Trunk Archaeology: The Song That Wasn’t

Digging through a box of my (very) old manuscripts, I’m finding things I wrote long ago that I had more or less forgotten about. One of those is a song. No, scratch that. It’s not a song. It’s a lyric. A song has to have a melody. And in trying to write a song, I discovered that I have no talent whatsoever for creating new melodies. I think it was Mozart who said that tunes were always walking into the back of his head. The one time I tried to compose a tune, they ran screaming.

Carol and I attended a couple of high-school Catholic retreats in 1970 or thereabouts, and also took part in a new wrinkle in Catholic culture called a “guitar mass.” These were held in the church basement, and included songs that weren’t anything like the hymns we knew. They were melodic, upbeat, affirming, and strong in their statements. One of these was a well-known song by folk guitarist Ray Repp called “To Be Alive.” It was manic and borderline political and I’m sure rubbed traditionalist church people the wrong way, but considering the pre-Vatican II church that we all grew up in, it was bogglingly infectious. Less bouncy and more thoughtful was “Easy Come, Easy Go” by Kevin Johannson, which I much liked and often whistled when I was working in the basement on a telescope or something.

I’m pretty sure it was “Easy Come, Easy Go” that prompted me to write a song in a similar vein, with perhaps a little more religion in it. I got the lyric down quickly. Words, no sweat. Music, heh, no chance. Here’s the lyric to a tuneless song I called “I See God”:

In every sunrise there’s a glow,
In every dawn a light
To help me look and see and know
The things that fly and crawl and grow
That weren’t there last night.

For every day is different; new buds on life’s tall tree.
And I see God in everything, in everything that be.

I know things change with time and tide;
Today will soon be gone.
But though today’s grown old and died
I watch the tears today has cried
And see tomorrow born.

Then all its shape and all its sound will sing new songs for me
While I see God in everything, in everything that be.

Life’s a very precious thing,
Whatever turns it takes.
And glad I live the days that sting
For hurt’s a very tiny thing
Against the good He makes.

For as He brought me to this day, He brings this day to me,
And I see God in everything, in everything that be.

Sure, it’s sentimental. Corny, even. Remember that I was 19 when I wrote it. Keep in mind that it’s not a poem. It’s a lyric. And without a tune it’s incomplete. I had no idea what to do with it back in 1971. So I did what I was good at: I wrote an SF story around it. Really.

The story (called “I See God,” natch) involved a race of high-gravity aliens who gently take over Earth without saying why or what they’re up to. They are building enormous inexplicable machines all over the planet, with high-tech roads running between the machines. One of the aliens, Caeliph, suffers a vehicle malfunction while tearing down a road from one machine to the next. He ejects from the vehicle and watches it go into a ditch. In poking around the rural area he finds himself in, he encounters a small group of human teens, who when they see him, shrink back in fear from a “tightfist” (what humans called the aliens) but also shout “I see God!”

It turns out that this quirk originated with one of the older teens who plays a guitar. Every time one of the kids sees something he or she has never seen before, they say, emphatically, “I see God!” The leader of the group plays the song for Caeliph and the group sings it. They explain it as best they can, but Caeliph is an engineer, not an anthropologist. Humans are not supposed to know that the Ynyr (the tightfists) are building a hyperdrive for planet Earth, because the Ynyr know that the Sun will soon go nova. Their plan is to move Earth to a similar star system before the Sun blows up and takes Earth with it.

When Caeliph is picked up by one of his colleagues, another Ynyr, Gwerrbach tells him that the humans appear to be catching on to the Big Plan. “They are more intelligent than we thought,” Gwerrbach says. It’s the first time Caeliph has heard one of his colleagues admit that humans aren’t stupid. “I see God,” Caeliph says with a certain wry satisfaction, and roars off into the sunset to continue his job of saving Earth.

Even I could tell that the story wasn’t good enough to try to sell to one of the magazines, so I tossed it into a box full of other manuscripts, and went on to other, better ideas. I wrote the first draft of “Our Lady of the Endless Sky” in 1972, and sold it (my very first sale) to Harry Harrison’s Nova 4 anthology in the fall of 1973.

Sure, not every story is publishable. But every story is practice, which helped me down the road as I began to sell my tales to the mags and anthologies on a regular basis. I offer this advice to writers: Whether or not your juvenalia passes that test, don’t erase it or throw it away. Above all else, it’s the best way possible to remind yourself how far you’ve come.