Meet Me at Infinity

by James Tiptree Jr.

  All right, Face. Face it. We could be insane. Do we really believe somebody’s reading twice?

  Do I read twice?

  Hmmm. Wellllll… no. Be honest, I don’t, at least not read all the way through again. Not right away. What I do with one I like is immediately turn back and investigate chunks and bits, places where a sort of rich puzzlement set in. (I know this means something, but what?) Or I verify suspicions which in the light of the ending become delightful certainties, Oho, now I really dig it… wow! At the very least, since you can easily get me to admit I have good short-term recall—like most of you reading this, I’d guess—I brood. (Also criticized in traffic.)

  No, I don’t read twice. But I can say this: If somebody snatched the pages out of my hand when I came to the final period, I’d hit him. I’m not finished, see… I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with it, but judging from my library it seems to produce a lot of soup and peanut butter stains.

  Doesn’t everybody?

  I mean, like the guy with the trunk full of pancakes, am I alone? Is it just read-read-read, up and down the roily coaster, faster and higher, ending with a four-beat spasm on the final sentence—and then, Goodbye, thank you, ma’am? Drop the book, it’s dead?

  Wait. (I’m starting to look outward now.) Stories differ as to reread-ability. First, you have the so-called conventional mystery stories in which the whole point is the artfully planted misdirection and concealed clues, so you really have to go back to verify that the sweet little child was left alone with the future corpse. (Trivial puzzles, I hate ‘em.) Then there’s the trick-ending stories where, say, the narrator turns out to be the villain, or writing from the moon, or whatnot, so you have to at least think back and reinterpret. (I can’t think of any examples because I just wrote one like this.) It’s also a trivial trick, except for a few grand old startlers.

  This brings us to a type you get much of in SF, the story told by an alien or a child or a crazy who doesn’t grasp the meaning of what he’s telling, but you, the reader, see beyond his stammering words to What Really Went On. Flowers for Algernon did this at the start and end where the hero was stupid; when he says how his friends kidded him, we know they were being cruel. And 1984 comes to mind, at the end where the brain-stomped hero accepts. I think of these as the “It’s a nice world, Jack” type. Also included here are the stories where you catch on that the narrator is part of the problem, he’s spreading the plague he doesn’t understand, or he’s ripping the world off while thinking he’s just protecting himself. A lot of great stories here, if the characterization (I guess you call it) is rich. But thinking back, these aren’t the ones I reread much; usually you get it all as you go (slowly) along.

  What I really dig is the story that’s like being plonked down in an alien scene, the future or whatever, and the strange stuff comes by naturally. Like watching unknown life through a peephole. You understand just enough to get into it and then more and more meanings develop as you go, until at the end you suddenly get this great light on cryptic bits right back to the beginning. (Hey, Baird?) Lots of Phil Dick is this way. I go back and reread big chunks of Dick, snuffling lustfully. Or take Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. I rooted around in that for days, savoring the sprig of white heather in the glass and the jellyfish and specially shivering about what the hell really happened on that ghastly April fourth. (I still don’t know and I love it.)

  Is this kind of thing a trick too? No! It strikes me as a way of being like life. Life plunks you amid strangers making strange gestures, inexplicable caresses, threats, unmarked buttons you press with unforeseen results, important-sounding gabble in code… and you keep sorting it out, sorting it out, understanding five years later why she said or did whatever, why they screamed when you—

  You reread life, Oh man, do you…

  So why not make stories like that?

  (Of course, you can overdo it. I wouldn’t want all stories like that. A lot of, say, Sturgeon or Ellison isn’t that way. But it’s one good way of making stories.)

  But I’m forgetting one more type of rereadability thing. I guess you call it… ellipsis? The story told with omitted statements, or with action touched in so compactly you can’t hardly get all of it first time over. I mean like mentioning the hero is “picking up his buttons,” thereby revealing that when whatever it was happened a few paragraphs back all his buttons fell off. (This is done a lot in fight scenes; by this time everybody feels that there has been some repetition of the standard blow-by-blow.) In fights it’s trivial, but with Human stuff and big happenings it’s interesting. (To me.) I like the feel of this continual little loop in time, the illumination playing back on what went just before. When the wind-up events do this for the central plot, that’s when I reread avidly.

  But it’s always on the verge of being a trick. It can give puzzle value to a bunch of nothing. I mean, if it’s so great, why not come out and tell it? I reproach myself here. Because, see, for some reason probably including innate furtiveness, this is my natural way of telling a story. Like, say, “Beam Us Home”: you aren’t supposed to catch that the program the boy was addicted to was Star Trek until well along in the tale. Why? Well… did I feel that telling it straight would turn people off before they found out how significant et cetera things would get? Yeah, I know now I did. Not at the time. (A voice from under my pancreas dictated the first five pages while I was washing a car.) But—I say in justification—the puzzle wasn’t the story. It was just an angle.

  Or take “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain.” That whole damn story is told backward. (Incidentally, I reread it the other day because somebody wants it and I threw up… what I remember as clean prose comes on like bubble gum. A good story and I raped it.) It’s a perfect example of Tiptree’s basic narrative instinct. Start from the end and preferably five thousand feet underground on a dark day and then don’t tell them. Straight from behind the pancreas… But there’s one conscious item, which ties up with what we’re talking about. I had to give Ain a first name. Charles. So that makes him C. Ain, see, CAIN. His brother’s murderer.

  Would you believe I assumed everybody—everybody!—would pick that up afterward and use it to verify the plot (he really did kill everybody) and also extract a little irony (Cain as savior of life)???

  Because to me everybody naturally rereads… insists, like the Face, that it be worth rereading or reinvestigating in part. Wants there to be thingie in the box. But do they? Do you?

  Ha-ha-ha.

  Oh, Baird, thou hast confronted me with reality.

  But I can’t change. Reality, go away.

  Now before I really quit, two things. We’re not talking about stuff so great, so beautiful, so interesting that you read it again and again, maybe at intervals all your life. All we’re at is rereading-for-complete-illumination, to get the fullness of the story itself. Rereading-as-a-part-of-the-original-experience. A technical matter, not the genius aspect.

  (By the way, I reread Huxley’s Brave New World the other day and cringed for us all, my god the people who have been eating for years by mining his subplots.)

  The other thing is that the story Searles was talking about is Kit Reed’s Armed Camps, and he thought it was, overall, great. Reed is a pet of mine. Now there’s a closemouthed storyteller for you! You sidle in to find out what this kind of tense quiet scratching sound is and she zaps you… oh gee, do it again. I can’t figure out why Searles had to rereread Armed Camps-, I only went back once (to check the Captain White button on Hassim’s bikini). About as obscure as being shot out of a cannon.

  Ah well, wavelengths differ.

  May 1972 be good to you. My next communication, if any, will be by forked stick from a jungly place in the Quintana Roo.

  —January 7, 1972

  The Voice from the Baggie

  Phantasmicom 9 was handed to me on an airstrip yesterday, along with the 2 January and 6 Feb New York Times. I read PhCom. Man, did I. Grateful. Remind me—no, you won’t, I’ll try—to reimbu
rse you for the roll of stamps.

  My agent thinks I’m hard at work on lots of new stories I promised. Well, I do have a couple, handwritten on weird Spanish kids’ schoolpaper, which the Red Baron finally produced. But I’d rather write you. I just connected with my typewriter last week, it arrived at Belize, Honduras, via Spitzbergen and has green fuzzy stuff on it. This is a very active climate; if you put something down it either grows roots or becomes an informal demonstration of electrolysis or turns into low-grade beer or ten thousand palmetto bugs rush out of it. The palmetto bug is to all intents a German cockroach and they breed like they were burning up. Mother cockroaches are full of eggs. It sounds silly, but don’t put this manuscript in with other papers and forget it. Put it in a sealed baggie or spray it or both if you want to keep it. I stick anything too delicate to boil in the freezer for a month or so when I come out of here. Or in a snowbank. Including, especially, dirty laundry. Books get sprayed page by page and left in a sealed case full of spray for a couple of days. The palmetto bug is not vicious or icky, it is just hungry and a good mother. It also grows as big as a mouse but the young are transparent little blips and very fast. The thing is, if the letter or envelope has eggs on it you won’t see anything for a while but about September you’ll wonder why your library or Ann’s underwear is in pieces.

  This is going to be a longie, better get out that baggie until you feel like being Ancient Marinered. I’m lonesome for English above the level of Why is there kerosene in the gasoline? Or Who was Andreas Quin-tana Roo? Or How do you say kilowatt in Maya? (“Kilowatt,” stupid.)

  Let’s see. I’ll write after I sluice off some sweat. It is muggy hot in this coco beach. I’m dripping into the fungus. I’ve handwritten a couple quite different bits, but am bored with them. (Love, death, $.) Feel like talking about what I’m looking at. It may come out too long. Do what you want. I think I have to come back in April, but may not be in communication as what I have to go back for is to have a piece of stomach ulcer cut out, after which I’ll maybe be moving again. Goddamn ulcer isn’t healing; it perforated once and nearly killed me and I’m quite a ways from any emergency medical intervention and likely to remain so. Also I want to eat chilis. They have a luscious stuff called salsa verde here you put on cheese or fish or your finger and after the top of your head settles back, this beautiful green shooting star roams around your back palate making life good. If I got rid of this badly vulcanized stomach section once and for all, I could pig it, really pig it on peppered snapper and cactus buds and not be all the time worrying about is there bits of shell in the coconut. So I think I’ll give in to the medicos, who predicted it would be like this. Hate to fulfil other people’s prophecies about my own dammit body.

  Hey, a word maybe worth saying. Essentially what I said about Canada, but with fangs: Don’t come here freaky. Mexico, I mean. They’re having a drive on U.S. cultural influences, and if there is one word that is known from Cuernavaca estate to Indio hut, it’s “Ippy.” I saw a barefoot Maya toddler say “Ippy!” and spit. Why? Well, first don’t forget Mexico culture is partly (superficially maybe) traditional Spanish, churchy and square. But more important—Mexico is a revolutionary country and most revolutionary countries are prim. Prudish. They’re fighting for the early stages of what we’re rejecting the ripe-rot stage of—literacy, plumbing, jobs (JOBS!), malaria control (which means guys in uniforms and checkboards, very dedicated and mechanized), clean-living progressive patriotic youth. Man, they’ve had lying around in hovels screwing and meditating and puffing grass—they’ve had centuries of that, now they’re after Getting Out the Vote and Rural Electrification. My eldest boy has won an engineering scholarship: That’s the stage the dream is at, here. So be warned. And be warned like this: hair.

  Mexicans, you see, don’t really dig any of the distinctions between Yank and Yank that you and I would see at once. All they see is hair. And that goes for mustaches. Remember, most Indians have little or no facial hair. A mestizo’s idea of a mustache is a Ronald Colman hairline on the upper lip. Their head hair is straight and black and chopped in a curve about earlobe length at most. (That’s progressive.) So when they see a bunch of pink giants with frizzy light-colored stuff cascading all over their heads and faces, we look like Martians. I don’t care if you’re IBM’s squarest computer designer in a three-button suit and polished floaters, you come here with an inch and a half of mustache and—“Ippyl” Splat.

  And another thing: Aside from the Spanish religious prejudice and the general revolutionary ideals, you have the billion-dollar budgetary weight of the turismo industry, a big big item in a still-poor country. And what are the best paying tourists? See that family over there, rhinestone hornrims on the old lady, forty pounds of lard on everybody, Truman shirts? They’re buying rebozos and baskets and staying at the Acapulco Holiday Inn or the Presidente and hiring cars and guides and eating—Christ, do they eat—and what they are is good fat sheep trotting through the tourist circuit, leaving rich hunks of wool on all the little hooks. And nothing—but nothing—that upsets them or tightens their wool or scares them off is going to be tolerated. And it has been discovered—shades of St. Miguel d’Allende—that some kinds of Yank young people upset them. What kind? The kind with—you guessed it—hair.

  And it has been further discovered that the hairy young family in a VW camper unfortunately does not buy serapes and dyed hats or stay at the Presidente or go on the Robinson Crusoe cruise, that they bring their own granola and leave, instead of wool, decorous little plastic bags of Pepsi bottles and soiled disposable diapers. Period. And so, no matter how nice they are, or simpatico, and genuinely interested in the Mexican people or art or history, they are a zero sign in the big balance sheet which is counted on to build roads and hospitals as well as enriching politicians. And so… if they step over any line, or get too near the sheep run, regretfully, their car papers get misstamped, their tourist cards expire, their trailer hitch is unsafe, their vaccinations suddenly become necessary—in short, good-bye to sunny Mexico.

  And the first dividing line is hair.

  Beyond that line, way beyond it, is any chemical from grass up. (I carry every prescription taped to every pill bottle in my first aid kit, even vitamins.) It’s as simple as this: Tequila or any sort of juice, yes. Anything else, no. And the “No” takes the form of a Mexican slam, which is very very very unpleasant in many indescribable ways, and your friendly U.S. consul not only can’t get you out but may never find out you’re there. You are, friend, in jail on an alien planet. And you stay. And stay. Mom and Pop can come down and feed you through the bars—maybe. (Prisoners have to buy several essential, too.) The only good thing that can be said about it is that you probably won’t die and it’s a comparatively fast method of growing ‘way ‘way up, if you’re capable of reflection. But I’m sure PhCom’s readership can figure other methods, and certainly they won’t make the error of thinking that just because the fuzz is three feet high and a strange color that they aren’t efficient as hell with a commo system that makes the country a small town. And one in which we’re just as inconspicuous as a radioactive self-luminous moog-amped giraffe on the main street.

  So if it occurs to you that the Martians next door are worth seeing—and O god they are—grit your teeth, take out the clippers, stash your stash, and set forth as humble skinheads, even as your pal Tip.

  I don’t want to give the impression that I think you can only come here shaved bald. Of course you can come in hairy; there are mustachioed Yanks motorscootling around in a lot of towns, unmolested. (It does help to come in a tour group of thirty with Express Checks plastered on your nose. Or an armful of scuba gear—but you’d better be able to fit those curls into your mask.) What I mean is that hair nigger-izes you. If you hit somebody’s fender or chicken, the hair throws the presumption against you. If you get sunstroke, you’re presumed stoned. If you smile, the whores and shopkeepers will be mostly smiling back, not the people you’d maybe rather meet. And as for the
countryside… Here: I was here when three young men visited the next plantation and made a deal to rent a hut. They looked to me like ex-Eagle scouts, seriously interested in swimming and savoring this incredible spot. (Tiptree owns binoculars, not being a Maya.) Clean solid new camping gear, expensive equipment, tailored shorts, sedate swimsuits. No sounds of music of revelry. Only thing they seemed to be lighting was a Coleman lantern. But… one had shoulder-length hair, two had modest guardsman lip bangs. Now they probably thought they were on a deserted world, but the fact is the place is and has been for three thousand years full of sharp-eyed Mayas. Their every move was observed by an eleven-year-old, who reported to his mother, who told her aunt, who told the foreman. (I was present, that’s when the baby went “Ippy—splat.”) (Another term is Malo typo.) Anyway, the foreman murmured to his boss, whose orbit crossed that of the next plantation owner, who sent word to his caretaker… and in five days the hut became no longer available. One loused-up vacation in paradise. See what I mean?

  And there’s a great deal to freak out on here, and there are, as everywhere, ways to freak out in your own very pleasingly after you learn the lines—would I be here?—so it’s worth thumbing through your stereotypes and selecting the right head to wear. Says Tip, anyway.

  As of spring 1972. Things may change.

  —March 31, 1972

  Maya Máloob

  Listen, I have to talk to you about Maya Indians. I ache to talk about Maya Indians like Lawrence ached to talk about Ay-rabs. My motives are a little different, for example I’m not so far as I know suffering from obscure yearnings for alien buggery. (If I were I’d probably talk your ear off about it.) More important, Mayas are about as different from Arabs as Frisbees are from cyanide capsules. The only thing they have in common is that people come down with the same intensity of Mayaphilia that you see in Victorian Arabophiles, or U.S. Pakophiles. But Mayas hook a different kind of people.