RACHEL POLLACK
Winner of the
World Fantasy Award
Arthur C. Clarke Award
Nominated for the
Nebula Award
Locus Award
Mythopoeic Award
Tiptree Award
Gaylactic Spectrum Award
Lambda Award
“‘The Beatrix Gates’ is a stunning study in identity and mutability. It can be read most easily as a story about transexualism or simply a powerful examination of difference and its more positive consequences, as well as a subtle investigation of exactly what makes our identities.”
—Green Man Review
“Brilliantly original, funny, and fascinating…. Pollack turns the world on its spiritual head.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“‘The Beatrix Gates’ is a marvelous example of how scifi can remythologize the terms of common experience to elucidate and give new and deeper meaning.”
—Lambda Book Report
“Godmother Night, like a river in flood, resists the well-channeled ways, cutting its own channel through the fictional terrain.”
—Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game
on Unquenchable Fire
“Pollack has crafted a powerful—and powerfully funny—vision of a mystical yet modern world. Enlightened and knowledgeable in tone, this recent winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for speculative fiction is both a cautionary tale and a paean to the New Age.”
—Library Journal
“Rachel Pollack—wise woman, Tarot master, Jewish sage, vigorous intellectual—has written an iconoclastic vision in which divergent literary traditions collide with two women’s idealism and the raucous dead.”
—Sarah Schulman, author of Rat Bohemia
“Not only the best fantasy of the year, but possibly the best of the decade, and the best feminist novel of the decade. A real tour de force, full of wicked wit.”
—New York Review of Science Fiction
“The sheer density of witty imagination which Pollack brings to bear lifts Unquenchable Fire into a category all of its own. A wonderful, disturbing, and by God, original fantasy.”
—Interzone
PM PRESS OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS SERIES
The Left Left Behind Terry Bisson
The Lucky Strike Kim Stanley Robinson
The Underbelly Gary Phillips
Mammoths of the Great Plains Eleanor Arnason
Modem Times 2.0 Michael Moorcock
The Wild Girls Ursula K. Le Guin
Surfing the Gnarl Rudy Rucker
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Cory Doctorow
Report from Planet Midnight Nalo Hopkinson
The Human Front Ken MacLeod
New Taboos John Shirley
The Science of Herself Karen Joy Fowler
Raising Hell Norman Spinrad
Patty Hearst & The Twinkie Murders: A Tale of Two Trials Paul Krassner
My Life, My Body Marge Piercy
Gypsy Carter Scholz
Miracles Ain’t What They Used to Be Joe R. Lansdale
Fire. Elizabeth Hand
Totalitopia John Crowley
The Atheist in the Attic Samuel R. Delany
Thoreau’s Microscope Michael Blumlein
The Beatrix Gates Rachel Pollack
A City Made of Words Paul Park
“The Woman Who Didn’t Come Back” first appeared in More Tales from the Forbidden Planet, ed. Roz Kaveney, Titan Books, 1990
“Burning Beard” first appeared in Interfictions, eds. Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, Interstitial Arts Foundation, 2007
“The Beatrix Gates” first appeared in The Future Is Queer, eds. Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006
“Trans Central Station” is original to this volume and this universe
The Beatrix Gates
Rachel Pollack © 2019
This edition © PM Press
Series Editor: Terry Bisson
ISBN: 978-1-62963-578-1
LCCN: 2018931528
Cover design by John Yates/www.stealworks.com
Author photograph by Rubi Rose
Insides by Jonathan Rowland
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
The Woman Who Didn’t Come Back
The Beatrix Gates
Trans Central Station
Burning Beard
“Radical, Sacred, Hopefully Magical”
Outspoken Interview with Rachel Pollack
Bibliography
About the Author
The Woman Who Didn’t Come Back
IN THE OLD DAYS, when a woman died, she returned to life after nine days.
On the first day after her death her friends laid her body on her bed. They tied ribbons around the hands and feet and placed a stone over the mouth. Then they would sit around the bed, as silent as their dead sister. Those who were bored, or sore, or hadn’t liked the dead woman very much, told themselves they would need the same thing done for them someday. And they kept sitting.
On the second day they got up and cooked, their first hot food in twenty-four hours. When they were sitting round the bed again, they began to speak, telling what they knew about the woman. They told of favors she’d done them, fights they’d had with her. Someone might tell how the woman had nursed her when she had the flu, another how the woman had cheated her when they’d shared a house. They told whatever they could remember, the whole day long. The third day they buried her.
On the fourth, fifth, and sixth days they took care of their sister’s business, paying her debts, writing letters for her, selling old clothes and useless junk, leaving only the things she would need for starting over. If the woman had enemies, some of the friends put on masks of her face and visited the people, doing what they could to satisfy the anger. When they got tired they reminded themselves of a woman named Carla, who had made so many enemies before her death it seemed like half the women in town were putting on masks and visiting the other half.
On the seventh and eighth days they prepared for the party. They hung banners in the woman’s colors, they decorated the bar with her picture, they cooked or baked all her favorite foods. They cleaned and polished the bar, the furniture, and even the silverware. They set out baskets of flowers up and down the street.
On the ninth day they paraded from the woman’s house to the bar, setting out at sundown with drums and whistles, arriving just as the last sigh of daylight faded from the sky. Then the party began. It went on for hours, everyone getting drunk or stoned, playing the woman’s favorite records, until all of a sudden, when it seemed they’d forgotten about the woman herself, the door opened and there she stood.
The returned women always came in slightly wet, hair damp and curly, skin glistening. They walked inside and looked around, and everyone stopped, the only noise coming from a record player, or someone who’d tripped against a table or knocked over a glass.
After a moment someone would rush up with a drink, someone else with a roll baked in the shape of the Earth and covered with poppy seeds. As soon as the woman had taken a sip and a bite everyone started to talk again. But the nervousness would last, people spilling drinks or banging into each other. For there was something they had to do, even though no one knew why. Finally one of the younger women would go up to the returned woman and say to her, “What was it like?”
The woman would think a moment, maybe look away. “Sorry,” she’d say, “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” And then all the women would go back to dancing and getting drunk.
Sometime in the late evening,
just as everyone was thinking it was time to go home, the woman who had come back would look around the room and see someone, maybe an ex-lover, maybe someone she’d never noticed before. She would ask her to dance. When the two of them had gone off together the party could end.
Sometimes the couple stayed together for months, even years, sometimes just for a night or a few days. But always, as the returned woman left the bar, holding on to her lover, something like a breeze would pass across her face, and she would stop for a moment, squinting, or tilting her head, like someone trying to remember something. Then her friend would pull on her arm and they’d go home together. Later, if anyone asked her “What was it like?” she’d shrug, or shake her head. “Don’t know,” she’d say. “Can’t remember.”
For a long time this went on. Then one day a woman named Marjorie drowned when her boat smashed against a rock. Her friends built a stone circle at the water’s edge and asked the sea to return her body. When it washed ashore they took it home and laid it on the bed.
Nine days later Marjorie returned, wearing yellow pants and a loose black shirt over her low breasts. A tall woman with thick shoulders and veined hands and long black hair, she stood in the doorway, wet and shining like the morning. It was strange to see her without glasses. No one had ever seen Marjorie without glasses before. The dead always returned with perfect vision, though it only lasted a few days before the world began to blur again.
Marjorie took a roll and a glass of bourbon. A few minutes later Betty, a neighbor of hers, asked her, “What was it like?” Marjorie threw up her hands and laughed. “Sorry,” she said, “secret.”
All evening Marjorie danced about the room or sat trading stories with her former lovers. As it got late people started looking at each other, wondering when they could leave. Finally, Marjorie spotted someone, a young woman named Lenni. A newcomer, Lenni leaned against the pool table, drinking a bottle of beer. She was thin, with narrow hips and long fingers. She wore tight black pants and yellow boots and a blue silk shirt and silver chain with a black crescent around her neck. She tilted back her head to finish the beer, and when she brought down her eyes there was Marjorie.
“Want to dance?” the returned woman said.
Lenni had just broken up with a woman named Berenice. Berenice was so beautiful that some people said the Moon faded and then hid for three days a month because she couldn’t compete with Berenice. And Marjorie had a slight scar on her left cheek below the ear, where a lover had cut her with a ring. So when Marjorie asked Lenni to dance, Lenni stared down at her empty bottle and shook her head.
No one in the room made a sound.
“Do you want to dance?” Marjorie asked again.
“I’m sorry,” Lenni said, so low she could hardly hear her own voice. “Maybe another time.”
Marjorie stood up straight. She ran her fingers through her still damp hair. All her life Marjorie had hated it whenever anyone told her no. She’d gone sailing and smashed her boat because a woman named Kathleen had told Marjorie she couldn’t see her anymore. Now Marjorie stared at Lenni until the younger woman tried to walk away. Marjorie blocked her. “Why won’t you dance with me?” she said.
Lenni shrugged. “I don’t want to,” she said. And then she smirked.
Jayne, who was running the bar that night, ran up to take Marjorie’s arm. “Come on,” she said, “let’s dance.”
Marjorie pulled loose her arm. “Shut up,” she said. To Lenni she demanded, “Why don’t you want to dance with me?”
Lenni crossed her arms. She looked Marjorie up and down and then she smiled.
Marjorie clenched her fists. She opened them and wiped her hands on her jeans. “Do you want to know what it was like?” she said. “Do you want me to tell you what it was like?” Lenni tried to slide away, but Marjorie grabbed her arm. When Jayne tried to separate them, Marjorie shoved her aside.
Marjorie told Lenni and all the others everything that happened to her. She told them of a dark room, so large she couldn’t see the walls, only a green floor and high above her a yellow ceiling. She told them of the sound of wings, and birds crying, of a cold wind shaking her body, cleaning off the smell of the sea. She told them of laughter and scuffling feet, and voices, as if the whole room was filled with people, but when she tried to see them she could only get a kind of afterimage in the dark—people lying together, or dancing in each other’s arms. And then she was opening a red door and walking up stone steps with nothing on either side but a noise of grinding rocks. She became sluggish, afraid her unbalanced lump of a body would tilt backwards and roll down the stairs. And then something brushed her face, and she panicked and began to run …
The story went on, while some of the women covered their ears or banged on the tables. Lenni stood there, her arms folded, her chin down, her eyes tilted up. Only when Marjorie had finished, when all the other women fell silent again, only then did Lenni and Marjorie take a step back, staring like lovers who’ve goaded each other into some undesired act of violence. Marjorie turned around, saw all the frightened faces. “Shit,” she said, “I wasn’t supposed to do that.”
“Marjorie?” Lenni said. She took a step towards her. Marjorie ran for the door, slipping once on a pool of beer. Just as she reached the street she heard Lenni shout something. She turned around.
In the bar the women heard a horn and screech of brakes. When they rushed outside Marjorie lay dead.
For the next nine days the women followed all the customs. But on the first day they found it hard to keep silent, and on the second found it even harder to come up with something to say. After they’d buried her, no one could think of anything to do, anything they wanted to fix, any people they wanted to see. Jayne thought of putting on a mask of Marjorie and visiting Lenni. But she kept postponing it, and postponing it, until the sixth day had passed and it was too late.
On the seventh day they did nothing. On the eighth they hung a few banners and bought some cake, but no one polished anything or put out any baskets of flowers. And on the ninth evening only a few women walked together to the bar, and when a couple tried to sing something the others didn’t join in and they stopped after a single verse.
The party went on until dawn, but there wasn’t much celebrating. The only woman who’d bought any new clothes was Lenni, dressed in red silk trousers and a long yellow shirt, with spangled green running shoes. But Lenni only stood in the back, leaning against the pool table with a bottle of beer in her hand. The women stayed until dawn. When they saw the sky brighten, and people walking to work, they knew that Marjorie would never walk through the door, would never stand before them, her skin glistening with water and light.
From that day no one who dies has ever come back.
The Beatrix Gates
DO YOU REMEMBER CANCER? In the old days people fought long heroic battles with it, usually in a scorched-body campaign. Destroy enough tissue and the cancer will run out of food and shrivel away. When the original Nano Factory came up with the first cancer nannies the designers gave them to doctors who fitted them out like miniscule robo-soldiers and sent them off to war. Cut and burn. Cell by cell. Retake the ground and wall off the infected village, kill the organs in order to save them.
Then it struck someone. Maybe we’d misunderstood cancer. Maybe cancer was the body’s desire to become immortal. Cancer cells refused limits, refused to decorously die. They invaded wherever they could go, wherever the medical empire couldn’t firebomb them. So over the outrage of the doctors the Factory (already partly in the hands of the Revolution) began to send in nannies to run with the cancer insurgency. See what cancer really wants, see how we could use it to overthrow the body’s commitment to limits and death. Out of this campaign came the Immortalist program, with all its possible bodies no one ever thought of.
The someone who first saw all this was Annie O, one of the Ancient Trannos, that group of us who managed to survive the rapturous leap into the new world of unlimited nano-transformo. In the old
days, Annie was the secret king of America. A homegrown Kansas transgirl, a Colorado Biber Baby (named for the cowboy doctor and his sex change clinic in the Plains town of Trinidad), Annie had a brief career as a transgender terrorist before she discovered the hijras of India, the world’s oldest ongoing trans religion. She arrived in Delhi just as hijras were starting to win seats in Parliament under the platform “Men have fucked up and women too, so why not try something else?” Like some sort of trans anthropologist, Annie came to film and take notes. She stayed to put on a sari and dance in the streets. She’d already passed the hijra initiation test—“made the cut,” as someone once put it—and the hijras embraced her American trans-formed body, sending her back as king to an America that had no idea it needed one.
Annie could see cancer in a different way because she understood desire. The desire to die and the desire to live, entwined like two snakes around a tree older than the world. This is the tranno secret, that we are not just willing to die, we long for it, passionately, as the pathway to life. Cut open, emptied out, boiled and cleaned and reassembled. These are old stories, from long before the Nanochine Society took over the Factory and began to get it right, creating new people out of old longings.
Do you know about the birth of Aphrodite? Ouranos, the Sky, was hurting the Earth, Gaia. Actually, he was suffocating her and killing all their children. Clever Gaia managed to save one of their kids, Kronos, and as soon as he was old enough, Momma gave him a stone sickle and told him to take care of Daddy. Kronos didn’t go for Pop’s throat. He aimed further down and cut off Ouranos Jr. and threw it into the sea. Ouranos gave up after that. The Sky pulled back a safe distance from the ground, crossed only by birds and rockets, neutrinos and weather nanos. But those missing pieces—they stirred up a torrent of foam on the water and out of that foam stepped Aphrodite the Passionate. This is a very old story.
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