Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker, I would very much desperately like to think, would have declared a moratorium after a week of this heat. She’d have decamped to her armchair, with her standing fan aimed at the back of her neck and a wet bird on her shoulder – a wet bird can be a very cooling thing, especially since they don’t object to getting wet – unlike cats. And Harry could be counted on to dance about and flap his wings, too, thus becoming a little portable hurricane all on his own.

A hurricane would be welcome here. Maybe just the edge of one. The weatherman keeps talking about “monsoon-al flow” but so far all that means is rising humidity and coy little glimpses of thunderheads over the mountains. Tropical depressions are skipping all around the edges of Mexico and Ecuador – but nothing is crossing cleanly over to the Pacific and heading up the coast … what good is monsoonal anything if all it means is rising humidity but no precipitation? Even hot rain would be good.

Fog is reputedly lurking at the coast. It’s a mere 20 miles from here to Santa Monica Pier, (I just Googled it) which is – I know – a home of fog. It could certainly slink up the glass canyons of Wilshire and visit us here; the hills of Griffith Park are full of appropriate places where ocean fog could find a place to rest. The Hollywood Bowl is surrounded by oaks, firs, manzanitas and eucalyptus; the Greek Theatre lies in a copse of pines on the edge of the deliciously overgrown Bird Sanctuary. Hell, the Los Angeles River – which actually is a river around here – runs through miles of cottonwood trees, their feet in the water and their branches waving like torn green silk at eye level with the freeway.

But does fog come visit? Nope. It sat on us all May and most of June, but now – tricksy devil – has fled away to sip cheap beer and slushy margaritas in Malibu. It’s enjoying fried bananas and Mexican flounder where Sunset runs into the sea at Highway One.

After a week of this, the heat just doesn’t go away any more. We stay hot, and we get a little hotter every day. It makes one feel abandoned. I am profoundly depressed. One more pet shelter commercial on the television and I fear for my sanity.

Last night, sitting in the dark watching telly and wondering whether to eat cold watermelon or stuff it down my shirt, it came to me that I couldn’t remember how Kage’s voice sounded. Oh, I can “hear” the way she would shape words; her technical voice, as a writer would construct it, the personal grammar that parses out as Kage and no one else. But not the sound. Not the specific vibration of air molecules that was the actual sound of her voice.

I spent a lot of last night, therefore, trying to find recordings of Kage online. I myself don’t have any, just as I don’t have many photos. We were always too busy to take any pictures, to tape any sound; we were too busy living to squirrel away memories for an eventual drought. We never imagined, neither one of us, that a heat could come so fierce it could burn away our life.

People aren’t hardwired to imagine that. No one could live at all if we were. But it does eventually leave one sitting about hopelessly, longing for rumours of a tropical rain to materialize …

Anyway. I found a couple of snippets online, sitting in the hot dark last last. I cried so hard I thought my eyes would fall out. I don’t think I’d better do that very often. My brain is close enough to burning as it is right now .

It’s too hot to flirt with live flames. Hot rain only makes steam.

Kage Baker.

Much, much, much too hot. Too humid – 70% humidity at 11 PM, and not a storm in sight in the LA Basin? Render me down for my water, the desert is winning.

Chocolate cream pie and cold cucumbers for dinner. Iced coffee. Iced water. Hell, iced pickle juice; whatever fights off the heat malaise. Why do all my linen and cotton clothes suddenly weigh a ton? Why do the cats want to sit on my neck and radiate microwaves into my melting brain?

It’s been too many days at too high a temperature. No blog tonight – I need to take some evolutionary time and develop ways to deal with this. The weather has reduced me to an amoeba. Back as soon as I figure out how to produce pseudopods to type with …

Kage Baker idolized Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie.

As, indeed, who does not, who has any interest in archeology, postsherds, Egyptology or the infamous Pyramid Code? In an age when archeology was a past-time of legitimately looney private gentlemen, Flinders Petrie disguised a brilliantly analytical mind under a veneer of deliberate eccentricity. Notorious for conducting his digs in a pink tutu and boots, he convinced native Egyptians that he was insane and thus protected by God. Once he had the cloaking reputation, he eschewed the ballerina costume and often simply went naked at his digs; his staff and diggers either thought him insane or were devoted to him – often both – and he went unmolested in areas where other Europeans needed armed guards.

Kage discovered Sir Flinders while researching The Queen In Yellow, and fell in love with him. He was simultaneously so skilled in both scholarship and calculated insanity that she found him irresistible – in short order Petrie became the lynch-pin of the story, in the company of the fecklessly romantic Operative, Lewis. Many of you, Dear Readers, have expressed a fondness for this story. Believe me, the real details of Flinders Petrie were every bit as weird as the ones Kage manufactured.

As an archeologist, Flinders pretty much invented stratigraphy: the art of mapping the layers in an archeological dig, and so dating the finds by their relationship to geology and one another. It was arguably the first reliable dating system for Egyptian archeology. He advocated strict records, copious scholarship, delicate tools and careful methods – as opposed to his fellow diggers, who often resorted to dynamite to excavate the fragile tombs of kings dead 3,000 years.

His father was a devout member of the Plymouth Brethren sect. He was also quite convinced of the truth of the Pyramid Code, a religious conspiracy theory from the more oxygen-deprived edges of the Victorian lunatic fringe.  It postulated that in the measurements of the Great Pyramid at Ghiza were all the secrets of the past, present and future. The specific measurements of the Great Pyramid were referred to by their European devotees as  the Pyramid Foot, Yard, Rod, and Inch. They bore only small relationship to the actual dimensions of feet, rods, yard or inches, but the lengthy calculations required to translate the prophecies concealed in the sizes and positions of the stones didn’t work using actual, real measurements: hence the speciality items.

Petrie was brilliant in mathematics, and was initially sent to Egypt by his rather nutty father to work on these translations. He discerned very quickly that the entire thing was nonsense, kicked over the traces,and went single-mindedly for the wild free life of an archeologist. And over a rough half century of work, he managed to convert a dilettente’s hobby into a respectable and miracle-producing science.

By the time Kage had finished The Queen In Yellow, she had converted Petrie’s childhood head injury to a brain-altering bit of serendipity. She also left him firmly in the cross-hairs of the Company’s attention. However, she never got around to writing his ultimate fate, him and his wonderfully sparking, unique brain … and while she knew he was buried (mostly) in Jerusalem, she didn’t know all the peculiar details.

Some of you, Dear Readers, doubtless do. I only found out some of them literally two days ago, doing some reading on this year’s gathering at Sir Flinder’s grave in the Presbyterian Cemetery.  It was the 70th anniversary, you know, on July 28th.

Anyway. When Sir Flinders died, he was in Jerusalem. There he is buried, except for his head. He willed his head to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, in the hopes it would stand for “an average British skull”; which is pretty funny on its own, considering what he’d done with it in his time. The doctors in Jerusalem duly decapitated the great man at his death and stored his head in a jar. But then, a number of problems arose – two world wars, various types of troublesome Germans and Italians roaming Africa, poor postal systems, bad glue on the identifying label … the head went missing. It wasn’t located again – in London – until 1989.

Kage was delighted to learn of this. She was absolutely sure the Company had collected him, to investigate that fireworks display of a brain. The Company does a lot of odd things with heads. (CAVEAT: A photo of the head is shown below at the very end of this entry. Be warned!)

And, you see, there is some dissension about whether the head in the jar in London is actually Sir Flinders Petrie. It’s not on display, but is available for viewing if one makes an advance request. Identification was finally made  in 1989 by noting a scar over the right eye; however, various people familiar with him have stated that the features are not his. His eyes showed dark in all photographs from life, but the eyes of the head are reported as blue.

The hair and beard are the black of a young man.

I know what Kage thought, even before I learned the last few bits of this fascinating tale last week. I’m sure I know what she would think now, or at least speculate gleefully about. Whose head is in that jar? Where is Sir Flinders Petrie?

You may decide, Dear Readers. But me, I’m hoping for his immortality.

Petrie-at-Abydos-1922

Kage Baker – like just about every other English-speaking person in the world – liked to quote Mark Twain from time to time.

She greatly regretted learning that he did not actually say that thing about the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco; partly because it’s such an accurate description of summer in that City. (Much as she loved it, Kage always thought that Eric Burden must have gotten into the mushrooms when he sang about a warm San Francisco night.) But it was apt and clever, so she would quote it and then conscientiously add, “Of course, Clemens never said that.”

But Clemens did say that everyone talked about the weather and no one did anything about it. Kage also liked and quoted that, then always added. “That one is witty but it’s wrong. People do all sorts of things about the weather. It’s just that none of them work the way people want.”

Which is pretty much true. People have all sorts rites and rituals for doing something about the weather – usually either starting or stopping the rain – and whether it’s the ceremonial slaughter of a frog or firing metallic salts into the clouds with cannons, they all depend pretty much on faith. And that faith’s main use is as a distraction, Kage said, until the weather changes of its own accord.

Frog sacrifices don’t work. Neither do beer, fireworks or virgin sacrifices – and those besides are less than profitable because they also use up otherwise perfectly fine distractions: at least, according to the Kage Theory of Propitiatory Meteorology. Even cloud seeding has had doubt cast upon it in recent years, as the storm patterns are altered from their familiar routes and seasons – and seeding won’t work anyway unless you have some clouds to start. Desperate farmers and preachers’ daughters wait in vain for the mountebank with his scatter gun and Messianic prayers to arrive and make it rain.

California is the very Queen of particulate atmospheric matter. We’ve got every kind of dust and crud you can imagine, from barley chaff and cow shit to rare metals shavings exuded from the strange furnaces at JPL. And yet – we don’t have much rain. In Southern California, we don’t even have many clouds, and humidity in the summer is usually less than 15%. We’re our own seeding project, and it still doesn’t work.

Right now, it’s 8:45 PM, 80 degrees, 51% humidity. Half the world scoffs at our sweaty complaints here in Los Angeles – especially the poor folk in literally blazing Oklahoma – but, you know … weather grief is real, if what is happening is out of synch with what you expect and need. The weather in which your body knows automatically how to regulate temperature and breathe. So people try odd things to try and change the weather; wash your car. Wash your windows. Open an umbrella in the house. Hang a load of laundry out of doors.  Find and sacrifice a frog. Draw a hopscotch grid in red chalk, and hop it using a chunk of green grass for a lagger, chanting, “One, two, three, four, five, six seven – let the rain fall down from heaven!”

It won’t work. None of them will. It’ll rain when the conditions are right. If it happens soon enough after the juju, people will hail the power of the frog bones bleaching on the lawn.

But people have found one sure way to do something about it. Unfortunately, the only way humans have found that really, really works is to burn things for 10,000 years. Forests. Prairies. Oil, natural gas, peat, coal. That’ll do it, all right. But it does take quite a while for the effect to show (at least until you work up to the petroleum products. Those work a treat!). Then, by the time everyone notices and decides they don’t like it, it’s gone too far to stop.

Kage observed, as the climate change evidence began to mount: “Man, folks are gonna wish no one had done anything about the weather!” She also did some arcane calculations and decided that the ocean wouldn’t rise far enough in what remained of our lives to do more than give us beach front property. I’ve done her one better and moved 20 miles inland.

Meteorologists tell us that when the climate changes do get more severe, we’ll start getting monsoons. The sea will rise, and a ribbon of expensive houses and free beaches a thousand miles long on the coast will follow the fate of Atlantis. Then we’ll be sorry, they say, feckless Californians that we are. But I can guarantee that we won’t. If we lose the coast, we’ll sell off the new one for exorbitant prices. If we get monsoons, we’ll grow more rice and bananas. Tropical ambiance spreading through the state can only prove profitable, many Californians will feel.

I’ve still got the barometer, the brass telescope, the good beach chairs. I could handle it.

If only the monsoons get here soon.

Kage Baker sang of Mars. Domestic ballads, mostly; folks songs. People mattered more to her than machines. Usually.

But she never met a Mars rover she didn’t like. She watched Spirit and Opportunity land, cheering with a star-spangled umbrella in her rum and coke. She followed their careers as closely and affectionately as if she were their Auntie. They inspired her personally.

Today, if the gods of going are kind, Curiosity will land on Mars. It will be only the 4th US rover to succeed, though we’ve sent nine. Mars eats observers, it appears. The Russians have tried 19 times, and never made it once. There are various theories – some funny, some blackly superstitious – around JPL, concerning just what it is that repels our spacecraft when they approach Mars.

But we never give up! And today, Curiosity lands! So go to your computers or your HD tellies tonight and watch the grand spectacle. NASA TV is broadcasting all day, and it’ll heat up a few hours before the anticipated ETA of 10:30 PM.

Be there! Be witness! This is one of the steps that leads to Mars I and Mars II, not to mention Mars 3 through ∞. And others:  Marsport, Lake Lowell, Percivalville and that jewel of Barsoom: Helium.

I lay this geas upon you, Dear Readers: sit and watch, with me in spirit, while Curiosity lands on Mars tonight.

Kage Baker never actually stopped writing any story. She just stopped writing most of them down.

But she would still tell the stories, as they occurred to her. They all began as told tales, to the solitary audience of me; that’s how the addenda, codices and marginalia continued. Often in the car, of course – for Kage, forward motion translated literally into plot line. Others … in restaurants, or grocery stores, or while gardening, as something struck her fancy and initiated a phase-change cascade somewhere in her mind. It was a common beginning to conversation of an evening, when Kage would suddenly turn the sound down on Top Gear or Ghosthunters, and remark casually, “You know, there’s an active trade in bone jewelry crafted specifically for the markets of the Children of the Sun. Demons carve the stuff, and trade it to the Yendri.  The Yendri won’t work it, because they’re too prissy, but they’ll broker it to the Children. And then pay the demons on commission. And you know what the awful part is? The carvings are made from the bones of the Children of the Sun themselves.”

“Why? What happens if they find out?” I really wanted to know.

“I don’t know. Yet.” And Kage would look thoughtful and turn the sound back up.

I haven’t found the notes. Yet.

But this morning I found a charming note from Margaret (Hi, Margaret!) explaining that since they’d had some good lightning last night where she lived, she was happy to celebrate the Dread Gard’s birthday today. A philosophy with which I am in total agreement. And I sat down to tell her so, and this happened:

“The Dread Gard’s birthday: There will be many wild celebrations in the Black Halls, and the wine will run like … not blood, because not even demons sling good booze around on the floor. Water will have to suffice. Little sweet cakes (Not cupcakes! Kage snarled at me when I suggested that, once.) with cream frosting and custard filling and delicately piped skulls on them in black icing. In the Officer’s Mess they will be toasting him in Black Moons (Guinness and champagne, more or less). Last man standing and still able to say his name wins. It’s usually Gard.

But down in the top level of the cellars, where the household shrines are, there will be a constant stream of quiet visitors. These aren’t shrines the Family visits; the demons built and furnished them. This day, men and women of the household – especially the army – will go in and leave their prayers and thanks round the feet of a statue of Gard, notes and small bits of metal written on like potsherds; shards of weapons are the most popular. The paint over the chest of his statue will be worn right away from all the fond touches over his heart.

Tomorrow, hung-over, they will ceremoniously repaint it.”

That’s a gift from Kage. It came pouring into my head as clearly as if she were speaking it. While I was making the bed. Which is still sitting there unmade, as I went straight to the computer and  started writing in a white heat. And that’s how it was when she told me the stories, Dear Readers; bits and pieces that she said aloud and trusted to my ears to catch.

The notes she left – decades old, on cocktail napkins and that damned erasable typing paper, sometimes on the endpapers of books or candy wrappers turned inside out – are frustrating and myriad and all, all undated. But they are as pages of crystal engraved with incorruptible gold compared to the whispering in the back of my mind … still, sometimes it goes clarion on me and I get a bit like that.

String enough of them together, and there’s a story. In the meantime – Happy Birthday, Gard. Live forever, Master of the Mountain!

Kage Baker was, frankly, not especially interested  in the space program when we were kids.

I was up before dawn to watch launches, all the way back to the Mercury days – camped out in front of the telly in my footie pajamas, clutching a cup of hot chocolate and staring rapt at the tiny B&W images of the launches. It fascinated me from the very get-go, and I watched everything that was broadcast. Everything was broadcast, back in my neolithic childhood.

Kage slept in, and read about it. She watched the reruns, as it were – she was as familiar as most people with the views of the Moon from the Apollo missions, of Earth from the Moon, of Earth from orbit. Somehow, it just didn’t seem to stir her emotionally: not the way schooners did, or the golden age of piracy. She listened politely when I raved and expostulated, but I couldn’t understand how space flight left her unmoved.

That turned out to be a mis-perception on my part. Kage was thinking about it all those years, and deciding where the best stories were … the stories about people, and ideals, and dreams. While she admired clever machinery, it didn’t inspire her unless she could tell a story from the viewpoint of the machine: which, of course, she ultimately figured out a way to accomplish, in the cyborg Operatives, and the AI Captain Morgan. Kage liked to be able to get inside her characters’ heads.

But space, simple of itself, wasn’t interesting. Kage couldn’t get a handle on the emptiness of space, unless she could find a way to make it – well, UN-empty. Writing about immense nothingness, she said, was work for French surrealists, not her. Cowboys in space, another classic approach, didn’t do much for her either – she hadn’t especially liked cowboys in cowboy-land, back in the 1950’s when they dominated television. Pirates in space had potential – Kage felt that pirates, rather like chocolate, could be added to anything – but her attempts at stories in that mode produced the ghastly space opera she ultimately gave to Lewis to write. The dreadful adventures of the intrepid space smuggler Marshawke  sent us both into giggles, but weren’t otherwise very useful.

Then Kage discovered Mars.

Mind you, she’d been listening to all my preaching for decades. (She never forgot anything, even when she gave you the impression she was in a coma or another world.)  Then, when we researched for her Company stories, and for Empress of Mars, she got intrigued with the oddities of the Tharsis Bulge. Then the rovers’ pictures began coming in, photos and films of the surface of another world; and supplied, as well, by two machines with totally heroic personalities … Kage was hooked.

The tendency of Mars to eat our exploratory vessels fascinated her. The failures of mathematics, navigation and Congressional funding were blackly amusing. The rise of Space X as a commercial venture intrigued her. And finally, she had her motivation.

Mars, said Kage, would never be successfully explored until the venture became profitable.

And so rose Mars I, inhabited by good ecology-minded communalists but funded by successful capitalists for the basest and most old-fashioned of motives. And in its time, so too rose Mars II, founded by people who really wanted to be successful capitalists but also wanted to just plain survive. Not the gleaming white scientific outposts so often portrayed, but real towns full of people. And cottage industries. And scrap heaps. And plumbing difficulties. And diverse varieties of bull shit. The frontier was alive.

And if space was the final frontier ( reasoned Kage) what did a frontier people need to survive? Food and shelter, sure; but no one would essay Mars without those in the first place. As soon as the walls went up, what people wanted were other things: sex, drugs and rock & roll, typically. For a given definition of all three, at least … a  little fun. Fancy food.  News from home. Beer.

Compelling dreams arise when people are desperate. They are nurtured when people get a little breathing space, a small success, a taste of freedom. When you can buy a new hat or get your teeth fixed. What Mars would eventually require, decided Kage, was small heroes.

It’s why she loved the rovers Spirit and Opportunity so much. They’re little guys, who have lasted much longer than expected, plugging away at their jobs in a workmanlike way. She was so glad they outlived her … she would be thrilled with Curiosity, now about to make its mark (in a safe, survivable way, we hope) on the surface of Mars.

And now, Dear Readers, I am off to try and connect the living room TV to my hard drive. The whole household wants to watch Curiosity land  on Mars tomorrow night. It’s been a long trip but it’s nearly over!  And Curiosity is gaining.

Kage Baker loved summer storms. Their rarity was a big factor, of course – we don’t get many, here in California; less even than few, here in the south where we grew up.

But today, here on the edges of the Hollywood Hills and Griffith Park, it’s relatively cool and thinking of maybe raining. It’s 75 degrees and 75% humidity; rain wrack has been scudding across the sky all day, and the wind is rising. Thunderheads are breeding in the east, looking over the mountains like contemplative genies. The air smells of something wild and strange, green and grey, that might be rain …

Kage would have loved this. In Pismo, we would have a fairly good expectation of lightning later, out over the sea and the dunes: white-bronze sword blades quenching themselves in the Pacific, and blowing up all the transformers out in the dark vegetable fields of Nipomo. Though Kage always maintained those were caused by UFOS,  because of the constant reports of weird lights cruising above the rows of cabbages and radicchio.

Here in the Basin, we’ll be lucky to glimpse a flicker of light on the hills that run east behind Pasadena; we’ll be downright blessed to get a few fat, hot drops of rain. Kimberly is still tenderly hand-watering her new lawn three times a day, and would dance in glee if even a little rain fell – she, like Kage, always feels that water from the sky, even just trace amounts, will guarantee the life of a garden.

“In thunder weather, when the sky was lead.” That was how Kage described the birth of the Dread Gard, the Arch-demon Mage of her Anvil universe. It was in just such weather as today that the lovers go up the hill, Ran helping Teliva, who is pregnant with a strange future. And when they come back down, doomed Gard is on one of Teliva’s arms, and doomed Ranwyr is on the other. (Kage felt strongly that family was at the root of most people’s problems.)

She usually celebrated Gard’s birthday during the first few days of August – when the weather brewed up some rumour of a storm, or the air got that weird green glass lustre … she would declare it his natal celebration, recite the first few paragraphs of what eventually become The House of the Stag; and we’d toast Gard in red wine all evening. Strong red wine and sweets – somewhere along the line, the Dread Gard developed a sweet tooth, and so Kage always indulged that on his birthday. Something with lots of cream and custard and fresh fruit, usually, to honor his yendri inheritance as well. Somewhere else along the line, she had decided that Gard – unless constrained by slavery or the professional demands of sorcery – was a vegetarian …

Weird times in our household, to be sure. But always with an excuse for a party.

You know, it’s a very peculiar thing, but for the first 30 years that I knew Gard’s story, I thought that line about his birth weather was “In thunder weather, when the sky was red”. That was because it was in Kage’s appalling handwriting, and she wrote it only the once, in water-soluble Higgins black ink on erasable typing paper. And as it sat and oxidized, and the ink turned unlikely shades of lavender and pewter, and the paper went transparent where the water in the ink vaporized and sweated away in a diffuse halo of silver around each letter … well, it never got easier to read. So I thought for 30 years that Gard was born when a summer storm cast eldritch colours on the thunderheads, unnatural decoration for the birth of a sorcerer.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be lead. In Times New Roman, no less. I had to re-imagine the entire scene to look more like today, and less like Morgan plundering Chagres.

Life’s funny that way. Storms, too. Especially this time of year, in thunder weather, when the sky is lead.