At the Eaton conference in 1993, sitting on a panel having to do with postmodernism—or perhaps it is the archetypal hero in history and science fiction—Ruthven has an insight. Perhaps it is not an insight but an emotion disguised as reason, mocking in this shielded form his delusion that he has at last understood himself. It is not so much the debauchery of the field of science fiction, now combined with fantasy and known in places like these as "fabulation," as decadence which has done matters in. With all of their yearnings, twitches, quick and slow poisonous entanglements on the beds of a thousand conventions, with all of their alcoholism, narcissism, cowardice and greed, his colleagues were able in the old days to separate to their satisfaction the three-cents-a-word labors and the more riotous and disgraceful entanglements which truly kept them going; now however, with the embrace of the fantastic and the outskirts of academia slowly enfolding science fiction, it seems at last to have departed—along with his remaining colleagues and their successors who have wandered through various doors—any conviction that from these small and terrible constructions might come some real portrait of the world which had caused them all such discomfort. Now it is the emolument of the performing arts which is all.
Ruthven thinks of this and other things, feeling—as he tends to feel increasingly in these public moments—a kind of disconnection so strong that it might be remorse: remorse for his 67 years, for the passage of the light, for the expunging of his own time and desire on the ramshackle surgical tables of deconstruction or anomie. It is all too much for him, along with almost everything else, and he has the good sense to remain quiet, to let matters drift around him, to let the poet, the professor, the mainstream fantabulator discuss the deconstruction or reaffirmation of the fairy tale within the post-technological context while, dreaming in the soft and radiant slants of the California sun, come late to his circumstance but beckoning him to ignore or depart earlier constraints, Ruthven thinks of women outside his marriage whom he has embraced, old griefs bedazzled and recollected in this remorseless academic cubicle, the wounded and bleak fire of the adulterer's orgasms with which in the old days he was able to stretch weekends of this sort into the stuff of recollection which could hold him in place through the summers and winters of his marriage to follow, all of those seasons of his marriage and of his twitching, inconsequential career which nonetheless has brought him to California toward the end of his life to stare at the blonde moderator, a professor of women's studies, and try to place the college sophomore from Erie, Pennsylvania whom he had met in Boston in 1980 to whom she bore some fragrant resemblance. The sophomore from Erie, Pennsylvania, had shown the 54-year-old Boskone special guest Henry Martin Ruthven all the way home, and poised upon thoughts of decadence and loss as he might have been, Ruthven could remember the thrall of his entrance, long-delayed but triumphant in its spill, far better than he could any of the statements or conclusions of this panel of some 45 minutes duration.
Later, at the reception after the first complete day of the conference, one which has invited the widowed Ruthven, all expenses plus a $150 honorarium, to offer his own remembrances and recollection of 1950s fabulation as part of an early post-millennial survey of fabulation, Ruthven has been backed against an open window on this first floor by the blonde moderator, who in close-up and in the extremity of Ruthven's regret, now looks less like the college sophomore and more like a blunter and more achieved version of his late wife, Sandra. "You had very little to say this afternoon," the moderator says. Ruthven has never troubled to retain her name. "I wonder if you found the topic unacceptable or whether we were just running on a bit. I know that there was a clear concept of heroism in your Sorcerer series so you've obviously thought about the issue."
"No," Ruthven says, "no, I haven't thought of the issue. I don't think of anything these days much, it's easier that way. In fact," he says, "I'm really a rather superficial person. Writing for the cent-a-word markets in your developing years will do that to you if you're not careful, and then if you get locked into formulaic writing, it becomes even grimmer. I'm 67 years old. It's too late for further insights, I think." And too early for death, he would add, at least in my case, at least this is what he would have added if a certain keen and absent horror had not drifted into the otherwise obtuse features of madame chairman and had not acted to propel her toward the far wall, shaking her head and waving her glass at him. He has this effect upon many people and never more so than when he is trying not to offend, when he is working in a deliberate fashion to repress the very real loathing which comes over him at any time that science fiction or fantasy or fabulation are approached in a manner which would define. But the light, what there is of it at dusk in this small and compressed place, is soft and radiant, and his sense of remorse is not so great that he cannot appreciate the strange and devious nature of his own life as it has led him so belatedly to this, and he cannot question as well the received material of inference in this room: it might have been possible for him even 10 years ago to have found someone with whom to spend the night. Now, in his final years, surmounting the poisons of his own history and the small and utter damages which he takes fabulation to have accomplished, Ruthven is able to draw some sustenance from that inference even as he knows with a less tentative force that he will spend this night alone, he will spend many nights alone, he is as likely to spend every remaining night of his life alone as his books and his contribution to the sport of alternative are likely to slide from all consideration within 10 years of his death. Anya Seton, Otis Adelbert Kline, Oscar Friend, Ray Cummings. Ed Earl Repp. Harl Vincent, the pseudonym for Harl Vincent Schoepflin, prolific contributor to Astounding Stories until Campbell had discharged Nat Schachner, Vincent and quite a few others in a stern and final decree whose insistence—real people, real situations, a real future founded upon an enclosed and apprehended past—Ruthven can feel in the soles of his feet at the present time. The golden alien bird, drifting and singing in the cage of the Snow Maiden, its throat cruelly torn open by the Star Beast, by the products of the Weapon Shops of Isher.
Ruthven had achieved a certain amount of notoriety—fame was never a word which could be used within fabulation, it was grandiose in a field of grandiosity and therefore never meant anything at all: fame for the damaged Ruthven would be the means of access to the absence of pain and he simply did not comprehend such a thing in his life, any more than he could comprehend the true, transubstantiative nature of prayer—for his guest of honor speech at the Cincinnati Convention in 1983. At this convention (which Ruthven had not at that time had the wit to think of as SinCon, and now that he did have that wit, he simply did not have the means or the audience), Ruthven had started that guest of honor speech as a reading of a transcribed satirical jaunt through the trivial and mean-spirited history of the field; he had meant it as renunciation but had somehow, caught up with self-importance or the thrust of a memory of the night he had spent with the Boston schoolteacher just before, come off the page to deliver a prayer in praise and loss of science fiction, breaking down at the end, crying sickeningly into an open microphone while the chairman hovered and at last came mercifully forward to lead Ruthven to the side under the attention of 3,000 people, most of whom had no understanding of what had happened. Ruthven's final words had been printed in Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle and—in debased form—in his hometown newspaper. They had been used in a story falsifying his career and true nature which had been used in an author collection (no magazine would have printed it) and which had become moderately famous within the field, not that Ruthven read or tried to keep up with such matters or gave a damn what ill-use had been made of his truths; ill-use had been made of him all his life. Nonetheless, the speech and its pathetic close had marked him in the dungeons and secret caverns of the field from which last perceptions eventually congealed as an emotional and sentimental man, something of a panderer, not only the author of the Sorcerer series, which had become the basis of three bad films, a series of graphic novels and multitudinous foreign editions, but a writer filled at last with that very kind of self-importance and sentimentality which he had always disdained. No Hydra Club for Ruthven or sentimental essays on the pulp days for Science Fiction Review, he had stood away from all of that and the academization of the genre as well, and yet in his prolix and unwinding years he had become a symbol after all, a kind of Tristan of the penny-a-worders, a man who had confessed to 3,000 friends and strangers that he had died for love of that which he had not known was his. It is for this reason that the invitations to places like Eaton have been coming in through the latter decade. Ruthven could be counted upon to give something of a show and remind the audience—juxtaposed against the kids with their large advances and open-ended series, the academicians with their mingling of contempt and fear, the writers of his time or just before who reacted to the Star Wars and Star Trek years like oxen led past the slaughterhouse and into an alfalfa field, the sound of the machinery around them at all times but their own lives seemingly deknived—that there was more to science fiction than the suburbs and high-rise cooperatives of fantasy and fabulation, that in its keenest and deadliest spaces science fiction seemed capable of bringing to bear the desirous, yearning adolescent child in ways which most other pursuits could not. Ruthven had taken the invitations—he needed in the first five years of this last decade to get away from the house in a justified way more than ever before—but he had not given good weight; he had always felt shame over his public breakdown, and while he accepted the invitations and certainly never denied what he came to think of as his disgrace, he was not interested in repeating it; one did that kind of thing once in a lifetime or perhaps three or four if one carefully scattered the residue, but one simply did not do much of this, because pandering soon enough would freeze into self-replication and performance, and performance would sink into expectations of design; he would become in these last years when he found it impossible to produce more than a novel a year or to write more than three pages a day or to produce more than 200 words at a single burst of work only a performer and consumer of his own perceived persona. That would make him emblematic of science fiction, he supposed, a further example in microcosm of a field whose origination as a genre in the United States had been virtually synchronous with his own birth on 4/12/26, but he had never aspired to that, had not aspired to emblems of any sort, had tried to live his life in cunning and caution and an absence of pain until at last in his 40s, the restraints had become too difficult—"fuck only at conventions and then always go home" had been the advice of a colleague when the yearnings of his 40s had so overtaken him as to leave him weak, gasping and vulnerable at the sight of a single Botticelli passing him in the streets or a shuddering recollection of one or another love object of his college years presented in the speed and dwindling of night—and his life had become calamitous, insupportable and intolerably vague only long enough for Ruthven to understand that he could no longer abide this way, not on such pain and less than $15,000 a year, and it had been about that time that the commercialization of the Sorcerer, the night drives to the state border and the serious drinking had begun, been exacerbated and finally had eased, leaving him drained if not quite resigned when he had crawled past his 50th, then his 55th birthday (the guest of honor breakdown had changed little) and finally into his 60s, the expansion of science fiction into fantasy, film, television and common obsession somehow running contrapuntally to what seemed to be the implosion of his own perspective. Film and the academicians, the fans and the furies seemed to see more: aliens, dinosaurs, stegosaurs, elves, wolves, magic rings, witches, devils, disciples, quests and rings and things and wings, but he, Ruthven, had always seen less; his focus dwindled so that all he knew were the small convolutions of his own Sorcerer books, which seemed at all odds to be holding their place in the market, and the deadlier implosion of his marriage, which with Sandra's ovarian cancer and the ongoing operations which had carried her through another three years and an extended, unpleasant death, had seemed to become a replica of itself, ever, endless replication of its own dysfunction and ruined desire holding the former world convention guest of honor ever more desperately in place—one could not leave a sick and dying wife any more than one could leave the field of science fiction to be anything else. Sandra sickened and sickened and eventually died, his age, 64 years old in 1990, the last months so striated and rending that he was able, eventually, to recall none of them.
She had died in pain and great purity, the cancer stripping the years and the desperation, the recrimination and the hurt from her even as it had taken her bones and pancreas; at the end, lying in his arms, shuddering against him with small cries reminiscent of the way he had held her in the early years of their marriage, she had become somehow the woman he had loved and she was this because she could love no more nor he nor they nor all of the dreams and disengaged portions of the heart. She had died quietly at the end and with the small, sighing release of a bird's breath, her spirit coming out against his cheek in that last exhalation, and speechless he had gone through the rest of it and three months later the death of the older daughter in an automobile accident without further emotion. He had felt through that period that surely he had become a sociopath in his endless coping mechanisms, and that the interior had been taken from him along with the last of his hair and possibility, but in the long, wracking nights to follow after the anesthesia of mourning, he had found that he was not a sociopath at all but some simulacrum of his earlier self, some desperate and shallower version of the intense young man who had read Simak and Sturgeon, had desperately wanted to reproduce that material for some kind of self-definition and more of that. He had staggered through the year of inconstant and grievous pain while paying as little attention as possible and ignoring the attempts of his younger daughter to establish some kind of bridging connection, and then he had found himself at the end of this to be another version of himself, reduced and tentative, at the edge of frailty but nonetheless recognizable, just as dying Sandra in her last breaths had been recognizably the Sandra who had cried his name and arced with him in 1955 and 1956 calling, calling him home.
Called home, again, then, called to the strange and lustrous California heat and moisture, Ruthven excuses himself from the reception and walks alone, holding a glass, on the antique and cobbled path of the college, looking at the foliage and thinking of the interstices of a business which had taken him to California and his readers to further places than that and yet which—he had to see this in his own case if not as a generality—had taught him absolutely nothing, had left him only this drained and bleaker version of the original self. While the Sorcerer had soared into extrapolation and interchangeability, his own spirit had shriveled; perhaps while science fiction itself had probed this or that corridor of possibility, it had neglected to keep itself properly embedded in the earth and had therefore utterly fragmented into this clawing and disparate animal which allowed the academics to count its toes, its appendages, and its teeth, without ever quite understanding its origin or the nature of its behavior.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps none of this held any water at all; he does not know, as strange to himself in these radiant and sinking days as his interior in childhood had been to his parents. Ruthven understands that he has lost any real sense of consequence or causality in his life, that events once seemingly linked and propelled by some constant of consequence had become disconnected, that all seemed to be outcome without trigger, the cusp of his life decanted with no trace remaining. Once his life seemed wholly explicable in terms of science fiction, most of them felt that way, that science fiction for its practitioners was the world, that fans were slans, that the possibility shack was the probability shack, that the bomb and the astronauts had made all of their speculations justifiable, inevitable. That had been a time, somewhere in the two decades after Hiroshima, when science fiction had seemed the simulacrum, but the politicization of the space program and the infusion of Tolkien into the very heart of science fiction had changed all that: elves and dragons and flat, dead voices from space talking to Mission Control in scatology-free, highly-edited language had leached from Ruthven at least any conviction that the world was responsive to what he had done. It had all become garbage to him in those bitter and enclosed 40s, the period of his unwritten book The Lies of Science Fiction and his frenetic but never pointless adultery had all become some kind of a monstrous anecdote rigged against him, and then with Star Wars and the fantastic overwhelming most of what he thought of as the stark and bitter simplicity of science fiction, everything but his income and his own ability to work had seemed to lurch out of control. Where had the academicians been in the 1950s when stroke by stroke the field had managed to redefine itself, where were the elves and the dragons when all through the 1950s the lights of the country had seemed extinguished by the brighter dazzle of television, the duller impressions of bureaucracy and commie-hunting operatives? Where were any of them? They had come in too late for Ruthven, Sturgeon, Kornbluth or Merrill, even though they had been well early enough for Alien III and Mork and Mindy, even though Merril and Kornbluth would not have known what to have done with these situations even if presented. All was radiant and simple on the way in, dark and impassable when you sought your way out; for the life of him, and it had been a fairly long life, the widowed Ruthven could not say how he had come to this condition or what any of it meant. Looking at the hills, looking at the ground, walking through the campus abandoned by the season, Ruthven had the intimation that not only his life but his very condition, the very circumstances which had framed him had been stripped away, that he was left in this 68th year of his life wandering the campus, as a wound surrounded by murmurous and damaged flesh, regret and remorse barely disguised by respiration, angel of the spaceways swaddled as a series author. A millennial preconception, perhaps, of which there was much in these times but nonetheless true for any of this. The ancient and wizened, the needful and the blood-marked genitals below, the harness of regret above, cinched like a beast to his history, Ruthven patrolled the borders not so much of circumstance and memory as his own insufficiency and realized that there were no conclusions whatsoever, none, that what had been done had come from instance and synchronicity to some kind of latter possibility but none of it at all through the efforts or hypocrisies of those who had perpetrated that which had overtaken them all.
Sturgeon, Bester, Heinlein, Asimov, Wilson, Kuttner, Clifton, Hamilton, Nourse, Kornbluth, Shaara, Campbell, and Ruthven could (but would not) go on and on; he understands that his is the legacy of chronology, he knows far more of the dead than of the living when he thinks of passion and influence. Most of the people whom he has known and loved are dead and still; in thrall, alive, Ruthven cannot commit himself to that great extinguishing hammer which in the nights and days of the lost decades had so enticed him.
Ruthven goes to bed with the blonde moderator; he connects with her after the drinks and the dinner and the speeches and the plaques on the last night of the conference; it is as easy, perhaps unavoidable, as any of these things had been for him in his 40s. No simulation or copy of Sandra, not Sandra herself had ever gripped him more explicitly nor conjoined more cunningly than the professor of women's studies, and rising bleakly, restored to himself if only for the few apocalyptic final seconds of his fleeting shudder, Ruthven sees the great bird of desire heightened in the night, reaches with a gasp, feels the fire, takes the fire, falls across the woman into the stuporous and entangling final bed which subsumes him. He sees, sinking, once again, the light against the light, the light that falls forever. He hears the sound of great timpani. He vaults the universe and he seeks, at last and at point ultimate, like all of his brethren, to begin. To begin in the light that falls forever.