The Ballad of Beta-2 itself was interrupted when I managed to get back my wind on the trilogy’s recalcitrant book two. After the third volume appeared, I finished Beta-2. (Yes, I managed to complete the trio; after volume two, work on the third was as surprisingly easy as, for the second book, it had been unexpectedly hard. That meant — to me — it was time to go on to projects which would be harder.) Beta-2 appeared as the shorter half of another Ace Double at the start of 1965 and then in an Ace volume containing The Ballad of Beta-2 and another of my short science-fiction novels, Empire Star. In 1982 Beta-2 was again released by Ace, this time in a stand-alone paperback that remained in print till 1987. Altogether the book had a run of twenty-two years in print, as did The Jewels of Aptor.
Although They Fly at Çiron was, in fact, the third of the three here to be published (which is how it earns its “C”), while I think of it as my second novel, actually it was my nineteenth published. The reason I published it at all is because in 1991, in Amherst, Massachusetts, I took it out and reworked it end to end.
In 1993 They Fly at Çiron had two separate hardcover printings, a trade hardcover and a special edition, both from Ron Drummond’s incomparable small press, Incunabula. Two years later, a hardcover and a mass-market paperback followed from Tor Books.
The above is all to say, whether the effort was wasted, invisible, or has somehow left its signs either in pleasing or in awkward ways, by the time these three were actual books, I’d worked on them as hard as I could — as did the publishers to see that they were successful in the marketplace — and I hope it says it in a way that conveys three further facts (the second of which I’ll return to in my “Afterword”):
First, with each book, moments arrived in the creation process when the text felt as if it required more work than I could possibly do. I gave up. I despaired. Then I came back and tried to do it anyway. In short, it was a process like any other human task. What made it different, however, was that it was primarily internaclass="underline" the “shape” of its internality made it wholly of itself and only indirectly and incompletely communicable in any rigorous way.
Second, over a very, very long time — tens of thousands to multiple millions and even billions of years, rather than over decades or centuries — a congruence arises between creatures and the conditions that are the landscapes in which they and we dwell.{2} Along with that congruence arises the illusion of a guiding intelligence. (There may be a truth behind the illusion. There may not be. But that is metaphysics, however, and not our concern here. The similarly structured illusion of direct animal and human communication through the senses, by the same process imposes the effect/illusion of a metaphysics we arrogantly presume must exist behind our necessarily mediated perceptions to form a reality resonant with our aesthetic wonders and distress, our appetitive pleasures and pain, our political urgencies, disasters, and satisfactions, and their largely unseen structuring forces: another illusion, another effect. The same indirect process that feels so direct to us (and probably to all the animals who utilize it) is what allows wolves to bay out to warn their pack of danger or approaching prey — and humans to tell stories, gossip, and write novels, as well as create cultures: the cultures we form are the only realities we have, however, or can have any access to, and our ignorance of which, when we are aware of it, all too infrequently we take as a mandate for both honesty and humility (the engine of ethics at its best), even as these realities of which we are a part create the curiosities, the yearnings, the passions to know so often perceived to be that arrogance itself. That these multiple realities are parsimoniously plural, however (without having been directly caused by evolution; only the ability to construct them and respond to them is evolutionary, not what is constructed), is the first, but by no means the strongest, evidence for their complex relations,{3} however functional or problematic their multiplicity.
Third, the work of art — a sculpture we carve or a novel we write — can be and can exhibit a complex structure that appears to mimic some of the world (some of one reality or another; or even some of one that does not exist) because it evolves from the world; it mimics it in much the way certain insects camouflage themselves as the bark or the leaves of the trees they sometimes rest on, in the same way that intelligence can sometimes mimic something greater than itself, both spatially and temporally, even while simpler in its details and less protracted in operation; thus we can camouflage what we have to say as a series of happenings from life. And sometimes something that is not mind but that here and there entails one or millions of minds, at different levels and at different tasks — mind that is as likely to be on the way out (like gigantism in dinosaurs) as it is to be developing into something more useful, the results of which we will not live to see because it (they) will not manifest in any way we might notice or even it itself might notice or comprehend — if ever — for another handful of millions of years or more, is only another wrinkle in the bark or the leaf — another fold in the monad, as Leibniz would have it.
The possibility that from time to time such aesthetic work as I have so inadequately described can create anything of interest is another effect: direct causality between work and result is as much an effect here as is any other sort of communication. But because that interest is communicated and therefore indirect, incomplete, constituted of its own inaccuracy and slippage, already there in whatever education from which we can construct our experience of utterances (including what can be spoken about), or of texts (including what can be written about; and they are not necessarily the same). From time to time, locally or briefly, however, something of interest occurs. We suspect it does mostly because, however briefly and locally, we are interested.
The Jewels of Aptor
Afterwards, she was taken down to the sea.
She didn’t feel too well, so she sat on a rock and scrunched her toes in the wet sand. She looked across the water, hunched her shoulders a little. “I think it was pretty awful. I think it was terrible. Why did you show it to me? He was only a boy. What reason could they possibly have had for doing that to him?”