by Dave Duncan
Copyright © 2002 Dave Duncan
Published in the United States in 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of Red Deer Press or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, ON M5E IE5, fax (416) 868-1621.
The Publishers
Red Deer Press
813 MacKimmie Library Tower
2500 University Drive N.W.
Calgary Alberta Canada T2N 1N4
www.reddeerpress.com
Credits
Edited for Bakka Books by John Rose and Salman A. Nensi.
Cover design by Mike Speke, Speke Visual Communications.
Text design by Dennis Johnson.
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens for Red Deer Press.
Acknowledgments
Financial support provided by the Canada Council, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, a beneficiary of the Lottery Fund of the Government of Alberta, and the University of Calgary.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Duncan, Dave, 1933-
West of January
ISBN 0-88995-252-3
I. Title.
PS8557.U5373W47 2002 C813'·54 C2002-910249-9
PR9199·3·D874W47 2002
5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Foreword
The Herdfolk
The Tyrant
Violet-Indigo-Red
The Seafolk
Brown-Yellow-White
The Ants
The Traders
Black-White-Red
The Spinster
Red-Yellow-Green
The Angels
Three-Red
God the Father Afterword
FOREWORD
Dear Reader:
I address you here in a short screed commissioned as a foreword, but if I were the editor of this most excellent series of classic Canadian speculative fiction reprints, I’d put it at the end, because it’s full of spoilers. I can’t help it. In order to talk about Dave Duncan and West of January I have to actually talk about it, so if you find this letter from me at the start of the book, no one will mind if you skip it until you’ve read the book. That’s what a bunch of you did already, I know it. Who wants to read a foreword when there’s an unread Dave Duncan to dive into?
If you just picked up this book out of idle curiosity, you might want to hang in while I explain to you who Dave Duncan is. Hmmm. Let’s see…
What do you get when you cross a rapid typist with a guy with a classical education or a love of the classics (comes out to the same thing) and let him loose on the speculative fiction world? You get Dave Duncan, a menace to crowded bookshelves everywhere.
Dave is the kind of writer who makes slow writers envious. He does everything we do but faster, backwards and in high heels—oops, wrong joke. Try again. He writes about five books a year, and they’re all good. No joke. Dave has written so many books, and so many each year, that the publishers have taken to putting out some of them under pseudonyms, so as not to startle the public or to set up expectations the rest of us poor drudges—I mean, slower writers—can’t live up to. But it’s an open secret, for example, that Sarah Franklin happens to share Dave’s liking for the Iliad and the Odyssey—and she may even have the same tidily cropped salt-and-pepper beard that graces Dave’s puckish face. (Poor woman. The beard looks good on Dave, but on the writer of a sexy, fascinating historical novel making a major heroine out of a minor woman character from the story of the Trojan War? Well.)
Dave used to be a geologist, but in the original edition of this book, which I have before me, he listed a few other recreational interests he pursued during the 30 years of his geology career: astronomy, acting, statistics, history, painting, hiking, model ship building, photography, computer programming, chess, genealogy, and stock market speculation. He then wrote, “An attempt to add writing to this list backfired—he met with enough encouragement that he took up writing full time. Now his hobby is geology.” That was in 1989. Who knows what else is on the list now?
In the copy of the first edition which I own, Dave has written: “Candas, I am sure you will enjoy getting your teeth into this—or do I mean claws?” It had been 12 years since August of 1989, but now I get my chance. Your call, Dave, whether you think what follows is teeth or claws! The inscription goes on to say: “P.S. Try not to explode before you get to the end.” But I admire and like this book. As series editor of Tesseract Books from 1994 to the present, I was even offered the chance to reprint it, but publishing being a perilous endeavor, we never did get to a reprint series. How delighted I was to hear that Salman Nensi and Bakka Books was going to bring out this edition, and how further delighted I am to be asked to introduce it. If anyone tries to convince you that SF publishers compete, especially in Canada, laugh in their face. We are all in the service of the wonderful writers who abound in this field in this country, of whom Dave Duncan is one of the foremost (and most prolific), and that’s my segue back to West of January. This is also where the spoiler warning takes effect.
West of January is one of Dave’s early books. He’d only written five before this one. (That had been published, that is. Who knows what secret manuscripts he was reserving so as not to seem too greedy about his market share?) Shadow and A Rose-Red City, the early books, are out of print and deserve republication. (Duncan fans made since then would fall upon them with delight, I should think, as they will—as you have—on this new edition of West of January.) Then the first of the swordsmen fantasy trilogies. The Seventh Sword books hooked a bunch of trilogy readers, young and old, on the Duncanesque view of the world: the one in which the story seems to be slicing right down the middle of the genre sward, but if you go along for the ride, it proves to have a few hidden twists and spins. Read Robert Runté’s critical writing about Dave’s books if you want more detail.
West of January was something different. Or maybe not, but at least in terms of setting, it was only ostensibly fantasy. In fact, it is one of Duncan’s most interesting thought experiments, and the premise is relentlessly “SFnal”: what’s it like to try to set up a civilization on a planet with the rotation just slightly shorter than its revolution. Unlike Earth’s moon, for which both of revolution and rotation are the same period, which is why the moon turns the same face to its primary, Earth, all the time, the planet Vernier slowly, slowly changes the face it turns to its sun, and the “day” creeps destructively around the planet on a cycle of many hundreds of years. It’s a pure science fiction premise, and a complicated one.
But Dave doesn’t waste much time with the expository lumps. He gives us the key to the story in his epigraph—a Duncan signature, by the way, so all you lazy readers who skip the twiddly bits in the italics on the page before the “real story”, take warning from me on this: you are missing out on core thematic material. (Remember Robert McKee’s dictum: Theme is the writerly perspective on the significance of the story.) Then Dave gets right down to business.
West of January hinges on chronology, so narratively, it is not only obvious but also subtle (take that, my ingenuous friend!) to structure the story chronologically, along the life cycle of a single resident of Vernier, and to name the regions of the planet after units of time. Knobil (can there be any symbolism in the name?) is born west of January, travels through to April or May or so (from what I can figure of the maps), and ranges from Wednesday north and south to…oh, I told you not to read this until after! All right, forget the spoilers. Let’s make them teasers th
en. Knobil goes all over the place and had adventures. He has a lot of sex. He sires a lot of children. He learns a lot of cool stuff. Just the sort of thing to attract the entertainment-oriented reader.
It’s true, if you read this book you will have a lot of fun too. But I have very bad news for you. If you read this book you might learn something. You might have to think. And the things you might have to think about are both the great human themes and the local human problems: the nature of civilization; when it’s wrong to kill; man, woman, birth, death, infinity (oops, wrong genre, wrong medium, and showing my age as well…); gender roles—really—and the survival reasons for tribal family structures; how to use your intelligence; who is God. Dave likes to pretend he’s doing all this writing stuff for pure fun, to entertain people, to frolic—but he isn’t. He has something to say.
But don’t let that put you off. It doesn’t hurt. In fact, it actually makes reading his books more fun.
Dave Duncan has a clear and well-organized “perspective on the significance of the story.” He has read a lot of history and anthropology. He has read a lot of the Great Literatures of several European cultures. He knows stuff about population migrations, climate changes and their effect on human tribal cultures. But Dave isn’t one of those writers who insists that if he had to do all that research, the reader darned well better sit through all of it. No, Dave’s more of a prestidigitator. He saves the technical stuff for behind the scenes. Instead, he provides story: action, character, dialogue, movement, change, catharsis, suffering, insight, prejudice, individual point of view—all the stuff we look for in “pure entertainment.”
The reason Dave warned me not to explode back in 1989 is that he knows I’m a feminist. He put some pretty patriarchal and misogynist societies on Vernier. He wanted me to wait to pass judgment until I saw what the story did in the way of transformations—and I did. Yeah, West of Januarys protagonist is probably the furthest thing from the kind of save-the-world protagonist I’d write (except for the good sex, of course). But so what? I don’t know whether Dave would explode himself if I were to call him a feminist too. But the fact is, despite some local differences in the ideology of gender, Dave is a civilized person, and not only does he really like women, he really thinks women are—gasp—people. Doesn’t that make him a feminist too?
Okay, Dave, do you buy the argument that West of January is the kind of book a Scottish-born (in 1933), happily married, well-read, logically minded, conservative, interesting, genre-loving, ambitious, fast-typing, bearded feminist writes? I bet that sound is Dave snickering. Tough luck. And it’s true, I’m not sure that some doctrinaire radical feminists of my acquaintance would buy the argument either. But I will still argue that books like this are necessary, valuable and useful as well as being fun. I think that people of good conscience who are gutsy enough as writers to go where the story demands are the writers who are going to raise new generations with more thoughtfulness, more conscience than the generations before. If we can’t all contribute to that great endeavor of changing the world for the better in ways that are colored by our individual selves, then to quote a feminist (and a popular t-shirt), I don’t really want to be part of that revolution.
Now, let’s face it. Getting one writer to comment on another’s way of solving story problems is a “parlous” enterprise: are we driven by ideology or the almost irresistible urge to tell our own version of the story? So that’s all I’ll say about ideological concerns or story structure. I’ll leave it to the scholars to apply feminist theory or sociobiology or queer theory or deconstructionism or the theory of Canadian SFnal uniqueness to West of January. They can get all the pub. credits. They won’t find it a perfect book. But that’s not the point. It’s a fascinating book. It’s an entertaining book. It has texture and structure. It has secrets and surprises. It’s a real book.
It’s been a long time since 1989 and lots of things have happened in the world. Some of them seem almost designed to convince us that the concept of “civilization” is just a human pipe dream. Modern humankind has a lot more in common with Knobil than we think. We too are trying to figure out how to save and improve our world. At least we can see, by the end of West of January, that Knobil, as an appropriately larger-than-life hero type (self-effacing though he may be in the first person), had a chance with his, and made the most of it.
—CANDAS JANE DORSEY
The probe telemetry was wrong! Close, but not close enough—the damned things not locked on the star as we thought Revolution—264.6 days; rotation—263. 6. Not much of a difference, is it?
But do you realize what that does to all our plans?
—MIKE ANGELI, PLANETOLOGIST, COLONIZATION EXPEDITION
We named the ship well, didn’t we—the Mayflower? With a hundred years of daylight, we’re all going to be mayflies!
—CELESTE GABRIEL, SOCIOLOGIST, COLONIZATION EXPEDITION
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when past, and as a watch in the night. Thou earnest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and it withereth…
So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
—PSALM 90
—1—
THE HERDFOLK
I WAS STILL VERY YOUNG WHEN I FIRST SAW AN ANGEL, yet so great was the impression made upon me by his visit that it remains my earliest memory, like a most distant tree at the limit of vision on an empty plain. Or so it seems, for all I truly remember are a few vague images enclosed in mist, recalled in later times. Inevitably the details have been smeared and entangled with details of other visits by other angels, when I was older and better able to understand. Even that first time, though, tiny as I must have been, disturbed and troubled me. What I recall most clearly is a small child’s sense of injustice and betrayal.
The herdfolk divide a man’s life into five stages, and at the time I barely could have reached the second, the toddler stage. I can retrieve no other specific event from those far-off times, only a general blur of memory, of the soil that nurtured my infant roots. All of the landscapes have merged into the endless rolling grassland of my youth, and all weather has become the constant golden sunshine of childhood. Certainly that sunshine was spotted by showers. Certainly among the little hills lay innumerable sloughs and watering holes, set in their guardian clutters of cotton trees. It was by those that we camped. But again all those are merged, one into another. I remember sitting in my mother’s tent, listening to rain and the thump of cloth beating in the wind, spraying me with a fine mist. I remember playing on the edges of wide stretches of blue water, immeasurably vast to a toddler. And yet all storms are now one storm in my mind; all rainbows, one rainbow; all lakes, one lake. In truth those little ponds were larger then, for they did dwindle as I grew, but to the small eyes of a small child they seemed most terrifyingly huge and clear and shiny.
Angels were the only visitors the herdfolk trusted or made welcome. The herdfolk honored angels, admiring their lonely courage and self-reliance, valuing the information and counsel that an angel could bring, his advice and his warnings. In return, the herdfolk freely offered their humble hospitality—food and shelter and safe rest.
I do not recall the angel’s arrival. I do not know who first noticed him coming. Most likely it was my father, for little escaped his notice by land or sky. We may have been camped, or we may have been on the move, but if that was the case, then the tents would have been pitched again at once.
The earliest of all my memories is of that angel sitting at my father’s side, cross-legged on cushions on a rug. Behind them were the tents—four of them, for at that time my father owned four women. Later he had six, and when I was a herdboy I was proud of his wealth, but when the angel came he had but four. The rug, the tents, and the cushions were all made of wool from our own herd, all striped and checkered in saffron and scarlet and vermilion, eye-nipping bright in the harsh white s
unshine, squatting on small puddles of black shadow.
The visitor must have alarmed me already to have made such an impression. He was a great contrast to my father, for like all herdmen, my father was enormous. He outweighed any two of his women, and even sitting, he towered over the angel. In fine weather he wore only riding boots and leather breeches. He had little need for a shirt to protect him from the sun, for his thick black hair flowed down to mingle with the dense fur on his shoulders and back. His great beard merged into the pelt on his chest and belly. In only a few places, such as the sides of his ribs and the undersides of his forearms, was any of my father’s walnut skin ever visible.
The angel, in contrast, was blond and slight. His face was clean-shaven and ruddy. His boots and even his breeches may have seemed unexceptional to my childish gaze, but his upper half was enclosed in a leather shirt, open down the front because of the heat, and decorated with very alarming fringes. He had fringes on his trousers, also, and he carried a broad-brimmed hat. Horrified, I clung to my mother’s gown and peered around her as if she were a tree.
Doubtless the crowd of older children had streamed in from the herd to sit wide-eyed, observing the visitor. I do not recall. Doubtless the women had blushed and simpered as they prepared and served the best feast they could assemble. And doubtless, also, each had donned the finest, brightest gown she owned to honor the angel. My father would have expected these things of them.
The meal ended. I recall the four women lining up and my father leading the angel forward to look them over. The tents were at hand. My father would have made the customary offer. Vividly I recall my terror when the angel’s eyes met mine. They were a brilliant blue, and I had never seen blue eyes before. I buried my face in my mother’s dress.
Of course, this monster did not want me. But my mother was the youngest woman. I expect she had already recovered her figure after bearing my sister Rilana. My brother Uldinth may well have been conceived by then, but not showing yet. Obediently she set off toward her tent, and the stranger followed.