Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker advocated pizza as the meal of choice for Lammas: which today, August 1st, is generally accepted to be. Happy and profitable Lammas to all of you!

Pizza was the closest Kage could come up with for a sun-wheel image, and it also fulfills most of the qualifications for a Loaf-Mass meal. I mean, you can screw around with the sauce and the toppings, but if you leave off that bread dough crust, you don’t have pizza – all you have is a feral stew.

She also liked a good copper beer to celebrate, though my perennial suggestion of whiskey chasers was well-received as well. Grain, that was the main emphasis. One of the many, many things Lammas celebrates is grain – the harvest thereof, and the promise of eating something through the winter and getting a new crop in the ground come spring.

It’s a hopeful holiday, Lammas. Bonfires are always fun, and staying up late with food and drink in the summer night – dancing, running, praising the good gods that give us so much to enjoy in this little world. Sometimes a few early Perseids will show up, though the majority of that glorious meteor shower won’t arrive for another fortnight.

The first sliver of a new moon will be visible tonight, a slender brooch of pearl above the sunset. In hot weather like this, one can often see the old moon in the new moon’s arms, as well – the phantom maria stretched like a figured veil between the horns of the new crescent, revealed before their proper time by the reflection of sleeping sunlight. Kage loved that phase of the moon best of all.

Elsewhere …  well, it’s an especially rotten Monday for me. Frankly, Dear Readers, I am depressed. Discouraged. I’d crawl under the bed, except I have a captain’s bed with no underneath available for hiding …  My car battery is dead, and the resuscitation process has revealed that my alternator is on its way out, as well. My limbs are inflating in the heat; my feet are rising like cheap frozen bread dough and are both uncomfortable and repulsive. I can’t get any rings on or off because my fingers have metamorphosed into kielbasa.

The news from the world in general simply sucks: more ugliness and hate spreading out from the mass murders in Norway. The US Congress has lost its aggregate mind up its aggregate rectum. Africa is drowning in so much blood no one even bothers to report it anymore. China, not sated with its fake Apple stores, is now opening fake Ikea stores as well. What does it say about the once-Celestial Empire that they view copying mass-produced Scandinavian furniture as a cultural advance? The mandate of heaven now comes ready to assemble …

Grain. The cycle of life, the Green God always rising and falling for our salvation, your basic, beloved vegetative deity leaping up with open arms to welcome us to joy and fulfillment! That is Lammas!

John Barlecorn is king of all the fields, and is standing tall and golden in his kingdom today. He is ready to give his life, as always, to the thirst and hunger of the world. And the world looks at his holiday gift and sniffs, “I’m gluten-intolerant, you know.”

Kage Baker was big on lists. She loved the idea – both philosophical and neurological – of “permanent portable memory.”

That’s often put forward as one the real paradigms of human advancement, the concept of maintaining memories outside of our heads and in permanent form .Books, scrolls, clay and wax blocks, reindeer shoulder blades recording the days between someone’s menstrual periods – man, I bet that was  been an important one!

It’s what lets everyone remember Gramma’s beer recipe, and the stories of the gods, and whose great-grandparents were related. It prevents bad cooking, culture loss and inbred babies. It assures history – hell, it creates history, as one can argue that history unrecalled in not really history, just blips in the local quantum state that have spread out in undifferentiated ripples. It takes recorded lore to tell us why it’s vital that we all wear red ribbons in our hair, and should bash the hell out of those impious buggers wearing blue ones.

It’s all rather New Age fuzziness, described so glibly, but it really does matter. Permanent portable memories have given us paintings on cave walls, libraries, king lists, incontrovertible tax records, the revealed word of Mumbo Jumbo, God of the Jungle; or whoever is really running this show. Most of the study of the past consists of careful examination of someone else’s lists. If you do dig up something original, then you make the best lists about it that you can and everyone studies those.

We don’t keep our memories entirely in our heads. It’s why they are so huge and last so long (the memories, I mean. But also the heads …) It’s how we read minds, time travel, walk through walls. It is one of THE Great Magics of our species. Mine, anyway. I’m not arbitrarily assigning species to anyone else. But there is plenty of evidence that other clever animals around here pass on memories verbally to their kids, as well. That means the dolphin version of Hildegard of Bingen doesn’t have to re-invent that nose-protecting sponge technology every generation; the unique technique used by Australian bottlenosed dolphins while foraging on overly-crunchy sea floors. And, BTW, it is used almost exclusively by females, and is passed on from mother to daughter … like the routes elephant matriarchs use between water sources.

Among humans, everyone makes lists and passes them on. “How To” is the largest section in our cultural library. And Kage loved to pore over the multitudinous volumes on the shelves, committing someone else’s memory to her own and getting a glimpse of what mattered one day 10,000 miles and 10,000 years away. If she didn’t have time to read as much as she wanted to, she assigned it to me and then we’d brainstorm over it – trading details of the evolution of knitting with ways to preserve paper, or stone-knapping for how to cook eels.

If you didn’t learn enough stuff at your mother’s knee, I strongly recommend your sister’s dining room table. Believe me, it works.

I wandered into this meditation while making my morning pilgrimage through the groves of the Internet. First thing in the morning is when I check science sites, weird news aggregators, library indices and Tables of Contents. Coffee and cold pizza and plums to hand, I wander the brink of the Pierian Spring and read the graffiti left there overnight; I learn a lot, doing that every day, and it keeps the doors of my mind lubricated and swinging, too. Very useful habit, and it gives one something to do while eating breakfast.

It’s not a day for moving around much, here. The unnatural humidity has once again risen over Los Angeles, and we are covered in an invisible warm sea. The wind is rising, though, and by sunset my brain will dry out enough for some real activity; until then, I’m amusing myself by looking over the shiny pebbles in that fabled Spring and meditating on the strange things we commit to immortality:

The Hubble Telescope has found a giant buckyball in space. At the same time, the US Congress has inexplicably (but not too surprisingly) cancelled the funds for Hubble’s upgraded successor. Neanderthals probably wore feathers. Some Chinese archeologist is claiming Archeopteryx was not a bird, but he’s got a good red-blooded Chinese critter that is. Horses don’t have the genes for albinism. Younger women have more children than old ones.

Astonishing stuff. Sometimes what is astonishing it that someone thought it was news in the first place, but that’s all right. No knowledge is useless, and we ought to examine our racial memory to check out what’s been added to it from time to time. Muggy summer Sunday are great for that.

I’m going off to eat more plums, and check out a report that someone has found a way to force squirrels to hibernate. Sounds like a great storage idea to me.

Tomorrow: The Silly Season Is Upon Us

Kage Baker loved the internet for the opportunity it gave her to talk to people on her own terms. She didn’t blog, because she didn’t feel she had the time – but she answered every email she received, she participated in online forums, she gave interviews. And, as she said, every book was another lecture; and the Q & A period had no expiration date. If a reader had a question, ever, it got answered.

But for a lady who didn’t like eye contact, or being touched; whose privacy zone was half a mile wide; whose voice was low and who really considered invisibility the most elegant of fashion choices – the aether of the Interwebs was the ideal medium for social intercourse. Many a friend who would have found it well-nigh impossible to engage her in conversation in an open room discovered that – secure in her electronic zenana – Kage was the the wittiest, most intimate and most open of companions.

She enjoyed startling questioners. It’s why, on being asked the inevitable “Who are your favourite writers?” she always replied, “Dead white guys.” Mind you, it was mostly true, as well – she had a classical education, and few of her personal favourites had been born in the 20th century. But she also enjoyed the wide eyes her statement produced. She enjoyed it even more when someone told her it was politically incorrect – as a quarter-breed Native America (red hair and freckles don’t show on the level of your genes), Kage figured she was entitled to have any opinion she bloody well wanted of dead Europeans. And she liked some of them.

She had wonderful time in her last year of life, shocking the kind of people who ask those soft-center, stupid questions of the actively dying. You know, things like: “Now what did you do to yourself?” or “How are we today?” or the ubiquitous and enraging injunction to “Smile!”  Kage told the truth (as she always did) with no frills or protective wrappers. If someone didn’t want to hear that the gaunt redhead with the burning black eyes was, yes, really really sick, they shouldn’t ask her how she was doing – that was Kage’s opinion.

I remember her turning to an especially vulgar and noisy roommate (who was, frankly, having a tantrum) and saying, “Listen, lady, it’s past midnight and some of us are trying to die over here. Would you please shut up?”

She had little time for social prevarication at the best of times, and she pretty much jettisoned it at the end. Too much to try to say, do, complete; too much to begin, even, as the  fact of her own imminent demise did not stop Kage for a single moment from beginning new projects. It’s why I’m working on a Mars story, and why I’m picking out stories and essays for two new compilation volumes, and why there will a sequel to Nell Gwynne. Around the world or between a couple of them, it made no difference to Kage.

She had stories to tell, queries to make, questions to answer.

That offer to answer all questions still stands, too; it’s part of the geas she laid on me on her death bed. I know where it all came from, I know what it all meant to her: it’s my duty to explain it to anyone who wants to know. I am an oracle once removed; a recycled sybil. I’m Cassandra’s message machine.

Beeeep.

Kage Baker was always amused and mystified by what it turned out her audiences liked. She seldom saw it coming, and in fact considered her own judgement as to what would be a crowd-pleaser to be inexplicably poor. The letters carefully explaining just what her readers found to be especially charming (or horrid) were enlightening – in that she hadn’t thought of that – but usually a surprise to her.

Having tried with her first novel to accommodate every trope, fashion and personal editorial twitch in the genre, she finally gave up. She re-wrote Iden one last time to satisfy the legitimate concerns of grammar and spelling, and sent it off. And it promptly secured an agent: the splendid Linn Prentis, who sent it back but with the message Not A Rejection written on the front of the package. Which is all that prevented Kage from sending it to live with the cut-throat trout and mallard ducks in Pismo Creek.

After that, though, Kage never again made someone else’s wishes her paramount target in a story. When she contracted to write on specific topics – wizards, space opera, cthonic gods – she kept scrupulously to the specified heading; when she accepted invitations to write pastiches of genre greats like Jack Vance, she studied her subject for months. Other than that, though, she gave up trying to please the audience in advance. She just couldn’t tell what the hell would catch people’s fancy.

Lewis, for example, the Literary Specialist from the Company series. Everyone loves Lewis. Kage loved him herself, and was delighted that he won such a following: but she had thought he would be a very minor character, a throw-away, a walk-on. On the other hand, her actual hero – Nicholas/Edward/Alec – left a majority of readers cold. In fact, the only letters Kage ever got expressing active dislike for a character were about Edward. Our own sister Anne detested him and said so vociferously. You’d have thought the man had come to dinner and made off with the silverware. Kage never understood it.

You, Dear Readers, continue to astonish me in similar ways; though I have evidently yet to come up with anything you abhor as much as most folks do Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. But when I glance over the stats for this blog, there are funny peaks and valleys. Days I thought myself especially scintillating reflect low readership – then some exercise in utter silliness pulls in 300 hits. My dissertation on humidity hit a considerable mark, which was hilarious and surprising: but apparently the weather and its eccentricities are every bit as avidly interesting as Sam Clemens claimed they were.

Of course, I have kind of pre-selected my audience here. You are all fans of Kage Baker, Dear Readers, and I am trying to be faithful to her vision and her voice.  Honestly, sometimes I can barely tell if I am hearing her in my head or only remembering her: but whichever it is, it’s your patient attention that lets me bring off the trick at all. I am so very grateful for that. Shouting out across the aether to all of you keeps me communicating with people, and keeps my gradual evolution into a crazy old lady to a socially acceptable speed.

In the deep and merry meantime, I am free to follow the gleams and sparks of inspiration that drift through the Universe to impact on my undefended brain. I know I have a friendly group of auditors willing to listen to my speculations on the identity of roadkill and the true source of those footprints you find on your windshield at dawn. Or to listen when I tell tales of Kage, or about Kage, or by Kage. It’s a nice feeling, Dear Readers, to know that someone out there will actually think for a moment when I present some peculiar trend or observation – like, there are currently half-a-dozen toilets lolling about on lawns in my neighborhood.

Why? There is no knowing; it’s a mystery. Last month it was mattresses; this month it’s potties. There are signs that next month it will be strange nest-constructions of cardboard. And something is producing an elusive scent of spice and bubblegum around the detritus, as well – some species of phoenix, perhaps?

I’ll keep the aether posted.

Kage Baker was generally pretty scornful of American attempts at philosophers and metaphysicians. Thoreau, Emerson, Kerouac, Whitman … she found them all rather puerile and just a little too fraternity-minded. Being of both an historical and intellectual bent, she read them all extensively – but in the end, she also dismissed them as shallow boys.

She loved Kerouac’s passion and love of the life of the road – she felt it, too – but she couldn’t approve of his habit of dumping the impediments of family for adventure. “He’s like that guy in Close Encounters,” I remember her saying. “Kids and wives only get in the way when the High and Distant Horizon calls you. That sucks.”

Thoreau amused her; she felt he’d come up with one of the best societal drop-out schemes ever. Gary Trudeau, whose Doonsebury strip she loved, had absolutely discerned the amiable flakiness underlying Thoreau’s philosophy when he created the Walden II Commune. Whitman was another borderline flake, Kage judged – so looped on sensuality, so high on life, that he’d have gotten himself locked up if he hadn’t also been blessed with a shrewd and angelic way with words. Whitman’s poetry was grand, but as Kage (a landlady’s daughter) observed: “I’d never lend him a $20 or rent him an apartment!”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, patron saint of  Transcendentalism, flatly annoyed Kage. He wrote with assumed authority, she said, on things he’d never engage in personally – austerity, communalism, “natural” life, abolition. He lived a rather comfortable middle-class life while espousing quite a different lifestyle: he was, for instance, anti-slavery but did not lecture on it because he was nervous about attracting public notice on the subject. His famous statement – “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” – Kage saw as the most enormous and self-referential cop-out imaginable. It excused anything; it rationalized everything; it defended nothing.

Kage was contemptuous of inconsistency. It offended her, it smacked too much of hypocrisy. If it was accidental, she regarded it as a weakness, as being too flaccid to maintain your own mind under the force of other people’s. “Infirm of purpose!” cries Lady Macbeth to her vacillating hubby – he’s been complaining of Duncan’s rule for pages and pages, yet he hesitates to finally act on his own rebellion; it’s Lady M. who grabs the knife and does for the old king. And sets up up the idiot guards to be framed for it, too.

Not that Kage advocated knifing sleeping old men, or even incompetent guards. She just felt consistency was a lot more important a character trait than old Ralph Waldo (who, among other oddities, took up atheism when it paid more than his job as a pastor) did.

That hobgoblin didn’t ride her shoulder. She turned her laser eyes on the little creep, and fried him to a greasy stain on the ground.

It was possible to get Kage to change her mind, but it was no easy task. (I can hear the squeaking of rolling eyeballs from all our sisters and friends now …) She was adamant. She was steadfast. She was staunch. She was stubborn as a rock wall; which may, over the centuries, lean and soften and even fall apart – but will never completely stop being a wall. When it’s been reduced to a line of discoloured dust in some ancient stratigraphy, you will still be able to tell it was, once, a wall … that was Kage.

Mind you, if she subsequently was presented with enough good evidence that contradicted her stand, she might change her mind. She did, sometimes in enormous ways. Times pass, circumstances change, people grow – and shrink, too. She could and did change, at need. She just didn’t find most needs large enough to over-rule her instinctive constancy.

Kage was constant. She admired the North Star for its legendary faithfulness, and was rather horrified when she learned the thing actually shifts; she never trusted it after that, and lamented its state as if Polaris had taken up smoking opium.*

Kage was, as she once described one of her own characters, as true as steel.

*Correction/update: it has been accurately pointed out to me that Polaris does not move (thank you, Steve Skold!) except insofar as it is retreating from us along with everything else in our expanding Universe. This is true. But due to all sorts of wobbles, wibbles, and precession of equinoxes, the site of True North in the sky is not always marked by that particular star. Nor will it be always be. That was my point, and that this normal, natural occurrence shocked Kage. But the stars are no more unchanging than are the day’s mayflies.

Kage Baker had, for most of her life, a quiet sort of background faith that things would work out all right. She didn’t fret about enormous problems too much; she tried to keep her worrying down to a level where she felt she actually had a chance of effecting outcomes. Or, conversely, where the problem was so huge that she herself had as much chance of altering things as, say, the background radiation of the Big Bang; or the chance production of the Higgs boson.

She carefully worked out where the new shoreline would be, for instance, in the event of our local ocean level rising. When you live two blocks from the beach, I guess that makes some sense … anyway, she figured that any ocean rise up to 3 feet would still let us enjoy shore-front property without having to resort to pontoons. I was never really sure about her math (Kage was basically enumerate) but it eased her mind; that was fine with me.

On the other hand … she never have a moment’s thought to, nor a tinker’s dam about, her own long term health. That may have been sort of sensible: when you simply cannot get medical insurance, the best way to maintain at least mental health is not to worry much. But when she started bleeding a year after she reached menopause – when the bleeding got gradually worse and worse – I wish she had told me. Sooner. At some point before the afternoon she confessed that something was probably really wrong, and did I think she ought to see a doctor or just throw in the towel?

I hit the ceiling and dragged her to a doctor. However, despite her determination; despite one dedicated doctor and a skilled (if uncaring) surgeon; despite a couple of small miracles: she was dead inside a year of that first revelation to me. Part of it, yes, was because her cancer moved fast and she had moved slowly. But part of it was because Kage was poor; and thus, of first priority to no one in the medical industry.

Her treatment was delayed, her records were misplaced, when her first assigned surgeon went on vacation her surgery was not re-assigned but cancelled, and there was no financial aid available until she was destitute. Which happened pretty quickly – just not quickly enough.

I had a heart attack a few months before Kage was diagnosed with a rare, intransigent uterine cancer. I took three weeks off work, changed some vital habits, paid attention to my doctors and took my meds. I got a bit better. But then Kage got sick, and needed increasing amounts of care. It placed rather a bit of strain on me: although it helped somewhat when my employer had to close their offices and laid me off – I had more time to take care of Kage.

And Kage needed more and more care; and she got sicker pretty quickly; and then she died. I had to close up our house and move. Then I spent the next 6 months running back and forth across the US on book business for Kage; collecting awards – which was wonderful – and getting more and more exhausted. Which was not. Nor was it very smart. Caring for Kage in her extremity pretty much broke my health. I had another heart attack, got another stent in my chest, and discovered I had developed congestive heart failure.

Kage would have been furious with me. But heck – I didn’t ignore anything willfully. I honestly didn’t notice, until that November afternoon I fell over. Hearts don’t really break!

Since then, I’ve been being a pretty good girl. But the time has come for me to see if Social Security can be of any use to me – a few years early, but not all that many, really. I’ve been contributing for 40 years now; and I doubt I will trouble the system all that long – I am not realistically looking forward to the Presidential centenary certificate – because CHF is not, you know, curable. Thus I have leaped into the roiling sea of paperwork.

I picked a hell of a lousy time, of course. But they are, in their slowly grinding way, responding. Today I had an appointment for a physical, to see if I am really sick enough to qualify for any help. They’ll be deciding shortly whether or not I am disabled. I’ll be really intrigued to see whether I am or not – because I sure feel disabled. One of the reasons I sit here and write is because it’s one of the very few activities that doesn’t provoke faintness, chest pain and an over-dependence on oral explosives. That seems disabling to me.

On the other hand, Kage argued with the Feds throughout the entire, tragically brief, course of her mortal illness. They sent the letter deciding she was, yes, disabled, the very week she died. It took them another couple of months to cope with the filing changes necessitated by her inconveniently dying just as they’d declared her case active …

On the other other hand, I’ve learned to be rather noisy about this crap. I don’t sit and wait meekly. I learned to scream and leap up and down during Kage’s illness (it’s the only way I got her surgery re-scheduled), and no matter how short of breath I am, I can still howl with outrage. I have a lot of pent up resentment and anger – might as well use it for something.

So I battle on. I can’t afford to ignore this; I think I need more time than my body will give me without help. I have things to write, things to say, messages from Kage I promised to deliver. Our moron overlords dropped the ball for Kage. They owe her, and they owe me for her. I’m not even slightly meek.

I may an Invisible Woman, but I’m a loud one. I mean to show up on something.

Kage Baker used to complain about the lack of humidity in California. She liked fog, she loved the smell of the sea, she liked her garden green. Living in the Los Angeles Basin, we grew up in what is technically (I think) sub-desert – Kage always mourned that, asking why we couldn’t have “sub-tropical” instead?

Then we started going to conventions in other parts of the United States.

The first shock was Austin in August. It’s Texas; it’s supposed to be dry, sage-brushy, prairie – right? Wrong. So wrong. And so much for believing the movies and guide books. Stepping out of the airport felt like having a boiling, wet wool blanket attack one. Walking a block was very nearly fatal, and not from the heat – 103 degrees is nothing to an L.A. girl. No, we were in danger of drowning.

Our genial and splendid hosts took us to the County Line Barbecue, and I must say: Texas barbecue is every bit as good as legends say. It was barbecue of the gods. But it was also in a river valley, and when we walked under the cotton wood trees, we thought gills would pop out on our necks; and that we’d surely die it they didn’t.

Let me say here: Austin is a lovely, lovely city. It’s got beautiful old buildings, and so many pecan and cotton wood trees it’s like being in an orchard. But despite all those trees, there is just not enough oxygen. We who live on the west side of the Rockies have lost some essential ability to breathe water …

We went to New Orleans the year before Katrina hit that wonderful city. The first thing we noticed, walking through the airport, was that it smelled like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. That totally enchanted us. Then we got outside, and found ourselves gasping like frantic hamsters in a puddle. The air was wet! No, the air was water. We had a wonderful time there, but everytime we went outdoors there was that shock of walking into an alien atmosphere. Somehow, intrepid space-women that we were, we managed our excursions out into the Swamp Planet – but it was a near thing. And all those wonderful, courteous, people around us, asking worriedly in their beautiful Nawlins accents, were we alright? Because we surely were short of breath … did we need a drink of water?

“I need an oxygen mask,” croaked Kage in our room at night. We closed the windows and turned the air conditioning to Dessicate.

Missouri was the same. So was Kansas. So was Ohio. Wisconsin was dry, but that was because we went in the spring and it was still covered in snow – we could tell that if we came back when the thousand lakes we saw from the air had thawed, we’d once again be trying to see where the natives hid their gills.

“I am never, never, never going to Florida,” swore Kage. Nor did she, but I did – to accept her post mortum Nebula. Cocoa Beach was not bad at all, being as it is on the edge of the Atlantic – but the drive through the lowlands and swampy bits between Orlando and Cocoa Beach was astonishing. I clearly had never known what real humidity was.

I’m not made for humidity. My lungs have evolved for an entirely different planet that what exists east of the mountains; my alveoli can’t suck enough air out of the air out there.

Today, through some evil trick of meteorology, the humidity in L.A. is currently 43%. I know, Mid Westerners and East Coasters are laughing at me now, but you just don’t understand! That’s not possible! That can’t sustain human life! I swear, I can feel my sinuses and lungs developing mildew; the cats and the Corgi are lying around like sad little fur tippets, flat as throw rugs. Only the parrot – evil evolved dinosaur that he is – is frisky and alert in this Triassic miasma. He’s singing and laughing on his perch, mocking my self-deluded mammalian superiority.

You know … Eons ago, there were inland seas covering the middle of the United States. Things like Lake Agassiz throve there, vaster than the current Great Lakes; the Gulf of Mexico once curved inland thousands of miles, claiming the land where the mighty Mississippi is now the last thin remnant of its power.

The ghosts  of those enormous seas still roll there, and all the inhabitants of this continent’s center live under a spiritual weight of water a mile deep. They have soul-gills. It’s the only explanation.

Kage Baker, mostly, refused to speak on the telephone. This annoyed her friends and family, because they believed that she was almost always home. They were wrong – we just didn’t tell anyone when we went haring off, for the same reasons Kage wouldn’t answer the phone. She didn’t want anyone to find her.

Also, prior to retiring to her domestic fortress to write 24/7, Kage had made her living for years as a customer service representative. She spent a couple of decades at the job, and did it well. But once she clocked out, she developed a contact allergy to telephone equipment.

No one seemed to understood why, given the choice, she  refused to use the phone once she was home and private. I did understand – it sometimes annoyed me to be part of her DEW system, but if I really didn’t want to talk to whomever was calling, I just didn’t answer the phone either. A message machine was one of the first things we got once we left home; we were early proponents of caller ID, too. This pissed off a lot of folks who were convinced, in their bones and hearts, that every time they called we were sitting there in the living room snickering and leaving them to talk to the robots.

To be honest, they were right, as often as not. I admit it freely. Relatives, friends and business associates were known to call, get the answering machine, and then spend their allotted message time acidly informing Kage that they knew she was there, or begging Harry the Parrot to pick up the damned receiver. Harry never learned to do it, but both Harry Prime and now Harry Redux talk to the pained voices on the machine – really, if you could hear it, folks, you would know that at least one person in the household cares you called. He always says “Hi!” And usually, “Oh, noooo!” And then he sings Rule Britannia to you all.

So anyway: when the phone rang, I’d ask Kage is she was in. We’d wait until the announcement function kicked in and someone identified himself. Then she’d decide. She’d usually consent to talk to sisters and her agent – the other unfortunates either got me, or were encouraged to leave a message. Some folks had to call back two or three times, because they spent too much time arguing with a dead line over whether or not the hypothetical Kage on the other end was going to pick up … which Kage said just proved she was justified in not picking up in the first place, if people were going to be that silly.

From time to time, the caller would be an editor, and I would make polite stalling conversation while Kage raced frantically from her desk. Once, the caller was Harlan Ellison (!) who had just called to tell Kage how much he liked her work (!!). Mr. Ellison got treated to the ghostly sounds of pantomime on the wires, as I firmly forced Kage – who was doing a nautch dance of terror – into accepting the phone and talking to the legend on the other end. One does not tell Harlan Ellison that one is too frightened to talk to him, or one finds out what frightening really is … but he was charming to Kage, and I hope never realized how close she came to throwing herself out the window rather than talk to him.

But then, of course, she had what every up-and-coming science fiction writer needs: a Harlan Ellison anecdote. She packed it for every subsequent convention.

Now I’m the one who doesn’t want to answer the phone. This isn’t as successful for me, since most folks call on my cell – but Kimberly is a very good sport about vetting the calls that come in on the landline. And I can always let even cell calls go to message. I do assure everyone out there, though, that I try to answer my cell phone – unless I’m asleep, or really deep in the writing. Most of the real crap comes in on the landline, anyway.

I’ve gotten three calls today from people who want to talk to me about my (non-existent) credit cards. Someone putatively from my bank wanted to discuss details of my accounts (but did not know the account numbers nor my last name); various folks are pantingly eager to clean my drapes, floors, chimney,and lower intestine. That last one really gave me pause – I don’t think I’ve ever had a job as bad as making cold calls to people offering coupons for high colonics. Thank God.

Kage was right – except for comic relief, writers should let other people handle their phones. I’m letting Harry answer the calls for awhile, I think.

Kage Baker loved Santa Rosa plums above all other fruits of the earth. Even the enormous spectrum of apples was not so dear to her palette as this one, old-fashioned plum. Every summer saw a new steely-eyed hunt for them, and them a couple of weeks where she essentially ate nothing else.

There was a Santa Rosa plum tree in the front yard, when we were kids; its harvest was ferociously defended by Kage, like some sort of enraged squirrel. Even after she left home, she’d go back up to Momma’s every day for the brief Santa Rosa season, methodically stripped the tree and doing her very best to eat every single plum.

This wasn’t always received especially well – she wasn’t the only one to prefer the delicate succulence of the Santa Rosa – but Kage was adamant, indomitable, and also not distracted by the charms of other fruit trees. Peaches, nectarines and apricots also grew in the yard, but her heart belonged only to the plums: which was all right with me, at least, because I was an apricot fiend, and that left more of them for me.

Oh, the blissful summer afternoons … lying in the grass on the few sloped lawns amid the flower beds, laps full of fresh-picked fruit! We’d eat ourselves into stupors, companionable quiet comas broken by slurping and the sound of pits being spat down the hillside. Not even stories went on then – Kage’s mouth was full and I was in an apricot daze, all other senses turned off to appreciate the overwhelming golden trove I was eating.

We were the freaking Lotus-eaters, then.

Santa Rosa plums are still regarded in most plumcentric circles as THE plum, the ultimate, Norvana-flavoured stone fruit. But they have fall en out of favour commercially – it’s harder and harder to find them in supermarkets, because they have a short ripe season. The trees bear well, but not explosively; the fruit is large but not enormous. There are plums that are “better”, if your only criteria are having them available for 2 months at a time and being able to pack them like pool balls in boxes. But nothing else compares for fragrence, flavour, or colour.

Every year it’s gotten harder to find them. The year Kage died, we found them at a local fruit stand for only one week – but she was happy enough with that, and lived on them for those 7 days. Last year, I never found any at all; though my search did reveal many new and enchanting pluots, which were a nice dividend.

But today – ah! We went to the local Farmers Market, Kimberly and I, and found that the Santa Rosas are finally in season! It’s late for them here, but we found them; from small orchards in Santa Barbara and Santa Clarita, the first  glorious Santa Rosas! We immediately bought pounds of them and scarpered home, cackling like loons. The gentlemen sort of looked at them and said Oh. Plums. Nice.

Philistines.

Oh, Santa Rosas … their wine-red skins that break in the mouth as crisp as blown glass, speckled with a dusting of golden spots under the blue bloom. The perfume that rises from them, and the taste – ! Ruby red flesh, juicy enough to spurt over your chin when you bite into them, the mingled tastes of tart cherry and warm dust and honey that are the essential nature of PLUM … man, there is nothing else like it in the world.

Our friendly fruit farmers say there is at least another week’s worth still ripening on the trees. Maybe two. So we can eat all these, and then sate ourselves with white nectarines and black apricots, with elephant-heart and dinosaur-egg pluots for the rest of the week. And then next Sunday – back for more!

Now, it’s really summer.  I can feel Kage’s dreaming spirit. The Santa Rosas are in.

Kage Baker loved The Marine Layer.

That’s a fixture in coastal California – theoretically, it’s a meteorological phenomenon, but it happens so dependably it might as well be geography. Or architecture. In May and June, especially, the ocean edge of the state lies under the top-most layer of froth on the sea: fog and bubbles as secure as a tent ceiling, roofing the land 10 miles wide and a thousand miles long.

The Marine Layer makes a distinctive and unique environment on the western side of the sea-hills: Kage took it for her natural habitat, and was never happier than we lived in its cool embrace. The years in Pismo, we certainly did.

All summer it comes and goes, that Layer. Even the clear hot days of July and August will have their spells of “late night early morning cloud” – it’s all one word to Californians. Kage always said it wasn’t the bottom layer of the air, but the top layer of the sea: we all lived in the littoral zone, where air and water mixed indiscriminately for half the year and we learned to breathe through our skins.

“In Fall, the Coast is clear.” It’s what the little towns on the coast advertise, to make the most of the incontrovertible fog that covers them the rest of the time. The summer fog is still a blessing; people drive in desperately from Bakersfield and Modesto to escape the heat under that milder cover.

San Francisco just shrugs and ignores the problem – because if you don’t know that The City is under the fog in the summer, your opinion of the weather doesn’t count, does it? But it’s why Mark Twain is credited with complaining that the worst winter of his life was a summer spent in San Francisco. It’s why Captain Sir Francis Drake – an Englishman, for gods’ sake! – complained of the “filthy fogs” when he stopped at Drake’s Bay to careen his ship.

Checking my palantiri this morning, I found the coast deep in fog from the Golden Gate to Pismo Beach.  It was clear on the deck of Nepenthe, in Big Sur; but 20 feet below their railing, a roiling sea of opals washed around the oaks. Pismo was in a bubble-fog, small children and wet dogs appearing and vanishing out of drifts on the sands. And even here in Los Angeles – where the sun has been out for some hours – there is the tell-tale metallic undershadow to the blue sky that means the fog is just waiting to return …

With the Fog King, no doubt. So, let us resume the story:

The Fog King, continued

The first day was with Momma, and that was fine. It wasn’t the first time Wenekla had been to the Mother House, but she got to go different places that day. She saw the Lady Preceptor’s office, where that august lady quizzed her on her letters and complimented Momma. She saw the dormitories and was allowed to bounce on a little white bed to see how soft it was. She saw the Chapel, where the flame that was the Mother rose up out of a huge rose made of red glass; and she was allowed to throw the incense in herself. And then they went home, and that was just fine.

But the next day she went back with the big girls, hand firmly in hand with her determined sister-cousin Halka. Momma and all the Aunts kissed her: she was Going To The Sisters (which suddenly sounded a lot more sinister); she was Going To School. Halka delivered her to a room with a dozen other nervous little girls in it, and walked off to her own classes with a palpable air of martyrdom.

That was one of the best days of Wenekla’s life to date. The tall lady who came in to take charge of the class was kind, beautiful, patient – like one of the Big Girls, full of strength and fire, but transmuted from a natural disaster to a benevolent goddess.

“Little sisters, I am your Elder Sister Cirlan. You are all very lucky children – for you, the world will be a broad smooth highway,” she told the little girls. “And I will teach you how to run down it as fast as flames and sunlight.”

Enraptured, they all believed her.

***

Wenekla didn’t always care for her lessons, but they were arranged in such a way that a new one came up just when an old one was fomenting mutiny in the students. They ran everywhere – the halls of the Mother House were broad and smooth, and filled with rivers of girls intertwining, passing and overtaking one another at ferocious speed. Ribbon scarves on collars let you track your class through the maelstrom.

The physical training was a great relief – interspersed with reading maps and memorizing entire treatises and learning to travel by the stars (A Runner is like a sailor cast away without even a boat, said Sister Cirlan. She must be better than a mere sailor at navigation.) there were the lessons in running, tumbling, wrestling, climbing. Young Runners were encouraged to solve all problems in movement; they learned meditation while jogging round the city walls, timing trance-state to their own foot-falls.

By the middle of the first year, they could run from the Duke’s palace, down the Haft to the Spike. By the end, they could circle the Spike and run all the way back without a rest. In the second and third years, they began to race one another. There were prizes for every class and age division. There was also a lively black market betting pool among the students themselves; and, it was rumoured, another one among the Teachers.

It was traditional for the Lacquer girls to sleep at home. A flock of them went back and forth at least twice a day, running between the Mother House and home like the tides. But that was only because they lived right there in Axe Bay; most girls slept in the dormitories, and all of them were gently urged to try it.

Wenekla moved in during her first week. She loved it there in the Mother House – the neat, narrow little bed, the tidy privacy of her own spaces and places: no Big Girls to rampage over her and her toys, friends her own size … Momma and the Aunts didn’t mind, as long as she was happy. Her cousins all teased her for rooming in, but she knew they would have teased her just as much for going home. That was the way they were.

But they went home instead of her. Wenekla began to learn peace and solitude in her evenings; her teachers said she might make a long-distance Runner.