Meet Me at Infinity (26 page)

No. No one would ever know—any more than we will ever know the color of the eyes that looked out from under Neanderthal’s shaggy mane. Perhaps they were clear, and filled with compassion and the growing light of reason. We cannot know. We have, I fear, killed them. And I fear, I greatly fear, that those lost eyes were a brilliant blue.

Now I have made my record. To you who hear it, I beg, allow yourselves to imagine how it was. To be moved. To help! Surely the Federation could spare one small party to sort this out, to transport the goldskins to another planet. To save what can never be replaced of peace and beauty, of mind.

This was the next-to-last story completed by Alice Sheldon, sent to her agent in November 1986. (Her final story, 1987’s “In Midst of Life,” was included in
Crown of Stars,
Tor 1988.)

Alli referred to the final version of any story as “draft x,” because she rewrote extensively. As she worked, she discarded the earlier drafts, often taping pieces from different drafts together. Even the manuscripts sent to editors would sometimes include taped pages.

‘The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” is almost unique in that part of the original handwritten manuscript exists, in a spiral-bound notebook. The first page contains several alternate titles (“The Other Road,” “Love on the Other Road,” “Into the Mists”) and the statement “1st Draft—Needs extensive revision and tightening.”

The differences between this and the final typescript are “extensive” but not necessarily substantive. There are no real cuts, but almost every sentence has been rethought. Here are the first several handwritten paragraphs. (The manuscript originally started with “I am lazily cruising along just outside a coral reef…”; the segment before that was taped into the notebook.)

It is all my fault, all of It, and Kamir is dead. But you must do something.

Now it is afterwards, I am recording this on shipboard so you will understand. Much of this belongs in a Second Contact report—and much more does not. But I am too exhausted and torn to make a formal Report, I am simply setting down what happened so you will see that something must be done:

At first, all is serene and joyful.

I am lazily cruising along just outside a coral reef on the beautiful sea-world unimaginatively christened “Wet.” But now the sun is starting down. I turn up the motor and start looking for a pass through the reef toward shore. I find one, and cautiously zigzag through; my little neo-latex dinghy is too precious to risk tearing into that sharp coral. Once through, I turn and stop, watching. Something has been following me all afternoon, popping up for a look at intervals, sometimes near, sometimes far.

I don’t want to spend the night alone on a strange beach without checking out my follower. Will it follow me here?

The ninth page ends with Jared and Kamir going to sleep the first night, and the notation “To new p. 10.” The original pages 10 through 32 are very different from the final version: Agna arrives much earlier in the story, before Jared even knows Kamir is female. They go to the village, and Jared makes his Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon comparison immediately. The tribe is suspicious of him when they learn that he is a male who does not raise children, the same as the golden people. The scenes in which Jared learns Kamir and Agna’s genders, that the females die after bearing children, and that the Mnerrin have developed math and science (and chess) all appear earlier in this draft. This section ends at the top of page thirty-two with the approach of the storm that in the finished story thrust Jared and Kamir together while they were still alone:

The band of white cloud is growing rapidly higher. Now a band of darkness shows at the bottom. It’s the squall line, all right. The light is golden yellow, and still not a ripple or a frond stirs. The barometer is falling through the floor, it seems oddly hard to breathe.

Now the Mnerrin are

The “New 10” starts recasting this material, and is—like the first nine pages—similar to the final version, with minor changes in almost every line but no major additions or subtractions. This continues until pages 26 and 27 (the latter a separate sheet paper-clipped to the former), which have a longer version of the island tour taken by Jared and Kamir, ending with the note “To next book,” which no longer exists.

The novella was originally published in the May 1988 issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

The goal for this section was to produce a volume of Alice Sheldon’s complete public nonfiction, compiling everything that she had written for publication but not using her notebooks, diaries, or (for the most part) private letters. There may be some items written for publication which we failed to identify, and some she did (like her thesis and her columns on art in the 1940s) that seemed to fall too far outside our focus. I haven’t included letters to the editor, either newspaper editors or science fiction fanzine editors, because they offered little outside the context of the publication. There are a few small items which I’ve extracted from her personal correspondence to me, because they connect with other, published pieces.

Most of these articles were published in fanzines, so a word about them seems in order.

When the first science fiction magazines started appearing
(Amazing Stories
number one was dated April 1926), the publication of readers’ addresses in the Letters to the Editor columns gave SF fans a means to write to each other. A small but active “fandom” quickly established itself, forming local clubs and conventions and publishing amateur magazines. The word
fanzine
is now in the dictionary, and there are fanzines for any activity which has fans (music, sports, collectibles), but the word was coined within science fiction fandom for its own magazines. Until recently, most SF fanzines were mimeographed, hand-collated and-stapled, and generally given away to its contributors and to publishers of other fanzines. The easy availability of offset printing has turned fewer practitioners into “ink-stained wretches,” and now the Internet is changing fan publishing even more.

I published fanzines from 1969 to 1978. There were two main types of fanzines in the seventies, the large “genzines” (general interest fanzines, with a variety of contents; mine were considered “sercon,” SF-oriented serious and constructive, as opposed to the lighter tone many faneds adopted) and the small “personalzines” (which were mostly editor-written, sometimes by fans who proudly stated that they had stopped reading SF when they discovered fandom). To say that every fanzine fell into one of these two categories would not even resemble the truth, because we faneds had no one to answer to but ourselves, and any issue could be any size and contain any material that suited our fancy at any time. It was delightfully chaotic, and it made every day’s mail an adventure.

My fanzines went under three names:
Phantasmicom
(#1/Summer 1969-#11/May 1974),
Kyben
(#1/December 1971 [included as pages 27-46 of
Phantasmicom
8]-#12/September 1975), and
Khatru
(#1/February 1975-#7/February 1978).
Phantasmicom
and
Khatru
were my genzines,
Kyben
my personalzine.

Phantasmicom
was actually started by Donald G. Keller, who saw some fanzines I had received and decided on the spot that he wanted to do one himself. We had to pretty much write the whole sixty-eight-page first issue ourselves (this was true for most of the early numbers), but we were reading a lot of SF and fantasy and loved having the forum to talk about it. I was eighteen and Don seventeen when we started, and we became noticed for the “youthful enthusiasm” of our writing and of our ambitious publishing schedule. For our third issue, P. S. Price (an actual contributor!) wrote up a meeting he had had with R. A. Lafferty into a fairly substantial piece on Lafferty’s life and work. I approached Virginia Kidd, who was Lafferty’s agent, for help with a bibliography and ended up with an unpublished short story as well. Now we were feeling like real editors, and were commended for devoting so much space to a writer who deserved more attention than he had so far been receiving. Other professional writers noticed what we were doing, and Harlan Ellison and Dean R. Koontz in particular encouraged us to continue to spotlight less-well-known writers, and Piers Anthony emphasized the importance of the interview part of the feature.

Well, we (especially me) weren’t up to the formal sit-down-with-a-writer-and-a-microphone kind of interview, but if there were a way to do it through the mail, that might be okay. We talked about several writers we might approach, and I decided that I would try for James Tiptree, Jr. I wasn’t particularly a Tip-tree fan, but I had read several of his stories and had liked some of them. What I was most interested in was the fact that in 1970, when there was a virtual war declared between the Old Wave and the New Wave in science fiction, Tiptree was being claimed by both camps. There had to be a story in that.

My first attempt to reach Tiptree was through one of his editors, and included the line, “Piers suggested we try to find the writer first, and drag out of him whatever information he is willing to disclose.” That letter was forwarded to Tiptree, and not surprisingly went unanswered. A little later, though, I scored Tip-tree’s address and tried again: “What I am proposing is an exchange of letters—questions and answers—as few or as many as you would agree to—which would be combined into an interview-type article.” I of course did not know that Tiptree could not be interviewed in person or by phone, but in my shyness I had stumbled onto the only way he
could
be. (For her part Alii saw that if she did this, then anyone else asking for information about Tiptree could just be forwarded a copy of his one interview.)

We spent two months sending the interview back and forth, another couple months arranging the bibliography and short story to accompany it, and just kept writing to each other after that. I have no idea how it happened, but a deep friendship developed that still sustains me, all these years after her death. (Putting this book together, rereading all the letters, immersing myself in our relationship again, has been a wonderful experience.)

I asked Tip to write articles for my fanzines, and I got a lot of them. Sometimes there were pieces on specific topics, sometimes more general remarks, mostly on her travels. (These went into a column in
Kyben,
the personalzine, under the title “The 20-Mile Zone,” which she named after a Dory Previn song.) Some of the travel pieces were written as letters to me, but designed to be published. Some letters contained both public and private pages, and often the two bled over. In the informal world of fanzines this didn’t matter at all, but it makes some of the “essays” look odd in this book, with their asides to me and their “best to Ann”s. In the public parts of the letters, Alii said, she was “speaking to the SF world embedded in you,” that she couldn’t write to a faceless audience but could to one person.

We start, after a brief note from a private letter, with the postal interview I conducted with Tiptree from December 3, 1970, through January 29, 1971, which was published in
Phantasmicom
6, June 1971.

Having done all this idiotic stuff about
ME
has put me in a very strange mood. (Have you ever tried talking about yourself for 6 hours straight—into a mike held by a pleasant stranger?) Jeff, I am so sick of
ME-E-E
—it’s indescribable. I have all the normal ego, and often use my life for (hopefully) funny stories—hut, I don’t know, is it possible
not to believe
in one’s biography?… And also I’m nostalgic for the old simple days—somehow my “Interview” with you—remember, how it all started? Anyway, I think that was “realer” (for god’s sake, won’t I ever learn to say “more real?”)—anyway, more true
&
spontaneous and unselfconscious than all this Alice B. Sheldon malarky… Maybe it has something to do with women changing their names so much—and also in my work I once had to use extra names; I’ve lived under, let’s see… at least six, for longer or shorter. Try changing your name someday, Jeff, just for the experience. Oddly refreshing—but too much is disorienting… .

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that none of this current stuff can blot out our old good first Interview of all.

10 Sep 82

Smith:
Your friends and associates are unaware that you are a science fiction writer, so you don’t want SF people finding out who your friends and associates are. But how about telling us what you
are
willing to let us know about you?

Tiptree:
Well, I was born in the Chicago area a long time back, trailed around places like colonial India and Africa as a kid (and by the way, I knew in my bones that they weren’t going to stay “colonial” any more than I was going to stay a kid, but nobody ever asked me). I’m one of those for whom the birth and horrendous growth of Nazism was the central generation event. From it I learned most of what I know about politics, about Human life, about good and evil, courage, free will, fear, responsibility, and What To Say Goodbye To… And, say it again, about Evil. And Guilt. If one of the important things to know about a person is the face in his nightmares, for me that face looks much like my own.