All right, Tiptree. Start.
I’m looking at a Maya Indian, Maya puro. His name is Audomaro Tzul which means Honcho or Knight in Maya. His nickname is L’mus, meaning L’mus. L’mus is an adult, nineteen; his body is a braid of muscle the color and shine of a black bay horse. He is wearing khaki shorts and a red bandanna, a blue-black earlength bob and magnificent Maya teeth.
Seen sideways, L’mus is a normal well-formed male about 4′ 9″ tall. When he turns, which he does with the snap and power of a tuna’s tail, you see that he is also about 4′ 9″ broad. He can pick up an eighty-pound gas tank one-handed, hoist it in the air, and run. (Mayas run a lot. The sand is full of gouges where their broad, prehensile toes have dug in for take-off.) Moreover, L’mus’s old grandmother could hoist you on her head and toddle off with you, without sweating her embroidered petticoat.
L’mus is an electrician. An electric line came through here last month from a generator L’mus helped install, through two transformers he also helped line in. When the juice was turned on L’mus stood at severe attention to the god of Faraday, six hundred volts in each eye.
When the voltmeter socked the mark, L’mus split a grin of such beauty that the moon landings paled.
He has, however, one professional difficulty: his good brain struggles with his Maya macho. This makes it difficult to persuade him to break a 115-volt current before handling the wires. And when the line was run to my tent and L’mus ran up the palm trees to twist it around nails, I saw how he cuts and strips wire: He bites it. Up to No. 14. Teeth!
All right, so far nothing much, and maybe you’ve seen lots of Indians. So have I, especially the Huastec-language people in the main part of Mexico. Aztecs, to you.1 Now Aztecs are great. Aztecs specialize in a wild, adenoidal, faintly horrified profile that’s satisfyingly archaic. But Aztecs, and most other tribes, are… well… class-structured. With them you meet this dominance-submission thing, a certain amount of Yassuh-Boss. Aztec thinking has ladders in it; you get the bottom-rung resentment shit, the middle-rung climbing piss, the deviousness, the opacity—the residue of millennia of conquering-and-being-conquered; slaves, masters, gore, and tribute.
Not Maya.
Mayas—like the Scots—have never been officially conquered in war. They’ve been massacred and chased, most lately by the Mexicans under Porfirio Diaz, when Yucatan wanted to secede. But Mexico didn’t flatten them; it ended with a negotiated truce in—gasp—1935. (The last Secretary of the Maya Armies died recently, and when this coco ranch was started in 1936 the mestizo homesteader had to pay regular tribute to the nearest Maya chief in addition to his Mexico taxes.)
Mayas have also warred plentifully among themselves—they probably ruined their ancient cities that way before the Spaniards came. But the Maya people en masse have never lived under anybody’s heel. They simply took off into the jungle and some of them haven’t been found to this day.
What this means is that a Maya looks at you in a way you’re not used to unless you’re lucky. Like the Scotsman; straight, easy, humorous. Who you? And they laugh in a way you don’t hear much. Right out, delighted. They laugh a lot, they value a joker. (Broke your leg? Ha-ha-ha! But gentle and tender to real infirmity and to babies.) When you meet Mayas, don’t expect the How do you do, senor, si senor snake oil. What you get, from men, women, infants, is questions. Sharp minds have been watching you and everything else in the environment. (Why aren’t you fishing today? How much money do you make? What kind of social security program they got in the States? What’s that thing for?)
Be ready to account for yourself.
Mayas have their social trauma, sure. The juggernaut of cauc culture is punishing them, too. Some Mayas lost their language before the present realization that it’s valuable. They suffer the fierce glooms that lurk inside the guy on the bottom of the intercultural cement grinder. (And which can make intercultural drinking parties end bloody.) L’mus stares slit-eyed at his transformers, knowing in his heart they’re child’s play; he senses computers he’ll never have the chance to master, how-to mathematics he can’t read. But it isn’t in him to whine; he throws his black wings back and sends Rosa Pech Balan a killing grin. Thinking, maybe, of his new Uruguay tapes or the fact that his sons will get free education.
Rosa? Wait a minute. I didn’t finish telling you how Mayas look.
Technically, Mayas are the most Oriental-appearing of all American Indians. They have the strongest—is it epicanthial?—eyefold; their eyes are so slanted their own artists draw them as 90-degree angled almonds. And Mayas are short. But although some of the Maya tribes over by Merida are yellow rather than mahogany and look superficially Chinese, the second look shows you the tremendous solid bones. Stone bones, fantastic strongly built. These are, remember, the people who have owned and survived in this land for at least three thousand years. They have walked right out of the old, old murals of Bonampak. L’mus was here when Pilate had his administrative problem.
One characteristic I particularly admire is the Maya leg and foot. (We’re coming to Rosa.) The Maya torso is relatively small, more like a knot of muscle at the point where legs meet arms and head and their old artists drew it that way. All limbs. Their legs are powerful but curiously smooth muscled, a single line ending in an enormously high-arched short foot. It gives a bell-bottomed mod look, like the Beatles Yellow Submarine style. Maya court dress emphasized this: The bigger you were the more tassels you wore on your sandal instep. And your sandals had thick short soles. Very little glop hiding the body, everything mobile, going.
Mayas, you see, go. The first words they taught me were Tzim bin—“I go.” Followed by You go, He goes, We go, They go, Let’s go. And by God they do; Mayas take off. Boom. Walk to the next country, swim, drive, fly, pole, sail, whatever. Tzim bin! About the time of Christ they built a network of white roads, sac bes, through Yucatan and Guatemala and Honduras, limestone walkways raised about six feet above the jungle floor, and they’re still using some of them and nobody knows where they all lead. Driving on a highway you’ll see a brown figure duck off, and sure enough, under the lianas and the godawful mangrove scrub, there’s a chalky ridgeline.
But I still haven’t told you: the Maya face. Hold hard.
In Maya, cross-eyed is beautiful. Not only that, but a slanted-back forehead is aristocratic elegance. Add to this strong, almost beaky nose, high cheekbones, a firm but receding lower face with wide curled lips—and I wish I could draw. Those eyes, remember, are looking at you V-shaped, centered in their upper lids. Can you believe it’s great?
Maya mothers used to tie a board on the baby’s forehead to slant it, and hang a ball of tallow over its nose to encourage cross-eyes. And obviously there’s been preferential breeding for these traits; Maya babies tend to be deliciously cross-eyed, like Siamese kittens. (They also seem to walk at six months, which I can’t yet believe: Tzim bin?)
The whole thing is straight out of real Martian history, and believe Uncle Tip: Until you’ve seen a Maya chick trotting down the avenida with that perfect build in a minishift and Elizabeth Arden iridescent eye gloop on those fabulous cockeyes, with the merry millennia looking out at you pussycatwise—you have not seen the full erotic spectrum. Nothing, but nothing like the oriental doll; nothing like any thing but Maya.
Or the same profile in the old man’s version, archaic essence of mankind… of a very special flavor. Style, they had it, those Mayas who first designed their genes. The Anglo-Saxon swineherd who designed mine should have been so smart.
All right. Rosalie Pech Balan. I saw her last night, running like a deer in a blizzard of blue moonlight, her long black hair flying from her small elegant head. (She was probably going to find a lump of Caribbean tar to patch the roof.) Rosa is sixteen. She has the trim minimal Maya torso, in her case the muscles being combined with other features of compact but highly adequate character. She wears a short white tubular thing from which her classic Maya legs emerge in a way that makes me happy I don’t wear conta
cts, they’d fall out. (One of my problems is that the tube seems to be getting shorter and shorter; it’s about the size of a washcloth now and by next week Uncle Tip may be a stretcher case.)
The point is the way she runs. Wide, leaping strides and yet flowing close to the sand. Those legs flash, float with power, she is all running leg. A totally natural run, the freedom of precise adapted function. You can’t learn to run like that, I think. You run like that when the genes for running in other and lesser ways got chopped out of your gene pool while the pyramids rose and fell.
Rosa has, I understand, another feature: the Mongolian spot. This is described by my textbook as an irregularly shaped blue-purplish mark on the spine just above the buttocks; it is said to be especially pronounced in Yucatan females. I would like to ask Rosa to assist me in confirming this piece of information. But there are problems.
One is at the moment twenty-five feet down a well cheerfully slinging muck in preparation for installing a bomba electrica and his name is Audomaro Tzul.
There are also Rosa’s three brothers-in-law and one father-in-law, all of whom can do things with their machetes that you’d think required a laser, and the coconut is far tougher than the Human head. And there is also the fact that I have seen Rosa herself bending iron pipe barehanded…
But…
Will you believe those aren’t the reasons, really? Not to live a comic strip, or see life that way.
Maybe it’s to keep the other Maya, the veil of illusion… ?
And so we leave Tiptree, who hasn’t even told you about the Maya religion (none, thank God), or the Maya Hennequin situation (lousy since nylon replaced sisal rope), or Maya-Spanish hand speech, or how Mayas sleep in midair, or the eye-popping Maya ruins and the foreigners thieving artifacts, or the joke Lorenzo-the-dark-Djinn played on L’mus the night L’mus got Rosa to hear his Uruguay tape, or how Arturo-the-neurotic-Maya got prick-fungus and went to the herb-doctor, or what Mayas do in the ocean, or what Mayas do on a bender (roll Jeeps over and laugh like mad), or whether Mayas really sacrifice people, or practically any damn thing at all… except one three-thousand-year-free girl running forever in my brain in the wind and the moonlight…
Coox chital u body bee.
(Which means, Let us lie down in the shade of the roble tree, and is pronounced just as written except for a few things like sticking the back of your tongue up your nose.)
Tzim bin.
—March 31, 1972
Looking Inside Squirmy Authors
The next piece Tiptree wrote about the Mayas was for Harry Harrison’s anthology SF: Author’s Choice 4 (Putnam 1974), a series in which writers were invited to contribute their favorite stories and notes about why they liked them so much. As observed earlier, Alii preferred not to write about her stories, but several times she appeared in anthologies which required it.
This group of essays contains a fanzine piece about the Harrison anthology (Khatru 1, February 1975) and four introductions and afterwords, to: “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain” (SF: Author’s Choice 4), “The Milk of Paradise” {Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison, Doubleday 1972), “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” {Final Stage, edited by Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg, Charterhouse 1974), and ‘The Night-blooming Saurian” (Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, Bluejay 1986).
Last night I was reading an SF series that I cannot figure out why in the name of the Jolly Green Giant everybody doesn’t read. Or at least borrow and talk about. It’s so interesting. For years now I’ve been reading the series and I haven’t yet heard anybody mention it or seen but one tepid review that missed the point. I refer to the Author’s Choice series that Harry Harrison has been stubbornly bringing out to the accompaniment of deafening silence for lo these years. It’s now at Number 4. Number 4 is a specially good issue ‘cause it contains old Guess Who, but I felt just the same enthusiasm for Numbers 1, 2, and 3. Here’s why. Are the stories all masterpieces? Of course not. (Although there’s quite a few, like Brian Aldiss’s “Old Hundredth,” that made me go Oo-oooh.) But masterpieces is not the point. The point is, each story is the author’s private pet—and therein lies the tale. Moreover, Harry made everyone write a piece saying why he picked that story, and when you read those, man, the tails really begin to hang out. Fascinating. I’ve said it before, when an author opens his mouth about his stories, he or she usually blurts out more than you may want to know about his or her self. Can’t help it. Embarrassing, don’t look—but let’s be honest, I love it. There they are, squirming and shell-less. Some of them so earnest and hopeful you want to pat them; some puffed up like blow-fish peeking at you over their engorged egos; some quietly, monoma-niacal, going on about how the story fits into Phase 3, Subsection 4 of My Early Style, you know, My Work which has become the universe. And some—well, you’ve never seen so many people in weird poses. Anybody with a jigger of snoop-juice in their blood has to love that series.
(And what pose, you may ask, did Tiptree get into? Don’t ask. Froze up self-consciously and talked at great length—poetically even—about the thing which had made me angry enough to write the story. Which, dammit, I believe—but it was a cop-out. Uh, sorry… doesn’t that tell its own story too?)
One more thing before we quit this: There’s a kind of beautiful thing about the series too, as well as the pants-down revelations. All of us dream, you know. Clown-writers dream of tragic poetry, destructo writers dream of a gentle world—sometimes. And their pet stories are often their pets because a bit of the private dream comes through. And some of them are, well, beautiful…
Read.
(And don’t say I didn’t warn you; what is old good-guy Tiptree’s dream? Killing everybody, that’s what. Uh, sorry again.)
A Ba-a-a-d Idea
Encouraged by the howling nonsuccess of Harry’s Author’s Choice series, I have an idea for an anthology which everybody, dammit, ought to want to read. Especially everybody who wants to write, which must include about ten million souls. Anyhow, it includes me, I’d buy it: Bad Stories by Good Writers. An antho where everybody you like sent in their worst published stories, together with a short piece on What’s Wrong With This Floop.
By using published ones you’d get the stuff that is just tantaliz-ingly almost okay, the kind where you can really learn something about technique. Every writers has got a cookie or two like that. Lord knows I have: a turkey called “Happiness Is a Warm Spaceship” which I thought was buried for eternity until a good, thorough reviewer named Don D’Ammassa dug up its embarrassed bones. I reread it, marveling. The bloody beast has everything—plot, relevance, jokes, fights—everything except what makes a story… that intangible known as pacing or timing, that mystery known as shape. By the time I really know what makes that story so boring I just might know how to write. And oh how I would love to see the different sins of others and hear them explain why the rocket fell. Man, would I buy that antho!
Wouldn’t you? And you? No?
Dammit…
We are alone.
—August 29, 1974
Comment on “The Last Flight of Doctor Am”
Writing about my own story reminds me of those tremendous floats you see in small-town Labor Day parades. You have this moving island of flowers with people on it being Indian Braves or Green Bay Packers or Astronauts-Landing-on-the-Moon (Raising-the-Flag-at-Iwo-Jima has happily gone out of fashion) and great-looking girls being great-looking girls. That’s the story. Under each float is an old truck chassis driven by a guy in sweaty jeans who is also working the tapedeck and passing cherry bombs to the Indians. That’s the author. Now Harry wants me to crawl out and say hello. Well, I love saying hello. But my feeling is that the story is the game. Who really needs me and my carburetor troubles up there blowing kisses with Miss Harvest Home?
Still, Harry is one of those for whom I’d row quite a ways in a leaky boat, and you can always stop reading this and turn to the tal
e. So…
Remember way back in 1967 B.E.? Before Ecology, that was; we were worrying about The Bomb then. In those days I did my screaming to myself; it sounded pretty silly saying, I love Earth. Earth? Rocks, weeds, dirt? Oh, come on. A friend lectured me: People have to relate to people; you can’t relate to a planet.
Sorry, you can. But you’d better not. Because—as we’re all finding out—to love our Earth is to hurt forever. Earth was very beautiful with her sweet airs and clear waters, her intimacies and grandeurs and divine freakinesses and the mobile art works that were her creatures. She was just right for us. She made us Human. And we are killing her.
Not because we’re wicked, any more than a spirochete is wicked. (At this point maybe I’d better say that I do relate to people, too.) Nor is modern Western technology the sole culprit. We’re the current destructo champs, but man was always pretty good at ecocide. Innocent goat herds turned North Africa into desert; did you know that people used to take pigs to be fattened on the acorns of the majestic oak forests where the Sahara blows now? War and fire finished off the flora of the Hebrides before gunpowder. And sheer numbers of people scratching a living devastated much of India and China into the lunar landscape it is today. It’s just us, man collectively, doing what comes naturally. A runaway product of the planet Earth, we have become a disease of Earth.
And of course it’s speeded up unbelievably. Virgin lakes I knew only ten years ago in Canada are shore-to-shore beer cans now. Here’s a few of the things we’ve lost in the four decades I’ve been observing (I thought they’d last forever, see?): learning to swim in the pure water of—gasp—Lake Michigan in front of Chicago… ten thousand canvas-back ducks whistling down the wind of the peaks behind Santa Fe… the great bay of San Francisco before the bridges shackled it and the garbage poured in… Key West, a sleepy fishing village lush with tropical wildlife (and old John Dewey’s doorknob head shining in the can-tina) before the Navy and Disney heard of it… Timberwolves singing where shopping centers are now in Wisconsin… the magic trolley ride to Glen Echo, in ten minutes from the heart of D.C. you were clicking along silently (and fumelessly) with flowers and songbirds coming in the window… A very nice life, only a few years back.
Meet Me at Infinity Page 25