Mildred coughs and slaps my hands. “Get away from me!” More coughing. “What are you?”
The “what” is too much for me. It shuts down my emulation net, and all I have is the truth. “I am Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, Mrs. Owens. I am your caretaker. May I please check that you are well?”
But my empathy net is still online, and I can read terror in every line of Mildred’s face. “Metal monster!” she yells. “Metal monster!” She crawls away, hiding under the lilac bush. “Metal!” She falls into an extended coughing spell.
I’m torn between her physical and her emotional health, but physical wins out. I crawl slowly toward her and inject her with a sedative from the medical kit in my chassis. As she slumps, I catch her and lay her carefully on the ground. My empathy net signals a possible shutdown condition, but my concern for her health overrides it. I am programmed for long-term care, not emergency medicine, so I start downloading protocols and integrating them into my storage as I check her for bruises and burns. My kit has salves and painkillers and other supplies to go with my new protocols, and I treat what I can.
But I don’t have oxygen, or anything to help with Mildred’s coughing. Even sedated, she hasn’t stopped. All of my emergency protocols assume I have access to oxygen, so I don’t know what to do.
I am still trying to figure that out when the EMTs arrive and take over Mildred’s care. With them on the scene, I am superfluous, and my empathy net finally shuts down.
• • • •
Today I am Henry. I do not want to be Henry, but Paul tells me that Mildred needs Henry by her side in the hospital. For the end.
Her medical records show that the combination of smoke inhalation, burns, and her already deteriorating condition have proven too much for her. Her body is shutting down faster than medicine can heal it, and the stress has accelerated her mental decline. The doctors have told the family that the kindest thing at this point is to treat her pain, say goodbye, and let her go.
Henry is not talkative at times like this, so I say very little. I sit by Mildred’s side and hold her hand as the family comes in for final visits. Mildred drifts in and out. She doesn’t know this is goodbye, of course.
Anna is first. Mildred rouses herself enough to smile, and she recognizes her granddaughter. “Anna . . . child . . . How is . . . Ben?” That was Anna’s boyfriend almost six years ago. From the look on Anna’s face, I can see that she has forgotten Ben already, but Mildred briefly remembers.
“He’s . . . He’s fine, Grandma. He wishes he could be here. To say—to see you again.” Anna is usually the strong one in the family, but my empathy net says her strength is exhausted. She cannot bear to look at Mildred, so she looks at me; but I am emulating her late grandfather, and that’s too much for her as well. She says a few more words, unintelligible even to my auditory inputs. Then she leans over, kisses Mildred, and hurries from the room.
Susan comes in next. Millie is with her, and she smiles at me. I almost emulate Mr. Robot, but my third part keeps me focused until Millie gets bored and leaves. Susan tells trivial stories from her work and from Millie’s school. I can’t tell if Mildred understands or not, but she smiles and laughs, mostly at appropriate places. I laugh with her.
Susan takes Mildred’s hand, and the Henry part of me blinks, surprised. Susan is not openly affectionate under normal circumstances, and especially not toward Mildred. Mother and daughter-in-law have always been cordial, but never close. When I am Paul, I am sure that it is because they are both so much alike. Paul sometimes hums an old song about “just like the one who married dear old dad,” but never where either woman can hear him. Now, as Henry, I am touched that Susan has made this gesture but saddened that she took so long.
Susan continues telling stories as we hold Mildred’s hands. At some point Paul quietly joins us. He rubs Susan’s shoulders and kisses her forehead, and then he steps in to kiss Mildred. She smiles at him, pulls her hand free from mine, and pats his cheek. Then her arm collapses, and I take her hand again.
Paul steps quietly to my side of the bed and rubs my shoulders as well. It comforts him more than me. He needs a father, and an emulation is close enough at this moment.
Susan keeps telling stories. When she lags, Paul adds some of his own, and they trade back and forth. Slowly their stories reach backwards in time, and once or twice Mildred’s eyes light as if she remembers those events.
But then her eyes close, and she relaxes. Her breathing quiets and slows, but Susan and Paul try not to notice. Their voices lower, but their stories continue.
Eventually the sensors in my fingers can read no pulse. They have been burned, so maybe they’re defective. To be sure, I lean in and listen to Mildred’s chest. There is no sound: no breath, no heartbeat.
I remain Henry just long enough to kiss Mildred goodbye. Then I am just me, my empathy net awash in Paul and Susan’s grief.
I leave the hospital room, and I find Millie playing in a waiting room and Anna watching her. Anna looks up, eyes red, and I nod. New tears run down her cheeks, and she takes Millie back into Mildred’s room.
I sit, and my nets collapse.
• • • •
Now I am nobody. Almost always.
The cause of the fire was determined to be faulty contract work. There was an insurance settlement. Paul and Susan sold their own home and put both sets of funds into a bigger, better house in Mildred’s garden.
I was part of the settlement. The insurance company offered to return me to the manufacturer and pay off my lease, but Paul and Susan decided they wanted to keep me. They went for a full purchase and repair. Paul doesn’t understand why, but Susan still fears she may need my services—or Paul might, and I may have to emulate her. She never admits these fears to him, but my empathy net knows.
I sleep most of the time, sitting in my maintenance alcove. I bring back too many memories that they would rather not face, so they leave me powered down for long periods.
But every so often, Millie asks to play with Mr. Robot, and sometimes they decide to indulge her. They power me up, and Miss Millie and I explore all the mysteries of the garden. We built a bridge to the far side of the creek; and on the other side, we’re planting daisies. Today she asked me to tell her about her grandmother.
Today I am Mildred.
* * *
Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side . . . or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! His work has appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, and Writers of the Future Volume 31. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction Thirty-First Annual Collection and in Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4.
The Women You Didn’t See
By Nicola Griffith
(Note: This is nonfiction from Letters to Tiptree)
Dear Alice,
You were brilliant, I think, but consumed by the inevitability of the abattoir. In your fiction all the gates are closed; characters are funnelled down a chute to flashing knives. In your best fiction, the characters know what is happening but the knowledge makes no difference; there’s no way out.
You didn’t believe in the possibility of escape. Assuming the persona of James Tiptree, Jr. meant at least you could step outside the chute and be the one wielding the knife. Raccoona Sheldon, on the other hand, bound you—and us—inside the doomed and running cows; then you sometimes tantalised your victims with a vision of a better reality before tearing it to shreds before our eyes (“Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” [1]), and sometimes you focused unwaveringly on the stark machinery of death (“The Screwfly Solution”[2] ). But for you there was no way out.
• • • •
When you were little, you saw filth, death, deprivation, and suffering in India and Africa. So too, of course, did many of the h
undreds of millions who lived there. Unlike many you were not, as far as I know, physically brutalised. But you were alone: a pretty, pampered, privileged little girl plunged unprepared into violent contradiction—then exposed by your writer mother just before puberty to the hot breath of public scrutiny. You had no herd protection, no people just like you, nowhere to turn for comfort or take shelter. Did it warp you in the chrysalis? Or were you exactly as you were born to be?
We’ll never know. It doesn’t matter. But this, if I had to guess, is why you hid all your life. This is why you picked up professions and dropped them as soon as you got good, and why, when you found writing as an adult, you took pseudonyms: the best way to stay safe was to not be known. You could rotate a facet of yourself before a curtain with a single slit. No one ever got to see the whole, not even you.
We never met in person. I didn’t smell your skin or feel the vibration of your voice. I can’t call up a memory of how you moved or the way you responded to particular sounds. But I heard your written voice: I read your fiction. Now that you’re beyond hurt, I admit: I did not admire your novels or your later short fiction. For this reader, you produced your best work when you were behind the curtain.
• • • •
One of the things we don’t know about that person who hid is whether choosing to write as a man meant you also wanted to be, or felt as though you were, a man.
You wrote a letter in response to Joanna Russ in which you said, “I am a Lesbian.”[3] If this is true, you identified as a woman who loved women—or tried—rather than as a man in the wrong body. Weighed against this is the youthful (I think, and, according to your biographer, probably drunken) cri de coeur scribbled in a sketch pad. “[I long to] ram myself into a crazy soft woman and come, come, spend, come, make her pregnant Jesus to be a man…I love women I will never be happy.…”[4] Given the (possible) youth and (probable) drinking this might be the melodrama of immaturity. It could be a test, an exploration of the kind teenagers indulge in, donning and doffing identities and attitudes to see what suits the emerging self. You emerged many times, of course, most spectacularly in middle age.[5] I suspect that if wanting to be a man was a thing of the body rather than the spirit, if you wanted physically to have been born a man—as opposed to yearning to be treated with the respect usually reserved to men—being among women would not have made you feel free or proud. But that’s exactly how you felt when you joined the Women’s Army Corps: “the first time I ever felt free enough to be proud.”[6]
We don’t know, we can’t know. So I will take you at your word: you were a lesbian, a woman who loved women.
• • • •
There are two words—both with the same root in covert, the past participle of covrir, Old French for to cover—that I suspect you understood in your bones: covert and coverture. I have no doubt that as part of the CIA you were deeply and consciously familiar with the denotation, connotations and consequence of the former. The latter is a legal doctrine, probably introduced to English common law by the Normans, by which a wife’s legal identity is covered and subsumed by her husband’s. As Wikipedia puts it, in a marriage there is only one person, and that person is the husband. Some aspects of coverture survived into the second half of the twentieth century—more than fifty years after you were born.
This doctrine influenced the relative status, behaviour, and regard (including self-regard) of women and men. Men were real people, judged as such. Women were not. And it’s my belief that “James Tiptree, Jr.,” three words, gave you cover, a way to be free in the world without risking a particular scrutiny. A man, even a clearly pseudonymous one, is judged as a person and not for the myriad ways she is a not-quite-person. Given your experience, you believed Tiptree could be a writer. Alice Sheldon could only have been a female not-quite-person who wrote.
It’s likely, then, that you became Tiptree because as a man you could write what you think and how you feel, be respected and liked. You deserved to live in a place of respect, a place we all deserve, a place we all belong: recognised as real people without having constantly to fight to be a human being.
So why did you—ex-CIA—let slip a vital piece of information about the death of your mother? Did you want, on some level, to be revealed? Or did grief fuck with your head? Grief does that; it can make you crazy.
Whatever the reason, you were grieving far more than your mother when your first novel came out under the Tiptree byline but was understood to be written by Alice Sheldon. You were mourning the cover and camouflage that kept you secret, kept you safe. You had lost the hidden place that felt like home. Once again, you were exposed to the world.
• • • •
I’m a woman. A dyke. Foreign (even in the UK, where now I’m often thought to be Canadian). A cripple. In today’s parlance I suffer a lot of intersectional micro-aggression: the constant, mostly unintentional but damaging nonetheless, insult of unthinking words and attitudes scraping along my hull below the waterline. Most of us in oppressed groups tend to seek out our own kind as a matter of survival; people like us offer us a mirror, a place to belong and be understood. Shelter from the cold.
I’m the only expat lesbian cripple I know. It gets lonely.
Being out my whole life—even when I was four I knew I would not marry a man; actually falling in love with a woman when I was 15 was just a detail—meant I had nowhere to hide. Queer was the only minority I knew without grants, government departments or liaisons, laws, schools, or families of origin who understood how hard it is, and whose mission was your encouragement and support. I felt isolated, alone. I’ve no doubt you did, too. Many of us do.
So I understand why you might not have wanted to be out in the early twentieth century. Being out was hard. It cost a lot.
• • • •
Of your major works, “The Women Men Don’t See” is singular. The two women our traveller meets don’t know what they’re heading towards, exactly, whether they are jumping from the frying pan into the fire. They know only that they are burning and must get out.
Two things about this story interest me particularly. First, we are left with hope for the women. It’s only a sliver, true, and sharp with irony, but it’s there. Second, neither of the women has—as far as we know—suffered physical violence. They are damaged, yes—as are all of us who, day in and day out, navigate cold and hostile waters, scraped and battered and weighed down by that ice—but not broken, not essentially breached. They will live. They are making a choice.
It’s a forced choice, but a choice. We are shown some of their circumstances but not all; we have to make assumptions. We can’t know for sure whether what they’re doing is a good idea. Similarly, we can never know a writer’s reasons. We can make assumptions—about why, say, for one woman gender-neutral initials will be enough to provide cover to write; why another keeps an obviously female name but clears her path by hosing everything with rage; why yet a third takes a male name—but we can never know. They all grow in different microclimates, under different gravities.
Living under a higher gravity than those around us levies a weight penalty: we have to use more energy, more strength, more attention to run the same distance and hurdle the same obstacles.
• • • •
I listened the other day to a panel of women talk about diversity in fiction. They talked about how difficult it was to grow up as immigrants to another culture, how they were pressured by family to succeed in a profession—engineering, medicine, law—rather than art. I resonated with some of their experience but in another way I could not. I could not imagine growing up in a world where my family and wider society assumed I was capable of a profession, where I would be welcome in a profession, where I could survive in a profession.
I can’t know anyone’s struggles. I do know that they and you and I laboured under different burdens; our eras, places, classes, and cultures were different. But for the women on that panel access to a profession was a given. We may as well have been bo
rn on different planets.[7]
• • • •
Today, women and quiltbag folk still live under a greater gravity than others but that is changing every day. Hopefully, by the time others read this the gravity will have dropped a notch: same-sex marriage will be the law of the land. I’ve written elsewhere about how, in my opinion, this will change gender equality on a fundamental level.[8] It will take time, of course; it always does. But what I’m getting at is that already, today, there are women growing up who will not labour under any weight penalty.
Girls losing their milk teeth today will become women who won’t have the faintest idea what coverture means unless they become historians. These women will be able to put their strength, attention and brilliance into forging new paths, making new connections, dreaming of new possibilities rather than carrying extra weight or keeping themselves safe.
These are the women you didn’t see. They will own the world.
[1]”Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” Raccoona Sheldon, Aurora: Beyond Equality (Fawcett, New York, 1976)
[2]”The Screwfly Solution,” Raccoona Sheldon, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, June 1977
[3] A letter Sheldon sent to Russ. “Oh, had 65 years been different! I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up.” From a review of the Phillips (below) by Elizabeth Hand:https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2006/eh0610.htm, (accessed 4/30/2015).
This direct quote from Sheldon, and others below, are from James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips (St. Martin’s, New York, 2006).
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