Chapter 1

I am certifiably sane, which is probably more than 99% of you can claim. In fact, I actually have the certificate to prove it. Do you?

On the other hand, if you ignore the paperwork (and most folks do), I'm about as nutty as anyone else. Hell, just having a certificate that proves you're sane is tantamount to confessing that you aren't.

I got my certificate of normalcy back in the early 90's following the end of the first Gulf War. It took five long mind warping months of interviews, tests, group therapy sessions and drug treatments to get it though. Sometimes the government insists on being far too thorough. The real pity is that if they'd been as thorough ten years earlier I would never have had to go through those final five months. And my life would have probably turned out a hell of a lot differently.

My name is Ike Blacktower, and I'm a mutt. That's mutt, not nut. Remember, I have an official certificate.

Most of you identify yourselves by the heritage of your parents and their parents. In America (since we're such a young country) that means you might be one quarter English, one quarter Irish, one quarter French and one quarter German. We don't (or can't) trace back as far as some of the older countries. In some ways this is a good thing but it's also proved to be intensely harmful.

There is no such thing as a pure blooded anything anymore and hasn't been for a very long time. And identifying human beings based on country of origin is so patiently stupid it hardly bears thinking about. Countries are (in the grand scheme of things) such transient entities. (if you want a 'for example' take a look at any map of the world made prior to 1750 then compare it with one made this year) The USA didn't even exist three hundred years ago. So how could there be a pure American? Germany, as a national entity, didn't exist until the latter half of the 1800's. Even China, one of the oldest and longest existing nations, has been in constant flux... sometimes fragmented, sometimes unified, sometimes larger and sometimes smaller. Hell, the concept of nationality is still relatively new. Before nationalism came along, people tended to be identified by where they lived and worked (oftentimes it was the same tiny little podunk place where they'd been born).

Anyway, as I was saying... I'm a mutt. If you label me based on my parents and grandparents I'd be English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, German, French, Swedish, Dutch, Russian, Romanian, Spanish, Egyptian, Nigerian, Apache, Navajo, Sioux, Jamaican, Haitian, Chinese and Korean. Oh, and second generation American... on my dad's side. And that's just going back two generations. If I went back two more, to my great-great grandparents the listing becomes geometrically more complicated. My family has a long and proud history of not mixing with the local stock.

In point of fact, we have a long standing tradition of enforced diversity. No one in my family (that we're aware of... and we are aware of as far back as the mid 600's Common Era) has ever married someone that looked even remotely like themselves. We go for the exotic and unusual. I don't know if this tradition is genetic or learned, but it's real enough. We choose mates that are as different from ourselves (physically as least) as we can find.

Description time: My father, as a young twenty year old, stood about six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, had dark black hair, black eyes and after an hour in the sun could pass for either a Mexican or an Arab. My mother, as a young twenty year old, stood around five and a half feet tall, weighed just over one hundred pounds, had very light brown hair, pale blue eyes and after an hour in the sun would have been dead from sun stroke. Her skin was almost alabaster white.

They had three children, four if you count the one who died minutes after being born.

My brother Ivan, at twenty, stood five feet nine inches tall, weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, had dark black hair, brown eyes and was just a shade or two lighter than my father. My sister Isabeau, at twenty, stood five feet ten, weighed one hundred and thirty pounds, had dark brown hair, deep blue eyes and skin that looked like mocha coffee. The baby that died was also a girl and probably would have looked like Isabeau, since they were twins.

And then there's me. I'm the youngest of my parent's children... and the oddest of an admittedly odd family. At twenty I stood six feet four inches tall, weighed two hundred and forty pounds, had a full head of snow white hair, pale gray eyes and skin so white you could see the veins running underneath the surface. Not quite an albino, but too damn close for my personal comfort.

My brother Ivan got married ten days after he graduated from college. His wife Svetlana is Lithuanian, very blond with green eyed, about my height and weighing in around one hundred seventy five pounds. (Ivan looks like a football player, but he's actually more of a chess master/PhD type, by which I mean he's very smart but is sadly lacking in common sense... Svetlana looks like a fashion model/centerfold, but she was a track and field athlete in college.)

Isabeau didn't marry... she was waiting for the right person.

I got married three and a half months into my second year of college.

I graduated a year early from high school (in case you're wondering, I did NOT max out my SAT... only scored 1510. I did score a 23 on the ACT... I'm not even sure they give that test anymore.) starting my freshman year just before my seventeenth birthday.

I have always stood out. The pale skin and bright red hair I had as a child made it very hard to blend in. Looking totally unlike my siblings didn't help either. I used to get shit from them on top of the neighborhood kids. Ivan, to this day, claims that it was all part of their plan to toughen me up and make me better able to deal with the rest of the world. What bullshit! That may be how it turned out, but I don't believe for an instant that it was ever planned that way.

I got called a lot of names and got pushed around and bullied. Not being able to spend a lot of time out in the sunlight made things worse. No outdoor fun for me. No trips to the beach, no pool parties, no long summer days running wild with my childhood friends or my brother and sister.

I was shy and introverted as a kid. My mother often described me as over-sensitive. My father and brother used less tactful language. (In fairness I should say that my father never called me a 'wimp' or 'pussy'. At least I never heard him use those words. Those terms came from my brother. My father was more... circumspect. If my mother had ever heard either of them using language like that about me she might have actually hurt them physically. And she could have done it too. You did not want to piss off my mother. Her temper is the stuff of family legend.)

So I had a lot of free time on my hands as a youngster. I read... a lot. I read everything and anything I could get my hands on and I don't mean Dr. Seuss. I had read the collected works of Shakespeare and Mickey Spillane by the age of twelve. I played games like Chess, Go and Backgammon. If it required thinking and planning I played it. I killed at Scrabble and Risk.

When the sun went down the other kids went home and were afraid of the dark. But that was when I went out to play. I had (and do to this day) exceptional eyesight. My night vision is three times better than your run of the mill human, and my standard vision is rated at something like 20/10. My night vision is only slightly worse. So I played in the dark, running and jumping and climbing trees... all the kinds of things that young kids usually do in the daylight. When I got older (about twelve I think) I started lifting weights and beating on punching bags.

Just about the time I was starting junior high school, some bright bulb scientist invented a type of sun blocker that worked on skin like mine, and suddenly I emerged from out of the dark and descended upon an unsuspecting world. Mostly it descended on me.

I got my first growth spurt when I started puberty at 11. I went from four foot ten to about five foot five in less than three months. Damn, did that ever hurt. My second growth spurt came the following year when I went from five six to five foot ten. I had another surge at thirteen when I made it all the way to six feet. I stopped growing for a while and my last growth spurt came when I was eighteen and I finished up at six foot four. I never grew another inch after that. Fortunately for me I did gain some weight for a time... I guess my body mass was trying to catch up so I wouldn't blow away in a stiff breeze. The big joke when I was thirteen was that if I turned sideways and stuck out my tongue I'd look like a zipper. If I kept it in I was a matchstick.

As it turned out, my high school football and basketball coaches both tried very hard to convince me to play. I'd bulked up some by then and was somewhat larger than most fourteen year olds, so I was a desirable prospect... even if I'd never played either sport before. Unfortunately there were a few little problems.

First, I didn't like basketball. Not even a little bit.

Second, I'm not (by natural inclination and also by training) a team player. I mean, what the hell do I know about working with other people? When did I ever have an opportunity to learn?