We Install (17 page)

No, to sleep, to dream, ay marry there it goes,

For in that dream of death, when we awake,

And borne before an everlasting Judge,

From whence no passenger ever return'd,

The undiscovered country, at whose sight

The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.

But for this, the joyful hope of this,

Who'd bear the scorns and flatteries of the world,

Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor?”

The difference between that sorry text—probably set in type relying on the shaky memory of one of the actors in the play—and what Shakespeare actually wrote is the same sort of gulf that lies between those who would imitate Tolkien and the man himself. It is the difference between haste and care, between commerce and love. (I don't mean to suggest that Tolkien was immune to concerns about commerce; any examination of his letters proves otherwise. But he had built his world long before commerce became a concern. It is not often, and cannot often be, thus.)

As I've noted before, perhaps the greatest debt of gratitude fantasists of all stripes—emphatically not just the imitators—owe to J.R.R. Tolkien is what his success did for the genre as a whole. A couple of generations ago, speaking in broad terms, fantasy was something sf writers occasionally turned out in between novels full of spaceships. Science fiction normally outsold it by a considerable margin.

It isn't like that any more. Fantasy novels, these days, appear on bestseller lists far more regularly than their counterparts from science fiction. And a rising tide lifts all boats. Fantasies that could not have hoped to find a home in the 1950s or 1960s now have a better chance of seeing print, because—in no small measure due to Tolkien's work—fantasy has become a recognized category of its own. It is no accident that the professional organization for those who produce speculative fiction recently changed its name from the Science Fiction Writers of America to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

The next question to ask is, why has this happened? What has made Tolkien so enduringly popular? What has made fantasy in general so popular, besides Tolkien's example? Part of the answer, I think, lies in the ongoing, ever more rapid, changes in American life—indeed, in life throughout the industrialized world—during the course of the twentieth century, and especially after the end of the Second World War. We are all time travelers nowadays. When we look back to our childhoods, we remember a world quite different from the one in which we live today.

Take me as an example. I am, as I write these words, fifty-one. Things we take for granted nowadays but either did not exist or were in their infancy when I was born include television; vaccines for polio, mumps, measles, and chicken pox (I had all but the first, though I didn't come down with chicken pox till the age of forty-three); frozen foods; jet airliners; no-fault divorce; most though not all antibiotics; audio- and videotapes; space travel and most of what we know of astronomy (in the 1950s, the canals of Mars and oceans of Venus were legitimate topics for hard science fiction); birth-control pills; microwave ovens; the civil-rights, women's-rights, gay-rights, and environmental movements; freeways and the interstate highway system; rock 'n' roll; lasers; CDs; Mass in the vernacular rather than Latin; computers; legal pornography; e-mail; the hydrogen bomb; organ transplants; and the World Wide Web. The list is brief, and far from comprehensive.

No wonder, then, that every so often we are tempted to stop and wonder,
What the hell am I doing here?
Throughout almost the entire course of human history, people lived in much the same world at the end of their lives as at the beginning. Change did happen, but incrementally, even glacially. Medieval artists dressed the Roman soldiers around the crucified Jesus in the armor of their own day, and saw nothing incongruous in doing so. That styles and techniques in such things had altered through time was beyond their mental horizon.

Only in the past couple of hundred years has change become rapid enough to grow visible in the course of a single human life. It is no accident that historical fiction—fiction emphasizing the differences between past and present—came into being at about the same time as the Industrial Revolution took flight. The smooth continuum between past and present was broken; the past became a separate country, and interesting specifically because of that.

And I also think it no accident that fantasy has become so popular in an age of unprecedented change. It offers the reader a glimpse of a world where the verities underlying society endure, where moral values are strong (and, returning directly to Tolkien here, those who neglect the moral underpinnings of his work blind themselves to a large part of the world he built), where choices between good and evil are simpler than in the real world, and where good may reasonably be expected to triumph in the end. It's an anchor on a wildly tossing sea. Sometimes, it can be a crutch.

Few of us, I think—I hope!—would care to live permanently in such a world. But, especially when presented as magnificently as Tolkien does, it is a wonderful place to visit. We can enjoy the intricate adventure for its own sake, and for the respite it gives us from the complications and frustrations of mundane life. And perhaps, even after we set the books aside, we find ourselves a little more ready to face with good heart the world in which we do live. What more could one possibly ask of a work of the imagination?

BIRDWITCHING

My first daughter, Alison, is a serious birder. My wife and I are birders, too, though somewhat less passionate about it. And so, when Esther Friesner asked me for a story of suburban fantasy for a book to be called
Witch Way to the Mall
, this was what I came up with. In any competition, somebody's gonna cheat. The how and why may vary; the fact won't. That's what makes the story.

L
ucy Parker was a birder. So was her son, Jesse. Lucy was a witch. It wasn't obvious whether Jesse had the Talent; he was only nineteen, and it didn't manifest itself till people got into their mid-twenties. John Parker, Lucy's husband and Jesse's father, was terminally mundane and had no interest in birds except dark meat. These character flaws notwithstanding, he did have other talents, and the three of them lived happily enough in Sunset Grove.

Fred O'Neill was also a birder. So was his daughter, Kathleen. Fred was also a witch, as well. Kathleen was only eighteen, so nobody knew whether she had the Talent, either. Her mother—Fred's wife—Samantha­ was every bit as mundane and at least as uninterested in birds as John Parker (though she liked white meat). So you can pretty much forget about her and John.

You do need to remember that the O'Neills lived in Fernwood, just over the barony line from Sunset Grove. You also need to remember that Lucy Parker couldn't stand Fred O'Neill, and that it was mutual. Who done what to whom? It all started a long time ago, and they tell different stories. They both sound sincere when they do, too. By now, that hardly matters. They ain't friends, and they ain't ever gonna be.

Jesse Parker, on the other hand, thought Kathleen O'Neill was pretty cute. She had red hair and freckles and everything else an eighteen-year-old girl ought to have—and Svarovski binoculars besides. She didn't think Jesse was half bad, either. This horrified and amazed his mother and her father. Not Montague-Capulet country, maybe, but you could see it from there. Also not your basic California Dreamin'.

And you need to remember that the annual Yule Bird Count was coming up. Sunset Grove and Fernwood birders would have been rivals even if Lucy Parker and Fred O'Neill were thick as thieves (which each thought the other was). They lived next door to one another, for cryin' out loud. If you can't brag on yourselves and woof on your neighbors, well, what's a heaven for?

So every year there was a mad scramble to spot as many different sparrows and raptors and waterfowl and other feathered critters that happened to lurk anywhere close by, and to publish same, and to laugh at the neighboring birders whose count happened to come up short. About every other year, there were charges that Sunset Grove's birders—or Fernwood's, depending—counted birds they didn't really see, just to make their numbers bigger.

Everybody denied everything, of course. Of course. Nobody would stoop to such evil, underhanded tactics, of course. Of course.

“We'll get 'em this year,” Jesse told Lucy as the big day approached. Fernwood had outcounted Sunset Grove the year before. Suspicions of cheating were more than usually rampant—among Sunset Grove's birders, anyhow. Jesse was a competitive kid. It all added up.

“You'd best believe we will, kiddo,” Lucy answered. She was even more competitive than her son. It wasn't easy, but she managed. “We'll whip 'em good. You can count on it.”

“Cool.” Jesse grinned. Then, perhaps incautiously, he added, “Kathleen says—”

“What does Kathleen say?” Was that frost in Lucy's voice? As a matter of fact, it was ice. A competition with Kathleen was a competition she'd lose. Come to that, a competition with Kathleen was a competition where she couldn't even compete. She knew it, too. She hated it, but she knew it.

For his part, Jesse knew something wasn't quite right there, but his hormones made sure he didn't know what. “She says some of Mr. O'Neill's birding buddies were talking with him the other day. They were asking him what he could do about, like, finding some extra birds for the Yule Count.”

“Oh, they were, were they?” Lucy's ice turned into a glacier and started overrunning a continent. “Magicking birds into place for the count is immoral and unethical.” She paused. If you listened near the edge of the glacier, you could hear woolly mammoths trumpeting. “And I wouldn't put it past Fred O'Neill for a minute.”

“Kathleen says that they said that some of them thought that maybe you'd done some birdwitching before,” Jesse said.

It was a good thing he needed three dependent clauses to get where he was going with that, or the whole glacier—and probably the poor woolly mammoths, too—would have flashed to superheated steam. As things were, what Lucy said made Jesse's jaw drop. Moms weren't supposed to talk like that.

“I haven't,” Lucy continued, biting syllables off between her teeth. “I didn't. But if Fred O'Neill is crooked enough to think he can get away with pulling that kind of stunt, he'd better think twice. Those nearsighted yahoos in Fernwood won't cheat their way past us again. Not a chance.”

“Cool,” Jesse said again. Then, even more incautiously than before, he started another sentence with, “Kathleen says—”

“What?” Lucy barked.

Her son flinched. When he got his nerve back, he finished, “She says her dad says he won't let us win by cheating, either.”

“Oh, he does? Oh, he won't?” Lucy echoed ominously. “Well, we'll just have to see about that, won't we?”

Yule dawned clear and cool. It would get up into the high sixties later on, maybe even to seventy. Winter in Southern California. Lucy, who'd been born in Cleveland, loved it. Jesse, a native, took it for granted, the way he did his upper-middle-class lifestyle. Lucy and John (maybe you can't
quite
forget him) had busted their humps for years so he could do exactly that.

The Parkers had a big back yard, full of trees and flowers. Flowers at Yule? Sure. Why don't
you
pack up and move here? Everybody else has. It was also full of hummingbird feeders full of sugar water, of seed feeders on poles with big iron baffles to keep squirrels away (there were even bigger ones to keep raccoons away, but the coons didn't come around very often), of suet left out for woodpeckers and other birds that found it tasty, and little fountains so the feathered beasties could sing in the shower.

Behind the Parkers' yard were fields and scrubby chaparral. Plenty of birds that wouldn't come into a yard on a bet liked it fine out there. Some of them were even willing to be spotted.

Even though it wasn't
very
cold, John (yeah, there he is again) had set the Yule log burning in the fireplace at midnight. Tradition? Tradition! It was down to coals when Lucy and Jesse got up a little before sunrise. She smiled as she lurched into the kitchen to make coffee. The embers and the smell reminded her this was a holiday.

Holiday or not, it would also be a small war. She needed no witchy Talent to figure that out.

Jesse hated coffee. He bounced around anyhow. Nineteen did that for you, or to you. He peered out the kitchen window. An early-rising Anna's hummingbird that was about to tank up at the feeder hanging outside buzzed away instead.

“One Anna's,” he sang out.

“Well, we're started.” Lucy poured sugar into her cup. Her mix had less sweetness and more caffeine than hummer water. Hummingbirds were speedy enough—they didn't need caffeine. She darn well did.

“You ought to note it down,” Jesse said, reproof in his voice.

“I will—once I get to the bottom of my mug here. I don't think I'll forget till then. If you can't stand to wait that long, do it yourself, Charlie,” Lucy said. He sighed. He was no good at waiting. Along with being able to function in the morning without coffee, that went a long way toward tagging him by age.

Something moved in the magnolia not far from the window. Jesse stared intently. “Yellow-rumped warbler,” he said after a couple of seconds.

“Okay. An Anna's and a butterbutt,” Lucy said. Even half a cup of coffee started to clear the cobwebs.

“Butterbutt,” Jesse echoed. “That's a silly name.”

“I know. So what?” his mother answered. “Birders have their own secret lingo, same as witches, same as any other bunch of people interested in the same thing.” There were differences, of course. Misusing birders' jargon wouldn't get you toasted by a salamander or drowned by an undine. But it would show the people you were trying to impress that you didn't really belong with them. As often as not, that was the main function of jargon.

Lucy thought about a second mug of coffee, at least as much to annoy Jesse as to get herself up to speed. It could wait, she decided, not without regret. She went over to the kitchen crystal and attuned it to the Cosmos-Spanning Consortium. Mystically linking all the crystals in the world was the greatest sorcerous achievement since the megamagics that had swept two Nipponese cities off the map at the end of the Second Great Slaughter. And CSPANC had a lot more peaceful possibilities than sorceries of mass destruction any day.

She quickly steered to the CSPANC scroll that recorded birds seen in the Sunset Grove Yule Count. Other local birders had already identified house finches, house sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, and a California towhee. All of those, like her Anna's and yellow-rump, were completely unsurprising, which didn't mean they didn't count.

“Oh!” she said, spotting another check on the list.

“What's up?” Jesse came over to see for himself. “A barn owl! That's pretty neat.”

“It is,” Lucy agreed. Barn owls lived over most of the world—they had one of the widest ranges of any bird—but weren't common anywhere. You sure couldn't rely on conveniently spotting one for Yule. Somebody'd done it, though: somebody who'd crawled out of bed too bloody early, odds were.

“What have they seen in Fernwood?” Jesse asked.

Murmuring a charm, Lucy shifted to the rival town's CSPANC scroll. They must have had somebody out at the lagoon early in the morning, because they were reporting double-crested cormorants and a pied-billed grebe and a northern shoveler, which was a duck with a bill shaped like a serving spoon. And they'd spotted a California scrub jay and some American robins.

“Nothing they shouldn't have,” Lucy said grudgingly. “Not yet, anyhow.” She trusted Fred O'Neill as far as she could punt him. Since she was no football player, and since
dear
Fred weighed about 250 pounds …

A flock of tiny, twittering birds flew into the leafless apricot tree from the yard next door. Then, one by one and two by two and several by several, they fluttered into the magnolia. They hopped around the branches, looking for bugs. A moment later, they were gone, as abruptly as they'd appeared.

“Bush tits,” Lucy said.

Her son nodded. “Tree fleas,” he said scornfully—the birders' nickname for the bouncy little birds.

“Hey, I like 'em,” Lucy said. Jesse looked at her as if she were dribbling marbles out her ears. Most birders thought bush tits were nothing but nuisances that disturbed less common, more interesting birds. They reminded her of a pack of first-graders turned loose on the playground for recess. They were fun. If you couldn't have fun with your birds, why watch them?

To keep track of how many different kinds you've seen
. Plenty of birders, Jesse among them, would have given the answer without even pausing to think. He was a good kid, so good she almost forgave him for liking Kathleen O'Neill. No denying he could be too serious for his own good, though.

Another quick spell brought Lucy back to the Sunset Grove Yule list. “How many bush tits would you say there were?” she asked. “Maybe twenty-five?”

After careful consideration—he was Jesse, after all—her son nodded. “Sounds right.”

“Okay.” The bush tits they counted would get added in with all the others Sunset Grove birders spotted today. Somewhere behind the scenes at CSPANC, a sprite with an abacus would draw overtime.

Lucy did pour herself another cup of coffee then. She split a bagel and put honey on one side and jam on the other. Then she slapped them together and started eating breakfast. Jesse scrambled eggs. He was young enough so he didn't have a healer clucking reproachfully whenever he did something like that.

His pocket crystal made a noise like a rhythmic kangaroo as he was sitting down at the kitchen table. Till he started using that particular ringspell, Lucy hadn't imagined there was any such thing as a noise like a rhythmic kangaroo. But there was, and Jesse was far from the only kid with that ringspell. Hip-hop music was all the rage these days. You could either put up with it or wear earplugs, one.

“Hello?” Jesse said, and then, on an altogether different note, “Oh. Hi!”

Kathleen,
Lucy thought unhappily. She knew that note, all right.
He's talking with fat Fred O'Neill's daughter. Talking with the enemy's daughter. With the enemy
. Was Jesse sleeping with the enemy? Lucy didn't know. She couldn't very well ask. Parents who snooped on their pretty-much-grown children's love lives deserved the trouble they landed in. Lucy did know one thing: if Jesse wasn't sleeping with Kathleen, he sure wanted to. He was male. He was nineteen. He had a pulse. 'Nuff said.

“Nothing real exciting here so far,” he was saying. “Tree fleas, a butterbutt, an Anna's … Oh, wait. A couple of stoogebirds just landed on the platform feeder.”

“A couple of
what
?” Lucy could hear Kathleen's voice coming out of the pocket crystal.

Stoogebirds
was family slang, not regular birders' slang. Jesse had to explain it: “You know. Mourning doves, on account of their wings go
woob-woob-woob-woob
whenever they take off. Just like Curly, right?” He paused, listening, then answered with more than a little pride in his voice: “Sure I'm weird. Like you didn't already know.” He listened one more time, then said “'Bye” and stuck the crystal back in his pocket.