She'd never used the balcony herself, after they'd arrived in Venice. Had barred the door leading to it; insisted that the drapes on the windows facing it never be opened. The servants had thought that odd, since the reason the room was considered one of the best in the palazzo was its magnificent view of the waters.
But, they'd obeyed. People usually did, when Sharon Nichols chose to be nurse firm about something.
Ruy Sanchez had been the one to break the command. The first day he'd been able to walk, he'd immediately gone to the door, unbarred and opened it. Sharon had begun to protest, half-angrily, but the Catalan had simply continued his work.
"I will respect your grief, woman," he'd said. That had cut Sharon's protest off in mid-sentence. How had he known? She'd never told anyone how she felt about the sea.
When he'd turned to look at her over his shoulder, she'd seen the understanding in his eyes. And remembered something her father had once told her: A witty man may not be a wise one, but he'll sure as shooting be a smart one.
"I will respect your grief," Sanchez repeated. "Even be glad for it, in the end. For you, because you need it; for me, because it tells me something I need to know as well. But I will not feed the monster."
That said, he'd finished his work, slipped through the door and vanished for an hour.
Sharon had not joined him that day. Not for a week, had she ventured onto the balcony herself. By then, she discovered, Sanchez had set himself up a table to hold his precious morning coffee-Turkish-style, of course; Ruy disdained anything weak-as well as a stool on which to prop his feet.
He'd also set two chairs. She was quite sure he'd had that done on the second day. Strange, how a man as impulsive as Sanchez could also at times be so patient. His was not a broad vein of patience, to be sure; but it ran very deep.
Perhaps that was the Andalusian side of his heritage. Sanchez was only part-Catalan, he'd finally admitted to her, although he considered himself such. But then, he'd immediately insisted, all true Catalans were only part-Catalan. How could it be otherwise, with such a mongrel nation? Any man tells you he's a pureblood Catalan, he's a Castilian trying to give himself airs.
His mother had come from Andalusia. That region of Spain which, if it had none of Catalonia's cosmopolitan flair and panache, had virtues of its own. Tenacity, above all. Over the centuries, the peasants of that harsh land had seen conquerors come and go-Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Moors, Berbers-the Castilians being only the latest. Andalusia endured and outlasted them all; wailing sorrow, only in its music.
It had taken her another week before she could bring herself to use that second chair; another week, to sit it in for longer than a few minutes; yet another, to remain for the entire hour that Ruy did, enjoying her own style of coffee; and still another, before she could finally gaze upon the sea.
Gaze upon it, now, like a human being. Not stare at it, dully hating and dumbfounded and despairing, like a mouse before a snake.
She did not know, and never would, the day when she finally forgave the sea. It simply happened, as of its own volition. She did not even realize it, until one morning she understood that she had.
She did not know, and never would, the day when her grief for Hans finally closed over. Became a healing scar, not a bleeding wound. It simply happened, as of its own volition. One morning, gazing from the balcony upon the sea, she realized that Hans had become a memory instead of a haunting ghost.
Treasured memory, to be sure; and still one that often brought a pang of sorrow. But that would never change, she knew, for the rest of her life. Ruy had told her that there were still times when he would stop in his tracks, remembering that first young wife who had died so many decades ago, paralyzed for just that moment. The same, for his second and third.
He found that a comfort, he'd told her. Proof, in the end, that there was such a thing as a soul.
Sharon thought he was right, even if she didn't share Ruy's eccentric theology. Her own religious beliefs, insofar as she retained them from her mother's adherence to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, tended to run along conventional lines. Ruy, on the other hand, was the closest thing Sharon could imagine to a Sufi mystic's version of Catholicism.
She knew a fair amount about Sufism, as it happened. Leroy Hancock had claimed to adhere to that variant of Islamic faith. But if the man had had much of Ruy's wit and bravura, he'd possessed not an ounce of the Catalan's integrity. Living proof that a smart man need not be wise. Mysticism, to such as Leroy Hancock, was a way to evade all responsibility. To such as Ruy Sanchez, a guide to it.
"Sit," he said to her, smiling. "Your coffee-if I may so misuse the word-will be suitably tepid for you by now."
As she sat, Sharon smiled back. It had become a running joke between them. The fiery Catalan; the cool American. Ruy claimed to like everything hot: his climate, his food, his coffee-above all, his women. A claim which was immediately followed by sour grumbling that in his old age he'd clearly gotten senile. Abandoning a lifelong devotion to passion because he'd become besotted by an American! He was a disgrace to Catalonia.
But even Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz had a hard time maintaining the grumble. When the time came, he'd have no complaint when it came to Sharon Nichols' passion. None at all. He knew it, and . . .
So did she.
Sharon did not know, and never would, the day when she found her answer to Ruy's question. She would not speak the answer until October 8, still some months away, for she had come to believe in the power of ritual. But the decision had already been made.
Had made itself, somehow. One morning, not long before, she'd gazed from the balcony onto the sea and realized that it had become settled in her mind. In that mysterious back of the mind, which was so much more reliable in such matters than the treacherous frontal lobes.
Set and firm. As firmly set as her loving memories of Hans, which could now become a support for her life instead of a barrier to it.
"It will be a good day," Ruy predicted.
"Yes," Sharon replied.
Afterword.
1634: The Galileo Affair is the fourth volume to appear in the 1632 series, following 1632 and 1633 and the anthology of stories entitled Ring of Fire. There are a lot more books coming down the road. David Weber and I will be writing four more novels, the next of which-1634: The Baltic War-will conclude many of the story elements which were left unsettled at the end of 1633. Not all of them, though: the adventures of the diplomatic mission trapped in the Tower of London will be continued in a novel I will write called 1634: Escape from the Tower. And some of the political issues which emerge in The Baltic War won't be fully resolved until a novel I'm now working on with Virginia DeMarce comes out soon thereafter. That novel will most likely be titled 1634: The Austrian Princess, and it develops some lines of the overall story which Virginia began in her novelette "Biting Time," contained in Ring of Fire.
Nor will that be all the novels set in the year 1634. I'm also working on a novel which follows up the storyline I began in my short novel The Wallenstein Gambit, which is also contained in the Ring of Fire anthology. Mike Spehar, who wrote most of the flying sequences in 1633, is my co-author on that novel. (We don't have a title for it yet. Right now, Mike and I are just calling it "1634: Bohemia.")
All that, in one year?
Well . . . Yes. In terms of its narrative structure-as well as the way it's written-the 1632 series could just as easily be considered a shared universe as a series in the traditional sense of that term. A shared multi-verse, in fact, as I'll explain in a moment.
The basic premises of the setting and the story as a whole are established in 1632 and then expanded and elaborated in 1633. From there, the story branches in many directions. Branches-and constantly reconnects. Characters who play a major role in one novel will not necessarily appear onstage in another, although their actions will often have an indirect effect. Minor or secondary characters in one story will become major characters in their own right in another. Throughout, as the series continues, some characters will tend to remain constantly at the center of things, in one way or another-as Mike Stearns does in this book. And most of the characters, whether major or minor in any given novel or story, will tend to keep appearing and reappearing.
That initial "story explosion" will all happen more-or-less in the year 1634, which is the reason so many of the novels in the series have that date as part of the title. (Okay, one of the reasons. The other one is that it's a nifty marketing device.) Thereafter, the complexities will continue.
People have asked me many times now if I have any final end goal in mind with this series, and the answer is no. I try to let this story tell itself in the sense that I more-or-less approach each book as it comes up. I say "more-or-less" because, for obvious narrative reasons, any author has to give some thought to what's going to happen down the road. So, for instance, what'll happen in the book Virginia and I are working on is connected to what will happen in the books I'll be doing with Mike Spehar and Dave Weber.
But I try to keep that sort of predestination to a minimum, and I make no attempt to develop some overarching general plot outline for the series as a whole. As much as possible, I want to try to capture the often purely contingent aspect of real history-not to mention that this method (I think, anyway) tends to produce better stories because in the final analysis the key ingredient in making a decision is usually purely dramatic. I'd far rather adjust later developments to incorporate a really nice dramatic development in a novel I'm working on, than to truncate the drama for the sake of making the novel fit into a preconceived schema.
That's also the reason I like to work with so many co-authors in the series, either in the form of collaborative novels or by surrounding the novels with shorter stories in anthologies or the new online 1632 magazine I've created called the Grantville Gazette. (See below.) I find that keeps the series loosened up, because different writers will constantly bring in different ideas and angles than I would have thought up on my own. To give an example, except for Sharon Nichols and Lennox, none of the major characters in 1634: The Galileo Affair are ones who played any real role in 1632, except, to a very limited degree, Father Mazzare and Rev. Jones. Most of them, in fact, don't appear at all in that book-and few of them in 1633, and then in cameo roles.
The characters of Stoner and his sons and Stoner's wife, Madga, were first introduced into the series by Mercedes Lackey, in her story "To Dye For" in Ring of Fire. True, they first appeared in print in the novel 1633, simply because of the publication order of the books. But Dave Weber and I based the characters on Misty's portrait in her short story, which had already been written. Likewise, Billy Trumble and Conrad Ursinus were introduced into the series by Deann Allen and Mike Turner in "American Past Time," one of the many other stories in Ring of Fire. Mazarini and Heinzerling, by Andrew Dennis-and it was really Andrew's story "Between the Armies" which lays the basis for the important roles played by Father Mazzare and Monsignor Mazarini in this story.
Sharon Nichols is mine, so to speak. From the moment I decided to turn 1632 into a series, I planned on developing her into one of the central and major characters of the series, on a par with characters like Jeff Higgins and Gretchen Richter. But all the specific ways in which that eventually happened in this novel were shaped by the input of many other writers.
I like it that way. Partly, because I enjoy collaborative writing. But, mostly, because I think it helps keep the story lively and helps prevent the (always ever-present) danger of the series sliding into a formulaic rut. When I wrote 1632, over four years ago now, I did not intend for it to be the first book in a series. I planned and wrote it as a purely stand-alone novel. I hesitated for some time before changing my mind, after many people urged me to turn it into a series. The main reason I hesitated was because I've seen far too many good single novels turned into tedious series which simply recycle endlessly and pointlessly the ingredients of the founding novel. Eventually, I decided I could avoid that-and a large part of the reason was because of the narrative structure I decided to adopt. The great advantage to a shared universe, as is true with human interaction in general, is that it's very different from having a conversation with a mirror.
Earlier in this afterword, I mentioned the multi-verse aspect of the 1632 series, and I should take a little time to explain what I meant. My publisher, Jim Baen, pointed out to me some time ago that there was no inherent reason that only one Assiti Shard might have struck the Earth. From that initial observation, he and I began thinking through some other ways to expand the setting-both to the side and outward, so to speak. What has come out of that concretely, so far, are two other books which I will be writing:
One of them will be 1781, which posits the effect of a far larger and more complex Assiti Shard transposing both George Washington and Frederick the Great (along with their armies) into the chaotic and turbulent period of the Roman Empire usually known as the "third-century crisis."
You might think of that as the sideways expansion. The "outward" expansion is a novel which I am beginning with a new co-author, Sarah Hoyt. This novel, By Any Other Name, will take up the Assiti themselves and the initial clash which the human race has with them. Part of the novel is set in Elizabethan England, but most of it takes place on a strange setting which is no part of human history-indeed, exists in another universe altogether. By Any Other Name will at least begin to provide the overall framework and logic for the Assiti Shard multi-verse, of which the 1632 series is a subset, as well as-always the most important thing-being an enjoyable story in its own right.
A few words on the Grantville Gazette. As I mentioned in my afterword to 1633, the 1632 setting has spawned a very large and lively discussion group in Baen's Bar, the discussion area which is part of Baen Books' website. (www.baen.com, then go to "Baen's Bar" and the "1632 Tech Manual" conference.) Over time, a lot of fanfic started being written in the setting. Some of it is . . . awfully good. So, after discussing it with Jim Baen and getting his go-ahead, I tried the experiment of producing an online magazine which would incorporate the best of the fan fiction, with me serving as editor, as well as a number of factual articles which bear on the series. The first issue came out in October of 2003, and sold enough copies to make the magazine financially self-sustaining. Once that became clear, we decided to turn the initial experiment into an ongoing publication. The Grantville Gazette will have no regular schedule, but I expect to be able to produce at least two issues a year. The second issue is already out.