The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  That One thinks the dance and song we made is all about him because he’s so great and brought us fie which we don’t even use and don’t even want. It’s too hot. We don’t say he’s wrong about that song and dance, but we put in some new words he doesn’t know and that we’ll not tell him, about how it’s worth sand. We sing, “Fie, fie, fie, and all worth sand and you, too, worth sand,” and we come onto the beach and throw sand up like we do sometimes and People get it in their eyes and have to cry and go back into the water to wash it out even though we’re all crying at how funny it is. When we sing that song, That One stands on a high place and swings his arms around and says this is right for us to do for him, but that we shouldn’t laugh so much. Well why do it if not to laugh?

  I brought him berries. That made him smile. He’s so hard to make smile, sometimes I think that’s another reason why I stay around with him, just to see if I can do such a hard thing. He said he didn’t know we had berries, and I said, “You’re glad we do.” He looked happy while he was eating them. That was the first time I thought he had a nice face even though it looks so funny.

  I’m becoming a talker (which is what I do become). It all starts with That One telling things to me and me telling things to him. So in the future I will be telling everybody all about it so it will be known that all that happened is happening.

  He puts together that big skin and bones of the biggest thing of all in a different way than they were before and when he’s done he tells me I’m part of the plan and that I have to do it with him.

  “You’ll be Zuesa’s woman. You’ll be above all the other mas. There’s no word in your language for what I’ll make you. There’ll even be stars named after you.”

  I say no. No is a word not to say, but I say it. (If ma is the first word, then no is the last, or so we always say.) I’m glad none of the others hear me say it.

  Then he says (and it isn’t the first time) that I and we all should call him Zuesa and not call him That One anymore. This is his real name which is the name of one so big we don’t have a word for it yet because we’re not that far advanced, but we change Zuesa to Zand for sand and to Zat One and to Zeaweed, and we’re glad we have so many new things to laugh about. Then he says this Berry Place will be called Zuesa’s Beginning because this will be where he starts from, bringing fie and bowawa and many other good things to the whole world. So we mustn’t call it Berry Place anymore. But we decide that we’ll just point to it and laugh. We’ll not call it anything and everybody will know exactly where we mean.

  Now he stands on the hill and tells us things we already know. The world is round—as round as the moon, but that can be seen by any child who has gone from swim to walk and can stand on a high place and look out from it. It’s a very large circle. We all know that. We don’t talk about it, we just know it—that we live here on a round place like on the moon, just as he says.

  I tell him to stop talking. (This is after all that talk.) I brush his funny belly hair with my hand. As I do it, I see Zat One’s little penis come out and up. I’m just playing with his belly hair and not thinking about going into the water with him or with anybody and he turns and, almost before I know what he’s doing, it’s done already. I hadn’t given him my cowry and there it is, done, and so fast. My first time. Done from behind, too, like bugs, no looking eye to eye, no swimming around, no laughing, not even smiling.

  But Zat One is very happy. “You’ll be the first mother of the men of fie,” he tells me. “There’ll be lots, but you’ll be the first and you’ll be above all the others.”Then he turns to do the thing again and from the back again, but I go off into the water too far for him to follow.

  This is the beginning of all the bad things.

  Out there with the Berry People there are three women that are not pregnant yet. Like me, they’ve come into their full fat. And there are two girls that are just beginning to get into their fat time though they have their moons at the full of the moon like the rest of us. One dawn, when the bowawa is finished and sits on the sand with some shells full of berries in it, I hear a great noise of brothers and uncles and Deep Diver is with them. They come to me and say it’s all my fault, that I let Zat One be here and then this happened, and I say, “What?” And they say every one of their women that were ready for it. He has been with them and not even in the water and not even laughing and not even just one, but all, and in that single night, and he did it in such a way they hardly even knew it had happened. Then they throw stones at me and at Zat One. “Don’t be here anymore,” they tell me. “You and Zat One also. You both go.”

  Zat One says that now I have to come with him or they’ll hurt me, but he has done a very bad thing, and I’m thinking it’s true, the land is a bad place to have made him like he is. I say, No, and, No, again, but all the time I’m running with him because I don’t know what else to do. I know my People don’t mean for me to go away forever, but I know I should go for a while so they have a chance to forget some of this. Zat One and I push the bowawa off the sand and jump into it and they don’t swim out after us. They just begin to laugh a lot. They watch us go off this funny, slow way, wobbling in the waves. I have to laugh, too, in spite of what’s been happening. And that’s not the only funny thing about it. Zat One has made two things of skin, two little moons he stuck on each end of a big bone. He waves these around and makes them be the arms of the bowawa so it can go along. I lie there in it laughing and laughing and I can hear the people on the beach laughing, too, even though they’re angry, and I think what Old Man Lost Egg says sometimes, that, well, it’s done so it’s done, so if you can laugh, might as well do it.

  We go right on past my beach. I feel like getting out and swimming back home to be there when they all get back from Berry Island. When they come with that nice fat and those berries mixed into it, they’ll have forgotten all this a little bit, but Zat One says to wait and I’ll be glad I did, but I doubt it. He says not to forget I’ll be the mother of the men of fie, but I don’t even like fie and I tell him so. I know how to make it now. It’s no big thing and I can’t think of a time I would ever want to do it. Besides, it used up that stuff that the sea washes up to us. I do stay there with him, though, but for a different reason. The water is humping up and I can smell the wind coming. He can’t see that or smell it. He goes on talking and pushing the bowawa along in that funny way. I stay because this bowawa will not be very good when the waves get big and I know if I’m not there with him, Zat One will surely die. He’s not a good Person, if Person at all, but is he so bad I shouldn’t help him? So I let us pass my home beach, but I’ll swim back to it soon. Zat One can’t last very long anyway, even with me staying. Nobody likes him. I’m the only one that wonders about him and helps him. All he knows is what I taught him and there hasn’t been time to tell everything. So I go on, watching after him like he is my little one, and he is my little one.

  ZUESA

  Where I come from, giants rule…. Generations of princes, lords, barons, sitting in the royal tree limbs, all the leaders having swung down on private chutes or air bridges of their own suspending, having entered through the sky gates of the messengers of good tidings, all, feathered like sun birds, and I, permitted to take my place at the topmost royal hearth when the fires burn brightest. Now all gone, my master hat tossed from my head, my strings—except for these colorless copies—slashed; even access to any tree, whether figurative or real, impossible to me. Except there are trees. That, the captains surely didn’t know. They thought the land too hot and dry. Uninhabitable, they said, and left me here because it was uninhabitable. A little circle of green around the edges of the poles, and on purpose they didn’t drop me off at either one. I’m to suffer. And I have suffered: Eaten disgusting fish things, chewed seaweed, sucked at things I couldn’t chew or swallowed them whole—I can’t get that sea-taste out of my mouth. Even the bird’s eggs taste of the sea. I’ve thought many times I’d not be able to take one more breath of this hot air, nor another st
ep across the desert, but I’ve seen a giant, dried-up trunk on one of the beaches. It would have taken five men with outstretched arms to gird it. I’ve eaten steaks bigger than they ever knew existed… sea mammal steaks. I’ve had berries sweet as tree-top blossoms. Out of this world I’ll build a new one, half me, half these creatures that swim. I’ll call the planet Zuesa, so if they ever come back, they’ll know this all came from me.

  It’s clear these once were land beings. As far as I can tell, all the mammals here were also, at one time, of the land, but they’ve gone back to the beaches and into the oceans. The land got too hot. Under these circumstances it’ll be hard to make a decent civilization.

  Can there be such a thing as a civilization without trees?

  That’s always been the question, and I’ve heard those captains debating it, crouched under their crowns. After all, the trees made us what we are. There was a time when we had shelters of slabs of bark tied about our nests of leaves. There was a time when we packaged nuts and fruits in tree pods and made strings of fibers in order to make the knots which we used to count the packages, so the stuff of the trees was the beginning of everything. “From the gods of forest,” as they used to say, but no trees here that I’ve seen except for that one old log washed ashore from gods know where. Only that one old log as though a sign of hope to me, and I do hope. It pleases me to think that somewhere, far north or far south, there is a forest of giants almost as big as the giants of home and that, one day, I might be able to stretch my arms again and swing and leap and sleep to the rocking of the wind instead of the rocking of the waves.

  I will go north and create a new civilization. It won’t be easy with these creatures. You’d think life was all play the way they go about it. She, too, laughs too much. Even so, I think of her as my sister-wife. I call her that because, in times to come, my sons will have to marry their sisters, otherwise my genes would get lost. My ideal is for a much thinner people, certainly with fur, but as tall as these creatures are, and with great showy penises continually exposed, as theirs are, so that when my captains come back… but I must keep in mind they may never see any of this—but if they do, they’ll get the same shock I did. Here will be Zuesa’s men of fire, all with my face, all with the hats and crowns of their status, and all with enviable penises.

  Ah, but she…. I call her sister, but I also call her by my mother’s name just to be able to say that word again and to remind me how a woman can really be. I mustn’t get used to these soft gigglers. I want to remember how a woman can be: Thin and stringy, with tiny, woodland breasts, black-tipped. Had she been a man, my mother would have been a warrior. She lived in the upper reaches. Our house was at the top. Mother hardly ever came down. She liked the sway of things up there. She slept in the highest hammock. Her fur was orange-red. She was like fire herself. That’s how I’d like my sons to be, thin and fiery, phosphorescent eyes glowing out in the night, not like the pale eyes of these creatures, all the color of the water that they spend their days floating around in.

  I taught them…. I taught all her group fire. They didn’t like it. How can one like or not like a thing like that? I showed them boat, and they said they didn’t need that either, though these are all part of progress. Yet they did sing about me, if you can call that waa waa boo baa singing. They threw sand and blew into shells. They know my worth even though she’s the only one who shows it. The rest are afraid. Though they have no castes, they sense a higher rank in me.

  But I do realize how much I need her—just as she is, actually—to help me. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have died for sure in the storm. We lost the boat. At first I thought for good, but she found it. I don’t even remember how we got to that beach. I came to myself afterwards, when we were already up on the cliff where only the spray from the waves could reach us. More of those creatures were up there, too, waiting out the storm. They don’t seem to care how wet they get. None of them, she included, bothered to go up where the spray couldn’t reach. I suppose it’s that layer of fat that does it. They did huddle together, but it seemed more for friendliness than warmth. Zoe (she doesn’t know yet I’ve named her that), Zoe kept me warm, though, held me to her all night long. I was throwing up and shaking. I think I was in shock. Gods, she’s big! Like a feathered nest. I sank right in, stopped shaking, and slept through it as though I was one of theirs.

  In the morning, when those other creatures got a good look at me, they didn’t much like what they saw, that was clear. Zoe told them we’d go as soon as she found the boat, and she left me there along with them and went out swimming. (I can’t see how they do that—swim off with all kinds of weird fish out there. I got stung when a poison tail whipped me, and I saw fish with needle teeth.)

  The creatures turned their backs on me. I wasn’t afraid they’d do anything. I know they throw stones, but they always miss. It got hot as usual. I went partway into the water to cool off, and even then, as usual, I felt so hot I couldn’t breathe. The young ones came swimming up to me to feel my fur and laugh. They have less fear of me when I’m in the water. That was true with the others, too. Those young ones really laughed to see me learning to swim. Even the young are fat and hairless, except for their heads.

  Zoe said the storm felt like taking me but changed its mind at the last minute. She said she would go to see if the storm had decided to take the boat or not. She said she could do it faster by herself. My mother never spoiled me by doing anything of that kind. Mother would say, “Climb up and see for yourself to your kites and gliders or any hot air toy.” I had all those toys that ride the tree tops. Mother thought they were good for me, and that was true because I became a great pilot, though what good is that now? I’ll write it all down for my sons—for the princes and lords of fire. Though the first priority is seeding them. Zoe’s son will be above them all. It’s what these creatures need most, gods and emperors. I really am their gift from the stars. I was thinking all this when the young ones splashed around laughing at me and the adults turned away and covered their smiles, and I thought, go ahead and laugh. You’ll soon see.

  Then I thought it would be a good idea, when Zoe came back with the boat, if I should try to plant some more sons, two or even three if I could be fast about it. (It’s a good thing I’m young and quick and have practiced the single-thrust method our highest leaders prefer in order to conserve energy for more important tasks and also to conserve energy in order to impregnate as many as possible in the shortest amount of time.) I must pick out the ones not yet pregnant, those with their shells still near them. Zoe could wait for me with the boat all ready to get out of here fast. It always takes those big uncles a while to figure out what happened. Even the women don’t react that quickly, almost as though they’re not sure it happened at all.

  VENUS

  We have to go away again as fast as we can, though not much stone throwing. Those Cliff People don’t know what to do about us, but I know we should go before they decide something. The bowawa needs to be fixed. We have to find a good stopping place, but first we have to get away. Zat One has me scoop the water out as we go. My hands, he says, are made for it. We go along, but not as fast as we could if we were swimming, except Zat One can’t swim even this fast.

  He’s smiling at me when he says my hands are good. That’s another one of his smiles. I’m counting up maybe one hand’s worth in all, but I’m not sure this one belongs with the other. It’s not a good smile so I’m not smiling back at him. “What are you doing,” I say, “using up cowry-shell women?” Already I’m not talking like my People talk. I’m talking like he would talk if he could talk as well as we can. I’m asking questions about things that shouldn’t be asked about, except things like this didn’t happen before Zat One came. “This is a thing to say no about,” I say. “It should be learned without having to say anything about it,” and I say, “I won’t let this happen.”

  “I have a plan,” he says, but I know all those furry children he plans on will be left out for the waves
to take. Those thin hairy things won’t like the ocean. They will have gotten inside the mas by the way of the air instead of by the way of water as they should get in. The mas won’t know what to do with them. They’ll be given up to the storms and swept away like they should be.

  “North,”he says, and asks me if I know what that is. Then he tells me and I see by what he’s telling that I do know what it is. It’s the second corner of the earth. I tell him that, but he says there are no corners to the earth, but I know that also. Old Man Lost Egg, when he was young, did as the young ones do sometimes. He swam out and around and only came back much later and much older, saying that the world is as series of circles, and that it went on and on, and that there were People on good beaches and good rocky places and on islands of stones which they shared with the seals.

  Zat One tells me, “We go north,” and I say, “I’m not going.” I say, “I’ll go as far as where you can stop and fix this bowawa, but not farther.”Then I turn my back and keep on scooping up the water and he jumps on me again. It’s over in the time it takes to scoop a fish. I stop scooping out the water so that the bowawa fills up and we have to land in a place that’s not a good place. He climbs halfway up the cliff and begins to try to fix the bowawa there on a little ledge. I stay in the water, thinking. He watches me. I let myself drift out with the pull of the tide. He calls. I think he’s thinking I’m not coming back. I’m thinking the same thing, and thinking he’ll die soon without me, but then I think maybe he won’t die as quickly as I want him to. Maybe he’ll go on doing that bad thing and live a long time going on doing it. I’ll have to be the one to kill him if the sea doesn’t do it soon. But then I have a good idea. I swim back. “Come,” I say, “we’ll find a better place to fix the bowawa.”