Being a Green Mother

by Piers Anthony

  Satan turned back to the guests as he sang the next stanza, and they seemed as rapt as was Orb herself. What Satan was doing was impossible, yet he was doing it. The demon choir was flickering so rapidly that it seemed unreal. Satan himself seemed to be developing a glow.

  Could this be another vision? That would account for the effects; Satan was not really singing a hymn, not really uttering words that were forbidden to him. It was all a dream, crafted for maximum effect.

  But if this were the case, the wedding was not valid. That was where the notion foundered. Satan might fool her into believing she had married him and, in that manner, have his will of her in any way he chose. But he could not fool the other Incarnations: not Chronos, who had lived through future history; not Fate, who was her mother; not Mars, who had loved her. They would not accept the marriage unless it was real; and if they did not accept it, the alliance was suspect. It had to be real for Satan to achieve his purpose.

  This ran through her mind as she listened, entranced. Satan was doing what he could not do, and she believed it, and the guests and other Incarnations believed it. Perhaps there was no proper explanation. Meanwhile, her doubts had run their course and faded like mist; she believed the Prince of Lies and she loved the Lord of Hate.

  The choir flickered into nonexistence; all the available demons had been upgraded to the status of damned souls. For the final stanza, Satan sang alone. He turned again to Orb, and the glow about him intensified. He had become godlike in the nobility of his countenance. He met her gaze and sang with an earnestness that transfixed her.

  "Must Jesus bear the cross alone And all the world go free?"

  The light about him became so bright that it resembled flame. Orb's eyes were smarting from the effort of looking at him. What was happening to him?

  "No, there's a cross for everyone And there's a cross for Me."

  As Satan concluded the hymn, the light turned blinding. Orb squinted, then blinked—and he was gone!

  She lurched to her feet. "Satan, my love!" she cried. "Where are you?"

  Mym stood. "He is gone, Gaea," he said.

  "But—"

  "He was doomed the moment he took up his cross. He knew it, but he had to do it. He has left you at the altar and given you back the world."

  "What cross?" she asked, horrified.

  Niobe stood and walked toward Orb. "The cross of his true love for you," she explained.

  "Then he wasn't lying," Orb said. "He really did—"

  "He really did, dear. He knew he could never truly marry you, but he had to come as close as it was possible to do. To love you, to have your love in return, and to complete the vows of marriage. But you are now a widow."

  "The glow—" Orb said, numbed.

  "It was the brightness of the redeemed souls being released from Hell. He could no longer hold them, once he invoked the forbidden song. He truly loved you, as he had never loved before, and he gave up everything for you."

  Orb looked at the empty chair that had been reserved for God. Had God really elected not to attend? Surely He had known...

  Then the magnitude of her own loss struck Orb. She fell into her mother's arms and sobbed with her private heartbreak.

  "Not too much, dear," Niobe murmured. "When you cry, Gaea, the world cries with you."

  Indeed, it was raining throughout the world. But no damage was being done, and in time the sunshine would return. Now it was time for her to learn the office she had assumed and so far neglected—to concentrate on being a Green Mother.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  As I wrote each of the prior novels of this series, their themes tended to impinge on my own life. Thus Death became prominent during Pale Horse and Time during Hourglass and Fate during Tangled Skein and War during Red Sword. Perhaps it is a matter of interpretation as much as of reality; you can be the judge. Green Mother concerns Nature, and I was indeed aware of the things of Nature.

  To begin with, as I completed the prior novel in this series, my shoulder began to hurt. It worsened over the months, and finally the pain cut off all my exercises except running. I had been doing about thirty chins on my study rafter, and 75 Japanese push-ups in under four minutes, but the pain took no note of physical condition. When it began to manifest as I reached for my keyboard, I saw the doctor; I can live without the exercises, but this affected my livelihood.

  It turned out to be tenonitis. Not "tendonitis"; there is no such word, contrary to public belief. It is an inflammation of the tendon that manifested, in my case, when I tried to stretch out my arm. When I was bitten by a deerfly and swatted it, the pain of the effort was so sudden and intense it had me reeling. I could not reach my back pocket or lift my hand above my head. I learned how to be left-handed in most respects; fortunately I am already left-handed in a number of ways, such as eating. Sleeping was a problem because there was no position in which my right arm remained comfortable; I had to undertake contortions to avoid being awakened by a jolt of pain. Sometimes by day I would simply pick up my right arm with my left hand and put it where it needed to be. I'd rather not discuss the effect this ailment had on my love life.

  Pills had no effect. Finally the doctor gave me a shot in the tendon, and that turned the corner. The inflammation gave ground as slowly as it had advanced; six months later it hardly bothers me, and in a few more months it should be gone entirely. I don't know whether I'll resume my arm exercises then; after about a year's layoff, I have lost what it took me ten years to develop, and I suspect I'll call it a day. The truth is, those exercises were pretty grueling, and I feel more relaxed in their absence. Thus I learn about my own nature; now that I am on the downhill side of 50, I'm more inclined to relax a bit.

  In this period I also learned more about equine nature. We moved to the forest when my daughter Penny reached horse-craze age, and each daughter got a horse. I liked Penny's horse Sky-Blue from the start; she was a registered Hackney, a former racer, then twenty years old, which would be something like sixty in a person. Blue had raised her former owner from age ten to fifteen, and had raised Penny through the same range. The former owner is now married, and Penny is in college, so you can see how well Blue did her job.

  Cheryl's horse Misty was another matter. She was arrogant, not acceding readily to the directives of her rider, and taking any feed she could get at. We had to fence Blue off during feeding time so that she could eat in peace; otherwise Misty would take it all. That is why Blue became the model for two of my creatures in other series, while Misty was unrepresented. I knew which kind of horse was better.

  But in this period Misty developed severe foot problems. She saw the vet more times than I saw the doctor. The essence is that the bones in her front feet warped, so that she could no longer stand normally; she had to bend her legs just above the hooves back at a thirty degree angle when she stood, and was in obvious discomfort. She lay down for most of the day. This is the stage at which horses are shot, but we are not a horse-shooting family. We accommodated her as well as we could, bringing her food and water to her.

  Blue, however, had a different notion. Realizing that the mighty had fallen, she took to stealing Misty's food. Now I had to fence Blue off to protect Misty. At one point I brought some hay to Misty that Blue hadn't deigned to touch, and opened the gate, figuring Blue wouldn't try to steal that. I was wrong; Blue charged in so determinedly that Misty lurched to her feet to avoid her. Blue bit at her anyway and stood outraged guard over that hay until Misty had hobbled far away and lain down again, hungry. Then Blue left the hay—still untouched. She had never wanted it; she wanted only to establish her dominance. We had wondered why Misty was losing weight, while Blue got fat; now we knew. My illness was reversible; Misty's will be terminal.

  Thereafter I fenced them apart for the full day, opening the gate only at night. I had seen to my regret that horses are no better than people; when the underdog finally gets power, he can be just as mean as the overdog was. Might makes right. Human beings, at least, can sometim
es rise above their instincts and act in a more generous manner— but I think not often enough. This is the nature of creatures of whatever kind.

  Another aspect of nature is the weather. Here around Florida the summers get hot and humid—on occasion our high temperature for a day has been two degrees above the high for the nation for that day—and those who have read this novel know how that can lead to trouble. There has been tremendous overbuilding along the shoreline by those who apparently assume that hurricanes are a myth. It was time for a warning blow. It came in the form of storm #4 for the season, at the end of AwGhost—Hurricane Elena. She was just passing by, heading for Alabama or Louisiana; when she was safely by our latitude, I relaxed and turned in for the night.

  I should not have. Elena took that opportunity to make a right-angle turn and headed straight for us. Now hurricanes are allowed to go ashore where they choose, but not right where I live! I worked up some magic and straight-armed that storm, pushing her off. But it takes an awful lot of magic to stop a hurricane in full advance, and I had been caught off guard. Elena slowed, but wouldn't turn away. For two days she hovered there, building up strength; she had been a minimal blow of about 90-mile-per-hour winds, but she swelled to a hundred, then to a hundred ten, and finally became a major hurricane of a hundred twenty-five, still determined to land on our house. The entire Florida shoreline in this region was taking a beating. Then, finally, the magic prevailed and shoved her back on course toward Alabama. What a struggle! But of course I should have known better than to relax before the storm had actually landed elsewhere.

  The season kept throwing storms at us, but none of the others got that close. One was called Juan (pronounced Wan), that wandered all over. I could have told them that would happen; it was predicted in the operetta The Pirates of Penzance, in the song "Poor Wandering Juan." The path of storms can be predicted; you merely have to know the proper key.

  But these were just warm-ups for the coming novel. Once I got into the actual writing, things intensified. Not all can be lightly dismissed. For example, the person who arranged to buy this novel, Judy-Lynn del Rey, Publisher of DEL REY BOOKS, was on the phone in SapTimber, spending an hour talking with me in an effort to straighten out a problem that had come up between the publisher and me about this series. In OctOgre Judy-Lynn had a stroke that put her in a coma. In FeBlueberry she died. She and her husband Lester had put me on the map as a bestseller in fantasy, along with Steven Donaldson and David Eddings and Terry Brooks; they had done more to make fantasy a big-time operation than anyone else I know of. I fear that thus suddenly a golden age is waning. There were other deaths in this period: Theodore Sturgeon, perhaps the best writer the genre has seen; Frank Herbert, author of one of the most successful science-fiction novels ever, Dune; L. Ron Hubbard, who left the genre for thirty years to found Dianetics and then Scientology, then returned; I have no brief for Scientology, but Hubbard was certainly a figure to be reckoned with.

  Let's move on to a gentler aspect of nature: the nature of women. This novel was delayed because I came down with a flu-like illness, running a fever of a couple of degrees for a couple of days. Then it dropped to normal, the same day, FeBlueberry 4, that Blue drove Misty from the hay. I relaxed and turned in with a book; I always read myself to sleep. I was out of paperbacks at the moment, so I was in a hardcover: The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense by Suzette Hayden Elgin, who is also a genre writer. The essence of the book is that you can defend yourself from verbal abuse if you are alert. The first thing is to recognize when you are under such attack; it is obvious if someone calls you a @#$%&*!! of a Censored/Blank, but not if the person says "I don't understand why you don't try to be fair." Beware of words like "even" and "really," as for example "If you really loved me, you wouldn't be such a jerk." Recognizing the state of siege, you may then respond in a guarded or diversionary manner, so that you don't wind up feeling like a C/Blank. I found it interesting; I took judo classes for three years and learned that you can't throw a person who retains his balance; similarly, Suzette shows, you can't verbally damage a person who retains verbal balance. I had a coughing fit that delayed my sleep for an hour or so; then when I finally nodded off, the book fell from my hand and smote me on the mouth, cornerwise.

  Now this did not seem quite fair of Ms. Elgin, considering the doctrine she was preaching. I would have continued reading her book on the morrow, after all. Wide awake again, I resumed reading, and in another hour I nodded off a second time. Whap! Suzette smacked me again. What a temper! It took me yet another hour to nod off, this time with the book propped so it couldn't hit me, making four hours in all. Next day my fever shot up to new heights, peaking at 102.5°. My mouth felt like bruised cheese rind. Thus it was two more days before I could resume paying work, and yes, I did finish reading the book. Suzette, dearest, if you really loved me, you wouldn't even want to publish in hardcover....

  The nature of computers and their programs also figured heavily in my life at this time. Those readers who object to this sort of discussion are encouraged to skim on down the page until I return to something interesting, if ever. The fact is, though I resisted getting computerized for a long time, just as I resisted getting involved with girls throughout high school, when I finally did get into it, I fell in a big way. For me, being on the computer is like starting a fine automobile or mounting a dynamic horse: it seems alive and exciting, with limitless potential. But it can also be ornery, and the challenge, frustration, and joy of it was never more evident than when I wrote this novel.

  You see, I got a new program in No-Remember. I like PTP, the text processor I was using, but it had two weaknesses: it could use only half my computer's memory, so that I had to keep chopping chapters in half because they wouldn't fit, and it had no windows, so I could look at only one file at a time. My wife spied this ad for a text processor named Edward that solved both these problems, so we sent for it, just in case. And Edward changed my life. It addressed all my computer's memory, so I no longer had to divide files, and it had fourteen buffers, or places where files could be called up, as it were, in parallel. I could call up Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, etc. without exiting Chapter 4, and flick back and forth between the buffers to compare, or I could move material from one file to the other, or make a change in one and save it and close down the buffer. I spent a week getting into it, not because it was that complicated, but because it opened up such new horizons for me and made me appreciate new qualities about the programs I already had. For example, Edward had a squintillion places to put macros, those keys that do simple or complicated chores with single keystrokes, such as typing out my entire address-block. I rechecked SmartKey, which is a macro program, and discovered it would put macros in those new places, too; I never realized! Thus I could set fifty macros if I wanted, instead of the twenty-two I had before. I could embed macros within macros, putting a SmartKey macro in an Edward macro. And Edward allowed me to move its functions about, putting them on any keys I want. That meant I could place them to match the equivalent functions on PTP and not have to retrain my reflexes. What fun!

  But Edward had some horrendous holes, too. At one point it filled our hard disk with garbage; at other times it blew the memory, which was a frightening experience, rather like a pressure cooker exploding, only the effects were non-physical. We had to figure out exactly where those holes were, because they were like mines waiting for someone to blunder into them. More hours I lost, defusing mines! There were also some formidable problems. Edward couldn't underline, and I use underlining frequently. The wonderful Edward macros could not be saved for future use: some glitch in the routine that was supposed to save them. Edward's printing program was of the "batch" type, which was so completely unsuitable to my need that I never even loaded it into my machine. I discovered by experimentation that PTP would print an Edward file, and that I could use "escape" codes to put in underlining. That saved Edward; I could use it after all. I decided to write a novel with Edward and see how I liked it.
Yes, this novel.

  Thus, on-schedule DisMember 1, I started writing on Edward. I had to use special escape codes to underline, and PTP to print, and to set up my macros each time. But before the month was out, I knew I wanted to stay with Edward. It was those buffers. I had worked things out with PTP to accommodate my [brackets] system of writing; with Edward I didn't have to do that, because I could set up an entire separate buffer for my ongoing notes. And another for an ongoing Table of Contents. And one for a list of characters, so I didn't have to search through past text for names I'd forgotten. Plus any temporary notefile for stray notions about other novels that occurred to me while working; I could write them and save them with no fuss. Thus everything changed; my --->arrow<--- macros disappeared, and my brackets. I had a better system. Just about the time I worked it out, we got hold of a collection of public-domain programs that do marvelous little things that the regular programs never thought of, such as un-erasing a program you erased by accident that contains irreplaceable material, or scrambling a file so nobody else can read it without the code word—and these, too, had their glitches that could and did blow the memory. After much struggle I figured out how to debug the major glitch and sent a letter to the public domain folk, who evidently hadn't known; they did not respond. Glitchers never do; that's human nature.

  No need to go into detail about the myriad little refinements I worked out to integrate PTP and SmartKey and Edward; suffice to say that the three programs now seem like one, overlapping marvelously. But the doing took time, much time, and that coupled with other interruptions such as horses and illness and correspondence—I wrote 1206 letters last year, and am doing over a hundred a month so far this year—have run this novel into overtime, putting me behind schedule. Aspects of the novel do reflect the nervousness and wonder of the computer experience, such as Orb's first traveling by turning the pages on reality, and the manner that mysterious codes or sequences can do truly remarkable things. Just getting the page number in the right place took us three months to figure out; PTP vindictively shoved the page numbers for Edward text so far to the right they sometimes went off the page. The breakthrough? I now put nonprinting symbols in the heading. The printer just eliminates them and closes up the line, sucking the page numbers in several columns, and PTP never even knows, heh, heh. It can take real cunning to outsmart a stupid machine, but what a satisfaction!