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

by Lisa Yaszek

  When the hollow way did open, Payne was working late in his office, his mood exhilarated contentment. As he leaned back, still analyzing a photograph of particles in a bubble chamber, Lee was so close she could have been on the other side of the wall—only there was no wall. Payne was conscious of a dark rim bounding what he saw, making Lee’s universe somehow beyond all reaching, though right at hand. She, eager as a child holding a wrapped present, studied a photograph too; he tried to see of what. All he got was a feeling of something slightly, and in no expected way, unfamiliar. But he found it hard, even craning his neck, to look. It was far more interesting to study Lee’s intent face. He told himself she ought not to go at things so hard. After all, during these rare glimpses, she might be interested in him.

  Payne had never been a vain man, but now he tried to see the figure he would cut before her. He wanted her to look, a wanting so desperate he was sure it would get through to her. While he sat rigid, she lifted her head, turning in his direction. She knitted her brows impatiently, a little as though he were a pet animal demanding attention. Then she smoothed her forehead with an unconscious gesture, smiled, and bent over the photograph again.

  He could find some way to get to her, he told himself, some way that would not make her vanish, some way that would put them in actual communication. He had his chance now. It might never come again.

  He influenced her a little, obviously. But making her look in his direction got him nowhere. Well, since she was now absorbed in physics on something like his level, he would reach her through their shared curiosity.

  Payne took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote some equations he had found of real interest. Though no complete formulation of his theories on anti-matter and on fields that could affect it, they were still suggestive.

  Briefly, he hesitated. If his mathematics were beyond her hopelessly, she might be discouraged. After all, he did not know how far her studies had taken her. His fingers reached for the edge of the paper, to tear it up.

  But, he reflected, his figures would be a good reaction test. He held the formulae up in front of him. Once more he willed Lee to be attentive.

  Her resistance became almost tangible. Payne concentrated against her concentration. Again she frowned, and he concentrated harder. After all, he was sure she was interested and he had something breathtakingly new to show. Briefly he felt a pride in his work that almost made him forget her.

  She stopped frowning and turned toward him. He raised the sheet of figures. He saw her read what he had written.

  Her glowing, vibrant expression dimmed to weariness. Quickly, while she watched, he wrote out something simpler, and waited for a flash of recognising delight. But Lee looked away from the figures straight into his face. Payne could not fathom her expression.

  Then with a shock of joy he felt Lee reach out for his attention. Something in their minds seemed to interlock. All the while Lee went about some business of her own. He saw her tack a large piece of paper to the wall, select a crayon and begin to draw.

  What grew under her hand was an arabesque in depth, a figure beyond the calculus of matrices. Correspondences and symmetries were clear as in the work of a great mathematician. Yet music could not have been more moving. She glanced at him as she added the last touch.

  Payne stared. He began to understand. The Atom! Still staring, he saw what she must intend to represent the proton. Wrong, for the rest of the arrangement! Of course, it would be. Trust Lee to be confused. Its cross section was twice—

  Payne drew in his breath with a gasp. There was no confusion except his own. Suddenly it came clear. Lee’s atom was not matter, but anti-matter.

  He felt a little dizzy, and though he was sitting down, he grasped the edge of the desk. Anti-matter, so like, so nearly the same as matter! Anti-matter, his own field of study! He knew with absolute certainty, their minds still interlocking, that he stared at some small part of a universe which almost but not quite duplicated his own in reverse.

  He remembered his brief impression of a nebula when he stood in his garden. But he found himself saying an author’s name, “Lee. Lee Payne.” So this Lee had been married. His whole body shook with jealousy. She was his Lee. They had a unique relationship wherever, whatever, she was.

  Impressions surged through him, growing clearer. No, she was not his Lee. He was suddenly sure of that. She was what his wife had brought him across uncounted parsecs. Lee’s epocation must have been incredibly strong to linger like a vibration beyond her own death. Why? Why? Was this new Lee a last scarcely believable gift to him?

  But while Payne questioned he no longer felt the contact of mind with mind. Instead he met resistance ten times stronger than before. He heard himself shouting and realized that in Lee’s anti-world the silence was unruffled. He saw her speaking to him. Yet he heard nothing. The two worlds were as still, each to each, as stars to some gazer with his eyes at an instrument.

  But if this Lee were speaking, there was some way to understand. There must be.

  It came in one flash that if he formed the words with his lips, Lee could talk to him, speaking with his very voice. He studied her face.

  He copied.

  “Darling,” his own mouth formed the word for her. She watched him and spoke again, very slowly.

  He echoed aloud, “Darling, you bore m—”

  Payne never finished. He felt a bitter humiliated impulse to lash out. Only there was no way. Lee turned her back and walked out of sight.

  He thought of all the ways in which a physicist might destroy himself. It could look like an accident. A freak accident. Grimly he resolved that he would never do that for any woman in any universe. Suicide—never! He could, he would be happy in spite of everything. Savagely, he resolved that tomorrow he would spend the whole day bedding the garden down for the winter.

  1961

  ALICE GLASER

  The Tunnel Ahead

  THE floor of the Topolino was full of sand. There was sand in Tom’s undershorts, too, and damp sand rubbing between his toes. Damn it, he thought, here they build you six-lane highways right on down to the ocean, a giant three-hundred car turntable to keep traffic moving over the beach, efficiency and organization and mechanization and cooperation and what does it get you? Sand. And inside the car, in spite of the air-conditioning, the sour smell of sun-dried salt water.

  Tom’s muscles ached with their familiar cramp. He ran his hands uselessly around the steering wheel, wishing he had something to do, or that there were room to stretch in the tiny car, then felt instantly ashamed of his antisocial wish. Naturally there was nothing for him to do because the drive, as on all highways, was set at “Automatic.” That was the law. And although he had to sit hunched over so that his knees were drawn nearly to his chin, and the roof of the car pressed down on the back of his neck like the lid of a box, and his four kids crammed into the rear seat seemed to be breathing down his shirt collar—well, that was something you simply had to adjust to, and besides, the Topolino had all the five-foot wheelbase the law allowed. So there was nothing to complain about.

  Besides, it hadn’t been a bad day, all things considered. Five hours to cover the forty miles out to the beach, then of course a couple of hours waiting in line at the beach for their turn in the water. The trip home was taking a little longer: it always did. The Tunnel, too, was unpredictable. Say ten o’clock, for getting home. Pretty good time. As good a way as any of killing a leisureday, he guessed. Sometimes there seemed to be an awful lot of leisuretime to kill.

  Jeannie, in the seat beside him, was staring through the windshield. Her hair, almost as fair as the kids’, was pulled back into pigtails, and although she was pregnant again she didn’t look very much older than she had ten years before. But she had stopped knitting, and her mind was on the Tunnel. He could always tell.

  “Ouch!” Something slammed into the back of Tom’s neck and he ducked forwa
rd, banging his forehead on the windshield.

  “Hey!” He half-turned and clutched at the spade that four-year-old Pattie was waving.

  “I swimmed,” she announced, blue eyes round. “I swimmed good and I din’t hit nobody.”

  “Anybody,” Tom corrected. He confiscated the spade, thinking tiredly that “swim” these days meant “tread water,” all there was room to do in the crowded bathing-area.

  Jeannie had turned too, and was glowing at her daughter, but Tom shook his head.

  “Over and out,” he said briefly. He knew a car ride was an extra strain on kids, and lord knew he saw them seldom enough, what with their school-shifts and play-shifts and his own job-shift. But his brood was going to be properly brought up. See a sign of extroversion, squelch it at the beginning, that was his theory. Save them a lot of pain later on.

  Jeannie leaned forward and pressed a dashboard button. The tranquillizer drawer slid open; Jeannie selected a pink one, but by the time she had turned around Pattie had subsided with her hands folded patiently in her lap and her eyes fixed on the rear seat TV screen. Jeannie sighed and slipped the pill into Pattie’s half-open mouth anyway.

  The other three hadn’t spoken for hours which, of course, was as it should be. Jeannie had fed them a purposely heavy lunch in the car, steakopop and a hot, steaming bowl of rehydrated algaesoup from the thermos, and they had each had an extra dose of tranquillizers for the trip. Six-year-old David, who was having a particularly hard time learning to introvert, was watching the TV screen and breathing hard. David, his firstborn son, born in the supermarket delivery booth in the year twenty-one hundred on the third of April at 8:32 in the morning. The year the population of the United States hit the billion mark. And the fifth child to arrive in that booth that morning. But his own son. The tow-headed twins, Susan and Pattie, sat upright and watched the screen with expressions of great seriousness on their faces, and the baby, two-year-old Betsy, had her fat legs stuck straight out in front of her and was obviously going to be asleep in minutes.

  The car crawled forward at its allotted ten mph, just one in a ribbon of identical bright bubble cars, like candy buttons, that stretched along the New Pulaski Skyway under a setting sun. The distance between them, strictly rationed by Autodrive, never changed.

  Tom felt the dull ache of tension settled behind his eyes. All of his muscles were protesting now with individual stabs of cramp. He glanced apologetically at Jeannie, who disliked sports, and switched on the dashboard TV. Third game in the World Series, and the game had already begun. Malenkovsky on red. Malenkovsky moved a checker and sat back. The cameras moved to Saito, on black. It was going to be a good game. Faster than most.

  They were less than a mile from the Tunnel when the line of cars came to a halt. Tom said nothing for a minute. It might just be an accident, or even somebody, driving illegally on Manual, out of line. Another minute passed. Jeannie’s hands were tense on the yellow blanket she was knitting.

  It was a definite halt. Jeannie regarded the motionless lines of cars, frowning a little.

  “I’m glad it’s happening now. That gives us a better chance of getting through, doesn’t it?”

  Her question was rhetorical, and Tom felt his usual stir of irritation. Jeannie was an intelligent girl; he couldn’t have loved her so much otherwise. But explaining the laws of chance to her was hopeless. The Tunnel averaged ten closings a week. All ten could happen within seconds of each other, or on the hour, or not at all on a given day. That was how things were. The closing now affected their own chance of getting through not one iota.

  Jeannie said, thoughtfully, “We’ll be caught sometime, Tom.”

  He shrugged without answering. Whatever might happen in the future, they were obviously going to be held up for a good half hour now.

  David was wriggling a little, his face apologetic.

  “Can I get out, Daddy, if the Tunnel’s closed? I ache.”

  Tom bit his lip. He could sympathize as well as anyone, remembering the cramped misery of the years when his own body was growing and all he wanted to do was run fast, just run headlong, anyplace. Kids. Extros, all of them. Maybe you could get away with that kind of wildness back in the Twentieth century, when there were no crowds and plenty of space, but not these days. David was just going to have to learn to sit still like everybody else.

  David had begun to flex his muscles rhythmically. Passive exercise, it was called, one of the new pseudo-sports that took up no room, and it was very scientifically taught in the play-shifts. Tom eyed his son enviously. Great to be in condition like that. No need to wait in line to get your ration of gym time when you could depend on yourself like that.

  “Dad, no kidding, now I gotta go.” David wriggled in his seat again. Well, that sounded valid. Tom looked through the windshield. The thousands of cars in sight were still motionless, so he swung the door open. Luckily there was a chemjohn a few yards away, and only a short line in front of it. David slid quickly out of the car. Tom watched him start to stretch his arms over his head, released from the low roof, then sheepishly remember decent behavior and tighten into the approved intro-walk. “He’s getting tall,” Tom thought, with a sudden accession of hopelessness. He had been praying that David would inherit Jeannie’s height instead of his own six feet. The more area you took up the harder everything was, and it was getting worse: Tom had noticed that, already, people would sometimes stare resentfully at him in the street.

  There was an Italian family in the bright blue Topolino behind his own; they too had a car full of children. Two of the boys, seeing David in front of the chemjohn, burst out and dashed into the line behind him. The father was grinning; Tom caught his eye and looked away. He remembered seeing them pass a large bottle of expensive reclaimed-water around the car, the whole family guzzling it as though water grew on trees. Extros, that whole family. Almost criminal, the way people like that were allowed to run loose and increase the discomfort of everyone else. Now the father had left the car too. He had curly black hair; he was very plump. When he saw Tom watching him he grinned broadly, waved towards the Tunnel and lifted his shoulders with a kind of humorous resignation.

  Tom drummed on the wheel. The extros were lucky. You’d never catch them worrying unduly about the Tunnel. They had to get the kids out of the city, once in a while, like everybody else; the Tunnel was the only way in and out, so they shrugged and took it. Besides, there were so many rules and regulations now that it was hard to question them any more. You can’t fight City Hall. The extros would neither dread the trip, the way Jeannie did, nor . . . Tom’s fingers were rigid on the wheel. He clamped down, hard, on the thought in his mind. He had been about to say, needed it, the way he did.

  David emerged from the chemjohn and slid back into his seat. The cars had just begun to move; in a moment they had resumed their crawl.

  On the left of the Skyway they were coming to the development that was already called, facetiously, “Beer Can Mountain.” So far there was nothing there except the mountainous stacks of shiny bricks, the metal bricks that had once been tin cans, and would soon be constructed into another badly needed housing development. Probably with even lower ceilings and thinner walls. Tom winced, involuntarily. Even at home, in a much older residential section, the ceilings were so low that he could never stand up without bending his head. Individual area-space was being cut down and cut down, all the time.

  On the flatlands, to the right of the Skyway, stretched mile after garish mile of apartment buildings, interspersed with gasoline stations and parking lots. And beyond these flatlands were the suburbs of Long Island, cement-floored and stacked with gay-colored skyscrapers.

  Here, as they approached the city, the air was raucous with the noise of transistor radios and TV sets. Privacy and quiet had disappeared everywhere, of course, but this was a lower-class unit and so noisy that the blare penetrated even the closed windows of the car. The imme
nse apartment buildings, cement block and neon-lit, came almost to the edge of the Skyway, with ramps between them at all levels. The ramps, originally built for cars, were swarming now with people returning from their routine job-shifts or from marketing, or just carrying on the interminable business of leisuretime. They looked pretty apathetic, Tom thought. You couldn’t blame them. There was so much security that none of the work anybody did was really necessary, and they knew it. Their jobs were probably even more monotonous and futile than his own. All he did, on his own job-shift, was verify figures in a ledger, then copy them into another ledger. Time-killing, like everything else. These people looked as though they didn’t care, one way or the other.

  But as he watched there was a quick scuffle in the crowd, a sudden, brief outbreak of violence. One man’s shoe had scraped the heel of the woman ahead of him; she turned and swung her shopping bag, scraping a bloody gash down his cheek. He slammed his fist at her stomach. She kicked. A man behind them rammed his way past, his face contorted. The pair separated, both muttering. Around them other knots of people were beginning to mutter. The irritation was spreading, as it seemed to do from time to time, as though nobody wanted anything so much as the chance to strike out.

  Jeannie had seen the explosion too. She gasped and turned away from the window, looking quickly back at the children, who were all asleep now. Tom pulled one of her pigtails, gently.

  The skyline loomed ahead of them, one vast unified glass-walled cube of Manhattan. Light rays shot from it into the sunset; the spots of foliage that were the carefully planned block gardens, one at each level of the ninety-eight floors of the Unit, glowed dark green. Tom, as he always did, blessed the foresight that had put them there. Each one of his children had been allotted his or her weekly hour on the grass and a chance to play near the tree. There was even a zoo on each level, not the kind of elaborate one they had in Washington and London and Moscow, of course, but at least it had a cat and a dog and a really large tank of goldfish. When you came down to it, luxuries like that almost made up for the crowds and the noise and tiny rooms and feeling that there was never quite enough air to breathe.