Paragaea (46 page)

Leena sat on the unforgiving seat of the hardwood bench, the corridor cold and empty. The door to the committee chamber was closed, but through the heavy wood, she could hear the muffled voices from beyond. She shifted uneasily. Her uniform, starched and pressed, seemed confining and restrictive, the jacket too tight across the belly, and the collar itched her neck.

This would be her tenth appearance before the committee, and her last. She would make one last attempt to convince the committee members, and then wash her hands of the whole matter.

When she had appeared in Moscow, weeks before, no one had believed for a second her account of another world, of ancient science and jaguar men and giant beasts. Most of the officers and agents who had interrogated her in the weeks that followed thought that she was mad, that she had crash-landed more than two years before, and then wandered in a haze of delirium in all the long months since, dreaming of her other world. Some few who'd spoken to her were convinced
that she was a traitor, having spent the time since her disappearance among the Americans, selling national secrets, and that she was now being sent back among them like a snake slithering back into a bird's nest to steal more eggs.

Whichever view, in the end, held sway, Leena knew she would never be hailed as a returning hero. The committee would likely send her to an asylum, or a prison, or, at best, to a posting well out of the public eye, in Siberia where there would be few to hear her mad tales, and fewer still to believe.

But Leena would give them one more chance. One last opportunity to hear her testimony and be convinced of its truth, and then she would put her plans into motion.

The door to the committee chamber opened, and a young, fresh-faced private peered out into the corridor. He smiled sheepishly and motioned to Leena. “Lejtenant Chirikova?”

Leena drew a heavy breath, and climbed to her feet. She paused for a moment and laid a hand on her swelling belly. It would be a few months still before she would begin to show, and by then she would either have been exonerated by the committee, or she would be somewhere far, far from here.

Leena crossed the corridor, and stepped into the committee chamber for the final time.

Leena stood on a London street, holding the little girl's hand and staring intently at the blue door, as snow fell in flurries all around them.

“Mat',” the little girl cried, catching a snowflake in her outstretched hand. “Snezhinka!”

“English, Sinovia,” Leena scolded, shaking her head. She looked down at the child who could never have a future in Russia, but might well here in England. “Remember, always English now.”

The little girl twisted her mouth into a moue of concentration for a moment, and then said, tentatively, “Snowflake, Mother?”

“Very good, Sinovia.” Leena nodded, and leaning down, picked the little girl up. Only two years old, she seemed to be getting heavier by the day. Leena shrugged her shoulders, repositioning the straps of the pack on her back, which held their every worldly possession. “Snowflake.”

The little girl held in her arms, Leena crossed the street, walked up
to the blue door and, pausing only a moment to collect her thoughts, rang the buzzer.

A young woman opened the door, her stomach slightly swollen in contrast with her slight frame.

“Is this the Bonaventure residence?” Leena asked, having almost lost all trace of her Russian accent.

“Yes,” the woman answered.

“Are you…are you a Bonaventure, then?”

“Not quite yet,” the woman said with a confused smile, cradling her belly, “but I will be by next month.” She turned, and called over her shoulder, “Stephen.”

An unassuming man with unkempt hair and glasses appeared at the woman's side. “Yes?”

“This woman is looking for a Bonaventure, darling.”

“Hello. I knew another Bonaventure, a relative of yours, I believe, somewhere far away.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, and when I located your branch of the family in London, I thought…I thought I might introduce myself. And I very much wanted my daughter Sinovia to meet you.”

“Sinovia, is it?” The man reached out and patted the little girl's cheek, awkwardly but with affection. “You know, I've got a nephew just about your age.”

The young woman beside him placed her hand over her stomach, and smiled at him lovingly. “And we've got a little one of our own on the way. Rodger, if it's a boy; Roxanne if it's a girl.”

“Well now,” the man said, looking from the woman to Leena and the little girl. “We can't very well leave you outside in the cold, can we?”

The man stepped to one side, and motioned to Leena eagerly.

“Come in, come in,” he said.

Leena passed through the doorway, out of the cold and into the warmth beyond.

“Where did you say you knew this other Bonaventure, then?” the man asked, closing the door behind them.

Leena smiled. She would find her way back to Paragaea and Hieronymus one day, but until then, at least Hieronymus's daughter would know her family, in some small fashion.

Readers of my previous novel,
Here
,
There & Everywhere
, may recall that I am the type of reader who, while I feel that stories should explain themselves, likewise feels cheated when “The End” are the last words in a book. I won't, for example, buy a DVD if the “Special Features” are nothing more than theatrical trailers. I like a little extra material to explore when I finish the story itself, a bit of behind-the-scenes business that I can chew over. It's one of the ways I learned to become a storyteller in the first place, by studying the skeleton beneath the skin, as it were.

With that in mind, I offer the following notes:

O
N THE
B
ONAVENTURE
F
AMILY

The dashing Hieronymus Bonaventure, former lieutenant in His Majesty's Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, is a member of a large
extended family of explorers and adventurers, the Bonaventure-Carmody clan, which also includes Roxanne Bonaventure (from
Here
,
There & Everwhere
) and Jon Bonaventure Carmody (from
Cybermancy Incorporated
). Hieronymus himself previously appeared in
Set the Seas on Fire
, a nautical adventure set in the South Pacific in the spring and summer of 1808, shortly before he fell through a traversable wormhole into Paragaea. The full text of this earlier appearance is now available under a Creative Commons license at
http://www.paragaea.com.

The Bonaventure-Carmody family and their associates play a central role in my work, and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Leena's daughter Sinovia, briefly glimpsed in the second epilogue, will be featured in a series of books for young readers entitled
Young Explorers
, for example, while Benu will return in
End of the Century
, in which we learn what befell him after he stepped through the gate in Hele.

O
N
A
KILINA
M
IKHAILOVNA
C
HIRIKOVA

In attempting to bring some verisimilitude to Leena's life as a cosmonaut in the Soviet era, I am deeply indebted to James Harford's
Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon
(John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) and William E. Burrows's
This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age
(Random House), but especially to Mark Wade for his superlative “Encyclopedia Astronautix” (
www.astronautix.com
), which is truly without equal. Anyone interested in astronautics owes it to themselves to visit Wade's site and marvel.

O
N THE
L
ANDSCAPE OF
P
ARAGAEA

As the dedication makes evident, this novel owes a clear debt to the science fantasy I grew up reading. There is in the landscape of Paragaea
a familial resemblance to the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs's “John Carter” novels, and to the Mongo of Alex Raymond's “Flash Gordon.” But as much as to either of those, a debt is owed to Sid and Marty Krofft's
Land of the Lost
television series, and to David Gerrold, who was responsible for everything clever and good about the show. Having watched the adventures of Rick, Will, and Holly Marshall as a kid, I was amazed to discover, watching the series on DVD as an adult, that it was actually better than I remembered. For the first season of the series, Gerrold was actually doing the nigh-impossible, and bringing real science fiction to Saturday morning children's television, and hiring real science fiction writers to do it (including Larry Niven, Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon, and Ben Bova). The sets were a bit shaky, the acting more than a little over-the-top, but the ideas were first-rate, and the seeds planted in my impressionable mind as I watched week after week, all those decades ago, have finally borne fruit, and I have David Gerrold to thank for it.

Thanks, David.

O
N
C
LEVERNESS AND A
L
ACK OF
H
UMILITY

The text of this novel abounds with references, allusions, and “Easter eggs,” which I've included primarily to amuse myself. But I'm forced to admit that some small part of me (okay, perhaps not so small) wishes nothing more than for someone to come along and point out precisely how clever I've been.

Most things in Paragaea are more than what they seem, sometimes being several things at once. Anyone interested in cataloguing them all would be advised to do so while the author is still living, and available to confirm that you've got them all. I'm more than happy to answer any and all questions. (I'll start you off with an easy one: the sculpture outside Benu's temple, over which Hieronymus and Balam disagree, is
a direct reference to the story from which the notion of Benu's phoenixlike resurrection is borrowed.)

Chris Roberson
Austin, TX

CHRIS ROBERSON
's short fiction can be found in the anthologies
Live without a Net
(Roc, 2003),
The Many Faces of Van Helsing
(Ace, 2004),
Tales of the Shadowmen
, Vols. 1 and 2 (Black Coat Press, 2005 and 2006),
FutureShocks
(Roc, 2006), and
Forbidden Planets
(Daw, 2006), and in the pages of
Asimov
'
s
,
Postscripts
, and
Subterranean Magazine.
His novels include
Here
,
There & Everywhere
(Pyr, 2005) and
The Voyage of Night Shining White
(PS Publishing, 2006), and he is the editor of the anthology
Adventure Vol. 1
(MonkeyBrain Books, November 2005). Roberson has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and twice for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form (winning in 2004 with his story “O One”).

Along with business partner and spouse Allison Baker, Roberson is the co-owner of MonkeyBrain Books, an independent publishing house specializing in genre fiction and nonfiction genre studies. On February 19, 2004, the couple became the proud parents of a daughter, Georgia Rose Roberson. The family resides in Austin, Texas.

Visit him on the Web at
www.chrisroberson.net.