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

by James Tiptree Jr.

  His stomach heaves, only what it is, he is coming in his Levi’s in a dreadful slow unrelieving ooze like a red-hot wire dragging through his crotch, while he stands by her uselessly as he will stand helplessly by in some near future he can’t imagine or remember—and the tension keeps building, pounding, the light flickers—a storm is coming or maybe his eyes are going bad, but he can see below him her pure profile resting spent on the edge of the toilet, oblivious to his furious towel; in the flashing dimness sees the incomprehensible letters S-E-P-T-I-C A-B-O-R-T-I-O-N snaking shadowy down the spine of his virgin love, while the universe beats Black! Flash! Black! Drumming with hooves harsher than any storm—hurling him through lightning-claps of blinding darkness to a thrumming stasis in which what exists of him senses—something—but is instantly shot away on unimaginable energies—

  —And achieves condensement, blooms into the green and open sunlight of another world, into a mellow springtime self—in which a quite different girl is jostling his hip.

  “Molly,” he hears his older voice say vaguely, seeing with joy how the willow fronds trail in the friendly, dirty Potomac. The bars and caduceus on his collar are pricking his neck.

  “Yes, sir, Doctor sir.” She spins around, kneels down in the scruffy grass to open Howard Johnson boxes. “Oh, god, the coffee.” Handing him up a hot dog, swinging back her fair hair. Her arm is so female with its tender pale armpit, her whole body is edible, even her dress is like lemonade so fresh and clean—no, radiant, he corrects himself. That’s the word, radiant. His radiant woman. He shrugs away a tiny darkness, thinking of her hair sliding on his body in the Roger Smith hotel bedroom.

  “C’mon sit, Pete. It’s only a little dirty.”

  “Nothing’s dirty anymore.” He flops down beside her, one arm finding its natural way around the opulence of her buttocks on the grass. She chuckles down at him, shaking her head.

  “You’re a hard case, Pete.” She takes a big bite of hot dog with such lips that he considers flinging himself upon her then and there, barely remembers the cars tearing by above them. “I swear,” she says, chewing, “I don’t think you ever screwed anybody you were friends with before.”

  “Something like that.” He puts his hot dog down to loosen his GI tie.

  “Thirty days to civvies, you’ll be in Baltimore.” She licks her fingers happily. “Oh, wow, Pete, I’m so glad you got your fellowship. Try the coleslaw, it’s all right. Will you remember us poor slaves when you’re a big old pathologist?”

  “I’ll remember.” To distract himself he pokes in the boxes, spills coleslaw on a book. “What you reading?”

  “Oh, Whately Carington.”

  “Whatly what?”

  “No, Whate-ly. Carington. A Limey. Psychical research man, they do that veddy seddiously, the Limies.”

  “Uh?” He beams at the river, blinks to get rid of a flicker back of his eyes. Amphetamine withdrawal, after six months?

  “He has this theory, about K-objects. Whatever thing you feel most intense about, part of you lives on—Pete, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  But the flicker won’t quit, it is suddenly worse; through it he can just make out her face turned nurse-wary, coming close, and he tries to hang on through a world flashing black—green—BLACK!—is trapped for unbreathing timelessness in dark nowhere, a phantom landscape of gray tumbled ash under a hard black sky, seeing without eyes a distant tangle of wreckage on the plain so menacing that his unbodied voice screams at the shadow of a metal scrap beside him in the ashes, 2004 the ghostly unmeaning numbers—STOP IT!—And he is back by the river under Molly’s springtime eyes, his hands gripping into the bones of her body.

  “Hey-y-y, honey, the war’s over.” Sweet sensual pixie-smile now watchful, her nurse’s hand inside his shirt. “Korea’s ten thousand miles away, you’re in good old D.C., Doctor.”

  “I know. I saw a license plate.” He laughs unconvincingly, makes his hands relax. Will the ghosts of Seoul never let him go? And his body guiltily intact, no piece of him in the stained waste cans into which he has—Stop it! Think of Molly. I like Ike. Johns Hopkins research fellowship. Some men simply aren’t cut out for surgical practice.

  “I’m a gutless wonder, Molly. Research.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Pete,” she says with total warmth, nurse-hand satisfied, changing to lover’s on his chest. “We’ve been over all that.”

  And of course they have, he knows it and only mutters, “My Dad wanted me to be an Indian doctor,” which they have been over too; and the brimming gladness is back now, buoyantly he seizes the coleslaw, demands entertainment, demonstrating reality-grasp.

  “So what about Whatly?”

  “It’s serious-s-s,” she protests, snickering, and is mercurially almost serious too. “I mean, I’m an atheist, Pete, I don’t believe there’s anything afterward, but this theory. . . .” And she rattles on about K-objects and the pool of time, intense energic structures of the mind undying—sweet beddable girl in the springtime who has taught him unclaiming love. His friend. Liberated him.

  He stretches luxuriously, relishes a coleslaw belch. Free male beside a willing woman. No problems. What is it man in woman doth require? The lineaments of gratified desire. The radiance of her. He has gratified her. Will gratify her again. . . .

  “It’s kind of spooky, though.” She flings the box at the river with tremendous effort, it flies twenty feet. “Damn! But think of parts of yourself whirling around forever sticking to whatever you loved!” She settles against the willow, watching the box float away. “I wonder if part of me is going to spend eternity hanging around a dumb cat. I loved that old cat. Henry. He died, though.”

  The ghost of a twelve-gauge fires soundlessly across his mind, a mare whickers. He sneezes and rolls over onto her lap with his nose in her warm scented thighs. She peers dreamily down at him over her breasts, is almost beautiful.

  “Whatever you love, forever. Be careful what you love.” She squints wickedly. “Only with you I think it’d be whatever you were maddest at—no, that’s a horrible thought. Love has to be the most intense.”

  He doubts it but is willing to be convinced, rooting in her lap while she pretends to pound on him and then squirms, stretching up her arms, giving herself to the air, to him, to life. “I want to spend eternity whirling around you.” He heaves up to capture her, no longer giving a damn about the cars, and as the sweet familiar body comes pliantly under him he realizes it’s true, he’s known it for some time. Not friendship at all, or rather, the best of friendships. The real one. “I love you, Molly. We love.”

  “Ooh, Pete.”

  “You’re coming to Baltimore with me. We’ll get married,” he tells her warm neck, feeling the flesh under her skirt heavy in his hand, feeling also an odd stillness that makes him draw back to where he can see her face, see her lips whispering, “I was afraid of that.”

  “Afraid?” His heart jumps with relief, jumps so hard that the flicker comes back in the air, through which he sees her lying too composed under his urgency. “Don’t be afraid, Molly. I love you.”

  But she is saying softly, “Oh, damn, damn, Pete, I’m so sorry, it’s a lousy thing women do. I was just so happy, because. . . . ” She swallows, goes on in an absurd voice. “Because someone very dear to me is coming home. He called me this morning from Honolulu.”

  This he cannot, will not, understand among the flashing pulses, but repeats patiently, “You love me, Molly. I love you. We’ll get married in Baltimore,” while she fights gently away from him, saying, “Oh, I do, Pete, I do, but it’s not the same.”

  “You’ll be happy with me. You love me.”

  They are both up crouching now in the blinking, pounding sunlight.

  “No, Pete, I never said. I didn’t—” Her hands are out seeking him, like knives.

  “I can’t marry you, honey. I’m going to marry a man called Charlie McMahon.”

  McMahon—Maaa—honn—aa—on-n-n the idiot sou
nd flaps through the universe, his carotids are hammering, the air is drumming with his hurt and rage as he stands foolishly wounded, unable to believe the treachery of everything—which is now strobing in great blows of blackness as his voice shouts “Whore!” shouts “Bitch-bitch-bitch . . . ” into a dwindling, flashing chaos—

  —And explodes silently into a nonbeing which is almost familiar, is happening this time more slowly as if huge energy is tiding to its crest so slowly that some structure of himself endures to form in what is no longer a brain the fear that he is indeed dead and damned to live forever in furious fragments. And against this horror his essence strains to protest But I did love! at a horizon of desolation—a plain of endless, lifeless rubble under a cold black sky, in which he or some pattern of energies senses once more that distant presence: wreckage, machines, huge structures incomprehensibly operative, radiating dark force in the nightmare world, the force which now surges—

  —To incorporate him anew within familiar walls, with the words “But I did love” meaninglessly on his lips. He leans back in his familiarly unoiled swivel chair, savoring content. Somewhere within him weak darkness stirs, has power only to send his gaze to the three-di portraits behind the pile of printouts on his desk.

  Molly smiles back at him over the computer sheets, her arm around their eldest daughter. For the first time in years the thought of poor Charlie McMahon crosses his mind, triggers the automatic incantation: Molly-never-would-have-been-happy-with-him. They had a bad time around there, but it worked out. Funny how vividly he recalls that day by the river, in spite of all the good years since. But I did love, his mind murmurs uneasily, as his eyes go lovingly to the computer printouts.

  The lovely, elegant results. All confirmed eight ways now, the variance all pinned down. Even better than he’d hoped. The journal paper can go in the mail tomorrow. Of course the pub-lag is nearly three years now; never mind: the AAAS panel comes next week. That’s the important thing. Lucky timing, couldn’t be neater. The press is bound to play it up. . . . Going to be hard not to watch Gilliam’s face, Peter muses, his own face ten years younger, sparkling, all lines upturned.

  “I do love it, that’s what counts,” he thinks, a jumble of the years of off-hours drudgery in his mind. . . . Coffee-ringed clipboards, the new centrifuge, the animal mess, a girl’s open lab coat, arguments with Ferris in Analysis, arguments about space, about equipment, about costs—and arching over it like a laser-grid the luminous order of his hypothesis. His proven—no, mustn’t say it—his meticulously tested hypothesis. The lucky lifetime break. The beauty one. Never do it again, he hasn’t another one like this left in him; no matter! This is it, the peak. Just in time. Don’t think of what Nathan said, don’t think the word. (Nobel)—That’s stupid. (Nobel) Think of the work itself, the explanatory power, the clarity.

  His hand has been wandering toward the in-basket under the printouts where his mail has been growing moss (he’ll get a secretary out of this, that’s for sure!), but the idea of light turns him to the window. The room feels tense, brimming with a tide of energy. Too much coffee, he thinks, too much joy. I’m not used to it. Too much of a loner. From here in I share. Spread it around, encourage younger men. Herds of assistants now . . .

  Across his view of tired Bethesda suburbs around the NIH Annex floats the train of multiple-author papers, his name as senior, a genial myth; sponsoring everybody’s maiden publication. A fixture in the mainstream . . . Kids playing down there, he sees, shooting baskets by a garage, will some of them live to have a myeloma cured by the implications of his grubby years up here? If the crystallization can be made easier. Bound to come. But not by me, he thinks, trying to focus on the running figures through a faint stroboscopic blink which seems to arise from the streets below, although he knows it must be in his retinae.

  Really too much caffeine, he warns himself. Let’s not have a hypertensive episode, not now, for god’s sake. Exultation is almost tangible in the room, it’s not distracting but integrative; as if he were achieving some higher level of vitality, a norepinephrinelike effect. Maybe I really will live on a higher level, he muses, rubbing the bridge of his nose between two fingers to get rid of a black afterimage which seems almost like an Apollo moonscape behind his eyes, a trifle unpleasant.

  Too much doom, he tells himself, vigorously polishing his glasses, too much bomb-scare, ecology-scare, fascism-scare, race-war-scare, death-of-everything scare. He jerks his jaw to stop the tinnitis thrumming in his inner ear, glancing at the big 1984 desk calendar with its scrawled joke: If everything’s okay why are we whispering? Right. Let’s get at it and get home. To Molly and Sue and little Pete, their late-born.

  He grins, thinking of the kid running to him, and thrusts his hand under the printouts to his packet of stale mail—and as his hand touches it an icicle rams into his heart.

  For an instant he thinks he really is having a coronary. But it isn’t his real heart, it’s a horrible cold current of knowledge striking from his fingers to his soul, from that hideous sleazy tan-covered foreign journal which he now pulls slowly out to see the penciled note clipped to the cover, the personally delivered damned journal which has been lying under there like a time bomb, for how long? Weeks?

  Pete, you better look at this. Sorry as hell.

  But he doesn’t need to look, riffling through the wretchedly printed pages with fingers grown big and cold as clubs; he already knows what he’ll find inside there published so neatly, so sweetly, and completely, with the confirmation even stronger and more elegant, the implication he hadn’t thought of—and all so modest and terse. So young. Despair takes him as the page opens. Djakarta University for Jesus Christ’s sake? And some Hindu’s bloody paradigm—

  Sick fury fulminates, bile and ashes rain through his soul as his hands fumble the pages, the gray unreal unreadable pages which are now strobing—Flash! Black! Flash! Black!—swallowing the world, roaring him in or up or out on a phantom whirlwind—

  —Till unsensation crescendos past all limit, bursts finally into the silence of pure energy, where he—or what is left of him, or momentarily reconstituted of him—integrates to terrified insight, achieves actual deathly awareness of its extinct self immaterially spinning in the dust of an eons-gone NIH Annex on a destroyed planet. And comprehends with agonized lucidity the real death of everything that lived—excepting only that in himself which he would most desperately wish to be dead.

  What happened? He does not know, can never know, which of the dooms or some other had finally overtaken them, nor when; only that he is registering eternity, not time, that all that lived here has been gone so long that even time is still. Gone, all gone; centuries or millennia gone, all gone to ashes under pulseless stars in the icy dark, gone forever. Saving him alone and his trivial pain.

  He alone . . . But as the mercilessly reifying force floods higher there wakes in him a dim uncomforting sense of presence; a bodiless disquiet in the dust tells him he is companioned, is but a node in a ghostly film of dead life shrouding the cold rock-ball. Unreachable, isolate—he strains for contact and is incorporeally stricken by new dread. Are they too in pain? Was pain indeed the fiercest fire in our nerves, alone able to sustain its flame through death? What of love, of joy? . . . There are none here.

  He wails voicelessly as conviction invades him, he who had believed in nothing before. All the agonies of Earth, uncanceled? Are broken ghosts limping forever from Stalingrad and Salamis, from Gettysburg and Thebes and Dunkirk and Khartoum? Do the butchers’ blows still fall at Ravensbruck and Wounded Knee? Are the dead of Carthage and Hiroshima and Cuzco burning yet? Have ghostly women waked again only to resuffer violation, only to watch again their babies slain? Is every nameless slave still feeling the iron bite, is every bomb, every bullet and arrow and stone that ever flew, still finding its screaming mark—atrocity without end or comfort, forever?

  Molly. The name forms in his canceled heart. She who was love. He tries to know that she or some fragment of her is war
m among her children, but can summon only the image of her crawling forever through wreckage to Charlie McMahon’s bloody head.

  Let it not be! He would shriek defiance at the wastes, finding himself more real as the strange energy densens; he struggles bodilessly, flails perished nonlimbs to conjure love out of extinction to shield him against hell, calling with all his obliterated soul on the ultimate talisman: the sound of his little son’s laugh, the child running to him, clasping his leg in welcome home.

  For an instant he thinks he has it—he can see the small face turn up, the mouth open—but as he tries to grasp, the ghost-child fades, frays out, leaving in his destroyed heart only another echo of hurt—I want Mommy, Mommy, my Mommy. And he perceives that what he had taken for its head are forms. Presences intrusive, alien as the smooth, bleak regard of sharks met under water.

  They move, precess obscurely—they exist here on this timelost plain! And he understands with loathing that it is from them or those—machines or beings, he cannot tell—that the sustaining energy flows. It is their dark potency which has raised him from the patterns of the dust.

  Hating them he hungers, would sway after them to suck his death-life, as a billion other remnants are yearning, dead sunflowers thirsting toward their black sun—but finds he cannot, can only crave helplessly as they recede.

  They move, he perceives, toward those black distant cenotaphs, skeletal and alien, which alone break the dead horizon. What these can be, engines or edifices, is beyond his knowing. He strains sightlessly, sensing now a convergence, an inflowing as of departure like ants into no earthly nest. And at this he understands that the energy upbuoying him is sinking, is starting to ebb. The alien radiance that raised him is going, and he is guttering out. Do you know? he voicelessly cries after them, Do you know? Do you move oblivious among our agonies?

  But he receives no answer, will never receive one; and as his tenuous structure fails he has consciousness only to wonder briefly what unimaginable errand brought such beings here to his dead cinder. Emissaries, he wonders, dwindling; explorers, engineers? Or is it possible that they are only sightseers? Idling among our ruins, perhaps even cognizant of the ghosts they raise to wail—turning us on, recreating our dead-show for their entertainment?