Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (13 page)

In longer forms, I made two attempts at novels; one, though it might be worth completing, I doubt I could do alone. When I did finally complete a novel, it was only much later, in collaboration with Poul.

In 1959, we bought a new, though small, car for cash; that was the year the Detroit Worldcon committee invited Poul to be their Guest of Honor. I think his hotel bill was to be paid, but little if anything more. We decided to drive; and then we “played map.” We wouldn’t have to go directly, of course; wouldn’t we want to see the Cogswells in Indianapolis and my relatives in Kentucky? Then go by way of Washington to New York?—And why not Boston, and a bit of Canada as long as we were that close? Then after the convention, we’d see his mother in Minnesota, and the MFS gang; then, so late in the year, we’d want to drop south and stop at Barringer Crater . . .

People who fly miss all these choices. When committees did cover air fare, though, they sometimes also took us unimagined places: In Calgary, we were taken into a museum’s storage space and given the privilege of holding an authentic tilting-lance. So well balanced it seemed massless, it nestled eagerly between my arm and side.

But, to return to the 1959 trip: I’d never learned to drive. Up to age twenty-five it would have meant higher insurance payments; now past that age, I still used bicycle or public transit. Now I needed to share in this transcontinental drive. I began lessons in empty parking lots on weekends, went on to level streets, then winding streets in the hills.

We headed east on US 40, a road that we’d used more than once on camping trips to reach Lake Tahoe. Its two lanes, with occasional passing lanes, wound up and up; I recognized this restaurant, that service station with snow-tire rental—but now I was behind the wheel. The Donner Pass was my seventh driving lesson.

What we saw, whom we visited, and which relatives took care of Astrid, can be left for a longer reminiscence. But I must mention one event.

We’d headed north along the Blue Ridge Parkway and stopped at a campground in North Carolina; I think it was the only time we blew up our air mattresses. We had a bare stone hilltop to sleep on.

I woke in the hours before dawn to see, glowing amid a clear starry sky, what looked like a fluorescent orange comet. It had to be a man-made object in space! I woke Poul and we discussed it. Next day’s newspaper mentioned a sounding rocket from Wallops Island; at the convention Willy Ley confirmed that the rocket had squirted out sodium vapor above the shadow of Earth.

Conventions run together in my memory. Was it here, late one party, Poul and some others sang
“Die Beiden Grenadiere”
while Willy translated the lyrics to me? Likely Gordy Dickson and Ted Cogswell were singing too. It was surely where we met Kelly Freas, creator not only of covers and interiors for so many of Poul’s stories, but also of his portrait for the April 1971 special issue of
F&SF
.

Homebound after Detroit, we visited in Minnesota and did indeed see Meteor Crater as we swung south to California. On the last morning, hungry and cashless, we used a bank’s check-guarantee card that allowed me to draw $100 when a branch opened. We bought gas and breakfast and made like bats out of Barstow. After that Poul agreed to have a gasoline credit card, so long as it was kept paid off.

All these things formed the basis of our continuing lifestyle. We drove once by a direct route as far as Chicago and back for a convention. Attending those, we talked, partied, and sang with writers, editors, artists, publishers—above all fans, many of whom aspired or even succeeded professionally. Specialty presses like Gnome and Shasta, and semi-pro ones like Advent, fed an appetite ignored by general publishers until the runaway success of
The Lord of the Rings
. Paperback houses like Berkley and Pyramid added science fiction to their crime and suspense lines, and Ace started the double-novel experiment in both genres. Poul sold them not only original novels but at least one collection of short works as his own flip side.

At the end of 1959, we were ready to buy our own home, rather than renting. (Our last tenants, Terry and Miriam Carr, had moved to better housing.) We searched Berkeley and neighboring cities before finally choosing a house in Orinda. Excellent in some respects, it was only tolerable in others; I might have looked longer if I’d known we would be there over forty years.

In 1965 we went to Loncon II, our first foreign worldcon; as in 1959, we traveled in great loops before and after the convention that was the primary business purpose. The IRS never questioned our receipts for that or any travel we claimed. London 1965 was like Detroit 1959, and so were Heidelberg 1970 and Brighton 1979. We combined Den Haag 1990 with a science tour. We visited foreign friends and Poul’s Danish kinfolk, saw museums, and took local tours. Only rarely did we go to a nightclub or the like, being more likely to rest our feet and plan the next day.

In Europe, we saw passage graves, reconstructed Iron Age dwellings, medieval and Renaissance merchants’ houses, lords’ castles and royal chateaus, the pomp of Versailles and Peter the Great’s responses at St. Petersburg; and always surviving temples, churches, and cathedrals from Athens to Moscow. In the New World, we saw pre-Columbian remains of Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs as well as Hispanic developments. Around the world, we saw the variousness of the world itself and its history. A writer’s imagination can only work on what’s been put into it.

François Bordes, who’d translated Poul’s work for the French edition of
F&SF
, and his wife Denise de Sonneville-Bordes had become our friends while at UC Berkeley. His work in re-developing knapping techniques would suffice to make him famous, and Denise’s work on typology was equally respected. He gave us an Acheulean hand-ax—“I can do this legally, since it was picked up in a river and has no importance for research.”

In Dordogne, François showed us painted caves only open to researchers, and his students’ ongoing dig at an
abri
. (When I last visited, the Smithsonian displayed a recreation of his site.) He took us to a site open to the public where I picked up a worked stone; he identified it as a Perigordean blade, and said I was welcome to keep it, as it lacked stratigraphy. (Imagine a thickish injector-razor blade, about one-and-a-half scale, made from a long flake of white stone.) He had both the knowledge and the authority, being head of the Department of the Quaternary at the University of Bordeaux.

During such travels, Poul used his Danish bilingual upbringing and college German, while I had Latin, Spanish, French, and both classical and a bit of modern Greek to call on. I used the last to create “sophont” for a story of his, a term taken up by anthropologists to mean an intelligent nonhuman.

In 1966, we became part of a counter-counterculture.

Diana Paxson had invited numerous friends to a medieval re-enactment on May Day, in her back yard just south of the UC campus. Poul had work, my mother needed me in D.C., but she’d invited twelve-year-old Astrid too. Poul could drop her off and fetch her. Combats, music, and pageantry succeeded so well that further events were arranged in Berkeley parks. The Society for Creative Anachronism was well under way when, first at Westercon and then at Worldcon in 1966, pilots of
Star Trek
were shown. Post-event revelry became Trek fan-sessions.

Dorothy Jones, one of the Consortium Antiquum singers who had joined the SCA as a group, became a Trek fan and a close friend of Astrid’s. She was in her twenties, but she and Astrid together turned into eighteen-year-old twins. We and other family groups at the beginning carried out Diana’s idea of re-creating the cultural Middle Ages, not just the martial arts.

The SCA, appealing to the same mentality as science fiction, spread from convention to campus to army base. One fighter started a branch at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany; another, serving in the Pacific, set one up on an aircraft carrier. Poul and I, with Astrid, Dorothy, and others put together the filk operetta “HMS Trek-A-Star” for a Westercon; it turned out to have all-SCA cast and crew. I sang Spock. The audience included Gene Roddenberry and James Doohan. A near-original cast re-ran it at the 1968 Worldcon, with a few lines updated; David Gerrold, with a tribble he and I had stitched up, substituted as Kirk.

Poul took to SCA fighting with enthusiasm, and what he learned on the field (though with duct-tape-wrapped rattan) gave him the combat experience to re-write his early fantasy
The Broken Sword
, still available from Orion both in paperback and in e-publication. “Sir Bela of Eastmarch” is especially remembered by early fighters as setting an example for chivalry.

We went occasionally to the annual meetings of the AAAS; some years, as when Hal Clement gave a paper on habitable extremes, they were irresistible. We attended a bioastronomy conference in Santa Cruz and one on lunar and planetary science in Houston. Meeting Poul, a surprising number of scientists said science fiction had turned them toward their profession. Space scientists and rocket engineers, met at Florida launches or JPL flybys, have also called SF writers and artists influential in shaping their work.

In 1986 and later, we joined conducted tours with lectures by scientists to see a comet or an eclipse. Exotic sites (and information we picked up) would always spark a story: “The Year of the Ransom” sprang from the L5 Society’s trip to Perú and the Galápagos to see Halley’s Comet, with lectures by David Levy, before Comet Shoemaker-Levy made him famous. Jay Pasachoff led an eclipse tour in 1990 that we made part of a grand sweep. It began in July with a visit to Helsinki and a quick trip to Leningrad and Moscow, before returning for the charter flight that showed us the eclipse at 33,000 feet above Finland. We left the group when their ship reached Stockholm, on our way to Den Haag for the 1990 worldcon. Other eclipse tours took us to Oaxaca (also Monte Albán, Yagúl, and Mitla) where we could eat
huitlacoche
; or brought us through Argentina with a look at the Falls of Iguazú on the way to the Gran Chaco and the Mennonite enclave of Paraguay. That latter gave rise to the scene where a South American experiences a computer-created dream of Jorge Luis Borges.

Having left the 1990 tour, we rented a car, traveled down the east coast of Sweden, crossed Denmark and went through part of the Netherlands to the Worldcon. Tom Doherty took us to lunch and said, “You know, if I had a new Time Patrol story, I could put together an omnibus.” Poul said, “Funny thing about that: we were just researching it.” The story was “Star of the Sea,” in which my translations of the Latin inscriptions we’d seen on Batavian traders’ votive altars found in the Netherlands and our speculations about their iconography melded with what we’d seen on Öland and what Tacitus had said about the Germani and their cult of Nerthus.

That European tour concluded as a family reunion: Astrid, her husband Greg, four-year-old Erik, and infant Alexandra, joined us to visit Poul’s relatives in København.

We participated in many annual CONTACT (Cultures of the Imagination) conferences, created by anthropologists James Funaro, Reed Riner, and Joel Hagen.

Such exercises start with choosing a type of star and sort of planet, Poul’s specialty, and working up from there through ecology, culture, and languages; the last are my strengths. Two teams (each representing humans or other sophonts: time, near or far future) would present their culture session by session as they developed it, and finally role-play their encounter with each other.

For a spinoff Contact conference in Japan, we created a world complete with ecosystem and sophonts’ history and mythology, including a planetary trade-language. Poul’s story “The Shrine of Lost Children” arose there. We converted a set of planets from the Technic Universe for a role-playing exercise at one of the Asimov Conferences at White Eagle Lodge in New York; for another Asimov Conference, Poul and I developed the assigned Ben Bova book
Welcome to Moonbase
into a “Murder Weekend” game.

Travels before and after Brighton 1979, originally Regency-driven, led into Roman connections. Hadrian’s Wall confirmed that we would write a late-Roman story; it became a fantasy when I found Martin of Tours, definitely of our period, embedded in the Breton legend of Ys. Researching further at home, I saw we could cross it with Frazer’s King of the Golden Wood. I spent a year doing book research, and we returned to Brittany for a look at places and things we hadn’t seen before. The writing, beyond some verses of mine, was entirely Poul’s; we plotted it together. Later, visiting his brother John (retired from a professorship of geology), I remarked that I thought of the novel as my master’s thesis; John said, “I’ve seen Ph.D.s given for less research.”

I had always wanted to write science fiction and fantasy. If I sold little of my own, still I was helpmeet to one of those who shaped it, and lived among people for whom it was the most important thing in the world. And why not? Our dreams, if we shape them aright, can in turn shape a better future for the world.

In 1998, Poul was recognized as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.