by Greg Bear
People who fly miss all these choices. When committees did cover air fare, though, they sometimes also took us unimagined places: In Calgary, we were taken into a museum’s storage space and given the privilege of holding an authentic tilting-lance. So well balanced it seemed massless, it nestled eagerly between my arm and side.
But, to return to the 1959 trip: I’d never learned to drive. Up to age twenty-five it would have meant higher insurance payments; now past that age, I still used bicycle or public transit. Now I needed to share in this transcontinental drive. I began lessons in empty parking lots on weekends, went on to level streets, then winding streets in the hills.
We headed east on US 40, a road that we’d used more than once on camping trips to reach Lake Tahoe. Its two lanes, with occasional passing lanes, wound up and up; I recognized this restaurant, that service station with snow-tire rental—but now I was behind the wheel. The Donner Pass was my seventh driving lesson.
What we saw, whom we visited, and which relatives took care of Astrid, can be left for a longer reminiscence. But I must mention one event.
We’d headed north along the Blue Ridge Parkway and stopped at a campground in North Carolina; I think it was the only time we blew up our air mattresses. We had a bare stone hilltop to sleep on.
I woke in the hours before dawn to see, glowing amid a clear starry sky, what looked like a fluorescent orange comet. It had to be a man-made object in space! I woke Poul and we discussed it. Next day’s newspaper mentioned a sounding rocket from Wallops Island; at the convention Willy Ley confirmed that the rocket had squirted out sodium vapor above the shadow of Earth.
Conventions run together in my memory. Was it here, late one party, Poul and some others sang “Die Beiden Grenadiere” while Willy translated the lyrics to me? Likely Gordy Dickson and Ted Cogswell were singing too. It was surely where we met Kelly Freas, creator not only of covers and interiors for so many of Poul’s stories, but also of his portrait for the April 1971 special issue of F&SF.
Homebound after Detroit, we visited in Minnesota and did indeed see Meteor Crater as we swung south to California. On the last morning, hungry and cashless, we used a bank’s check-guarantee card that allowed me to draw $100 when a branch opened. We bought gas and breakfast and made like bats out of Barstow. After that Poul agreed to have a gasoline credit card, so long as it was kept paid off.
All these things formed the basis of our continuing lifestyle. We drove once by a direct route as far as Chicago and back for a convention. Attending those, we talked, partied, and sang with writers, editors, artists, publishers—above all fans, many of whom aspired or even succeeded professionally. Specialty presses like Gnome and Shasta, and semi-pro ones like Advent, fed an appetite ignored by general publishers until the runaway success of The Lord of the Rings. Paperback houses like Berkley and Pyramid added science fiction to their crime and suspense lines, and Ace started the double-novel experiment in both genres. Poul sold them not only original novels but at least one collection of short works as his own flip side.
At the end of 1959, we were ready to buy our own home, rather than renting. (Our last tenants, Terry and Miriam Carr, had moved to better housing.) We searched Berkeley and neighboring cities before finally choosing a house in Orinda. Excellent in some respects, it was only tolerable in others; I might have looked longer if I’d known we would be there over forty years.
In 1965 we went to Loncon II, our first foreign worldcon; as in 1959, we traveled in great loops before and after the convention that was the primary business purpose. The IRS never questioned our receipts for that or any travel we claimed. London 1965 was like Detroit 1959, and so were Heidelberg 1970 and Brighton 1979. We combined Den Haag 1990 with a science tour. We visited foreign friends and Poul’s Danish kinfolk, saw museums, and took local tours. Only rarely did we go to a nightclub or the like, being more likely to rest our feet and plan the next day.
In Europe, we saw passage graves, reconstructed Iron Age dwellings, medieval and Renaissance merchants’ houses, lords’ castles and royal chateaus, the pomp of Versailles and Peter the Great’s responses at St. Petersburg; and always surviving temples, churches, and cathedrals from Athens to Moscow. In the New World, we saw pre-Columbian remains of Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs as well as Hispanic developments. Around the world, we saw the variousness of the world itself and its history. A writer’s imagination can only work on what’s been put into it.
François Bordes, who’d translated Poul’s work for the French edition of F&SF, and his wife Denise de Sonneville-Bordes had become our friends while at UC Berkeley. His work in re-developing knapping techniques would suffice to make him famous, and Denise’s work on typology was equally respected. He gave us an Acheulean hand-ax—“I can do this legally, since it was picked up in a river and has no importance for research.”
In Dordogne, François showed us painted caves only open to researchers, and his students’ ongoing dig at an abri. (When I last visited, the Smithsonian displayed a recreation of his site.) He took us to a site open to the public where I picked up a worked stone; he identified it as a Perigordean blade, and said I was welcome to keep it, as it lacked stratigraphy. (Imagine a thickish injector-razor blade, about one-and-a-half scale, made from a long flake of white stone.) He had both the knowledge and the authority, being head of the Department of the Quaternary at the University of Bordeaux.
During such travels, Poul used his Danish bilingual upbringing and college German, while I had Latin, Spanish, French, and both classical and a bit of modern Greek to call on. I used the last to create “sophont” for a story of his, a term taken up by anthropologists to mean an intelligent nonhuman.
In 1966, we became part of a counter-counterculture.
Diana Paxson had invited numerous friends to a medieval re-enactment on May Day, in her back yard just south of the UC campus. Poul had work, my mother needed me in D.C., but she’d invited twelve-year-old Astrid too. Poul could drop her off and fetch her. Combats, music, and pageantry succeeded so well that further events were arranged in Berkeley parks. The Society for Creative Anachronism was well under way when, first at Westercon and then at Worldcon in 1966, pilots of Star Trek were shown. Post-event revelry became Trek fan-sessions.
Dorothy Jones, one of the Consortium Antiquum singers who had joined the SCA as a group, became a Trek fan and a close friend of Astrid’s. She was in her twenties, but she and Astrid together turned into eighteen-year-old twins. We and other family groups at the beginning carried out Diana’s idea of re-creating the cultural Middle Ages, not just the martial arts.
The SCA, appealing to the same mentality as science fiction, spread from convention to campus to army base. One fighter started a branch at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany; another, serving in the Pacific, set one up on an aircraft carrier. Poul and I, with Astrid, Dorothy, and others put together the filk operetta “HMS Trek-A-Star” for a Westercon; it turned out to have all-SCA cast and crew. I sang Spock. The audience included Gene Roddenberry and James Doohan. A near-original cast re-ran it at the 1968 Worldcon, with a few lines updated; David Gerrold, with a tribble he and I had stitched up, substituted as Kirk.
Poul took to SCA fighting with enthusiasm, and what he learned on the field (though with duct-tape-wrapped rattan) gave him the combat experience to re-write his early fantasy The Broken Sword, still available from Orion both in paperback and in e-publication. “Sir Bela of Eastmarch” is especially remembered by early fighters as setting an example for chivalry.
We went occasionally to the annual meetings of the AAAS; some years, as when Hal Clement gave a paper on habitable extremes, they were irresistible. We attended a bioastronomy conference in Santa Cruz and one on lunar and planetary science in Houston. Meeting Poul, a surprising number of scientists said science fiction had turned them toward their profession. Space scientists and rocket engineers, met at Florida launches or JPL flybys, have also called SF writers and artists influential in shaping their work.
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bsp; In 1986 and later, we joined conducted tours with lectures by scientists to see a comet or an eclipse. Exotic sites (and information we picked up) would always spark a story: “The Year of the Ransom” sprang from the L5 Society’s trip to Perú and the Galápagos to see Halley’s Comet, with lectures by David Levy, before Comet Shoemaker-Levy made him famous. Jay Pasachoff led an eclipse tour in 1990 that we made part of a grand sweep. It began in July with a visit to Helsinki and a quick trip to Leningrad and Moscow, before returning for the charter flight that showed us the eclipse at 33,000 feet above Finland. We left the group when their ship reached Stockholm, on our way to Den Haag for the 1990 worldcon. Other eclipse tours took us to Oaxaca (also Monte Albán, Yagúl, and Mitla) where we could eat huitlacoche; or brought us through Argentina with a look at the Falls of Iguazú on the way to the Gran Chaco and the Mennonite enclave of Paraguay. That latter gave rise to the scene where a South American experiences a computer-created dream of Jorge Luis Borges.
Having left the 1990 tour, we rented a car, traveled down the east coast of Sweden, crossed Denmark and went through part of the Netherlands to the Worldcon. Tom Doherty took us to lunch and said, “You know, if I had a new Time Patrol story, I could put together an omnibus.” Poul said, “Funny thing about that: we were just researching it.” The story was “Star of the Sea,” in which my translations of the Latin inscriptions we’d seen on Batavian traders’ votive altars found in the Netherlands and our speculations about their iconography melded with what we’d seen on Öland and what Tacitus had said about the Germani and their cult of Nerthus.
That European tour concluded as a family reunion: Astrid, her husband Greg, four-year-old Erik, and infant Alexandra, joined us to visit Poul’s relatives in København.
We participated in many annual CONTACT (Cultures of the Imagination) conferences, created by anthropologists James Funaro, Reed Riner, and Joel Hagen.
Such exercises start with choosing a type of star and sort of planet, Poul’s specialty, and working up from there through ecology, culture, and languages; the last are my strengths. Two teams (each representing humans or other sophonts: time, near or far future) would present their culture session by session as they developed it, and finally role-play their encounter with each other.
For a spinoff Contact conference in Japan, we created a world complete with ecosystem and sophonts’ history and mythology, including a planetary trade-language. Poul’s story “The Shrine of Lost Children” arose there. We converted a set of planets from the Technic Universe for a role-playing exercise at one of the Asimov Conferences at White Eagle Lodge in New York; for another Asimov Conference, Poul and I developed the assigned Ben Bova book Welcome to Moonbase into a “Murder Weekend” game.
Travels before and after Brighton 1979, originally Regency-driven, led into Roman connections. Hadrian’s Wall confirmed that we would write a late-Roman story; it became a fantasy when I found Martin of Tours, definitely of our period, embedded in the Breton legend of Ys. Researching further at home, I saw we could cross it with Frazer’s King of the Golden Wood. I spent a year doing book research, and we returned to Brittany for a look at places and things we hadn’t seen before. The writing, beyond some verses of mine, was entirely Poul’s; we plotted it together. Later, visiting his brother John (retired from a professorship of geology), I remarked that I thought of the novel as my master’s thesis; John said, “I’ve seen Ph.D.s given for less research.”
I had always wanted to write science fiction and fantasy. If I sold little of my own, still I was helpmeet to one of those who shaped it, and lived among people for whom it was the most important thing in the world. And why not? Our dreams, if we shape them aright, can in turn shape a better future for the world.
In 1998, Poul was recognized as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
He had been a member of MWA before SFWA existed, and was familiar with their motto: “Crime does not pay—enough!” As a founding member he had agreed that it must, like MWA, be not a literary society but an organization of professionals. Poul worked hard to support it. He was elected one of its first presidents, and served two terms, missing deadlines for the first time. I had made sales enough to join the organization along with him, and paid my dues regularly, though my solo sales were few. Eventually we bought life memberships.
In 1966, after that year’s Worldcon, we took part in the Milford Writers’ Conference hosted annually by Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm at their home. Participants benefited from critiquing each others’ stories, and also from extended discussions, going beyond those that took place at Worldcons. We thought SFWA would profit from a similar annual get-together. Next spring, we put on the first annual SFWA Awards gathering. Astrid and her “twin” were our support staff, handing out badges and suchlike. (I was very proud in 2004 to see how well Astrid ran the weekend in Seattle.) We continued, in spite of the sometimes furious internal controversies, to support the organization in every way we could.
When Poul received his Grand Master award at Santa Fe, instead of having a typed acceptance speech he spoke extempore. I wish someone had been recording the proceedings, because he spoke of me and all the ways I’d assisted him through the years. He ended with the words, “She is my love.”
DANCING ON THE EDGE OF THE DARK
by C.J. Cherryh
C.J. Cherryh is the author of more than sixty novels, the winner of the John W. Campbell Award and three Hugo Awards, and a figure of immense significance in both the science fiction and fantasy fields. In science fiction, she’s published the thirteen-volume Foreigner series, the seven-volume Company Wars series, the five-volume Compact Space series, and many other series and stand-alone novels, including Cyteen. In fantasy, she’s the author of the four-volume Morgaine series, the three-volume Rusalka series, the five-volume Tristan series, the two-volume Arafel series, and, as editor, the seven-volume Merovingen Nights anthologies. Some of her best-known novels include Downbelow Station, The Pride of Chanur, Gate of Ivrel, Kesrith, Serpent’s Reach, Rimrunners, The Dreamstone, Port Eternity, and Brothers of Earth. Her short fiction has been collected in Sunfall, Visible Light, and The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh. Her most recent book is a new novel in the Foreigner world, Betrayer. She lives in Spokane, Washington.
Swashbuckling but ruthless Imperial agent Dominic Flandry, who works tirelessly to prevent the Terran Empire from falling, although he knows that the interstellar Dark Age that will follow the Empire’s collapse inevitably will come someday in spite of his best efforts, may be Poul Anderson’s single most popular character. Flandry’s first adventure was published in 1951, and he subsequently featured in six novels and enough shorter works to fill two collections, stretching across Anderson’s entire career. Dominic Flandry is occasionally referred to as “science fiction’s James Bond,” but the fact is that Flandry started his adventures two years before James Bond made his fictional debut, so perhaps James Bond should instead be referred to as “the mainstream’s Dominic Flandry!”
Here, C.J. Cherryh gives us a new generation of Flandrys setting up shop in the family business . . .
The Empire was frayed on the edges. There had been the business in Scotha, and there had been so many others besides, wars, conquests, collapses, rebellions . . . all, all in constant motion. The Galaxy was wide. The reach of ships grew, without the presence of enough Empire force to police the territories they opened up, and there was no shortage of other lordlings and dictators with ambitions and fleets.
The Terran Empire had been potent once—at least in concept. The Empire had thrown its perimeter wider and wider, incorporating the foreigners, the odd, the strange, the different—and the occasionally incomprehensible.
Success had widened its boundaries so very far now there was no way, now, that all of the Empire could be attacked at once.
But neither could it be defended, even piecemeal, and moving assets about to deal with brushfires in the hinterworlds grew harder and harder for th
e Empire to deal with. There was an incursion in the double sun system, on the desert moon of Lothar, which needed a fleet to deal with it, and the Empire dealt with that—bringing in a hundred ships from Audette; but moving forces from Audette encouraged Duadin to move on its neighbor, and while all that was going on, over on the opposite side of the Empire, the Succession Wars of Patmai broke out, which simply could not be addressed.
The winner of that struggle took a sector out of the Empire, and the Empire, for once, had to sigh collectively and say that rebellions were short and tyrants had lifespans—while the Empire was long, and had a long memory for former situations. It meant to bring Patmai and Patmara back into the Empire.
It would—perhaps—do that, when it found the time. And when it was convenient.
Meanwhile the Mersians, old allies, conspired at overthrow, in yet another direction.
One thing happened, and another, not far apart.
That was the way the Empire ebbed a little from certain shores, even while still advancing on others. That was the way that, here and there on its edges, more small fires sprang up, put out if convenient, allowed to burn down in isolation if not—sometimes peeling a world away for a while, or longer.
The fact was the Empire had become like an old cloth fraying from wear at the edges—and if ever a young, strong and hungry force such as it had once been should brush up against it now, the Empire would be in the direst difficulty, unable to muster all its scattered parts to its own defense.
Therefore the Empire feared the borders it once had thundered out to expand and expand and expand . . . while its secret heart grew weaker.
Fear became its own war of attrition. Policymakers at the heart of the Empire feared the motives of those who came from those border worlds. It was easy, safe politics, to blame every ill on the barbarians, so as not to have to examine the rot at the heart of things that still functioned tolerably well, as the center of Empire saw it. The status quo became the rule, and woe to him who disturbed it.