Chaos Mode

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.

Not quite. When the first novel of this series, Virtual Mode, was published in hard cover, a reader who was Penny’s age named Jessica bought it, read it, and liked it. Jessica’s seven-year-old daughter Samantha, also a fan of mine, saw the book, and asked to take it to school so she could read it during her free time. Now these Mode novels are adult, and I don’t recommend them for children. Had I been on the scene, I would have urged that she take a Xanth novel instead. But some children are more mature than others, and can handle adult material. Indeed, even Xanth may not be safe, as I had discovered two years before.

On that occasion, a Florida grade school student, Tommy, had taken a Xanth novel to school, because he was hyperactive and his counselor recommended that he take something interesting to read instead of running around. So he took a copy of Heaven Cent, a humorous fantasy about a nine-year-old boy, and was reading it in the cafeteria when a teacher approached, looked at the book, and took it away from him. The book was not returned. When Tommy’s mother protested, she was lectured; apparently the school administration felt that it owed no accounting to the child’s parent. Now I once taught school in Florida, and I know the general procedure: if a book is inappropriate, the teacher takes it from the student, but returns it at the end of the day with the admonition not to bring it to school again. Policies may vary from school to school, but this is really all that is required for a first offense. One might ask why the schools are not the first place where reading should be encouraged, and censorship discouraged. But if there is too much freedom, the kids will be bringing in whatever they believe will freak out the teachers, including wild pornography. So there do have to be reasonable limits. A Xanth novel is hardly a taboo-breaker, however, and many schools encourage the reading of Xanth novels because they do get students interested. Xanth has taught many folk to read. Also, this was not just any trashbin junk; this was a copy specially autographed to Tommy, of some personal value. When I learned of this, I wrote to the principal. “What is the difference between this and theft?” I inquired. But the principal fudged the issue, claiming that books weren’t allowed in the cafeteria. The counselor, whose advice Tommy had been following, pursued the case, challenging the teacher, in the presence of the principal, to establish why the book was forbidden. Well, it seemed there was a picture of a naked man in it. The counselor had a copy of the novel: Would the teacher show the bad picture? Of course the teacher could not. Could it have been the cover, which does show the back of a bare boy? No, it was an interior illustration—though there are no interior pictures in that novel. Still the book was not returned, and no apology was forthcoming. Probably the teacher, with the arrogance of a minion almost impervious to accounting, had simply thrown the copy away. Yet there was no recourse; I saw that the principal was covering for the teacher’s mistake, stonewalling it, and would fudge the truth as far as necessary to avoid admitting error. Florida education is not first-rate; I knew that from my own days as part of it. Many teachers are dedicated, but the bureaucracy too often weeds them out while protecting the inferior ones, because a dedicated teacher is apt to be the first to protest injustice. By the bureaucracy’s definition, that’s a troublemaker. I sent Tommy another autographed copy, with the note “Some battles need to be fought. ” Even when, as in this case, they are lost. Virtue is not necessarily rewarded, and truth is too often secondary to convenience.

So this time, with Virtual Mode, I would have recommended caution, because that is a novel of a different nature. It is, in its way, an expose of the reality of too many public schools, where drugs abound and girls get raped in stairwells while the administration covers up.

However, I was not there, and it is the parent’s prerogative to determine what type of reading is appropriate for the child. Jessica had read the novel, and knew her daughter, and judged that Samantha could handle it. Samantha was a bright girl, with advanced reading ability and maturity. If the school disagreed, there are procedures to clarify such things, even if they aren’t always honored. So Samantha took the book to school. And—how did you guess?—she got in trouble. The principal sent Samantha home three hours early, and suspended her for a week, because she had been caught reading “such immoral trash. ” Jessica went to see the principal, and—I see you’re ahead of me, here!—got lectured herself. In fact, the principal suggested that her daughter should not be allowed to read any more Piers Anthony books. Because, he said, they contained such things as rape, suicide, bodily functions, and sex. Perhaps it was incidental that this novel also poked fun at stuffy principals. A child, he explained, might be harmed by such material, because at that age they can not distinguish fantasy from reality.

I have to say that the man did have a case. Virtual Mode does contain such elements, and some children might indeed be harmed by such exposure. I would question whether children are not more likely to be harmed by the endless violence they watch on television, but that does not justify harming them in school. Yet the principal hardly buttressed his case by condemning all my work outright, attributing elements to it which are not found, for example, in my Xanth series. He should have informed himself, before making a statement which could be regarded as slanderous. Unfortunately, ignorance of this type abounds in the school system and in communities at large, with even classic works of literature getting banned for spurious reasons. The principal also erred when he attempted to preempt the parent’s authority, and to dictate what a child might read in her free time—and indeed, to punish the child for what was at worst an error in judgment by her mother. The moment any person outside the family or legal guardian attempts to ban certain books from being read within the family, that is censorship, and I believe unconstitutional. The principal had far overstepped his authority.

But the principal did not stop there. He filed a report with the local Social Services, charging Jessica with negligence for giving questionable reading material to a minor. Because Jessica was a single parent with little formal education, he questioned whether she was capable of raising a child with above normal intelligence. Never mind that she was obviously doing so, for Samantha was doing well in school. It was evident that the man had a private agenda, and was determined to punish mother and daughter yet more for the nominal crime of bringing Virtual Mode to school.

You might think that such a vendetta would be laughed out of existence, the moment the basis of it was discovered. Not so. An investigation was made. This led to court proceedings. In the preliminary hearing, the judge decided that there were sufficient grounds to remove both Samantha and her five-year-old brother Joshua from Jessica’s custody. They were placed in a foster home, and Jessica was forbidden to visit them. How could this happen? Well, Jessica had to work to support her family, so she had a full-time job. But she was also trying to improve herself, so she was taking classes three nights a week. She couldn’t afford a day-care center, so a neighbor took care of the children before and after school, until Jessica got home from work in the afternoon. She couldn’t afford a car, so time was also lost with the bus schedule. The Social Services folk made six surprise visits. Four times, Jessica wasn’t home, being at work or school. Once they came on Saturday, which was her cleaning day. So the beds were apart, the children’s room had toys scattered across it, the kitchen sink was piled with dishes, and the living room was turned upside down so the children could play and watch TV there while Jessica did the other rooms. Her clothes dryer wasn’t working, so she had strung a rope up in the bathroom and hung the wet things there. That was when what looked like southern dowagers, complete with white gloves, walked in unannounced. There was Jessica in this mess, wearing a T-shirt and cutoff shorts, and her children still in their pajamas. She was horribly embarrassed.

Now you might think that the Social Services folk would have some inkling what real life is like. That they would see that there was no neglect or abuse here, but simply a typical housecleaning in progress. I was once a social worker, and I visited homes to be sure that children were being properly cared for. I would have understood, as I think would any normal parent. If the visitors had found the mother drunk, and bruises on the children, they might have had a case. Instead Jessica was doing exactly what she should have been doing: catching up on everything that there hadn’t been time for during the hectic weekly schedule. But on the basis of such visits, and the fact that Jessica’s bookshelves were full of science fiction, fantasy, romance, and horror genre books, including some Piers Anthony novels, they concluded that the children should be removed and visitation rights denied to the mother.

Remember, all this started because a child brought Virtual Mode to school. Does this seem stranger than fiction to you too? Do you wonder at the evident priorities of our schools and social services? Or is this sort of thing already all too familiar in your own community?

Jessica borrowed money from friends so that she could hire an attorney. He was amazed. He went into action. He filed for another hearing, where he gave the judge Jessica’s work schedule, school schedule, and bus schedule. He brought in the baby-sitter, who was licensed as a day-care worker, and he documented everything, showing that in no way had Jessica been a neglectful parent. The neglect had been on the part of the Social Services investigators, who had not bothered to get the facts before destroying a family. The judge yielded somewhat. He granted Jessica visitation during the week, and let her children come home on weekends. This continued for six months. Samantha made it through okay, but Joshua couldn’t handle the disruption—remember, he was five years old, suddenly taken from his home and mother—and wouldn’t do any work at school. He was removed from kindergarten.

Meanwhile the battle continued. Jessica wrote letters to the newspaper, the school board, the television station, the city prosecutor, and even the mayor. Her attorney brought to court a book reviewer, a child psychologist, two analysts, the school director, a teacher from the school for gifted children, Jessica’s family, neighbors—everything.

Finally justice was served. Jessica got back custody. The principal who had started it all was removed from the school board and forced to retire. Jessica received formal apologies from the school board, Social Services, and the mayor.

Now Samantha is in a school for gifted children and loves it. Joshua is at a new school and is excelling. Both of them are running and laughing again. Jessica got her GED and a license for nursing, and is making more money than before. She is buying a house in the middle of an apple orchard. The family has a cat, a hamster, a goat, and three little pigs. Jessica now has more faith and confidence in herself. She fought through and won, and now truly appreciates what happiness is. “It really is true,” she says, “that you don’t realize exactly what you have, until something is taken away. ” (Later the cat got at the hamster. Sigh. )

So good triumphed over evil, this time. But isn’t it sad that Jessica ever had to go through this ordeal, and see her children suffer—because she let her daughter take the first Mode novel to school. Isn’t it a shame that it took six months before this obvious wrong was righted. Colene is a fictional character, based on a composite of real ones. Jessica is a real person. I believe Colene would like her. Colene did, after all, affect her life. I think we need more people like Jessica and Samantha, and fewer like that principal.

So, once again, the writing of a novel has brought me experience and emotion. This one more than most, because of the evidence that this series is affecting real people. I hope those of you who are not suicidal, and who are not in danger of losing your children for reading it, also find it meaningful.

As usual, my notice: those who wish to subscribe to my personal Newsletter, or to find a source for any of my in-print titles, can call my “troll-free” number 1-800-HI PIERS. (e-book note: this phone number is no longer valid. For similar information try the official web site at http://www.hipiers.com instead.)

Copyright © 1993 by Piers Anthony

Cover art by Romas Kukalis

ISBN: 0-441-00132-7