“What I want you to do,” my father said impatiently, “is to make Number Five understand that the experiments I have performed on him, particularly the narcotherapeutic examinations he resents so much, are necessary. That if we are to become more than we have been we must find out –” He had been almost shouting, and he stopped abruptly to bring his voice under control. “That is the reason he was produced, the reason for David too – I hoped to learn something from an outcrossing.”
“Which was the rationale, no doubt,” Dr Marsch said, “for the existence of Dr Veil as well, in an earlier generation. But as far as your examinations of your younger self are concerned, it would be just as useful for him to examine you.”
“Wait a moment,” I said. “You keep saying that he and I are identical. That’s incorrect. I can see that we’re similar in some respects, but I’m not really like my father.”
“There are no differences that cannot be accounted for by age. You are what? Eighteen? And you,” he looked toward my father, “I should say are nearly fifty. There are only two forces, you see, which act to differentiate between human beings: they are heredity and environment, nature and nurture. And since the personality is largely formed during the first three years of life, it is the environment provided by the home which is decisive. Now every person is born into some home environment, though it may be such a harsh one that he dies of it; and no person, except in this situation we call anthropological relaxation, provides that environment himself – it is furnished for him by the preceding generation.”
“Just because both of us grew up in this house –”
“Which you built and furnished and filled with the people you chose. But wait a moment. Let’s talk about a man neither of you have ever seen, a man born in a place provided by parents quite different from himself: I mean the first of you…”
I was no longer listening. I had come to kill my father, and it was necessary that Dr Marsch leave. I watched him as he leaned forward in his chair, his long, white hands making incisive little gestures, his cruel lips moving in a frame of black hair; I watched him and I heard nothing. It was as though I had gone deaf or as if he could communicate only by his thoughts, and I, knowing the thoughts were silly lies had shut them out. I said, “You are from Sainte Anne.”
He looked at me in surprise, halting in the midst of a senseless sentence. “I have been there, yes. I spent several years on Sainte Anne before coming here.”
“You were born there. You studied your anthropology there from books written on Earth twenty years ago. You are an abo, or at least half-abo; but we are men.”
Marsch glanced at my father, then said: “The abos are gone. Scientific opinion on Sainte Anne holds that they have been extinct for almost a century.”
“You didn’t believe that when you came to see my aunt.”
“I’ve never accepted Veil’s Hypothesis. I called on everyone here who had published anything in my field. Really, I don’t have time to listen to this.”
“You are an abo and not from Earth.”
And in a short time my father and I were alone.
* * *
Most of my sentence I served in a labor camp in the Tattered Mountains. It was a small camp, housing usually only a hundred and fifty prisoners – sometimes less than eighty when the winter deaths had been bad. We cut wood and burned charcoal and made skis when we found good birch. Above the timberline we gathered a saline moss supposed to be medicinal and knotted long plans for rock slides that would crush the stalking machines that were our guards – though somehow the moment never came, the stones never slid. The work was hard, and these guards administered exactly the mixture of severity and fairness some prison board had decided upon when they were programed and the problem of brutality and favoritism by hirelings was settled forever, so that only well-dressed men at meetings could be cruel or kind.
Or so they thought. I sometimes talked to my guards for hours about Mr Million, and once I found a piece of meat, and once a cake of hard sugar, brown and gritty as sand, hidden in the corner where I slept.
A criminal may not profit by his crime, but the court – so I was told much later – could find no proof that David was indeed my father’s son, and made my aunt his heir.
She died, and a letter from an attorney informed me that by her favor I had inherited “a large house in the city of Port-Mimizon, together with the furniture and chattels appertaining thereto.” And that this house, “located at 666 Saltimbanque, is presently under the care of a robot servitor.” Since the robot servitors under whose direction I found myself did not allow me writing materials, I could not reply.
Time passed on the wings of birds. I found dead larks at the feet of north-facing cliffs in autumn, at the feet of south-facing cliffs in spring.
I received a letter from Mr Million. Most of my father’s girls had left during the investigation of his death; the remainder he had been obliged to send away when my aunt died, finding that as a machine he could not enforce the necessary obedience. David had gone to the capital. Phaedria had married well. Marydol had been sold by her parents. The date on his letter was three years later than the date of my trial, but how long the letter had been in reaching me I could not tell. The envelope had been opened and resealed many times and was soiled and torn.
A seabird, I believe a gannet, came fluttering down into our camp after a storm, too exhausted to fly. We killed and ate it.
One of our guards went berserk, burned fifteen prisoners to death, and fought the other guards all night with swords of white and blue fire. He was not replaced.
I was transferred with some others to a camp farther north where I looked down chasms of red stone so deep that if I kicked a pebble in, I could hear the rattle of its descent grow to a roar of slipping rock – and hear that, in half a minute, fade with distance to silence, yet never strike the bottom lost somewhere in darkness.
I pretended the people I had known were with me. When I sat shielding my basin of soup from the wind, Phaedria sat upon a bench nearby and smiled and talked about her friends. David played squash for hours on the dusty ground of our compound, slept against the wall near my own corner. Marydol put her hand in mine while I carried my saw into the mountains.
In time they all grew dim, but even in the last year I never slept without telling myself, just before sleep, that Mr Million would take us to the city library in the morning; never woke without fearing that my father’s valet had come for me.
* * *
Then I was told that I was to go, with three others, to another camp. We carried our food, and nearly died of hunger and exposure on the way. From there we were marched to a third camp where we were questioned by men who were not prisoners like ourselves but free men in uniforms who made notes of our answers and at last ordered that we bathe, and burned our old clothing, and gave us a thick stew of meat and barley.
I remember very well that it was then that I allowed myself to realize, at last, what these things meant. I dipped my bread into my bowl and pulled it out soaked with the fragrant stock, with bits of meat and grains of barley clinging to it; and I thought then of the fried bread and coffee at the slave market not as something of the past but as something in the future, and my hands shook until I could no longer hold my bowl and I wanted to rush shouting at the fences.
In two more days we, six of us now, were put into a mule cart that drove on winding roads always downhill until the winter that had been dying behind us was gone, and the birches and firs were gone, and the tall chestnuts and oaks beside the road had spring flowers under their branches.
The streets of Port-Mimizon swarmed with people. I would have been lost in a moment if Mr Million had not hired a chair for me, but I made the bearers stop, and bought (with money he gave me) a newspaper from a vendor so that I could know the date with certainty at last.
My sentence had been the usual one of two to fifty years, and though I had known the month and year of the beginning of my imprisonment, it had bee
n impossible to know, in the camps, the number of the current year which everyone counted and no one knew. A man took fever and in ten days, when he was well enough again to work, said that two years had passed or had never been. Then you yourself took fever. I do not recall any headline, any article from the paper I bought. I read only the date at the top, all the way home.
It had been nine years.
I had been eighteen when I had killed my father. I was now twenty-seven. I had thought I might be forty.
* * *
The flaking gray walls of our house were the same. The iron dog with his three wolf-heads still stood in the front garden, but the fountain was silent, and the beds of fern and moss were full of weeds. Mr Million paid my chairmen and unlocked with a key the door that was always guard-chained but unbolted in my father’s day – but as he did so, an immensely tall and lanky woman who had been hawking pralines in the street came running toward us. It was Nerissa, and I now had a servant and might have had a bedfellow if I wished, though I could pay her nothing.
* * *
And now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account, which has already been the labor of days; and I must even explain why I explain. Very well then. I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometime read what I am now writing and wonder.
Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself; or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.
It has been three years since my release. This house, when Nerissa and I re-entered it, was in a very confused state, my aunt having spent her last days, so Mr Million told me, in a search for my father’s supposed hoard. She did not find it, and I do not think it is to be found; knowing his character better than she, I believe he spent most of what his girls brought him on his experiments and apparatus. I needed money badly myself at first, but the reputation of the house brought women seeking buyers and men seeking to buy. It is hardly necessary, as I told myself when we began, to do more than introduce them, and I have a good staff now. Phaedria lives with us and works too; the brilliant marriage was a failure after all. Last night while I was working in my surgery I heard her at the library door. I opened it and she had the child with her. Someday they’ll want us.
JOANNA RUSS
Nobody’s Home
Like Kate Wilhelm and R. A. Lafferty, Joanna Russ would begin selling in the late ’50s, but would not become widely known until the late ’60s. Even Russ’s early work would display the same kind of wit, sophistication, and elegance of style that would characterize her later work, and the best of it – stories like “My Dear Emily,” “There Is Another Shore, You Know, Upon the Other Side,” and “The New Men” – holds up well even today. Almost all of Russ’s early work is fantasy, much of it about vampires – 1962’s “My Dear Emily” remains one of the most stylish and fascinating vampire stories of modern times – and she might have established her reputation years earlier than she did if she had continued to steadily produce work like this, but her output was sparse throughout the first half of the decade, and mostly overlooked. (Even at her peak of production, Russ would never be a prolific writer, even when compared to most careful craftsmen, let alone to the high-production sausage factories that have always been common in the genre.)
By 1967, Russ would be attracting attention with her “Alyx” stories, which at first seemed to be merely better-than-usually written sword and sorcery stories, featuring a tough-minded and wily female cutpurse rather than the usual male hero, sort of the Gray Mouser in drag. This may seem an obvious enough reversal now, when the fantasy genre is flooded with sword-swinging Amazons and swashbuckling women adventurers, but it was radical stuff at the time – with even Damon Knight saying that, before Russ, he would have thought that “nobody could get away with a series of heroic fantasies of prehistory in which the central character, the barbarian adventurer, is a woman.” The Alyx stories would veer suddenly into science fiction with “The Barbarian” in Orbit 3, in which Alyx outwits a degenerate time-traveller, and then Alyx herself would be snatched out of the past and thrown into a decadent and fascinating future for Russ’s first novel, 1968’s Picnic on Paradise, the work with which she would make her first significant impact on the field, and a work which even now strikes me as one of the best novels of the late ’60s. (It was one of two books, both Ace Specials – the other was Lafferty’s Past Master; the impact of Terry Carr’s Ace Specials line on the SF world of the late ’60s can hardly be overestimated – that I read for the first time during a long and grueling Trans-Atlantic flight, miles above the roof of the world with sunlight gleaming on the clouds far below. I remember thinking how appropriate both books were to the setting in which I was reading them, for both were unlike anything I’d read before; I still maintain a special fondness for both novels.)
By the early ’70s, Russ would have published her complex second novel, And Chaos Died, by turns brilliantly effective and opaque almost to the point of deliberate obscurity; won a Nebula Award for her controversial feminist story “When It Changed”; and be producing work like the story that follows, “Nobody’s Home” – a sleek, sly, and blackly witty story that was years ahead of its time, especially in its brilliant depiction of what the society of the future was going to be like … and, more importantly, what the people who lived in it were going to be like. The rest of the genre wouldn’t catch up to the kind of thing Russ was doing here, with unruffled ease and elegance, until the late ’80s.
By the early ’70s, Russ was also, in some circles at least, one of the most hated writers in the business. I’m not quite sure why, since there were other writers around who were producing work that ostensibly seemed much further from the aesthetic center of the field. Perhaps it was her large body of critical work – she was the regular reviewer for F&SF at one point – in which she would express a lot of unpopular opinions, although her often incisive criticism can be shown to have had a demonstrable effect on other writers such as Le Guin. Maybe it was just that she was an uppity woman who wouldn’t stay in her place. Even before “When It Changed,” though, her first overtly feminist story, I can remember being on a panel at a science fiction convention in 1970 or 1971, and mentioning that I liked Russ’s work, and having the audience actually boo me, loudly, with two or three people rising to their feet and shaking their fists. (At another convention, after I’d mentioned the work of Gene Wolfe, another fan, his face contorted with hate, told me that they were going to drive “people like you” out of the field – how quaint all these passions seem now, at this remove, as if we were quarreling about which end of the egg to break!)
Later, when she published her fierce and passionate feminist novel The Female Man in 1975, she became a bête noire of unparalleled blackness, practically the Antichrist. Perhaps all this furor, added to the general malaise of the late ’70s, contributed to her slow drift out of the field. She published two more books in the next three years – including her weakest novel, 1977’s We Who Are About To … – and then fell silent for several years.
She returned to SF in 1982 with her Hugo Award-winning novella “Souls,” and with the other stories that would go into making up Extra(ordinary) People, and this time, ironically, instead of the conservative wing, it was the young, leftist, radical new writers who fiercely attacked her, one of them sneeringly referring to “Souls” as the “Abbess-phone-home” story. Almost nothing has been heard of from Russ in SF since then, perhaps not surprisingly, but I personally miss her work, and hope that she will decide to take another tour of duty on the barricades sometime in the ’90s. At her best, she was one of the best writers ever to work in the field, and one of those who helped to shape it the most profoundly.
Russ’s other books include the novel The Two of Them, the collections The Zanzibar Cat, Extra(ordinary) People, The Adventures of Alyx and The Hidden Side of the Moon, and the critical works Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts, and How to Suppress Women�
�s Writing.
After she had finished her work at the North Pole, Jannina came down to the Red Sea refineries, where she had family business, jumped to New Delhi for dinner, took a nap in a public bed in Queensland, walked from the hotel to the station, bypassed the Leeward Islands (where she thought she might go, but all the stations were busy), and met Charley to watch the dawn over the Carolinas.
“Where’ve you been, dear C?”
“Tanzonia. And you’re married.”
“No.”
“I heard you were married,” he said. “The Lees told the Smiths who told the Kerguelens who told the Utsumbés and we get around, we Utsumbés. A new wife, they said. I didn’t know you were especially fond of women.”
“I’m not. She’s my husbands’ wife. And we’re not married yet, Charley. She’s had hard luck: a first family started in ’35, two husbands burned out by an overload while arranging transportation for a concert – of all things, pushing papers, you know! – and the second divorced her, I think, and she drifted away from the third (a big one), and there was some awful quarrel with the fourth, people chasing people around tables, I don’t know.”
“Poor woman.”
In the manner of people joking and talking lightly they had drawn together, back to back, sitting on the ground and rubbing together their shoulders and the backs of their heads. Jannina said sorrowfully, “What lovely hair you have, Charley Utsumbé, like metal mesh.”
“All we Utsumbés are exceedingly handsome.” They linked arms. The sun, which anyone could chase around the world now, see it rise or set twenty times a day, fifty times a day – if you wanted to spend your life like that – rose dripping out of the cypress swamp. There was nobody around for miles. Mist drifted up from the pools and low places.
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