Cybele, With Bluebonnets

by Charles L. Harness

Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Joseph first encounters Cybele when he is a 10-year-old skipping rocks, but he falls in love with her in high school, where she is his chemistry teacher. After he graduates, they have a whirlwind romance, but she won't marry him because she knows things about the future that she won't reveal. She encourages his affinity for chemistry, though, cementing his dedication to the science. Thereafter, miracles abound, both scientific and supernatural, and Cybele seems to look after Joseph even when she is no longer around him. With the help of her spirit, Joseph works for the police in solving the case of the Holy Grail and for the government during World War II.

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

The best way to introduce this new novel by the legendary Charles L. Harness is to start with Gene Wolfe’s words to the publisher:

“There are perhaps a thousand wonderful books. Most of us are fortunate if we so much as hear the titles of them in the course of a lifetime. Very few of us ever touch the covers of more than half a dozen. This is one of them. If you do not buy the copy you are holding, you are not likely to see one again.”

All of Harness’s novels flow from the wellsprings of autobiography. Remembrance refracted through a science-informed imagination is what gives his novels reality and conviction. The author can’t help it; his talent works by occupying his created worlds with authentic experience and knowledge, however fanciful his conceptions.

When J. G. Ballard published Empire of the Sun, his autobiographical novel about his boyhood internment by the Japanese during the Second World War, it was clear that this novel was perhaps a key to all his science fiction and later novels, in which we find the signs, footprints, and healed wounds of the past. With Charles L. Harness we also sense bits of autobiography in his fictions, which may also include dreams and what-might-have-beens from his life, transformed into artful alternate realities.

But where in previous novels the autobiographical details lend an extra emotional charge to the fantastic dramas, and need no further explanation, the story of Cybele is more overtly autobiographical, in the manner of the growing-up novel. It is full of painful joys and beauties, as well as tragedies, and a sense of youthful places. The novel explains itself, but one feels that the author was more willing to approach his secret places and the hidden center with greater courage. I’m reminded of C. M. Kornbluth’s comment that the major component of fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is more concerned with “unconscious symbolic material,” with “the individual’s relationship to his family and the raw universe than with the individual’s relationship to society.” Social criticism is implicit, because a human being is presented from “inside” his experience. What else the reader sees in the wider context is up to him.

Cybele is not a long novel, and it keeps intently to the details the author wishes to present. What most interests him affects us more deeply because of this intense focus which sets all else aside.

It might be described as a ghost story, even a tall ghost story, in which the teller, Joe Barnes, knows full well how much he may be fooling himself and the reader in describing the miraculous, perhaps supernatural, events that guide his life. Or they may be naturally occurring phenomena poorly observed and only fancifully explained. This first love of the teller’s life, Cybele, has an undoubted effect on his life, whatever the explanations of how this comes about, and that is the larger truth of the story. The past and its people do live on in all of us. They may do so because we keep them with us, or because it can’t be helped. There is survival after death, in this way.

The denial of death and the power of hope are major themes in Harness’s work, clearly present in his classic novel The Paradox Men, which I had the privilege of shepherding back into print three times. In that novel Alar the Thief is also a ghost of himself, bringing an active hope back to humanity, as Ulysses did when he came home and set his house in order. Ghost stories are perhaps the classic form of storytelling, because storytelling is itself a way of resurrecting the dead past. Once we began to think of death as an observed finality, we also began to wonder whether what we see in the physical ruin of a human being is the last word, and to wish that it might be otherwise. It’s not over, ever, is a grand cry, and a powerful hope. A ghost story attempts to redeem a loss by making a “return” part of the story, in itself already a re-creation. One day perhaps we’ll make it so, by another road—along the way of knowledge and its creative applications. Until then we have writing and poetry, and all the arts that live by remembrance, which includes being mindful of possible futures.

The telling of this novel is hypnotic. The various stories within stories of Texas life during the Great Depression exhibit a humane curiosity about the people who were part of the teller’s life, despite the sharp, often bloodied edges of their behavior. Harness makes us care deeply about what happens to his people. The sense of detail, both suggested and presented, is extraordinary, as is the Twain-like ease of telling—so convincing that we accept everything we are told and believe it’s so, because it is so within us.

Science, especially chemistry, plays a large role in Joe Barnes’s life. He knows how to think, except when love mercifully clouds his skepticism—all to the better. He is skeptical of coincidences, but faces up to their reality.

For those of us who have read Harness, this novel can only confirm to us what we all know: that at the heart of all his works, both personal and literary, there lives a wonderful human being, whose eager, questing response to his own humanity and to the raw universe has earned him high praise for sharing his visions with his readers. Perhaps this novel will reveal him to be the major American writer whom we read in the words. His modesty prevents him from thinking of his work in this way, even though I suspect and hope that he has some inkling of his true accomplishments. He actually doesn’t need to think of himself in this way; he has spent his time on the writing, which fulfills itself in his readers.

George Zebrowski

Delmar, New York

May 22, 2002

My first real contact with Cybele Wilson where I could daily undress her with adoring lascivious adolescent eyes, was in high school. She was my chemistry teacher.

She was well named. In ancient Phrygian mythology Cybele was the Goddess of Nature. Miss Cybele Wilson was a very special teacher and a very beautiful woman. I was sixteen, nearly seventeen, and she was not yet twenty-four. Sure, I had a crush on her. A lot of the boys did.

I had never seen a completely naked woman, but I had seen plenty of girls at the Forest Park swimming pool, and I had seen explicit pictures in art magazines. I had a fair idea of how they were put together.

Mentally, and working at top speed as soon as she walked into the classroom from the lab bay, I stripped her of lab coat, cotton print dress, slip, brassiere, teds. By the time she reached her desk she wore only her stockings and garters and low-heeled shoes. As I watched her come through that door and walk those eight steps, I knew how Keats had felt, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

She had green eyes and long light brown hair, which she gathered in a bun at the back of her head. She was of average height. If I were holding her closely, the top of her head would fit just under my chin. Her breasts were perfect, neither over-large nor undersized. They were firm, presumptively virginal, the upper surfaces sloping to the nipple.

Below her breasts came the smooth slightly rounded belly, interrupted by her navel, probably lightly touched with lint. With my hands on her opulent hips I bowed and kissed that navel. Next …

I had to quit. She was checking the roll and I didn’t want to meet her eyes. Instantly I re-dressed her and hoped my jock strap was holding.

We sat in tiers, the highest rows in the back, so the students in the rear could see over the heads of those in the front. I sat in about the middle, out of the way, yet with a good view. Sometimes, to show us a specimen of something or other, she would leave her desk and walk up through the tiers. My heart would beat like a machine gun when she passed me. She never seemed to notice.

The year before, the student body had voted her the most popular teacher – which of course made her a bit suspect in the eyes of the administration. She was always into something new. She started an early morning volunteer class in calculus. Sadly I couldn’t attend because I had an early morning paper route for the Record-Telegram. It netted about fifty cents a day. Money. Always money. The Great Depression was a bad time.

Not much was known about her prior life. Her origins were at least semi-local. She had been boarded and educated through high school at St. Joseph’s Sanctuary, a religious institution out in the country west of the city, supported by endowments and donations. That would suggest that she was an orphan. On the other hand I understood that she had been regularly visited there by a lady who might have been her mother.

St. Joseph’s had a certain bizarre claim to fame – which it neither asserted nor denied. In one of its buildings known as the Cup Chapel there was in fact a cup. And not just any cup. There were those who contended it was the very cup that Jesus drank from, at The Last Supper; which is to say, it was the Holy Grail.

It was actually on display in the Cup Chapel. You genuflected, wished for whatever miracle you had in mind, dropped your offering in the collection box, and left.

Off to one side there was a pile of discarded crutches, canes, a wheelchair, a hearing trumpet, and so on. Outrageous fakery, some said.

It was known that when Miss Wilson left St. Joseph’s, she went East. From things she let drop, it appeared that she got her B.S. and M.S. from a university in Washington, D.C. And thence back home and into the august faculty of JimBowie High.

She had run-ins with the system from time to time.

Take the case of J.D. Jones.

Now of course students were not permitted to smoke in school. Some of the boys tried to get around the rule by chewing tobacco – which generated copious saliva and required frequent spitting. Hey, no problem. J.D. Jones, for example, carried a stoppered ink bottle. In chemistry he sat on the front row and we could all watch him as he went into action. As soon as Miss Wilson turned to the blackboard he’d pull out the stopper and spit. But on this particular day, with perfect timing, she walked over and confiscated his bottle. Eventually his mouth filled, and – oh boy! – he had to swallow. In fact, he swallowed plug and all. He turned green, and she sent him to the nurse’s office. He went home for the day. His mother complained bitterly to Mr. Vachel, the principal, who called Miss Wilson into the discussion. The matter was dropped when the school nurse pointed out that nicotine in this form was a fine vermifuge and that J.D. for several years had needed a thorough worming.

Miss Wilson came out of that one smelling like a rose.

Several of the other teachers were jealous of her and suspected her of various felonies and misdemeanors, such as being an evolutionist, an atheist, or even having Yankee parents. But they were never able to prove anything.

In class she would talk about the future. “It’s on the way,” she would declare. “We’ll have synthetic soaps. And plastics, clear as glass, tough as steel. We’re going to wipe out disease with new medicines and drugs. People like Albert Einstein will show us how to split the atom. We’ll have cheap new energy sources.” When she got like this, her beautiful green eyes would snap and sparkle. She spoke with solemn certainty, like a beautiful Delphic priestess.

Of course, word of her weird prophecies got back to her wide circle of enemies, and they added “dangerous insanity” to her growing list of crimes.

So why did she stay? I think because she loved to teach. Teaching was her passion, the way painting was van Gogh’s, or music was Beethoven’s. She loved the contact of minds, the awakenings, the widened eyes when an idea registered.

My last thoughts as I fell asleep at night were generally of her. I remembered how she walked: with rhythm and meter, a lyric in classic mode. A poem by Coleridge. Even when standing totally motionless, she radiated grace. Yet it was impossible to point to any one feature that defined her beauty. It wasn’t just her face (though that was beautiful). It wasn’t just her body, though that was certainly superb. It was the sum total of all of her that overwhelmed me. I never tried to analyze it. It just … was.

I have to back up a few years.

A stretch of creek ran through a sort of wasteland about three miles from our home in Fort West. On the map the area is called Sycamore Park. But it isn’t a park. It is owned by neither city nor county. There’s no upkeep. When I was first there, aside from a few cattle wandering on the other side of barbwire fences, civilization had not yet encroached.

On this bright day of June 1925, my gang and I had gone hiking down into the park and along the creek. As usual, they went in one direction and I headed off in another.

Now, there was one particular stretch where the creek broadened into a wide flat ankle-deep mini-lake. This was my very favorite spot, because what with the long expanse of water and an abundance of flat rocks and shells along the narrow shore, I could stand barefoot in the middle of the creek bed and skip shells way up the creek.

There’s a trick to making rocks skip along the water surface. I learned it by trial and error. First, the rock (or shell) must be tolerably flat. Second, it should be fairly circular. Third, it should be of a certain size, not too little, not too big, because it must be grasped neatly in the “C” formed by the curve of thumb and forefinger. Fourth, you squat low over the water, so as to give your skipper a low angle of contact. And now with all your might you simultaneously spin your missile clockwise and throw it. Your rock hits the water, bounds, hits, bounds, hits, bounds … maybe as many as four or five times. And finally it sinks.

Only ten-year-old boys can fully appreciate the beauties of rock skipping.

Now this particular skipper was a real show-off. It bounced eight times over the water, then leaped out onto the other side of the creek. Yes, I remember the feel of the serrated edges, the exact fit between thumb and forefinger: it had the look and form and shape and performance of a true champion. Right then and there I named it, Champ. It even had a black mark on it, like a “J”. For me – Joe Barnes?

I decided I would keep it in a cigar box at home when it wasn’t in use, or being passed around for admiration and envy. The box held various of my other treasures: a Chinese coin with a hole in it, a cannon cracker I had been saving for the day school let out (and then forgot), a poison dart I had borrowed temporarily from Mr. Mathers, my Sunday School teacher. (He had been a missionary somewhere deep in Brazil, but had caught malaria and they brought him home. Then he died, and there was no one to return it to.)

For starters I would brag about my skipper to the other boys, maybe with a demonstration. So I waded over to get it.

It had landed by a fair-sized hole in the cliffside. As I picked up my Olympian skipper, I took a close look at the hole. It had been there all along, of course, but I hadn’t noticed it before, because some dead branches had mostly concealed it. But now they seemed to have fallen away.

The hole obviously led into a cave. The invitation was irresistible. I got down on my hands and knees, looked into the cave entrance, and listened.

Nothing.

Slowly, carefully, I crawled in.

Within seconds I was out again and running for my life.

As I ran, I realized I had dropped Champ inside the cave. But I wasn’t going back. Not just then, anyhow. And several days later, when I did go back, very very cautiously, and with a flashlight, Champ was gone. Very puzzling.

During my precipitous flight upstream toward the other boys and dubious safety I tried to figure out what I had seen – or hadn’t seen, and I was recalling that one of the names originally proposed for Fort West was Panther City. For all I knew, Sycamore Park was crawling with panthers.

Should I tell the gang I had probably seen a panther? As I splashed along I thought it out. No, that wouldn’t work. If I mentioned the bare possibility, word would surely get back to parents, and we wouldn’t be permitted to play there anymore. So I slowed down. When I rejoined them I wasn’t even breathing hard.

Granted, my fear of panthers now seems pretty silly. On the other hand, for me it was real.

Here’s why.

Until I was seven we lived in Colorado City, Texas (population, then and now, 4,000). Our house was across the river from town, way off by itself, and was of course called Riverside. Dad was a country boy. He loved the solitude at Riverside, the silences. Mother was a city girl. She yearned for neighbors, noises, church activities. She wanted to live in the town; or better still, in a genuine city. And after certain things happened, she got her wish, and we moved to Fort West.

But first, about the river. The Spaniards named most of the rivers in the New World – at least those in South America and New Spain in North America. And whenever they encountered a fair size stream loaded with red clay, they called it Rio Colorado – Red River. There are two in the United States: the big one separating California and Arizona and which pours into the Gulf of California, and my Colorado River in Texas. And of course, there are towns on these rivers named Colorado City: one in Arizona, and my Colorado City, in Texas. That’s the important one. For me, anyhow. M. . .