Kage Baker assigned me all the IT tasks in our household. And the garbage, and the baking. She did the rest of the cooking, the beds and stubborn stains. Plumbing and other utility disasters were mine; bugs and spiders were hers. Most everything else we shared, on the basis of who was closest and could reach it.

Today was an IT day for me. I finally got Fry’s Electronics to tell me what the ransom was, and sprang my poor CPU from their fiendish service department. Maybe they aren’t entirely fiends; they did a good repair job – they just have a demonic disinterest in communicating in any known language, and I had no handy oracle for translation. I’d ask what the problem was; they’d tell me how long it would take (they lied); I’d ask when it would be ready, and they would give me the store hours. I was raving by the time I picked it up today.

Of course, the general atmosphere of the Burbank Fry’s is very condusive to dementia. It is a huge warehouse out in the industrial section of Burbank, with a life-sized model of a UFO crashed into the front wall. The saucer juts proudly over the Handicapped section of the parking lot, glittering balefully. Inside, giant atomic ants (from Them) and robots and Storm Troopers and Sith Lords and little green aliens are lurking all over the place; also, a nice assortment of US military people shooting desperately from dubious redoubts amid the coaxial cables. The in-house cafeteria is a drive in – really, the booths are actually cars – and the check out area is a diner, complete with interesting adverts for Blue Plate specials that don’t exist and a world-class selection of snacks and candy, which do. Only place I know where I can always find peppermint bark.

I love the Burbank Fry’s.

I usually buy parts and do my own repairs, but I’d never replaced a motherboard before: I chickened out. It took them 3 weeks, during which time I stole the Buke back from poor Kimberly (who was using it in her corner of the couch to do her teacher homework and play a little Plants Vs. Zombies) and have picked desperately at the half-sized keys for 21 days, now. But tonight – ah, tonight! I have my CPU back, my dear out-sized flat screen is back in business, I have a full-sized keyboard and all is well!

I spent a happy 20 minutes under my desk putting the system all back together this afternoon. The little black cat insisted on helping me, which was was soft and purry but not really very useful; she has an unfortunate tendency to affectionately lick the monitor screen. A UCB jack had gotten bent, I think by a galloping Corgi, and I had to sculpt it back into true free-hand, with a screw-driver. And I had to clear a jam in the printer, which I’d been unable to access the programs for until I got the CPU back – it suffers unusual stress, due to the little black cat sleeping in it when I am not around to notice; then, of course, it promptly ran out of ink … but not before I was at least sure it was working again.

You can accumulate a lot of small problems when your computer system sits around in a coma for three weeks. Some of them meow. Found a few Good & Plenties in odd places, too, and removed them – I’m not sure of the conductivity of liquorice.

Anyway, that’s why I am writing late and not very coherently of my day. Kage would have carefully ignored all my steaming and cursing and carrying on, had she been here; quietly read a little, watched some cartoons, made me a splendid hot dinner for that moment when I got us re-connected to the aether … and lo! Re-connected we are!

Normality, or what passes for it around here, resumes on the morrow.

Kage Baker loved Shakespeare, and England, and archeology, and heroes and sailors. She also loved staying warm, and was a devout believer in instant cocooning in the face on inclement temperature – which, for her, was anything below 70 degrees for more than half an hour at a time.

It’s a cold, grey, wet day here in Los Angeles. The first autumn rain fell this morning; the skies have refused to clear, and though the wind has dried the streets somewhat, it’s a chilly wind. It’s the kind that bites when you meet it – a nasty little terrier of a wind. Of course, the rain may be all we see for the next 6 months; you never know around here. On the other hand, it may rain until next May Day (it’s done that, too, some years) and in the meantime everything is damp and evil.

I’ve tried to spend the day in bed, but it got boring. Except for the little black cat, who keeps going outside and getting icy cold and wet, and then coming back in to shelter under the covers – which is exciting but unpleasant. So I’ve been desultorily wandering around on the Net, trying to find something to engage my interest, my creativity or at least my amusement …

Instead, I realized that today is St. Crispin’s Day! Shakespeare’s speech for Henry 5th on this day is one of the best, most rousing and beautiful hymns to desperate courage ever written. It is one of my private prayers, my reminders to not give up – whether in Lawrence Olivier’s voice or Kenneth Branagh’s, or in the various voices in which I have heard it performed at Renaissance Faires – it is one of the ultimate hero’s speeches. It burns, it sings; it makes us immortal to hear it and imagine we, too, might aspire to such heights and glories.

Appropriately enough, today I also found an article describing a marine archeology team who thinks they are about to find the encoffined body of Francis Drake.(http://tinyurl.com/3tapyya)

Captain Sir Francis Drake! Hero of England’s victory over the Spanish Armada; explorer, privateer, pirate, unflappable bowls-player … the patron hero of the English Navy, Elizabeth 1st’s private purveyor of pearls, gold and emeralds. Not to mention international scandal.

He died aboard ship, off the coast of Panama, and his crew reportedly dressed him in full armour and slid him into the sea in a lead-lined coffin. His ships were found some time ago, and now the team thinks they are close to finding the coffin itself. As Sir Henry Newbolt famously asked, “Capten, art tha sleeping there below?” Not much longer, comes the answer – instead, that stalwart sailor may be on his way home to Devon at last.

How nice, upon St. Crispin’s Day, to learn that a hero long-lost may someday soon come home! It warms the grey day. It would have all been a treasure hunt for Kage, the perfect search and delight mission for a day like this.

And just to delight the rest of you as well, Dear Readers, here is the splendid St. Crispin’s Day speech from William Shakespeare’s (not Edward DeVere or the Earl of Southampton)  Henry 5th. Enjoy, in the heroic male voice of your choice – and if you don’t have one of those available, I suggest you strike an appropriate pose and say it out loud yourself:

WESTMORELAND. O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

KING. What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Kage Baker’s favourite season was undoubtedly summer – for sheer personal pleasure, for warmth and freedom and endless hours of light. But she had special remembrances for all seasons, and took their progression and suitable rituals quite seriously. It was for mood and ambience, you know? You have to decorate properly to keep the seasons on track, especially in California.

Of course, non-Californians (and the less-observant emigrees) will claim California doesn’t have seasons. Or, worse, has purely apocalyptic ones like Fire, Wind, Flood and Mud. This is the rankest calumny to the native attuned to the local seasons. Hell, it doesn’t snow in Honolulu, either, but no one claims winter doesn’t come. In Australia they run the whole show upside down, but no one claims they don’t have seasons, or label them Wildfire, Flood, Poisonous Spiders and Salt-water Crocodiles.

Kage liked autumn – for the colours in the deciduous trees (the California broad-leafed maple is every bit as lovely as the East Coast trees), the fogs and cool winds, and especially the escalating hysteria of Halloween. In a house with lots of kids, Halloween lasts two weeks, at least; preparation, feuds over who got to be what, acquiring  the candy, hiding the candy, hunting and illegally eating the candy; rehearsals and decoration. And we always had lots of kids in the house. By the time the youngest were outgrowing Trick-or -Treat, the eldest were breeding their own.

So Kage had a special fondness for Halloween, as the linchpin of Autumn. And then there was the fact that she and I (all the girls, in fact) were conceived around this time. We had to be, we were all born in June and July. So while Kage’s heart belonged first to the summer sun, the fall fogs were second on her list of faves.

Things change so interestingly in the fall.

Fall is, hands down, my favourite season. Maybe because of the weather cooling down, or the joys of Halloween, or the lengthening nights; maybe the cellular memory of beginning that cellular memory when the weather was just like this. Family legend says that I was conceived after a Halloween party at a brewery, beside what is now the I-5 Freeway, that road of mystery – the brewery is still there, though it’s hard to tell whether it is still producing or being considered for lofts. But it’s there, vast and Ghormangastian in its brick and lead-paned glory, and I drive by it twice a day getting the nephew to and from CSULA.

I was apparently born to sell beer. And I was reportedly conceived in the fogs of autumn and hot barley mash, coiling into the chill air of Los Angeles on an October night.

Kage loved that family story. She said it was a par with Sir John Falstaff being conceived in the groin of the Cern Abbas Giant. It’s why she made my character at Faires an InnKeeper, why I still run the Green Man Parlour at Dickens Fair, and the main reason Kage made me a tavern keeper-character in several of her books.

I think of that with fond nostalgia as I speed past the brewery these mornings and evenings. There between the wooded hills around Downtown and an especially lively stretch of the LA River – full of birds and fish and cotton wood trees; parts of it are real, you know – stands the beer factory responsible for … well, me.

And responsible, too, by the romance with which she endowed it, for the careful shaping of my character undertaken by Kage through thousands of written words.

She never quits.

Kage Baker lived on colour. She associated everything with a colour of its own; she assigned temperments, tastes, scents, weather, and moods with specific colours. There were “green bottle dawns” and “blue days” and “saffron black nights”. She understood Homer’s wine dark sea perfectly, and never mind that scholarly nonsense about all the ancient Greeks being colour-blind.

Her own art was usually in water colours and inks, because they seemed like cleaner hues to her – oils and acrylics, she said, were lumpy. Literally lumpy; texture, for Kage, had no business superseding colour in the eye of the beholder, so the ability pile one paint on another in a 3-dimensional way narked her,

She admired Van Gogh’s  desperate passion, that often led him to lay paint on canvas with his hands, too hurried and determined to use a brush. But it took the singularity of a Van Gogh to do that sort of thing and get away with it. Kage was sure that if Vincent had found a way to layer on water colours with his hands, he’d have used that more translucent medium for his art.

She did. I’ve watched her paint skies and water with a single finger, leading one colour through another more than painting them, weaving them together on the page. Persuading the blends of hue. She finally turned to words more than paint because they were more supple, more pliable, than even her beloved inks.

She loved strong colours – scarlet, gold, emerald. Jewel tones, though paint and fabric can rarely actually display the glassy perfection of the colours in gems. Stained glass enthralled her; so did neon, coloured candle cups, variegated lights … Had Kage been able to dress in glass or light, she would have.

Red-haired and paper-pale, she wore greens and blues a lot – but, unlike many redheads, she could get away with wine-reds and scarlets without looking either flushed or pallid. Momma dressed her in oranges and golds and tropical pinks when she was little – she saw the possibilities, and – also being a painter – indulged them in how she dressed Kage.

In fact, with so many kids to dress and accouter, Momma tended to assign a particular colour to each kid and dress them automatically in that spectrum. It saved some time and thought. Kage’s primary colour, rather than the green one would expect for a redhead, was scarlet. Momma often slid that into pink when Kage was little – it’s the girl colour, after all – but until well into her maturity, Kage hated pink. There were some epic battles.

It was one of the things we agreed on. I do not like pink either. Left to my own devices, I wear blue and grey and black. But everyone who buys me clothes – which has mostly been my sisters, as my native taste is notoriously wretched -buys me pink. Even Kage did it, because the colours looked “purer” on me … but for years and years, she wouldn’t wear it herself.

When she discovered Hawaiian shirts, all that changed. Suddenly pink came in a more heated palette that she quite liked – island sunsets, tropical flowers, drinks made with grenadine. Her first capitulation was a major event – a friend’s wedding, to which Kage wore a pink tuxedo, pink high-tops with gold laces, and a huge gold bow on the end of her braid. It was stunning, too.

Her favourite convention outfits were severe blazers – I want to look like Agent Scully’s eccentric aunt, she explained – over her pinkest Hawaiian shirts. All the girly colours Momma had fought helplessly to get her to wear, Kage finally embraced in her 30’s and 40’s. Teal silk. Pink linen.

I just found a video on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9dqJRyk0YM&feature=player_embedded) that proves pink does not exist. Kage would have been fascinated. Evidently what we interpret as pink is 1) a blend of blue and red; and 2) a subtle misfire in our optic perception. What we are really seeing is “the absence of green”, which is so hilariously metaphysical that Kage would have laughed out loud with delight.

She wouldn’t have believed it, though. She’d have regarded it as a trick, an optical illusion. The limitations of human eyesight, in her opinion, do not trump the realities of light and colour. Pink IS. Any colour you can’t see is your own problem.

But she would have been so pleased to say that she wasn’t wearing pink – she was wearing “the absence of green”.

Man, that is an ultimate colour.

Kage Baker finally has a Best Of compilation coming out from Subterranean Press – 489 pages of assorted goodness, several novellas and lots of short stories.

The stories range from her very first sale, “Noble Mold”, which appeared in Asimov’s Magazine through the good graces of the esteemed Gardner Dozois; to a deliciously peculiar little romance called “The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park” – which she wrote about the time her cancer was diagnosed, and appeared in a pretentious little hipster mag that wanted to buy something “really literary”. They didn’t know what to make of it, but you, Dear Readers, will.

I just got the uncorrected bound proofs copies. The finished product will be available from Subterranean (www.subterraneanpress.com) and also via Ingram (www.ingrambook.com), and Baker and Taylor (www.baker-taylor.com). No idea yet on price, but I feel it incumbent upon me to note that Subterranean Press volumes tend to be very nice but also pretty pricey.

It’s a lovely collection, though. It really is. I tried to make sure there was a good selection of favourites, as well as a nice number of stories that only got published once.

Also – I’m working on the proofs for Nell Gwynne II, which should be out in a few months. I am informed that the illustrations are in the works even as we speak. Illustrations! I am thrilled.

Aside from that all that nice news, though, I am walking-into-the-walls sleepy – them old narcolepsies got me, kids. I’m going to perk up the blood sugar with some lemon meringue pie and then go back to sleep.

Have a good weekend, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker would have called for early closing tonight. I’m going to do that, too.

Saw the oncologist this afternoon, for another attempt at a biopsy. Very nice doctor, deft and careful and considerate – she was, however, defeated by the peculiarities of my personal architecture.

Dr. R: It won’t be comfortable, but it won’t hurt as much.

Me: (willing to believe) Cool.

Dr. R: And I’ll be careful, so you probably won’t bleed at all.

Me: Yes, I will.

Begin procedure, count to 10 or so – not too bad, the doctor really is good at what she does. Then she says Uh-oh – which is nothing you  ever want a doctor to say – and I can tell right away it’s gonna be another mop job.

Much cleaning and patching later, the doctor is conferring  sharply with her procedures clerk about how soon they can schedule surgery. So, when my cardiologist clears me, I’ll probably be in hospital sometime week after next to settle this. Which is the good news.

The bad news is that there is still considerably mystery as to what exactly is wrong with me – but they’re closing in on the culprit. Doctors are always advised that when you hear hoofbeats, you should expect horses: zebras are very rare, and odds are it’s just old Dobbin racing down the lane toward you. But keep your mind open, because sometimes – sometimes – the zebras are loose.

My problem is that the approaching herd is mostly horses.  Probably. But there’s a small zebra in there as well; and they haven’t got his license plate yet.

But tonight I am tired and sore and light-headed. So I’m going to bed, Dear Readers.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Kage Baker was a keen observer of history. She said there was nothing quite as true as the statement Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it – although, in her grimmer moments, she also said that whether you learned anything or not was not that much help. History tended to go round and round in repeatable (and inevitably repeated) cycles anyway.

Skirt lengths go up and down, the amount of leg and bosom going in and out like the phases of the moon; the genders trade sides on who gets to wear bright colours, who has to go veiled, whose basic garment is the source of all fashion. (Don’t believe it? Skirts have been the yardstick much more often than breeches.) Fads in government are no more lasting than fads in music, and each one comes and goes constantly. Somewhere in the world, percussion and volume are always in fashion; somewhere else, anarchy, monarchy, tribalism and democracy trade partners in a constant pas de deux.

Though more of the time it’s more like a clumsy do si do: politics is seldom elegant. There’s an awful lot of flat-footed boot-stomping involved. It’s like one of those kindergarten dances where half the corps de ballet is scared to death and other half is looped on sugar. Or a country dance where people are shouting “Hay left! Hay left! Your other left!”

And as soon as this batch of dancers learns left from right and the band identifies the beat – a huge flock of newbies shows and up and you all have to start over.

One of the things that did comfort Kage, though, was that certain processes have apparently inevitable ends. Life will find a way; so will justice, and in both cases it often takes a generation for change to show. The classical sentiment  referenced in today’s title is a good example of that.  For those of you who did not take Latin (what do they teach in school these days? Tut tut harumph …)  it means Thus will death always come to tyrants.

This is because even tyrants die. All politicians are disposable; tyrants more than most. Any lifespan is unnaturally long for a tyrant, and most die of the violence they propagated – not enough of them, but lots.

This has been a pretty good harvest year for that kind of action. Today, it appears one of the bigger nuts finally fell off the tree. Moamar Ghaddafi , the fashion-and-spelling-impaired dictator of Libya, has been killed.

The most comprehensive reports I have seen so far are from the BBC. It appears that, while fleeing for the border in a mercenary convoy,Ghaddafi’s party was strafed by jets. It is assumed at this time they were NATO. Some of the party scarpered for a nearby sewer outlet, carrying a wounded Ghaddafi; from whence they were extracted by locals, loaded in a truck and whisked off to the nearest city – Ghaddafi’s own birthplace, Surt. He is reported to have “died from his wounds after capture”. At least one account says he was last seen alive being pulled from the back of a truck by an angry mob …

How … classical. How apt. How much classier than his usual behaviour. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Nothing so became him like his ending, and all that; mostly because he has, yes, finally ended.

What goes around, comes around, Kage would have said approvingly. Indeed to God.

Update: I have, since posting this, seen a video taken by camera phone of the finale in Surt. A man who certainly appears to be Ghaddafi, wounded, and still alive is pulled from the bed of a pickup truck. The hands of the mob hustle him roughly off like a specimen to be mounted, until all the arms and hands and shouting faces close over him. It’s blood chilling.

Kage Baker, as all you Dear Readers know by now, loved Halloween. She loved the build-up, she loved the ancillary activities, she loved the deep philosophical questions of what to be that year. Even in those years where she spent most of her life in a costume, deciding what to wear at Halloween was a profound and engaging question.

She liked to look … cool.

However, since she really preferred to be invisible at all times, she usually contented herself with large, attention-diverting props. If  the audience’s attention was distracted by the cloak, the single string of glowing pearls, the head-sized gourd tucked underneath her arm or the martini glass wired to hover invisibly beside her ,,, well, then, Kage could step back and be  disguised as the background to the special effect.

Very subtle costuming. She was so clever that way.

Frequently, she engineered me to be the special effect. I could be, essentially, wound up and let loose to scamper along the sidewalk, distracting everyone. When she began to go to science fiction conventions, I hovered at her side, obsequiously omnipresent: checked schedules, made notes, hustled her away when an energy vampire cornered her and she gave me the SOS  signal. Her clothes were chosen as distractions to the audience – hence the multiplicity of Hawaiian shirts. Also, she did love them …. but they and I were part of her overall mask. All for coolness!

Few people realized that they were most likely to meet Kage without a disguise when they talked to her online. Behind the obscurity of the aether, she felt quite relaxed and safe; she let her hair down, as it were (which was actually kind of dangerous, with her hair …) and relaxed. Her correspondents saw her more intimately than most of the people she met at conventions.

Her last Halloween we spent at the World Fantasy Convention. We were working our up North – after the Convention, it was off to Santa Rosa to stay with generous friends, and the first weekend of rehearsals for Dickens Fair. Then her surgery was due,  in San Francisco.

Kage had a lot of fun being pushed round the WFC in her wheelchair, a bag of chocolates in her lap and me and Neassa being her Amazon guard … we bumped into furniture and ran into walls, and she could hold court wherever she wanted. She claimed her Halloween costume was a cross between FDR and Miss Haversham.

I got to be Igor the Faithful Semi-human Assistant a lot – fun, except it’s hard to push a wheelchair when you’re trying to lurch at the same time. There was much giggling … Neassa kept leaking Hershey’s Kisses, which she habitually keeps in her purse at all times.

I’ve been masquerading since then as a modest middle-aged lady. I needed the rest, but it’s gotten boring. But with Halloween posturing on the horizon, and Samhain being the Celtic New Year and all … I think I need a new mask. Time to decide what I want to be for the next year.

Probably time to fasten that writer face a little more firmly over my own – I just got the proofs for Nell Gwynne II, so that is certainly approaching reality. And I did 50,000 words on a book in last November’s Novel In A Month contest, which is pretty much half a novel – I intend to write the other half this November. And there are those scraps of stories that you all have been kind enough to encourage …

Yeah. The writer mask. With the feathers and rhinestones and mirrored eyeholes.

That’ll be cool.

Kage Baker knew how to get me out of bad moods. She knew when to be stern, when to ignore me, when to play the clown. If you think her writing was funny, you should have seen her inventing little dialogues with the parrot to get me out of the sodden brooding melancholies …

I’m in a wretched mood today – angry, uncomfortable, sad, embittered. It’s probably hormonal or something, as my body betrays its own timetable and pumps gallons of hormones I’m no longer using into my bloodstream … the very worst part of post-menopausal lady problems is that you only get the bad parts repeated.

I’ve rather enjoyed the results of menopause per se. The ebbing of the irrational tides has been wonderful – not so much a decrease in passion for life, just a more measured pace of appetites and urges. It’s rather like late childhood again – that point when you’ve learned some stuff and the world is fascinating and your brain has kicked into high gear, but things are clear and cool and accessible.

Of course, then the fever of puberty sets in, and you spend the next 40 years trying to run a command center full of smoke: screaming people running everywhere, flames spurting from the machinery, occasional bacchanalias and conga lines coming through from God knows where. It’s like trying to run the bridge of the Enterprise on a really bad day.

That’s why menopause is so nice. The hysteria goes away. You can reason again. The riot on the lower decks … falls silent.

Unless it doesn’t. Then, without warning, all those chemical alarums and excursions reappear to make you craaazzyy. Moods. Sulks. An assortment of bipolar behaviours in dark, milk, smooth center and crunchy. Even cramps and zits, and believe me – re-discovering acne because your endometrium has gone haywire is not even the least of your worries.

I mean, yes, I know there’s surgery in my future (and another biopsy this Friday, blecchh) – but do I have to face it with a pimple on my nose? I can see that damned pimple, so it bothers me more than the stuff I know is going wrong inside – at least that isn’t making me look bad.

Oh, yeah -you get real petty again, when that damned hormonal tide resumes. Menopause, I have come to believe, is the Goddess’ gift after a lifetime of frenzied fertility. I really resent having that peacefulness torn away. It makes me mean. And Kage isn’t here to save the world or me from my moods. I really miss her …

At least when you survive puberty, there’s a reward. You’ve got adulthood ahead of you, decades that look like eternity to a brain barely 20 years old. And even if your brain is stupid – and at 20, most of our brains are – your body knows you’ve made it to the final round in that Great Breeding Lottery. You may get to reproduce! And even if you don’t manage the prize, there will be sex. Pretty good deal.

Now … jeez, what a paucity of reward there is. If I survive this latest disaster, what do I get? I get to live longer – already past the point where it’s pleasant. I’m not young or strong anymore, my friends are dying, I’ve got a freaking pimple – and the prize for getting past this will be an extra 20 years of what I already don’t like?

Well, blow this for a game of Barbies. I never liked Barbies anyway. I only had one, and I dissected her to see how her joints worked.

I’m gonna go take a nap, because I’m old. When I wake up, I think I’ll read a Kage Baker story. If anyone can cheer me up, it’s Kage.

Kage Baker became fascinated with other worlds rather late in life. Real worlds, anyway; she was a devotee of imaginary worlds from an early age. Whole, entire, breathing worlds – that was what she liked. Oz, Narnia, the Summer Lands; Erl and Gormanghast.

The worlds of science fiction didn’t interest her that much, because they were not matchable to their real counterparts. It was permissible, Kage felt, to outline the geography of Faerieland or Hell, because you were giving definition to a construction of gauze and fantasy to begin with. But if you were talking about what Venus and Mars and the moons of Jupiter looked like, you needed to reference the real things. Anything less was cheating.

Of course, for most of the history of the genre, it wasn’t possible to match up the geography of alien worlds with the imaginings of poets: no one knew what the geography was. Even the two closest bodies – Mars and our own moon – where kept shrouded in mystery for decades by the limitations of lens quality.

The shadows and bright plains of the Moon we now know to be lava flows, ejecta from meteors, or the silky dust of 5 billion year old rocks decaying under impacts and the solar wind. But early astronomers initially described vast seas and thickly wooded plateaus, confused by the thick ripples of our own atmosphere and the crude glass of their telescopes. Mars was endowed with canals, locks and channels, towering cities – all by virtue of a mistranslation from Italian, and one amateur’s short sightedness through a home-made lens.

Small wonder Kage disdained the worlds of science fiction.

As soon as real pictures began to arrive though – she was caught. One of the greatest thrills of her life was to sit at her computer and look at the actual, living surfaces of other worlds. Mars immediately fascinated her – never mind the lack of tharks or dune-schooners, Kage could watch the pink whirlwinds dance across the sands for hours. Mars was real.

When Saturn’s moon Titan began to come under the purview of the Cassini probe, she was thrilled. The brief visions sent back from Huygens, in its first-and-only landing on Titan, had her dancing around the living room, shouting with glee. Why? Because it landed on a tidal mudflat, and Kage could recognize it. The wet, rocky shore where it set down looked exactly like the beach two blocks from our house. Mud, rocks, puddles, the sheen of moisture and the dull matte finish of puddles: a littoral landscape, 750 million miles from Pismo Beach.

Now that was the thrill of an alien world! It was real. It wasn’t fanciful, it wasn’t fantastic – but the fact that mud and rocks and tides could look the same on different worlds utterly charmed Kage. She understood completely that the rain was methane and the puddles contained ethanol, and oxygen was likely a handy metallic ice – those, she said, were just details. The miracle was that there was one best way to build a sea shore, and there it was: Real. Recognizable. A living world.

The little bit of moving pictures that valiant Huygens managed to send back to Earth wasn’t much. But still photos, in a dozen exotic lights and wavelengths, have continued to be broadcast from Cassini as it loops over and over through Saturn’s satellite system. Now the details are beginning to yield to analysis, and the overall picture is coming clearer. See here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44861704/ns/technology_and_science-space

“Surprising Earth-like features” it says. What that means, is: Titan is shaped like Earth. It appears there is one best way to build a world, too – at least, one that has rocks and dirt and flowing liquids. There is one best way to make sure a river system drains its lakes properly, one best way for falling liquid and blowing gasses to erode cliffs. There is one best way for ripples to form on a soft bed of mud, and it’s just as pretty when the wavelets are CH4 as when they are H2O.

Kage knew that was an alien beach the moment she saw it. She’d be dancing her triumph dance again, now, if she could see this.

C’mere, Harry. Time to dance!

Beach On Titan