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