He turned his head—those words have not been in our language for six hundred years—and said, in bad Russian:
“Who’s that?”
“My daughter,” I said, and added (with that irrational attention to good manners we sometimes employ in moments of insanity), “My daughter, Yuriko Janetson. We use the patronymic. You would say matronymic.”
He laughed, involuntarily. Yuki exclaimed, “I thought they would be good looking!” greatly disappointed at this reception of herself. Phyllis Helgason Spet, whom someday I shall kill, gave me across the room a cold, level, venomous look, as if to say: Watch what you say. You know what I can do. It’s true that I have little formal status, but Madam President will get herself in serious trouble with both me and her own staff if she continues to consider industrial espionage good clean fun. Wars and rumors of wars, as it says in one of our ancestors’ books. I translated Yuki’s words into the man’s dog-Russian, once our lingua franca, and the man laughed again.
“Where are all your people?” he said conversationally.
I translated again and watched the faces around the room; Lydia embarrassed (as usual), Spet narrowing her eyes with some damned scheme, Katy very pale.
“This is Whileaway,” I said.
He continued to look unenlightened.
“Whileaway,” I said. “Do you remember? Do you have records? There was a plague on Whileaway,”
He looked moderately interested. Heads turned in the back of the room, and I caught a glimpse of the local professions-parliament delegate; by morning every town meeting, every district caucus, would be in full session.
“Plague?” he said. “That’s most unfortunate.”
“Yes,” I said. “Most unfortunate. We lost half our population in one generation.”
He looked properly impressed.
“Whileaway was lucky,” I said. “We had a big initial gene pool, we had been chosen for extreme intelligence, we had a high technology and a large remaining population in which every adult was two-or-three experts in one. The soil is good. The climate is blessedly easy. There are thirty millions of us now. Things are beginning to snowball in industry—do you understand?—give us seventy years and we’ll have more than one real city, more than a few industrial centers, full-time professions, full-time radio operators, full-time machinists, give us seventy years and not everyone will have to spend three-quarters of a lifetime on the farm.” And I tried to explain how hard it is when artists can practice full-time only in old age, when there are so few, so very few who can be free, like Katy and myself. I tried also to outline our government, the two houses, the one by professions and the geographic one; I told him the district caucuses handled problems too big for the individual towns. And that population control was not a political issue, not yet, though give us time and it would be. This was a delicate point in our history; give us time. There was no need to sacrifice the quality of life for an insane rush into industrialization. Let us go our own pace. Give us time.
“Where are all the people?” said that monomaniac.
I realized then that he did not mean people, he meant men, and he was giving the word the meaning it had not had on Whileaway for six centuries.
“They died,” I said. “Thirty generations ago.”
I thought we had poleaxed him. He caught his breath. He made as if to get out of the chair he was sitting in; he put his hand to his chest; he looked around at us with the strangest blend of awe and sentimental tenderness. Then he said, solemnly and earnestly:
“A great tragedy.”
I waited, not quite understanding.
“Yes,” he said, catching his breath again with the queer smile, that adult-to-child smile that tells you something is being hidden and will be presently produced with cries of encouragement and joy, “a great tragedy. But it’s over.” And again he looked around at all of us with the strangest deference. As if we were invalids.
“You’ve adapted amazingly,” he said.
“To what?” I said. He looked embarrassed. He looked inane. Finally he said, “Where I come from, the women don’t dress so plainly.”
“Like you?” I said. “Like a bride?” for the men were wearing silver from head to foot. I had never seen anything so gaudy. He made as if to answer and then apparently thought better of it; he laughed at me again. With an odd exhilaration—as if we were something childish and something wonderful, as if he were doing us an enormous favor—he took one shaky breath and said, “Well, we’re here.”
I looked at Spet, Spet looked at Lydia, Lydia looked at Amalia, who is the head of the local town meeting, Amalia looked at I don’t know whom. My throat was raw. I cannot stand local beer, which the farmers swill as if their stomachs had iridium linings, but I took it anyway, from Amalia (it was her bicycle we had seen outside as we parked), and swallowed it all. This was going to take a long time. I said, “Yes, here you are,” and smiled (feeling like a fool), and wondered seriously if male-Earth-people’s minds worked so very differently from female-Earth-people’s minds, but that couldn’t be so or the race would have died out long ago. The radio network had got the news around planet by now and we had another Russian speaker, flown in from Varna; I decided to cut out when the man passed around pictures of his wife, who looked like the priestess of some arcane cult. He proposed to question Yuki, so I barreled her into a back room in spite of her furious protests, and went out on the front porch. As I left, Lydia was explaining the difference between parthenogenesis (which is so easy that anyone can practice it) and what we do, which is the merging of ova. That is why Katy’s baby looks like me. Lydia went on to the Ansky Process and Katy Ansky, our one full-poly-math genius and the great-great I don’t know how many times great-grandmother of my own Katharina.
A dot-dash transmitter in one of the outbuildings chattered faintly to itself—operators flirting and passing jokes down the line.
There was a man on the porch. The other tall man. I watched him for a few minutes—I can move very quietly when I want to and when I allowed him to see me, he stopped talking into the little machine hung around his neck. Then he said calmly, in excellent Russian, “Did you know that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth?”
“You’re the real one,” I said, “aren’t you? The other one’s for show.” It was a great relief to get things cleared up. He nodded affably.
“As a people, we are not very bright,” he said. “There’s been too much genetic damage in the last few centuries. Radiation. Drugs. We can use Whileaway’s genes, Janet.” Strangers do not call strangers by the first name.
“You can have cells enough to drown in,” I said. “Breed your own.”
He smiled. “That’s not the way we want to do it.” Behind him I saw Katy come into the square of light that was the screened-in door. He went on, low and urbane, not mocking me, I think, but with the self-confidence of someone who has always had money and strength to spare, who doesn’t know what it is to be second-class or provincial. Which is very odd, because the day before, I would have said that was an exact description of me.
“I’m talking to you, Janet,” he said, “because I suspect you have more popular influence than anyone else here. You know as well as I do that parthenogenetic culture has all sorts of inherent defects, and we do not—if we can help it—mean to use you for anything of the sort. Pardon me; I should not have said ‘use.’ But surely you can see that this kind of society is unnatural.”
“Humanity is unnatural,” said Katy. She had my rifle under her left arm. The top of that silky head does not quite come up to my collarbone, but she is as tough as steel; he began to move, again with that queer smiling deference (which his fellow had showed to me but he had not), and the gun slid into Katy’s grip as if she had shot with it all her life.
“I agree,” said the man. “Humanity is unnatural. I should know. I have metal in my teeth and metal pins here.” He touched his shoulder. “Seals are harem animals,” he added, “and so are men; apes are promisc
uous and so are men; doves are monogamous and so are men; there are even celibate men and homosexual men. There are homosexual cows, I believe. But Whileaway is still missing something.” He gave a dry chuckle. I will give him the credit of believing that it had something to do with nerves.
“I miss nothing,” said Katy, “except that life isn’t endless.”
“You are—?” said the man, nodding from me to her.
“Wives,” said Katy. “We’re married.” Again the dry chuckle.
“A good economic arrangement,” he said, “for working and taking care of the children. And as good an arrangement as any for randomizing heredity, if your reproduction is made to follow the same pattern. But think, Katharina Michaelason, if there isn’t something better that you might secure for your daughters. I believe in instincts, even in Man, and I can’t think that the two of you—a machinist, are you? and I gather you are some sort of chief of police—don’t feel somehow what even you must miss. You know it intellectually, of course. There is only half a species here. Men must come back to Whileaway.”
Katy said nothing.
“I should think, Katharina Michaelason,” said the man gently, “that you, of all people, would benefit most from such a change,” and he walked past Katy’s rifle into the square of light coming from the door. I think it was then that he noticed my scar, which really does not show unless the light is from the side: a fine line that runs from temple to chin. Most people don’t even know about it.
“Where did you get that?” he said, and I answered with an involuntary grin. “In my last duel.” We stood there bristling at each other for several seconds (this is absurd but true) until he went inside and shut the screen door behind him. Katy said in a brittle voice, “You damned fool, don’t you know when we’ve been insulted?” and swung up the rifle to shoot him through the screen, but I got to her before she could fire and knocked the rifle out of aim; it burned a hole through the porch floor. Katy was shaking. She kept whispering over and over, “That’s why I never touched it, because I knew I’d kill someone. I knew I’d kill someone.” The first man—the one I’d spoken with first—was still talking inside the house, something about the grand movement to recolonize and rediscover all the Earth had lost. He stressed the advantages to Whileaway: trade, exchange of ideas, education. He, too, said that sexual equality had been reestablished on Earth.
Katy was right, of course; we should have burned them down where they stood. Men are coming to Whileaway. When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome. Maybe men would have come eventually in any case. I like to think that a hundred years from now my great-grandchildren could have stood them off or fought them to a standstill, but even that’s no odds; I will remember all my life those four people I first met who were muscled like bulls and who made me—if only for a moment—feel small. A neurotic reaction, Katy says. I remember everything that happened that night; I remember Yuki’s excitement in the car, I remember Katy’s sobbing when we got home as if her heart would break, I remember her lovemaking, a little peremptory as always, but wonderfully soothing and comforting. I remember prowling restlessly around the house after Katy fell asleep with one bare arm hung into a patch of light from the hall. The muscles of her forearms are like metal bars from all that driving and testing of her machines. Sometimes I dream about Katy’s arms. I remember wandering into the nursery and picking up my wife’s baby, dozing for a while with the poignant, amazing warmth of an infant in my lap, and finally returning to the kitchen to find Yuriko fixing herself a late snack. My daughter eats like a Great Dane.
“Yuki,” I said, “do you think you could fall in love with a man?” and she whooped derisively. “With a ten-foot toad!” said my tactful child.
But men are coming to Whileaway. Lately I sit up nights and worry about the men who will come to this planet, about my two daughters and Betta Katharinason, about what will happen to Katy, to me, to my life. Our ancestors’ journals are one long cry of pain and I suppose I ought to be glad now, but one can’t throw away six centuries, or even (as I have lately discovered) thirty-four years. Sometimes I laugh at the question those four men hedged about all evening and never quite dared to ask, looking at the lot of us, hicks in overalls, farmers in canvas pants and plain shirts: Which of you plays the role of the man? As if we had to produce a carbon copy of their mistakes! I doubt very much that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. I do not like to think of myself mocked, of Katy deferred to as if she were weak, of Yuki made to feel unimportant or silly, of my other children cheated of their full humanity or turned into strangers. And I’m afraid that my own achievements will dwindle from what they were—or what I thought they were—to the not-very-interesting curiosa of the human race, the oddities you read about in the back of the book, things to laugh at sometimes because they are so exotic, quaint but not impressive, charming but not useful. I find this more painful than I can say. You will agree that for a woman who has fought three duels, all of them kills, indulging in such fears is ludicrous. But what’s around the corner now is a duel so big that I don’t think I have the guts for it; in Faust’s words: Verweile doch, du bist so schön! Keep it as it is. Don’t change.
Sometimes at night I remember the original name of this planet, changed by the first generation of our ancestors, those curious women for whom, I suppose, the real name was too painful a reminder after the men died. I find it amusing, in a grim way, to see it all so completely turned around. This, too, shall pass. All good things must come to an end.
Take my life but don’t take away the meaning of my life.
For-A-While.
VANDANA SINGH
The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet
Vandana Singh is an Indian writer of speculative fiction and a scientist living and working in the United States. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies and has frequently been reprinted in year’s-best publications. She is a winner of the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. Her most recent publications include stories for Lightspeed magazine and for Tor.com. “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet” concerns a relationship shaped by changes that lead a wife to question her marriage. It was first published in Trampoline in 2003.
Ramnath Mishra’s life changed forever one morning, when, during his perusal of the newspaper on the verandah, a ritual that he had observed for the last forty years, his wife set down her cup of tea with a crash and announced:
“I know at last what I am. I am a planet.”
Ramnath’s retirement was a source of displeasure to them both. He had been content to know his wife from a distance, to acknowledge her as the benign despot of the household and mother of his now-grown children, but he had desired no intimacy beyond that. As for Kamala herself, she seemed grumpy and uncomfortable with his proximity—her façade of the dutiful Indian wife had dropped after the first week. Now he lowered his newspaper, scowling, prepared to lecture her sternly for interrupting his peace, but instead his mouth fell open in silent astonishment.
His wife had gotten to her feet and was unwinding her sari.
Ramnath nearly knocked over his chair.
“What are you doing—have you lost your mind?” He leaped at her, grabbing a scrap of blue cotton sari with one hand and her arm with the other, looking around wildly to see if the servants were around, or the gardener, or whether the neighbors were peeping through the sprays of bougainvillea that sheltered the verandah from the summer heat. His wife, arrested in his arms, glared at him balefully.
“A planet does not need clothes,” she said with great dignity.
“You are not a planet, you are crazy,” Ramnath said. He propelled her into the bedroom. Thankfully the washerwoman had left and the cook was in the kitchen, singing untunefully to the radio. “Arrange your sari for heaven’s sake.”
She complied. Ramnath saw that tears were glistening in her eyes. He felt a stab of concern mingled with irritation.
&
nbsp; “Have you been feeling ill, Kamala? Should I phone Dr. Kumar?”
“I am not ill,” she said. “I have had a revelation. I am a planet. I used to be a human, a woman, a wife and mother. All the time I wondered if there was more to me than that. Now I know. Being a planet is good for me. I have stopped taking my liver pills.”
“Well, if you were a planet,” Ramnath said in exasperation, “you would be an inanimate object circling a star. You would probably have an atmosphere and living things crawling about you. You would be very large, like Earth or Jupiter. You are not a planet but a living soul, a woman. A lady from a respectable household who holds the family honor in her hands.”
He was gratified that he had explained it so well because she smiled at him and smoothed her hair, nodding. “I must go see to lunch,” she said in her normal voice. Ramnath went back to reading his newspaper on the verandah, shaking his head at the things a man had to do. But he could not concentrate on the prime minister’s latest antics. It came to him suddenly that it could be a rather frightening thing not to know the person with whom he had lived for forty years. Where had she been getting such strange ideas? He remembered the scandal when, many years ago, a great-aunt of his had gone mad, locked herself in the outdoor toilet of the ancestral home and begun shrieking like a sarus crane in the mating season. They had finally got her out while curious neighbors thronged the courtyard, muttering with false sympathy and shouting encouragement. He remembered how quiet she had seemed after they helped her over the broken door, how there had been no warning before she bent her head, apparently in meek surrender, and bit her husband on his arm. She had ended up in the insane asylum in Ranchi. What terrible dishonor the family had suffered, what indignity—a mad person in a respectable upper middle class family—he shuddered suddenly, set down his newspaper and went to call Dr. Kumar. Dr. Kumar would be discreet, he was a family friend …
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