Meet Me at Infinity

by James Tiptree Jr.

  A lot of the Mayas around there are into learning English this year. The Maya-English accent is good, except the consonants sound like rifles. Even an “1.” The extremely powerful lady who does the laundry for the fishing camp caused some excitement by beamingly announcing, “Billow! Shit!” You’d have to get the sound effects to recapture it. Also the air of total mastery. I got the (imported) flu while in her vicinity and she approached me and laid on me hands of such power and warmth that I cowered. I think the flu did too. She announced that she was going to pray for me; I wondered to what god. It worked. Clearly she is one of the ranch healers; her hands were really extraordinary. She took hold of both thighs and—well, maybe this doesn’t describe so well. But it was not pornography. I’m told they cure many things by massage; one of the ranch owners here is wondering if somebody shouldn’t look into it, because some of the pregnant girls his Western medicine couldn’t cure of various symptoms were fixed by the local massage honcho down the coast.

  Funny thing about medicine: Western medicine is cold. Here’s a pill, go ‘way. We all know about U.S. hospitals, about doctors interested in diseases, not people, etc., etc. You see it clearly here. A pill or a shot is great, sometimes there’s no substitute; but a person interested in you is something irreplaceable. The ceremonious direction of total attention to the sick person, the importance of the sick person. The laying on of hands, the doctor taking on the disease in a personal way. Man, it’s half the cure. I know. Only thing, as I mentioned, it is faintly scary. You have to be convinced of the importance of yourself and your disease to endure it. (Remember I said I “cowered.”) Of course in a “primitive” world, people are convinced of the importance of their disease because there’s very little fake sickness. It’s too depriving.

  As I write these words I realize there’s a whole big unopened thing there. Has anybody looked into the way sickness and health function in a society without real medicine? (Note the chauvinist pride of that “real.” Well, it’s partly true. I’ve been reading Zinsser on typhus—Rats, Lice and History—and Rosebury’s Microbes and Morals on syphilis. Until recently, mortality was in general least where there were fewer doctors. Bad medicine is worse than no medicine, and we’ve had a lot of it.) But what I was after above, I imagine that the average Maya here feels and behaves quite differently from the average us about health and pangs and symptoms and actual illness. Somebody must have written a comparative study. Must look.

  Of course most nontechnological societies are ridden with the witchcraft thing. Soustelle shows it among the Aztecs. Sickness is viewed as caused by Human malevolence; somebody hired a sorcerer to bewitch me. Was true all over Africa, too. Thus actual sickness is complicated by Human relations, guilt, expectations, etc.

  Tiptree, you’re out of your depth.

  I’ve been trying to hack out an End-of-Everything story for an anthology Barry Malzberg and Ed Ferman are doing. Couldn’t get started until I saw my first newspaper in several weeks, headlined “Fear of New Hostilities in Indochina.” Meaning, if I read my Spanish aright, that that wretch in the White House is about to blow his top and punish the rest of the world for not realizing he is king—with bombers with my name on them.

  Oddly enough I got a plot that night, but nothing to do with Nixon. If, as Whately Carrington has proposed, one’s most intense feelings might have a certain immortality as energy patterns, might these not be our most painful feelings? Trouble is the damn thing is too long, they want a short one.

  Well, this is a lot of nothing—except the Huastecs—but lots of good to you.

  —March 6, 1973

  Going Gently Down, or, In Every Young Person There Is an Old Person Screaming to Get Out

  When Don Keller and I decided to stop publishing Phantasmicom (with #11, May 1974), we asked all our contributors to write something special. Everyone came through for us, and we had an issue we were very proud of, but no one came through for us like Tiptree did.

  Nobody tells you the truth about old age.

  Nobody tells you much of anything useful, in fact, but that isn’t my point now. About getting old they not only tell you nothing, they tell you lies. When they talk about it at all, that is. Their eyes veil up, they get behind a cardboard smile mask and shove you a couple hysterical slogans: Think Young. Don’t Worry. Then a whimper comes out of their throats and they take off, fast.

  Even if you’re only five, the implication comes through perfectly: Cheer up, kid—you’re doomed.

  Remember how you first met it? A huge face comes at you. Pores, pustules, craters. Wattles and ropes hanging down. Brown crusts, yellow cheesy things. A soft, wobbly wart or two, with hair in them. Tufts and snarls of dead hair in the sore-looking nostrils. Eyes like an oyster’s blowhole. And the smell, the stink blasting at you out of the deformed orifices!

  “Hiya, boy,” a broken bellows wheezes, rumbles in the garbage. You identify it, tentatively, as a Human being.

  “Mother! What’s wrong with him?”

  “That’s Uncle William, dear. Isn’t he marvelous?”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Why nothing, dear. He’s just a little older, that’s all.”

  “Will I get like that?”

  “You and your ideas, heh-heh. You don’t have to think about that for a long, long time, heh-heh.”

  “Will I get like that, Mother?”

  “Say, you have some homework to do, right now.”

  “Mother. Will I?”

  “… Yes.”

  No. No!!!

  Remember that, the No? They won’t get me. They can’t make me stick around for that. Leave, that’s what I’ll do. Leave first. Crash the car, dive into the sea in a Piper Cub from ten thousand feet. Have a little hunting accident. Give a party on the edge of a volcano and jump in at midnight, smashed out. fust walk away. Remember?

  Because by this time you’ve found out some of the other things about Uncle William besides the deterioration in his looks. Uncle William’s useless thing, for instance, dangling dead and pallid like a pickled worm. The way Uncle William keeps making the unfortunate mistakes that mean he has to be hastily reclothed by Auntie. And Uncle William’s conversation.

  “You already told me that story, Uncle William.”

  “What say, boy?”

  “I said, you told me that before.”

  “What? What you say, Martha?”

  “I’m not Martha, Uncle William.”

  “What?”

  The amount of “What?” older people say is weird. Uncle and Auntie have whole conversations that are nothing but “What? What?”; their heads are total mush. In fact, Mom and Dad say “What?” quite a bit, too. You begin noticing that all these adults that you’d taken for normal people, I mean, not people exactly but at least alive, okay—they have some funny little ways. You notice this more and more. By the time you’re driving a car all by yourself you’ve realized that the general class of older people, say over twenty-five, are pretty nauseating. For example your mother’s repulsive way of referring to her old-hag friends as “girls.” And more: these old men who seem to have the delusion that your mother is a girl. Jeeesus! Why don’t they realize? Why don’t they shut up and go around unobtrusively, wear veils or yashmaks or something, like nuns?

  I think about here comes a split. The kids who stop there and more or less forget it, versus the kids who go on thinking about it. I was one of those who couldn’t forget it, some kind of third eye and ear inside me stayed stuck to it, focusing, like a diver who has glimpsed a dim, cold alien form: shark.

  Maybe most of you reading this are like that too. The people who know there is tomorrow. Time-coming is real, maybe more real than right now. Sometimes it’s great, today is beautiful because of the great thing coming. But underneath it’s Brrrr. Now always passing, future always there, coming. Ozymandias. The plain of dust, covering all. Time.

  I had terrible trouble with time. Looking at a picture of Uncle William, a blond Mark Spitz grinning
on a load of lumber: young! Uncle William as a little baby for crissake. I remember looking at the U.S. Senate once and seeing two hundred little babies, mothers saying what sweet little kids. Then I’d look at real kids and see… skeletons. Old old skeletons in baby carriages in the Red Owl store.

  I learned, too. I remembered everything I read about it when I got to the book world. Like the faculties you lose, the falling metabolic rates, the falling response-time rates, the falling everything rates. (We didn’t have Kinsey then, but I had the news.) Out shooting ducks—I quit killing things later—I’d hear the high pinging whistle of birds coming over the pass at 100 mph and a voice inside would murmur, Enjoy it, baby, you won’t be hearing 18,000 cps ten years from now. When I did a back flip (my painful achievement) the voice would inform me about declining reflex curves.

  And the girls. Oh, the girls. One girl in particular, the first time it hit me that it was going to happen to everybody. That corpselike moment: I heard the rasp of her mother’s voice in her laugh, I glimpsed her mother’s jowls waiting beside that perfect jaw.

  Thirty, I thought: Say thirty. That’s the end.

  Man, the day I turned thirty I really expected to wake up as a pile of dust.

  It was kind of a shock, thirty-morning, finding I looked the same. (Well, just about. Recognizable, anyway.) I could even still do a back flip. Of course, there were all these young kids running around thinking they were people. But what the hell, things didn’t seem to have changed too much, and I couldn’t spend much time thinking about it. I had all these things I was doing. Busy, busy. I decided I’d made a mistake. Forty. Forty was the time to go.

  Well, forty came, but there kept being all these interesting things I was doing, doing, doing. And I still seemed to be functioning okay, if maybe a little tiredly, perfectly understandable when you’re so busy. The girls were still around, sort of. Of course, I didn’t do any more back flips after the time the board caught my chin going down; accidents happen. But I still felt the same underneath, I was still me.

  And then one day I heard myself saying “What?” Not for the first time, either. I began to suspect. And pretty soon I knew: a trap.

  A trap, see? It sucks you in, one day is so much like the next; there’s no place to dig your heels in. You don’t hear the trap closing, in fact you don’t even know it’s there until you’re in it. No day says, This is where you get off. Even your old uniform still fits… almost. And hope, hope is all around. Soon as this is over I’ll take a couple weeks off and get back in shape. Because you’re always so busy, see? You’re doing things.

  Ah yes. And pretty soon—“What, boy?” “Yeah, that’s Uncle Tip, isn’t he marvelous?” Oopsy daisy, time for beddy-by. “What?”

  So here comes the next split, the different ways people go. Maybe it’s the same split all over again.

  Some of us go gentle into that good night. The sheep, the golden yearsies; stoic, flat, puzzled voices interminably pointing out the missing limbs, the hospital horrors. The Winnebago trailers trundling at 35 mph, the wallet full of grandchildren, the gardens, and handicrafts. The pills. The comfy void.

  Or you have the fighters. You see them—the ones that do get back in shape. The ones that play tennis through their forties and marry new women in their fifties and crack up their planes in their sixties and go on talk shows in their seventies and marry teenagers in their eighties. Think young. Rage, rage against the falling of the night. Dean Martin.

  Only… they talk about it. Oh god do they. Ever hear a twenty-year-old boast about playing three sets of tennis? At fifty they do. They make whooshing backhand gestures and tell about the old serve. (I won’t even go into their sex-talk bag, no.) And that’s damn all they talk about, the ones that Think Young.

  Pathetic.

  Man, there has to be another way.

  Of course there is one other way, the people so interested in something outside themselves that they don’t even notice the scythe cutting them. I just saw an old plant-hybridizer, his legs won’t work and his retinas are falling out so he can only see a pinhole, but he crawls, crawls over fifteen acres of seedling rows, weeding and feeding and squinting at the new ones every year and breeding more. Some biologists and artists are like that. Tiptree Sr. was sort of like that too, maybe I’ll be.

  But I think there’s another way still.

  I don’t know exactly what it could be, but years ago I got a hint out of Gandhi’s autobiography. The idea of stages beyond stages of life. New, interesting stages, I mean. The first ones aren’t new, of course. Youth: the gonad time, the exploding time. Fucking and loving and running around experiencing the world and rebellious theories; maybe brilliant in science. Next comes full-body middle age, full energy drive, adrenaline, skills, strong-loving-but-wary ego. Building time. Building family, movements, anything. Money/power/status time. (Christ was thirty-two, remember?) The thrill of I can. Full involvement. Goes on awhile. Nothing new yet.

  But the next stage, that’s new. In our culture there is no next stage. No map, no idea beyond holding on, repeating what you did. (I have a friend in his seventies starting his fourth family.)

  But suppose there is a last metamorphosis: not holding on, letting go. Migrating inside yourself into some last power center, where you never really lived before. Changing forward one last time.

  You can, you know. Even if your first stages came to nothing, even if sex was a puddle and status was a joke, that’s all over now. Time to move on. How? Well, I don’t really know how but here’s what I think.

  Turn in your buttons. Say good-bye. Take up the holy beggar’s bowl and go. Out. Free. Alone, literally or mentally. Go out… in search of something. Call it the Bo tree, call it the invisible landscape of reality, or wisdom, or union with the cosmos. Or yourself.

  Because you’re different, you know. When you’re old enough you really are free. Your energy is not only less, it is different. It’s in—if you’ve done it right—a different place. Your last, hottest organ.

  That old force that drove your gonads first, that spread out to power your muscles and hands and appetite and will—where is its last fortress? In your brain. Let me explain.

  Your brain really is hot, you know. The hot under the belt is tepid compared to the hot between your ears. It uses 24 percent of your oxygen in every breath. And it’s working every minute, changing, packing and adding, cramming itself full.

  You’ve been using it, of course. Nobody drives his brain faster than an eighteen-year-old mathematician. But it’s an empty brain—that’s why the geniuses of the empty sciences are so young: They can twist that thin brain into fantastic patterns. Physics, for example, requires complex patterns of relatively few data. Other sciences require more data, but the patterns get simpler: That’s why good anthropology and psychology tends to come from older people. At forty the brain is getting packed with data, but it’s still a driven brain. It’s harnessed to life goals: winning a campaign, running a farm.

  By the time you get sixty (I think) the brain is a place of incredible resonances. It’s packed full of life, histories, processes, patterns, half-glimpsed analogies between a myriad levels—a Ballard crystal world place. One reason old people reply slowly is because every word and cue wakes a thousand references.

  What if you could free that, open it? Let go of ego and status, let everything go and smell the wind, feel with your dimming senses for what’s out there, growing. Let your resonances merge and play and come back changed… telling you new things. Maybe you could find a way to grow, to change once more inside… even if the outside of you is saying, “What, what?” and your teeth smell.

  But to do it you have to get ready, years ahead. Get ready to let go and migrate in and up into your strongest keep, your last window out. Pack for your magic terminal trip, pack your brain, ready it. Fear no truth. Load up like a river steamboat for the big last race when you go downriver burning it all up, not caring, throwing in the furniture, the cabin, the decks right down to the w
ater line, caring only for that fire carrying you where you’ve never been before.

  Maybe… somehow… one could.

  —July 8, 1973

  The Spooks Next Door

  This was apparently written for the Science Fiction Writers of America, but so far as I know it was never published by them or anyone else. If it has been, it was under a different title. The manuscript shows signs of heavy revision, but is untitled.

  People ask me what it’s like to live next to a large intelligence agency. Well, to begin with, I don’t live next to the CIA, they live next to me. Frankly, intelligence agencies have been living next to me since about 1943 when they were called the OSS.

  The first thing is that the food in the local markets gets upgraded. In the middle of desolate racks of Pop-up Sugar Waffles there appears Swiss Fructifort, real pumpernickel shows up among the Wonder bread, and the butcher suddenly displays a resentful knowledge of Savoy and kidney cuts. The liquor merchants start wedging vodka and brandy in between the red-eye bourbon. The drugstores develop a rash of chess sets and the paperbacks sprout Galbraith and Mailer among the nurse porno. It becomes possible to buy The New York Times. The local welding shop acquires a Saturday waiting line of harassed ex-anthropology professors clasping ten-speed bikes and busted lawn mowers. So far so good; all these things happened in the farming crossroads called McLean when The Campus went up.

  What is not good, of course, is the goddam new roads and the doubly damned developers bulldozing every bloody tree under—that not only happened to me in McLean, it happened in Foggy Bottom when I lived next to the Tile Factory there. But that isn’t what you want to hear about. What you want is the creepies.