Meet Me at Infinity

by James Tiptree Jr.

  And it’s the same all over, you know. I spent part of my childhood in Africa and it hurts to remember the beauty of the Ruwenzoris—the Mountains of the Moon—before the planes and the guns and the Land Rovers and Hemingway and the rest of the white man’s crap rolled in. And even I can’t believe I rode a pony in peaceful woodlands in a place now called Vietnam…

  All gone. Gone under the concrete and plastic and bombs and oil and people and garbage unending, growing and spreading daily.

  Can you stand one more?

  I’m writing this in the moonlight on a coconut plantation on the “wild” shore of Yucatan. The jungle was homesteaded in 1936 and worked by a few Maya families. Miles of nothing but white coral beach, the Caribbean making slow music on the reef, shadows of palm-fronds wreathing over the sand. The moon is brighter than my lantern. A pelican crosses the moon, looking like a wooden bird from some mad giant’s cuckoo clock. Paradise…

  Ah, oui.

  The fish the pelican is hunting are tainted with chlorinated hydrocarbons now; her eggs are thin-shelled, may not hatch. The same for the flamingoes and roseate spoon-bills and noble frigate birds on the lagoon behind me. They are also scared up daily by Maya powerboats. On the shore, each wave as it breaks leaves myriad globules of tar from ships over the horizon, leaves also a dish-pan ring of plastic bottles, broken zoris, light bulbs, and dismembered dolls. (I wonder about those dolls. Do crazed tourists gather at midnight for strange rites at the rail?) The trash is not just ugly; each globule of tar smothers and poisons one more small sphere of the sea’s life—and the oceans, we know now, are fragile and finite. The plastics too break down, relasing polychlorinated biphenyls to be absorbed by organisms. An average of 3,500 little bits of plastic per square kilometer was measured last year—in the Sargasso Sea. And we’ve all heard about the miles of floating Human offal Heyer-dahl met in the mid-Atlantic. The refuse isn’t all microscopic either; last month a forty-five-foot shrimp boat, apparently abandoned for insurance, broke up on the reef. The day of the marine junkyard is at hand.

  But the point is that theHuman beings who are doing all this are not malicious or aberrant. They are doing what we have always done. It’s right and natural in Human terms to flush a toilet or an oilbilge, to throw away a broken light bulb or a broken boat, to zap an insect attacking your food or your child. Even the trawlers who are fishing with nets five miles long—killing everything in huge swathes off the Florida seas—are doing the Human food-getting thing.

  How can we stop? How can we possibly change ourselves enough and in time?

  I fear we can’t—and there’s where my real nightmare begins. Because if we do kill everything else on Earth, we probably won’t die. At least, not right away. We will, I terribly fear… adapt.

  You’ve seen the pictures of Calcutta and Bangladesh. Calcutta isn’t a musical comedy; it’s a symbol of a steady state humanity can reach, way down the entropic slide. I was there as a kid too. I remember stepping over and around the endless bodies, living and dead, inhabiting the pavement about one to a square yard as far as I could see to the horizon. Starving dwarf-children roving around racks of bones that were mothers trying to nurse more babies, toothless mouths and unbearable eyes turning on me from rag heaps that were people—people—a million people born there and going to die there, unable to help themselves or even to protest, world without end forever. Surviving…

  That’s what we do, you know. We don’t change our behavior, we adapt to the results of it. Even to extremis where the Human being is stripped down to a machine for keeping the genes alive, waiting for rescue. But when we pass the point of irreversible damage to our biosphere, our Earth, there will be no rescue. The beauty that is going is only another name for the health of Earth and her children, the condition of our humanity. As our Earth dies under us, what will we do? Change ourselves in time? Die?

  Neither. When the last housefly and the last crabgrass plant have died in the world’s last zoo, when the oceans are dead and the land is paved over, we’ll go on. Our marvellous vitality will carry us down, shoulder-to-buttock, gasping our own poisons and scrabbling for algae soup as the conveyor belt creaks by. Don’t worry: We’ll survive.

  Excuse me while I put out my garbage.

  —May 5, 1972

  Afterword to “The Milk of Paradise”

  Reading an afterword is like watching a stoned friend sail onto an interstate expressway. One can’t help looking and one is seldom made happy. Exceptions, sure. Our long-established favorites may safely peer around the edges of their monuments, even wave and wink. And we have also the walkie-talkie writers, the Pan troglodytes who verbalize every twitching moment and who are named Mailer and Wolfe when they’re good. To them are permitted forewords, afterwords, asides, superscripts, anything—because their separate stories are in fact only nodes, local swirls in a life-flow of words.

  But the rest of us, poor carnivores whose inwards meagerly condense into speech. Only at intervals when the moon, perhaps, opens our throats do we clamber up the rocks and emit our peculiar streams of sound to the sky. Good, bad, we do not know. When it is over we are finished. Our glands have changed. Push microphones at us and you get only grumbles about the prevalence of fleas or the scarcity of rabbits. And this is what makes most afterwords such nervous reading, gives rise to the suspicion that the baying itself was a cryptic complaint about rabbits.

  We think not, of course. We think it was somewhat deeper in the blood. But we’re in no condition to argue. Push me at noon on the streets and I can only tell you—those damned rabbits are dying out and the fleas have us.

  Peace?

  About this story. A thermal vortex by the arbitrary name of Harlan Ellison has been bashing out a bit of free space where writers who need some elbow room can try. Count me among those currently running and flapping, dragging homemade fly-buggies up on cliffs and taking off with hope. The resultant is not of course a neat scene, nor necessarily art. Moreover, Ellison is instantly recognizable as that type of absolutely top guy whose friends all go around with tubes in their stomachs. But after all the Maalox has been gulped and the old ladies picked up and apologized to, I think a ragged cheer is in order. For the guy without whom everybody would have slept better and dreamed less.

  —September 29, 1969 and October 8, 1969

  Afterword to “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever”

  Abominations, that’s what they are: afterwords, introductions, all the dribble around the story. Oh, I read them. And often happily, other people’s afterwords are often okay. Not mine. The story, that’s really all I know. And after I reread any one of my own, the only sincere thing I have to say to the reader who has suffered through it comes out as a kind of obsessed squeal—Oh gods of the English language, forgive these pages which it is now too late to revise! Reader, can you actually even begin to see what I was trying to bring in through the flak of ill-made sentences, can you possibly share the vision? How marvellous if you can, but how unlikely… .

  Now, editors don’t really want this type of outburst. They desire the author to straighten his underwear and get up and say something cool, like “The Doomsday theme in science fiction demonstrates, etc.” Well.

  All right. The Doomsday theme in science fiction is… a great deal more than a mere theme. Ever since things got serious, ever since we realized that we really are in danger of killing ourselves, of bombing or poisoning or gutting or choking the planet to death, or—perhaps worst of all—of killing our own humanity by fascist tyranny or simple over-breeding, science fiction has been the only place we could talk about it. The mainstream took one look at it in Orwell’s 1984 and promptly caponized itself. It’s too terrible, don’t look. Tell me Jesus saves.

  Science fiction has gone on looking, showing, working out all the dire road maps to Armageddon, the nasty slide ways to Entropy and Apocalypse. I loathe you, let me count the ways. Even the crazy hopeless hopes—remember Bester’s last man dragging himself over the radioactive ruins so that his
dead body would fertilize the sterile sea and start life again? Oh, of course we can see occasional traces of adolescent fantasy bulging out here and there—is there literary life without libido?

  But noble, ingenious, terrifying stories. Which hurt, because the fear is real.

  Now here I learned something else about the Doomsday theme in science fiction. Thinking it would be nice to end with a bow to the great ones, I went through eight volumes of science fiction criticism, looking for a list. And found virtually nothing except a brief European discussion of anti-utopias and some reviews of specific works. Writers being notoriously erratic researchers, perhaps I have missed the definitive Doomsday essay. If not it looks as if there is an empty place where someone should assemble and relate the SF warnings of man’s end.

  A Doomsday study would not only do justice to some heavy writing; it would, I think, turn up some interesting things. For example, wouldn’t you expect to find a change, as the menaces became real? How cool the old stories were: Wells’s silent landscape under a dying sun, in the far future; the exciting but improbable disasters of When Worlds Collide. Great stories, wild ideas. Thirty years after Huxley wrote Brave New World he remarked he had no idea things would move so fast. But somewhere around Hiroshima the tone changes—we suddenly see ourselves On the Beach next Wednesday. The stories become immediate: Change our ways or die. And the dooms proliferate. And finally, I think you would find that some of them become so well known that they are only symbolized, become almost interchangeable. Who cares if it’s chain reaction of greenhouse effect, imperialism or fecundity? The interest turns to a Human mechanism of cause, or possibly, survival. Can you use an imbecile as Mother of the World?

  And so on. Surely the kindly editors will excuse me now.

  But if they insist on a word as to how “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” attaches itself to the grand procession, well, it does so through that strand of hope. Carrington’s work is real, and his speculation on the real nature of time holds out a faint rational hope of a curious sort of immortality. His idea is that, perhaps, just perhaps, very intense psychic structures might have existence in timelessness or “static” time. But Carrington, good man that he was, unhesitatingly assumed that intense psychic structure was good, was in fact a sort of Spinozan intellectual love of some aspect of life. A beautiful picture—all the fragments of loving farmers merging around the ideas of earth and seed, bits of philatelists converging forever around a two-penny black, parts of all of us webbed eternally around great poems or symphonies or sunsets. Lovely. But look back in your memory. Moments of pure selfless love, yes—but what about the fearful vitality of the bad past—the shames, furies, disappointments, the lover defected, the prize that got away? The pain. As the psychologists put it, aversive conditioning persists. One shock undoes a hundred rewards. If by wild chance Carrington’s theory is in some degree right, his immortality would be a hell beyond conception… . until we can change ourselves. Drain the strength of pain from our nerves. Make love and joy as strong as evil. But how can we?

  —May 10, 1973

  Introduction to “The Night-blooming Saurian”

  If! Ah, If! What it meant to us! It wasn’t Galaxy, Fred PohPs golden seal of approval, but a chancier magazine, more free—a friend to experiments, a place that tolerated wild flappings toward the heights and occasional ignominious bellywhops when the wax wings melted. (Always provided Fred had decided there was some possibility of pin feathers.)

  If gave a home to the worst turkey I ever launched, which let me see why it was no good—and to the best I early achieved. If was no mere Galaxy overflow, it was a special, canny scheme for helping on new writers. I’ve never heard Fred Pohl say this in so many words, but Fred is not one to tell you all he knows or is up to.

  As for my own Saurian yarn here (and I’ve been surprised at its persistent minor popularity), the point is simple. I’ve always been bugged by writers who neglect to think things through, to work up the whole scene, with those vital “trivial” factors which actually cost so much effort and can make or break grand schemes. Where do you get your repair parts, in space? How do you milk a dragon without its tail zapping you in the head? How does your hero/heroine blow the nose in a space suit? How do your fleeing refugees get rid of their garbage without leaving a trace?

  In World War II, I was briefly a logistics officer in a port of embarkation, and I saw an entire armored division (and its convoy) delayed because a QM laundry machine broke down. A friend, starving on a blockaded South Pacific island, told me how the heroic relief ship finally reached them—and, by computer error, turned out to be loaded with toilet paper and office machines.

  So, as I planned “The Night-blooming Saurian,” while stumbling down a moose run in Ontario, I tried to consider the, ah, whole problem of recreating a scene from the old Cretaceous… and not without a grin.

  —February 24, 1980

  The Laying On of Hands

  This letter was published in almost its entirety in Kyben 4 (July 1973), as there were only a couple personal remarks to me. It had no title then, just “The 20-Mile Zone.”

  This letter is prompted by guilt: I find I made an error in “Maya Máloob.” If you put another issue out, I’d appreciate including this:

  Tiptree’s report on Mayas erred in saying that “Huastec” were actually an isolated Maya-related tribe up in northeast Mexico. The Aztecs were Aztecs; they are also called by some, “Mexicans,” for reasons too controversial to go into here. They spoke Nahuatl, which they seemed to have picked up from the remains of the Toltec civilization, and so did most of the tribes that they eventually overran. I probably should have used the term “Nahuatl-speaking” Indians to distinguish the tribes in the main part of Mexico who did so much conquering and being conquered, from the Mayas who had a different history. By the way, there seems to have been another unconquered group just northwest of the Aztec imperial power, the Tarascas. Be interesting to meet them.

  If you crave one fascinating book to go to bed with the flu with, try Daily Life of the Aztecs by Jacques Soustelle, Pelican. He reconstructs the empire’s life just at the eve of the Spanish irruption. Unforgettable. Take this picture, written by Bernal Diaz, of five Aztec officials passing by what was to be their dooms:

  Some Indians… came running to tell the chiefs who had been talking with Cortes that five Mexicans (Aztecs) had been seen, the tax gatherers of Motecuhzoma (“Montezuma”). On hearing this they went pale and began to tremble with fear. They left Cortes to himself and went out to welcome them… adorned a room with foliage, prepared some food and made a great deal of cocoa… . When these five Indians came… they passed by the place where we were with so much confidence and pride that they walked straight on, without speaking to Cortes or any of the others of us. They wore rich embroidered cloaks, loincloths of the same nature, and their shining hair was raised in a knot on their heads: each had a bunch of flowers in his hand and he smelt to it; and other Indians, like servants, fanned them with fly whisks.

  Shortly afterwards, says Soustelle, these empire men called in the Totonac chiefs who had been talking with Cortes and gave them hell for presuming to negotiate with them.

  As you can see, Fve been at the books; one contracts a hunger to read everything on the mysterious world among whose bones one treads here. The French and English seem to have done more than the U.S., judging from what’s here. Trouble is, book distribution in Mexico is if anything zanier than in the States. Part of a series will be in French, part in Swedish or Zulu; all of Volume One of something is, say, at Uxmal, while all the Volume Twos are in Honduras. And anybody is an instant expert. There’s one nut whose mimeoed booklets are all over who has found secret messages from the Martians in the snake sculpture, and another series of cheap guidebooks that is apparently a translation from the Japanese—that was where I picked up the Huastec-Aztec booble.

  (You’d be amazed at the good paperback SF books in little barrio stalls here, especially English. Most in one co
py each, often secondhand.)

  Final note: A great new ruin probably more magnificent than Chichen Itza has been discovered (from the air) near Tulum on the east coast of Yucatan. It is believed to be unlooted. The government is trying to protect it until proper funding can be arranged for clearing and restoration. Name is Coba (Ko-bah). About ten years from now when you get down here the character being hauled up in the main pyramid in a wheelchair will be Uncle Tip.

  Back to you, Jeff; by the way, no need to freeze this communication, it’s being writ on a recently government-sprayed cuarto. When these boys spray, they make the U.S. in Vietnam look like amateurs. Even the Tequila tastes of it.

  I got back to the rancho and saw L’mus, a year older and definitely sinister now; his head has filled out into a more triangular shape, wide above the temples, and when he looks at a nonfunctioning motor with that primordial menace in his slit eyes you expect the motor to moan. He’s thicker too, his wrists are about six inches across, like locomotive pistons—Did you ever see one?—and his hands should belong to a guy 6′6″ instead of 4′9″. He doesn’t use a vise to drill metal; just grips it in one vast hand and drills a perfectly vertical slot. He’s into gasoline motors this year. Somebody’s station wagon gave out. L’mus yanked up the hood, stuck his screwdriver in his teeth, and dived onto the engine block with it still running, hot as fire. All you could see were his enormous square feet expressively writhing, and suddenly the motor went wild and then settled down sweetly. His grin when he got out was the same old L’mus. A great guy. I gotta bring him a decent watch.