Category Archives: A Writing Life

152. Montrose and Argyil

Leave a reply

Here is a poem based in an era when having the wrong religious belief would get you killed very quickly and very cruelly.

The English Civil War was fought while America was being born, between fierce sects of Protestant Christians, over points of doctrine so small that no one remembers them but historians. It was a time of multiple and conflicting loyalties, when opportunists and men of conscience alike changed sides, then repented and changed back again. Much of the freedom of religion we cherish in America today came as a reaction to the excesses visited on the people when armies decided what God had intended.

It was not unlike Shia and Sunni today. I understand them both, and fear them both when they march, because I remember how recently our Christian ancestors were killing each other for the same kinds of reasons.

To explain the obscure points in this poem, it takes place in Scotland which was under English rule. The tolbooth is Edinburgh city hall and the heads of executed prisoners were hung there. Corbies are crows in the Scots language. Montrose and Argyll were sometime enemies, depending on shifting fortunes. Both fought long and eventually lost – then lost their heads. I have bent history enough to put them on the spikes at the same time, so they could have a final conversation.

Montrose and Argyll

There is a spike by the Tolbooth side
Where famous heads are hung to dry;
There came the Marquise of Argyil,
Bereft of body, to reside.

In sun and rain, by weeks and days,
‘Til bare of flesh, by corbies pared,
Above the commons in the street
Who gibed and jeered, and milled and stared.

Montrose later joined him there,
Come newly from the scaffold head,
With fresh and bloody countenance,
Unwelcome, save that he was dead.

Then Montrose said to Argyil’s skull,
Staring eyeless at his side,
“A martyr’s death ye sought and found;
I see your flesh is mortified.”

The skull spoke back, “My Lord Montrose,
Ascent has brought you to my side;
And yet the rose upon your cheek
Comes newly leaking from your eye.”

They bickered harshly through the day
Of who was right when King Charles fell,
And who the Lord most dearly loved,
And who would spend his days in hell.

Then said the Marquise of Argyil,
“That ye died was no one’s fault but yours.
Ye had the chance to do the right,
But ye woudna’ heed the Lord.”

Replied the Marquise of Montrose,
“Full many died, whose deaths are yours.
Ye had the chance to let them live,
But ye woudna’ heed the Lord.”

They both paused, their voices spent,
Reflecting on the weary years,
The twists, the turns, the changing sides,
Betrayals, deaths, and bitter tears.

To overthrow an upstart King,
Then, repentant, bring him back again.
For Scotland, God, or Covenant
‘Til Cromwell’s axe cut short his reign.

Now all is done; the King is dead,
The Scottish church no stronger stands;
Both Marquises have lost their heads,
And Cromwell strides upon the land.

  * * *

          Myself, I am a sinful man,
          My kindness an indifferent sort.
          Temptation is my truest friend,
          And prayer remains a last resort.

          Yet when I stood beneath those spikes
          To hear the dead and mighty speak
          With undiminished passion still,
          Though hung in shame before the weak.

          I wondered then, as I ask now,
          What further deeds they might begin,
          In Jesus’ name, on Jesus’ flock,
          If they were not such Christian men.

151. Not So New Enemies

Leave a reply

Part two of a comparison of Christianity and Islam.

Bush Two called those who strap on bombs to kill their enemies, cowards. That was the most monumentally stupid statement to ever come out of the mouth of a man not noted for his wisdom. People who die for their beliefs are not cowards. If we are to defeat them, we have to understand them. Mislabeling them is not useful. And if we call them fanatics, we had better understand what fanaticism is.

We made a start yesterday by looking at Christian fanatics. Now it’s time to make the comparison to Islam.

*****

Muhammad did not claim to be God or his son. He claimed to be God’s messenger, a prophet, making him closer to Moses or Isaiah than to Jesus. Muslims believe that Jesus was also a prophet, but not the Son of God. Christianity grew out of Judaism, fulfilling it and therefore removing its validity, at least according to Christians. Islam grew out of both and recognizes both as sister religions which have been rendered obsolete by the Koran. Christians and Jews get preferential tax treatment in Islamic law as People of the Book.

That doesn’t keep wars from happening.

Christians claim to be a religion of peace, but history does not bear that out. Actual wars of religion occurred throughout the Reformation period, and wars of politics and commerce often had a strong religious component. Think of the conquest of Mexico, with priests marching beside the conquistadores and building their missions in the shadow of the presidio.

Islam was born in conflict and has never hidden its belief that the Koran should be spread by military conquest.

Before the Reformation, Christianity had about a thousand years of supremacy, full of internal strife, but well able to keep that strife in check. When Jan Hus rebelled against the Church, they burned him at the stake; problem solved.

Islam, on the other hand, split into two parts almost from the beginning. Upon Muhammad’s death, two lines of succession emerged. Those who favored Abu Bakr became Sunni; those who favored Ali ibn Abi Talib became the Shia. Both sects follow the five pillars of Islam and both believe in the absolute authority of the Koran. They differ on their interpretations of the Koran, and those disagreements have been passed on by sectarian schools. Each sect would say that the other might think they follow the Koran, but they are following false doctrine, and have abandoned Allah. All of this sounds a lot like my Baptist father arguing with my Catholic uncle.

Each of the two sects of Islam remained unified. This was very different from the Catholic and Protestant split. The Catholic church remained unified, but Protestants exploded into hundreds of different denominations, mostly at verbal war with one another, and occasionally at real war.

Throughout the history of Islam, church and government have interacted closely. Islam was spread by conquest, which isn’t necessarily as bloody as it seems. Wherever Islam conquered, the old underdogs often rode the elevator of change to high position in the new order. Sometimes they were very helpful in easing the road to conquest.

By a century after Muhammad’s death, much of the Holy Land was in Muslim hands, which did not please the Catholic church. When Tariq ibn Ziyad led his armies across the Straits of Gibraltar and conquered Spain in 711, the Catholic church fought back, but it took seven hundred years to expel the conquerors. In 1492, the Catholic rulers of Spain finally drove out the last Muslims, expelled the Jews, sent Columbus exploring, and began the Spanish Inquisition. Lovely year.

Also during that period, the Catholic church decided to take back the Holy Land, and set the Crusades in motion. Everybody knows that. What is not so well known is that for most of the second millennium, Eastern Europe was a battleground where vast areas were conquered by Muslim leaders, then reconquered by Christian leaders a few decades later, then Muslim, then Christian, for a very long and depressing time.

So we come to today, in a section of the world where two warring sects of Islam are filled with fourteen hundred years of hatred for each other; where religious, ethnic, and dynastic differences abound; and where those who would prefer prosperity at any reasonable cost, clash with those who are entirely dedicated to following the word of Allah, as their particular leaders understand that word. Many would love to kill westerners, but satisfy themselves instead by killing members of the opposite sect who are so near at hand, and such an easy target.

Above all, Islam is a religion which never exploded into a hundred sects. When there are only two sects, victory and the destruction of the other seems possible for both.

In Britain during the War of the Three Kingdoms (see tomorrow’s post) even pious men kept switching sides because they were enmeshed in conflicting loyalties to King or Parliament, to home region, to religion, to friends, and to their own particular bottom line. All of these loyalties were absolute, but as the situations changed, one loyalty would override another and a man would find himself fighting along side the ones he was fighting against only months earlier.

That should sound familiar. Change the names and the dates, and it could be the Middle East today.

150. Old Enemies

Leave a reply

There are times when a man has to stand up and defend his country. That is the flip side to yesterday’s post criticizing boot camps.

Today we face Islamic extremists who would destroy us. We can bemoan the our mistakes in Iraq, but we have to move forward from where we are. Wishful thinking is of no value in this issue. We call them fanatics. That’s an accurate description, but it is not useful. It’s just another word like evil, enemy, or barbarian – just another word that means THEM, as opposed to US.

If we are going to understand Islamic terrorists in order to defeat them, we have to find the inner fanatic in our own culture, so we can start to see the world through their eyes. Today we will revisit a time when Christians were killing each other over doctrine. Tomorrow, we’ll compare that to Islam.

*****

Trying to compress two thousand years of Christian history into a few hundred words borders on the burlesque, but let’s try. Christianity began with Jesus, who did not write the Bible. Fundamentalists like my people believe that it was written by his immediate followers under the infallible inspiration of God, but textual evidence suggests that it was actually written hundreds of years later.

In any case, by the third century there were hundreds of “books” to chose from. The Church chose some and discarded many in order to create the Bible. This gives some validity to the Catholic notion that the word of the Church is more important than the Bible, or at least others’ interpretations of the Bible.

Within the Roman empire, Christianity went from persecuted, to allowed, to the official religion of the state. Then along came Martin Luther. He was not the first to question the Church, but he was the first one to live through the encounter, because of changes in world politics which pitted proto-German rulers against Rome and provided him with a sanctuary.

The dam broke and here came a vast flood of new denominations, each anti-Catholic and each disputing with its fellow Protestants. For protection, many of these denominations sought the protection of secular leaders. Protection from outside enemies soon moved toward forced conversions within an area. The Dutch and Swiss became largely Calvinist, many Germanic states became Lutheran, Ireland remained Catholic at the core, although under increasing pressure from their English conquerors, France and Spain remained Catholic, England became the realm of the Church of England, and Scotland fell under a particularly Knox-ious form of Calvinism.

From 1618 through 1648 the Thirty Years War decimated Europe as country after country fought to see which form of Christianity would prevail, cementing the notion of one realm, one ruler, one religion. The notion of individual choice in religion was crushed under the boots of Kings and generals. This era provided every denomination with myths of how THEY were trying to destroy OUR beliefs. That WE were also trying to destroy THEIR beliefs tends to be forgotten.

The English Civil War, also called the War of the Three Kingdoms, came hard on the heels of the Thirty Years War. American notions of religious freedom were born out of the horrors of a conflict where various interpretations of God’s Truth were enforced at sword point, and partisan armies swept the land. The American answer to all this was the separation of church and state, found in the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .

There is a bit of cynicism in this. Instead of insisting that God’s will be done, Americans have learned that the man in power rarely understands God’s will.

149. Boot Camp

Leave a reply

It’s Armed Forces Week again, that time of year when any questioning of the military is taken as a slap at servicemen or veterans. Citizens who have the temerity to say, “Wait a minute, let’s talk this over,” are seen as unpatriotic. When I was in the military, those people were called commie-pinko wimps. I was one of them, but they drafted me anyway. I’ve told that story in 42. The Other Veterans. I also told the flip side of the story in 43. S. L. goes to War and 44. S. L. in Occupation, which detail my father’s WW II experiences. There are times when a man has to stand up and defend his country. There are also times when a man has to stand up and tell his country to back off.

The military has no use for patriots, because patriots think for themselves. In combat, a soldier who shouts, “We must not do this,” is likely to get himself and his teammates killed. He has to go on, following orders.

So how do we turn patriots into yes-men? Boot camp. That’s what it’s there for.

Boot camp is not seen as something important, or morally debilitating. And, I suppose, compared the things that happen later in the field, it isn’t that important. But . . . without boot camp to turn patriots into soldiers, those later events could never happen.

This isn’t about me. I went through boot camp in neutral mode, observing, remembering, and trying not to feel. I wan’t always successful, but I was successful enough to survive intact. I was changed, of course, but by my own experiences, not by pre-programmed manipulations.

This also isn’t about the eighteen year old children who made up most of the recruits, who were eager to follow the path their elders had set, and ready to go over and kick some commie ass. This is about one young man, and those he represents. He came into boot camp a patriot, ready to serve his country, full of love and compassion, but ready to do his duty. They broke him. I can still see him standing in the barracks before lights out, talking to his friends, saying, “This isn’t right. I joined up to fight for my country. Why are they treating us like this?” His friends laughed at him and told him that this was nothing, it was just getting him ready for what was to come.

It wasn’t nothing, but it was getting ready for his life to come. That was the point.

I never talked to him. There was nothing I could say. He was learning in front of my eyes what I had learned years before, at other hands, under other circumstances. But I never forgot him.

Boot camp is what in Anthropology we call a liminal experience, one that tears down an old identity in order to build a new one. The folks at boot camp are really good at this, even in mild boot camps like the one I experienced at the San Diego Naval Training Center. We could see the real thing across the fence at the Marine boot camp, and we thanked God every day that we weren’t Marines. While I was there, a Marine recruit who could no longer take the daily abuse ran off and stowed away on a jet liner at the civilian airport just over the fence. Hours later the jet landed at his home town on the east coast and he fell out of the wheel well, frozen, asphyxiated and dead. The Marines said good riddance. We worms (as Navy recruits are called) laughed. Learning to laugh at the death of others is part of the boot camp experience.

It was all choreographed indignation, play-acting inflicted onto a captive audience. They said that if we didn’t keep our barracks clean enough or our socks rolled tightly enough, the Trouble Shooters would come.

“You worms have been given socks to roll! That’s all we trust you with now! How can we trust you with nuclear bombs once you’re on an aircraft carrier if you can’t roll socks now!”  Every word was delivered at a shout.

Of course, the Trouble Shooters came. They always do. They came in the night, screaming in manufactured rage and tearing the barracks apart while we stood at attention in our shorts at the foot of each bed.

Near-naked, helpless, frightened into immobility, knowing that the only way to survive was to  let the insanity happen. Civilian identities dying; new, military identities growing.

The making of a Navyman. You could put it on a poster.

148. Novella 3, Lost Legacy

Leave a reply

Heinlein was not a hero to me when I read him as a youth, just one of many science fiction writers that filled up my head with stories. We are talking about the sixties, but I was reading old library books that went back to the thirties and forties, so there was a lot to choose from. For ideas, I went to Clarke – who else? For adventure, Andre Norton every time. Reading Heinlein was like listening to stories told by one of my uncles.

Clarke’s people lived in cities and on spaceships. Norton’s lived in the wilderness – alien, but still wilderness. Heinlein’s people all carried Missouri in their blood, and Missouri was only forty miles away from where I lived. Heinlein’s characters were like goofy, distant members of the family.

I see Heinlein’s star fading, and I think his down-home characters won’t stand him in good stead in the future. He’s going out of style in the squeaky clean, politically correct present. It’s too bad; I liked his people, warts and all.

Of all Heinlein’s work I read when I was young, the story that took my breath away was his novella Lost Legacy. I see that Heinlein had three novellas in the running for this year’s retro Hugo for 1941. Lost Legacy should have been one of them.

If you are a writer, or want to be, seek out Lost Legacy, because Heinlein puts on a clinic in how things ought to be done. It begins with badinage between a surgeon (Coburn) and a psychologist (Huxley) is the local club. Using his favorite schtick, joking conversation between competent professionals, Heinlein gives a a thumbnail introduction to para-psychology. Then comes a phone call, and Coburn has to rush off to tend to an accident victim. He invites Huxley to watch. The description of the prep and surgery is spot on for the era, and rises to poetry near the end.

The accident victim was one of the psychologist’s subjects, a man who could “see around corners”. After Coburn has to excise part of his brain, his clairvoyance is gone. Huxley feels that esp must reside in that part of the brain and sets out, with his girlfriend, to prove his hypothesis.

Incidentally, to enjoy Lost Legacy, you have to keep reminding yourself that in 1941 the functions of various parts of the brain were unknown and that our relatively full complement of pre-human ancestors had not yet been dug up. You also have to resist a too-easy accusation of sexism. The teasing is sexist – or, by 1941 standards, normal – but Joan Freeman is fully a part of the team.

Once they have mastered clairvoyance, their difficulties really start. No one believes them, they are fired from their respective jobs, they set off to think things over, and they fall into the company of a group of adepts. They discover that they are part of a multi-millennial war for the soul of man, and fight in its last battle.

That’s seventy five pages squeezed into three sentences, and it’s all I’m going to give you. Read the original. Copies of Assignment in Eternity, which contains it, are not hard to find in used bookstores.

***

Okay, fair warning! If you aren’t a word nerd, or a fan of both Heinlein and E. E. Smith, you may want to stop reading right now. From here on, it gets pretty obscure, pretty fast.

Near the end of Lost Legacy, Moulton says, “We come.” This is present tense, actually used to mean the present moment, something it almost never means in ordinary speech. “Present tense” means usually, or habitually, or from time to time. It never really means now. “I go to the market” doesn’t mean right now, this moment, as we speak. It would be used something like, “I go to the market every Tuesday.” If we meant right now, this moment, we would say, “I’m going to the market right now.” Note the addition of am.

When I read Lost Legacy, in high school, during the sixties, I had never seen present tense used to actually mean present tense. It jumped off the page at me, a little, polished gem of wordcraft that I never forgot. I didn’t see anything like it again for a decade, until I read Children of the Lens, where E. E. Smith put the words, “I come, at speed,” into the mouth of one of his characters.

Pardon a digression. Past tense isn’t about the past. We don’t write historical novels in past tense, contemporary romances in present tense, and science fiction in future tense. Past tense is story tense. It says to the reader, “The events in this story, the sequencing, the cause and effect, are of this story only. They do not relate to your world. When you enter here, you become a part of the story’s space-time. If it is four o’clock on page nine when you read this as a child, it will still be four o’clock on page nine when you read it again as an old man.”

The ubiquitous use of present tense as story tense in modern writing offends me. It is clumsy, ugly, and there is no longer any novelty in it.

More decades passed before I discovered that Heinlein and E. E. Smith were close friends. I would love to know more about how much they bounced ideas back and forth.

The original magazine version of Smith’s Lensman series was published between 1937 and 1948. Lost Legacy was published in 1941. It seems like half the characters in Heinlein’s universe were named Smith, although that could as well be an “everyman” reference. There is no question that Lensman Ted Smith who has a cameo in The Number of the Beast is a shout-out to Heinlein’s old friend.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall of Doc Smith’s kitchen when the Heinlein’s came to visit.

Now, reading Lost Legacy again after many years, I am struck by its similarity to Smith’s work. It seems to capture the whole mojo of the Lensman series in seventy-five pages.

147. Novella 2, Hunter, Come Home

Leave a reply

I was in high school when I read Hunter, Come Home for the first time and found it deeply moving. Richard McKenna was a force in the science fiction world, but only for a sadly short time. I had to search the internet and my local interlibrary loan to find a copy to re-read. I found it in Casey Agonistes and Other Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories by Richard McKenna, Harper & Row, 1973.

McKenna is famous outside the science fiction community for his one best seller The Sand Pebbles. He was born in Montana in 1913, joined the Navy in 1931 at the height of the depression and served in WWII and Korea. After retirement, he used the GI Bill to finished the education that had been cut short decades before. He became a writer, but of only a few stories and one novel. He had only six years between his first publication and his death.

If you get the book, you will certainly read the other stories and be glad you did, but my focus is Hunter, Come Home.

Here is a brief, spoiler-free summary. Mordinmen were descendants of a lost Earth colony which had fought a generations long war against the dinosaur like creatures which inhabited their planet. Manhood had become symbolized by the killing of a dino, but now the dinos were scarce and poor families, like Roy Craig’s, could no longer afford a hunt.

Mordinmen had now claimed another planet and were setting about to destroy its native ecosystem, in order to rebuild it in the image of their home planet. Red dots (successful hunters) were running the show, assisted by blankies like Roy who was working toward the time he could make his kill on the new planet. Hired as specialists, the Belconti biologists were providing the virus-like Thanasis used to destroy the native life.

When the story begins, the fight to transform this new planet has been going on for decades, and it is failing. Now the Mordinmen, against warnings by the Belacaonti, are about to unleash newer, harsher, more dangerous plague on the planet.

That’s about as far as I can summarize without a spoiler alert. Roy Craig wants more than anything to be a full fledged member of his machismo society, but his blanky status leaves him marginalized and frustrated. At the same time, he is drawn to the relatively gentle society of the Belaconti with whom is is working, symbolized for him by the woman Midori Blake.

The native life of the planet is totally interconnected, essentially a one-world-tree (shades of Gaia). It does not so much fight back against the invaders as simply refuse to die

There is a three way contrast in Hunter, Come Home. The Mordinmen, from a macho society built on killing are placed in contrast to the Belaconti, scientists who understand and treasure the ecosystem they are trying to destroy, and they in turn are contrasted to the interlocked, almost self-aware native life of the planet. Roy and Midori are each caught in conflicting loyalties as the planned apocalypse moves forward.

Hunter, Come Home is beautifully written, full of human passions, and insights into cultures in conflict. On publication, it was far ahead of its time in its appreciation of the importance of ecology.

146. Novella 1

Leave a reply

I have concluded that every piece of writing has its natural length. Take Flowers for Algernon, surely one of the great pieces of science fiction, or any other kind of fiction. When it was published as a short story, it was superb. When it was expanded to novel length, it was still a fine work, but it lost some of its impact. Charly, the Academy Award winning movie made from it, was clearly excellent, but not up the the quality of the short story.

That is, in my opinion – but what else matters in choosing the best of the best.

As a youth, I started off devouring short stories like candy. Over the years, my taste moved to novels, but throughout my life I have had a weakness for the novella length. It seems to bring out the best in writers.

Take Hemingway, for example. I love reading his work but I have never been convinced of his mastery. He seems more like the greatest writer of novels in which a man fights a war, makes love to a woman, lands a fish, and dies on the final page. Nevetheless, I don’t argue with his Nobel prize, because he won it for his one true masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea. A novella, you will note, even though it is sold as a novel.

Even people who don’t read Dickens love A Christmas Carol, which is a novella. Conan Doyle’s four long Sherlock Holmes stories, including Hound of the Baskervilles, are novellas.

Even two of the stories I hate most in science fiction are novellas: The Persistence of Vision (it won a Hugo and a Nebula) and A Boy and His Dog (it won a Nebula and was nominated for a Hugo) There is no accounting for taste.

I wanted to write appreciations of two of my favorite novellas (tomorrow and Thursday), so I decided to do a little background research. What a morass! No one agrees on anything, except that novellas are a hard length to sell.

In the science fiction world, the word of the SFWA is final for nebula award nominees. They set these lengths:

short story    under 7,500 words
novelette       7,500 -17,500 words
novella         17,500-40,000 words
novel            40,000 words and up

Anything outside of science fiction doesn’t have to follow these rules, and very few outside the field have ever heard of a novelette.

Chuck Sambuchino of Writer’s Digest says, “Novellas generally run 20,000 to 50,000 words. About 30,000 words is average.” That may be true in 2016, but when I started writing in the 1970’s the typical paperback mystery, western, or science fiction novel came in at about 50,000 words.

A good cynic’s rule would be, “It’s hard to sell a novella, so stretch your story into a novel. If it won’t stretch, pretend it’s a novel anyway.”

Next, I went to Goodreads. I only recently got high-speed internet because I live in a dead zone in the Sierra foothills, so I am just now learning to use what is clearly a fine resource. I find their reviews surprisingly sensible, so I went to Listopia: World’s Greatest Novellas. It’s a nice list, well introduced, but if you want entertainment, slide down to the comments. I give these people credit for trying to make sensible choices in an under-defined situation, but it also looks like seven blind Hindus describing an elephant. Not that I could do any better.

Let me add one more bit. Here are some of the stories that, according to Wikipedia, are traditionally presented as novels, but still short enough to fall into the novella category — The Call of the Wild, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Heart of Darkness, The Stepford Wives, A River Runs Through It, Billy Budd, Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

There are a lot of familiar faces here. One would almost think that our teachers and professors picked out books for their curricula because they were short; but that can’t be, can it?.
tomorrow, Hunter, Come Home

145. The Soul of the People

Leave a reply

The Earth to which the Cyan explorers have returned is much changed. What was overpopulated at their departure is much worse at their return. Governments have fallen and been reconstituted. NASA has been replaced by a military space organization.

The one stable thing in this new world is Saloman Curran, the world’s richest and most powerful man. His overriding consistencies are ruthlessness and obsessive dedication to the colonization of other planets. The explorers find themselves on his team and under his power as they plan for Cyan’s colonization.

Even Curran is not omnipotent. He finds himself blackmailed into adding a contingent of colonists from India. When Keir and Gus inspect these new colonists, they are given a new perspective on Curran by the Indian leader.

***

Bannerjee explained, “There was no Saloman Curran to finance our colonization effort. Each colonist had to pay twenty billion rupees for the privilege of going. Each applicant had to pay one billion rupees, non refundable, for the privilege of applying.”

“You mean only your rich could even apply?”

“That is correct.”

Gus shook his head. Bannerjee smiled and said, “I see you don’t know the history of your own country. How do you think Europeans got to America? Do you think ships’ captains just said, ‘Get on board, I’ll be glad to take you?'”

“I never thought about it.”

“To get to America in the early years, one either had to be rich or had to indenture oneself, that is, agree to be what amounted to a slave for a set number of years. Exploration and colonization have never been free.”

Keir said, “We chose our colonists on the basis of what skills they could bring to Cyan.”

“Indeed.  So did we. There are plenty of people who are both rich and skillful.”

They walked on through the camp. It was noisy, brawling, dusty, hot, and exciting.  Keir felt a smile growing on his face with every step. What an addition to Cyan these people would be!

“Kumar,” Gus said, “who is supplying your transportation to Uranus?”

“Gee Craft, Ganymede.”

Keir exchanged a look with Gus.  GCG was a subsidiary of Curran International. “How much per head?”

Bannerjee quoted a price that was three times the going rate.

“You’re getting screwed.  Why not shop around?”

“‘Shopping around’, as you put it, is not permitted. The price of transportation was negotiated as part of the main agreement. So was the price Curran is charging for the ship his people are building for us.”

“That means you are actually helping to finance the USNA expedition.”

“Yes. We are financing a major part of the expedition.”

They were thoughtful as they walked back to the VTOL. Finally, Bannerjee mused, “I wonder what Curran is buying with our money?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your people are not paying for their passage. I assume that means that they are not co-owners of the expedition, as ours are.”

“That is correct. The factory modules are being supplied by CI, so CI will own them. The people going are guaranteed land and subsistence food and clothing for five years.”

“And employment?”

“Well, the farms and factories won’t run themselves.”

“Will it take fifty thousand to run them?” Bannerjee asked.

“Perhaps not.”

“So there will be an excess of labor, and one man will own all the means of production. Does that seem healthy to you?”

Keir did not respond.

“It is said,” Bannerjee added as they were standing at the ramp of the VTOL, “that the man who owns the factory, owns the soul of the people. I would think about that, if I were you.”

144. Who Said You Were Mexican?

Leave a reply

Happy May fifth, although I’ve already covered Cinco de Mayo in a sneaky way in my post on Saint Patrick’s Day. This last post for Teacher Appreciation Week is also about teaching Mexican-American students.

I was once asked to chose the races of my students.

If you’ve followed A Writing Life at all, you know my belief that we are all one gene pool.  All “blacks” have some “white” ancestors, and all “whites” have some “black” ancestors. There may be a few statistical anomalies that fail to bear this out, but probably not.

Look at any post between January 18 and February 18 of 2016, and you will find out more than you want to know on the subject.

If this is true of the USA, it is doubly true of Mexico. The English came to America as families, and avoided Indians or fought with them. The Spanish came to Mexico as soldiers and married the native women. That’s painting with a broad brush, but it’s a reasonably accurate overview.

Back to the story. When I was a relatively new teacher, I was preparing to administer the yearly state-wide standardized test to my students. I was given a computer printout with their names and told to fill in the appropriate race for each. White, hispanic, black, eskimo . . .  You’ve probably seen similar lists.

I asked how I was to know? I didn’t get a good answer, but it was apparent that I wasn’t supposed to ask the kids themselves. Given the history of Mexico, the Mexican-Americans were all white, at least partially, but that would not have been acceptable.

Okay, there they sit. Help me choose.

What about using skin color as a criterion? I had no student that year that anyone would have called black, so that simplifies things. What about that boy? Is he Mexican, or did he just spend the summer playing shirtless in the sun? What about Khrishna Srinivas; he’s dark enough?

Maybe names will tell us. What about Maria de la Rosa, that pale blonde whose parents just moved here from Madrid? If I don’t put her name down, anyone who just reads these names will think I cheated.

What about Paul Rogers, son of Bill Rogers and Delores Sandoval? White, of course.

But what about his cousin Raul? His father is Jorge Sandoval, Delores’s brother, and his mother is Beth Rogers, Bill’s sister.

Raul Sandoval – Mexican, of course.

If you don’t find this humorous, don’t worry; neither do I. The event actually happened. I made up the examples, but there were real ones I could have used.

This all happened thirty years ago. Things are better now, aren’t they? Maybe? Try this on for size. The man on the six o’clock news says that the latest poll determined that 73 percent of Latinos prefer Hillary Clinton.

Really? How does he know?  Who said the members of the survey group were Latinos? Who set up the criteria for what it takes to be a Latino?

And doesn’t this all sound just a little absurd?

143. Class on Cyan

Leave a reply

This is the third post for Teacher Appreciation week.

Until I retired, I called myself a novelist who taught, rather than a teacher who wrote books. It was a bit like a British officer dressing for dinner in his tent while serving in India – not a denial of the moment, but a reminder-to-self that present circumstances were only temporary.

My attitude was not disrespectful. I dedicated my complete energy to teaching for nearly three decades, and counted it an honorable profession. I just had further plans.

Some of the things I learned as a teacher spilled over into my writing. I wrote  a teaching novel (35. Symphony in a Minor Key) and Keir, the lead character in Cyan, took up teaching ecology and survival education to the colonists’ children, walking quite literally in my footsteps.

***

The snow started in the afternoon, first as scattered flakes, but soon clinging to the kaal stalks and frosting the gray-purple bowl of the valley with white.  Will turned to Keir for advice, something he rarely had to do any more.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Keir replied. “It looks like this snow shower will pass quickly.  We’ll push on a few more kilometers and make camp by the river. When we set up the tents, have them staked carefully. Ramananda said we could expect heavier weather when Procyon sets.”

Will nodded and turned away to organize his troop. Then he touched his throat mike and relayed Keir’s advice to Marci’s group who were coming in from another angle and still out of sight in the forest that rimmed the valley.

Most of Will’s kids were about twelve, and this was their graduation exercise. After two years of laying the groundwork, Keir had convinced the council to devote most of the seventh year of the colony’s school to Cyanian ecology and survival techniques. Keir had taught the first few years, but since they had turned sixteen, Will, Marci, and Sven Aressen had taken over the day to day teaching. Keir remained as mentor, and planned each graduation trip.

A few of these kids had seen snow trickling down onto city streets on Earth when they were six or seven, but none of them, including their young leaders, had ever seen snow falling in a natural environment. They were wide eyed with wonder.

They had taken a cargo skimmer eight hundred kilometers north from Crowley and had come the last hundred kilometers on foot. Except for the brief sweep through the region which Keir and Gus had made three weeks earlier, no one had ever explored this area. That was the essence of the exercise; it was real. The land was new and the dangers were only partially known.

The second party broke out of the trees across the valley. Keir glassed them. Marci Nicholas was waving her arms about, pointing out something, still teaching. She was a natural. Gus stumped along beside her.

Keir turned back to his own group, who had quickly moved ahead of him. Each child carried a massive pack and a fletcher in a holster at his side. Only Will could have handled the recoil of one of the scout’s automatics, but those polymer rocket launchers were recoilless, just as deadly, and only a fraction of the weight.

These children were the cream. Of the four hundred children of their age group, these were the thirty who had passed every test, mental, physical, and moral, that Keir could devise. They had learned everything Keir had to teach them. Cyan’s Olympians. Keir smiled with pride, then hurried so they did not leave him behind.