Margaret was all dry-eyed business. She looked down at Mama and said, “I saw Jennie. She’s dead.”

It was a flat pronouncement, with no more emotion than a discussion of the weather. At first it didn’t sink in, then Mama began to cry, open-eyed, open-mouthed, a mad, rising sound. I shut it out, shut out my sister’s memory, and fled down toward the fighting.

I rounded the comer and looked out across the village square, keeping down. Bodies littered the ground. Some were twisted grotesquely or bore visible wounds. Those I could accept. It was the ones who lay quietly as if in repose, their wounds hidden, that bothered me most. I knew them all, first-shippers and newcomers alike, both Dannelites and Pertoskans.

A group of men leaped up and charged my position.

I swung Papa’s gun around then recognized Papa in the lead. Dust danced near their feet and I swung back toward the snipers, fired, hit nothing. They broke over me and took cover behind the same overturned cart I had sheltered in.

Papa’s face was smeared and bloody. He spared me only one comment, “Reload, dammit!” Shocked back to attention, I did so.

We waited behind the cart. Occasionally one of us or one of them tried a shot, most of which went wild. One of theirs burned Sabine Conners’ shoulder. Probably we did no more damage than that.

After a while my father turned to me and asked, “Are your mother and the children safe?”

“Mother and Alan are at the house.”

“Where’s Jennie?”

I gestured, “Out there . . . dead.”

For a moment he said nothing, then he leaped up and fired, releasing rounds in a single roar of sound until his automatic was empty. He screamed. Three shots came from the enemy; two missed. The third hit the cart just before Papa and exploded a board into a hundred splinters, all of which hit him. He went down, cursing and bleeding wildly. Sabine and I were on him in a moment, but his wounds, though numerous, were superficial. We caught him up and retreated to the house.

***

Damn this cold planet for dredging up memories. Still, I could probably have forgiven, could probably react to these people around me as people, not simply as Monists, if there were no sequel to the memory. But in the end it is not what happens to us, but what we do ourselves, that affects us most.

***

Daniel Andrax, my father, came to Hallam’s World on the first ship, worked hard, built a place for himself and his family, and aided in the building of the community. He proposed and largely supported the drive to raise money for the importation of fruit trees. He fought cannys – deadly, persistent predators – and was in the forefront of the drive to bring in the dogs that finally finished them off.

Daniel Andrax was a deeply religious man, a Danneline Monist and a minister of that faith. He was a brilliant leader, bath religious and secular, a good provider, and a good father. He was also a zealot with little time for opinions other than his own, but that is not an uncommon failing.

He was not unlike Marcel Dumezil.

A decade after Hallam’s World was settled, the second shipload of colonists arrived. Natural increase had already doubled the population of the original colony. For the Ministers of Colonization this is the prime index of success, and in the next decade twelve more colony ships arrived. In the influx Daniel Andrax could have easily lost his preeminence, but he did not.

A conflict based on the doctrinal differences between the two Monist denominations did develop, and Baylor became the Pertoskan champion.

Then Baylor struck my father – or my father struck Baylor. I have never been quite sure who struck the first blow, nor are my impressions of the melee that followed clear. In seconds the entire village was engaged in a general brawl. I rushed to my father’s aid and was promptly smashed down, whether by friend or foe I am not sure. He and Baylor stood toe to toe trading blows with their staves until Baylor fell. I remember staggering to my feet and being caught up in my father’s arms as he retreated with me.

He dropped me to the dirt floor inside our house, and I sat holding my head while he and my mother argued. He was rummaging in his chest, that same chest he had carried two decades earlier when he emigrated. I could make little sense of my mother’s words for she was hysterical. I stood, swayed, leaned against a table and watched as my father pulled out the automatic pistol he had taken as plunder in some war. He checked its load, drew back the cocking bar and strode out. I can see his face as if it were before me and even now, as then, the expression is unreadable.

He left the house at a run and I heard the bullroar of a heavy rifle. My father was not the only one to have gone for better weapons. Then I heard a scream and it went on and on, high-pitched, mad, the cry of a woman bereaved. More shots echoed, different pitches distinguishing different weapons, some of which I recognized. I heard more screams as I staggered outside. Buildings intervened between me and the fighting, but I could see flames where someone’s house was burning. My mother caught my arm and held me back.

The flames had spread to other buildings, or were being spread. Alan crouched beside my mother; he was ten. I realized that Jennie was not with us. Someone ran up our street, staggered, and fell. Then he began to crawl forward, and when he raised his head I recognized him. Mr. Thoms! I broke away and ran to him. He had been shot through the leg and was bleeding badly. I stopped the wound and helped him drag himself inside the house. Wounds were nothing new to me, even then, for Hallam was still a frontier world.

His face was white from shock and loss of blood.

“Anna,” he said, gripping my mother’s arm, “it’s terrible. Those damned new people . . . ” He broke off, too angry to continue. The smell of smoke had reached us now. Firing was sporadic, but unrelenting. Apparently both sides had taken cover to snipe at one another. Two women herded a group of children into sight, heading toward us. Our house was one of the town’s original structures, of full hewn logs set on a mound with an open field of fire, a relic of first ship days when the cannys had not yet been killed off. It was apparent that they intended to take shelter here. I took down Papa’s single-shot hunting rifle and loaded it, cursing myself for not having remembered it sooner, and went down to help.

The women were Mrs. Thoms and her daughter Margaret, but the children were a mixed lot, her own and a round dozen from other families. She saw her man as she entered the house and ran to him with tears of relief on her face. Margaret was all dry-eyed business, herding the children to an inner room and threatening dire punishment if they whimpered or left its security. Then she came back and walked to where Mama and Alan were crouched. Her face was white; she seemed in greater shock than her father, though there was no wound on her. She looked down at Mama and said, “I saw Jennie. She’s dead.”

Chapter 6
Interlude: Incident on Hallam’s World

“Andrax, you can’t seriously contend that crucifixion is a viable part of the Monomythos. It is a barbaric concept, not a true part of the Word.” The speaker was angry, as was my father’s reply.

“It is not my place to advise God on what is and is not proper. Crucifixion, the self-sacrifice of God for Man, is a part of a vast array of religions from Zulis to the Christ. Who are we to throw it out?”

They stood face to face, poised like fighting cocks, two small men with pretensions to power, each secure in his own theology. This I know now, but then I only saw that my father was threatened by the heretic Baylor and that, insofar as he was threatened, I was likewise threatened. I was twelve years old.

I remember the incident clearly still. It was the last argument that Baylor and my father had. I had been schooled in the Danneline Monomythos and I believed it implicitly. There was no room for doubt in my small, ordered world.

The sun was warm; flowers were blooming in the village square on the imported fruit trees that were our village’s special pride. The grass was green after a long winter of brown and the pond at the base of the muddy main street was clear blue again, having shed its winter coat of ice. All these details are made more poignant by the intervening years and the comparison they offer to this cold hell-planet. Hallam, or Hallam’s World as it is often called, is a prime property.

A crowd gathered as the argument continued, each man gesturing with the staff he carried to kill the poisonous reptiles then prevalent. Baylor’s supporters were almost exclusively newcomers to Hallam, the company of a ship that had planeted only two years back. They were followers of the Pertoskan Monomythos, demons to me then. Now I recognize that the difference in doctrine between their people and mine was small.

When Louis Dumezil collated the earth’s religions into one grand scheme, he had hoped to put an end to religious persecution by deriving a universal religion. Scholars are uncertain today whether or not he believed in his teachings himself; it is a common theory among historians that he was not a religious man, merely a man of peace working through religion to attain his ends. If that is so, he failed miserably, for there has never been a more fractious group than the Universal Monists.

By the time the argument had continued for ten minutes, most of the village had gathered, each group of adherents separating from the other. My father was red-faced; Baylor had gone white. Each was gesturing, shouting, cutting off his opponent, making personal slurs. Then Baylor struck my father – or my father struck Baylor. I have never been quite sure who struck the first blow.

*****

I wrote Jandrax in 1976, less than a year after completing my first master’s thesis. It shows. I won’t ever rewrite Jandrax, but if I did, the end of the third paragraph is an example of what needs help.

This I know now, but then I only saw that my father was threatened by the heretic Baylor and that, insofar as he was threatened, I was likewise threatened.

If I were rewriting, I would replace it with:

And what threatened my father, threatened me.

Ah, the joys of hindsight.

Before we start today’s installment, here is the answer to Friday’s puzzle. If all that snowmelt flows into the lake without an outlet, it won’t be fresh for long. And an outlet big enough for all that snowmelt might stop the migrating herds. The concept needs a bit of tweaking.

You didn’t see that? Don’t be surprised. I wrote it in 1976, and only noticed the problem about a week ago.

Now, on to the story . . .

Angi rolled over and leaned on one elbow. The faint light touched one bare breast until she rearranged her clothing. Even in lovemaking they could not undress fully and for that Jan damned the cold planet anew.

“When are you going to marry me, Jan. I’m getting tired of snatching love when we can find a hole to hide in.”

He sat up and adjusted the hang of his pistol. It was true, more for him than for her. He could never relax and enjoy their brief liaisons because his Scout training kept him looking for danger when he should be concentrating on her; furthermore, he felt guilty for breaking his own rules about going beyond the sentry line.

But what could he say?

“Hon, it isn’t as simple as it seems.”

“Why isn’t it?”

To that he didn’t reply.

“You owe me the truth.”

“Not really. It may be that I owe you silence.”

“No, Jan.” He looked around uneasily and she smiled. He was worried about longnecks and afraid that if he suggested that they leave she would think he was avoiding the question. And at the same time, he was avoiding it. “Tell me about Hallam.”

She could not have shocked him more if she had shot him.

“How did you know about that!”

“No, I’m sworn to secrecy on my source. But I deserve to know – and I need to know – why you hate and fear my people.”

When he didn’t reply, she said, “Jan, either you let me into your life or I’ll put you out of mine.”

He dropped an oath. “Sexual blackmail?”

“No. Self-preservation. You know me better every day, but to me you remain an enigma. I can’t live with that.”

He cursed again and drew his weapon. It was apparent that there would be no retreating behind the sentry line now and defense remained his first instinct. “You won’t like the story.”

“No, I’m sure I won’t.”

*****

Today’s entry is short because it finishes a chapter, and what follows tomorrow is quite different. Thomas Anderson’s review of Jandrax complained that it is all over the place and hard to follow. Personally, I like a story that jumps around, although I admit that the connections are far from seamless. It was my first real book, after all.

Another thing is about to happen that the normal reader will probably miss, but will be of interest to writers. I wrote most of Jandrax in first person. It didn’t work, so I rewrote the whole thing in third person.

Two chapters, however, did work better in first person, and were retained unchanged. Jan Andrax’s recollection of the Hallam War, starting tomorrow, is a story told to Angi in his own voice. First person works there. Much later in the novel, his son Jean Dubois’ interlude on the island in the middle of the lake – which may be a dream, or a hallucination, or God (literally) knows what – comes off better as first person because he is both physically and emotionally alone at the time it occurs. more tomorrow

Okay, folks, no excerpt from Jandrax today. Instead, it is time for some world building. But first, a paragraph from yesterday’s post:

Captain Childe confirmed Jan’s suspicions; the melt would come twice yearly, but the herds only accompanied one melt. When the green latitude moved northward, the herds would follow the opposite shore of the lake.

Now let me apologize for the map. The draw portion of Apple Works wasn’t up to the job and I haven’t yet downloaded EazyDraw, so after decades of using computer graphics I was reduced to a paper, pencil, and scan.

The unharmonious planet called Harmony has an axial tilt of 32 degrees, enough greater than Earth to make the seasons extreme. It lies “close in to a cool sun” but we won’t worry about that, because I didn’t know that we were going to be dealing with two sets of seasons per year when I wrote that description on the first day of the first draft. Let’s just assume that we have a year roughly the same length as Earth’s. I also won’t repeat what is meant by two sets of seasons.

The heavy tilt makes the seasons extreme, but glaciation comes from the cool sun. Glaciation has locked up most of Harmony’s water, making the oceans small and salty. The landing site is inland near a large, freshwater lake.

Because Harmony is cold and water starved, with universal low humidity and no mountains nearby, it never rains in the vicinity of the landing site. It does snow during the coldest months, and this accumulates until warmth returns. This is the melt, during which plants grow.

Let’s watch the cycle from space, beginning with chapter one. The sun is overhead some degrees north of the equator, and moving southward. At that latitude, there is a world girdling band of melting snow. South of this, all is snowbound. North for a hundred miles, give or take, is a band of green and growing vegetation, briefly flourishing on snowmelt; further north still is a band of desiccated land reaching all the way to the face of the glaciers. In the green belt, the herds are happily munching their way southward on the east side of the lake only.

As the sun moves southward, the line of melting snow, followed by the band of growth, followed by the desert left after the snowmelt drains away, trails out behind. Snow begins in the far north, and becomes another southward trending band, following the dry belt. By the time the sun reaches its most southernmost excursion, snow covers the land to well below the equator. Now the sun starts northward, but it will be some time before it reaches the southern boundary of the snow and begins a new, northward-marching melt. What are the herds to eat until then?

They will have to eat the unsavory, dried out remnants of vegetation from the previous melt – which exists only on the west side of the lake -until the reach the latitude of the new, northward melt. You’ll see this happen quite late in the novel.

How did the all come about? Did it evolve as the planet cooled? Did the God-of-the-island plan it all? You’ll meet him late in the novel, too, unless he was just a hallucination. In any case, it’s up the the reader to decide. I just work here.

Now wouldn’t it be a horrible mess to dump all this onto the reader as an undigestible narrative lump? Does he (or she) even care?  World building is a means, not an end, and you have to feed it to your reader in digestible bites, as needed.

One last thing. There is something in all this that doesn’t add up. Did you see it? No? I’ll tell you what it is after the weekend. See you then.