Meet Me at Infinity (29 page)

Oh Christ, I don’t know whether he’s a “good” writer or how he stacks up against, say, Vonnegut. I wouldn’t know how to interest anybody in him. Maybe it’s a sign of something good that he bores you. Maybe he hit me in a vulnerable planetary conjunction. All I know is,
Don’t try to take it away from me.

Now I want to say a word about influences, and whatever you cut, Jeff, please leave this in because I’m beginning to feel like this was my last will and personal Time Capsule and it contains more on Tiptree than anybody including me will ever likely see or want to again.

Who one admires and who one is influenced by aren’t the same. For example, sometimes you learn a trick from a guy who has nothing but that trick. (Even that chap with the shears “influenced” me, ah
oui!)
You learn from a myriad people,
and
from their mistakes. But there’s a feeling that your list of “influences” is your list of greats.
Not so.
And here’s the important thing to me:

Who do I admire in SF? You and you and you as far as eye and memory reach, sir and madam. Some for this, some for that. All different. But more than that—

I love the SF world. And I don’t love easy. Out of SF I wouldn’t spare one, from the dimmest two-neuron dreamer to the voice from the heart of the sun. Maybe to you on the inside it’s not as clear as to me out here. What
is
SF?

What but a staggering, towering, glittering mad lay cathedral? Built like the old ones by spontaneous volunteers, some bringing one laborious gargoyle, some a load of stone, some engineering a spire. Over years now, over time the thing has grown, you know? To what god? Who knows. Something different from the gods of the other arts. A god that isn’t there yet, maybe. An urge saying Up, saying Screw it all. Saying Try. To… be… more? We don’t know. But
everyone
has made this. Limping, scratching, wrangling, clowning, goony, sauced, hes, shes, its, thems, bemmies for all I know, swooping glory, freaked out in corners, ridiculous, noble, queerly vulnerable in some ways others aren’t—totally irrelevant, really.

These are the nearest to winged people that we have and I would shut up forever rather than hurt one of them. Dead or alive.

That’s what’s bugging Tiptree about listing “influences.”

Dig?

—December 3, 1970-January 29, 1971

When I decided to start publishing the small fanzine
Kyben,
I described it to Tip-tree as a zine “in which I and my friends sit around and talk about things, mostly…. Would you like to write a little column?”

Tip agreed, and in
Kyben 1/Phantasmicom
8 (December 1971) we introduced ‘The 20-Mile Zone.” The column consisted of two essays, “I Saw Him” and “Spitting Teeth, Our Hero—,” and a piece of the letter to me that had accompanied them.

Most of the installments of “The 20-Mile Zone” contained travel writing, but the second, “Do You Like It Twice?”
(Phantasmicom
9, February 1972), was a response to a review in
F&SF.
The third column again consisted of an essay (“Maya Máloob”) and parts of the letter accompanying it. When I ran this in
Kyben
3 (September 1972) I edited the letter into two segments, “Mexico on 5 and 10 Haircuts a Day” and ‘The Voice from the Baggie.” This time, instead of just reprinting it that way, I went back to the original letter and edited it more lightly, so the one section here is longer than the two sections were in the fanzine.

Never have I seen so much Human lard—except when I was a kid in what were then the Dutch East Indies. (The colonial Dutchman was a Human swine and so was his mate.) Up north it isn’t pig fat, just solid cylinder-people… and tourists. Old, old tourists in their millions, busloads of geriatric specimens, singing “You Are My Sunshine.” The entire Route 61 around the west end of the Lake Superior is bumper-to-bumper with old old people in beige Cadillacs. Gerontology Boulevard. Old old men hung with cameras, dressed in weirdo mod stuff their pantsuited old ladies have put on them. Man, if they were all stripped I bet you’d only see three navels visible west of Ontario. Not to mention other organs. But the natives of the Rockies, though aged, are tough. Met one still climbing with ropes at eighty-two, another ninety-seven. It’s a UN there, due to the railroads. Found Scots, Swedes, Swiss, Gypsy, Indian, Hungarian, and assorted Oriental hybrids. (Chinese restaurants appear early in the frontier.) They’re the only ones with waistlines.

Also found a marvelous army of young Canadians male and female, who go in to staff all the lodges during the summer and who were just pulling out to scatter to their colleges. Restored faith in the race after the Golden Years brigade. Also some kids who were born there and love it too much to leave. They’re living in another world, the world where your folks came in and homesteaded wild ground and the oldest son is the hero who hauled the generator up the mountain and is organizing a helicopter patrol. Colony on Planet X?

Man, if we could only go on living like that! Human-sized problems, but five generations later you get—Us. Mice in the crevices of Mordor. Ah well, let’s fry an ore for supper.

I ought to mention that it’s becoming a bad scene to try hitchhiking in the Canadian parks. The Canadians are fairly accepting, but they had a bad experience when they tried to set up facilities for hitch trippers. One chap (the Hungarian) told me a heated tale about Mafia infiltration, heavy drug-pushing in the hostels and camps. The old pioneer types that run the area are getting edgy. They’re used to beards and jeans, but they can’t tell one long-haired kid from another. If you go, get some sort of wheels, square up into a Great American Nature Lover type when you arrive, and make Contact with the local young people to find out how the scene works. The place is so great, assuming you’re not allergic to pure air, it’s worth a little tactical effort.

And, go early or late; in midsummer you can’t see around the bodies. Unless you get ‘way up back on foot.

—September 18, 1971

Ballard’s Drowned Giant, I mean. He’s lying on the North American continent, frozen stiff. Among the peaks of the Canadian Rockies. That’s where I saw him, or at least his arm.

It’s not called his arm, it’s called the Athabasca Glacier, which is one limb of the Columbia Icefield, which is the largest hunk of the Ice Age left south of the Arctic. (150 square miles of it with peaks at 12,000 feet, figurewise.)

The Ice Age has of course been gone for ten thousand years or so. Imagine an ice cube so big it can melt for ten thousand years and still be there. Great thick towering green-creviced, hundred-mile blocks of ice, cradled in the peaks, forever gushing down torrents of melt to nourish the forests and moose and meadows below… for ten thousand years. When it’s all gone…?

What you see, edge on from the new highway, is one huge, incredible mess. Devastation. The party’s over. Think of a tray of ice cubes melting in a sink—that’s about the scale of it. Only the ice is seven miles long and the sides of the sink are thousands of feet high. And the ice has made that sink. Ice a mile high once filled it up, grinding forward, gouging, crushing through and over the peaks. A mile down under the ice, what went on was terrible. Now as the ice retreats you can see it. A world of rubble, of mountains ground to gravel. Not a leaf, not a moss. Sterile. You approach through a lunar landscape; all it needs is a little tin flag to be an Apollo TV. Glaciers make an abominable mess, probably the worst mess going. Nuclear bombs, volcanoes—mosquito bites, comparatively.

Glaciers also have bad breath. They exhale a sullen archaic draft. The cold flows down forever from the icefield above. Even though the day is bright a mile away, freezing squalls and blizzards play at the edge of the ice.

This is what is called a tourist attraction.

I was a tourist. I got out and joined the line of Human insects straggling up the cold moraine toward the ice. The ice. I told myself I wanted to see what made the astounding corrosion-green color in the crevasses. Secretly, I wanted to touch it. I passed signs that said the ice ended here in 1950, and here in 1960. Everybody was jumping over streams of meltwater on its way to become the MacKenzie River and end in the Arctic Ocean. This icefield feeds three oceans; it’s the hydrographic apex of the continent. We passed under a small rainbow. My desire to touch the ice-beast did not seem to be shared by my fellow primates; they advanced one-eyed, holding up their Instamatics like magic amulets.

When I came to the edge of the ice I saw that the whole mass was dimly lit up oystercolor from within. The ice itself here was glistening granular, full of pebbles and other debris of its million geologic crimes. The edge sloped and the bottom was about a foot off the ground. Pursuing (I told myself) my interest in the green, I stuck my head underneath. This involved kneeling in a stream. The whole glacier seemed to be hollow underneath, dripping from a billion ice udders. It was resting only lightly on the ground, like—like a vast hand. A hand barely pressing on its fingerpads. I pulled back out and saw the Drowned Giant. Or his big frozen brother.

Remember Ballard’s description of the troops of people clambering up, over, into the drowned body? Picking at him, scuffling in his eyeballs?

I looked at the line of little figures trudging up over the gravel waste. More cars arriving. A busload now. All day, every day. I saw a big woman in curlers pry off a piece of the ice-body. (A very small piece.) It was snowing. A man had his girl photograph him standing on the ice shelf. As he climbed down he stopped and frowned. Then he kicked the ice. The ice-finger did not break.

I looked up; the ice-arm behind the hand was seven miles long; the shoulder was an enormous icefall. Tiny snow-cat buses were sightseeing near the elbow. They had worn a dirty track. The arm lay quietly; the first ten thousand years had been easy. I watched Ballard’s tourists. A boy crawled into a serac. Remember the boy who crawled into the giant’s nostril and barked? If this boy barked I didn’t hear him. Glaciers are noisy.

Another man was kicking the glacier. Making no impression, he backed off, nodded fiercely at nobody in particular and then jumped at it with a kind of clumsy karate kick,
hard.
That didn’t affect the ice-giant either. The man went away. I saw three more men kick the glacier. Very popular act. It hailed and I too went away, wondering.

Kicking glaciers…?

Race memory, could it be? The ice-giant was helpless now. But I could see his work. If that ice ever rises again, man, we are through. A mile-high wall grinding over cities, missile bins, Disneyland, Pat Nixon,
everything.

Well, I never found out what was causing the green. But I touched it, the ice age. I can report that it is cold, dirty, and a lot bigger and older than I am. And I didn’t kick it.

Sort of wish I’d tasted it, though.

—September 18, 1971

—Curled up, that’s what.

Imagine you’re wrestling some big old shutters off a fishing shack in a big old forest. Imagine further that these so-called shutters are actually monster antiques made of heavy splintery planking and the kind of hardware they tie ships onto. To get them off you have to push up; it’s like heaving a piano through a transom. Luckily there’s a big guy helping you. Okay?

So, just as you notice the planks are kind of slippery, your eye catches an interesting ripple on the lake behind you—

Ooops—
powwwww!

And you’re down on the ground feeling your gushing face to see where your teeth are and if your nose is still there. And you
hurt.
The shutter hit your facebones, split one lip and cut the other off the gums, and knocked half your teeth around. Blood pouring.

What do you think about?

Well, of course you think about plunging your agonized muzzle into the cold lake, and where’s a doctor, and so on. But if you’re a writer you also think about all those heroes. How they get their faces stomped in or shot off and leap up gamely and—

Steal an alien rocket ship, and—

Figure out a vector-mathematical language and/or the secret of the universe, and—

Fuck at least the bad girl and the good girl during surgery, while—

Making a half a dozen brilliant psychosociophilosophical speeches.

Man, I couldn’t. I
couldn’t!

I couldn’t do anything but sit down and sluice my face and accept a ride to the hospital, and after I got sewed up I just
sat down
some more.

I wasn’t interested in the nurses and the only speeches I made were something like ” ‘Anksh ‘Oc” and “Fflthh.”

Who can?

Well, another thing I thought was, Jeesus, this is what your professional ring fighter goes through every week or so. You’ve seen him—Joe Meathooks, down on one knee, blood streaming down his mashed puss, crowd yelling at him to get up.

And he does.

The more I thought of this the worse I felt.

My injuries were
minimal
you understand, compared to Joe’s. Shoot, nothing was broken, my teeth may even stay with me. No wires. A nothing, a tap. Joe would laugh.

So what’s wrong with me? Yellow? Decadent intellectual faked up in a woodman’s shirt?

Well (I told myself), Point A, this sort of thing is part of Joe’s
business.
Lots of businesses have painful parts. Astronomers freeze their arses off all night, politicians cripple their shaking hands. Joe might even dislike a couple parts of mine… maybe.

Or, Point B, Joe has his adrenaline going. Adrenaline is really something. My very few small brawls taught me that it really does block pain. (I even noticed a pinkish haze, too; can’t imagine why.) Whereas I hadn’t been desperate, or mad at the shutters—I was in a peaceful cholinergic state when the Pow! hit.

So I concluded that our adrenaline-powered Hero probably can get up and fight some, shinny up walls, and bash doors and such. And maybe (after the wet towels) he can fumble around a bit with the girls. But man, no speeches. And as for cracking the higher mathematical functions, the grand intuitive insights—