Archie Recruits Andy
Rob
Archie does have a few questions Krane might be able to answer, and also he just enjoyed talking to him. I mean, his attempt at putting a whammy on Krane went about as well as all Archie's attempts at subterfuge or Enthrallment have gone, which is not well. But they did make a bit of a connection. So I think Archie will play to his strengths and be sincere. He'll go in and sit down, all friendly and avuncular, with a cup of coffee for each of them. "Well, it looks like we've got a bit of time to kill, Mr. Krane — can I call you Andrew? Why don't we chat a bit?"
Michael
Krane looks at Archie with a weird combination of intensity and exhaustion. He crinkles his brow at this seeming complete non sequitur but eventually smiles in something between relief and surrender. "Okay. Yes. Anything to help re-anchor me to reality."
"Andrew's fine. Do you think I could have a cigarette?"
Rob
"Sure, sure!" Unless he's asking Archie for a cigarette, in which case, "Oh, sorry, I don't smoke."
Archie smiles placidly, takes his time, with a general air of "here we are in this funny situation, ah well, what are you gonna do?"
"So. What to chat about? The ad game? America? Atlantis? I guess I'm not a true 'sci fi' diehard, I mean I've never been to a convention before, but I meant what I said last night, Andrew: your books are swell. Real page turners."
Michael
"Thank you. I sincerely appreciate that." Andrew looks nervously at his cuffed hands. "You know, I always had suspicions, you know? I mean, my mid-'60s stuff — the telephone cops book, the one about future TV running everybody's lives—all that was based on what the kids at Sproul Hall were saying, about how we're all punchcards in a giant IBM, you know? Like these college kids were being stamped out by democracy's arsenal to be weapons against the Sovs." He inhales, shivers. "So I never thought it was a literal conspiracy, like all the computers are secretly linked together by the military and the universities and used to control and surveil us all. But … " he peers at Archie keenly, "But it is kind of like that, isn't it?"
"Man to man, Archie. I can take it. I'm a man who had his first psychotic break today, but not his first one ever."
Rob
"Well, yes, Andrew. It is a little like that. When I read Atlantis Rising, you know what I said? Hand to god, I said: how does this fellow know all this stuff? Crystal magic, the Atlantean hive mind, MARPA … It's supposed to be top secret! But he's got it all exactly right. OK: Bobby Kennedy isn't president — as far as I know, ha ha — but other than that? I could have been reading the New York Times."
Michael
"Surely you're having me on, now, Archie. I mean, I can accept government conspiracies but the magic stuff? Atlantis was … is! a metaphor! For those kids wanting to be set free of being stamped and filed and numbered. I mean, I'm as conversant in the occult and paranormal as the next sf writer — I've even had a couple of strange encounters, you might call them, on drugs — but surely those are metaphors too? For power, for history, for … tribal myths transformed into political magic."
Rob
Archie looks Krane in the eyes, summons up all his sincerity and (non-Anunnaki) powers of persuasion for this next line. And he is, after all, telling the truth:
"You won't find it under the sea, Andrew, but: Atlantis. Is. Real."
"It's real and it's dangerous. And if you understand that, you'll understand why America needs the computers and the surveillance and the James Bond stuff. We're the good guys, Andrew! I hope you can still see that."
Michael
Andrew blinks. "How did I channel it, Archie? How did I write these books? Do I have some kind of psi ability? Because if so that's fucking frightening!"
Marshall sees genuine panic in Krane's eyes right now. The idea of him unconsciously channeling something is absolutely authentically frightening to him. He has no idea.
Rob
"Well, that's exactly what I'd like to know." Then, cheerfully, as if an unrelated thought just occurred to him: "Say … tell me about Genevieve Abeille."
Brant
Marshall smirks and muses to himself alone in the other room that Archie is quite good at this.
Michael
"She's the only good writer I know, Archie. The rest of the sf field is full of hacks. She could be bigger than any lady author out there, in sf or in real literary circles, if you buy such a thing. She could be the biggest if she weren't so goddamn weird. And that's why she's the best. She's got integrity, Archie. She's a bodhisattva. Every family she works with comes out beaming. Not that fake smile you'd see on billboards in the '50s. But they know why they're here after they talk to Viv. Why they're here on this planet."
Andrew looks aside, "And I've been around her for 35 years and I haven't changed a fucking bit."
Rob
"Gosh, that's quite an endorsement! I hope she gets you to blurb her books."
"I picked up a couple of her books before the convention. I'm sure you're right about her literary talents, I mean you're the expert. All I ever wrote for was puppets and cereal boxes! But I have to say they weren't my cup of tea, Abeille's books, I mean everything in them is all … squishy and strange, you know? Plus I think she's misread B.F. Skinner.
So you've known her a long time? Would you say she's an influence on your work?"
Michael
"'Squishy and strange,'" Andrew laughs heartily, like way more basso profundo than you'd expect for a tall, gangly dude. "Oh my goodness, that really does fit her writing to a tee, doesn't it?"
"We met in fifth grade. We were the two most serious children in the class. Serious in different ways, of course: I was studious, Genevieve would unnerve all but the most bohemian art and music teachers with her asking "why" about everything. Prodigies, they would call you back then. Whiz kids. Berkeley had good schools, ready to deal with our genius, but our parents said to keep us in our own grades. Good choice by our folks, I think.
In college after the war, boy, we had some intense discussions over coffee and biscotti. I think it's back then she started smoking grass because a lot of the kids in the cafes were starting to try it. I was always more of a dexedrine man myself." Andrew seems genuinely wistful about college; honestly, a 43 year old man nostalgic for when he was 18? Unseemly.
"That's when she first started changing. Politically, you see. I was much more of a Truman booster and she said he was a mass murderer for dropping the Bomb. She was always really convincing, though. I met my first wife through her. She was a commie, but I guess you probably already know that, don't you?"
"Who knows how we both got started with sf. I can't remember whether she or I brought it to the Med one day. Amazing Stories. I'd read mags like that in high school, of course, but now she was interested. But it took her fifteen years to start writing. I started the next day." A chuckle.
Rob
Archie's smiling through all this. He is genuinely interested.
When Krane pauses, he asks, "Are you in love with her?"
Michael
Andrew sort of uncomfortably chuckles, "Archie, let me put it this way: if you asked her if I was in love with her, she'd say yes, and so is everyone else she meets."
"You've read the books. Everything in them is powered on love, the universe's love for itself, in all its parts and emanations. In the final analysis you and I and your sinister colleagues and Viv and my obsessive fans... we're all One Being."
Rob
Archie, chuckling: "I know you're not married any more, Andrew, but if the Mrs ever asked me if I was in love with somebody else's wife, and my answer was all that … well, I'd be in hotter water than if I'd just said yes."
"It's fine, I get it, Viv sounds like a very special person and she's obviously special to you. But I want you to think carefully about this question, and be honest, with yourself: how much of the stuff in the Atlantis Rising books did you get from her?"
Michael
So Krane has been deftly parrying all your conversational gambits so far: sort of ignoring the question you ask in favor of some other embarrassing fact he doesn't mind revealing. But now the money's on the table, the hand is on the bible, and he can't avoid this one question.
"The Atlantis stuff — the good parts of the Atlantis stuff, where the Atlanteans heal the sick in the Congo or aid hurricane victims in Central America using crystal magic and ask for nothing in return but embracing their ideals of world unity across humanity and Atlanteans—that's all her. But I also put my fears of what life would be like in Atlantis would be too, my legitimate fears over identity and individuality and control in a society so perfectly in equilibrium."
"Yes, Viv inspires me. She inspires me to be better. But she also scares me. Because if she's right, if she is right about what it would take to live in peace and harmony on this planet, it would mean we need to change everything about how we live, about how we treat each other. And I just don't know if that's possible. And if it isn't … we get to live here for the rest of our lives." Andrew sort of frowns at that.
Rob
The last part doesn't compute for Archie — what's wrong with living "here"? (Berkeley? San Francisco?) But he feels like he's gotten half of what he wanted from this conversation, which was confirmation that Abeille is the source of whatever's dangerous in the Atlantis books, and if there is a leak about SANDMAN etc., it runs through her. So he presses for the other thing he wants, even if he hasn't admitted it to himself, which is to persuade this guy who weirdly reminds Archie of himself that SANDMAN/MARPA are the good guys.
"Identity and individuality and control — that's just it, Andrew! In groups, in masses, human beings are so, so easily manipulated. Free will only works at smaller scales. That's why individual liberty is so very precious."
Michael
"Easily manipulated. Okay. So is that why I watch six hours of the tube a day and then end up buying the brands I see on TV at the Safeway? The 'ad game' you were talking about at the outset of our little chat … it's just a cover for keeping people buying and distracted and not thinking about, er, Atlantis?" Krane catches on very fast, but that would make sense for someone receiving vague psi images of What's Really Up the past four years.
Brant
Marshall knocks on the door and then opens it before waiting for a response. “Arch, MJ is on the phone. You’re needed.” He catches Krane’s eye and gives him a nod.
Rob
Archie slaps his knees with both hands in a way that says "great chat!"
"To be continued, I guess." Archie gets up.
Later, in his office, Archie thinks …
Given Archie's solid and resilient basis in understanding fan culture (from a, er, proper anthropological distance of course), he knows even before doing an esmological analysis that fans are a fractious lot. Individual fen swear their allegiances to authors both popular and obscure, and while that can create a social landscape of larger groups engaging in factionalism, there is a very strong strain of individuality in fan culture, one that can help fans evade totalizing memetic narratives out of pure cussedness. At the same time, of course, authors can obviously command immense loyalty — from Heinlein to Asimov to, yes, Krane, we've seen exactly what can happen when a writer becomes a cult. This is even leaving aside the very recent bifurcation of Old Wave vs. New Wave and the implicit political, social, gender, and age demographic conflict that occurs under that banner, or even the science fiction vs. fantasy dialectic.
So what are the narratives that unite fandom in general? Why do all these disparate fans still flock together? There is a meta-narrative of being a sf nerd: being an outsider is practically inscribed into the sf scene's very heart over the past 35 years or so. An enjoyer of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells is not an outsider the same way that an enjoyer of Robert Heinlein and Alfred Bester (or indeed James Tiptree and Genevieve Abeille) is, but they all find themselves on the outside looking in: the nerds at school, the strident voices in their college literature clubs, the 30-somethings with the weird opinions on life, technology, magic, and society with their noses in a book of speculative fiction. Their passion, the quality which unites fandom, often makes fans appealing, in a larger sense, only to each other. Which is why you can end up with old school fans sparring joyfully with New Wave fans at cons. No one knows you/hates you like family, after all.