by Joanna Russ
"I'm glad, so glad, so very glad," says J softly. She doesn't mind Jeannine's being a coward. She turns the warmth of her smile on Jeannine the way none of us has ever been smiled at before, a dwelling, loving look that would make Jeannine go through fire and water to get it again, the kind of mother-love whose lack gets into your very bones.
"I am called Alice Reasoner," says J, "christened Alice-Jael; I am an employee of the Bureau of Comparative Ethnology. My code name is Sweet Alice; can you believe it?" (with a soft, cultivated laugh) "Look around you and welcome yourselves; look at me and make me welcome; welcome myself, welcome me, welcome I," and leaning forward, a shape stamped by a cookie-cutter on to nothing, with pleasant art and sincere gestures, Alice-Jael Reasoner told us what you have no doubt guessed long, long ago.
III
(Her real laugh is the worst human sound I have ever heard: a hard, screeching yell that ends in gasps and rusty sobbing, as if some mechanical vulture on a gigantic garbage heap on the surface of the moon were giving one forced shriek for the death of all organic life. Yet J likes it. This is her private laugh. Alice is crippled, too; the ends of her fingers (she says) were once caught in a press and are growing cancerousand to be sure, if you look at them closely you can see folds of loose, dead skin over the ends of her fingernails. She has hairpin-shaped scars under her ears, too.
IV
Her pointed fingernails painted silver to distract the eye, Alice-Jael plays with the window console: the East River clouds over to reveal (serially) a desert morning, a black lava beach, and the surface of the moon. She sat, watching the pictures change, tapping her silver nails on the couch, herself the very picture of boredom. Come up close and you'll see that her eyes are silver, most unnatural. It came to me that we had been watching this woman perform for half an hour and had given not one thought to what might be happening around us or to us or behind us. The East River?
"An artist's conception," she says.)
V
"I am," says Jael Reasoner, "an employee of the Bureau of Comparative Ethnology and a specialist in disguises. It came to me several months ago that I might find my other selves out there in the great, gray might-have-been, so I undertookfor reasons partly personal and partly political, of which more laterto get hold of the three of you. It was very hard work. I'm a field worker and not a theoretician, but you must know that the closer to home you travel, the more power it takes, both to discriminate between small degrees of difference and to transport objects from one universe of probability into another.
"If we admit among the universes of probability any in which the laws of physical reality are different from our own, we will have an infinite number of universes. If we restrict ourselves to the laws of physical reality as we know them, we will have a limited number. Our universe is quantized; therefore the differences between possible universes (although very small) must be similarly quantized, and the number of such universes must be finite (although very large). I take it that it must be possible to distinguish the very smallest differencessay, that of one quantum of lightfor otherwise we could not find our way to the same universe time after time, nor could we return to our own. Current theory has it that one cannot return to one's own past, but only to other people's; similarly one cannot travel into one's own future, but only to other people's, and in no way can these motions be forced to result in straightforward travelfrom any baseline whatever . The only possible motion is diagonal motion. So you see that the classical paradoxes of time-travel simply do not applywe cannot kill our own grandmothers and thereby cease to exist, nor can we travel into our own future and affect it in advance, so to speak. Nor can I, once I have made contact with your present, travel into your past or your future. The best I can do in finding out my own future is to study one very close to my own, but here the cost of power becomes prohibitive. My Department's researches are therefore conducted in regions rather far from home. Go too far and you find an Earth too close to the sun or too far away or nonexistent or barren of life; come too close and it costs too much. We operate in a pretty small optimal range. And of course I was doing this on my own, which means I must steal the whole damn operation anyway.
"You, Janet, were almost impossible to find. The universe in which your Earth exists does not even register on our instruments; neither do those for quite a probable spread on either side of you; we have been trying for years to find out why. Besides you are too close to us to be economically feasible. I had located Jeannine and not Joanna; you very obligingly stepped out of place and became as visible as a sore thumb; I've had a fix on you ever since. The three of you got together and I pulled you all in. Look at yourselves.
"Genetic patterns sometimes repeat themselves from possible present universe to possible present universe; this is also one of the elements that can vary between universes. There is repetition of genotypes in the far future too, sometimes. Here is Janet from the far future, but not my future or yours; here are the two of you from almost the same moment of time (but not as you see it!), both of those moments only a little behind mine; yet I won't happen in the world of either of you. We are less alike than identical twins, to be sure, but much more alike than strangers have any right to be. Look at yourselves again.
"We're all white-skinned, eh? I bet two of you didn't think of that. We're all women. We are tall, within a few inches of each other. Given a reasonable variation, we are the same racial type, even the same physical typeno redheads or olive skins, hm? Don't go by me; I'm not natural! Look in each other's faces. What you see is essentially the same genotype, modified by age, by circumstances, by education, by diet, by learning, by God knows what. Here is Jeannine, the youngest of us all with her smooth face: tall, thin, sedentary, round-shouldered, a long-limbed body made of clay and putty; she's always tired and probably has trouble waking up in the morning. Hm? And there's Joanna, somewhat older, much more active, with a different gait, different mannerisms, quick and jerky, not depressed, sits with her spine like a ruler. Who'd think it was the same woman? There's Janet, hardier than the two of you put together, with her sun-bleached hair and her muscles; she's spent her life outdoors, a Swedish hiker and a farmhand. You begin to see? She's older and that masks a good deal. And of course she has had all the Whileawayan improvementsno rheumatism, no sinus trouble, no allergies, no appendix, good feet, good teeth, no double joints, and so forth and so forth, all the rest that we three must suffer. And I, who could throw you all across the room, though I don't look it. Yet we started the same. It's possible that in biological terms Jeannine is potentially the most intelligent of us all; try to prove that to a stranger! We ought to be equally long-lived but we won't be. We ought to be equally healthy but we're not. If you discount the wombs that bore us, our pre-natal nourishment, and our deliveries (none of which differ essentially) we ought to have started out with the same autonomic nervous system, the same adrenals, the same hair and teeth and eyes, the same circulatory system, and the same innocence. We ought to think alike and feel alike and act alike, but of course we don't. So plastic is humankind! Do you remember the old story of the Doppelganger? This is the double you recognize instantly, with whom you feel a mysterious kinship. An instant sympathy, that informs you at once that the other is really your very own self. The truth is that people don't recognize themselves except in mirrors, and sometimes not even then. Between our dress, and our opinions, and our habits, and our beliefs, and our values, and our mannerisms, and our manners, and our expressions, and our ages, and our experience, even I can hardly believe that I am looking at three other myselves. No layman would entertain for a moment the notion that he beheld four versions of the same woman.
Did I say a moment? Not for an age of moments, particularly if the layman were indeed a man.
"Janet, may I ask you why you and your neighbors do not show up on our instruments? You must have discovered the theory of probability travel some time ago (in your terms), yet you are the first traveler. You wish to visit other
universes of probability, yet you make it impossible for anyone to find you, let alone visit you.
"Why is that?"
"Aggressive and bellicose persons," said Janet with care, "always assume that unaggressive and pacific persons cannot protect themselves.
"Why is that?"
VI
Over trays of pre-cooked steak and chicken that would've disgraced an airline (that's where they came from, I found out later) Jael sat next to Jeannine and glued herself to Jeannine's ear, glancing round at the rest of us from time to time to see how we were taking it. Her eyes sparkled with the gaiety of corruption, the Devil in the fable tempting the young girl. Whisper, whisper, whisper. All I could hear were the sibilants, when her tongue came between her teeth. Jeannine stared soberly ahead and didn't eat much, the color leaving her little by little. Jael didn't eat at all. Like a vampire she fed on Jeannine's ear. Later she drank a sort of super-bouillon which nobody else could stand and talked a lot to all of us about the war. Finally, Janet said bluntly:
"What war?"
"Does it matter?" said Miss Reasoner ironically, raising her silver eyebrows. "This war, that war, isn't there always one?"
"No," said Janet.
"Well, hell," said Jael more genuinely, "the war. If there isn't one, there just was one, and if there wasn't one, there soon will be one. Eh? The war between Us and Them. We're playing it rather cool just now because it's hard to work up an enthusiasm for something forty years old."
I said, "Us and Them?"
"I'll tell you," said Sweet Alice, making a face. "After the plague-don't worry; everything you eat is stuffed with anti-toxins and we'll decontaminate you before you gobesides, this all ended more than seventy years agoafter the bacteriological weapons were cleaned out of the biosphere (insofar as that was possible) and half the population buried (the dead half, I hope) people became rather conservative. They tend to do that, you know. Then after a while you get the reaction against the conservatism, I mean the radicalism. And after that the reaction against the radicalism. People had already begun gathering in like-minded communities before the war: Traditionalists, Neo-Feudalists, Patriarchalists, Matriarchalists, Separatists (all of us now), Fecundists, Sterilists, and what-have-you. They seemed to be happier that way. The War Between the Nations had really been a rather nice war, as wars go; it wiped the have-not nations off the face of the earth and made their resources available to us without the bother of their populations; all our machinery was left standing; we were getting wealthier and wealthier. So if you were not one of the fifty percent who had died, you were having a pretty good time of it. There was increasing separatism, increasing irritability, increasing radicalism; then came the Polarization; then came the Split. The middle drops out and you're left with the two ends, hein? So when people began shopping for a new war, which they also seem to do, don't they, there was only one war left. The only war that makes any sense if you except the relations between children and adults, which you must do because children grow up. But in the other war the Haves never stop being Haves and the Have-nots never stop being Have-nots. It's cooled off now, unfortunately, but no wonder; it's been going on for forty yearsa stalemate, if you'll forgive the pun. But in my opinion, questions that are based on something real ought to be settled by something real without all this damned lazy miserable drifting. I'm a fanatic. I want to see this thing settled. I want to see it over and done with. Gone. Dead.
"Oh, don't worry!" she added. "Nothing spectacular is going to happen. All I will do in three days or so is ask you about the tourist trade in your lovely homes. What's wrong with that? Simple, eh?
"But it will get things moving. The long war will start up again. We will be in the middle of it and I who have always been in the middle of itwill get some decent support from my people at last."
"Who?" said Jeannine crossly. "Who, who, for Heaven's sake! Who's Us, who's Them? Do you expect us to find out by telepathy!"
"I beg your pardon," said Alice Reasoner softly. "I thought you knew. I had no intention of puzzling you. You are my guests. When I say Them and Us I mean of course the Haves and the Have-nots, the two sides, there are always two sides, aren't there?
"I mean the men and the women."
Later I caught Jeannine by the door as we were all leaving; "What did she talk to you about?" I said. Something had gotten into Jeannine's clear, suffering gaze; something had muddied her timidity. What can render Miss Dadier self-possessed? What can make her so quietly stubborn? Jeannine said:
"She asked me if I had ever killed anybody."
VII
She took us topside in the branch elevator: The Young One, The Weak One, The Strong One, as she called us in her own mind. I'm the author and I know. Miss Sweden (she also called Janet this) ran her hands over the paneling and studied the controls while the other two gaped. Think of me in my usual portable form. Their underground cities are mazes of corridors like sunken hotels; we passed doors, barricades, store windows, branch corridors leading to arcades. What is this passion for living underground? At one barrier they put us in purdah, that is, some kind of asbestos-like fireman's suit that protects you against other people's germs and them against yours. But this time it was a fake, meant only to hide us. "Can't have them looking at you," said Jael. She went apart with the border guard and there was some low-voiced, aggressive byplay, some snarling and lifting of hackles which a third party resolved by a kind of rough joking. I didn't hear a word of it. She told us honestly that we couldn't be expected to believe anything we hadn't seen with our own eyes. There would be no films, no demonstrations, no statistics, unless we asked for them. We trundled out of the elevator into an armored car waiting in a barn, and across an unpaved, shell-pocked plain, a sort of no-man's-land, in the middle of the night. Is the grass growing? Is that a virus blight? Are the mutated strains taking over ? Nothing but gravel, boulders, space, and stars. Jael flashed her pass at a second set of guards and told them about us, jerking her thumb backwards at the three of us: unclean, unclean, unclean. No barriers, no barbed wire, no searchlights; only the women have these. Only the men make a sport of people-hunting across the desert. Bulkier than three pregnancies, we followed our creatrix into another car, from out that first one, through the rubble and ruin at the edges of an old city, left standing just as it had been during the plague. Teachers come out here on Sundays, with their classes. It looks as if it's been used for target practice, with holes in everything and new scars, like mortar scars, on the rubble. "It has," says Jael Reasoner. Each of us wears a luminous, shocking-pink cross on chest and back to show how deadly we are. So the Manlanders (who all carry guns) won't take pot-shots at us. There are lights in the distancedon't think I know any of this by hearsay; I'm the spirit of the author and know all things. I'll know it when we begin to pass the lit-up barracks at the edge of the city, when we see in the distance the homes of the very rich shining from the seven hilltops on which the city is built; I'll know it when we go through a tunnel of rubble, built fashionably to resemble a World War I trench, and emerge neither into a public nursery (they're either much further inside the city proper or out in the country) nor into a brothel, but into a recreation center called The Trench or The Prick or The Crotch or The Knife. I haven't decided on a name yet. The Manlanders keep their children with them only when they're very richbut what posit I? Manlanders have no children. Manlanders buy infants from the Womanlanders and bring them up in batches, save for the rich few who can order children made from their very own semen: keep them in city nurseries until they're five, then out into the country training ground, with the gasping little misfits buried in baby cemeteries along the way. There, in ascetic and healthful settlements in the country, little boys are made into Menthough some don't quite make it; sex-change surgery begins at sixteen. One out of seven fails early and makes the full change; one out of seven fails later and (refusing surgery) makes only half a change: artists, illusionists, impressionists of femininity who keep their genita
lia but who grow slim, grow languid, grow emotional and feminine, all this the effect of spirit only. Five out of seven Manlanders make it; these are "real-men." The others are "the changed" or "the half-changed." All real-men like the changed; some real-men like the half-changed; none of the real-men like real-men, for that would be abnormal. Nobody asks the changed or half-changed what they like. Jael flashed her civil pass at the uniformed real-man at the entrance to The Crotch and we trundled after. Our hands and feet look very small to me, our bodies odd and dumpy.
We went inside; "Jael!" I exclaimed, "there are"
"Look again," she said.
Look at the necks, look at the wrists and ankles, penetrate the veils of false hair and false eyelashes to measure the relative size of eyes and bone structure. The half-changed starve themselves to be slim, but look at their calves and the straightness of their arms and knees. If most of the fully changed live in harims and whore-homes, and if popular slang is beginning to call them "cunts," what does this leave for us? What can we be called?
"The enemy," said Jael. "Sit here." We sat around a large table in the corner where the light was dim, snuggling up to the fake oak paneling. One of the guards, who had followed us inside, came up to Jael and put one giant arm round her, one huge paw crushing her bearishly to his side, his crimson epaulets, his gold boots, his shaved head, his sky-blue codpiece, his diamond-chequered-costumed attempt to beat up the whole world, to shove his prick up the world's ass. She looked so plain next to him. She was all swallowed up.
"Hey, hey," he said. "So you're back again!"
"Well, sure, why not?" (she said) "I have to meet someone. I have some business to do."
"Business!" he said fetchingly. "Don't you want some of the real thing? Come on, fuck business!"