Free Letters to Jenny by Piers Anthony Page A

get pain, I have half a notion how that is. Some years back, when I was doing more strenuous exercises than I do now, my right arm started hurting, especially when I moved it, and it got to the point where it was getting hard for me even to type on the computer keyboard. So I saw the doctor, and it turned out to be tenonitis, or inflammation of the nerve. Not a life—threatening ailment, and it doesn’t sound like much, but if I moved my arm suddenly I could just about faint from the surge of pain. It was a job sleeping at night, because when I rolled over, the pain jerked me awake. Medicine didn’t help. Finally the doctor gave me a shot of Novocain in the nerve. That wasn’t a nerve block, and it didn’t make the pain go away, but it did reverse its course, so that in the following months I was able, slowly, to reach farther before the pain started. About the time my right arm got better, it started in the left arm. This time medicine helped, but it still reversed grudgingly. All told, it was about two and a half years from start to finish, and it wiped out all my arm exercises. I had done as many as fifty chins on my study beam, and a lot of Japanese pushups, and I had muscles on my arms. All gone now. Running is the only exercise I maintained. But in the course of this, I learned that pain was not necessarily bad. I found that when I knew exactly what caused it, and how to avoid it, and could control it by reaching only as far as I cared to tolerate the level of pain, I could get along with it. I get the feeling that you suffer pain, and you don’t want to make a scene about it and get everyone all up in a heaval, so you just tolerate it. Sometimes the pain is better than the shot in the nerve. Okay.
    Your mother got tired of waiting for me to forward the “Curtis” comic strip, so had them run it in your local paper. Okay, I’ll just enclose the ones I had already cut out, plus a cartoon about the unpleasantness of having a shot in a nerve or wherever. Tell her that Adept #6,
Unicorn Point
, is already out, in hardcover; if she makes the library ignore the bad reviews and stock it, she can read it. And I didn’t mean to make trouble for you with that Mary and Ann problem; I can give you the formula to solve it, if—you say not to bother? Well, it’s no trouble, really. Uh, okay, I’ll drop it.
    Mayhem 12, 1989
    Dear Jenny
,
    Remember when I said I didn’t think your picture illustrated the flower story? Ouch! Five lashes with a wet noodle. When I got into it to adapt it I saw my mistake: I was thinking of Lily, not her mother, and the picture was of her mother. Anyway, I did the scene, and have printed it out for you. But don’t go straight to it; let me explain the background first.
    Che Centaur, the winged foal, is. captive in Goblin Mountain. Jenny and Sammy go with him, voluntarily, because Jenny feels the foal needs company. They meet Gwendolyn Goblin, the daughter of Godiva Goblin, who turns out to be a rather nice twelve year old girl. The reason Godiva wanted a centaur companion for her was to help her get about and to see things, because she is a bit lame and so nearsighted that everything farther than a foot or two away is a blur. Jenny’s problem was solved by her spectacles, but Gwenny’s problem can’t be solved that way, so she really does need help. She has a chance to be the first female chief of the goblins—a chiefess—who can make the goblins behave much better, but if any of them learn about her sight problem, they will kill her and put in a male instead, and things will be as brutish as they have always been with goblins. So Godiva really does have good reason for what she has done: only a centaur can work so well with Gwenny that the goblins will be fooled, and she can rule. That’s part of the larger problem in this novel: Jenny and Che have agreed not to tell, because if they do, Gwenny will die, and she really doesn’t deserve that. But can Che agree to be prisoner of the