Apart from that, the main excitement has been that all the girls who were on the bus have been asking me nonstop about “my boyfriend,” where I met him, what he’s like, what he does, and so on and on and on. Some of them who were in the cafe know about his reputation and have warned me about him—what, seventeen-year-old boy had sex with girlfriend, shock horror! It’s such a weird mixture of puritanical and prurient. The girls who have local boyfriends say they’re not serious about them, and some of them have what they call serious boyfriends at home. What they mean by serious is just what Jane Austen would have called an eligible parti, a boy of the same class who they might marry. They’re slumming with the local boys, and the local boys mostly know that. It’s vile, they’re vile, the whole thing is vile and I don’t want to think about Wim in the same breath as that.
The real difference is that we’re not of different classes. Wim and I are both of a class that expects to go to university. I don’t know what his father does, but that his mother works in the hospital kitchens while I go to school here is irrelevant. Well, maybe not irrelevant, but not the point. Anyway, I’m not sure if Wim is my boyfriend, and even if he is it isn’t at all the thing they’re talking about with their serious and not serious. I’m only fifteen. I’m not sure I ever want to get married. I’m neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some “real thing.” What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn’t we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I’m not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?
But that’s also almost irrelevant, because there’s also the ethical thing of the magic. I should probably tell him, and then he’d hate me, anybody would.
I’ve asked Nurse to make me a doctor’s appointment. She didn’t ask what for.
WEDNESDAY 6TH FEBRUARY 1980
Zelazny meeting last night. Wim thinks Zelazny’s the greatest stylist of all time. Brian thinks style is unimportant compared to ideas, and he thinks Zelazny’s ideas are ordinary, except for Shadow. It’s funny how people divided on that one. I think if we’d voted for whether style matters or only ideas, the division would have been really different from whether Zelazny has good ideas. I think he does, and I think both matter, which isn’t to say that the Foundation books suck because they have no style, or Clarke either. Zelazny can get where he’s all style and no substance—I can’t forget Creatures of Light and Darkness after all, which almost put me off him forever. But mostly he keeps the balance.
We talked about Amber and what’s going to happen, and we talked about the kind of wisecracking voice he uses in those and in Isle of the Dead and This Immortal and we talked about whether it was actually science fiction or fantasy. Hugh thinks the Amber books are fantasy, and so is Isle of the Dead, because despite the aliens and everything, worldbuilding is talked about in such magical terms. “That’s condemning him for being poetic!” Wim said.
“Saying it’s fantasy isn’t condemnation,” Harriet said.
So, a good meeting. Afterwards Wim said to Greg, “Do you have a recent Ansible?”
There’s a magazine, a “fanzine” called Ansible! It’s for information about what’s going on in the SF fan world, it’s funny, and it’s so exactly what I would have called it that I love the author, Dave Langford, sight unseen without meeting him. Ansibles are from The Dispossessed and they’re faster-than-light communication devices. Brilliant. All the details about Albacon in Glasgow at Easter were in Greg’s copy, and I copied them down, and all I have to do now is get the money from Daniel when I see him, probably at half term, which is at the end of next week, and send it off.
Walking out of the library, Wim held my hand. “Are you sure I can’t see you until Saturday?” he said. “Will you be locked up in school the whole time?”
“Well yes, apart from going to Shrewsbury Thursday afternoon for acupuncture,” I said.
“What time are you going?” he asked.
“On the half-past one train—but don’t you have to work?”
“I work mornings and go to college in the afternoons,” he said. “That’s how I came to see you in hospital, remember? I can skive off tomorrow afternoon if I want to. Nobody cares.”
“Skive” is like “mitch,” it means “skipping school.” That’s what they say around here. The first time I heard it I had no idea what it meant.
“You’ll care when it gets to the exams,” I said.
“I won’t even notice,” he said. “I’ll meet you in Gobowen railway station, all right?”
Greg drove me back to school, as normal. “So, I was right,” he said.
I blushed. I don’t think he saw in the darkness. “Sort of,” I admitted.
“Well, good luck.”
“Hot jets,” I replied.
Greg laughed. “I’ve always said that what Wim needs is a girlfriend who could quote Heinlein at him.”
Has he always said that? Or does he only think he always said that because I did the karass-magic? Greg existed before I did it. I know he did. I met him in the library. But he never said a word to me beyond not letting me join the first day and then taking my interlibrary loan cards. Was the book group, and SF fandom, there all the time, or did it all come into being when I did that magic, to give me a karass? Was there Ansible? I know they think there was, that there were conventions going back to 1939, and certainly science fiction was there all the time. There’s no proving anything once magic gets involved.
I’m going to have to tell Wim. It’s the only ethical thing.