Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was an avid fan of the Silly Season. That’s the idea that late summer brings all sorts of bizarre news stories to the fore – because editors are bored, because reporters are all on vacation, because by deep summer a certain portion of the population has burned off a significant number of brain cells and gone nuts …

Whatever causes it, there is a tradition of whacky news stories in late summer. And Kage loved it; not only as a source of ideas, but as a seasonal delicacy in the ways of news. Bigfoot and UFO sightings tend to peak around this time; ditto rains of frogs, fish and other aberrant precipitation. It’s the time of year when men bite dogs, cats chase deer, and sea monsters wash ashore.

Sea monsters were one of Kage’s favourite weirdnesses. And actually, two of them have reportedly washed ashore lately at Long Beach (thank you for the notice, Tom Barclay!). They’re probably oarfish, which do normally inhabit the waters off the California and Baja California coasts, but are rarely seen. The adults only come up to the surface when they’re dying; then, since they average 12 to 20 feet long, are bright metallic silver and have red dorsal fins and crests like scarlet feathers, they are pretty damned noticeable. But two in a summer is odd.

And whale sharks are on the increase in the Sea of Cortez this summer. No one knows why. But since they are 30 to 45 feet long, have toothless mouths like giant mail slots and display big white polka dots on a blue background, they too are pretty noticeable. The local fisherman have been improvising whale shark tours, where American turistas go out to swim with and pet the giant sharks …

Social disasters continue to mutate and spread, getting weirder this time of year. There’s been a plague of penis thefts in Africa – well, there’s always a low-level endemic of penis thefts in Africa, but evidently it’s reaching some sort of peak. I’m not sure quite what to make of that, since all the stories that come up in my news feeds are written absolutely straight-faced – and a couple of goats have met their fate at the hands of lynch mobs, so it must be worst than usual … but I guess blaming the goats instead of people might be a sign of common sense advancing?

A team of scientists in England have grown beef in a Petri dish. They formed the resultant disorganized meat cells into a hamburger patty , and served it to a test taste team, live on television! It cost $330,000 and since they grew only muscle cells – no fat cells – it was rather tough and tasted “almost” like a hamburger. “Crunchy” was a descriptor used. Still, what they were experimenting with was a way to grow environmentally harmless meat protein for human consumption, so it was hailed as a triumph. Kage would not have been even slightly surprised that the first vat-grown “meat” was produced by the UK – the ultimate fate of British beef?

Another team of scientists (in Austria) have grown “mini brains” from human stem cells. They’re not full size, they’re not functional, they don’t even have circulatory systems: which means they cannot grow outside their nutrient baths. But in the right supportive circumstances, they are alive and growing into tiny deformed assemblages of unmistakeable brain tissues – grey and white matter, which includes that part that – in living brains – thinks … The scientists are calling them “cerebral organoids”. Kage, I know, would be wondering: if people are having fits over GMO corn and rice, what is the reaction going to be to blank human brains? Hmmm?

The story that most caught my attention is from Kazakstan. Kazakstan is just north of Kyrgyzstan; Kyrgyzstan, as you may recall, Dear Readers, is home to the Giant Kyrgyzstan Gerbil, which is the actual animal reservoir of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes  bubonic plague. While any mammal can harbour the fleas that harbour the bacterium, the Kyrgyzstanian gerbils are the historic source of the disease – it travelled from them up and down the Silk Road, to wreak havoc in Asia and Europe. And when modern scientists began to investigate the area, they found that the local peoples had lots of unique rules about how and when you could safely hunt the gerbils – which was, mainly, never.

Well, a young man in Kazakstan has died this week, from bubonic plague. He caught him a nice big marmot (which is what a Giant Gerbil is) and took it home; cooked it and ate it. One of its fleas apparently made its own meal on him, with the historically predictable result. Either he didn’t listen to his elders talk about hunting lore, or they don’t have the right gerbil stories in Kazakstan the way they do in Kyrgyzstan … hence the tragic outcome. Oh, and several other people in his village are showing symptoms now, too.

Kage would have mourned the poor young man, but also shaken her head in lack of surprise. It’s what happens, she would say. People forget all sorts of things from the past; some don’t matter, but some do. And the cost of failing to figure out which is which can be your life.

And the fact that it happened in August? Just the statistical weight of the Silly Season, she would say. He might have been carried off by a ghost caravan from the old, empty caravansaries. He might have been carried off by a flying silver wheel full of people with big blank black eyes. Instead, he was carried off by a marmot flea engaged in its traditional family business.

That’s just August.

Kage Baker pretty much hated current events. She loved history – but until events were sufficiently aged to be history, she frankly didn’t care much. In fact, they depressed her.

She thoroughly detested Current Events classes in school. We all had to read a glossy little rag called The Student Outlook, which nowadays is an email program – but back in our distant girlhood, it was a 4-page newspaper full of news about Vietnam and the space program and the slow death of monarchism across Africa … Haile Selassie was in there every week, it seemed like, along with the growing piles of bodies in the rice paddies of Vietnam.

It all horrified Kage. She ignored it as much as possible, and did her best to forget anything she accidentally learned. For her, modern history ended in the 1940’s. I used to point out that she had excluded her own birth date with this philosophy, but she averred that it just meant she was  born in the future.

As an adult, she refused to read the newspaper. The only news she got was whatever she glimpsed on television or the Internet: if it intrigued her, she would track down more information, but usually she just flipped resolutely past it. It was my job to keep abreast of interesting news – technology advanced or remembered, archeological finds, brand new animals re-discovered living amid some plant presumed to have died out in the 17th century. The only current events she was actually interested in were the increasing numbers of police chases on telly – but those were like her childhood fondness for Roller Derby, an attraction to vulgar but largely hypothetical violence …

I’ve got to admit, there are times when keeping abreast of the news sends me spiralling into the Slough of Despond, as well.  The Internet is the home of so many depressing idiots; you can’t kill them, and they usually manage to say something ugly before you can turn them off. People love posting disasters. They love getting into fights. And the electronic distance gives everyone invulnerability, so ugly scenes are de rigeur.

It gets me so down …

This has led to my giving up all the daily newspaper’s offerings except the comic strips and the crossword puzzle; I try to ignore the network news as well. It’s gotten to the point where the best coverage of things that really matter is more likely to be heard from professional clowns than “real” newsmen. Colbert and Stewart I can still stomach – but other than them, I cherry-pick my way through the science news, and as much of current events as I can take from BBC and Al Jezeera. They’re still serious journalists.

Foreigners and satirists. That’s all I can manage. There’s a moral there, I’m sure.

Sometimes, for something approaching comfort, I go look up what happened on this date in the past; who was born or died, what was good or bad news long enough ago to actually be history. It’s both satisfying and informative. Even if the news was dreadful, at least it’s over! Cosimo de Medici has long ago settled that conspiracy plot by Luca Pitti which was discovered this day in 1466.

Captain Cook set sail from England in the brave Endeavour, sure of glory and with no idea he’d end up on the menu. Krakatoa began the wind-up to its final eruption and ultimate destruction. The English and their indomitable longbows won the Battle of Crecy; Michelangelo won the commission to carve the Pieta.

Today is the birthday of Lavoisier, who disproved the existence of the hilariously-named phlogiston while discovering oxygen; and also of Montgolfier, who didn’t give a fig what air was made of, as long as he could get it hot enough to float his balloons. Queen Victoria’s beloved Albert was born – Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who invented microscopes and first identified microbial life, died. So did Reginald Bartholomew, but since he was a successful diplomat, I am sure he was no relative of mine …

And it’s the feast day of Saints Simplicius, Victorinus and Zephyrinus, who sound like a liturgical music hall act.

And behold! Already I feel better. Perusing the rich pickings of the past is so satisfying. A lot of nonsense, lies and public displays of appalling character flaws is exhibited there, but 4th grade-level name-calling has not been preserved. It’s undeniably  funny that oxygen was discovered while looking for something with as silly a name as phlogiston, but at least no  career politician is stating that Canada is not a foreign country. Or that Islam is a country at all … History is a grand mood elevator.

More and more do I understand Kage’s refusal to commit to any age between 1603 and 2450. I think I’ll go re-read Sky Coyote. And maybe watch Duck Dodger in the 23rd & 1/2 Century.

I like the ways those stories turn out.

Kage Baker loved weather like today. Especially this evening, wherein I am happily writing because it was too damned hot to actually turn my brain on during the day.

It was hot, hot, hot today in Los Angeles; with the middle air clear and yet storm-wrack way high up – scattered clouds, dark and puffy, hinting at rain but never getting numerous enough to do more than tease. Thunderheads have been crawling up over the Verdugoes  all day, and promptly evaporating away in the hot air; palaces of djinni, rising up into salt-white anvils and then whirling away into heated transparency.

The air smells of incense and blacksmiths’ forges.

The sun is gone at last, so I can finally venture outdoors without fear. The light in the sky is deep and rich and looks like it will never end – but twilight will eventually creep out from the roots of the mountains and flood the streets below. All the long warm arches under the cedar and camphor and and jacaranda and crepe myrtle trees will fill up with perfume and soft heat – at noon you couldn’t walk out there, your feet would fry in your shoes; if you went barefoot (like me, aging ninny that I am, forgetting I am no longer 14) your feet would blister unless you could leap from shady spot to shady spot to the thick-painted lines of street work. Those painted lines are always just cool enough to walk on …

The clouds overhead have been stretched so thin and long on the sky, they look like the ripples under shallow waves. They are ghost beaches up there, phantom coastlines. The Observatory, silhoetted in ivory and bronze, rimmed with lanterns,  has always suggested to me that it might be the coast of Numenor up there, drowned deep under the dreaming sea while Gondar keeps watch on the black hills. Or maybe it’s Lyonesse. Or Ys, of whom Mount St. Michael is a lost memory. Or, the heck with ancient tales, maybe it’s a bastion of the Lost City of the Lizard Men.

It’s the hour of the day when you just don’t know which universe the twilight will tip you into …

I’ve been going through the proofreader’s edit of In the Company of Thieves, and my brain burned out its bearings some hours ago. Proofreaders are nice people, and utterly invaluable to writers: but sometimes I think they suspend their critical faculties so far to achieve objectivity that they lose track of some common aspects of life. They don’t extend that friendly willingness to be fooled that characterizes the pleasant reader; they want one’s immortal prose to make sense! Can you imagine?

Well, sometimes I can’t imagine anymore, nor recall just why I wrote that sentence that is so confusing. As immortal Browning once admitted to someone querying the underlying point of one of his poems: “When I wrote that, only God and Robert Browning knew what it means – now, only God knows.” Man, there was a guy who spoke truth.

Well, I went through all the proofing, and sent my work off into the aether; the sweet twilight is creeping in through the open doors and windows just like  music, or fog, or perfume … it’s lovely. Time for a mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwich and a tall iced coffee. Large parts of California are on fire from dry lightning; darkness is almost complete, and yet it’s 80 degrees out there.

But I’ve done some work today, so I don’t feel like a total waste; even though I don’t have enough working neurons left offer you more than a stream of semi-consciousness. Have a lovely summer evening, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker always said, if she could sit up – she could write. And that she used as the rule of her life, until the last year of it. Then she discovered that even if she couldn’t sit, writing was still within her reach. She wrote on the little keyboard of her Buke until she couldn’t manage it; after that, she simply dictated.

She dictated her work for 4 or 5 months, ultimately. And it worked, too. Pages and pages of notes and scraps, of course, that are stored for eventual incorporation into new stories – but also literal dictation, from her lips to the computer screen via my fingers. The years of brain-storming were useful yet again: she already had the habit of verbal storytelling, and was able to recite line after line with ease.

I can’t do that. Not yet. Bits of lines show up new-forged and complete in my emails and in my conversation – I am an irrepressible improvisor – but then I have to pry them out of the conversational matrix into which they were born, and transpose them into a storyline. And for that, I do need to be able to sit up. The dance between my hands and the keyboard is the impetus I need, the sensation that sets off the creative flood.

I have been a bit unwell the last couple of days, which has interfered seriously with sitting up. I’m getting used to diabetes, which entails fussing more over meals that I like: the days of carefree fasting, or living on bagels and cream cheese, or making a swift lunch off gummy Life Savers … alas, such youthful insanities are past me now. I find it necessary to make sure I eat at regular intervals, and in sensible amounts, and a lot of things that take more effort to prepare than a handful of raisins and digestive biscuits. When I ignore these rules, my body makes it wrath known at once – which is unpleasant, time consuming, and not conducive to creativity.

Then yestreday I had an appointment with my cardiologist. Good news – my heart is working. Bad news  – my veins are too narrow, and my heart doesn’t empty completely. Its down-stroke is defective, I suppose; it fills well, but then the lees of every heart beat stay behind, sloshing round in the chambers of my heart.

There’s a nice metaphor here – my heart does not empty, it clings to what fills it – but under the romantic word play is the fact that it means I am always running short on oxygen. And my blood pressure tends to bottom out; after a life time of high blood pressure caused by eccentric kidneys, the kidneys are finally under control and now my circulatory system is running on perpetual low …  there ain’t no justice.

And I can still catch a stomach bug and get heat sick. Which is what I’ve been doing the last couple of days. I just can’t buy this – if I’m fighting off big problems, the little crap ought to sit this out! I shouldn’t be susceptible to heat and gastroenteritis! But Fate feels differently about it, and so I have been laying about uselessly swooning.

Maybe I can get accustomed to using something like Dragon … recite composition to my computer while I loll about like a gutted rag doll. Then all I’ll have to do is go through afterwards and remove the background noise  … the Corgi singing. The washer playing The Bear Went Over The Mountains when the cycle ends. The cats having velvet slipper fights under my desk (Paff! Paff! Paff!). Harry talking right along with me, word for word and syllable for syllable, in English-cadenced gibberish that lasts just as long as every sentence I speak. It’s enough to make one go sit in a Starbucks and work on a screenplay. Almost.

Though not even Kage ever resorted to that …

Kage Baker was always thrilled when she got advertising notices of her books. You know – flyers on new science fiction from the local indie bookstore. Or those “Just Like” and “Recommended for You” emails from amazon.com. From time to time, she’d get those; mostly because she looked up her own stuff on Amazon and of course the store’s vast cybermind kept a record of what she looked at. They never noticed the similarity in the names, because Kage never had an account with Amazon. She used mine.

It can be a bit of a problem for anyone with a public persona; staying private and still keeping up-to-date. Kage solved it by approaching the majority of her contacts in the World Outside while using waldoes. I was the waldo. Mine was the name on most of the orders she placed online; she even used my name for a couple of chat rooms, after she got her first flaming … and I used her name, too, in many cases of suspicious correspondence and unproven chat rooms.

The exceptions were interviews, people she actually knew, and EBay. She had her own EBay account, and it got a lot of use. Kage loved playing the “almost last minute, who’s paying attention?” game. However, I was the one with a PayPal account, so once she won her much-desired Beistl cutout or German pyramid candle, I got to play CFO and see to it that the funds got where they were going. Kage didn’t like leaving too wide a trail through the world …

I used to yell at her for checking the reviews and rankings on amazon.com too often. It always depressed her horribly. Someone sending a copy of a good review would send her into a dancing mania of joy and exhultation – one poor review, though, and she was ready to quit writing and spend her life bricked up in her bedroom.

It never came to that, luckily. I would have refused to drive her to the hardware store anyway.

Gradually, Kage got a better idea of how amazon.com did (and did not) work; there are repeat reviewers who seem to live only to spread pain and despair among authors. There are also reviewers so enthused about the entire process that they review everything – but they do so in such a slapdash, delusional way that one was hard put to believe they’d read the book in the first place. And rankings are based only on sales, not reviews; essentially, popularity being paid for by the pound.

Overall, it tended to work out as a halfway-operational analogue. But only halfway – Kage learned to take the ratings and reviews less seriously. She never stopped sneaking on to amazon.com to check from time to time, though; and it sometimes took a couple of days to get over the resultant depression. Massive analyses and brain stormings on the current project, whatever it was, would be necessary to get her back in writing mode. And while in many cases the story was improved – well, the toll on the author was not worth it.

But she never, ever lost the thrill of announcements coming to her. From the publisher, or a favourite bookstore, or Amazon, or a friend: it was always a grand surprise present. Sometimes it was the first glimpse Kage got of the finalized cover, or found out the publication date. Authors are often at the end of the list for those sorts of notices …

Anyway.

Today, I opened my email and behold! A notice from amazon.com, informing me that, based on past purchases and look-ups, I might be interested in A*NEW*KAGE*BAKER!!!!

Well, yeah. It wasn’t a surprise, exactly, but hot damn, yes, I’m interested! So now there is the formal announcement of In The Company of Thieves, and it will be officially released on October 1, 2013. In the meantime, it’s up and listed on amazon.com and is available for pre-order. At the moment, it appears to be available only as a paperback: but, from the inimitable Tachyon, that always means a trade paperback of high quality and great beauty.

It’s available for pre-order from Tachyon, too, of course. And it still has that gorgeous cover:

As you can see, the colour values seems a little cooler. I think it looks amazing.

So there you are, Dear Readers – a new Kage Baker on the way. Only one story original to the book, but the others are rarely-collected stories and quite delicious.

It’s my good news for the day,  and I’m delighted to share it with you.

Kage Baker used to hate being asked that classically disingenuous question: Where do you get your ideas? Especially when the questioner would then stand there, eyes at stretch for wonder and mouth open  like a baby bird, obviously sure that Kage was about to reveal some ancient, sacred, authorly secret … Kage hated disappointing them.

She also  hated being asked, partly because she felt it was an intrusive question  (and then felt guilty about that) and partly because she really didn’t know most of the time. And it made her wonder so much about where the ideas did come from that she would begin to worry – like the centipede who walked just fine when he didn’t think about it, but promptly tied himself into a knot when someone asked him how he did it.

So I told her that Roger Zelazny, whose writing she much admired, had according to legend replied: “From a post office in New Jersey.” The idea tickled her and she used it thereafter, unless engaged in a serious discussion about a specific story. Some grimly earnest fans asked her for the P.O. Box, with the obvious intention of subscribing, but she always explained that if she told them that, she’d have to kill them … which I think they also believed.

The truth is, sometimes you don’t know where an idea comes from at all. Sometimes you do: Kage wrote a lot of stories on assignment, as it were, which have some source to the stories by implication, if nothing else. She would also just sit down sometimes and decide she wanted to write an Ermenwyr story; or a Joseph one; or one about duck-billed platypusses or whatever topic was currently obsessing her.

But there are the stories that just appear in your mind. Best case scenario, the story appears in its entirety, like the Cyprian goddess from the paternal foam. Then you just have to write it down, dictation from your muse. But much more often, a single scene or scenario appears – it blazes in your brain, which is good, but it has no source, no provenance, no background. It is a singularity, a mental quazar that lights up the dark landscape of the mind but imparts no information: not direction, neither nativity nor senescence. No idea what it means, no idea where it leads.

When that happens, Kage always began with research. But what do you research, if you don’t yet know what you’re talking about? Whatever you can make out, whatever detail sprang out at you from that bright, brief flare – a man with one blue-steel hand. A gull dissolving into a high, grey sky. A cow in Martian gravity.

So, a great deal of the time, Kage began the process of a story researching. At one point in the distant past, that meant a trip to the library with a list – I’d bring her books, she’d pore through them; or we’d stack them up and go at the pile from both sides. The city of Mars Two was founded via that method, me passing Kage books with pertinent passages and even more pertinent pictures – Mons Olympus and the Tharsis Plateau took root, blossomed and then burned in Kage’s head through one long summer afternoon in the Ivar Street Library.

Of course, once the Internet was available, Kage did most of her research herself, and right there at her desk. From having to catch the barman’s eye and drink one pint at a time, she went straight to controlling the keg herself: and while she was moderate with drink, Kage was a libertine with knowledge; she bathed and drowned in it. Her plot rose out of the DT’s, or at least from some similar over-stimulated and hallucinatory state. Kage actually grew to depend on the mad wild chain-reaction in the reactor of her brain – she’d start wherever inspiration had left an image, and just leap from reference to reference until something came alive.

You can maybe see, Dear Readers, why she didn’t try to explain this process to eager interrogators. I’ve descended into a veritable grab-bag of confused metaphors, trying to explain what I actually saw her do. And I have the advantage of having watched her while it happened!

Nonetheless. It did – and does – work.

And when she reached that point where the cascade of information and inspiration began, Kage would start the story notes. The bones of the plots – she always aimed at three plots from the very start, to make sure the story would have enough depth. The initial scene or scenes that had flashed across her mind; often, extensions and twists arose while she wrote it down. A beginning. An end. Neither of those might survive the entire process, but Kage never began without having one of each committed to paper – You’ve got to know the punchline, she would say.

She appended these notes, bits and pieces, passages from poetry, sacred texts and advertising – whatever had inspired her – to the end of the document. Then she went back to the beginning, and started to write. She wrote until she had gone through all the ideas and plot points in her notes, adding new ideas as they occurred to her; she wrote until the story met the notes and went out the other side. And then it was done.

Simple, huh?

So. Yestreday I got a lot of mail and fascinating conversation about the newly discovered olinquito; much of it, Dear Readers, from many of you. And as I was making a silly remark about the Company operatives whose consuming passion is little furry animals, a bolt of light leaped across the darkness of my mind: They call them the Teddy Bear Squad.

it read. And added parenthetically:                  And they don’t like it very much.

Employing Kage’s methods, research today has ranged all over the North California coast, leaping from ground squirrels to the Esselen tribe to photophobia to symbiotic molds and lichens to albinism to the hiring practices of the National Park Service.

And now I’m 101 words into a new story, “The Teddy Bear Squad.”

News as it develops, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker was, as all her friends and fans know, an avid collector of strange “found objects”. The tendency of classical art and music, legendary writings, extinct animals and hitherto unsuspected entries into common genera to suddenly pop back into the world  forms the bedrock of her Company series.

She started collecting these peculiar stories in the 1970’s; together, she and I amassed entire file boxes full of them. Our friends and family have gotten into the habit of sending them on to us when they find them, too. Thank you, all of you!

“Lost” musical pieces, plays and historic documents tended to get pride of place back at the beginning. Kage was always eager to see what  had been misfiled in the Bodleian Miscellany, or found written in the margins of a quarto First Folio discovered in the 3rd story water closet of a estate house in Kent. My especial interest being biology, I concentrated on the resurrected woodpeckers, revenant fish and brand new rats that are still found in unexplored corners of the globe.

As Kage remarked, when the enormous and gaudy saola was discovered in Vietnam in 1992, “You’ve got to be searching in the corners of a globe to miss this thing for thousands of years!” The saola, also called the Vietnamese ox, is actually a gazelle. Or maybe a deer. Maybe even a primitive bovine – no one is sure. But it’s as big as a cow and a rich chestnut colour, with symmetric white streaks on its face like makeup in a Noh play. It has two straight horns but it’s hard to tell if they are effective defense: they curve back over its shoulders like pompadoured unicorn horns. It exudes musk from long slits in its cheeks, which it flaps open and closed like gills. It’s beautiful. And weird. And not even the local people knew it was there, amid the muntjic deer and the water buffalo …

Searching the corners of a globe became Kage’s catch-phrase for how the these things all get found. Those corners are where Mozart hid his finished Requiem, where Liebnitz forgot the conclusive proof that he invented calculus before Newton; and it’s where Orson Welles stashed his lost, first film Too Much Johnson. That last one, by the by, surfaced only recently in an Italian warehouse – the hilariously titled work will debut in October of this year, at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Hardy har har, eh?

It’s been a busy few weeks for these Company drops. The acquisition of treasures they store away doesn’t make the news, of course. The entire idea is to remove them from the abrasive flow of Time, so they can re-emerge at some safer, happier, more lucrative time. With things like films and documents, there is not too much trouble for the operatives who collect them; you have to provide a safe and undisturbed cache for these things, but you don’t have to worry about feeding them. You don’t have to muck out the stalls for the liturgical masterpieces, or make sure the unknown masterwork of a gifted novelist meets an unknown masterwork of a comparable pedigree, so as to breed more of ’em.

Some rare animals can be trusted to increase and multiply in the wild, under minimal supervision. Somewhere in the cloud forests of Ecuador, insanely cute little mammals called olinquito have been happily thriving in the jungle canopy. They’re small, fuzzy, cousins to raccoons and probably scrumptiously munchable – and somewhere else in the cloud forest some hermitage-inclined operative has been watching over them until the Smithsonian would get its act together and come “discover” them. And if they are almost hand-tame for the eager scientists, and if they’ve been bred to maximize their adorableness – well, it gets boring out there in the cloud forests, with nothing to do but keep the harpy eagles from eating too many olinquito.

The operatives who specialize in unknown fuzzies like this are known to the other Operatives as “The Teddy Bear Squad”. Their lives are lonely, and full of exotic hair balls.

So, live animals are tough to handle.  Orson Welles’ maiden effort was safe in its can all these decades (aside from being viewed by a few fascinated operatives, I am sure). However, whoever is working on maintaining the lobster population of the US Eastern Seaboard must have been having a hell of a time. Keeping the lobsters alive is hard, even though the lobster fishing industry is a pretty well-ordered one. Keeping lobsters plentiful on site is harder, when you have to occasionally take an entire crop of, say, 2-year old lobsters and clandestinely sow them along the New England coast, hoping they will promptly start breeding.

Where have you been growing them until they mature?  They have to be kept separated, or they eat each other. I have visions of plastic honeycombing in some unhappy operatives shower stall, each pentagon housing a single lobster like a really cranky Irish monk in his cell.

One thing for sure. Since the main job of this program is to make sure the lobsters don’t go extinct and the fishery doesn’t fail, the breeding stock is encouraged to go at it lustily. This brings all sorts of recessive genes to the fore, which may be the reason that orange, green, blue, yellow, pearly white, sooty black and outright freaking calico lobsters have been showing up in the traps. It’s been Skittles lobsters out there in recent years. Let’s hope a giant annoyed one doesn’t show up in Boston Harbor.

One of the calicos – black spots on an orange background – was pulled from the sea only this week, in fact. She will not be eaten, but rather donated to a life of ease and (hopefully) wild crustaceous sex in the Mystic Aquarium. Her name … is Katie.

You can’t make this stuff up. Not all of it, anyway.

Kage Baker loved the late, much-lamented British musician Nick Drake. She had all his albums, and his voice was part of the sound track of her last year.

Drake tragically killed himself in 1974, at age 26. He was arguably one of the most gifted guitarists of his time, and one of the most unknown. He and his clever hands and his sorrowing bard’s voice have become well known in the last 5 or 10 years, though; now, all sorts of people know who he was. He wrote music like flowing water and moving leaves, and most of his songs were sad.

Kage said he sang like a yendri …

Her favourite song was called Pink Moon. It’s exquisite and I love it, too – but the one that has come to mean the most to me is Black-Eyed Dog. The instrumentation …  is mist moving on a mirror-still lake; silver embroidery on a white sleeve; braided water over stones. The words are very simple. If you have to think about what they mean, you will never understand.

That dog knows my name. I’ve been walking with him the last little bit. I haven’t come home, but I have come back.

We resume our program in mid-catharsis.

A black eyed dog he called at my door
The black eyed dog he called for more
A black eyed dog he knew my name
A black eyed dog he knew my name
A black eyed dog
A black eyed dog.

I’m growing old and I wanna go home
I’m growiing old and I don’t wanna know
I’m growing old and I wanna go home.

A black eyed dog he called at my door
A black eyed dog he called for more.

Kage Baker, as I have observed before, rarely suffered writer’s block. When she did, it rarely lasted long; its duration could be measured in hours. Sometimes in minutes.

Her primary cure was a session of gardening. Half an hour pulling weeds, and she would come running back indoors, eyes alight with purpose. Neither the weeds nor the block ever had a chance.

The other best way to unblock the flow was brain storming. She liked to wait until it was dark, or we were on the road to somewhere – then she’d have me light my Lava Lamps, or we’d head North for at least 6 hours. And she’d start telling me the story – what was wrong with it, why she thought she was stuck, what she wanted to say and had accidentally ploughed over the path to … What happens next? she would ask.

As I’ve also said, what Kage chose to happen next was rarely exactly what I suggested. My suggestions were like flares – in their hanging light, drifting down the darkened sky, she could see where her inspiration was hiding, and drag it out to do its job. Sometimes, to my delight, we’d fall into a sort of call and answer dialogue: the characters spoke through her then, and sometimes even through me, and the channeled badinage would ultimately yield a scene.

More often, I was what Kage turned to in order to work out technology. I was the one who read science books and magazines … more and more,as the years went on, because you never knew what sort of machine Kage would have to justify at a moment’s notice. Not that I am any kind of an engineer! But I do know enough to be able to warn Kage when she outright trampled a law of physics without explanation, or devised something someone else had already famously used. Like a lot of science fiction writers, Kage leaned optimistically on the old And here a miracle happens technique – but, also like most of her brethren and sistern, she tied it all as tightly to known technology as she could. I tended to know what was possible – Kage, I remember, was actually astounded to discover that vending machines had not yet even approached the abilities of the food replicators so dear to the hearts of the genre …

She figured there’s been plenty of time to perfect those. Finding out what it takes to build plant and animals tissues from cell cultures both surprised and horrified her … I have the notes for a nasty little story where someone’s similarly horrified reaction leads them to urban cannibalism. And the deficits and sins of phoney “meat” were thoroughly explored in her Company novels, where it came in colours like Play-Do and was about as edible.

But it also led to the core tech failure at the heart of the short story “Facts Regarding The Arrest of Dr. Kalulgin”. W were discussing a new story – all she had were a couple of intense images and the knowledge that it concerned the operative Kalugin. And we were discussing allergies. Most allergies are caused by a body’s sensitivity to a protein – the main job of  most genes is to code for the production of proteins – auto-immune diseases arise from some unfortunate’s sensitivity to their own proteins … and it occurred to Kage that a person could become allergic to their own memories; at least, to the messenger RNA  used in memory production.

I don’t know how her mind made that connection of my babbling along about protein production, and why she needed an antihistamine because her eyes were red and itchy. But I know we were coming up out of the Santa Ynez valley headed south, where the 101 swings to the left to parallel the coast for miles and mile. I remember because my first sight of the sea that day was accompanied by Kage asking, in growing delight, “Could he be allergic to his own memory RNA?” Eureka!

There are moments like that attached to everything Kage wrote; hours of them, sometimes, when the argument went on and on. She had her hard times, when every word had to be pulled from a malignant sea like an unwilling fish – but usually it was like a spring thaw. A few hours of creaking and then the ice exploded, and the river was in full spate.

Me, I am in a blocked state at the moment. I have the galleys of Company of Thieves to edit, though, which helps a bit. And I am despairingly familiar with the one-word-at-a-time struggle; it’s how I’m writing this entry, Dear Readers, sweating aetheric blood over the difficulty of the task.  Still, it works.

By the time I finish the editing, maybe the ice will begin to break up. If not, I’ll see if knitting needles can be turned to good use as a gaff. Somewhere in the back of my mind, words are stirring …

I will pry them out somehow.

Kage Baker was much given to repeated dreams.

There were specific dreams she dreamed repeatedly – those usually went on until she assigned meaning to them, and satisfied whatever subconscious rash was breaking out in  her mind. One of those set her to reading alchemy, researching the ethos behind it. It turns out there really is a step-by-step DIY procedure for attaining the Philosopher’s Stone, but it’s in code. It only works once you’ve deciphered the code, and while there are hundreds of supposed volumes doing just that, few of them agree with one another … and none of them work. Kage learned some interesting ways to fake making gold from lead, though, which she felt was a good addition to her social tricks inventory. Even at the cost of ruining a couple of perfectly good saucepans to melt the lead.

She had other dreams, broader in topic, that fell into cycles. No specific dream repeated, but the general setting recurred over and over.  The most frequent of those was what she called Budapest On A Tuesday Night, where she found herself  riding endlessly on a bus through a crumbling, benighted Eastern European city … the bus was dark and almost empty; so were the streets, where drifts of black dust rippled up over broken curbs and leafless trees loomed in the headlights. All the empty cities in her books rose from those dreams.

From early childhood, Kage also dreamed of clockwork. It fascinated her – she dissected many, many aging alarm clocks, to familiarize herself with their general anatomy. By the time she was in high school, she was also putting them back together – I remember her triumph the first time she got one re-assembled with no parts left over! On one of the clocks – a big brass wind-up model – she somehow lost the hands during the disassemble procedure: but she managed to get it back together without them. Then she had a clock that ticked lustily but never showed the time … that image became the sigil of the Operatives in Dr. Zeus, the badge of servitude imposed on them by their corporate masters.

The same clock ticked on her desk for years. When it finally kicked the jam jar, she replaced it a clock-face from a craft store, carefully denuded of hands. She stuck it over some of the function lights on her copier, so the clock face lit up with a sweep of unknown and mysterious time when she printed out her stories. Kage had a funny relationship with clocks, and with time …

And with literal clockwork, too. From early childhood, she had recurring nightmares about machine parts appearing in her own body. She dreamed that mirrors would show her gears through a panel in her skull, or that one eye would be shown to house some glittering mechanical lens. She dreamed of pistons and gears under her skin, steel and ivory bones fitted together not with muscles and tendons, but mortices and tenons. Those images horrified her, but she could never shake them.

What she ultimately did with this idea, Dear Readers, should be obvious. Originally, the immortal operatives of the Company ran on clockwork; rather like Tik-Tok, the Clockwork Man of Oz (her favourite character in the books). She revised her concept when she began to consider practical problems like noise, and access panels, and industrial accidents and war injuries … and I nagged her into finally at least considering procedures utilizing nanotechnology and biochemistry and strange energies.

But because she was Kage, she endowed them with a profound life of the spirit. She wanted them to be human as well as machines. She wanted the boundary lines to be hard to see, even for the operatives. She felt that identifying one’s own soul was one of the benchmarks of humanity, and she gave that to her operatives. She made them work it out for themselves, though.

Materially, once Kage began to look at micrographs of all the cunning little machines scientists were whimsically constructing out of individual atoms, she was hooked. That stuff was elegant, it was art; it had STYLE.  And Kage loved STYLE.

The tiny carts and cars and windmills and graffiiti enchanted her – she agreed that nano-construction was what her immortals needed.  Bad dreams about gears and escapements under her own skin  led to the immortal cyborgs of Dr. Zeus. Nano-art made them work. A Model-T made of resin molecules, a Coca-Cola sign rendered in vanadinite crystals: even the  original gears were possible, constructed from individual atoms of silicon. To be practical, Kage embroidered circuitry in silver thread  on white cells, to power inhumanly accurate immune systems. Bones were reinforced with steel and porcelain. And for her, The Terminator movies became comedies …

So, what are little operatives made of? Recurring dreams. Science jokes. Nightmares. And straight from Kage’s own soul, the flame of spirit. Because gears and polished steel and strange crystals plated over exotic metals are only fashion.

Real STYLE comes from the soul.