Progress Report and a Free Sample of my Wares
Well, work on my latest novel continues slowly but surely. Last week I had to throw out some 500 pages or so: this is the disadvantage of writing without an outline. Young writers, learn a lesson from me and avoid my time-consuming mistakes.
In any case, I am restarting at about page 100, keeping the beginning of the tale the same, but jazzing up the middle and end. Of the 500 thrown out pages, I should be able to rework and reuse most of it. A thrifty cobbler never throws away good leather.
Anyway, here is part of what I wrote this week. To set the scene–naw, never mind. You’ll pick up what’s happening as you read.
1. Thaw
AD 2399
Menelaus Montrose woke to a sensation of floating serenity. His thoughts seemed focused and sharp, but his head ached liked it had been filled with helium. Had he been drugged?
He sat up in bed. That was the first surprise: because it was a bed, an old-fashioned four-poster, big enough to hold a family of bounders, their first cousins and their dogs, hung with heavy drapes, with sheets and coverlets around him like a snowfield, and a real down pillow where his head had lain.
Menelaus felt the back of his head. There had been some sort of appliance there, stuck to his skull, implanted halfway into his skull, right at he top of his spine. The pillow from the previous room—a white, empty place with padded walls—had plugged into the skull-jack, no doubt feeding him brain-chemicals.
No, there had been two places. The second place had been clean but lacked that smell of blood and antiseptic Montrose always associated with infirmary tents. It looked more like a room in a fancy Japanese motorist-hotel, with mirrors instead of windows to make the small room look large. Montrose had been blurry-headed for those days, his memory stuttering like a bent datastick, complaining at the nurses who helped him through the physical therapy sessions, demanding to see a phone, a lawyer, a gunsmith, a doctor, in that order.
Everything had looked wrong: there were no switches or knobs to open the doors or douse the wrong-looking lights hidden in the ceiling paint. The way the shadows moved when he moved his head was wrong; the way the counterpane and curtains changed hue was wrong, the way the male nurse batted eyelashes at him, and the female one didn’t, was really wrong.
Worse, it looked wrong the way they all spoke in midair, in the middle of conversations, maybe calls of some sort from hidden phones… or maybe they were lunatics. He didn’t know if it was rude or not to interrupt, and after a few days of being treated like livestock, he didn’t much care.
Everyone wore glasses, and the lenses turned blue, or went all mirrored, without warning, so half the time it was like looking at a blind men. He was sure they were watching picture streams, or playing games.
But now where was he?
He threw open the bed curtains, and recoiled, blinking. The sunlight poured in from French doors leading to a balcony. Outside was dizzying scenery: majestic mountains, crowned and ermined with snow, and gathered between crevasses, like emeralds sown into the silvery-white garments of emperors, narrow valleys of pine and spruce. Above, a sky so pale and clear it was as glass, and there on motionless wing, an eagle, highest flown of all the fowls of earth.
In the foregrounds, despite the snow piled thick outside the gates, the view outside the window was a flower maze, green lawns, fountains with silver basins. Maybe the hospital was stuck in the middle of some Museum, or one of those old French palaces. But did they heat the whole estate, merely to grow a rosegarden and grape arbor in the middle of the mountain peaks? Menelaus wondered at the energy expended.
Inside the chamber, there were paintings on the ceilings, and arches of carved wood in floral patterns and hunting scenes framing the doors and windows, Persian carpets like nothing he’d ever seen on the floor, and every which way he looked, everything was either gold, or crystal, or polished wood, or fine china, or substances he could not put a name to. There was a black paneled bowel of red roses on the nightstand, and some sort of candelabra in the ceiling, surrounded by painted babies with pink wings. The candelabra—if that was what it was—had no bulbs nor candles, so how it lit up, if it lit up, Menelaus could not say. Maybe it was a metal sculpture of an octopus gone wrong.
The hospital room was damn pretty, though, he had to give them that.
Menelaus only noticed what he was wearing when he stood. The sable fabric rustled and caressed him. It was not that hospital gown made of slick pallid stuff—whatever it was—that had no zipper or seam, but had opened, or turned transparent, whenever the doctors nodded at him; haunted clothing, half-alive, seemed like. This was something from the earth he knew: silk pajamas. There was a monogram on the pocket, a combination of the letters D and X and A. They weren’t his initials. At least it was Latin letters.
He wondered where he was. Not a hospital, that was sure. Maybe in the Delta-Pavonis X-Planet Alliance? Xylophone Anti-music Department? The Algophilists of the Desolation of Xipetotec? (Given a vote, he’d prefer disgruntled percussion musicians to votaries of a old Injun blood-god.)
And, lucky him, here was a fireplace. Menelaus hauled himself over thataway in a trice, and was hefting the brass fire-poker in his hand, wondering if it would give way on impact with a man’s skull, when there came a noise behind him. The door opened a crack, and someone knocked politely, and then the door opened the rest of the way, which gave Menelaus time to straighten up and hide the poker behind his back.
Opening doors here in the future was evidently a two-man affair. A man as black as black coffee, so tall Menelaus had to look twice—the fellow was twelve feet heel to helmet and not an inch less—dressed in outlandish armor, bedecked with feathers and leopard pelt and leaning on a spear, was holding the door open for a small man, black skinned also, but a lighter shade (call it coffee with cream), dressed in a high-collared white coat whose buttons ran up the side. His pants had balloon-legs that looked silly. He walked with no noise at all, nor did his head bob. It was as if he were carrying an invisible book on his head.
Which reminded Menelaus—he needed a nice, rich, scalding cup of coffee.
To judge by his outfit, the fellow was either a doctor, or a fencing instructor. His posture was stiff, like an old man’s, even though his face was not wrinkled. He was short and bald, and he had the oddest mix of racial features. A big hooked nose like a Jew or a Moor, but the cheekbones and epicanthic eye-folds of a Chinaman. The doctor had a pair of thick goggles slung on a strap around his neck, which he donned.
For a moment he stared at Menelaus, and the lenses clicked through several colors, blue, silver-white, gold, and green. With goggles turned clear when the man spoke.
"How are we feeling today?" He said brusquely.
Must be a doctor. Fencing instructors would not talk that way.
"We feel like we are getting the hell’s flaming testicles dangling from the devil’s blue roger out of here, Doctor—are you a doctor? Where the pest is your nameplate?"
The doctor’s glasses turned mirrored, and he wiggled his fingers as if typing an air-keyboard. Menelaus assumed there was some system translating the finger-motions intocommands. Very futuristic. Stupid looking, though. Maybe that was the price of progress.
Glasses turned transparent again. No, the eye looked slightly blurred. Menelaus was convinced the doctor was inspecting him under amplification, looking at his pupils, something like that.
"We seem more alert, today, Mister Montrose. Do we remember where we are?"
His mood might have been better if he had woken with his skull bulging with the genius of the next step of human evolution. Instead he felt light-headed. Perhaps his wild experiment in topographic branch formation had deadened some delicate balance of nerves in his brain. Perhaps he was lucky he could talk at all.
"Lemme guess. This is one of those horrible futures where there’s no more individual spirit, and y’all worship a machine or something, and so you’re not allowed to say ‘me’ or ‘I’ because the Machine Police will get you. Right? Y’all just one mass-mind, hard-linked through a party line, so I’ll have to light out for the hills and reinvent the lightbulb or something jackass like that."
The old man looked so doubtful that Menelaus wondered if they had a sense of humor up here in the future. Best not to kid around.
Menelaus said, "I got wit enough about me to know these are thaw symptoms, here, right? The symptoms were all explained ‘a me before I signed the articles for the Hermetic. Has she sailed yet? Even if she was a two thousand hours full boost further downrange, a 2G-constant punt could still reach, if it had a high enough fuel-to-payload ratio. What’s wrong with me? What year is this? Did they hold up the launch for me?"
"Nothing is wrong with you at the moment, Mr. Montrose. Activity in your hypothalamus and brain stem has returned to normal; your blood oxygen levels have established their old balance; and your EKG is no longer showing a Delta-wave pattern while you are awake."
Menelaus realized there must be instruments pointed at him, either in the doctor’s goggles, or hidden in the walls and rich furnishings of the chamber. There was a sinking sensation in his chest, almost a feeling of suffocation. Even if he had not admitted it to himself before, it was clear enough now that these were technical advances of more than a few years.
Decades had passed. The ship had sailed. The stars had slipped out of his grasp.
Menelaus shivered, grimacing, beating away despair as if by an effort of will. He forced a casual note into his voice. "Sounds like I was sleep-walking. Is that what you’re saying?"
The doctor pulled down his thick goggles, so they once more hung around his neck. "It was a mental state we could not classify. According to the Palacios Conjecture, it might be unclassifiable."
"What were the scans? Did my brain show topographic alterations? What about cortex cell-branching? I’d like to take an I.Q. test or three, to check for cognitive development, or, pest-dammit, degeneration maybe."
The doctor’s tenor was aloof, almost monotone. "Mr. Montrose, it is not my habit to trouble my subjects with the details of their case. So far, the indications are promising that you have made a full recovery—indeed, such a rapid recovery, that I almost suspect you were malingering then, or playacting now, if that is the word—well, that is speculation, not fact, so let us put it aside."
Menelaus decided he did not like the sound of the sawbone’s voice. "If I am your patient, I get a say as to what’s done me, and I get to know what’s been done. Don’t I?"
"Mr. Montrose, if I may be blunt, I do not answer to you. Your are indebted, as am I, to our mutual patron, and you more severely than I. It is not considered well-mannered to speak of such things, but…" He shrugged. "Things are as they are."
" ‘Doctor’."
"Did you have a question? If we are ready to depart, I can summon your varlet..?"
"No, I mean, I am a doctor. Not a doctor doctor, not a sawbones, but you keep calling me ‘Mister’."
"After long slumber became commonplace, the notation of medical and academic degrees was given a sunset date."
"Meaning what?"
"Your doctorate expired while you slept,” said the doctor dismissively. “In any case, the Master strictly instructed me not to disturb you with too much information, too quickly, especially since we have yet to confirm if the damage done to your nervous system is mitigated. How many fingers am I holding up?"
"Fifteen or so. What year is it? Do you have flying cars yet? Where the pox am I? Who is your— did you say ‘master’? Hmpf. I sure ain’t sure as I like the sound of that."
"Do you remember who you are?"
"Menelaus Illation Montrose, J.D. and Ph.D, Graduated Soko University in Nip Frisco, Class of ’34, before that, commissioned in ’25 as Lance-Corporal in the United State Imperial Calvary, the Tough-Ruttin’ Thirty-Fifth, decommissioned thank God, and after that, Monumentician and Semantic Logosymbolic Specialist, Joint Indosphere-Hispanosphere Scientific Xenothropological Expedition to Centuri V 866. Does that sound like I know who I am?"
"What race are you?"
"Purebred Tex-Mex. What’ya think?"
"No, I mean, do you know what species you are? Do I look like a member of your own species to you, at the moment?"
"What the hell kind of question is that? My what?"
"Are we both human?"
"Rut me with a harpoon! You kidding? You ain’t kidding. What, is you aiming to rip off your mask and turn out to be a monster bug from Arcturus or something? Big clustery eyes and dripping sideways mouth and all? Damnation, go ahead! Let me see it. I dare ya! Do we have starships to Arcturus as yet?"
"Extend your hands to either side, and, while closing your eyes, touch your nose. Quickly, please."
"I will be damned if I will. You ain’t answering my queries, Doc."
"Hm. Insubordination is not a mental disorder, I suppose, but it is not exactly a healthy sign either. It is against my judgment, but the Master is eager to grant audience to you, and I dare not go athwart of him. Are you ready to dress?"
"Sure. Gimme some duds."
"The seneschal has assigned you a staff, including a wardrobe mistress. I am not familiar with this week’s dress code, foolishness, if you ask me, but the Master insists on propriety.” He turned his head as the door opened. “Ah! Here we are."
"You are twisting my wee third leg, Doc, if you think I am letting some señorita strip me down and dress me up. I got hands, ain’t I?"
For at the moment, the black giant held open the door for two women.
2. Wardrobe, Protocol, and Others
The two women—or, rather, a woman and a girl, because one of them looked no older than sixteen—dressed in rippling long skirts of black fabric glided into the room, as graceful as ballerinas when they walked. The lady’s get-up looked like a cross between a ballgown, a kimono and a sari, as it went from left hip to right shoulder, leaving one arm bare. Each one had a train coming from her bustle, a long streamer of fabric that hung in mid-air behind them, and a second train rising from her right shoulder. Menelaus could not see what kept these scarves afloat. Tiny cells of buoyant gas in the fabric? Antigravity? Electrostatic repulsion?
Perhaps because her garb was kimono-like, Menelaus took the girl to be Japanese. She had long straight black locks, parted in the middle, that hung like a waterfall of India ink, gathered into a jade clasp at the small of her back, with only one strand out of place, artfully arranged to curl along her cheekbone. Her face and features seemed normal enough.
The other, older woman was bronze-haired and very thick-lipped, perhaps Spanish or Greek, and her hair was held in a bizarre pyramid on her skull, thickly impaled with combs and ornaments, some of which twinkled with captured light. Her lips were puffed and red as blood, and her face was chalk-white, her eyes so unusually large it bordered on the grotesque. Was she an albino? A mutant? A subterranean race starved for light? Perhaps it was radical plastic surgery. If so, the fashions in female beauty had verged into exaggeration.
Both of them had what seemed large round ornaments hanging at either temple, but Menelaus realized that these were lenses of their goggles sets, which somehow unhooked at the nosepiece and slid to either side. He could not see what was holding them in place, unless the ear-straps were woven of the lady’s own hair.
A man also danced into the room with a mincing motion, his footfalls as light and graceful as a stag’s. He looked like a Dominican monk, since he wore a hood and a long black robe. His eyes were hidden behind thick goggles, and hood was trimmed with white tassels and blue silk. His waist was clasped, not with a rope belt, but with a set of metallic scales studded with what looked like electronics. The lower half of the man’s face (which was all Montrose could see) was strikingly handsome, high cheeks and firm chin. Montrose once again did not recognize the race. Perhaps he was a Dravidian or a Bushman or something. Maybe there were more races on Earth these days.
The hooded man bowed, and raised one hand like an orator before he spoke. His words were in Spanish, but a second voice came out of his hood, matching his voice in tone and pitch, but in English-accented English, not real English: shedule not skedule.
"Might I introduce myself? I am Severo y Quevedo. Pleased to meet you. Howdya do? I am a scholar who has studied your time period, and it has pleased the Master to assign me as your gently-assisting mediator of protocol. My instructions will be plain and clear as smooth water, and true wisdom suggests you do nothing to lower our notation rate, lest this reflect badly on our patron. In the first instance, there is no shame in having the wardrobe mistress to apparel you: such is her office, and her skill and intuition is proved exact from many points. A thousand eyes will see you, countless as the stars, and yet you will be shamed in none of them. I am to explain that we have no nudity custom in this time."
Menelaus turned to the doctor. "Who the hell is that?"
The doctor said drily. "Scholar Severo y Quevedo, your protocolist. Are we having short-term memory lapses? Perhaps we should delay the audience."
"How would your master feel if I grabbed that protocol fellow, jumped out yonder window in a fearsome spray of glass, and buggered him up his anal cavity on the way to the ground, landing so as to crack my head open, spilling out my brains, dying some godawfully thorough death, but having my soul go screaming straight to hell, where I will spend forevermore on burning sands under a sootfall of fiery flakes with the sodomites, murderers, suicides, and windowbreakers. Would your master care for that outcome, a bit?"
The doctor said, "I suspect not. Do you suffer from suicidal impulses?"
"Nossir. I suffer from an impulse to go see your boss right this here second, to have some straight talk talked at me and no more bamboozling around, wearing these pajamas. Good enough to sleep in is good enough to walk in, says I. Since you talk English just fine, why don’t you just show me the way?"
The albino-pale wardrobe mistress said, "I will fetch you a smoking jacket and slippers, sir, which will lend an air of austere yet casual informality to your presence."
Menelaus could only stomp in a satisfactory fashion with one leg, as he had to twist his hip each time to bring his bad leg forward, but he could limp with an aggressive scowl and an exaggerated lurch and stomp every other step, so that would have to do.
The effect was spoiled a little bit because, first, once out of the room and in a scarlet-carpeted hallway, he had no notion where to go, and, second, the twelve-foot tall black man politely but unsmilingly took the fire poker from him, and, third, the little Japanese girl with the floating sash trailing behind her danced up, graceful as a fawn, and started slipping a long robe up his arms, merely smiling more woodenly and trying more ferociously the more he twisted and tried to shake her off.
"Doc!" he shouted.
"Do we have a question, Mr. Montrose?" said the dark-skinned Oriental-eyed man, gliding into the corridor. Damn, all these people walked like gazelles.
"What’s your name, Doc?"
"Kyi."
"Family name or Christian name?"
The doctor inclined his head respectfully. "That is my Medicine-Buddha name, which more fully is Sgra-dbyangs kyi rgyal-po, whom I emulate. My refuge name is Bhlogrochosnyi, Intellect Cosmic Order Sun, obtained when I took refuge in the three jewels of Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. I am of Tashilhupo, who follow the Yellow Hat sect."
"Uh… sure. Doctor Key, can you tell this little girl to stop mugging me?"
"That is not within my bounds," said the Doctor blandly. "Scholar Severo can explain our obligation and command structure more carefully, if you would care to heed his advice. Wardrobe falls under the Butler’s staff."
Scholar Severo spoke again in Spanish, and again a second voice issued from his hood. Menelaus wondered if the guy had two heads. It was probably just some futuristic translator machine, but Menelaus hoped not, as two heads would have been a sight mightily worth seeing.
"Ah, the patronage is controlled by the flow and counter-flow of notation, which is as intricate as a self-correcting biological system, delicate as a watch in motion! The Household staff has a special notation pool, not affiliated with contractuals or indentures. You, as a guest, draw directly from the Master’s personal reserve, but also take in parallel riders from the paparazzi fund and external publicity suppression, who are obviously bidding against each other. There is a separate historical account which we may establish later! But points do not grow on the thorn-bush, as the saying is! Deportment is a consideration. Do not speak directly to the Frock-maid, but address the Wardrobe Matron. Use firm but respectful language, perhaps with a compliment to show largesse, which is an expected virtue. Holding up your hand in a refined gesture is not mandatory, but it is suggested, in case the audio channel fades. Let me advocate a phrase: Like summer rain, generosity can inundate without refreshing, if proffered improprietously…"
"No, no, no, scholar guy. Let me advocate a phrase. I aim to yerk you up by your ankle-bones, dunk your head in the privy, and mop the floor with your hair, if you do not see fit to close, cohere, secure, seal and shut your yammer funnel. I don’t need someone to tell me how to talk."
Dr. Kyi said mildly, "Unless you expect to be heard, of course, in which case you may. Tell me, are you suffering from feelings of anxiety, hostility or aggression?"
"Pshawg! Yes."
"Very good. That is normal."
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
