In this universe, my credentials are too obsolete.
Ultimately, even the newly born will disappear. The heat death will arrive.
I fling my silhouette into a turbulent burst of light. Revolving, it merges into the subsequent era.
The early days of a newly created universe are so calm. It will be many years before life emerges. I feel incredibly lonely. This is the price of continuing to exist.
But, not long after, I find, by chance, bird footprints at a newly formed planet. I’m certain that I didn’t leave them.
They are the footprints of the two small birds, slender and clever, walking by. The planet’s infant ocean is still rising. If I’d arrived a little later, any footprints would have been washed away by the tide.
I’m shocked to smell the flavor of olden days.
At the same time, I have an ominous premonition. It’s possible that I’m not the master of this new age. The real masters are the two birds, who keep an even lower profile than a bird of prey.
Burning Sky
RACHEL POLLACK
Rachel Pollack (1945– ) is an award-winning US writer born in Brooklyn who lived abroad for almost two decades, most of that time in Amsterdam. Her fiction is often pointedly feminist or ecological in outlook and influenced by the tarot. Pollack published her first science fiction story, “Pandora’s Bust,” in New Worlds Quarterly 2 (1971), edited by Michael Moorcock, but her interests have, over time, taken her further and further from clearly identifiable genre fiction.
Pollack’s most famous work is the Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning Unquenchable Fire (1988). Set in an alternate America in which shamanism is as credible a means of understanding the world as science, Unquenchable Fire’s “bureaucracy of shamans” seeks out energy from deep within the Earth. Pollack’s protagonist is a miraculously pregnant woman with a rich backstory, told through flashbacks, who characteristically refuses her role as the mother of a new, possible prodigal shaman. A sequel, Temporary Agency (1994), continues the story. Throughout, Pollack’s portrait of a radically different but alarmingly similar United States is meticulously drawn, and her depiction of life in an alternate Poughkeepsie, New York, is frequently hilarious. Several stories—like “The Protector” (Interzone, 1986)—depict similarly transformed universes. From issue 64 to its demise at the end of 1994 with issue 87, Pollack also wrote Doom Patrol for DC Comics.
Her collection Burning Sky (1998), with an introduction by Samuel R. Delany, examines a variety of gender and women’s issues through a series of surreal short stories and folklore-influenced tales. As Delany writes, Pollack’s short fiction occurs “in a universe of wonders, where Free Women revenge sexist wrongs and a ten-kilometer-tall tree grows from the head of a comet…Pollack’s theme is the pursuit of ecstasy. Her characters approach that state from every conceivable direction.” Delany also identifies Pollack as in many ways an intellectual mystic, her writings in the service of a vision. This is a useful way to think of Pollack’s work, which is not turned in toward core genre but outward toward the universe.
In keeping with this stance, it’s unsurprising that Pollack has had a long professional interest in the tarot and that this has generated several nonfiction presentations of its underlying philosophy (and various packs) as well as an anthology of original stories, Tarot Tales (1989), edited with Caitlín Matthews, in which each contributor used the French Oulipo school of literary constraint to extract story ideas from a tarot pack. She has also written a series of fantasy tales assembled as The Tarot of Perfection: A Book of Tarot Tales (2008).
“Burning Sky,” reprinted here, is an incendiary and visionary classic of feminist science fiction from 1989, originally published in the infamous Semiotext(e) anthology, whose contributors included William S. Burroughs.
BURNING SKY
Rachel Pollack
Sometimes I think of my clitoris as a magnet, pulling me along to uncover new deposits of ore in the fantasy mines. Or maybe a compass, like the kind kids used to get in Woolworth’s, with a blue-black needle in a plastic case, and flowery letters marking the directions.
Two years ago, more by accident than design, I left the City of Civilized Sex. I still remember its grand traditions: orgasms in the service of loving relationships, healthy recreation with knowledgeable partners, a pinch of perversion to bring out the flavor. I remember them with a curious nostalgia. I think of them as I march through the wilderness, with only my compass to guide me.
—
Julia. Tall, with fingers that snake round the knobs and levers of her camera. Julia’s skin is creamy, her neck is long and smooth, her eyebrows arch almost to a point. There was once a woman who drowned at sea, dreaming of Julia’s eyes. Sometimes her hair is short and spiky, sometimes long and straight, streaming out to one side in the wind off Second Avenue. Sometimes her hair is red, with thick curls. Once a month she goes to a woman who dyes her eyelashes black. They darken further with each treatment.
Julia’s camera is covered in black rubber. The shutter is a soft rubber button.
The Free Women. Bands of women who roam the world’s cities at night, protecting women from rapists, social security investigators, police, and other forms of men. Suits of supple blue plastic cover their bodies from head to toe. Only the faces remain bare. Free Skin, they call it. The thin plastic coats the body like dark glistening nail polish.
Julia discovers the Free Women late one summer night. She has broken up with a lover and can’t sleep, so she goes out walking, wearing jeans and a white silk shirt and high red boots, and carrying her camera over one shoulder. On a wide street, by a locked park, with a drunk curled asleep before the gate, a man with a scarred face has cornered a girl, about fourteen. He flicks his knife at her, back and forth, like a lizard tongue. Suddenly they are there, yanking him away from the girl, surrounding him, crouched down with moon and streetlights running like water over their blue muscles. The man jerks forward. Spread fingers slide sideways. The attacker drops his knife to put his hand over his throat. Blood runs through the fingers. He falls against the gate. The women walk away. Julia follows.
Julia discovers the Free Women one night on the way home from an assignment. Tired as she is, she walks rather than take a taxi home to an empty apartment. She has just broken up with a lover, the third in less than two years. Julia doesn’t understand what happens in these relationships. She begins them with such hopes, and then a month, two months, and she’s lost interest, faking excitement when her girlfriend plans for the future. Recklessly, Julia walks down the West Side, a woman alone with an expensive camera. She sees them across the street, three women walking shoulder to shoulder, their blue boots (she thinks) gliding in step, their blue gloves (she thinks) swinging in rhythm, their blue hoods (she thinks) washed in light. Julia takes the cap off her lens and follows them, conscious of the jerkiness in her stride, the hardness in her hips.
She follows them to a grimy factory building on West Twenty-First Street. As they press buttons on an electronic light Julia memorizes the combination. For hours she waits, in a doorway smelling of piss, thinking now and then that the women are watching her, that they have arranged for her to stand there in that filth, a punishment for following them. Finally they leave and Julia lets herself inside. She discovers a single huge room, with lacquered posts hanging with manacles, racks of black-handled daggers along the walls, and in the middle of the floor a mosaic maze, coils of deep blue, with the center, the prize, a four-pronged spiral made of pure gold. On the wall opposite the knives hang rows of blue suits, so thin they flutter slightly in the breeze from the closing door.
Over the next weeks Julia rushes through her assignments to get back to the hall of the Free Women. She spends days crouched across the street, waiting for the thirty seconds when she can photograph them entering or leaving. She spends more and more time inside, taking the suits in her hands, walking the maze. In the center she hears a loud fluttering of wings.
She tells herself she will wr
ite an exposé, an article for the Sunday Times. But she puts off calling the paper or her agent. She puts off writing any notes. Instead she enlarges her photos to more than life-size, covering the walls of her apartment, until she can almost imagine the women are there with her, or that the maze fills the floor of her kitchen.
And then one day Julia comes home—she’s gone out for food, she’s forgotten to keep any food in the house—and she finds the photos slashed, the negatives ruined, and all the lenses gone from her cameras.
Julia runs. She leaves her clothes, her cameras, her portfolios. She takes whatever cash lies in the house and heads into the street. Downtown she takes a room above a condemned bank and blacks out all the windows.
—
Let me tell you how I came to leave the City of Civilized Sex. It happened at the shore. Not the ocean, but the other side of Long Island, the sound connecting New York and Connecticut. I’d gone there with my girlfriend Louise, who at nineteen had seduced more women than I had ever known.
Louise and I had gotten together a few months after my husband Ralph had left me. On our last day as a couple Ralph informed me how lucky I was not to have birthed any children. The judge, he said, would certainly have awarded them to him. He went on to explain that it was no coincidence, our lack of children, since any heroic sperm that attempted to mount an expedition in search of my hidden eggs (Raiders of the Lost Ovum) would have frozen in “that refrigerator cunt of yours.” Ralph liked to mix metaphors. When he got angry his speech reminded me of elaborate cocktails, like Singapore Slings.
I can’t really blame Ralph. Not only did I never learn to fake orgasms properly (I would start thrusting and moaning and then think of something and forget the gasps and shrieks) but even in fights I tended to get distracted when I should have wept or screamed or thrown things.
Like the day Ralph left. I’m sure I should have cried or stared numbly at the wall. Instead I made myself a tuna sandwich and thought of sperms in fur coats, shivering on tiny wooden rafts as they tried to maneuver round the icebergs that blocked their way to the frozen eggs. I don’t blame Ralph for leaving.
Anyway, he went, and I met Louise window-shopping in a pet store. That same night we went to bed and I expected to discover that my sexual indifference had indicated a need for female flesh. Nothing happened. Louise cast her best spells, she swirled her magician’s cloak in more and more elaborate passes, but the rabbit stayed hidden in the hat.
I became depressed, and Louise, exhausted, assured me that in all her varied experiences (she began to recite the range of ages and nationalities of women she’d converted) she’d never failed to find the proper button. It would just take time. I didn’t tell her Ralph had said much the same thing. I wondered if I’d have to move to my parents’ house upstate to avoid safaris searching for my orgasms like Tarzan on his way to the elephants’ graveyard.
—
Julia runs out of money. She disguises herself in clothes bought from a uniform store on Canal Street and goes uptown to an editor who owes her a check. As she leaves the building she sees, across the street, in the doorway of a church, a black raincoat over blue skin. Julia jumps in a taxi. She goes to Penn Station, turning around constantly in her taxi to make sure no blue-hooded women sit in the cars behind her. At the station she runs down the stairs, pushing past commuters to the Long Island Rail Road, where she searches the computer screens for the train to East Hampton.
On track twenty she hears a fluttering of wings and she smells the sea, and for a moment she thinks she’s already arrived. And then she sees a trench coat lying on the floor. Another is falling beside her. A flash of light bounces off the train, as if the sun has found a crack through Penn Station and the roof of the tunnel. She tries running for the doors. Blue hands grab her wrists. Blueness covers her face.
—
No. No, it happens along Sixth Avenue. Sixth Avenue at lunchtime, among the pushcarts selling souvlaki and sushi, egg rolls and yoghurt, tofu and pretzels. Julia’s pants are torn, the wind dries the sweat on her chest, she’s been running for hours, her toes are bleeding, no cabs will stop for her. She turns a corner and tumbles into a class of twelve-year-old girls. The girls are eating hot dogs and drinking Pepsi Cola. They wear uniforms, pleated skirts and lace-up shoes, brown jackets and narrow ties. The girls surround Julia. They push her down when she tries to stand up. Somewhere up the street a radio plays a woman singing, “Are you lonesome tonight?” The girls tear off Julia’s clothes. They pinch and slap her face, her breasts. Grease streaks her thighs. The girls are whistling, yelping, stamping their feet. Now come the wings, the smell of the sea. The girls step back, their uniforms crisp, their ties straight. They part like drapes opening to the morning. A woman in blue steps into the circle, bright shining as the sun. Spread fingertips slide down Julia’s body, from the mouth down the neck and along the breasts, the belly, the thighs. Wherever the woman touches, the welts disappear. She lifts Julia in her arms. Slowly she walks down the street, while the crowd moves aside and the whole city falls silent, even the horns. Julia hears the cry of gulls searching for food.
—
Over the weeks Louise changed from bluff to hearty to understanding to peevish as her first failure became more and more imminent. She suggested I see a doctor. I told her I’d been and she got me to admit the doctor had been a man. She lugged me to a woman’s clinic where the whole staff consisted of former lovers of hers. While Louise went in to consult the healer on duty I sat in the waiting room.
I got into conversation with a tall skinny woman wearing a buckskin jacket, a gold shirt, and motorcycle boots. She showed me the French bayonet she carried in a sheath in her hip pocket, explaining it would “gut the next prick” that laid a hand on her or one of her sisters. I asked her if she’d undergone any training in knifeware. Not necessary, she told me. Pricks train. The Goddess would direct her aim. The Goddess, she said, lived in the right side of the brain. That’s why the government (99 percent pricks) wanted to burn left-handed women.
“Janie’s a little strong-minded,” Louise told me as she led me down a corridor to see Dr. Catherine. The corridor’s yellow striped wallpaper had started to peel in several places, revealing a layer of newspaper underneath.
“Did you sleep with her?” I asked.
“Only a couple of times. Did she show you her bayonet?” I nodded. “She kept it under the pillow in case the police broke in to arrest us for Goddessworship. That’s what she calls women screwing.”
I didn’t listen very closely to Catherine, who didn’t like the name doctor. I wanted to think about pricks training for their life’s work. They probably do it in gym class, I decided. While the girls try backward somersaults and leap sideways over wooden horses the boys practise erections, and later, in advanced classes, learn to charge rubber simulations of female genitals. At the end of each lesson the instructor reminds them not to speak of this in front of their girlfriends.
Catherine didn’t find my G spot or raise my Mary Rose. (I strongly identified with Henry VIII’s sunken flagship and all its chests of gold. I cried when they raised it, all crusted in barnacles and brine. That left only one of us hidden in the murk.) She did give me some crushed herbs for tea and a bag of tree bark to chew on while I lay in the bathtub. Louise raged at me whenever I neglected my treatment. “You can’t let yourself get negative,” she shouted. “You’ve got to believe.”
—
In the ritual hall Julia spends days hanging from copper, then brass, then silver manacles. Six, no, nine of the women weave in and out of sight, sometimes whispering to each other, sometimes laughing, sometimes standing before Julia and silently mouthing words in a foreign language. Across from her the blue suits rustle against each other.
Julia learns to catch bits of food thrown at her from across the room. Twice, no, three times a day one of the women brings her water in a stone bowl. A gold snake coils at the bottom. Sometimes the woman holds the bowl in front of her, and Julia has to
bow her head and lap up as much as she can. Or the woman moves the bowl away just as Julia begins to drink. Or throws the water in her face. At other times she gently tilts the bowl for Julia. Once, as Julia drinks, she discovers that a live snake has replaced the metal one. The head rises above the water and Julia’s own head snaps back so hard she would have banged it against the wall if a blue hand wasn’t there to cushion her.
They shave her head. No, they comb and perfume her hair. They rub her with oils and smooth the lines in her face and neck, slapping her only when she tries to bite or lick the cool fingertips sliding down her face.
Once or several times a day they take her down from the wall and force her to run the maze. The women surround the tiled circle, hitting the floor with sticks and trilling louder and louder until Julia misses a step or even falls, just outside the gold spiral. When she’s failed they yank her out of the maze and hold her arms out like wings as they press the tips of her breasts into champagne glasses filled with tiny sharp emeralds.
On the day Julia completes the maze the women dress her in shapeless black overalls and heavy boots. They smuggle her out of the country to an island where a house of white stone stands on top of a hill covered in pine trees. The women strip Julia. With their sticks they drive her up a rock path. The door opens and a cool wind flows from the darkness.
A woman steps out. Instead of blue her suit gleams a deep red. It covers the whole body, including the face, except for the eyes, the nostrils, the mouth. Her muscles move like a river running over stone. Her name is Burning Sky, and she was born in Crete six thousand years ago. When she walks the air flows behind her like the sundered halves of a very thin veil.
—
One night, after a fight, Louise kicked the wall and ran from the house. The next morning, the doorbell woke me at six o’clock. Frightened, I looked out the window before I would open the door. There stood Louise in a rough zipper jacket and black turtleneck sweater. She saw me and waved a pair of rubber boots. Afraid she planned to kick me, I didn’t want to let her in but I couldn’t think of how to disconnect the doorbell. She’d begun to shout, too. “For heaven’s sake, Maggie, open the fucking door.” Any moment the police would show up.
The Big Book of Science Fiction Page 183
