Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  "What America used to be," Jefferson says with a distant look in his eyes.

  "So these corporate fascist regimes—China, nearly all of southeast Asia—they'll have some real, close-up competition. A solid, worked-out example of another way to uplift people. An alternative, sitting due north of them. On the mainland, not some idea from 'way over the horizon." Trotsky stops, realizing that he may have gone too far. But what the hell, this is the Revolution.

  Jefferson looks both dreamy and shrewd, an expression Trotsky has never seen before. "So...how do we get Siberia?"

  "See, that's the free market glory of the thing. We buy it."

  ~~~~~

  Emma Goldman fumes as she leaves her yearly evaluation session. On overall effort she got a 98 percentile and a pay raise. But now the company says to shut down the research work she's doing on the contraceptive and join a team doing "more likely market oriented tasks." And she's just finished the prelim field trials!

  She remembers the long hours in the lab, the part of the work she liked best. The nifty ideas that didn't pan out and some that finally did. All that, gone?

  She calls her assistant in and tells him to assemble the task group, twenty-three good people. They're waiting in the conference room when she finally gets her head around what she has to do.

  "I'm sorry to tell you that our program is discontinued, as of Friday," she opens. Gasps. "And I resign."

  Out the door she goes, not looking back.

  ~~~~~

  Franklin brings along Emma Goldman to the dinner with Washington. She's been pretty down lately with the resignation, but tonight she says she's got some venture capital guys behind her at last, and the work can go forward again. She's still mysterious about just what the work is, even though the corporate proprietary rules don't apply.

  He forgets about that because she's rubbing against him at discreet moments, giving him the eyes. All in good taste, though. She's just a very sexy lady. Washington has no woman with him, just this funny guy in a black suit. Emma mistakes his name for Lennon.

  Washington is at his best, holding forth about this guy Lenin's ideas. The main one seems to be "horizons." Lenin thinks they should be expanding human horizons and uplifting the bulk of humanity—all at the same time. "You can't do one without the other," Washington says.

  "Not by bread alone, I know all that," Lenin says. "But you've got to have bread to say that in the first place. Otherwise, you're too busy."

  Franklin is hungry and the bread here is very good. It's a retro-TwenCen restaurant, red meat and martinis, and show business people don't come here.

  Washington nods. "A way to unite humanity, that's what we need."

  Franklin decides to bring up his agenda, since everybody else is. "Do something big, then. Go to Mars."

  They all blink over their appetizers. Emma Goldman is the first to speak. "How's that help people?"'

  "By giving them a focus." Franklin waves his hands. "A huge drama, running three years. Life or death, every day, on prime time."

  It takes them a while to get it. Of course it will cost money. Plenty. "Maybe as much as another carrier group for the U.S. Navy," Lenin says sardonically. "Instead of cruising around the Third World, we can cruise to Mars?"

  Franklin thinks going to Mars with a manned expedition—Emma says, "Womanned, too," and they all laugh—would pull the whole planet together.

  "Why?" Lenin probes.

  "Because they'll go to settle a real, important scientific point," Franklin says. "Did life ever arise there? Does it still hold out, under the dried out surface? We all gain a little stature by answering that."

  There are looks around the table. Somebody mentions social justice and somebody else says Why does it have to be either/or? and Emma smiles at him. Why can't far horizons and up-close justice work together?

  There's plenty of talk, endless talk, and some joking. But unlike all the gossip and tit-for-tat talk he's heard for decades now, this dinner party discussion is about something.

  Franklin can see that Washington is waiting until the people around the restaurant table have ridden their individual hobby horses as far as they will go. When the momentum is spent, Washington says, "Y'know, for years now I've had a restless feeling. I thought I was living in the long plateau of an empire. That there was no place to go. But now...you feel it too, don't you?"

  They did. A woman comes in selling flowers, playing to one of the high-priced mannerisms that makes Lenin curl his lip. But tonight Franklin buys roses for Emma and somehow it's just fine. She beams. Lenin goes along with it without making a fuss. "Gotta keep perspective," he admits.

  Emma reminds them all that if they're going to promote big ideas, they should remember that people have to stay grounded in their own selves, their bodies. If they don't, it will get all abstract and theoretical. Like the TwenCen. "That's how big dreams turn into nightmares," she says.

  "We're practical people," Washington says, "not ideology idiots. Sure, you're in a car, you need to know the general direction—but then it's up to people who know how to steer."

  ~~~~~

  There's some arguing over that, while they cut into thick steaks and have another martini. Emma has had two and she gets a bit giddy. Washington’s speech—and he always seems to be making a speech, too, a macho thing, quite unconscious—has put her off. But you have to use the energies flowing in the moment. She notes how the other men look up to him—literally, except maybe for Jefferson in some Taiwan lifters. Physical presence had to count if you were going to change the world; we are primates, after all. No politics could do without a salting of biology. Evolution and economics had to work together.

  Under probing she tells them that the product her new company is going to make is a male contraceptive. "That's not new," Franklin says.

  She leans forward, her dress sliding smoothly over her body, and argues back. Macho these guys might be, but she could handle that. There were other skills, honed back in Africa. Evolution, yes.

  ~~~~~

  Franklin smiles, his nose reddening from the drink. Her silky grace, her fetching dress belying the steel-sharp argument—none of this came by accident, of course. One of the things Franklin loves about her is her direct sensuality, intellect unashamed. She is completely at ease within herself. Nobody else at the table can match her for that.

  She says, "Gentlemen, this contraceptive is the answer to population growth in the Third World. It'll sell for pennies, because we'll price it low. No research overhead on it, so my new company can lowball market it. I got the patent rights as part of my separation agreement from my old company. They thought there was no money in it! No demand from guys."

  Washington begins, "It's going to sell cheaply? But price isn't enough with most men in the tropical nations, I thought. There was a piece in the Economist about it just a few weeks ago."

  Emma Goldman nails Washington with a jabbing finger to make her point. "Right! Most men think it isn't their problem, right?"

  Around the table there come reluctant nods. "So I designed the tricky part of this product myself. It's a chewing gum. Easy to take."

  Washington persists. "Even that's probably not going to make a big dent in the demographics—"

  "And—" She jabs at Washington again. "—it's addictive. Not harmful, not even narcotic. Just addictive."

  The men sit, stunned. Between them passes a very rare event: silence.

  Just then the waiter arrives for dessert orders. Still a bit dazed, Washington beckons toward the shadows—and there, coming in for the ending, is an old buddy, Jefferson. With him is a sleek black beauty named Sally and Jefferson seems a little embarrassed about it. They've been seeing each other a long time, it seems, but not in public until now. He's also got in tow a skinny fellow, under-dressed for this restaurant and with hot, darting eyes: Trotsky. They have an idea they want to discuss, they say.

  Franklin gets up to go to the bathroom and Emma goes, too. The restaurant has those new unisex joh
ns and they go in together. A matron outside looks scandalized. There was a time when they'd have taken advantage of the moment, maybe just to irk the matron, and actually have sex.

  Not now. There is something about this night. A heady sensation of gathering energy, of living on the edge, the very limit of who you could be.

  They don't want to disturb it, because in the air there seems to hang a certain crystalline note, like a bell that has rung in a distant steeple, the tone lingering on, clear and long.

  Franklin notices on his way back to the table that he has an erection. Ahead, the gang is making a lot of noise, arguing and joking, disagreeing and planning. Behind is Emma, a smoldering center of his world. Somehow it all comes together in mind and body for him, soft surges of the heart. He looks out the window. Diamonds sprawl across the San Fernando Valley. Somewhere out there somebody is bleeding to death and somebody else is giving birth. He leans against the cool window pane brimming with distant luminous promise, and feels the whole vast moment seep through him and knows it is the Revolution.

  (Back to TOC)

  Two Faces Of Love

  1. When the Silence Calls Your Name

  2. The Fiddle Plays Until It Aches

  Tanith Lee

  from the songs:

  When the Silence Falls

  Forever Young

  by Janis Ian

  1. When the Silence Calls Your Name

  I dreamed the sky was falling

  I heard the planets end

  I heard the voices calling

  Never again

  Never again

  ~ from When the Silence Falls by Janis Ian

  2002

  So you're going up into the mountains? A woman of twenty-seven in your beat-up car, speed blowing your hair, and the hurt of the world on your back, pain big as one of those boulders.

  She drives through the golden-leaf light of dying afternoon. Off the highway now, those tracks will still, she supposes, take her to the cabin before nightfall. Years ago she'd had to get used to American roads, American cars. Now she's used to everything.

  Long shadows of pines stripe the roadway. The low sun flashes between. It's almost strobe-like, hallucinatory. Above, the mountains rise from the lower decks of the land, carved out of sky, catching sun mysteriously on things that sparkle—quartz, knives, tears.

  The last gas station is a hundred miles in the past. The old man who shambled out had glared at Hester as if she were an ancient enemy, not a human being needing to fill the tank of her car. He was surly and rude, like everyone else she'd met along the roads, the drunk jackasses in their convertible, the kids who slung rocks presumably just because she dared drive by, the cop who'd pulled her over—such a minor infringement—made a sneering comment on her English accent: "You a Brit?" then lectured her from the height of hi six-foot-three black, with gun. Even the gas station dog had snarled, red-eyed, on the length of cruel, crude chain.

  The dirt road turns a corner, around the brown flank of the slope. Forest closes in. How much farther? Had they lied to her about the cabin? People lie, don't they.

  About thirty feet ahead a deer, propelled as if in flight, leaps across the road. She curses the deer. She might have hit it. Everything is against her.

  Look at the sunset, Hester. You used to like those, like you liked deer and other animals, like you liked people and new places, landscapes, cities. Just as you loved—once.

  Blue shade going to purple, but coming up out of the trees, you find this sky like the translucent wing of a fire-butterfly.

  Hester remembers sundown outside the crowded restaurant where Drew shouted at her, left her, and the girl he'd been flirting with all night had seemed to smile an unhidden secret smile of contempt.

  No, the sunset's lost on Hester.

  When she reaches the cabin, it's as it was described. It sits at the head of its own track, up on the ridge, with a loosely strung-out bodyguard of pines, and over all the top-lit mountains' colossal backdrop.

  Sun almost down now. In the light-struck forest, she glimpses squirrels, gophers darting to their lairs. Here the pool of shadow gathers, out of which a streamlet races glittering for the vanishing light, and tumbles for its troubles right over the ridgeside.

  Log-and-stone built, the cabin is far less rustic than it seems. Inside are big rooms, windows with views, cleverly piped-in clean water, a heating system, generator, microwave, TV, a freezer stacked with delicacies. There are oil-lamps too, for fun.

  She distrusts however the sympathetic New York friends who have loaned her the cabin. ("You need to get out of the City, Hes.") And anyway, the cabin-couple were too happy together. The earth was populated by pairs holding hands, locked in a public embrace.

  Night falls when she's inside. She switches on electric lamps, organizes the percolator and drinks some coffee. She takes a hot shower.

  Outside, birds sing, stop.

  Below on the road she can see from a window, far, far down, cars still pass now and then, with a snake-like hiss. They said wolves herd into the valleys in winter, but now it's only early fall. Instead an owl laments in the pines. Lying awake for hours, the liquid mercury of stars sears holes in the drapes, her lids, the moon drives over to gleam its flashlight in her eyes, and she hates the owl. The world, once so possible and fine, has shrunk to a pip at the kernel of her bitter heart.

  She sees no reason in anything, for she has been shut out, she and her kind.

  What wakes her from her foray into sleep is—nothing. That is, the silence. Silence wakes her like the ringing of a mighty bell.

  Half comatose, sitting up in darkness, panicked, she tries the portable radio she had left on to counteract the owl. But the radio is silent too. None of the stations of the world will speak to her now.

  Hester receives an intimation of fear.

  Then she realizes, the battery is dead.

  When she pads into the main room, the TV answers at a touch, milling with persons, laughing in their seamless perfections. Envious and despising, she turns down the sound after all, but leaves them there, stupidly performing to an empty room.

  Why get scared like some child? The world won't end—isn't that what they say? Oh well, it isn't the end of the world… and if it did—why should it happen now? The eternal nightmare of apocalypse anyway couldn't be missed. She thinks of a terrible brightness in the heavens, the rush of thunders like an express. Two more hours pass before she sleeps again.

  Hester dreams.

  A car is driving through the sky (a Cadillac? a Rolls?), perhaps a modern version of the Chariot of the Sun—it is scalding bright. There is, isn't there, something awesome and frightful about this car, though perhaps it's only made of clouds or flames.

  A voice speaks in Hester's ear, one word only:

  Now.

  She doesn't wake. The radio and the owl are silent. In the main room the TV murmurs. Has anything changed?

  ~~~~~

  In the morning, the TV has gone quiet. Dumb and accusing it stands there, blank-faced and inert.

  Hester feels angry now. It never takes much, for the solid grey grief to tip over into rage. She swears at the TV. She gets dressed, eats a pancake she hasn't sufficiently heated through, despite the warnings on the box, and goes out to the car. There's a town, they've told her this. According to her happy, sympathetic, successfully-still-in-love friends, the town is located only a few miles along the road. Her portable CD player is acting up too. The CDs jump, voices hiccupping in demented treble.

  Why does every fucking thing go wrong at once?

  Hester drives. Light now is clear and sharp. Rocky vistas soar above.

  Nothing passes on the road. That's good.

  Sometimes she thinks she sees birds or animals moving, a sort of flutter on-off-on in the sunlit woods. Twice she spots, indifferently, what might be an eagle, hugely outspread on the sky, static as if pasted there. It's looking for something to kill below. That's what they do.

  Despite the map she's be
en given, and the described directions, Hester doesn't find any town. She drives for nearly two hours. She keeps expecting it—this road goes through it, they'd said. Must be farther off than they said, or is she somehow on the wrong road? Not even a shack, a store, a gas station goes by, though there must be some. In the end, it seems wise to head back while there is fuel left in the tank.

  No wonder there's no other traffic on this road. Nowhere to go.

  Like me.

  The car radio won't work either. What is this, The X-Files?

  On the way back, she glances up occasionally, after the eagle, but it must have come unstuck and hurtled down into the pines. The woods are caught in a motionless noon hush.

  In the cabin again, she makes lunch, being more careful now to heat the burger meat through. She drinks half a glass of red wine. But alcohol doesn't lift her mood. Get used to that.

  What am I going to do?

  Frankly, now she's here, Hester is actually afraid of being all alone, the very thing that frightened her most when Drew began to talk of their splitting up. She'd clung to him, not bodily, but with her words, her heart. And in the end he started to hurt her with his words, to deliberately dislodge her by his actions, till finally he was gone.

  She's brought some books with her. She sets them out, chooses, tries to read. She reads the same sentences over and over. The wine has made her leaden. She falls asleep.

  Hester dreams of a cloud on fire, nuclear perhaps? No, more beautiful, more—far more—terrible—

  By evening, when she wakes up, the blue-violet shadows are gathering, and the sun beyond the ridge makes everything into raw topaz, and the CD machine won't play at all.

  Hester stands out on the deck, craning to see gophers and squirrels darting around in their pre-slumber rituals. She can't detect any tonight.

  The pines rustle. You have to strain to hear. No birds now, nothing sings. Her presence must have disturbed them all.

  Tomorrow I'll walk through the woods, she thinks, a nature ramble. I'll see plenty of things then. Critters, maybe people strayed from the cabins further up.