Angela was still in high school when she began writing to the Lanthanides. One of them had written a comment in one of the fanzines she subscribed to, and he mentioned the Fan Farm. Their Tennessee address had reassured her somehow that these were nice boys. You never knew with the ones from New York or Minneapolis. Her mother had drummed it into her head that Yankees couldn't be trusted, that they weren't the right sort of people. After all, look what they did to Vicksburg. By the time she discovered the northern origins of most of the Lanthanides, they were solidly entrenched as her friends and confidantes, and she had become a fan publisher with her very own 'zine, reaching out to Yankees and other alien beings from coast to coast. She used the church's mimeograph machine, paying for her ink and paper supplies with money she earned on a paper route. The response was astonishing. For the first time in her life, Angela found herself popular.
She hadn't intended to be a self-published magazine editor. At first she merely wanted to correspond with the people she met through other people's 'zines, but a few samples of these grainy, amateurish efforts convinced her that she could produce a better one, and she quickly realized that it was much simpler to produce one magazine than it was to try to write twenty-five personal letters.
So Archangel had been born. Either by luck or uncommon good sense (she refused to remember which), Angela had written to Brendan Surn and Pat Malone and a couple of the fan-elite of the day, asking them to contribute articles to her first edition. And because most of them would have given an article to anyone who asked them nicely, they responded by sending her amusing and informative columns that she dutifully typed in on her father's old Underwood typewriter. When the issue was complete, she sent it to a few of the People Who Mattered in fandom, and suddenly she was a celebrity. People clamored for subscriptions to Archangel, and overnight she had a hundred new friends.
She would be the first to admit that Archangel was not the legendary fanzine that Alluvial was. It was generally acknowledged that Alluvial?, chief editor, Pat Malone, was brilliant, but because Angela had a less abrasive personality and was able to get along with almost everyone in fandom, she could get a wide variety of interesting articles from almost everyone. By the time some of these fans went on to become famous pros, Angela was one of the most respected and influential amateur publishers.
She smiled again, remembering the heady feeling of acceptance in those early days. It was like being cheerleader, prom queen, and secretary of the class all rolled into one. And the letters were so interesting. They read the books that she read, and they seemed absorbed in worthwhile subjects, like space travel and future societies. Whereas her other correspondent, her dreary cousin Betty in Texas, only talked about her boyfriends and what she wore on dates. This was definitely an improvement.
Looking back, Angela knew that most of those people were not her friends at all. They sent her lectures on their own pet obsessions with a word or two of personalization, or they sent mimeographed letters to who-knows-how-many correspondents. Convoy duty was not her idea of a relationship, but it took her a good many years to realize that. The letters that were personal were mostly from unattached young men, who viewed her as a rare prize, because in the fifties women in the hobby were few and far between. She had indulged in a few long-distance romances with some of the more eloquent souls, but the spark never survived an actual meeting.
Over the years, though, Angela had become more perceptive, and more selective about her friends, and she had found some good ones and had managed to keep most of them for several decades now. She no longer published Archangel, though. As the years went by, she found that fans were getting younger and younger, and she no longer had much interest in communicating with the new bunch. She went to an occasional science fiction convention, upon prearrangement that friends she wanted to see would be there, but they paid little heed to the scheduled events, preferring to hold their own reunion. And every so often, someone would work up a privately published tribute to fandom, and she would be asked to include an article about Archangel, which she always did, reasoning that it was a debt she owed to the hobby in return for its earlier kindnesses to her.
Aside from that, she answered a few of the correspondents she chose to keep with real letters, and a score of less intimate acquaintances with a modest letterzine, really a round-robin letter in which she answered everyone in one letter and then sent copies to all of them. This lesser publishing effort she called Seraph, a pun both on Archangel and on the serif fonts she preferred in her IBM Selectric typewriter. Aside from these pastimes, Angela worked the night shift at the lab at the county hospital so that she could afford postage and cat food.
She had been surprised to hear from-she smiled at the conceit-MistralWorld, Inc. about the Lanthanides' reunion. The former residents of the Tennessee Fan Farm did not number among the friends she kept. She didn't suppose they had noticed, though. She still got eight-page letters from George Woodard about three times a year, but at least six of the pages were photocopied essays with no personalization whatsoever on them. They usually discussed the Woodard daughters, favorable comments received about Alluvial, and a bit of name-dropping: "… Had a nice note from my Maryland neighbor A. C. Crispin (Yesterday's Son)…" Occasionally George would dredge up a math puzzle, like Gauss' theorem of consecutive numbers, to amuse his readers, and once he had begun a mock-serious campaign to introduce another integer between two and three. He called it umpty, and encouraged his correspondents henceforth to count one, two, umpty, three… Then between the numbers twelve and thirteen, one would insert the related digit umpteen. She wondered how many people got George's manufactured letter. Dozens, probably. Whenever she got one, she would skim the biographical monotony looking for the bits pertaining to herself (few, but close together, so that the page could be inserted into the pre-existing sermon). Then she would write back a cordial but inconsequential reply, similar to the tone of her letters to Cousin Betty, and George apparently never noticed that there was no real communication or sentiment between them at all. When Angela's mother died of a stroke, her letter to George went off as perfunctorily as ever, but with no mention of the family circumstances. She couldn't bear to receive a one-sentence-personalization condolence.
As for the others, she had lost touch with Bunzie and Surn, half afraid that if she did write to them, she would receive a reply from some secretary treating her as another piece of fan mail. Occasionally they would appear at a science fiction convention, but she never looked them up. There was always too much else to do in a short weekend. She and Barbara Conyers exchanged Christmas cards, but she hadn't heard from Stormy or the others in years, and the fandom grapevine reported several of them dead.