The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “Where are all the people?” said that monomaniac.

  I realized then that he did not mean people, he meant men, and he was giving the word the meaning it had not had on Whileaway for six centuries.

  “They died,” I said. “Thirty generations ago.”

  I thought we had poleaxed him. He caught his breath. He made as if to get out of the chair he was sitting in; he put his hand to his chest; he looked around at us with the strangest blend of awe and sentimental tenderness. Then he said, solemnly and earnestly:

  “A great tragedy.”

  I waited, not quite understanding.

  “Yes,” he said, catching his breath again with the queer smile, that adult-to-child smile that tells you something is being hidden and will be presently produced with cries of encouragement and joy, “a great tragedy. But it’s over.” And again he looked around at all of us with the strangest deference. As if we were invalids.

  “You’ve adapted amazingly,” he said.

  “To what?” I said. He looked embarrassed. He looked inane. Finally he said, “Where I come from, the women don’t dress so plainly.”

  “Like you?” I said. “Like a bride?” For the men were wearing silver from head to foot. I had never seen anything so gaudy. He made as if to answer and then apparently thought better of it; he laughed at me again. With an odd exhilaration—as if we were something childish and something wonderful, as if he were doing us an enormous favor—he took one shaky breath and said, “Well, we’re here.”

  I looked at Spet, Spet looked at Lydia, Lydia looked at Amalia, who is the head of the local town meeting, Amalia looked at I don’t know whom. My throat was raw. I cannot stand local beer, which the farmers swill as if their stomachs had iridium linings, but I took it anyway, from Amalia (it was her bicycle we had seen outside as we parked), and swallowed it all. This was going to take a long time. I said, “Yes, here you are,” and smiled (feeling like a fool), and wondered seriously if male Earth-people’s minds worked so very differently from female Earth-people’s minds, but that couldn’t be so or the race would have died out long ago. The radio network had got the news around the planet by now and we had another Russian speaker, flown in from Varna; I decided to cut out when the man passed around pictures of his wife, who looked like the priestess of some arcane cult. He proposed to question Yuki, so I barreled her into a back room in spite of her furious protests, and went out on the front porch. As I left, Lydia was explaining the difference between parthenogenesis (which is so easy that anyone can practice it) and what we do, which is the merging of ova. That is why Katy’s baby looks like me. Lydia went on to the Ansky Process and Katy Ansky, our one full-polymath genius and the great-great I don’t know how many times great-grandmother of my own Katharina.

  A dot-dash transmitter in one of the outbuildings chattered faintly to itself—operators flirting and passing jokes down the line.

  There was a man on the porch. The other tall man. I watched him for a few minutes—I can move very quietly when I want to and when I allowed him to see me, he stopped talking into the little machine hung around his neck. Then he said calmly, in excellent Russian, “Did you know that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth?”

  “You’re the real one,” I said, “aren’t you? The other one’s for show.” It was a great relief to get things cleared up. He nodded affably.

  “As a people, we are not very bright,” he said. “There’s been too much genetic damage in the last few centuries. Radiation. Drugs. We can use Whileaway’s genes, Janet.” Strangers do not call strangers by the first name.

  “You can have cells enough to drown in,” I said. “Breed your own.”

  He smiled. “That’s not the way we want to do it.” Behind him I saw Katy come into the square of light that was the screened-in door. He went on, low and urbane, not mocking me, I think, but with the self-confidence of someone who has always had money and strength to spare, who doesn’t know what it is to be second-class or provincial. Which is very odd, because the day before, I would have said that was an exact description of me.

  “I’m talking to you, Janet,” he said, “because I suspect you have more popular influence than anyone else here. You know as well as I do that parthenogenetic culture has all sorts of inherent defects, and we do not—if we can help it—mean to use you for anything of the sort. Pardon me; I should not have said ‘use.’ But surely you can see that this kind of society is unnatural.”

  “Humanity is unnatural,” said Katy. She had my rifle under her left arm. The top of that silky head does not quite come up to my collarbone, but she is as tough as steel; he began to move, again with that queer smiling deference (which his fellow had showed to me but he had not), and the gun slid into Katy’s grip as if she had shot with it all her life.

  “I agree,” said the man. “Humanity is unnatural. I should know. I have metal in my teeth and metal pins here.” He touched his shoulder. “Seals are harem animals,” he added, “and so are men; apes are promiscuous and so are men; doves are monogamous and so are men; there are even celibate men and homosexual men. There are homosexual cows, I believe. But Whileaway is still missing something.” He gave a dry chuckle. I will give him the credit of believing that it had something to do with nerves.

  “I miss nothing,” said Katy, “except that life isn’t endless.”

  “You are—?” said the man, nodding from me to her.

  “Wives,” said Katy. “We’re married.” Again the dry chuckle.

  “A good economic arrangement,” he said, “for working and taking care of the children. And as good an arrangement as any for randomizing heredity, if your reproduction is made to follow the same pattern. But think, Katharina Michaelason, if there isn’t something better that you might secure for your daughters. I believe in instincts, even in man, and I can’t think that the two of you—a machinist, are you? and I gather you are some sort of chief of police—don’t feel somehow what even you must miss. You know it intellectually, of course. There is only half a species here. Men must come back to Whileaway.”

  Katy said nothing.

  “I should think, Katharina Michaelason,” said the man gently, “that you, of all people, would benefit most from such a change,” and he walked past Katy’s rifle into the square of light coming from the door. I think it was then that he noticed my scar, which really does not show unless the light is from the side: a fine line that runs from temple to chin. Most people don’t even know about it.

  “Where did you get that?” he said, and I answered with an involuntary grin. “In my last duel.” We stood there bristling at each other for several seconds (this is absurd but true) until he went inside and shut the screen door behind him. Katy said in a brittle voice, “You damned fool, don’t you know when we’ve been insulted?” and swung up the rifle to shoot him through the screen, but I got to her before she could fire and knocked the rifle out of aim; it burned a hole through the porch floor. Katy was shaking. She kept whispering over and over, “That’s why I never touched it, because I knew I’d kill someone. I knew I’d kill someone.” The first man—the one I’d spoken with first—was still talking inside the house, something about the grand movement to recolonize and rediscover all the Earth had lost. He stressed the advantages to Whileaway: trade, exchange of ideas, education. He, too, said that sexual equality had been reestablished on Earth.

  —

  Katy was right, of course; we should have burned them down where they stood. Men are coming to Whileaway. When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome. Maybe men would have come eventually in any case. I like to think that a hundred years from now my great-grandchildren could have stood them off or fought them to a standstill, but even that’s no odds; I will remember all my life those four people I first met who were muscled like bulls and who made me—if only for a moment—feel small. A neurotic reaction, Katy says. I remember everything that happened that night; I remember Yuki
’s excitement in the car, I remember Katy’s sobbing when we got home as if her heart would break, I remember her lovemaking, a little peremptory as always, but wonderfully soothing and comforting. I remember prowling restlessly around the house after Katy fell asleep with one bare arm hung into a patch of light from the hall. The muscles of her forearms are like metal bars from all that driving and testing of her machines. Sometimes I dream about Katy’s arms. I remember wandering into the nursery and picking up my wife’s baby, dozing for a while with the poignant, amazing warmth of an infant in my lap, and finally returning to the kitchen to find Yuriko fixing herself a late snack. My daughter eats like a Great Dane.

  “Yuki,” I said, “do you think you could fall in love with a man?” and she whooped derisively. “With a ten-foot toad!” said my tactful child.

  But men are coming to Whileaway. Lately I sit up nights and worry about the men who will come to this planet, about my two daughters and Betta Katharinason, about what will happen to Katy, to me, to my life. Our ancestors’ journals are one long cry of pain and I suppose I ought to be glad now, but one can’t throw away six centuries, or even (as I have lately discovered) thirty-four years. Sometimes I laugh at the question those four men hedged about all evening and never quite dared to ask, looking at the lot of us, hicks in overalls, farmers in canvas pants and plain shirts: Which of you plays the role of the man? As if we had to produce a carbon copy of their mistakes! I doubt very much that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. I do not like to think of myself mocked, of Katy deferred to as if she were weak, of Yuki made to feel unimportant or silly, of my other children cheated of their full humanity or turned into strangers. And I’m afraid that my own achievements will dwindle from what they were—or what I thought they were—to the not-very-interesting curiosa of the human race, the oddities you read about in the back of the book, things to laugh at sometimes because they are so exotic, quaint but not impressive, charming but not useful. I find this more painful than I can say. You will agree that for a woman who has fought three duels, all of them kills, indulging in such fears is ludicrous. But what’s around the corner now is a duel so big that I don’t think I have the guts for it; in Faust’s words: Verweile doch, du bist so schoen! Keep it as it is. Don’t change.

  Sometimes at night I remember the original name of this planet, changed by the first generation of our ancestors, those curious women for whom, I suppose, the real name was too painful a reminder after the men died. I find it amusing, in a grim way, to see it all so completely turned around. This, too, shall pass. All good things must come to an end.

  Take my life but don’t take away the meaning of my life.

  For-A-While.

  And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side

  JAMES TIPTREE JR.

  Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon (1915–1987) was a US psychologist who wrote groundbreaking science fiction as James Tiptree Jr. and as Raccoona Sheldon. As Michael Swanwick wrote in his introduction to Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (2004), “strangest of all were three writing desks [in Sheldon’s house], each with its distinct typewriter, stationery, and color of ink. One belonged to James Tiptree Jr. A second was used exclusively by Raccoona Sheldon. The third was for Alice Sheldon, a sometimes scientist, artist, newspaper critic, soldier, businesswoman, and retired CIA officer, who on occasion moved to one of the other desks.” In 1991, the authors Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy founded the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which is given annually to a work of science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.

  Tiptree used the pen names initially to protect her academic work, but speculations about her gender within the field of science fiction led to controversy and often heated discussion. The evolving understanding of Tiptree’s identity is interesting to track. In 1972, Frederik Pohl wrote in Best Science Fiction, “James Tiptree Jr. is a writer I…have never met. I rather think the chances are we never will, because every time [I] suggest we get together for a drink, it turns out that he is that week off to Borneo or Brooklyn or Swaziland.” The editor Terry Carr, in Best Science Fiction of the Year #3 (1974), wrote in the story note for Tiptree’s “The Women Men Don’t See,” “Like any branch of literature, science fiction reflects the trends of current thinking. Last year Joanna Russ won a Nebula Award for a feminist story entitled ‘When It Changed’; this year James Tiptree Jr. offers a male viewpoint on the same subject. As you might expect, other than the basic theme, there’s very little similarity between the two stories.” Ursula Le Guin, a year or two after the truth became known, may have gotten in the last word with this comment accompanying Tiptree’s story “Slow Music” (in Interfaces: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction, 1980): “James Tiptree Jr. is a pseudonym. He is a woman. She is also Raccoona Sheldon. They are an experimental psychologist of great insight, a writer of surpassing strength, and a person of infinite reserve, generosity, and charm.”

  Tiptree wrote primarily short stories, publishing only one novel, Up the Walls of the World (1978). She worked in a variety of styles, often combining the trappings of “hard” science fiction with “soft” science fiction like sociology and psychology. Tiptree stories retain their power even today, and demand rereading, because they resist easy interpretation. Nor are Tiptree’s characters mouthpieces for ideas or rhetoric, and the unconventional structures of her stories render them mysterious and luminous—in a way similar to Carol Emshwiller’s and also Margaret St. Clair’s stories from the 1950s and early 1960s, which can be read as precursors to the hyperrealistic mental landscapes that dominate Tiptree’s fiction.

  “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” takes the pulp “sense of wonder” about space travel and pushes back against it with a portrayal of alien contact in a gritty dystopic future. Few prior stories manage to anticipate the complexities of such a situation. Much about this culture clash points to how fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, within the New Wave and outside of it, wanted to portray a more “real” reality. Tiptree’s story also shares thematic resonances with Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah,” which sharply interrogates other assumptions made by classic science fiction.

  AND I AWOKE AND FOUND ME HERE ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE

  James Tiptree Jr.

  He was standing absolutely still by a service port, staring out at the belly of the Orion docking above us. He had on a gray uniform and his rusty hair was cut short. I took him for a station engineer.

  That was bad for me. Newsmen strictly don’t belong in the bowels of Big Junction. But in my first twenty hours I hadn’t found any place to get a shot of an alien ship.

  I turned my holocam to show its big World Media insignia and started my bit about What It Meant to the People Back Home who were paying for it all.

  “—it may be routine work to you, sir, but we owe it to them to share—”

  His face came around slow and tight, and his gaze passed over me from a peculiar distance.

  “The wonders, the drama,” he repeated dispassionately. His eyes focused on me. “You consummated fool.”

  “Could you tell me what races are coming in, sir? If I could even get a view—”

  He waved me to the port. Greedily I angled my lenses up at the long blue hull blocking out the starfield. Beyond her I could see the bulge of a black and gold ship.

  “That’s a Foramen,” he said. “There’s a freighter from Belye on the other side, you’d call it Arcturus. Not much traffic right now.”

  “You’re the first person who’s said two sentences to me since I’ve been here, sir. What are those colorful little craft?”

  “Procya.” He shrugged. “They’re always around. Like us.”

  I squashed my face on the vitrite, peering. The walls clanked. Somewhere overhead aliens were off-loading into their private sector of Big Junction. The man glanced at his wrist.

  “Are you waiting to go out, sir?”

  His grunt could have meant anything.

  “W
here are you from on Earth?” he asked me in his hard tone.

  I started to tell him and suddenly saw that he had forgotten my existence. His eyes were on nowhere, and his head was slowly bowing forward onto the port frame.

  “Go home,” he said thickly. I caught a strong smell of tallow.

  “Hey, sir!” I grabbed his arm; he was in rigid tremor. “Steady, man.”

  “I’m waiting…waiting for my wife. My loving wife.” He gave a short ugly laugh. “Where are you from?”

  I told him again.

  “Go home,” he mumbled. “Go home and make babies. While you still can.”

  One of the early GR casualties, I thought.

  “Is that all you know?” His voice rose stridently. “Fools. Dressing in their styles. Gnivo suits, Aoleelee music. Oh, I see your newscasts,” he sneered. “Nixi parties. A year’s salary for a floater. Gamma radiation? Go home, read history. Ballpoint pens and bicycles—”

  He started a slow slide downward in the half gee. My only informant. We struggled confusedly; he wouldn’t take one of my sobertabs but I finally got him along the service corridor to a bench in an empty loading bay. He fumbled out a little vacuum cartridge. As I was helping him unscrew it, a figure in starched whites put his head in the bay.

  “I can be of assistance, yes?” His eyes popped, his face was covered with brindled fur. An alien, a Procya! I started to thank him but the red-haired man cut me off.

  “Get lost. Out.”

  The creature withdrew, its big eyes moist. The man stuck his pinky in the cartridge and then put it up his nose, gasping deep in his diaphragm. He looked toward his wrist.

  “What time is it?”