Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (3 page)

But she was a 60-year-old woman. Her health was indeed precarious. One way or another, the air of the planet did get her. And the work she produced in her last decade – though it would grace the oeuvres of many writers – seemed, in comparison with the work of her prime, churchy and fey, self-pitying and exiguous. Unfortunately, because her publishing career was oddly shaped, most readers by the end of the 1980s knew nothing more of Tiptree than that late work. She had written two novels –
Up the Walls of the World
(1978) and
Brightness Falls from the Air
(1985) – but only the latter, weaker volume seemed readily available. The late short stories had been generously hardbacked with the release of
Tales of the Quintana Roo
(1986),
The Starry Rift
(1986) and
Crown of Stars
(1988); and
The Color of Neanderthal Eyes
(1990), her penultimate tale, and the best work she produced in the final spate that preceded her suicide, finally received book publication as part of a Tor Double. Two stories from her prime had also appeared in book form as doubles –
The Girl Who was Plugged In
(1988) and
Houston, Houston, Do you Read?
(1989) – but the great mass of her best work had become difficult to trace for those who remember it. Her finest stories had appeared in four paperback volumes –
10,000 Light-Years from Home
(1973),
Warm Worlds and Otherwise
(1975),
Star Songs of an Old Primate
(1978) and
Out of the Everywhere, and Other Extraordinary Visions
(1981) – and though each one of them could claim to be among the very few permanently significant collections to appear during that period, not one of them was ever even published in hardback (except for the first, released in England by Methuen in a setting that boasted unjustified right margins and a whole new crop of proofing errors to augment the contemptible slurry of goofs that corrupted the ill-edited original version from Ace). Subsequently, Doubleday did publish, in
Byte Beautiful
(1986), complete with expurgations to fit its contents to the library market, a collection of old and new work oddly sorted and poorly argued as a conspectus of her distinguished career. James Tiptree Jr had become virtually unknowable.

The publication of
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
, as edited by James Turner, comes therefore as an important event. Because almost every story James Tiptree Jr wrote at the apogee of her passage across the heavens is here assembled,
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
ranks as one of the two or three most significant collections of short SF ever published. Of the 18 stories in the volume, I would have myself omitted only one, ‘And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways’ (published in 1972 but written at the end of 1968: all further citations will be of year of composition only), because the cartoon crudity of its telling conforms all too well to the melodramatic epiphanising of its close. And of those stories Turner has had to omit, I would have argued fervently only for one, ‘All the Kinds of Yes’ (1972), a tale which refines and darkens and speeds up and in the end utterly transforms the comic clatter of Tiptree’s earliest work, so that ‘Yes’ closes on a twist of plot (just who
isn’t
an alien in the bloody thing) which is an epiphany which is a world-view which is a shrug which is a benediction, all at once. Of the 17 remaining stories, every single one is a joy, a consolation of achieved form; swift in nuance, extravagant in density, extroverted,
athletic
; but also (because James Tiptree Jr was possibly the darkest writer ever to publish SF of the first rank) every single one tells some sort of death.

Almost every story collected in
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
ends in death, literal or metaphorical, experienced or nigh. Our touch upon the planet is death; sex is an intricacy of death; exogamy (our lust for other species and for the stars) is death; the ultimate taste of any human being (as in the 1973 title story) is of an anguish unto death. Death comes as the end; the end is Death’s come. The plan is Death. But none of this makes Tiptree a dour writer, though her messages are grim. Because she is an author who talks about the world before turning in, the extroversion of her stories is genuine and exultant. They are crowded with events and folk and things to think about; folding the world and its outcomes into one breath – one telling – they almost seem to
grin
. Like a shaping bone within the babushka of the world, the skull of death may ultimately stare the show shut, but the grin on the mask of James Tiptree Jr is the tender knowing omen-haunted gong-tormented grin of a wise lover with no time to spare, whose time is limited.

As so many young writers in America have done, she flashes across the firmament like a meteor, but with one difference. Most American writers burn out because they have ransacked too savagely experiences too slender to grow back after the frost of exposure; James Tiptree Jr burns out from the freight and convergence of the years. The spirit is willing but the body is weak. She burns out
old
. She leaves behind her a body of work no young writer could have conceived, no old writer should have had the energy to shape. And that, in the end, is the secret of her Janus face – her antic glances so deathward-bound, her deathward gaze so full of life.

The stories collected in
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
have been sorted into several rough thematic categories, and need little further bush. The first two – ‘The Last Flight of Doctor Ain (1969; rewritten circa 1974) and ‘The Screwfly Solution’ (1976) – are lessons in what might be called eschatological ecology. Both are told in skewed and variable retrospect, exceedingly complicated to describe but crystalline in the reading. Both are famous. Because the human race is destroying the Earth its mother, Doctor Ain spreads a virus which will destroy the human race (he could be spreading his death seed in anguish and rage this very day). In the second tale, aliens destabilize the fragile equipoise that keeps the two human sexes masked from one another; and men begin to kill the women of the world, because that is the plan of our nature when stripped.

Four tales that further frame our state now follow. ‘And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side’ (1971) argues that any superior alien race will have a Cargo effect on humans, binding them most utterly in the region where they are most explosively at risk – which for Tiptree is always the stress-knot of sex (but always she is Janus-faced, because clearly she loves sex, finds sex fascinating, writes finely of sexual love). ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ (1969) and ‘And I Have Come Upon this Place by Lost Ways’ (1968), show a risky aggressiveness of diction and plotting, which the author has not yet fully controlled; the whole flippant time-travel narrative frame of ‘Girl,’ for instance, while elbowing us ostentatiously away from the sentimental tale it glosses, in truth only underlines the nurse-romance (but how brilliantly she almost carries the farrago off). And ‘The Man Who Walked Home’ (1971) inscribes the longing for a return to Eden in great flashes across the sky, so vividly that ‘Man’ has become a kind of paradigm of the tale of exile.

Tiptree’s most famous single story heads the next three. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ (1972) manages almost miraculously (
pace
some feminist readings of the tale as a univocal advocacy of radical misandry) to retain a sense of the humanity of the ageing alpha male who narrates, who miscomprehends the women with whom he is cast into extremis, who watches them leave the planet altogether rather than remain chinks in his world-machine. ‘Your Faces, O my Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!’ (1974) and ‘Houston, Houston, Do you Read?’ (1974) both carry the analysis further – the first in terms of experience traumatized beyond salvation, the second within a science-fiction frame whose orthodoxy makes the arguments it contains about the nature of male humans all the more crushing.

We are barely halfway through. ‘With Delicate Mad Hands’ (1980) and ‘We who Stole the ‘Dream’’ (1977) both show some signs of burn-out, the first through excessive length and sentiment, the second through moral gimmickry. But then, wordperfect over its great length, and almost unbearably dark in the detail and momentum of the revelation of its premise that humans are gametes looking to consummate an exogamous fuck they cannot survive, ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’ (1973) may be the finest densest most driven novella yet published in the field. ‘Her Smoke Rose Up Forever’ (1973) we have mentioned; ‘Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death’ (1971) has a juggernaut drive, a consuming iron melancholy, a premise the author never backed away from; ‘On the Last Afternoon’ (1971) pits personal transcendence against the cultural/biological survival of the race in a tale of such cumulative dialectical drive that it nearly causes burn-out to
read
; ‘She Waits for All Men Born’ (1974) casts in fable form a lesson about Death, who is the dance and the Dancer and the very flesh of Love; and ‘Slow Music’ (1977), Tiptree’s last great story, serves as a requiem for all the gay gorged gangrenous world she loved and gave us the pulse of. At the nub end of our span on earth, two last young people meet, mate, fail to breed, trek a false river to an ambivalent alien transcendence, stop and trip and slide into the beam of transcendence to become an ode by Keats, deathless but thoroughly dead. It is the end. It was very nearly the end for James Tiptree Jr.

Soon she was utterly spent. She died old. She is here.

John Clute

THE LAST FLIGHT OF DOCTOR AIN

D
OCTOR
A
IN WAS RECOGNIZED
on the Omaha-Chicago flight. A biologist colleague from Pasadena came out of the toilet and saw Ain in an aisle seat. Five years before, this man had been jealous of Ain’s huge grants. Now he nodded coldly and was surprised at the intensity of Ain’s response. He almost turned back to speak, but he felt too tired; like nearly everyone, he was fighting the flu.

The stewardess handing out coats after they landed remembered Ain too: a tall thin nondescript man with rusty hair. He held up the line staring at her; since he already had his raincoat with him she decided it was some kooky kind of pass and waved him on.

She saw Ain shamble off into the airport smog, apparently alone. Despite the big Civil Defense signs, O’Hare was late getting underground. No one noticed the woman.

The wounded, dying woman.

Ain was not identified en route to New York, but a 2:40 jet carried an “Ames” on the checklist, which was thought to be a misspelling of Ain. It was. The plane had circled for an hour while Ain watched the smoky seaboard monotonously tilt, straighten, and tilt again.

The woman was weaker now. She coughed, picking weakly at the scabs on her face half-hidden behind her long hair. Her hair, Ain saw, that great mane which had been so splendid, was drabbed and thinning now. He looked to seaward, willing himself to think of cold, clean breakers. On the horizon he saw a vast black rug: somewhere a tanker had opened its vents. The woman coughed again. Ain closed his eyes. Smog shrouded the plane.

He was picked up next while checking in for the BOAC flight to Glasgow. Kennedy Underground was a boiling stew of people, the air system unequal to the hot September afternoon. The check-in line swayed and sweated, staring dully at the newscast. SAVE THE LAST GREEN MANSIONS—a conservation group was protesting the defoliation and drainage of the Amazon basin. Several people recalled the beautifully colored shots of the new clean bomb. The line squeezed together to let a band of uniformed men go by. They were wearing buttons inscribed: WHO’S AFRAID?

That was when a woman noticed Ain. He was holding a newssheet, and she heard it rattling in his hand. Her family hadn’t caught the flu, so she looked at him sharply. Sure enough, his forehead was sweaty. She herded her kids to the side away from Ain.

He was using
Instac
throat spray, she remembered. She didn’t think much of
Instac
; her family used
Kleer.
While she was looking at him, Ain suddenly turned his head and stared into her face, with the spray still floating down. Such inconsiderateness! She turned her back. She didn’t recall his talking to any woman, but she perked up her ears when the clerk read off Ain’s destination. Moscow!

The clerk recalled that too, with disapproval. Ain checked in alone, he reported. No woman had been ticketed for Moscow, but it would have been easy enough to split up her tickets. (By that time they were sure she was with him.)

Ain’s flight went via Iceland with an hour’s delay at Keflavik. Ain walked over to the airport park, gratefully breathing the sea-filled air. Every few breaths he shuddered. Under the whine of bulldozers the sea could be heard running its huge paws up and down the keyboard of the land. The little park had a grove of yellowed birches, and a flock of wheatears foraged by the path. Next month they would be in North Africa, Ain thought. Two thousand miles of tiny wing-beats. He threw them some crumbs from a packet in his pocket.

The woman seemed stronger here. She was panting in the sea wind, her large eyes fixed on Ain. Above her the birches were as gold as those where he had first seen her, the day his life began. . . . Squatting under a stump to watch a shrewmouse he had been, when he caught a falling ripple of green and recognized the shocking girl-flesh, creamy, pink-tipped—coming toward him among the golden bracken! Young Ain held his breath, his nose in the sweet moss and his heart going
crash—crash
. And then he was staring at the outrageous fall of that hair down her narrow back, watching it dance around her heart-shaped buttocks, while the shrewmouse ran over his paralyzed hand. The lake was utterly still, dusty silver under the misty sky, and she made no more than a muskrat’s ripple to rock the floating golden leaves. The silence closed back, the trees burning like torches where the naked girl had walked the wild wood, reflected in Ain’s shining eyes. For a time he believed he had seen an oread.