A Woman of the Iron People

by Eleanor Arnason

  I thought he was being kind. I had mishandled the meeting with Inahooli, and Derek had been irresponsible about the bracelet he had found in the old volcano.

  Someone asked, “What kind of bad things?”

  “We had trouble with the Trickster,” the oracle said. “You know what he is like. A malevolent troublemaker! He likes to turn people against one another. He likes to make them forget all the old customs and the right way to behave.

  “And we met a spirit north of here, not far from the river. It was in a cave.” He paused. “It was one of those things that are found in dark places, usually underground. They have various names. The Old Ones. The Unseen. The Hungry.

  “Most of the time, they aren’t a problem. They sleep in their dark place. Sometimes they wake up and notice people. Then they are likely to cause trouble—out of hunger or a stupid anger.” He paused. “I have forgotten what I was going to say.”

  “I asked you to give your opinion of the hairless people,” Angai said. “But you went off about spirits.”

  He made the gesture of agreement. “I can’t tell you what to do. You aren’t my people, and you have your own spirits to give advice. But I like Lixia and Deraku, and I don’t think these people without hair are dangerous.”

  He stopped. Derek translated.

  Eddie said, “Wrong!”

  The square was darkening. People brought out poles made of metal and stuck them in the ground. They placed torches in brackets on the poles. The torches streamed in the wind, flaring and dimming. Most were close to Angai. She and Nia and the oracle were pretty well lit. But the light kept changing in intensity. Shadows jumped and flickered. Faces, hands, eyes, and metal ornaments went in and out of darkness.

  “Nia has spoken clearly,” Angai said. “And the oracle is worth listening to, even if he is not always clear.”

  A voice said, “What is your opinion? You are the shamaness here. These other people are strangers.”

  “I will tell you.” She waited a moment. The bells on the standards went ching-ching in the wind. A baby cried briefly.

  “I think Nia is right. We ought to welcome these people, as we have always welcomed strangers, not out of fear of the Dark One, but out of the respect for the spirits and for decent behavior.

  “I think Nia is right in a second way. This is a time for changes. We cannot ignore the changes. When the ground shakes and old trails go in new directions, only a fool pretends she can travel the same way as before. The wise woman says, ‘This rock is new. That slope was not here last summer.’ ”

  Angai straightened up to her full height. She looked around commandingly. “Listen to me! This is my decision! We will welcome the hairless people. But we will do it carefully. Like a wise traveler, we will go one step at a time.”

  She paused. Derek translated.

  Eddie said, “Damn!”

  Angai went on. “The hairless people can stay in the village they have built so long as they remember that this is not their country. They are visitors.” She looked at us. “Do not move your village without asking permission, and do not ask more of your relatives to come and stay with you. I don’t want our country to fill up with hairless people.

  “Nia says among your people men and women cannot be separated. Therefore—it is my decision—you can live in your village according to your customs. But when you visit us or any other ordinary people, leave your men at home.”

  “Shit,” said Derek.

  “I will not have men in this village again. It is too disturbing. The old women become angry. The children get new ideas.”

  Angai stopped. Derek translated.

  “This is good,” said Ivanova. “But not as good as I had hoped.” She paused for a moment. “It’s a beginning.”

  “It stinks,” said Derek. “How can I do fieldwork? I have to be able to go into the villages!”

  “Talk to the men,” I said.

  “They’ll try to kill me.”

  Angai went on. “Nia says you are going to want to travel all over and ask questions and look at things. Is she right? Is this true?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Angai frowned. “I am not certain what to do about that. I do not want to find hairless people in every part of our country, turning over rocks and poking sticks into holes. It is hard enough to have children.” She paused. “Stay close to the village until I have had a chance to think more about this.”

  Derek translated.

  Eddie said, “This isn’t going to work.”

  “Yes, it will,” said Mr. Fang. “They have the right to set these kinds of limits. We have the discipline to keep within the limits they have set.”

  “What about Nia?” asked a voice.

  “I have not decided,” Angai said.

  “We have,” said the voice. “Ten winters ago we told her to leave. She has not changed. She was a pervert then. She is a pervert now. Look at the people she travels with! Tell her to go with them. Tell her to live in their village—not here, among people who know how to behave.”

  The crowd parted. I saw the speaker now: a stocky woman of middle age. Her fur was medium brown and oddly dull. It soaked up light like clay.

  “That is Anhar,” Nia said.

  “I will ask the spirits what to do about Nia,” Angai said. “Not today. They don’t like a lot of questions all at once.”

  “You have always liked Nia,” Anhar said. “You have always protected her. You are trying to bring her back into the village.”

  Angai said, “You never know when to be quiet, Anhar. I am tired of your opinions! You have a little mind, full of nasty ideas. It is like a cheese eaten out by cheese bugs. It is like a dead animal eaten out by worms.”

  “Wow,” said Derek.

  Anhar turned. The crowd let her through. She walked away from Angai out of the torch-lit square. I lost sight of her in the darkness.

  “What about the man?” another woman asked. “The Voice of the Waterfall?”

  The oracle answered. “I am going to the village of the hairless people. My spirit told me to learn from them. I have not had any new dreams telling me to do anything else.”

  Angai said, “I am done speaking. You have heard my decision. Do you agree with me? Or is there going to be an argument?”

  There was silence. I had a sense that the people around me were unhappy. But no one was willing to speak.

  At last someone said, “What did the spirits tell you, Angai?”

  “I dreamed I was on a trail I did not recognize. The country around me was unfamiliar. The ground under my feet was hot. Smoke rose from holes. I could not see where I was going.”

  “That does not sound like a good dream, Angai.”

  The shamaness frowned. “I am not finished! There was an old woman with me. She had a fat belly and drooping breasts. She carried a staff and it seemed to me that she was having trouble walking. Sometimes she walked next to me. Sometimes ahead. Sometimes in back. She never left me. She made noises from time to time: grunts and moans. Most of the time she was silent. Once she was in back of me, and I thought I heard her stumble. I stopped and looked back. She said, ‘Keep going. Don’t worry about me. As old as I am, I will keep up with you.’ I went on. That was the end of the dream.”

  The woman who had asked the question said, “All right. I will go along with you, Angai. Even though I am made uneasy by these new people. And even though I think Anhar is right about Nia.”

  Angai made the gesture that meant “it is over.” She turned and went into her tent.

  I said, “You finish translating, Derek. I want to speak to Nia.”

  He made the gesture of agreement.

  I walked over to Nia and the oracle. A couple of women removed the torches from their holders, taking them away.

  Nia said, “I am not certain that Angai was being clever. She ought to have been more polite to Anhar. Now she’s made an enemy of her.”

  “No,” said the oracle. “She has changed nothing. They were enemi
es already. Now they can stop pretending. I have never had an enemy, but I know it’s hard work being polite to someone you hate. It makes a woman tired. She loses strength. She cannot do things that are important.”

  “You’ve never had an enemy?” I asked.

  “Most men do not. If a man gets angry, he confronts the person who has made him angry. Or else he leaves. The women are trapped in their villages. They spend winter after winter next to people they dislike. They do not speak their anger. They cannot get away. That makes enemies. I have seen it happen.”

  “Do you want to stay in the village?” I asked Nia.

  She made the gesture of uncertainty.

  “Do you have a place to stay tonight?”

  “Here. With Angai.” Nia paused. “That was Ti-antai. The woman who spoke last. The woman who cared for your hand this morning. She was a good friend of mine when we were young.”

  “Aiya!” I said.

  The oracle said, “I will go with you. Angai made me stay at the edge of the village last night in an old tent that was full of holes. Even with the holes and the wind blowing through, it smelled of old age and craziness.” He paused. “Not holy craziness. The other kind.”

  The square was empty except for my companions. The torches were all gone. There was no noise except the wind and Derek’s voice, still translating.

  “What was the dream about?” I asked. “Why did it satisfy your cousin?”

  “You don’t know much, do you?” Nia said.

  “No. Who was the old woman?”

  “The Mother of Mothers. If she tells us to go on through a strange country, then we will.”

  “It was a good dream,” said the oracle. “I have had only a few that were that easy to understand. No one can possibly argue with it.”

  Derek said, “I’m done.”

  “Coming,” I said.

  We left the square, walking through the dark village.

  Ivanova said, “This decision is not going to satisfy anyone. The research teams are going to want to be able to travel. And Eddie, of course, is horrified that we have not been ordered off the planet.”

  “That’s right,” Eddie said.

  “I think the problem is vulgar Marxism,” said Mr. Fang.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said.

  “We oversimplify the dialectical process and we become fascinated by the drama of revolution. We forget that human history is very complex and very slow. Every big change is preceded by a multitude of small changes. There are compromises. There are failures. We take a step forward and then are forced to go back a step or even two.

  “Even revolutions are full of compromise and failure. Even in the midst of great transformations, we go back. After the triumph of the October Revolution came Kronstadt and the crushing of the Workers’ Opposition.”

  “I don’t understand where this is leading,” Ivanova said.

  “We expected this meeting to resolve everything. We expected a revolution, the simple kind that we see on the holovision.

  “We are in the middle of a revolution. It has gone on for over five hundred years. I have no idea when it will end, if ever. But it is not a simple drama. It does not move forward all the time. And there are no neat divisions. No scenes and acts. At least none that we can see. Historians put in such things later.

  “Today—I think—the revolution has moved into a new stage. It has certainly moved onto a new stage. There are new actors and new problems. But there is no resolution.”

  “True enough,” said Eddie. “What we have is goddamned compromise. It isn’t going to hold. Once we are down here—”

  Ivanova said, “For once I agree with Eddie. We have to be able to travel. We have come so far.” She paused. “Maybe we can find another people who will set fewer limitations.”

  “Not tonight,” said Mr. Fang.

  We reached the river. There were lights on one of the boats. Tatiana and Yunqi sat together on the deck. They helped Mr. Fang onboard. Ivanova and Eddie followed.

  The oracle said, “I want to sleep. This has been a long day.”

  “You’re right about that,” I said.

  We took him to the other boat and got him bedded down in the cabin.

  Derek and Agopian and I went out on deck. The river air was cool and full of bugs. They swarmed around the deck lights once we turned them on. Agopian and I sat down. Derek went and got beers.

  We drank, not speaking. We could hear voices from the other boat: Ivanova and Eddie, describing what had happened to Tatiana and Yunqi.

  Agopian said, “I don’t know how long that conversation will go on.”

  “Hours, most likely.”

  “Maybe.” He set down his bottle. “There is something I have to tell you.”

  I looked at him. “Your secret. Your ethical complexity.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “I’m not sure I’ll be able to get you alone. This is perfect now, if I have enough time.”

  Derek said, “I’m willing to listen.”

  Agopian looked at me.

  I nodded.

  “I’m going to try to tell this as quickly as possible. I don’t know when that conversation will end, and Tatiana will come over. There is information that has been kept hidden and lies that have been told. I think it’s time this situation was rectified.”

  Derek leaned forward. “What kind of information?”

  “History. What’s been happening on Earth during the past one hundred years.”

  “We have the messages from Earth,” I said.

  “They are lies.”

  “You know this for certain?” asked Derek.

  “I wrote them—with help, of course. It was too big a job for any one person.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Derek asked, “When?”

  “You know there was trouble coming into the system.”

  Derek made the gesture of agreement.

  Agopian looked puzzled and went on. “There was a lot more junk than we had expected, and a lot of it was a long way out. A kind of super Oort cloud. And there were problems with the astrogation system. The computers decided it was an emergency. They woke the crew up early. We brought the ship in.

  “We didn’t have time to wake up any other people. But we did have time to check the messages that had been coming in from Earth. They were crazy.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean exactly that. The messages are crazy. Earth has changed a lot.” He paused. “We thought history would stop because our lives had stopped, because we were sleeping a magic sleep like children in a fairy tale.

  “Not true. History went on and took a turn…” He paused again. “Progress is not inevitable. That is an error the vulgar Marxists make. I’ve always liked that term. I imagine a man with a big thick beard, farting at the dinner table as he explains commodity fetishism or the labor theory of value. And of course he gets the theory wrong.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Progress. There is no law that says humanity has to evolve ever higher social forms. Collapse is possible. Regression or stagnation. That’s essentially what happened after the twentieth century. Not regression but stagnation. We thought it was a characteristic of post-capitalist societies: extreme stability, as opposed to the extreme instability of capitalism, the crazy rate of change during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  “I think now the stability came from the terrible mess created in the twentieth century, the lack of resources and precarious state of the environment. We spent two hundred years cleaning up—trying to return the planet to its former state, trying to undo what those creeps and epigones had done. We didn’t have time for innovation.”

  “We built the L-5 colonies,” I said.

  “And the ship,” said Derek.

  “Those are new objects. I am talking about new ideas. Most of our ideology and technology comes—came—from the old society. Most of what we have done
is based on what people already knew prior to the collapse.”

  “That isn’t entirely true,” I said.

  Agopian said, “It is mostly true. We have been like the people of the early Middle Ages. We used the old knowledge in new ways. But we did not add to it.”

  Derek frowned. “I question that analogy.”

  “I don’t want to argue about the Middle Ages.”

  Derek made the gesture that meant “forget what I said.”

  “In any case, the stability—or stagnation—was only temporary. That’s what we learned when we woke up and listened to the messages from home. About the time we left, the various societies on Earth began to change rapidly.”

  He paused, frowning. “The changes were disturbing. We—I mean the crew—could barely handle the information we were getting, and we are—without a question—the most disciplined people on the ship. We had no idea what would happen if the rest of you woke up and heard. We imagined panic and a collapse of morale. Some people would want to run home, though home to what is a question. Others would fall apart. There would have been months of argument and a decline in the quality of work. It seemed to us that the expedition had to be protected. We took a vote—everyone who wasn’t frozen. We decided to change the messages.”

  I opened my mouth.

  He held up a hand. “Don’t ask questions. I don’t know how much time I have, and I want to tell you as much as possible.”

  “Okay.”

  “We started by changing history. That was comparatively easy. We drafted—I drafted—an alternative history, one we felt more comfortable with. After that it was a matter of searching and replacing. We told the computer system to look for certain kinds of events—and remove them and replace them with other kinds of events.”

  He smiled. “I have to say, I have a new respect for liars, especially those who lived before computers. I have no idea how you can manage to rewrite history without a computer.”

  “Why did you do it?” I asked. “What could possibly be so terrible about the messages from Earth?”

  He sat next to one of the deck lights. I could see him clearly: a rectangular face, pale brown in color. His eyes were large and dark. His nose was high and narrow, with a slight curve. His mouth was ordinary. It was the eyes that dominated the face and the unruly curly hair, worn slightly longer than was fashionable among members of the crew.