The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [62]
Every Thursday evening during our senior year found us sitting in front of Lois's television (she had the color set) watching Star Trek. We suborned other friends into joining us. We rigged up Lois's father's reel-to-reel tape recorder and recorded each episode—audio only, the concept of the VCR being science fiction itself.
The tape would pick up the sound of the telephone ringing in the background, chairs scooting, popcorn crunching. And during the previews to the episode "This Side of Paradise," it recorded half a dozen female squeals as Spock actually (be still, my teenage hormones) smiled!
I wish we still had the tape which immortalized her mother's voice saying, "You girls are going to be so embarrassed when you grow up and remember how you acted over this program."
For a time our writing explored the Star Trek universe. Then, finding ourselves choked by working in someone else's cosmos, we moved above and beyond and into a multigenerational future history that absorbed our attention for several years. Among other things, we allied our version of the Klingons with the Federation long before Next Generation did.
Our graduation from high school took place on a Thursday night, forcing us to miss the episode "Shore Leave." Strangely, our families refused to attend the ceremonies without us. The younger sister of a friend was deputized to do the taping and fill in the video portion with gestures and expressions.
The next fall I went away to college, in a town that had only two television stations, neither of which showed Star Trek. Lois transcribed the episode "Amok Time," including the stage directions ("bowl of soup flies across passageway"), and sent it to me. My roommate sniffed and said I was psychologically abnormal. But another friend gave me a poster of Spock.
Meanwhile, back in Columbus, Lois had struck gold in the SF section of a bookstore: a young man who invited her to come to a science fiction fan club.
We were no longer alone.
By the time I returned for the summer, Lois was a well- established member of COSFS, the Central Ohio Science Fiction Society. The only female member, at least until I arrived. Whether our mothers ever knew this is mercifully unrecorded. We ourselves were blithely unaware of the implications. When 2001 opened, the group attended en masse. Lois and I wore cotton dresses and sandals over bare legs. The other girl in the party, someone's date, came dressed primly in a party dress and heels.
Oh well, so we were still dragging our knuckles.
There were enough members interested in writing that COSFS extended a pseudopod, a writing workshop meeting at the house of member Lloyd Kropp, a graduate student in English at Ohio State. (Lloyd, too, went on to become a pro writer.)
One of the stories Lois wrote during this time concerned a hermaphrodite, no doubt a symbolic ancestor of Bel Thorne.
One warm, dark evening no one had anything to read, so we went for a walk around Lloyd's neighborhood. Since his only flashlight wasn't functioning, he and his wife provided us with candles. Looking like a procession of monks who'd lost their way through the cloisters, we strolled along a railroad track, tried out the equipment at a park, and at last found ourselves on a street corner waiting for the traffic light to change. A police car pulled up beside us. The eyes of the officers inside opened so wide they reflected the candle flames. Demurely we crossed the street and returned to Lloyd's house, not breaking into laughter until we were inside.
Some members of the group, heavily into intellectual pursuits such as Also Sprach Zarathustra, were dubious about our enthusiasm for Star Trek. Others took it in stride. Until the day that Lois and I, like Garland and Rooney declaring, "Let's put on a show!," announced that we were going to try our hands at one of those things called a "fanzine." One