Through the Ice (29 page)

This was their vacation, and it was good to relax, even if they both loved the work they were doing. Both the empires of Nefarious and Teutonia were fading as prosperity and peace spread across the frame, but it required constant work to keep things on-course. Tomorrow they would get back in harness.

In due course they conjured themselves to the deep forest. Three children charged out of the cave beneath a huge tree. "Mommy! Daddy!" the girl with striped hair cried. "See what Funny can do!"

"That's Fauny," Tirsa corrected her as she hugged her.

"Sure, I know! And I'm Thirsty! Look!"

For the little girl with goatlike feet had a little reed whistle. She played a note, and a mudball appeared and plopped to the ground.

Seth shook his head. His daughter was Thirzi, but enjoyed confusing it.

Rame hurried out. The four lines showed as faint scars on his forehead; he wore them as a badge of honor. "Malape won't let her do that inside the cave," he explained, embarrassed, as he shook Seth's hand.

Seth squatted down to talk with the other boy. "Where's your dad, Domey?" he asked.

"That's Dummy!" the boy protested.

Seth smiled. "No, I think I had it right the first time. You were named after your mother."

"I guess." The lad idly squeezed a pebble between two fingers. The pebble crumbled to sand. Even at this age, no one called him "dummy" without smiling.

At that point a man came forging rapidly through the forest, covering ten paces at a step. "Daddy!" Domey exclaimed.

"Domela insisted on a last moment cleaning of the house," Vidav explained as he picked up his son. "So she sent me on ahead, with the boots."

"Let's go climb Lape's Tree!" Thirzi said, tiring of such long-winded explanations.

"No you don't!" Seth said, catching her before she could scramble away. "You have to go to the other plane to visit your Aunt Ferne, remember?"

"Oh, yes!" she agreed, remembering. "Can Funny and Dummy come too?"

"Not this time. Maybe one day we will know how to let anyone cross between planes, but right now it's just me—and you, when I carry you. We still have a lot to learn about magic."

"Well, hurry up and learn it!" she told him. Then, mentally:
I love you, Daddy.

Seth almost dropped her.
When did you learn mind talk?
he demanded, amazed.

Mommy wanted to surprise you,
she thought cheerily.
Did I, Daddy?

You sure did!
Then he hugged her. If only he had known what a wonderful life he was going to, despite a few bad moments along the way, that night he fell through the ice!

I suspect you are wondering how collaborations come about. Well, it varies, but I think this one is unusual even within the genre of collaborative novels. I assume you have read it before coming to this Note, so you will know that it is a fairly standard adventure fantasy with, I trust, some touches that will make you remember it and perhaps think a little. It is what is known as a juvenile genre novel, featuring a main character in his teens, and it does not dwell unduly on sex or bloodshed.

I am Piers Anthony, and my work may have been known to you before you encountered this novel; I think I need no special introduction. My collaborator, Robert Kornwise, has had no novel published before, so I will tell you something about him, and about the stages of this collaboration. Let me phrase this as a story, as if he is a character in it.

Rob was a handsome youth whose description might be similar to that of the main character of his novel, Seth Warner. He was tall—six feet three or four inches—and muscular. He had brown hair and serious brown eyes whose effect was ruined by his frequent laughter. He smiled often. His nose was long, and really not his favorite feature, though his sister called it "interesting." His sister also called him "Robby," which bothered him in public but perhaps not privately. He tried various hairstyles, but finally settled on short and clean-cut, so that he could get out of the shower and shake it dry quickly.

Rob started this novel, I believe, at the age of fifteen, encouraged by his English teacher, Judy Hite. Many teenagers (and many who are older, too) have the aspiration to write, to make a story come to life, and to be published. It is a desire I understand; I went through it myself, though I was twenty before I got serious about it, and twenty-eight by the time I made my first sale. Often the hopeful writer is a misfit: someone who doesn't get along well with the existing system, so retreats to his private fantasy world. This was not the case with Rob. He was popular in school, with many friends of both sexes. He was a good student, and athletic, and interested in music. In fact, he took classes in the Okinawan form of martial art, Ryu Kyu No Te, literally "hands and feet"; there is a picture of him in his high school yearbook executing a kick. Rob did not speak of this directly to me, but my own experience with Kodokan Judo, a different martial art, helped me to understand his interest. A serious martial artist does not swagger around picking fights on the street; the first things he learns are discipline and respect, and this was Rob's approach. Neither did he just dabble in music; he played three instruments: saxophone, harmonica, and the synthesizer. He was also an amateur composer and songwriter. You can see these interests in his novel; to that extent he was writing about what he knew. He wrote the novel outside of class, for his own enjoyment. He had an interest in mythology, and I think it shows in the setting for the fantasy, with a satyr as a major character, and his magical reed whistle.

Some people turn inward because of a bad family life. There is more division, misunderstanding, and outright abuse in our society than we care to think about, but often it is hidden, buried within the family, a guilty secret. It would be understandable that a teenager would turn to his private world to escape such a situation. This may have been true with me, though I was not abused; fantasy became more sustaining in certain respects than reality, and I cannot be certain that situation ever changed. But this was not the case with Rob. His family life was close and supportive, and he returned the favor. His father had multiple sclerosis, and Rob was always at his side when needed, and did the same for his mother. "If you were able to draw a picture of what you wanted as a son," his father said, "it would have been a picture of Rob." He even got along well with his sister—any teenager with a sibling will appreciate how tough that can be!—and indeed regarded her as his best friend. He loved to tease Jill, because she always fell for his jokes, though she was two and a half years older than he. Sometimes he would jump out of some dark place and scare her, just to hear her penetrating scream. She couldn't stay angry with him long! When younger, they used to pretend they were "Cheerios," rolling along the floor and giggling as they sang out "Cheer-i-oooo!" Or he would pretend he was a fisherman, and she was his pet fish named "Okie" whom he caught and threw back into the water, over and over. Or they might be twins with super-powers. They would read each other bedtime stories, or write songs together, or make forts and haunted houses. They would exchange secrets about their boyfriends, girlfriends, love life and all, to their parents' frustration. No, his interest in writing did not stem from any alienation within the family.

Sometimes the larger environment is restrictive. When I was cooped up in the city, I dreamed of the country, and I dreamed of the city when I was in the country. A person might write about his dream of a better land, one he might like to visit. But Rob was not restricted; he may have had the best of both, living in Michigan but not in the big city. He didn't like homework (who does?) but would read things on his own, and was politically and socially aware. He loved to camp, hike and canoe, to get away from it all, but I don't think he had any aversion to his regular life. He liked building fires, making tools, and just plain
living.
He revered life, and when he found a spider in the house he would gently take it out and set it free. When he found a hurt animal he would adopt it and nurse it back to health. So I think he was writing about what he knew as much as about what he dreamed of; he extended his experience of the country into a complete fantasy land, but he was not dependent on it psychologically.

The truth is, he did not finish his novel. I think this is the liability of too full a life; there are many calls on one's time, and the long hours with a computer can become tedious, even though the story being developed is not. He read my novels, yes, I was his favorite author, and wanted to do the same. So he started in, but the distractions of a busy life made progress slow. His friends commented on the ongoing text, correcting his spelling (no one worth his salt finds spelling easy: I speak as one who was an original speller almost from the start) and making suggestions. Then disaster: a full chapter was lost through a computer foulup. Computers are like that; they wait until you least expect it, and gobble up your material. It was his longest and perhaps most significant chapter—gone beyond recovery. That sort of thing can make even a veteran writer ponder the meaning of life.

But chapters can be rewritten, galling as it may be to have to do it, even if they can never be restored precisely as they were. I think in time Rob would have gotten down to it, but I can't blame him for waiting. There were, after all, so many other things to do, and he was sensitive to the needs of others. His sister Jill went away to college, an English Major at the University of Michigan, and he visited her there, and talked to her when she was in the throes of adjusting to their father's illness and her new life away from home. Activity at school was constant. He organized a band, and he hoped to be a disc jockey on the school radio, and he worked at a nature center, and he set up his own computer sales business with a friend. He had boundless energy, and was constantly getting into new things. He liked creative games and individual sports; he and his friends would play simulated adventure games they created themselves. He enjoyed computer science fantasy games too, and loved to create his own. He was able to "lucid dream" and kept a dream journal. He had, he felt, two "out of body" experiences.

He cared about people, too. He had friends everywhere, but also a quick temper which he was handling better as he got older. There were things that made him angry, such as prejudice and racism, liars, cheats, thieves. He hated poverty, disease, injustice, and things which divided people, religion being guilty of that, too. Drunk drivers, bad drugs, alcohol, smoking, nuclear war. He was a strong advocate of social justice. He wanted to be a politician or a judge, or an FBI agent, or even just a policeman who enforced the law and helped others. Anything but a comfortable idiot! He wanted to change and make changes. He was impatient with conventional education; he knew it was important to learn, but at times school seemed repressive and more like a prison. But he valued the excellent teachers, and was challenged by good projects.

So it continued, with his busy life, as whiter came. In early December he went on a skiing trip with some friends, for he was into winter sports too. Thursday night, December 4, 1987, he phoned his sister, as he so often did, staying in touch. "Jill, I love you," he concluded. Friday he started home. He was in the passenger seat, wearing his seat belt, while the vehicle was waiting for a light. Another vehicle struck them from behind, traveling at something like fifty or sixty miles per hour. The collision was such that apparently Rob's vehicle bounced around and was struck again, on the right side. The passenger side. He received a blow on the right side of his head, that didn't look too serious; it was just a laceration of the scalp. But it was far worse than it looked; he had sustained a massive injury to the brain, and he was dead. He was sixteen.

On January 26 Rob's friends wrote a letter to me, in care of a publisher, asking me to read Rob's unfinished manuscript. I received it the following month, and answered with a quick card, agreeing to look at the novel. The truth is, I was not eager to do this, for my time was exceedingly pressed. I had answered a total of 221 letters in January, and was getting ready to move, and was about a month behind on my writing schedule. I was soon to get a secretary to help with the correspondence, but still, things were jammed. About the last thing I wanted to do was read amateur fiction, which normally has high hopes and execrable execution; I was all too likely to be stuck with the chore of trying to make some positive comment on awful fiction, so as to avoid hurting feelings. But I remembered something.

When I was sixteen, in 1950, my closest cousin, fifteen, died of cancer. He had been a cheerful boy, bright, popular, with everything to live for, in contrast to me. Suddenly he was gone, while I remained, at Westtown Friends' School where we both were students. It seemed like a mistake; obviously I should have been the one to go. That shock, and the continuing questions it generated in my mind, changed my life. At first I couldn't accept it; I dreamed that it had been a confusion, that he had only been ill, and had recovered. I papered it over, as it were, and went on with my life; my roommate of the time says I hardly mentioned the matter. After all, I had known Ted in life as a child, his strengths and his weaknesses. I remembered when he had talked me into pulling him on his wagon; I struggled, but hardly made progress. Then I saw that he was holding the brake tight, laughing. I was a poor sport; I quit in a huff. I shouldn't have; it was a joke, and he was a fun person. How could such a
human
boy die? It didn't make sense. But I visited his family, serving in a manner in lieu of a brother for his younger sister, and I slept in his bedroom and saw all the little artifacts of his life as he had left them. I saw the terrible grief of his family. It was as if a giant hammer had come out of a clear sky and smashed it, leaving only the pieces. Where was the justice in this? I never was able to resolve this question, and remain an agnostic today: I cannot believe in a God who allows this sort of thing, and I don't know what rationale remains, but I hope that in some way it is justified. To an extent, my life and career have been an effort to compensate. To find some meaning in what seems to be the horrible unfairness of the universe. Now there was
déjà vu,
as another good boy that age was dead. No, I could not turn this request down.