But, in the end, it was none of these things, of course. It was only Hrothgar’s claustrophobic mead hall with the monster waiting in the darkness without. We had our Grendel, to be sure. We even had our Hrothgar if one squints a bit at Sad King Billy’s poor slouched profile. We lacked only our Geats; our great, broad-shouldered, small-brained Beowulf with his band of merry psychopaths. So, lacking a Hero; we settled into the role of victims and composed our sonnets and rehearsed our ballets and unrolled our scrolls, while all the while our thorn-and-steel Grendel served the night with fear and harvested thighbones and gristle.
And this was when I—a satyr then, formed in flesh as mirror to my soul—came as close to completing my Cantos, my life’s work, as I have come in five sad centuries of stubborn continuance.
(Fade to black)
It occurs to me that the Grendel tale is premature. The players have not been brought upon the stage. Dislinear plotting and noncontiguous prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum. Haven’t you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are—at this instant—poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago? At any rate, if this fucking story’s to be told, you should know who’s in it. So—as much as it pains me—I’ll back up to begin at the beginning.
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was programmed in classic binary. And the Word said, “Let there be life!” And so, somewhere in the TechnoCore vaults of my mother’s estate, frozen sperm from my long-dead daddy was defrosted, set in suspension, shaken like the vanilla malts of yore, loaded into something part squirt gun and part dildo, and—at the magic touch of a trigger—ejaculated into Mother at a time when the moon was full and the egg was ripe.
Mother didn’t have to be impregnated in this barbaric fashion, of course. She could have chosen ex utero fertilization, a male lover with a transplant of Daddy’s DNA, a clonal surrogate, a gene-spliced virgin birth, you name it … but, as she told me later, she opened her legs to tradition. My guess is that she preferred it that way.
Anyway, I was born.
I was born on Earth … Old Earth … and fuck you, Lamia, if you don’t believe it. We lived on Mother’s estate on an island not far from the North American Preserve.
Notes for sketch of home on Old Earth:
Fragile twilights fading from violet to fuchsia to purple above the crepe-paper silhouettes of trees beyond the southwest sweep of lawn. Skies as delicate as translucent china, unscarred by cloud or contrail. The presymphony hush of first light followed by the cymbal crash of sunrise. Oranges and russets igniting to gold, the long, cool descent to green: leaf shadow, shade, tendrils of cypress and weeping willow, the hushed green velvet of the glade.
Mother’s estate—our estate—a thousand acres centered in a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day. Royal oak. Giant elms. Cottonwood and cypress and redwood and bonsai. Banyan trees lowering new trunks like smooth-sided columns in a temple roofed by sky. Willows lining carefully laid canals and haphazard streams, their hanging branches singing ancient dirges to the wind.
Our house rises on a low hill where, in the winter, the browning curves of lawn look like the smooth flank of some female beast, all thigh muscle and meant for speed. The house shows its centuries of accretion: a jade tower on the east courtyard catching the first light of dawn, a series of gables on the south wing throwing triangles of shadow on the crystal conservatory at teatime, the balconies and maze of exterior stairways along the east porticoes playing Escher games with afternoon’s shadows.
It was after the Big Mistake but before everything grew uninhabitable. Mostly we occupied the estate during what we quaintly called “periods of remission”—stretches of ten to eighteen quiet months between planet-wide spasms as the Kiev Team’s goddamn little black hole digested bits of the Earth’s center and waited for its next feast. During the “Bad Times,” we vacationed at Uncle Kowa’s place out beyond the moon, on a terraformed asteroid brought there before the Ouster migration.
You might already be able to tell that I was born with a silver spoon up my ass. I offer no apologies. After three thousand years of dabbling with democracy, the remaining Old Earth families had come to the realization that the only way to avoid such riffraff was not to allow them to breed. Or, rather, to sponsor seedship fleets; spinship explorations, new farcaster migrations … all of the panicked urgency of the Hegira … as long as they bred out there and left Old Earth alone. The fact that the homeworld was a diseased old bitch, gone in the teeth, didn’t hurt the riffraff’s urge to pioneer. No fools they.
And like the Buddha, I was almost grown before I saw my first hint of poverty. I was sixteen standard years old, on my Wanderjahr, and backpacking through India when I saw a beggar. The Hindu Old Families kept them around for religious reasons, but all I knew at the time was that here was a man in rags, ribs showing, holding out a wicker basket with an ancient credit diskey in it, begging for a touch of my universal card. My friends thought it was hysterical. I threw up. It was in Benares.
My childhood was privileged but not obnoxiously so. I have pleasant memories of Grande Dame Sybil’s famous parties (she was a great-aunt on my mother’s side). I remember one three-day affair she threw in the Manhattan Archipelago, guests ferried in by dropship from Orbit City and from the European arcologies. I remember the Empire State Building rising from the water, its many lights reflecting on the lagoons and fern canals; the EMVs unloading passengers on the observation deck while cooking fires burned on the overgrown island mounds of lower buildings all around.
The North American Preserve was our private playground in those days. It was said that about eight thousand people still resided in that mysterious continent, but half of these were rangers. The rest included the renegade ARNists who plied their trade by resurrecting species of plants and animals long absent from their antediluvian North American haunts, the ecology engineers, licensed primitives such as the Ogalalla Sioux or the Hell’s Angel Guild, and the occasional tourist. I had a cousin who reportedly backpacked from one observation zone to the other in the Preserve, but he did so in the Midwest where the zones were relatively close together and where the dinosaur herds were much scarcer.
In the first century after the Big Mistake, Gaea was mortally injured but slow in the dying. The devastation was great during the Bad Times—and these came more often in precisely plotted spasms, shorter remissions, more terrible consequences after each attack—but the Earth abided and repaired itself as best it could.
The Preserve was, as I say, our playground but, in a real sense, so was all of the dying Earth. Mother let me have my own EMV when I was seven and there was no place on the globe farther than an hour’s flight from home. My best friend, Amalfi Schwartz, lived in the Mount Erebus Estates in what had once been the Antarctic Republic. We saw each other daily. The fact that Old Earth law forbade farcasters did not bother us in the least; lying on some hillside at night looking up through the ten thousand Orbiting Lights and the twenty thousand beacons of the Ring, at the two or three thousand visible stars, we felt no jealousy, no urge to join the Hegira that even then was spinning the farcaster silk of the Worldweb. We were happy.