Chapter 25

Monday, November 12, 2001

The Pennsylvania Turnpike is an old road as four-lanes go; in spite of upgrades, it's narrow, and there's little separation between the opposing lanes, so it was a little nerve wracking for Dave to drive early the next morning. However, he had the advantage rush-hour traffic going the other way. By the time he got out of the Philadelphia area things were relatively light, so he soon had the driving set on automatic with the Chevy's cruise control keeping him just above the speed limit.

Given the late start from Shae's the day before and the longer than expected time he'd talked with Eve, it was close to dark before the two of them had gotten out of the hot tub, their skins shriveled like prunes. At least as far as Dave was concerned then, he was feeling pretty relaxed and at ease with where things were now. After they'd rushed through the cold air to the house and gotten dressed again, Eve had asked if he really intended to get on the road that evening after all, and Dave had conceded he didn't really want to. Eve offered the use of their spare room for the night -- Shae usually stayed there, and it had a lot of her things in it -- and under the circumstances Dave wasn't willing to refuse.

John had already made a pretty good start on dinner. He finished getting it ready while Dave talked with him in the kitchen and Eve spent some time one on one with Sergei and Milla, who were going pretty good by that time. Dave had been through it and not long ago, so he knew what was involved.

The five of them had dinner and just hung out for a while talking afterward, too. Dave also spent some time playing with the kids and proved he could tell a story, too -- although nowhere as good as Shae, he knew.

Once the kids had been put to bed, John broke out a bottle of wine and the three unwound a bit. At one point over the course of the next couple hours, the subject came up of how John felt about being married to a transsexual -- it was a question he'd been asked before, and he wasn't shy about it. It turned out there was a little denial going on with him, too: he was a little unusual in that he'd been only one of a couple people -- the other being Cheryl -- who had known Eve at all well during high school, but only as Eve. He'd never met Denis as Denis, only when he was presenting as Eve, which was a fair statement up through the end of high school. So, even though he knew better -- he'd been through much the same thing with Cheryl, whose birth name was Paul -- Eve had always been a female to him, though one with a condition that precluded children. As Eve said, it didn't have to make sense, but it worked.

Dave explained that he understood, as something similar was going on with him: he really had no proof that Eve really had been Denis. Short of something like fingerprints, Eve could have been a genetic female who had just been well briefed on Denis. Dave and the Bradford '88s, except for Shae, would be unable to prove any different.

Together, Eve and John explained how things worked a little differently between Chad and Cheryl, though they worked just as well. Chad had never known Cheryl as Paul, but was fully aware of her being transsexual. But Chad, it turned out, was a little bisexual and had had liaisons both ways before he met her. While he was mostly heterosexual, Cheryl having once been male tickled his bisexual side just enough to keep things smooth. "Whatever works," Eve commented.

They wound things up early -- the McClellans had to get up fairly early in the morning to get the kids around. In the summers the kids were often left with Eve's parents, who lived in their summer house a few miles away, but they were now in Florida for the winter. Now, a nanny came in to watch the kids during the day so Eve and John could go to work.

They got up early, and Eve offered to make breakfast. It was a little on the light side, cereal and toast and juice, but Dave thought it could hold him for a while. On the way to their vehicles, all had made promises to see each other again soon.

All in all Dave felt much better about things as the result of his time in the hot tub with Eve. While he conceded that he didn't exactly have things all the way back together, they were coming along. He was still a little concerned about how fast things were moving with Shae, but at least he wasn't dissatisfied with the direction they were going and was looking forward to eventually getting a little more serious with her.

So, Dave was in a good mood as he headed westbound up the turnpike that Monday morning, and didn't feel as if he needed to spend the next ten hours agonizing over the things that had bothered him over the weekend. In fact, to a degree, the way Dave dealt with stress was to turn his back on it, and he'd had enough stress over the weekend to hold him for a while, so resolved to think about something else while driving home. Rob's suggestion to think about an alternative way to assess new manuscripts seemed like it had potential as a topic.

His comment to Rob on Thursday came back to him, about authors spending hundreds, even thousands of hours working on a manuscript, to only have it rejected out of hand with little real consideration, sometimes possibly because the reader was just in a bad mood or didn't like or know enough about this type of story. Granted, a lot of the crap that came through the slush pile was just that, slush -- but occasionally something good came through, and more often something just potentially good, but needed more work.

Like many editors, Dave had long harbored quiet fantasies of writing a book himself, but he'd never gotten around to giving it a try. If he were to write one, he was pretty sure he could get it published, if for no more reason than he had a major inside track. If it were anything but pure crap, Rob would probably publish it as a courtesy to him -- or some other publisher might pick it up for no more reason than the politics that often went on between publishers. The heck of it was it wouldn't be fair -- not fair to the hopeful authors who didn't have his inside track, not fair to the publisher that took it for a reason other than it being good, and worst of all, not fair to himself because he would have no real proof if it were good or bad. To be fair, he'd have to submit it under an assumed name and have someone else make the buy-or-bounce decision -- and it would not be hard to manage.

What if he were to write a fantasy book?

Face it; he knew his way around the genre as well as anyone, in fact, more than most new authors. At least as much as any editor, he knew what was good, and what was bad. He knew what worked and what didn't, the forms and givens, what needed to be explained to the reader and what the normal reader of fantasy would understand without question. The odds were good that if he were doing an adequate job of judging his own work, it would be better than all of the crap that came through the slush pile.

Maybe it was his own ego talking, but he thought if he were to write a fantasy book, he wouldn't write something conventional, but something that would push the limits of the genre, trying to plow some new ground while staying within the limitations -- something that could cross over into the general area of literature. After all, he had a master's in literature; he ought to be able to prove he knew something about it. He'd always shied away from writing something original in the past. Partly, it had been because he had enough going across his desk that he didn't need to add to it, partly because he didn't need the ego boost a book would give him, partly because he doubted he had the necessary imagination, as he was a grounded kind of person. And then with his salary and Julie's, they hadn't needed the money.

Hell, he didn't need the money now. Julie's money still seemed very unreal to him, even though he'd known about the brokerage account money for months. It was just there, something to remind him of her, something that needed to be administered. But realistically, it was a lot of money. There was no telling how much until Aaron Tietelbaum got done with looking in all the nooks and crannies then figured out how much would have to go to the Internal Revenue Service. Dave could be pretty certain what was left would be well over a million by the time everything was said and done, and most likely over two million. If that money were invested conservatively it could provide an ongoing return. How much?

For the sake of figuring, suppose he could get a five-percent interest rate on it. He had no idea of what bank interest rates on various investment plans were at the moment, but they might go that much or higher, and be insured to boot, so there would be little risk. He had little talent for doing math in his head, but it didn't take much talent for him to work out that five percent of a million was fifty thousand, which was a pretty nice sum. Hell, he could retire on that, and just forget about Dunlap and Fyre. Fifty thousand a year was really more than a little on the small side to live in New York, especially Manhattan, but it would be a darn good income for Bradford; he could live there comfortably on fifty grand a year. And, fifty grand was just about a minimum, worst-case figure -- it almost certainly would come to more than that.

The thought surprised him -- he had never quite thought about the money in that way before. Basically, he'd worked for Dunlap and Fyre and put up with all the hassles because he'd needed the money and on balance he enjoyed the work. Now, he could be pretty sure that, once Tietelbaum got done with his account, he wouldn't need the money from work if he were careful with Julie's money.

But what the hell would he do if he weren't working? Good question! The work was a centerpiece of his life; as much as anything else, it had kept him sane the last couple months -- being able to turn to it had taken his mind off of the pain of losing Julie. Things would have been a hell of a lot worse if all he'd had to do was to sit around and mope; he'd learned that in the first week in Shae's apartment. Whatever he did, he'd have to have something to do, something to keep him centered and focused and organized. He might be able to be a little more flexible about it, a little more free about taking off if he wanted to do something else.

So it raised the question: did he really want to go back to New York and work at Dunlap and Fyre like he had been doing a couple months ago? And especially, without Julie? If Julie had still been alive, he probably wouldn't have considered anything else -- but if he'd figured out anything this weekend, he had to admit Julie was gone -- and he didn't have to go back to the old way for the sake of her memory.

It all needed much more thinking about than just some idle musings on the Pennsylvania Turnpike -- he needed to run it by Eve at a minimum, and Shae, and maybe even Emily, just for an independent viewpoint. In any case, nothing could be done until Tietelbaum had worked out what he was dealing with in the first place -- thank God that Rob had gotten on his case about his finances!

But what would he do? The obvious answer was to not change things much and wait until something came along. Maybe he could approach Rob about still doing editing, but on a contract basis. The old office politics issues that had made him reluctant to work out of Bradford no longer seemed to apply, because he would no longer be scrambling to keep a career growing. Perhaps as an independent he could work for other publishers, or, even better, perhaps he could work for writers, especially ones trying to break into the market. He could afford to work cheap, maybe even on shares, for someone he thought had talent but needed a little honing.

Or, maybe he could write. After all, he'd have the time to concentrate on it, with no financial worries -- he could use his better times of the day, and not be forced to write late at night or on the weekends while working full time, like so many aspiring authors had to do. He could use his experience to do things right, and go beyond the normal, the expected, the formula, and maybe even set a new standard.

What to write about? There had been a number of times in the past he'd thought this idea or that idea could be developed into a good story, but he'd never gone past the thought.

It would be nice to honor Julie somehow, even though he didn't want to get within ten miles of the subject of the World Trade Center for good and personal reasons. He suspected September 11 was going to be a point of contact in plenty of books in the upcoming years, and almost by definition he wanted to separate himself from them. But what kind of fanaticism must it have taken for those Muslim fundamentalist bastards to do something like that? Muslim fundamentalist fanaticism had taken Julie from him, but what the hell did they plan on accomplishing other than tearing down a something that was more a symbol to them than it was to us, and killing a lot of unbelievers in the process? The obvious answer was that they wanted to jam their point of view down everyone's throats and keep jamming until they got what they wanted.

What the hell kind of society would develop if they were to succeed?

Not a pretty one, for damn sure. You'd have a very conservative religious dictatorship run by people who only looked to ancient writings for guidance, not to modern realities. Much like would happen if the conservative Christian evangelical fundamentalists were to get their way, too. There'd be a very closed society, very controlled, with religious police to make sure everyone stayed that way. Actually, not a hell of a lot unlike Saudi Arabia, but without the moderation introduced by money and international influences and oil. Left to themselves and without a great deal of money, the Saudis would be a very strict and conservative society, and what they had today might be pretty liberal ... from a modern viewpoint, it would be a pretty ugly society at best and more than likely an ugly dystopia.

OK, hold that idea, he thought. How in hell could a society like today's get to something like that? A number of worst-case outcomes, maybe a nuclear war to knock things back a few centuries? Then some kind of invasion, jihad, and holocaust? Given a century or three, a radical fundamentalism could easily morph into an entrenched orthodoxy.

He contemplated the thought for a moment. Dave wasn't at all thrilled about doing a post-apocalyptic story. There had been an awful lot of them done in the years since the fifties. Most fantasy was written in a more or less medieval setting, although the setting often was in a world different from earth. But not all -- one of the things that had attracted him to Castle Wyrthingham was the fact it was fantasy set in a steampunk gothic world -- an England in which the Regency lasted another ten years or so, where Victoria wasn't such a prude. A lot of the theme had to do with Celtic gods adapting to the Industrial Revolution world. So, setting a fantasy story in a post-apocalyptic world wasn't an impossibility, especially if you set it far enough in the future that the nuclear holocaust and the jihad holocaust that followed were but dim memories verging on legend. If the history of the time wasn't respected, or restricted by the religious zealot overlords, then, say, five hundred years would be plenty of time for even legends to fade.

Given the proposed post-apocalyptic Muslim jihad -- and let's say of North America -- what happened to the Christians? Dumb question; a holocaust so bloody it made Hitler in the 1940s seem like a playground squabble. Maybe a few Christians converted, and a smaller number yet tried to maintain an underground hunted down by the religious police and members brutally and publicly killed as examples. A little of Christianity might have fused into the life of the overlords, but probably damn little.

And before we get any farther, Dave thought, let's get rid of the terms 'Muslim' and 'Christian', as well as some of the terms that would identify with them as either. The damn fundamentalists of whatever branch get touchy if you diss their plans for world domination, no matter how odious and oppressive they are. I ought to be able to write it so anyone with half a brain will be able to see whatever words I choose are the metaphors for, anyway. There are plenty of ways to do it even if the words aren't the same.

That gives us a society, and not a pretty one: a despotic theocracy, very conservative, very static, where new or different ideas are abhorred because they don't fit someone's idea of what's in the holy book. Women are especially beaten down -- they're at best little better than slaves, kept mostly away from society in a virtual lockdown, maybe a harem, at that. They have no rights and nearly no privileges; on the odd occasions they're allowed in public they have to be "fully modest" which implies something like a burqa or worse. The temptation women put on men is the root of all evil in the world, just ask any fundamentalist Muslim imam today.