Meet Me at Infinity

by James Tiptree Jr.

  They have come from a small, exclusive fishing camp forty kilometers behind, and are headed, hopefully, for the airport at the international government tourist resort of Cancun, fifty kilometers ahead. From Cancun they will jet to Houston for their oldest grandson’s wedding, and thence to Baja California for more fishing. After that they have reservations on a trout river in the Argentine. This is their first motor trip to Cancun; in previous years they flew in by small charter plane from Cozumel.

  Lady Tourist, extricating herself from a fallen duffel: “It’s all spoiled now, George, isn’t it? Since this road came through. Blue jeans. Store bread. Canned tuna. A supermercado at Tuluum! Why, you remember—”

  George: “Muriel. My rod case.”

  Muriel: “It’s all right; George, I’m not putting my weight on it—And those awful commercial fishermen, ruining the fishing. I heard them coming back at night from Pajaros loaded down. Stone crabs, even, Manuel said. And the Indians help them, too. Don’t they see they’ll soon be extinct? Stupid…” She sighs. “This was one of the last places… and we actually had a robbery too, first robbery. Evian Newcombe lost her pearls, somebody came right into their cabin. Just before we got here. Sixty thousand, she said. Of course, they won’t—”

  George grunting: “I’ve seen ‘em. I wouldn’t have paid sixteen. She won’t get anywhere claiming sixty.”

  Muriel: “I know. And she should never have had them here. She’s a dreadful woman, anyway… And Pedro being too drunk to guide, twice. It’s those horrid motorcycles, they can go right to Chetumal or Libre Union on weekends. You know I haven’t seen a single Maya woman wearing a huipil or pounding tortillas? Except old Dona Juanna. And all those children… Don’t they have sense enough to… .” Her voice trails off as she catches the reflection of the driver’s slanted black eyes on her.

  Driver, who has been mentally upping the fare by several percent: “Senora Smeeth, you make bread for you husban’?”

  His voice is soft and humorous. She flusters for a moment, then sturdily replies, “Well, no, Miguel. But it’s a pity—don’t you think it is sad to see the old traditions go?”

  Miguel, still pleasantly: “And Senor Smeeth, you have many, how you say, gran’ cheeldren, I think?”

  Muriel gets it and flushes silently, but George is hit on a weak point.

  George feeling automatically for his wallet: “You bet I have! Eight of ‘em. Of course two are just babies—”

  Miguel: “And if the baby is sick, Senor Smeeth, you take heem to hospital caminando—by feet? Maybe seexty kilometers? I theen’ no, I theen’ you have road, you take car.”

  George, mentally eliminating most of the projected tip: “Well, of course. But that’s entirely different. Muriel, I feel rotten. I’m positive the water from that new well is polluted. Those goddamn guides piss anywhere. I told Manuel so. He says it’s been inspected, but by God, I have a sample, and if—”

  They become aware of the Buick making strangling noises. It stalls, recatches, stalls again and slows erratically to a stop.

  Miguel, unsurprised, emits untranslatable Maya remark on the Buick’s ancestry.

  Smiths, in unison: “We’ll miss our plane!”

  Oblivious to their frantic questions, Miguel leaps out, cuts the string holding down the hood, and begins doing arcane and noisy violence to the engine. The Smiths gaze around, seeing nothing but coral sand, mangrove jungle, coco palms and glimpses of the turquoise Caribbean. It is very hot. Suddenly there is the sound of another motor, and a motorcycle appears ahead. It roars at and past them, showering them with white dust, amid which there is an interchange of apparently friendly shouts between its driver and Miguel.

  Muriel has belatedly rolled up her window against the dust; she rolls it down again and wails after the cycle driver, who guns away: “We could have sent a message to Manuel,” she cries at her husband.

  Miguel comes to their window, spitting gasoline ferociously: “I am sorree. The petrol, the gasolina is no good. Is water in the fuel pomp.”

  George, making purposeless and futile efforts to get out: “If we miss our plane—”

  Muriel, almost weeping, “Oh please! Oh, we must catch the plane, the av-ee-one—don’t you understand, Miguel? What can we do?”

  Miguel, solicitously soothing: “Maybe no, maybe no. You wait. My brother-in-law, he lives muy cerca—one, two kilometers on the road. I go queeck, he will come. In peek-op he will take you to Can-cun. You will see! All is cool. The plane you will meet in much time. I promees.”

  Muriel: “Oh, how wonderful! Please hurry, please!”

  Miguel, giving an odd, jaunty Maya salute: “I go!” He wheels to stride off.

  George, loudly: “Tell him I’ll pay anything he asks—within reason—if we make that plane.”

  Miguel turns back, makes a gracious half bow: “Yes. I am sorree. My brother-in-law must stop his work, it is for that. I fear he asks much—muy cava. He cost you! Not like in days before, I am regret.” He nods commiseratingly, turns, and his broad square toes dig into the sand as he sets off. He is grinning radiantly, as only a Maya can grin, as he contemplates the fee he will split with his brother. Dzo’voc u ma’an u kinil, he murmurs to himself, or something like. Ya paso el dia.

  Which translates roughly as, Those days are gone forever.

  There is of course more, much more: The new marvelous incarnation of L’mus as a Maya hard hat: the gloomy Maya brilliance of his younger brother, Ruffino, who looking at his newborn son told me that we gringos were going to blow up the world, perhaps in twenty years; the jokes they played on me and my stubborn attempts to communicate with the women; the sixty-five beautiful lacy underpants and matching bras, in every color of the rainbow, hanging on the wash line, which turned out to belong to Don Jose’s retarded daughter, known as The Lump; the new schoolteacher, whom the owner treated like an animal, and through whom I bought a few elementary math texts for Ruffino and others, finding that a simple paperbound math book in Mexico costs $10 U.S.! (What you don’t get in school is forever beyond your reach.) The melodramatic diplomacy and negotiations that went into getting the owners’ permission for my building—or rather, having built—a second tank filled off our motorpump, so the women don’t have to raise and lug, raise and lug and haul the endless buckets of water for the camp laundry. Sick, pregnant, or dying, they haul that damn water. The grand finale day of hoisting that concrete monster onto the iron-wood base the men had built was unbelievable; old Don Jose said with a squint, “Mayas know how to get things up!” So it is El Nuevo Pyramid. And the hoses came and that water ran! (I got hugged by nineteen Mayas of all ages and conditions, and felt crummy as hell playing Lady Bountiful on the cheap.) Or the real tragedy of old Don Jose himself, as his former authority is undermined by the new priorities and skills of the younger men. Just as he has brought to perfection the huge rancho which was his life work, it has turned into nothing but real estate. Golden unspoiled beach property, the last left. So he gets drunk oftener and oftener, and more and more Indian, and wanders at night firing off his gun—he is the only Maya allowed to carry one, it was his pride—at imaginary woodpeckers eating the moon. It made me sad to hear him called merely “Jose Camuul,” to distinguish him from another Jose; no more the Don. Or the terrible day and night that Ting, my husband, who is seventy-eight, spent with a very young Maya guide, drowning and freezing in the quicksand of a tiny islet, lost in the great raging waters of Ascension Bay. (The fishing had been fantastic, and the Maya boy had failed to spot the oncoming squall line with tornadoes.) By the last dawn I and others thought I was a widow; I watched, watched, watched for thirty hours, and could scarcely believe my eyes when when the familiar tall, white-bearded figure came striding up the road. (He slept for ten hours and then went out fishing—“Muy hombre!”—and I went to bed with a migraine for three days!)

  Yes, there’s a lot more for those who enjoy following the fortunes of Maya Malo’ob—Gregoria Ku; and the clock, the Maya cackle-culture, the ni
ght Jorje came out of the wrong house, the antics of the tourists—and the beauty, the beauty that’s still there. But it’s in the mail now or in the wastebasket…

  and so

  In yama-ech, (which you can surely decipher)

  from alii, aka Tip

  —May 15, 1979

  This is a young friend, Matteo Camuul, who guided for Ting some years. He is considering whether the bonefish are more likely up north or on the flats. His expression is typical of the Maya in casual thought, but it has been known to be quite frightening to tourists, especially when met on a dark night by flashlight. When he smiles he will look very different. And if his feelings are hurt, he will look very different again.

  Not a New Zealand Letter

  I’d planned to write you as soon as the first fit of ecstatic babbling wore off, but it’s six weeks now and the babbling is only denser and more complex; the ecstasy is still on. To make it short, we stumbled into the closest approximation of Eden I expect to find. Not perfect, you understand; not Joy Unalloyed—no choir of seraphs, no thornless rose—but, well, just about perfect, that’s all. The very small lacks of conventional “perfection” makes it so….

  If you were still running a fat fanzine and I had a typewriter, Td have a try at writing you my New Zealand letter, culling the fat notebook I swore not to start. Instead—well, I sit by a great glass wall, with CRUX and Rigel Keut and company blazing down under a full moon three million miles brighter than ours. Did you know that the sun is three million miles closer to the Southern Hemisphere in summer? And that N.Z. is under “a hole in the Van Allen belt?” And that you can see the difference, just before you get skin cancer?—Stop!

  Anyway, just outside is a great, pure, still, steel-pink lake, ringed with mountains dominated by an “extinct” volcano, which in 1886 blew up with the second loudest bang ever heard on Earth (Mt. Tarawera), and in the moonlight float a pair of fantastic black swans (which we don’t refer to because they are Ozzies—Australians) with five ungainly young, clucking and calling to each other above the wails of the Morepork owl, and the rustle of tree ferns, scents of jasmine—and an excruciatingly lush and conventional English perennial border. Oops, sorry, it’s raining now—it does that four times a day—over in a minute—and if it throws a moonbow I’m going to—I don’t know what. Take an aspirin.

  I tell you, Jeff, if one more beautiful and/or exciting, interesting, touching, delightful, comic or generally spot-on thing happens, I’ve had it! Misery I can cope with; this much good stuff is murder.

  Save this place in your list of where to go when all is ashes, psychologically or otherwise. I think it’ll keep. But change your name—if you call out “Jeff!” here, half the male population looks around. (Who, who, impressed so many pregnant ladies thirty years ago??)

  —March 28, 1980

  Writing “Tales of the Quintana Roo.” (Three of them.) Hard to recapture Yucatan after New Zealand. Tempted to say, that’s my life… the procrastinator, condemned to write about always last year. Gentle but perhaps nicely spooky little yarns, maybe tailored to F&SF. Actually easier to do now after some passage of time; when I wrote, or tried to write you that piece last year I was too upset about the changes going on down there. Now the farther past, the dream that was—or maybe was only in my head—has reasserted itself. The past encapsulates and then gains vitality in its time-shell.

  —April 28, 1980

  Biographical Sketch for Contemporary Authors

  In March 1980, Jean W. Ross of BC Research wrote to Alii asking if she could do a half-hour phone interview for publication in a volume of the Gale Research reference series Contemporary Authors. This simple request led to two years of work on both Alli’s part and Contemporary Authors’s and the following two remarkable documents. Ross sent Alii a list of suggested questions, and Alii made notes as to how she might answer them. On September 3,1980, the interview took place. CA sent a transcript on September 15, and Alii started to work on it. She didn’t finish it until September “1 or 2,” 1982. Almost every paragraph was rewritten (or at least revised), and almost every answer was lengthened. Sometimes she moved comments to a more appropriate location in the interview; sometimes she set up the next question better by inserting a leading remark in the previous answer.

  She retyped most of the interview, taping in parts of the original where the changes were minor. Of the twenty-six manuscript pages, twenty-one are completely retyped and three partially retyped; only two pages of CA’s original transcript survive intact. There were at least two different times that parts of the interview were retyped, there were later typed portions taped in, later yet handwritten lines inserted, and one substantial handwritten segment (on her father) taped in so late it wasn’t even included in the book.

  CA also sent a sheet for biographical information. This went through the same process, being rewritten and lengthened several times over the two years. This document was used as source material for an essay preceding the interview, but this is the first time it has been published in full.

  The entry on Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon is in Contemporary Authors volume 108, edited by Hal May (Gale Research Company 1983). (Sheldon’s obituary is in volume 122.)

  NAME:

  SHELDON, Alice Hastings Bradley 1915-

  (“James Tiptree, Jr.” “Raccoona Sheldon”)

  PERSONAL:

  Born 24 August 1915, in Chicago, IL 60615: siblings, none

  Parents:

  Herbert Edwin Bradley, b. Canada; Attorney-at-Law (Ann Arbor); explorer, big-game collector and naturalist by avocation (see Early Travels, below); and

  Mary Wilhelmina Hastings Bradley, b. Chicago; Smith Col., Oxford (Engl.); F.R.G.S., PEN; author of over thirty-five books (history, travel, fiction) and many short stories, articles, lectures, etc., some still noteworthy today as first to break the popular media’s taboo on serious feminist issues such as a woman’s right to an abortion. 1919 to 1931 she accompanied husband on all expeditions and hunts (see below); sharing hardship and danger; self-taught, excellent shot; also linguist, collecting hitherto-unknown tribal folk tales; also was first to publicize peaceful nature of gorilla and call for its removal from “game-animal” category. 1944/5, war correspondent, European fronts, sponsored by Collier’s mag., and War Dept., to report on WAC; first American woman to inspect and report on some of most hideous of German death camps. On return to U.S., campaigned vigourosly to convince still-numerous Midwestern disbelievers of the terrible reality of the extermination camps and the Holocaust itself.

  Early Travels:

  From age 4 to 15, Alice Sheldon’s childhood was dominated by the experience of accompanying her parents on all their (widely reported) explorations and trips. She was plunged into half a world of alien environments all before she was old enough to be allowed to enter an American movie house. This meant exposure to chaotically diverse environments—from the then-unspoiled tropical Ituri rain forest to the corpse-obstructed streets of Calcutta; from the broiling, animal-filled vastness of the Semliki savannahs to the orchid-scented, forested hills that were to become Vietnam; the Towers of Silence of the Parsees, vulture-guarded; the manicured, flowery cemeteries of English towns, the smoky Burning Ghats of Benares, and the then-unrestored desolation of the great Egyptian tombs; the cozy little tree nests of the Batwa pygmies—and the 1912 modernity of “home” in Chicago, Illinois, with its built-in vacuum cleaners. And as with places, so with people. She found herself interacting with adults of every color, size, shape, and condition—lepers, black royalty in lionskins, white royalty in tweeds, Arab slavers, functional saints and madmen in power, poets, killers, and collared eunuchs, world-famous actors with head-colds, blacks who ate their enemies and a white who had eaten his friends; and above all, women; chattel-women deliberately starved, deformed, blinded and enslaved; women in nuns’ habits saving the world; women in high heels committing suicide, and women in low heels shooting little birds; an Englishwoman in bloomers riding out from her castle at th
e head of her personal Moslem army; women, from the routinely tortured, obscenely mutilated slave-wives of the ‘advanced’ Kibuyu, to the free, propertied, Sumarran matriarchs who ran the economy and brought six hundred years of peaceful prosperity to the Menang-Kabau; all these were known before she had a friend or playmate of her own age. And finally, she was exposed to dozens of cultures and subcultures whose values, taboos, imperatives, religions, languages, and mores conflicted with each other as well as with her parents. And the writer, child as she was, had continuously to learn this passing kaleidoscope of Do and Don’t lest she give offense, or even bring herself or the party into danger. But most seriously, this heavy jumble descended on her head before her own personality or cultural identity was formed. The result was a profound alienation from any nominal peers, and an enduring cultural relativism. Her world, too, was suffused with sadness; everywhere it was said, or seen, that great change was coming fast and much would be forever gone.

  Itinerary follows: 1919/1920, Bradleys with Carl Akeley on successful final quest for legendary Central African Mountain Gorilla (see group in Amer. Museum of Nat. Hist., NYC); this and following trips were under auspices of that museum, also Field Museum of Chicago, and National and Royal (Brit.) Geographic Societies. 1924/25, Herbert Bradley led own expedition across Mountains of the Moon and through 200 miles of then wholly unknown territory west of former Lake Edward, making first European Contact with (cannibal) people there. Duration of each expedition about one year, total miles walked, approx. 3,000. It may be helpful to recall that no radios or planes or means of rescue existed then; all roads, phones and electricity ended at the coast, and in the interior of Africa there were no maps, no towns or landmarks, only old foot trails, many made by slavers. Nor were there cars or trucks or Land Rovers nor any powered vehicle or bike or boat, nor lamps, nor saws; no gasoline, nails, woven cloth, matches, paper; no mail, no dictionaries of the languages, no coined money, no medicine or doctors; and no draft animals (because of equine encephalitis). Communication was by runner and unaided Human voice; trade by barter (espec. salt), light from personally imported candles, and transport was on Human heads and legs. Distances were calculated with compass and pedometer.