[357] And it's a good thing he did, because if he'd flagged it as an independent quarian ship in its own right, Tali would have to go through her adult life as "Tali'Shukra vas 25 or 6 to 4".

[420] It occurred to me while I was writing this scene that "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it" doesn't make sense as something a quarian would say, because to them a bridge is the little room up top where you fly the ship. You can't cross it, it's a dead end, corridor-wise.

Okay, I promised in the annotations for The Crying of Lot 490 that I'd explain about the title, so now that you've read the story, here's the story:

Long, long ago, when I first started writing what eventually became Scrapheap City Shuffle, its working title was Starcrossed, because my plan, insofar as I had one, was that that story was going to unfold... well, rather like this one did, actually. I had in mind that it was going to be a tragic love story, in which a younger, less bitter and more shell-shocked Gryphon (it was 2290, a mere two years after Sonset) met an amnesiac cyborg on a planet of junk and, with the common ground that they were both sort of cosmic discards, they'd fall slowly in love over the months he spent hiding among the scrap and rebuilding his Valkyrie. Of course, they wouldn't be able to do anything physical, on account of her body being, well, mechanical, but I figured that would only put an edge on things. And then - presumably just as she got around to devising some way of working around that problem and they were, perhaps unknown to him, on the verge of being able to move to the next level, Kei would show up and ruin the whole thing.

As the project went on, though, that tack just didn't work. Starcrossed ended up hanging fire for a decade or more because it kept hanging fire on that point. However I tilted the screen and shook, Gally and Gryphon were just not that kind of couple together. They were great friends, and they were capable of working together to form one terrifying engine of mayhem under the right circumstances (which sadly did not arise on screen, though we saw echoes of it in what he and Sumire did to the Javkiels in Aegis Florea 2), but they just didn't click as the poles of a romance, doomed or not. When I eventually faced up to this, it all unfolded much more smoothly, Skuld got involved, and we ended up with a nice little early-Exile actioner and the basis for Alita Ironheart to appear as a Valkyrie in FI. (Scrapheap City is flagged as part one of a series, but I should probably fix that; it works oddly well as a stand-alone piece, leaving its ultimate ending to the reader's imagination.) And, since the love story plot went almost entirely out the window, the title no longer made sense, which is why it ended up being called Scrapheap City Shuffle instead. (I think the "Shuffle" part was inspired by Cowboy Bebop's episode titling style.)

Fast-forward to, well, last month, when - more or less on a whim - I dusted off the old Lot 490 fragment and set to wondering if I could make something useful out of it. Now, here I had just the opposite notion in mind. Of course, since it was an Exile story, I knew it wasn't going to have a happy ending, but I didn't want to waste everyone's time, including my own, with yet another pointless festival of angst and revenge. Perhaps a nice light fugitive caper story was in order. What G says his plan was, in The Purest Form of Democracy? That's pretty much what I had in mind - that he'd rescue a young quarian from peril, they'd have a wild adventure, and then she'd be on her way with a great story to tell and no permanent consequences, and he'd be off to, well, end up in a parallel universe. She'd be an ancestor of Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, who would appear in Future Imperfect as an aspirant IPO member, having heard the story from her grandmother of the great adventure she had "when I was about your age" and decided that she wanted a piece of that action for her own pilgrimage.

Except that as I got into it, the story just wasn't unfolding that way. In fact, though I didn't realize it until I was almost finished, it was basically following the plan I'd once had for what became Scrapheap City - right down to the impossibility, or at least inadvisability, of the protagonists' getting up to anything physical together. For most of the story, they can't even eat the same food, or eat in the same room, much less make the beast with two backs. Which was oddly refreshing, because it opened up whole new ways for me to have them show their growing affection - sort of smoothed the curve their relationship followed, as it were. (As Wedge said during the peer-review process, "It's just that we've seen Gryph get an awful lot of play over the years.")

When I realized that the shape the A-plot was taking was familiar, well, there was only one thing I could call it. I hyphenated it in order to set it apart from the old working title for Scrapheap, but in a lot of ways, Star-Crossed is the story I was trying to make Scrapheap be for most of the time it was unfinished. Why did it work with Tali when it didn't work with Gally? Why did it work in 2356 and not in 2290? Dunno, really, but I can speculate.

Maybe Gryphon was (literarily speaking) ready to be part of such a story then, and not before. When we see him at the beginning of Star-Crossed, he's been on the run for 67 years. He's been chased out of Mega Tokyo, Cheltopolis, Olympus, Ishiyama, and who knows how many other ports of call besides. He's grown bitter and jaded, so much so that he can successfully play the villain well enough to attend a criminal auction as the Butcher and get out alive (if not entirely unmolested). He can no longer tell whether what he really wants to find is justice, revenge, or just someplace to lay his weary head to rest and cry no more.

He's not even really sure who he is any longer, but he's pretty sure that whoever he is, it's not anybody very nice. He abandoned Reika on New Japan (still the nadir of his personal history if you ask me); he and Sumire passed within an inch or two of each other one foggy night on Ishiyama, but never made the connection (which was just as well for professional reasons). Maybe his capacity for that kind of thing has just been burned out of him by life.

Besides, things have a habit of blowing up around him. He has his own personal angel of death who's constantly on his trail, willing to kill anybody who takes his side. It wouldn't be safe for anyone to get close to him even if they were inclined to, and it would be a hard, hard life for anyone who tried. He's damaged goods and an actuarial nightmare. Life with him is a bet that nobody would take, except possibly a machine intelligence with a questionable grasp of the risk/reward principle, and machine intelligences are notoriously poor at spending lazy afternoons cuddling on the couch.

And then, quite by accident, along comes a young woman who is quite well aware of all that, regards the situation with her eyes wide open... and chooses him anyway. She's what our French friends call tout le paquet*: a brilliant technical mind, a dry, slightly dark wit, a fantastic capacity for loyalty (giving and receiving), and the heart of a lion, all wrapped up in, let's face it, a pretty high-class chassis. So he can't see her face. There are worse things. The man's 382 years old. If he hasn't learned by then that there's more to life than Tab A and Slot B, he has bigger problems than the Exile.

(Mind you, A->B is nice, don't get me wrong. But it's not a reason to opt for or against everything else.)

Ahem. Anyway. Without her brief but incandescent cometary trajectory through his life, I doubt he'd have been in position to do what he did with himself once he arrived in the Split Infinitive universe. Here is the place he told her he wished he could find. The place where a man can catch his breath. And without that, would anything like Manhunt ever have happened?

Well, maybe. Part of me is sad that I'll never get the chance to develop the wild adventures they didn't get to have as the galaxy's most wanted cross-species couple, the Butcher of Musashi and his quarian moll, as I'm sure the galaxy at large would have perceived them. That would have been good times. Under the right circumstances, I could see them attracting a few of the survivors of the Normandy crew to their banner and, after much difficulty and many madcap capers, forcing a different but equally valid conclusion to the Exile. And if I were doing the UF universe in chronological order, that's probably where I'd go with this. Crossroads and all of Future Imperfect would be incredibly, almost totally, different.

But I'm not doing the UF universe in chronological order, and I can't chuck out three-quarters of the canon now. Hell, if I could do that, Tali'Zorah would probably be the original bass player in the Art of Noise, and where would that leave poor Moose MacEchearn?

And anyway, they'll meet again. It's inevitable. It'd be more than a little weird if it hadn't already happened, actually; the man's been back from Manhunt for 30 years by the Symphony No. 5 era, and most of that time he's been in the White Pages.

Anyway, little insight into the creative process there; it sort of turned into a ramble about characters' destiny and might just be a bunch of pseudophilosophical crap, but there it is, for whatever you think it's worth. Fifteen years ago I set out to write a love story and failed; a month ago I set out to write a wacky adventure and got a love story instead. Go figure that...

--G.

* "the total package"