Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (386 page)

“Further,” he said, “you have displayed a complete lack of understanding of Corps discipline, the respect due a senior agent, even the basic courtesies. Your aggravated displays of temper, ill-timed outbursts of violence and almost incredible arrogance in the assumption of authority make your further retention as an officer-agent of the Diplomatic Corps impossible. It will therefore be my unhappy duty to recommend your immediate—”

There was a muted buzz from the communicator. The ambassador cleared his throat.

“Well?”

“A signal from Sector HQ, Mr. Ambassador,” a voice said.

“Well, read it,” Spradley snapped. “Skip the preliminaries.”

“Congratulations on the unprecedented success of your mission. The articles of agreement transmitted by you embody a most favorable resolution of the difficult Sirenian situation, and will form the basis of continued amicable relations between the Terrestrial States and the Yill Empire. To you and your staff, full credit is due for a job well done. Signed, Deputy Assistant Secretary—”

Spradley cut off the voice impatiently.

He shuffled papers, eyed Retief sharply.

“Superficially, of course, an uninitiated observer might leap to the conclusion that the—ah—results that were produced in spite of these … ah … irregularities justify the latter.” The Ambassador smiled a sad, wise smile. “This is far from the case,” he said. “I—”

The communicator burped softly.

“Confound it!” Spradley muttered. “Yes?”

“Mr. T’Cai-Cai has arrived,” the voice said. “Shall I—”

“Send him in at once.” Spradley glanced at Retief. “Only a two-syllable man, but I shall attempt to correct these false impressions, make some amends.…”

The two Terrestrials waited silently until the Yill Protocol chief tapped at the door.

“I hope,” the ambassador said, “that you will resist the impulse to take advantage of your unusual position.” He looked at the door. “Come in.”

T’Cai-Cai stepped into the room, glanced at Spradley, turned to greet Retief in voluble Yill. He rounded the desk to the ambassador’s chair, motioned him from it and sat down.

* * * *

“I have a surprise for you, Retief,” he said, in Terran. “I myself have made use of the teaching machine you so kindly lent us.”

“That’s fine. T’Cai-Cai,” Retief said. “I’m sure Mr. Spradley will be interested in hearing what we have to say.”

“Never mind,” the Yill said. “I am here only socially.” He looked around the room.

“So plainly you decorate your chamber. But it has a certain austere charm.” He laughed a Yill laugh.

“Oh, you are a strange breed, you Terrestrials. You surprised us all. You know, one hears such outlandish stories. I tell you in confidence, we had expected you to be overpushes.”

“Pushovers,” Spradley said, tonelessly.

“Such restraint! What pleasure you gave to those of us, like myself of course, who appreciated your grasp of protocol. Such finesse! How subtly you appeared to ignore each overture, while neatly avoiding actual contamination. I can tell you, there were those who thought—poor fools—that you had no grasp of etiquette. How gratified we were, we professionals, who could appreciate your virtuosity—when you placed matters on a comfortable basis by spurning the cats’-meat. It was sheer pleasure then, waiting, to see what form your compliment would take.”

The Yill offered orange cigars, stuffed one in his nostril.

“I confess even I had not hoped that you would honor our Admirable so signally. Oh, it is a pleasure to deal with fellow professionals, who understand the meaning of protocol!”

Ambassador Spradley made a choking sound.

“This fellow has caught a chill,” T’Cai-Cai said. He eyed Spradley dubiously. “Step back, my man. I am highly susceptible.

“There is one bit of business I shall take pleasure in attending to, my dear Retief,” T’Cai-Cai went on. He drew a large paper from his reticule. “The Admirable is determined than none other than yourself shall be accredited here. I have here my government’s exequatur confirming you as Terrestrial consul-general to Yill. We shall look forward to your prompt return.”

Retief looked at Spradley.

“I’m sure the Corps will agree,” he said.

“Then I shall be going,” T’Cai-Cai said. He stood up. “Hurry back to us, Retief. There is much that I would show you of Yill.”

“I’ll hurry,” Retief said and, with a Yill wink: “Together we shall see many high and splendid things!”

* * * *

Copyright © 1962 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.

(1929– )

Ursula Le Guin and I are usually on opposite coasts, so I haven’t had many chances to meet her. I’ve loved her writing since I was very small, and enjoy teaching her work, so I was very much hoping to have a chance to get to know her during the one convention she and I were on a panel together. Unfortunately the panel turned into one of those surreal, slow motion disasters (for reasons I won’t go into here but that make a funny story if you ever happen to run into me at a convention) and we haven’t been in the same room since.

Le Guin is one of the field’s superstars, and brought an anthropological and feminist approach to her writing unseen in science fiction before her work. She challenged the basic idea of what a story was at times, arguing against the tendency to conflate story with conflict. And she’s written in many forms—novels, short stories, essays, poetry, children’s books—as well as having a huge impact on both science fiction and fantasy.

The daughter of famed anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and psychologist and writer of children’s stories Theodora Kroeber, Le Guin was educated at Radcliffe College and Columbia University, where she won a Fulbright Fellowship. She also studied in France, where she met her husband, the historian Charles Le Guin. She’d wanted to be a writer from an early age, and submitted (unsuccessfully) her first story to Astounding when she was eleven. While working for several colleges, she began writing in earnest. Mostly she wrote nonfiction and children’s stories, but her first genre story, “April in Paris,” was published in Amazing in 1962.

By the mid-1960s she was writing science fiction: Her first novel was
Rocannon’s World
(1966).
The Left Hand of Darkness
(1969) and
The Dispossessed
(1974), set in the same universe as
Rocannon’s World
, each won both the Hugo and the Nebula, making Le Guin the first author to win both awards for the same book twice.
The Lathe of Heaven
(1971) would twice be adapted for television. She also built a reputation for being fearless in her subjects, taking on human sexuality in
The Left Hand of Darkness
, for instance. In 1968,
A Wizard of Earthsea
, the first novel of the Earthsea Trilogy (expanded further two decades later), made her a major voice in fantasy as well, setting a contrast to sword-and-sorcery tales with her story that revolved around keeping the world in balance.

Le Guin has won literally dozens of awards for her writing, in- and outside of the field, including five Hugos, four Nebulas, three Tiptree Awards, a Newbery Silver Medal, a Pushcart Prize, a PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, a Maxine Cushing Gray Fellowship for Writers for distinguished body of work, and nine honorary degrees.

First published in
Omni
, January 1992

Mrs. Jerry Debree, the heroine of Grong Crossing, liked to look pretty. It was important to Jerry in his business contacts, of course, and also it made her feel more confident and kind of happy to know that her cellophane was recent and her eyelashes really well glued on and that the highlighter blush was bringing out her cheekbones like the nice girl at the counter had said. But it was beginning to be hard to feel fresh and look pretty as this desert kept getting hotter and hotter and redder and redder until it looked, really, almost like what she had always thought the Bad Place would look like, only not so many people. In fact none.

“Could we have passed it, do you think?” she ventured at last, and received without surprise the exasperation she had safety-valved from him: “How the fuck could we have passed it when we haven’t passed one fucking thing except those fucking bushes for ninety miles? Christ you’re dumb.”

Jerry’s language was a pity. And sometimes it made it so hard to talk to him. She had had the least little tiny sort of feeling, woman’s intuition maybe, that the men that had told him how to get to Grong Crossing were teasing him, having a little joke. He had been talking so loud in the hotel bar about how disappointed he had been with the Corroboree after flying all the way out from Adelaide to see it. He kept comparing it to the Indian dance they had seen at Taos. Actually he had been very bored and restless at Taos and they had had to leave in the middle so he could have a drink and she never had got to see the people with the masks come, but now he talked about how they really knew how to put on a native show in the U.S.A. He said a few scruffy abos jumping around weren’t going to give tourists from the real world anything to write home about. The Aussies ought to visit Disney World and find out how to do the real thing, he said.

She agreed with that; she loved Disney World. It was the only thing in Florida, where they had to live now that Jerry was ACEO, that she liked much. One of the Australian men at the bar had seen Disneyland and agreed that it was amazing, or maybe he meant amusing; what he said was amizing. He seemed to be a nice man. Bruce, he said his name was, and his friend’s name was Bruce too. “Common sort of name here,” he said, only he said nime, but he meant name, she was quite sure. When Jerry went on complaining about the Corroboree, the first Bruce said, “Well, mite, you might go out to Grong Crossing, if you really want to see the real thing—right, Bruce?”

At first the other Bruce didn’t seem to know what he meant, and that was when her woman’s intuition woke up. But pretty soon both Bruces were talking away about this place, Grong Crossing, way out in “the bush,” where they were certain to meet real abos really living in the desert. “Near Alice Springs,” Jerry said knowledgeably, but it wasn’t, they said; it was still farther west from here. They gave directions so precisely that it was clear they knew what they were talking about. “Few hours’ drive, that’s all,” Bruce said, “but y’see most tourists want to keep on the beaten path. This is a bit more on the inside track.”

“Bang-up shows,” said Bruce. “Nightly Corroborees.”

“Hotel any better than this dump?” Jerry asked, and they laughed. No hotel, they explained. “It’s like a safari, see—tents under the stars. Never rines,” said Bruce.

“Marvelous food, though,” Bruce said. “Fresh kangaroo chops. Kangaroo hunts daily, see. Witchetty grubs along with the drinks before dinner. Roughing it in luxury, I’d call it; right, Bruce?”

“Absolutely,” said Bruce.

“Friendly, are they, these abos?” Jerry asked.

“Oh, salt of the earth. Treat you like kings. Think white men are sort of gods, y’know,” Bruce said. Jerry nodded.

So Jerry wrote down all the directions, and here they were driving and driving in the old station wagon that was all there was to rent in the small town they’d been at for the Corroboree, and by now you only knew the road was a road because it was perfectly straight forever. Jerry had been in a good humor at first. “This’ll be something to shove up that bastard Thiel’s ass,” he said. His friend Thiel was always going to places like Tibet and having wonderful adventures and showing videos of himself with yaks. Jerry had bought a very expensive camcorder for this trip, and now he said, “Going to shoot me some abos. Show that fucking Thiel and his musk-oxes!” But as the morning went on and the road went on and the desert went on—did they call it “the bush” because there was one little thorny bush once a mile or so?—he got hotter and hotter and redder and redder, just like the desert. And she began to feel depressed and like her mascara was caking.

She was wondering if after another forty miles (four was her lucky number) she could say, “Maybe we ought to turn back?” for the first time, when he said, “There!”

There was something ahead, all right.

“There hasn’t been any sign,” she said, dubious. “They didn’t say anything about a hill, did they?”

“Hell, that’s no hill, that’s a rock—what do they call it—some big fucking red rock—”

“Ayers Rock?” She had read the Welcome to Down Under flyer in the hotel in Adelaide while Jerry was at the plastics conference. “But that’s in the middle of Australia, isn’t it?”

“So where the fuck do you think we are? In the middle of Australia! What do you think this is, fucking East Germany?” He was shouting, and he speeded up. The terribly straight road shot them straight at the hill, or rock, or whatever it was. It wasn’t Ayers Rock, she knew that, but there wasn’t any use irritating Jerry, especially when he started shouting.

It was reddish, and shaped kind of like a huge VW bug, only lumpier; and there were certainly people all around it, and at first she was very glad to see them. Their utter isolation—they hadn’t seen another car or farm or anything for two hours—had scared her. Then as they got closer she thought the people looked rather funny. Funnier than the ones at the Corroboree even. “I guess they’re natives,” she said aloud.

“What the shit did you expect, Frenchmen?” Jerry said, but he said it like a joke, and she laughed. But— “Oh! goodness!” she said involuntarily, getting her first clear sight of one of the natives.

“Big fellows, huh,” he said. “Bushmen, they call ‘em.”

That didn’t seem right, but she was still getting over the shock of seeing that tall, thin, black-and-white, weird person. It had been just standing looking at the car, only she couldn’t see its eyes. Heavy brows and thick, hairy eyebrows hid them. Black, ropy hair hung over half its face and stuck out from behind its ears.

“Are they—are they painted?” she asked weakly.

“They always paint ‘emselves up like that.” His contempt for her ignorance was reassuring.

“They almost don’t look human,” she said, very softly so as not to hurt their feelings, if they spoke English, since Jerry had stopped the car and flung the doors open and was rummaging out the video camera.

“Hold this!”

She held it. Five or six of the tall black-and-white people had sort of turned their way, but they all seemed to be busy with something at the foot of the hill or rock or whatever it was. There were some things that might be tents. Nobody came to welcome them or anything, but she was actually just as glad they didn’t.

“Hold this! Oh for Chrissake what did you do with the—All right, just give it here.”

“Jerry, I wonder if we should ask them,” she said.

“Ask who what?” he growled, having trouble with the cassette thing.

“The people here—if it’s all right to photograph. Remember at Taos they said that when the—”

“For fuck sake you don’t need fucking permission to photograph a bunch of natives! God! Did you ever look at the fucking National Geographic? Shit! Permission!”

It really wasn’t any use when he started shouting. And the people didn’t seem to be interested in what he was doing. Although it was quite hard to be sure what direction they were actually looking.

“Aren’t you going to get out of the fucking car?”

“It’s so hot,” she said.

He didn’t really mind it when she was afraid of getting too hot or sunburned or anything, because he liked being stronger and tougher. She probably could even have said that she was afraid of the natives, because he liked to be braver than her, too; but sometimes he got angry when she was afraid, like the time he made her eat that poisonous fish, or a fish that might or might not be poisonous, in Japan, because she said she was afraid to, and she threw up and embarrassed everybody. So she just sat in the car and kept the engine on and the air-conditioning on, although the window on her side was open.

Jerry had his camera up on his shoulder now and was panning the scene—the faraway hot red horizon, the queer rock-hill-thing with shiny places in it like glass, the black, burned-looking ground around it, and the people swarming all over. There were forty or fifty of them at least. It only dawned on her now that if they were wearing any clothes at all, she didn’t know which was clothes and which was skin, because they were so strange-shaped, and painted or colored all in stripes and spots of white on black, not like zebras but more complicated, more like skeleton suits but not exactly. And they must be eight feet tall, but their arms were short, almost like kangaroos’. And their hair was like black ropes standing up all over their heads. It was embarrassing to look at people without clothes on, but you couldn’t really see anything like that. In fact she couldn’t tell, actually, if they were men or women.

They were all busy with their work or ceremony or whatever it was. Some of them were handling some things like big, thin, golden leaves, others were doing something with cords or wires. They didn’t seem to be talking, but there was all the time in the air a soft, drumming, droning, rising and falling, deep sound, like cats purring or voices far away.

Jerry started walking towards them.

“Be careful,” she said faintly. He paid no attention, of course.

They paid no attention to him either, as far as she could see, and he kept filming, swinging the camera around. When he got right up close to a couple of them, they turned towards him. She couldn’t see their eyes at all but what happened was their hair sort of stood up and bent towards Jerry—each thick, black rope about a foot long moving around and bending down exactly as if it were peering at him. At that, her own hair tried to stand up, and the blast of the air conditioner ran like ice down her sweaty arms. She got out of the car and called his name.

He kept filming.

She went towards him as fast as she could on the cindery, stony soil in her high-heeled sandals.

“Jerry, come back. I think—”

“Shut up!” he yelled so savagely that she stopped short for a moment. But she could see the hair better now, and she could see that it did have eyes, and mouths too, with little red tongues darting out.

“Jerry, come back,” she said. “They’re not natives, they’re Space Aliens. That’s their saucer.” She knew from the Sun that there had been sightings down here in Australia.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “Hey, big fella, give me a little action, huh? Don’t just stand there. Dancee-dancee, OK?” His eye was glued to the camera.

“Jerry,” she said, her voice sticking in her throat, as one of the Space Aliens pointed with its little weak-looking arm and hand at the car. Jerry shoved the camera right up close to its head, and at that it put its hand over the lens. That made Jerry mad, of course, and he yelled, “Get the fuck off that!” And he actually looked at the Space Alien, not through the camera but face to face. “Oh, gee,” he said.

And his hand went to his hip. He always carried a gun, because it was an American’s right to bear arms and there were so many drug addicts these days. He had smuggled it through the airport inspection the way he knew how. Nobody was going to disarm him.

She saw perfectly clearly what happened. The Space Alien opened its eyes.

There were eyes under the dark, shaggy brows; they had been kept closed till now. Now they were open and looked once straight at Jerry, and he turned to stone. He just stood there, one hand on the camera and one reaching for his gun, motionless.

Several more Space Aliens had gathered round. They all had their eyes shut, except for the ones at the ends of their hair. Those glittered and shone, and the little red tongues flickered in and out, and the humming, droning sound was much louder. Many of the hair-snakes writhed to look at her. Her knees buckled and her heart thudded in her throat, but she had to get to Jerry.

She passed right between two huge Space Aliens and reached him and patted him—“Jerry, wake up!” she said. He was just like stone, paralyzed. “Oh,” she said, and tears ran down her face, “Oh, what should I do, what can I do?” She looked around in despair at the tall, thin, black-and-white faces looming above her, white teeth showing, eyes tight shut, hairs staring and stirring and murmuring. The murmur was soft, almost like music, not angry, soothing. She watched two tall Space Aliens pick up Jerry quite gently, as if he were a tiny little boy—a stiff one—and carry him carefully to the car.

They poked him into the back seat lengthwise, but he didn’t fit. She ran to help. She let down the back seat so there was room for him in the back. The Space Aliens arranged him and tucked the video camera in beside him, then straightened up, their hairs looking down at her with little twinkly eyes. They hummed softly, and pointed with their childish arms back down the road.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. Good-bye!”

They hummed.

She got in and closed the window and turned the car around there on a wide place in the road—and there was a signpost, Grong Crossing, although she didn’t see any crossroad.

She drove back, carefully at first because she was shaky, then faster and faster because she should get Jerry to the doctor, of course, but also because she loved driving on long straight roads very fast, like this. Jerry never let her drive except in town.

The paralysis was total and permanent, which would have been terrible, except that she could afford full-time, round-the-clock, first-class care for poor Jerry, because of the really good deals she made with the TV people and then with the rights people for the video. First it was shown all over the world as “Space Aliens Land in Australian Outback,” but then it became part of real science and history as “Grong Crossing, South Australia: The First Contact With the Gorgonids.” In the voice-over they told how it was her, Annie Laurie Debree, who had been the first human to talk with our friends from Outer Space, even before they sent the ambassadors to Canberra and Reykjavik. There was only one good shot of her on the film, and Jerry had been sort of shaking, and her highlighter was kind of streaked, but that was all right. She was the heroine.