Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker always maintained that her blood got thicker  in the winter – like maple syrup. In logical corollary, she insisted it got thin again in the spring.

This is a popular old bit of folk wisdom, of course, which has persisted for millennia. Liquids do change in the cold: tree sap gets thick and slow, water goes syrupy on its way to freezing, blood in a dead person – who is obviously cooling – clots. It clots in a wound, too, which has opened up the cozy warm insides of a person. It’s a belief hallowed by time and common sense observations, and like a lot of common sense observations, it’s WRONG.

Kage knew it was crap; she just insisted on it to make me crazy. Sisters have a lot of weird things like that – customs that are partly jokes, partly warfare, and partly OCD … it’s a special kind of game, with specific rules. It’s been played with skill and finesse in my family all our lives. This is one of the things that happens with your father can’t say NO to door to door salesmen, and you grow up with 7 sets of encyclopedias in the house.

Kage also maintained that raw potatoes gave you tularemia, a fiction she developed as a defensive maneuver when I convinced her that possums and opossums were two different species. The goal of the game here is to unsettle your victim’s convictions to the point where she gives in and actually looks the nonsense up – if she does, you win. And any winning weaponized “fact” can then be trotted out again and again to make your sister shriek. Thus, Kage speculated mordantly every time I ate crudites, reducing me to that ultimate retort, “Oh, screw you!”

The addition of the Internet to our lives has only made us worse. I have friends who look askance at any exotic fact I share with them, simply because I have so often fed them a line of total nonsense. They only listen because I do know lots of odd things, and I might be honest … this time. This is a very useful skill for a fiction writer, by the way, and Kage was not only the Queen of Search Engines but the Evil Empress of Insane Factoids …

The blood thinning/thickening thing was a frequent excuse for seasonal indulgences with Kage, too. Spicy foods would thin her winter-thickened blood, she maintained – therefore, she needed tacos. Or absinthe. Or rum, which is evidently the real universal solvent. In summer heat, ice cream could be invoked to give necessary body to her thinning blood. And chocolate just fixed everything, restoring all bodily humours to their most effective consistency.

There may be some truth to that last one. Chocolate is testing out as a panacea lately. I am quite sure, however, that hoodies with Jolly Rogers on them have no discernible effect on blood thickness. No matter what Kage insisted.

Here in Los Angeles, the weather has been quite lovely lately. And fairly odd. The days have been warm and clear – it’s 79 degrees here on the edge of Griffith Park today, and we’ll be barbecuing hamburgers for dinner. However, the last several nights have dipped into the 30’s  long enough for frost to form. The car windows have needed scraping every morning, and the bright new grass crackles underfoot. One hardly knows what to wear.

If Kage were here, her blood would be fizzing in her veins like a Christmas bubble light, frantically thinning and thickening. It would be just about to flash phase into an incandescent plasma, probably, and reflect off the backs of her corneas like candle flames.

It was all due to calcite crystals. Yep, calcite crystals. It’s why trilobites had laser eyes, you know.

(Caveat: I never lie to you, Dear Readers. Everything I tell you is the honest truth. The world is just a lot weirder than you ever suspected … )

Kage Baker often compared her computer to the palantiri from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. She loved the access to texts of all times and nations that the Internet provided, but what really zooed her was the ability to see stuff; real stuff, with her own two eyes, in a magic glass.

Her favourite characters in LOTR – predictably, given her love of tools and gardening -were the dwarves and the ents. She liked the palantiri because they were one of the few things in Middle Earth that seemed to be technology: and while she understood the lesson of Isengard with no argument (though she thought it unsubtle) and sided decisively with the ents, she liked good machines in their place. She liked artificers. She loved careful gardens. She’d have made a good dwarf, or an Entwife.

What she was instead was a middle-aged lady who wrote genre literature and had a computer. So she used what she had to secure a little magic for herself. She was fond of quoting Clarke’s Third Law: that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. Since, as she freely admitted, she didn’t understood her computer anyway, it was both convenient and sensible for her to regard it as sorcery.

Kage had a roster of web cams she checked daily, for her magical views of the real world. (I still check them myself, as part of the daily checklist that leads to writing.) There is a clear and potent magic to actually seeing the light of other lands with your own eyes, especially while sitting at your own desk – the sunset on the coast of Cornwall with your morning coffee, fog crowding the Golden Gate Bridge while a hot wind is blowing in your window from the Mojave … and Kage also liked to make sure certain portions of the California coast hadn’t fallen right off the continent in the night. Between San Simeon and Pacifica, that happens rather a lot.

She could check on Mars, if it took her fancy, or a growing assortment of asteroids, comet heads, Jovian and Saturnian moons. She could roam the world and not only get current news within minutes, but watch current events half the globe away in real time – if there was a news crew, or a site cam, or even an office worker on break with a decent phone. And that thrilled her.

This morning was a bit blurry for me; one of those white nights where one never sleeps at all. My activities degenerated with my neurotransmitter levels – first reading some interesting emerging archeology on the continental shelf of Europe; then reading science fiction; then watching steadily worse and worse science fiction films on my desktop. I finally reached the level where not even a simple game like Solitaire or Phlinx was still in my grasp, so I just started surfing news sites …

Where I discovered that Egypt had risen, like a levitating stone, and claimed a new freedom for its people. Six thousand years, give or take a millenium, and Pharaoh may have finally let his own people go. The Egyptians were among the first to invent a middle class: a society where every man could buy immortality and the children of farmers and merchants had worth in their own right. For the last 18 days they have patiently waited, like the born bureaucracy they are, to take power into their own hands – today they achieved it, without the blood of any tyrant to sully their victory.

And I watched it live, on a feed from Al Jazeera, narrated in English by a man with a lovely accent and perfect diction and a name out of the Arabian Nights. I sat there at my palantir, clutching my Turkish coffee, brain burned out on special effects and fantasy, and watched – with my own eyes – as The Black Land, The Two Lands, Musur, Musri, Misri, Misr danced for joy and freedom in the streets.

Wow.

Kage Baker observed the classic calendrical markers for the seasons, because after all – there they are, they must be good for something.  It helps you keep track. And there’s no denying the lengths of the days and nights: solstices and equinoxes, they aren’t susceptible to opinion. It’s either the longest day or it’s not.

But Kage also maintained, from years of common sense observation, that California has her own seasons. You can lay the weather of the rest of the country over the state like one of those transparent cutaway illustrations in the encyclopedia, but Lady California is only doing you a courtesy by  going along with the gag. And she forgets frequently.

The calendar says that today, mid-February, is still the heart of winter. East of the Rockies it certainly is – and in fact seems to be aiming for Ragnarok and Fimbulwinter, at that. But here, in our narrow 300 or so miles between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, spring has been sneaking round the back stairs for a fortnight or so. In four days it will be Valentine’s Day – which Master Shakespeare informs us is the day the birds begin to mate – but in the wintergreen trees outside my bedroom, a mocking bird has been singing his amourous heart out for a month.

Kage said, we don’t so much have a set season for Spring here, as we have a wet season.  She observed that our early fecundity arrives like a riot, disregarding the calendar or the month. The rains come – December through March, some part or all of that stretch, it rains here like the birth of the world. Between the storms, the hills go green as England and all the flowers of the earth begin to bloom. It’s not very organized, but we natives know it for Spring.

There are poppies blooming now- not the careful, formal, tame Iceland poppies planted in the courtyards of banks and hotels, although those are lovely and in much evidence. No, the feral California poppy, with its crazy leaves like mutant carrots and its four blazing petals, is coming up in every barren empty lot, between all the cracks in all the sidewalks. They burn your retinas as you pause for the turns onto the freeway ramps, colour as loud as trumpets.

Crane’s bill geranium is blooming, too –  tiny purple flowers studding its ragged stems, sending up a scent like new-turned earth. Some sort of tropical trumpet vine grows unattended on the thousand miles of bent chain link fence downtown, scarlet and pink, clearly gone insane in the brief winter abundance of rain. It’s doing its best to bury the broken walls and ruins of cottages and auto shops down there, the remains of strip malls and lost driveways that stud the hills – but it’s doomed to failure, a late entry in the race that the blue morning glories won a generation ago.

Morning glories will even eat ivy, and they rule the empty lots of downtown Los Angeles. This is their season to thrive and spread: blue as ink, blue as shadows on white stone, bluer than even the warm sea lapping the coast. Someday,  Kage always said, Los Angeles will be only glass towers gleaming through a cloak of cobalt blue – this time of year  previews that age to come, before the heat of summer beats the morning glories back. But they’ll win someday.

That’s one of the worlds that lived in Kage’s head: a world where Spring in some broken stone city by the sea rises from a tide of blue flowers and stained glass. There’s a tower in the hills, where a girl watches a narrow glimpse of the distant ocean between green slopes, over a waving sea of oak trees and wild oats.  And one day a man comes walking along the road …

It happens in the Spring, the early California Spring, that comes when the rest of the continent is still asleep under the snow. He comes, and they walk away between the burning poppies and the morning glories and the new silver-green grain;  in some land where Spring comes at the end of January.

And wonders ensue.

Kage Baker was queen of the search engines.

She loved search engines. When I set up her first computer, one of the helpful built-in To Do exercises was a list of suggested search engines; which one did we want to dedicate on the system? (This was long ago – Altadena, Lycos, Webcrawler … Kage liked the spider logo for that last one.) When I explained what a search engine was, Kage’s eyes lit up with that special fanatical fire only she seemed to produce.

“You mean, I can just tell it what I want to know and it’ll find all the references?” she asked in amazement and growing avarice.

I explained about parameters, about the literality of computer searches, about the uses of commas and parentheses , about how “AI” was still a hoped-for concept … and Kage, semi-hemi-demi-Luddite that she was, caught on at once. It appeared she had an unexpressed gene or eight for library science; all it took was the right environment for the trait to express itself.

It was the one aspect of computer use I never had to teach her again. I never did manage to teach her how to avoid – or use – accidental key commands. It took literal years before she always remembered to close a document before she shut down the computer. But search engines? Her natural habitat. She knew about each succeeding new one before even I did, and worked out all the ways to refine searches far ahead of me. I think she had a wireless cyborg connection in her head – this woman who took four years to realize her monitor and hard drive were two separate pieces of equipment …

Kage had always loved treasure maps, and scavenger hunts. She had a natural affinity for maps, and was a born navigator. I don’t know what sort of domain of light she imagined in her head when she pictured cyperspace – but I know she saw something. She was a visual person, and all her ideas were framed in pictures. When she was concentrating on an idea, she would close her eyes: and you could see her gaze track  back and forth beneath her eyelids, like REM sleep, following some interior landscape that not even she – wordsmith deluxe! – could describe verbally. But she could see it.

Search engines let Kage cast her spirit out into a non-corporeal world. Like a hawk on the wing, like a dragonfly of light, she swooped through the halls of information and plucked what she wanted from the aether. It became a form of recreation for her, too; she could spend hours traveling through electronic lands, following one obscure hint or reference to another – she didn’t need a goal or a destination, she just went roaming to see what could be found. And she found amazing things.

(I learned all about firewalls and security and viruses and tracking cookies, as a direct result of this habit. I was doing search-and-destroy maintenance on a nightly basis when most people had not yet learned it was even needed. When your housemate wanders off into the Fields We Do Not Know and habitually leaves the back door open, you learn all about latches and watch dogs.)

One of the bells and/or whistles on this lovely blog site is a set of research tools. It tells me how many of you Dear Readers look at this daily drivel, and where you wandered in from; if you came directly or if you found a link somewhere else and followed it. It tells me if you got here via a search engine, and what the search terms most commonly used were.

That last one is the best, I think. Some very odd searches are going on out there in the aether – and somehow, they end up here with my musings on Kage Baker. Yestreday, for example, the listed terms included:  carrying on the tales kage baker, pictures of complicated cogs, kage kathleen, painting of typewriter keyboard frontgate, kinds of mustard …

Some of these are obvious, of course. And some of the others can be extrapolated from Kage’s known fondness for steampunk and retro-technology. But – pictures of complicated cogs? Painting of a keyboard? Or is it painting keyboards themselves? They are pretty dull, usually, and could probably use some paint. Whose front gate was looked for?  … who the heck got here by searching for kinds of mustard? And why?

I dunno, Dear Readers. But I do know that it all has the savour of the kind of search Kage herself would have been on. Some of you out there are of a like mind with her, and are speeding on fiery wings through the same aetheric woods that she did. You’re finding the same sorts of lightning she did, hanging like ripe fruit on strange trees, and snapping it up. There is an element of glee and wildness in hunts like that …

I find it very comforting.

Kage Baker did not approve of naps. No matter how tired she was, she never went for a lie-down in the day unless she was ill. Even then, it had to be some illness with a bit of heft – a bad flu, or a real head-cracker of a migraine. You know, something that left her blind with pain or puking uncontrollably.

She usually did sleep at night, which may have contributed to her refusal to nap; in fact, as I have said, she could hardly help it. Under normal circumstances, she could barely stay awake past midnight for a party or other festive event, let alone because of insomnia: she almost never “just couldn’t sleep”. It was like Kage ran on a solar charger, and automatically went down when the sunlight faded. And when she did suffer the occasional white night – which everyone does, from time to time – it really did for her. She looked and felt awful. She was utterly sandbagged by fatigue, and would stagger around the next day as if she’d been slipped a Mickey Finn, rather than staying up until dawn desperately watching the entire LOTR trilogy.

But even then, she wouldn’t nap. She’d claim  she was tired, not sleepy; that she just couldn’t relax; that if she slept now, she’d never get to sleep at night. And I must assume she believed all these things, even though I watched her nod off in her chair a million times, stubbornly refusing to admit she needed to lie down – when a 45-minute nap would have restored her. All I could ever conclude was that, on some level, she thought napping was weak. Sissy. Probably immoral.

Even in her last, mortal illness, I can’t truthfully say she ‘napped’. She was in bed a lot; finally, confined to bed – but she stayed awake in the day as much as she could. She refused to sleep. Only exhaustion would carry her off in the daylit hours, and it was a bone-deep exhaustion indeed – fighting cancer takes a lot of strength; which, increasingly, Kage did not have. But naps, apparently, were still for babies. She’d fight grimly to keep her eyes open, and only succumb to real rest once it was night – and then, no matter what procedures had to be carried out at night, she slept for the 8 hours she had always preferred.

I changed bandages, administered pills, and gave her entire regimens of IV drugs at night – and she slept through them. I think it was by sheer will power. Kage had the strongest will in the world, and she made the world behave as she thought it ought to. She tried, anyway. She succeeded more than most people ever do.

Death is like a sleep, or so a lot of poets claim. They were all living poets when they said it, though, and none has issued citations after their own deaths – so I think we can safely assume they were all talking through their hats and personal hopes. Death could be like an awful lot of things – who would not prefer it to be like a sleep, rather than, say, a hangover? Or a bout of dysentery? Or an afternoon stuck in traffic on the 405- you know, on that stretch by Mountain Gate, in the Sepulveda Pass,  where the air always smells of garbage from the landfill?

A sleep is pretty good, really, considering what else could happen. Personally, I think there is more to it than mere sleep. But no one really knows. It’s the universal uncertainty. I won’t believe any one else’s account of it, because it’s probably not true; and if it is, it probably is only true for them. I won’t know for sure until it is my turn.

I, however, do honestly believe in a life in a world to come. I can’t get much more specific than that – I don’t have the kind of faith that reassures me as to what life or world is waiting. All I have are the details I know I would prefer, ranging from the profound to the utterly banal – there had better be chocolate in the next world, for instance, or you can cancel my subscription. The one thing of which I remain convinced, however, is that there IS a continuation. We don’t go out like candles, or fall silent like finished songs. The soul is immortal and goes on.

Why do I believe this? Because Kage went. If it was only sleep – if there was nothing waiting – she wouldn’t have gone at all.

I do believe that.

Kage Baker was a successful mid-list science fiction author.  That doesn’t mean tons of money. It meant she was was able to support herself with her writing, in a state of genteel poverty. Since her practical goal was to earn her living with her writing – to escape the cubical ghetto of the middle-aged female office drudge – she was pretty damned happy about that.

More money would have been great, of course. Sometimes enormous amounts came in, and she spent happily and freely. Not to mention insanely …  But, in the last couple of years (before her cancer was diagnosed and began its remorseless blitzkrieg on her body), it finally became obvious she was going to Make It: she could earn her living with her pen. It was an enormous satisfaction to her. Kage never wanted a life of indolence – she wanted to write. Making money by writing meant she didn’t have to stop writing to make money. As it were. And between Kage’s large but irregular checks, and my small but every two weeks paydays, we managed a comfortable life.

Kage’s needs were few and she was not generally indulgent. She was happy with her standard of living if she had enough to buy books and music whenever she wanted them – that was about her highest goal, that and prezzies for friends and family. I kept  the budget for the mundanities of rent and groceries and utilities, and when she saw something she wanted – a special volume of Robert Louis Stevenson, a specific recording of The Threepenny Opera, a pearl-white laptop for a collage-bound niece – she would simply say, “I need this fill in the blank. When can I get it?”

And I would say, “Now,” or “With the next royalty check” or “After I get paid on Friday” or “When Lemuria rises again.” That last one would get me a scowl and a thoughtful look – then she’d write another story and point out that whatever impossibility she had so desired was now within reach. It usually worked, too.

The week she died, she told me that at least her tiny estate would be easy to handle.  I bravely agreed. Oh, were we wrong …

Kage’s estate consisted mostly of books – her own books in boxes from the publishers (rather a lot of those) her private personal library, which was mostly sea novels and Stephenson and Shakespeare (even more of those). An amazing wardrobe of hoodies and Hawaiian shirts and high-topped Converses. Odds and ends, bits and pieces, memorabilia and souveniers. The most important part was the notes, on works completed and yet to come.

Money? Nope, not much. Not by the time she died. I spent it on her health care; and then I spent it on her comfort. And then I spent it on what are so euphemistically called “final expenses”, of which an inordinately large part has been fees to the state of California  and some foreign countries to accept Kage’s Will and Executor … it’s not enough to die. You have to be able to prove you’re dead. You have to be able to prove you died in the right way. Your choice of heir must be approved – and I think thrones may be inherited with less fuss than Kage’s estate has required. You must have your papers.

At the moment, I am arranging a road trip to San Luis Obispo. Kage’s Will passed Probate some months ago, but now the Court want an inventory of her estate. What I’ve just shared with you, Dear Readers, a few paragraphs ago, is just about it – but I guess I have to tidy it up some before I present it to them.

Item: a blue velveteen ring box containing half a dozen tickets to various Hollywood Bowl concerts from the 1970’s.

Item: 14 hooded sweatshirts, all black, many with cartoon insignia, one jeweled.

Item: 8 pairs of high-top tennis shoes: pink, white, blue, blue, blue, red, green, red and green

Item: a mayonnaise jar full of blue beach glass

Item: a shoebox full of bubble wrap ….

What they will do with it, I cannot begin to imagine …

Kage Baker watched humanity like she wasn’t a member of the species. Writers tend to do that. Especially science fiction writers.

Ideally, this is how all  scientists should work, too, especially  in the biological fields. One should cultivate a completely objective perspective, laying aside the empathies, antipathies and appetites that you may have in common with your target species; treating the subject of study as if they were aliens, to be studied in a cool, unemotional vacuum. In reality, most folks cannot even summon enough objectivity to avoid identifying with flatworms or fruit flies, let alone fellow fuzzy mammals. Heck, even physicists have assigned qualities like “charm” and “flavour” to subatomic particles.

I think writers actually can get closer to this objective view than many scientists. They certainly  get closer than anthropologists, who do the most direct studies of humankind and yet display the least emotional detachment. There are few fields as acrimonious as paleoanthropology, where opinion and interpretation provoke verbal blood-feuds among those who study the few sad bones of our ancestors and cousins. There are anthropologists who get invited to be on panels with one another just to liven up conventions.

Neanderthals were long excluded from the direct line of humanity, mostly because no one wanted to admit we were related to them. In fact, only in the last year has it been accepted that some our genes were actually acquired from them – which, as people don’t indulge in the broadcast chastity of fish (spreading milt impersonally and anonymously), means there had to be some genuine intimacy involved. But the paleontologists who first examined Neanderthal bones – and most of the ones who studied them subsequently – couldn’t bring themselves to admit a close relationship with such brutish ancients … it took a generation of study before anyone calmed down enough to realize that the original skeleton was of a guy with serious arthritis, and had been assembled carelessly to boot. Kage loved that story – she thought it revealed more about human nature than the actual study of the fossils.

Of course, now that we have pretty good proof there was some hanky-panky going on after all, it’s become necessary instead to inflate Homo neanderthalensis virtues and similarities to Homo sapiens: they still aren’t being taken much on their own unique merits. But it’s better than relegating them to the trash heap of history. And I suppose it’s less embarassing than acknowledging that our ancestors would not only screw anybody, but that they passed the habit on to us.  As Kage said, the Cro-magnons probably would have had sex with the Neanderthals even if they had belonged to a different genus, let alone a species. And it’s a fair bet the neighboring Neanderthals had the same inclination, because they were human, too. And humans are an indiscriminately randy lot.

Kage studied archeology because she loved history, and was fascinated with the qualities of sapience, intelligence, humanity. She had a childhood horror of actual bones, though, so she confined her study to books, preferably books about rocks and pottery and ancient technology.  She left most of the physical anthropology to me to research, and then read my notes: photos of skulls creeped her out. As a serious curiosity about human origins grew and continued through her life, though, she got easier with the pictures. Eventually, the distinctive faces of the last 4 or 5 editions of humanity were as familiar and friendly to her as photos from our childhood.

And that is one of the reasons Kage invented several sub-species of humans in her Company series. She developed a fondness for them, all those great-grand-to-the-nth power folks. And when she loved someone, when she could not bear the thought of ever losing them, she wound them into her stories. In a bit of a disguise, usually, but she conferred immortality as best she could.

So at the end, I guess her objectivity failed a bit. The more she studied humans, the better she liked them. In the abstract, anyway, at a decent distance – say, about 50,000 years or more. Everybody’s virtues show up better that way, she said. After all, we have much more evidence that they all made love than that they made war.

Tomorrow: more examination of Kage and her species.

Kage Baker once stayed awake for almost 40 hours. She considered it a personal best, which it was, and was very proud of the fact. Ordinarily, she was one of those people who falls asleep by midnight, and turns into a variety of semi-sentient fungus if she doesn’t get 8 hours of sleep a night. She’d stay up until 1 or 2 if she was racing a writing deadline, but pay for it by being in a helpless coma the next morning.

So she was justifiably proud of her best streak of wakefulness. She also never wanted to repeat it, as it was fairly weird toward the end there.

Of course, the end was on the roof/patio of her agent’s wonderful shotgun apartment in New York,  at the tail end of a publishing party, drinking Cuban coffee and smoking … stuff, and watching city lights impersonating UFO’s. So there is really no telling how much was the psychotropic effects of fatigue poison and how much was the interesting hor d’oeuvres.

In that 40 hours, though, Kage had flown across the continent, accompanied me on a fevered pilgrimage to see rose-quartz hand axes and Homo ergaster skeletons at the Natural History Museum, observed polar bears and Arctic char and the wonderful animal clock at the Zoo,  danced between the lions at the New York City Library, watched a falconer hunt pigeons between apartment buildings, dined at Aquavit restaurant, seen Baz Lurhman’s La Boheme on Broadway, driven round Times Square leaning out the window of a cab, done a radio show, given a reading, had a late night supper in a Irish pub, and dodged porters hefting huge baskets of oysters and mussels on the cobbled sidewalk of the harbour end of Wall Street.

And those were just the more active parts … but she was speaking in tongues by the time I tucked her into the beautiful sleigh bed in Linn’s guest room. Which was not so much a room as an alcove off the living room, where the neon sign from the Cuban grocery downstairs blinked colours on the walls all night.

We were living in magic during that trip to New York, and Kage was determined not to waste a moment.

This has always been my personal philosophy – sleep is for sissies, etc. I have been blessed for most of my life with a low need for sleep, as well, ordinarily getting by on 3 or 4 hours a night. It was not unusual for me to stay awake for entire weekends at Renaissance Faires; or subsist happily on cat naps so as to spend the nights with the other insomniacs, sharing poetry and port by lamplight or running pike drills in the Dragon Maze.

I eagerly anticipated middle and old age. I believed that myth that the elderly don’t sleep much, and figured that by the time I was 60 I could have dispensed with sleep almost entirely. However, that turns out to be a huge, lousy, stinking lie. It also doesn’t take heart disease into consideration, which is pretty stupid when you consider that it’s just at that point in life that most hearts begin to falter …

To my annoyance, I now need more sleep than I ever did before in my life. It is a family legend that I was the non-sleeping variety of infant. My memories of insomnia go back to seeing my next youngest sister asleep in her crib while I was running round the bedroom floor, so it must be true. I was awake through adolescence. I was awake through my early and middle adulthoods. I have seen more midnights than noons, and cringed from more dawns than any vampire. This is a serious drag, man.

Kage was thrilled when she managed to spend almost 4 days awake – but she realized it was an aberration, and she never tried to do it again. She was always wiser than me in base-line practicalities …  usually I stay awake to write and read in the quiet hours of the night that have always been my natural habitat; then I catch a few hours of sleep. But now, when I am once again awake and armed with coffee and deep into my morning correspondence,  this new incubus sneaks up on me and I don’t wake up again until 2 in the afternoon! Not acceptable!

I would happily just go nocturnal if it meant I could manage on 6 or 7 hours of sleep again. But it seems I need more like 12 or 14, and it is making serious dents in my time. Is there something like a reverse sleeping pill? Some medication that will restore my waking hours and not turn me into a red-eyed psychotic? I don’t even mind a few hallucinations if they keep to my schedule … grist for the writer’s mill, and all that. Hasn’t anyone developed electro-sleep headsets yet?

Must go check EBay …

Kage Baker felt that February was incontestably the most boring month of the year. She thought it was a very good idea that is is also the shortest, as it’s pretty much an endurance test. Cabin fever, ennui, petite malaise – all guests of February.

The holiday season is over and done with; any sweeties you may have forgotten to eat are probably in a doubtful state by now. Chocolate with vitiligo is so unappetizing … The “new” has worn off all your presents, even if you are too old to have broken them. But you’ve read the books, worn the clothes, played the games,  installed the software, listened to the music. You may even have housebroken the new puppy. There is not really a decent holiday on the horizon, either, not one where you might get the day off or some astounding goodie.

Well, there was the multi-culture clash on the 2nd. Candlemas, Groundhog Day, Imbolc – you could get your candles blessed while waving branches of box wood, chasing your local burrowing rodents about in pursuit of shadows: which sounds exciting but is probably not worth the trouble it takes to set up. Kage and I used to put up some box (when anyone in the neighborhood had a box hedge) and dine by candlelight … never could figure out how to work the Groundhog in, though.

And of course, there is Valentine’s Day, but that is fraught with pitfalls. If you’re a kid, your parents make you bring a Valentine to school for every kid – even the ones with whom you are mortal enemies; that is, if your school has not forbidden Valentines altogether on the grounds of sexual harassment. And if you are a grown up, there are all sorts of other horrendous choices. Do you give chocolates or diamonds? Godiva’s and a little velvet box, or Whitman’s Milk Assortment and rhinestones? If you are in romantic extremis and don’t even have a Valentine, there is nothing quite as depressing as buying your own choccies and eating them in depressed solitude …

There is always Presidents’ Day, of course. Wow, that’s a big one, isn’t it? If you’re old enough, you remember when it was two separate days, Washington’s and Lincoln’s individual birthdays; you made construction paper hatchets and stove pipe hats in school, and Momma made cherry tarts. Nowadays it’s one amorphous 3-day holiday, nobody mentions the iconic Presidents except furniture and car salesmen touting sales, and most folks just treat it as one more long weekend with beer.

The weather tends to be dull or uncomfortable. This year, most of the United States is freezing to death. My agent Linn, a denizen of New York City, has informed me that the snow hasn’t melted in 10 days; it’s outrageous, she says, they are getting Upstate weather. Here in Southern California, the weather hasn’t even managed to become inconvenient, though. Mostly it’s just chilly enough to need a sweater – at least for the first 20 minutes you go outside, then it gets too warm and you have to figure out somewhere to put it. There’s a thin layer of clouds on the sky, like soup scum, and everything is overlaid with a faint tinge of beige.

On a February day like this, Kage would curl up in her arm chair and watch The Wrong Box. We’d order some ethnic takeout for dinner, and read graphic novels and check out just how horrible the latest SciFi Original movie was. It’d be a good night for the antics of some shark/badger hybrid chasing college kids.

Come to think of it, it still is. Hiow can I be bored with all this in the offing? I’m gonna go read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and meditate on the virtues of chow fun versus Philly cheese steak …

Kage Baker was fascinated with the many and various robotic space vehicles mankind has launched over the last 50-odd years. She wasn’t that taken with the romance of space ships; it was the intrepid machines that really caught her fancy. She adored cunning machinery, and the human race has produced nothing so cunning as the space probes and rovers.

Part of the fascination was that it all happened during her actual lifetime – no other generation before us has been able to watch the heavens open up and reveal their secrets as we have. I was the fanatic who watched every televised launch and live-from-space broadcast, but Kage was acutely aware that the subject matter was unique. She did point out to me, though, that the phenomenon itself was not – it’s happened over and over, whenever a frontier is reached and crossed. There is always a primary generation for whom the world abruptly becomes wider and stranger – who learns the new geography, the exotic foods and names and technologies for the very first time. Not so long ago, it was covered wagons and the American West; shortly before that, it was sailing ships and the Mysterious East.

It’s always been something, somewhere. Archeology has pretty strong hints that at some point it was rafts and how to cook a wallaby. Kage thought that was at least as fascinating as rocket ships and space colonies – the intrepid folks who made it to Australia were still using stone tools. She made some notes on the feat for a story …

But it was the Voyagers I and II, and the Huygens lander, and the heroic Mars Rovers that really captured Kage’s heart. It was the pictures, I think. They sent back pictures of where they were; photos of things no one had ever seen.  Other worlds.  The light on landscapes no human had ever walked. When Huygens sent back the ground level photos of its landing on Titan, Kage was beside herself. “That’s a beach!” she said. “That’s damned littoral environment!”

“Um – there’s no water on Titan,” I pointed out. But Kage – who sat through biology class  with her scarf tied over her face and never, ever took chemistry – was miles ahead of me.

“There’s liquid, isn’t there? Some kind of liquid?” she demanded. “I know what a beach looks like, and that is a beach! Something out there has waves and tides and mud! It may not be life, but it’s a living planet!”

And with every passing year since then, it looks like she was right. She trusted the machine eyes that showed her that most foreign of shores, and believed their evidence.

It was the photos and stills of Mars that she loved best, though. She studied them avidly; she often wrote with a second window open on her computer, showing some Martian scene that intrigued her. The dust devils were among her favourites, and the sun setting … she’d play them over and over, gazing out onto alien landscapes in total satisfaction. The machines had not failed. They promised goodies and they duly delivered. Kage joined the club that thought of the Mars Rovers as some kind of stalwart men-at-arms, prowling out there at the edge of the unknown, writing letters back to home.

She also loved the Rovers because they justified her personal idea of what Mars was like. They proved a lot of her guesses and speculations about Mars. They made Empress of Mars harder science fiction. She liked that.

I am glad she was gone before Spirit got into trouble up there. It would have made her so sad.

Right now, Voyager I is reaching the heliopause – that ultimate (as far as we know) border of the solar system. After 30-odd years it is about to cross into intersteller space and head to meet  its destiny – which we all sincerely hope will not involve coming back to whup our planetary ass. Voyager I has never stopped sending information: in fact, the knowledge there even is a discrete border to the solar system is something we didn’t know until Voyager found it. In a few years, it will cross that line of electromagnetic energy. Look here:      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11988466

For centuries, astronomers thought the solar system was surrounded by literal shells of matter: crystal spheres were a popular choice. Classical scientists like Eudoxus, Aristotle, Aristarchus and Ptolemy calculated that their numbers ranged form three to fifty-five (which does seem excessive, but it was Aristotle’s idea so no one threw it out).

Now, it turn out there really is a shell – only it’s energy, not matter, and as far as we can tell there is only the one. Of course, we didn’t know even the one was there until the cunning machine got close enough to see it. And soon, Voyager I will cross and sail on, still functioning …

There’s a beach on Titan. The sands of Mars are real. The crystal spheres are real. The cunning machines are forging on, carrying us with them. Kage would have liked that.