Dance the Eagle to Sleep

by Marge Piercy

  But she only sobbed with pain and writhed on the bed.

  “Ginny, hear now. You got to do that breath-thing right, you know, the way it tell in the book” Marcus came to the foot of the bed, smiling with pity. “Don’t you remember, in the mountains you go on how much you want to make a baby? You knew he was only half with you, but you got him to give you one, you know? Now you’re like a child that started down the big slide, and halfway down, that child is scared and wants to get off and starts clutching at the sides. Now it hurt you to be trying to hold back.”

  “I don’t want to live in this world! Maybe you should cut me open. Take the baby and let me die! I thought I was stronger than I am.”

  “Human beings aren’t naturally strong enough or nasty enough to live in this world,” Marcus said. “You got to remember how to breathe.”

  Shawn wiped the lank wet hair off her forehead. “We have to get down out of here and find out who’s left. We have to start again open and slow. We have to keep at it for twenty years.”

  “But we failed. Corey said we were the last generation. We tried and we lost” She tossed from side to side, hands scrabbling on the swell of her belly.

  “While there are people, we haven’t lost. We were right and wrong, but the system is all wrong.”

  “Come on, now, Ginny, you got to push. You come nine months of the way home, and now the baby wants out and you got to swing with it.” Marcus limped toward the edge of the bed and sat down on its edge. “It too late to stop. We all walked through the big fire, and we are changed inside and outside. Sometimes we have to swing with the big changes” He held up his good left hand. “Remember the exercises. Come on, stop playing stupid, girl. Come on, you got to help. We been waiting on you for months. Time to get moving. Time to push that baby out and teach him to walk and clear out of here. We can’t reach nobody but the mosquitoes and the rabbits up on this hill.”

  So they sat on either side of the bed with her and did the counting and the breathing with her, and the sweat ran down them all. All night she labored, and sometimes she broke and wept and screamed, and they had to calm her back to the rhythms, back to going with her contractions instead of fighting them. But the baby did not come. Shawn was afraid and Marcus was afraid and they sweated their fear till the cabin smelled of a harsh animal reek. When their stares crossed, when Marcus’ dark eyes met Shawn’s, they pushed away from each other.

  Shawn was afraid that she would die. Never would the thing be done. Nothing could be worth the suffering. She would die and leave them. She would become a pile of meat. Marcus and he would be left alone together, and they would commence fighting and biting on each other until they were dead of each other’s poisons like two rattlesnakes. To all their dead would be added more. He could not bear it.

  He could not give her up. He gripped her hands and let her dig her nails into him until his palms bled and he found his own muscles straining to move the baby.

  Finally two hours after dawn, the final contractions thrust out the slimy wet head and Marcus drew out the baby, red and iridescent and screaming with life, slapped it for good measure and cut and tied the cord. Ginny lay in her blood, spent and torn. Shawn laid his cheek against her limp fallen hand and wept. Faintly her hand stirred to touch him. When he looked at her again, she was smiling. The baby wriggled damply against her belly, and she was staring and smiling.

  Marcus quickly sped through the six baby books to make sure he had forgotten nothing he must do. Shawn felt useless and yet full of energy and light, a turned-on bulb, a ridiculous helium-taut balloon. The baby lived and she lived and it was day for Marcus and for him, it was day for all of them.

  ABOUT PM PRESS

  PM Press was founded at the end of 2007 by a small collection of folks with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience. PM Press co-conspirators have published and distributed hundreds of books, pamphlets, CDs, and DVDs. Members of PM have founded enduring book fairs, spearheaded victorious tenant organizing campaigns, and worked closely with bookstores, academic conferences, and even rock bands to deliver political and challenging ideas to all walks of life. We’re old enough to know what we’re doing and young enough to know what’s at stake.

  We seek to create radical and stimulating fiction and non-fiction books, pamphlets, t-shirts, visual and audio materials to entertain, educate and inspire you. We aim to distribute these through every available channel with every available technology — whether that means you are seeing anarchist classics at our bookfair stalls; reading our latest vegan cookbook at the café; downloading geeky fiction e-books; or digging new music and timely videos from our website.

  PM Press is always on the lookout for talented and skilled volunteers, artists, activists and writers to work with. If you have a great idea for a project or can contribute in some way, please get in touch.

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  PO Box 23912

  Oakland, CA 94623

  www.pmpress.org

  FRIENDS OF PM PRESS

  These are indisputably momentous times — the financial system is melting down globally and the Empire is stumbling. Now more than ever there is a vital need for radical ideas.

  In the three years since its founding — and on a mere shoestring—PM Press has risen to the formidable challenge of publishing and distributing knowledge and entertainment for the struggles ahead. With over 100 releases to date, we have published an impressive and stimulating array of literature, art, music, politics, and culture. Using every available medium, we’ve succeeded in connecting those hungry for ideas and information to those putting them into practice.

  Friends of PM allows you to directly help impact, amplify, and revitalize the discourse and actions of radical writers, filmmakers, and artists. It provides us with a stable foundation from which we can build upon our early successes and provides a much-needed subsidy for the materials that can’t necessarily pay their own way. You can help make that happen — and receive every new title automatically delivered to your door once a month — by joining as a Friend of PM Press. And, we’ll throw in a free T-shirt when you sign up.

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  Vida

  Marge Piercy

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-487-8

  $20.00 416 pages

  Originally published in 1979, Vida is Marge Piercy’s classic bookend to the Sixties. Vida is full of the pleasures and pains, the experiments, disasters, and victories of an extraordinary band of people. At the center of the novel stands Vida Asch. She has lived underground for almost a decade. Back in the ‘60s she was a political star of the exuberant antiwar movement—a red-haired beauty photographed for the pages of Life magazine—charismatic, passionate, and totally sure she would prevail. Now, a decade later, Vida is on the run, her star-quality replaced by stubborn courage. She comes briefly to rest in a safe house on Cape Cod. To her surprise and annoyance, she finds another person in the house, a fugitive, Joel, ten years younger than she, a kid who dropped into the underground out of the army. As they spend the next days together, Vida finds herself warming toward a man for the first time in years, knowing all too well the dangers.

  As counterpoint to the underground ‘70s, Ma
rge Piercy tells the extraordinary tale of the optimistic ‘60s, the thousands of people who were members of SAW (Students Against the War) and of the handful who formed a fierce group called the Little Red Wagon. Piercy’s characters make vivid and comprehensible the desperation, the courage, and the blind rage of a time when “action” could appear to some to be a more rational choice than the vote.

  A new introduction by Marge Piercy situates the book, and the author, in the times from which they emerged.

  “Real people inhabit its pages and real suspense carries the story along… ‘Vida’ of course means life and she personifies it.”

  — Chicago Tribune

  “A fully controlled, tightly structured dramatic narrative of such artful intensity that it leads the reader on at almost every page.”

  — New York Times Book Review

  “Marge Piercy tells us exactly how it was in the lofts of the Left as the 1960s turned into the ‘70s. This is the way everybody sounded. This is the way everybody behaved. Vida bears witness.”

  — New York Times

  “Very exciting. Marge Piercy’s characters are complex and very human.”

  — Margaret Atwood

  The Wild Girls

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-403-8

  $12.00 112 pages

  Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the forty years since The Left Hand of Darkness, her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about.

  Her Nebula winner The Wild Girls, newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end.

  Plus: Le Guin’s scandalous and scorching Harper’s essay, ‘Staying Awake While We Read’, (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And of course our Outspoken Interview which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America’s best-known SF author. And delivers.

  “Idiosyncratic and convincing, Le Guin’s characters have a long afterlife.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “Her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry.”

  — The Library Journal

  “If you want excess and risk and intelligence, try Le Guin.”

  — The San Francisco Chronicle

  “Her characters are complex and haunting, and her writing is remarkable for its sinewy grace.”

  — Time

  “She wields her pen with a moral and psychological sophistication rarely seen. What she really does is write fables: splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales about such mundane concerns as life, death, love, and sex.”

  — Newsweek

  Mammoths of the Great Plains

  Eleanor Arnason

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-075-7

  $12.00 152 pages

  When President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the West, he told them to look especially for mammoths. Jefferson had seen bones and tusks of the great beasts in Virginia, and he suspected—he hoped!—that they might still roam the Great Plains. In Eleanor Arnason’s imaginative alternate history, they do: shaggy herds thunder over the grasslands, living symbols of the oncoming struggle between the Native peoples and the European invaders. And in an unforgettable saga that soars from the badlands of the Dakotas to the icy wastes of Siberia, from the Russian Revolution to the AIM protests of the 1960s, Arnason tells of a modern woman’s struggle to use the weapons of DNA science to fulfill the ancient promises of her Lakota heritage.

  PLUS: “Writing SF During World War III,” and an Outspoken Interview that takes you straight into the heart and mind of one of today’s edgiest and most uncompromising speculative authors.

  “Eleanor Arnason nudges both human and natural history around so gently in this tale that you hardly know you’re not in the world-as-we-know-it until you’re quite at home in a North Dakota where you’ve never been before, listening to your grandmother tell you the world.”

  — Ursula K. LeGuin

  “Eleanor Arnason’s wise and engaging stories make you question the things you take for granted. How we love, how we fight, how we live.”

  — Maureen McHugh, Winner of the James Tiptree Jr. and Hugo Awards

  “Arnason doesn’t write about peace, the unreachable stasis. She writes about reconciliation: and art, a process, an intricate and never-ending dance. A literature of reconciliation, a celebration of this other ancient preoccupation of humanity, is a truly exciting development in our genre. It takes feminist SF out of the ghetto, out of the realm of reaction and reproach, into the real world.”

  — Gwyenth Jones, Winner of the James Tiptree Jr. and Philip K. Dick Awards

  “Arnason… refuses to write within the neat, confining boundaries of genre expectation, and in part because her fearless exploration of difficult political and social issues makes some editors and readers uneasy… Her work exploring gender, and particularly its intersection with politics, stands comparison with that of such better-known writers as Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas and Sheri Tepper.”

  — Michael D. Levy, Professor of English Literature, University of Wisconsin-Stout

  Calling All Heroes:

  A Manual for Taking Power

  Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-205-8

  128 pages $12.00

  The euphoric idealism of grassroots reform and the tragic reality of revolutionary failure are at the center of this speculative novel that opens with a real historical event. On October 2, 1968, 10 days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico, the Mexican government responds to a student demonstration in Tlatelolco by firing into the crowd, killing more than 200 students and civilians and wounding hundreds more. The massacre of Tlatelolco was erased from the official record as easily as authorities washing the blood from the streets, and no one was ever held accountable.

  It is two years later and Nestor, a journalist and participant in the fateful events, lies recovering in the hospital from a knife wound. His fevered imagination leads him in the collection of facts and memories of the movement and its assassination in the company of figures from his childhood. Nestor calls on the heroes of his youth—Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and D’Artagnan among them— to join him in launching a new reform movement conceived by his intensely active imagination.

  “Taibo’s writing is witty, provocative, finely nuanced and well worth the challenge.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “I am his number one fan… I can always lose myself in one of his novels because of their intelligence and humor. My secret wish is to become one of the characters in his fiction, all of them drawn from the wit and wisdom of popular imagination. Yet make no mistake, Paco Taibo—sociologist and historian—is recovering the political history of Mexico to offer a vital, compelling vision of our reality.”

  — Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate

  “The real enchantment of Mr. Taibo’s storytelling lies in the wild and melancholy tangle of life he sees everywhere.”

  — New York Times Book Review

  “It doesn’t matter what happens. Taibo’s novels constitute an absurdist manifesto. No matter how oppressive a government, no matter how strict the limitations of life, we all have our imaginations, our inventiveness, our ability to liven up lonely apartments with a couple of quacking ducks. If you don’t have anything left, oppressors can’t take anything away.”

  — Washington Post Book World

  Fire on the Mountain

  Terry B
isson

  with an introduction

  by Mumia Abu-Jamal

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-087-0

  $15.95 208 pages

  It’s 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent Black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet. And a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great-great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s guerrilla army.

  Long unavailable in the US, published in France as Nova Africa, Fire on the Mountain is the story of what might have happened if John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had succeeded—and the Civil War had been started not by the slave owners but the abolitionists.

  “History revisioned, turned inside out… Bisson’s wild and wonderful imagination has taken some strange turns to arrive at such a destination.”

  — Madison Smartt Bell, Anisfield-Wolf Award winner and author of Devil’s Dream

  “You don’t forget Bisson’s characters, even well after you’ve finished his books. His Fire on the Mountain does for the Civil War what Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle did for World War Two.”

  — George Alec Effinger, winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for Shrodinger’s Kitten, and author of the MarTd Audran trilogy.

  “A talent for evoking the joyful, vertiginous experiences of a world at fundamental turning points.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “Few works have moved me as deeply, as thoroughly, as Terry Bisson’s Fire On The Mountain … With this single poignant story, Bisson molds a world as sweet as banana cream pies, and as briny as hot tears.”

  — Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row prisoner and author of Live From Death Row, from the Introduction.