Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (10 page)

On my knee her head shook. After a while she said, all breath and no voice, "Don't you think you… should leave?"

"Okay," I said, and stood up.

She sat back on the hem of her coat. She hadn't taken it off yet.

I went to the door.

"Incidentally." She folded her hands in her lap. "There is a place in New City you might find what you're looking for, called the Flower Passage—"

I turned toward her, angry. "The frelk hangout? Look, I don't
need
money? I said
any
thing would do! I don't want—"

She had begun to shake her head, laughing quietly. Now she lay her cheek on the wrinkled place where I had sat. "Do you persist in misunderstanding? It is a spacer hangout. When you leave, I am going to visit my friends and talk about… ah, yes, the beautiful one that got away. I thought you might find… perhaps someone you know."

With anger, it ended.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, it's a spacer hangout. Yeah. Well, thanks."

And went out. And found the Flower Passage, and Kelly and Lou and Bo and Muse. Kelly was buying beer, so we all got drunk, and ate fried fish and fried clams and fried sausage, and Kelly was waving the money around, saying, "You should have seen him! The changes I put that frelk through, you should have
seen
him! Eighty lira is the going rate here, and he gave me a hundred and fifty!" and drank more beer.

And went up.

JOANNA RUSS

Joanna Russ would begin selling in the late fifties but did not become widely known until the late sixties. Even Russ's early work— stories such as "My Dear Emily," "There is Another Shore, You Know, Upon the Other Side," and "The New Men" —would display the same kind of wit, sophistication, and elegance of style that characterized her later work, 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.

By 1967, Russ would be attracting attention with her "Alyx" stories, which at first seemed to be merely better-than-usually written sword & 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). 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, a work that even now strikes me as one of the best novels of the late sixties.

By the early seventies, Russ would have published her complex second novel And Chaos Died, won a Nebula Award for her controversial feminist story "When It Changed," and was 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— and how inferior we ourselves would appear by comparison, if we could somehow be measured against them. 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 eighties.

By the early seventies, 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 farther 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. 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 seventies, 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 Nebula-and Hugo-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 as part of the sellout Hugo-winning establishment. Almost nothing has been heard from Russ in SF since then, perhaps not surprisingly, although I hope that one day she'll decide to take another tour of duty on the barricades.

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.

"My God," he said, "it's summer! I have to be at Tanga now."

"What?" said Jannina.

"One loses track," he said apologetically. "I'm sorry, love, but I have unavoidable business at home. Tax labor."

"But why summer, why did its being summer—"

"Train of thought! Too complicated" (and already they were out of key, already the mild affair was over, there having come between them the one obligation that can't be put off to the time you like, or the place you like; off he'd go to plug himself into a road-mender or a doctor, though it's of some advantage to mend all the roads of a continent at one time).

She sat cross-legged on the station platform, watching him enter the booth and set the dial. He stuck his head out the glass door.

"Come with me to Africa, lovely lady!"

She thumbed her nose at him. "You're only a passing fancy, Charley U!" He blew a kiss, enclosed himself in the booth, and disappeared. (The transmatter field is larger than the booth, for obvious reasons; the booth flicks on and off several million times a second and so does not get transported itself, but it protects the machinery from the weather and it keeps people from losing elbows or knees or slicing the ends off a package or a child. The booths at the cryogenics center at the North Pole have exchanged air so often with those of warmer regions that each has its own micro-climate; leaves and seeds, plants and earth, are piled about them. Don't Step on the Grass! —say the notes pinned to the door— Wish to Trade Pawlownia Sapling for Sub-arctic Canadian Moss; Watch Your Goddamn Bare Six-Toed Feet!; Wish Amateur Cellist for Quartet, Six Months' Rehearsal Late Uhl with Reciter; I Lost a Squirrel Here Yesterday, Can You Find It Before It Dies? Eight Children Will be Heartbroken— Cecilia Ching, Buenos Aires.)

Jannina sighed and slipped on her glass woolly; nasty to get back into clothes, but home was cold. You never knew where you might go, so you carried them. Years ago (she thought) I came here with someone in the dead of winter, either an unmatched man or someone's starting spouse— only two of us, at any rate— and we waded through the freezing water and danced as hard as we could and then proved we could sing and drink beer in a swamp at the same time, good Lord! And then went to the public resort on the Ile de la Cité to watch professional plays, opera, games— you have to be good to get in there! —and got into some clothes because it was chilly after sundown in September— no, wait, it was Venezuela— and watched the lights come out and smoked like mad at a café table and tickled the robot waiter and pretended we were old, really old, perhaps a hundred and fifty.… Years ago!

But
was
it the same place? she thought, and dismissing the incident forever, she stepped into the booth, shut the door, and dialed home: the Himalayas. The trunk line was clear. The branch stop was clear. The family's transceiver (located in the anteroom behind two doors, to keep the task of heating the house within reasonable limits) had damn well better be clear, or somebody would be blown right into the vestibule. Momentum-and heat-compensators kept Jannina from arriving home at seventy degrees Fahrenheit internal temperature (seven degrees lost for every mile you teleport upward) or too many feet above herself (rise to the east, drop going west, to the north or south you are apt to be thrown right through the wall of the booth). Someday (thought Jannina) everybody will decide to let everybody live in decent climates. But not yet. Not this everybody.

She arrived home singing "The World's My Back Yard, Yes, the World Is My Oyster," a song that had been popular in her first youth, some seventy years before.

*

The Komarovs' house was hardened foam with an automatic inside line to the school near Naples. It was good to be brought up on your own feet. Jannina passed through; the seven-year-olds lay with their heads together and their bodies radiating in a six-personed asterisk. In this position (which was supposed to promote mystical thought) they played Barufaldi, guessing the identity of famous dead personages through anagrammatic sentences, the first letters of the words of which (unscrambled into aphorisms or proverbs) simultaneously spelled out a moral and a series of Goedel numbers (in a previously agreed-upon code) which—

"Oh, my darling, how felicitous is the advent of your appearance!" cried a boy (hard to take, the polysyllabic stage). "Embrace me, dearest maternal parent! Unite your valuable upper limbs about my eager person!"

"Vulgar!" said Jannina, laughing.

"Non sum filius tuus?" said the child.

"No, you're not my body-child; you're my godchild. Your mother bequeathed me to you when she died. What are you learning?"

"The eternal parental question," he said, frowning. "How to run a helicopter. How to prepare food from its actual, revolting, raw constituents. Can I go now?"

"
Can
you?" she said. "Nasty imp!"

"Good," he said, "I've made you feel guilty. Don't
do
that," and as she tried to embrace him, he ticklishly slid away. "The robin walks quietly up the branch of the tree," he said breathlessly, flopping back on the floor.

"That's not an aphorism." (Another Barufaldi player.)

"It is."

"It isn't."

"It is."

"It isn't."

"It is."

"It—"

The school vanished; the antechamber appeared. In the kitchen Chi Komarov was rubbing the naked back of his sixteen-year-old son. Parents always kissed each other; children always kissed each other. She touched foreheads with the two men and hung her woolly on the hook by the ham radio rig. Someone was always around. Jannina flipped the cover off her wrist chronometer: standard regional time, date, latitude-longitude, family computer hookup clear. "At my age I ought to remember these things," she said. She pressed the computer hookup: Ann at tax labor in the schools, bit-a-month plan, regular Ann; Lee with three months to go, five years off, heroic Lee; Phuong in Paris, still rehearsing; C.E. gone, won't say where, spontaneous C.E.; Ilse making some repairs in the basement, not a true basement, really, but the room farthest down the hillside. Jannina went up the stairs and then came down and put her head round at the living-and-swimming room.
Through the glass wall one could see the mountains. Old Al, who had joined them late in life, did a bit of gardening in the brief summers, and generally stuck around the place. Jannina beamed. "Hullo, Old Al!" Big and shaggy, a rare delight, his white body hair. She sat on his lap. "Has she come?"

"The new one? No," he said.

"Shall we go swimming?"

He made an expressive face. "No, dear," he said. "I'd rather go to Naples and watch the children fly helicopters. I'd rather go to Nevada and fly them myself. I've been in the water all day, watching a very dull person restructure coral reefs and experiment with polyploid polyps."