Preternatural Too: Gyre

CHAPTER ONE

Karen's mind was filled with voices lately. She wasn't quite sure what to do about them.

Max Neimark had made the most sensible suggestion the minute the film wrapped. Max Neimark the anomalous leading man, who'd parlayed a fortuitous bit of casting as a three-eyed alien on a Sixties TV space opera into a career as a respected actor/director/screen writer/producer, had sat across the table in the studio commissary that phantasmagorical afternoon, raised an eyebrow at her and said in that wonderfully resonant voice of his:

"Maybe you need to write a sequel, Karen," and Karen had laughed and answered:

"Tell it to my editor!" at the same time thinking: Oh, sure! He thinks it's really that easy. But Max had been so pleased with himself that afternoon, and the whole experience of having a movie made out of one of her usually invisible little novels had been so magical she hadn't wanted to disillusion him, or herself for that matter. She knew the moment was illusory, and never to be repeated.

All of them, the three Hollywood types - Max and Larry Koster the Superhero and Tessa McGill the self-made guru - had gone on about their ever so interesting lives once the film was over, wishing Karen well but not giving her a second thought. She'd expected nothing more. Larry had his stud farm and his image to worry about; Tessa, in between concert tours, was off on a vision quest in Tibet, and Max was already in production on his next film by the time Karen's plane touched down in Newark out of LAX. It was the way things worked, and that was fine. Karen wasn't part of anyone's posse; she was a working writer. It was time she got started on the next book.

However, no one seemed interested, and that was getting to be a problem.

Karen Rohmer Guerreri, forty-something housewife, single mother of a daughter and a son in their twenties, novelist. Not a very exciting protagonist for anybody's fiction, except that she heard voices. That, ewe sea, was how it all began.

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Voices? Did you say "voices," Kemosabe? Hey, we'll give you voices; how many would you like? As many as All There Are?

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To recap Her Back Pages (for those of you who've just joined us), once upon a time Karen wrote a rather odd little novel called Preternatural, about a species of intergalactic telepathic jellyfish who had a somewhat unusual way of making first contact with humans. (That's they making all that racket in the background. Awl rite, guise, that's enough now; simmer down!)

In one reality Karen's convoluted little fiction saved a planet and, on the assumption that there was no such thing as a minor motion picture, became a major motion picture, yanking her out of debt for the first time in years, if not quite making her rich and famous.