by Joanna Russ
“That, mes enfants,” said the tractor-driver at last, “is a man.
“That is a real Earth man.”
VI
Sometimes you bend down to tie your shoe, and then you either tie your shoe or you don’t; you either straighten up instantly or maybe you don’t. Every choice begets at least two worlds of possibility, that is, one in which you do and one in which you don’t; or very likely many more, one in which you do quickly, one in which you do slowly, one in which you don’t, but hesitate, one in which you hesitate and frown, one in which you hesitate and sneeze, and so on. To carry this line of argument further, there must be an infinite number of possible universes (such is the fecundity of God) for there is no reason to imagine Nature as prejudiced in favor of human action. Every displacement of every molecule, every change in orbit of every electron, every quantum of light that strikes here and not there—each of these must somewhere have its alternative. It’s possible, too, that there is no such thing as one clear line or strand of probability, and that we live on a sort of twisted braid, blurring from one to the other without even knowing it, as long as we keep within the limits of a set of variations that really make no difference to us. Thus the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the Past one visits is never one’s own Past but always somebody else’s; or rather, one’s visit to the Past instantly creates another Present (one in which the visit has already happened) and what you visit is the Past belonging to that Present—an entirely different matter from your own Past. And with each decision you make (back there in the Past) that new probable universe itself branches, creating simultaneously a new Past and a new Present, or to put it plainly, a new universe. And when you come back to your own Present, you alone know what the other Past was like and what you did there.
Thus it is probable what Whileaway—a name for the Earth ten centuries from now, but not our Earth, if you follow me—will find itself not at all affected by this sortie into somebody else’s past. And vice versa, of course. The two might as well be independent worlds.
Whileaway, you may gather, is in the future.
But not our future.
VII
I saw Jeannine shortly afterward, in a cocktail lounge where I had gone to watch Janet Evason on television (I don’t have a set). Jeannine looked very much out of place; I sat next to her and she confided in me: “I don’t belong here.” I can’t imagine how she got there, except by accident. She looked as if she were dressed up for a costume film, sitting in the shadow with her snood and her wedgies, a long-limbed, coltish girl in clothes a little too small for her. Fashion (it seems) is recovering very leisurely from the Great Depression. Not here and now, of course. “I don’t belong here!” whispered Jeannine Dadier again, rather anxiously. She was fidgeting. She said, “I don’t like places like this.” She poked the red, turfed leather on the seat
“What?” I said.
“I went hiking last vacation,” she said big-eyed. “That’s what I like. It’s healthy.”
I know it’s supposed to be virtuous to run healthily through fields of flowers, but I like bars, hotels, air-conditioning, good restaurants, and jet transport, and I told her so.
“Jet?” she said.
Janet Evason came on the television. It was only a still picture. Then we had the news from Cambodia, Laos, Michigan State, Lake Canandaigua (pollution), and the spinning globe of the world in full color with its seventeen man-made satellites going around it. The color was awful. I’ve been inside a television studio before: the gallery running around the sides of the barn, every inch of the roof covered with lights, so that the little woman-child with the wee voice can pout over an oven or a sink. Then Janet Evason came on with that blobby look people have on the tube. She moved carefully and looked at everything with interest. She was well dressed (in a suit). The host or M.C. or whatever-you-call-him shook hands with her and then everybody shook hands with everybody else, like a French wedding or an early silent movie. He was dressed in a suit. Someone guided her to a seat and she smiled and nodded in the exaggerated way you do when you’re not sure of doing the right thing. She looked around and shaded her eyes against the lights. Then she spoke.
(The first thing said by the second man ever to visit Whileaway was, “Where are all the men?” Janet Evason, appearing in the Pentagon, hands in her pockets, feet planted far apart, said, “Where the dickens are all the women?")
The sound in the television set conked out for a moment and then Jeannine Dadier was gone; she didn’t disappear, she just wasn’t there any more. Janet Evason got up, shook hands again, looked around her, questioned with her eyes, pantomimed comprehension, nodded, and walked out of camera range. They never did show you the government guards.
I heard it another time and this is how it went:
MC: How do you like it here, Miss Evason?
JE (looks around the studio, confused): It’s too hot.
MC: I mean how do you like it on—well, on Earth?
JE: But I live on the earth. (Her attention is a little strained here.)
MC: Perhaps you had better explain what you mean by that—I mean the existence of different probabilities and so on—you were talking about that before.
JE: It’s in the newspapers.
MC: But Miss Evason, if you could, please explain it for the people who are watching the program.
JE: Let them read. Can’t they read?
(There was a moment’s silence. Then the M.C. spoke.)
MC: Our social scientists as well as our physicists tell us they’ve had to revise a great deal of theory in light of the information brought by our fair visitor from another world. There have been no men on Whileaway for at least eight centuries—I don’t mean no human beings, of course, but no men—and this society, run entirely by women, has naturally attracted a great deal of attention since the appearance last week of its representative and its first ambassador, the lady on my left here. Janet Evason, can you tell us how you think your society on Whileaway will react to the reappearance of men from Earth—I mean our present-day Earth, of course—after an isolation of eight hundred years?
JE (She jumped at this one; probably because it was the first question she could understand): Nine hundred years. What men?
MC: What men? Surely you expect men from our society to visit Whileaway.
JE: Why?
MC: For information, trade, ah—cultural contact, surely. (laughter) I’m afraid you’re making it rather difficult for me, Miss Evason. When the—ah—the plague you spoke of killed the men on Whileaway, weren’t they missed? Weren’t families broken up? Didn’t the whole pattern of life change?
JE (slowly): I suppose people always miss what they are used to. Yes, they were missed. Even a whole set of words, like “he,” “man” and so on—these are banned. Then the second generation, they use them to be daring, among themselves, and the third generation doesn’t, to be polite, and by the fourth, who cares? Who remembers?
MC: But surely—that is —
JE: Excuse me, perhaps I’m mistaking what you intend to say as this language we’re speaking is only a hobby of mine, I am not as fluent as I would wish. What we speak is a pan-Russian even the Russians would not understand; it would be like Middle English to you, only vice-versa.
MC: I see. But to get back to the question —
JE: Yes.
MC (A hard position to be in, between the authorities and this strange personage who is wrapped in ignorance like a savage chief: expressionless, attentive, possibly civilized, completely unknowing. He finally said): Don’t you want men to return to Whileaway, Miss Evason?
JE: Why?
MC: One sex is half a species, Miss Evason. I am quoting (and he cited a famous anthropologist). Do you want to banish sex from Whileaway?
JE (with massive dignity and complete naturalness): Huh?
MC: I said: Do you want to banish sex from Whileaway? Sex, family, love, erotic attraction—call it what you like—we all know that your people are comp
etent and intelligent individuals, but do you think that’s enough? Surely you have the intellectual knowledge of biology in other species to know what I’m talking about.
JE: I’m married. I have two children. What the devil do you mean?
MC: I—Miss Evason—we—well, we know you form what you call marriages, Miss Evason, that you reckon the descent of your children through both partners and that you even have “tribes"—I’m calling them what Sir———— calls them; I know the translation isnt perfect—and we know that these marriages or tribes form very good institutions for the economic support of the children and for some sort of genetic mixing, though I confess you’re way beyond us in the biological sciences. But, Miss Evason, I am not talking about economic institutions or even affectionate ones. Of course the mothers of Whileaway love their children; nobody doubts that. And of course they have affection for each other; nobody doubts that, either. But there is more, much, much more—I am talking about sexual love.
JE (enlightened): Oh! You mean copulation.
MC: Yes.
JE: And you say we don’t have that?
MC: Yes.
JE: How foolish of you. Of course we do.
MC: Ah? (He wants to say, “Don’t tell me.")
JE: With each other. Allow me to explain.
She was cut off instantly by a commercial poetically describing the joys of unsliced bread. They shrugged (out of camera range). It wouldn’t even have gotten that far if Janet had not insisted on attaching a touch-me-not to the replay system. It was a live broadcast, four seconds’ lag. I begin to like her more and more. She said, “If you expect me to observe your taboos, I think you will have to be more precise as to exactly what they are.” In Jeannine Dadier’s world, she was (would be) asked by a lady commentator:
How do the women of Whileaway do their hair?
JE: They hack it off with clam shells.
VIII
“Humanity is unnatural!” exclaimed the philosopher Dunyasha Bernadetteson (A.C. 344—426) who suffered all her life from the slip of a genetic surgeon’s hand which had given her one mother’s jaw and the other mother’s teeth—orthodontia is hardly ever necessary on Whileaway. Her daughter’s teeth, however, were perfect. Plague came to Whileaway in P.C. 17 (Preceding Catastrophe) and ended in A.C. 03, with half the population dead; it had started so slowly that no one knew about it until it was too late. It attacked males only. Earth had been completely re-formed during the Golden Age (P.C.300-ca. P.C.180) and natural conditions presented considerably less difficulty than they might have during a similar catastrophe a millennium or so earlier. At the time of The Despair (as it was popularly called), Whileaway had two continents, called simply North and South Continents, and a great many ideal bays or anchorages in the coastline. Severe climatic conditions did not prevail below 72° S and 68° N latitude. Conventional water traffic, at the time of the Catastrophe, was employed almost exclusively for freight, passenger traffic using the smaller and more flexibly routed hovercraft. Houses were self-contained, with portable power sources, fuel-alcohol motors or solar cells replacing the earlier centralized power. The later invention of practical matter-antimatter reactors (K. Ansky, A.C. 239) produced great optimism for a decade or so, but these devices proved to be too bulky for private use. Katharina Lucyson Ansky (A.C. 201-282) was also responsible for the principles that made genetic surgery possible. (The merging of ova had been practiced for the previous century and a half.) Animal life had become so scarce before the Golden Age that many species were re-invented by enthusiasts of the Ansky Period; in A.C. 280 there was an outbreak of coneys in Newland (an island off the neck of North Continent), a pandemic not without historical precedent. By A.C. 492, through the brilliant agitation of the great Betty Bettinason Murano (A.C. 453-A.C. 502) Terran colonies were re-established on Mars, Ganymede, and in the Asteroids, the Selenic League assisting according to the Treaty of Mare Tenebrum (A.C. 240). Asked what she expected to find in space, Betty Murano made the immortal quip, “Nothing.” By the third century A.C. intelligence was a controllable, heritable factor, though aptitudes and interests continued to elude the surgeons and intelligence itself could be raised only grossly. By the fifth century, clan organization had reached its present complex state and the re-cycling of phosphorus was almost completely successful; by the seventh century Jovian mining made it possible to replace a largely glass-and-ceramics technology with some metals (which were also re-cycled) and for the third time in four hundred years (fashions are sometimes cyclic too) duelling became a serious social nuisance. Several local Guilds Councils voted that a successful duellist must undergo the penalty of an accidental murderer and bear a child to replace the life lost, but the solution was too simple-minded to become popular. There was the age of both parties to consider, for example. By the beginning of the ninth century A.C. the induction helmet was a practical possibility, industry was being drastically altered, and the Selenic League had finally outproduced South Continent in kg protein/person/annum. In 913 A.C. an obscure and discontented descendant of Katy Ansky put together various items of mathematical knowledge and thus discovered—or invented—probability mechanics.
In the time of Jesus of Nazareth, dear reader, there were no motor-cars. I still walk, though, sometimes.
That is, a prudent ecologist makes things work as nearly perfectly as they can by themselves, but you also keep the kerosene lantern in the barn just in case, and usually a debate about keeping a horse ends up with the decision that it’s too much trouble, so you let the horse go; but the Conservation Point at La Jolla keeps horses. We wouldn’t recognize them. The induction helmet makes it possible for one workwoman to have not only the brute force but also the flexibility and control of thousands; it’s turning Whileawayan industry upside down. Most people walk on Whileaway (of course, their feet are perfect). They make haste in odd ways sometimes. In the early days it was enough just to keep alive and keep the children coming. Now they say “When the re-industrialization’s complete,” and they still walk. Maybe they like it. Probability mechanics offers the possibility—by looping into another continuum, exactly chosen—of teleportation. Chilia Ysayeson Belin lives in Italian ruins (I think this is part of the Vittore Emmanuele monument, though I don’t know how it got to Newland) and she’s sentimental about it; how can one add indoor plumbing discreetly without an unconscionable amount of work? Her mother, Ysaye, lives in a cave (the Ysaye who put together the theory of probability mechanics). Pre-fabs take only two days to get and no time at all to set up. There are eighteen Belins and twenty-three Moujkis (Ysaye’s family; I stayed with both). Whileaway doesn’t have true cities. And of course, the tail of a culture is several centuries behind the head. Whileaway is so pastoral that at times one wonders whether the ultimate sophistication may not take us all back to a kind of pre-Paleolithic dawn age, a garden without any artifacts except for what we would call miracles. A Moujki invented non-disposable food containers in her spare time in A.C. 904 because the idea fascinated her; people have been killed for less.
Meanwhile, the ecological housekeeping is enormous.
IX
JE: I bore my child at thirty; we all do. It’s a vacation. Almost five years. The baby rooms are full of people reading, painting, singing, as much as they can, to the children, with the children, over the children Like the ancient Chinese custom of the three-years’ mourning, an hiatus at just the right time. There has been no leisure at all before and there will be so little after—anything I do, you understand, I mean really do—I must ground thoroughly in those five years. One works with feverish haste At sixty I will get a sedentary job and have some time for myself again.
COMMENTATOR: And this is considered enough, in Whileaway?
JE: My God, no.
X
Jeannine dawdles. She always hates to get out of bed. She would lie on her side and look at the ailanthus tree until her back began to ache; then she would turn over, hidden in the veils of the leaves, and fall asleep. Tag-ends of
dreams till she lay in bed like a puddle and the cat would climb over her. On workdays Jeannine got up early in a kind of waking nightmare: feeling horrid, stumbling to the hall bathroom with sleep all over her. Coffee made her sick. She couldn’t sit in the armchair, or drop her slippers, or bend, or lean, or lie down. Mr. Frosty, perambulating on the window sill, walked back and forth in front of the ailanthus tree: Tiger on Frond. The museum. The zoo. The bus to Chinatown. Jeannine sank into the tree gracefully, like a mermaid, bearing with her a tea-cosy to give to the young man who had a huge muffin trembling over his collar where his face ought to have been. Trembling with emotion.
The cat spoke.
She jerked awake. I’ll feed you, Mr. Frosty.
Mrrrr.
Cal couldn’t afford to take her anywhere, really. She had been traveling on the public buses so long that she knew all the routes. Yawning horribly, she ran the water into Mr. Frosty’s cat food and put the dish on the floor. He ate in a dignified way; she remembered how when she had taken him to her brother’s, they had fed him a real raw fish, just caught in the pond by one of the boys, and how Mr. Frosty had pounced on it, bolting it, he was so eager. They really do like fish. Now he played with the saucer, batting it from side to side, even though he was grown up. Cats were really much happier after you after you (she yawned) Oh, it was Chinese Festival Day.