Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker disliked having neighbors.

Most of ours over the years were amiable enough – because, mostly, they weren’t there. We didn’t often have any; not with two legs and last names, anyway. We lived in a lot of funny places, and they all shared a certain degree of isolation. We came to depend on it, especially after the crowded warren that was Momma’s house.

When Kage first left home in early 20’s, she joined me in a subterranean little studio apartment literally in one of the Hollywood Hills. It had a front door and a back door (12 feet of living room separated them) and was otherwise dug into a ridge of earth. The front led to a tiny lawn and several staircases running up and down the hillface; the back door led to a hidden staircase up a tiny canyon, from which one emerged through a jasmine bush onto the street. It was a lot like living in a hobbit hole, and while it was part of an apartment complex and we technically had neighbors – we never saw them, nor they us. No one’s doors came out in the same place …

We lived in a series of such apartments, engineered precariously in a series of ledges up the face of the Hills. We were usually in the lowest one. I don’t know why. But it meant that no one ever had to pass our door to get anywhere, and so we rarely interacted (even leaving out of it our tendency to depart via rain gutters and gullies).

When we graduated to real houses, they were all duplexes: separate entrances, not much neighbor contact. And then we left Los Angeles to follow the Faire all around California, and ended up living in contrived sets and cottages and trailers and carriage houses and garages. Our neighbors were usually deer and foxes. They are quiet, at least, except when they ran into the walls at night or ate your linen costume pieces off the clothesline.

From life in the groves we went to life in Pismo, and similarly eccentric housing. All I can figure is, we were habitually drawn to the unusual as long as privacy was guaranteed. Having to climb 14 steps and then descend another 23 to reach the front door was worth if if it meant no one ever came to the front door by accident. In Pismo, we found another tiny studio (full sized kitchen, no bedroom …. but cooking matters more than sleeping) and then! Then we found the House of Birds and Flowers, the cottage made of scavenged boat parts where we lived for 10 years. Being a tiny house in a huge garden, we had no neighbors but sea birds and gophers. It was paradise.

But insanity comes into every life, as long as you live within arm’s reach of human beings. Our last Pismo home was an amazingly large, bright, clean, mod-con-equipped apartment, with a view of the sea and a garage and two bathrooms and all sort of amazing things. It also came with 3 other apartments all in close proximity, and in one of them lurked … Ant-Lion Woman. ALW lurked in her hole and leaped out at prey.

She was a violent drunk, a failed matriarch, a cyclical lunatic. Her offspring and various mates slunk in an out of her door, and she fought with all of them all the time. Her favoured technique was to shriek threats and nonsense until she drowned out the opposition – although it usually just left. She didn’t like that, either, because it meant she couldn’t win. I think she had some vague vision of herself tearing the throat out of a thoroughly cowed victim; but no one would stay to be defeated, and so she was frustrated, as well.

ALW  would spring out of her ground level apartment to interrogate any visitors – friends, relatives, pizza delivery men, Mormon missionaries – most of whom would flee rather than fight for access. She sabotaged washing machines in the laundry room, she threw out other tenants’ mail, washing, packages, pets, and potted plants.

ALW loathed gardening with the classical heat of a thousand suns, preferring dirt and concrete: they were neater. Kage encountered her once, a few days after we moved in, and never, ever, descended to the garden area alone again. Most of her garden moved up to our porch, and she only went downstairs in my company. Ever. The woman utterly terrified her. Screaming nonsense and violence was something with which Kage could not cope.

However, as Kage finally decided, “We don’t have to acknowledge neighbors unless we want to. As of today, we have no neighbor!”

Fortunately, ALW got herself evicted before our fortunes changed and we had to deal with Kage’s illness. Boy, was that a lovely surprise! Kage had a wonderful several months of gardening downstairs again in peace and quiet. And it saved me from prison, I’m sure, as I would have killed ALW had she ever caused Kage one second of disquiet in her final year.

Anyway: while I have reams of stories about the antics of ALW, she is gone; good riddance and bad cess to the bitch. But I’ve discovered, to my HORRaaaaahhhh (as Momma used to say) that Kimberly’s next door neighbor is almost as bad. He wears a lot of camo, and likes to shoot ravens and mocking birds. He likes to take a weed whacker to plants of which he does not approve, and an edger to lawns he does not like, and clippers to anything that grows taller than he thinks it should – even if it’s in someone else’s backyard. A request on my part that he stop edging our parkway (he has edged to death everything we’ve planted  in the last year; no wonder it’s ugly!) resulted in a howling diatribe that concluded with him identifying me as Satan.

He was smiling when he said it, too, so it evidently gives him considerable satisfaction to have cleverly identified the Father of Lies and Prince of Hell as the fat, middle-aged woman next door. But it isn’t true. However, it’s also too freaking hot to argue with lunatics. And I really don’t want to relive ALW.

So I will do what I want in the yard, and ignore him, and remember Kage’s advice. As of today, he does not exist.

And now I will go water the lawn.

Kage Baker would be amused (wryly, I am sure) at some of my problems today. And also be cheering me on, I hope.

Today is my sister Kimberly’s birthday! She gets to choose the celebration, and she has chosen defensive gardening as today’s activity. So we are fortifying the perimeters, in sensible ways; the razor wire and deadfalls were lovingly considered but – on mature consideration – had to be set aside. Kimberly’s composter is small.

Anyway, today I need to help build the first of three new gates for the back yard, to keep out our demented commando neighbor. The first trip to Home Depot has already occurred, and my Cruiser valiantly fetched home all kinds of lumber, which was pleasantly reminiscent of Faire. (I can get 8-foot timbers in that car.) There is cutting and screwing and sinking of posts to be done, before we get to the fun part of painting it Kelly green.

I need to help re-seed portion of the parkway the neighbor has weed-whacked into oblivion; put up stakes and neon-oxalis-yellow caution string and a No Trespassing sign.

And a resident of Lord Howe’s Island took umbrage at my post of yestreday. I need to send a response and a guarded apology. It’s never nice to offend someone, even if you do it accidentally.

Have a very nice day, Dear Readers. I shall think of you all as I hold 2 x 4s and re-point the merlons.

Kage Baker would undoubtedly have said, “Yecchhh!”

Also, “I should think they’d be grateful. Who’d want those things back?””

Eventually, though, she would see that the black rats of Lord Howe’s Island have got to go.

You all remember Lord Howe’s Island, I am sure, Dear Readers. It was the home of the eponymous Lord Howe’s Island Stick Insect, aka Land Lobsters. They are the outlandishly large and armoured stick insects once indigenous to that tropic isle, long thought extinct. They were recently rediscovered on Ball’s Pyramid – a needle of about 15 mostly vertical acres in the Tasmin Sea – under a melaleuca bush. In the dark, by some climbers doing a bio-inventory of the big pointy rock that is Ball’s Pyramid …

I wish I could have seen their faces when they found a nest of foot long bugs apparently carved out of licorice. But whatever their reactions, they were in the best tradition of biologists: the endangered insects were transported to a breeding paradise in Australia. The Lord Howe’s Stick Insect, once extinct, now numbers somewhere around 11,000.

That’s an awful lot of really big bugs, you know? What do you do with 11,000 giant bugs? Aside from try and take over the world, of course … well, you find them somewhere to live, somewhere more nurturing of a giant insect life style than the sterile halls and boxes of a lab. The logical place to turn them loose would be Lord Howe’s Island, where one presumes there is a giant bug-shaped eco-niche now empty and longing to be filled.

Unfortunately, the cause of the insects’ extinction is still there, and in fact living in several species’ eco-niches. They are a huge menace to the dominant fauna  – which, like most Pacific islands, is primarily birds – and in fact have helped obliterate 8 endemic species of birds, including a Coot, a Pigeon a Parakeet and the unfortunately named BooBook Owl. And these are gone forever; none of them evidently had the sense to head for Ball’s Pyramid or nearby Roach Island. Many endemic species of bird have fled to both or either of those islands; petrals, shearwaters, noddies and terns. (I don’t know for sure what else is on Roach Island, but I am absolutely sure I don’t want to know, either.)

And what has caused this holocaust on Lord Howe’s Island? Oddly enough, not humans. No, it’s rats. Thousands and thousand of rats. Black rats, to be precise (Rattus rattus); a charming animal when encountered singly or in same-sex pairs in a secure cage. However, give them a chance to run around and breed, and you will shortly find yourself knee-deep in black rats. And very little else.

On Lord Howe’s Island, the rats have done for lots of birds; lots of insects, though apparently only the Stick Insect was driven to near-extinction; the beetles, as usual, are doing just fine. But there is a skink, a gecko and a snail, all endemic, which are suffering badly from being rat-chow.

There is only one native mammal left on the entire island. This is the Large Forest Bat.  The Small Forest Bat used to live there, too, but was eaten by – guess, anyone? – the rats.

Basically, although Lord Howe’s is a sort of pocket paradise, it is rapidly coming to be so only for humans and their symbiotic animals: dogs, cats and rats. And in the meantime, there are 11,000 Stick Insects looking for a home. So a campaign is now in the works to get rid of the rats by bombing them with poison:

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/bombs-to-fight-the-killer-rats/story-e6frep26-1226426042276

It is to be hoped that the dogs, cats and humans will be brought under control by less drastic measures. I also think it’s safe to assume that the entomology crew at the vast subterranean Company redoubt  in Australia have at least one member on the directing board for the Rat Crusade. They have a very personal stake in this: they probably have even more stick insects than the Australian Zoo that has bred the 11,000.

But, really, how can there be an argument? For the sake of the Lord Howe’s Stick Insect alone, the battle should be fought. They showed amazing resourcefulness for a non-beetle insect, making their little refuge under that maleleuca bush … whereas rats can thrive anywhere, and just about inevitably lower property values when they do.

Someone needs to make it possible for the Stick Insects to go home. Someone needs to save the Large Forest Bat, the Stag Beetle and the Flax Snail. And the birds … shearwaters, petrals, boobies and terns visit all the Pacific Islands, but how can you really have too many white-winged sea birds? Blackbirds, kestrals and wood hens are doing rather well, though the wood hens have had to retreat to a preserve. But the Emerald Ground Dove, the Sacred Kingfisher, the White-eye, the Currawong and the Golden Whistler – those still need to be saved from the rats.

And I know Kage would agree: a few giant bugs are a reasonable price to pay for a white-faced heron.

Kage Baker often claimed she hated cats.

It made some people look at her askance. (Cats are religion with some folks.) I would hastily explain she was allergic, and had actually known some cats she liked, and yadda yadda yadda …

And Kage was say, gleefully, with eyes alight and a mad grin, “Nope. I hate ’em. Hate, hate, hate.” Looking down at a friend’s or sister’s cat: “Especially you. Aroint ye, or I’ll spurn you with my mailed foot.” *

This made for some awkward conversational silences, sometimes, until people got to know Kage well enough to realize that – for all her comments – she talked to animals as if they were humans and would never have injured one. And, since she really did not like most of them, that was very odd … but then, she didn’t really like most humans much, either.

Anyway, about the hating cats part – I like cats. I really do. Until I moved  in with Kimberly, though, I had lived for 25+ years without one, so I guess I’d forgotten some of their habits. Also, touch technology has come to many of my electronics in that quarter century – and you know what? While a parrot’s beak is too hard, cool and inert to activate most touch screens, any portion at all of a cat works just dandy.

The little black cat occasionally butt-dials email, and has been known to hold down keys to watch the cursor go nuts on the computer screen. And she really wants to lick my Kindle’s leather cover. Otherwise, though, she co-exists peacefully with my electronic pets. But the elder cat …

CatMadam is a gorgeous silver tabby. She is at least 12, and time has worn her down to exquisite bone structure under fur like watered silk. She has enormous, beryl-green eyes and a sweet mew. She also has the hauteur of an Oriental Queen, and simply ignores anything she doesn’t like: she is 6 pounds of indifferent, self-centered beauty.

She is, however, rather fond of me. Not like my velvet buddy, the little black cat – CatMadam regards me as some sort of ear-stroking utility; I, and all my possessions, exist to amuse, comfort and accommodate her. Carefully lifted down from where she is sitting in the exact middle of my desk, obscuring the computer and staring at me, she will leap back up – over and over and over. Gently gathered up from my chair and deposited in a basket of laundry, she’ll be back in my chair before I quite turn around.  She neither bites nor scratches (too regal) but simply persists in whatever she wants with absolutely no regard for anything or anyone else.

Yestreday, she decided to sleep on my keyboard. This is no little kitten demurely sitting down, 4 ounces of fluff pleading for skritches – no, CatMadam just stalks up and casts herself down across the keys like a landslide. Her goal is to press as many keys as possible. Whatever cunning evil  she performed yestreday shut down my computer, in such a way that it froze halfway through shutdown, had to endure a hard shutdown instead, insisted on re-activating in traumatized safe mode, and required half an hour of re-setting and repairing before it would run again.

During this, CatMadam somehow caused my blog to disappear.

Also during this – while I was consoling myself during a Registry clean-up by reading a new R. Scott Bakker novel – CatMadam strolled over from the Government in Exile on my printer, and cast herself full-length across the Kindle screen. The icons went sliding under her paws, the active book blinked shut, and the screen froze in a hazy freeze-frame of the home page. It took me another 20 minutes to restore the Kindle – I finally had to download the activation software again.

When I got my beloved Kindle back to normal and checked on my desktop, WordPress was refusing my passwords. Which it continued to do until a night-long cleanup and compression was completed. Consequently, I never posted anything yestreday.

Also, I have now been turned into one of those ladies who talks about her cats …

So, this is an explanation of why my Lord Howes Island post has been delayed, why there was no word from me for most of last evening, and why I am remembering with genuine nostalgia the fearless way Kage would stare back at some feline interloper and say, “Hello, cat. I hate you. Don’t even think about jumping on this desk.”

And they obeyed her. Sigh …

*This is an Edward Eager joke. I think, by now, no one alive still understands it except Kimberly.

Kage Baker was fascinated by seeing evolution in action.

Caveat primus, here: if you do not favour the theory of evolution, Dear Readers, stop reading now. Kage did, I do, and both of us found the evidence to be so overwhelming that one could – frequently, easily, and all over the place – catch the process in process. And those snapshots of evolutionary change were what most fascinated and amused Kage. But they are among the things that make creationists foam at the mouth.

One of the most famous and most hotly contested examples (by evolutionary scientists themselves, never mind the creationists!) is, of course, the British Peppered Moth. These moths come in a wide spectrum of black-and-white colouration patterns. Their most common form, the typica, was mostly white prior to the Industrial Revolution – but when coal vapours began to turn every wall and roof in England black with soot, the white moths decreased. They were showing up too well, and their main predators – birds – ate them up.There were still as many Peppered Moths, though, because the blacker moths, called carbonaria, simply increased to fill the place of their missing, whiter brethren. However, when the 20th century rolled around and people began diminishing coal use and cleaning buildings off, suddenly the black carbonaria were back on the bird menu. And so the white typica increased again.

So now evolutionary biologists quarrel about how and why this happened. One side maintains that its just an artifact of the existence of differently-coloured Pepper Moths: whoever is most visible in any environment gets eaten and so becomes rarer. The other side maintains that, no, the carbonaria moths were a defensive mutation in the species, and the returning typica moths were the exact same mutational response – but in reverse.

Caveat secundus: it’s never that simple. Or maybe it is, and the hard part is convincing observers that it’s that simple. Because ….

Most moth-watchers says it’s actually a combination of the two: evolution, yes, because it happened in direct reaction to the changing environment. Mutation, also yes but not as much:  because the Peppered Moth was always showing some variation; it just didn’t need it until coal dust rendered the typica morph more likely to be eaten.

And there are still the unconvinced, who maintain it’s a series of miracles from the benevolent hand of a Diety who likes black and white moths almost as much They like beetles.

It was arguments like these that so interested Kage. She said that the reaction of human beings was itself a sign of evolution in action among humans: the tendencies toward faith and demanding proof fighting it out in the population at large. Or, as she said, “Religious woo-woo vs. scientific woo-woo.” Because there is scientific woo-woo, and some otherwise rational people make a religion out of that.

Kage felt there was just no end to the fun of watching people try to make sense of the world.

As a writer of fiction, she herself felt entitled to present anything at all as a “fact” in the pursuit of the storyline. However, as a writer of “science fiction”, she liked to anchor her inventions as firmly to physical fact as she could. That’s why the sorcery in her fantasy universe was based on good mathematics and perfect-pitch musical skills. And it’s also why she never wrote a story set in deep space or another star system: she was unconvinced there was sufficient rational underpinnings for an FTL drive.

Evolution, though – that was always right there in the forefront of global vision. All you had to do was look. And think a little …

There is a growing tumult right now about an possible “autism epidemic”. Kage was quite interested in this; as someone theoretically on the autism spectrum (where the DMS-4 placed Asperger’s Syndrome) she was part of the epidemic. However, Kage didn’t believe in the epidemic to begin with. She felt it was a slowly-growing case of statistics and mutations.

There has probably always been a tendency in humans being for autism; and not just classical autism, but its various permutations like savantism and Asperger’s. But these are not supportive of survival. We can read back through history and make guesses – these famously clever but peculiar people had Asperger’s Syndrome, these low-effect super-calculators must have been autistic, this story of an aristocratic heir never being able to leave a heavily guarded nursery must be one, too.

Kage thought that a lot of the modern “epidemic” was therefore actually that the condition was more obvious to the modern eye. It’s almost chic these days – enough for D-list celebrities to take public stances on medical issues connected to autism, enough for the DMS to be on the verge of issuing a 5th edition with a new definition of autism and its putative spectrum. It’s a hot button topic, and therefore much more well known; the symptoms and diagnoses are seen, made, noted everywhere. By everyone. Whether or not they know what they’re talking about.

On the other hand, Kage thought maybe a mutation was slowly making itself manifest, as a response to modern, urban, cybernetic society. There have always been people with more affinity for systems and machines that other people. But it’s only now, in the last generation or so, that the machines have caught up to these human beings. Suddenly, there is an enormous survival potential in being a geek.

And here is caveat tertius, Dear Readers: evolution has no point. None at all. It hasn’t got a goal, an ideal, a purpose. All it does is enable one generation to produce the next generation: and whoever best fits with the conditions at the moment gets the better chance to breed. That’s it. Bigger brains, bipedality, omnivory, art appreciation, writing computer code –  none is for anything. But if having or doing it doesn’t increase your chances of dying and does increase your chances of contributing to a kid: voila, Evolution finds your name on the list and and the goon at the door lets you in.

Is it another case of statistic and mutation combining forces? Kage thought Maybe. She also wondered if it mattered. Because the time has rolled around where being a geek makes you rich and popular, and how it happened doesn’t matter. Not to evolution, which has apparently kept autism spectrum in her quiver as something that just might work out someday; and certainly not to the human race in general – who want their computers and other “magic” machines to keep working and don’t really care how the magicians got their powers.

People, said Kage, will accept anything that keeps the lights on and puts dinner on the table. And that, Dear Readers, is reallyo trulio evolution in action.

Tomorrow: Return To Lord Howell’s Island!

Kage Baker spent  a certain amount of time in what she called “free association research.”

She usually started with a Google entry, something random and potentially amusing: panko pando. Garnet spectrum. Chromophobe. She select some entry on, say, page 7 (because these nonsense searches always yielded page after page of hopeful near-matches) and then just go on to wherever it led her.

She’d leap from link to link, checking images at intervals to see what might turn up, until she was metaphysical light years away. Her path was a series of stepping stone for 7-league boots, linked by whatever associations poor Google and Kage – opposite poles on a Turing Test – came up with. And from such paths, she contrived story ideas, or plot details, or interesting titles. Or just something interesting and new on which to obsess for a while as a rest from building worlds.

There was usually a profit to be had from this habit. At worst, it relaxed Kage’s mind and let her unconscious work closer to the surface. At best, it sparked stories. In between … well, I now have a set of bone needles and bobbins carved from the femurs of good English beef cattle, a century or more ago in Devon. The lady who had them no longer knew what they were for. Kage knew they were for me.

And she found Events Shadows this way, and things with which to fill them. For instance, I have the notes  suggesting ways in which to use the Great Fire of London (raging in September of 1666) to cover oddities arising from Newton’s work with prisms and calculus, and the inconveniences of the Burial in Woolens Act; not neglecting the fact that the first European records of coloured clouds were destroyed in the Great Fire.

Kage had a real weakness for following mysterious bright lights through any available bog.

What she called “free-association” I called “chumming for shark with a pork roast tied to your leg”. At first, when search engines were new and she was groping her way slowly along the strands of Webcrawler (whose name amused her), the dangers were few. However, I doubt any environment on Earth has developed predators and parasites as quickly as the Internet did: maybe the primeval seas, where proto-cells and bacteria were still working out the difference between eating and breeding …

Anyway, I learned about security real fast (anyone else remember John Bull Antivirus? Had a charming icon.) and the necessity of regularly-scheduled maintenance on the computer. The only times anything did get through the crystal spheres I erected around our private cyberspace were after some free-association search of Kage’s had gone on until 3 AM and no one remembered to let the watch-weasel loose on the computer.

Since Kage has been gone, though, I have discovered the joys of just following the links. No knowledge is useless; and the more you accumulate, the wider – and stranger – the associations between them can grow. That’s been especially apparent this week, when story ideas have been cropping up in my mind like faerie rings of mushrooms. Like the subterranean fungi that cover multiple acres of Oregon and only show a few fruiting bodies on the surface, huge networks of unrelated facts can produce shining, strangely luminescent mushrooms on the top of my mind.

Which is a fairly dreadful and interesting image, actually. Jeff VanderMeer has made much splendidly horrific hay of the idea, too. As did H. P. Lovecraft; and both of those gentlemen contribute largely to the body of ideas in my memory-bins.  But that’s how the whole process seems to work, and very nearly literally.

Brainstorming with you, Dear Readers, is also part of this process. It’s been especially fruitful this week. And the link-safaris have been especially productive and entertaining. A tree that covers 100 acres, and a fungus that covers 1,000. What does it mean that Oregon is sitting on the back of a giant mushroom? What does the sign in a coastal McDonald’s that advised “Free Ice To Senior Citizens: Bring Your Ice Chest!” mean? Why does the combination give me goose bumps?

Time to search a little more, and see what comes to light. And update Norton. All kinds of things go wandering after will o’the wisps on hot Saturday nights.

Kage Baker had a “thing” about tracking the weather. She was mildly obsessive about it.

Part of it was because she did so much outdoors performance; and so much travelling on California’s always-decaying roads. Part of it was because she was terribly sensitive to temperatures. Part of it was an occasional  longing to be somewhere else. But part of it was just that the tools for prognostication were many and varied and constantly improving, and she was fascinated by them.

She kept a barometer on the wall by her desk, and loved comparing the weather she could literally see breeding out on the Pacific – all of two blocks away – with what the barometer said was happening. She kept two thermometers for the same reason. For a long time, she had one of those weird ceramic poodles that turns from pink to blue depending on the likelihood of rain. But in the coastal fog zone of Pismo Beach, the dog was usually a faint sickly lavender from the fog and so was not a lot of use.

Her favourite was the Weatherbug station I installed on her computer. It had 3 kinds of maps to display weather changes, plus maps for lightning, heat and winds – all attractively colour coded, which was a code Kage read easily. She liked the Doppler maps best, though; she loved the way the weather fronts could be seen charging in from the Pacific or striding down the coast like an army. She liked having a personality assigned to the weather.

She was also amused by the various little icons, showing the breath of the winds or the frequency of lightning strikes. And when the temperature exceeded 100 degrees and the read-out started flashing crimson, she was always delighted. She said if she had to be that hot, a show was the least she deserved.

Weatherbug also has a rather hilarious WARNING noise, when Severe Weather alerts come in. It sounds like a cricket on speed, with a side of helium. Kage called it the Cricket O’Doom, and just loved it when its falsetto cry trumpeted shrilly from her desktop.

She’d love today. We’ve had the Cricket O’Doom announce heat warnings; and while the temperature is dropping a little now, there was a flash of crimson at 101 around noon. The Doppler shows drizzle, rain, heavy rain and torrential rain doing a country dance all over the map of Los Angeles County – changing partners, swinging through a hay, double down the middle to your left … your other left!

Everything  possible is happening somewhere in Southern California today. There’s lightning from the Sierras to the Rockies. And coming straight off the Pacific is an air-borne river of storms heading right over downtown Los Angeles. We’ve got a 50% chance of more rain today!

Of course, Kage always said that doesn’t actually means it will, yes, rain. It just means that half of whatever falls will hit you. She always took percentages of expected rain very personally, too.

It’s warm and grey and muggy. I am fortified with iced tea and cold water in the fridge. There is ice cream, and cottage cheese, and watermelon, and other hot weather comestibles. I have no errands to run outside the house, wherein it is dim and cool and beautifully scented by the magical scent of hot, wet concrete …

I am going to go off and read awhile as the day simmers down to a perfect melange of twilight. Then I’ll write some more. But for now, Dear Readers, I advise everyone to take refuge in their favourite tropical Other World and wait it out. Have a mai tai with Long John Silver or Ginger Ted, wait for the rain on the roof with cat-eyed Sadie Thompson.

Or imagine yourself as guests of the Casa Mombasa – the tropical rest home for old re-enactors Kage always wanted to build. She and I would drift through the place, along the wide roofed verandas and under the wooden palm leaves of the overhead fans, dressed in linen Gibson Girl gowns 30 years too young for us; at twilight or when the storm darkened the skies, Kage would stand on the long porch with an oil lamp in her hand, breathing in the violet scent of sperm whale oil and guiding late guests to our doors … while I made the rounds of the Remittance Men and Decayed Gentlemen, Soiled Doves and Grass Widows in the high-backed wicker chairs and the dark bar, with foaming glasses of beer or crystalline pitchers of gin and tonic.

Now, that is where I wish I was today. Barefoot under my petticoats, with wilting orchids in my greying hair. Ah, the Casa Mombasa …

Kage Baker buttressed her personal vision of time travel with the invention of the Event Shadow.

This is one of the key tricks that allows The Company to save, hide, and later resurrect  … things. People, books, statues, recipes for magic antibiotics and famous contraceptives. All the fascinating animals that people regret having eaten once they are extinct – and the horrible ones, too, that no one regretted doing in – until it turns out they fertilize barley or chocolate, or are the only natural enemy of the bug that carries 21st Century Purple Fulminating Brain Rot. (Identified in late 2013, in Washington DC; vulgarly referred to as “The Zombie Apocalypse, Finally!”)

It works like this: something happens in the world. It is a huge event, one that totally monopolizes the news media and records for wherever it is that it happens. Sometimes these really are global events; sometimes very local. What matters is that they get all the attention for a given area and date. Hence, other things that happened in that place and time become invisible, and can be … altered. Enhanced. Used.

Because, while history cannot be changed, this can only be observed to function in recorded history. And as Budu says, one can record lies.

Kage adored Event Shadows. She kept lists of them, and perused them as carefully as Dr. Zeus must, looking for conveniently shaped and timed Shadows where all manner of productive shenanigans might be accomplished.

Disasters are very handy Event Shadows. For instance, other things did happen around April 18, 1906: but what most papers reported and what most people recall, is the San Francisco Earthquake. Kage herself pointed out that, at the very same time, Vesuvius was erupting. It was a major mess – thousands lost their homes; many people died; villages, and an observatory and a funicular railways were destroyed; the top of Vesuvius itself blew clean off. And unless you lived in Italy or have read “Son, Observe the Hour” carefully, you probably don’t know this.

And because of the Event Shadow, no one knows the very strange observatory records and photographs that vanished when the observatory was destroyed in April 1906; or what they showed rising from the depths of the caldera.

That’s how Event Shadows work. They are Snow Days, Sadie Hawkins Day, and Double Secret Probation for time travellers. Dr. Zeus’ inventory depends on them, and their skillful manipulation. Sometimes they can be used to essentially circumvent themselves – there is so much confusion as to who destroyed the Library of Alexandria, and when, and what clever bastardly thing they said when they did it, that the Company Operatives who saved the manuscripts had years of Event Shadows in which to make sure they got all the goodies.

Today, July 12th, is a very nice Event Shadow, if somewhat specific. In 1973, a full third of the National Personnel Records of the United States burned: the entire 6th floor of a facility in Missouri. Whoosh, all those military records gone! All those identities that could then be stolen, all those actions and decisions and peccadillos that could be altered, all those missing soldiers that might be re-assigned throughout time. That was a goldmine.

In 1970, the home of composer Geirr Tveitt  burned, destroying his ouvre. (It’ll show up later, in a box originally full of Moon Pies, in an attic in Tallahassee.)

In 1806, Lichtenstein gained its independence. This is the only notable thing that has ever happened in Lichtenstein. Consequently, Dr. Zeus has a long-term storage facility there, with an especial emphasis on ivory and combustible plastics. It’s easily hidden in the vast Event Shadow that is Lichtenstein, and  by its sole industry of making pool balls, false teeth, and … artificial ivory.

In 1562, Fray Diego de Landa, acting Bishop of Yucatan, burned the holy books of the Mayans. Except, of course, he didn’t. And there are things in there a lot more alarming that the supposed end of the world this coming December. Oh, and this is what he apparently looked like …

Or it might be some monk in his entourage – it’s hard to tell, at this temporal distance. Kinda Basque-looking, don’t you think?

And this is how Event Shadows work. And why they are so vital to the workings of Dr. Zeus and its many, many Operatives. Not to mention its surreptitious and often befuddled chroniclers and amenuenses.

Why, in 1961 the Pune flooded. Who knows what secrets of Mother India were discreetly removed to safety during that disaster?

Only Dr. Zeus …

Kage Baker adored Slurpees. There are all sorts of crushed ice and sugar syrup drinks out there, of course – all manner of Icees and Frostees and such. They were all drinkable in hot weather, but the King of iced drinks all was, to Kage, the 7-11 Slurpee.

Her favourites were Cherry and Coke; or, best of all, those two combined. And they were always perfect. The ice was just the right texture. It melted and released the syrup up the straw at just the right speed. It always dyed one’s tongue an unnatural colour; which, averred Kage, meant the flavours were really strong and pure.

Of course, this piece of logic dates from about her 14th year, so take it with a grain of salt. But there is no denying that nothing dyes your tongue green or red or purple or blue like a Slurpee.

And today is Slurpee Day! I have actually no idea if anyone else marks this occasion, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s 7-11, after all. and it’s fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot, which makes it even better weather for a giant, gently sweating Slurpee. With maybe the latest cartoon movie hero on the side … which would be Spiderman, right now, I guess. Hell, I wouldn’t care if it was Ghengis Khan, if it was a large cherry Slurpee.

It still seems to be cooler where I am than most anywhere else in the country – but that’s not much to say, when it’s 105 in the San Fernando Valley. Or 120 in Las Vegas, which one of my correspondents reports it was yestreday. But it did get into the 90’s here, and tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter. I am waiting for the temperature readout on Weatherbug to turn scarlet and start pulsing like Sauron’s eye, which is what it does when it hits 100. Kage always liked that.

It’s a cold pasta salad night here, too. Kimberly has an uncanny talent for producing pasta salads that are simply divine. I think she’s planning on a BLT one tonight – bacon, fresh tomatoes from the garden, crispy bits of celery and Romaine lettuce – all tossed with elbow macaroni and some amazing dressing based on Miracle Whip … served cold, cold, cold. With watermelon for dessert.

It’s wonderful, when the heat finally dies down enough to let one contemplate dinner, to have something so very worthwhile to eat.

Pasta salads are not my forte, but I make grand green salads. I used to tempt Kage in the heat with all manner of  dinner salads – field greens, fancy lettuces, savoury leaves all shades of emerald and ruby. Endives, cresses, butter and bibb and romaine lettuce; raddichio and escarole and lollo rosso. I’d braise a chicken breast in soy and honey and shred it up; add julienne beets and walnuts and toss it all with sweet Balsamic vinegar and oil … ah, those were good dinners! Kage would even ignore the fact that it was all actually good for her.

As long as there was a Slurpee on the side.