“On my way,” he said. “Risk’s got their van.”
Then it started going wrong. It would take only two or three minutes for Hero to get there, as he had been staying clear so as not to risk alerting the meaters. But Dapper wasn’t waiting. He swept around the table and put his hands on Tourette, literally ripping off her clothes.
“Hero, hurry!” Haven said tensely.
“Trying,” he answered.
All Haven could do was watch as the man stripped Tourette and dragged her onto the floor. He opened his fly. His erect member sprang out. He was going to rape her!
On one level Haven knew this was folly, because the meaters needed to drag the girls into their van and depart as quickly as possible. On another she realized that the man wanted to rape a living girl, rather than a dead one, and he might not have a chance later in the process. So it made a kind of selfish sense. Still, it was a horror.
The man threw himself on her bare body and rammed into her, thrusting so hard her whole torso jumped. But that had an effect the meater evidently hadn’t anticipated.
Tourette woke. Maybe it was because her nervous system was not quite normal. Maybe she hadn’t eaten enough of the drugged pudding to be knocked all the way out for long. Maybe she simply didn’t like getting raped. She was sexually experienced, but this was something else.
She struck that man on the side of his head with her wrist. It was no token blow. Tourette, like all Basque children, was an avid player of handball, pelote, their national game along with its cousin jai alai. Her wrists and hands were hardened from years’ experience striking the hard little ball, and she had muscles where it counted. There would be a bruise.
Bruises. Tourette followed up with a flurry of blows by both hands, battering the man’s ears painfully. He tried to jerk his head up and clear, but she followed him, now striking at his face. In a moment his nose was bleeding and his eyes were bloodshot. He lifted up off her—and she caught him with a knee. Where it counted.
Hero burst into the room. Now he saw his daughter savagely attacking the man, and realized at least part of what had happened. He clubbed the meater on the head with his own hardened fist, knocking him unconscious. Then he enfolded Tourette, who at last was able to relax and cry. She was going into a seizure, but at this point that hardly mattered.
Craft followed Hero in, and went immediately to the two girls, who were stirring. He enfolded Tula. So it truly was mutual, Haven noted; he did care about her. As if there could be any real doubt. Haven was already feeling better about it. The two really were, as Fia had said, well matched. The highly competent man and the brave and beautiful girl.
The rest was routine. Hero summoned the police, who took possession of the sadly battered meater and his partner in the van, whom Risk had conked on the head as he labored to start the pied motor. Both would be in need of the universal health-care treatment Euro provided, before they were put on trial. The police verified the identity of the meaters, who turned out to have a long record, and authorized the bounty.
The Family had done a public service. They had also secured their finances for the winter. They had paid a cruel price; Tourette would not recover her emotional balance for some time. Keeper would surely help her a lot.
It had been a rough day. But they had survived. That was what counted.
Whether there will be such a thing as fungfoo is questionable, but the problems of population and global warming are real. If there is not something of the sort, the near future will be much uglier than this. The twin pressures of the sheer numbers of people, and the loss of agricultural capacity will lead to wholesale starvation. People will not simply lie down and expire; there will be savage warfare for edible resources.
What of the Basques? How did they come to have such a difficult language, seemingly unrelated to any other? That is as yet unknown, as is their early history. It is theorized that they are a remnant of early peoples who were living in the area before the great expansion of the Indo-Europeans, managing to stave off the cultural onslaught, there in their mountain fastness. That their language was spoken there 5,000 years ago, before any of the contemporary people arrived on the scene. Cave art in the region dates back 15,000 years. Could that have been by the same people? But they do not seem to be significantly different from their neighbors in anything except language. The project to examine DNA around the world may in time determine whether they differ from the neighbors genetically as well as in language. Blood-typing suggests that they are indeed distinct from others in Europe. But there has surely been much physical admixture as well as cultural. They fought over the centuries to retain their independence, but with imperfect success. The later twentieth century saw the Basque Separatist Movement in Spain, an often ugly guerrilla campaign. But this may well have been justified by the cruelly repressive measures taken against them by the government, as was the case elsewhere with the Australian Aborigines, the Central American Maya, the African Xhosa, and the Armenian neighbors of the Alani. Brutality breeds brutality. At least, in this conjectured future, the Basques achieve independence.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1966 my wife and I visited science fiction genre writer Keith Laumer. He was at that point a successful professional writer, readily able to sell what he wrote, who lived about forty miles north of us in Florida. I was a new writer, with about eight story sales to my credit, eager to get the word from an established one. It was a pleasant day-long visit, and I learned many things in the course of our discussion. In a subsequent year he had a stroke and became a mean man, and I never met him again thereafter. The stroke effectively cut off his writing and ended his marriage, until finally he died. It was a sad conclusion to a promising career.
But I inherited his reputation for being an ogre at conventions, though I had never attended one, and that was to dog me for decades. Apparently fans and other writers did not bother to distinguish between two genre writers living in west central Florida. I even wrote a novel in which an ogre was the hero, Ogre, Ogre, which became my first national best seller, perhaps the first fantasy paperback original ever to do so. It didn’t seem to matter in that respect. So my career flourished commercially, while my personal reputation remained low, though I have always treated both fans and other writers courteously, as those who have interacted with me directly know. Well, in fanzines—amateur magazines—when someone came at me with guns blazing or with a false accusation, I put him down; I never suffered fools or rascals gladly. Maybe that contributed to the determined effort of some to cast me as a talentless lowlife. So my life within the science fiction and fantasy genres has been anything but placid, and I owe organized fandom essentially nothing. And it all seemed to start with Keith Laumer.
But there is another connection to the man. In the course of our discussion I mentioned how I had aspirations to write ancient historical fiction, though I regretted not being able to take it back beyond historical times. He asked something like “Well, why don’t you?” A simple question, and it made me realize that I was needlessly limiting myself. That was the point at which the GEODYSSEY series came into conceptual existence. I started collecting books on history, archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, and anything else relevant to the human condition as I wished to write about it. For a quarter century I built up my library, and pondered how to handle the huge project.
Finally in the early 1990s, my reputation secured by my fantasy sales, I started writing it, and the first four volumes are the result: Isle of Woman, Shame of Man, Hope of Earth, and Muse of Art. Big novels, ranging up to a quarter-million words long, and the subject barely touched. My early notion of having detailed progressive maps showing the changing extent of ancient empires faded as unworkable, and became simple spot maps to set the scenes. In this volume I don’t even have that; I simply describe the locales.
My biggest problem was how to cover the whole of human history for several million years yet keep it intelligible and interesting to the average reader. Of course I h
ad to sample it, as there is way too much to address fully. So I had a series of stories relating to breakthroughs in the human condition, such as the development of facile speech or the lockable knee. Stories, because the average reader does not relate well to anthropological lecturing. He needs to identify with a character and see the world through those eyes, feeling the character’s feelings. In short, a soft touch. I saved the lecturing for the italicized notes surrounding the stories, which readers could skip if so inclined. No lists of kings and dates here; I prefer the feel of the times, especially for the common man.
Even so, it wasn’t enough. I did not want my narrative to fall apart into many loosely connected episodes. I needed to unify it. This brought me to perhaps my single most significant device: having a single small cast of characters per novel, experiencing life as it was ten million years ago, one million years ago, a hundred thousand, five thousand, one thousand, five hundred, and so on right up to the present and the near future. But not science fiction, not time travel. I did it by having them be different people, of different periods, but similar in character and relationships and names. In this novel, Hero is actually twenty different people; the name is a mere fictive convenience. He always has two younger brothers and two younger sisters, similarly aged and named, whatever their race or situation. We are all ordinary people, regardless of our appearance or circumstance. Hero always is interested in a woman named Crenelle, regardless of whether he marries her. I let the reader, knowing that, suspend his disbelief and see Hero and his siblings as the same people. That lends personal unity to the whole, despite widely changing times and places and cultures. A few characters originated in prior volumes, but they have the framework of this novel when visiting here.
All went reasonably well for four volumes, and I was satisfied to continue writing them indefinitely. I had hired a researcher, Alan Riggs, who was marvelous in delving into arcane references and coming up with the information I needed. Yes, I had my library of about 3,000 selected volumes, but I figured it would have taken me a year or more to write each volume, doing my own research, and I couldn’t afford that. Because I earned my living through funny fantasy, not historical fiction, and I needed to maintain my income so that I could afford to take the time for history. My frivolous fantasy was my serious business, while my serious historical fiction was my less commercial preference. That’s the way it is, in the inverted realm of publishing. As it turned out, each volume still took me half a year, compared to the three months or less each fantasy novel took.
Then I lost my market for historical fiction. Details are complicated, but the essence is that my publisher mismarketed it as dark fantasy, which it wasn’t, so that readers of historical fiction didn’t know about it, and readers of fantasy weren’t much interested. It was a shame. Publishers can be idiots, but they control the money and marketing, sometimes to the detriment of their authors. So sales declined, and the publisher lost interest. Deprived of my market, I let my researcher go and stopped work on the novel. Climate of Change was two-thirds completed, but there it stopped. I wrote fantasy instead. I am, after all, a commercial writer; if I can’t sell it, I hesitate to write it.
Thus it remained for a decade. In the interim several things happened. I became a decade older, now in my seventies, and increasingly conscious that I risked leaving several projects unfinished when I died, and that bothered me. So I started completing novels and series, tying up loose ends. One of them was Climate of Change. But of course my researcher was long since gone, and I still didn’t want to take a full year or more for a single novel. Still, I should be able to finish a third of a novel in half a year, using my accumulated library; that seemed a fair compromise.
My wife’s strength declined mysteriously, until she could no longer walk or even stand and was confined to the wheelchair. She could not move it herself, because her arms weakened the same way her legs did. I took over the household chores, meals, dishes, shopping, etc., and had to heave her in and out of the wheelchair. My writing plummeted as my working time diminished. This also affected my appearance: for decades we had exchanged haircuts, but she could no longer do mine, so I started growing my hair long. Now I wear it in a ponytail and I’m satisfied. I like to say that I never knew what beautiful hair I had until after I turned seventy. Then at last we got a diagnosis: CIDP, or Chronic Inflammatory, Demyelating Polyneuropathy. In English, that means that her immune system was attacking and stripping the myelin insulation around her nerves, so that they were in effect shorting out. The signals her brain sent to her limbs didn’t get there, and her muscles were atrophying for lack of use. It is related to Lou Gehrig’s disease and other wasting diseases. After taking out the arms and legs it can progress to the lungs, and that is the end. Fortunately for us this variant was treatable. It required four-hour infusions of IVIg every five or six weeks. Each treatment cost $3,000, and for a time we had to pay it ourselves, after Congress changed the reimbursement rate to make it unfeasible for hospitals. We were lucky we could manage it, because others who could not were dying. But the treatments are effective, and she was able to learn to walk again, painfully, and now is securely back on her feet. She can’t walk far, but she can function well enough. This year we had our fifty-second anniversary; death has not yet us parted. She took back some of the household chores, and my writing time increased, though not to what it had been before. It was another reminder of mortality, however. We never know what the future holds. It was time to get this project done.
In that interim the Internet expanded to prominence, and with it came services like e-mail, search engines, and online data bases. I discovered that Google and Wikipedia were fine research tools, effectively replacing my human researcher. Modern technology was coming to my rescue. It wasn’t perfect, but the combination of my library and the Internet enabled me to complete the novel on my schedule.
Meanwhile human history continues. In that intervening decade the United States manufactured a pretext to invade and occupy another nation, leading to incalculable financial, human, and moral costs. Population continued its devastating increase, leading to widespread poverty and starvation. The scourge of AIDS became globally prominent, worse because whole nations are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. The cost of energy, notably oil, is increasing horrendously. And the climate, of course—global warming is now recognized, and is helping drive plant and animal species toward extinction. The change of climate is increasingly dominating public awareness.
I discovered something as I returned to historical research and writing. My writing and reading tastes have been warped by my success in fantasy. I once thrilled to research ancient cultures and events; now they are less compelling. Oh, it was great fathoming how the Alani princess was captured and married by the Armenian king, discovering how the Zimba of Africa ate entire towns, how the Spaniards destroyed the last independent Maya state, how the first British colony of Australia was founded, how the Xhosa torpedoed themselves by believing a teen girl’s vision, investigating the notorious Armenian genocide—yes indeed, it all is fascinating. But not as much so as it was for me before. I regret that on one level, but must recognize its reality. I have been corrupted by the ease and wonder of fantasy.
Still, I’m glad to finally complete this novel, and hope that readers like it. So has my negative impression of the direction our species is taking ameliorated? Not at all. This novel suggests a positive outcome to the several trends that can destroy us, but I’m not at all sure such necessary policies will be implemented. I fear we will continue with the ecological disaster we call agriculture, with outrageous pollution, and to breed and consume wastefully until we crash, leaving a devastated remnant reverting to savagery. With luck, I won’t live to see that, but I’m afraid my children will. I wish it were otherwise.
I hope I am wrong.
Piers Anthony, Climate of Change
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