Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker had a compass in her head. She always knew where she was; she always knew where North was. She was a whiz with maps, but even without one she could navigate from where she was to where she wanted to be – just by steering in as straight a line as possible between those two points.

Nonetheless, we spent a lot of time lost. Since she didn’t know what was in the between, our progress was often unexpectedly exciting. What Kage’s mental compass told her was that we had to go more that way: more left, more right, more East or South. It wasn’t Google Earth or a GPS, though, and she didn’t know what would turn up in our way.

“No, of course I don’t expect you to drive through a fence,” she would concede when I objected to some new barrier. “We just need to find a way around it. Head to the left.”

“Why there?” I would ask suspiciously.

“The hills look lower, and we need to lose some altitude,” Kage would explain. Which was not exactly comforting to the geographically-challenged driver, me. I’d done this before,  and there were times when our roads had devolved into goat-tracks and game trails. What was a broad line in Kage’s head often turned out to be, in reality, a crumbling ledge along the face of a cliff.

Whatever was in her head worked, though. It may have been tiny specks of magnetite, such as are believed to guide migrating birds; perfectly natural phenomenon. I must point out though, that no one knows yet what the mechanism is, that permits pigeons and cranes and people like Kage to translate the movements of the nanoparticles of metal in their central nervous system and steer confidently through the curtains of the planetary magnetic field. You can’t feel the movements of the mitochronidria in your cells – how does anyone feel the movement of microscopic bits of magnetite?

She didn’t even have to have been to her destination before. She did need to have seen a map of some sort, demonstrating a connection to some feature or local she could identify. Even a written description would suffice, as long as it included some landmark she knew; the holograph in her head would then slot the previously-unknown into the already mapped portion of the universe, and her unconscious would solve for x. This made Kage both tremendously competent at reading maps, and frighteningly prone to ignoring their instructions when her head told her there was a more direct way.

In a way, we got lost so often because of the map in Kage’s head. She knew where we’d been and where we needed to be: just not exactly where we were at the moment. That middle process part of a problem was always what she found hardest to explain to someone else, whether it involved getting us to an island in the middle of the Columbia River or writing the middle third of a novel. Kage knew her sources – she knew her goal – and somewhere in the middle of the equation, a miracle happened.

There are  lots of people with this talent, and I’d bet they don’t know how it works, either. On the other hand, what’s in my head is evidently more like a lava lamp – the pattern melts and reforms and is never the same twice in a row. I am apparently capable of losing my way in my sleep: I often wake up confused as to where I am, unable to identify which bed I’m in, what house out of the many I’ve lived in, who is asleep down the hall – or even the physical relationship between my room and the rest of wherever the hell I am.

This is because I wake up not knowing where the hell I am. I’ve woken in the middle of the night, and walked straight into walls or closets in the firm belief I am walking to the bathroom; only that bathroom is not connected to this bedroom. Sometimes, as on camping trips or sleeping on Faire sites, there isn’t even a bathroom to find … but since I think, for the first few seconds, that I am in the two room apartment illegally jiggered out of Fay Wray’s old house in the Hollywood Hills (where we lived in our early 20’s), I fumble around in confusion  trying to find a porcelain door knob on a tent flap.

Sleeping so much these day, and having had such a world-shattering year previously, I am now particularly prone to waking up totally lost. I’m experimenting with ways of orienting myself automatically. The best one so far is to close my eyes and ask myself, “Where would Kage say we were?” And ultimately, my brain sorts through a thousand memories of her confidently pointing out a window and declaring: “There! That’s North!”

And you know what? Most often, it is. The lava lamp in my head settles down, and I know where I am. And Kage has saved me again.

Kage Baker did love to read.

She was a self-taught reader at the usual preternaturally early age, and voracious into the bargain. She coerced several of our younger siblings into taking out library cards for which they had no desire, but which she then took over. In her prime days of book banditry, she could take out 40 books at once every week.

As she got older, more of her time went into writing than reading. By the time she was a professional writer, reading for pleasure had become a rare personal indulgence. She mainly read for research (though she enjoyed that too) and spent any spare “free” time writing her own stuff. Though she’d re-read Treasure Island at regular intervals. And she read O’Brian’s entire Aubrey-Maturin saga no less than 4 times: it may have been her favourite of all time.

And Terry Pratchett! Kage dropped whatever she was doing to read each new Pratchett novel as it came out. That was not only a reader’s keen pleasure, she said it was almost a religious duty: one learned so much from one of Sir Terry’s books.

So, anyway, she was a book person. Being read to was one of her last delights, as it had been among her first.

I am therefore deciding she will not mind if I take the rest of today off to read. Patrick Rothfuss, that energetic and amazing young man, has finally brought out the second volume in his “Kingslayer Chronicles”. The first one was The Name of the Wind; this is The Wise Man’s Fear. And I have it! It’s huge, it’s engrossing, it’s much later than we all expected, and I am now going to go immerse myself in it like a hot bath.

I loved The Name of the Wind.  I had the privilege of reviewing it in 2007: (http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_rothfuss_thenameofthewind.html), for the online review journal, Green Man Review (which you ought to sample anyway; good stuff is there). So this is going to be a major treat.

So I’m signing off. Everyone go read!

Kage Baker felt the second day of March was rather unfairly overshadowed by its one-day-elder sibling. March 1st is the traditional founding day of Rome; St. David’s Day, if you are into Welsh saints and leeks; and National Pancake Day, as well. So she occasionally declared celebrations for March 2nd.

She didn’t do it for the most common reason I am seeing on the Web today – the birthday of Theodore Geisel – but because it also happens to the anniversary of the births of  Kurt Weill, and Thomas Bodley. Those were two gentlemen whose accomplishments she much admired. Weill wrote the music for The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany, two of Kage’s favourite operas. And Thomas Bodley founded the Bodleian  Library, which is a wonder of the historian’s world and was on Kage’s “Must See” list.

But most folks today are commemorating Mr. Geisel: or, as he is better known, Dr. Seuss. Kage never celebrated that. Despite his being adored by millions of children, parents and primary school teachers, and Kage being herself part of his target generation, she detested most of his work. It had offended her when she was very small, with what she regarded as condescending silliness and suspect morality; she felt that The Cat In The Hat, especially, was a degenerate and a bad influence. The only thing of his she liked was The Grinch – and that was because it was eventually animated by Chuck Jones and voiced by Boris Karloff, two other men she adored.

Kage also disliked Mr. Geisel’s propaganda work during WWII – not because she disapproved (he was doing his duty, after all) but because she didn’t like the way he drew things … few things drew Kage’s least rational ire as much as bad cartooning, and she just didn’t like Mr. Geisel’s. And she liked Dr. Seuss even less when her own literary creation – Dr. Zeus, Inc. – began to be confused by various critics with Geisel’s nom de plume. He hadn’t been in her mind at all when she came up with the Company and its bronze avatar.

I can’t pretend to entirely understand Kage’s dislike of the Seuss oeuvre, though it never meant a great deal to me. I learned to read from books of cartoons, all right, but they were the exquisitely drawn work of Walt Kelly. That man could draw moss-draped oaks and herons that were as lovely as a haiku …

So, Pogo Possum and Albert the Alligator were my tutors, which has undoubtedly contributed to my lifelong inability to spell: Walt Kelly wrote dialogue in a creatively-spelled Okefenokee patois. Kage had taught herself to read a couple of years earlier than I did, from  Andrew Lang’s  fairy tale books and Illustrated Classics comics; and her spelling, and her taste in good illustrations, were therefore well set by the time we both encountered On Beyond Zebra or that villainous Cat.

And so was her aversion to silliness. (She didn’t much like Lewis Carroll, either.) That foundation solemnity is certainly present in Mendoza, who abhors whimsy; and even the most outrageous of Kage’s Trickster figures, like Joseph and Ermenwyr, owe a lot more to the sinister charms of Mack the Knife and  Albert the Alligator than they do to any ingenuous Seussian character.

So: because Kage felt any day was enriched by a holiday, and no excuse for a party was too small, we’d celebrate Weill and Bodley on the 2nd of March. We’d listen to Threepenny Opera (Kage could sing it in German); we’d read books over a dinner of cold pancakes and jam – because we certainly celebrated Pancake Day on the 1st! And Kage would excoriate the Cat In The Hat a little, for old time’s sake.

Good times. Good times.

Kage Baker and I spent a lot of time last year talking about where I would live after she was dead. It wasn’t morbid, or at least didn’t feel so at the time – we’d been discussing old age a lot in recent years, and it seemed practical to make some plans for what was suddenly going to be a solo gig for me.

We’d been living in Pismo Beach for some 16 years, and seriously considering staying there for the rest of our lives. Kage cherished a hope to someday retire to Catalina Island, though, or Monterey – I believe her love of pirates figured largely in both choices – and I wouldn’t have minded. But I thought it more likely we’d stay planted on the stretch of coast we’d already conquered, and vacation in the others as we’d always done.

It was all a subject for speculation, though. We knew, even as our 50’s slipped away, that retiring anywhere wasn’t going to happen soon; we’d very likely end up right where we were and be working ladies to an advanced age. But Kage’s illness put paid to speculation pretty firmly. Although she may have feared my wistful desire to take up life in an RV and just wander the highways with a parrot and a million books was serious: she got quite firm about making me promise to find a permanent base.

I had many, many choices. It is a testament to the generosity and courage of our friends that so many of them offered me a home last year.  No matter how many children, dogs, cats, and existing elderly relatives my dear friends already possessed, most of them didn’t hesitate to extend me house-room. It makes me worry about their sanity, though, as taking me and Harry on is no light matter; let alone the insane amount of luggage I dragged with me when I left. Maybe these good folks shouldn’t be wandering around without keepers themselves …

Kage knew all of them would offer, too. She told me sternly not to take advantage of anyone, being aware how many of them would take me in without a second’s thought. She also warned me to leave Pismo Beach, or at least our apartment. “If you stay here,” she told me, “you’ll go crazy in a month. If the stairs don’t make your heart explode first. Get out of here and go somewhere flat.”

I came to the conclusion she was right by the middle of February last year – it took me a month to clear the apartment (with copious help) and I was pretty much raving by the end. But by the last weekend of that awful month, I was able to drive away with my worldly goods. Someday I’ll be able to go back to Pismo with a glad heart; but I have never been so glad to leave anywhere in my life as I was to leave Pismo Beach that day. Harry, too – in his travel cage beside me on the truck seat, he was singing by the time we hit Santa Maria.

I’d been living for a month in what was increasingly a giant packing box filled with smaller boxes – I wanted desperately to go home. Fortune being kind, I had a home to go to. I went back to Los Angeles, that vast basin of improbable and unlikely where we’d grown up, and my younger sister Kimberly took me in. Not many people flee for shelter to Los Angeles: but even so vast and weird a city as LA has its homing pigeons, in whose brains are little grains of magnetic iron focused on Sunset Boulevard and the Hollywood sign.

I have been here a year today. I have been gladder every day of my choice. It’s been a horribly cruel and difficult year, but it was much easier to bear here, where the light and the sky and the trees are familiar. Amazingly, the weather has improved over the last 20 years, and it’s a lovely place to be … Kage, in her dystopia mood,  would say that that’s because the place was such a mess when we left, just after the Rodney King riots. But no, it’s more than just contrast with the fact that the dear old place is not currently on  fire.

The air has gotten clearer, cleaner. The summers are hotter, the winters are colder: there is more presence to the weather now. The fountains at Griffith Park and the Hollywood Bowl are both working! There’s a subway system that almost functions! There are cormorants and 8 kinds of fish living in the L.A. River!

I can write here. It’s the first place I did write, when we were children. It’s the last place I wrote seriously, before I laid aside my own writing to assist Kage over the Mountains of Madness into the life of a full-time author. I know these streets – I’ve seen them reflected in Kage’s eyes.

Good place to have spent my mourning year. Good place to be writing now.

Kage Baker, as I have mentioned, largely felt that February was a write-off month. The major winter holidays were over, it wasn’t Spring enough to go camping or run around a lot, and it was often the coldest month of the year. She tended to cocoon and pupate into a new year’s model of butterfly.

She always threw a commemorative feast for George Harrison’s birthday on the 25th: an excuse for eating lamb chops (which were that gentleman’s favourite food before he became a vegetarian) and listening to Beatles’ music for a day and a night. Some years, the drifts of incense smoke were as thick as the spring fogs out on Highway 1, and the house smelled of frankincense and hyacinths for days. But that was usually the most exciting thing that happened all month.

Most of the time she spent working on notes or slogging through difficult bits of the current book project. The difficult bits always seemed to arrive in post-December cold; that was when she had to force herself to write. Kage was very sensitive to cold, evidently being intended to live in a volcano vent, like a salamander – in February, she’d hunch over her computer, legs wrapped in lap robes, typing grimly away with fingers slowly turning blue. This, mind you, while the fireplace was lit and the heater blared, and I was across the room barefoot and in a T-short, sweating to death … but that was always when deadlines loomed and the plots got sticky. And Kage got cold.

When it became impossible to write, it was time for research and brainstorming. Brainstorming at home was almost always an evening activity: we’d turn out all the lights except for my Lava Lamps – designated by Kage as The Official Lamps of The Weird – and then we’d talk all night. There’s a major portion of every one of Kage’s novels that was hashed out by firelight and glowing purple blobs … she used to claim her synapses would fall into synch with the pattern of the blobs in the Lamps, her thoughts waxing and waning and copulating and mutating like the molten goo and glitter in the convection currents of hot oil.

But sometimes, brainstorming was an in-flight activity on long drives. We might drive in a huge circle all weekend long just to keep the conversation going. Once weekend we went out for a picnic breakfast on Saturday morning and didn’t make it home again until Monday night. A lot of Hellfire At Twilight came out of that. And I learned to knit cables.

Anyway, February is almost over now. I can feel a chilled winter lassitude fading, like ice going transparent on a frozen river just before it breaks up. I am hoping for some useful, fertile flooding to occur.

In the meantime, the sequel to The Ladies of Nell Gwynne has been completed and sent to the agent. I am working on Linn’s first edits and suggestions. I still have a stalled plot with incompetently rogue nuns and a spreading plague. And a few stories may be stirring, things Kage worked on and told me several times  … there are ghosts in wetsuits in the waters off Ocean Beach.   A new bride is about to flee Troon and end up in Konyn Fey as a widow. There’s this deaf guy with a theremin and a laser.

Starting tomorrow.

Kage Baker vastly enjoyed the Academy Awards. It was a ritual in our house: unplug the phone, turn off the computer, make chocolate chip cookies and brownies, settle down in front of the telly. Enjoy three hours of shallow, sentimental, over-hyped, hysterical in-joke indulgence. Watch for the gleam of real gold: there’s always something noble amid the glitz and carrying-on.

Growing up on the edges of the Industry,  we didn’t find this annual celebration glamorous; we’d heard too many stories about the participants. But we had favourites to cheer most years – when we were younger, family friends and even relatives. Even in a poor year, there were people we could root against. Feuds last a long time in a factory town, and on one very specific level, that’s what Hollywood is: a factory town. And our family worked in the Dream Mines.

Kage and I never missed the Awards. As kids we watched them in our jammies, with our parents hooting and giggling and passing insider gossip over our heads; applauding dutifully for whatever studio was signing the paychecks that spring. As grownups we walked out on parties, conventions, rehearsals – drove 8 hours and 400 miles a couple of years, just to make it home in time to watch.

This year, it’s Kimberly and I. (Her husband and son generously tolerate us.) We’ve already made the ritual trip to Trader Joe’s, for supplies – it’s mini-tacos, sushi and chocolate tonight, because we have no intention of being in the kitchen cooking. Our Trader Joe’s is on the edge of Silverlake and Echo Park, too, and it was a truly heroic effort making it there and back: everyone in the Hills is throwing an Oscar party, and it was worth your life to linger too long over the humus or bagel chips.

So many questions to answer …  Will the musical numbers suck??(Almost surely Yes.) Will a film 5 people actually saw win an award? (Yes; and likely never be heard of again.) Will everyone in the beautifully dressed audience scurry to the bathroom during the technical awards? (Of course; isn’t it what they’re for?) The glamour is a sham, but it’s still lovely to see: the clothes! The jewels! The chance to see who makes an ass of themselves! Or who shows an unexpected grace …

It’s the home movies for The Industry. It’s a night show, a wrap show, a roast; half the jokes will outrage or confuse the lay audience, but those same jokes will reduce the most dignified professionals to helpless giggles. The most arrogant and short-sighted business on the globe will honour its beloved dead and celebrate its best – or at least whatever, for the duration of that busy afternoon each member of the Academy took to fill out their ballot,  seemed the best at the time.

Coal and diamonds are the perfect analogy. The Academy Awards are the end of the pressure and the heat for last year’s swamps. The vast majority will stay mud. Some will be coal – useful, but not magic. A very, very few will be diamonds.

Coal and diamonds are the same substance. Everyone knows that. You can’t really squeeze a piece of coal into a diamond, though – that’s a piece of movie magic reserved for Superman and Greek gods. But if you start with the basic sludge of carbon, the same bottom floor of a swamp, and amp up the power applied – run it through the caldera of a volcano, say, through the blue clay and sugar-white quartzite: some of it will be diamonds by the time it reaches the sun again. The rest will be coal, and it will light your home and warm your house and blossom as electricity to light cities one can see from space. Pretty cool, for both of them.

And in the meantime, something memorable may happen. Someone may waltz down the red carpet dressed as a giant swan. Someone may read the wrong name. Someone may say something appalling or incredibly fine and moving. Some of the best acting of the year will be on display in the seats, from the folks whose names are not called to rise and take the trophy.

I’ll eat brownies and finger food from Trader Joe’s and thoroughly enjoy myself with my family. And I’ll cry during the In Memoriam reel. And I will miss Kage.

Kage Baker could sometimes recognize and submit to superior forces. Not often, not much, not willingly – she wasn’t big on compromises. When she wanted something, she wanted That. Specific. Thing. And she had rather do without it than accept substitutes. For Kage, there was no such thing as just as good as.

Despite that stubbornness, she was patient. She could wait years to get something she wanted – there were things she first saw in childhood that she didn’t manage to get until her 40’s and 50’s; things she worked and waited decades to acquire. I don’t think she ever quite changed her mind, or gave up on anything.

And Kage was faithful. She knew her own mind and heart,  and was true to what she loved. She could fall in love with someone or thing immediately; and once she loved, she stayed that way. It might take her 30 years to finally embrace something she desired – she loved it just as much when she finally got it as she had the first time she saw it. There were objects and places she loved and would go visit, for years, until the day she got to take them home or live there. That’s the way it was with Beistle cutouts, 16th century coins, the Chapel Room in the Seven Gables Inn in Monterey. Hauling on the rigging of a mainsail. Pismo Beach.

The adventures and wonders that filled her life were mostly due to that combination of stubbornness and passion. It certainly fueled and fed her writing.

Me, I am not as determined. I am just as rock-stubborn (I think it’s genetic) but I have been know to fall in and out of love with things. I sometimes give up. I am a negotiator. I’m trying to channel Kage’s peculiar style of perseveration into the continuance into her stories – and so far, I’m succeeding – but the house of my life is still framed in green willow, flexible to the point of collapse. Kage’s was framed in oak.

All this roundabout meditation is because the hour I have spent working on this is only the second of the two hours I have spent awake in the last twelve. My heart, it appears,  is tired. I’ve got perhaps a half ounce of platinum in my chest (but no Iron Man glow, alas); I take far too many damned pills to make it beat stronger, slower, steadier: and everything works, but when it gets tired, I helplessly fall sleep. I’m told it’s how my heart resets itself … The cat loves it; I am almost as dependable as the coverlets on my bed, in that I am usually just lying there for kitties to snuggle …

It’s a drag. But I guess it means that every moment I am awake, I need to dedicate to work. No time to waste! Kage refused to give up, and wouldn’t sleep even through the last few days of her life. I’m going to stay awake at least until the sun sets.

Kage Baker believed in her dreams. Not the factual veracity of them so much – though often they did seem prophetic – but that they were at least significant input. She didn’t subscribe to the idea that dreams are random static. If, she said, they were just the brain processing waking moments, it still mattered what her brain was processing: because she was never too sure what it was doing while she was awake, and she needed all the clues she could get.

Believing this, Kage took her dreams seriously. She tended to act upon them. It was a dream of hers that sent us to Catalina Island for the first time, where so much of the Company story ended up happening. It was another that led us on the walk that showed us the old mine adits behind Avalon, and – on our way back down, panting for margaritas – through a garage sale on Sumner Avenue, where we found a century-old map of the island that showed features that have since vanished from every subsequent map … a whole chunk of alternate history arose out of that.

A dream convinced Kage to try and write for a living: George Harrison (whose birthday it is today, or would be had he not escaped the Wheel) wrote on her hand, telling her to try for more structure and character. So she did. That dream led her through hundreds of thousands of published words, and is still leading me along the same path. She wrote several short stories in dreams, essentially intact; after that it was just a case of sitting down and writing it out until she reached the end. But she woke up with the whole story line intact and whining to be let out.

I remember, so many mornings over coffee, her looking thoughtful in a particular way and saying, “I had the weirdest dream …”

“Tell me,” I would say.

And she would relate it over breakfast – hardly eating, hands flying through the air as she delineated the story, until the pressure grew too great to get past her lips fast enough, and she would retreat to the computer. When stories came on her like this, she just dove right into the monitor screen – I went back and forth as quietly as I could, filled her glass when it was empty, made her eat something every 8 hours or so, answered questions like “How deep is the carotid? Is the jugular deeper?”

So Kage wrote stories even in her sleep.

Personally, I enjoy my dreams, but I don’t place a lot of faith in them. They are usually vivid and detailed, and I get a lot of viewing pleasure from them – but since I can often dream lucidly and thus influence the plots, I can’t take them very seriously. I mean, consider the source … the only really useful thing is that I can plan in my dreams: and once you realize you can do that, you can devote a lot of your time sleeping to solving the problems of waking life. I’ve puzzled out a lot of problems while asleep, and woken with solutions fresh in my mind. They are often pretty odd, but they generally work. I am aware, though, that no divine inspiration is involved -this is my brain on overtime and with the speed governor removed, spinning friction-free and coming up with new applications of things I already know.

Last night I dreamed repeatedly, to the point of tedium in fact, about the Fibonacci series. It’s hard to achieve tedium with the Fibonacci numbers, as they are an amusing and important series of numbers – even for a mathematical dullard like me. It is easy to calculate them; they yield all sorts of fascinating artifacts like the Golden Mean and the Golden Ratio of antiquity; they are instrumental in marketing statistics and search algorhythms. They can be used to plot the breeding patterns of rabbits – badly.

And! They occur everywhere in nature, especially in patterns of plant growth. What are sunflower seeds, an uncurling fern, the shoots of a pinapple (already weird, as the pineapple is actually a bromeliad – usually found in the upper stories of the rain forest canopy) doing displaying Fibonacci series? I don’t know, but it’s marvelous to see.

Still, I don’t know what it means; other than a random bubble in my production of neurotransmitters.  My dreams really are static; sometimes I can tune them in to a station, but the station is really mine as well. Except for a few dreams I have inherited from Kage, mine are just a carrier wave. No god is whispering to me in my sleep. I think they did, to Kage.

Kage Baker will never leave my life. Mostly, this is a good thing, but … some days are still bad, and the last couple have been very hard. I spent two hours last night going through the rental videos on Amazon, morbidly noting which ones had been her favourites and are only now available on a home computer.  A major case of grieving funk.

But good things are happening too! Kage’s audio books are finally achieving some real speed. Just got the contracts for two more,  The Empress of Mars and House of the Stag. I don’t know when they will be available, but it should be soon. Watch this space for news!

Other than that, it is an uninspiring day. The clouds are rolling in, it’s getting steadily colder – snow is actually a possibility in low-lying areas like San Francisco and Burbank, and the rest of us will get very cold rain. It’s a dim, lead-coloured day here in Los Angeles. My car is in the shop with suddenly-shrieking brakes; mercifully being repaired, but it means I am housebound. All my favourite webcams show nothing but rain, mist and clouds – except the pier in Pismo Beach, where the railing apparently fell off the pier and the waves are presently obscured by great hulking piles of construction materials.

Oh, and Avalon, where evidently the coming storm has violated some municipal ordinance for weather in tropical paradises: the camera on  Crescent Avenue is showing a scene from 4 days ago, in bright and improbable sunlight. Time runs funny on Catalina Island. Kage always said it was because the Company base there was built by the low-bid contractor, and the insulation leaks.

***DISCONTINUITY***

Back from the mechanic; the brakes work again and the Pirate Pearl is full of clean oil. Which is leaking – only slow, only a little, but it is … so the first audio book payment will be poured right back into the car.  As everyone knows, cars have sensors that register the arrival of tax refunds, publishing fees and royalties. But I rejoice I can do this! Kage bought the car for me, and she is still paying for the maintenance. Time slips can be our friends.

And now I am going to turn off the little of my brain that is working, and curl up on the couch with a parrot, a horror novel, and a box of Thin Mint cookies. I wish you all something at least as nice.

Kage Baker had faith in the over-seeing sentience of the Universe. She felt the Universe was naturally inclined to be responsive to the behaviour of the living things in it – like water is sensitive to the splash of a stone. And if the lesser sentient minds that made up the Universe just paid attention, they would notice the Universe reacting to them. Much could be anticipated by being observant.

This has nothing to do with religion, by the way. Kage was a fairly pious, mostly Roman Catholic person. These last several decades, it’s been rather fashionable to describe one’s self, if not an active member of a church, as an agnostic or a deist – but Kage found that mealy-mouthed and bloodless. Her relationship with God was deep and personal and passionate: she just didn’t like organized religion very much. But there was no doubt in her as to the existance of God. It was just a private affair. If she hadn’t had a living to make, she’d probably have been an ecstatic, an anchorite.

No, her  faith in the sentience and aliveness of the Universe was like her belief in the reality of birds, pavement, pizza, rum. There they are – they are real. Actions performed on them will result in equal and opposite reactions, in accordance with the Third Law of Motion. You do need to pay attention to get the full effect. But it’s that way with everything – if you don’t pay attention to the  sleeping dog upon whose paw you have just trodden, it will be a surprise when the dog lunges up and bites you. You won’t know where it came from. It will be a Mystery.

This happens all the time. Thousands of people every day are bitten, run over, beaten up, served with papers, presented with awards, proposed to, descended upon by aliens, etc. – and they have no idea why. They were just sitting there, “minding their own business”, and this guy shot them. Or gave them a million dollars. Or flapped his arms and flew away. Doesn’t matter; they weren’t paying attention, and so have no idea of what the perfectly logical chain of events was that led to the final action.

Kage always tried to keep her eye on that. It was the Universe, moving all around her, aware and responsive. She liked to get the jump on it.

Me, I operate more on a less instinctual level. When Kage was with me, I relied on her radar and her mythotropic senses to let me know what the cosmic tides were doing; nowawdays, I must admit, I am more stumbling along the beach and hoping I don’t encounter a tsunami or a jellyfish. I am trying not to mind my own business too much, because that seems to be the classical path to disaster: so far, though, all I have managed to achieve is not knowing what the hell I am doing most of the time. But hey, it’s a start, right?

Anyway, today my patient legacy agent, the amazing Linn Prentis, sent me an email asking me for the original copyright provenance of one of Kage’s last stories: The Books. Gardner Dozois – Editor Supreme, Wizard Deluxe, one of the Great Gentlemen of Science Fiction, Live Forever, Noble Lord! – wants to use it in his coming 28th Year’s Best Science Fiction. So where was it printed first? inquired Linn.

Hell, I didn’t remember. I could picture perfectly what the cover looked like  – though not the title, just the Eiffel Tower melting in a huge swollen sun … I racked my brains, I plundered the mansion of memory, trying to recall. I asked Harry (he sang me the Spongebob Squarepants theme). The little black cat rose up behind my chair and massaged my aching scalp. The Corgi initiated a running fit back and forth through my room, barking insanely, cornering like a ferret on speed round the edges of my desk …

And, turning to smite the little bugger, I saw the book. The book with The Books in it, the author’s copy sent to me after Kage’s death. It was sitting there, not 6 feet away, with a  plastic box of African animals on top of Kage’s retro turntable that I keep so I can listen to old vinyl. Beside my sewing basket, which I ransacked last night looking for a tape measure and beside which there were no books of any sort at the time.

The Universe had flexed its muscles and tossed me a major breadcrumb. Or Kage is still waving her hands through its substance from somewhere, and sending me a ripple of response. A ripple with a rubber ball on it, to hit me between the eyes and say Wake up!

Thanks, kiddo.