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Raven’s Run 36

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Such violent passion could not be sustained. It was over in minutes, and it left me with no desire to prolong it. I rolled off and sat up, reaching for my clothing. Then I thought, “Why bother.” The other sunbathers were studiously not looking in our direction. Will was out among the breakers, looking seaward. Gulls were cutting circles against the high, faint clouds.

My passion had spent itself, but the anger and resentment remained. Raven looked up from where she sprawled, half dazed, and said, “What’s wrong.”

“That is the second time you have manipulated me. I don’t like it!”

“It seemed to me that you did.”

I looked hard at her. I said, “I won’t be used by anyone.”

“Men use women all the time. Why shouldn’t I have the same privilege?”

“I am not men! I am not a category; I am not generic; I am singular, unique, myself only. I don’t give a damn what men do. I don’t use; I don’t manipulate. Not men, not women, and particularly not friends. And I won’t tolerate being used! Not by anyone!”

I was shouting at the last. Raven backed away from me. I took my rage in both hands and forced it back into the little room at the bottom of my soul where it hides, never asleep and never forgotten.

“I was only trying to arouse you,” she said.

“Bullshit!”

Her face froze in anger, then slowly relaxed. Tears formed and trickled down her cheeks.

“Bullshit,” I repeated softly. “It was touch and go. You might just as easily have ended up under Will. Or both of us.”

“Would that have been so bad?”

“That’s not the point. Life is complicated. It isn’t just a fuck on the beach. Every act has consequences. What you did today jeopardized my friendship with Will, and Will may be the only real friend I have.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

I pulled on my bathing suit and reached for my jeans. Will was coming back up the beach. I turned to Raven and said, “Twice you’ve manipulated me. But never again!”

And I waited. If she had said anything, a cutting remark or an offhand attempt to make the situation seem smaller than it was, I would have used my last dollar to put her on a plane back to California.

Four people, now dead, would still be alive if I had.

#          #          #

The ride back to Marseille was silent and strained. Will did not ask what had happened between Raven and me, and I did not volunteer any information. He dropped us off at the quai and said that he would see us in the morning.

The sun had set already. The boulevard was alive with cars and the sidewalks were alive with people. I said, “What do you want to do now? Walk around or go to bed?”

Raven shrugged. She looked very unhappy.

“Do you want to be alone?”

“Yes. For a while.”

“Marseille isn’t safe at night. If I left you on the Wahini, you could bolt the hatch. I would like to walk around for an hour or so, anyway.”

“All right.”

“We have to talk about this some more, you know. Unless you are just going to get on a plane and fly out of my life. If we stay together, we can’t let this lie.”

“I know. But not now. Please.” more tomorrow

245. Serializing

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I’ve been doing a lot of serializing lately. In fact, I’ve been at it for over a year, but lately it has become intense.

Publishing novels serially in periodicals is a very old idea. Most of Charles Dickens work came out that way. What I’m doing is a bit different though, because Dickens wrote his novels to be serialized. The size of each chunk was known to him when he wrote. And the chunks were bigger.

David Copperfield was a novel of 358,551 words. I know this by downloading it from Project Gutenberg, transferring it to my word processor, and using the word count function. You might make note of that; it is a useful technique. David Copperfield was published in twenty monthly installments. That makes each installment was about 18,000 words. In SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) terms, each installment was of novella length.

My typical serial post is about 600 words.

Dickens serialized in order to sell to those who could not afford his books, and at the same time, to boost sales of those books when they came out after they appeared in periodicals. Most successful nineteenth century authors followed the same pattern. So did the big names in twentieth century science fiction, although they wrote smaller novels and presented them in fewer, but longer installments. Often they didn’t sell their books for serialization until they were already completed.

That is also my situation. Nothing I have presented in Serial was in progress at the time it was serialized. I’m too slow and picky a writer for that. Some of the things presented had been published, some had not, one was presented as a excerpt from a completed novel, and one was a fragment from a novel I’ll probably never finish. Jandrax was annotated to such a degree that it almost forms a writing primer, and How to Build a Culture was entirely a how-to.

Everything I have presented in Serial has been to assure continued readership of the website. It’s a trick. Leave ‘em hanging, and they’ll come back. And the whole website is to assure a readership for my upcoming novel Cyan, and for others that will follow.

But man, it has been fun.

I’ve enjoyed revisiting old friends. I’ve learned a lot from a close re-reading of old material, especially regarding pacing. Since I post four days a week, each post has to be relatively short, both to keep from running out of material too soon and to keep each reading experience brief for the sake of the daily reader. I didn’t originally choose 600 words; that just evolved.

The actual process of taking a novel and breaking it into pieces has been fascinating, frustrating, and a rewarding learning experience. It begins with a completed novel, which may be decades old, and which will already have been polished to a high shine. Still, I find errors from time to time.

First, using a word processor version, I have to re-read the novel, looking for natural breaks in the action every two and a half to three manuscript pages. I type a nonsense word at each break. I use breakbreak, as one word, which has meaning to me but would never appear in the actual text. This will allow me to use the find function to jump from break to break if I should need to. After typing breakbreak, I highlight what I have chosen, use the word count function, then type in the number of words. If it seems too short or too long, I adjust.

That takes care of post #1. Now to repeat. Jandrax required 92 posts. Raven’s Run will require 150. Some posts make sense on their own, but some require that I start with a sentence or two from the previous day’s post. I use bold-italic to denote this repeat.

All this takes place on a single word processor document. I then make individual documents of each post-to-be. This is a backup to what will actually appear on the website. At this point, I run the spell checker one last time and face the two-space conundrum.

I learned touch typing in high school in the mid-sixties on a mechanical (not even electric) typewriter. This was overseen by Mrs. Worden (AKA the warden) who pounded (pun intended) the rules into our heads. One rule was that you put two spaces between sentences.

Over the years I went from mechanical typewriters, to electric typewriters, to computers, but the rule stuck with me – even after everyone else had stopped using it. Raven’s Run was written before I kicked the two space habit, so now I have to go through each document removing the second space.

The last step is copying from word processor file to website.

Tedious? Yes. Fun? Absolutely. If you write, and you don’t enjoy reading your own work, why bother?

Raven’s Run 35

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“Well,” Raven said, “what do you think?”

“Jesus Christ!”

“What about you, Ian?”

“I’ve made my opinion clear plenty of times,” I growled. “But should strip teases be performed in pubic?”

“Don’t be silly. Look at those girls over there. This is a topless beach.”

Will looked at me in confusion, but I just shook my head. This Raven was new to me, too. She had my blood boiling, but I would have preferred to see the show in private.

“Are you two going to sit there dressed like this was a garden party, or are you going to join me?”

I shrugged and pulled my shirt over my head. Will hesitated.  When Raven gave him a scornful look, he said, “If I take my slacks off after that show, it could be embarrassing.”

“Not to me,” she replied. She sat back on her heels, with her spread knees dug into the sand. She sipped her wine and watched while we slipped off our clothes. Will wore baggy trunks that hid any evidence of his feelings. My bathing suit was smaller. Raven laughed and said, “I see you still love me.”

“I always did wear my feelings on my sleeve.”

“Sleeve?”

“Whatever.”

Will looked embarrassed. He was too good a friend to try to cut me out, but Raven seemed as interested in him as in me. Did she want us both? At once? He had to be thinking that. I know I was. And I didn’t like it.

She said, “I’ve always wanted to try a topless beach,” and reached behind her back to untie her bikini top. The strings fell to her sides and she reached up behind her neck. The loosened bra rose with the motion and revealed the smooth curves at the bottoms of her breasts.  There was just a hint of rosy aureole peeking out. She fumbled with the upper string, frowned prettily, and said, “It’s stuck. I’ve snarled the knot.”

“That would be a terrible disappointment,” Will said. His voice was rough and he seemed to be having a hard time breathing.

Raven stopped dead, frozen motionless with her arms uplifted, and stared at me. Then she seemed to make up her mind suddenly. She moved sideways in one fluid motion and planted herself in front of Will with her nearly bare rump almost in his lap, and said, “Undo me, Will.” While Will struggled with the knot, she put her hands on his knees and arched her back. The bikini top fell into her lap. Still with her back to him, she rose gracefully and made a slow turn, pushing back her hair with her hands.

I thought his heart would stop.

A storm was building inside of me. I was hurt, burning with lust, and filled up with a primeval desire to lash out.

Raven glanced at me out of the side of her eyes. It was a look of pure challenge. It was the kind of look that said, Raise, or get out of the game.

I hooked my thumbs in the waistband of my bathing suit and skinned out of it. Now there was no question about my passion. Vaguely, I heard Will mutter something coarse.

Raven smiled a slow smile, like coming home after a long absence. She said, “Goody. Bottomless. Even better.” She stripped off her bikini bottom, tossed it aside, and posed, naked, feet spread wide apart in the sand and quite unabashed by Will or the other sunbathers who had turned to watch.

Will lurched to his feet and said, “I’m going for a cold swim.” It didn’t matter. What had been a game for three, had suddenly become a game for two. I was hardly aware when he loped away toward the water.

It was a public beach, and there was no cover anywhere. It didn’t matter.

It was savage lovemaking. There was little tenderness involved, little carefulness, no caresses. Our foreplay had been her challenge and my response. When I first drew her down to the towel beside me, she was ready and I plunged in without preamble, oblivious of the other sunbathers. They turned away, too full of French savoire faire to stare; but they watched covertly. more tomorrow

Raven’s Run 34

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We walked up to Notre-Dame de la Garde to enjoy the view of Marseille, then worked our way down through the maze of twisting streets and back to the consulate. We were scheduled to have lunch with Will. He came out dressed in pale slacks, a loose white shirt and loafers, and led us immediately to his small Renault. He said, “I’ve been working extra this last month, helping out after hours with backed up paperwork so I could take some time off when Ian arrived. Do you have bathing suits on board the Wahini?”

I nodded and Raven giggled. Will didn’t get it; he would when he saw his gag-gift string bikini put to good use. Will double parked at the quai. Raven and I went below to change and get towels while Will inspected the Wahini.

Will took us south and east along the coast. It was a land of deep green dusty trees and bare red earth, twisted and hilly. The coast was indented with calanques with narrow strips of sand or gravel at their bases. Raven rode silently, curled up in the tiny back seat while Will and I talked about the Wahini and the crossing. She remained quiet while Will parked at the roadside, pulled a backpack out of the trunk, and took us on a narrow, dusty footpath that led by many twists and diversions down to a small, sandy beach. A dozen sunbathers were already there, scattered in twos and threes around the hidden cove, enjoying the sun without the crowds of tourists that flooded the more accessible beaches.

We spread our towels and Will opened the backpack. He spread a tablecloth on the sand and produced a bottle of Bandol, glasses, Perrier for me, cheese, bread rolls, half a dozen kinds of cold meats, melon slices, grapes, and chutneys. He split one of the rolls, made and handed Raven a sandwich. She said, “Yum.”

“Do I have to make my own,” I asked.

“Of course.”

I did. Raven said, “You may put food before beauty, but I’m not going to waste any of this sun.” She reached up to unbutton her blouse. She had locked eyes with Will and he stopped chewing to watch her fingers flipping buttons with casual efficiency. She shed the blouse with a twist of her shoulders. As she folded it and set it aside, she asked Will, “Does anything look familiar?”

“My heart’s desire? All my dreams made flesh?”

Devil lights were in Raven’s eyes. She had Will in the palm of her hand, and she was enjoying it. “No, silly,” she giggled. “I meant the bra.”

Will looked blank. And smitten. The bikini top consisted of two spaghetti straps, one around her body and the other tied behind her neck, with minimal triangles of red nylon.

“He never saw it out of its egg,” I said. I tried to keep my voice light, but I didn’t like the way things were developing.

“Then I’ll have to show him.” She took the cuff of her jeans and pulled the little zipper that closed it tight around her ankle. It made a crisp rasping sound that send chills up my back. Again for the other cuff, then she stood up in one fluid motion. Her hair was a black mass, her skin was flawless, her waist was slender, and her navel played peek-a-boo above the waistband of her jeans. She untied the sash and pulled it through the belt loops in a smooth motion and dropped it to the sand. She turned away and again the rasp of a zipper sent chills. Swiveling her hips she forced the jeans down past her thighs. The string bikini left her buttocks quite bare, and in delicious motion.

When she bent over to recover her jeans, the illusion of nakedness was complete.

She stood facing us, folding the jeans, with her legs a little apart, and her eyes on Will. “Well,” she said, “what do you think?”

“Jesus Christ! more tomorrow

243. On Fantasy: Archaism

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Marion Zimmer Bradley is well known for her fantasies, but she cut her teeth on science fiction. Her Darkover series was a massive best seller in its day. Darkover is a planet in our universe, populated by humans from a stranded starship, whose powers of the mind come (quite scientifically) from the pollen of psychotropic plants and from interbreeding with non-human natives. Lost and out of contact with their technological roots, they evolve a feudal society. They create an archaic world from a purely science fiction starting point.

Of course this is a reductionist view of a complex and massive series of novels and short stories. But it makes the point that archaism in fantasy is easy to achieve. You could almost write a formula:

HORSES + SWORDS + MAGIC = FANTASY

Of course it takes more than that to achieve good fantasy.

The time before known time is an ancient idea. Atlantis and Mu fit into it. Tolkien’s Middle Earth came before recorded history. So did the world of Conan. The worlds of Michael Moorcock seem to be of this nature, but a closer reading will have to follow them sideways in time. Alternate histories allow access to archaic worlds coexisting with our modern world. We can go to other 2016s, where the Native Americans are the only Americans, or Rome still rules, or Muhammed became an atheist. Take your pick, and if you can’t find what you like, you can write your own.

Remnant stories also let the past live on. Professor Challenger found dinosaurs still living deep in the Amazon. Hilton’s characters found Shangri-La. Even Rick Brant, in the favorite series from my childhood, found a lost remnant of an earlier age hidden in the Himalayas in The Lost City.

You could go sideways in time, or backward, or to some lost valley and find dystopian, crowded cities, but that almost never happens. Archaism is about escaping modernity, crowding, complication, and life in cities. Back to simpler times. Back to the good old days. Back to the land of childhood. Back to the middle ages where knights in shiny armor rode pretty horses and rescued damsels with big bosoms and pearly teeth from dastardly villains – or dragons.

Does anybody believe this? Of course not. Does anybody want to believe? Of course. And in the friction generated when those two truths rub together, the fire of archaism is born.

So our hero goes back (or sideways) and he/she finds the land of her/his heart’s desire and it isn’t what she/he expected at all. But it isn’t bad. There are problems to overcome, heartaches to endure, and villainy to face, but so what? That’s true in Portland, and Austin, and New York City as well. In the new/old world  there are beauties and wonders, in addition to troubles. And it’s probably green, with trees and meadows, even if it also has rain and snow instead of eternal sunshine.

Above all, there aren’t any traffic jams. And the cell phone never rings.

Wait a minute. I’ll get my backpack, and we can go.

Raven’s Run 33

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Upwardly mobile, that’s us. Just a couple of yuppies.”

“Us?”

“Us,” I said. “I passed my state department tests, too. It’s just a matter of time until they call me in. Until then, my plans were to deliver the Wahini to Will and then wander around Europe on the cheap.”

Raven shook her head. “You two are incredible.”

Will pulled out his wallet and counted out some bills. He handed them to Raven and said, “Lovely as you are, I recognize sailcloth when I see it sewn into a dress. Why don’t you go get some clothing while your passport is being processed. Then I would like to take the two of you out on the town after work. Deal?”

“Deal,” Raven grinned. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

Outside, I got my jackknife back from the guard and we headed back down toward la Canebiere. Raven was counting her francs. She said, “You didn’t tell me your friend was such a hunk.”

“Would you have?”

“No. He gave me six hundred francs. How much real money is that?”

(Aside:  1989 was before the Euro.)

“About a hundred dollars.”

“What? How many clothes can I buy for that?”

“You could buy three or four outfits like I’m wearing. Not counting shoes. But counting socks.”

She gave me a sideways appraisal and said, “I can believe that.”

#          #         #

Will mentioned bouillabaisse and we both said, “No!”, so he took us for couscous at a tiny restaurant on Longue des Capucins. It wasn’t fancy; they wouldn’t have let us into a fancy place. I was still in levis and khaki. Raven wore a pair of stone washed jeans one size smaller than her skin, a short, sleeveless lavender blouse that stopped two inches above her belt line, with a matching sash threaded through her belt loops and trailing down her left leg, and sandals. She had received eight francs in change at the boutique, and considered herself a thrifty shopper. By her standards, no doubt she was.

Will had a hard time not staring; I didn’t even try to restrain myself.

As the sun went down, Will herded us to a safer part of town.  We spent the rest of the night at the Ascenseur listening to a hot Brazilian trio, while Will gave Raven a seminar on French wines. I abstained. When we walked Will back to his apartment, he and Raven were both swaying slightly, and I felt like a designated driver.

The next morning, we slept in. By the time we walked to the consulate, the fishermen were packing up their unsold fish at the market and the early June sunlight was beginning to build up to a hot day. Will was busy, and we did not want to disturb him, so we picked up Raven’s new passport and left again. There was no word from Sacramento.

Supporting Raven was going to be a strain on my thin budget if her money didn’t come soon, but that was not my real worry. When her money came, she would be free to go. She might fly back to America, or she might wander around Europe for a while. She had talked about her options, without making any decision.

I did not want to lose her. Yet I might. I don’t think she felt much more for me than gratitude and affection. She was lovely and loving, but she was still a stranger. And I felt – what? If it wasn’t love, it was getting close. No one I had ever known had affected me as deeply as she did. If she left now, I would be losing something precious. more tomorrow

242. On Fantasy: Language

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Up sword, sayeth Sir Gallant, lest I cleave thee where thou standest.

Yeah, that’s pretty bad, and it has been a long time since I’ve seen that kind of fake-ancient language used in fantasy, except as a joke.

Language in fantasy is both a necessary tool, and a dangerous one. You can’t just throw in some thees and thous and -ests, but you also can’t speak in modern, colloquial English. Simple formality is the easiest way out. Even Zelazny, for all his smart-ass-with-a-sword characters, wrote with intelligence and a great deal of formality. If you want your characters to speak slang, you have to invent slang appropriate to their world, and that takes some effort.

Remember, whatever language your characters speak, even if you are setting your fantasy in early England, no one on Earth speaks that language today. In my fantasy world of the Menhir there are three languages in play, and a mid-sea island has a bastard language drawn from all three. It doesn’t matter. The book gets translated into English, whatever language the characters are speaking.

Whatever your genre, you are likely to have characters from different levels of society. Whether you are writing about nomads from the desert encountering the Pasha of Nevermore, or a Bostonian talking to a southern slave in 1845, you need to find a way to make your characters sound different from modern America, and from each other, but still be comprehensible. And it needs to sound natural. ‘Taint easy.

Languages – note the difference – are also dangerous, but at least you don’t have to invent one if you don’t want to. Tolkien did, to a degree far in excess of the needs of his stories. Almost no one else ever does.

I did, in a manner of speaking. The Menhir stories grew from a single image, and I had no idea for years where they were going. Things got invented, and the world of the Menhir grew by accretion. I invented a style of fighting, which required invention of a sword/lance, which required invention of a name, and lancette entered my story’s vocabulary. A thousand place names and personal names got invented. Gradually, the world grew a religious background which became the underpinning for what passes for magic on the world. This morphed into an entire system for the handling of life and death, and words like ai, enreithment, and abahara entered the vocabulary of the story. I invented a kind of peasant dwelling and now we had hartwa. My people started out with oxen and horses but that wasn’t satisfactory so they were soon riding kakais and using tichan to pull their wagons.

Words begat words, morphographically. Since ai means power and dzi– means man of, then a dziai is a man of power, and the men of the plains whose entire lives revolve around their mounts are, of course, the dzikakai.

As if that weren’t enough, my people started quoting words and phrases from the language of a nearby kingdom; just like the English quote the French, n’est-ce pas. I eventually made myself a glossary, but don’t take that as a requirement. I’ve been living on the world of the Menhir, part time at least, for four decades, but even I get confused sometimes.

**      **       **

I’ve told this story before, but I can’t leave the subject of language in fantasy without repeating it. The scene, as I recall, was Westercon 33, Los Angeles, in 1980. A panel of writers and editors was discussing fantasy, and things had gotten out of hand. After a grueling discussion of what some magical breed of horses in Lord of the Rings ate, they had moved on to the subject of archaic language. Somebody said it was okay, but don’t overdo it. Somebody said archaisms should be used sparingly, like spice in food. That went back and forth for several minutes until some wag in the audience stood up and asked, “Are you saying we can have archaic, and eat it too?”

I wish I had thought of that.

Raven’s Run 32

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Take my word for it, Ian is just about as broke as Raven.”

Evan Cummings looked politely disbelieving. “A yachtsman, broke? Really?”

Will said, “Really,” and turned to Raven. “The consulate has a fund for stranded travelers, but it is not official money. It comes from donations and fund raisers by the officer’s wives and it is never quite sufficient to our needs. For a friend, a small loan will be my treat.”

Cummings rose and we joined him. “First a photo,” he said, “then Will will show you how to make an international call.”

We trooped down for the photo, then Will led us to his desk, dialed the number Raven gave him, and handed her the receiver. “Daddy’s secretary said that my father would be out of town for another two days,” Raven explained as the connection was made, “so I’ll leave a message on his answering machine at home.” Then she turned her attention inward, her head bobbing slightly as she followed the recorded message. She said, very fast, “Daddy, if you haven’t talked to Elena, call her. She has the details of what happened to me. I’m at the consulate in Marseille. I’ve lost my money and I need you to send me a couple of thousand.”

There is always a moment of dissatisfaction at the end, when you’ve talked to a machine as if it were a human. Raven’s face registered it, then she passed the phone back to Will, who hung it up. Will’s face was full of mischief. He said, “A couple of thousand?”

Raven didn’t get it. She turned to me for enlightenment, but I was shaking from the effort of not laughing out loud. She looked irritated at being left out of the joke and became more irritated when it dawned on her that we were laughing at her.

Finally, I controlled myself enough to say, “I’m sorry, Raven. A couple of thousand is probably reasonable, for you and your family. Will and I aren’t used to moving in those circles. We both worked our way through college, where a ‘couple of thousand’ might have to last us a semester.”

“You two own a yacht!”

“We built a yacht. I had a rich aunt who gave me a job as a guard at her freight yard and paid me more than I was worth. She gave me the opportunity to work my way through college, but she wouldn’t pay my way. That’s the kind of person she was. Wahini was in the back of the freight yard, about half finished. It came with the property when my aunt bought out a bankrupt competitor who spent too much time dreaming of Tahiti and not enough time tending to business. When Will and I decided to finish her, she agreed to buy the materials, if we would do the work. That’s how we got her.”

“But it takes money to travel.”

“That depends on how you travel. Why do you think we ate canned stew all the way across?”

Raven grinned. She had forgiven us. She said, “I just though you had no taste.”

“Close. I have never had the chance to acquire taste. Unlike Will . . .; Will, how much did you pay for that suit?”

Will held the lapels back to display the perfectly tailored vest and chuckled, “Half of my first paycheck. I arrived at Marseille in blue jeans, with one cheap suit in a cardboard suitcase. Upwardly mobile, that’s us. Just a couple of yuppies.” more tomorrow

241. On Fantasy: Magic

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Clarke’s third law.

The universe is full of forces; some of those forces are personalities.
reference lost

I believe that the second quotation above is from a piece by James Blish, which I read many years ago and no longer have available to me. If anyone recognizes the source, let me know. In that same piece, I believe, he spoke of Black Easter as an experiment in which he treated the Book of Revelation as simple fact. Roger Zelazny made a career out of treating non-Western religions as if they were simple fact.

Like stardrives, magic can be highly structured or haphazardly thrown in when the story needs it. Both styles work, depending on the skill of the author. The most organized magic I recall is Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories. For disorganization, see any new author.

A primary, underlying question in any presentation of a fantasy world is, “Where does the magic come from?” Is it a dispersed, readily available natural resource like The Force in Star Wars? Does it reside within its wielder, and a natural consequence of his being? Or is it owned by other powerful beings, who must be supplicated or bargained with to obtain a portion of their power? This choice has a huge effect on how dark the story is likely to become.

Christianity, in earlier centuries, saw witches as wielders of power which they obtained by pacts with Satan. Harmful as they were, they had no power of their own. In many dark fantasies, the searcher after power obtains his heart’s desire from some greater being who is, in essence, a Satanic stand-in. Such Faustian bargains never end well.

Magic, in fantasy writing, often goes unexplained. The talisman in The Monkey’s Paw is understood by the reader without elaboration, just as a reader of westerns doesn’t need an explanation of how a six gun works.

It is quite usual for a fantasy hero to have inborn power. Harry Potter was a wizard born of wizards. Ged is an unknown until his power is discovered by a mage. Corwin is a son of Amber.

It is equally usual to concentrate on the education of a wizard, or mage, or dziai. Ged went to Roke; Harry Potter went to Hogwarts, and my Tidac took two books to learn how to use his power because he had no mentor. His father never learned, and it destroyed him.

Can we have fantasy without magic? Pavane is an alternate universe science fiction or an alternate history novel, but its tone makes it read like fantasy, except for the absence of magic. What seems to be magic in one chapter, may just be a dying dream; it isn’t made clear to the reader. For me, this places Pavane on the borderline between genres.

On the other hand, Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories are all about magic, but their system of magic is so comprehensively worked out that they read like science fiction.

I know that my Menhir story, in its infancy, read like a quasi-medieval world. Slowly I came to grips with how the powers of every soul are affixed to menhirs at death, making menhirs into gestalt sentient beings which become repositories of power that can be tapped, at peril, by men of power. Only then did magic come into the world of the menhir. And only then did it begin to read as fantasy.

Raven’s Run 31

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Chapter Nine

After Raven had told her story, getting her a new passport was the first order of business. Since she was a friend of a friend of Will’s and the daughter of a state senator, they made it a priority item. Cummings made a call to Sacramento, to Senator Cabral’s office, to confirm Raven’s identity. When he asked Raven for her full name, she said, “Ramona Maria Elvira Cabral.”

“Ramona?” I said.

“Just shut up!”

“Maria?”

“Ian!”

“Elvira?”

“Look, Raven is who I am. What my parent’s named me twenty years ago doesn’t matter. They didn’t know me then.”

Cummings talked a long time, occasionally asking questions of Raven and relaying her answers. Once he passed the phone to Raven so she could speak directly. After she passed it back, she said, “My father wasn’t in. Actually we were lucky to get anyone; it’s past midnight there. That was his secretary. She was under the impression that I was still in New York.”

“That means something,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about the attack. If your luggage had been left in your room, the cruise line would have suspected something. Did you drop your purse during the struggle?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Let’s assume you did. All Davis would have to do is take your key, clean up your room, and drop your purse and luggage overboard. Then there would be no way of knowing, or even suspecting, that you hadn’t just gone off somewhere on your own.”

Will nodded. “That makes sense.”

“It begins to look more and more like a deliberate act, planned out in advance.”

Cummings had cradled the phone. He said, “Intelligent improvisation would account for it just as well. We don’t really know much for certain.”

Raven’s eyes had grown fierce in memory of her attack. She wanted to know who would investigate.

“To be frank,” Cummings replied, “no one. The attack took place in international waters, aboard a ship of Norwegian registry. Bermudan authorities will be notified so they can watch for the pair in the future, and we will send a copy of the report to the New York police for the same reason, but you know the crime rate in New York. I doubt if the report will even be read by anyone but the clerk who files it. The only ones with the right and responsibility to follow up the incident are the Norwegians, and what could they do?”

Raven’s comment was not ladylike, but Cummings was too urbane to notice.

“Anyway, our next step is to walk down and get a photo for your new passport, and then you’ll have to excuse me while I notify the port authorities. They will want to know why your yacht is moored in France and you have not registered with them.”

“Mr. Cummings,” Raven said, “this is embarrassing to mention, but I’m flat broke. All my money is apparently on the bottom of the Atlantic, where I was supposed to be.”

“You can phone home at our expense, of course, but I had assumed that Mr. Gunn would be providing for your immediate needs.”

Will had been sitting quietly, as befits a very junior officer. Now he laughed and said, “Evan, some time I must explain Ian’s peculiar financial circumstances. Take my word for it, he is just about as broke as Raven.” more tomorrow