Completely unconscious? How little they knew!
“Your friend Joshua is on his way here,” the nurse said. “He was really concerned for you.”
“Just what happened to me?” Kody asked her. “Did I get hit by a rogue cement truck? What kind of surgery did I have?” But the nurse was already moving on to the next patient. Par for the hospital course. Everybody knew about the details of his case except the patient. Well, Joshua would surely tell him.
Kody saw that he was definitely back in the real world. His amazing dream was over. But he felt the dream pass in his mind and knew he could invoke it when he chose. His life in Mundania was totally different, but he knew that when he was ready he would return to the fantasy dream, Esrever, not Doom. To his friends there. To the magic. To the ludicrous puns. For a few hours at a time.
And to Zosi.
Author’s Note
This is #37 in the Xanth series of novels. The next one, slated to be titled Board Stiff, will complete the alphabet in Xanths. Will the series go beyond that? That depends on how well reader interest holds up. The publishing industry is suffering a seismic quake as electronic books pass paper books in sales, and I think no one knows for sure what the future holds. I am getting my books published both ways as much as I can, so as not to lose a sizable portion of my readership. Negotiations with publishers have been fierce; I hired a high-powered lawyer to represent my case that those rights are mine to assign.
I had my seventy-seventh birthday AwGhost 6, 2011, which I celebrated by staying home and getting my work done. At this age birthdays are not the novelties they were in youth. No, no birthday cake; I am keeping my weight down. Next day I wrote five hundred words of notes for Esrever Doom, as I got serious about starting the novel. Next week when I was doing my morning exercise run, my right foot snagged on something and suddenly my face was on the pavement. I made it home okay, but my face, hands, and knees were awash in blood. My wife helped clean me up. Fortunately the scrapes were superficial; no bones broken or bent. But I did wonder whether it had been a mistake to turn seventy-seven.
Three days later, on the 15th, I started writing text on the novel. It went well. But then, on the 28th, I fell again. This time it was Sunday morning. I was on the scooter I use to go out to fetch the morning newspapers on days when I’m not running. It’s the kind you push with your foot, an adult version with sixteen-inch wheels. I did not see a fallen branch, and in a moment I was on the pavement again, the scooter beyond me, the branch behind me. I was wearing a helmet and goggles, so didn’t hurt my face this time, but I did crunch down on my left shoulder. I climbed to my feet, in pain, my left arm inoperative. My wife took me to the emergency room, the same one I had taken her to when she fell last year, where they took about twenty X-rays of my shoulder. They determined that no bones were broken, my collarbone was intact, but a couple of ribs might have hairline fractures. No surgery needed, and I was good to go home. That was a relief.
I can now report that even a bruised shoulder and a hairline rib fracture can be plenty incapacitating. I couldn’t cough, and heaven forbid that I should have to sneeze; pain was instant and awful. For about sixty years I had eaten with my left hand; I’m right-handed, but on a whim in high school switched for that one thing, and it stuck. Well, now I had to eat right-handed. I couldn’t get into or out of a regular shirt. I couldn’t lie down to sleep; for two weeks I sat up in my study easy chair for that. And of course I couldn’t maintain my exercise schedule. I exercise seriously for my health, not pleasure, and believe I am healthier than the average man my age; I hated being so limited.
But I did manage to maintain normal life in other respects. I make meals, wash dishes, and make beds, since my wife can no longer stand on her feet long enough to do such things; I continued, slowly, very carefully. I couldn’t run, but could walk, so I walked. Each time it was faster, as I healed. I started jogging, faster, and within a month I was running again, and working out with my hand weights. The hardest recovery was my archery: I could not come close to drawing a fifty-five-pound pull bow, let alone do it with an arrow nocked. But I kept trying, and one day I was able to draw the left-hand bow once. The right-hand bow recovery was slower. This might seem odd, since it was my left shoulder I had injured; my right side was fine. But what I discovered was that it was easier for my left hand to pull than to push. So I could pull on the left bow, but to do the right bow I had to hold it with my left hand, and the pressure was inward on the left shoulder. No way! But eventually I got there too, and was able to build up slowly, and finally resume archery, albeit rather clumsily at first. My target-hitting scores were abysmal, but that’s no change from before. I do it for arm muscle, not accuracy.
How did this affect my writing? Not as much as you might think. I found that if I rested the heel of my left hand on the base of the computer keyboard, I could reach the keys with my fingers. I was severely slowed by the time spent at the hospital, and taking daytime naps, and my typing was not speedy, but I did do it. The main limitation is imagination rather than typing speed, and my mind was fine. (Pause here for the sardonic laughter of my cri-tics to fade. As you surely know, a cri-tic is an obnoxious bug that hates everything.) The day before the fall I typed twenty-one hundred words of text; the day after, one hundred. It remained low for a week, one hundred to three hundred words a day. But on the eighth day following the fall, it was twenty-one hundred again, and it continued at one to two thousand words a day. So I was still in business.
One other complication was my computer: I had shifted to a new distribution of Linux, Fedora, and liked it. But it did not have Courier, the fixed-character font that has been the standard for writers for decades, and I had to shift to a proportional character font. The thing about a fixed font is that you can calculate exactly how much space a manuscript will take when published. Publishers need to know that, so they can judge how many pages they’ll need. It would be unfortunate if they allotted 300 pages for the book, and it ran 305 pages and the ending was chopped off. No, they don’t actually operate that way, usually, but you can appreciate my point. The computer wordage count doesn’t do that; each word is equal, and “a” is equal to “antidisestablishmentarianism” in that reckoning. I’m not sure what kind of a headache this manuscript will be for my publisher, but I couldn’t help it. It’s a nuisance for me too, because I write to a certain wordage, and computer count simply does not match calculated count. I wish there could be computer programmers who are also writers, so that they would understand such things. But it has long since been evident that if I want the perfect computer system for a writer, I will have to design it myself. Maybe someday, if I live long enough and don’t fall and hit my head too hard.
Apart from such concerns, my mundane life is nothing special. I’m a reasonably ordinary guy living on my little tree farm with one exploitable talent: writing. I don’t go flying to all parts of the world to research for my books, I stay quietly home. I don’t have a luscious woman in every city, I stay with my wife of fifty-five years. I tease her that she was nineteen when I married her, but she didn’t stay that age. Sigh. Between novels I may spend a few days pigging out on videos I lacked the time to watch while writing, and catching up on accumulated science and news magazines. I’m a writaholic; when I’m in a project, other things tend to slide. In short, I’m dull. Now you know. If you still doubt, then visit my www.hipiers.com Web site, where I do a monthly blog-type column, provide information about my other novels (I do write more than Xanth), let readers know when there are movie or TV prospects for my books (so far there have been many prospects but nothing has actually made it to the big or little screen), and maintain an ongoing survey of electronic publishers that aspiring writers may want to check. Just trying to do my bit for the world, while I last and it lasts.
As usual, I had more ideas from readers than I could accommodate. I hate using an excellent notion as a throwaway scenelet, but sometimes have to. Some I have marked for the next Xanth novel, so as to
try to do justice to them there. Suggestions kept coming in while I was writing the novel; I noted them down, but couldn’t keep feeding them into ongoing scenes, so they must wait for the next. It’s like bailing out your boat in a thunderstorm; catching up completely is impossible without magic. Some ideas relate to characters who didn’t fit into this novel; they’ll get their turns in due course, I trust. Readers are great for suggesting super-phenomenal magician-class talents for great protagonists, but the sneaky truth is that ordinary folk with ordinary talents make for better stories. You may have noticed that the central cast of characters this time are way beneath Magician-level magic. Thus they can never be quite certain they will surmount ordinary challenges, and they may mess up the attempt, just the way any of us would. Kody doesn’t know until the very end whether he will win or lose, and then it’s clear he won’t be a king or billionaire or famous celebrity. He will just disappear into the nonentity from which he came, and few in Mundania will ever know or care about his dream life. That’s the fate most of us face. Welcome to dreary reality.
Here, at any rate, are the credits for this novel, and I hope I didn’t foul any up this time. They are in approximate order of appearance, except for being grouped when more than one is from one person. Sometimes I don’t have a complete name, so I use what I have; e-mails can be obscure about identities. Leading off with one about me: Chris Ceranskiy sent an anagram based on my name: Horny Panties. Now we know why in Xanth girls freak out boys with naughty panty flashes. I couldn’t help it; it was in my name.
Kody—Joshua Harrelson; catbird, barrel of crackers, robots with corrosion, path paved with Good Intentions, Primrose Path, re-seeding hairline—Robert; the Time Being—Jessi Rha; Griff the Hipporoc—Shauneci Switzer; vices—Cal Humrich; Sniper Harpy—ippikiokami; melon-collie gourd dog—Robert Lecrone (there was a straight melon collie in Pet Peeve); Frank ‘n Stein—Eileen DuClos; crab grass, storm front, cashews, something that goes bump in the night—Darrel Jones; Novel-tea—Nathan Theriault; ass-et—Tina Yu; gravi-tree—Gavin; Demon Ceased—Kevin Swearengin; D Mension gives other demons length, width, depth; Talent of Ida’s child: converting lies to truths; mining in the nymph lodes; Eye Pod as hypno-gourd seedling—Misty Zaebst; talent of persuasion—Brant; sidehill hoofer—Dean Howell; Hadi the Alicenagon, boot rear float—Harli; egg plant, chains, tee party—Tim Bruening; gin rummy, Annie Mal—Jeff Stephens; tough cookies—Ben; Senior Citizen Ship—Thomas Pharrer; Mother Ship, Father Ship, etc., reality check—William Roper.
The ability to call fish, Nymph Ophelia Maniac, Intella-Giant—David D’Champ; prose and cons, oil wave ruining Xanth shore—Aaron Jackson; CAT scan—mb; Philip fills things up—Phil Giles; Nora Nosnoora, I M Bigbucks, Xanth running low on zombies, zombie sit-down strike, names of Woofer/Rachel’s pups, house cat, flying buttress—Mary Rashford; Onomatopoeia—Tia Adams; heir guitar/heir band—Olivia Davis; panty shield—Andrew and Amber Pilon; Burnice from Burnsville—Nathan Machelski; Aqua-fir, sandalwood tree—Thomas Pfarrer; curse of losing memories for lies, Micro-Wave, Mega-Wave, catch her, catch him, pitch her, pitch him—Athena-Lee Maynard; Barbar and Barbara—Kellie Madyda; Moonshine and Moonshadow—Nadia Edwards.
The Maiden Yukay—Andrew Fine; Zap Griffin—Noele Ashbarry; pan-pipe trees, crossed zzz’s—Nadia Edwards; floorist—Jessy Galletley; pop-up windows—Jacob Buehler; Bear Minimum—Jon Conyers; Ivan—Ian; Naomi, Nagahide—Naomi Blose; seal closing envelopes—Shyan Simpson; man-a-tease—Felicia Sible; dumb bell, smart asp, gownless evening straps, smoke and mirrors—Joanie Evans; shooting star—Shyan Simpson; sugar cane walking stick—Kerry Garrigan; dangerous talents sent to Mundania—Laura Kwon Anderson; jean pool—Kyle Bernelle; liquidator—John Cochrane; steal-toed boots—Emilio Valdovinos; rap scallions, mel odious—Lou Nelson; earrings—Mark A. Davis; Bogeyman—Clayton Overstreet; careworn clothes demoralize the wearer—Mark A. Davis.
And I hope you enjoyed the novel. There should be another next year.
TOR BOOKS by PIERS ANTHONY
THE XANTH SERIES
Vale of the Vole
Heaven Cent
Man from Mundania
Demons Don’t Dream
Harpy Thyme
Geis of the Gargoyle
Roc and a Hard Place
Yon Ill Wind
Faun & Games
Zombie Lover
Xone of Contention
The Dastard
Swell Foop
Up in a Heaval
Cube Route
Currant Events
Pet Peeve
Stork Naked
Air Apparent
Two to the Fifth
Jumper Cable
Knot Gneiss
Well-Tempered Clavicle
Luck of the Draw
Esrever Doom
THE GEODYSSEY SERIES
Isle of Woman
Shame of Man
Hope of Earth
Muse of Art
Climate of Change
ANTHOLOGIES
Alien Plot
Anthonology
NONFICTION
How Precious Was That While
Letters to Jenny
But What of Earth?
Ghost
Hasan
Prostho Plus
Race Against Time
Shade of the Tree
Steppe
Triple Détente
WITH ROBERT R. MARGROFF
The Dragon’s Gold Series
Dragon’s Gold
Serpent’s Silver
Chimaera’s Copper
Orc’s Opal
Mouvar’s Magic
The E.S.P. Worm
The Ring
WITH FRANCES HALL
Pretender
WITH RICHARD GILLIAM
Tales from the Great Turtle
(Anthology)
WITH ALFRED TELLA
The Willing Spirit
WITH CLIFFORD A. PICKOVER
Spider Legs
WITH JAMES RICHEY AND ALAN RIGGS
Quest for the Fallen Star
WITH JULIE BRADY
Dream a Little Dream
WITH JO ANNE TAEUSCH
The Secret of Spring
WITH RON LEMING
The Gutbucket Quest
About the Author
PIERS ANTHONY is one of the world’s most popular fantasy authors. His thirty-six previous Xanth novels, including Knot Gneiss, Well-Tempered Clavicle, and Luck of the Draw, have been read and loved by millions of readers around the world. He daily receives hundreds of letters and e-mails from his devoted fans, whose ingenious ideas are often incorporated into Anthony’s tales. He lives in Inverness, Florida.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ESREVER DOOM
Copyright © 2013 by Piers Anthony Jacob
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Julie Dillon
Map by Jael
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-3136-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-4661-2 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781429946612
First Edition: October 2013
Piers Anthony, Esrever Doom
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