What my father thought of the changes in me, I did not know. As always he was aloof, brooding now about the loss of his lands, his position, and his daughter.

In those days Papa was often tied up with matters of administration. We made our headquarters in a cluster of log houses we took in a high valley. Every day more Dannelites straggled in, each influx fanning our angers with new tales of terror. That we also spread terror was my pride; only later could I see the whole affair in perspective.

Even when Papa could not go, Sabine and I went raiding. We stole stock and food, clothing, arms and ammunition, and sometimes we found ourselves in firefights. I watched men go down before my gun and heard them scream from cover. Many of the former were probably just wounded and some of the latter probably died. It was impossible to assess our successes and failures.

We survived.

Somehow the Pertoskans manage to maintain secrecy about our war. Then as now, there is no fast long-range communication except by ship. Synapse technology can send solid bodies but not messages. For a year we had the field to ourselves and mercilessly slaughtered each other for the glory of God, but eventually a ship landed and carried away rumors of rebels in the hills. The Patrol ship that investigated found more than rebels and returned for reinforcements.

When the Patrol peacekeeping force arrived I was a seasoned veteran of thirteen. The Pertoskans were subdued at once since they were tied to the towns. We simply changed enemies and kept on fighting.

More time passed and we were severely pressed, forced out of the foothills and into the high mountains. Food was scarce and ammunition could no longer be had at all when our scouts brought word of a detachment moving into our area. We laid an ambush.

They came up through a long valley and tumed toward our camp, cutting through the narrow ravine where we were poised. They had two civilian scouts, Pertoskans, ordered to duty but relishing a chance to take their revenge on us. We let them come until they were directly below us and opened fire. The Pertoskans went down together and the Patrol went to earth like the trained soldiers they were, leaving three of their number behind.

We waited then, having a commanding position, and kept them pinned down. The light duty half-track growled forward and to the left until it jammed between two trees, its driver slumped over the controls. Sabine and I slipped down to recover the supplies it carried.

We were fools. We should never have stayed there after our first burst of fire, but we were unused to fighting a modern force. Sabine and I worked our way down, taking our time, and were sorting through the half-track’s contents when we heard a strange humming. Sabine knew immediately what we were facing. He hit the bushes, shouting for me to follow, but I turned to see what was coming.

It was a silver bullet, whizzing across the treetops at a hundred kilometers an hour, ducted fans thrusting down the air which supported it, flattening the vegetation as it went. For an almost fatal moment I paused, then leaped for cover. A high-explosive shell hit the spot where I had been standing. Everything went black.

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

It has been suggested that all of the warfare between the two sects was a result of political pretensions given the guise of a holy war. This is not true. I knew my father better than anyone, both then and later; he was a truly religious man in both the best and worst senses of the word. He felt that the search for God’s word among the complex and contradictory lessons of the “Great Religions of Earth” was a holy task, one that had been concluded correctly, once and for all time, in the Danneline Monomythos. He would not abide attacks upon it, or Baylor’s attempts to have his version of the Monomythos elevated to official status. That their secular pretensions also clashed was a strictly secondary consideration.

***

When the war broke out there were eleven thousand colonists on Hallam, about a thousand of them living in a cluster of villages called Hallam, which was also the capital “city” and starport. There Baylor and my father fought as they returned from services in their respective churches. By that night the entire town was fighting and half of it was ablaze.

We abandoned our post that night and took to the hills. Most of the first-shippers had been Dannelites and the Pertoskans who came later were of a different breed that had gravitated to the towns. In Hallam City we were outnumbered three to one. In fact, my father had threatened to abandon the house and move into the outback for years; only his politicking had kept him tied to the place.

Hallam was set on the floodplain of a minor river near its mouth and backed by a rugged coastal mountain range. We eased out of the house some hours before dawn and were at the base of the mountains by sunrise. There was no pursuit.

We began a guerrilla war, slipping down from the mountains to raid, pillage, and burn. I went on my first raid within a month of the outbreak of hostilities. Papa, Mr. Thoms, and Sabine Conners slipped down to a Pertoskan farm in hopes of stealing burros. I remained with Papa’s automatic pistol on a hillock overlooking the house; I was to lay down covering fire should they be spotted. No one actually expected me to hit anybody, just to keep their heads down.

They were waiting for us; how they knew that we were coming I never did find out. As our men approached the corrals, the Pertoskans fired from ambush. All three went down. I was so startled by the suddenness and shaken by the roar of gunfire that I forgot to fire. Then one of the Pertoskans stood up, laughing, and I shot him three times. He crumpled like a ragdoll.

Then there was only silence.

Several minutes later I saw movement in the bushes outside the Pertoskan house and emptied the rest of the clip. Somebody screamed. I reloaded and waited.

After ten minutes the bushes below me rustled. I covered the area and waited until Papa’s voice reached me. He was dragging Sabine Conners; Mr. Thoms was dead.

That was the beginning.

Any boy on the frontier becomes an efficient woodsman and is tough in mind and body. At twelve I had drawn blood, though I am no longer proud of that achievement. In the months that followed I became a hardened and highly efficient guerilla. My size allowed me to slip into places a grown man would not have dared, and the revolver I captured some weeks into our exile made me as deadly as any adult. What my father thought of the changes in me, I did not know. As always he was aloof, brooding now about the loss of his lands, his position, and his daughter.

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.

Chapter 5

The camp had fallen into a pitiful squalor. The palisade was far too small and the brush huts inside were not only pathetic shelters but also a grave fire hazard. One spark could wipe them out.

The time had come to expand the colony and to go down to the lake, a distance of 450 kilometers and a move the colonists were reluctant to make. They had been living from moment to moment for five months and wanted some time to rest and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Once again, Jan was thankful for Marcel Dumezil’s drive. The leader agreed that the colony must move and must expand.

The colony needed a constant supply of fresh water. The river Lydia was too seasonal in its flow to support proper sanitary facilities, though it provided enough water for their primitive life style. The lake would allow a nonseasonal access to protein – fish – and a chance to try domesticating the native plants. Jan was convinced that water was the limiting factor in plant growth and that irrigation could provide a bountiful harvest of native flora.

The patriarch agreed with him on every particular. They spent a month finalizing plans for the new “city” – a trying time for Jan as he fought against his natural dislike of the man.

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.

For two months the land was desert, then for four months it was snowy. Throughout that time the colonists cut logs until great rafts of timber awaited the melt. They would form the palisade of the new lower colony. The women smoked meat and prepared pemmican.

The Lydia was now in a stationary equatorial orbit just overhead. Captain Childe had only to request it and Henri Staal would take the landing craft up to get him, but he persisted in his self-imposed exile. He had converted holdspace to hydroponic tanks using algae native to Harmony and had established a closed-cycle ecosystem for himself. Jan was sure that he had no intention of ever grounding.

***

Jan was on the crew that went to the lake. They steered their rafts into the shallows at the height of the flood and drove in the long pilings they had prepared. Then they sat, imprisoned on their wooden islands, living on raw fish to preserve their pemmican, and waiting for the melt to pass. When the waters had receded, they surveyed a site on a bluff on the south bank of the Lydia. There they dug trenches and carried up the logs.

Everything they had cut in six months was used to make the stockade. Houses would wait until the next melt. The return trip was made afoot, staying near the Lydia for her failing, muddy water.

Two more couples were married within a week of their return.

*****

Although I don’t really remember the moment of enlightenment, this is clearly when I realized for the first time that Harmony had two sets of seasons per year. This happens at equatorial locations. (see 120. Still Inclined) That the herds only return every other melt (i.e., once per year) was a notion that occurred to me when I became aware of this, but I never worked out why it happens. You can only do so much hidden world building; eventually, you just have to write. more tomorrow

The herds came. Like an endless river they flowed past the palisade. The colonists worked themselves into exhaustion with the slaughter, killing, killing, killing; butchering until their skins ran red with blood, until their hair was matted with clotted, black, insect ridden blood. Haunch after haunch of trihom, herby, humpox, and leer tumbled into the pit north of town to be covered with clean sand and still more haunches. Bones and entrails inundated the land.

On the third day of the hunt, the skimmer was destroyed by a moving mass of flesh. Tennyson Risley had been piloting it between the hunters and the pit. Broken castings and twisted sheet metal were scattered over a square kilometer and Tenn’s body was lost to the scavengers along with the load of meat he had been carrying.

On the eighth day of the hunt, young Jean Dumezil, the patriarch’s third son, was carried in dead, his throat ripped out by a longneck. He was wrapped in the skin of the animal which had killed him and buried beside Tom Dennison and Jason D’Angelo. Marcel Dumezil read the service dry-eyed.

Walking away from the grave, Lucien Dubois and Alexandre Chambard could not meet one another’s eyes. They remembered the day they had found young Jean standing over the body of Jason D’Angelo, a bloody club in his hand. They remembered all too well how Jean had felt no contrition for the murder, reminding them how D’Angelo had mocked their God.

They remembered dragging the body to a place where it would be struck by a falling tree. They remembered the look on Jan Andrax’s face when he found tiny bits of moss embedded in the wound.

And Lucien Dubois remembered Jason’s near-death protecting him from a charging leer.

When the herds had left, the land was tortured, gouged, and mangled. It was a morass of drying dung, blood, entrails, and bones.

The herbivores had swept the ground like locusts, leaving nothing behind. All plant life was gone and within a week the moisture was gone as well; the land stretched away as pure desert, save for the trees on the mountains behind the camp and the tough new growth that sprang up near the shrunken river.

A week after the herds’ disappearance, Helene Dumezil and Valikili were married. The ceremony took place in the courtyard, attended by the entire colony. Angi squeezed Jan’s arm in delight at its conclusion, a delight that died when she saw the look in his eyes. It was the look of a caged animal.

*****

As with yesterday’s post, the narrator (c’est moi) spills the beans and another mystery is subverted rather than revealed.

My thinking on this was logically valid, but not necessarily valid from the viewpoint of drama. Who threw the grenade, was D’Angelo murdered and, if so, by whom, and who attacked Valikili (something you will never be told) were issues of minor importance in the face of the colony’s fight for survival. That was my thinking. In the closing pages of the novel, the notion of retribution returns, but by then human society is settled into its new pattern, and its survival is well established.

Whether undercutting the mysteries was the best decision is for readers and future writers to decide. more tomorrow

Marcel Dumezil, patriarch of the Benedictine Monists on the planet called Harmony, moved with assurance in everything he did. It was not egotism, exactly, that made him feel his every act was correct, but faith in God, faith in his special place in God’s plan, and faith in his understanding of that plan. Had he been accused of egotism, he would have denied the charges hotly – but humbly. He had long since transcended identifying his personal wishes with God’s. Now he was tangled in the less common, but more dangerous fallacy of identifying God’s personal wishes as his own.

Marcel Dumezil was a man without doubts. He was also a man of great practical wisdom and vast experience in colonizing and in the leading of colonists. He held himself to be indispensable and was more than half right.

He slept only four hours each night, devoting to prayer the other four hours he allowed himself away from his duties. Hypocrisy was not one of his characteristics; he believed utterly in his God and his mission. And this made him dangerous. Lacking internal weakness, he tolerated no weakness in his followers. Believing first in God and only secondarily in man, he was utterly ruthless.

He had thrown the grenade.

*****

The description of Marcel Dumezil’s mindset at the end of the second paragraph is confusing, and I’m okay with that. If the reader passes over it, fine; if he is puzzled, perhaps his irritation will help clarify his thinking. Not everything needs to be spelled out.

To keep names straight as you read on, colony leader Marcel Dumezil is a fire eater who is totally consumed by his religion. Today, he would be a jihadi. His son, named Anton, is a competent leader whose religious fire also burns, but with less heat. He becomes the colony’s leader after his father’s death. Anton’s son, also named Anton, is a twit. All the strength in that line dies out in three generations, but Anton the younger will still set things in motion in the second half of the book.

The last line in this section irritated Thomas Anderson at Schlock Value, when he reviewed Jandrax recently. He said:

Oh wait, about twenty pages in we just…learn who did it (threw the grenade). It’s not even a mystery solved. The narrator tells us. Out of the blue. It was very disappointing.

In fact, Dumezil threw the grenade to remove his people from the temptations of the world. It set up the story and gave a clear picture of his character. There was no intention of creating a mystery. The stranding was of supreme importance; who did it, wasn’t particularly important. Once the results of the explosion had been firmly nailed down, I let the reader know who did it at the first convenient moment. No mystery intended; just a timing issue.

Of course, there is a lesson here for the would-be writer. What we intend is a great deal less important than what the reader sees. more tomorrow