THAT DAY

I'm reading the book reviews in Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great. First I note a few I'd like to read, but after twenty reviews, I start to notice broad patterns. Walton reads with a writer's eye; she sees (and admires) structural things I don't.

She also tolerates (admires?) violence and ugliness I can't. I'm not sure that's a strength; she likes a lot of Gripping Dystopias I've tried and found dreary. She seems to buy the "veneer" theory of human nature--decency is recent, a mere skin over brutality. It's a common belief, but in her study A Paradise Built In Hell Rebecca Solnit debunks it in detail. In disasters, people self-organize and cooperate, quickly and efficiently. Only when the rules of business-as-usual resume--bosses and profits--do people start misbehaving again! Human nature, as we know and decry it, is a reaction to exploitation.

So a lot of Walton's reviews about "great" books leave me cold. More militarism, patriarchy, empire? Who cares how well-painted it is, if its view of human nature is false and it imagines nothing better than we have?

What I like (to read, and to write) Walton would probably dislike--or just dismiss as immature, wishful thinking. Unicorns in love, with pink wings. But then utopians often get mocked for building paradise out of chopsticks and duct tape. As if our present dystopia isn't equally flimsy!

I write this while sick again--fever, sweating, joint aches, shakes, racing heart. What has western medicine prescribed? Migraine pills! Which don't work. But migraines are common, so they'll try them on a headache. What WORKS is azithromycin, implying a bacterial infection, but Kaiser won't prescribe an antibiotic without a firm diagnosis. Which they aren't looking for. Surely it must be something common they've overlooked...

THAT NIGHT

I'm a hisa. We look a bit like your Terran kangaroos, though we run, not hop. Upright like you, but forward-leaning, balanced by a long tail (prehensile at the tip). Long face, mobile ears. Brown coat on my back, cream countershading.

We lack your technology; we've never flown, let alone traveled space. To us it's heaven.

I've met a fair number of Terrans. Your people built an orbital station to trade with us. And our atmosphere's so dense that Terrans can breathe our stratosphere, so you've set up small trade stations on our highest mountaintops too; well above our comfort zone, so none of us minded.

I'm a well-known private detective--the nearest local equivalent of your Sherlock Holmes. Respected even by Terrans. Recently the manager of a Terran trade station hired me for a difficult case, waiving the usual tech-quarantine--the Prime Directive about altering native cultures. I've done local business with Terrans, but this'll be my first trip outside the hisa zone.

See, the crime-scene is a station--a small town, really--atop a high shield volcano much like Mount Olympus on your Mars. The crime was an elaborate break-in that clearly took a team. It's a mystery how they got in without cameras spotting them. I need to examine that perimeter and its tracks closely, on foot. How? Much debate and fuss... how to get me up there to investigate? Rig an oxygen mask fitting my long hisa head? Or can I drive a pressurized rover? Or run a robot explorer from inside the station? (I veto this last. Need to be there, touch it, taste the dirt.) All mean exposing me to offworld tech.

I don't recall whodunit. Or howtheydunit. What I do recall comes after I solve the case. (Of course I solve it! I told you: I'm the hisa Holmes.) But later...

A stubborn streak makes me go home my own people's way, not flying in the daily shuttle: I need to connect with the land and make my journey back down Olympus real, by walking all the way home. I flew up, reluctantly, because time was of the essence; but a technomagical flight BOTH ways would leave my memories ungrounded. Sacrilegious to a hisa--and just plain disorienting.

So I hike down the shield of Olympus--and that's an epic trek! Hundreds of kilometers, a week's walk even at our leggy people's fast pace. I do use an adapted breathing-mask and bundle up in furs, UV goggles and a ridiculous fuzzy hat. Humiliating and uncomfortable--our people hate clothes confining our own fur. Itchy.

But I have to. I need to walk. I can't hitch rides, not even with security guards in ground vehicles when they drop off my oxygen refills and bring me mail... let alone ride in their shiny, easy shuttles overhead.

An endless trek, risking high-altitude radiation, oxygen shortage, sunburned ears, embolism, frostbite, sore paws (dark basalt in that high-altitude sun gets hot)...

But I need to. To recover from that disconnected flight. To know where I am. And who I am.

Do you?

NEXT MORNING

• Hisa among humans: Jo Walton critiqued CJ Cherryh's Downbelow Station for her portrait of the hisa, "her least interesting aliens, cliched Noble Savages". Funny, what bored me were the humans in the book: Ignoble Assholes. The hisa made more sense. Unsurprising, since I am one, basically. And my dreams confirm it by making me a hisa--among humans. Or, as Walton put it recently: Among Others.
• Furry Holmes: I just read Eleanor Arnason's story "Holmes Sherlock". A scholarly wharhath, a catlike alien, reads Conan Doyle, and successfully applies Holmesian logic to a local mystery, which turns out to hinge on a scandalous secret: closet heterosexuals! (When you've eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how preposterous, must be true.)
• Dense air, station on stratospheric peak, tech differences: an old Poul Anderson book--I forget the title--had a big world with 6-10 atmospheres at sea level; humans built a trade station on a peak where the pressure's Earthlike (and locals gasp). A local warrior insists she must be part of a space battle to represent her people; but can only witness helplessly. Not that the human starship crews are in control either--that's Anderson's point.
• My stubborn, slow trek down:
  1. My dream agrees with Australian Aboriginal tradition: after a fast high-tech trip, kick back till your soul catches up! Jetlag's obvious; subtler, but equally real, is carlag.
  2. I'm stubbornly trying to get help from an HMO built to manage common illnesses, not diagnose rare ones. That frustration's spread--makes me feel like I'm stuck in EVERY area of my life right now--love, creativity. While others zoom by... swift and disconnected.
• Low-tech, primitive, animal: next to Jo Walton's speed and productivity, I do feel slow. But I'm a primitive. I have to stay grounded.
• ACTION: keep taking my primitive herbs. They're slow, but slow beats malpractice--as dispensed by high-tech fools in a hurry.

TEN MONTHS LATER

Kaiser kept pushing migraine pills, though they didn't work. I got tired of not being believed, and dropped Kaiser. It took my new doctor three months, but after reviewing my scattered medical records and actually LISTENING to my description of (quite peculiar) symptoms, concluded I did have some infection, as I'd felt all along. I'm now waiting to see this health plan's only (part-time) infectious disease specialist. Ten-week wait! While I stick to my primitive protocols--diet, rest, herbs.

I plod down Olympus, step by step, while your shiny shuttles dart overhead.

Soundtrack for this dream: Leonard Cohen's "Slow".

I always liked it slow I never liked it fast With you it's gotta go With me it's gotta last.

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