On A Pale Horse Part 30

"What is this?" Luna asked.

"Maybe one of my clients," Zane replied uncertainly.

"And here he is," the announcer said. "The key witness, the one who knows whether the burden on the soul of Death will s.h.i.+ft toward Heaven or toward h.e.l.l as he enters his regular term in the office."

"Who?" Zane demanded.

The camera swung around to center the picture on Mortis. The Deathsteed.

"And what do you say, witness?" the announcer asked.

The horse neighed.

"This is ludicrous!" Luna exclaimed.

"I don't know," Zane said. "Mortis is no ordinary horse."

"And there you have it, folks. From the horse's mouth." The announcer paused. "Oh, the translation? Of course. Mortis says his new master has demonstrated a quality unique among Incarnations, and this alone transforms his errors to a.s.sets. He will have a positive freighting on his soul, and will go on to become one of the truly distinguished holders of the office." He paused, while Zane stood amazed. "Congratulations, Death. We of Purgatory are proud to have you with us."

"Zane!" Luna exclaimed. "You won!"

"But all I did was try to help make it easier for people to die," Zane said. "I broke several rules, and often I bungled it anyway."

Then the television camera swung upward to show the welkin, the lovely dome of the Earthly sky. In a moment it turned from day to night, and the stars scintillated in their myriads, and the images of rafts of angels formed, each angel with a s.h.i.+ning halo. All of them applauded politely: the salutation of Heaven. It seemed to Zane that one of them looked like his mother, and others resembled some of his clients.

The camera swung down to show the fires of the nether world, with its ma.s.sed demons, all of them sticking out their forked tongues. But dimly visible behind them were the condemned souls of h.e.l.l, and here and there among these were covert thumbs up gestures.

Zane smiled, experiencing a joy as deep as Eternity. "Thanks, folks," he said, and clicked off the set. "I'll settle for the applause of one." He turned to Luna.

"Always. Forever," she agreed, kissing him.

"But I wonder what that unique quality of mine is supposed to be?" he said as an afterthought.

"It is why I love you," she said.

Zane, back in the routine of his office, saw that the mother was suffering terribly from the first shock of her grief as she cradled her dying baby in her arms. He was still working on the enormous backlog of clients that had acc.u.mulated during his strike, but he could not let the bereaved mother suffer more than she had to.

Zane stood before her. "Woman, recognize me," he said softly.

She looked up. Her mouth fell open in horror.

"Do not fear me," Zane said. "Your baby has an incurable malady, and is in pain, and shall never be free of it while he lives. It is best that he be released from the burden of life."

Her mouth worked in protest. "You you wouldn't say that if one you loved had to go!"

"Yes, I would," he said sincerely. "I sent my own mother to Eternity, to end her suffering. I understand your grief and know it becomes you. But your child is the innocent victim of a wrongful act " He did not repeat what she already knew, that the child had been conceived by incestuous rape and born syphilitic. " and it is better for him and for you that he never face the horrors of such a life."

Her haunted eyes gazed up at him, beginning to see Death as more friend than nemesis. "Is is it really best?"

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge said it best," Death replied gently, extending his hand for the suffering baby's soul. "Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to Heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there."

As he spoke, he drew the tiny soul out. He knew even before he checked it that this one would go to Heaven, for now he had discretion in such cases.

"You're not the way I thought you would be," the woman said, recovering some stability now that the issue had been decided. "You have " She faltered, seeking the appropriate word. "Compa.s.sion."

Compa.s.sion. Suddenly it fell into place. This was the quality Zane brought to the office of Death that the office had lacked before. It made him feel good to realize that the delays he had indulged in and the rules he had broken that such acts could be construed positively instead of negatively. He cared about his clients, strove for what was best for them within the dreadful parameters of his office, and was no longer ashamed to admit it.

He knew he had been installed in this office for reasons not relating to merit. But he had conquered his limitations and knew that he would perform with reasonable merit henceforth.

"Death came with friendly care..." he repeated as he set his watch for the next client. He liked the thought.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

Every novel is an adventure, for the author as well as the reader, but some are more so than others. The last extended Author's Note I did was for my science fiction novel Viscous Circle; those readers who encountered that and didn't like it should avoid this one, because it is more of the same. I believe that a work of fiction should stand pretty much by itself and not require any external explanation; certainly On a Pale Horse can survive without this one.

Coincidentally if one believes in coincidence my Author's Copies of Viscous Circle arrived as I was typing this Author's Note. I glanced at that prior Note and realized it signaled the change in my outlook that has resulted, among other things, in On a Pale Horse. I had suffered an illness in 1980 that disrupted my schedule, put me in the hospital, and forcibly reminded me of my own mortality. In consequence, I planned to s.h.i.+ft my efforts from the kind of science fiction I had been doing to fantasy, horror. World War II fiction, and maybe some general mainstream writing, exploring and broadening my parameters while it was convenient to do so. That is, while I still had my health and vigor and imagination. I wanted to discover where I could achieve more meaning in writing.

So how did that effort work out? Well, I did try but the first thing I discovered was that publishers were not interested in nonfantastic genre Anthony efforts. They showed the same disinterest that they had shown in my early science fantasy writing and it took me eight years to break into print. It seems it may take me a similar period to break into another genre. I have kept plugging away, meanwhile filling in with light fantasy, because that is easy and fun and the readers like it and it makes a lot of money; if I have to wait those extra years for publishers to appreciate my merit, I might as well wait in comfort. Thus I completed almost half a million words of fantasy in 1981, and that seems to be expanding my reputation in that subgenre. I will continue trying the other genres, for I remain an ornery cuss, and I think in time I will break through and prove that all those uninterested editors were wrong, just as I did before. I have, as may be apparent, not much respect for editors as a cla.s.s.

But impediments, whether editorial or otherwise, can lead to rewarding innovation. As I wrestled with the problem of putting meaningful writing into print, I discovered that it was possible for me to do much of the social commentary I had in mind within the SF/fantasy genre itself. Instead of stepping outside the genre to protest such things as world hunger and nuclear folly, I realized I could stretch the genre boundaries to cover the territory. Since I already have markets and readers for my fantastic genre writing, the editors can't stop me. This facilitates my ambition enormously. On a Pale Horse, for example, is on one level a fun fantasy with a unique main character, and I hope most readers enjoy it on that level. Fiction should always entertain! But on another level it is a satiric look at contemporary society, with some savagely pointed criticism. It is also a serious exploration of man's relation to death. Man is the one creature on Earth who knows he will die, and that is an appalling intellectual burden.

I need to clarify how I do my writing, as I am not quite like other writers, professionally or personally. Of course, no writer is quite like any other; each thinks himself unique in some typical fas.h.i.+on. I live in the backwoods of central Florida and have a twelve by twenty four foot study in our horse pasture. Yes, I am surrounded by horse manure! I now have electricity there for three years I did so I can type at night if I want to, but have no heating. In summer I use a fan to cool me, for we do hit 100 F often enough, and in winter I bundle up with voluminous clothing as if for a hike through a snowstorm. Our area seldom gets below freezing in the daytime, but even 40 to 50 becomes bone chilling when one is sitting at a typewriter for hours at a time. Even with sweater, jacket, scarf, and heavy cap, I slowly congeal, because I must expose my hands to type. Back when I typed two finger, it was possible to do it with gloves on, but now I touch type and must bare my flesh.

So I avoid winter typing when possible, arranging my schedule to write the first draft in pencil on my clipboard at the house, where we have a fine wood stove that puts out so much heat that my darling daughters complain. Between literary thoughts, I feed more chunks of my hardsawed and split wood to the monster, maintaining my primitive comfort.

Don't get me wrong; I live here because I love the wilderness and the rustic independence of it, and I distrust complex machines. The wood stove is not only cheap to operate, it's fun. It also heats all our water in winter, via a copper coil in the stovepipe. (In summer the solar system does the job.) Then when the land warms, in spring, I hie me back to my study to type the second draft, and then the submission draft. Each novel is done three times, ironing out the bugs. But the four months of inclement weather are too long for a single novel; I need only two months for the first draft, and sometimes less, depending on the nature of the project. So I try to schedule two novels in pencil in the winter, then type both later.

The winter of 1981 82, my two novels were one fantasy and one science fiction, each the initial volume of what I hoped would be an ambitious, hard hitting, socialcommentary, five novel series. The science fiction series was Bio of a s.p.a.ce Tyrant, superficially a s.p.a.ce opera, covertly a serious political commentary, to be published elsewhere . The fantasy series was Incarnations of Immortality, that t.i.tle given with a nod of appreciation toward William Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood. This present novel, with Death as its protagonist, is the first of that series.

I understand some writers just start writing and watch almost with surprise what develops; I plan considerably farther ahead. I know how a novel will end before I begin to write it and before I write it, these days, I sell it. I realize that sounds backward, but it's true. I make a summary, and my New York literary agent shows it around, and if a publisher offers a contract for it, then I go ahead and write the novel. I have any number of summaries that no editor wanted, so those novels have never been written. Sometimes I really want to write one, but have to let it go. You might say that some of my best novels of the past have never been written. In the early days of my career I wrote my novels first and marketed them second, and naturally the editors gleefully bounced them. At one point I had built up a backlog of eight complete unsold novels. That's not the best way for a writer to make a living. When I caught on and changed my system to escape that bind, my income tripled, and then began a sharper rise because suddenly I was selling everything I wrote. Rather, I was writing everything I sold.

As it happens, both these series, Bio and Incarnations, relate strongly to death, a subject with which I am morbidly fascinated. I wish I were not; this constant awareness of death makes it impossible for me to go blithely about my life in simple contentment. This has been so since my closest cousin died, when I was a teenager. He is represented in this novel as Tad: the one who had everything to live for, while I did not. It seemed to me that Death had somehow taken the wrong one of us. Now I am highly aware that my time on Earth is limited, and I do not believe in any afterlife. It follows that anything I want to do, I must do in this session, as it were. Perhaps this explains in part the determination with which I write novels, including this one. It is my way of saying whatever I have to say while I have the opportunity, hoping others will profit thereby.

I think few writers have tried, as I have here, to present Death in a sympathetic manner. Therefore it was chancy to market On a Pale Horse, for many publishers seem to be uninterested in innovation. If Death could not make it into print, how could there be any hope for the following notions that were percolating through my mind? For the rest of this series, as it finally shaped up, concerned other unusual protagonists: Time, Bearing an Hourgla.s.s; Fate, With a Tangled Skein; War, Wielding a Red Sword; and Nature, Being a Green Mother. All of it started with Death, and Death in print was not nearly so certain as death in the real world. This concept was obviously fantastic, corresponding to the established scheme of the Afterlife only very loosely; perhaps it would offend some readers. I, as an omery writer, don't much care if I offend a reader or two, but publishers have hypersensitive nerves about popular reaction, and very little courage of conviction. My more challenging notions have had trouble with publishers before. Those of you who think of me as a lightentertainment writer have not seen that portion of my writing that never made it into print.

So I played it safe. I sent a private, informal query to my fantasy editor, Lester del Rey of Del Rey Books, describing my notion and asking whether he might be interested in seeing a more formal presentation at a later date. A writer can do this when he knows an editor well enough. I have a track record at Del Rey; they know what my writing is like, so can tell from even a brief description whether a particular project of mine would be to their taste. If Mr. del Rey didn't like the notion, or did not care to gamble his company's money on it, he would tell me privately, and that would spare the two of us and my agent the embarra.s.sment and inconvenience of a formal rejection.

Now let me switch to another subject, in the tantalizing manner of the storyteller I am. I have gotten interested in colored stones of the precious variety. Most people know of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, and I have acquired samples of these. No, I didn't spend ten thousand dollars for a one carat diamond two years ago and watch its value shrink in half. Lack of money served in lieu of wisdom, there. Instead, I bought rough diamonds from a wholesale dealer at ten dollars a carat. They look like gravel; they don't sparkle prettily from cut facets.

But they are diamonds, so I can lay claim to owning diamonds. I shopped similarly for bargains in other stones. There are many pretty ones, comparatively inexpensive, ranging from a hundred dollars or more per carat down to eight cents a carat for faceted smoky quartz in quant.i.ty. Know something? In a dim light, you could have trouble distinguis.h.i.+ng quartz from diamond, and quartz will scratch window gla.s.s.

There are also topaz, aquamarine, garnet, tourmaline, zircon, amethyst, scapolite, andalusite, and others, each with its own special qualities. It is possible to develop an interesting collection of such gems for a tiny fraction of the price of the smallest cut diamond, and that collection may be a more secure investment than that diamond. Certainly this has been the case recently; the value of most colored stones has risen, in some cases dramatically, while diamonds have declined.

But there are pitfalls. People who aren't expert in gemstones can get rapidly fleeced, unless they have a reliable source of supply. I had such a source in the large, wholesale House of Onyx, but was lured by an ad in the local newspaper for a huge star sapphire on sale privately. I went to see it, and it was an ugly stone maybe it would be kinder to say the stone had character with a fantastic floating star. It had come from North Carolina, where some sapphire mining is done. In sunlight, that star seemed to sit an eighth of an inch above the surface of the stone, and it s.h.i.+fted about on its rays like a spider as the stone moved, almost like magic. I'm a sucker for magic, considering that I don't believe in it, so I bought the stone.

Then, of course, I wondered whether I had been smart. I had paid over ten dollars a carat for the sapphire, which was a lot of money for a stone that size one hundredfourteen carats. Good sapphire is worth a lot more but was this one a bargain? Was it even true sapphire? Now that it was too late, I had to know. So I phoned Fred Rowe, owner of the House of Onyx you can do that if you know him well enough and he very nicely agreed to appraise the stone for me. He is not in the business of appraising other people's stones, of course; he did it as a private favor, much as Lester del Rey did me the favor of appraising my novel notion privately. I dare say there are two busier men in the world, but I really could not name any offhand. Sometimes the busiest are also the most generous.

On September 8, 1981,1 received two important items in the mail one from Mr. Rowe, the other from Mr. del Rey. Mr. Rowe was returning my stone with his appraisal: it was corundum (sapphire and ruby are both corundum), but of a cheap grade imported from India for fifty cents a carat and sold to gullible tourists in places like North Carolina as local stones for five to ten dollars per carat. He himself had sold a number of five thousand carat parcels of this type of stone to clients in North Carolina at the fifty cent price. In short, this was ajunkstone. I had been bilked. Not, I believe, by the person who sold it to me; he honestly believed in the value of the stone, and I'm sure many other people with similar belief have similar stones. But for what it's worth, I recommend that people be wary of bargains in gems from North Carolina.

Mr. del Rey's letter was more positive. Yes, he liked the notion of On a Pale Horse. No, I did not need to submit a formal presentation through my agent at a later date. He was prepared to offer my agent a contract on it now. He did not name a figure, but I knew from experience that this novel would earn me at least ten times what I had lost on the sapphire.

That was some mail! Fate had neatly juxtaposed these events. Mr. Rowe and Mr, del Rey had, figuratively, met in my mailbox. (Mr. Rowe, meet Mr. del Rey; Lester, meet Fred. So nice to have you both here. Now let's get out of this hot mailbox!) Who was I to argue with Fate? Thus it was that my unfortunate star sapphire became a part of this novel. The two just seemed fated to merge.

There was more to it than that. I am omery in various ways, and one of them is that I don't like to make mistakes, but mistakes stalk me like sendings from h.e.l.l. So I try to turn every experience, good or bad, to my profit, whether monetary or intellectual. I had blundered in buying the stone, but if I used that experience in the novel, that might redeem it somewhat. In fact, by this device I could make this stone unique. It might not be worth much as a junk grade star sapphire, but as the stone that suckered Piers Anthony um, let's rephrase that. As the stone that launched a new man into the dread office of Death, it well, it just might eventually be worth what I paid for it. Thus, perhaps, it could no longer be considered a blunder. Of course, this mundane stone lacks the literal magic of the one in the novel, and I dare say any potential purchaser would in due course catch on to that. But I don't want to sell it anyway. I merely want to erase a mistake. Just think: If this ploy is successful, no one will ever know about my blunder in buying that stone...

I also put my watch into the novel, as the Deathwatch. I bought it about the same time. Mine is identical to the fictive watch, except that mine times forward, not backward, and it lacks much of the magic power. I have had a long history of trying watches, from simple ten dollar windups to sophisticated solar chronographs, and all had one thing in common: they ceased working after a year or so. The folk who set a one year limit on the warranty know what they're doing. Thus I finally blew three hundred and twenty five dollars on this Heuer heavy duty mechanical timepiece, watertight and self winding and unpretty. It weighs a full quarter pound, and if it conks out after one year, I will be most distressed. Time will tell.

I said at the outset that each novel is an adventure. This one has been more than I bargained on. My first drafts are more than fiction; they are running records of my ongoing life. Problems, interruptions, and stray thoughts (I'm always thinking) are included in the text, set off by brackets [like this]. I don't know of any other writer who works this way but then I don't know of any other writer who never suffers the dread malady known as writer's block, though it is barely possible some exist. I never block, because my text incorporates the blockages and converts them to text. When I complete the pencil draft, I review it and index my bracket notes, since they may contain the summaries of several additional novels that occurred to me along the way. A good notion for a novel is far too precious to waste; it must be caught the moment it flashes into mental view, or it will escape to the brain of some other writer who really doesn't deserve it. For example. On a Pale Horse was worked out in brackets in the text of the prior fantasy novel. Night Mare. My creative notions don't have to wait their turn; they are always welcome.

This novel concerns death, as most readers will have grasped by this time. I don't believe in the supernatural, yet I experience eerie coincidences. The worst of these are yet to come in this Note. When I started part time work on this novel (because I was then typing Night Mare I work on a kind of a.s.sembly line in summer, working on different novels in pencil and typing stages simultaneously) in September, two supposedly unrelated things developed.

One was a series of excellent three mile runs. I have adult onset diabetes, a mild case, and I treat this by staying away from free sugar and by exercising vigorously, including my thrice weekly cross country runs. When I do well, I break twenty two minutes for the distance, then jog and walk another half mile, warming down, so as not to stress my system unduly by abrupt changes. Well, in September I was finis.h.i.+ng a decent but not great run when the weekly garbage truck came up behind me in the last half mile. That truck cuts through the forest to reach another section of our wilderness, and our paths happened to coincide here. So I speeded up to get out of its way, without stopping my run. It's amazing what a stimulus it is to have a truckful of garbage pursue you up a hill! Suddenly I was running a record finish, and because of this, it became one of those rare sub twenty two minute runs, by just two seconds. Well, good enough; and next time I kept a slightly faster pace and broke twenty two again. And a third time I did it a little faster yet. Unexpectedly, I had a string going. I had never put together more than three of these in a row before; could I do it on this Garbage series? Yes! I did the fourth, fifth, and sixth, and finally, with great effort on a drizzly day, the tenth. What a series! Now I could relax. But the series continued, until it carried me through the entire month of October, despite problems of scheduling the runs. I was amazed and gratified. The other thing was negative. My wife's father had been suffering some low grade malady during the summer, but now it got serious.

[Interruption at this point to go pick up a horse's balky foot for my daughter. We check and clean out the feet before riding, to be sure there is no stone or stick wedged that could cause lameness, but the horse doesn't always cooperate. I have more power than my daughter has; that foot came up for me. Had this interruption occurred earlier, I would have thought to have my protagonist check the feet of his gallant Deathsteed. Now, in the Author's Note, it is too late. Well, I'll catch it in another novel. This has been a sample bracket note, a live performance.]

My wife's father had to be hospitalized, put on dialysis for kidney failure, and have abdominal surgery. He was still bleeding internally, so they set him up for corrective surgery but were not sure he could survive another operation so soon. The chances seemed to be fifty fifty; if the bleeding didn't kill him, the surgery might. His wife, my wife's mother, was distraught. Naturally my wife went down to Tampa to help out, so she was away from our home about half the month of October. That was why I had a scheduling problem for my runs, because I don't like to do them when there is no one to backstop me at home. There are hunters out there in the forest who don't necessarily see straight enough to tell man from deer, and there are rattlesnakes and such, and rampaging garbage trucks; and, of course, I'm laboring so hard that I could trip over an unseen root and take a fall and pull a muscle and be in trouble, and I want someone to call the ambulance if necessary. (I believe I mentioned my morbid streak.) But we managed; my two daughters, then aged fourteen and eleven, helped run the household and feed the animals when they (the girls) weren't in school. Penny, the elder [whom we just met in a bracket], cooked supper, while I washed the dishes. And my father in law tided through.

Things eased up in November and December, as I worked full time on the first draft of this novel and my series of twenty two minute runs continued. My fatherin law made it home for Thanksgiving, though ravaged by what had turned out to be Wegener's Syndrome, a rare and normally fatal malady before modem medicine changed the odds. We live, in some respects, in fortunate times.

I finished my first draft of Pale and s.h.i.+fted to the first volume of Bio for a couple of months. My good runs continued forty, fifty, sixty in the series. In fact, they speeded up to a subseries of21:30 minute efforts, and then to a sub subseries of sub twenty one minute runs. I was breaking the seven minute mile! To my amazement, I managed to put together ten of these superfast for me runs in a row, before the rising heat of a Florida spring put an end to that in March. But I was still on my twentytwo minute series: seventy runs, eighty... when would it end?

My mother in law, perhaps worn out by the terrible siege of her husband's illness, got sick herself and went to the hospital. But it was more than that. She had cancer of the pancreas. We didn't know much about this disease and thought she would have six months or a year to live. But after only six weeks, as I was typing the second draft of Pale in late March, she died.

This is a novel of death, as I have said. The serious illness and sudden death, occurring while I was immersed in fictional death this disturbed me deeply. I had a brutal refresher course in what death feels like to the survivors.

There was nothing to do but go on with novel, with running, with life. But there was now a deeper quality of gloom about it. Death is not funny. It may be the normal end of life, but I still don't like it. No, not at all!

My run series hung on, despite my depressed spirits and outdoor temperatures in the mid 80s. I made runs number eighty one, eighty two, eighty three... maybe I could actually make it all the way to one hundred! I reject all superst.i.tion vehemently, yet I found myself counting those runs as if they were years of my life. It seemed I had now been promised at least eighty three years; how many more? Nonsense, of course; still...

As April 1982 came, I was near the end of my seconddraft typing and saw that the novel was going to be short: about eighty thousand words instead of the ninety thousand or so expected. There is normally a ten or fifteen percent expansion in the submission draft, because of polis.h.i.+ng, blank s.p.a.ce at the end of chapters, and the addition of notes that have been crammed into the margins of second draft material. I needed enough second draft wordage so that that expansion would put the final draft comfortably in the hundred thousand word range I had contracted for. Normally I run overlength and have to tighten up a bit, but this time my bracket notes had taken up more s.p.a.ce, throwing off my estimate.

Writers pay a lot of attention to wordage, because some publishers seem to care more about length than about quality and will automatically reject novels that don't fit their narrow standards of length or will chop out extra wordage to make a novel fit. Not so long before, I had had to chop out twenty thousand words from my novel Mute, damaging it; I share the average writer's aversion to such mutilation, especially since it makes the finished product seem choppy or disorganized when it wasn't that way originally, and can damage his reputation for intelligibility and thus perhaps harm his career. Editor Lester del Rey has never done that to me, and so my fantasy has prospered but I don't push my luck.

In this case, there was material I had wanted to include, but had bypa.s.sed because of the difficulty of organizing a novel with a high emotional commitment. Fortunately, the notes were right there in my brackets. Some key cases of death I could break Chapter 6 into two parts and fit these scenes in the first part, and this would bring the number of chapters to thirteen exactly right for a novel about death. So while I typed the second draft, I resumed work on the first draft, doing those scenes. Oh, yes, writers do work this way; the smooth, finished product you readers see is likely to be the result of considerable and scrambled effort.

Good news came in on the early sales of my science/ fantasy novel Blue Adept, lightening my mood; the paperback edition had jumped to number three on the B. Dalton Bookseller list, and to number five on the Waldenbooks list. This is rarefied territory for light fantasy, and the best performance of any of my novels so far. It meant Blue was a mainstream bestseller, though it didn't quite make The New York Times list. A writer lives for such news!

The phone company sent a man out for no reason we could see, and he switched the iines, so all our calls came to our neighbor and vice versa. My New York agent tried to phone me three times about ongoing negotiations on the sale ofBio of a s.p.a.ce Tyrant, my biggest contract so far, and each time wound up talking to the neighbor's boy. Par for the course. Satan only knows what kind of contract I might have wound up with, had I not caught on and hastily phoned my agent back. Maybe Satan sent the phone man out! Of such minor elements is a writer's life fas.h.i.+oned.

I did my eighty fourth sub twenty two minute run on Monday. Ha I would live to age eighty four! On Tuesday, April 6, at 1 P.M., I did my alternate day exercise, the j.a.panese push ups. I can't describe them; they are done in martial arts cla.s.ses for warm up, and they are more complicated than regular push ups. They have put new sheaths of muscle on my arms and chest, so that I no longer look quite as thin as I am. Over the years I had built up to seventy five push ups within a five minute span; I time them on my Deathwatch. Without the time limit, I have done one hundred but those final ones become h.e.l.lishly uncomfortable, so I eased back. Why do I do push ups? Well, running is good for every part of the body except the arms, so I do pull ups and push ups to sh.o.r.e up that weakness.

When I was less than half my present age, as a draftee in the U.S. Army in 1957,1 was poor at regular push ups. When I was unable to do ten in one session, the corporal told me to go back to the barracks and find a man to replace me. Only in the Army is manhood defined by push ups, which is part of what's wrong with that inst.i.tution; nevertheless, that corporal would not so address me today.

I hate push ups, but I like the body they give me, so I grind my teeth and do them. On this day I felt indifferent, physically; to my surprise, the push ups were exceedingly strong. In fact, I broke my speed record, doing my seventy five in four minutes and seven seconds on the stopwatch. Terrific! I unkinked my digits these pushups are done on the tips of ten fingers, which is part of why they get uncomfortable and settled down for lunch. Then the mail came, and I was reading it at 2 P.M. when I felt a pain in my left side. Indigestion? Well, that would pa.s.s.

It didn't pa.s.s. It got worse. I struggled with it for an hour, finding no relief vertically or horizontally, and retched into the sink a couple of times before I asked my wife to call for help. Soon she drove me in to see the doctor. Yes, it was the same doctor who had wrestled with my Cat Scratch Disease two years before, as noted in my prior Author's Note. By this time I had the cold sweats and my limbs were jerking, sometimes violently. The ride was interminable; every half hour or so I rechecked my watch and discovered it had only moved along five minutes. "You know," I gasped, "I fear death, but if I knew the rest of my life would be like this, I would welcome death!" I meant it. Pain provides a special perspective, and that perspective is reflected in the novel.

People tried not to stare at me in the doctor's waiting room as I sat there, hunched over to my left, panting violently; that was the only way I could keep the pain bearable. My hair was wild, and I was in T s.h.i.+rt, shorts, and sandals, with dirty feet, the way I normally am when writing at home. I didn't have a regular appointment, of course, but the doctor arranged to see me soon, and I don't think any other patients objected. I was wheeled into an office. I was beginning to feel faint, and motion only made things worse. Everything made things worse! But in due course we had an opinion. There was a trace of blood in my urine, and the symptoms indicated a colic of the kidney, probably caused by a kidney stone.

I wound up in the hospital with a shot of Demerol, which I understand is synthetic morphine: a powerful painkiller. It didn't kill this pain, but it zonked out much of my brain, and that helped. My wife tells me I was saying strange things, such as something about a fly on the window and steps on a cabinet; I remember none of it. If I had been able to write, I probably would have made bracket notes, and today would know exactly what was on my mind then. A fly? Do you suppose the Lord of Flies could have ? I do remember waking up long enough to inquire, "Am I making sense?" And my wife, in the manner of good wives with difficult husbands like me, a.s.sured me that I was. I faded in and out; the pain did not depart, but at least I was unconscious some of the time. Six hours after it began, the agony began to ease, and in another hour it was gone. I can't honestly say it was the worst pain I have suffered, though our book of medical symptoms says that kidney stones can indeed be among the worst agonies to afflict man. I think it hurts more when I stub a toe hard. But the toe hurts only a minute; this was six hours. The remorseless continuation of pain is, candidly, something else. I suspect even a mild pain could become unbearable if continued long enough; I think that's part of the secret of the Chinese water torture.

Next day they gave me a complex X ray series, a pyelogram, with dye in my blood to show the course of the various conduits. Yes, my left ureter that's the tube between the kidney and the bladder was distended, as if blocked by a kidney stone. Probably my exceptionally vigorous push ups had dislodged the stone and sent it on its painful way. It had taken an hour to encounter a constriction, and then wow! Nothing much; it was really only a grain, like a piece of sand, and with luck it would clear on its own. Meanwhile, the urine was getting by, so I was okay. All I had to do was strain my urine through a meshed funnel, to catch the stone when it came out so they could a.n.a.lyze it.

I was glad to cooperate. If this was a little stone, I didn't want to encounter a big one! But they had hooked me up to an IV bottle I suspect this is standard hospital policy to make sure the patient doesn't walk out without paying the bill and the needle was taped to my left arm. To go to the bathroom, I had to trundle the bottle stand along with me. To forget would be a b.l.o.o.d.y mess as the needle ripped out of my vein. I understand it happens to absent minded patients. And they had me in one of those hospital gowns you know, the type that falls open at any pretext to bare your posterior. Everybody in the hospital wants to get at your posterior! Have you ever tried to, as they phrase it, void through a funnel into a plastic container, with a tube connected to your arm that tends to drape itself between you and what you're doing? And the hospital nightie falling off your front? Naturally they are worn backward, and no one had tied the ap.r.o.n strings on mine. If I lifted my arm too high, trying to get things out of my way, the blood backed into the IV tubing, making another mess. I discovered that by the time I got everything ready to go Nature had changed her mind. I think it is called "bashful kidney."

There were other little niceties of hospital life. One night I had a headache. I asked the nurse for a pill but she informed me the only medication listed on my chart was Demerol. Synthetic morphine for a headache? This was like shooting a sparrow with a cannon! So I had to struggle along with the headache until the doctor came to apply some common sense. I had the usual ha.s.sle with the food, too. I am a vegetarian and diabetic, so I stay off all meat products and sugars, and I don't drink coffee or tea. Naturally my lunch consisted of coffee with two packs of sugar, gelatin (which is made of protein from the bones of cows, mixed with sugar), sickly sweet fruit, and a piece of cake with horrendously thick sugar icing. Fortunately, there was also corn, beans, and mashed potato, so I didn't starve; and my wife visited and fetched me some water naturally my pitcher hadn't been filled so I survived. Not that I really needed to eat, with the IV dripping sugar water into my vein.

When I finished, I wanted to go to the bathroom, but discovered that the bedside table unit that overhung the bed would actually tip over rather than swing out of the way. I think if more doctors got sick and had to wrestle with these little matters, some improvements would be made. I explained gently about the food to a nurse, and that brought the dietician, who remembered me from two years before, and we finally got the matter of no meat, no sugar, no coffee straight just about the time I was to be released from the hospital.

Then there was the Candy Striper. These are teenaged girls who bring fresh water and juice and such to patients, thereby gaining experience in the operation of a hospital. They wear cute pink and white striped uniforms with sweet little matching caps. This one showed up about 4 P.M. my second day. She had golden hair flowing to her bottom. She not only filled my water pitcher, she brought in her family and they sat around my room and ate pizza and chatted. Then she made me brush out her hair and braid it, so she could go on duty in decent order. She seemed to take such attention for granted.

Oh perhaps I neglected to mention that this particular Candy Striper was Penny Jacob my mundane daughter. Penny Candy Striper, Heaven Cent. This time she had me right where she wanted me. I understand some fathers don't pay enough attention to their children; obviously they don't have children like mine.

The consulting urologist prescribed a gallon of urine a day. Uh, no, not to drink; I merely had to imbibe enough fluid to generate a full gallon of void each day. Have you any idea how much drinking that entails? The purpose is to dilute the urine so that no additional stones would form. It seems that kidney stones are the province of middleaged men and that I live in a kidney stone region; there is much calcium in our water (though they aren't sure that's the cause) and the local heat causes body dehydration, concentrating the urine, so that stones form. So I must, for the rest of my life, be constantly drinking water and pa.s.sing it through. I can no longer sleep the night in one haul; I have to get up once or twice to you know. But if that's what it takes to keep the stones away, so must it be.

The first night home, I got up at 2:30 A.M., did my business with the funnel and container and then could not get back to sleep. I didn't want to turn on the light to read, lest that disturb my wife, who had had problems enough, with her father so ill recently, then losing her mother, then having to deal with my illness. Problems had been striking like explosive sh.e.l.ls around us, and that gets wearing. So I dressed and went off to my study in the pasture to type some more on Pale Horse, which novel had been interrupted by my hospitalization. Naturally our horses thought it was feeding time, and Blue knocked on my door with her hoof. I went out and explained that it was 3 A.M. and that feeding time wasn't for three hours yet, but she resumed banging the moment I went back inside. I was afraid she would break down the door, so finally I went out with the broom and swatted her on the rear. That moved her off but when dawn broke, she would not speak to me, and I felt like a heel. Such is lifeafter kidney stone.

I had not let the time in the hospital go to waste. I continued reading books, including Dream Makers, edited by Charles Platt, which tells what other genre writers are like. They are all oddb.a.l.l.s, almost as strange as I am! I will be in the companion volume, however, so I'd better not criticize. I also had my clipboard along. Remember, I was reworking Chapter 6 and adding scenes. So while I was there I wrote the scene about the atheist whose att.i.tude is basically mine, with the fundamental difference that I do believe in doing good in this life and try very hard to benefit the universe,'whether by being kind to a wild animal or by writing a novel like this one. And yes, I also wrote the scene about the old woman in the hospital. I could hardly have had a better environment for that one. But if the hospital staff had caught on, I might have had trouble getting out of there. As it turned out, there was one nurse who was a fan of mine, but she did not realize who I was remember, I use a pseudonym until too late to catch me. However, my daughter the Candy Striper arranged to have that nurse visit me at home a month later, so all was not lost.

I settled back into my routine. My run series was broken at eighty four, and I was awash in fluid, but life went on. The neighbors (the ones with the contract negotiating boy) had to take off suddenly because a parent had a serious complication of the pancreas; we had learned the hard way about that sort of thing and knew it was terminal. Death is ever with us. While they were away, their prize mare, Navahjo, went into labor, and there wasn't anybody around who knew what to do. She was having trouble; the foal was hung up with one foot protruding for the better part of an hour, and we feared a stillbirth. But another neighbor came, took hold and pulled, and got it out: live birth of a colt. What a relief! The little horse was healthy and soon was frisking about; I suggested mischievously that they name him Colt 45, or maybe Colt 46. Thus, with our neighbors, life was originating even as it was ending. This, too, is as Nature decrees.

My funnel caught no stone in a month, so I had a follow up pyelogram. I had to drink a magic potion concocted from senna fruit to clear my bowel. It was awful stuff, as these brews are, but I gulped it down. It had no effect. Then about eight hours later, in the middle of the night FWOOM! Mount St. Helens!

I had been through the pyelogram procedure before, but this time the details differed. They put me in a hospital gown with three armholes; I wondered whether triplearmed alien creatures patronized these facilities. They injected the dye into my arm and suddenly I felt sick and dizzy and generally s.p.a.ced out, and then sneezed several times. They said it was normal, though none of this had happened the last time. In between the s.p.a.ced X ray shots, I lay on my back and read a science fiction novel I planned to review; no sense letting blank time go to waste.

We took the pictures directly to the urologist. There was no sign of the kidney stone; apparently it had cleared at the outset, and we hadn't caught it. Too bad; it would have helped to know what kind it had been. But this latest X ray showed a spot inside the bladder. Oh oh could that be a tumor? The doctor decided he'd better have a direct look. So we made an appointment for a cystoscopy, four days later.

It was a nervous wait. With everything else that had been happening during this novel, it could be just my luck to discover but maybe it was nothing. Old scar tissue, maybe. I know my readers like stories with definite conclusions, so I held up my typing of the last of this Note for two days to await the dread verdict.

That cystoscopy was sort of scary to approach. There I sat in the doctor's office, a yard square paper napkin draped around my quivering naked loins, eying the torture instruments laid out for the procedure: a black box with an electric connection, an IV bottle with transparent fluid, sinister gray tubes, and two immense nine inch long monster metal needles. Ouch! They gave me a good five minutes to examine that array before the doctor arrived. I know psychological torture when I experience it!

The doctor squirted an anesthetic solution up the conduit; it felt like voiding backward. Then he inserted the larger diameter needle, sliding it up the urethra to the bladder. Unfortunately, that particular channel has a natural curve in it. What do you do when you have a straight instrument and a curved channel? F found out! You straighten the channel. WRENCH! and my curve was straight. No, it didn't really hurt, but it was uncomfortable, physically and psychologically.

Then the doctor slid the lesser needle into the larger one, sending in a mirror and a light bulb or whatever so he could see through the tube and look about inside. The IV bottle filled the bladder with clear fluid; I dare say that improved internal visibility. I could picture that light flas.h.i.+ng around all the crevices, spying out excrescences, kidney stones, pebbles and boulders, and whatever other garbage there might be in there. Finally he closed up shop and drew out the instruments, letting my anatomy try to recover its curvature.

The verdict? Nothing. There was nothing in there. I was clean. No kidney stone, no tumor, no garbage. Apparently the X ray blob had been false. Another sending of Satan. A thumbprint, my daughter suggested. I'll settle for that.

Oh, yes I was a little sore following the cystoscopy and voided a few drops of blood. But nothing bad, and it was worth it. My kidney stone incident was over.

This, then, is the story of the manner in which my consciousness of death has been heightened, in and out of this novel. Has it been worth it? I hope so. It seems to me that all living species need to survive, so nature provides them with instincts of pain and self preservation that compel them to live. They also need to die, to make way for progress; otherwise the world would still be full of dinosaurs. (There's a new theory about those dinosaurs: at certain temperatures, some reptiles produce offspring that are all male or all female. Suppose the climate changed enough to throw aH the big reptiles into one s.e.x?) But circ.u.mstance takes care of termination, so it isn't necessary that creatures like dying. When something is truly voluntary, such as procreation. Nature makes sure it is pleasurable for the male. Cynically, she does not require pleasure for the female; that is optional. With many species, rape seems to be impossible; not so for ours. Nature really is a green mother.

So we are left hating and fearing our inevitable death, though objectively we know this is pointless. Possibly, as my protagonist suggests, if we had a better appreciation of the larger picture, of the place death plays in life, we would suffer less. This novel is an attempt to encourage such understanding. If I succeed in this one thing, my own life may have justified itself.

So now I try to appreciate the mixed splendor that life is while it is mine. I watch my daughter with her horse and can not imagine a prettier sight. I also watch Blue galloping at dusk by herself, mane and tail flaring, playing Nightmare. I say h.e.l.lo to the wild gray bunny that comes out at dusk to feed on the grain spilled by the horses; sometimes I can get within six feet. I call it Nicky (ie), because of a nick in his/her left ear. I see the rare pileated woodp.e.c.k.e.r working on our deadwood; that's the largest woodp.e.c.k.e.r in our nation, and that species will be preserved as long as we have deadwood. I see the wild deer, and the big box turtles, and hope for a glimpse of an armadillo. I see the myriad spider webs, fogged by moming dew. The flowering cactus, like lovely yellow roses. And the confounded red bellied woodp.e.c.k.e.r that sneaks into our coop to peck neat holes in the eggs; now we have to race the little critter to the eggs.