Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker: this time last year, she had 8 days to live. Luckily, we had no idea it would be so soon, so fast.

We had come home from the seaside motel, where we had stayed until therapy was pronounced of no more use. Getting home was so simple, so absurdly easy  … I called a private ambulance company, who specialized in things like this: careful, tender, non-emergency patient transport. Kage and I were learning about a whole new society we had had no idea existed: the complex service industry of the dying.

Weird, the things you discover at the end of a life. There are really, really nice people who run whole businesses designed to make it easier for strangers to die well. So don’t leave your beloveds in the cold hospital, Dear Readers. I assure you, just like canning fruit and holiday dinner and a good night’s sleep, dying is better done at home.

But the ambulance people were charming and expert, and the weather was beautiful that morning; they kept the sun out of Kage’s eyes, and yet managed to give her a view from the gurney, and point out how lovely our garden was looking. She caught my eye as she was borne up our demonic stairs for what was probably the last time, and started to giggle.

“I’ve been carried up these stairs by so many handsome young men lately,” she observed.

“And we’ll tuck you right into bed, too,” one said gallantly, and made Kage laugh.

Everyone who made Kage laugh those last weeks is on my permanent prayer list. Some of you, I don’t remember your names – but I remember your faces. I pray for you every night, in gratitude.

Death is often simple. Dying, though,  is freaking complicated. The paperwork alone is enough to be fatal to someone sick enough to need it – one of the reasons you need to keep your friends and family around you is to beat away the bureaucrats that come flocking like paper moths to a dying flame. Caregivers, never forget this: you are your loved one’s best, first and last line of defense; and when it comes to the end your job is to keep the idiots away from them. The day Kage came home, no less than 4 representatives of the hospice organization showed, up after the other, well-meaning beads on a regulation string, with things for her to sign.

None of them even got to see her. Once she was tucked into bed by her male harem, I gave her a bath and some pain meds and an egg cream; put her in a clean nightie, and she went to sleep at once, exhausted. But we had long ago set up her power of attorney for me, and I had her End of Life care orders as well. So I was well equipped handle each of the earnest young women who arrived with sheafs of papers to be signed.

I remember the second one told me in worried tones, “You must realize, Ms. Baker is dying.” I was unable to be stop myself from replying: “Yes, that’s why I called you people. That’s why you’re here.” However, I did manage not to call her a moron.

When I went back in to Kage’s room, she was briefly awake. She looked at me and said, “So they figured out I’m dying, huh? Man, you can’t hide anything from these professional types.”

We sat there and snickered shamelessly. If the poor young lady heard us as she went down the stairs, she must have thought the strain was getting to us.

It wasn’t, though. There was no strain left. We had no idea how little time Kage had left, but we were pretty sure it wasn’t much. She was all right with that – she had plans, because she thought she had a month or so, but she knew it was the end. I was not nearly as strong about it.  But I only broke down once where she had to comfort me, that night in the motel, crying and begging her not to go … it took poor Kage about two hours to talk me down out of the trees, but I never did it again.

And once we were back home, everything was amazingly peaceful and comfortable. The sun was shining. We had drugs for her pain. We had everything she wanted to drink. We were still reading Coppertop. Friends and family were calling, making reservations to come see her – so we knew we would get visitors Kage actually wanted.

So it was all right. Though the paperwork was a bitch.

Kage Baker said that one never outgrew the childhood conditioning of Saturday!!!

It’s the free day, the day with no obligations, the day we are most likely to resent having to do anything goal-oriented. No, she would say, don’t tell me you virtuously run 12 miles every Saturday because you ought to. You do it because it’s your own idea and you’re getting some personal satisfaction out of it – if it was a mere duty, you’d resent it.

Her theory was undoubtedly heavily influenced by Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays, one of the wonderful Melendy Family books from our childhood. We all adored those books.  The Saturdays is about 4 siblings who all contribute their allowances to a common purse, so that each one of them gets a Saturday each month when they are rich and free and can do whatever they like.

We didn’t have allowances and our mob was much less organized than the Melendys. But it molded Kage’s ideas of all and any Saturdays, forever. Even when 36 Saturdays out of a year were spent doing historical Faires – maybe more so, then, despite the fact that we still didn’t get any allowances and the mob was even bigger … much more fun, though.

Years before school ended, one was firmly set in the calendrical rut. Monday through Friday are work days. Sunday is church or family or some other non-work obligation, and anyway: it is always overhung by the looming horror of Monday just beyond it. Saturday, though, is the party day, the adventure day, the Land of the Lotus Eater, the holiday. It’s the day that lasts forever.

Even when one is unemployed (or self-employed, as Kage succeeded in becoming) the cachet of Saturday remains. I mean, you know it’s actually Saturday … you find yourself sleeping in, or rising before dawn to drive into the mountains; you go antiquing, or stay in your pajamas and frankly loll. You indulge. The knowledge that it is Saturday gives one more license to recline on the couch with a favourite novel and the last of the Hershey’s Kisses. (Thanks, Kimberly!)

Of course, your idea of indulgence may require tons of physical labour – I have plenty of friends whose idylls involve anvils or adzes or skimming across San Francisco Bay at a 45-degree angle. Still, according to the Kage Baker Theory of Saturdays, whatever it is you choose to do is more fun because of the knowledge that it is a Saturday activity. That conditioned calendar in your head marks it in holiday red for you.

Four hundred odd words ago, I was going to say – hey, Dear Readers, it’s Saturday; I’m going back to bed. Everything is  officially Blown Off.  Then I got carried away with the whole Saturday thing, remembering Kage’s theorizing on the gravitational pull of the day. Sure, it’s a conditioned reflex, but it’s interesting.

It also appears that I have developed another conditioned reflex. It’s certainly what usually happened to Kage. She’d pontificate awhile on the holiday frame of mind, she’d recall a few book adventures, she’d get a fresh Coke … and then her eyes would go all distant and she’d turn back to her desk. And soon I would hear the tap of keys getting faster and faster, and I would know she was back on her 12-mile run: not because she had to – it was Saturday, after all – but because nothing pleased her so well.

And I would sigh happily and pick up my knitting and relax. But today – well, there’s more to write, isn’t there? I’ve got a fox terrier running down a beach with a length of gros grain ribbon for a leash – I don’t think that’s strong enough to work. There’s a badly beaten butler somewhere, and I don’t know if he’s dead or just battered; if he’s arranged tastefully on a pile of nets, or stuffed under a bathing machine. Elsewhere, I have a plague breaking out in a 5-star hotel, and a couple of nuns in very strange danger. And a vague idea about whole-body hearing is nipping at my heels. It’s just waiting for me. And I have all the gleeful time in the world to indulge myself with it.

It’s Saturday.

Kage Baker, unlike many science fiction writers, was not herself a science person. Unless you count some of the “softer” sciences (dismissively so-named by physicists) like sociology and cultural anthropology – those she was intensely interested in, and read in constantly throughout her life. It is famously aphorized that Behaviour Doesn’t Fossilize – but Kage maintained that wasn’t true. Human civilization carries as much half-fossilized relics from its past as our crowded cellular nuclei do. Folklore alone is the Burgess Shale of behaviour.

But Kage was aware she needed to know what was sharpening the cutting edges, and besides: new findings in anything are fascinating. Even if you don’t quite comprehend them, there is a glitter and a glamour to the ideas that the Milky Way may be surrounded by invisible satellite galaxies of dark matter. Or that there are close to two dozen elements that are only produced artificially, and then only for a few seconds – faerie metals. Or that the upper reach of human life span appears to be the nonsensical age of 116. Or that the surface of the Moon smells like gunpowder. One’s life does not depend on knowing this stuff. But it gives depth and elegance to the entire affair.

Kage did dedicated research when she was working on a specific idea: she believed she ought to know How Things Work if she was going to write about them. When she couldn’t devise active participation herself (lots of odd and interesting kitchen experiments there …) she sought out the people who did do them; knowing people in groups that ranged from Roman medical re-creation to the Mars Society helped. Kage believed in hands-on research, and when her own hands didn’t reach, she sought out people with bigger hands.

Kage cruised several science news sites daily, to see what was exciting whom. And she employed a clip service – me, whose job it was to read magazines and journals and report on interesting developments. It was a pleasant compromise, because I would have 1) been reading these things anyway; and 2) reading my favourite bits out loud and making Kage crazy. This way it was useful. And some magazine subscriptions became tax deductions. (Not the knitting mags, alas, but Scientific American qualified.)

Presently, the red giant star Betelgeuse might be upon point of going supernova.  The readings of  its radiation output indicate  that its mass is shrinking steadily and (in stellar terms) rapidly. This would have fascinated and horrified Kage. Fascinated, because, wow, a freaking supernova! Horrified,  because Betelgeuse is the right shoulder of Orion, a constellation Kage loved. (Also, it is the home of Zaphod Beeblebrox, though one presumes that if Betelgeuse is indeed going supernova, that slippery gentleman has scarpered.)

This is tremendously exciting for astronomers – we haven’t had a close-to view of a nova in centuries, and Betelgeuse looks fair to be a Big Deal. It’s relatively close – 600 llight years away – and it’s a ginormous star: a Super Mega Killer Roman Candle firework of a star. It may well be visible to the naked eye. And while it’s close enough to be observable, it is not so close as to be dangerous to us. Ringside seat at Safe and Sane Supernova!

However, the tantalizing chance that it could mean the doom of mankind has the fringe press and Apocalypse fans in a frenzy. Except it couldn’t, but never mind – ignoring all the actual data, what one can draw from the astronomy reports is that Betelgeuse is BIG (well, our sun is pretty wimpy) and CLOSE (relatively. In a galaxy 100,000 light years across, 600 is just the next block) and SOON TO EXPLODE (also relative. Might be tonight, might be in a thousand years). Man, what if it goes up in 2012!?!?! This is the current highly uninformed, most hysterical and loudest speculation.

What if Betelgeuse does become a visible supernova in 2012?  Well, it’ll be a huge coincidence and we’ll be pretty lucky. Those of us alive now will get to see a real supernova. The information gathered will be enormous. Orion will be left a bit of a gimp, of course, but there’s drama in that, too.

Kage would have been fascinated  even more by the Doomsday frenzy than an incipient supernova. She observed often that there is a wide-spread human longing for the end of the world – to see God, to get revenge on the evildoers, to purge the planet, to clear your credit card debt … lots of reasons, and lots of people sort of sneakily like the idea. She thought the attitude was cowardly, and that those who played into it – largely politicians, religious fundamentalists, and skunks of a similar stripe – were despicable. It was one of the aspects of human nature that made her shake her head in amazement and despair.

What would have occurred to Kage first and foremost, though, was that the entire frenzy – whether enthused or terrified – was a tempest in a tea pot. Much ado about – not nothing, but the wrong thing; and certainly a lot of yelling and shaking spears at a shadow in the sky that is not real. Because Betelgeuese is big, and is close, but the information we are getting from its light is old, stale news. If it is destined to be a supernova, it has almost certainly already exploded. We’re just waiting for the confirmation.

Nice little paradox in time, there. Just the sort of thing Kage loved.

Kage Baker liked wind storms.

We got doozies when we lived in Pismo Beach. That fabled town is a ribbon on the edge of the continent – a mile wide and 7 miles long, unless they’ve annexed some more empty canyons recently. The Pacific breathes heavily on it, and there are hills behind it that channel all the inland winds right out to meet the ocean. Consequently, the place is prone to gales and micro-bursts.

Micro-bursts are modern explanations for sudden descending whirlwinds, apparently. They come rushing up like an invisible train and hammer everything in their path. I think they used to be identified as marauding angels. In Pismo, they move kayaks, power poles, garden furniture, birds and small animals between houses in unexpected and amusing ways. Simooms rise on the beach and leave enormous dunes piled against the pier and herds of surprised tourists.

Kage adored this. We lived for many years in a tiny cottage made of shipwreck scraps – really, there were timbers from scorched houses in the foundation; no two windows matched, there was not a level floor or plumb wall in the place, and the kitchen door had come from a fishing boat’s cabin. When the winds rose and gusted, the entire cottage shook. The living room ceiling – which was plastered plywood hung maybe 4 inches from the roof beams – flexed like a tarp.

And the wind howled. We had eaves – teeny tiny ones – and the wind sang and orated in them like the voice of God. When we moved up the hill and up a story to our last apartment, we got better construction: but the wind still howled around the building. We faced the sea, looking west through the middle air, and the winds hit our living room wall and went singing in all directions. It was great.

We had grown up in the Hollywood Hills, literally in the Cahuenga Pass, in a house perched on a knife-edge hilltop. The yard sloped precipitously fore and aft, it was 50-odd steps to the street below, and the house itself boasted a tower on the front. That cupola was Kage’s domain … and when the winds would come roaring in from the San Fernando Valley, her tower was the rock on which they broke. In winter the icy north winds made the entire Valley glitter like a bed of embers; in the summer, when the Santa Ana wind blew madness and fever through the Basin, the exhalations of the desert filled her bedroom.

Even when we left home, we stayed in the Hills. We lived in a neighborhood more or less behind the Hollywood Bowl, halfway up streets that ascended like staircases from Highland Avenue. (Some of them were staircases, totally inaccessible except by foot, roundly cursed be generations of firemen and delivery guys.) They were reefs in the ocean of the seasonal winds, which hit the hillcrests and then splashed down the narrow streets like invisible tides, bearing off trees and roof tiles.

Kage considered the whole process a show.

Right now, the Los Angeles Basin is under a wind advisory. We are told to expect gusts up to 65 miles an hour “below the canyons” (that is a meteorological code phrase for “anywhere that isn’t an actual hillside”). The weather app on my desktop keeps giving off its warning chirp, which sounds like the Cricket of Doom. But no wind is evident where I live, though I am indisputably below several famous canyons.

It was foggy yestreday. Today the air is clearing, the eastern mountains are visible again, downtown has surfaced from its tide pool of haze. Somewhere there must be wind, and it’s pulling the haze away like a plunger just out of sight. Currents must be moving in the upper air, skimming the lower layers of murk away off to San Bernardino … but nothing is blowing here.

It’s weird and disappointing. I like me a good wind storm myself, and the panic-mongering weathermen have been predicting one for days now. So far, though, nothing is stirring the air here near Griffith Park but the memories of past winds. We deliberately dressed the tree in the front yard in white and green lights, to imitate the new leaves we hope for soon – I want to see those garlands dancing!

Better go scratch the foremast, I guess. Kage always said that would work.

Kage Baker hated attention. I know, that sounds illogical and unlikely: she was a performer and a writer, and serious about both of those arts. But she didn’t really want people to focus on her. Only on what she did.

She became a performer at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in order to achieve invisibility (and get in free). Being a member of the audience makes one a constant target – several hundred fanatically determined actors want your attention and most will do anything, no matter how loud, how outrageous or embarrassing, to get a reaction out you. The only way to avoid them is to be one of them. Also, being one of the cast is the safest way to get backstage, where the truly amazing things happen … it’s the hunting blind technique, the gillie-suit trick; the Paleolithic hunters’ strategy of tying antlers to your head.

Kage made most of her observations  of life this way, from discreet hiding. You have to build those blinds in the deep woods, though, if you want to see the really wild animals; you have to get out under the trees in your camo  suit, crawl close enough so your horns show in order to hunt the deer. Sometimes the hunter gets caught.

In the early days of the Faire – when we arrived as bedazzled customers – standards were not so much low as merely appalling ignorant. They were learning the history as they portrayed it. Anyone in an entire costume, with no zippers or wristwatches ( those were mid-20th century clothing fetishes, kids, predating velcro and cell phones) in sight, could easily be mistaken for an actor. If they looked good enough, they could find themselves press-ganged into walking in processions to fill out the extras.

One afternoon, brave on dollar pints of Whitbread’s Pale Ale – this was a very long time ago – we ventured into the enormous tent behind the Main Stage. I think we were partly sneaking where we ought not to be, but also looking for chemical toilets without lines … We were both fully costumed. And to our delight, we were mistaken for actors! Which is to say, no one caught us and threw us out.

Seated on a hay bale, we just stared around in delight and awe. There were exceedingly strange and fascinating people rehearsing, relaxing, arguing, eating, drinking, smoking, changing costumes and collecting props all around us. The back of Main Stage rose above us, in all its dusty, splintery functionality – the glory was all on the front side, where the audience could see it. But a group of young men was busily hoisting a glorious palanquin onto their shoulders in anticipation of bearing the Queen out, and there were guys with arquebusses and polearms and Swords of State and God He only knew what else … a wiry blond guy with his eyes starting out of his head was running back and forth on an elevated catwalk and yelling something about Where the hell is the Queen’s chair? and roaring that he needed someone to fill on Main until Progress got there.

You call yourselves actors? he bellowed down at the performers, and a dozen people yelled NO! while simultaneously running up the stair on to the stage, juggling balls and fruit and blades and one another …

A little lady standing near us, holding a relic case on a pole, noticed our amazement and asked us if we were new. We said yes. She glanced around with a tired pride of belonging at the growing Bedlam, and said they were just about to go out with the Queen. She asked us what we did.

“We’re just street performers,” I said, aiming for a safe generality.The little lady nodded and then spoke the words that sealed our doom:

“Are you staying in Actors Camp?”

A blinding light went off in my head. I know it went off in Kage’s too, because I could see the flames leaping up in her eyes as her brain promptly caught fire. There was a universe of glory and adventure in those words, an implied life that would finally be everything we had been promised as little girls … Actors Camp?  There was an actual Camp? Where you could stay? And live here, and do this, and (presumably) spend your days eating the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun?

Oh. My. God.

“Not this year,” said Kage. “But next year we will.”

“It’s great after hours,” said the little lady casually. “Maybe I’ll see you there.” And she went off then to march in shouting adulation in front of Elizabeth Gloriana, Queen of England (not to mention Air and Darkness), God Save The Queen, Live Forever Gracious Lady!

Kage and I followed the Queen’s Progress out of the tent, and into the rest of our lives.

Kage Baker really fought during that last bout of therapy.

She didn’t even do it for herself. She did it for Anne and her girls, for her readers, for the dozen ideas she still had in her head. She did it for all the people who were waiting for her, who needed something from her. She did it for me. But in her own heart, Kage came to terms with her dying days before anyone else.

We were staying in a hotel, on the flats of Pismo – so we could get her in and out of the bed and the car, and to her daily doctor appointments. We were right next to the sea, which was great. The weather was … odd. Torrential rain, then wind, then heat. More rain. She got weaker and weaker; I was lifting her into the wheelchair and the car, and the therapists came out to meet us every day to carry and wheel her into the office. She really, really tried – never gave up at all, never demurred or refused. She couldn’t sit up unassisted, but she cracked jokes while we moved her.

I was the one who lost it all, finally. She wasn’t getting better. I couldn’t tell how much was due to the rigours of therapy – which gets horribly debilitating after a while – and apparently neither could anyone else. There were a lot of blank looks and shrugs and spread hands … no one wanted to be the one to make the call.

Finally, after a day carrying Kage to therapies through a vertical flood of rain, I left a message for her oncologist  (Dr. Palchak, a wonderful man who resembled the operative Lewis) telling him I thought she was sinking, begging for something to help. When he called me to tell me he was one his way to our hotel – that he was making a house call – I just sat on the floor and wept. Doctors don’t make house calls … Kage tried to comfort me, but she fell asleep. The day’s perambulations had been too much for her.

When Dr. Palchak arrived, he was gentle and kind. But he didn’t offer us euphemisms or prevarications – he never had, through the whole horrible process. It was just that, before, there had always been some hope. But what he brought us that night were Kage’s latest imaging results.

The tumour in her brain was shrinking, again. But now there were masses in her lungs, in her gut, in her liver … Dr. Palchak said he had never seen a cancer move so fast, so inexorably, and I have never heard a real doctor in such despair. They had done everything they could, and Kage had responded well to everything – except that the cancer kept spreading, like a hydra. Knock it back in one place, and it sprang back in three others.

“So how do we handle this?” asked Kage, with really astonishing calm.

“Hospice care. It’s time to get peaceful and comfortable,” said Dr. Palchak, and I swear Kage’s face actually lit up.

“No more hospitals, though,” she said. And anyone who knew her also knew that tone of voice – she would not be dissuaded or denied.

So, no. No more hospitals. There wasn’t one, anyway. In San Luis Obispo County, they don’t have the facilities for actual hospices. Instead, there is a 24-hour system of nurses and physicians who make house calls; who are available on the phone at all hours; who will come and stay with the dying if they have no one else. And if they do have someone, they will make all these resources available to that care-giver, so the patient’s last days are as comfortable as possible.

For us, it was perfect. It meant I could take Kage home. It meant she could lie in her own bed, looking at her treasures, seeing the light on the sea from her own window. No strangers, no strangeness. No more tests and therapies; all comforts she could want, in a place she loved.

Good deal. The only drawback was, it meant she was dying.

Kage Baker put Martin Luther King Jr. on the list of Great Good Mortals. Mendoza learns it in her baby cyborg training – it is one of the foundation stones in her perception of what is right and moral. It’s also a foundation stone in her opinion of the human race; since most of the people on the list are, like Dr. King, martyrs.

Mendoza prefers live heroes to dead martyrs. So did Kage. She made Mendoza that way too because most people – especially the ones who talk loudly in public and make policy – seem to prefer it the other way around. Kage felt this was … unhealthy.

Dead martyrs are so convenient, though! They are permanent, for one thing – when their martyrdom is fresh, no one would think of looking for scandal, nor believe it readily if some unbeliever did so: Shakespeare was right about this one, the good men do lives after them. Even when and if it becomes obvious that the martyrs may have actually been  real live human beings, most people are forgiving. They don’t like their martyrs to be real men and women; that would mean their behaviour, hard and painful and fatal as it was, could be imitated. And no one wants to do that. But it’s tolerable, forgivable.  People just prefer the noble dead, who were exceptional and cannot be duplicated.

A live hero can, sadly, outlive their heroism. Sometimes they just behave like normal people, warts and all, and end up repulsing their admirers. The admirers want to be able to cherish the hope that they themselves may be like the heroes: they don’t want to know for sure that the heroes are like them.  And sometimes the local taste in heroism changes – folks do get bored, after all – and the breathing, walking, most of all talking heroes find themselves going on about stale old news … I don’t quite understand how tales of virtue, bravery and nobility can be boring, but I am clearly aberrant. I don’t understand why celebrities’ sexual escapades are news, either.

Martyrs are more compliant, too. Their message doesn’t change, unless the Powers That Be find it necessary to make it change. That doesn’t always work, of course, because by then a lot of people have heard the original message – but talking loudly and frequently and controlling sources of information helps. Doesn’t always succeed, but the process of debating just what the Sacred Dead Person actually said can eat up a lot of time.

Live heroes can – and do – listen to the news one day and then call a press conference and say: “Man, that is a load of shit. I never said that.” Awkward, that …

Martyrs are remembered in love, and memorialized in reverence, and trotted out on every occasion where they might be useful. Heroes are watched warily, and speak in public with 5-second delays.

All over America, in every city where I have traveled, there is a Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. It makes for a lot of abbreviated street names and double-decker signs; the more sensible cities put big signs on the roadside, rather than try and squeeze the name on the light fixture signs. It is usually a short, twisty street built out of leavings of larger thoroughfairs and hastily constructed connector roads; rarely did a new, purpose-built street get renamed. (Though Los Angeles built a Richard M. Nixon Freeway.) It’s usually near an airport, or a port, or it edges a business district: someplace where people are moving fast and on their way to somewhere else, and don’t stop to think. It tends to dead-end, double back on itself, and just stop for blocks at a time – resuming somewhere unexpected.

It would be better if all the Martin Luther King Jr. Boylevards were wide and clean and shining, and lined with parks and schools. But in this aspect of his remembrance, Dr. King is treated not as a dead martyr, but as a live hero. A dangerous man – too dangerous to forget, but much, much too dangerous to safely be consigned to the dependable storage room of history.  He’s treated as if he is still speaking.

I hope he would like that better.

Kage Baker felt that attendance in the “real” world – the world put together by majority societal consensus – was pretty much optional. She was not alone in this outlook; many classical philosophers have felt similarly. Some abjured their followers to avoid the general reality, others advised them to embrace it. I guess it all depended on just how grumpy any given philosopher was on any given day.

America bred its own variety of this kind of abstainer. Thoreau ran off to the woods and seemed to feel it was best to go to town only when one had an opportunity to annoy authority. Emily Dickinson stayed indoors, but ranged through a variety of  worlds of her own devising – her “soul’s society”. John Humphrey Noyes (and many like him) solved the problem by starting his own society, and establishing consensus reality by his private rules.

The solo act seemed to work best, on examination. Thoreau and Dickinson are revered and remembered as inspirations; Noyes was arrested on sex charges, and his communalist idealists eventually became a silverware company … philosophically, a bit of a let down. His emotional successors include survivalists, and the communes of the ’60’s (most of which have either failed or gone the Oneida route), while the image and practice of the lone sage has remained an icon.

Kage viewed most communities from the outside, and only joined the few that appealed to her. She actively resisted being included in anything against her will – she took no membership for granted, and in act tended strongly toward Groucho Marx’s viewpoint. Being born in a given society did not mean you were suited for it, and she held to the opinion that if water could seek its own level, so could she. When I pointed out that this phrase was generally taken as a description of someone sinking to a coarser habitat, she responded: “Nope, because water also evaporates and becomes clouds!”

Very hard to argue with Kage Baker. Reality was not only personal, it was arbitrary. And she had the storyteller’s gift of convincing her auditors that her reality was realest.

There were societies Kage not only enjoyed,  of course, but set out to join. Even there, though, she was a Maker. The few communities in which she counted herself were changed by her participation: she altered their reality. Science fiction itself was one of those. Societies are always changed by their bards, and she ended up in that section of the choir.

Kage’s other, older, oldest and most beloved community of choice, though, was the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. When she joined it, there was still only one – the original Faire in Agoura, California and its brand new harvest edition in Marin County. The founders – Ron and Phyllis Patterson – were still young and lively and moved through the Faire as the spirits of the place, Master and Mistress of the Revels. The Faire was born out of their brains: whatever else it became, however many it became, no matter whose hands it passed through – Ron and Phyllis started it. And we thousands who have lived in it – some of us for all our lives! – owe a  portion of our souls to the Pattersons’ reality.

Kage never forgot that. She acknowledged it often. Parts of her own stories were formed and influenced by living in the Faire community Ron and Phyllis not only devised, but kept alive.

Yestreday, Ron Patterson died. He was full of years, and love, and honor. And he was wrapped in the communal arms of his society, the reality he helped to shape. Our consensus was informed and permeated by his, like life’s blood.

Ron Patterson: November 1930 to January 2011. Requieset in pace. Merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again. Be born again, Ron, to us.

Kage Baker loved the halcyon days. I don’t mean peaceful, warm weather – I mean the classical halcyon days, of Greek legend.

Traditionally, these are a fortnight or so of calm seas and warmth around the time of the Winter Solstice. They were gifted to Alcyone, a daughter of Aeolus, the Lord of the Winds and a son of Poseidon, as comfort after the death of her mortal husband – Alcyone threw herself into the sea in grief, but (being a granddaughter of Poseidon) did not drown but was transformed into a kingfisher. So was her resurrected love. They are said to brood and hatch their eggs in a floating nest on the surface of the sea, calmed by these magical warm midwinter days …

California is of a similar latitude to Greece, and so are the terrain and (sometimes) the weather. Certainly, here in Los Angeles, there is usually a warm spell around or after Christmas – the winds are soft, the air is warm, the hills turn green and luxuriant. All the local birds begin to court, and some will nest weeks before the others. Some years it happens at the Solstice, some years later. This year, it is now.

After devastating storms and snow in the streets of Burbank, yestreday was in the 70’s. Right now it is 80 degrees outside; I have the side door open, and a scent of new grass and warm stone is blowing into my room. The hyacinths and roses, the daffodils and crocus are all putting out new shoots – even while the Christmas cactus is covered with huge ruby winter blossoms, and the mulberry tree is as naked as any ecdysiast.

It won’t last,  this interlude, but it is glorious while it is here. Kage loved this time, and would open all the windows and let the breath of the garden fill the house. She always misjudged the heat of the day – which doesn’t last, not even in halcyon weather – and by sunset would be shivering and running from window to window, slamming things shut. But until then she would stretch in the sun like the hyacinths she loved, visibly shooting up in the sudden heat and light.

This time last year, the halcyon days came in late January, too. The weather, after a harsh and horrid winter, was suddenly fine for a week or two. During that time, I opened up the windows in our hotel room and let the sea air in; Kage sat up and gloried in the light, and dictated Nell Gwynn II to me with renewed strength and determination. We watched the tourists come and go, and were vastly entertained by the parade of plastic buckets and boogie boards and wetsuits; little kids and dogs, covered with sand and thrilled to be running around on the beach in Midwinter. The smell of barbecues.

An interlude of peace, given by the gods to those they love.

A mole, made by the craft of man, adjoins
the sea and breaks the shoreward rush of waves.
To this she leaped—it seemed impossible—
and then, while beating the light air with wings
that instant formed upon her, she flew on,
a mourning bird, and skimmed above the waves.
And while she lightly flew across the sea
her clacking mouth with its long slender bill,
full of complaining, uttered moaning sounds:
but when she touched the still and pallied form,
embracing his dear limbs with her new wings,
she gave cold kisses with her hardened bill.

All those who saw it doubted whether Ceyx
could feel her kisses; and it seemed to them
the moving waves had raised his countenance.
But he was truly conscious of her grief;
and through the pity of the gods above,
at last they both were changed to flying birds,
together in their fate. Their love lived on,
nor in these birds were marriage bonds dissolved,
and they soon coupled and were parent birds.
Each winter during seven full days of calm
Alcyone broods on her floating nest—
her nest that sails upon a halcyon sea:
the passage of the deep is free from storms,
throughout those seven full days; and Aeolus
restraining harmful winds, within their cave,
for his descendants’ sake gives halcyon seas.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI

Kage Baker slept. Not a very world-shaking statement, that, unless you are one of those people who do not sleep. But she did. At the end of every day, she sought her bed – carefully put together to give the maximum comfort, with a feather mattress and a down comforter and feather pillows; with a coverlet in a bold black and white racing check, and cotton throws of dolphins and sea shells, and pirate pillow cases. There was a Jolly Roger on the wall above it, and lamps whose glass bases were full of coral and sea shells. And the sound and scent of the sea breathed in the windows all night long, and she slept sound.

It had a high wooden frame of tropical wood, tall enough to need a step to get into it. She had put it together to be a refuge, and it was.

I have never slept well, or much. Since earliest childhood, I have remained awake in the hours of the night. I remember playing on the bedroom floor in a swath of moonlight, building sleeping villages in the dark; in the crib above me, Kimberly -a year younger than I – slept behind the wooden bars of safety. (Even when it was my crib, I climbed out and played on the shadowed bedroom floor.) I remember climbing out of my narrow little bed and watching her sleep. Our parents would find me in the morning, finally asleep on the floor beside or under someone else’s bed.

The last weeks of Kage’s life, I sat beside her bed half the nights, listening to her breathe. I had to listen very closely to hear it. Sometimes the sea was louder than her breath. Sometimes I fell asleep on the floor, and woke up in the dawn under the edge of the bed, as  I had used to wake up under Kimberly’s crib.

Tonight, all the household is asleep around me. It often is. This has happened all my life; everyone else is sleeping. I listen for their breathing from all the other rooms, to know they are all right. Mt family continues to breath. The black cat is in the laundry basket, and she snores delicately. The grey cat is a wreath on my unused  pillow. The corgi is snoring, too, a sturdy man-at-arms sort of snuffle, as if every few breaths he snorts awake to check on the possibility of encroaching raccoons and goblins. Harry stirs  in his cage from time to time, with a sound like heavy silk as he ruffles out his wings.

Sometimes a train wails out in the night. In the summer, the helicopters race back and forth all night; tonight they are resting on the tops of buildings 5 miles away in Downtown, dreaming of flight.

These nights a year ago … I got out of the habit of sleeping in my bed. When I got too tired, I slept on the floor, or the couch, or the edge of Kage’s bed so I could tell she was still warm. I couldn’t imagine sleeping in my own bed – there was too much to watch, too much to do, to waste time lying so far away and with my eyes shut. I kept a monitor with me all the time, though, so if I did doze off somewhere, Kage’s smallest sound would waken me.

But now there is nothing to listen for. Not really. The house is filled with the sweet sound of strong breath and ticking domestic clocks. The clocks are measuring out nothing more sinister than the hours until morning – the sun will rise in 3 hours or so.

I should sleep. If I cannot, I should at least lie down. It’s just hard to get out of the habit of the nocturnal vigil. I never did sleep much, and it was in the last year of Kage’s  life that I finally found out why … so I would be used to it. So I could stand the watch all night, guarding the sleep of those who need to rest. So I could get used to being awake in the dark.

I don’t know how to stop. But I guess I can try it from under the covers for a while.