, but we want heroes who rise above their flaws to spit in the eye of Fate.  In time we are all doomed, so why go gentle into that good night?  More importantly: why write about, why read about heroes going quietly rather than gesturing their defiance until the last moment and even after?

The Human Wave is a gesture made with one hand or two (or even four, if that’s the type human you are) it is defiance personified, a refusal to bow the knee. In Britain it requires two fingers per hand, in America it needs but one; but throughout the universe it stands for the same thing, always: You’re not the boss of me!

Right now, Where Horse And Hero Fell is free on Amazon. 

Also, I’ve put up two collections of five short stories each for 4.99 a piece, which makes them 99c a story again.

They are Five Future Tales and Five From Magic.

And, in your strange news of the week, I inexplicably, find myself in the running for conservative blogress diva over at Gay Patriot.  (Diva me?  Well, okay, maybe.)  So weird for someone who only came out of the “conservative” — libertarian is conservative right? — closet about two years ago!

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

Rogue’s Progress

It wasn’t the ghost riders, riding madly through London that scared Jonathan Blythe.  After all, he’d had a decent magical education.  He wasn’t a fool, either.  Ghosts are ghosts.  Which is not to say that they can’t do anything to you.  Only uneducated fools would think so.  Ghosts couldn’t of course, as such, touch you.  They were on another plane. And couldn’t interact with humans in the way physical objects could.

No, what ghosts could do, though, was trail magic.  In fact, they couldn’t help doing it.  Crossing over from the other plane, whether they were true ghosts, caught in between the worlds, or just memories of past events, being reenacted in the present day, to manifest they required magic, and they brought with them a magic disturbance – a rift in the nature of the magical power that undergrid the world.

This was why on seeing a ghost people would feel a chill and an eldritch fear.  There was a disturbance in the magic, and it was impossible not to perceive it, even if you didn’t have enough magic to name it.

But the more important point was that, once the magic had been torn, anything could come through it.  Anything, including creatures that didn’t normally inhabit the human plane of existence – things that were, or could be, physical.  Things that weren’t so well intentioned.

And London was now filled with ghosts.  Jonathan was going to guess the ghosts of every person who’d ever died fighting or murdered in the land that London now occupied – Roman legionnaires and armored knights, women screaming and running in bloodied nightgowns, and through it all, in the middle of it all, every cavalcade who’d ever ridden through London – victorious or not.  He was almost sure the ones in Roman armour, with plumes, were Arthur’s cavalry when they’d come to London to install him.  But there was also Essex’s forlorn effort and John Lackland’s last hope – riding disarmed and blindfolded, with their standards reversed, as they had on the way to their execution.

Jonathan swallowed hard, looking at these figures of defeat, not only at seeing so vividly brought to life that which he’d only before seen in history books, but also at the number of ghosts.

He knew what had caused it, right enough.  The land wakening would waken all who slept an unquiet sleep among the dead.  But the land itself had caused a disturbance in magic, and now this…

It took almost no time at all for Jonahtan to spot them.  Demons, he supposed they should be called, although they weren’t.  Not really.  Not the tempting demons of theology, at least.  These creatures were barely sentient, little more than animated particles of evil.

But evil they were, walking lurching and rolling – they had varying forms – upon the land.  Their forms gave one headaches, simply because they shouldn’t possibly exist, and yet they did, claw and fang, and odd colored eyes peeking out of unexpected places; fur and feather and something that was neither, in colors that made one nauseous just staring at them.

They were wrong.  They smelled wrong, too, their stench following them.  And they fell upon the passerbyes, the late night opera-leavers, the prostitutes and their clients, the beggar children, with equal ferocity.

They didn’t fall on Jonathan.  He didn’t expect it.  Honestly, even creatures of the abyss had more sense than to fall on a trained wizard with years of practice, even if the trained wizard was Jonathan Blythe, who’d learned magic rather by default and to stop his masters badgering him than because he had any interest in it.

But gripping his cane – with its silver handle – in his hand, and frowning at the scene of mayhem around him, Jonathan was taken with a most unexpected sensation.  He was sure – in fact, he could almost swear – that he was supposed to be doing something about all this.  He heard screams from a group of crossing sweeper children who were trying, ineffectively, to defend themselves with their brooms against fanged purple horrors.

But, damn it all, he told himself.   I am a rogue.  Jonathan Blythe, only out for what he can get, if what he can get is a bit of stooping or some good liquor, at least.  I am not a hero.

And yet, the growing conviction at the head of his mind, was that if he did not do something, he would not be able to wake with himself in the morning.  His father’s death didn’t bother him – what?  Far less ignominious and far less shameful than he deserved – but these children had done nothing but get caught at a bad time.

Sighing inwardly, he charged, with his cane, swinging as hard as he could at the furry head and feathered one, at violet horror and red one, at horn and claw and fang.

The horrors recoiled, as the urchins, gaining heart, started swinging with vigor, sending the minor demons flying across the street.

Jonathan started forward, towards a group of besieged opera goers, all female, all clustered and screaming, as demons pulled at their dresses and bit them.  He realized the urchins were following him and, without looking, he said a careless spell endowing their brooms with demon killing spells.

The screams of glee from the urchins as the demons exploded on contact told him everything he needed to know.  They batted the demons off the opera goers and flagged down a coach going too fast to accrue abominations, then charged forward, towards the next group.

He continued in this fashion, aware that he was gathering a growing crowd of followers, only because he was charging their weapons, until he met with a group coming the other way.  They converged on a group of debutants, just out from Almac’s, screaming and crying as demons tore their pretty muslin frocks and bit their peaches-and cream faces, and their rounded, perfect arms.

He’d seen a group of demons trying to drag one of the girls off, and he ran forward.  His cane almost met, midair, with a fan going the other way.  Fan and cane fell on demons at once, and demons exploded and burst.  Jonathan’s group of street urchins set to, clearing the road around, while the other chap – no, girl’s – followers, who appeared to be a ragtag group of prostitutes, did likewise.

And Jonathan, looking up, met with the brightest pair of green eyes, the reddest hair he’d ever seen, in the most impudent female face, this side of a streetwalker’s.  He registered the impression, as well as the impression the girl was quality, if not wealth.  She was dressed as a dowdy children’s governess, in a black, very modest dress, which was all out of kilter with her beauty and her bold style.  The fan she’d clearly bespelled to be lethal, was chicken skin and drawn upon in Jewel colors.

Jonathan set to killing demons again, but between one and the next, he removed his hat for a moment and said, “Jonathan Blythe, at your service madam, and you are?”

“Ginevra Elfborn,” came a voice that matched the face, clear and loud, and well-accented.

“Elfborn,” he said in some confusion.

“Elborn and not ashamed.  I am a governess at the orphanage where I grew.  I was out for the evening to… well… and I came upon this!”

To… well… those words set Jonathan’s mind reeling.  He was not going to ask, not right now, but the many things a woman like that could be doing out at night… well, he should be shocked, but he never was a very regular man.

She caught the silence, he thought, and felt his thoughts.

“It is no use,” she said.  “Your thinking a lot of indecent things.  My mother was a swan maiden, you see, sometimes I need–  Sometimes I need to be near water.”

Jonathan realized that even as he was smiting demons, his face had split in a grin.  He’d known a swan maiden once—

“Miss Elfborne.  If  you do me the honor, I’ll escort you to the river, and help you kill demons on the way.  That is, if you’re agreeable.”

He looked up for a moment to catch a glimpse of green-flashing, narrowed eyes, and a brief and surprised smile, “Indeed, Mr. Blythe.  I shall be very pleased.”

He’d tell her about the title later.

With a Whip And A Chair but only because the electrical cattle prod is on the blink, again.

That’s what I answer if you ask me how I control my muse.

And by this I don’t mean getting ideas – I’ve already confessed I have more ideas than I’d like, and frankly if things get any tighter I might resort to standing at corners, near writer’s conferences and whispering to passing groups, “Hey, buddy, wanna buy an idea?”

No the problem starts once the idea is in motion.  One of the things I disliked about the… ancient regime of writing, the traditional way of going about things, is that if I wanted to sell something I needed a proposal.  And sometimes I needed to tweak the proposal to be acceptable to the publisher.  Which was to my purpose, nothing, as you will see.

Later I sold some books on one paragraph description, but even then houses were likely to say “Okay, you told us who dies and where the body is hidden, but what is the purpose of the book?  What does it mean?”

Yesterday Robert was helping me cook dinner.  As usual in this house, when two of us are busy at anything non-mental, the talk turned to writing.  When it’s the four of us we talk of other stuff too, mind you.  This might be a trained reflex to prevent the house from becoming an extended, overstretched, single-focus writers’ conference.

So, Robert was chopping the salad and said that the problem he has in sticking to any kind of outline, or even changing a book so “it’s not quite so weird” is that “if I play with any of the elements, the meaning might not ever come out right, or I might not ever know what the meaning is, even.”

This was the first time I knew he works like I do, with the meaning unfolding slowly – I was going to say like a flower opening but that’s not the right metaphor.  It’s more like you just found an egg in the woods and you bring it home, and as it starts to crack, you wait to see what comes out and have no idea if it’s a snake, a lizard or a bird.  Only this egg was in show business before (shuddup – whose blog is this, anyway) being an egg, and so opens very slowly, letting you catch this which might be a claw or a beak, or a fang, then a glimmer of brown that might be pin feathers or infant scales, then—  Then suddenly and gloriously it opens up (and you could literally get addicted to that moment.)  and it’s like the whole universe unfolds, and you see it all and what it means.  Afterwards, as I read the book over for editing, I realize it’s all a cohesive whole and it all points the right way and that the glimmers of the meaning/result are obvious halfway through. But while I’m in it I don’t see it.

I’ve always know this —  no, wait, a brief digression is in order:  When I started writing I was a pantser, which is roughly the method I’m describing.  Pantser is short for “flying by the seat of my pants.”  It is opposed to “plotter.”  Plotter has many varieties mind.  Some people write a two page plot and leave all the details and subplots blank.  Some people write plots that are novels without the dialog and the more vivid description.

Any time you get a bunch of writers together, you hear plotters and pantsers arguing. The Hattfields and the McCoys have nothing on us.  “You guys just throw stuff at the page and see if it sticks.  Your plots aren’t cohesive.”  “You hold your plot so tightly you squeeze the life right out.  Inside your carefully outlined books there’s live characters screaming to come out.”  You haven’t lived till you see a bestseller plotter or pantser comment on the book of a bestseller of the other group.  The curl of the lip, the sneer in the voice, the “So and so is one of THEM and it shows.”

My problem is that, by temperament, I’m a plotter.  Look, I’d be an engineer if it weren’t for the tragic fact that I can’t give someone a phone number without transposing at least two digits – and in equations I can get to be lots of fun.  Mind you, I loved math, and given enough time to make sure I hadn’t transposed anything, I was very good at it.  But I guessed at an early age that working in a high pressure environment where I’d be required to solve mathematical problems quickly and in the middle of chaos, my little problem could become a major liability.  So I gave up on the dream.  But my temperament is still the same.  I like to know the thing will work before I build it.  I like to know what elements I can alter.  I like to know and be able to tell the publisher “Yeah, put the dragon on the cover.  There’s a dragon in it” and not have it turn into an emu or an ostrich halfway through.  A well plotted, well oiled novel moves the way it’s supposed to, and does what it’s supposed to… except…

I tried it.  Did I EVER try it.  You can’t say I didn’t give it more than a fair shot.  For about the first five years of my career I forced myself to plot, tightly.  I removed everything that my – for lack of a better term – muse insisted on putting in.  Funny scenes, excessive grief, and the bit where he held onto her hand for no good reason.  Also, the moment when the character realizes there’s something wrong with him.  Or…  All of that.  If it didn’t move the main plot or one of the auxiliary plots forward, it came out.  (And the auxiliary plots had to move the main plot forward.)  At the end of it, my outlines could run to fifty pages, and had side notes on what this scene or that was trying to show.

I was saved from strict plotting by attending a reading of a fellow author.  The fans had heard her read that novel before and requested one particular scene.  “The bit with the sausage.”  It was a scene that took place in an inn and it wasn’t – it couldn’t be – in any way instrumental to moving the plot forward.  It was a bit of slapstick, the equivalent of Shakespeare’s bits with the man and the dog.  It meant nothing.  The audience LOVED it.

This was when I was revising Draw One In The Dark to deliver, and about to cut the scene I call “three guys in a car” which is basically when you have the three, very young protagonists, coming away from a fight, getting food and clothes, and well… making jokes with each other the way three guys who aren’t (yet) friends and who were in a fight on the same side do.

It wasn’t in the outline, and my gimlet eye judged it to be useless.  Just three guys being sort of funny in a car.  It was using up words and I should cut it.  (I should explain here I come from a poetry background.  Every word must do work or out it comes.)  After watching that scene I decided to leave it in.

I’ve just revised DOITD for re-issue (I think in Summer, but those of you who are flies can ask Toni.)  And now, that I’ve been away for… 5? years, the scene reads completely different.  Without it, the book wouldn’t really work.  Or rather, it would work, but the meaning wouldn’t be the same.  That is the scene in which the guys become friends, and what makes it possible to believe they look out for each other in the climax.

So, I’m not dumber than the average bear.  But I didn’t know why my mind was inserting that scene in there, when it did, and were it not for the fortuitous having listened to the audience reaction to that bit with the sausage, I’d have mutilated the book.

I have not read the other books I’ve written as a strict plotter to see if I mutilated them, either.  I don’t want to know, unless the rights revert and I get to fix them, there is no point.

But what I’d never conceptualized till last night was WHY it worked or didn’t.  And why I can’t work as a plotter – unlike other people I won’t sneer and say no one can.  I’ve got friends who are plotters and who do very well – and why a lot of other people – rational people, even from STEM backgrounds – are forced to be pantsers.

I told Robert I’d told a ton of editors “I have to write the book so I know what it’s about.”  (Note, children, this process is very bad with legislation.)  And “I work through issues by writing a book.”

And Robert said “Oh, that explains it.  I’ve felt for a long time that I write with the same part of the brain with which I do calculus.  It makes sense, one way or another, it’s highly abstract manipulation of symbols.  This is why given a set of premises, writers can write something that’s, say, extremely Libertarian while they themselves are well nigh Stalinist.  It’s why writers who can’t discuss a subject coherently can write a novel that puts everything in place for other people.”

I thought about it.  I was always rather good at higher math, where it’s all symbols.  It’s the kitchen math that trips me up.

Robert explains this better than I do, but if you take the various elements of the novel as symbols that you are manipulating to get a result that makes mental/emotional sense, you can see where it would be out of the control of the author.

Your subconscious comes in by (usually) dictating the problem that must be worked out.  In my case, stuff that’s been nagging at me tends to fall into novels: rebellious ne’er do well children; the dynamics of government… what have you.  And then the “equation” sets itself up in my head.  Sometimes I have control over the parameters, sometimes I don’t.  (One of my published books – no, not the upcoming one, that was something I couldn’t change – I changed the gender of the main character.)  Robert said something about this phase being where you setup the symbols and – I think.  It’s been a long time since I took calc, and it wasn’t in English – populate them.

And then you work through the problem set up that way by rules of logic.  (And novels have their own internal logic.)

To ask a writer who works that way what the novel means before the novel is done is sort of like asking what the result of a new mathematical proof will be before the mathematician is done solving it.  It doesn’t work that way.

Now, you say “but you’re always teaching us techniques.  If we have no control, what good are they?”  Well, mathematicians still need to know math.  Everything you learn goes into your “internal rules” and besides, if you get to the end and the result is “two ducks” and you’re writing a novel that involves physics, you want to know where you went wrong and how to change it.

One of the most common signs that you did something wrong, btw, is when the novel “seizes” i.e. the mechanism stops working, because you violated a fundamental rule of how the novel logic works.  That means you need to go back and work through and try to find out what went wrong.  For that you need to know what the general rules are.

So, now if you work like me, you have the tools to explain it to people “It’s like solving a calculus problem; in Martian; under water; blindfolded.  I can’t tell you what it means till I get to the end.”

Now, if I could get series to stop presenting this way.  In the Earth revolution series, for instance, I can see EXACTLY one book ahead, and I have glimmers of what I think is book six?  But I don’t even know how long the thing is.

Quadratic equations.  Under water.  In the dark.  Blindfolded.  In Martian.  With my feet in a cement sack.

But it’s the only way to do it, and so I forge on.

I have been reading in recent days and casual attacks on strangers (or even mass murder) don’t really seem to be getting more frequent.  But people feel as though they are.  People feel as though these are sitting RIGHT in our lap, so to speak.  People hug their kids a little tighter before sending them off to school.  People worry.

Part of this, of course is the media feeding frenzy.  In the same way Halloween was made a night of fear for many parents by what turned out to be totally made up stories of people putting blades in apples and what not – yes, there was a case of poisoned candy, in California, but it wasn’t random at all, it was a stepfather trying to get rid of his stepson.  In the same way, the Tylenol poisonings of the eighties turned out to be a husband’s attempt on his wife, disguised as a bunch of killings of strangers.  But the media reports these and people who hear the report often don’t hear the debunking, and next thing you know you are changing the way Tylenol packages its active agent (though other medicines, and vitamins too, happily use capsules) and hospitals are spending time on Halloween x-raying candy.

In the same way the perception that at any minute someone could come into the classroom and let loose with a gun on your kids makes people panic and demand – mostly very bad – legislation, ranging from disarming those who would never commit such a crime, to making sure all the kids behave “normally” to making the life of odd, but perfectly functional people sheer misery.

And part of the horror that allows the media to whip this up is… death.  Worse, death of children.  (The shooting in the theater in Aurora, CO, though bad, didn’t evoke the horror this does.)

I was thinking about this the last few days and I realized we – we modern people – have a very odd relationship with death.

Look, I’m in no way complaining about this, okay?  I want you to understand that upfront.  For my final exam in American culture, back in Portugal, I had to read this very stupid book who deduced all sorts of crazy stuff about Americans from the fact our dead are usually embalmed.  Frankly, I think the author should have his head examined.  (He also went on about our putting people in old age homes, forgetting that our elderly live MUCH longer than normal, which means at the end they need a lot more specialized care.  He also seemed not to get the sheer immensity of our territory which means family can be flung all over the continent.  Organizing a rostrum to visit grandma and make sure she takes her meds is a tad-bit more difficult than in a village or even a moderately sized town.)

However, I’m a fifty year old woman who has never had to sit with the dying, never had to help prepare a body for burial, and the whole idea of death seems a little unreal – a little odd.  Oh, I’ve lost people I loved: both my grandfathers, when I was 14 and 20, but I was going to school and (at the time) this was something to be guarded as it were and also mom thought I was too young, so I was protected from the nitty-gritty of death.  Then when my beloved grandmother died I was over here and … well, every time I go over I’m a little shocked that she’s not there, that I can’t go over and have tea with her.  I visit her grave, but it’s more like she’s moved to yet another country, one I can’t reach.  (Since I believe in life after death, this might be literally true, but not physically true, if that makes sense.)

But even if I had looked after my grandparents as they died, or helped with the burial, I would still have been highly unusual in light of the experiences of my ancestors – and your ancestors too, while we’re at it, only your ancestors would have been far more remote than mine.

My parents are the in-between generation between WWII and boomers.  They were both born during WWII.  While Portugal was neutral – and of necessity sending supplies to both sides to keep from getting womped.  No, I don’t want to hear it about Portugal being craven.  This would be far more believable if everyone didn’t go about sainting the Swedes for being neutral.  The Swedes didn’t even have Spain next door ready to march in if they went in with the allies.  The fact that Portugal didn’t join the axis or violate its treaty with Great Britain is the telling point – apparently more than once it was thought that it would be bombed.  They remember some sort of public officials coming around putting tape on the windows to minimize flying glass, and they remember blackout curtains.

Their histories are quite different, too.  Though the country was very, very poor – just recovering from bankruptcy – my father was solidly upper middle class, living in a relatively large house and from a family with enough land to grow most of the stuff they needed (though they weren’t farmers.)  Mom on the other hand lived in what can only be classed as a slum, in what had once been a prosperous craftsman’s cottage… sometime in Elizabeth’s day, I think.  My grandfather came from a wealthy family but had run through the money and sold the land and then run through more money.  (He was a brilliant, fascinating AND deeply flawed man.  I loved him and miss him still, but I was always aware there was … another side to him.)

However, both of them had – disproportionate numbers, mind – of their classmates die very young.  It was so common for mom, in fact, that the favorite game of her childhood was – I swear I’m not making this up – doll’s funerals.  Mom explained to me she was prized among her classmates because she made really good cloth dolls.  I was stomped.   I mean how many dolls could a kid need?  Then she explained that she made them, they played with them about a year, and then they had a wake and a funeral for the doll.  And then they made another.  This is how common death was for them – a normal part of “mothering”, like feeding, cleaning and dressing the kid.  Think about that for a moment.  Let it sink in.

As I said, I’m not complaining.  I like the fact that given my unspectacular fertility, I was able to raise both kids to adulthood and have a better than even chance they’ll outlive me.  Kings and Queens in the past lacked this probability.  It’s a good thing.

However it makes us weird about death.  And it distorts our view of everything.

Accidents most of all.  What, you think it’s a coincidence that the more remote the possibility of death, the more we pile on safety mechanisms in cars?  The more we make our kids wear helmets and eye protection for perfectly harmless activities?  (I think the end run of this is that we pad all the trees, like the royal family of Spain when their kids had hemophilia.)

And it goes further.  Any death has become unthinkable.  We react with shock to any death that doesn’t take place after protracted illness.  We start cowering back from eating meat because “the poor animals” and we shy back from any war and try to have it humane and with ROEs that make it impossible to do what war should do: inflict terror and pain on the enemy until they surrender.  (I think this goes hand in hand with no longer knowing how to END a war.  We don’t say “We’re going to end it by winning.”  Or “It ends when the other guy is rubble.”  No, we say “We need an exit strategy.”)

If you think of death as the dark tints of life, we’ve become washed out, and in many ways incomprehensible to cultures in which death is still very common.

I know, I know, culture this, culture that – but in the end I wonder how much of our decay and our seeming wish for suicide, from having too few kids to not being ruthless enough to those who hurt us, comes from the fact that death has come to seem unnatural and strange.

Again, I’m not complaining.  I’m no more fond of death than anyone else, and no more resolute in the face of it.  I know I might be called upon to die for what I believe in, and that’s fine – it’s much, much harder to accept dying because someone’s clutch slipped, or because I caught some weird virus no one could figure out.  And I can’t imagine dying even at 100 without feeling that I’m leaving a lot of stuff undone.  Still, I can come to terms with my own death – the death of those I love is something else.  I’ve already told Dan he must die after me or I’ll never talk to him again.  The thought of losing the kids is unimaginably horrific.  Heck, I’m all broken up about the idea of losing a cat within the year, and I’ve lost cats before.

BUT while I wouldn’t want a return to things quasi-ante, and while the solutions I could pose – as a science fiction author – range from the repugnant to the horrible and are all “I don’t want this” (Though some might make interesting stories.)  I do wonder what part of our decay, or the decay of our willingness to fight and win, is because death is alien and a surprise to us.

We have become like the elves who spawn rarely and live unnaturally long “blessed” lives.  Maybe there is some ancestral memory there.  Maybe there is a cycle where you become too comfortable, too little used to death, and then the ruthless cultures come in and destroy you, because they walk with death everyday.

All I know is that in the Elizabethan age, people had a lot of kids and expected to die much younger than we do.  (No, don’t want arguments.  Shakespeare died at 58 and it was considered a very great age.)  They got in brawls on the street over very little.  They killed and died with abandon.  Death was familiar.  This also allowed them to embark to strange lands in ships made of wood, with no real direction, knowing chances were they’d die in the adventure.

We have few kids, we live long, protected lives, and we won’t risk going to space, we won’t risk doing anything that might involve the loss of human lives.  And we want someone to protect us from the (very rare) madman with a gun.  We want to banish even the specter of that death we don’t really know.  We want to continue our happy, sheltered lives.

I wouldn’t trade our conditions for theirs – but neither do I want human civilization to regress because of the consequences of forgetting that the old bony gentleman is always with us, scythe at the ready.

I have no solutions – just a question – now that our children are not in the valley of the shadow of death, how do we teach them that it’s still needed at times to five up life to fight evil?

UPDATE: Post now up at Mad Genius Club.

Many years ago, when I was strange in judgment,  (okay, stranger than now) a bunch of school administrators thought it was a good idea to round up the lot of us who asked too many questions, who didn’t sit still, who read ahead, and who challenged teachers and put us into two forms.  (This was in Portugal where schools work on the form system.  A group of some number of students – in our case, 34 – has a classroom to which the teachers come.  The students have all classes together.  Grades are posted by “form.”)

The two forms quickly became the highest scoring in the school.  They also quickly became troublemakers.  My form’s adventures included (but weren’t limited to) convincing the chemistry teacher we were possessed, until she locked herself in the classroom closet praying the rosary.  After that we had another teacher; sabotaging the electricity in the school (they shouldn’t have put us near the board, should they?) so that the class we had after sundown with a very boring teacher had to be cancelled.  There was other stuff.  At one time – half of ninth grade – we were in open war with the directive council which was what revolution-era Portugal had instead of a principal.

We weren’t exactly bad seeds.  Most of our teachers loved us and came to our parties and went out with us to the beach in the summer (we stayed in touch for a long time.)  It was just a certain type of teacher brought out the worst in us.

All this to lead up to the point when we greeted the French teacher (who was one of our favorites but had done something to offend us) by standing up and singing “We don’t need no education; we don’t need no thought control;[can’t remember this lyric anymore]; Teachers, leave the kids alone.”  She showed she got it by sighing, waving a hand and going “Oh, sit down.  Let’s talk.” Which was JUST the way to handle us.

Which brings me to – in the United States, any of us, alone or severally would have been expelled or worse.  Worse?  Well, even some of our minor peccadillos would have got us put on endless detentions with the real hard cases, they would have got us interviews with the school psychologist, they would – probably – have got us tracked into special education for emotionally disturbed kids.

Were we?  I don’t know.  I started my essay for my AFS application with a quote from Farenheit 451 “I am seventeen and I’m insane.  My uncle says both happen at once.”  (I’m too lazy to look up the exact quote but it’s something like that.)  Then there is the genius factor.  This is not the place to argue what IS high IQ or what importance it has to society.  I test oddly in IQ tests, because my verbal is above what they can quantify, my math is average and my visual is low enough to be considered mentally damaged.  You can take your pick and consider me either a brain damaged genius, or, more likely (particularly considering that how fast I write is abnormal) an idiot savant.  I’m cool with either and I don’t care, because my job doesn’t require me to fit into a neat category.

What I can tell you is that what can only be termed “genius” and madness runs in the family, particularly on mom’s side.  And that the two are often conjoined.  Also, I can tell you that my “gifted” form picked by choosing every “so sharp she cuts herself” girl in my class (it was an all girl’s school) had the same conjoined presentation.  Most of the kids there were brilliant and had odd health issues and bizarre mental quirks.  One of my best friends and possibly the most multi-gifted woman I ever heard of (besides being stunningly beautiful) burned herself before burning/cutting yourself was fashionable.

Also, because (like Miss Marple) I was raised in a village, and one where most people’s family had lived for generations (if you had only been there three generations your family nickname was wherever your ancestor had come from.  You were a “stranger”.)  Also I was my grandmother’s shadow, which means I heard a lot more history and gossip (and historical gossip) than people normally get.  So I have some idea that heredity for “intelligence” works oddly and that you often get mentally slow and genius from the same parents.  (And in my case, in one person.  Two, two in one!)

Without going into the uses of genius to society (I don’t know, most geniuses end up being useless even to themselves, but perhaps the exceptions makes it worth it?  It takes a goat to move the sheep forward?) I have to tell you that if you want genius, you have to take a certain amount of odd behavior.  If you want innovation, you have to tolerate people who don’t fall in line easily.  If you don’t want to stagnate, you have to have Odds.  You have to tolerate odds.  You have to give them room to be themselves –  as long as they don’t disrupt other people.

I used to think that what the school did to us, herding us into two forms then hiding us (one of our classrooms was in the attic, past all the broken furniture, in a room so small that if you sat by the window – me – and needed to go to the bathroom, you had to walk on people’s desktops.) was terrible, but after seeing two kids through k-12 in the US I think it would be a brilliant way (given smart enough teachers) to deal with our odds.

Because, you see, the problem is school bureaucracy.  Bureaucrats, and people trained to deal with kids as groups and classifications and  “pathologies” don’t see the difference between quirky Odd and outright disturbed.

And this is a problem when school shootings happen.  Yes, you knew I was going to come to it.

(No, I haven’t talked about it, except by fulminating the person so silly as to send me an email asking me to support gun control.  I’ll dispose of it here since this is not what the article is about.  Gun control is great.  You should always keep your gun under control, not have your finger on the trigger unless you’re pointing at something you mean to shoot.

Governmental gun control is a bad idea.  It’s a bad idea that makes totalitarians salivate.  Hitler was all for it.  And our current crop, with their China-envy very much wish they could keep guns out of the hands of civilians.  It’s is JUST so hard to herd the populace when they might shoot you, after all.

Among other charming things, Portugal was gun-controlled when I grew up – probably still is – which meant crime was rampant.  Also that I – being an odd – got offered guns (really cheap) every time I walked into the train station.  I can honestly say no gun salesman has ever accosted me on the street in the US.

But let’s say the US managed to establish better gun control than Portugal.   It still wouldn’t work.  The technology is not that hard to create/spoof/build.  Are you going to go after anyone with equipment that can make guns, too?  Also, as a parting shot, I wonder how much all those would-be-statists would love gun control if they couldn’t have armed body guards.)

Anyway, when school shootings happen, it is impossible for anyone living in Colorado not to flash back to Columbine.  And what I’m flashing back to, precisely, is what happened afterwards.

Because it was decided the school shooters were odd – and they weren’t, really.  They were psychopaths, which is something QUITE different – and that they were bullied – no, they really weren’t.  They talked about shooting the bullied and the lonely.  The other is a narrative created by the media – this led to all sorts of distortions in the schools.

About a month after Columbine we had floods from torrential rains.  At the time I didn’t own a car (we had one, my husband drove it to work) so I walked to pick up my preschooler.  I wore a raincoat with a hood.

Imagine my surprise when I found guards at the school pointing guns at me.  You see, the shooters had worn “trenchcoats” – so close enough for government work.  Even though the shooters weren’t parents, picking up little tykes, and even though everyone there knew me, and even though it was pouring rain.

I had to be patted down before collecting my kids.  Because they valued the children’s safety so much they’d thrown their brains out the window.

This was confirmed by their way of dealing with “shooter in school” which was to lock the little ones in classrooms.  (Can you say sitting target?)  For the longest time, my kids got the lecture every year “if there’s a shooter alarm, you break the window and get out and run home.  We’ll deal with the school.”  (Yes, there were more detailed instructions on how to run, and what to do if the shooter was in THEIR classroom.  I’m not stupid.)

But the real impact of it didn’t hit until the kids were in middle school.  Anti-bullying regulations were so strict that it was Napoleonic law.  If you were accused by more than one person, you had no defense.  A group of unscrupulous girls used this to BULLY my younger kid by using administrators.  They’d accuse him of calling them things, following them home, etc, and the administrators didn’t  believe me when I said I was picking him up, so he couldn’t follow anyone home, and that I’d personally seen one of the girls follow him calling him names.

You see, my child was Odd – brilliant, but he had a speech impediment, he was a little overweight, and he was fond of playing by himself, often fantasy-based games.  He didn’t fit in.  He was the square peg in a row of neat round pegs.

And this brings us to what I’m already seeing floating around after the Connecticut tragedy.  Instead of looking at our broken mental health care system (yes, there are civil liberty doubts involved in whether the guy who sits on the corner calling foul names and weeing on himself should be institutionalized.  But then there are civil liberties issues and doubts with taking guns away too.  Weird how people in charge only worry about one set, uh?  My friend Pat wrote about the mental health angle to the tragedy here.) schools are looking at how they can best regiment people, so that anyone who deviates from norm can be flagged as a potential problem.

Because never letting a crisis go to waste is always the function of totalitarians, from the highest in government to the lowest school principal.  And what these people want is control.

When my kid was having issues at school, he kept begging me to come have lunch with him (picture that – sixth grader wants mom to sit with him at lunch.  That’s how bad it was.)  So I finally did.  And I found their cafeteria had assigned seats and that the vice principal spoke ALL THROUGH lunch and the kids were supposed to sit there and listen.  I hadn’t realized I’d sent my kid to school in prison.

I know not all middle schools are like that, but from what I hear a lot are.  Middle school is where the odds are fashioned into “shape.”  They told us over and over he had to learn to “behave like other kids.”  And let me tell you, compared to me, my child wasn’t even that Odd.

I remember the bad ideas in the wake of Columbine.  I’m afraid what they will be now.  School shootings aren’t that common, but they are, of course, horrible and attention grabbers.  And because the media amplifies them, they seem to be MORE common.

Which means people hungry for power love to use them to get the ability to pound all those square pegs into round holes, and to make all those goats into sheep.

It won’t help, but it will give them power.  And you see, in the end, that’s what it is.

And if there’s a thing guaranteed to take a normal, quirky odd, and make him into a psychopath, it’s trying to make him into a standard issue model.

So all that’s being done is to our (Odd) purpose worse than nothing.  Instead of preventing tragedies, it’s more likely to precipitate it.

But it will give tinpot — and other — tyrants a chance, so, hey…

All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.

*In the next two weeks, now and then, I’ll post stuff I have started here.  What I’m looking for is some type of reaction.  Yeah, some of you have seen some of this before.  But now I’m looking at finishing things for indie, so…  looking for reactions.  You know “yes, yes.”  Or “for the LOVE OF G-d, bury it” or… :)  Well, be gentle, I’m a fragile flower, but give me the general feeling.*

                        Hell Bound

                                         Sarah A. Hoyt

I grabbed my purse and my folder from the floor, shoved the phone into my pocket and got out of the car, locking it after me.  The folder had nothing important in it – or at least nothing important except to the law firm which had paid me to investigate someone’s ancestry in order to defend an inheritance.  But, while Colfax was nowhere as dangerous as it had been in the eighties or even in the nineties, it was the sort of street that was safe and unsafe in patches.  And unless you knew the particular patch you were in very well, you’d best assume it was shady.

Considering the area where the car had died was mostly shuttered warehouses and the like, I thought it was likely that someone would break the window to get the folder, hoping it contained pay day checks.  And, having replaced one  window, I didn’t need to replace another.

The night was cold.  Frigid air stung at my hands and face, as I started down the sidewalk back in the direction I’d driven from.  A man walking the other way caused me to tighten my hold on my purse, but he didn’t even look at me, or slow as he passed me, head down, walking fast.

All the same I hurried my step.   It felt like someone was following me.  The shadows on the cracked sidewalk, fast becoming speckled with patches of snow, seemed to writhe and project as if there were people who were following me – people who danced and leaped and changed shapes.  I didn’t look back.  It was one thing was to become paranoid, it was another thing to let it get out of control.

It turned out the coffee shop had closed.  I almost passed it – just one unlit facade in a row of them, but as I was going past, a car came from the back parking lot and drove past me.  This caused me to look up and see that the coffee shop – a squat little building with broad windows – was empty and cold.  I could see the tables inside, with chairs turned upside down on top of them, and I restrained the stupid impulse to flatten my nose against the cold glass, in case someone was left inside who could open the door for me.  Or who was in possession of a functioning cell phone.

“Claudia!”

I turned.  Impossible not to.  That voice could arguably have got me from my death bed.  Or from the depths of my tomb.  Which was all too appropriate, since it was Chris’ voice and it was supposed to be in the tomb – or at least in the jar of ashes atop the shelf in my closet.

He was coming towards me through the snow, walking briskly, ignoring the fast-growing-slippery patches on the sidewalk.  And it was Chris.  There was no way I could deny it.  He looked just as he had that day in June, when I’d kissed him in the morning before he went to work.  He even wore the clothes he’d worn that morning – a white t-shirt and over it, because Colorado mornings could be quite chilly even in summer, a loose, many pocketed jacket.  He wore olive chino pants and his immutable black boots.

My mouth fell open and went dry.  After last night, after all I’d seen, I could not be surprised, I should not be surprised.

But something deep inside me was protesting.  No wonder he’d been sending me messages.  No wonder.  Of course, he’d been alive somewhere.  Had he also come to visit me yesterday night, before I was fully awake?  But why?

I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck, as my body tightened with tension.  Why the charade?  I presumed the body they’d found was not Chris’, though it beggared the imagination how they’d found someone who looked so much like him.  I’d identified his body.  I’d thought I was absolutely sure it was him.  Did Chris have an unacknowledged twin, someone he’d never met?  It was the stuff of soap operas.

But I could not deny that it was him, as he came closer, and I could smell him – the particular smell of him, and see his face – oval, with features just strong enough to be masculine, and the deep, deep almost-blue eyes under the Asiatic fold.  “Where…”  I started.  “Where have you…”

He put out a hand and touched my arm, not quite grabbing it, but touching it, gently, “I’ll explain,” he said.  “I promise.  But right now, you must get out of here.  You are in the greatest of dangers.”  He gave a smile that was pure Chris, a slight lift and twist of the right corner of his mouth.  It was the expression he made when he was embarrassed and amused.  “And so am I.”

“In danger!” I said.  “The flying bulls.”

He frowned at me, the expression he always made when he was utterly confused by something I’d said.  “The… yeah,” he said.  “I guess so.”  But it seemed to me that he had not the slightest idea what I was talking about.  Just the type of thing one says to stop a child or a mad woman from going on incomprehensibly.  “Come on,” he said and turned sharply towards the side of the building and around to the back.

I followed, while I tried to explain and to get some sense out of him, some explanation of what all this meant.  “I was attacked…” I said.  “By a flying bull.  At least the flying bull didn’t… Well, none of them did attack me, but they came into the house.  And it was a flying bull and a bunch of what looked like animated bronze statues.  Some sort of ancient warriors.”  The image found a niche in my mind from work I’d done for a crazy writer in Colorado Springs who wanted a mythology that hadn’t been used to death, but neither did she want to invent her own.  The strong features, the odd peaked hats, the bare chests and kilts.  “Assyrian warriors,” I said.  “Assyrian warriors.  That explains the flying bull!”

He looked back for a moment, and his eyes sparkled with amusement.  “If you say so, honey.”

“They came into the house to–” I said, and stopped.  We were almost at the back parking lot, and Chris turned back to look at me.  “What is wrong?”

I couldn’t tell him, because I didn’t know.  At least I didn’t know in any way I could gather into words.  Something was wrong.  Something was very wrong.  I could feel it in the prickling of the hair on the back of my neck, I could feel it in the way the air around me stung my skin, the way everything seemed more real than ever, the way everything seemed very slow.  But I couldn’t tell what was making me react.  “I…”  I looked him over, from the fall of his impeccably cut, black, glistening hair, to the way his chin jutted just a little, the way he held his shoulders square, a little pulled back, as he usually did.

The look was right, the clothes were right.  That he wore exactly the same outfit as on the day he’d disappeared – considering one was in June the other in November – was a little strange, but not too much.  Chris wore that color combination and that attire very often.  Sometimes he exchanged the chinos for black jeans, but that was about it.  If he was going to have to talk to one of his supervisors at work, he wore a polo.  And under duress or for weddings, he’d wear a shirt and tie.

We turned into the back parking lot, and then I realized he had his shoulder bag over his shoulder, and froze.  He reached to pull me forward.   “You can’t have…”  I said, and swallowed.  “Did you go home?”

“What?” he said equally puzzled.

The prickling at the back of my neck felt like a hundred frozen needles, and I couldn’t have taken another step forward to save my life.  My throat worked.  I tried to get words out but they wouldn’t come, and when they finally did, they weren’t rational.  “The bag.  Your… bag…”

He looked blank, which I suppose made some sense, since I hadn’t explained – couldn’t explain that his bag had been on the top of my closet for six months.  How had he got it, and why?  If there had been some convoluted identity theft, then the bag in my closet wasn’t his.  But the bag in my closet had to be his, because Uri had answered the phone, and Uri had known Chris.

And “Chris’s” reaction to my question was wrong too.  It was not what he would have done.  It wasn’t what any human would have done.  If your lover goes pale and stutters about your bag, the usual thing to do is to look at the bag, to see if you have snakes coming out of it, right?  But instead, the … person, reached further back for me, as if to pull me forward.  And, as he reached towards me , the light fell on his palm, which looked odd.

It looked odd enough to make me jump back, attempt to run.  It wasn’t till… the pretense of Chris had uncoiled, shredding into multiple ribbons, like a paper construction coming unraveled, that I could think of what was so wrong.

His hand didn’t have any lines.  It was as blank and smooth as a plastic doll’s.

I heard a scream come out of my mouth, but it was drowned in a scream the apparition gave.  It was all ribbons – a bit of khaki jacket, a bit of pants, the white that had faked a shirt, but it flailed about with a purpose, grabbing me at ankles and arms and chest, holding me immobile, while a high, piercing human voice, emerged from the mouth it didn’t have, and called out a series of strange sounds.

The sounds were words.  I didn’t know what they meant, but they had to be words.  They were spoken with that sort of intent, that sort of rhythm.  I couldn’t see.  My hair had come undone and the portions of my vision it didn’t obscure were covered by waving ribbons of what had been an almost flawless walking-talking picture of Chris.  But I could hear running feet from the parking lot, from the corners, and the revving of a car engine from the alley I vaguely remembered ran along the side.

The motor entered the parking lot, and I could hear it somewhere in front of me, and I was kicking and struggling, desperately, trying to escape but hands – warm, human hands – joined the ribbons holding me still, pulling me.

My throat felt scratched from screaming, but I couldn’t stop.  They didn’t seem to mind.  That meant that there wasn’t anyone else to hear me.  And I couldn’t stop them dragging me, no matter how much I tried to fix my heels to the asphalt of the parking lot.  The hands of the people holding me, the ribbons of the creature who’d got me in a bind, still pulled me.

In front of me, I heard a car door open.  They were going to throw me in a car.  And after that?

I kicked to one side, then the other, but nothing happened.  Someone talked in front of me.  I kicked again.  To my left I hit someone.  I knew I had, because there was a gasp, and for a moment my left hand was free.

I reached for the only weapon I could think of – the bit of flint in my back pocket.  As a weapon, it sucked, but it was better than my nails.  I grabbed the top of it, just as the hands attempted to grab my arm again.

Blindly, I fought with all my strength, throwing my arm to the side and up, attempting to cut my captor.

At first I thought the blinding light was something my captors had done, but then I heard them scream, and I was suddenly free.  In my hands – I instinctively brought the other hand up to help hold the suddenly increased girth and weight of the weapon – was not a little flint knife, but a huge, blazing sword.

It looked, and felt, like the old medieval swords, made in some glistening silver like metal that shone with bright, white fire blazing along it and from it and illuminated the ribbon creature, which was attempting to move away from it, but didn’t seem to know how to walk on the many tentacles its feet had become.  Beyond it, five or six young men stood, petrified, staring.

The ribbon creature first.  That it seemed to be made of pieces of Chris both revolted me and scared me.  I swung the sword forward, cut through the middle of it and the fire from the sword seemed to shrivel the rest, so that it could only stay in place and wave its tentacles at me.

The young men were piling into the car, haphazardly.  I let them go.  I wasn’t sure what they’d wanted to do with me, but they were human.  This wasn’t.  I sliced.  I cut.  I burned.  I swung the sword until nothing was left of it, and the car was driving away, in a squeal of tires, leaving me alone in a Colfax parking lot, under steady snow, staring at a gelatinous burned mass and ashes on the ground.

I tried to slow my breathing and, as I did, the fire burned down on the sword, and then the sword… shrank?  It was more like it collapsed on itself.  In my hands was a small sliver of flint, polished along both edges.  And yet, I had no doubts that it had been a fiery sword.  Or that it would be one again, if I needed it.  I could feel tiredness in my muscles from hefting the much larger, much heavier weapon.  And I knew, against all my senses and the evidence of my eyes, that this was that weapon, just like one of those automatic umbrellas was the same fully open or compacted.  Ready to extend again at the touch of a button.

I slipped the flint knife back into my back pocket.  Nifty thing to have around.  But I probably – I thought, as I looked around the deserted parking lot – shouldn’t stay here and give them a chance to try again.  I wasn’t sure who they were or what they would try, but I was sure there was a they and that they would try something.

As I hit the distinctly non-weird sidewalk – late night Colfax under street lights – I was also sure that whoever had just tried this, had also been behind the winged bull and the ghostly warriors.  It only made sense, I thought, as I half-ran back, in the direction of my car.

The chances of something that strange happening to me in two consecutive nights must be very small.  The chances that one event was not related to the other were even smaller.  They had to be related.  Some sort of… magic? was at work.  Magic or something weird and I didn’t even want to think about.

And going to the car was just sense.  I was going to lock myself in and wait for morning.  Or at least till the coffee shop opened.

Thinking this, I ran faster and faster, till I reached the car, beeped it open with the automatic unlock.  Flung the door open.  Dropped onto the seat.  Dropped my purse and folder on the floor of the passenger side.  Slammed my door closed.  Locked it.  Rested my head on the steering wheel and willed my heart to slow down.

Looking down, I saw that my cell phone had dropped out of the purse when I threw the purse down.  And the little light at the bottom of it, that indicated the state of the battery, was glowing green.  It had been out of charge, hadn’t it?

With a nerveless hand, I reached for it, opened it.  The screen said Welcome Claudia.  And beneath it, the time.

I don’t know how long I stared at it, disbelieving.  Sweat dripped from my forehead onto my eyebrows and some got through to sting my eyes.

With trembling fingers, I found the pre-programmed number for triple A roadside assistance, but then I thought if it was working, then why wouldn’t my car be?  Both had suffered an electrical issue, right?  Both…

I got my keys from my pocket, inserted them in the ignition.  And the car turned on, flawlessly, the lights in the dashboard glowing, the lights ahead of me – when I switched them on – illuminating a road fast-growing white, and a continuous falling curtain of snow.

Releasing the parking brake, I drove slowly down Colfax.  Before I reached the turnoff to my neighborhood, I was certain of two facts: Things were happening that, rationally, should be impossible.  And Uri Heaven had a lot more to tell me than he’d chosen to reveal.

If You Are But A Dream

            By the time I pulled into my driveway, I was sure of something else – that whatever Uri was, he was not just sex on two legs with cool tattoos on his arms.  There was something else there.  He was involved with – part and parcel of the weirdness.

Not everyone, after all, could give you a flaming sword.

I hadn’t exactly had what anyone would consider a proper religious upbringing.  Maman considered all religions, and everything supernatural, the same thing – stories invented by cavemen in their dank caves and all worth the same.  Father believed in a sort of uncomplicated Christianity.  If asked he would say he was a Christian, but he wasn’t one to dote on the words in any book, and he never went to church.  He said he felt G-d every morning, watching the sunrise over the mountains.  That left me grandmother.  She was buried in an Episcopal service, but I didn’t know if she ever attended the church.  All the same, she had a bible, in her basement and that bible I’d read, just as I read about anything else that the adults in my life owned which had print on it – from cereal boxes to old issues of Reader’s Digest.

And I remembered something about a fiery sword.

This was no magic, like my pagan friends practiced it, raising the energy and hoping – the results invisible or felt only in the mind, and perhaps detected, if looked for, in future events.  No, this was something else, something old and scary.  Something beyond the ken of humanity.  Something from the time before humanity was humanity perhaps.

Just thinking about it gave me the same feeling you get when you run up to the edge of an abyss and stop.  What had I met?  What had been in my house?  What were his powers?  And was he benevolent?  No.  It was more than that.  What did benevolent mean, to a creature like that?

I galloped up the step to the front door, opened it, locked it behind me, and stopped, in the living room, looking at the room in the moonlight.  Uri Heaven had done something to the window.  And he’d fixed my hands.  I was sure my hands had indeed been blistered enough to – at least in other circumstances – warrant a visit to the emergency room.  But now the palms were smooth… no, not smooth.  I thought of the palms of the ribbon-creature who’d impersonated Chris and shivered.

Turning on every light in my path, I ensconced myself in the arm chair in front of my desk.  I half expected, as my laptop fired up to be confronted with the message that I should call Heaven Bound, or perhaps – with luck – that I’d done well to survive the attack.  But there was nothing but wall paper – picked up on a free site on the net, some weeks before Chris’ death – which showed a muscular blond man in armor with wings folded behind him.  Chris had teased me about it, saying I was lusting after blonds.  Now the echo of blond angels made a shiver run up my spine and I shook my head, as I brought up my browser and clicked through to a search engine.

The query on flaming swords brought thousands of sites.  And I clicked through a few, my hair rising on my head as I realized that Uriel was the archangel of the sword, the one who had been set to guard the gate of the lost garden, to prevent humans from returning to it.

I thought of the ivory statuette slid across the table at me, and of his words: daughters of Eve.

It was like leaning over a howling abyss and feeling eternity reach up for me.  Look, no, I don’t believe that the world was created six thousand years ago.   Not in the sense that most people would say it.  But then, neither would I believe in angels.  Or fiery swords.

But what if there was something… something out there beyond the obvious and material creation.  What if time ran differently for that dimension?  Didn’t scientists talk of holographic reality and of time being an illusion peculiar to the human brain?

Who could quibble over six thousand years or millions of them?  It was like arguing over oranges when the subject was eggs.  My feeling was that the object in my pocket, and the ivory that had been lost, both had come from eternity and belonged to it – to the first hesitant and slow steps of mankind.  To a time before rationality had given us the mind-tools to measure time itself.

Normally, research like this, done for a client – say some crazy writer having me do his footwork before writing some fantastic novel – would take me months.  I would document every step.  But right then, I just wanted to know.  No.  I needed to know, just like a person walking down a path needs to know whether it continues or drops off, abruptly.  Or if there are attackers hiding in the shadows ahead.

I tore through all the cutesy pages on angels and the countless, saccharine novels where angels come down from heaven to touch someone and make their lives better gratis and for nothing.  I have said before that I don’t believe in aroma therapy.  I don’t believe in benevolent aliens.  Well, neither do I believe in creatures who are benevolent and do things for you just to make your life better, for no reason.

Heavenly guardians?  Oh, perhaps.  If that’s what they were created for – though again, that’s hard to conceive – but they won’t be individual guardians, will they?  Not the kind that make sure little Janey finds her doll and that little Billy doesn’t crash his first car.  No.  If the Almighty – if he existed – ever moved his everlasting hand to ponderously set his thumb on the scales of fate, it would have to be something incredibly important.

Not a child’s lost toy.  Not a bride’s wish for a sunny day.  No.  It would have to be something on which the fate of all of mankind hung.  Of course, that MIGHT involve a bride’s wish or a child’s happiness.  But it might just as easily involve snow on a June wedding, or a child’s death.  The power to do the best for the whole world must inevitably mean that little things would get crunched in the web of decisions and that the ultimate good could sometimes see unimaginable evil to those experiencing it.

I shivered and reached for my jacket, to wrap myself in it.  There was a feeling like someone else was in the room with me, but a look around disclosed nothing.  Which did not help.  Not after recent events.  I had a feeling as though, if I listened carefully, I would hear breathing, just behind me, in a steady rhythm.  It’s just the heater blowing out.  Just the heater.

Avoiding all pages with smiling pretty girls in spangled gowns particularly those that had little birdies holding up their hallos, I cut through the nitty gritty.  I was starting to get a glimpse of angels – or what was behind angels – and I was not entirely sure I liked it.  For instance, most if not all of our angels had come from the angels of Babylon and older religions, and had incorporated along the way many elements of pagan gods.

Uriel was supposed to govern Tartarus – not the hell of Christians, though he was ostensibly a Christian archangel and a saint – which was as like the Hades of the ancients as there was very little difference at all.  Were these just wrong, unfiltered, human perceptions, that had foreseen in pagan divinities and spirits the glory of the messengers of a God they didn’t know?  Or was it that those divinities, those creatures were really part and parcel of these beings?  Scratch Uriel and get…  Pluto, Lord of Hades?

I had a feeling that the answer to these questions was “Yes,” and the shivering became worse.

Which was the worst possible time for the phone to ring, in the depths of my purse.  I almost dropped it, my hands were shaking so hard.

Opening it, without even glancing at the caller ID, I didn’t expect a deep voice, with operatic tones, “It wasn’t supposed to happen,” it said.

I took a deep breath, that I swear was echoed behind me, and managed to say, “Ah!”  Which meant nothing much, except that the last person – being? – I expected to call me was Uriel Heaven, the same creature whose details and bio filled my screen.

“I beg your pardon,” the voice said, all polite niceness – would an immortal being older than time be nice? – “I should have started at the beginning.  Christopher… I had a phone call from Christopher’s phone, saying that you were attacked, that…”

“Yeah.”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen.  It shouldn’t have happened.  I gave you protection.”

I was biting my tongue, because insanity howled just behind my veneer of normalcy and I wanted to scream, to shriek, to laugh.  I felt as if the ribbons of the creature that hadn’t been Chris were wrapping around me anew, as though I were back in the parking lot, away from everything, ready to be dragged off… to what?  And Uri Heaven hadn’t told me.  And Chris hadn’t told me.  And neither of them could protect me, that was clear.

“You had… the amulet with you, yes?” he said.  “The one I gave you?”

“No,” I said.  “My mother… She said she didn’t take it, but it disappeared.”

A long silence, and then a frostiness crept into the musical, masculine voice.  “How could you let it?”  There was a long silence which carried with it a feeling of exasperation, though nothing like a long exhalation conveyed it.  “Don’t you realize that you are in the very gravest of danger?”

This time my chuckle escaped me, though I didn’t feel particularly amused.  “Oh, I think I’ve realized that.”

“Then–”

“Then perhaps it’s time to tell me what I’m in danger of,” I said.  “Now.”

The silence again, this time feeling as if he were deliberating.  This time there was an exhalation, forceful, full of annoyance.  “Chris went through all this to keep you out of it.  He didn’t think you should even be exposed to it.  He thought–”

“Chris is dead,” I said, even though the words felt like the slamming down of a door.

A giggle that seemed purely spontaneous.  “You say it like it makes all the difference,” the voice said, but then a throat was cleared as if the man – the thing? – were trying to make itself behave rationally.  Or perhaps simply behave more as he thought that humans should behave.  “But he died because of you.  To keep you safe.”

And he seemed to think that by saying this he made all the difference – that it would make me stop wanting to know what was happening and what threat hung over my head.  He said it as if he expected me to go oh, all right, if he died to make me safe, I will be a good girl, and I won’t ask any more questions.

Now that I thought about it, from my imperfect understanding of Christian theology, it was full of that sort of thing.  Christ was supposed to have died for all our sins, and that, somehow, was to wipe clean all our evil impulses, and we weren’t supposed to feel debilitating guilt or the wish to lash out at a gift of that magnitude, unasked for.

Perhaps the minds of angels were that simple.  Perhaps those pages with the spun sugar hair and the pretty-pretty gowns had gone to their heads.  Perhaps they truly believed that life was that simple, and that gifts didn’t come with obligations.

He had another thing coming.  “You know how Chris died?” I asked.

“Uh…”

“No spun sugar please.  You know?”

“Uh.  Yes.  By which I mean, I knew when it happened and I–”

“And you didn’t tell me?” I asked, my voice roaring with the tone of an affronted lioness whose cub has been molested.  “Was it drugs?”

“No!”

“Sex?”

“Yes, but…”

“What?”

“But not in the way you mean it.  I shouldn’t tell you this.  I’m not supposed to–”

“You’re not supposed to?  You’re not supposed to tell me the truth?” I asked.  I was raging.  If he’d been around, I’d have skewered him with his own blazing sword.  “I thought you people were all about the truth.  I thought you were holy.”

“Yes, but–”

“But you won’t tell me what I need to know to defend myself.  Oh, no.  It’s all about people sacrificing themselves for you.  It’s a pretty lie but I won’t have it.”

There was something like a moan from the other end of the phone, and he said.  “What won’t you have?”

“This.  The idea that you’re all spun sugar and goodness, that–”

“Did I tell you I am spun sugar and goodness?  Did I at any time–”

“It’s all of a piece,” I said.  “And I don’t like lies.  You’re standing between me and whatever it is.  You gave me an ivory trinket but you didn’t explain anything, and you –”

“I can’t explain.  It’s not the sort of thing–”

“For puny human minds?  Try me.”

The silence this time extended, long, long.  I had a feeling of something being weighed, of a debate going on.  A debate in which I had no part.

When he spoke, he sounded all collected and final.  “No.  It is not mine to tell, nor yours to hear.   I’m sorry you lost the ivory.  If I were you, I would try to find it.  It will protect you. The sword can help you keep evil at bay, but not stop it from molesting you.”

And then – and then, to my disbelieving ears, there was the click of a disconnected phone.

I sat there for a moment looking at the glowing screen of my computer.  I’d argued with an angel.  I’d argued with a creature that had seen the world formed, that had known the first humans.  It seemed stupid, or impossible, but not as impossible as the fact that he had hung up on me.

What did he think I was going to do?  Sit here and quietly sniffle my sorrow on my little lace handkerchief?  What, right after a creature I couldn’t even describe had taken the image of my dead fiancé and tried to grab me and deliver me to a bunch of men who clearly had no good intentions?  Right after my house had gotten broken into by the gods of a lost myth?

Yeah.  Of course I was going to sit here quietly.  If I were someone completely different.  If I didn’t feel that every person alive had the responsibility to defend himself.  If I believed in spun sugar and little birdies that hold up hallos.

Unfortunately for me – and for Uri – I didn’t not fit that mold.  Which meant that I thought I was responsible for myself.  Which meant…  That I had to figure out a way to make him answer me.

Someone To Watch Over Me

            Do you know how many versions of how to invoke a spirit, an angel or a demon there are on the internet?  I do.  Ten million, one hundred and fifty five.

Kidding.  I’m sure there are at least ten times that many.  They ranged from the more… applied version of the spun sugar angels – people who thought you should invoke spirits with kindness and maybe a little bit of sprinkled rose water, to those who thought invoking a spirit was much like making a roast – first you made a marinade consisting of a certain number of herbs, always including sage, since apparently spirits had a lot in common with turkeys.

There was another set of rituals older and darker.  I looked through them while, outside, the howling wind blew snow round and tapped on my windows with a sound like fingernails.  Tap, tap, tap.  Like something wanted to get in.  Which, if true, I was not about to let it.

Halfway through my reading, I turned the heat up, wrapped myself in Chris’ robe, which he only wore on cold nights and which therefore – having been washed at the end of the last winter – retained no scent of him, except perhaps an almost ghostly fragrance and sense.

It was old, having seen him through his college days and of the sort of fluffy material that collects all sorts of pilling after the first washing.  It didn’t matter.  Each crease and stretch in the robe had been made by the way that Chris wore it.  It was enough.

I discarded some of the rituals out of hand.  It did not seem to me like the best of ideas to invoke a creature of dubious goodness by using blood, mine or others.  In fact, the idea of using my own blood seemed just plain stupid.

Although I was not pagan and had never performed a ritual, I had a strong feeling that one’s blood had an essence of oneself.  Ancient religions had attached the meaning of life and individuality to it, and modern geneticists would agree.  I did not need to give Uriel, whoever and whatever he was, the keys to my being.

So my work would be mostly symbolic.  Salt and water, air, light – the basics of life.  The idea of any religious symbols, I rejected.  Theoretically he was a Christian saint, but he was so many other things.  And though none of these identities were mentioned for him, personally, what I read about angels indicated that many of them… moonlighted as demons, or perhaps worked as double agents.  The problem of double agents – as anyone who studied the lives of such people as Christopher Marlowe will tell you – is that after a while you’re not sure for which side they are working.  So a cross might or might not work.  But more importantly than that, since I didn’t believe strongly in any organized religion it seemed to me their symbols would make ineffective protection for me.

In the end I settled for one of the oldest rituals, one of the oldest possible symbols – a double wheel, one inside the other, symbolizing heaven and Earth or else the material world and the spiritual one.

I had no chalk, but I reasoned that flour would also work – it was also one of the elements of life, after all.  Grain.  Food for men and beasts.  I took a handful from the pantry

and headed into the open area of the kitchen, in front of the sink.  It was easy enough to draw by letting the flour trickle between my fingers in a thick line.  Against the wooden floor, the pale brown of the whole wheat flour looked stark and clear.  I looked at the printout and drew the little lines like spokes between the two wheels.  Twelve of them for the months of the year.  It looked like a grid, or like bars on a prison.

I outlined the outer circle again in salt, carefully trickled through the spout of my salt container.  Sea salt, which I judged to be good, since, if all the smart people were right, life had begun in the sea.  Thinking of the sea and for good measure, I started to get a cup of water, but it occurred to me that water, purified by the city and spiked with various chemicals was not what was called for in this old ritual.

However, it was snowing.  Outside my kitchen door, I collected a cup full of fast-accumulating snow.  I set it on the table to thaw, and went in search of candles.  At first this proved fruitless.  I did mention I’m not an aroma therapy kind of girl, right?  So, no perfumed candles to outline the bath in.  At any rate, the permanently greyish bathtub did not invite soaking.  Chris and I had planned to replace it with a whirlpool bath, if and when we had the money.

I sighed and thought I heard the sigh repeated behind me, but didn’t turn to see.  I would deal with one form of the supernatural at a time.

Next up were a series of birthday candles.  The one in the shape of a tombstone with a 30 engraved on it, last used for Chris’ birthday, now seemed in the worst possible of tastes.  The other ones, skinny and striped would burn down in no time at all.

And then I remembered that Chris, being Chris, had insisted that we have, along with the safety kit for the car, what he called a disaster preparedness kit – flashlights, candles, and a couple of bottles of distilled water.  As far as protection against a major disaster, it seemed about as effective as a band-aid on an hemorrhage, but it would have to do.

I found them on the uppermost shelf of the bathroom closet, where the first aid kit had been.  And was happily surprised that they had the yellowish tint of wax.  The fact that they were linked together at the top, with one big loop of wick told me where Chris had got them, and it was such a typical thing for him to do that it made my eyes sting with tears.  Someone else, struck with the idea they might need emergency lighting would either have got a bunch of batteries for the flashlights or, being a little more traditional, would have gone to the local supermarket and picked up a handful of white, paraffin candles.  Or maybe both.

But Chris had probably intended to buy candles all along for a few months, and had never remembered, until he found himself at a medieval fair or colonial days celebration – in fact, I vaguely remembered he had covered the Pioneer Days Festival just before he died – and had thought he might as well grab some of the expensive, self-consciously old-time candles.

I wasn’t complaining.  I had feeling that for this ritual old fashioned was better than ultramodern.  I think the human spirit and the realms it touches are like computers that take a long time to program and whose basic programming can’t be removed and reapplied – only changed infinitesimally over time.  So the … collective human spirit, or whatever you wanted to call it, would not recognize electrical light, or even newer candles.

In the same vein, I refrained from cutting them with scissors, and, instead, got Chris’ sharpest pairing knife and used that to cut each candle free, and then set each of them at the divisions of the spokes between the wheels.  There.  One for each month.

I took the now-thawed snow and sprinkled water over the whole bit.  Oh, it was going to be FUN cleaning the wet flour off the floor.  Now, the candles.  I hadn’t incurred fire hazard, yet.

I looked at my printouts.  Uriel was the angel for the month of September.  So, I would start in October.

I got a matchbook from my dresser drawer, where I kept my socks and the matchbooks that Chris dragged home a bit from everywhere.  The one I grabbed was for Black Magic night club, something I found funny, though I was trying very hard NOT to make this black magic.

I removed Chris’ robe because it was too long on me, and it encumbered my movements, and because I wanted to have easy access to the flint on the back pocket of my jeans.  It was, after all, the only protection I could count on in the end.  Well, that and the fact that I had been a marathon champion in highschool.

I’d heard friends talk of rituals.  I’d done my research.  I started by lighting the candle to the left of the one I’d been facing.  I said aloud, as I did so, “Strength and power of the month of October, I invoke your protection and binding for this ritual.”  It sounded unbearably silly, but though I still had the impression – more sensed than audible – of someone else breathing in the room, I did not hear any sniggering.  Which was good.  So I continued, whispering the name of each month till I came round to August.  Having lit that, I paused because something special seemed needed for September.  “Month of September,” I said.  “Transition between seasons.  I invoke your power to hold your titular guardian behind your light.”  And then I lit the candle.

It looked very pretty, in the middle of the floor – a circle of candles and the brighter lines of flour.  Of course, it might all be completely insane.  I had a strong feeling if Maman saw this she would have me committed.

Even to my wishful mind, after all the research I’d done, the idea that a circle of flour on the ground would prevent a supernatural being from getting out seemed kind of ridiculous.  When I was in highschool, I’d read about experiments on turkeys, who could not see in three dimensions and who, therefore, understood a chalk line on the ground just like bars or a wall.  Perhaps angels REALLY are like turkeys, I thought, and smiled a little as I fetched the ritual I’d hastily typed, composed of bits and pieces from a hundred other rituals.  Not that it was that long, but I’d taken the sentences that seemed to recur most often, as well as what seemed to me to be logical ideas.

Of course, bringing logic into the realm of magic was probably about as indispensable as a fiddle in a rhinoceros hunt.  This all seemed to hark back to the primitive brain of man, which had no logic at all, expect maybe the logic of association.

But I had been born a logical and reasonable woman.  I needed the logic.  And after all I’d read, I’d fastened on to the following reasoning – the reason the flour, the light, the water and the salt could bind an angel, or any spirit, was that these weren’t entirely alive.  Their substance, such as it was, could only approximate that of living things and of the material world, but it wasn’t as strong and concrete.  At least, it wasn’t as strong and concrete in our world.

Also, as I understood it, the angels and such were in a way subordinate to us.  The ideas on why this was so varied – it could be because humanity burned briefer and for that reason more intensely.  It could be because we, not them, were made in the image and semblance of God.  It could be simply because we were the union of two aspects – physical and spiritual – while they had only one.  At any rate – and though I was willing to admit this might be wishful thinking – every page I looked at from Christian to Pagan and from spun sugar to the sort that wanted you to paint the room red, believed that in general the power of the relationship between normal, mortal human and these immortal magical creatures of light and spirit rested with the human.

Oh, I was quite willing to concede it might be mortal chauvinism that made us believe this.  But perhaps not.  If these creatures were in fact so much more powerful than us, why had they not wiped us out and taken over?  The goodness of their hearts?  Right.  If they hadn’t it was because they couldn’t, and that meant that somehow we had them by their ethereal short and curlies.

The other fact seemed to be that when invoking these creatures their name was a sort of bind on them, in a way it wasn’t on humans.  The true name – or perhaps in the case of an angel as many true names as possible – was an important weapon.

With all the candles blazing, I picked up my paper.  “Uriel, Archangel of the Presence, Fire of God, Ruler of Hades, Archangel of Salvation, I summon Thee.”

It seemed to me that the candles flickered, but it could have been anything, including a draft from the windows or… something.  The circle remained empty.  Fine.  Maybe it wouldn’t work.  But I was not about to give up.  I let loose with the string of names I had read associated with him, culminating in the most powerful.  “Uriel, Nuriel, Uryan, Jeremiel, Vertil, Suriel, Puruel, Phanuel, Jehoel, Israfel, Metraton, the voice of the Almighty, I command you!”

This time there was a hazy mist in the middle of the circle, visible like a reflection of a reflection or a ghostly image in an untuned TV.  It was clear enough to see that it was a muscular, tall man – or angel – his hands stretched above his head and together, possibly tied, and his chest bare, but while his bottom was encased in tight blue jeans.  There wasn’t enough clarity to the picture to see his expression, but I got a feeling of surprise – if from him or me, I didn’t know.

I cleared my throat, and managed to raise my voice, louder, “Angel of Vengeance, Regent of the sun, Master of Alchemy, Warner of Noah, Destroyer of the hosts of Sennacherib, Prince of Lights, I command you to appear and answer me.”

There was a sound like a tire bursting, a brilliant spasm of light like a thousand camera flashes erupting at once, the smell of ozone like a disaster in an electronics factory.  I blinked, trying to rid myself of both tears and confusion.

Then I jumped back, as my vision cleared.

Uriel was in the middle of the circle, amid the candles.  He was half-crouched, as though he’d been dropped from a height, and his hair stood out in a wild mess, with tendrils in every direction, as if it had been loose down his back and then he’d been caught in a wind storm.  Or perhaps dragged backward, by his heels, across not-quite real space.

He was naked.  Not naked as if he had undressed, but as if the clothes had been ripped, or possibly exploded from his body as he was brought here.

He rose from his crouch to stand in the middle of the circle, blinking at me with the strangely vacant look of someone in shock.  His body was as muscular and perfect as could be guessed through his clothes before, but exposed now, fully, to my gaze, which gave me a curious feeling of voyeurism and an even more curious feeling of embarrassment.  I was fairly sure for good or ill that angels shouldn’t wear silver nipple rings.       I was almost as sure that angels shouldn’t sweat, or lose control of their saliva – wiping his lips to the back of his hand – or have eyes overflowing with tears, in clear reaction to the violence of his arrival.

The only tattoos on his body were the wings on his biceps.  He opened his mouth.  Closed it.  Then – in defiance of all the web sites who called Uriel the cleverest of angels, he tried to step over the ring of candles.

A sound like an aluminum sheet struck by a projectile and causing it to bounce back echoed and he fell backwards, only to hit the back boundary of the circle and cause it to make the same sound.

Tottering to a stable position, he glared at me.  “Why?” he said, his lovely, operatic voice little more than a croak.  “Why bring me here?  Why…”

“Silence,” I said.  “You will speak only to answer my questions.”

Something like fury blazed through his eyes.  Could angels feel angry?  He was giving a good enough impression.  He crossed his arms on his chest.  “I don’t think so,” he said.  “My duty is to protect humans, not–”

Right.  “Silence I command you, by all your names and the power that brought you here.”

He opened his mouth but no sound came out.  His eyes blazed in silent fury.

“How did Chris die?” I said.  “Answer me.”

I could see him thinking.  I could see the wheels turning in his head as he tried to come up with an answer that would satisfy the injunction but would yet not tell me whatever it was he thought I should be protected from.  At long last, his lips moved, slowly, and his voice came out, little more than a growl.  “He stopped breathing.”

“What caused him to stop breathing?”

Again the careful thought.  “The spark of life went out,” he said, and then in a rush, as if volunteering important information.  “His heart stopped beating.  His brain stopped functioning.  His soul… fled.”

I realized I’d got the flint knife from my back pocket and was holding it in both hands.  In that moment, I understood that before thinking about it, I’d meant to sweep it across my captive to… Do whatever it was a fiery sword could do to an angel.

He squared his shoulders, threw his head back, and I knew he had come to the same point in his reasoning and decided that he would take it, whatever it would do.  The flickering of his gaze – this way then that – and the way he blinked twice, told me he had no more idea than I did whether he could survive it.

And I couldn’t do it.  Oh, I’d used the fiery sword on a creature that was attacking me, and if the men with that creature had pressed their luck, I’d have used it on them too.  But they had been attacking me, and that made all the difference.

I held the sword in only one hand, and prepared to put it back in my pocket.  Then I thought the sword was part of Uriel – or at least a divine gift, handed to him before the beginning of time as men reckoned it.  It had to have power.

He was looking at it, attentively, almost fearfully.

“By the power of the sword,” I said.  “By the power of the fire that was first discovered by men, by the power of humanity for good and ill, by the power of divine vengeance embodied in this weapon, I command you, Uriel, Archangel of the Presence, that you should tell me the truth of all you know that might pertain to me.”

He writhed.  I’d read that many times, but never really seen anyone do it.  Not as a standing body, edging this way and that, as if trying to avoid hot pokers surrounding him on all sides.  His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again.  He closed his teeth so forcefully I could hear them clang together and, had he been human, I suspect they would have cracked.  The wings that were on his arms seemed to unfold backward and open, unfurl – white wings made of feathers sculpted of pure light.

“In the beginning there was the word,” he said through clenched teeth.

And I understood that this was a lot like a computer program and I’d given a wrong command.  Clearly the creation of the world pertained to me, as did the creation of mankind, the fall of Eve…  Well, look at it this way, I was the result of all of human history up to this moment.  Had to be.  If things had gone different I wouldn’t be me.  Maman would never have met Dad.  Or else my personality would be different.

I had just given Uriel permission to tell me the entire history of mankind, at least as seen from Heaven.

“Stop,” I said, just as he volunteered something about the serpent being the most beautiful of all animals.  “Tell me everything that pertains to me and Christopher since we met and that explains why I’m under supernatural attack and why Christopher told me to call you.”

He struggled.  His lips moved.  He cleared his throat, and then he howled.  The sword held in front of me, between me and the circle, glowed white.

“It was Ishtar,” he said.

“Ishtar the goddess?”

He nodded.

“Tell me.”

“There is a supernatural fault line running through Denver.  The planes of many worlds touch here.  Mountains… mountains are like that.   Here… The goddess Ishtar was invoked by… seven young men… they…  They’d read she was the goddess of fertility, that a hundred men a night were incapable of satisfying her.  And they thought…”

I wanted to laugh, but cry too.  “That they could get laid?  Was Christopher one of them?”

I’d known my darling very well in his maturity, but what had he been like in his pimply college years?  There was no accounting.  Late adolescence and madness were close kin at the best of times.

“Speak,” I said.

“No!” he said.  And before I could command him again, he clarified.  “Christopher was not one of them.  But Ishtar is a powerful… being.  She took over the young men.  She taught them her ways.  They recruited others.”

“How did Chris get involved in this?”

“Christopher… found out that they meant to steal a young woman, to make her the living incarnation of Ishtar.  They had… stolen young men, to feed their vitality to her.  He was investigating their disappearance, and he found out they meant to take a young woman.”

“A young woman?  What kind of young woman?” I said.  “Just anyone, or–”

“The young woman needed to have the sort of… the pattern of soul where the power and mind of Ishtar could imprint.  There was only one.  Or only one they could find in this part of the world, a woman descended from the ancient priestesses of Ishtar.”

He looked at me, his blue eyes blazing – and I mean that.  It wasn’t an expression.  They seemed to give off flashes of blue-white light.  His wings flapped against the barrier of the circle.  He didn’t want to tell me something.  And I very much suspected I didn’t want to hear it.  But I wasn’t really surprised as he said, “It was you.  Claudia Neri.”