Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by James Tiptree Jr.

  “No planes today.”

  “Oh, good morning, Don. Should we look at that cut now?”

  “It’s minimal.” In fact the skin is hardly broken, and no deep puncture. Totally out of proportion to the havoc inside.

  “Well, they have water to drink,” Ruth says tranquilly. “Maybe those hunters will come back. I’ll go see if we have a fish—that is, can I help you in any way, Don?”

  Very tactful. I emit an ungracious negative, and she goes off about her private concerns.

  They certainly are private, too; when I recover from my own sanitary efforts, she’s still away. Finally I hear splashing.

  “It’s a big fish!” More splashing. Then she climbs up the bank with a three-pound mangrove snapper—and something else.

  It isn’t until after the messy work of filleting the fish that I begin to notice.

  She’s making a smudge of chaff and twigs to singe the fillets, small hands very quick, tension in that female upper lip. The rain has eased off for the moment; we’re sluicing wet but warm enough. Ruth brings me my fish on a mangrove skewer and sits back on her heels with an odd breathy sigh.

  “Aren’t you joining me?”

  “Oh, of course.” She gets a strip and picks at it, saying quickly, “We either have too much salt or too little, don’t we? I should fetch some brine.” Her eyes are roving from nothing to noplace.

  “Good thought.” I hear another sigh and decide the girl scouts need an assist. “Your daughter mentioned you’ve come from Mérida. Have you seen much of Mexico?”

  “Not really. Last year we went to Mazatlán and Cuernavaca. . . .” She puts the fish down, frowning.

  “And you’re going to see Tikal. Going to Bonampak too?”

  “No.” Suddenly she jumps up brushing rain off her face. “I’ll bring you some water, Don.”

  She ducks down the slide, and after a fair while comes back with a full bromel stalk.

  “Thanks.” She’s standing above me, staring restlessly round the horizon.

  “Ruth, I hate to say it, but those guys are not coming back and it’s probably just as well. Whatever they were up to, we looked like trouble. The most they’ll do is tell someone we’re here. That’ll take a day or two to get around, we’ll be back at the plane by then.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Don.” She wanders over to the smudge fire.

  “And quit fretting about your daughter. She’s a big girl.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Althea’s all right. . . . They have plenty of water now.” Her fingers drum on her thigh. It’s raining again.

  “Come on, Ruth. Sit down. Tell me about Althea. Is she still in college?”

  She gives that sighing little laugh and sits. “Althea got her degree last year. She’s in computer programming.”

  “Good for her. And what about you, what do you do in GSA records?”

  “I’m in Foreign Procurement Archives.” She smiles mechanically, but her breathing is shallow. “It’s very interesting.”

  “I know a Jack Wittig in Contracts, maybe you know him?”

  It sounds pretty absurd, there in the ’gator slide.

  “Oh, I’ve met Mr. Wittig. I’m sure he wouldn’t remember me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not very memorable.”

  Her voice is factual. She’s perfectly right, of course. Who was that woman, Mrs. Jannings, Janny, who coped with my per diem for years? Competent, agreeable, impersonal. She had a sick father or something. But dammit, Ruth is a lot younger and better-looking. Comparatively speaking.

  “Maybe Mrs. Parsons doesn’t want to be memorable.”

  She makes a vague sound, and I suddenly realize Ruth isn’t listening to me at all. Her hands are clenched around her knees, she’s staring inland at the ruin.

  “Ruth, I tell you our friends with the light are in the next county by now. Forget it, we don’t need them.”

  Her eyes come back to me as if she’d forgotten I was there, and she nods slowly. It seems to be too much effort to speak. Suddenly she cocks her head and jumps up again.

  “I’ll go look at the line, Don. I thought I heard something—” She’s gone like a rabbit.

  While she’s away I try getting up onto my good leg and the staff. The pain is sickening; knees seem to have some kind of hot line to the stomach. I take a couple of hops to test whether the Demerol I have in my belt would get me walking. As I do so, Ruth comes up the bank with a fish flapping in her hands.

  “Oh, no, Don! No!” She actually clasps the snapper to her breast.

  “The water will take some of my weight. I’d like to give it a try.”

  “You mustn’t!” Ruth says quite violently and instantly modulates down. “Look at the bay, Don. One can’t see a thing.”

  I teeter there, tasting bile and looking at the mingled curtains of sun and rain driving across the water. She’s right, thank god. Even with two good legs we could get into trouble out there.

  “I guess one more night won’t kill us.”

  I let her collapse me back onto the gritty plastic, and she positively bustles around, finding me a chunk to lean on, stretching the serape on both staffs to keep rain off me, bringing another drink, grubbing for dry tinder.

  “I’ll make us a real bonfire as soon as it lets up, Don. They’ll see our smoke, they’ll know we’re all right. We just have to wait.” Cheery smile. “Is there any way we can make you more comfortable?”

  Holy Saint Sterculius: playing house in a mud puddle. For a fatuous moment I wonder if Mrs. Parsons has designs on me. And then she lets out another sigh and sinks back onto her heels with that listening look. Unconsciously her rump wiggles a little. My ear picks up the operative word: wait.

  Ruth Parsons is waiting. In fact, she acts as if she’s waiting so hard it’s killing her. For what? For someone to get us out of here, what else? . . . But why was she so horrified when I got up to try to leave? Why all this tension?

  My paranoia stirs. I grab it by the collar and start idly checking back. Up to when whoever it was showed up last night, Mrs. Parsons was, I guess, normal. Calm and sensible, anyway. Now she’s humming like a high wire. And she seems to want to stay here and wait. Just as an intellectual pastime, why?

  Could she have intended to come here? No way. Where she planned to be was Chetumal, which is on the border. Come to think, Chetumal is an odd way round to Tikal. Let’s say the scenario was that she’s meeting somebody in Chetumal. Somebody who’s part of an organization. So now her contact in Chetumal knows she’s overdue. And when those types appeared last night, something suggests to her that they’re part of the same organization. And she hopes they’ll put one and one together and come back for her?

  “May I have the knife, Don? I’ll clean the fish.”

  Rather slowly I pass the knife, kicking my subconscious. Such a decent ordinary little woman, a good girl scout. My trouble is that I’ve bumped into too many professional agilities under the careful stereotypes. I’m not very memorable. . . .

  What’s in Foreign Procurement Archives? Wittig handles classified contracts. Lots of money stuff; foreign currency negotiations, commodity price schedules, some industrial technology. Or—just as a hypothesis—it could be as simple as a wad of bills back in that modest beige Ventura, to be exchanged for a packet from, say, Costa Rica. If she were a courier, they’d want to get at the plane. And then what about me and maybe Estéban? Even hypothetically, not good.

  I watch her hacking at the fish, forehead knotted with effort, teeth in her lip. Mrs. Ruth Parsons of Bethesda, this thrumming, private woman. How crazy can I get? They’ll see our smoke. . . .

  “Here’s your knife, Don. I washed it. Does the leg hurt very badly?”

  I blink away the fantasies and see a scared little woman in a mangrove swamp.

  “Sit down, rest. You’ve been going all out.”

  She sits obediently, like a kid in a dentist chair.

  “You’re stewing about Althea. And she’s probab
ly worried about you. We’ll get back tomorrow under our own steam, Ruth.”

  “Honestly I’m not worried at all, Don.” The smile fades; she nibbles her lip, frowning out at the bay.

  “You know, Ruth, you surprised me when you offered to come along. Not that I don’t appreciate it. But I rather thought you’d be concerned about leaving Althea alone with our good pilot. Or was it only me?”

  This gets her attention at last.

  “I believe Captain Estéban is a very fine type of man.”

  The words surprise me a little. Isn’t the correct line more like “I trust Althea,” or even, indignantly, “Althea is a good girl”?

  “He’s a man. Althea seemed to think he was interesting.”

  She goes on staring at the bay. And then I notice her tongue flick out and lick that prehensile upper lip. There’s a flush that isn’t sunburn around her ears and throat too, and one hand is gently rubbing her thigh. What’s she seeing, out there in the flats?

  Oho.

  Captain Estéban’s mahogany arms clasping Miss Althea Parsons’s pearly body. Captain Estéban’s archaic nostrils snuffling in Miss Parsons’s tender neck. Captain Estéban’s copper buttocks pumping into Althea’s creamy upturned bottom. . . . The hammock, very bouncy. Mayas know all about it.

  Well, well. So Mother Hen has her little quirks.

  I feel fairly silly and more than a little irritated. Now I find out. . . . But even vicarious lust has much to recommend it, here in the mud and rain. I settle back, recalling that Miss Althea the computer programmer had waved good-bye very composedly. Was she sending her mother to flounder across the bay with me so she can get programmed in Maya? The memory of Honduran mahogany logs drifting in and out of the opalescent sand comes to me. Just as I am about to suggest that Mrs. Parsons might care to share my rain shelter, she remarks serenely, “The Mayas seem to be a very fine type of people. I believe you said so to Althea.”

  The implications fall on me with the rain. Type. As in breeding, bloodline, sire. Am I supposed to have certified Estéban not only as a stud but as a genetic donor?

  “Ruth, are you telling me you’re prepared to accept a half-Indian grandchild?”

  “Why, Don, that’s up to Althea, you know.”

  Looking at the mother, I guess it is. Oh, for mahogany gonads.

  Ruth has gone back to listening to the wind, but I’m not about to let her off that easy. Not after all that noli me tangere jazz.

  “What will Althea’s father think?”

  Her face snaps around at me, genuinely startled.

  “Althea’s father?” Complicated semismile. “He won’t mind.”

  “He’ll accept it too, eh?” I see her shake her head as if a fly were bothering her, and add with a cripple’s malice: “Your husband must be a very fine type of a man.”

  Ruth looks at me, pushing her wet hair back abruptly. I have the impression that mousy Mrs. Parsons is roaring out of control, but her voice is quiet.

  “There isn’t any Mr. Parsons, Don. There never was. Althea’s father was a Danish medical student. . . . I believe he has gained considerable prominence.”

  “Oh.” Something warns me not to say I’m sorry. “You mean he doesn’t know about Althea?”

  “No.” She smiles, her eyes bright and cuckoo.

  “Seems like rather a rough deal for her.”

  “I grew up quite happily under the same circumstances.” Bang, I’m dead. Well, well, well. A mad image blooms in my mind: generations of solitary Parsons women selecting sires, making impregnation trips. Well, I hear the world is moving their way.

  “I better look at the fish line.”

  She leaves. The glow fades. No. Just no, no contact. Goodbye, Captain Estéban. My leg is very uncomfortable. The hell with Mrs. Parsons’s long-distance orgasm.

  We don’t talk much after that, which seems to suit Ruth. The odd day drags by. Squall after squall blows over us. Ruth singes up some more fillets, but the rain drowns her smudge; it seems to pour hardest just as the sun’s about to show.

  Finally she comes to sit under my sagging serape, but there’s no warmth there. I doze, aware of her getting up now and then to look around. My subconscious notes that she’s still twitchy. I tell my subconscious to knock it off.

  Presently I wake up to find her penciling on the water-soaked pages of a little notepad.

  “What’s that, a shopping list for alligators?”

  Automatic polite laugh. “Oh, just an address. In case we—I’m being silly, Don.”

  “Hey,” I sit up, wincing. “Ruth, quit fretting. I mean it. We’ll all be out of this soon. You’ll have a great story to tell.”

  She doesn’t look up. “Yes . . . I guess we will.”

  “Come on, we’re doing fine. There isn’t any real danger here, you know. Unless you’re allergic to fish?”

  Another good-little-girl laugh, but there’s a shiver in it.

  “Sometimes I think I’d like to go . . . really far away.”

  To keep her talking I say the first thing in my head.

  “Tell me, Ruth. I’m curious why you would settle for that kind of lonely life, there in Washington? I mean, a woman like you—”

  “Should get married?” She gives a shaky sigh, pushing the notebook back in her wet pocket.

  “Why not? It’s the normal source of companionship. Don’t tell me you’re trying to be some kind of professional man-hater.”

  “Lesbian, you mean?” Her laugh sounds better. “With my security rating? No, I’m not.”

  “Well, then. Whatever trauma you went through, these things don’t last forever. You can’t hate all men.”

  The smile is back. “Oh, there wasn’t any trauma, Don, and I don’t hate men. That would be as silly as—as hating the weather.” She glances wryly at the blowing rain.

  “I think you have a grudge. You’re even spooky of me.”

  Smooth as a mouse bite she says, “I’d love to hear about your family, Don?”

  Touché. I give her the edited version of how I don’t have one anymore, and she says she’s sorry, how sad. And we chat about what a good life a single person really has, and how she and her friends enjoy plays and concerts and travel, and one of them is head cashier for Ringling Brothers, how about that?

  But it’s coming out jerkier and jerkier like a bad tape, with her eyes going round the horizon in the pauses and her face listening for something that isn’t my voice. What’s wrong with her? Well, what’s wrong with any furtively unconventional middle-aged woman with an empty bed? And a security clearance. An old habit of mind remarks unkindly that Mrs. Parsons represents what is known as the classic penetration target.

  “—so much more opportunity now.” Her voice trails off.

  “Hurrah for women’s lib, eh?”

  “The lib?” Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. “Oh, that’s doomed.”

  The apocalyptic word jars my attention.

  “What do you mean, doomed?”

  She glances at me as if I weren’t hanging straight either and says vaguely, “Oh . . .”

  “Come on, why doomed? Didn’t they get that equal rights bill?”

  Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different.

  “Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We’ll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You’ll see.”

  Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons.

  “Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch.”

  No answering smile.

  “That’s fantasy.” Her voice is
still quiet. “Women don’t work that way. We’re a—a toothless world.” She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. “What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.”

  “Sounds like a guerrilla operation.” I’m not really joking, here in the ’gator den. In fact, I’m wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs.

  “Guerrillas have something to hope for.” Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. “Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City.”

  I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one.

  “Men and women aren’t different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do.”

  “Do they?” Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be “My Lai” and looks away. “All the endless wars . . .” Her voice is a whisper. “All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we’re just part of the battlefield. It’ll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—” She checks and abruptly changes voice. “Forgive me, Don, it’s so stupid saying all this.”

  “Men hate wars too, Ruth,” I say as gently as I can.

  “I know.” She shrugs and climbs to her feet. “But that’s your problem, isn’t it?”

  End of communication. Mrs. Ruth Parsons isn’t even living in the same world with me.

  I watch her move around restlessly, head turning toward the ruins. Alienation like that can add up to dead pigeons, which would be GSA’s problem. It could also lead to believing some joker who’s promising to change the whole world. Which could just probably be my problem if one of them was over in that camp last night, where she keeps looking. Guerrillas have something to hope for . . . ?

  Nonsense. I try another position and see that the sky seems to be clearing as the sun sets. The wind is quieting down at last too. Insane to think this little woman is acting out some fantasy in this swamp. But that equipment last night was no fantasy; if those lads have some connection with her, I’ll be in the way. You couldn’t find a handier spot to dispose of the body. . . . Maybe some Guévarista is a fine type of man?