Outcasts (14 page)

She felt marginally better. It had occurred to her that she
felt light-headed and removed and hallucinatory because of hunger, not because
of advancing pathological changes in her brain; that helped. It was another
matter of relying on feedback from a faulty instrument. The thought of food was
still nauseating. It would be harder to eat the longer she put it off, but,
then, perhaps it was too late to matter anymore.

The sitting-park restored her, as it was meant to; for her
it was the silence and isolation, the slight respite from cold and the clean
twisting lines of it, whatever reasons others had for responding. She would
have liked to stay.

She walked a long way toward the edge of the bazaar. Her
knees still hurt — it took her a few minutes to remember when she had
fallen, and why; it seemed a very long time before — and her legs began
to ache. Resting again, she sat on a wall at the edge of the bazaar, at the edge
of the mountaintop, looking down over a city of pinpoint lights (holes in the
ground to hell? but the lights were gold and silver, not crimson). The lights
led in lines down the flanks of the mountain, dendrites from the cell of the
city and its nucleus of landing field. She knew she could get out of Highport.
She believed she could run so far that they would not catch her until too late;
she hoped they would never find her, and she hoped her body would fail her
before her mind did, or that she would have courage and presence enough to kill
herself if it did not or if the pain grew great enough to break her. All she
really had to do was get to the bottom of the mountain, and past the foothills,
until she reached lush jungle and great heat and a climate like an incubator,
where life processes are faster and scavengers prowl, and the destruction of
decomposition is rapid and complete. The jungle would conspire with her to deny
the Institute what she considered most precious, knowledge. She slipped off the
wall and started down the hill. Before her the sky was changing from midnight
blue to gray and scarlet with the dawn.

~~~~~

Vonda N. McIntyre: The Real Story

You people attending Lunacon probably think you know a lot about Vonda N. McIntyre, right? That’s why you invited her to be Guest of Honor, right?

Well, you’re wrong. Maybe you know
some
things about her. Maybe
you know her books, for instance. Maybe you know her unassailable generosity
and strength of spirit. Maybe you even know her middle name. (I will not
reveal it here, but it distinguishes her from her mother.)

But do you know her lost novel
Droomslang
, her secret persona
Ygor, her clandestine taste for country music? Do you know that she used
to stable her horse where Microsoft sits right now? You don’t? Then you
do not know everything about Vonda N. McIntyre. Come closer, and I will
tell you more things of which others are unaware.

Very few people, for instance, know that Vonda keeps a large personal
menagerie of wild snakes, tame wolves, and cloned dinosaurs, plus a huge
mole named Philby that sleeps on the hassock in her office, and a wolverine
named Ursula, of which she is inordinately fond. In addition, Vonda has
created an urban-wildlife rescue area, with crocuses, on the parking strip
in front of her house. It attracts and nurtures native Seattle wildlife,
such as raccoons, possums, wombats, slugs, grunge bands, and bald eagles.

She also controls a vast woodland empire, where she’s building a stately
pleasure-dome out of recycled popsicle sticks. She personally oversaw the
planting of thousands of tiny trees on this preserve, which contains a
trout-stream with genuine trout in it. She feeds the trout home-made chocolate-chip
cookies, which they take from her hand, emitting chirps of pleasure. From
time to time, salmon wend their way upstream to spawn. it’s extremely bucolic
and picturesque, or will be when the trees get bigger.

You are all aware, I am sure, that Vonda is a superb cook, specializing
in certain Seattle delicacies: coffee, chocolate decadence with raspberry
sauce, and the occasional geoduck sushi for fiber. But not many of you
know that she prepares an excellent hot-and-sour soup. It’s true, and if
it were more widely known, she would undoubtedly have gained an unsought
three-star rating in the Guide Michelin, and the crocuses on her parking
strip would be overrun with BMWs. So we’ll let this be our little secret,
won’t we? And you might keep mum about the chocolate decadence, too, while
you’re at it — there’ll be all the more for those of us in the know.

This weekend you will witness Vonda’s ability to make an elegant personal
fashion statement: suede boots, silk shirts, the restrained use of gemlike
color. I will disclose here the darker side of her fashion sense: the stuffed
effigy of a beaver (Castor canadensis) named Roscoe that she dressed for
Westercon last summer. Roscoe, bedecked with velvet, satin, gold spraypaint,
brass chains, and iridescent glow-in-the-dark fishing lures, like some
sasquatchian Infant of Prague, may foreshadow an in-your- face, go-for-broke
rebellion on Vonda’s part against her accustomed wardrobe. Or he may not.

Many people writing about Vonda would mention how responsible she is,
how loyal to her friends, how helpful to those in need. Such talk makes
her seem much older than she is, and gives the impression that she’s part
sheepdog and part boy-scout, which she isn’t. But I would like to add here
that Vonda can be a very forgiving person. How do I know this? Well, one
lovely June evening, I lured her to a railway siding where the Survival
Research Laboratories seated her amongst tall strangers, then assaulted
her with noise and drenched her in crickets and rocket fuel. She forgave
me for that. She may even, some day, forgive me for this biography.

Eileen Gunn

(Lunacon Program Book)

The Exile Waiting

Dreamsnake

Superluminal

Barbary

The Moon and the Sun

The Starfarers Quartet

Starfarers

Transition

Metaphase

Nautilus

The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

Outcasts

Three Stories

Vonda N. McIntyre

Book View Café

10 April 2012

Copyright © 2012 by Vonda N. McIntyre

ISBN: 978-1-61138-164-1

Cover Photograph Copyright © 2009 Carolyn McIntyre

Cover design by Amy Sterling Casil

“Vonda N. McIntyre, The Real Story,” Copyright © 1994 by Eileen Gunn
Reprinted with the kind permission of the author

First publications:

Screwtop

Copyright © 1976 Vonda N. McIntyre

First Published:
The Crystal Ship,
ed. Marta Randall.

Steelcollar Worker

Copyright © 1992 Vonda N. McIntyre

First Published:
Analog Science Fact/SF
, November
1992

The Genius Freaks

Copyright © 1973 Vonda N. McIntyre

First published:
Orbit 12
, ed. Damon
Knight.

v20120328vnm

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