Wielding a Red Sword (43 page)

The operating system I use is CP/M, obviously an abbreviation for an old retired naval man called Captain Manager. Captain M supplements his income by renting his house, which is a fine old edifice of some fifteen storeys (as he spells it) and a capacious cellar. Each floor contains six rooms and is provided with all the amenities of the domicile. Because the Captain never saw fit to adjust all the way to civilian life, he calls his boarders “Users” and he assigns them numbers. Thus User 1 occupies the first floor, and when he enters the building he must step into the elevator and punch out the code USER 1, and instantly he is there. Similarly for User 2, and on up to the one on the top floor, User 15. Some of these boarders sublet individual rooms, and these they reach by pausing in the elevator to punch out
A, B, E, F, G
, or
H
, which are the designations the Captain has coded for this building. Now you might suppose that this was an aggravating nuisance, but in fact it is very much to the advantage of the boarders, for each one had absolute privacy within his number and letter. All the furniture is set up exactly as he wants it, and the rooms are completely individualized. It is as if the rest of the building doesn’t exist. The elevator has a Directory that can be flashed on a screen by typing the secret code word MAINT, and it will show a complete inventory of everything in the designated room on that floor. There may be hundreds of other items in the various other rooms and floors, but this Directory ignores them; they have their own Directories.

What this means is that the Captain provides the ideal situation for a writer who has a number of projects going simultaneously and wants to keep them all distinct, without accidentally erasing one, but who also has teenage offspring that wish to borrow the machine for word-processing homework. For the House of CP/M is my computer, as organized by that operating system. I had nightmares of a daughter turning on the computer, touching the wrong button, and erasing my past week’s work. So I set us up with the House, and now the cellar (User 0) contains the assorted software programs including the good Captain M himself, while I have reserved floors 1 through 9 for business purposes, and two floors each for wife and daughters. Penny, who likes the view from the heights, has the top two floors, for example, and when she uses the computer she punches in User 14 or User 15 and there she is, with her margins set the way she left them, her macros ready, and all the files she has saved ready for her. When she punches the Macro 7 button she gets whatever she has put on it; when I punch the same button, down on User 1, I get my down-arrow. On User 3 that same button evokes my About-the-Author boilerplate. (A boilerplate is a set passage that can be inserted into a letter or other text without retyping; it can be very handy for answering the same question from different fans.) I would be quite lost on her floors, because I don’t know her macros and don’t understand the contemporary teengirl way of doing things. And she would not be at
home on my floors, should she go to one by accident. And we don’t snoop on each other; I visit her floors only by invitation, so she has privacy of correspondence, and of course she’s not interested in
my
correspondence. Neither of us can affect anything on the other’s floor from our own floor, so accidents are impossible. A family with fifteen or even sixteen Users could give each a floor, and each one could program each of the six rooms (four sections of the hard disk, plus the two floppy disk drives) differently, to allow for an infinite number of variations. Yes, infinite, because there is no limit to the number of floppy disks that can be used in turn in their drives, and the defaults are stored on the disks themselves. If a daughter takes one of my floppies by mistake and uses MAINT to check what’s on it, it won’t tell her, because it answers only to my User number. So it is as if we have several computers, and it’s beautiful. We even have color-coded cases for the disks: Blue for Penny, Green for Cheryl, Red for my wife, and Black and Yellow for me. I suppose what I’m saying is that we have a family computer system in the most compatible way, and we all like it, and visitors (yea, even Bill Ritch) are impressed by our setup. Bill even took home a disk containing my macros, so that he can get little arrows and things, though I can’t imagine what he does with them. (I picture him running about Atlanta, poking people with little arrows …)

But the Captain is not the only operating system. There is MS-DOS, obviously the abbreviation for a somewhat prim lady of uncertain age and marital status. Ms Dos distrusts apartment buildings, having perhaps had some bad experience there, but she likes to garden. So her layout is in the form of a garden with paths leading to the various entries. When you enter this garden you encounter a Directory with several diverging paths; pick a path, and it leads to another Directory with several more, and each one of those paths leads to its own sub-Directory of files. So each occupant of the garden can have privacy, with his own selection of flowers and such, but by a different mechanism. Our computer is equipped to handle both CP/M and MS-DOS, so I thought I’d try the latter for this novel. But I found that the Captain and the Lady
don’t get along together all that well; if I want both at once, I have to split my hard disk into two halves, one for each, and the two hardly speak to each other. And it seems that the Lady doesn’t have the MAINT feature that puts all my files in alphabetical order and allows me to change titles, delete files or take a quick peek at any file without disturbing it, and gives me the space used by each file and the total space used by them all. Those are housekeeping features I use constantly, for every day’s work is a separate file and there may be sixty of them for a novel. PTP has both CP/M and MS-DOS versions, and so does SmartKey, so I can have my keyboard layout and macros and things with either, but the Captain’s type of organization just seemed to be better for me. So my apologies to those of you who know and like Ms Dos, and wish I had used her for this novel. Maybe some other time.

Part II: Personal

But enough (more than enough!) of computers; I realize that the relatively gentle rivalry between the Captain and the Lady is not the type of violence you want to see in this Note. You want to know exactly how violence and war struck at me while I was writing
Red Sword
. Well, I started this just after the turn of the year, Jamboree 2, 1985, in the Ogre Calendar. Penny, whom we taught to drive two years ago in
Hourglass
, now drives to school, taking two friends with her, because they have early classes that the schoolbus doesn’t catch. You might suppose that there are no hazards of the road, on that twelvemile trip through the sparsely inhabited countryside. But one day some truck left a tangled mass of metal just over the brink of a hill that Penny encountered—flat tire, phone call, we got out there to rescue her, discovering one of her teachers changing the tire, and I drove her car in to get the tire fixed. Since I had never even been
in
that car before, I had to figure out how to operate it, which was an uncomfortable business, because it has little features that didn’t exist in my day. You might say the macros and defaults are all wrong. But that was before; now,
in Jamboree, came a more serious call. That’s right; there had been an accident, and she was phoning from the hospital.

Periodically in this region, the forestry folk do what they call controlled burns, burning off regions of the state forest in the slack season so that there will not be uncontrolled forest fires at other times. The policy makes sense, but sometimes the burners lack common sense. This winter has been generally dry, and there have been a number of uncontrolled burns. This time they started a burn adjacent to the highway Penny drives to school, and the wind blew it out of control. We passed it in the evening, as we came home from an archæology meeting; the fires raged for a mile or more beside the road, and the region resembled a section of Hell. (I happen to know what Hell looks like.) The next morning was foggy, and the fire was still smoldering. We cautioned Penny about driving through that region. “If there is thick smoke there, you don’t dare slow down too much, because the car behind will ram you,” I said. But we doubted that it was bad, because there had been no news of smoke, and the road was open. However, it
was
bad, and Penny, driving in to school alone for the first time (the two other girls coincidentally had other business), found herself caught in dense smog. All night, owing to an inversion, that smoke had accumulated by that road. Penny, mindful of my warning, slowed to 25 mph—and rammed into a truck that was moving at walking speed. The truck was hardly damaged, but our little car suffered a $2,600 repair bill. They pushed the car off the road, and Penny, shaken up but not really hurt, thanks to the use of her seat belt (I taught her, remember; I taught her right. Anyone who drives or rides in a car without using the seat belt is a fool; I don’t care how educated he may consider himself to be in other respects.), went out to try to flag down other cars before they collided. Her friend, who normally rides in with her, was next to arrive; she recognized Penny and stopped, then started to maneuver to get off the road. And a fourth car came up and crushed the friend’s car against the original truck. So there it was, a four-car accident—and it was obvious that had Penny not driven the
speed she had, she would have been rear-ended by that fourth car, or crushed between the two. As it was, she was technically at fault—but alive. A person has to consider not only the law, but common sense.

That smoke, all told, accounted for nine cars that morning, and several more that were peripheral. It was the worst traffic situation in the history of the county. An ambulance was dispatched; when it encountered the smoke, it had a man walk ahead of it to show the way, and then that man had to slow down because the vehicle couldn’t keep up with him. The police said that they had never seen worse driving conditions; that visibility was zero.
Now
they closed off the road; why they had not done so before is an unanswered question. Penny’s name appeared in the accounts of three newspapers. Our car was out of commission for the rest of the month. Now Penny is afraid to drive in fog, understandably; the day I started typing this Note, we had to drop breakfast and head out to rescue her because she didn’t dare drive into it. The fog gets pretty thick some mornings, and we understand. This is what families are for. I got gun-shy about driving after my roll-over, back in 1956, and I still don’t really like to drive. One morning when there was light fog, Penny braced herself and drove anyway. Came a phone call: “Daddy, this is Penny, calling from the bank.” Oops; where was she caught now? “The bank?
What
bank?” “The fog bank,” she replied. She had made it through. Oh, what about the real culprits in this mess, the forestry and highway departments who burned recklessly and never told the public about the hazard? It seems they are immune from fault, and our insurance paid.

That was Jamboree: fire and collision. But this novel required two months to write, even with the computer. I’m not really a fast writer; I’m a steady one. An average of two thousand words a day for two months covers a one hundred twenty thousand word novel. Actually, I work faster, then suffer interruptions. So what violence occurred in FeBlueberry?

I was awakened at 3:40 A.M. by the phone. It was a neighbor—the high school was burning to the ground. Both my daughters go there. As it turned out, only part
of the school burned, but that was enough to eliminate normal functioning. So the freshmen and the seniors had to take their classes elsewhere—and we have one of each. It may never be known whether the fire was natural or arson; it seemed to start with an explosion, but whether it was a bomb or a faulty heater can not be ascertained. Classes will be affected the rest of this year and next year, while they see about rebuilding. Unfortunately the library was lost, with all its books, including some of mine. So we donated a thousand dollars to the library fund; after all, it behooves a writer to support both library fund; after all, it behooves a writer to support both libraries and the school his children attend. I had a thank-you note from a teacher on another matter, and sure enough, the envelope was scorched. Good thing I knew the cause, or I might have feared it was a letter from Hell.

And more news: a local company asked permission to explore the entire state forest that we live against for possible limerock mining. Now this sort of mining is open-pit, and it leaves a landscape reminiscent of that of the Moon. Reclamation is a joke; the tree and animal ecology are gone. We bought land where we did in order to have a guarantee that the natural land could never be denied us. But it seemed that while the state owned the land, the national government retained the mineral rights, which meant it could license the land for strip-mining. (It is said that profits can run as high as a million dollars per acre.) Ah, but
was
there lime-rock there to mine? Yes, indeed; it was under our own land. Was the acreage we owned to become an island of wilderness next to a wasteland that was once the state forest? If this was not war, it seemed very like it. The outlook was grim. But then, before the battle was joined, new information came to light; the state forest had been designated for public use only, back when it had been set aside, and could not be signed away for private mining. Satan had been balked by a technicality—about the time I wrote the final chapter.

Let’s narrow the focus to the more personal aspect. How am
I
doing, these two months of this novel? Well, I can write well enough, unless distracted by other calls on my time, such as letters and manuscripts and research for other projects. What was the story there?

Life continued at its frenetic pace. I made notes on items I might mention here, but the inclusion of all of them would render this Note much longer than anyone would have patience for. So, just the more significant ones, and briefly. My major concern was research for a mainstream novel relating to the situation of the American Indians of this region of Florida at the time Hernando de Soto passed through. Every Sunday we went out to the Indian mound being excavated, where my daughter Cheryl worked. Our involvement is intimate; there will be more on that elsewhere in due course. For now it suffices to say that significant finds are being made and that the matter has been taking up a significant amount of my time. Associated with this, before the turn of the year, our whole family joined an archæological canoe trip, with Cheryl and I sharing one canoe. It was a kind of nightmare. So I enhanced the details and put it into this novel. Those who wonder where I get my ideas may take due note; I do more adaptation from life than most readers realize.