Twenty years or more ago, I wrote a novel called The Fifth Sacred Thing. In that story, an ecotopian Northern California–Califia–struggles to resist an invasion by the brutal, militarist Stewards of the Southlands using nonviolence and magic.
This month, I’m officially releasing the sequel, City of Refuge. Writing it was a long process—and writing a sequel to a book decades old is probably not a great career move—but the themes and issues in Fifth seem more relevant today than ever, and the world and characters were calling. When Bantam—the original publishers for Fifth and its prequel, Walking to Mercury—declined the sequel, I mounted a Kickstarter campaign that ended up the second-highest funded fiction project ever on Kickstarter!
The Fifth Sacred Thing ends with the Resistance successful, but then what? How can the Califians heal and rebuild while the Southlands remain subjugated? What will prevent the ruthless Stewards of the Southlands from mounting a new assault? Should the Califians go down to the Southlands and liberate them? But how do you liberate people who have no concept of liberation? How do you build a new world when people are so deeply damaged by the old?
I write fiction for many reasons. Perhaps the most important is that I love to read fiction, to immerse myself in a story, in the lives of characters and the world of the author. I especially love visionary fiction, fantasy and sci-fi, when they are well done, because speculative fiction allows us to confront ideas and possibilities and explore them. Writing is like meta-immersion, the chance to sink into a world of one’s own creation for months or years at a time, while avoiding hospitalization and maintaining the comforting illusion that you are doing something socially useful.
But these days, most of the fiction, the movies and TV shows and other popular media that addresses the future paint a fairly dismal picture of our possibilities. For me it is also a writer’s responsibility to hold out some hope, to imagine not just how bad things might get, but how they might get better, or how people might cope with the apocalypse and still bring something beautiful out of it. So below are a few excerpts of the vision of possibilities from City of Refuge.
A broken-nosed beauty, that’s what we are, thought Madrone as she picked her way through the tangled maze of torn-up trees and chunks of paving left by the Stewards’ Army in their latest invasion.
Punched in the face, eyes blackened, lips split. But we’re tougher than we look. We simply spit out a couple of teeth, and go on.
All around her lay the evidence of destruction. And all around her, as she wove her way through the tangle of paths and torn-up gardens, teams were at work, clearing away the rubble, digging new beds, pruning damaged trees.
She stumbled on the deep track left by a bulldozer and came out onto a cleared space overlooking the grounds of the healing center. Before the invasion, the old brick building had been surrounded by lush gardens filled with herbs used to staunch wounds or treat illnesses, and flowers to refresh the spirit, for the medicine of the City integrated the ancient knowledge of root-women and cunning men into Western allopathy, along with acupuncture and Ayurveda and the physic of the East.
Now the plants were trampled, the ginkgo grove was a waste-ground, and the myrtles and chaste trees of the Women’s Grove overlooked a ruin of torn-up leaves and shattered stalks.
The Stewards’ Army had taken a special delight in destroying gardens and uprooting sacred groves, as if beauty and abundance offended them.
We chose not to fight with bullets, but to make beauty itself our prime weapon, Madrone thought. Offering it to the invaders, beckoning … Join us, become us, taste our fruits. Until, in the end, the soldiers of the Southlands fell into our embrace, and were undone.
No wonder they went after fruit trees and flower beds! They recognized our true arsenal.
* * *
Madrone walked home in the fading summer light, threading her way through the ruins of the Math Park. There, in happier days, children had swung on pendulums or climbed up a helical ladder into the eye of the Fibonacci spiral slide. An enormous Aeolian harp had made music from the wind. In the center had stood a giant chessboard, with pawns and knights a child could ride that moved forward, sideways, diagonally. On lazy summer nights, in times of peace, teams would compete in chess tournaments while supporters grilled corn and baked potatoes in geometric fire pits.
Now it was all a ruin of smashed parts and torn up broccolis and sunflower seedheads. She perched, for a moment, on the remains of a sculpted earthen bench, then realized that was a mistake. Weariness washed over her, and it would take an effort of will to get up again. She was so tired!
She’d been in and out of the bee mind since before dawn, using the powers she’d gained from the Bee Priestesses of the Southlands. All through a long night shift and an endless day, she’d tasted the sweat of her sick patients and let her body brew up just the homoeopathic drop of honey that could cure. Magic. Or some science so advanced that only her intuition could follow it.
It was a gift, the healing gift that had made their victory possible. For the chemists could analyze her potions and reproduce them, and that was how the Cityfolk had been able to defeat the Stewards’ engineered epidemics. And how they’d weaned deserters away from the immunoboosters that had kept them enslaved to the army, and freed them to take up the place at the table they were offered. It was the magic that had allowed Maya’s vision and Lily’s strategy to work.
And now it was the magic that healed the wounds and the residue of diseases. But the trance took energy and concentration. Energy to slide in, and energy to pull herself back out, to shore up the walls that kept her human self distinct from the bee mind. She was tired now, and the walls were slipping.
A bee hummed, and a river of scent flowed over her: lavender, concrete dust, sunflowers, metal, human sweat. Two teenage girls bore away the severed horse-head from one of the huge pawns. A group of younger children were sweeping up the shards of the blown-glass beads that had been threaded on the poles of the life-size abacus. A boy gathered up the mess of springs and gears to be recycled.
She shook herself, and with an effort of will stood back up. Just take one step, then another, she told herself. Down the path through the replanted gardens—waves of lavender, whiffs of rose. Hungry! Dive in and let velvet flower petals enfold you in fragrance and soft touch. Hear the song of the bees, the song of well-being, that low, harmonic tone that hummed, All is well, all is blossom, all is golden pollen, sweet honey, and the Queen content upon the brood.
“Look out!” A young boy on a skateboard careened within a few inches of her nose. She jumped back. In her reverie, she had wandered onto the skateboard and bike path. A racing bike zoomed by. She shook her head and jumped over a patch of sage back onto the walking path. The cyclist left a trail in his wake, as if a hundred bicycles dopplered in and out of her range of vision. She was going to have to get a grip on herself.
* * *
Writing fiction is a bit like being in an extended trance, or a semi-controlled hallucinatory state, and it gets really interesting when your characters enter into trances or visionary states. In order to write about them, you have to experience them yourself, and in order to experience them—with enough of an internal witness to remember and describe them—you can’t (or at least, I can’t) just ingest something, I have to self-generate the endorphins or the entheogenic hormones or the connection to spirit allies or whatever it is that produces them.
But to work as part of a story, a trance can’t just be tripping. It needs to have some meaning for the character’s development, some way it moves the story forward. So below is an excerpt from the moment when Cress—the angry, bitter commander of one leg of the Army of Liberation—is introduced by the tecchies to the heart of their crystalline computer networks.
* * *
They lay down with their heads in a circle, their bodies radiating out like a five-pointed star, and began breathing in a slow, unified rhythm to bring themselves into trance. Cress synchronized his breathing with theirs, and forced himself to relax.
The lights dimmed and the dome above took on a pearly glow. Beams of light appeared, streaming out in all directions, in pure optic colors—red, yellow, violet. He was inside a sphere of light with shafts extending out like sea urchin spines. Then they began to fold back upon one another in a jumble like a cosmic game of pick-up sticks, a three-dimensional maze, a rat’s nest of rays.
He saw five speeding globes of light that carried him in their wake. They were confident, familiar with this strange world. He forced his body to breathe, to not panic as they towed him along at unimaginable speeds. Light speed…
They were racing along lines of force, tracking their way through a labyrinth of pure colors, trails of reds and blues and purples that were brilliant and clear, the essence of light…at last they halted in the center of a glowing chamber where questing fingers of light played upon the walls like the beams of a searchlight.
… Dimly he could remember one of his teachers warning them about techie-tripping, a fad among the teens when they had first begun to explore the use of intelligent crystal technology. You need training and preparation, Ms.Winslow had warned. Otherwise, it’s easy to get so distracted your body literally forgetsto breathe.
The beams radiated out from a glowing, pulsing sphere. Cress could hear it, like the harmonics of a crystal singing bowl, pulsing in rhythms that began to form music.
They journeyed toward it, and the tone divided into strands of sound, notes weaving around one another and merging into chords. The sphere was singing to him.
Music. The music of the spheres, as the ancients called it.
The song was itself made of light, multiple filaments woven and knotted with incredible complexity. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could ever grasp the intricacies of that tangle, yet the techies began searching rapidly, trying and discarding paths with amazing rapidity…
…And then they were facing a hard-edged, glowing crystal. It beamed out a brilliant white light that broke into rainbows against the prisms of the crystals that surrounded them. Cress and techies were six globes of light in a chamber studded with crystals, like the heart of a geode. Their reflections in the facets of the crystal sent rays bouncing and zinging around them, giving off pure tones like a celestial carillon.
…Suddenly he felt himself on display. The other lights dimmed around him and he could see rays spreading out from his own center, some of beautiful, bright colors, others the clotted dull red of blood or pain. Well, that’s who I am, he thought, a little ashamed. I didn’t choose that pain—it chose me.
He was a chord, a song, the deep tones of his grief giving weight to the blue rippling notes of flowing water.
He had wanted to be a musician once… But music was a luxury, Cress had believed. Water was a necessity.
Was that really it? a little voice whispered. Or were you afraid, afraid to be rejected, afraid of having to display your talent and falling short?
Fuck it! … His anger, his resentment, and yes, he admitted, his jealousy wove around him like dissonant chords, shrill and grating, so different from the sad but beautiful tones of his grief for Valeria and the child, his older grief for his mother and sister. This was like a needle scratch on an old-fashioned record, setting his teeth on edge. He wanted it to stop.
Then why do you keep digging it in deeper and deeper? Why do you worry it over and over, like a sore tooth?
Was that the voice of the crystal, or some voice of his own? Some half-remembered admonition of his mother’s? Was he getting lessons in forgiveness from a fucking machine?
But he could let it go, he realized.
He had turned his life to the service of something far more primal and vital than music, and he …could bring dead land to life.
And with that thought, the screech died away and instead he heard the roar of a river in flood, the liquid notes of an ocean-bound, rushing stream, the quiet chant of still pools sinking into parched land…
A wave of light broke over him. He was washed clean, absolved, forgiven. The airrang with song like an angel chorus rejoicing.
* * *
Ultimately, for me writing is a path of healing. So let me close with one of the passages from the book that speaks of healing and hope….
Bird dreamed of a fortress. Impregnable, formed of cold blocks of gray stone, it towered above him. A bugle blew. The gates opened, and legions of soldiers poured out. Masked and helmeted, armed and shielded, they marched in lockstep, left, right, left, an invincible force.
“But how do we fight this?” Bird asked. “How do we bring it down?”
He wasn’t sure who or what he was asking, but he heard a voice, low and toneless.
The fortress falls when the ground beneath it shifts.
A rumble…the earth shivered and trembled under his feet. He stepped closer to the fortress walls. A shaft of light came down out of the lowering clouds, and played over the surface of the stones. It formed a rippling pattern, like the broken webs of light playing through water. But the light, he realized suddenly, was shining through the stones. The walls that looked so solid were riddled with cracks. They were brittle, and ready to fall.
And now, up through the cracks, vines snaked, and out of the stones herbs and grasses sprouted. The walls began to crumble, but the roots and the twining stems held the structure together as mortar turned to dust. Trees took root in the rubble and arched overhead, their branches heavy with fruit.
Where the fortress had stood now was a leafy hall, open, with room for the multitudes.
