He did not answer. There was no need. Colene herself had just presented the case for him to remain here with Maresy. Now he had a compelling extra reason to do it. She could not turn this down. The alternative was to remain here and let the others travel, and that would cost her everything she wanted from the Virtual Mode. It wasn’t that being here with Maresy would be bad, but that Darius had to return to his Mode, to be the Cyng of Hlahtar, so she would lose him.
She had a choice between her man and her horse. She knew what that meant. The greater good for the hive lay in accepting the horse’s offer. They would lose magic in other anchor Modes, but they weren’t planning to go to any except Darius’ Mode. So maybe it didn’t make a lot of difference.
Colene wept. But all her grief could not change the awful nature of the choice.
She did what she had to do. She finned her resolve and bid farewell to Seqiro. Then she turned to Darius. “Do it.” Darius carried her back onto the Virtual Mode, while Seqiro stood at the stall. Then, as the mind predator clamped down, Seqiro vacated his anchor. “But I’ll still visit you!” Colene cried as the predator was yanked away from her mind. “Your Mode will remain. It just won’t be an anchor Mode. We can cross it for ten feet! And maybe later you can latch on again, and make a new anchor, and we’ll all be together again!” She knew she was babbling, but she couldn’t help it. Yes.
Then his thought faded, for the realities were whirling. It would require a search to locate the Horse Mode, but she would make that search. She just couldn’t give Seqiro up forever.
The whirling stopped. They had a new anchor. Someone from another Mode had latched on in the moment the opportunity had come. There would be a new person, animal, or thing to get acquainted with. Someone who was desperate to travel the Virtual Mode.
The outline of a palatial chamber formed. Within it stood three human figures with the faces of cats. One was robustly masculine; one was lusciously feminine; the third was neuter.
“Oh, no!” Colene cried. For she recognized them. These were the three feline Nulls who had served Darius in the DoOon Mode: Tom, Pussy, and Cat. Now, obviously, they would be serving the evil Emperor Ddwng, who wanted to get Darius’ Chip so he could use it to take over all the alternate Modes. The three of them, cloned from a single zygote, were the new anchor figures.
Before, Colene had tricked the Emperor into vacating his anchor, by having Seqiro send him a forceful thought to that effect. But this time Seqiro was not here.
There was going to be hell to pay.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
NO, we surely have not seen the last of Seqiro. By the ineluctable logic of this series, one major character is lost at the end of each novel, and a new anchor is introduced. The choices are becoming more difficult. But Colene simply will not accept the loss of Seqiro for long. She’s a pretty feisty girl who doesn’t necessarily settle for what is destined. We shall see.
As I completed this novel, writing the chapter titled “Horse,” I suffered something devastatingly relevant. My daughter’s horse Sky Blue died. Penny bought her in the spring of 1978, a registered hackney mare, a former harness racer, then twenty years old. She was black, with two low white socks on her hind legs. She was a small horse, just fourteen hands high, but healthy. It was the happiest day of Penny’s childhood, and Blue was the ideal horse for her: well trained, obliging, and old enough to be philosophical about things. Blue’s former owner had been ten when she acquired the horse, and now at fifteen was passing Blue along to the next ten-year-old girl. As I liked to put it, Blue’s business was raising girls, teaching them what they needed to know in life. So Penny learned to ride, to care for a horse, and know the special type of companionship a good horse represents. We hoped Blue would live for at least five more years, but she lived for almost fourteen, being a scant thirty-four when she died on the third day of 1992.
Blue was Penny’s horse, but I was the one who fed her. Penny grew up and went to college and became an adult, but Blue remained with us, with several companion horses over the years: Misty, who died in eight years after foundering so badly she could not stand; Fantasy, who died in four months because of a heart condition; and Snowflake, the white pony who survived her. So it was that Blue had perhaps as much impact on my life as on Penny’s, and her loss grieves me deeply. She entered my fantasy fiction, in the form of the Unicorn Neysa in the Adept series, who looked exactly like her except with a horn, and also Night Mare Imbri of Xanth, who lacked the white socks. Thus many of my readers know Blue, indirectly. She was a wonderful horse, and we loved her, and she will always be in our thoughts.
There are some credits for contributions. As I have done before, I will simply list the contributors alphabetically by first name, without identifying their entries, preserving partial privacy.
Amy Tanner
Cricket Krishelle
Jessica Timins
Margaret McGinnis
And Colene’s poem was actually written by Kira Heston.
There was some feedback relating to the first volume in this series, Virtual Mode. One woman had lost an acquaintance by suicide, and was spinning into chaos herself when the autographed copy of the novel arrived, containing her contribution. She said it gave her a lift at a critical time. Another recognized herself in the Author’s Note, and wrote to tell me that she had survived her suicidal inclination and was doing much better. But one contributor criticized the novel as, in essence, sexist. Maybe so: a man wrote to say that Colene was an almost perfect description of his girlfriend. He was in prison for statutory rape. Several wrote to say that they resembled Colene, and that she spoke some of their thoughts. And a woman wrote, excited about the prospects for a new character mentioned at the end of the novel; her name is Nona Colby. Well, there should be a number of Nonas in the various similar Modes; she could be one.
My reference for the nature of the Cambrian explosion and some of the creatures in it is Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. Because the world described in the novel is parallel in time to our own, I did not render such creatures literally; they had half a billion years to evolve. Thus they moved onto land and grew considerably larger, as did the chordates of our own Mode. But they retain their fundamental differences from our familiar forms of life. Readers who wish to see the origin of some of the named creatures, such as Anomalocaris or Hallucigenia, should read this book. It does indeed present a persuasive revision of the nature of evolution. The notion that chance determined that our kind evolved, instead of something like the floaters, awes me. Yet it may be so. But one correction: it was later concluded that Hallucigenia had been viewed upside-down. Those were protective spikes, not legs. Too late for this novel, alas.
As those who have read the novels of this series know, there is generally something socially serious afoot when Colene returns to Earth. There will be some problem which cries out for redress and isn’t likely to get it without Colene’s help. Well, there was a case that occurred in real life that was about as outrageous. I will refer to the participants by their first names only, without reference to their city or state, so that only those already conversant with the case will be able to identify them. The names hardly matter, but the principle does.
As readers of my autobiography, Bio of an Ogre, know, I had trouble with schools from the outset. In my day there were no dyslexics or learning-disabled students, there were only stupid or lazy ones. So it took me three years to get through first grade, and longer to satisfy teachers that I wasn’t subnormal. I was later a teacher myself, though I regarded some of the required material as irrelevant, and later still a parent with a hypersensitive, dyslexic, learning-disabled child. I became militant when the teacher was yelling at my daughter Penny from the first day of first grade. To make a seventeen-year story short, Penny did make it through to her college degree, and is today a well-adjusted adult. I fear she would not have made it, had I not fought throughout to ensure fair treatment for her. I thought my quarrels with the school system were over.