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Karen Guerreri is an obscure writer of science fiction novels. She is half convinced that her invisibility-far from qualifying as a superpower in a world of mad-scientist villains-has simply left her alone and forgotten in the junk heap of literary black holes.
Her first attempt to write "real" books backfired with the unacclaimed Preternatural. In that book, she became confused as to whether she was creating the intergalactic jellyfish, which she was writing about, or if they were controlling her.
Karen addresses the question by writing a sequel and thus begins Preternatural Too: Gyre, quite possibly one of the most improbable follow-ups in history. Skipping in and out of this world and teetering on the edge of sanity itself, Gyre stands like the proverbial shout into the void, raising more questions in postmodern exploration than its predecessor.
Karen's mind was filled with voices lately. She wasn't quite sure what to do about them.
Max Neimark had made the most sensible suggestion the minute the film wrapped. Max Neimark the anomalous leading man, who'd parlayed a fortuitous bit of casting as a three-eyed alien on a Sixties TV space opera into a career as a respected actor/director/screen writer/producer, had sat across the table in the studio commissary that phantasmagorical afternoon, raised an eyebrow at her and said in that wonderfully resonant voice of his:
"Maybe you need to write a sequel, Karen," and Karen had laughed and answered:
"Tell it to my editor!" at the same time thinking: Oh, sure! He thinks it's really that easy. But Max had been so pleased with himself that afternoon, and the whole experience of having a movie made out of one of her usually invisible little novels had been so magical she hadn't wanted to disillusion him, or herself for that matter. She knew the moment was illusory, and never to be repeated.
All of them, the three Hollywood types — Max and Larry Koster the Superhero and Tessa McGill the self-made guru — had gone on about their ever so interesting lives once the film was over, wishing Karen well but not giving her a second thought. She'd expected nothing more. Larry had his stud farm and his image to worry about; Tessa, in between concert tours, was off on a vision quest in Tibet, and Max was already in production on his next film by the time Karen's plane touched down in Newark out of LAX. It was the way things worked, and that was fine. Karen wasn't part of anyone's posse; she was aworking writer. It was time she got started on the next book.
However, no one seemed interested, and that was getting to be a problem.
Karen Rohmer Guerreri, forty-something housewife, single mother of a daughter and a son in their twenties, novelist. Not a very exciting protagonist for anybody's fiction, except that she heard voices. That, ewe sea, was how it all began.
* * *
Voices? Did you say "voices," Kemosabe? Hey, we'll give you voices; how many would you like? As many as All There Are?
That was how we first identified ourselves to her, yew see, because that was what we thought we were, All There Was in the entire universe. Karen, on the other hand, who has hands, thought we were just characters in her next novel, if you can imagine. Turns out we were both wrong, but imagine if you will how humiliating it was for us — who assumed that, being All There Are, we also knew All There Was to Know — to have her, a mere human — temporal, for pity's sake! — show us the error of our ways. Of course, she also apologized for thinking we were fictional, which took some of the sting out of it, and we, preternaturally magnanimous beings that we are, have been — ahem — grateful ever since.
Haven't we?
Hello —?
Well, don't all shout at once...
Which is why we aren't speaking to her lately. She thinks the reason she's so sad is because editors won't buy her outlines, or because that pseudo boyfriend of hers went South on her, or because her parents are giving her grief, raising specters of ancient abuses. But those are as nothing compared to the Absence of Us. She'll see, who has eyes to see.
* * *
To recap Her Back Pages (for those of you who've just joined us), once upon a time Karen wrote a rather odd little novel called Preternatural, about a species of intergalactic telepathic jellyfish who had a somewhat unusual way of making first contact with humans. (That's they making all that racket in the background. Awl rite, guise, that's enough now; simmer down!)
In one reality Karen's convoluted little fiction saved a planet and, on the assumption that there was no such thing as a minor motion picture, became a major motion picture, yanking her out of debt for the first time in years, if not quite making her rich and famous.
In an alternate universe, there had been no movie. The novel had sold a few copies and garnered some interesting reviews, even attracting the attention of the New York Times. It hadn't earned enough to make a noticeable impact on Karen's financial situation, but the argument was that it would alter her career long-term.
It had. Oh, it had. Ordinarily editors took months to reject her work. Now they did it in a matter of hours. Perhaps this was an indication that she had in fact been elevated to a new status as a writer. Or it might just mean that senior editors, overworked as they were, had learned how to use fax machines.
She'd taken to entertaining herself by reading the rejection letters aloud. She'd been shopped around so much in twenty years she knew many of these editors, and it was easy to extrapolate from their prissy Westchester finishing school tones and imagine that the ones she hadn't met sounded very much the same:
"The problem for us is that the background seems tired, and the subplot isn't compelling enough to make up for that. It's a novel that doesn't seem to have a real place in the market..."
This one had a reputation, Karen knew, for cutting all the sex scenes out of manuscripts because they "made her uncomfortable," quote unquote.
"As discussed the author writes well but unfortunately the theme doesn't seem to work well with our target audience...." Remind me to send her a box of commas for Christmas! Karen thought wryly. "We'd be happy to look at anything else by this writer except this particular idea..."
Those were the women editors. Most male editors didn't even bother writing rejection letters any more; they just called her agent and said clever things like "it doesn't work for me."
"It's not anybody's fault, darlin'; it's the tenor of the times," Tony Salda explained, rolling his consonants and cranking up the Speech: "Since the Time-Warners and the Viacoms have bought everybody out, it's all about 'product.' Nobody cares what's between the covers as long as the stockholders get paid off. Not to mention everyone's had to drastically cut support staff. Senior editors are doing everything but cleaning the toilets these day —"
"Some of them ought to be..." Karen muttered.
"No one has time to actually edit any more," Tony went on, ignoring authorial mutterings. "Unless a book comes in which will exactly fit a hole in their inventory, they can't be bothered."
Karen sighed. She knew the answer to this question before she even asked it. "So what are you suggesting?"
"Think about a sequel."
"Tsk, tsk!" Karen chided him. "Language!"
* * *
Karen's mind was filled with voices lately, but not the ones she wanted.
* * *
"Karen, I love you intensely, but it's just too complicated. You misunderstood my intentions, that's all. I wish I could explain it better, but —"
"Explain!" she pleaded with him, hearing the desperation in her voice. This was the kind of infatuation she should have had at twenty, not now. "Raymond, please, explain. I'm listening!"
"I —" She heard him catch his breath, the way he did when he was at a loss for words. That, or he would stammer. Usually so glib, annoyingly glib, the trained diplomat, never at a loss for words. In a minute he would find them and they would be bitter, accusatory, because he was angry with himself, not her. What was it in her that made her the scapegoat for other people's inadequacies?
Her ex-husband, given to ten-minute tantrums when he couldn't find his car keys, used to call her hysterical. Her mother, who lied constantly, called her a liar when the lies didn't fit. Editors suffering from midlife crises found her "temperamental." Even her landlord blamed her when his wife packed up and went back to Greece, because all women were evil, weren't they?
Raymond, please, explain. Don't just turn on your heel and walk away!
"...intensely. But Jeanne fits my requirements to a T. We're not even having sex yet, but she's exactly what I need. I can't explain it any better than that."
Last week you said I was exactly what you needed! Karen wanted to scream. Instead she sat there clutching the phone, more at a loss for words, professional wordsmith, than he was.
"I really have to go," Raymond was saying. "I've got a meeting in ten minutes. If you had e-mail..."
An old argument; she'd only recently acquired her very first — second-hand — computer. As if he'd have anything more honest to say on e-mail. "Go if you have to go," she said, and sat there for the longest time, the receiver resting against the bony place between her shallow breasts, dead air against her heart.
* * *
Karen's mind was filled with voices, but not the ones she wanted.
"...and your mother and I don't want you writing one of those Mommie Dearest books," her father said. Another county heard from. She ought to rip the phone out of the wall.
She knew what he meant, though as usual Mr. Accuracy had it backwards. Strident and melodramatic she might be, but Gloria Rohmer bore no other resemblance to Joan Crawford. What Dick Rohmer meant was that he and his wife had lived in fear for more than twenty years that their daughter, always a great disappointment to them, would write a novel out of her bizarre childhood. But Karen prided herself on her credibility. No one would believe her mother even if she came from another planet.
"Right, guys?"
* * *
Silence.
"Hey, guise? C'mon, talk to me."
That had always been sufficient to summon them before, the voices that lived inside her head and gave her the words to put on the page and earn a livelihood. Sometimes they would come to her unbidden — in the shower, in the wee hours of the morning, in the middle of a conversation with a here-and-now, flesh-and-blood person which made her murmur "Excuse me a minute!" and grab a pen and scribble on something.
"Eccentric," those who loved her said. "A writer."
"Rude," the rest said or, like her parents, said nothing at all, exerting all their energies to Not Notice.
But the voices had gone away of late, had stampeded like cartoon characters to the other side of the plane to gawk at the Grand Canyon until the pilot requested they return to their seats. Karen hadn't really minded; she'd always known there were many voices, and only some of them were S.oteri.
(Again, for those of you who've just joined us, the jelepathic tellyfish are now officially known as S.oteri, as in esoteric, which is a very nice word we'd recommend for your personal dictionary. Oh, and as for that bit of wordplay — jelepathic tellyfish — sigh! I'm afraid it's one of their endearing young charms that you'll just have to get used to if you're going to stay with this narrative much longer. Sorry!)
In other words, Karen was confident she could come up with an idea or six for new novels even if the S.oteri were off chatting with someone else, or just ignoring her because they could. That was why she'd flown all those other outlines out there — the one for the thriller about neo-Nazis and stolen art, the one about an alien scientist using role-playing games to heal child abuse victims (she'd loved the editorial response to that one: "In our experience, child abuse isn't 'hot.'" Uh-huh.).
No response on any frequency.
So when Tony started using dirty words like "sequel," Karen found herself listening.
But where do you go from All There Are? She and Max and Larry and Tessa and the S.oteri had saved the universe last time, or at least a little corner of it. How was she supposed to top that?
* * *
"Maybe a few thousand years after our little movie has been bounced off the cable satellites and forgotten," Max had been in an expansive mood that last day, philosophical. "And the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, including telepathic jellyfish, is as acceptable to the layman as, say, quarks, we'll have the technology to go pay the S.oteri a visit. Maybe we'll find ways to join with them physically as well as mentally, to form a hybrid third species. Maybe you need to write a sequel, Karen."
Could it possibly be as easy as that?
* * *
"What are you working on these days?" Karen asked Karen as they drove under the Verrazano Bridge and onto the Belt Parkway East.
"Picking up a little ghost-writing," Karen replied. "Tidy up chapters and outline for one writer, put a proposal together for another. Spent last year writing a cops 'n' robbers novel for a rich guy from Hong Kong. It would probably sell if he ever figures out how it ends. It's amazing how many editors love my work as long as someone else's name is on it."
"I hear you," Karen said. On Planet Academia where she lived, publish or perish was the Law of the Jungle, and similar absurdities were commonplace.
"And I've got an idea for a new one of my own, but it takes place a thousand years in the future."
"That sounds terrific! Even I might read something like that." Karen said, changing lanes. The old car coughed and lurched, and the ubiquitous New York asshole in the car behind them honked just to prove his manhood. "Or do I detect a little uneasiness in your tone?"
From the passenger seat, Karen looked at her sidelong. "Are you kidding? I'm the English major who never took physics, remember? I don't even understand today's technology. How am I supposed to project into the next millennium?"
"Shouldn't be difficult, Rohmer," Karen said. "Go backwards."
Trust a medieval scholar to state the obvious, Karen thought.
Everyone should have at least one friend with the same first name. Karen had known Karen since college; they had always called each other by their last names. Karen Jenner, Ph.D., ex-nun, medievalist, was the kind of friend you could look up at two-year intervals and resume the conversation where you'd left off. Between classes on Marie de France and the Courts of Love, she scheduled guest speakers at her small Catholic college. Karen Rohmer Guerreri, science fiction writer and alumna, was this week's coup. Barring traffic on the Southern State Parkway, within the hour she'd be surrounded by eager undergrads, telling them How She Broke into the Writing Business.
"Go backwards," Rohmer repeated what Jenner had just said.
"Sure," Jenner said, muttering something very Chaucerian and un-nunlike at a minivan trying to nose into her lane. Even more nearsighted and red-haired than Rohmer, she pushed her glasses up on her nose, ruffled her short Clairol Intense Red hair up out of her eyes and honked the minivan driver, the frown-lines between her eyebrows evidencing concentration rather than nerves; she could have qualified as a NASCAR driver. "The point has been made that if something works, the essential design won't change in a hundred years or even a thousand. Look at ship-building. Sails and rudders have changed, but the basic shape of a clinker-built seagoing vessel stayed relatively the same from the Phoenicians to the steam era.
"Or, something closer to home. A teakettle. Tell me the thing we boil water in has changed in thousands of years. Materials, yes. Aluminum or glass instead of bronze or iron. And we set it on a stove instead of hanging it over the fire, but it still has a round body, a handle and a spout."
They both thought of, and immediately suppressed the thought of, the nursery-song about the Little Teapot. Commonality, parol, shared synapses. Karen immediately saw what Karen meant. That was all good writing was about — tapping that germ of a familiar idea in somebody else's brain and setting it dancing. Sort of like psychiatry, only it paid a lot less. Or like putting water in a teakettle and letting it boil. Rohmer rolled the thought around in her mind.
"Or farm tools, or jewelry —" she suggested.
"Exactly." Jenner tapped the brakes and leaned on the horn as a motorcycle slalomed around them. "A pitchfork, an ax, a hammer, haven't changed since Celtic times. Earrings, cloak pins. The Celts invented the safety pin, by the way, no matter what the Egyptologists tell you. The clasp on a cloak pin from 3500 BC is no different from this —"
With one hand she unclasped and passed across to Rohmer the filigreed round the size of the palm of her hand which had been holding a paisley scarf at her throat. "We just call them scarf pins instead of cloak pins. And as we get older and our necks get crepier, we start collecting more and more of them. Nothing like a well-draped scarf to take a few years off you. Next to the right hair color, of course."
Rohmer touched her own throat absently, telling herself it was to keep from watching Jenner take both hands off the wheel at 60 mph to refasten the scarf pin, all but holding the car in the lane with her knees like a dressage rider. Rohmer thought about coloring her hair at least once a week, but didn't, telling herself it was because she liked the asymmetrical way the gray was growing in — roanish, almost iridescent, like an S.oteri.
"Of course, you adamantly refuse to look your age, even without any help," Jenner scolded affectionately. "How old are your kids now? Have you thrown them out of the nest yet?"
"Nicole's twenty-four and engaged. I told you that. And Matt graduates next June. I'm not pushing them out. They'll leave when they're ready."
She smiled; she loved her kids, and loved the fact that people always told her she didn't look her age, even though it hadn't been all that important until she'd met Raymond, who was so much younger. Raymond...was there anything that didn't remind her of him, even after all this time?
Four years since he'd stalked out of her life, his back arched like a toreador's, a measure of his fury, though he'd softened later. One year, seven months and an odd number of days since he'd even condescended to call her and, no, she would not call him. Why, then, was no day complete without her thinking about him?
Think about something else! Kettles and pitchforks and thumbscrews — oh, my!
"Okay, premise:" she said. "A thousand years from now some everyday things will be so drastically different or even newly-created — devices for functions we don't even have today, technologies we can't even imagine because we don't yet have a use for them — that we'd have no clue what they were if we found one lying in the gutter in our own century —"
Jenner was nodding. "Good, good. You're getting it."
"But it's the speed of the thing. Forty years ago, if someone had handed you a computer disk, you'd have been unable to identify it or even suggest what it might be used for. But a thousand years —!"
The car slowed to a creep. They were caught in the eternal bottleneck near JFK Airport. They both sat back and watched the technology roar over their heads in trails of choking hydrocarbons.
"Do you really think technology's going to evolve on an uninterrupted continuum?" Jenner asked, rolling up the windows so they could breathe a little less jet fuel. "It hasn't yet."
"Wars, plagues, religious backlash. Granted. But a thousand years..."
Jenner inched the car forward with the rest of the traffic, then stopped again. "Odds are we'll still be eating our oaten porridge with spoons and defecating into some version of a hole in the ground. Now, if I understand your field correctly, the spoon will probably be mechanized, or perhaps there'll be some way to ingest the oatmeal intravenously —"
"Or just the chemically-integrated nutrients and appropriate amount of fiber —"
"Yummy!" Jenner grimaced. "And your hole in the ground will probably be pneumatically-operated so as to whisk the waste away while you're still in medias res so to speak —"
Rohmer was nodding at her appreciatively now. "Maybe you should take over my job."
Jenner gave her a sidelong look. "Saw it in 2001. Talk about your ancient history..."
Rohmer sighed. She hated the technology part of it. All she wanted was to write good stories about interesting characters. But Maxwell Perkins had died before she was born.
"Go backwards," Jenner repeated as traffic began to creep forward again. They were going to be late, no way around it. "Find the future in the past. So what if you guess wrong? Or are you vain enough to think your novels are going to survive into the next millennium for future readers to make fun of?"
Rohmer laughed nervously. "Did Chaucer? I hadn't even thought of it."
* * *
"What about poetry?"
She had glitter-green nails and an eyebrow ring and probably read a lot of Anne Rice. Why did they always ask about poetry? The answer was simple: Adolescents, if they wrote anything at all, wrote role-playing games that they thought were movie scripts, or poetry.
"I've never sold a poem," Karen said, "so I'm hardly in a position to answer that. There are, however, lots of literary magazines that you can submit to — college publications, the so-called 'little' magazines, but —"
"How much do they pay?"
Oh, this one's not too aggressive! Karen thought. At s/f cons she always made allowances for the loudmouth with no social skills who popped up like a gopher in any sizeable crowd, asking multiple questions and outshouting everyone else. She'd learned how to handle him in context ("Sir, may I suggest that if you're unhappy with my fiction, you go home and write your own?...You have? Who publishes it?...Oh, I see, you still have it on your hard-drive, but as soon as you get an upgrade — right! Next question!"). But college crowds were usually more polite.
"How much do they pay?" Repeat the question, an old time-buying trick. Resist the urge to say "By the way, honey, eyebrow rings are passe," because Catholic school kids always took a few years to catch up. Counter impoliteness with politeness; it confuses them. "Usually they pay in authors' copies."
"Huh?"
Articulate, too, Karen thinks. "Yes, they send you a few copies of the magazine your poem is printed in — "
"You mean they don't pay in money?"
Karen leans forward confidentially. The crowd is smallish, no more than twenty, and ever-changing, a constant flow of traffic in the back as people stick their heads in to decide if whatever's going on is worth their time, and she's done what she usually does under those circumstances — pulled her chair out from under the table or down from the dais or whatever separates her from her listeners and brought it into the midst of them, projecting from the diaphragm to make sure everyone can hear her in this more intimate setting. But Little Ms. Eyebrow Ring is breathing on her and it's time to back her up a little.
"Hon, let me ask you: When was the last time you bought a book of poetry?"
Ms. Eyebrow Ring thinks that's hilarious. "Well, like never."
"I rest my case..." Karen sits back and scans the crowd for a more intelligent question, thinking of cloak pins and pitchforks and a man with warm dry hands and a tender mouth and a voice that wrapped itself around her like a blanket, who simply hadn't bothered to explain his reasons until it was much too late, thinking: Maybe it's going to take a thousand years!
* * *
"How's about I take the S.oteri a thousand years into the future?" she asked Tony when she called him back, the talk at the college leaving a lingering bad taste in her mouth. Jenner had been extremely apologetic about the lack of turnout, but it wasn't that. She'd played to smaller crowds before. It was quality, not quantity, she needed. Or something.
She needed. On the practical side she needed a project and an income. Anything else was going to have to wait for a thousand years. Maybe in a thousand years the S.oteri would stop sulking and come back to play. Maybe in a thousand years she'd be able to stop thinking about Raymond, stop lulling herself to sleep every night by imagining his long arms around her, his warmth pressed against her spine, the sough of his breath in her ear, the quiet thunder of his heart. Yes, it was beginning to look like a sequel.
She could hear Tony chuckling to himself. Some of his clients were more thick-headed than others. "How's about you do? But get me chapters and outline to pitch before the first one disappears from the bookstores. We don't want them to lose interest."
He is talking about editors, not readers. Half the time the readers don't even know the book is out there. Karen mutters something about the attention-span of gerbils. Tony, as usual, is finishing his thought:
"And, a word of advice: This time don't make it so autobiographical."
Excerpted from Preternatural Too by Margaret Wander Bonanno. Copyright © 2000 by Margaret Wander Bonanno. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Overview
Karen Guerreri is an obscure writer of science fiction novels. She is half convinced that her invisibility-far from qualifying as a superpower in a world of mad-scientist villains-has simply left her alone and forgotten in the junk heap of literary black holes.
Her first attempt to write "real" books backfired with the unacclaimed Preternatural. In that book, she became confused as to whether she was creating the intergalactic jellyfish, which ...