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anything I have felt before or since. It was not directly connected with
Kristine. But hearing of a car accident at Sunset Cliffs, days later, I
thought of her.
I had already ended her part in the novel. The protagonist was suffering
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intense grief over his loss. The book was far from finished, but "The Madonna
of Probability" was nearing completion. Adding the final touches one evening,
I decided to call Kristine and let her know it was done, and she could see it
if she wished. I did not phone immediately; the thought of calling bothered
me. I blamed my reticence on lack of courage. Perhaps I did not want to impose
on her any more. Still, something compelled me.
The next day, in my last class of the day, an English class, I again fell into
a strange mood and wrote a poem, part of which is now in
The Serpent Mage
. The poem strongly hinted of a loved woman's death. I
dreaded making the call. At home, late in the afternoon, I stood in a dark
hallway and dialed the number of Kristine's apartment.
A room-mate answered.
Hadn't I heard
? she asked. Kristine had left school about two months ago and returned to
Marin County. She had been killed there in an automobile accident. (Not in the
Sunset Cliffs accident.)
I ran outside and stood in an empty lot nearby, in shock. When I returned to
my room, I simply sat, stunned. For weeks I went through the motions of being
alive, but inside, I was shattered. I had faced the death of loved ones before
 grandmother, uncle, acquaintances. But none seemed quite so immediate, so
strange and final. And what haunted me  frightened me  was that I had seemed
to know what would happen to her from the very beginning, from the time I
first imagined her holding a symbol of death.
I went through various rituals, trying to escape this not wholly appropriate
grief. There had been little enough between us. She had been friendly and kind
and little more. And now I was going through the fire.
I was facing not just the ultimate end to all possibilities of love, but a
metaphysical puzzle straight out of
The Twilight Zone.
I had modeled a character in the novel after a living woman, and then had
removed her; and the living woman had died. I didn't take the more bizarre
aspects of this too seriously; that way lay true madness, and I have never
fancied madness. But it seemed obvious that I had sensed Kristine's
impermanence; in the plot of my life, at least, I had known she would be
removed.
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-...0Power%2002%20-%20The%20Serpent%
20Mage.html (206 of 208) [5/21/03 12:44:33 AM]
Bear, Greg - Songs of Earth and Power Vol. 2 - The Serpent Mage
In bed one night a few weeks after, I gathered all my mental forces and tried
to break through the barrier of death, to communicate with Kristine. I had
done this once, five years before, to communicate with a recently dead uncle:
nothing had happened then. But what I now experienced burned and horrified me;
I
imagined a kind of shell of Kristine, memories present but soul gone, having a
relation to the living woman like that of a flake of dead skin to live flesh.
She or it seemed to occupy a sphere of newly dead around the Earth, protecting
us from harsh outer realities much as dead skin protects the pink growing
flesh beneath. I doubt this was any genuine revelation, but it hurt me so much
that I recorded it in a diary, then ripped that page out and threw it away.
Here were truly things I did not want to know.
I worked on my novel in a kind of heat. I had to see how it all turned out.
The protagonist wandered through the last chapters, bereaved, experiencing
more and more revelations, until at the end, he was restored to a more solid
world, and regained Kristine.
With such wish-fulfillments, I began to purge myself. I finished the novel,
took out a student loan for one hundred and twenty-five dollars to have it
retyped, submitted it once  receiving a kind rejection slip from Betty
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Ballan-tine  and shelved it.
The work was neither complete nor mature. Its core was true, but its form was
awkward; the emotions and ideas were fine, perhaps more intense than anything
I would write later, but it was not publishable.
Too amorphous, too tied in with half-understood emotions, the book languished
for years. Occasionally I
would give thought to revising it, but I was working on other books and
stories that would eventually sell and be published.
Then, in 1979, the book reshaped itself in one evening of inspiration. In a
heat, I wrote the details down in a small blue notebook. The plot was
completely different, but much of the core remained. Arno Waltiri, Opus 45,
Kristine, the quotation from a nonexistent book by Charles Fort, and the
ensorceled Chinese were still there. My early protagonist  originally the son
of Arno Waltiri  had evolved into Michael
Perrin. Intricate plot and carefully worked out fantasy elements replaced much
of the amorphous surrealism.
Here at last was a book that could be written and sold. Still, I waited a few
years before I broached the idea to Terri Windling over lunch in a Chinese
restaurant in San Francisco. She asked to see the proposal.
Eventually, The Infinity Concerto became part of a package contract with a
very different novel called
Blood Music
. (They are still joint-accounted in the United States; [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]