Dragonwriter (32 page)

Currently a resident of Austin, Texas, ANGELINA ADAMS is a mother of four and friend to many. She enjoys taking on new challenges, which has proved to be both a blessing and a curse. Since 1996, she has delighted in taking an annual break from being an upstanding member of society to devote her time and energy to the Anne McCaffrey programming track at Dragon*Con. Her daughter, Michelle, is now eighteen years old and continues to astound medical professionals with her ability to defy the odds. She is the tiniest member of her graduating class and rules the hallways with her smiles as she zooms around the school with her walker. She is a source of inspiration for all who know her.

C
harlotte Moore is a force of nature. Hurricanes worship her, volcanoes erupt for her, and regular mortals either bow or get out of her way (sometimes both). That she is also an avid Anne McCaffrey fan and for many years ran the Weyrfest at Dragon*Con is only natural: after all, forces of nature do what they want, don't they?

ANNE MCCAFFREY TRIED
to kill me once.

It was my first day of active duty as a volunteer for Weyrfest, the Anne McCaffrey programming track at Dragon*Con, and I was literally running late. Barreling through the bowels of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, I kept my head on a swivel as I threaded my way through a glut of scowling Klingons and beaming superheroes, past cardboard robots and buxom cat-girls, around wide-eyed convention virgins with their fanny packs and camera bags and sprawling paper programs. It's important to keep one's head at a science fiction convention—in trying to look at everything, one ultimately sees very little. You certainly can't count on anyone else to see
you
(unless you're a painted Amidala in her layer cake frills or a Robocop with real hydraulic armor or a lanky six-foot-two twenty-something with a rubber penis strapped to his forehead).

Weyrfest, as it was still officially known at the time, was the only Anne McCaffrey-themed event at any convention anywhere, and in 2003 the Dragonlady herself was Dragon*Con's scheduled guest of honor. It wasn't my first convention, but it was my first year as a volunteer, and as an eager disciple of Her Lady of Dragons, I was keenly aware of my tardiness. In sprinting, I was merely trying to exercise due diligence. That, and I was hella stoked to meet Anne freaking McCaffrey.

Little did I know that I was about to.

I don't know who was more surprised when my shins crashed into the hard metal arm of a motorized scooter; I had only the impression of silver hair before my inertial dampeners smashed down.

Have you ever seen a dog lose traction on a hardwood floor? Canine physiognomy is capable of conveying a very specific, completely hilarious combination of surprise, dismay, and shame. I imagine my face looked much like that. I reflected briefly on the life I'd lived and regretted the way it would be changed by face-planting into Anne McCaffrey's crotch.
Oh well,
I thought.
I've had a good run.

Luckily for Anne McCaffrey's crotch—less so for my tibias—I caught myself in the nick of time. She looked up at me with those green eyes of hers, and I said something apropos like, “Oh my god I am so sorry you're Anne McCaffrey and I'm Charlotte I'm your junior staffer and it's so nice to meet you and I'm a huge fan an I'm really really sorry.” Weyrfest's director, Anna, with her brace of chaperones—we always had a few people on Anne Guard to keep
exactly
this kind of thing from happening—grinned at me, the picture of knowing parental bemusement. I had the vivid impression of becoming a floor.

I think Anne said, “It's nice to meet you.”

I fled.

Now, I know what you're thinking. “Charlotte,” you're thinking, “I'm gonna be honest: it kind of actually sounds like it was
you
who tried to kill
Anne
.” False.

By now it is
well
documented that when put in control of a motorized vehicle, Anne Inez McCaffrey became crazed with power. Anne Guard wasn't just meant for her safety. It was meant for
everyone else's.
One second, that mezzanine was clear. The next, Anne, in open defiance of physics, had appeared directly in my way. I can only assume she'd worked out how to take that damn chair
between.

The better part of my life, it often seems, has been characterized by intersections—or, if you like, near misses—with Anne McCaffrey.

Like many of Anne's fans, I was a sensitive, precocious adolescent with a voracious appetite for books. I preferred fiction as a rule, but my mother had not had much luck plying me with the dramas, mysteries, and florid classics she so loved: I snubbed
Rebecca,
ignored
Anne of Green Gables,
and demanded answers for
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
: Was she
trying
to bore me to death?

Jurassic Park,
however, went right down the hatch. I treasured my Edgar Allen Poe anthology and took great pleasure in carting it around to my sixth grade classes, where I knew my less subtle schoolmates would have little to no appreciation for the tome. (I couldn't fathom why this endeared me to no one.) I must have read Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Witch Saga half a dozen times. I was ten years old when L'Engle whisked me away to Camazotz. I could recite Dahl's
Matilda
in my sleep.

Yet I didn't discover science fiction as a genre until the seventh grade, when my fingers first flattened the title page of Anne's “The Smallest Dragonboy.” The textbook in which it was reprinted also contained Bradbury's vitally poignant “All Summer in a Day.” Together, the two stories were tailor-written for a gangly, earnest tomboy with eyes for the stars. I had never considered that dragons might be loyal, benevolent partners, but in a strange way it made perfect sense. When my teacher put us into groups to stage excerpts for our classmates, I clamored for—and easily won—the role of the hatchling dragon, and the night before the play I
slaved
over my costume (the first of many in the years to follow). Unable even to visualize “bronze,” I settled for gold acrylic paint slathered over a paper snout, paper wings, and a paper tail. Inside it I felt positively alien, eager for my single joyous line: “My name is Heth!” (I think I pronounced it “Heath.” Like the candy bar. Twelve-year-old girls are big into candy bars.)

Since then, a lot of people—boyfriends, mostly, but also coworkers feigning interest and curious passersby as I doodled at a sunny café table—have asked me, “Why dragons?” It's a question Anne herself was posed many times.

While they are the most enduring of the mythical creatures, with roots in every culture between here and Sumer, dragons don't really appeal to me any more or less than do unicorns or gryphons or centaurs or Elves or dark old things that live in very still water. I respect their mystique and versatility—a dragon can look like damn near anything—but ultimately, a dragon is just another creature in humankind's great mythological menagerie. It's
Anne's
dragons that are special.

Anne McCaffrey was an animal lover. So are most of her fans. So am I. And while most humans are driven by a basic biological imperative to communicate (barring Fox News pundits and people who don't use their turn signals and anyone from South Carolina), animal lovers are that much more gratified by connecting to a member of another species. We see much of ourselves in these creatures so unlike us—and many of them seem intrigued by us in turn. But while their intentions are clear, animals remain largely mute. We know that they dream, but not of what. We wonder what they would say if they could speak.

Anne's dragons exemplify the essential human longing for connection to the other. On Pern, dragons have wills, minds, and desires of their own. They fear and love and lust and hate. They are id and ego both; they are sweet children and impassioned soldiers by turns. And yet, one's dragon is a reflection of the best in one's self; they are an ever-present affirmation, a reminder to be just and to strive. Unconstrained by either space or time, a Pernese dragon is free to see the world as a place of boundless opportunity: all is achievable but that which, affronting the natural order, must not be achieved. I imagine they'd be fond of Yoda's axiom “Try not. Do, or do not! There is no try.” Anne McCaffrey may have shunned organized religion, but her dragons were Buddhists, every last one.

Drawing them, reading about them, thinking about them, soothes and settles me like little else. It's not simply the idea of enduring companionship that attracts me, though of course that's a huge part of the appeal. It's the idea of dragon as peacemaker: a serene, graceful mind whose single greatest instinct is to protect and sustain. In my dreams, they smell of warm earth, of sunshine. In flight together, my dragon and I travel beyond reach, beyond yesterday. We live for now, and we are now, and now is all.

I'm not the first girl-misfit to find solace in speculative fiction, but when I was growing up there weren't a lot of other girls who shared my interest. Even now, the numbers favor readers with Y chromosomes (though, thank the maker of little green apples, this is changing). Apparently no one told Pern fandom, which is dominated by women—women of all makes and models, countless women on whose collective behalf I could never presume to speak. Maybe another of this book's more illustrious, well-qualified contributors will speculate on why women are drawn to Pern. For my part, let it suffice to say simply that women relate to Anne's work—and that this strikes me as I think about the helical shape of my connection to her and where our paths intersect at Stuart Hall School.