Preternatural Too: Gyre

"...intensely. But Jeanne fits my requirements to a T. We're not even having sex yet, but she's exactly what I need. I can't explain it any better than that."

Last week you said I was exactly what you needed! Karen wanted to scream. Instead she sat there clutching the phone, more at a loss for words, professional wordsmith, than he was.

"I really have to go," Raymond was saying. "I've got a meeting in ten minutes. If you had e-mail..."

An old argument; she'd only recently acquired her very first - second-hand - computer. As if he'd have anything more honest to say on e-mail. "Go if you have to go," she said, and sat there for the longest time, the receiver resting against the bony place between her shallow breasts, dead air against her heart.

#

Karen's mind was filled with voices, but not the ones she wanted.

"...and your mother and I don't want you writing one of those Mommie Dearest books," her father said. Another county heard from. She ought to rip the phone out of the wall.

She knew what he meant, though as usual Mr. Accuracy had it backwards. Strident and melodramatic she might be, but Gloria Rohmer bore no other resemblance to Joan Crawford. What Dick Rohmer meant was that he and his wife had lived in fear for more than twenty years that their daughter, always a great disappointment to them, would write a novel out of her bizarre childhood. But Karen prided herself on her credibility. No one would believe her mother even if she came from another planet.

"Right, guys?"

#

Silence.

"Hey, guise? C'mon, talk to me."

That had always been sufficient to summon them before, the voices that lived inside her head and gave her the words to put on the page and earn a livelihood. Sometimes they would come to her unbidden - in the shower, in the wee hours of the morning, in the middle of a conversation with a here-and-now, flesh-and-blood person which made her murmur "Excuse me a minute!" and grab a pen and scribble on something.

"Eccentric," those who loved her said. "A writer."

"Rude," the rest said or, like her parents, said nothing at all, exerting all their energies to Not Notice.

But the voices had gone away of late, had stampeded like cartoon characters to the other side of the plane to gawk at the Grand Canyon until the pilot requested they return to their seats. Karen hadn't really minded; she'd always known there were many voices, and only some of them were S.oteri.

(Again, for those of you who've just joined us, the jele-pathic tellyfish are now officially known as S.oteri, as in esoteric, which is a very nice word we'd recommend for your personal dictionary. Oh, and as for that bit of wordplay - jelepathic tellyfish - sigh! I'm afraid it's one of their endearing young charms that you'll just have to get used to if you're going to stay with this narrative much longer. Sorry!)

In other words, Karen was confident she could come up with an idea or six for new novels even if the S.oteri were off chatting with someone else, or just ignoring her because they could. That was why she'd flown all those other outlines out there - the one for the thriller about neo-Nazis and stolen art, the one about an alien scientist using role-playing games to heal child abuse victims (she'd loved the editorial response to that one: "In our experience, child abuse isn't 'hot.'" Uh-huh.).

No response on any frequency.

So when Tony started using dirty words like "sequel," Karen found herself listening.

But where do you go from All There Are? She and Max and Larry and Tessa and the S.oteri had saved the universe last time, or at least a little corner of it. How was she supposed to top that?

#

"Maybe a few thousand years after our little movie has been bounced off the cable satellites and forgotten," Max had been in an expansive mood that last day, philosophical. "And the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, including telepathic jellyfish, is as acceptable to the layman as, say, quarks, we'll have the technologyogy to go pay the S.oteri a visit. Maybe we'll find ways to join with them physically as well as mentally, to form a hybrid third species. Maybe you need to write a sequel, Karen."