The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  While I buttered toast and boiled water Louise announced our plans for the morning. We were going fishing. “Dress warm,” she said, and gave me the spare boots she’d brought for me. I had to wear two pairs of socks, and my feet still slid around.

  In her pickup truck I tried to sleep, despite Louise’s cheerful whistle. But when we got all our gear and bodies in a rowboat out in the sound, it turned out that Louise didn’t plan to fish at all. “Now, goddamnit,” she said, “you can’t whine and get away from me. I’m not taking this boat back to shore until you come and I can feel it all over my fingers.”

  “What?” I said, ruining her powerful speech. Her meaning became clearer as she began to crawl towards me. She scared me but she made me want to laugh too. It reminded me of the time Ralph had locked us in a motel room with a bottle of wine, a bag of marijuana, and a pink nightgown. At least motel rooms are comfortable. Maybe Louise considered rowboats romantic.

  I decided I better hold my face straight. “You rapist prick!” I shouted, and tried to grab an oar to threaten her but couldn’t work it loose from the lock. I snatched the fish knife and held it with both hands in front of my belly. “Keep away from me,” I warned.

  “Put that down,” Louise said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  “I’ll hurt you, you prick.”

  “Don’t call me that. You don’t know how to use that.”

  “The Goddess will show me.”

  Apparently this all became too much for her. “Shit,” she said, and turned around to grasp the oars for the pull to shore. I sat slumped over and shivering. My hands clenched around the knife.

  —

  In a ceremonial hall hung with purple silk and gold shields the women tattoo a four-pronged spiral in the hollow of Julia’s neck. They present her with a blue suit. With four others she returns to New York on a cruise ship secretly owned by the Free Women. They wear disguises, like the Phantom, when he would venture out as Mister Walker, wrapped in a trench coat and slouch hat, to rescue his beloved Diana from Nazi kidnappers.

  Despite the women’s clever tricks someone on the boat recognizes them. A television anchorwoman, or maybe a right-wing politician. This woman once served Burning Sky, but disobeyed her leader on some assignment. Now she comes to their suite of cabins and begs the Free Women to readmit her. They play with her, attaching small intricately carved stone clips all over her skin. She suffers silently, only to have them announce she has forgotten how to break through the wall. They can do nothing for her. She goes away, later becomes prime minister.

  —

  When we got back to the rental dock Louise began to lug the boat onto the wooden platform. “If you want to go home,” she said, “give me a hand.” I took hold of the rope to tie it to the iron post that would hold it fast when the hurricane came.

  At that moment a woman came out of the water. Dressed in a black wet suit with long shiny flippers and a dark mask that completely hid her face, she stood for a moment rotating her shoulders and tilting her head up to the sun. Her speargun pointed at the ground.

  My heart began throwing blood wildly around my body: my vagina contracted like someone running for her life. “Will you come on?” Louise said.

  I stammered something at her. Louise had never heard me stammer before. “What the hell is the matter with you?” she said. Then her eyes followed the invisible cable connecting me and my beautiful skin diver. She looked back and forth between us a couple of times while a wolfgrin took over her face. “Sonofabitch,” she said, and laughed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know,” I said, and Louise got to see another first. I blushed.

  It was certainly a day for firsts. That evening, in the sloppy cavernous apartment Louise had inherited from her grandfather, she took out her collection of “toys”: whips, handcuffs, masks, chains, nipple clips, leather capes, rubber gloves, and one whalebone corset, c. 1835. No wet suits, but it didn’t really matter. I hope none of Ralph’s sperm remained camped inside me anymore. The spring thaw came that night, and the flood would have washed the courageous little creatures away forever.

  —

  The Free Women order Julia to go alone to her apartment and renew her professional contacts. At first she finds it hard to function without her instructors. She hates going out “naked,” as she thinks of her ordinary clothes. With no one to command her she forgets to eat and one day passes out while photographing a police parade in the South Bronx.

  Gradually the dream fades. Julia stops dressing up in her Free Skin at night, she goes on holiday with a woman reporter who asks about the tattoo on Julia’s neck. Julia tells her she got it to infiltrate a group of terrorists. When the woman falls asleep Julia cries in the shower and thanks the Virgin Mary for her deliverance. She wonders how she ever could have submitted to such strange and wretched slavery.

  An order comes. Something simple, maybe embarrassing a judge who suspended the sentence of a man who raped his five-year-old daughter. Something with a clear moral imperative.

  Julia takes off from work to decide what to do. In a cabin in the woods she tries on her Free Skin and lies in bed, remembering Burning Sky’s face, and the way her fingers looked extended into the air. She remembers lying with the other women in a huge bed, how they slid in and out of each other, while their bodies melted inside their blue suits. She remembers hanging from silver manacles, remembers dancing to the heart of the labyrinth.

  Julia returns to the city and locks the blue suit in a metal cabinet. The day of her assignment passes. She falls into a fever, attended by her reporter friend. When she recovers and the woman has left, Julia opens the cabinet. Her Free Skin has vanished. In its place lies a Chinese woman’s dagger, five hundred years old, with an ivory handle bearing the same spiral sign that marks Julia’s neck. Terrified, she waits for retribution. Weeks pass.

  —

  And so I left the City of Civilized Sex in one great rush on the back of a skin diver. Now that she’d preserved her record Louise lost interest very quickly, but at least she gave me some leads to “your kind of trick,” as she delicately put it. I didn’t know whether she meant the lovers or the activities.

  I discovered not only a large reservoir of women devoted to far-fetched sexual practices, but several organizations, complete with buttons, slogans, jackets, and conflicting manifestoes. After a while they all began to strike me as rather odd, not just for their missionary zeal, but for their hunger for community. Had I left the City only to emigrate to another nation-state?

  It wasn’t so much the social as the sexual conformity that disturbed me. Everyone seemed to agree ahead of time on what would excite them. I began to wonder if all those people in the Land of Leather really liked the same sort of collar (black with silver studs) or if each new arrival, thrilled at finding a town where she’d expected only a swamp, confused gratitude with eroticism, and gave up her dreams of finding leather clothes and objects of exactly the right color, cut, and texture.

  As my imagination began to show me its tastes I became more and more specific with the women who tried to satisfy me. That first night with Louise she could have tied me up with a piece of filthy clothesline and I wouldn’t have complained. A few months later I was demanding the right ropes (green and gold curtain pulls with the tassel removed) tied only in particular knots taken from the Boy Scout Handbook.

  And even that phase didn’t last. For, in fact, it’s not actions that I’m hunting. No matter how well you do them they can only approximate reality. City dwellers believe that fantasies exist to intensify arousal. Out here in the Territories the exiles should know better. I want to stand on a tree stump and yell through the forest, “Stop trying to build new settlements. Stop trying to clear the trees and put up walls and lay down sewers.” I want them to understand. Sex exists to lay traps for fantasies.

  —

  Julia’s life becomes as pale and blank as cheap paper. She goes to bars and picks up women. They all go away angry when they g
et back to Julia’s apartment and Julia just sits on the bed, or else goes to the darkroom and doesn’t come out. Julia returns to the ritual hall. She finds it replaced by a button factory.

  She drives out to the beach on a hard sunny day in December. Ignoring the cold wind she strips naked and walks toward the water, both hands gripping the Chinese dagger. She raises it to the sun to watch the light glint off the blade. But then she notices flashes beyond the knife. Small spots on the horizon. As she watches, they grow larger, become blue sails, then a row of boats coming out of the deep. Each one contains a single woman. The sails rise out of their shoulders like wings. They call to each other like birds, their voices piercing the wind. When they land they detach their skins from the boat masts and the plastic snaps back against their bodies.

  Julia falls down in the wet sand. A wild roaring in the Earth drowns out the sea as the six women lift her to her feet (six is the number of love, with Julia they become seven, the number of victory). They wash the mud and loneliness from her and dress her in the Free Skin she abandoned for an illusion of freedom.

  The only true happiness lies in obedience to loving authority.

  CHARLES MOULTON, SPEAKING AS QUEEN HIPPOLYTE OF PARADISE ISLAND TO HER DAUGHTER, PRINCESS DI, WONDER WOMAN COMICS, C. 1950

  Before I Wake

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  Kim Stanley Robinson (1952– ) is an award-winning US writer of science fiction whose novels have become incredibly influential outside of the genre world. Robinson has become known to the general public through frequent mentions by climate-change scientists and references both in pop culture and in magazines such as the Economist—whose 2015 special on global warming led off with a summary of Robinson’s novel 2312 (2012). He, along with Karen Joy Fowler, is perhaps the most successful of the so-called Humanist science fiction writers.

  Robinson became widely recognized with the publication of his first novel, The Wild Shore (1984), released as one of Terry Carr’s Ace Specials. It won the Locus Award and initiated the Three Californias sequence, set in three versions of Orange County on the Pacific coast just south of Los Angeles. Robinson is also highly regarded for his Mars Trilogy, starting with Red Mars (1992) and proceeding through Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996). All the books in the Mars Trilogy won the Hugo Award, and Blue Mars also won the Locus Award. The overall narrative unpacks in detail a future history during the course of which the human settlers of Mars gain political independence from Earth (Robinson, optimistic about reader tendencies, provides a full constitution in the text) while engaging in a debate over the ethics and practicalities involved in terraforming the planet. With suitable cognitive caution, the cast (and the sequence) comes down on the side of planetary transformation.

  Though it might be possible to call him a hard science fiction Humanist, what in fact most characterizes the growing reach and power of his work is its cogent analysis and its disposal of such categorical thinking. In some form or another, Robinson’s career has consistently adhered to an overriding cognitive imperative: the argument that humanity will not thrive unless technology can be used in ways sympathetic to the Earth’s ecology, an argument intimately married to a conviction that the alternative to making the world better is allowing it to become fatally worse.

  Robinson’s “Before I Wake” (1989) is not necessarily typical of his longer work, but at the short-fiction length he roves more widely. It’s a powerful Humanist tale about the nature of reality based in part on a dream journal Robinson kept between 1975 and 1980. Of course, the dream source is nicely balanced by Robinson’s natural tendency toward the rational.

  BEFORE I WAKE

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  In his dream Abernathy stood on a steep rock ridge. A talus slope dropped from the ridge to a glacial basin containing a small lake. The lake was cobalt in the middle, aquamarine around the edges. Here and there in the rock expanse patches of meadow grass gleamed, like the lawns of marmot estates. There were no trees. The cold air felt thin in his throat. He could see ranges many miles away, and though everything was perfectly still there was also an immense sweep in things, as if a gust of wind had caught the very fabric of being.

  “Wake up, damn you,” a voice said. He was shoved in the back, and he tumbled down the rockfall, starting a small avalanche.

  He stood in a large white room. Glass boxes of various size were stacked everywhere, four and five to a pile, and in every box was a sleeping animal: monkey, rat, dog, cat, pig, dolphin, turtle. “No,” he said, backing up. “Please, no.”

  A bearded man entered the room. “Come on, wake up,” he said brusquely. “Time to get back to it, Fred. Our only hope is to work as hard as we can. You have to resist when you start slipping away!” He seized Abernathy by the arms and sat him down on a box of squirrels. “Now listen!” he cried. “We’re asleep! We’re dreaming!”

  “Thank God,” Abernathy said.

  “Not so fast! We’re awake as well.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Yes you do!” He slapped Abernathy in the chest with a large roll of graph paper, and it spilled loose and unrolled over the floor. Black squiggles smeared the graphs.

  “It looks like a musical score,” Abernathy said absently.

  The bearded man shouted, “Yes! Yes! This is the symphony our brains play, very apt! Violins yammering away—that’s what used to be ours, Fred; that was consciousness.” He yanked hard on his beard with both hands, looking anguished. “Sudden drop to the basses, bowing and bowing, blessed sleep, yes, yes! And in the night the ghost instruments, horn and oboe and viola, spinning their little improvs over the ground bass, longer and longer till the violins start blasting again, yes, Fred, it’s perfectly apt!”

  “Thank you,” Abernathy said. “But you don’t have to yell. I’m right here.”

  “Then wake up,” the man said viciously. “Can’t, can you! Trapped, aren’t you! Playing the new song like all the rest of us. Look at it there—REM sleep mixed indiscriminately with consciousness and deep sleep, turning us all into dreamwalkers. Into waking nightmares.”

  Looking into the depths of the man’s beard, Abernathy saw that all his teeth were incisors. Abernathy edged toward the door, then broke for it and ran. The man leaped forward and tackled him, and they tumbled to the floor.

  Abernathy woke up.

  “Aha,” the man said. It was Winston, administrator of the lab. “So now you believe me,” he said sourly, rubbing an elbow. “I suppose we should write that down on the walls. If we all start slipping away we won’t even remember what things used to be like. It’ll all be over then.”

  “Where are we?” Abernathy asked.

  “In the lab,” Winston replied, voice filled with heavy patience. “We live here now, Fred. Remember?”

  Abernathy looked around. The lab was large and well lit. Sheets of graph paper recording EEGs were scattered over the floor. Black countertops protruded from the walls, which were cluttered with machinery. In one corner were two rats in a cage.

  Abernathy shook his head violently. It was all coming back. He was awake now, but the dream had been true. He groaned, walked to the room’s little window, saw the smoke rising from the city below. “Where’s Jill?”

  Winston shrugged. They hurried through a door at the end of the lab, into a small room containing cots and blankets. No one there. “She’s probably gone back to the house again,” Abernathy said. Winston hissed with irritation and worry. “I’ll check the grounds,” he said. “You’d better go to the house. Be careful!”

  —

  Fred was already out the door.

  In many places the streets were almost blocked by smashed cars, but little had changed since Abernathy’s last venture home, and he made good time. The suburbs were choking in haze that smelled like incinerator smoke. A gas station attendant holding a pump handle stared in astonishment as he drove by, then waved. Abernathy didn’t wave back. On one of these expeditions he had seen a knifing, and now he d
idn’t like to look.

  He stopped the car at the curb before his house. The remains of his house. It was charred almost to the ground. The blackened chimney was all that stood over chest high.

  He got out of his old Cortina and slowly crossed the lawn, which was marked by black footprints. In the distance a dog barked insistently.

  Jill stood in the kitchen, humming to herself and moving black things from here to there. She looked up as Abernathy stopped in the side yard before her. Her eyes twitched from side to side. “You’re home,” she said cheerily. “How was your day?”

  “Jill, let’s go out to dinner,” Abernathy said.

  “But I’m already cooking!”

  “I can see that.” He stepped over what had been the kitchen wall and took her arm. “Don’t worry about that. Let’s go anyway.”

  “My my,” Jill said, brushing his face with a sooty hand. “Aren’t you romantic this evening.”

  He stretched his lips wide. “You bet. Come on.” He pulled her carefully out of the house and across the yard, and helped her into the Cortina. “Such chivalry,” she remarked, eyes darting about in tandem.

  Abernathy got in and started the engine. “But, Fred,” his wife said, “what about Jeff and Fran?”

  Abernathy looked out his window. “They’ve got a babysitter,” he finally said.

  Jill frowned, nodded, sat back in her seat. Her broad face was smudged. “Ah,” she said, “I do so like to dine out.”

  “Yes,” Abernathy said, and yawned. He felt drowsy. “Oh no,” he said. “No!” He bit his lip, pinched the back of the hand on the wheel. Yawned again. “No!” he cried. Jill jerked against her door in surprise. He swerved to avoid hitting an Oriental woman sitting in the middle of the road. “I must get to the lab,” he shouted. He pulled down the Cortina’s sun visor, took a pen from his coat pocket, and scrawled To the Lab. Jill was staring at him. “It wasn’t my fault,” she whispered.