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Faces of Mist and Flame

If there are no more heroes – where will we be?  Faces of Mist and Flame is a wartime SF mix of The Time Machine, The Adventures of Hercules and Band of Brothers.
    Phoenix Lafayette is a combat correspondent on the Pacific Island of Guam during WW11 who believes he can only survive the carnage by emulating the Twelve Labours of Hercules. And the person who put this idea into his head is Professor Serena Freeman of Cambridge University, England.
    But she is not from 1944. She is from the present. Serena has invented a time machine that puts a person into the mind of someone from the past. And the British government would like to own it. At any cost.
    A quirky ex-child prodigy and a writer of mythical allegories: Two disparate strangers, separated by time – somehow linked by dreams.
    The mathematics of time are about to change.
    So where are the heroes?

 

 

Sample First Chapter

 

Chapter One

 

Friday afternoon.

    Serena glares at the lion, decides that either it or herself must cease to exist in the next two minutes, and so she utters a banzai scream and leaps towards the animal.  Since she is a five foot, three inch pixie of a woman and the lion is a waist-high stuffed toy, she calculates the odds are about even.  As Serena - a paw in each hand - wrenches its front legs apart, hoping to rip the beast asunder at the first attempt, she swears at the top of her voice and enjoys the sensation of seldom uttered guttural words rushing over her lips.  The words are ones her mother would consider disgusting and are so politically incorrect.

     Bad girl!

     She surprises herself with the originality of the language and decides she doesn’t care.  She realises an impartial observer might think that, instead of having just changed the geometry of time with a startling invention, the pressure of being a twenty-first century Miss Jean Brodie Cambridge mathematics professor has taken its toll, and that she is falling into the abyss of insanity.  But she doesn’t care.

     Ah, shucks and I'm only twenty-four.

     The right front leg of Caliban the lion succumbs to forces it was not designed to withstand, parts company with the torso, and it leaves entrails of foam to stream in front of her as the release of tension sends the head and body, and her knuckles, into a wall.

     Serena yelps, transfers Caliban to her other hand by grasping the scruff of his neck, flaps the wounded hand to crate a cool breeze over the graze, then smiles and dismisses the pain.

     And proceeds to bash the three-legged remains against the corner of a shelf with renewed frenzy.

     A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.  Wimp!  Die you little shit!  Die!

     Pieces of Caliban fly around the room.  The toy appears to try to maintain a quiet dignity, but Serena shouts that its inane smile is not fooling her any more.  One of them is ceasing to exist physically and the odds do not favour Caliban.  Neither is the old, insecure personality of Professor Serena Freeman expected to last; she wants to explode out of her shell into something new.  And save a hero at the same time.  Each blow increases in violence.

     At the age of four Serena Freeman could take two random numbers of three digits chosen by an intrigued adult and multiply them in her head, faster than they could tap the sum into a pocket calculator.  (Well done, Serena!  Did you see that, she's faster than I am!  Aren't you a clever little girl?!)  At six she could provide the square root.  (Wow!  That's amazing!)  And she understood calculus.  (Good god, girl!  What's that?!)  And liked chaos theory.  And wrote music.  And played the flute.  (Really?  Is that the time?  I must be somewhere else.)  She was aware that nobody of her own age, or any age for that matter, liked her much, but she had gone beyond cute.  This was a serious intellect and gift.  At ten she took her maths and physics A-levels, and it wasn't any surprise when she went up to Cambridge at the age of eleven.  She made the news.  The nationals with their journalists and photographers, broadsheet and tabloid, calling her name, calling her names.  Morning television - shouldn't you be in school?  Ha, ha, ha.  Evening television - isn't it past your bedtime?  Ho, ho, ho.  The late news - 'And Finally'.  As she stood in front of the world's media (raven coloured pigtails, thick-rimmed glasses, flowered patterned dress, desperately wishing she were elsewhere), she was made to accept a lucky charm in the form of a two-and-a-half foot high stuffed lion.  It came from some crone-witch of a politician who had long been deluded into thinking she photographed well with jingoistic symbols.  Serena mentally declared that she would like to progress from being eleven years old in body and to stop being an oddity in other’s minds.

     She tried to ignore the plaudits.  And the envy.  Some academics hinted that they thought she'd done her best research aged fifteen.  Others were honest enough to admit they were jealous of the grants she attracted.  At seventeen, burnout was predicted; at nineteen, out-flanked and confused professors mooted suicide as a career move.  Perhaps sex would drag her down?  Did she know what it was yet?  That was the one personal insult she found difficult to ignore.  It always made her blush.  And squirm.

     When it came to everything else though, she began to fool them all.  As an apparent aside to her work, she produced a series of mathematics texts for children that had become de rigueur in classrooms across the country, mainly because she used examples that the children could understand from within their world.  They found learning fun.  The publication of the books annoyed and astounded the other academics.  They used every opportunity to remind Serena of how she used to be herself as a child.  Had she been exposed to the adult side of life yet?

    The lion had lasted five years past her nineteenth birthday, but those nerdy glasses, skirt and pigtails had long gone.  That was a satisfaction.

     And she knew she still hadn't demonstrated the full extent of her genius.

     Today will prove that and nothing, but nothing, will stop her from becoming the person she wants to be.

    Odysseus had worked.

    Odysseus had worked.

    Serena stands still.  The stuffed lion is no longer stuffed.  Caliban is a formless mass of foam and floating motes.  Only his head remains in her hand.  In the space of only a few minutes, a once curious exhibit of childhood prodigy has been reduced to an object of minimal worth, and if she continues further it will completely vanish.

    An interesting physical state and metaphor for yourself, girl.

    As she rolls her shoulders and drags a lungful of air into her body, she catches sight of herself in her full-length mirror.

     Caliban’s not the only one that looks beat-up.

     Serena moves in closer for an inspection and tries to ignore the feeling that she is being watched.  She also wonders if her brother Alex was right and that her home could be bugged.

    Where would they put one?

    Her study is in the large upstairs room of her Victorian house just off from Queen's Road and The Fen Causeway near the centre of Cambridge.  The room had once been a studio for a relatively famous painter from the Thirties and consequently had been adapted to be filled with light.  The North wall of the room consists of floor to ceiling sliding windows.  These open onto a patio-balcony, itself being composed of a filigree wrought-iron fence in need of paint, a small octagonal pine table patterned with mug stains, a slated wooden deck-chair and half a dozen dead plants in terracotta pots.  This, in turn, overlooks the thicket of back garden with its small, untended forest of iris, forget-me-nots, lavender and islands of red-hot poker.  And, since the council felled a small, rotten oak in the park at the bottom of her garden a month ago, the balcony provides a view of the river Cam through the remaining trees and of the cream-coloured stone college buildings in the distance.

     Serena runs her free hand through her hair, wipes the run of tears from her cheeks and sniffs.

     You're okay girl.  You're okay.  You’re just tense and paranoid.

     The opposite wall to the view of Porterhouse, Queens and Kings, has two sash windows - both open, both wedged secure with candlesticks - overlooking the street.  From outside, normal, everyday life makes a muted call.  The sounds edge in and tickle the consciousness.  A group of students are still celebrating finishing their finals and preparing themselves for the forthcoming June May Ball (Serena likes the little oddities that university life throws up); there is a pop from another champagne bottle being sacrificed and laughter bubbles along with it.  The slow-moving traffic in Barton Road is a far sea of undulating rise and fall of pitch.  A wasp cannot make its mind up whether to fly into the room and bumps and buzzes the topmost frame of glass in one window.  Two sparrows squabble in the young ash tree leaning into the street from its station in the pavement - their prize a piece of crust from one of the many pies being sold from the vegetarian stall away down near the park.  In the gentle swirling summer air, the tangy aroma from the hot plate has drifted far and makes Serena lick her lips as she relishes her task.  She craves familiar smells.  Craves normality.

     It’s only the terror, girl, only terror.

     She sweeps her hand through her hair again, blinks away the remains of a last tear, sniffs one final time, pulls a grin and throws herself a hip and a pout into the mirror.  Her eyes appear to sparkle.

     Good.  You're looking good, girl.  Kiss-kiss.

     Serena knows her colleagues and students consider her to be a potential high-cheekboned, full-in-the-lip, cat-walk clone for a Paris fashion show (if she ever were to choose a different career); much to her blushing consternation.  But there are days when she likes the comparison.  And the delusion that she’d ever consider it as an option.

    Looking good.

    Fuller in the lips and hips than the waifs on the covers of the magazines perhaps, but there is nothing coy about the intelligent flash of determination in her eyes that blazes at the moment.  The childhood pigtails have been cut back to a shoulder length wave that curls into her neck, and the glasses are now rimless - circles of glass crimped to gold wires.  Her Pollyanna dress has become baggy black leather jeans, loose black cotton vest top, black silk bra and black silk knickers.  Those last two are her secret.  So is the inspiration behind a little metal comic-inspired anarchy badge - a capital V within a circle - clipped to the rear of her belt.

     Nah, I'm better than a stuffed toy.  I'm The Pocket Dynamo!

     She stares at Caliban's head in her hand.

     You poor boy.  Ha!

     Serena tilts her own head to one side, traps her tongue in the cool space between her top lip and her teeth, pulls at the lion's mane and it peels off in one go.  Dropping the bald decapitation and entrails, she wanders over to her desk, takes letters and notes from off a spike made from a pewter game figure (Chinese warrior pike-man meets cartoon designer), and grimaces as she rams the mass of woollen mane into place on his lance.  For a moment she thinks of Hercules and The Nemean Lion.  His first task.

     Nice paperweight.  And a nice way to mess with a hero’s life.

     Serena places her trophy on top of the envelopes and notes, and turns back to the board on the wall.  She picks up one of the chunky marker pens from the tray that runs the length of the board, contemplates her hieroglyphics that relate to Odysseus and taps her teeth with the end of the pen.  Serena has just tried, in earnest for the first time, the experimental equipment that resulted from her formulae and she has to saviour the moment.  It is a realisation of an idea, a fantastic conception, developed to conclusion from the form of symbols on a board, and conjured into the physical reality of a device she has named after one of her favourite, larger than life, Greek adventurers.  Odysseus and Serena - mind over matter.  She glances back at her trophy, her Nemean Lion.

     What if it was the first of the twelve?  Hercules’ twelve labours?  Will that save me from this mockery of a life?  Save my sanity?  Save him?  Or will this?

     She drums the board with her fingers and shivers.  The feeling of excitement still tingles in her hands, in the depth of her stomach, and it flutters in her groin and breasts.  She appraises the large size of the marker pen and rebukes herself.

    Naughty.

    Serena rubs her nose.  She can still smell the powder from the navy shells, still taste the salt from the sea and her tears, and can still feel the concussion hissing in her ears.  With a snap, she removes the cap from the pen, sticks the exposed end under her nostrils and takes a hit.  The chemical nip obscures, for a moment, some of the other smells that she knows she is always going to remember.  Gore has an awful texture.  It can remove the very essence of being.  But it could help her disappear from the success that was forced upon her.  As replaces the pen, she shudders.

 

Some distance away from her, a camera on a tripod clicks and another picture of her is taken.  The motor drive rushes the film onto the next frame and the camera is ready to be used again.  It is an expensive piece of equipment and the telephoto attachment is one of the most powerful available.  The person using the camera doesn’t need to, but he takes another photograph of the woman he sees through the lens.  Professor Serena Freeman has a lovely profile.

    But a lousy attitude to tidiness.

    He wonders if she knows she’s being watched.  Or listened to.

 

The room has everything Serena needs to do her work and everything she needs to ensure she can relax.  The latest PC is tucked away in one corner; the screen-saver showing Odysseus blinding the one-eyed Cyclops, there is a wall-full of books (text and ones of myths and legends) on shelves behind it and heaped on the floor.  Beside it is her full-length mirror, music stand and flute (a cluster of music scores are scattered with the books on the floor), hi-fi and CD tower, walnut writing bureau with its new paperweight and three mountains of papers, one of which consists of curling yellow post-it stick-on reminders.  Their infection is spreading outwards; a small glass vase that contains a silk imitation red rose has acquired three stickers already this afternoon.  The large white board, covered with equations, takes up most of the last wall and on the door, to one side of the board, is a Boris Vallejo poster of a hulk of a man with muscles instead of clothes and a warrior woman with a fantasy body.  She has even fewer garments than the man does.  Several plants, smaller living versions of the patio dwellers, struggle to do their thing in large pots either side of the door; each has a faded yellow sticker reading: Feed me!  It is a room that estate agents would describe as having possibilities.

    And in the middle of this room, moved from its normal position under the front windows, is a worn Seventies leather and chrome chaise-lounge with an additional, fearsome looking, headrest.

    Surrounding it on the exact points of a pentagon are five sentinels - football sized polished aluminium spheres constructed of thirty-four interlocking triangular surfaces, encased with a fine copper mesh - each on a two foot high tripod.  Every box is connected to another with a daisy-chained multiway electric data cable, and all the units are emitting a low hum.  The sort of oscillation that high-voltage power cables emit.  But there is also a slow, underlying, resonant beat that they produce in sympathy with each other; something that would not be heard coming from high-voltage cables.  The multiway runs off to a skirting board and, after disappearing behind the shelves of books, finally connects the system to the PC.

    This is Odysseus.

    On the chaise-lounge itself, in direct contrast to the technologically brushed metal finish and polish, is a red cotton bean bag with cross-stitched Greek figures and next to that is a turquoise coloured and gold banded fountain pen.

    Serena bends down to the units in turn and flicks a chrome lever switch on each.  It gives her something to do.  She is putting off the inevitable.  The resonant beat alters - rapid, slower - as the hum from each box ceases to contribute, and the low noise stops with the last switch flicked.  Now there is only the murmur of Cambridge through the open windows.  She picks up the fountain pen, taps it against her teeth and closes her eyes.  She thinks of her hero Odysseus and his ten-year voyage after his defeat of Troy using the Trojan Horse.  A long-suffering traveller whose adventures with all manner of fantastic beasts and mythical people was caused by a disagreement with the god called Poseidon.  There was also the fact of Odysseus’ love of his wife.  That was something else to consider.  The romance.  It seems so appropriate.  She then thinks about her own strange voyage that she has just experienced.  Her body jolts at the memory.

    As a harbinger of what was about to happen, it was completely wrong.  The ocean was calm (a slow, rise and fall of Pacific swell the only indication of movement), while above the waiting hordes of assault craft, the isolated clouds were thin and transparent.  The colours were too close to her expectations of tropical paradise to suggest that anything could disturb the peace.  Vibrant Prussian Blue indicated the deeper ocean, while the coral that lay only feet below the surface near the shore of the island, caused the sea to shimmer abalone mother-of-pearl.  The sky was cobalt.  The blue of the ocean and sky met at the horizon as a sharp line and the sun rose fast above it.  It was raising the temperate and increasing anticipation the higher it climbed.

    Even that early in the day, there was too much warmth.  There was nowhere for anyone to escape the heat.  And nowhere to escape the experience of calm disappearing.  At a preordained time, loud noise shattered and annihilated it.  In the sky, new, thick clouds were spontaneously formed from substances other than rainwater.  The navy had opened fire.

     Inside the yawing landing vehicle, which seemed to be an amphibious tractor or tank to Serena's eyes, the huddle of marines tensed as they rode the Pacific swell in towards a point on the island.  The bow wave washed in over the sides, the rotating tracks churned the water underneath into froth, and the men watched as the shelling from the destroyers began to move up the beaches and into the jungle beyond.  Above them, the air was being ripped apart with gunfire from the large guns on the supporting ships.  It was a cacophony that made Serena want to shrink into a ball and wrap hands and arms around her head.  But she couldn’t.  Planes added their screeches as they rushed in from the horizon and strafed and dropped bombs.  The unfettered diesel exhausts of the floating tractors belched and coughed as their pilots increased their vehicles to full speed.  The violence of noise around the craft was tremendous.  Only the men were quiet.  The beach was fast approaching.

    The man whose senses Serena had experienced all this through, less than a quarter of an hour ago, hiked his gun over his shoulder and adjusted the position of his camera as he tried to take photographs each time another round from a destroyer hurtled overhead.  To Serena, it seemed each naval gun from each ship was going berserk.  Multitudes of shock waves punched the air.  Men threw up.  One man - no, a boy, even Serena could see that - had wet himself.  A sergeant had his hand on the boy's shoulder.  Serena thought the sergeant didn't looked much older than the marine he was giving support to.  She could not understand how most of the marines were so calm.

    Didn’t they have any conception of what was about to happen?

    Serena didn’t think that it was like the Hollywood ethos of John Wayne.  It wasn’t even the realism of Saving Private Ryan.  Spielberg may have got it about right in the eyes of the men that were there at Normandy, but this attack on Guam was no film, it was happening, she was there.  And the thing that amazed her, the thing she could not work out, was how anyone could have been persuaded to take such a risk.  She had delved into the history of the man she had been within, and there had been no indication that such a creative mind would have been able to ignore what he must have imagined beforehand.  Yet there he was.  Doing his duty.  It was crazy.  Where did he keep his fear?

    The planes dived down from the heavens again and guns from the enemy on the beach returned fire.  The lead plane exploded.  The fiery pieces carried on, splashing into the surf and crashing into the palm trees.  There was nowhere to look.  She couldn’t avoid the utter carnage that was unfolding.  Several vehicles, identical to the one she was in, were now on fire.  They were floating infernos, but still moving forward.  Men were trying to climb out.  The craft beside the one she was in took a direct hit.  She watched men disintegrate.  One moment they had been living, presumably thinking about what they had to do as they had been trained to, thinking about their loved ones, feeling their hearts pound within their chests, then they were no more.  It was no Hollywood invention.  It was no potential special-effects Oscar.  The marines left in the landing vehicles that were on fire screamed.

    A bullet slapped the side of the photographer’s helmet and, for a moment, Serena was aware that he was temporarily stunned into unconsciousness.  He staggered and gripped the side of the vehicle.  Serena found her voice.

    This is impossible!  No one can survive this!

    The landing vehicle thrashed itself onto the beach.

    They’re going to die!

    The men jumped ashore.

    No!  No!  Stop!  Please stop!

    Serena shouted out in terror.  The man stopped, paused, looked around.

    Boom!

    Shrapnel and fire from some weapon ricocheted and erupted in the place the man would have been if he had not stopped.  He would have been killed.  She was sure of it.  So, it appeared to her, was he.

     Serena stopped remembering.

     Too late.

     W Day.  0802.

     The smell.  The sights.  A sudden thirty or forty seconds of incoherent jabbering to him about Hercules and about how much he reminds her of the legend.  Just at the moment he needed all his faculties.  And because, at that moment, she had a sudden need to keep him alive.  She thought he was a hero.  If he died there’d be no point for having heroes anymore, and then who would save the world?

     God to hell, I hope I didn't influence him.  Have I altered the present?  Oh, dear God, what have I done?  How can I correct it?

     Serena shivers and closes her eyes for a moment.  She tries to ignore the tinnitus in her ears.  But out of the memories comes an adrenaline rush of another source.  The excitement of what she has accomplished, what she has done, hits her again.  She gives a little squeak and, for no reason that she can think of, jogs on the spot.  At speed.  The desire to be reckless, to show she is alive, makes her to toss her head back and shout.  She has to do something with her excitement.  She has invented something amazing.  She runs to a front window of her room, thrusts her head outside and shouts, "Eureka!"

     The students outside pause in their celebrations and then cheer, causing the sparrows to scatter.

     Serena laughs.

     It’s so good to be alive.

 

Half a mile away, in a small upstairs box-room, a young man takes another photograph.  He is still new to the job and he wants to make a good impression with his superiors.  The removal of the old rotten oak in the park, by a team on loan from A1 in operations of MI5 disguised as council workmen, has provided excellent visual access to Professor Serena Freeman's study.  He turns down the volume of the hidden microphone in her room for a moment as she shouts again and again.  The young man, not much older in fact than Serena, has been watching and listening to everything that has occurred in the room over the last four hours and he bites his lower lip.  Someone, somewhere in F7, is going to be interested in what he has to report.  It has either been a breakthrough or a breakdown.

    As he contemplates her easy pirouettes as she dances around her room, the young man remembers his brief and bends back to sweep the telephoto lens to the board.  He notes what Serena has written on it: The Mathematics of Time.  As he squints through the lens, he wonders if the idea behind the words were what prompted the murder of a toy.  Then he sees that Serena has stood back from the board and is rubbing her nipples.  Her secret spy becomes voyeur and he smiles to himself.  The young man hopes he will be ordered to continue with this operation and wonders if she has any idea of the magnitude of interest that will be unleashed when he makes his report.  Or the danger.

 

"Jon George mixes quantum physics and time travel with a frighteningly realistic depiction of World War 11."
John Jarrold - SFX magazine

"Jon George has made a crashing entrance with his debut novel ... securing what I believe will be a devoted fan base and his place among great Science Fiction authors ... the whole book is an outstanding accomplishment in writing ... an almost unnerving knack of actually transporting the reader to the places he describes ... I would heartily recommend this book to men and women alike because the mood he creates is compelling and hard to pull away from ... Jon George has a way of getting under your skin ... a page turner in the best sense ... It will make any reader think about the subject matter of war and how its affects changes people for better or worse and I believe any book that manages to do that deserves huge recognition ... I expect this won't be his last phenomenal literary outing he has to offer."
Donna Jones - SF Crowsnest

"Faces of mist and Flame is a fascinating concoction, simultaneously very weird and very normal, mundane and magical, sweet and ugly ... being able to write well counts for a lot ... lots of well-written action-oriented prose and some very enjoyable characters in unexpected places."
Rick Kleffel - The Agony Column

"War and heroics and politics and the doing of science - Jon George's debut novel is far better at all of this than might be guessed from from its title."
Roz Kaveney - Time Out

"The main thrust ... is a gritty and realistic story about the American re-capture of Guam during WW11 ... fascinating to watch unfold."
Cheryl Morgan - The Emerald City

"... so refreshing ... A different take on a classic piece of sci-fi writing that also merges ancient myths ... For this the author must be congratulated ... will make Jon George a name to watch."
Gareth Wilson - Falcata Times 

"It mixes ... Sci-Fi, a nicely humorous account of the mythical labours and the out-and-out Horror of combat to enthralling effect."
Anthony Brown - Starburst 

"It blew my mind."
Don McNeil - Cognitive Behavioural Therapist

"It'll probably be okay."
Clinton - barman, The Royal Oak, 26.5.04