This time, I spent more time with Anne than I had before. I found myself swept along to meals with her, Todd, and an ever-changing cast of fascinating characters. There was always room to squeeze another chair at the table as her friends appeared. Each meal would end up a delightful mixture of famous and fandom, with Anne reigning over her adoring court like a benevolent queen. I will never forget the way she seemed to sparkle from the inside out. Her laughter was infectious, and she had a talent for drawing stories out of people. I would sit at the far end of the table and quietly observe the subtlety of her interactions. It was easy to think she was lost in a sea of sounds as everyone around her laughed and talked at the same time. But then someone would make a remark that would catch her attention, and she would turn the full force of her charm on them. With a light touch of the hand and an encouraging smile, she would soon have them pouring out every detail of whatever anecdote she found entertaining or moving. While watching this hypnotizing dance, I came to realize why Anne’s fans were so fiercely devoted to her. The love and adoration they were lavishly pouring over her wasn’t just being received; it was being returned. Putting Anne and a fan together was magical. They would both get a glow of joy around them that was humbling to see.
After the convention was over, I had the opportunity to be on the receiving end of that intense charm. Anne and I were sitting in the chairs that reappear in the lobby of the hotel once Dragon*Con is over. I was showing her pictures of my kids, and we were enjoying a nice chat. She asked me how things had been in the Weyrfest room, and I shared a few amusing stories with her. I also told her about a panel we had that year where everyone had a chance to share a “how Anne’s writing touched my life” story. I briefly told her some of the things people had said that really stuck with me. She kept nodding her head and listening. Then came the touch of the hand and the smile as she said, “And what was your story?” I knew I’d walked right into her web. So I took a deep breath and told her about Michelle and Helva. She never said a word, just kept patting my hand even as both our eyes got a bit watery. When I finally finished sharing, she squeezed my hand and all she said was “Thank you.” Todd had told me how special The Ship Who Sang was for his mom; the dedication to her father at the beginning of the book merely hints at the deep emotions, inspired by the Colonel’s death, that Anne poured into the pages. I understood and returned her hand squeeze. Then she grinned and tapped a picture of my older daughter, whom she’d met at the convention, and said, “Now that one is special!” The tears were replaced with smiles as we began another round of swapping kid stories. She was a crafty one who knew how to build a bond, applying equal amounts of laughter and tears.
Over the years I would be fortunate enough to have several opportunities to interact with Anne and observe the way people opened up around her. Somewhere along the way, in my eyes she stopped being the legendary author and simply became my dear friend’s mom. While getting ready for an awards banquet one year, she was treating me to a delightfully embarrassing tale of Todd while I braided her hair and helped with her makeup. I was struck by the immense contrast between the fragility of her skin and the vigorous spirit shining in her eyes. The green eyes and freckles mentioned in that long-ago author’s note were very much in evidence, and in light of the force of the personality contained within—the rest truly did change without notice. It was but the shell that carried around an incredible essence that not only compelled others to respond with openhearted love, but was brave enough to love in return. I hugged her and looked at our faces reflecting back a matching set of mischievous green eyes and realized how true my first impression had been. She was indeed the sort of person I could be, and amazingly was, friends with.
A few years ago, as we began the frenzy that is part of Weyrfest planning, whenever Anne would announce she would be joining us, Todd suggested we do a staged reading of The Ship Who Sang. I thought this sounded like a wonderful idea and was both honored and nervous when I was given the part of Helva. Few would understand how much it meant to me to be her voice, but Todd was one of them. Unfortunately, health concerns kept Anne from being able to make the journey. Instead, we filmed the presentation to send to her as a get well wish from all of us at Weyrfest. I can close my eyes and still hear the tremble in Todd’s voice as he read, before the notes of the requiem sounded, “Softly, barely audible at first, the strains of the ancient song of evening and requiem swelled to the final poignant measure until black space itself echoed back the sound of the song the ship sang.” The powerful silence of a room filled to capacity with people moved to tears by the words Anne had written fifty years before was tremendous.
The impact on my life of that brief paragraph in the back of a book so many years before suddenly hit me. By reading one book, my life had taken a direction and been filled with people I never could have imagined. Those offhand words weren’t just a clever disregard for the effect time has on a physical appearance; “the rest changes without notice” was life. Without my noticing what was happening, Anne managed to reach out and make profound changes in my life.
But now that I have noticed, I am forever grateful. Thank you, Anne. For every word, every smile, every tear, and every song.
Currently a resident of Austin, Texas, ANGELINA ADAMS is a mother of four and friend to many. She enjoys taking on new challenges, which has proved to be both a blessing and a curse. Since 1996, she has delighted in taking an annual break from being an upstanding member of society to devote her time and energy to the Anne McCaffrey programming track at Dragon*Con. Her daughter, Michelle, is now eighteen years old and continues to astound medical professionals with her ability to defy the odds. She is the tiniest member of her graduating class and rules the hallways with her smiles as she zooms around the school with her walker. She is a source of inspiration for all who know her.
Charlotte Moore is a force of nature. Hurricanes worship her, volcanoes erupt for her, and regular mortals either bow or get out of her way (sometimes both). That she is also an avid Anne McCaffrey fan and for many years ran the Weyrfest at Dragon*Con is only natural: after all, forces of nature do what they want, don’t they?
The Twithead with the Dragon Tattoo
CHARLOTTE MOORE
ANNE MCCAFFREY TRIED to kill me once.
It was my first day of active duty as a volunteer for Weyrfest, the Anne McCaffrey programming track at Dragon*Con, and I was literally running late. Barreling through the bowels of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, I kept my head on a swivel as I threaded my way through a glut of scowling Klingons and beaming superheroes, past cardboard robots and buxom cat-girls, around wide-eyed convention virgins with their fanny packs and camera bags and sprawling paper programs. It’s important to keep one’s head at a science fiction convention—in trying to look at everything, one ultimately sees very little. You certainly can’t count on anyone else to see you (unless you’re a painted Amidala in her layer cake frills or a Robocop with real hydraulic armor or a lanky six-foot-two twenty-something with a rubber penis strapped to his forehead).
Weyrfest, as it was still officially known at the time, was the only Anne McCaffrey-themed event at any convention anywhere, and in 2003 the Dragonlady herself was Dragon*Con’s scheduled guest of honor. It wasn’t my first convention, but it was my first year as a volunteer, and as an eager disciple of Her Lady of Dragons, I was keenly aware of my tardiness. In sprinting, I was merely trying to exercise due diligence. That, and I was hella stoked to meet Anne freaking McCaffrey.
Little did I know that I was about to.
I don’t know who was more surprised when my shins crashed into the hard metal arm of a motorized scooter; I had only the impression of silver hair before my inertial dampeners smashed down.
Have you ever seen a dog lose traction on a hardwood floor? Canine physiognomy is capable of conveying a very specific, completely hilarious combination of surprise, dismay, and shame. I imagine my face looked much like that. I reflected briefly on the life I’d lived and regrett
ed the way it would be changed by face-planting into Anne McCaffrey’s crotch. Oh well, I thought. I’ve had a good run.
Luckily for Anne McCaffrey’s crotch—less so for my tibias—I caught myself in the nick of time. She looked up at me with those green eyes of hers, and I said something apropos like, “Oh my god I am so sorry you’re Anne McCaffrey and I’m Charlotte I’m your junior staffer and it’s so nice to meet you and I’m a huge fan an I’m really really sorry.” Weyrfest’s director, Anna, with her brace of chaperones—we always had a few people on Anne Guard to keep exactly this kind of thing from happening—grinned at me, the picture of knowing parental bemusement. I had the vivid impression of becoming a floor.
I think Anne said, “It’s nice to meet you.”
I fled.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Charlotte,” you’re thinking, “I’m gonna be honest: it kind of actually sounds like it was you who tried to kill Anne.” False.
By now it is well documented that when put in control of a motorized vehicle, Anne Inez McCaffrey became crazed with power. Anne Guard wasn’t just meant for her safety. It was meant for everyone else’s. One second, that mezzanine was clear. The next, Anne, in open defiance of physics, had appeared directly in my way. I can only assume she’d worked out how to take that damn chair between.
The better part of my life, it often seems, has been characterized by intersections—or, if you like, near misses—with Anne McCaffrey.
Like many of Anne’s fans, I was a sensitive, precocious adolescent with a voracious appetite for books. I preferred fiction as a rule, but my mother had not had much luck plying me with the dramas, mysteries, and florid classics she so loved: I snubbed Rebecca, ignored Anne of Green Gables, and demanded answers for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: Was she trying to bore me to death?
Jurassic Park, however, went right down the hatch. I treasured my Edgar Allen Poe anthology and took great pleasure in carting it around to my sixth grade classes, where I knew my less subtle schoolmates would have little to no appreciation for the tome. (I couldn’t fathom why this endeared me to no one.) I must have read Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Witch Saga half a dozen times. I was ten years old when L’Engle whisked me away to Camazotz. I could recite Dahl’s Matilda in my sleep.
Yet I didn’t discover science fiction as a genre until the seventh grade, when my fingers first flattened the title page of Anne’s “The Smallest Dragonboy.” The textbook in which it was reprinted also contained Bradbury’s vitally poignant “All Summer in a Day.” Together, the two stories were tailor-written for a gangly, earnest tomboy with eyes for the stars. I had never considered that dragons might be loyal, benevolent partners, but in a strange way it made perfect sense. When my teacher put us into groups to stage excerpts for our classmates, I clamored for—and easily won—the role of the hatchling dragon, and the night before the play I slaved over my costume (the first of many in the years to follow). Unable even to visualize “bronze,” I settled for gold acrylic paint slathered over a paper snout, paper wings, and a paper tail. Inside it I felt positively alien, eager for my single joyous line: “My name is Heth!” (I think I pronounced it “Heath.” Like the candy bar. Twelve-year-old girls are big into candy bars.)
Since then, a lot of people—boyfriends, mostly, but also coworkers feigning interest and curious passersby as I doodled at a sunny café table—have asked me, “Why dragons?” It’s a question Anne herself was posed many times.
While they are the most enduring of the mythical creatures, with roots in every culture between here and Sumer, dragons don’t really appeal to me any more or less than do unicorns or gryphons or centaurs or Elves or dark old things that live in very still water. I respect their mystique and versatility—a dragon can look like damn near anything—but ultimately, a dragon is just another creature in humankind’s great mythological menagerie. It’s Anne’s dragons that are special.
Anne McCaffrey was an animal lover. So are most of her fans. So am I. And while most humans are driven by a basic biological imperative to communicate (barring Fox News pundits and people who don’t use their turn signals and anyone from South Carolina), animal lovers are that much more gratified by connecting to a member of another species. We see much of ourselves in these creatures so unlike us—and many of them seem intrigued by us in turn. But while their intentions are clear, animals remain largely mute. We know that they dream, but not of what. We wonder what they would say if they could speak.
Anne’s dragons exemplify the essential human longing for connection to the other. On Pern, dragons have wills, minds, and desires of their own. They fear and love and lust and hate. They are id and ego both; they are sweet children and impassioned soldiers by turns. And yet, one’s dragon is a reflection of the best in one’s self; they are an ever-present affirmation, a reminder to be just and to strive. Unconstrained by either space or time, a Pernese dragon is free to see the world as a place of boundless opportunity: all is achievable but that which, affronting the natural order, must not be achieved. I imagine they’d be fond of Yoda’s axiom “Try not. Do, or do not! There is no try.” Anne McCaffrey may have shunned organized religion, but her dragons were Buddhists, every last one.
Drawing them, reading about them, thinking about them, soothes and settles me like little else. It’s not simply the idea of enduring companionship that attracts me, though of course that’s a huge part of the appeal. It’s the idea of dragon as peacemaker: a serene, graceful mind whose single greatest instinct is to protect and sustain. In my dreams, they smell of warm earth, of sunshine. In flight together, my dragon and I travel beyond reach, beyond yesterday. We live for now, and we are now, and now is all.
I’m not the first girl-misfit to find solace in speculative fiction, but when I was growing up there weren’t a lot of other girls who shared my interest. Even now, the numbers favor readers with Y chromosomes (though, thank the maker of little green apples, this is changing). Apparently no one told Pern fandom, which is dominated by women—women of all makes and models, countless women on whose collective behalf I could never presume to speak. Maybe another of this book’s more illustrious, well-qualified contributors will speculate on why women are drawn to Pern. For my part, let it suffice to say simply that women relate to Anne’s work—and that this strikes me as I think about the helical shape of my connection to her and where our paths intersect at Stuart Hall School.
I can’t talk about Anne McCaffrey without talking about Stuart Hall.
I had known since I was six that I wanted to attend the all-girls boarding school in southwestern Virginia, my mother’s cherished alma mater. While my peers couldn’t comprehend boarding school as anything but a punishment, I saw it as a godsend, a refuge from the torments of those same indifferent peers, from whom I often hid in Benden Weyr’s secret passages, in Menolly’s precarious seaside caves. Imagine my elation when I found Anne McCaffrey’s name among the brochure’s list of notables. It wasn’t just a selling point. It was serendipity.
I loved Stuart Hall. It was there that I began to come out of my shell, built as a bulwark against the open scorn of my fellow adolescents. I had a role in every play. I took voice lessons and lent my ungainly mezzo-soprano to the school’s small but able choir. I was one of the first students to enroll in the intensive Visual and Performing Arts program.
But I’d never been much for academics. There was too much other interesting shit going on outside the classroom—and even more, exponentially more, going on inside my head. Charlotte Moore is never where she’s supposed to be, even when she is.
Pern was rocket fuel for daydreaming. I obsessively graffitied dragons on any piece of paper, any half-empty chalkboard, any virgin three-ring binder, that came within reach of my twitchy teenage fingers. Other girls were doodling horses or hearts in the margins of their carefully rendered English notes. My English notes were some halfhearted scrawls about how “The Awakening” made me want to walk into the ocean, followed by a dozen inept sketches of dra
gons dancing through the air, dragons belching fire, dragons peering into the sky. As much time as I spent practicing for my future as a liberal arts geek, I spent almost as much time doodling, procrastinating, oversleeping, neglecting homework, and feigning sickness to get out of class—which led to nearly as many hours sitting in detention (during which time I neglected still more homework in favor of reading and drawing more Pern).
The summer following a rocky freshman year, I sent an email to Anne via the fan page hosted through Del Rey’s old website. You may remember it—it featured the winners of an art contest, news about upcoming publications, and even a fun feature where you could “go between” from one page to the next. It also included a contact form that, unbeknownst to me, was more or less a direct line to Anne herself.
I couldn’t tell you now why or what I wrote to her. It was likely the kind of inane, nervous question you’d expect a fifteen-year-old fangirl to write; and while I don’t remember the contents of the message, I remember writing it with heat in my hands and face, with a frenzied tremor in my fingers. I don’t know what I feared more: that she wouldn’t answer me, or that she might.
Some time went by, and as I plunged into summer, I more or less forgot the matter. Then one afternoon I opened my inbox and there, perfectly nondescript, was a reply from Anne McCaffrey. Upon seeing it, I did what any intelligent, educated young woman would do and promptly shit myself.
That email should have been printed and framed, but instead is lost to time. Here’s what I remember:
Anne glossed over whatever question I asked her. Instead, she began by (politely, always politely) informing me that she had been in touch with Stuart Hall’s alumnae director, a benevolent, broadly smiling woman named Margaret, who had taken a liking to the scatterbrained waif tearing ass down the halls. Margaret, Anne told me, had let her know that I was not giving due attention to my studies.
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