Viscous Circle

  The Polarian chaplain, Smly, returned to his native System of Etamin and counseled many of the important creatures whose influence was increasing. They called him "Smelly," in the fashion of Monsters, and said there was a good odor to his advice. Perhaps he influenced the decision to treat the Bands more graciously.

  Thus the Bands survived, despite their mythology. Therefore the Viscous Circle survived, too, and this was perhaps the most important and least appreciated thing of all.

  Author's Note

  On May 8, 1980, I started writing the first draft of Viscous Circle. I had sold it the year before on the basis of a summary, and now it was time to get to it. I was running on a tight schedule, because my agent had gotten me contracts for five novels, more or less on top of each other; I had completed three and this was the fourth. Fortunately I am one of the most disciplined writers extant; I allow nothing to interfere with my work.

  Well, almost nothing. I have two little girls and one big girl—daughters and wife—and a number of animals and neighbors and fans and similar ilk, and all of them seem to have better things for me to do than write my novels. So I try to isolate myself in my study, which is a twelve- by twenty-four-foot wooden cabin two hundred feet from the house, in the pasture with the horses and the squirrels. It has no electricity, and in the summer afternoons, even with all windows open, the temperature rises to 102°F. My glasses slide off my sweaty nose and I leave sweat-prints on my manuscript, but I do work. The ilk let me have about six working hours a day, seven days a week. I do sneak in reading at odd moments, such as while eating and watching TV and waiting in lines; and I have learned to write novels on a clipboard in pencil anywhere, such as when riding in a car, visiting relatives, babysitting horses, waiting for the dentist to proceed with his next torture, and similar occasions of otherwise wasted time.

  You see, I am strange: I actually like to write. Most writers prefer to make money, have best-sellers, win awards, and get drunk. They don't really enjoy the lonely chore of writing, and are glad of any opportunity to escape from it. I, in contrast, escape to writing, for my personal life is hopelessly pedestrian. I have never been drunk or drugged in my life, and I have never been to a science fiction convention, where I understand the action is. I have been told that stories circulate about what an ogre I have made of myself at such conventions; would it were true, for I do like ogres, but apart from the fiction of my attendance, the fact is I get along personally with everyone I meet, even those who aren't ogres. I realize this confession could have an adverse effect on the success of my novels, especially among ogres. Anyway, once I get into the safety of my study, nothing interferes with the progress of a novel like Viscous Circle.

  Except... I happen to be a puzzle freak. Intellectual and practical puzzles fascinate me, as well as convolutions of numbers and words, as may be apparent in my novels. We had recently obtained a puzzle-cube, with nice squares of color on each side: the trick is to scramble the 54 color-squares by rotating the axes this way and that, then put them back together so that each face of the cube is a single color. Easy—hah! The manufacturer claims there are three billion combinations. That confounded cube tied me up for two hours, interrupting the novel, so that all I wrote on May 8 was 600 words on Viscous and 450 on another novel, Juxtaposition. It was not a phenomenally efficient writing day, and those who may have felt doubts about my claim to being well disciplined may now be permitted a knowing smirk. But it does take time for the mind to orient and the subject to properly coalesce. The first day of anything is not efficient, except perhaps for World War Three.

  The next day, May 9, started even worse. It was a cloudy, rainy morning, so I got wet as I ran our dogs on the leashes on the half-mile path we use. The TV radar showed no precipitation at our location, which is a typical example of the weather bureau's fiction. Then I fed our horses, and found that Blue, my favorite, who is featured on the cover of another novel of mine, was not eating well. Twenty-two years is old for a horse; in fact the average horse dies around that age in these parts, so I began to get that uncomfortable feeling that is best not bruited about. Then I went down to feed our neighbor's horses—we have this deal whereby we may ride one of them if we feed him—and the neighbor's cat had had kittens recently and was desperate for food, so I fed her too. I don't like cats, but cats like me. I am a vegetarian, because I don't like to have animals suffer or die in untimely fashion, so I am an easy touch even for cats, and they know it. So I gave her what there was: a handful of dog food. But the neighbor's dogs would not permit any cat to get a mouthful—which was one reason this cat was hungry—so I had to put the food on the feedshed roof, shoo away the predatory chickens—everyone is hungry at seven in the morning!—and lift the cat up to it. She was so eager to get at the food that she scrambled from my hand, scratching me on the left wrist in the process. Then, finding the food wet from the rain, she jumped down, intending to sneak into the feedshed for something dry. I'd been that route before; once the animals get into the feed-shed, it's a federal case to get them out again, and my neighbor would hardly be pleased if I let his animals clean out his week's supply of feed in an hour. So I sent the cat off. I had precious little thanks for my attempted kindness, which of course is one reason I don't like cats. My scratch was stinging, at the base of my hand near the wrist. But after the forty minutes the morning chores take me, I finally got to settle down to make and eat my own breakfast, which got disrupted by assorted thises and thats, delaying the start of my working day.

  Naturally something really bad was developing; the omens were plain enough. I don't believe in omens, which is why they plague me. Something sure enough did happen, and it made national headlines—but it was not right at our place, and I must take a moment to make the context plain. This is the sort of task writers are supposed to do, after all. To wit:

  I used to live in the Tampa Bay region of Florida, not far from the famed Skyway Bridge. This bridge, according to the covenant under which it was financed, was to be paid off by tolls, then not refinanced. Once paid for, it was destined to be forever free. It did so well that the tolls were reduced, and still the bridge paid off ahead of schedule and was in imminent danger of achieving that reprieve. But the local politicians, typical of their breed, violated the covenant and refinanced it to build a second span. The Skyway was just too good a money-maker to let go of. Now, instead of one free bridge, there were two toll bridges.

  Well, God got them for that. On this particular morning the storm was most intense around the bridge, and the wind blew a freighter into a support-pylon and knocked it out. The guilty new span of the Skyway Bridge came tumbling down. Cars plunged merrily into the bay, as did a bus, and a section of the roadway landed on the deck of the ship along with a pickup truck. It was said to be the worst bridge disaster in the history of America. So it seemed that my cat-scratch was merely a fringe effect of the Act of God that punished the machination of the unfreed Skyway span, eighty miles to the south, on May 9, 1980. What kind of a scratch would I have gotten had I not moved out of the center of that vortex? It gets scary, especially for someone who does not believe in Acts of God. Nevertheless, in the afternoon I did buckle down and write a thousand words of Viscous.

  So it went. On the tenth I wrote 1200 words, and next day 1300, nudging gradually up to my normal stint of 2000 words per day. My motor had finally warmed up, and no Act of God had touched me, I thought in my innocence. But this novel was not moving as well as it should; I was satisfied with neither the quantity nor the quality. Was I losing my touch? Writing is never a chore for me; could something be the matter?

  Well, let's consider the puzzle from another angle. One reason I do not suffer from the dread ailment Writer's Block is my health. I am something of a physical fitness freak and health-diet nut. It pays; I am perhaps the healthiest middle-aged diabetic bad-kneed vegetarian science fiction writer in the world. At this time I was routinely doing 19 or 20 chins on my study rafter. I was doing Japanese pushups too, and had recent
ly set my personal record of 50, nonpause. But my main pride was running.

  In the city, dogs and cars and ignorant neighbor's had prevented me from distance-jogging, but in the forest I measured a one-mile loop cross-country and in the course of three years had built up to a regular 2.5-mile run that I did three times a week. This summer I had cracked the eight-minute-per-mile barrier. That is, I consistently ran the distance in 20 minutes or less. Now I know that Olympic runners break the four-minute mile, and that marathoners maintain the five-minute mile indefinitely, and a healthy young man can do a mile in six minutes. But for a 45-year-old science fiction writer, running at noon through loose sand, over tree roots, uphill and down, keeping a wary eye out for snakes and wild dogs while he swats at stinging deerflies and avoids sandspurs, eight minute miles are just fine. It is the same velocity certain American presidents have been known to run, after all. It's hard work; I weighed myself before and after, and discovered that I sweated off an even two pounds per run. And I was still gaining. First run in June, with the outdoor temperature 90°, I completed the course in 17:37, just seven seconds over a seven-minute-per-mile average. Few middle-aged, diabetic, etc. people could match that, I think. I was at my very peak of physical fitness, and proud of it.

  Ah, but has it not been said that pride goeth before a fall? Believe it! Partly at the behest of my worrying wife, who feared I would keel over and die from heatstroke—she tends to concern herself with such nonessentials—I extended my run to three full miles and slowed the pace, making the workout easier. But instead the runs became more difficult, even when the heat was down on cloudy days. I maintained my eight-minute miles, but raggedly. Yet I was not sick. Well, I had a little sore on my left wrist that was sensitive to the touch, but that was probably an embedded splinter. Then my left arm, near the inside shoulder, began to hurt as if I had pulled a small muscle—but the twinge didn't go away. My chins became awkward, and my pushups sent a streak of pain through my arm. But these bruises happen.

  Then the fever began. Now, I am wary of fevers. I take vitamin C to stop colds, and it works. Once upon a time my nose dripped into my typewriter, which was annoying—one can imagine the grumbling editor shaking out a damp page of manuscript—but that doesn't happen any more. One gram of C per hour stops the faucet, and after a while the cold gives up in disgust and departs, no doubt seeking some idiot who doesn't believe in C. But, for me, C does nothing for a fever—and this one shot up to 102°F. So I stopped the exercises, which was a relief at this stage, and saw my doctor. Turned out to be a lymph infection, traveling down my arm from that wrist-lump to my armpit, aggravating the lymph nodes along the way. Nothing serious. Some pills and rest, and in a week I was ready to resume typing. For by this time, mid-July, I had completed my plodding first penciled draft of Viscous and was well into the typed second draft, proceeding more or less on schedule.

  My fever dropped, and I resumed exercises, at a cautious half-level—for one day. My fever shot up again. The lump in my left armpit swelled to what seemed like half-tennis-ball size (though my fevered imagination probably exaggerated it), and I could hardly use that arm at all. At night I was unable to turn over, and changing clothing was pain. The doctor gave me much more powerful pills, costing seventy-five cents each, and I had to take eight a day. No effect; the fever kept coming, rising as high as 101°, and the swelling persisted. So he upped the ante, prescribing one-dollar pills. Nothing worked. My family had to take over the chores I had done, while I slept and fevered.

  Finally, in desperation, the doctor put me in the hospital. For three days I lay with an IV hooked to my left hand, dripping sugarwater and penicillin (it burns!) and garamycin into my throbbing vein, while nurses measured my every fluctuation of fever, appetite, and drop of urine. Still no effect; my fever came and went at will, mocking the entire modern medical establishment, and my swelling remained adamant.

  I had, of course, a science fiction illness, undiagnosable, odd; and commonplace medications like dollar pills and antibiotic fluids can hardly be expected to work on that. Now if they'd had something futuristic, like Venusian orb-grackle juice...

  Actually the hospital was not a bad place. They allowed my children to visit me, and found me a roommate with a vaguely similar ailment—his was blood poisoning from a thorn—and the personnel were competent and friendly. They did not wake me up to give me a sleeping pill. I passed out copies of my novels. My vegetarian and low-sugar diet brought the head dietician to my bedside, so that I was able to explain all my foibles: no coffee, tea, cola, sweets, etc. I'm a man of few vices; I don't smoke or otherwise debilitate myself, which seemed to surprise some personnel. They X-rayed me, EKG'd me, blood-pressured me, took blood samples (ouch!) for tissue cultures to find the bug in my system: nothing. I was completely healthy, except that my system was waging a raging battle with an invisible enemy. There was simply no handle on this illness.

  I think the doctor's hair was thinning: was he tugging out handfuls in frustration? He wasn't used to dealing with science-fiction illnesses. "Do you have cats?" he asked irrelevantly, betraying how greatly his mind had deteriorated out of strain. I replied gently that we had two horses, five dogs, twelve chickens, two children, and no cats. "Then you couldn't have been scratched by a cat," he grumbled.

  Oh? As it happened, two and a half months ago when God punished the Skyway Bridge...

  And so the diagnosis was reached at last: I had contracted cat scratch disease, normally a rare childhood malady. It is unresponsive to medication, shows no bacteria in cultures, and simply has to run its ornery month-long course. It's not too serious, it just takes time—a bit like a writer working on a novel, or a woman shopping for a hat.

  So here I was: my exercise program destroyed at its height, my once-proud muscles melting into glop, my novel halted dead in space—for the first time in forty novels, I was destined to be late on a contract deadline—medical bills piling on (I carry no medical insurance—this is not lack of foresight so much as ire over the time they tried to rider me for mental disease), my wife wearing down to a frazzle—all because I fed one hungry cat on the morning an Act of God was scheduled.

  And do you want to know what happened to that cat? That cat died. No, I know you're thinking of Goldsmith's poem An Elegy On the Death of a Mad Dog, wherein the dog bit the saintly man and the dog died. It wasn't like that. My blood may be potent, but not poisonous. What happened was the cat got into an altercation with a larger cat and got chomped and gave up its ninth life. (Then again: you don't suppose that my blood could have made that cat crazy enough to pick that fight?)

  The hospital let me go, still with my fever and swelling and mad science fiction brain; there was nothing they could do for me. Freed of all this attention and medication, I began to improve. I finally turned the corner in early August, on my forty-sixth birthday: my month-long fever stayed down. But the swelling persisted, so a few days later the doctor stuck a brute needle into it and drew out a vial of mudwater. Viscous ugh, of course. He called this "aspiration"—a fancy term for a hellishly painful process. But it reduced the swelling to half-golf-ball size and freed my arm somewhat, and my armpit began to reappear. A few days later the puncture started leaking chocolate syrup onto my T-shirt: messy, but a relief, since it meant I would not have to suffer that dread needle again. Things continued to improve. In late August I resumed cautious exercise, my performance down to roughly a third what it had been, but improving rapidly.

  My writing never came to a complete standstill, for I am, as claimed, a disciplined cuss. I did a great deal of research reading on World War Two, and in the hospital started writing the first chapters of Volk, my projected WWII novel. Thus I actually got a head start on a new project, thanks to my pencil-and-clipboard technique. Now I resumed typing on a limited basis, though it did somewhat aggravate the swelling. I completed the second draft of the novel in the middle of August, typing in the mornings and resting, often sleeping, in the hot afternoons. I also typed second draft on
my WWII chapters, since I had them on hand. Then I typed the submission draft on Volk, extending my limits on the fifty-page small project before tackling the three-hundred-fifty-page big one, just in case. All seemed well. Gradually I worked back up to a full schedule, typing twenty or more pages a day, and completed the submission draft of Viscous Circle on September 20, just two days after the doctor cleared me as cured.

  So the novel was done almost entirely in the gradual course of the illness. If it seems sick, blame it on that cat. My clean living, wholesome diet, avoidance of vices, and vigorous exercise, a supposedly sure formula for health, did not preserve me from this experience. Perhaps I will never know the meaning of it, if there is one. But still there lurks the hope that, in some devious way, this ordeal does have meaning. For a while there was one hope: when they drew the sludge out of my swelling and made a culture to grow some of the whatevers that cause this mysterious disease, I thought my case might be the first to reveal the agent of that disease. If so, it would be a significant medical breakthrough, a mystery of decades solved, sparing others a good deal of misery. But no; my cultures came up as sterile as space samples, as is typical for this disease. That medical breakthrough awaits some other cat.

  Maybe this narration will help some reader who would otherwise suffer an unknown malady, the hint "cat scratch" putting his doctor on the track. Remember, this particular illness always gets better on its own. It is not nearly as serious as it seems.

  When you're sick it's a great time to do research, because you can read in bed. During this period I read Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning as part of my research for the WWII project. The thesis of this book is that man truly wants to live a life that is meaningful. Certainly he has strong drives to protect, feed, and reproduce himself, and whole philosophies of psychology have been constructed on the assumption that one or the other of these drives is paramount. But all other animals act according to these same drives, too often with greater enthusiasm and success than man. If man is really the highest of the animals, it is not because of his various physical appetites. Man's quest for meaning may be his truly distinguishing mark. This makes sense to me, and that notion is reflected in Viscous Circle.