The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin

by Lisa Yaszek

  Time passed. Miller though Quilk was paying him poorly, was saving money. Quilk let him sleep in the ticket office—he took the box-office receipts home with him at night, of course—and Miller’s expenditure for food was almost nothing. It was not that he was starving himself—in fact, he was gaining weight. But food did not much interest him. He began to think dreamily of buying a new spaceman’s outfit and going back to the employment agencies. Presentable and prosperous-looking, he was sure he could ship out into space again. Then the green plague broke out in Port Pendraith.

  Quilk was terrified. He talked of closing up the Royal Glory, and for a day Miller’s future hung in the balance. Then the two strongest traits in Quilk’s personality reasserted themselves.

  “The show must go on,” he said solemnly to his employee. “In a time of crisis such as this, personages have a particular need for the solace of art. The show must go on! Don’t you agree, Miller?”

  “Sure,” Miller answered. Quilk, as always, amused him. He was trying to smile.

  “And besides, I am in no danger,” Quilk continued, a little hastily. “Personally, I mean. It is not as if I were an ignorant, undernourished Pendraithian, with no awareness of the basic laws of health. With my new diet. . . . Yes, the show must go on!”

  “You bet!” Miller agreed. This time, he did smile. Quilk looked at him a little suspiciously.

  “Of course, we will take elementary prophylactic measures. You can wear my blaster. When you take the tickets, Miller, I want you to look in their mouths.”

  “H’um?” Miller said.

  “Yes, in their mouths. It is well known that the first signs of the plague appear there. If there are spots, they are not to enter. Perhaps in their ears also. I have heard that sometimes it appears in the ears.”

  Quilk was shivering. Miller, though he never could take him seriously, was sorry for him. “O.K. I’ll look in their mouths and ears.”

  Miller made his inspections conscientiously. He turned away two or three of the infected daily. He was not at all afraid of the plague himself, though terrestrials did contract it, for he had never felt more fit in his life.

  Surprisingly, business at the Royal Glory was good. Perhaps Quilk had been right, and personages at a time of crisis did need the solace of art. Quilk, counting his receipts at night and shivering, could congratulate himself.

  The port health authorities, meantime, were not idle. Disease is no respecter of status. What begins in the slums of a city may end by menacing government hill. They laid down a cordon sanitaire around the infected areas. For a while, as the plague grew more severe, the cordon tightened. Then it began to relax. In the fourth week the city was officially declared free of plague.

  “We came through that rather nicely, I think,” Quilk said. It was after theatre hours, and he was putting the night’s take in a metal mesh satchel. “Tomorrow I will get out some new posters—‘The only Vid House that stayed open all during the plague! The Royal Glory is first, as always—first in service, first in programs, first in artistic pleasure for you!’” He nodded. He picked up his blaster from the desk and strapped it around his waist.

  “Sounds good,” Miller said, in lazy agreement. He yawned and stretched. The light fell full in his open mouth.

  Quilk looked at him. His jaw dropped. Miller saw, without understanding it, that he had turned pale. Quilk said, in a wobbling voice, “It isn’t possible. They said there were no new cases.” He began to back away, one hand on his blaster, the other on the metal valise.

  “What are you talking about?” Miller asked irritably.

  “Your throat. There are plague spots, the green plague spots, in your throat.”

  “No, there aren’t. You’re crazy. I’m not sick.”

  “I saw the spots myself,” Quilk answered. He was trembling all over. “Keep away from me. After all my precautions! Get out!”

  Miller couldn’t understand the situation. After a minute he asked, “You mean I’m fired?”

  “If you like. Anything. Only get out.”

  “You owe me four days’ wages.”

  “Take it, then.” Quilk opened the valise, took out a handful of coins, and threw it at him. “Get out.”

  Miller turned an angry red. “Don’t talk to me like that, sticky. What in hell is the matter with you?” He advanced a step.

  Quilk drew the blaster. “Don’t come near me! I’m warning you!”

  “I tell you, I haven’t got the plague,” Miller answered. He was trying to be reasonable. “You’re too excitable.” Once more Quilk saw the plague spots in his throat.

  “Stay away! Stay away!” The blaster described a wobbling circle in Quilk’s hand.

  Miller bit his lip. Even at this moment the contemptuous amusement Quilk inspired in him kept him from taking the Pendraithian seriously. He picked up the coins from the floor and counted them. “You’re a day and a half short, sticky,” he said, looking at Quilk. “Pay me.” He walked toward him, holding out his hand.

  “No! Don’t! I—” Quilk shuddered. He couldn’t get any farther away from Miller because he was already against the wall of the box-office. He moaned. Then he closed his eyes and fired.

  It was all a mistake, of course. Miller never did have the plague. But he was just as dead, after Quilk blasted him, as if he had.

  The organisms that had colonized the crew of the Ara died with them, naturally. They were able to survive for considerably longer than the men, but the knife wound and the blaster charges disrupted their nicely balanced economy beyond repair.

  What they had done, as they grew on the men’s mucous membranes and in their body cavities, was to convert Norton and Evans and Miller into Wardian cases, terrariums—units in which chlorophyll and radiant energy (it did not have to be sunlight) cooperated to turn the carbon dioxide of katabolism into oxygen, complex starches, and growth. After the economy was well established, its hosts, had they known it, were potentially immortal. They could have gone for years without needing to eat or breathe. But the plants in a Wardian case die when the case is broken. And the tenants of Norton and Evans and Miller, for all their complex mental organization, were basically plants.

  They were not in the least resigned to dying, however. For hours they fought against it, screaming to each other, imploring, cursing, praying not to die. In the end, Evans and Miller and Norton had this in common, that each of them kept on talking for a long time after he was dead.

  1951

  ZENNA HENDERSON

  Ararat

  WE’VE had trouble with teachers in Cougar Canyon. It’s just an Accommodation school anyway, isolated and so unhandy to anything. There’s really nothing to hold a teacher. But the way The People bring forth their young, in quantities and with regularity, even our small Group can usually muster the nine necessary for the County School Superintendent to arrange for the schooling for the year.

  Of course I’m past school age, Canyon school age, and have been for years, but if the tally came up one short in the Fall, I’d go back for a post-graduate course again. But now I’m working on a college level because Father finished me off for my high school diploma two summers ago. He’s promised me that if I do well this year I’ll get to go Outside next year and get my training and degree so I can be the teacher and we won’t have to go Outside for one any more. Most of the kids would just as soon skip school as not, but the Old Ones don’t hold with ignorance and the Old Ones have the last say around here.

  Father is the head of the school board. That’s how I get in on lots of school things the other kids don’t. This summer when he wrote to the County Seat that we’d have more than our nine again this fall and would they find a teacher for us, he got back a letter saying they had exhausted their supply of teachers who hadn’t heard of Cougar Canyon and we’d have to dig up our own teacher this year. That “dig up” sounded like a dirty crack to me since w
e have the graves of four past teachers in the far corner of our cemetery. They sent us such old teachers, the homeless, the tottering, who were trying to piece out the end of their lives with a year here and a year there in jobs no one else wanted because there’s no adequate pension system in the state and most teachers seem to die in harness. And their oldness and their tottering were not sufficient in the Canyon where there are apt to be shocks for Outsiders—unintentional as most of them are.

  We haven’t done so badly the last few years, though. The Old Ones say we’re getting adjusted—though some of the non-conformists say that The Crossing thinned our blood. It might be either or both or the teachers are just getting tougher. The last two managed to last until just before the year ended. Father took them in as far as Kerry Canyon and ambulances took them on in. But they were all right after a while in the sanatorium and they’re doing okay now. Before them, though, we usually had four teachers a year.

  Anyway, Father wrote to a Teachers Agency on the coast and after several letters each way, he finally found a teacher.

  He told us about it at the supper table.

  “She’s rather young,” he said, reaching for a toothpick and tipping his chair back on its hind legs.

  Mother gave Jethro another helping of pie and picked up her own fork again. “Youth is no crime,” she said, “and it’ll be a pleasant change for the children.”

  “Yes, though it seems a shame.” Father prodded at a back tooth and Mother frowned at him. I wasn’t sure if it was for picking his teeth or for what he said. I knew he meant it seemed a shame to get a place like Cougar Canyon so early in a career. It isn’t that we’re mean or cruel, you understand. It’s only that they’re Outsiders and we sometimes forget—especially the kids.

  “She doesn’t have to come,” said Mother. “She could say no.”

  “Well, now—” Father tipped his chair forward. “Jethro, no more pie. You go on out and help ’Kiah bring in the wood. Karen, you and Lizbeth get started on the dishes. Hop to it, kids.”

  And we hopped, too. Kids do to fathers in the Canyon, though I understand they don’t always Outside. It annoyed me because I knew Father wanted us out of the way so he could talk adult talk to Mother, so I told Lizbeth I’d clear the table and then worked as slowly as I could, and as quietly, listening hard.

  “She couldn’t get any other job,” said Father. “The agency told me they had placed her twice in the last two years and she didn’t finish the year either place.”

  “Well,” said Mother, pinching in her mouth and frowning. “If she’s that bad, why on earth did you hire her for the Canyon?”

  “We have a choice?” laughed Father. Then he sobered. “No, it wasn’t for incompetency. She was a good teacher. The way she tells it, they just fired her out of a clear sky. She asked for recommendations and one place wrote, ‘Miss Carmody is a very competent teacher but we dare not recommend her for a teaching position.’”

  “‘Dare not’?” asked Mother.

  “‘Dare not,’” said Father. “The Agency assured me that they had investigated thoroughly and couldn’t find any valid reasons for the dismissals, but she can’t seem to find another job anywhere on the coast. She wrote me that she wanted to try another state.”

  “Do you suppose she’s disfigured or deformed?” suggested Mother.

  “Not from the neck up!” laughed Father. He took an envelope from his pocket. “Here’s her application picture.”

  By this time I’d got the table cleared and I leaned over Father’s shoulder.

  “Gee!” I said. Father looked back at me, raising one eyebrow. I knew then that he had known all along that I was listening.

  I flushed but stood my ground, knowing I was being granted admission to adult affairs, if only by the back door.

  The girl in the picture was lovely. She couldn’t have been many years older than I and she was twice as pretty. She had short dark hair curled all over her head and apparently that poreless creamy skin that seems to have an inner light of itself. She had a tentative look about her as though her dark eyebrows were horizontal question marks. There was a droop to the corners of her mouth—not much, just enough to make you wonder why . . . and want to comfort her.

  “She’ll stir the Canyon for sure,” said Father.

  “I don’t know,” Mother frowned thoughtfully. “What will the Old Ones say to a marriageable Outsider in the Canyon?”

  “Adonday Veeah!” muttered Father. “That never occurred to me. None of our other teachers were ever of an age to worry about.”

  “What would happen?” I asked. “I mean if one of The Group married an Outsider?”

  “Impossible,” said Father, so like the Old Ones that I could see why his name was approved in Meeting last Spring.

  “Why, there’s even our Jemmy,” worried Mother. “Already he’s saying he’ll have to start trying to find another Group. None of the girls here please him. Supposing this Outsider—how old is she?”

  Father unfolded the application. “Twenty-three,” he said, “Just three years out of college.”

  “Jemmy’s twenty-four,” said Mother, pinching her mouth together. “Father, I’m afraid you’ll have to cancel the contract. If anything happened— Well, you waited over-long to become an Old One to my way of thinking and it’d be a shame to have something go wrong your first year.”

  “I can’t cancel the contract. She’s on her way here. School starts next Monday.” Father ruffled his hair forward as he does when he’s disturbed. “We’re probably making a something of a nothing,” he said hopefully.

  “Well I only hope we don’t have any trouble with this Outsider.”

  “Or she with us,” grinned Father. “Where are my cigarettes?”

  “On the book case,” said Mother, getting up and folding the table cloth together to hold the crumbs.

  Father snapped his fingers and the cigarettes drifted in from the front room.

  Mother went on out to the kitchen. The table cloth shook itself over the waste basket and then followed her.

  Father drove to Kerry Canyon Sunday night to pick up our new teacher. She was supposed to have arrived Saturday afternoon, but she didn’t make bus connections at the County Seat. The road ends at Kerry Canyon. I mean for Outsiders. There’s not much of the look of a well-traveled road very far out our way from Kerry Canyon, which is just as well. Tourists leave us alone. Of course we don’t have much trouble getting our cars to and fro but that’s why everything dead-ends at Kerry Canyon and we have to do all our own fetching and carrying—I mean the road being in the condition it is.

  All the kids at our house wanted to stay up to see the new teacher, so Mother let them; but by 7:30 the youngest ones began to drop off and by 9 there was only Jethro and ’Kiah, Lizbeth and Jemmy and me. Father should have been home long before and Mother was restless and uneasy. I knew if he didn’t arrive soon, she would head for her room and the cedar box under the bed. But at 9:15 we heard the car coughing and sneezing up the draw. Mother’s wide relieved smile was reflected on all our faces.

  “Of course!” she cried. “I forgot. He has an Outsider in the car. He had to use the road and it’s terrible across Jackass Flat.”

  I felt Miss Carmody before she came in the door. I was tingling all over from anticipation already, but all at once I felt her, so plainly that I knew with a feeling of fear and pride that I was of my Grandmother, that soon I would be bearing the burden and blessing of her Gift: the Gift that develops into free access to any mind—one of The People or Outsider—willing or not. And besides the access, the ability to counsel and help, to straighten tangled minds and snarled emotions.

  And then Miss Carmody stood in the doorway, blinking a little against the light, muffled to the chin against the brisk fall air. A bright scarf hid her hair but her skin was that luminous matte-cream it had looked. She was smiling a little, but sca
red, too. I shut my eyes and . . . I went in—just like that. It was the first time I had ever sorted anybody. She was all fluttery with tiredness and strangeness and there was a question deep inside her that had the wornness of repetition, but I couldn’t catch what it was. And under the uncertainty there was a sweetness and dearness and such a bewildered sorrow that I felt my eyes dampen. Then I looked at her again (sorting takes such a little time) as Father introduced her. I heard a gasp beside me and suddenly I went into Jemmy’s mind with a stunning rush.

  Jemmy and I have been close all our lives and we don’t always need words to talk with one another, but this was the first time I had ever gone in like this and I knew he didn’t know what had happened. I felt embarrassed and ashamed to know his emotion so starkly. I closed him out as quickly as possible, but not before I knew that now Jemmy would never hunt for another Group; Old Ones or no Old Ones, he had found his love.

  All this took less time than it takes to say “How do you do?” and shake hands. Mother descended with cries and drew Miss Carmody and Father out to the kitchen for coffee and Jemmy swatted Jethro and made him carry the luggage instead of snapping it to Miss Carmody’s room. After all, we didn’t want to lose our teacher before she even saw the school house.

  I waited until everyone was bedded down. Miss Carmody in her cold, cold bed, the rest of us of course with our sheets set for warmth—how I pity Outsiders! Then I went to Mother.

  She met me in the dark hall and we clung together as she comforted me.

  “Oh Mother,” I whispered. “I sorted Miss Carmody tonight. I’m afraid.”

  Mother held me tight again. “I wondered,” she said. “It’s a great responsibility. You have to be so wise and clear-thinking. Your Grandmother carried the Gift with graciousness and honor. You are of her. You can do it.”

  “But Mother! To be an Old One!”