Among Others

couldn’t help contrasting her with Janine.
    It’s a pity about Wim.
    S UNDAY 9 TH D ECEMBER 1979
    If church—if religion—if Jesus, Aslan … but I don’t think it is. There’s a way it’s true, but it’s a layered way, not a literal way. It isn’t a way that’s going to help. Otherwise I could just have gone to the vicar about her, and said “Reverend Price, do something about my mother!” And he wouldn’t have said “Eh, what? What’s that? Maureen isn’t it, or are you the other one? How’s your grandmother, eh?” He’d have taken up his crozier, well, he doesn’t have a crozier, he isn’t a bishop, maybe he’d have snatched up the churchwarden’s staff and gone out to cast demons out of her. It’s hard to imagine.
    I had another even worse thought about magic. What if everything I do, everything I say, everything I write, absolutely everything about me (and Mor as well) was dictated by some magic somebody else will do in the future. The absolute worst would be if it was my mother, but I don’t think it could be, as so much of what we’ve done has been directly about stopping her. But if it was somebody in the future where she won and was Dark Queen Liz, and they did a magic to make us oppose her to make their world better. Well, I suppose I don’t mind that too much, though I don’t like the thought of being a puppet any more than making other people puppets.
    I wrote to Grampar and Auntie Teg and told them I couldn’t come for Christmas but I’d come down the day after Boxing Day, as that’s the first time there are trains. I wrote to Daniel, mostly about the book club and what everyone said.
    M ONDAY 10 TH D ECEMBER 1979
    Exams. Chemistry this morning and English this afternoon. Not as much time as normal for library, I’m writing this in prep. I’d kind of forgotten about the exams, or rather, I knew about them and have been working for them, but they seemed rather further away. Never mind. I can write down chemical formulae and witter on about Dickens even half asleep.
    T UESDAY 11 TH D ECEMBER 1979
    Exams. Maths and French.
    W EDNESDAY 12 TH D ECEMBER 1979
    So last night, after dinner, I signed out for the book club, showing my permissions, and took the bus into town. It was strange going in on my own in the dark. There were only two other people on the bus, a fat woman in a green coat and an old man in a cloth cap. Normally the bus is full of Arlinghurst girls when I go in. I felt conspicuous in my uniform and my silly hat. I was a little bit later than last week, but got there before things really started. Janine was earlier. She came in not long after me, and we sat together. The boys, Pete and Hugh, came and joined us.
    All the same people were there as last time except for Wim. I half-thought he’d come in late, but he didn’t show up at all.
    Brian led the meeting. He mostly wanted to talk about what an incredible range Silverberg has—well, he has. But let’s face it, some of it is hackwork. It’s still fun, but you can’t put Stepsons of Terra next to Dying Inside and take it seriously. Hugh hadn’t read any Silverberg before, and he read Up the Line and Voyage to Alpha Centauri for the meeting. “You keep saying ‘you should have read this, you should have read that,’ but all I could read was what was on the shelf,” he said. “And from the random sample that was on the shelf, I don’t think I’ll bother with any more.”
    Now I like Up the Line . I do have a weakness for time travel though. One of the first SF books I ever read was time travel, Poul Anderson’s Guardians of Time . (There is something to be said for alphabetical order.) But even so, I could see what he meant. Everyone agreed that Silverberg was variable, and people were talking about what his best books are, and then Keith mentioned The World Inside and we talked for ages about overpopulation, that book, and Stand on Zanzibar and Make Room! Make Room! , and whether it was a real problem or not, and whether Brunner’s view of it as something awful or Silverberg’s vision of it as something people would embrace was more plausible. It was epic! Brian didn’t get us back on topic the way Harriet had the week before, and the funny thing was that Harriet was one of the worst for going off topic and tossing out tangents.
    I was trying not to talk too much, but I probably did anyway.
    “Do we want to have a meeting next week?” Greg asked. “Or should we leave it until after