Letters to Jenny

by Piers Anthony

  So now on to the main letter. What? You want more of the novel? Look, I can’t tell you the whole thing! I haven’t even figured it out yet! Okay, I’ll tell you just about this section. Darius gets interested in Colene, then realizes how young she is. No, this isn’t “Tappy”; Darius immediately backs off, being an honorable man. Colene is heartbroken, but helps him complete his return to his fantasy frame. He goes, and she remains behind, though she would have given anything to go with him. Her thoughts of suicide return with doubled force.

  Once home, Darius thinks things over, and realizes that he has made a mistake. He owes his life to Colene, and now realizes that he loves her. She’s not too young by his realm’s standards. But he doesn’t know how to find her.

  Travel between realms is extremely tricky; he can’t just go back. What is he to do? Meanwhile Colene realizes that her choice is between Darius and death; she will either find him and be with him, or she will kill herself. She can suppress the almost overpowering urge to commit suicide only by fashioning a desperate plan to follow Darius to his home. And—the rest of the novel concerns this effort on the part of the two of them to get back together. There’s a telepathic horse named Seqiro, and an alien super-science conqueror, and a woman who remembers the future instead of the past, and—but why bore you with all that? On with this letter.

  Hm—I have notes for all manner of significant things, but here you kept me talking about the novel for two pages, and I can’t afford to do a six page letter. You’d just fall asleep. Okay, I’d better postpone the book reports until next time. No, don’t you dare sigh with relief! I have some books about trees and nature and the reclassification of the Burgess Shale, and if you think that’s dull, you’ll have to listen anyway. I’m worried about your education; I’m afraid they aren’t covering things of importance, such as the Burgess Shale and the daily comics. So here are a couple of Hagar the Horrible and Bent Offerings, and an item about a person being charged $35 for not eating any food at the hospital—you say you’re on that diet too?—and a dingus to help folk like you walk, and Curtis and Alligator Express with a fantasy princess story, I tried to copy a couple of atheist folk songs, but it was black on red and I guess God wouldn’t let it be copied. They are part of an atheist Christmas card a correspondent sent me, with songs like “O Come Ye unfaithful” and “Bad King Wenceslas.” I’m agnostic, which means I don’t choose to make an issue of my lack of belief in the supernatural, but the truth is my private belief is essentially atheistic. Well, here, I’ll quote some: “Bad King Wenceslas looked out/ On the Christmas season/ Where the peasants lay about / Hungry, poor and freezin'.” I like both the original song and this bitter parody. I also like the old Pogo parody: “Good King Sauerkraut looked out/ On his feets uneven/ Where the snow lay round about/ Gee, his feets was freezin'!”

  Through the Ice has now been published, and I am receiving letters of appreciation from the friends and family of Robert Kornwise. What does this have to do with you? Robert Kornwise was killed just about a year before you were hit, by another reckless driver. I completed his unfinished novel, that his memory might live to that extent. You and he are linked in my mind. He died, you survived, and I became involved. I think you would have liked each other. Your mother will read you the novel, when you get home, if you ask her. More next week, Jenny—

  Dismember 22, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  The big news this week is Penny’s cat. Penny, my elder daughter, adopts stray animals. Do you know anyone like that? Yes, I thought you did. Well, there was this stray cat in her neighborhood a couple months ago, and then it disappeared, and then in the past month it reappeared and she adopted it, took it to the vet for shots, and brought it into her apartment. Now he is named O Neku Sama, which is Japanese for Honorable Mister Cat. He is nine months old, brown/orange with tiger stripes, and fairly lively. Yes I know: up until that last, you thought I was describing a relative of Sammy’s. Well, maybe a distant relative.

  So Penny drove up two days ago, and Neku has been exploring our premises. We can’t let him out, because he might get lost in the forest and perish, but he’s had a ball exploring the house. The first evening Cam and Penny went off to a cocktail party put on by the local bank—we do a lot of business with the bank, so we’re on their list, but I don’t have a lot of use for either cocktails or parties, while Penny, now 22, can drink if she chooses, and maybe she just wanted to demonstrate she could do it, though I don’t think she has much taste for it either—and Neku remained here with me. He disappeared. I looked all over the house, fearing what my daughter would say if her cat had vanished forever when in my charge. I mean, what would you say to your daddy if—yes, that’s why daddies are careful. When Penny returned, Neku reappeared. Where had he been? That bugged me. So I kept an eye out thereafter, and I believe I know, because he’s there now: in the living room there’s a TV set in the corner, and there’s some space behind it, right in the corner, and that space is in shadow. But if you look carefully, you can see that some of the shadow has tiger stripes. Neku sleeps when Penny is away, so as to have plenty of energy for her return. Yes, I see you nodding your head; you knew it all the time.

  Yesterday I was typing Chapter 3 of Virtual Mode and Neku was up with me in the study when they left. Women are always off shopping, especially at this time of year. What interests a man is the sight of a beautiful young woman without much clothing; what interests a woman is the sight of a big department store without much limit on the credit card. If department stores had nude young women as clerks, men would get more interested in shopping. But cats aren’t much interested in shopping. So Neku explored the study. He came to sit on the desk beside the computer monitor, neat your Rose, and then went down behind to play with the wiring, I was a little worried about that, but I did manage to have a good day, typing 4,000 words. Colene, the heroine, is trying to recover the key to alternate realities, that muggers took from Darius. If she can get it back, he can return, and maybe take her with him. But getting anything back from gang-type punks is tricky, especially when you’re a fourteen year old girl without much money. But Neku wasn’t much interested in this, and wandered away. I think he finds me sort of boring. What, you do too? Oh, you want to know exactly how Colene gets that signal back? I don’t know; the Adult Conspiracy—how old did you say you were? If your mother found out I told you—Okay, you promise not to tell her? Remember, Colene is a gutsy girl, and suicidal. So she makes a deal: she’ll play the punk who has the key a game, and if she wins, she gets the key, and if he wins, he gets her. No, of course this isn’t a legal deal, but she’s desperate, and he’s a tough fence—that is, someone who makes illegal deals for cash, or whatever. He likes the idea of whatever, with a young, clean, non-addicted girl. So he agrees to play the game, provided that his friends are the judge of who wins. And her game turns out to be a contest to see who can bleed the most before fainting. She starts, slicing open her arm with a big knife. She’s suicidal, remember. Now he realizes that he has more blood than she does, and can probably outbleed her, but he’s about to faint even, before cutting himself, and he decides to forfeit, and she wins. Never get into a bleeding contest with a suicidal girl! His tough friends think it’s a great ploy; they admire her for it, and honor the deal. So that’s the scene I’m. in upstairs. But today, downstairs, I’ve got to type letters to confounded fans—oops, no, I didn’t mean you! Why do you have to jump to conclusions? Then who did I mean? Well, there was this girl who hasn’t read any of my books, but she wrote me an angry letter, calling me ignorant and sarcastic, because one of her friends had asked me how I felt about fan letters, and I said I’d rather be typing my novel. So I—no, I didn’t burn her letter. I wrote her a thoughtful missive asking her to consider how she would feel if she was required to answer 100–160 letters a month, squeezing out all her free time and some of her working time, and someone asked her how she felt about it, and she said she’d rather have more time for herself, so then she was accused of bei
ng ignorant and sarcastic? In short, I wrote her a pretty nice, sensible letter, that will make her feel like last months' uncleaned litter-box. Moral: don’t take off on a writer unless you are awful sure of your point. So anyway, this morning Neku wanted something to eat, so I poured him some milk, and he wouldn’t touch it. Only he and I were up at 6:15 A.M., you see. Sigh. Now he’s back behind the TV set, and I’m typing this letter.

  Meanwhile, what else is new? Well, the fanzine I write to published an edited-down version of my Convention Report, cutting out some of the detail about traveling and such, which makes sense. So now those readers know what it’s like to meet you. Unfortunately, it may be the last thing I send them, because I just can’t abide this business of censorship. I told them how I felt, and others have too—another writer even called me last month to tell me how emphatically he agreed with me, and that he was writing a strong letter to them—but no such letter has been published, and in the latest issue they published a snide remark by someone they favor—the one I implied was a sociopath, for taking pride in squishing spiders—about my being “testy” and taking my marbles home because of not having my way. In short, someone who will practice censorship is not about to admit that it’s wrong. So I will indeed take my marbles home, and I may not be the only one. They can ponder that at leisure. I don’t know whether you consider it an honor to be featured in my last report to a magazine, but I assure you that many of their more decent readers will be glad to know about you. I may write up the matter in the Author’s Note for Virtual Mode, as it is my custom to comment on what happens to me while I’m writing particular novels. Meanwhile, with a certain irony, the one who set this off, the prisoner on death row, feels very guilty about causing such mischief. He didn’t cause it; I caused it, by having him participate in what was supposedly a forum open to all. He asked what I thought of what he did to get sentenced to death, and I have written to tell him in unmincing words: he had no more business killing that girl than the fanzine had censoring him. I don’t like what he did any better than I like what that reckless driver did to you. But what I like and what I do may be different things, because what I do relates to principle, not pleasure.

  All of which is pretty heavy discussion to hit you with, at this season. And I still haven’t tackled those heavy subjects that got squeezed out last week. Well let’s tackle one of them: the reclassification of the Burgess Shale. I know, I know, you couldn’t think of a more boring topic if you concentrated for a week, and your daddy’s rolling his eyes as he reads this letter to you, wondering if maybe I didn’t just take my marbles home, I lost them entirely. Well, shut up and listen, girl, and if you’re still bored at the end, okay, you win. You see, a scientist recently said that the two most significant things to happen in the past decade or so in paleontology—that’s the science of the earth’s history, which includes dinosaurs—were the discovery of the periodicity of extinctions and the reclassification of the Burgess Shale. The extinctions of dinosaurs and other creatures turns out to follow a pattern of about twenty six million years; every time that period passes, boom! more extinctions. Because, it seems, severe meteor showers hit the earth, blasting things to smithereens. That’s how come the dinosaurs departed, so we mammals could take over the world; you owe your existence to a meteorite from space. So okay, you understand about that, but what’s this business about stupid shale? Well, the Burgess Shale was a fossil-bearing section in Canada about a city block in size and ten feet thick. It’s in the Canadian Rockies, 8,000 feet up. But the fossils are of sea creatures, so you know something strange must have happened. The fact is, back about 530 million years ago that region was under the sea; since then the mountains have formed and lifted it up. Remember in “Tappy” the bit about how history lives in the decline of the mountains? Well, it lives in their uplifting, too. Our earth is dynamic, and if you could watch fastmotion pictures of it, one frame every hundred thousand years or so, you would see how it wrinkles and the continents slide about. But that’s not the point.

  You see, there’s a lot of life in our world, and much of it is in the ocean. But there is a greater diversification of life forms in that one little sample of the Burgess Shale than in all today’s oceans. And it’s different. There are creatures there never seen before or since. And this makes no sense, according to the conventional theory of evolution. It’s supposed to be that simple forms evolve into more complicated forms, and split off into new species, so that the more time passes, the more species there are. But here at the beginning there were more species than there are now. What happened? Can evolution be wrong? Well, not exactly; we aren’t about to return to the Biblical version, saying that God created everything in one week. But it does suggest that everything existed a lot sooner than we thought, in that “Cambrian explosion,” and that the pattern since has not been one of increasing diversity of species, but of the elimination of most of the original species. Maybe by those meteor blasts every twenty six million years. We’re just lucky that it was our branch of life that survived; had one of those meteors hit a bit to the side, it might have abolished our ancestor and spared something else, and today’s life would be quite different. Instead of you in Cumbersome Hospital, it would be an invertebrate with a squintillion legs. You don’t find that interesting? Well, I do, and I think maybe I’ll use such a world as the setting for Mode #3, Chaos Mode, and we’ll just see what Colene, my suicidal protagonist, thinks of it. She’s into that sort of thing—extinctions. Forty years ago, when the Shale was discovered, they tried to classify it conventionally, and it just didn’t work; now they have done the job over, and scientists' jaws have been dropping. So admit it, Jenny—don’t you find the reclassification of the Burgess Shale a bit interesting after all?

  Okay, I hope you have been having a harpy Christmas. This letter should arrive about two days after Christmas, when you’re sinking into Post-Holiday Depression, and really weight you down. Don’t be mad at me for making you think when you wanted to laugh; you were the one who made me tell you all about Colene in Virtual Mode last week, so that I had to postpone the Shale. Christmas doesn’t mean a lot to me; I just keep plowing on with my work and my thoughts. Christmas day my family will drag me away for a couple of hours for opening presents and having a big dinner and such, but I think I’d be about as happy celebrating with the Grinch. Do you ever find holidays depressing? Some folk do, I just find them sort of neutral.

  Speaking of depressing: I had to exercise on the cycle today with it raining (it’s on the pool enclosure, outside but under cover) and the temperature mucking about between 39° and 41°. I wore a shirt and warm body vest and got through okay, cycling just over ten miles in half an hour, but I’d rather have it warmer. Tonight it’s supposed to get colder, and tomorrow colder yet. We worry about our plants, that may suffer freeze damage, and our dogs, who are not young any more. It’s not supposed to get this cold in Florida!

  Well, have a good holiday, Jenny. I’m sorry I didn’t have things to make you laugh this time, but maybe you can enjoy thinking instead.

  Dismember 29, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  So I started out doing eleven fan letters, bringing my total for the month to 145, with about 15 more in my “unrush” pile. Then came the mail: 18 more. No, I won’t have to answer them all; several can be done with just Ogre Cards. But I’m just barely holding even. Well, I’ll catch up on some more on Sunday, after I write to my family; that Family letter now goes out to ten members of the wider family, and some of those ten recirculate their copies to others. Your mother knows exactly how it is done. Today, ironically, my parents, both of whom have one or more PhD’s, are known less for their credits than for mine. “Oh, you’re related to him?!” You will have some of that experience, Jenny, when Isle of View is published next year and your relatives start being known through you. “You’re related to that Jenny? I don’t believe it!” Some will recognize you from the graphic edition the Elfquest folk will publish. “That’s Jenny Elf!” So brace y
ourself; you have some interesting times coming, in due course.

  No, I didn’t send you any gift for Christmas. My mind works in obscure ways. Neither Christmas nor gifts mean a lot to me; what counts is personal contact and understanding. I have been receiving gifts from fans, and it’s awkward, because I don’t send any in return. I want to discourage it. For one thing, they tend to be from female admirers, which makes it awkward at the outset. Three more arrived today. One from a female admirer, another from her husband. I think he caught on that (A) I was giving her a polite no time of day, and (B) I’m a useful contact for a hopeful writer. And he’s a hopeful writer. Now I have to explain to him how I do superior dialogue, when the truth is, I’m not sure how I do it. Critics think my dialogue is bad. Sigh.

  So how did you say you were doing? Eating more pudding? Speaking more words? Somewhere in the pile is a letter from Sue Berres, who gives an unpronounceable term for how you have to learn to speak again. No wonder you have trouble! Think how much easier it would be, if they had an easy term for it. Well, keep plugging away at it.

  So how am I doing? I’ve got a nuisance cold. Oh, you could tell? By my attitude? Usually I stave off colds with vitamin C, and I don’t care how many doctors say it doesn’t work; I am right and they are wrong. No, I don’t think vitamin C will make you recover faster, though I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. But this cold snuck up on me while I was on a long phone call with my agent, getting ready to market Tatham Mound. I went into the sneezes, and thought it was an allergy to something in the air. Hours later I realized it was a cold, but by then it was late. You have to use vitamin C right away, or it can’t do much. So I’m feeling generally about the way your mother feels after the dentist has entertained himself fishing for another elusive bone fragment (wouldn’t be sporting to catch them all at once!) and blowing out my sore nose every ten or fifteen minutes. No, the commercial pills don’t seem to work on me; my daughter got me a couple of kinds, and my nose laughed at them. Well, “laugh” isn’t quite the proper term; “snot” is. Finally yesterday I tore up tissue and stuffed it into my nose so it couldn’t drip on the keyboard; that gave me an hour to work in peace.