Ancient of Days Read online

  Table of Contents

  Far Too Human: An Introduction to Michael Bishop’s Ancient of Days

  PART ONE: Her Habiline Husband

  PART TWO: His Heroic Heart

  PART THREE: Heritor’s Home

  About the Author

  FAIRWOOD PRESS

  Bonney Lake, WA

  What if a living specimen of Homo habilis appeared in the pecan grove of a female artist living in Georgia? What if she reached out to her ex-husband, a restaurant owner in the small town of Beulah Fork, to help her establish the creature’s precise identity?

  From these dramatic speculations, Michael Bishop creates a complex story spanning several years in the late 1980s and intertwining the lives of many fascinating and/or exasperating characters, including . . .

  RuthClaire Loyd, an artist tasked with a project to illustrate several species of early human progenitors;

  Paul Loyd, the narrator of Ancient of Days, who believes that his rekindled devotion to RuthClaire will somehow win her back;

  Brian Nollinger, an anthropologist at the Yerkes Primate Center, whom Paul brings into their lives with disconcerting results;

  Dwight “Happy” McElroy, a televangelist who never passes up a chance to fund-raise, proselytize, or damn;

  A. P. Blair, a world-famous authority on human evolution who at first believes that RuthClaire’s “hominid” is an inept hoax;

  and Adam Montaraz, the living human fossil whom RuthClaire has named and dared to take into her home.

  Over the course of Ancient of Days, these characters and others work out their loves and conflicts across a variety of backdrops—from rural Georgia to the bistros and back alleys of Atlanta, all the way to the forests and caves of antique Montaraz, an enigmatic island under the dictatorial sway of “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti.

  A rare combination of science fiction, noir mystery, and comedy of manners, Ancient of Days will involve and challenge you as have few other novels.

  ANCIENT OF DAYS

  A Fairwood Press Book

  September 2013

  Copyright © 1985 Michael Bishop

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

  by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

  or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Fairwood Press

  21528 104th Street Court East

  Bonney Lake, WA 98391

  www.fairwoodpress.com

  Cover illustration & design by

  Paul Swenson

  Book design by

  Patrick Swenson

  First published in the United States of America by Arbor House Publishing

  Company in July 1985, and in the United Kingdom by Paladin, an imprint

  of Grafton Books, a division of the Collins Publishing Group in November 1987.

  ISBN13: 978-1-933846-39-2

  First Fairwood Press Edition: September 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-328-7

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  For David Hartwell,

  who has ridden to the rescue more times than the U.S. cavalry

  Far Too Human:

  An Introduction to Michael Bishop’s

  Ancient of Days

  by Michael H. Hutchins

  When volume thirteen of Universe, Terry Carr’s highly respected annual anthology series, appeared in the summer of 1983, Michael Bishop’s novella “Her Habiline Husband” occupied its lead-off spot and encompassed over a third of the anthology’s total length. Other stories in its line-up were by such science-fiction luminaries as Ian Watson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, and Bruce Sterling, but many readers considered Bishop’s novella the stand-out story not only of Universe 13, but of that entire year. This assertion is supported by the fact that the following year “Her Habiline Husband” placed first in the novella category in the readers’ polls of both Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle magazines.

  Michael’s fellow writers must have also liked the story. “Her Habiline Husband” was a finalist for the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. But just as had happened a decade earlier when Michael’s “Death and Designation Among the Asadi” and “The White Otters of Childhood” knocked each other out of contention, he had another story (“The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis”) of novella length on the Nebula ballot in 1984, resulting in a likely splitting of the Bishop vote. In any case, neither of his two finalists won the award.

  In an email exchange about the novella, Michael revealed that its title owes an obvious debt to John Collier’s short novel His Monkey Wife, and that the ending mirrors that of William Faulkner’s “Dry September,” a Mississippi-noir short story about an unorthodox variety of lynching.1

  Writing “Her Habiline Husband” as a stand-alone story, Michael had no early plans to expand it into a novel. Only later did he decide that there was “more story to the story” and sit down to write two additional parts to complete the novel, with the original novella as its opening section.

  “I’ve never altogether trusted the idea of expanding a story to novel length by injecting a metaphorical air hose and inflating it from within,” Michael responded when asked about the “expansion” of the novella into Ancient of Days. “Instead, I believe in expansions that grow from the kernel of the original story and then unfold in a more organic way. I should quickly add, however, that I may not always succeed in effecting a satisfyingly organic novelization because of this philosophy and this approach.”

  (In this regard, I, and many other readers, believe that Bishop does succeed in that very aim in Ancient of Days.)

  Bishop’s first attempt at this form of expansion has its embodiment in the 1979 novel Transfigurations, which grew from the excellent, often anthologized 1973 novella “Death and Designation Among the Asadi.” The lightly revised novella became the prologue of the novel, much in the same way that “Her Habiline Husband” serves as the opening section of Ancient of Days.

  I think it illuminating to note that this form of expansion exactly follows the pattern of Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 novel, More Than Human, a work that Michael and many others in the science-fiction community recognize as a masterpiece. The basic structure of Ancient of Days, the foundation on which Sturgeon and Bishop build their novels, is identical to that of More Than Human. Like Sturgeon’s opening novella (“Baby Is Three”), Bishop’s “Her Habiline Husband” is a self-contained story, with the latter two novellas being dependent on the preceding ones to fulfill their respective author’s narrative and thematic aims.

  In addition to acknowledging John Collier and William Faulkner for influencing the original novella, Michael credits several writers of hard-boiled detective fiction for shaping the substance, style, and format of the resulting novelization: “Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald go almost without saying, but I must also point to the popular series that I was reading in the early 1980s, namely, the Jacob Asch novels by Arthur Lyons and the Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker. Incidentally, I’ve always felt that Lyons’s work, in particular, never garnered the acclaim that it deserved.” This influence manifests undeniably in the second section of the novel, “His Heroic Heart,” where the story shifts from Beulah Fork, the bucolic small west Georgia town setting of “Her Habiline Husband,” to the bustling “mean streets” of Atlanta with its art-gallery and nightclub scenes.

  Concerning the novel’s title, Michael admits, “Once I’d finished the writing and most of my revisions, I had no idea what to call the entire book, but David Hartwell,
who often came to my rescue while editing my work, suggested Ancient of Days, a venerable Hebrew name for God and the title of a powerful Christian hymn, and I told him that the only thing wrong with it is that I hadn’t thought of it myself. David laughed ruefully and said something like, ‘Yes, well, there’s that.’ ”

  So what about the novel itself?

  It begins in a peaceful pecan grove in the rural South and ends on the serene beach of a remote Caribbean island. In between, important questions are asked by the central character, and by extension, the author. What does it mean to be human? Is our humanity in our genes or in our actions? Does every living creature have a soul? Is that soul a gift from a divine spirit, or is it simply biological?

  In a 2003 public radio interview, Michael said, “What I was attempting to do with Adam [the novel’s central character] was to show, in some respects, through a single individual, the evolution of an entire species, an entire race of creatures who are moving towards both sentience and spirituality. How did it happen that human beings came to have a sense, a feeling of connectiveness to the Sacred? I wanted to take a look at a creature who came out of a background that many of us would consider primitive and deprived, and yet, at the same time, show that there is something in that individual that is yearning toward something else. When he finally reaches a situation where he has a degree of safety, these questions come to the fore in his own mind. How can one person go through life never asking these questions at all, and another person spends his or her entire life asking them? Adam was one of those individuals for whom these questions had a great deal of significance. And until he could answer them to his own satisfaction, he didn’t feel that he had completed himself as an authentic creature, whether that happened to be a creature of God or a creature of Nature.

  “Adam evolves during the course of the novel from being a very primitive creature to [becoming] perhaps the noblest individual in the whole book. He attempts to confront all of the aspects of contemporary society and to incorporate those things in himself, to judge them, to test them, and to evaluate them. His nobility arises from actually transcending some of the faults that we have as a society now, but he does that consciously, and not as a completely primitive individual.”2

  Among his several published novel-length works, Michael considers Ancient of Days “probably my second favorite, although on some days it does come in first. I think it deserves to outlive me, but writers do not control the ultimate fate of their works, and so this opinion may be more interesting for what it says about my narcissistic prioritizing than for its insight into my critical acumen.”

  This first new print edition of the novel in more than eighteen years strengthens my hope that a new generation of grateful readers will discover Ancient of Days and that it will live again in the hearts of all who have read it before.

  1Email from Michael Bishop to Michael H. Hutchins, July 9, 2012.

  2Cover to Cover: Ancient of Days. Broadcast on Georgia Public Radio, September 28, 2003. Interviewer: St. John Flynn.

  PART ONE:

  Her Habiline Husband

  Beulah Fork, Georgia

  RuthClaire Loyd, my ex-wife, first caught sight of the trespasser from the loft studio of her barn-sized house near Beulah Fork, Georgia. She was doing one of twelve paintings for a series of subscription-order porcelain plates that would feature her unique interpretations of the nine angelic orders and the Holy Trinity (this particular painting was entitled Thrones), but she stepped away from the easel to look through her bay window at the intruder. His oddness had caught her eye.

  Swart and gnomish, he was moving through the tall shadowy grass in the pecan grove. His movements combined an aggressive curiosity with a kind of placid caution, as if he had every right to be there but still expected someone—the property’s legal owner, a buttinsky neighbor—to call him to accounts. Passing from a dapple of September sunlight into a patch of shade, he resembled one of the black boys who had turned Cleve Snyder’s creek into the skinnydipping riviera of Hothlepoya County. He was a little far afield, though, and the light limning his upper body made him look too hairy for most ten-year-olds, whatever their color. Was the trespasser some kind of animal?

  “He’s walking,” RuthClaire murmured to herself. “Hairy or not, only human beings walk like that.”

  My ex is not given to panic, but this observation worried her. Her house (I had relinquished all claims to it back in January, to spare her the psychic upheaval of a move) sits in splendid-spooky isolation about a hundred yards from the state highway connecting Tocqueville and Beulah Fork. Cleve Snyder, meanwhile, leases his adjacent ninety acres to a cotton grower who does not live there. RuthClaire was beginning to feel alone and vulnerable.

  Imperceptibly trembling, she set aside her brushes and paints to watch the trespasser. He was closer to the house now, and a rake that she had left leaning against one of the pecan trees enabled her to estimate his height at a diminutive four and a half feet. His sinewy arms bespoke his maturity, however, as did the massiveness of his underslung jaw and the dark gnarl of his sex. Maybe, she helplessly conjectured, he was a deranged dwarf recently escaped from an institution populated by violence-prone sexual deviates. . . .

  “Stop it,” RuthClaire advised herself. “Stop it.”

  Suddenly the trespasser gripped the bole of a tree with his hands and the bottom of his feet; he shinnied to a swaying perch high above the ground. Here, for over an hour, he cracked pecans with his teeth and single-mindedly fed himself. My ex-wife’s worry subsided a little. The intruder seemed to be neither an outright carnivore nor a rapist. Come twilight, though, she was ready for him to leave, while he appeared perfectly content to occupy his perch until Judgment Day.

  RuthClaire had no intention of going to bed with a skinnydipping dwarf in her pecan grove. She telephoned me.

  “It’s probably someone’s pet monkey,” I said. “A rich Yankee matron broke down on the interstate, and her chimpanzee—you know how some of those old ladies from Connecticut are—wandered off while she was trying to flag down a farmer to unscrew her radiator cap.”

  “Paul,” RuthClaire said, unamused.

  “What?”

  “First of all,” she said, evenly enough, “a chimpanzee isn’t a monkey, it’s an ape. Second, I know nothing at all about old ladies from Connecticut. And, third, the creature in my pecan tree isn’t a chimpanzee or a gibbon or an orangutan.”

  “Boy, I’d forgotten what a Jane Goodall fan you are.” This riposte RuthClaire declined to volley.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked, somewhat exasperated. My ex-wife’s imagination is both her fortune and her folly; and at this point, to tell the truth, I was thinking that her visitor was indeed an out-of-season skinnydipper or maybe a raccoon. For an artist, RuthClaire is remarkably near-sighted, a fact that contributes to the almost abstract blurriness of some of her landscapes and backgrounds.

  “Come see about me,” she said.

  *

  In Beulah Fork, I ran a small gourmet restaurant called the West Bank. Despite the incredulity of outsiders (as, for instance, Connecticut matrons with pet chimpanzees), who expect rural eating establishments in the South to serve nothing but catfish, barbecue, Brunswick stew, and turnip greens, the West Bank offered cosmopolitan fare and a sophisticated ambience. My clientele comprised professional people, wealthy retirees, and tourists. The proximity of a popular state park, the historic city of Tocqueville, and a recreational area known as Muscadine Gardens kept me in paying customers; and while RuthClaire and I were married, she exhibited and sold many of her best paintings right on the premises. Her work—only a few pieces of which still remain on the walls—gave the restaurant a kind of muted bohemian elegance, but, in turn, the West Bank gave my wife a unique and probably invaluable showcase for her talent. Until our split, I think, we both viewed the relationship between her success and mine as healthily symbiotic.

  Art in the service of commerce. Commerce in the service of art.


  RuthClaire had telephoned me just before the dinner hour on Friday. The West Bank had reservations from more than a dozen people from Tocqueville and the Gardens, and I did not really want to dump the whole of this formidable crowd into the lap of Molly Kingsbury, a bright young woman who did a better job hostessing than overseeing my occasionally high-strung cooks, Hazel Upchurch and Livia George Stephens. But dump it I did. I begged off my responsibilities at the West Bank with a story about a broken water pipe on Paradise Farm and drove out there lickety-split to see about my ex. Twelve miles in ten minutes.

  RuthClaire led me to the studio loft and pointed through her window into the pecan grove. “He’s still sitting there,” she said.

  I squinted. At this hour the figure in the tree was a mere smudge among the tangled branches, not much bigger than a squirrel’s nest. “Why didn’t you shoot off that .22 I gave you?” I asked RuthClaire, a little afraid that she was having me on. Even the spreading crimson sunset behind the pecan grove did not enable me to pick out the alleged trespasser.

  “I wanted you to see him, too, Paul. I got to where I needed outside confirmation. Don’t you see?”

  No, I didn’t see. That was the problem.

  “Go out with me,” RuthClaire said. “The buddy system’s always recommended for dangerous enterprises.”