Meet Me at Infinity (9 page)

She eventually gave up on the idea of writing for the series, and it was canceled, anyway. “The Nowhere People,” after a couple title changes, was published as “Meet Me at Infinity” in the
Star Trek
fanzine
Eridani Triad
in 1972.

Ideas for several other
Star Trek
stories went undeveloped, but while still trying to sell “The Nowhere People” to the show she created her own starship and crew, and plotted out four storylines for them (“two adventures, two deeper types”). Before writing them, though, she went back to do a story introducing the crew. This was submitted to John W. Campbell, Jr., at
Analog
on November 18, 1968, as “Happiness Is a Warm Spaceship” (the alternate titles” Two—Four-Six—Eight! Don’t Want To—’” and “The Shakedown Artists” were offered). Campbell rejected it as loo discursive,” and on December 9, 1968, it went to Fred Pohl, who was then editing
Galaxy
and
If.
Pohl returned it as too long, but he said he’d look at a revised version, which went to him on February 8,1969, “totally rewritten and shorter.” Pohl accepted it, complaining that “I like it, but… it still dawdles,” and said he would only be interested in further stories in the series “if they are tighter and preferably shorter.”

“Happiness Is a Warm Spaceship” was published in the November 1969 issue of
If,
by then under new ownership and with a new editor, Ejler Jakobs-son. Tiptree wrote to Jakobsson on June 16,1969, asking if he would be interested in the series; there is no response in her files. No other complete stories were written, although two versions of a book proposal and some brief fragments were. One plot shows up as both a
Rosenkrantz
story and a
Star Trek
one.

This story was included in the original manuscript for the first Tiptree collection,
Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home
(Ace 1973), and indeed her proposed title for the collection was
Happiness Is a Warm Spaceship,
but she eventually decided to remove that story from the book.

(Alternate titles for the first collection included:

News from a Warm Spaceship

Making It Through the Night in a Warm Spaceship

Tiptree Is a Warm Spaceship

Fragments of Angry Candy

If We Go to the Stars This Morning Where Will We Sleep Tonight?

I See People in Spacesuits They Are Making Love

Up the Main Sequence

Starproof Earwarmers

Some People Like These Stories

Comfort Me with Comets)

Alii grew disenchanted with this story. She mentions it disparagingly several times in the nonfiction portion of this collection and wrote this to me in August 1972: “Someday I might use part for a series—it started as a spoof on
Star Trek,
but then I thought of a couple good weird episodes—but it has to be reworked out of that ‘Dear Diary’ style. Anyway, the story as is—isn’t.”

The two versions of the book proposal, written in 1969, had slightly different lists of projected stories. I have blended the two manuscripts into one document:

This series, tales of the adventures of the integrated crew of the Patrol Boat
Ethel R Rosenkrantz,
was intended in part as a loving spoof of
Star Trek
and would appeal to the same or more mature audiences. The heroes operate an old space tub some centuries after the
Enterprise,
giving scope for some 1969-type problems. (“Space: a finished frontier. These are the voyages of the
Ethel R Rosenkrantz,
her mission to go where every Tom, Dick, and Bemmy has been before, and clean up the mess!”—as one of them says.) But of course there is some wildness left.

The adventures are of two types. Some are stories about the whole crew; then there are stories from the standpoint of various officers. The introduction and the last are from the Human Quent’s point of view.

1. The first story of the series has appeared in the November 1969
If
under the above title. Introduces the “hero,” a shiny new lieutenant burdened by a big brass pa. He is and isn’t a dope; he’s a good officer who is “liberal” despite Pa’s violent anti-alien politics. Assigned to an alien-run patrol boat, he is astounded to discover the crew doesn’t want to be integrated. He gets involved with them and the story leaves him headed for extended duty with them, happily oblivious to hints that the lower echelons of space duty are sloppily run and full of obscure hanky-panky. (The cop on the beat.)

2. They are called in to police a planetary mob scene caused by a sensory-religious revival movement analogous to Woodstock or Altamont. They have a combat crew of mercenaries, and the story revolves around their efforts both to control the mob and control their own blindly aggressive ant mercenaries.

3. They are provided with a batch of super-scientific remote-control gadgets for exploring new planets, which do
not
work—the turtlelike robot is taken as a love object by hostile aliens, the implanted voice transponders fail to turn off, etc. etc. General comedy with the point that there are still situations in which a living body and brain are the best miracle gimmick.

4. A sex-crisis story. Patrol boats have one female supply officer, on short assignment, often Human but sometimes alien. The Human hero, Quent, assumes that the Human girl is his prerogative, discovers that patrol boat custom dictates that she gives to none or to all who want her. The other officer interested is a furry lutroid, Lieutenant Sylla. There is interaction with an odd sex setup on a humanoid alien planet. Natives recognize two sexes, men and mothers, mothers the bosses. (Also too nonsexes, very young and very old.) Sex impersonation is a crime. The supply officer is arrested for impersonating a mother. Quent, temporarily caring for some kids in transit, is arrested for impersonating a man.

5. The bearlike captain, Imray, is aging and vitiated by space life and feeling impinged on by humans. And his sexual urges are tied to planetary rhythms, so he is a shadow-male. The
Rosenkrantz
is rebuffed in attempting to aid a luscious ursinoid princess who has been converted to mysticism and is a hermit with a Human guru. Captain Imray finally goes berserk, defies orders, and goes down single-handed to rescue her, in the process renewing his youth and having an A-1 time.

6. The lizardlike science officer, Svensk, has a coldly superior facade but complicated inferiority feelings about being a non-homotherm. He should have a slightly eerie plot where he makes it in some shuddery situation. There may also be a subplot for him where he lays an egg.

7. The furry, sexy otter, Lieutenant Sylla, is a fairly simple soul and should have an action plot, but I haven’t got quite the right thing for him yet. He loves water and has a poetic streak, maybe also a mean carnivorous streak, something really feral… ?

8. The only other Human in the crew is a runty old communications officer, Ensign Pomeroy, once probably a professional linguist, who has dropped out to the foreign legion life and a plentiful supply of Leo Lightning. He seems like a great guy, but he has a furtive side which never quite comes clean, and he does some smuggling. For a while this seems like good clean fun, but the
Rosenkrantz
gradually gets infected with too much corruption. I haven’t got the plot clear, but the idea is that somewhere along the borderline between harmless illegality and real crime one can slip too far and make a real mistake. The crunch probably comes when the crew finds that a bunch of baddies known as Drakes actually has a hold over them. A morality tale; Pomeroy or Imray may get killed.

9. The finale story, told from Quent’s view. Again not yet plotted, but the idea is a big jolt of strangeness. After we’ve been all through a nice cozy series, and the
Rosenkrantz
is like Quent’s home, something happens which casts a doubt on the fabric of this reality. In some turbulent way Quent’s fellow officers suddenly come to seem, for a moment, profoundly alien. He wonders if perhaps they are not quite other than they have appeared to him. The universe is bigger and stranger than he had supposed. The moment passes, and they set off once more with everything quite normal, but with a small cold place in Quent’s liver which will never go away. Coziness and familiarity are only glosses on the reality of an Otherness which is itself, and maybe what is most familiar is most alien of all… i.e., not Svensk’s scaly blue face, but Pomeroy’s goatee, or Quent himself.

As can be seen, these stories are not conventional hardware-adventure tales, but chew around on the kind of problems we all deal with in everyday life. And with some (hopefully) humor. Hence the title. But they are not intended as rosy-goo optimism. The author’s view is that the warmth of the spaceship is real, but it is an isolated and precarious warmth in a large, chilly, dark, and dubiously benevolent universe.

It might be of peripheral interest that part of the writer’s youth was spent as a member of a small expeditionary group in foreign parts, where the main problems always turned out to be, not the hostile environment, but the in-tent relationships.

A final note: These stories will get written, but
slowly.
I am a spare-time writer, a heavy reviser, and type agonizingly slow.

Four thousand Angstrom glimmered on the pile at the left side of the table. In the pile were scripts, scrolls, shards, spools, cassettes, a large leaf On the right side of the table was a funnel of luminous wire. Beside it was a spider holding two pieces of pumice. The owner of the table sat before a scanning lens and read:

—relief quirked Captain Herring’s thin, bronzed lips as the quan-tameter lights steadied on the control spectra. The blurry outlines of the cabin came back to sharpness. Safe in Ur-time! Captain Herring straightened his thin, bronzed shoulders. There was a faint
plop!
as they passed Planck’s constant.
Ocarina III,
intergalactic space tramp, had made it again.

Smiling under his thin, bronzed mustache Herring reached down for the lever to release himself from the antigrav cabinet. Nothing now to do for weeks but paste up his collection of recipes, he thought, his thin, bronzed ears twitching in anticipation. Then he froze. The antigrav lever felt odd. It felt like an ankle.

Space-torque, he thought. Better take it easy, old boy. He wobbled the lever. It still felt like an ankle. He fumbled for the fail-safe. That felt like an ankle too. Gathering them in his thin, bronzed fingers Herring reached down. Another ankle! He yanked it up.

“By Arcturus, it
is
an ankle!” Herring grated. “And that dainty chain looks like an unknown high-tensile molybdenum alloy!” Gingerly, Herring bent to read the inscription on the locket attached to the slim, warm joint. He had just made out the words,
if you can read this you’re too damn
—when something jabbed him in the inguineum.

Instantly the ice-hot reflexes which had carried him through many a rhubarb with the radioactive Khurds of Wey sent him five meters into the control panel.

“Come out of that, you!” he rasped, gammator at the ready.

Nothing happened. He tried it again in Lower Martian and was working up to Glottic when the owner of the ankles hoisted itself over the rim of the grav cabinet.

“Do
stop spluttering,” it said. “I thought you’d
never
get up. What kind of heap is this anyway? Ten gees to get off a filling platform and you sitting on my eyelashes.” Gurgling irritably it began to preen itself.

Captain Herring looked the thing up and—more or less—down, in Ur-time it was difficult to tell. He who had faced a thousand alien forms of life from the musical brain slugs of Ech to the flaming crystal cannibals of Utr Nadr was unnerved. This is the worst yet, he thought, choking.

“By the laws of intergalactic navigation,” he ground out, narrowing his thin, bronzed eyelids, “you—whatever you call yourself—are a stowaway. You are, I trust, familiar with the regulations governing the disposal of stowaways?”

“Ah, stow it, Buttons,” said the Thing composedly, picking at its toenails. Herring shuddered; they were an icky pink. “The way you flow this pig you need some ballast. What do you use for fuel, Saniflush?”

“Kerosene,” Herring blurted. “I mean, Hexadinitrobetameta-dioyla—”

“Hiccups, eh?” said the Thing. It uncoiled itself from the cabinet. “Well soon fix that.”

“Now look here!” Herring barked. “Ignorance is no excuse. You’ve got to go. Courtesy of the spaceways and all that, but there’s only room for one on the
Ocarina.
When I count to three I’ll pull the trigger. One!”

The Thing paused in its undulant advance.

“What are you going to pull?” it asked interestedly.

“The trigger,” Herring grunted, his thin, bronzed lips set in a lethal line. “Two!”

“What trigger?”

“If you have a god, pray! Thurr—”

“You do realize that’s a box of penuche you’re holding,” the Thing murmured.

“eee!”
shouted Herring and pulled. Then he glared incredulously at his hand. It was indeed the box of penuche he had tucked behind the control panel to munch in the long space night. He dashed it furiously at the floor which happened just then to be the ceiling. Mass being constant in free fall, the box sailed into the fuse clips with a solid bonk and the lights went out.

“Oh dear,” cooed the Thing in the darkness, “it looked so good. Dense, though. Who made ‘em?”

“I did,” muttered Herring, groping for the fuses. In the darkness he could hear the Thing groping too.

“Oh, here’s one!” it trilled and began chewing loud and wet. “What’s your name, Tiger? You make smashing penuche.”

Suddenly it was snuffling on his neck. And elsewhere.

“Red,” he gulped, wildly clutching at his thin, bronzed flight shorts.

“Reddy, baby,” the Thing was mumbling sloopily through the penuche, “don’t you really know what I am, Reddy dear?”

“Wha—what are you?” Herring squealed, his thin, bronzed toes curling and uncurling as he struggled in the dark. To die like this, he thought, trapped in my own control room by a Thing from the abyss—