We Install (16 page)

“Oh, yes,” she said softly. “Remember, I've been there.” She ate a last bite, then leaned back in her chair and stretched. “Now, do you want to wash or dry?”

“Wash. I hate drying. Tell me where the john is first, though. The one drawback of beer.”

“That hall there, first door on your left.”

When he got back, he did put his arm round her shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. “This is all wonderful.”

“What, doing dishes?” Her tone was sharp, but she didn't move away.

“Sure. That, too.” He let her go, turned on the hot water, and got to work.

“Amazing what enthusiasm can do,” she said a few minutes later as she put away the last fork. She folded the dish towel and hung it up. “Now what?”

“I don't know. Do I have better things to be enthusiastic about than dishes?” Small and slight, she felt strange in his arms as he kissed her; Elaine was a full-bodied five foot nine.

“I should stand on a stool,” she said against his chest. “You'll give me a crick in the neck.”

“Sorry.”

“Don't be. … I, ah, sort of like the man to take the lead at a time like this.”

“Um, I would, if I knew where to lead you to.”

“Well, yeah, that helps, I guess. Same way you went before, only a little farther.”

So he led. As they passed the bathroom, she slipped free. “With you in a second.” When she came out, her cheeks were puffed up like a chipmunk's, trying to hold in laughter that got loose anyhow. “It's so nice to have a man around the house,” she caroled.

“Huh?” He went red as realization hit. “I left the goddamn seat up!”

“You sure did. Good thing I noticed—talk about cooling things.”

“Sorry.”

“Not to worry. No harm done.” They walked down the hall. “Here we are,” she said. “Close the door after you so Clio can't get in.”

Afterwards, they lay together, side by side. She traced a scar on his belly with her finger. “Appendix?”

“Uh-huh. Seven years ago.”

“Ah.” Lazy silence for a while. Then she said, “Penny for 'em,” again. She seemed to do it for a game, to see what would come out.

“Really want to know?”

She nodded.

“Well, I was thinking that not very long ago I was wondering what it would be like with someone new—and whether I could at all.”

She leaned up on an elbow and looked at him in surprise. “You mean you never—?”

“No, never.” He didn't know how to feel about that, proud or embarrassed or what. He'd had chances, a time or two, but it never quite happened.

Her forehead creased. “Interesting,” was all she said, but the bitterness behind the word told of memories dragged into the light.

He didn't want that. He reached around her and started to rub her back. She grunted with pleasure and flopped over onto her stomach. He straddled her to do a proper job. “You give massages, too?” Jen said, her voice muffled by the pillow.

“Well, I try.”

“Not half bad.” A few seconds later, she added, “The lady was a fool.”

Something crunched under his hands. Jen purred. “Nice,” she said when he got to the base of her spine. “I feel limp as a jellyfish, but good.” She stirred. “What time is it?”

He looked over at the alarm clock on the nightstand. “A few minutes past ten.”

“We can still make the late show, then. Want to?”

“Why not?” He got off the bed and started climbing into his clothes. “Where is your, uh, Eightplex? I don't know Oakland real well.”

“Just drive—I'll get us there. I'm a hell of a navigator.”

“You got yourself a deal.”

The Nissan wheezed up the driveway again. Steve was glad for his jacket when he got out. The night was very clear, but chilly. His breath smoked.

He went around to let Jen out. They stood together for a few seconds. “Where do we go from here?” he asked.

She shrugged; she was older at this game than he was. “Who can tell yet? Maybe nowhere, maybe … Wherever we take it, that's all.”

“Okay.”

She yawned, then laughed. “Sorry to be rude and crude, but I'm going to get some sleep.” She tilted her face up for a kiss.

He watched her go up the stairs and into the big house, then fired up the car. It caught on the first try, as if it knew the way back was mostly downhill. He put it in gear and started home.

It was almost two when he got in. He was too keyed up to think of going to bed himself. Instead, he poked buttons on the phone.

“H'lo?”

“Ed?”

“Who—? Steve?” The poor devil sounded like somebody talking under water. “What's going—?”

“Ed, you know the Law? Logan's Law? It's wrong!” Was there even a fifty-fifty chance he wasn't full of it? He had no idea. But, right now, any chance at something good seemed a miracle of rare device.

Sleepy outrage filled Ed's voice. “Are you out of your mind? You call me up in the middle of the—what time is it, anyway?—to tell me that?” The line went dead.

Steve didn't care. He sat with the phone in his hand, smiling at the dial tone.

THE RING AND I

One more nonfiction piece here. Everyone who has written fantasy in the past sixty years owes J.R.R. Tolkien an enormous debt, of course, not least for popularizing the genre so others could hope to make a living from it. In “The Ring and I,” I was able to spell out some of how much more than that I owe him. It's been almost fifty years since that tall, skinny kid picked up a paperback and decided to spend a dollar to find out what kind of story the author was telling. The rest, as they say, was history.

I
discovered
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
in summer 1966. I was seventeen; I had just graduated from high school, and was about to head off to the California Institute of Technology. I liked
The Hobbit
pretty well: well enough, at any rate, that I bought the trilogy to see what else J.R.R. Tolkien had written.

With
The Lord of the Rings
I was utterly entranced, and have been from that day to this. What struck me most about the trilogy was the astonishing depth of Tolkien's creation. He had not simply imagined the fictional present in which his characters were living, but also a history thousands of years deep as well as not one but several fictional languages. And what had happened in the dim and distant past of this created world kept bubbling up and remaining intensely relevant to the fictional present, in much the same way as Arminius the German's defeat of the Roman legions at the Teutoberg Wald in 9 A.D. remains intensely relevant to the history of Europe during the twentieth century.

I read
The Hobbit
and the trilogy obsessively. In the year after finding them, I must have gone through them, appendices and all, six or eight times. This was, of course, my freshman year at an academically demanding institution. Falling head over heels in love with
The Lord of the Rings
isn't the only reason I flunked out of Caltech. It isn't even the most important reason. But the time I spent with Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin was time I didn't spend—and should have spent—with physics and calculus and chemistry.

Nor was I the only one at Caltech caught up in Tolkien's spell. There were about ten of us, three or four, as luck would have it, in my residence house. We would get together when we could to try to stump one another with obscure quotations, to seek to work out the meanings of Elvish words, and to argue about things as abstruse and unprovable as how well a Roman legion suddenly transported to the universe of
The Lord of the Rings
might fare: of this last, more anon.

We searched through the books for hints about how the unwritten history of the Fourth Age might go as diligently as fifth-century theologians went over the New Testament for clues as to the nature or natures of Christ. I came to the conclusion that the chief evil power of the Fourth Age would be the Lord of the Nazgûl. This is, no doubt, heresy of the purest ray serene, but, like the Arians or Nestorians of early Christendom, I had some texts on my side.

Consider. The Fourth Age is to be the Age of Man, with the Elves and other ancient races vanished or much reduced in power. The Nazgûl, proud men ensnared by Sauron's schemes, are the great bane of mankind. When Merry hamstrung the Lord of the Nazgûl, he did so with a blade from the Barrow-downs, a blade specially made with charms against Sauron's chief lieutenant, who had been the Witch-king of Angmar in the north. But when Éowyn struck the blow that finished the Ringwraith, what sword did she use? Only an ordinary weapon of the Rohirrim. And when the Nazgûl's spirit left him, it “faded to a shrill wailing, passing with the wind, a voice bodiless and thin that died, and was swallowed up and was never heard again
in that age of the world
[italics mine].” Not in the Third Age, certainly. But what of the Fourth?

I may also note that, having thus been disembodied, the Lord of the Nazgûl was not caught, as were the other eight of his kind, in the incinerating eruption of Mount Doom after the Ring went into the fire. And, in a footnote to letter 246 in Carpenter's collection, Tolkien, who had been talking about how Frodo would have fared had he faced the remaining eight Nazgûl, writes, “The Witch-king [the Lord of the Nazgûl] had been reduced to impotence.” Tolkien does
not
say the Ringwraith was slain, so I have, at least, a case.

Such was my reasoning. I should also note at this point that I was already trying to become a writer. I'd tried to write three different novels, and had actually finished one (none of this work, I hasten to add, came within miles of being publishable). The summer of 1967 was among the blackest times of my life. I had no idea how to cope with academic failure—thinking I could excel without studying much, as I had in high school, was another contributing factor, and not such a small one, to my flunking out of Caltech.

And so I plunged into a new novel. It was, of course, an exercise in hubris complete and unadorned. I realize that now. I did not realize it when I was eighteen. There are a great many things one does not realize at eighteen, not least among them being how very many things one does not realize at eighteen. Taking some of the arguments from the Caltech dorms, my own growing interest in history, and my belief that the Lord of the Nazgûl survived, I dropped a couple of centuries of Caesar's legionaries (and one obstreperous Celt) into what I imagined Gondor would be like during the Fourth Age.

God help me, I still have the manuscript. The one thing I can truthfully say is that I meant no harm. (I take that back. I can say one other thing: I am
not
the individual mentioned in letter 292 of
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
, the chap who not only aimed to write a sequel to
The Lord of the Rings
but sent Tolkien a detailed outline of it. That letter dates from December 1966, before part of the same bad idea occurred to me.)

I wrote it. I finished it: something close to 100,000 words, far and away the longest project I'd ever undertaken up till then. Even had all the inspiration come from my own mind, I couldn't have sold it. Neither the style nor the characterization—such as that was—measures up to anything anyone else would ever want to read. To this day, though, I can say the plot was not disastrously bad. I had a tolerable story, but I didn't yet know how to tell it or where to set it.

A dozen years passed. I did a lot of the things most people do going from eighteen to thirty. I found something that interested me and pursued it. (In my case, it happened to be the history of the Byzantine Empire, which I admit is not a subject reckoned universally fascinating.) I fell in love several times. Sometimes this was mutual, sometimes not, which is also par for the course. Once, when it was, I got married. That lasted a little more than three and a half years. Not too long after my first wife and I broke up, I met the lady to whom I'm married now. In short, I grew up, or started to.

After I got my doctorate in Byzantine history, I taught for two years at UCLA while the professor under whom I'd studied had a guest appointment at the University of Athens. I had kept writing, and I began to sell an occasional piece: a science-fiction novelette to a magazine that expired before the piece saw print; a fantasy novel that owed nothing to Tolkien except, of course, a debt of gratitude for vastly broadening the market for fantasy novels of all sorts.

In the autumn of 1979, I was engaged to the woman now my wife, unemployed—a combination always especially endearing to a prospective father-in-law—and hoping to find a job, any sort of job, before my savings ran out and I faced the ultimate indignity of my generation: having to move back into the house where I'd grown up. Being unemployed, I had time on my hands. I decided I would go to work on another fantasy novel. If all went extremely well, that would even help me pay my bills.

In pondering what to write, I remembered that novel I'd worked on in an earlier time of crisis, the one that dropped Romans from Caesar's legions into Fourth Age Gondor. By the time I reached thirty, I was smart enough to figure out that using someone else's universe—especially without his permission—was not the right way to go about things. I'd also spent all that time and effort acquiring specialized knowledge of my own. This time, I dropped the legionaries into a world of my own creation rather than Tolkien's. I should have done that in the first place, but better late, I hoped, than never.

The world I built was modeled on the Byzantine Empire in the late eleventh century, at the time of the crucial battle of Manzikert, except that magic worked. Into it I brought my Romans—and one obstreperous Celt. The broad outlines of the plot of what became
The Videssos Cycle
are the same as those of my earlier act of unauthorized literary appropriation. This is why
The Misplaced Legion
, the first book of
The Videssos Cycle
, is dedicated to my wife, to the professor under whom I learned Byzantine history, to L. Sprague de Camp (whose
Lest Darkness Fall
first interested me in Byzantium) … and to J.R.R. Tolkien. My own cast of mind and my work usually resemble de Camp's far more than Tolkien's, but I felt I needed to note all the origins of the series. Attention must be paid.

Stretching and cutting the plot to fit the new situation wasn't that hard. I had envisioned Gondor in the Fourth Age as being in a situation the Byzantines would have understood: ancient; proud; diminished in territory from earlier days; in constant conflict with neighboring peoples, some of them nomads off the plains. (To this day, that seems reasonable to me. Tolkien himself, in letter 131 of the Carpenter collection, writes, “In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Númenor, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.” The analogy was in his mind, too. The difference is, it had a right to be in his, but not in mine, not in his universe.)

One problem I had with
The Videssos Cycle
was the nature of my villain. The Lord of the Nazgûl was, as I mentioned, the chief evil power in my imagined Fourth Age. When he appeared among men, he necessarily went veiled and masked, as he had no face he could present to the world. I incorporated this feature of his appearance into the new world I was building: incorporated it without first asking myself,
Why are you doing this?

By the time I did think to ask myself that question, my masked and veiled villain had become an integral part of the world I'd created. That meant I had to devise some reason for his concealing himself, and one that needed to be far removed from the reason the Nazgûl never showed themselves. I hope I succeeded in this. Had I not transposed quite so thoroughly from the Tolkien-based world to the one I was creating myself, the difficulty never would have arisen. And, indeed, it shouldn't have.

Aside from strip-mining my unpublishable
hommage
to
The Lord of the Rings
to help form work I might legitimately show the world, I've used Tolkienesque motifs only once that springs to mind, in a short story called “After the Last Elf Is Dead.” There, the borrowing was intentional and, I believe, necessary. Tolkien and many of his lesser imitators depict the struggle of Good and Evil, with Good triumphant, at some cost, in the end.

This is, of course, how we want the world to work. The question I looked at in “After the Last Elf Is Dead” is, what happens if it doesn't work that way? What does the world look like if Evil defeats Good? Turning common tropes on their ear is often one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking things a writer can do.

One of the more
profitable
things a writer can do, however, is to repeat those tropes. Tolkien's influence on fantasy since the publication and enormous success of
The Lord of the Rings
has not been altogether beneficial. This is not his fault, I hasten to add. But he has had many imitators, and imitators of imitators, and imitators of imitators of imitators, until some heroic-quest fantasies resemble nothing so much as blurry sixth-generation xeroxes of his great work, borrowing not only structure but bits of background such as noble, immortal elves and wicked, bestial orcs as if they sprang from lore long in the public domain rather than from the imagination of a writer not yet thirty years dead!

One very successful imitator—at least in financial terms—stated quite openly in an interview that his method was to emulate all the elements of adventure in
The Lord of the Rings
and to suppress the mythological, theological, and linguistic themes: every bit of the lore and scholarship and depth that informed the original. I read his words in astonished disbelief and dismay. And yet, he proved a shrewd judge of what a substantial part of the reading public wanted, or was willing to settle for. His books outsell those of all but a handful of other writers in the field.

The essential difference, I think, is that Tolkien created his world for himself first, and for others only afterwards. He began building the lays and legends of Middle-earth more than twenty years before even
The Hobbit
saw print. Almost twenty years more passed before
The Lord of the Rings
appeared. Everything in these books is a product of long reflection, long refinement. It shows. How could it help but show?

Because of that, it is unique, and is likely to remain so. Most books come into being far more quickly, and with at least one eye toward the market. It has always been so, ever since the earliest days of the printing press. Several of Shakespeare's plays, for instance, were first published as what we now call Bad Quartos—hasty, pirated editions designed to make a printer a fast buck. If we had only the Bad Quarto of
Hamlet
, the Prince of Denmark's immortal soliloquy would read,

“To be, or not to be. Ay, there's the point,

To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all: